What is the sound of a dying planet?

UPDATE: It is apparently funded by the Arts Council England. Couldn’t we guess?

A new climate forcing, let’s call it Musikiness, will change the upper trough-o-sphere:

Climate change data is being transformed into beautiful symphonies

What is the sound of a dying planet? Translating hard facts into feeling is the issue of our age – and it is the task Climate Symphony have appointed themselves. A collective of artists and scientists, the London-based team are inspiring action by transforming climate change data into music.

Listen at the link

Wait til you see what it can do. This is a pretty powerful tool:

“Climate Symphony has developed a side-project – calling out lies in politics.”

“We want to create a formal record,” she says, “A method of fact-checking the things Trump is saying, of finding distortions. It’s revealing. You’re looking at it, and listening to it, and you find that it’s distorted. It’s all distorted.”

Musikiness could replace the US GAO. (Who needs auditors). But I worry about what happens if they use the wrong key.

Finally, twenty years late, EcoWorriers care about transparency and “hard facts”:

“…it isn’t just background noise…  music is the data.   “These are still hard facts – that’s the beauty of it.”

The data used is derived from a range of sources, all with the emphasis on transparency.

Climate data has been accumulated from NOAA and Nasa (sic)…

But what if the symphony is using adjusted data and it’s wrong — It’s not the sound of a dying planet, but a homogenized one?

I bet raw data would sound better. (Do you want to tell them or should I?)

Still, this may be the tool the Goddard Institute of Space has been waiting for to make their climate models work.

Borromeo and her team at Climate Symphony, including co-director Katharine Round and composer Jamie Perera, chart this data across musical notation, working with meteorologists, conservationists, sound artists and investigative journalists. Every bar of music in Climate Symphony is equivalent to one year of scientific data – with recordings amassing a total of 20 years from 1994 to 2014.

That’s a lot of “experts”. (Wonder who paid for them.)

Climate change is an area of politics in which facts are all-too-often purported as fiction.

In this case the facts are purporting to be “music”.

With these concern about transparency in politics, Borromeo stresses that Climate Symphony is committed to peer-reviewed science.

Yes, because all good artists are committed to supporting the grant-machine, sorry, establishment.

I’m glad these people are not building our bridges.

From public rallies to government legislation, Borromeo hopes that “any and all of these things” can arise from the project. Her message is simple: “Existence is resistance.”

Existence is resistance? It takes so little effort to be a reactionary these days — just keep breathing.

The warmists now want to transpose,
Climate data into work they compose,
For alarmists and greens,
As homogenized, means,
In their symphony, anything goes.

 — Ruairi

9.6 out of 10 based on 76 ratings

121 comments to What is the sound of a dying planet?

  • #
    JB

    I thought climate data had already been represented in music form by the Colonel Bogie March.

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    • #
      OriginalSteve

      More like the Minister for Silly Walks….

      41

    • #
      Bulldust

      Climate science as it currently exists would be best represented by the likes of the Insane Clown Posse.

      41

    • #
      Senex

      I thought it was Never Mind The Bollocks

      41

    • #
      Annie

      I think that must be the racket that commonly issues from Radio 3 after lunch ( which I listen in to for Choral Evensong after going to bed DownUnder). It’s been enough to make me turn off and then miss what I was hoping to hear later. Come to think of it, sometimes the Evensong hasn’t been a lot better, with fantastic organ playing and singing but totally lousy settings.

      31

    • #
      JB

      And played most admirably by the Climate Data Fiddlers.

      50

  • #

    Planets generally only die as their star does. Catastrophic events like impacts don’t seem to kill planets, as there have been many events on Earth in the past and life always bounces back. What they are creating instead is the sound of fake science dying.

    251

  • #
    Graeme No.3

    I think that this is PROOF that Climate Change causes lunacy.

    261

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    • #
      Rereke Whakaaro

      Well, it pains me to admit it, but here is proof positive, that we are living in the age of stupid.

      111

      • #
        Lionell Griffith

        Calling this the age of the stupid is insulting to the people who are actually stupid. Even the stupid can be right by accident part of the time. It takes a willful malignance to be wrong all the time.

        62

        • #
          Rereke Whakaaro

          I take your point. But would people who are actually stupid, recognise that they have been insulted en passant, as part of a bilingual generalisation?

          31

  • #
    John F. Hultquist

    I’m glad these people are not building our bridges.

    Well, if news from London is even half correct, they are helping to determine how fast buildings burn.
    Sorry to introduce this sad note, but these sorts of jerks do not always make me laugh.

    142

  • #
    Another Ian

    Not the music of the spheres methinks

    100

  • #
    Spetzer86

    Wonder if they’ve incorporated the error term as pitch for the various instruments? That’d add a lot of relevancy to the composition. Greater error would lead to discord, while good data would be harmonious.

    111

  • #
    Zigmaster

    My suspicions are that the volume for this will be adjusted up to drown out the sweet sounds of logic . Warmists are incapable of hearing things as they really are.

    81

  • #
    manalive

    The “sound of a dying planet” — more like the sound of a dying civilisation.

    131

  • #
    Robdel

    Will they add their score to Holst’s Planets?

    41

    • #

      Look, I know it’s off topic, but this Holst composition, The Planets is just an amazing piece of music, now 100 years old.

      I have around 400 LPs on vinyl, collected from the late 60s through till the 80s when marriage meant there was not all that much left of a fortnightly (RAAF) pay packet to get an LP.

      I got hold of my copy of The Planets in the early 70s and my copy, luckily, was the 1971 version done by The New York Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

      I’m absolutely an@l about my LPs and most of them would have only been played two or three times, the first time for me to listen to, and the second time to record them to blank cassette, (UDC90) so if I wanted to listen to the music, then I could play the tape, and not worry about damaging the LP.

      Using those UDC90’s, I could get one full LP on one side of the tape.

      Except for this Holst The Planets, as that was closer to 55 minutes in reality.

