Midweek Unthreaded

9 out of 10 based on 22 ratings

Only 16 countries are even aiming to reach their Paris targets

The Paris Agreement was always fake news

Only 16 countries have set domestic targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are clearly at least as ambitious as their pledged contributions to the goals of the Paris Agreement, according to an analysis published today (29 October 2018)…

Who are these environmental stars and global suckers?

The 16 countries with targets in national policies and laws that are compatible with their NDCs are:

Algeria, Canada, Costa Rica, Ethiopia,

Guatemala, Indonesia, Japan, FYR Macedonia,

Malaysia, Montenegro, Norway, Papua New Guinea,

Peru, Samoa, Singapore and Tonga.

“We found only six countries that have set economy-wide targets beyond 2030 in their NDCs – Iraq, Cameroon, Brunei, Armenia, Bhutan and Palestine. Only 16 countries plus the EU currently look beyond 2030 in their national laws, policies and directives…”

The committee writing the report seems to have a thing about “economy wide” targets probably because they are the most expensive, profligately wasteful and pointless schemes, like the Australian carbon tax which cost $5310 per ton of carbon reduced. Economy wide schemes […]

80% of Australian don’t want the government to put renewables ahead of costs, health, housing, jobs etc

With boring regularity, when voters are asked to rank their choices, “clean” energy is not a top priority. Only 7% of Australians want the government to promote renewables ahead of other major issues. It’s the same old, same old for years, yet the media and both parties are locked in a death spiral trying to turn it into an election issue. Real people put living Standards above Virtue Signalling, says Alan Moran.

Essential Report Oct 2018: Rocketing into top place is the cost of living. Stuck in the dull middle is renewables.

Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address. Click to enlarge.

Split voters into left and right, and remarkably they all want the same things. (So we’re all still human, though it says something about the type of questions asked.)

Conservative / liberal voters want to be able to afford stuff, stay alive, have a home:

Liberal voters put renewables at number 10 out of 13.

Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address. Click to enlarge.

Labor voters want to be able to afford stuff too:

Even Labor voters are only putting renewables at number 6.

Essential poll 2018. What […]

Don’t miss Dan Hannan in Australia – Perth, Melbourne, Sydney

He’s in Perth Tuesday night. I’ve seen him speak before and he was excellent. I’ll be there. Tickets to Perth here.

“British Conservative Member of the European Parliament Dan Hannan explains why London will soon be closer to Perth than Brussels, and outlines historic opportunities ahead for West Australian entrepreneurs.” With introduction by Andrew Hastie MP.

Dan Hannan In Australia: Melbourne on Wednesday 31 October in conversation with John Roskam and Nick Cater. Sydney, the 2018 Annual John Bonython Lecture with the CIS on 1 November.

 

10 out of 10 based on 27 ratings

Interview with David Evans — breaking the impasse in the climate change debate, and why he became a skeptic

David Evans speaks to Emmett at Resolving Reality radio on why he shifted to being a skeptic (4:15 mins), and on the current state of the climate debate and where climate modelers get their “implacable confidence” from (5:20). David discusses the impasse — the standoff. It’s possible that climate modelers can have the physics right but the model paths wrong.

Quite a bit of the interview is aimed at people new to this debate. Regular readers might enjoy more on the Sun’s role (22 minutes). And some of the history, like the rich pickings of working for the Gravy Train (32:15 minutes).

At 33:00 David discusses the audacious threat to national sovereignty and the near miss of 2009. Useful history to remind us of what is at stake. David goes on to discuss the systematic demonization of non-PC views — he argues that climate change was the test case for the newer more aggressive model of stamping out discussion in so many areas.

David’s research work continues, he prefers to keep a low profile and stay out of the “blood sport” online. I’m not going to put a date on it, original discovery doesn’t work to a timetable, but […]

Weekend Unthreaded

9.5 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

Scientist seals himself in plastic tent for 3 days for “climate change” — aborts in 15 hours, foiled by clouds

A 28 year old guy in British Columbia thought it had some message about climate change if he sealed himself in a primitive biodome with 200 plants. But the sun didn’t shine, the plants didn’t photosynthesize enough, and he “felt sluggish”. CO2 levels were a bit high so he had to abandon the experiment just 15 hours later — calling it “a huge success”. As you would, if you had no connection to actual hardship, or actual success.

