Giant blob of superheated rock under West Antarctica

A new seismic survey shows there is a blob of superheated rock 60 miles below West Antarctica. To describe it, the researchers use the phrase “like a blow-torch”. Of course, just because the parts of Antarctica that are warming are near or over this hot blob does not mean it’s causing the melting. It could be a coincidence. ; -)

… this is the first detailed look at the Earth beneath this region.

Not surprisingly, the maps show a giant blob of superheated rock about 60 miles beneath Mount Sidley, the last of a chain of volcanic mountains in Marie Byrd Land at one end of the transect. More surprisingly, they reveal hot rock beneath the Bentley Subglacial Trench, a deep basin at the other end of the transect.

The Bentley Subglacial Trench is part of the West Antarctic Rift System and hot rock beneath the region indicates that this part of the rift system was active quite recently.

The study really highlights how little we know about heat flow in Antarctica:

While heat flow through the Earth’s crust has been measured at at least 34,000 different spots around the globe, in […]

Ouch! Survey shows 45% of the UK want to pay nothing at all for climate adaption funds.

When asked about paying for developing nations to adapt to climate change, the 1066 British people surveyed said they were willing to give an average of only £27 ($30US) a year. This is far below the UN gambit that hopes to take as much as $150 per head per year. But even that £27 figure is deceptively high. The real story is that the number was skewed up by a few people who were willing to pay a lot each. Nearly half the crowd didn’t want to give a cent. The median value was a paltry £6 per year. And this was in a test loaded with nice and authoritative messages about how useful those payments would be. Fully 45% of Brits surveyed did not want to contribute anything at all. (The figure is probably similar in the US, and people wonder why Trump is so popular?)

The question is about the public Willingness to Pay (WTP) and the answer is “negligible”:

Overall, taking all responses together, results show that respondents are willing to pay about £27 per year in income taxes to support adaptation efforts in developing countries. This is equivalent to $29.37, using purchasing power adjustments […]

Live streaming Heartland Conference in Paris and new film Climate Hustle

In the years to come historians will note the remarkable role played by the Heartland Institute in the global scientific debate. Heartland didn’t start out to be a scientific group, but the NIPCC report is more comprehensive, balanced and will stand the test of time while the IPCC reports have already failed… And all done with a tiny budget compared to the billions squandered on mainstream universities.

Likewise Marc Morano, CFACT and Climate Depot. I never fail to be impressed with Marc’s professionalism and relentless good humour as he fends off the propaganda. Watch the schedule below for the World Premier of the Climate Hustle movie. I’m very much looking forward to seeing that!

See also Willie Soon, Bob Carter, James Taylor, Fred Singer, Christopher Essex, Jim Inhofe, Patrick Moore, Christopher Monckton, Tom Harris…

Kinda amazing to be in the room from so far. The playback can be replayed.

The Schedule

Monday, Dec. 7, 09:00 GMT+1

9 out of 10 based on 82 ratings […]

The Green-Blob actions betray them. Greens don’t care about the environment or CO2, just power and money

Bask in the hypocrisy — the concern about CO2 is faked

Climate change is The Greatest Threat on Earth but the Merchants of Panic don’t really care if we reduce CO2. Follow what they do, not what they say. This is our last chance to save the planet, but they won’t consider nuclear energy — apparently the planet is just not that important. Nor will they consider Ultra Super Critical hot burning coal, which could reduce emissions by 15% at a stroke. Likewise fracking. Instead, the answer to everything is always inefficient, government-dependent industries and trading schemes. These schemes don’t reduce much CO2, but they reward the patrons of big-government and punish the opponents. They suck money from independent corporations, and churn that cash through the “renewables” cheer-squad, the financial houses, and the groups that profit from keeping the climate scare going. Ponder that the EU had a monster emissions trading scheme, but the USA cut far more emissions — thanks to fracking and no thanks to any fake “free market”. The bottom line is that we may face the Anthropocene Mass Extinction Event, but apparently things are not so bad that the Greens will consider fracking. The big […]

Weekend Unthreaded

7.7 out of 10 based on 23 ratings

Emissions trading rorted, fraud, but hardly anyone cares if CO2 is reduced, just the appearance of it

Toss any idea that some people actually care about reducing CO2. Apparently the only thing that matters is the appearance of reducing it.

EU carbon markets are being horribly rorted, and almost no one is checking. (Only the silly, honest UK, and even then only about 1% of sites are audited.)

All up, something like “£14 billion has been lost to fraud”. The system was corrupted at every level — in Denmark at one stage, 4 out of 5 carbon trading accounts were fraudulent. The Ukraine and Russian governments gave away too many carbon credits, which flooded the market (and the price fell from £20 to £4). Credits were also given for things that would have happened anyway and shouldn’t have got them. (How can anyone base a market on “intentions”?) In the end, even though credits were cheap, a lot of companies didn’t bother buying credits, because no one was checking to see if they met their supposed requirements. And then there was the huge VAT Tax fraud across borders.

Where are most Greens, most NGO’s and activists, where is the outrage?