      I played it often, and in a day and age when there was so much good music around, I was looked at a little oddly when I played this classical piece with the volume up, and the guys in the living quarters would come to my room wondering why I had that classical cr@p playing, and nearly every one of them would stop and listen, and in the main, go away impressed.

      Although best heard when played by a full orchestra, it’s surprising how many rock bands (of that era) borrowed some of the individual pieces to play, as shown at this link, (half way down) a virtual who’s who of rock music.

      I actually went out and got hold of a Memorex chromium dioxide tape to record it all on the one side of a cassette.

      This climate change music has got nothing on The Planets.

      Tony.

      61

      • #
        Glen Michel

        Indeed. What would one reflect,say, on Beethoven’s 6th Symphony and its appeal to nature;beautiful and a piece for reelection.But Ludwig was I think a Socialist- though a Socialist of his times.AGW was not known in those generally cold years of the early 19 Century. Love of nature; not of mans idiocy.

        30

      • #
        William

        Tony, while in principle I agree with you, I feel that you may have made a bit of a boo boo.
        By re-recording the music to tape, you would have lost some of the dynamic range, and frequency responses of the music.
        As a result, you would have been listening to an approximation of the performance, not the real thing. Ie: while pretty good, not the full glass.
        This is reminiscent of the 50’s wives who would have a dish and cutlery set “for good” in a storage cabinet, but never used them; and then had their descendants throw them out after their funerals, never having been used.

        20

      • #
        William

        Tony, while in principle I agree with you, I feel that you may have made a bit of a boo boo.
        By re-recording the music to tape, you would have lost some of the dynamic range, and frequency responses of the music.
        As a result, you would have been listening to an approximation of the performance, not the real thing. Ie: while pretty good, not the full glass.
        This is reminiscent of the 50’s wives who would have a dish and cutlery set “for good” in a storage cabinet, but never used them; and then had their descendants throw them out after their funerals, never having been used.

        10

      • #
        Annie

        I think ‘The Planets’ is wonderful music. It captures the sheer remoteness, mythological character of the individual planets and the amazing beauty of the Solar System.

        10

  • #
    TimiBoy

    I’m going to start seeing a Therapist. I can no longer reconcile my existence with the sheer stupidity of these people and the masses that believe them.

    90

  • #
    TdeF

    There is a problem. Warner Bros. already have the trademark “Looney Tunes”.

    71

  • #
    Andrew McRae

    Translating hard facts into feeling is the issue of our age

    Many psychology researchers will tell you that the limbic system in our brain will react emotionally in the same way to both real and perceived stimuli.

    51

  • #
    TdeF

    Not building our bridges? No, but they are blowing up our reliable, cheap and adequate power stations and shutting the rest down and directing billions of our money to their wind temples for Gaia. Of course they are also telling us that we will have cheaper electricity by dramatically raising electricity prices.

    Our politicians are rushing to sign international agreements to cripple us further and send our money overseas. They say this is popular demand. By whom?

    Even the editorial in Australian says people want both cheaper power and renewables. Who said? Why can’t we have the government out of electricity completely?

    121

  • #
    Mick In The Hills

    Next: a taxpayer funded project to turn climate data into various odors.
    How many will the sniff test?
    (The standard for which is that opened carton of milk you left in the frige before going on a 4 week trip away)

    70

  • #
    OriginalSteve

    A question about solar inverters – generally the local grid has some form of voltage regulation to stop voltage getting too high or low.

    I had a discussion with a colleague this morning about whether if a whole suburb ( say 200 houses ) had solar panels on each roof, whether the solar inverter with each solar array would clamp its output voltage ( when dumping power onto the grid ) or whether it would just dump it out at max permissable voltage or whther it would follow the grid voltage.

    It concerned me as baseload generation is reduced and say 50% of households are generationg ontot he grid, how do you control the grid voltage so its stable? Obviously not everyone will generate at night either as not everyone will have storage batteries….

    Thoughts welcome.

    20

    • #

      Output is limited to the maximum voltage “permitted”.

      However, absent external, “clean” grid frequency at sufficient voltage, the inverter is not permitted to feed back into the grid.

      This applies to all small co-generators.

      61

    • #
      • #
        RobK

        See section 10.3 for grid voltage problems, followed by line impedance issues.

        10

        • #
          RobK

          Fault current detection can become an issue where pv input is high. Detailed in the following chapter.

          11

          • #
            OriginalSteve

            Thanks…its an easy to follow doc..

            Mentioned the over voltage & damage it can cause to a work colleague who lives in an area with many houses with PV, watched him get worried….

            Also explained to him the whole “wild west” of renewables on the grid is a contributing factor to the SA problems.

            It bugs me – for all the AS’s we have, there seems to be a need to more tightly control PV systems to clamp output voltage much lower than the max of 270V….just asking for trouble….

            31

            • #
              RobK

              The inverter with the highest voltage set point sells the most power to the grid (the last to drop-off)…so there is the incentive to go to the. Aust Standard of 270v or whatever is permitted by the grid. If the voltage is set lower, returns on the pv diminish rapidly.

              31

              • #
                Graeme No.3

                RobK:
                As far as I know the limit is 255V as higher than than causes appliances to burn out. Indeed some cheaper brands managed to suicide below that level. When I installed solar I could follow the voltage output as it climbed to 255V, then the controller would turn off the PV panels for over an hour before allowing output to the ‘grid’.
                I understand that any output from rooftop solar is not able to get past the local tnsformer. How I don’t know but several people have said the same.

                10

          • #
            RobK

            Basically, if pv penetration is high and grid impedance is high, when the sun shines bright inverters start to drop off on over-voltage….they start playing a tune of their own called instability. This causes fluctuating voltage and poor returns to the pv owner (aside from potential damage to equipment).

            31

            • #
              OriginalSteve

              Yes, kind of a self limiting stupidity in a way….I can understand why unscrupulous installers might set the output voltage high to “shout down” your competitors….

