Unthreaded Weekend

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German govt plans will “kill” wind industry

Sigmar Gabriel, the German Economy Minister, has announced they’d like to amend the Renewable Energies Act (EEG) in the next few months or so. The plan is for the total amount of renewable energy on the grid to be capped at 40 – 45% by 2025. It was at 33% at the end of 2015 but was still climbing rapidly. Check out the eyewatering transition being planned now:

A study by consultants ERA on behalf of the Green Party’s parliamentary group concludes that under these provisions the development of wind energy will collapse fairly soon: A target of 45 percent would mean that only 1500 megawatts could be installed annually after 2018, according to the study. That’s less than half as the average of wind energy installed in the past five days.

Boom, meet Bust.

This would be such a turnaround, that not only would new wind turbines not be added, there would be less of them:

A 40% cap for wind energy completely stop the construction of new wind farms by of 2019, according to the ERA [consultants] study. Overall, this would reduce onshore wind power by almost 6000 megawatts compared to the […]

Hot magma is melting Greenland ice – can windfarms save it?

Here on the ball of magma called Earth, there’s a hot plume of rocks under Iceland that stretches right across under Greenland. Those hot rocks are melting the ice from below in a band 1,200 km long and 400 km wide.[1]

I don’t think solar panels are going to stop Greenland melting.

The main part of the plume has been progressing eastward over the last 120 million years, right under Greenland and now lies under Iceland.

Will the media take a million years to catch on?

Presumably, being world class journalists, from now on all ABC/BBC/CBC stories will not mention melting Greenland ice-sheets without also noting that geothermal heat may be causing it instead of your long hot showers.

But a similar study published in Nature Geoscience 3 years ago was the forerunner to this one with similar conclusions and the mainstream media don’t seem to have noticed yet.[2] No mention of magma, tectonics and hot rocks here: ABC — Antarctica’s melting ice alone could lift sea levels one metre by 2100, March 31st, 2016. Or here: ABC — Global warming melts last stable edge of Greenland’s Zachariae ice stream, March 17th, 2014. Or on the BBC – […]

Earthshine reflected off the moon shows no trend during the Pause

About a third of the sunlight that hits Earth gets reflected back out to space mainly by clouds, ice or bare earth. A small change in this can make a big difference to the global energy balance. And the energy balance is kinda “everything” in the climate debate. So this new paper by Palle et al really ought to attract quite a bit of interest. But for lots of reasons real data was never going to provide much joy for most climate scientists.

Image of the moon taken by Bob King of Sky and Telescope.

The thing is, climate models predict that CO2 will cause warming, which will in turn cause ice to melt and the albedo to get smaller, which will cause more warming… it’s a positive feedback. So if albedo was shrinking during the last 2 decades, the Crisis Team could say the models were right about albedo, but then, golly, they were even more wrong about that warming that didn’t happen. On the other hand, if albedo was growing, they could add it to the list of excuses for The Pause and write headlines like: Global clouds increase — hiding the effect of CO2! But then […]

Fracturing in the ranks — Myles Allen, IPCC scientist, tosses renewables under the bus

Kudos to Myles Allen. He might think CO2 is a problem, but at least he is being honest and slightly practical about dealing with it. That’s a big step up from those who urge us to panic about CO2, but then choose the most useless and expensive options to reduce it. Allen effectively gives Abbott’s Direct Action plan a big tick. Finally (indirectly) Tony Abbott gets some credit for out-greening the EU, and offering a more effective and cheaper way to achieve what the Greens said they want. Like I said, Abbott got reductions for $14 a ton, the Greens should have loved him.

Anyway, Myles Allen’s done a study, published in Nature Climate Change, suggesting that there is no point in a few western nations driving in their economies into the dust to reduce their emissions when the rest of the world isn’t. So here’s one of the IPCC team repeating an argument that skeptics have said so many times: if we make ourselves a third world nation, we won’t be able to afford to look after the environment. Our children will have to burn the environment for breakfast.

In the end though Allen thinks the answer is to […]

The media is bored of climate change? Blame Abbott and those climate deniers for fooling the dumb voters

The Reef took 6000 years to form. Suddenly it is bleached white, but the media are not putting it on page one. Oh the gnashing of teeth!

Peter Hartcher Sydney Morning Herald –– Tony Abbotts Harmful Legacy

‘…the news of its most severe bleaching didn’t even rate in the top five news topics.

‘Why? “It’s only a hypothesis, but I think there’s been a peaking of interest or concern” in matters related to climate change [says iSentia’s Patrick Baume.]