The fakery around the CO2 scare is legion. It is supposedly the evil pollution set to destroy […]

If they are heard, the Climate-change skeptics win the public opinion war

This study really reinforces how important it is for skeptics to be heard. Just get out there, write letters to the editor, email your MP, and speak up at public events. It does help.

There’s a new long detailed study out struggling with how to keep Climate Fear alive. Oh, the disappointment, exposing people to both sides of the story created more skeptics. The researchers tried all their best angles, like pretending that using expensive energy would “help the economy”, or “free the nation from a dependence on foreign oil”. They tried the religious frame “we’re protecting god’s creation” and they tried what they thought was a nationalist frame (but which was really just another gonzo economic claim dressed up with US-flattery) “Innovative technology will keep our nation’s economy strong”.

Not surprisingly these dud messages don’t work. McCright et al miss the point that if they are selling schemes to change the weather, the best salesman would list the direct benefits — like how much nicer a cooler world will be, with fewer storms and floods, less heatwaves, and more cold days in winter, stuff like that right. (I can’t think why they don’t?) Could it be that no matter […]

Phillippe Verdier (Top French Weatherman) was sacked, now hired by Kremlin

It’s an upside down world. Now, to be allowed to speak freely, dissident scientists depend on Russia.

Phillipe Verdier was France’s main weatherman on the big public TV channel. In October he released a skeptical book, and immediately got told not to come back to work. Sacked for holding the wrong opinion.

Now, Verdier is working for Russia Today.

French news outlet Le Figaro reports Philippe Verdier is covering the United Nations climate summit in Paris for Russia Today France. Verdier has a daily news segment dedicated to covering what goes on during the U.N. climate talks.

“Hello I am very happy to talk to you about the daily COP21 … in freedom,” Verdier said in his first segment on Russia Today, according to a translation by The Daily Caller News Foundation, clearly taking a swipe at the French media for firing him. 9 out of 10 based on 116 ratings […]

Climate change causes global suffocation — Life on Earth gone in only 1,500 years!*

And you thought we’d heard it all. Not so, get out the plastic bags.

Seventy percent of the oxygen on Earth is made by phytoplankton, so the little critters do matter. A new study suggests that the phytoplankton pretty much fall apart if the worlds oceans heat by just six degrees. They stop making the good O2. We all die. Puppies, kittens, kids, and krill — it’s all over.

There are a couple of caveats — the study involves only binary phytoplankton (the kind made of zero’s and ones and which lives in hard discs at the University of Leicester). And the other one is that six degrees is an Awful Lot of Warming.

As best as we can tell (which is not very well) the oceans are warming at four hundreth of a degree per decade (give or take a lot). The all new Gee-Whizz Argo buoys are neat little robots, but the error bars are still a scandal, being somewhere from one tenth to one half a degree — ha-d-ha — too big to fit on the graph.( See all the white stuff — the errors are probably larger than that.)

Taking that single point of highly uncertain […]

Kochs, Exxon “influence”? Yale experts hunt through 40,000 documents for Big-Oil smear, find almost nothing

Got no actual data-trail on “big-oil” dollars? That’s no reason not to run another name-calling smear article. A Yale group has spent countless months reading through the tea-leaves of old worn out climate themes and think they’ve discovered that the Kochs and Exxon carried the most influence.

What’s really remarkable is that the Yale group had so much funding they could trawl through 40,000 documents, track 4556 people and 164 “contrarian” organisations across 20 years and through 39 million words. Yet despite this, they found nothing. There’s no smoking gun, no proof that anyone was being dishonest, that the messages were wrong.

What the Yale team found was that “documents produced by lobbyists backed by two key corporate benefactors (Koch and Exxon) — proved to have been reproduced more often and with more “semantic similarity”. Justin Farrell (of Yale) thinks that means the Koch’s and Exxon are artificially skewing public opinion. Here’s another hypothesis — Exxon and the Kochs are smart businessmen. They spotted the leading skeptics in the 1990’s and gave them some help. The messages stuck with the public because they were good ones, not because they were “oil funded”. Farrell gets cause and effect confused.

Despite running […]

Planetary Heroes meet in Paris to save Earth from bad weather

Never before has there been so many egos in the one room:

It was the largest single-day gathering of heads of state or government in history, the UN said.

“Never have the stakes of an international meeting been so high because it concerns the future of the planet, the future of life,” French President Francois Hollande said in an opening speech.

“The hope of all of humanity rests on all of your shoulders.” –– Paris Climate Change Talks begin, The Australian, Graham Lloyd.

Glory be. Pray to our Elected Fathers (and Mothers) who have come to save us from our sins.

The Chosen Ones shall rescue us with full gloss PR. For it is only in the world of Mass Marketing that we can call China a climate saviour:

[Obama] then met Chinese President Xi Jinping before the summit started, with his focus turned to deepening co-operation between the world’s two biggest emitters of the greenhouse gases that cause ­global warming.

“As the two largest carbon emitters, we have both determined that it is our responsibility to take action,” Mr Obama said as he sat alongside Mr Xi.

And so […]