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Sometimes we have laws, and sometimes it’s the wrong time for them A judgement today in a minor NSW court banned a coal mine in the hope of making storms and floods nicer for our great grandchildren. Curiously, it was not the much hated thermal coal mine, it was a coking coal mine – the stuff we use in making steel. It takes 600 kilograms of coal to make one ton of steel and Australian coking coal is considered some of the world’s best. It follows that either the world uses a bit less steel, or it buys the coal from somewhere else. Does the judge have something against steel? Let’s melt down wind turbines and solar panels instead. Most likely the world will buy the coal from somewhere else. It will likely be less pure and more polluting with few environmental controls or worker’s rights, but hey-de-ho, Judge Preston is not there to worry about environmental global concerns. It’s not like he’s a judge in the NSW Land and Environment Court. Oh… Effectively, an Australian court decided to increase global pollution by blocking a clean coal mine*. As usual, there is no scientific or legal consistency; No principle apart […] February 9th, 2019 | Tags: Coal, NSW (New South Wales) | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | | Warwick Hughes (h/t Dave Brewer) points out that on Dec 20th the Australian Bureau of Meteorology predicted that the Townsville region had only a 1 in 3 chance of exceeding the average rainfall in January. Australian Bureau of Meteorology, prediction, Jan 2019 rainfall. … How that turned out one month later: Australian Bureau of Meteorology, January rainfall, 2019. Or graphed as the rainfall anomaly rather than as the percentage of the mean: …. Predicting rainfall in Australia is very difficult. The issue is not that the BoM gets it wrong — it’s that they pretend they can do it that matters. Why bother issuing one month forecasts? Ten days out they were still hopelessly wrong As Warwick Hughes notes they also predicted on Jan 17th that February in Townsville would only have a 45% chance of exceeding the average rainfall. The downpour started on Jan 27th. Today, after one whole week in February, the area has already had over four times the normal rainfall for the whole month, but the BoM didn’t see that rain coming ten days in advance. The fancy-pants detailed graphics are entirely misleading — like advertising that sells an ability the experts simply […] February 7th, 2019 | Tags: Australian rainfall, BOM | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Another triumph of modeling In 2014, Townsville City Council launched a detailed flood mapping service. The maps will allow people to search individual properties to find out the risk of it being inundated during a one-in-100-year flood event. Five years later and they’re publishing inundation maps. Sadly, new suburbs were built with the wrong expectations. Townsville flood maps reviewed as more homes go under Jared Owens and Charlie Peel The Australian Townsville City Council’s spokeswoman said last night the model, which was based on expert modelling of different scenarios, was overwhelmed by an “unprecedented” monsoonal trough … Local Government Association of Queensland chief executive Greg Hallam said Townsville’s flood maps relied on “exhaustive modelling of every possible scenario”, looking at variables such as rainfall and artificial structures. “We’re not God. We don’t have supreme knowledge. We only have the best science, the best knowledge we can have,” he said. “We now know with the (dam) gates fully open … what will flood and what won’t, so there will be a new set of flood maps produced out of this event.” If we had better climate models, perhaps we might […] February 7th, 2019 | Tags: Floods, Queensland (QLD) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | … 10 out of 10 based on 20 ratings After epic flooding in Townsville, witchdoctors are blaming climate change. Queensland’s recent extreme weather – bushfires, heatwaves, coral bleaching, drought, Cyclone Penny, Townsville’s floods – showed Queensland is clearly experiencing climate change, Professor Ian Lowe said. Thus spake the Druid of Runes waving a bunch of multifactor complex processes that have been happening forever, can’t be predicted and only have scary trends if you draw short graphs with no error bars. Verily we see doom, doth payth my grant, or whatever it is that keeps Prof Ian Lowe going. He is allegedly in the Queensland Climate Advisory Council (QCAC) — an organization so successful its only existence on the internet appears to be a sidebar on page 15 of a government PDF. But whoever they are, they’re experts, trust