The BBC thought this badly planned, unscientific stunt failure was newsworthy and lauded him his 15 seconds of fame and advertising for the cause. Proving that any kind of measurable achievement is irrelevant. If it promotes the religion, anything will do.

I challenge anyone to find a lamer stunt in the history of climate panic

Kurtis Baute: Scientist leaves airtight dome after 15 hours

A self-styled “whimsical scientist” who locked himself in an airtight dome with 200 plants to raise awareness of climate change has ended his experiment.

He thanked fans and described the experience as a “huge success”.

While still inside the dome, he explained his mission in a Twitter thread, writing: “#ClimateChange […]

ABC-Watch: Beyond fake headlines — 61% of company directors do not care about Climate Change

Fake News Lesson: How to turn the views of a minority into National Headlines

Yesterday’s ABC headline tells the world that Australian company directors have started to “care” about climate change. What the ABC don’t mention is that only 17% of them actually ticked the box saying they think the Government should make “climate change” the top long term priority. While more directors were concerned about climate change than any other single issue, most directors thought other things were more important.

For every director who said the government should put climate change at number one, there were more than three who didn’t want that.

The Australian Institute of Directors surveys its 43,000 members every six months on lots of questions. In this round 1,252 members took part and answered something like 40 questions. Only 39% put “climate change” in the top five “long term” issues. So 61% of respondents didn’t think climate change even ranked in the top five issues facing the nation in the long run. Are they all skeptics?

The ABC also forgot to mention that in the short term, company directors wanted the government to fix Energy Policy.

This is what non-stop agitprop looks like

First: […]

ABC-watch: Economist talks unresearched conspiracy science to pretend journalist

Welcome to another $3 million-a-day quality moment on Their ABC

Here’s a Nobel Prize winning economist reviewing scientific evidence — something Nobel Prize winners in physics don’t get to do on the ABC. His interviewer is the star economist Emma Alberici.

The guest opens with near apocalyptic predictions:

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: If more and more of Australia are not liveable because of climate change, you’re not going to be better off.

You know, the future of the world, let alone the future of Australia really is at stake when we are talking about climate change.

These days, wild claims are just introductory wallpaper. Meh.

Who knew, the key scientific evidence was reviewed by economists.

The evidence is overwhelming and I was on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that reviewed the evidence back 1995, …

Which tells you everything you need to know about how rigorous the IPCC science reviews are.

But it would be OK if only he knew something about climate science, the IPCC or its predictions:

…and I’ve kept looking at the evidence and you know, the one mistake we made in 1995 was that we didn’t anticipate how […]

Midweek Unthreaded

9.9 out of 10 based on 17 ratings

Evil Nature caused Swiss Glaciers to melt faster in 1870 (See solar and volcanic effects)

A study on Swiss Glaciers shows that the fastest melting was in the 1860s and 1870s, long before the first coal fired power. (See that steep decline from 1850-70 in Part a in the graph below.) In Part b see the glaciers have been going back and forward in cycles that somehow have no correlation with human emissions.

Climate models can’t predict any of these turning points, don’t understand any of these cycles, but “doom is coming”.

Pay up your money to make glaciers grow again.

From the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI)

Figure 8. (a) Cumulative glacier length changes for the four glaciers Bossons, Mer de Glace, Oberer (O-) Grindelwald and Unterer (U-) Grindelwald …); (b) glacier length change rate …(c )glacier length changes compared to surface air temperature anomalies for the summer … Panel (d) air temps and stratospheric aerosol optical depth (SAOD) (Click to enlarge and read the proper full caption).

In Part c (above) — glacier lengths correlate with temperatures. In part d the brown spikes are the Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Depth [SAOD] — meaning volcanic dust, black carbon, soot. These were bad years to head to the beach.

