A million species face extinction? Time to burn fossil fuels to save them

A baby-IPCC of biology has just been born

UN logoThe new 145-expert-committee has just uttered its first words, and the headlines are Hollywood-apocalyptic: A million species face extinction. Daddy-UN is proud.

Nature is in its worst shape in human history, UN report says

Nature is in more trouble now than at any other time in human history, with extinction looming over one million species of plants and animals, scientists said Monday in the UN’s first comprehensive report on biodiversity.

Naturally, these are estimates from unverified models that count species we haven’t even discovered yet. This is truly a  scare-based-on-air, except air is real and has weight, and this isn’t that substantial.

Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, explains how vaporous this really is:

 “Since species extinction became a broad social concern, coinciding with the extinction of the passenger pigeon, we have done a pretty good job of preventing species extinctions.”

Moore bluntly mocked species extinction claims made by biologist Edward O. Wilson from Harvard University. Wilson estimated that up to 50,000 species go extinct every year based on computer models of the number of potential but as yet undiscovered species in the world. Moore: “There’s no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct. The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson’s computer at Harvard University. They’re actually electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species.”

Consider that the only mammal extinction officially due to “man-made” climate change was a little brown rat colony which had washed up on a sand dune a few hundred meters long in the middle of the ocean. The hapless rats survived for unknown years 50 km off Papua New Guinea. More rats will wash up there again sometime and the cycle will start over. The entirety of mankind’s industrial revolution disaster and that’s it, that’s the only actual mammal anyone can name as “caused by climate change”?

The species scare is bigger than just “climate change”. But in an era when we have more land protected in national parks and more funding to guard and research natural spaces, arguably we’re at a high point in human history. Humans have been wiping out species for 100,000 years, possibly mammoths, mastadons, giant sloths, cave lions, and sabre tooth tigers.

The UN is reviving the old Species Extinction Scare. It’s a handy excuse to get power, increase regulations, demand money, and launch twenty years of nice annual junkets:

 – Climate Depot, explains:

The UN has now officially expanded its mission now to include the “climate change” species extinction scare. The UN is once again calling for putting itself in charge of “solving” the newly hyped species “crisis.” “A huge transformation is needed across the economy and society to protect and restore nature, which provides people with food, medicines, and other materials, crop pollination, fresh water, and quality of life,” according to the new UN report. The AP quoted one of the activist scientists claiming “this is really our last chance to address all of that.” Hmmm. This is the same tactic the UN has used on climate for years. See:Every climate summit is hailed as the ‘last chance!’

The solution is cheap energy and spare wealth:

For the first time in human evolution we’ve reached a point where we can finally plan and save and study life on Earth. Three things we know for sure —

1. The worst pollution is in countries with a low income per capita — when people are hungry they raze forests. The most polluted cities are in places like Ghana, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Zambia, Argentina, and Nigeria.  The most deforestation occurs in Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, and Mexico. The worst air is in India and China.

2. Only rich nations have the resources to save the environment.

3. Countries that produce more CO2 are richer.

Findings of the Report include a lot of big meaningless numbers

  • Three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions. On average these trends have been less severe or avoided in areas held or managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.
Trends in indigenous controlled lands are only less now because prehistoric indigenous people wiped out the mega fauna years ago. The trends just reached an equilibrium.
  • More than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production.
We’ve tied up lots of land, so the last thing we want is to use wilderness for useless solar and wind farms, or palm oil plantations. Why keep coal and uranium underground when we can save forest instead?
  • The value of agricultural crop production has increased by about 300% since 1970, raw timber harvest has risen by 45% and approximately 60 billion tons of renewable and nonrenewable resources are now extracted globally every year – having nearly doubled since 1980.

And this is bad, how? Better yields means we need less land to feed more people.