              21

  • #
    Ruairi

    The warmists now want to transpose,
    Climate data into work they compose,
    For alarmists and greens,
    As homogenized, means,
    In their symphony, anything goes.

    171

  • #

    How soon will it be before Beyonce adds some lyrics and it rockets up the charts.

    I’m sure they could, umm, homogenise it down to a three and a half minute clip for radio.

    Tony.

    71

  • #

    There’s got to be a Grammy in this somewhere.

    Tony.

    71

  • #
    Tom R Hammer

    Musicians always find funding hard to get. Kudos to these guys for relating to climate change and seeking a new, lucrative funding source.

    101

  • #
    ColA

    Looks like the “Arts” have finally found a way to get their snouts in the trough!

    Can you put WAFTAM to music also??

    71

  • #
    Popeye26

    From the linked article:

    “As climate change reaches tipping point, the data being collected becomes more and more alarming. Arctic sea ice is rapidly melting; across the ocean, cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses are on the rise. It will only take another 0.4 degree Fahrenheit rise in global average temperature, to hit an atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide of 450 parts per million (ppm) – the threshold beyond which global warming becomes catastrophic and irrevocable.”

    BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH

    Oh, they ALSO get to include Trump in their music.

    Utter IDIOTS – the world is DOOMED with these people escaping from the asylum.

    BTW – who’s paying for these parasites – ah, that’s right, we bloody well re!!

    Cheers,

    61

    • #
      Rereke Whakaaro

      We need to remember the emphasis placed on the 450ppm figure.

      Then, when it gets to 451 ppm or higher, go back with an, “Excuse me, but didn’t you say …”

      41

  • #
    Greg NZ

    Here’s some music to my ears – although, no doubt, it is discordant, back-stepping chaos to Clima Worriers:

    http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/201848116/coal-industry-rallies-as-power-hunger-bites

    “More coal is being burnt to make electricity, to compensate for low water levels in South Island hydro lakes.” Thank goodness for alternative (old-fashioned?) emergency back-up power generation. With the longest night of the year – winter solstice – Wednesday, and sub-zero frosts a regular feature for the past month, a consistent supply of electricity is, I’m sure, appreciated by all children – oops – customers – oops – consumers.

    71

  • #
    pat

    20 Jun: HuffPo: Maddie Crum: The Dangers Of Climate Change Are Real In This New Comic Anthology
    Five artists weigh in on their art and their activism.
    In the past decade or so, a subgenre of dystopian fiction has emerged to confront our changing planet: climate fiction, or “cli-fi.” In stories like Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy…
    But, as a recent post on the Smithsonian blog points out, these stories are swiftly becoming not just future possibilities, but present realities.

    In an interview with HuffPost (LINK), VanderMeer noted that, “the solutions a fiction writer can provide, the speculation, is perhaps edging toward offensive in a policy context ― because we have scientists telling us what we need to do and they are the experts.”…

    A new cartoon anthology called Warmer (LINK) addresses these issues and more. Co-edited by artists Madeleine Witt and Andrew White, the collection of works serves to provide support and hope to those who are mourning the damage done to the earth.
    In an interview with HuffPost, White said, “As co-editors of Warmer, Madeleine and I wanted to make a book to offer comfort for those already fearful about climate change…

    We imagined Warmer in part as a book that will function to encourage and support activists; to comfort those who, like ourselves, are wrestling with the grief of climate change.”…

    Below is a selection from five of the book’s contributors…
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/the-dangers-of-climate-change-are-real-in-this-new-comic-anthology_us_594820bae4b0cddbb008ad9f

    20

  • #
    Kevin Anderson

    Can some one FACT check this?
    Where are the numbers that solar can power a steel mill 25/7??

    Media Release: Renewables with storage now cheapest form of ‘reliable’ energy supply, surpassing gas
    http://www.reputex.com/media-releases/rising-gas-price-falling-storage-costs-makes-renewables-cheapest-for-reliable-power-in-australia/

    40

    • #
      Bobl

      Very difficult to do 25/7 but I’m sure renewables can claim to change the length of a day. Still this crap gets released every day now, the problem is not that renewables aren’t cheap they are, or at least can be, the problem is that they are not reliable. Renewables can make cheap energy provided it’s acceptable to get it only 15% of the time on a random schedule and occasional outages of a week or two duration. To make renewable energy reliable you need to overbuild by a factor of more than 10 times. That means that to guarantee minimum supply is what we need some of the time we need to throw away 10 times that. It’s costly and wasteful. Renewable energy is not particularly expensive but reliable renewable energy is.

      10

  • #

    Following the links using Waterfox 64bit produces silence, so I had to pull up IE to get the samples. Boring. Doesn’t exactly compete with The Doors When the Music’s Over.
    Anyone can do this stuff. I have some diurnal plots of CO2 levels collected over the past 5 years, so I’ll try converting the values to frequencies. Will sound a bit like someone using tremolo or slide effect. The average tone won’t be rising, as there hasn’t been an upward trend at the point of measurement.

    20

  • #
    Mark M

    Is that a water pipe bubbling in the background?

    Like in Money, as in the dub reggae tribute to the Pink Floyd album, The Dark Side of the Moon, by the Easy Star All-Stars, “Dub Side Of the Moon.”

    If not, it should be.

    30

  • #

    Maybe they should try doing a heavy metal rendition of the 73 CMIP-5 models?

    20

  • #
    pat

    a GIF that keeps giving:

    16 Jun: Fast Company: Jessica Leber: NASA’s New Artist Has An Amazing Climate Change Tattoo
    Want to see temperatures spike over the last few decades? Check out Justin Guariglia’s arm.
    Justin Guariglia, a New York City artist who today launched a partnership with NASA, is obsessed with how humans are changing the planet…

    Guariglia is getting ready to embark on a new mission with NASA, Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG for short). It that role, it will be his mission to get people to pay attention–and his work won’t look anything like the graph on his arm.
    “We’re overwhelmed by data – and data is this thing i’m trying to fight.”