Peak Climate? Yes, please…

“It’s seen as something a bit from the past, as if getting rid of the carbon tax meant we’d got rid of climate change. It’s a funny one.”

Or maybe people are bored of climate ghost stories? Maybe people realized climate change is always here.

The reef survived the Holocene Horrible Warming Period. (Formerly called The Holocene Optimum 😉 ). Things were even hotter then and seas around Queensland were 1 – 2 whole meters higher. Apocalyptic stuff, yet somehow the reef made it without a single carbon trading scheme.

 

The last 8000 years of sea levels off Queensland

Source: S Lewis et al […]

CO2 emissions? It’s China China China all the way down…

No matter which way we slice and dice it, China is The-CO2-Player that matters. India is forecast for a larger percentage-wise increase, but it’s starting from a small base. By 2030 even after doubling its output, it will still be barely a quarter of China’s total mega-ton production. The Congo and Indonesia are among countries forecast to ramp up production of CO2 massively, yet both of them are but a spec. The hard numbers show that if CO2 actually mattered, and the eco-greens really cared about it, they be talking about “The China Problem”.

Australia is irrelevant, except in some symbolic sacrificial way. The 28% massive reduction, at great cost, will amount to nothing globally (assuming it can even be achieved). Though Tasmania may win the global race for the fastest transition from first to third world. (North Korea here we come).

In the end, the real drivers of global CO2 may or may not be things like forest and peat fires, ocean currents, phytoplankton in any case. Won’t it be a great day when we figure exactly where all that CO2 is coming from and going to?

— Jo

 

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Weekend Unthreaded

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Met Bureau Bingo: warm autumn nights sold as “Hottest Ever” March extreme

It’s another month of BOM Bingo. The ABC and BOM are trumpeting a “hottest” ever headline yet again, and Warwick Hughes is onto them already.

Conveniently the ABC forgets to mention that March Maximum Temps have been hotter before many times and with a pattern that has nothing to do with CO2. How many in the ABC audience would know that?

March temperatures sets record as hottest ever, Bureau of Meteorology says

“You could be forgiven for not noticing the end of summer — March was a hot one.” says Sara Phillips. But actually, if you are human, you could be forgiven for thinking this was just another hot March like so many before. For SE Australia where most humans live, the hottest March, and wildly so, was in 1940. Across the whole of Australia these kinds of maximum temperatures in March have been occurring for decades and 1986 was much much hotter. See the BOM graph below.

Hands up who can spot the horrid effect of CO2 in this graph?

Stick with the logic. Must be CO2 that caused the cold spike in 2011 (and 1967, 1942 and 1913). This is witchcraft.

You could be forgiven […]

The Cassandra Effect — Academic Apes protecting territory

April 1. A new anthropology paper looks at the Academic Ape and the way it guards its territory and resources, not surprisingly rejecting unpaid contributions from outside academia as a threat to their perceived status and income. The hypothesis predicts that the more qualified and erudite the outsider is, the more vicious the response will be, especially if the highly qualified outsider gives their labor freely.

The Academic Ape: Instinctive aggression and boundary enforcing behaviour in academia

Published on Amazon in Kindle version.

Two areas of territorial aggression are offered as examples — archaeology and climate (you couldn’t see that coming). This new paper looks at how the academic boundary enforcement compares to things like union disputes, and patterns of ape behaviour (See Table 1). An interesting paper.

The climate debate is so hostile people don’t even speak English — “denier”

There is no accurate definition of “denier” in English in a climate science debate, yet professors use it, and importantly other professors in virtually every other field don’t seem to mind. A survey of 5,000 skeptics shows almost all agree with most mainstream statements used in the climate debate — i.e. that CO2 is increasing, […]

Kill the Deniers — a government-funded fantasy play where “guns” solve climate issues

This is your brain on government funding (pace Mark Steyn). The government of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) gave $18k to a theatre group to put on a play called “Kill the Deniers”. Now, lucky us, we can read the e-book. Because the climate debate really needs more guns, hostages, brute force, and threats right?

Well, it does if you don’t have any evidence.

“Kill the Deniers” — All the wit and wisdom of government funded “arts”. Can’t persuade the voters? Shoot their representatives.

The Kill the Deniers e-book is coming:

…writer and theatre-maker whose work sits at the intersection of art and science, [David] Finnigan said Kill Climate Deniers grew out of discussions with Aspen Island Theatre Company’s Julian Hobba.

‘We got really interested in talking about the climate debate, and we were wondering why it was that in Australia the debate had stalled so badly; what is it about this country? And then we moved on to asking what would it take to shift the debate forward again – what would it actually take to generate real political change?’ said Finnigan.

Why did the debate stall? They could have done some research and […]