  • Land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of the global land surface, up to US$577 billion in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss and 100-300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of loss of coastal habitats and protection.
And wealthy countries are solving all of these problems faster than poor countries are. The best way to save wilderness is to increase the GDP of those in poverty. Free trade, fair agricultural markets. Less red tape. Less corruption.
  • In 2015, 33% of marine fish stocks were being harvested at unsustainable levels; 60% were maximally sustainably fished, with just 7% harvested at levels lower than what can be sustainably fished.
Again, in nations where there are healthy economies, fish stocks are being protected and are recovering. Whales too. Even great white sharks.
  • Urban areas have more than doubled since 1992.
  • Plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, 300-400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes from industrial facilities are dumped annually into the world’s waters, and fertilizers entering coastal ecosystems have produced more than 400 ocean ‘dead zones’, totalling more than 245,000 km2 (591-595) – a combined area greater than that of the United Kingdom.
The oceans cover 510 million square kilometers. So those dead zones cover 1 part in 2,081 parts —  or 0.05%. Sure, we should fix it. Let’s do that. Isn’t that problem mostly in South East Asia? Again, rich countries clean up pollution…

Don’t mention the Sixth Great Extinction

The UN team learnt that calling this the “Sixth Great Extinction” was an invitation for skeptics to mock them with reminders of real death and destruction which made their current scare seem pathetically light. To get around that now the blob somehow gets people who were”not part of the report” to mention it, then they can discuss how they are not discussing it. This is the “have cake, eat cake” Psychology 101 rule — if you want people to think of an elephant but have plausible deniability (so you can quash discussion of said-elephant), tell the people not to think of an elephant.

[CBC] “We’re in the middle of the sixth great extinction crisis, but it’s happening in slow motion,” said Conservation International and University of California Santa Barbara ecologist Lee Hannah, who was not part of the report.

Five times in the past, Earth has undergone mass extinctions where much of life on Earth blinked out, like the one that killed the dinosaurs. Watson said the report was careful not to call what’s going on now as a sixth big die-off because current levels don’t come close to the 75 per cent level in past mass extinctions.

 h/t to Marc Morano and CFACT

REFERENCE

Media Release: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’

Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services,

 

 

9.8 out of 10 based on 77 ratings

237 comments to A million species face extinction? Time to burn fossil fuels to save them

  • #
    OriginalSteve

    This is just the excuse to lock down humanity under Agenda 21/30 using #FakeScience…

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    • #
      ivan

      Very true, and a large proportion of the general public believe them regardless.

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      • #
        Sceptical Sam

        On the contrary ivan, this Species Extinction Scare is a sign that they know the population thinks it’s nonsense. Accordingly, the green/left alarmists know they’re losing the Climate Change/Disruption fight. They’ve already lost the CAGW fight – the proof being their changing of the name to Climate Change/Disruption.

        Thus this newest scare is the opening up of a second front.

        It’s not about the environment or species extinction to them. It’s about world governance under a socialist technocracy. That why they hate Trump. That’s why they hate Abbott. That’s why they rename the “Will of the People”, “Populism”. They are anti-democratic fascists.

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        • #
          Michael262

          Sam, I love your conspiracy theory schtick, keep up the good work.

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        • #
          Sceptical Sam

          Thanks Mickey. Very generous.

          However, I’m just taking the formal words of your puppeteers as evidence. Have you not been keeping up?

          Anyway, what’s it feel like to be a socialist “useful idiot” Mickey?

          Do you feel valued? Validated? Important?

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          • #
            AndyG55

            More like a useless idiot.

            Can’t think of any use for the likes of little-mick except cannon fodder.

            Oh I see, that’s what you mean, S.S 😉

            20

          • #
            Sceptical Sam

            Mickey,

            You’re not keeping up, are you?

            While you might choose to not recognize them, the following quotes are the words of your puppeteers:

            “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,……….This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”

            “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

            “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

            “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse.”

            “A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect.”

            “The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order.”

            “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth…”

            “…..we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of the doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

            “Mike, the Figure you sent is very deceptive … there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC …”

            “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is.”