    Correction: This article formerly referred to Guariglia as an artist-in-residence with NASA, but it is a collaboration, not part of a residency program,
    https://www.fastcompany.com/3063828/nasas-new-artist-in-residence-has-an-amazing-climate-change-tattoo

    10

    • #
      Rereke Whakaaro

      “We’re overwhelmed by data – and data is this thing i’m trying to fight.”

      And that folks, is the pinnacle of stupid. You can’t get any more stupid than that. For how could you measure more stupid, if by measuring it, you would get more stupid data.

      We’re all doomed.

      30

      • #
        Roy Hogue

        The amazing thing about all this nonsense is that if no one ever told any of these people there’s a problem they would never notice a problem on their own. And I say that with some confidence because I keep looking for a problem with Earth’s climate and I haven’t found one yet.

        So what if today is hotter or colder than yesterday? It’s all just weather, whether they realize it or not. Oops! I may just have unintentionally committed a pun about the weather. 😉

        20

  • #

    Sound of a dying economy: Whoosh-whoosh, whoosh-whoosh…whoooooosh…clank…(stillness)….whoosh-whoosh…whoooooosh…clank…(stillness again)…

    (Performances given daily, if fitfully, in Adelaide, which now really is the Athens of the South.)

    70

    • #
      Dave in the States

      It could be chattering teeth, as poor and elderly humans freeze to death in the dark.

      60

  • #
    pat

    u have to laugh:

    16 Jun: Reuters: Alister Doyle: Trump’s coal plan sends U.S. energy “back to the past”: Vatican
    Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said Pope Francis was concerned that any harm to the environment will be like a “boomerang that will come back … especially to poor people” with ever worsening effects…

    “This is to go back to the past and not to see the future,” Sanchez Sorondo, an Argentine like the pope, told Reuters in a telephone interview. He said future energy jobs would be in renewables, such as wind or solar power, rather than coal.
    Withdrawal from the Paris Agreement “is a disaster for this country (the United States) and also for all the world”, he said, echoing remarks he made to an Italian newspaper just before Trump’s announcement…

    Sanchez Sorondo criticized what he called the poor level of teaching of science in the United States, compared to many European countries such as Germany. “The German people are more educated in sciences and believe in science,” he said.

    “The real situation of the Earth today, of the planet, is described by scientists,” he said. To anyone on the surface the Earth can seem flat but scientific findings mean “it’s difficult to say the Earth is not round,” he said…
    http://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-vatican-idUSKBN197216?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews

    30

    • #
      CharlesM

      And he is getting to Oslo (end of the article) by hot-air balloon and the prevailing winds?

      40

    • #
      Roy Hogue

      Alister Doyle: Trump’s coal plan sends U.S. energy “back to the past”: Vatican

      Good! We had some common sense about energy back then but somewhere along the line our energy common sense all went to Argentina to learn from the soon to be elected Pope.

      I keep wondering if any of these church types who keep pontificating about electricity would know that to hook a flashlight bulb to a battery so it would light up you would need 2 wires.

      10

  • #
    JeffT

    Climate Symphony – set in the pitch of Gore, and tempo of a wind turbine just before failure

    60

  • #
    bullocky

    “…it isn’t just background noise… music is the data.”

    “Climate data has been accumulated from NOAA and Nasa (sic)…”

    Such creativity!

    70

  • #
    pat

    u know it’s getting bad for the CAGW mob when they go overboard telling us COLD KILLS, when their entire CAGW scam is based on COOLING DOWN the planet!
    written by a cheeky 10:10 activist, no less!

    17 Jun: Guardian: Alice Bell: Don’t blame green targets for Grenfell – insulation saves lives
    Rightwing papers have implicated energy-efficiency measures in the tragedy. But cold homes are dangerous and disproportionately affect poorer people’s health
    (Alice Bell is a writer, energy campaigner and head of communications at climate change charity, 10:10)

    In fact, it takes a very particular type of blinkeredness to try to pin the Grenfell fire on energy-efficiency measures. That is because insulation, done properly, saves lives. As we try to see what we can learn from this disaster, it’s vital we’re clear on this…

    The health impacts of cold homes aren’t always obvious. But year after year, the death toll creeps up. The Association for the Conservation of Energy has claimed that between 2010 and 2015, 46,700 people in the UK died due to living in a cold home…

    We know living in cold homes can worsen chronic lung disease, asthma, arthritis and rheumatism. It also reduces our ability to fight off infection. It’s sometimes characterised as a problem for the over-65s, but as a 2011 Institute of Health Equity report stressed, children living in cold homes are more than twice as likely to suffer from respiratory problems, and there are clear negative effects of cold housing and fuel poverty on the mental health of adolescents. The government’s Fuel Poverty Action Group estimates that cold homes cost the NHS around £1.3bn every year…

    The cost of energy in the UK is actually pretty cheap, relatively speaking. Per unit of energy we pay a lot less than customers in other European countries. And yet many people in the UK struggle with bills because we have to buy so much energy just to keep our homes the right side of bitterly cold. The National Children’s Bureau estimates 3.8 million children in England live in families that are struggling to pay energy bills…
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/16/dont-blame-green-targets-grenfell-insulation-saves-lives

    20 Jun: RenewEconomy: Leo Hickman (CarbonBrief): Factcheck: Right wing columnists blame Grenfell Tower fire on ‘green targets’
    (Editor’s Note: Murdoch columnists Rowan Dean and Miranda Devine have joined UK conservatives in trying to blame the tragic Grenfell Tower on climate action, green targets and even energy efficiency. Carbon Brief has a look at where this ugly nonsense came from).
    1 COMMENT ONLY:
    ***DevMac: Only sociopaths are this opportunistic.
    http://reneweconomy.com.au/factcheck-right-wing-columnists-blame-grenfell-tower-fire-on-green-targets-40553/

    ***perhaps DevMac is referring to the CAGW gatekeepers like Bell, Hickman & Renew Economy!

    20

    • #
      Mary E

      We know living in cold homes can worsen chronic lung disease, asthma, arthritis and rheumatism. It also reduces our ability to fight off infection. It’s sometimes characterised as a problem for the over-65s, but as a 2011 Institute of Health Equity report stressed, children living in cold homes are more than twice as likely to suffer from respiratory problems, and there are clear negative effects of cold housing and fuel poverty on the mental health of adolescents. The government’s Fuel Poverty Action Group estimates that cold homes cost the NHS around £1.3bn every year

      I thought the enemy was heat – not cold. Global Warming and all that, ya know. Now it’s the cold causing it all?