In terms of speed, note the lack […]

The largest poll in Australia on Climate Change was the 2013 Abbott landslide election

The flipping of Wentworth just marks a the morphing of the two major parties which started long ago.

The Labor Party now represents the rich and the welfare dependent. The Liberals represent the Deplorable worker and what’s left of the Middle Class and there aren’t many of those in the seat of Wentworth. Turnbull was the perfect fit for the seat as it transited from being a safe Conservative Seat to a safe Collectivist-Virtue-Signalling Seat. He was the Labor-guy badged as a Liberal. Kerryn Phelps is the “ideal” replacement — the Labor-Green candidate badged as an Independent. This made it easier for doctors-wives, lawyers and journalists to vote for an option which was essentially Labor-Green, but had the appearance of being “smarter” and above all the riff raff.

Kerryn Phelps essentially stands for a Get UP approved Labor Green Christmas Wish List: More renewable parasites, death to coal, pandering to collectivist UN committees, a ban on fossil fuel donations (but no ban for government cronies who take big-government funds and donate it to big-government parties.). She wants to restore funding to The ABC because $3m a day is not enough. Heck, they lost 5% a while back.

The vote […]

Unthreaded Party

Majority gone. The Liberals are not paying for the last leadership change, so much as the one before.

Picking a Labor guy to run the Party was never going to end well.

Thank Turnbull (and MP’s that voted for him) for turning a 24 seat majority into one seat rule that he then threw away…

Note to Libs: if the ABC approves, you are doing something wrong.

Latest Count

 

9.5 out of 10 based on 75 ratings

Despite record heat, six times as many people die of cold in Australia not heat

Australia has had the hottest temperatures for a thousand years (according to some). We’ve “shattered records” yet even so, at the peak of this hot era — six times as many Australians were felled by cold weather. Lord help us when the next ice-age comes.

A study on Australian deaths from 2000-2009 found that heat, cold, and temperature variability killed 42,000 people which was about 6% of all deaths. Of those temperature related deaths 60% were due to the cold. 28% were due to sudden changes in temperature. A mere 10% were due to heat.

Greenhouse gases should help prevent 90% of those deaths (they reduce temperature variability too). Looks like we need to burn more coal. For the sake of the vulnerable and needy.

When are our government and our government broadcaster going to start dealing with real problems, not fake ones?

 

Attributable fraction of deaths: Heat, cold and temperature variability together resulted in 42,414 deaths during the study period, accounting for about 6.0% of all deaths. Most of attributable deaths were due to cold (61.4%), and noticeably, contribution from temperature variability (28.0%) was greater than that from heat (10.6%).

 

Don’t assume we just got lucky. […]

Hadley excuse implies their quality control might filter out the freak outliers? Not so.

The Met Office, Hadley Centre response to #DataGate implied they do quality control and that leaves the impression that they might filter out the frozen tropical islands and other freak data:

We perform automated quality checks on the ocean data and monthly updates to the land data are subjected to a computer assisted manual quality control process.

I asked John to expand on what Hadley means. He replies that the quality control they do is very minimal, obviously inadequate, and these errors definitely survive the process and get into the HadCRUT4 dataset. Bear in mind a lot of the problems begin with the national meteorological services which supply the shoddy data, but then Hadley seems pretty happy to accept these mistakes. (Hey, it’s not like Life on Earth depends on us understanding our climate. :- ) )

As far as long term trends go, the site-move-adjustments are the real problem and create an artificial warming trend. On the other hand, the frozen tropical islands tells us how competent the “Experts” really are (not a lot) and how much they care about understanding what our climate really was (not at all). That said, we don’t know what effect the […]

Three out of four living astronauts who walked on moon are skeptics (men the ABC won’t interview)

Charles Duke, 1972

There are only 12 men who have walked on the moon, and only 4 are still living. Selected from the best of the best at the time, with impeccable reputations, why would any of them speak out and risk being called names like deniers of “basic physics”. Yet three of the four have: Harrison Schmitt, Charles Duke, Buzz Aldrin. (Plus others like Australian born Phil Chapman (support crew, Apollo 14) and Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7).