            Here’s the test for you, Mickey:

            1. Put the name of the author to each of the statements. (10 marks)

            2. Is there any evidence that the authors were successful Capitalists? (4 marks)

            3. Define a Capitalist. (6 marks).

            4. Write, in three sentences or less, why you think the authors might be green left socialists. (20 marks).

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    • #
      Curious George

      It is just a big-mouthed proclamation and speculation. No? To prove it, please provide a list of all species that went extinct in 2010, 2011, … 2018.

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    • #
      Michael262

      If Moore and Murano are your brains trust on this then it clearly explains why you guys are stuck in the wilderness playing thumbsies.
      Get some real scientists –please!.

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      • #
        AndyG55

        Oh look, little-mick’s minder has allowed him his 20 minutes/week of childish trolling time.

        Both those guys have MAGNITUDES more intellect and knowledge than you will ever have, little-mick.

        180

      • #
        AndyG55

        Patrick Moore
        University of British Columbia (Ph.D., 1974)
        University of British Columbia (B.Sc. Forest Biology, 1969)

        Now let’s see little-mick’s junior high fail. !

        EMPTY TROLLING.. the leftist way. !

        170

      • #
        sophocles

        Oh ha ha, little fuzzy brain.
        You and some scientists are too quick to blame humans for mass extinctions for too long. The North American extinction of the megafauna has been commonly laid at human’s feet for some time and it now appears to be wrong. as in been wiping out species for 100,000 years, possibly mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, cave lions, and sabre tooth tigers They were wiped out a mere 12,000 – 11,000 years ago.

        Go do your research, instead of adding smart-mouthed critiques; which make you come across as childish. Instead: try looking up the Younger Dryas. That would be a good starting point for your research. That happened only 12,000 – 11,000 years ago. What you find out may mean that you can add to the conversation constructively instead of as a cretinous coprocephalic.

        That means there is a high probability that wasn’t humans who caused the North American megafauna extinctions: it was a boulder from space. Boulders From Space, little Fuzzy Brain, tend to be very Big Rocks moving very fast. The crater under the ice-cap on the Hiawatha Glacier in Greenland is in the right place for the North American megafauna die off. At 31km diameter, it’s not as big as the Dinosaur Killer 66 Million Years Ago. It will need drilling into to accurately date it.

        There is a second crater slightly to the south east which could be older but it too needs drilling into to accurately date the impacts.
        The second crater seems older and we don’t yet know what it made extinct. More research grants needed.

        So if you want to believe the UN propaganda, and contribute negatively, that’s up to you, but it makes you look stupid.

        A million species face extinction … I could hope that the species known as UN Diplomats are top of the list … only the UN could come up with such unbelievable figures …

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        • #
          Michael262

          Fuzzy science,
          Its not UN propaganda, just straight science.
          Instead of preaching to the converted, send your Younger Dryas thoughts to some scientists ( try the CSIRO, LGBTI leftist ridden as they are) and ask if they’ve heard of it before.
          Also , while at it, tell them about the big yellow thing too.

          I’m giving you a green thumb for your splendid vocab.

          02

  • #
    John F. Hultquist

    Schist, I think this is called; as in – The folks just make stuff up, and most of it is Bull Schist.

    190

    • #

      Not so, the UN hired that little kid in the US, who calculated how many plastic straws the US dumps into the ocean each year, and he’s accurately calculated this extinction event.

      You should know by now that young children have inestimable knowledge about climate change and the imminent danger that it presents, just ask Greta Thunberg.

      241

    • #
      Greg in NZ

      John F., here in Aotearoa New Zealand (which consists primarily of goop squeezed up between the Australian & Pacific plates as they slide past each other with a few volcanoes & hot springs thrown in for good measure) we have a diversity™ of UN-approved multicultural schist types, from mica schist to garnet schist to green schist –

      https://flexiblelearning.auckland.ac.nz/rocks_minerals/rocks/schist.html

      Methinks you have discovered a new and (un)improved variety of schistosity, namely Green Bull Schist! It’s a well-coordinated & world-wide putsch as every radio station here today was bangin’ the drum of milione maximus exstinguere incessantly – I had to resort to listening to the Concert Programme (Beethoven’s OK but I can’t stand opera) simply to evade the babble-on newspeak talking-heads nonsense. Meanwhile it was another perfectly calm pleasant mild sunny day here… can’t see what all the fuss is about.