      Grabbing at straws to deny the problem – which was poor choice in materials used, not installing sprinklers.

      00

  • #
    Analitik

    The sound of a dying agenda is more like it.

    Off topic, Roger Andrews, at the Euan Mearns Energy Matters site, has put up an outstanding article on how the media misleads the public with claims of how the intermittency of renewables has been “solved” through battery storage.
    http://euanmearns.com/a-highly-misleading-article-on-solar-power/

    10

    • #

      There was an article on the ABC site this morning, and I went looking for it again, after having a real good laugh, but it seems to have disappeared of their main home page into the also rans, after less than three hours no less.

      So then, what made me laugh, loud and long really.

      It is a solar PV plant with battery backup.

      The PV plant (solar panels, not mirrors) is for 250MW, (wow, how monumentally huge) so at a CF of around 20% at best, that’s an average daily generation of 50MW, but at the peak time, say a couple of hours around Midday, it will be managing around 200MW in Summer, and around 150MW for a similar time around midday in Winter

      It has battery backup, and here’s where I laughed.

      It’s 80MW of battery backup, and get this they quoted 160MWH power delivery.

      They say it has two hours backup, so, umm, 80MW multiplied by two is 160MWH eh! or so the ABC mathematicians journalists think.

      Well now. Power out equals power in so if the battery only has capacity for 80MW, then 80MW is all you’ll get out of it, so two hours power delivery is only 40MW. It can give 160MW, but at 80MW Capacity, then that comes to only half an hour.

      So, the solar panels, all 2.3 Million of them will charge the batteries up during the day, and than they can use that power later on.

      Or, as the article says: (my bolding here)

      “This facility has two hours of storage — it effectively replaces peaking capacity when supply is disrupted or demand is unusually high.”

      Really, replaces Peaking Capacity. REPLACES IT. Replaces how much of it?

      40MW of it for two hours or 160MW for half an hour.

      40MW on the Victorian grid in Summer is around 0.33% of total power consumption for two hours or at the full 160MW, then it’s 1.3% of the total for half an hour.

      So, if demand is unusually high, then this wonderful battery system will add around 1% for half an hour.

      Oh for joy!

      And the cost?

      Why, it’s only $660 Million.

      For what is effectively a 50MW power plant at best. The power generated by the panels will be used to charge the batteries for at best two hours use. You either use the generated power or charge the batteries.

      And you wonder why I laugh at this.

      Tony.

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        Rereke Whakaaro

        I just happen to have a bridge, that might be for sale, if I can get the right price.

        Do you think these ABC types might be interested?

        It is only a one-lane bridge, but we have proven that you can drive over it in both directions …

        And it is very rustic and romantic looking …

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        Bobl

        Tony, your math is a little off, let me introduce a little engineering. Batteries don’t like being discharged on the whole, lead acid chemistry doesn’t like discharge of more than about 30% lithium batteries are degraded at 20% DoD. Neither chemistry will provide full rated current at more than 50% DoD as the internal resistance rises. So the best you might expect for say a 5year battery life would be 0.3×80 or around 24 MWh.

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    pat

    read all:

    19 Jun: GWPF: from UK Times: Gove needs to watch out for the green lobby
    by Matt Ridley
    From badgers to clean-air rules, environmentalists will fight him every inch of the way to protect their vested interests.
    https://www.thegwpf.com/matt-ridley-gove-needs-to-watch-out-for-the-green-lobby/

    read all:

    19 Jun: BBC: Matt McGrath: Scientists fear new EU rules may ‘hide’ forest carbon loss
    Europe’s forests have been increasing for the last century, and over the last 10 years the equivalent of 1,500 football pitches of trees have been added every day.
    However accounting for carbon contained in trees is a fiendishly difficult task. Forests can both soak up and emit carbon depending on how old they are, and how they are managed and harvested…

    To this end they (EU officials) want to cap the use of forestry at the levels seen between 1990 and 2009. If countries want to harvest more trees in future than they did during this period, the loss of carbon would count towards the country’s overall emissions.
    However several countries including Austria, Finland, Poland and Sweden want a change in these rules so that increased harvesting in the future should not be penalised…

    But researchers in the field are very anxious about the proposed changes. Around 40 forestry experts from across the world have signed a letter arguing that if the rules are amended, it would “hide” roughly 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year – equivalent to two-thirds of France’s annual emissions…

    Environment ministers from across the EU will discuss the issue on Monday in Brussels but no agreement on this complex area is expected at this point.
    http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40301769

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      Graeme No.3

      Considering you can burn them and not count emissions – see Drax in the UK – I can’t see why the EU worries about dodgy accounting. Oh! I see, it is only dodgy if it doesn’t conform to the dogma.