Maybe because they hate watching as the good name of NASA gets subverted into a pagan weather changing cult?

And because these are guys comfortable with risk.

The NASA space program was once one of mankind’s greatest scientific and engineering achievements. In 2012 49 former NASA staff including astronauts, directors of shuttle programs, flight operations, and spacecraft maintenance, wrote to NASA warning that GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) was risking NASA’s reputation by making unproven remarks and ignoring empirical evidence.

Harrison has been a vocal skeptic now for at least nine years. So far the ABC has not asked him why, or anything at all on the topic. But then, he’s only a PhD in Geology, what would he […]

Midweek Unthreaded

8.7 out of 10 based on 26 ratings

MediaWatch: Jo Nova, McLean, Newscorp fools! Govt committees are always right.

Ponder the irony — MediaWatch is meant to be a media auditor, but it starts from the assumption that every government run collective is 100% accurate (at least on climate change). And unaudited UN committees are infallible too. Indeed newspapers have a duty to repeat what these committees say without questioning them. Host Paul Barry actually uses the word duty.

Once upon a time, the duty of investigative reporters was to to investigate, now their job is to be glorified marketing hacks advertising the latest government scheme to change the weather. What could possibly go wrong?

How about if governments set up all their institutes to find problems with CO2 and asked none of them to audit the others? What if whole government departments were tasked to slay the carbon dragon, and while exactly no groups anywhere were funded to find out if the sun controlled the climate instead? Using the MediaWatch Wand of Truth, only government scientists can criticize government scientists (and only then for five minutes until their uni trawls through their emails and sacks them). Thus and verily IPCC scientists should be obeyed.

MediaWatch marvels that the Australian Newscorp media can’t be bothered repeating the […]

#DataGate: Hadley reply to first audit with foggy excuses about problems 2,000 staff didn’t find

Last week we exposed absurd errors, brutal adjustments and an almost complete lack of quality control (was there any at all?) in the key HadCRUT4 data. The IPCC’s favorite set is maintained (I’m feeling generous) by the Met Office Hadley Centre and the Uni of East Anglia’s CRU in the UK.

Finally the Hadley Met Centre team have replied to Graham Lloyd regarding John McLean’s audit. They don’t confirm or discount any of his new claims specifically. But they acknowledge his previous notifications were useful in 2016, and promise “any errors will be fixed in the next update.” That’s nice to know, but begs the question of why a PhD student working from home can find mistakes that the £226 million institute with 2,100 employees could not.

They don’t mention the killer issue of the adjustments for site-moves at all — that’s the cumulative cooling of the oldest records to compensate for buildings that probably weren’t built there ’til decades later.

Otherwise this is the usual PR fog — a few outliers don’t change the trend, the world is warming, and other datasets show “similar trends“. The elephant in the kitchen is the site move adjustments which do […]

ABC Climate fiction: Life at 0.5 degrees hotter, dead plants, animals, ghost towns, jellyfish hell

The job of ABC environment reporters is not to serve the public and ask scientists hard questions about whether we can rely on their climate models that fail 98% of the time and on every scale in time and locality.

Instead their job is to be fiction writers, converting failing models into vomiting babies:

Under IPCC forecasts babies born today will be 22 when warming hits 1.5C. What will life be like?

By environment reporter Nick Kilvert

Meet Casey X. She was born in Alice Springs Hospital on October 13, 2018.

She came into the world screaming, before projectile-vomiting over the hospital floor and falling asleep.

For this the ABC gets $3 million dollars every day.

We are talking about a half degree Celsius of warming spread over 22 years. This is double the decadal rate currently shown by satellites. But even if we assume that climate models are right for the first time ever, and this dramatic change in trends occurs, it’s still only half a degree more in a world where humans live from minus 50C to plus 40C and every day temperatures vary by 10 – 20 degrees.

Alice Springs 2040, […]