us, that the media doesn’t need to ask for an alternate opinion. Wouldn’t you know it though, floods seem to happen quite a lot in Townsville This is not to say that the current floods are not serious but just that Townsville is a floody kind of place. It’d be climate change if things stopped flooding in Townsville. In the last ten days Townsville has had 600mm […] February 6th, 2019 | Tags: Australian rainfall, Evidence, Extreme weather, Floods, Queensland (QLD) | Category: Global Warming, Meteorology | Print This Post | | Seen the Gillette “Toxic Masculinity” Ad? A couple of weeks back Gillette thought it would pander to the #Metoo women who do the shopping. Uproar resulted. James Delingpole won’t be buying Gillette in a hurry, but “news sells” and a boycott doesn’t always outdo the mindless sales boost. If you’ve had enough of politically correct advertising, spread the word. Egard, the Watch Company responds:
Just for balance, here’s Toxic Feminity: 8.6 out of 10 based on 72 ratings … 8.8 out of 10 based on 24 ratings Yesterday lots of people died and made the climate change. Today climate change is causing more AIDS and killing people. It all goes to show that climate change is the most useless phrase in the English language. It’s able to be used in so many contradictory ambiguous ways, as to mean everything, and therefore, nothing. It’s useless to anyone who wants to convey information, but pretty handy for those who want to convey fog instead. Anyone want to prey on the good-but-confused? How climate change is undermining the war against HIV in Africa Widespread poverty and worsening droughts, floods and other climate risks make Africa particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change Climate change is always 50 shades of evil: Yaounde — Teenage girls growing up in Lesotho in areas hit by harsh drought and other climate shocks are more likely to drop out of school, start having sex earlier and contract HIV, researchers say. Even the IPCC doesn’t really pretend in their scientific hearts that we can predict or attribute the causes of drought and flood, yet here it gets bundled in with “climate change” as if everyone knows that droughts are getting worse (they’re not) […] Is it April 1st in London? The BBC is reporting that academics from University College London have discovered that the Little Ice Age was not caused by the record low solar activity of the Maunder Minima, instead it was due to the colonization of the Americas. Thanks mostly to measles and small pox the death toll was so enormous that about 9% of the global population died, supposedly leaving empty farmlands. These were swiftly covered in forests causing a deadly fall in CO2 which cooled the world. This is an Apocryphal story that virtue signals in so many ways. A kind of triple-point scrabble maneuver combining climate, race, war, forests and imperial colonization in the one story. The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas caused the Little Ice Age Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth’s climate. That’s the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK. The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation. This pulled down enough carbon […] February 2nd, 2019 | Tags: Little Ice Age, Racism | Category: Global Warming, Pseudoscience | Print This Post | | Sudden Stratospheric Warmings Who knew? The polar vortices are the two strongest and largest “storms” on the planet. These continent scale storms are 600 miles across with winds raging at 300km per hour. Simon Clark is doing (or has done) a PhD in polar vortexes. He describes how each winter they form high over the poles. These are stratospheric, circling far above jet streams and planes. The tight circular pattern keeps the coldest air corralled. But every now again, the neat circle falls apart. In the polar stratosphere sometimes temperatures warm in days by stupid amounts, like 50 degrees C. It’s called a Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW) and one started around Christmas time. As Clark describes it, these are easily the most violent weather events on the planet. (They sound fascinating). As with unbalanced centrifuges, when things unravel, as the high speed system unravels, the arctic cold could spin off anywhere — this week it’s the US, but Europe and Russia are often targets too. There is a lag involved — after an SSW it may take two weeks for things to hit the fan on the surface, so to speak. Generally, when an SSW hits it presages a […] February 1st, 2019 | Tags: Cooling & cold snaps, Polar Vortex | Category: Atmosphere, Global Warming, Meteorology | Print This Post | | |
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