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    pat

    spruiking, as usual:

    19 Jun: Fast Company: Adele Peters: How Al Gore Keeps His Cool Over Climate Change
    The former vice president sees hope in the private sector, local governments, and all of us on the internet.
    In An Inconvenient Sequel, due in theaters July 28, he shares an outlook that is both more dire and more optimistic: Last year was the hottest ever on record, but it also marked a high point for installations of renewable energy…
    “We will solve this crisis,” Gore says. “No doubt about it.”…
    https://www.fastcompany.com/40425874/how-al-gore-keeps-his-cool-over-climate-change

    even the millennials are NOT buying it, Al:

    19 Jun: Daily Wire: James Barrett: EXCLUSIVE: 60% Of Millennials Willing To Give Just $10 Or Less To Fight Climate Change
    A new Daily Wire/Whatsgoodly online survey asked 1,250 millennials from all over the country just how much money they’d be willing to personally give this year to fight what the Democratic Party and the left-leaning media consistently reminds us is the greatest threat facing mankind: climate change. The answer is not much, if any.
    The survey asked millennials, “How much would you be willing to personally give to the government this year to fight climate change?” A total of 60% of the respondents — which included more liberals and centrists than conservatives — either offered no money at all or were only willing to hand over ten bucks…
    LINK See the full results of the survey here.

    (from link) Note on Methodology: Whatsgoodly is a polling company for millennials. These results are collected primarily from Whatsgoodly’s native iOS and Android apps for students aged 17 and older. The app verifies identity using school affiliation, location, and demographic attributes…
    http://www.dailywire.com/news/17674/exclusive-60-millennials-unwilling-give-more-10-james-barrett#

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      Rereke Whakaaro

      So the audience is the “worriers of the future”? But they are not really concerned now? So they won’t be worrying in the future when they have more history and experience to base their opinions on.

      This is very good news.

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        Graeme No.3

        I have a vision of people gathered in a room as Worriers Anonymous. Giving each other support so they are no longer worried about worrying.

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      Roy Hogue

      The former vice president sees hope in the private sector, local governments, and all of us on the internet.

      Now if we could just see some sign of hope in the former vice president…

      But don’t hold your breath.

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    pat

    16 Jun: ThinkProgress: Jeremy Deaton: Flooding the imagination: Climate change art installation hits Times Square
    Artist Lars Jan has presented a haunting portrayal of climate change.
    The Los Angeles-based artist and his colleagues built an elevator-sized glass tank that fills with water. Inside the tank, performers behave like nothing is wrong. They might coil a garden hose, tune a guitar, or sell fruit in the market while floating about. “Rather than acting as if there’s a crisis as the space starts to flood, they adapt their behavior in order to make do as best they can,” said Jan. Even when totally submerged, the performers are utterly complacent — a nod to humanity’s sluggish response to the climate crisis…

    Jan’s installation, Holoscenes, has toured North America and Europe since its debut in 2014. It arrived in New York for the World Science Festival, which coincided with Trump’s announcement on the Paris accord. “It felt like a gut punch,” said Jan of the announcement. “Doing this made it feel like we were able to punch back.”…

    The apparatus can fill with more than 3,000 gallons of water in as little as 45 seconds. It will fill and drain slowly and quickly over the course of a five-hour performance. Performers behave normally until submerged, and then they move about gracefully — continuing to make the bed or read the newspaper — coming up occasionally for air…

    Jan was determined to faithfully represent the science of climate change. He interviewed researchers, including climatologists but also social scientists who study how people think and talk about climate change…
    “If you’re so inclined to ask questions, people can teach themselves,” he added. “Maybe somebody watches An Inconvenient Truth on Netflix for the first time.”…
    https://thinkprogress.org/holoscenes-art-climate-4c3000f71c91

    19 Jun: Breitbart: James Delingpole: Trump Is Western Democracy’s Last Man Standing Against the Green Terror
    Don’t just take it from me. Read this Belgian philosopher, Drieu Godefridi, interviewed in the French liberal newspaper Contrepoints and translated here (LINK) by Friends of Science Calgary…
    http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/06/19/delingpole-trump-is-western-democracys-last-man-standing-against-the-green-terror/

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    pat

    btw thinkprogress has pic & video of Lars’s Holoscenes installation.

    even “climate scientists” are getting into CAGW Art:

    PIC: 15 Jun: EGU (European Geosciences Union) Blog: The art of turning climate change science to a crochet blanket
    by Prof. Ellie Highwood
    (Ellie Highwood is Professor of Climate Physics in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading. She did a Bsc in Physics at the University of Manchester before studying for a PhD at Reading, where she has been ever since! Her research interests concern the role of atmospheric particulates (aerosol) in climate and climate change…She also writes a regular “climate scientist” column for the Weather magazine)

    What do you get when you cross crochet and climate science?
    A lot of attention on Twitter…
    Given the interest on Twitter I thought I had better answer a few of the questions in a blog post. Also, it would be great if global warming blankets appeared all over the world.

    Q: How did you get the idea?
    A:The global warming blanket was based on “temperature” blankets made by crocheters around the world. Their blankets consist of one row, or square, of crochet each day, coloured according to the temperature at their location. They look amazing and show both the annual cycle and day-to-day variability. Other people make “sky” blankets where the colours are based on the sky colour of the day – this results in a more muted grey-blue-white colour palette.
    I wondered what the global temperature series would look like as a blanket. Also, global warming is often explained as greenhouse gases acting like a blanket, trapping infrared radiation and keeping the Earth warm. So that seemed like an interesting link…

    Where did the data come from?
    I used the annual and global mean temperature anomaly compared to 1900-2000 mean as a reference period as available from NOAA…ETC
    http://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/as/2017/06/15/the-art-of-turning-climate-change-science-to-a-crochet-blanket/

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      Graeme No.3

      pat:
      If the planet is warming why are they making blankets?

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      Roy Hogue

      After some of the things that have been called art during my lifetime, climate change sounds rather tame.

      Unfortunately they use the arts to reach and create more converts to the cause.