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      • #
        sophocles

        … and with our dairy farming, there is plenty of MBE … Male Bovine Excrement 🙂

        31

  • #
    Travis T. Jones

    “Humanity will need to start “consuming less, polluting less and having fewer children” if it’s going to stop mass extinction in the coming decades, CNN correspondent Nick Watt said summarizing the U.N. report, which was released Monday”

    CNN PROMOTES DISCREDITED ‘POPULATION BOMB’ AUTHOR IN CLIMATE COVERAGE
    CNN interviewed discredited environmental catastrophist Paul Ehrlich in its coverage of the United Nations’ latest warning of ecological collapse due to human activities and [global warming].

    https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/06/cnn-climate-coverage-paul-ehrlich/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=atdailycaller

    >> You cannot be more wrong than Paul Erlich, or more thoroughly documented, or more completely discredited.

    281

    • #
      neil

      I have a copy of Paul Erlichs’ sequel The Population Explosion 1990, in this he restates his concern about environmental collapse but gives a time frame of approx. 90 years, so he is not predicting these problem for another 70 years.

      Most of the concerns he raises are evident today, waste management, over fishing, fertiliser runoff, rampant population growth, increased CO2 etc.

      So exactly how is he wrong and discredited?

      32

      • #
        Kinky Keith

        I had read nearly all the Biggles books by the time I was thirteen.

        They were part fiction too.

        20

      • #
        yarpos

        Interesting list of problems, especially fertiliser run being raised to the level of the others. In reality its very location dependent, in some countries some of those problems exists, in others not so much or are well managed. In some countries they experience the reverse e.g. Japan and Europe for population. CO2 is just a statement of course, not a problem.

        But yes of course the sky is falling and we must continue to gaslight the younger generations as they arrive.

        20

  • #
    Graham Richards

    The engineering of this latest onslaught on western industrial strength is so obvious. First they haveschool children around the western world organised thru local enviro groups to strike, then we have their big brother students world wide have sit-ins demos & disrupt the lives of as many people as possible. Of course one must have celebrity involvement so David Attenborough is wheeled out to. He made a few unenthusiastic remarks in a croaky unconvincing way before being wheeled back to bed. Then of course one must have a special new UN committee to underline & confirm it all with some really drastic fake news.

    The fact that it’s still unseasonably cold & snowing in many countries in their summer months wouldn’t perhaps be the reason for all the hype to try & beat the cooling theory ???

    321

    • #
      OriginalSteve

      This appears to be a second front in what appears to be an assualt on humanity.

      The climate nonsense is close to breaking, so in sheer panic, they have openeed up a second front to divert attenting from the dying CAGW meme, and hope they can crank up new hysteria.

      I guess all the impressionable kids ( and teachers – who should know better ) who are wagging school, can weep over some new faux “crisis” ….

      182

    • #
      Patrick healy

      Well said Ghaham, but Special and New?
      Is that not the same numpty Watson who was one of the original IPPC scaremongers?
      I would be interested if this lot mentioned the chopping down of American forests to turn them into wood pellets to be shipped thousands of miles to generate electricity in Brax in England, which is built on top of a coal field? -thought not.

      31

  • #
    tom0mason

    And I foolishly thought that progress through natural selection had winners and losers because it is a competitive system. Obviously now it must be a cooperative one.
    Maybe all those other 99.99% of all flora and fauna that had lived before didn’t understand the message, and so competitively killed each other off — if only they had know they had to cooperate!

    Welcome to the new world of modeled science and socialize natural selection by unnatural cooperation.

    221

    • #
      tom0mason

      An extensive study: “The Specter of Species Extinction” (link to 60 page report) based on real world investigation concludes “To summarize, both theory and observation paint the same picture. A goodly portion of earth’s plants and animals should actually expand their ranges and gain a stronger foothold on the planet as the atmosphere’s temperature and CO2 concentration continue to rise. If the air’s CO2 content were suddenly to stop increasing, however, the biosphere could find itself facing a significant challenge, as the world’s plants would cease acquiring the extra physiological protection against heat stress that is afforded them by rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Consequently, the end result of curtailing anthropogenic CO2 emissions might well be just the opposite of what many people are hoping to accomplish by encouraging that policy, i.e., many species might actually be driven to extinction, rather than being saved from such a fate.”

