Weekend Unthreaded

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$176 billion a year lost to green tape – $7000 per Australian per year

Thanks to the IPA we can see just how fast green tape multiplies. In 1971 the first environmental laws covered just 57 pages. But now there are 4669 pages of laws. The IPA estimates that costs the nation $176b a year in lost economic opportunity. That’s a lot of jobs, and a lot of trees. *Apologies $176b corrected to million.

Dennis Shanahan, The Australian

Green tape’s 80-fold explosion, costing $176b a year

That’s a curve that looks like the CO2 emissions. Does extra CO2 cause environmental laws? Could be…

A tale of economic destruction:

The Adani central mining project application has been running for seven years and faced more than 10 court challenges. It includes a 22,000-page environmental impact statement.

In the Pilbara in Western Australia, the Roy Hill iron ore mine had to obtain 4000 separate licences, approvals and permits just for the pre-construction phase.

The Turnbull government vowed to review environmental laws to prevent activist groups’ legal challenges to development projects ranging from dams and roads to coalmines. It said challenges under section 487 of the Environment Act, which allows anyone with a “special interest in the environment” the right […]

Only half of meteorologists think human emissions are major cause of climate change

In 2016 67% of meteorologists said that humans have caused most or all climate change and The Guardian headlined that there was a Growing Consensus among Meteorologists. In 2017 that fell to only 49%. The Guardian said nothing.

….

In 2016 29% of meteorologists thought climate change was largely or entirely man-made, but that fell to only 15% this year.

Figure how this result fits with the idea of the overwhelming evidence and 97% consensus. Which group on the planet after climate scientists should be the second profession to “get it” — how about meteorologists?

So either:

1. meteorologists are really stupid, or

2. meteorologists know how hard it is to predict the climate.

8.7 out of 10 based on 88 ratings […]

CO2 reaches 410ppm: Panic now because Earth just hit another slightly significant base 10 number

A trace gas in our atmosphere hit 410ppm for the millionth day on Earth says Grist and this turned the planet in to something different. Who knew 410 was that exciting?

We just hit 410 ppm of CO2. Welcome to a whole new world.

This is not normal: We’re on track to witness a climate unseen in 50 million years by mid-century.

In pre-industrial times, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stood at 280 parts per million. And that number has been rising ever since, warming the planet by 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C) along the way.

It’s Big Number Fear Mongering which works so well on the innumerate. It might be the first time CO2 was this high in 50 million years, but if CO2 is so important, how come temperatures haven’t gone “to a whole new world”?

Kate Yoder on Grist has the usual calm dispassionate analysis:

As fictional carb-thief Aladdin once said: “Unbelievable sights/Indescribable feeling/Soaring, tumbling, freewheeling/Through an endless diamond sky.”

Frankly, I think Grist missed that in Base 3 this is the incredibly important 120,012 ppm. Spooky eh?

PS: Find numbers in other bases here. How much […]

Save the planet, get “biggest investment op in history of world”

The anti-carbon industry is in trouble — both Al Gore, and The World Bank are doing the hard-sell on “climate investments”.

The Fin Review used to be able to spot a chain letter…

Climate change offers huge investment opportunity, Al Gore tells World Bank

How did the worlds bankers miss something this big?

“It’s the biggest opportunity in the history of the world – it’s the biggest investment opportunity, but we have to have a clear vision, we have to have policy leadership… to bring the world community together to get the financing that is needed to move the momentum more quickly,” former US Vice President Al Gore told the discussion.

Any day now, this is going to be huge. (Right after they get that “strategy hammered out” yeah.)

World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said financing climate action could offer a more lucrative home for $US8.5 trillion ($11.2 trillion) in negative interest rate bonds, $US24.5 trillion in very low-yielding government-type bonds and a further $US8 trillion in cash, though a clear strategy still needed to be hammered out.

Try not to think about what it means when the government is borrowing money from people […]

Warning shots fired at Christie/ Spencer UAH Building?

News just coming in suggests someone took some pot shots at the building the UAH satellite data is analyzed in.

Shots Fired into the Christy/Spencer Building at UAH

April 24th, 2017 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

A total of seven shots were fired into our National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) building here at UAH over the weekend.

All bullets hit the 4th floor, which is where John Christy’s office is (my office is in another part of the building).

Given that this was Earth Day weekend, with a March for Science passing right past our building on Saturday afternoon, I think this is more than coincidence. When some people cannot argue facts, they resort to violence to get their way.

Maybe the “March For Science” should have been called the “March To Silence”.

More discussion at Roy Spencers Blog and also at WUWT.

Roy Spencer adds in an email:

I doubt any media have covered it yet. I doubt the police have even written a report yet. From what I’ve heard, it sounds like the police believe the shots were fired from a passing car, […]

Nearly 10% of USDA scientists believe their work has been tampered with

A survey of Dept of Agriculture (USDA) scientists by the agency’s inspector general suggests some very fishy things are going on in government science:

[Darryl Fears, Washington Post] According to the survey’s findings, nearly 10 percent said their research has been tampered with or altered by superiors “for reasons other than technical merit,” possibly because of political considerations.