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    pat

    20 Jun: Australian: Judith Sloan: Four questions for politicians considering Australia’s energy future
    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/judith-sloan/four-questions-for-politicians-considering-australias-energy-future/news-story/ee3a85d0a1b58c6bbf537494c81e3f70

    19 Jun: National Observer: Despite denial, explosive report about Trudeau and Merkel still standing
    By Carl Meyer
    A week after an explosive revelation by a German magazine forced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to repeatedly deny that he “appeased” U.S. President Donald Trump on climate change, that magazine appears to have reaffirmed its report, and is standing by its story…

    Last week, the prime minister denied the story on two occasions and his office said it had asked for a correction from Der Spiegel. The magazine has updated its story with an editor’s note that says it was indeed contacted by Trudeau’s office following the story’s publication.

    But it says the office requested it publish “a response,” not a correction. The magazine then published a reply that appears to back up its original reporting in the story…

    National Observer has asked Ahmad about whether the prime minister’s office is still demanding a correction, but he could not immediately respond before publication.
    http://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/06/19/news/despite-denial-explosive-report-about-trudeau-and-merkel-still-standing

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    pat

    more proof it’s a whole, political package:

    19 Jun: HuffPo: Harpreet Kaur: Climate Change and the Arts
    I have worked in arts and culture for 15 years wearing a range of hats from producing projects to developing audiences in different countries. More recently, reading for an MSc in Gender and International Relations and working with organisations focused on social justice, activism, human security, women’s empowerment, conflict resolution, the environment and social enterprise, my appreciation has galvanized for cultural diplomacy and the importance of addressing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)…

    Creativity, campaigning and climate change are connected. I explored this relationship in March 2017 as the recipient of a scholarship to participate in Creative Climate Leadership, the first international leadership programme for creatives passionate about climate change, by Julie’s Bicycle…

    My interest in climate change arose whilst reading about Human Security. I presented at COP21 in Paris about its relationship with spirituality and creativity from a Sikh perspective. In 2016 I participated in Pioneers into Practice with Climate KIC, an EU project to explore sustainability and a low carbon economy…

    Moving towards a 100% renewable powered arts world is key, to act as a beacon of best practice. Funding support is required to support a growing conscious and creative movement…

    Watch out for The Season 2018 when the UKs creative community will host a season of work and activities celebrating the environment and inspiring action from 1 June to 1 December 2018. It will coincide with the COP24 global climate talks and celebrate the widest range of creative responses to climate change and the environment across arts, design, broadcast, film, fashion, and music in museums, galleries, theatres, venues, cinemas, festivals, parks, and on the streets…
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/climate-change-and-the-arts_us_59478840e4b024b7e0df4d9f

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      Annie

      Ye gods!

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      Graeme No.3

      If they are going to perform outdoors in December in England they won’t have to emulate the ancient Britons and paint themselves blue as they caper around naked. They will be BLUE naturally.
      Unless of course they embark on a policy of animal exploitation by using skins and fleeces, No, surely they wouldn’t show their lack of empathy with the unwilling victims of anthropological exploitation of sentient life forms, And they shouldn’t step in the crap either.

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      Stand in awed contemplation before this landscape,Harpreet, honey,
      each of these thrumming giants is taller than the Statue of Liberty.

      http://smart-lab.ru/uploads/images/03/09/78/2016/03/22/b77b7e.jpg

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        Roy Hogue

        And every one of them is ultimately a threat to our liberty. Worse, the Statue of Liberty was a work of art and a gift from a nation in awe of what we had going on here in this country. But these windmills are, “…a blight upon the landscape,” to misquote John Muir, founder of the sierra Club.

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    pat

    20 Jun: Australian: Rosie Lewis: Malcolm Turnbull announces gas export limits, may support coal-fired power
    With AAP, Dow Jones
    Mr Turnbull also flagged possible taxpayer support for upgrading coal and gas-fired generators to secure affordable power.

    He will ask the Australian Energy Market Operator to review which power stations might be liable to close soon and report on ways, including government support, to secure investment in them.
    “The object is to make sure that affordability and security are protected,” Mr Turnbull said…

    “(They will) talk to suppliers and energy suppliers and particularly large-scale emissions intensity suppliers about what they need to do to secure future investment and examine how much continuous power is needed in the short-term to stabilise our power prices,” he said.

    If necessary the government would step in beyond its existing commitment to Snowy Hydro 2.0, such as investing in clean coal technology. “We’d certainly consider that.”

    The government will also scrap a legal process electricity companies use to hike power prices…READ ALL
    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/malcolm-turnbull-announces-gas-export-limits-may-support-coalfired-power/news-story/89a22dd4166ceb94bb336de063812f47

    a good read:

    17 Jun: NY Post: Salena Zito: Don’t be so quick to dismiss Trump’s coal mining initiative
    http://nypost.com/2017/06/17/dont-be-so-quick-to-dismiss-trumps-coal-mining-initiative/

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    pat

    19 Jun: Reuters: Interior head says public lands can make U.S. a ‘dominant’ oil power
    By Valerie Volcovici
    Boosting drilling and mining on America’s protected federal lands can help the United States become not just independent, but “dominant” as a global energy force, according to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, whose agency manages about one-fifth of U.S. territory…

    “There is a social cost of not having jobs,” the former Montana Congressman and Navy Seal said in the interview on Friday…

    While total U.S. oil production has risen to near records in the past decade, the share produced on federal land has dropped to a fifth in 2015 from more than a third in 2010, according to federal data from the Department of the Interior…

    Zinke issued his first major recommendation to President Trump on one of the monuments last week, a reduction in the size of the 1.35 million acre Bears Ears National Monument in Utah created by Obama in his last days in office. [L1N1J917V]

    Zinke told Reuters he is likely to take a similar approach to the other monuments, including the 4,913 square mile Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off the coast of Massachusetts – which is roughly three times the size of Montana’s Glacier National Park…

    During meetings with New England-based marine scientists, commercial fishermen and National Parks Service employees last week, Zinke argued that the Interior Department now makes around $15.5 billion per year less in revenue from offshore drilling than it did in 2008 due to Obama-era restrictions.