Looks like Monopsony Trouble: When almost all the research in some fields is done by government funding (one buyer), there is no competition. In answer to that, instead of finding ways to encourage competition, the government set up an agency instead — the SIP.

That didn’t work either.

In the survey, 85 percent of the 1,300 scientists who responded said the Scientific Integrity Policy established to protect their work didn’t benefit them, or offered no opinion. Nearly 20 percent said they didn’t know the policy existed.

Nearly 40 percent didn’t bother to take the survey, according to findings released April 13. Of those who did, more than half said they didn’t know how to file a complaint and some said they didn’t do so because they feared retaliation.

“You do not need to have […]

Unthreaded Weekend

7.3 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

March “for Science” — an attempt to replace the failing Earth Day

Today, the misnomer “March for Science” is trying to take over the aging faded Earth Day. It’s an attempt to steal the good brand “Science” yet again for other causes.

Once upon a time, Earth Day used to mean something. Back in 1970, 20 million people took part, 12,000 events were held:

Congress took the day off, and two-thirds of its members — Democrat and Republican alike — spoke at Earth Day events. The Today show devoted 10 hours of airtime to Earth Day.

Can anyone imagine both sides of politics cheering the March for Science?

By 2013, Time Magazine noted how irrelevant it was:

Earth Daze, what happened to the environmental movement?

It’s Earth Day, though you could be forgiven if you missed it

So, lo, along comes another name “March for Science”. Same political motivations, different guise.

9.7 out of 10 based on 93 ratings

Stand up and “March for Science” say people who don’t know what science is

The March for Science is on Saturday.

Will J Grant and Rod Lambert struggled with the message behind the “March for Science” at The Conversation. We should march, they said a month ago, because “science is a human process”, which will be news to people who thought science was about evidence and reason instead. On Saturday they will be marching for the kind of science that is “passion” and “belief”. Don’t turn up thinking this is about the dispassionate Laws of Physics. You’ll be at the wrong rally.

Is the March to solve a problem or create one?

The March seems to be fighting strawmen. It is supposedly about “Encouraging scientists to share their research” (as if scientists like to hide their research). We know they hide their data, their methods and their adjustments, but when the ABC turns up to interview them, they don’t seem to hide their opinions. They hide their declines but don’t hide their Nobel Prizes (even if they didn’t get them). Do they need encouragement?

And the March is there, apparently, “affirming science as a vital feature of a working democracy”, who says it isn’t? Like voters have been asking for witchdoctors instead? Absolutely no […]

Climate change steals river

Overnight a river in Northern Canada disappeared. A glacier had retreated and allowed the water upstream to sneak out via a different path. The water now ends up in the Pacific 1300 km away from the Bering sea where it used to emerge.

A close-up view of the ice-walled canyon at the terminus of the Kaskawulsh Glacier, with recently collapsed ice blocks. This canyon now carries almost all meltwater from the toe of the glacier down the Kaskawulsh Valley and toward the Gulf of Alaska. Credit: Jim Best/University of Illinois

 

You might think this event has happened every time glaciers retreated in the last 30 million years, but you would be wrong. Really, this is due to coal-fired power stations.

In a report published on Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, Dr. Shugar and his colleagues provide a detailed analysis of how an atmosphere warmed by fossil-fuel emissions has led to the river’s dramatic disappearance.

“To me, it’s kind of a metaphor for what can happen with sudden change induced by climate,” said John Clague, who holds a chair in natural hazard research at Simon Fraser University and was a co-author on the report.

[…]

Cotton grows 60% faster with double CO2 and warmed by 7 degrees

CO2Science found a 1999 paper done in China that shows just how awful climate change is for cotton. It’s a major global crop for fibre and oil and when the researchers warmed daytime growing conditions from 27C to 34C the plants seemed pretty happy about it as they grew faster and bigger. But if CO2 levels doubled as well, in hot conditions plant growth was up 60%. (Panic now. It’s a international emergency).

Don’t change your cotton futures portfolio just yet. At the current rate of warming (0.13C/decade) it will take about 500 years for Earth to get seven degrees warmer.

9 out of 10 based on 71 ratings […]

Easter Unthreaded

Wishing you an enjoyable Easter…

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There goes that scare: Antarctic Peninsula cooling by almost 1 degree

Don’t panic now, but all the coal burnt in China has been cooling the Antarctic Peninsula.

For the last twenty years, The Antarctic Peninsula was the poster-peninsula for the Global Worriers as they calculate how many meters the oceans will rise when it melts, but all across it, temperatures are going down, not up.

We can knock half to one degree off:

This cooling has amounted to a 0.5 to 0.9 °C decrease in temperatures in most of the Antarctic Peninsula region, the only exception being three stations located in the southwest sector of the peninsula that experienced a slight delay in their thermal turning point, declining only over the shorter period of the past decade.

Thanks to CO2Science: The Antarctic Peninsula: No Longer the Canary in the Coal Mine for Climate Alarmists

….

The start points matter. The cooling started after 1998, which was an El Nino, and we can see there was a similar downward slope from 1983 to 1993. As usual, with a climate graph, there are steps and stairs, and there is a trend up in the last 50 years (but probably down in the last 7,000).Whatever.

What there isn’t, […]

Australians duped into thinking that renewable energy is cheap

Crazy World Quiz #2349:

Let’s close the cheapest generators of electricity. Will electricity bills:

a/ go down, b/ go up, or c/ be paid by The Tooth Fairy?

A quarter of Australians don’t know. A half think the answer is “b” or “c”. It’s that bad.

A new survey came out this week which fans of renewables are using to argue we need more renewables, but hidden in the data is the big misinformation that underlies this attitude.

Coalition supporters back quicker shift to renewable energy

[Sydney Morning Herald]

Adam Morton says:

The wisdom of a campaign by the Turnbull government emphasising the risks of moving too rapidly to renewable energy has been thrown into question by polling that suggests a majority of its supporters don’t agree.

Not at all. The real issue, that Adam Morton misses, is that so much of the country is horribly misinformed. All the key questions in the survey depend on what would happen to electricity prices, and nearly half the country lives under the delusion that “renewables” make our electricity prices cheaper.

All Malcolm Turnbull has to do to turn these figures around is to tell […]

Climate change causes quietest cyclone season in Southern Hemisphere

Spot the effect of man-made CO2 in this graph.

Terror, terror I tell you — as the accumulated energy of cyclones in the southern half of the planet reaches a new low, far below anything seen in records that go back to 1971.

From the Daily Caller, and @Ryan Maue

Meteorologist Ryan Maue of Weatherbell Analytics noted tropical cyclone activity in the Southern Hemisphere for the 2016-2017 season is the “quietest on record, by far” based on records going back nearly five decades.

So far, the Southern Hemisphere has seen 13 named storms, including four hurricane-strength storms. Only two of those storms became major hurricanes, Category 3 or higher, according to data compiled by Colorado State University.

I don’t think Al Gore will be mentioning this in his inconvenient advertising.

h/t GWPF

9.4 out of 10 based on 73 ratings

US Science Teachers say trash books and watch Leo instead

Check out the book for yourself :- )

The Heartland Institute sent a round of 25,000 books to science teachers across the US. Knowing Heartland, the book Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming is loaded with dangerous material — peer reviewed references, graphs with both axes, stuff like that. Because it will have been checked, cross checked and subjected to twenty years of non-stop criticism it will be packed with facts. And that’s why the Climate Religion is so terribly, awfully scared of it.

The NSTC took the extraordinary step of writing to teachers and naming all the errors they could find, which was none. In lieu of that, they said it was false information anyway because, hey, they could still spell both words.

NSTC warns of an unprecedented attack:

David L. Evans (no relation) sets out his best three reasons:

“First, scientists don’t disagree about climate change or its causes,”

What consensus? Less than half of climate scientists themselves agree with the IPCC “95%” certainty. The “97% consensus” is a marketing ploy some journalists (and science teachers) will fall for.

“Second, labeling propaganda as science does not make it so.

Exactly, just what I […]

Weekend Unthreaded

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Climate grief group has nine step program

I nearly headlined this: Climate grief group meets at someone’s house, Grist covers it. That’s pretty much all this program is. No one even counts to nine in this story.

Depressed about climate change? There’s a 9-step program for that.

Imagine Alcoholics Anonymous mixed with an environmental humanities course, and you’ll begin to get a sense of the “good grief” group started by Schmidt. Its goal is to help people cope with what’s been called “climate grief” — anxiety, sadness, depression, and other emotions provoked by awareness of the planet’s march toward a hotter,… future…

What she found was that feelings of sadness and anxiety, and even literal nightmares, were common. Last year, with the help of her partner, Aimee Reau, Schmidt developed a nine-step program for building resiliency loosely modeled on AA…

But this is big:

About a dozen people attend each session and 50 subscribe to its mailings.

If I get 12 people to my house, and have 12,000 subscribers, do you think Grist will write it up?

Perhaps they have some good results?

Perhaps not:

Schmidt, who now works as an outreach coordinator at the environmental group HEAL […]

Alarming Arctic heat waves look a lot like the last alarming heat waves in 1940s

The Arctic is the most sensitive place to man-made emissions on Earth, which is why it has barely warmed since 1944? Well, it makes sense if CO2 is largely irrelevant. Humans have made 90% of all their CO2 in the last 70 years and nothing much happened in the place where it was supposed to hurt the most.

The WMO apparently missed the first 30 years of data. But Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt are here to help them out. : -)

“Heat waves in the Arctic – climate scientists sound the alarm“

Area weighted Arctic (70-90N) monthly surface air temperature anomalies (HadCRUT4) since 1920 in relation to the WMO normal period 1961-1990. Fig. 2: Arctic temperature since 1920. Data: HadCRUT4, Chart: Climate4You.

These heat waves look a lot like the last heat waves.

Read it all thanks to Pierre Gosselins translation:

Learning from the climate’s history: the Arctic heat waves of the 1930s and 40s

 

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