    Last month Zinke signed an executive order to lift some of those restrictions. He told Reuters he wants increased revenue from offshore to be used to finance a backlog of repairs throughout America’s national parks…

    Marine scientists gave Zinke a virtual tour of the Canyons monument at the New England Aquarium, and argued there was a need to preserve the area as a “reference point” to measure the impacts of climate change and overfishing.

    Zinke later told Reuters he believed “there are legitimate scientific endeavors and research that are recognized and important (around the site), but there are also recognized livelihoods, fishing jobs that are also important.”

    During his tour, Zinke also fielded questions about the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, a global pact to fight climate change. Zinke defended the administration’s decision, calling the agreement a bad deal for the United States.

    Zinke later told Reuters while the U.S. government should find solutions to adapt to changing climate, jobs are a priority. “If you don’t have an economy you can’t afford to put in the environmental protections you need,” he said.
    http://mobile.reuters.com/article/BigStory12/idUSKBN19A1KG

    19 Jun: WashingtonFreeBeacon: Elizabeth Harrington: EPA Ends $1 Million Taxpayer-Funded Gym Membership Program
    EPA administrator Scott Pruitt identified the gym memberships as an abuse of taxpayer dollars
    EPA spokesperson Jahan Wilcox: “Disinvestment in using federal funds for EPA fitness centers will allow the agency to invest this money in core activities to protect the environment.”

    Pruitt vowed an end to taxpayer-funded programs after the Washington Free Beacon report on the agency spending $15,000 on gym memberships in Las Vegas, earlier this year. Employees in the U.S. Environmental Science Division billed taxpayers $399 each for gym memberships, even though employees had access to a “state-of-the-art” gym on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) campus.
    The campus gym includes a relaxation room with massage chairs, fitness assessments, personal trainers for hire, a registered dietician, a spa and leisure pool, indoor jogging, and a “gender neutral bathroom.”…

    The benefits will officially end on July 31, and no additional funds for fitness centers will be provided. For facilities that already have gym equipment that is paid for, the EPA will no longer pay for the maintenance of the equipment and will not purchase any new equipment…
    http://freebeacon.com/issues/epa-ends-1-million-taxpayer-funded-gym-membership-program/

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      Roy Hogue

      Hey Pat, do you mean to say that there are other priorities besides the deah of our planet?

      Just asking…

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        Roy Hogue

        And did we really pay $399 for gym memberships for a bunch of useless employees? We don’t need someone to drain the swamp. We need someone to stick a pin in the bloated balloon that is the current fantasy right across the country from left coast to right coast, Canada to Mexico.

        If I wanted a gym membership I would have had to pay for it myself. Grr! 🙁

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    Freddyflatfoot

    I know not everyone here is religious, but reading this report brought to mind a passage of scripture from Timothy Ch4,
    “3For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, 4and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.”

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      Peter C

      That is very apt Freddy.

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      Roy Hogue

      2nd Timothy, Ch 4, v3-4 to be exact.

      And so they have.

      And even if you place no value on scripture at all you’ll have to admit that something written roughly a couple of thousand years ago has suddenly turned prophetic about today. That should tell all of us something about ourselves but a great many miss the lesson and become fools.

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    Salome

    Probably formed in the year that in order to get a grant for ANYTHING, you just had to include ‘climate change’ in the abstract. Emperor’s new clothes music, I bet.

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    Roy Hogue

    What is the sound of a dying planet?

    I really can’t answer, Jo. I haven’t yet heard what a dying planet sounds like. In fact I’ve yet to even find a dying planet.

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      Roy Hogue

      However, with that said there’s the little matter of climate data somehow turned into music that I need to deal with.

      And frankly I’ll take Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms or even baroque — how about Vivaldi for starters? And the list is really more than long enough that I don’t have to pretend that someone’s “bad trip” from smoking the wrong stuff is worth listening to. There’s music and there’s noise. And I know the difference. Make mine music please. Anyone who wants it can have my share of audible climate data along with those who compose it. 🙂

      If it was Christmas I would think all the fruitcakes had escaped from the bakery. And come to thinking about it, it does look like the fruitcakes have escaped even though it’s still the middle of June and a long way from Christmas.

      As Alice said… well, you know what she said.

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    Jason Calley

    Wow! Climate data to music! That is even better than my “Physics for Poets” class! Yeah, I was never really good at science – I mean, all those numbers and measurements and equations an all… But I listen to music a lot, so I am pretty good at that. Now I can just listen to some music and if I like it, then I am a scientist! Who knew science could be so easy? Now when some of my egghead friends start talking all that math stuff and sceptical stuff and raw data stuff, I can just tell them “HEY! You don’t know what you are talking about, but I do! I know SCIENCE because I listened to some of it just the other day. It was science music and it was saying “the Earth is dying!”

    (/sarc off)

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    Jason Calley

    It dawns upon me that the self-styled “climatologists” should not be the only branch of study to take advantage of this musical approach. Perhaps some school of Psychiatry can arrange their data into musical form. I suggest they take a formal study of apathy, and blend it with the chorus of “Jimmy Crack Corn.”

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    Rocky

    Will Brown Coal work in the new HELE generators?

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    Geoffrey Williams

    The Arts Council of England and ‘A Dying Planet’ . . .
    The Earth is not dying-the only thing that is dying is intellectual integrity from the Arts Council.
    GeoffW

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    sophocles

    If that is the sound of a dying planet then how can I help it die faster?
    To put it out of its misery?

    But that can’t be planet Earth. Wherever I look, I see boundless and renewing life.

    I prefer Beethoven. He mourned his hearing loss, accepted it and celebrated his continued life, challenging the world again in his 5th Symphony. He wrote some of his best music after becoming profoundly deaf; his 6th, and 7th Symphonies are both tours-de-force and there is his magnificent, fabulous, 9th.

    The Climate Symphony sounds too much like adolescents flailing around in the early stages of hormonally induced depression.

    10