      200

      • #
        Peter Fitzroy

        To your first point if one plant’s range expands, then it must be at the expense of another.
        To your second point there would not be the heat stress if CO2 was not rising.
        Terraforming the plant without knowing the consequences is stupid.

        328

        • #
          Graeme No.3

          Your first point: plant species can move onto ‘vacant’ land. e.g. plants growing on Anak Krakatau, or spreading into marginal areas thanks to the higher fertising effect of extra CO2. (The tree line heading north in Siberia and Canada etc.)
          Your second point: that rising CO2 causes heating requires somewhat more than your personal belief. The Sahara was full of animals (and humans) for thousands of years when it was warmer and wetter – see Tassili frescoes (Giraffes, Hippos, various bovines) – but the CO2 level we are told to believe was 260-280 p.p.m.
          Do try to learn something about the real world, esp. climate through the ages.

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          • #
            Peter Fitzroy

            Can you define vacant land? In ecology there is no such concept. For example in a warmer, higher CO2 world, fungi and molds will have a larger range – is that what you want?
            for the CO2 and heat follow that link. With the Sahara, I’ve read reports that like in south west australia, tree felling over time changed the rainfall patterns.
            The point is we are changing the environment without any thought to what are the consequences are. But the neoliberal pond scum would have you believe that the environment is of no consequence, and therefore it can be discounted on their P/L statements

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            • #
              AndyG55

              “Can you define vacant land?”

              Between your ears !

              Nothing grows there.. Nothing can.

              “follow that link”

              model after assumption driven models.

              MODELS ARE NOT EVIDENCE..

              Certain not a model from a chief climate scammer.

              FFS, Learn some basic science and stop having fits.

              Only pond scum I can see are the greens and those, like you, that support them.

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            • #
              glen Michel

              Peter says that clearing trees in SW W.A decreased rainfall.Circumstantial. My advice; don’t believe every silly report from some retard doing some post-graduate work.

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              • #
                Peter Fitzroy

                oh come on, there are 3 million articles which describe the effect

                312

              • #
                el gordo

                Clearing trees in SWWA was not the cause of decreasing rainfall, the intensification of the subtropical ridge was responsible.

                50

              • #
                Sceptical Sam

                3 million articles

                Don’t Gish gallop Fitz.

                Just a dozen citations would do.

                Three millions articles might demonstrate that post-grads lack the vision to find an original topic.

                However, given your philosophical position previously established on this site, that correlation = causation, you now have the evidence to show that man-made CO2 causes the production of excessive articles on how tree-felling in south west Australia changed the rainfall patterns over time.

                That’s Fitz Post-Normal Science (FPNS) in action. FPNS is a further derivation of PNS. The “new rule” being that correlation is causation and causation doesn’t need to correlate.

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              • #
                sophocles

                Israel’s Yatir forest says you’re wrong.

                http://www.kkl-jnf.org/tourism-and-recreation/forests-and-parks/yatir-forest.aspx

                Try doing your research first. If you had, you might have found this about trees. This article is from 2016 but I remember reading about the effects of turpenes on local cloud formation back in the 1970s.

                31

            • #
              el gordo

              ‘But the neoliberal pond scum would have you believe that the environment is of no consequence …’

              That is simply not true and when it comes to species extinction it happened naturally over time without human intervention. Try and focus on the real cause of climate change on this planet. Paleo climate history matters and human induced CO2 fertiliser at the end of the Holocene is a god send.

              Australia was wet and warm during the Holocene Max.

              ‘The Green Sahara may have suppressed ENSO activity, forcing a La Nina-like climate state, in a climate model this is accompanied by decreased upwelling and deepening of the thermocline in the Eastern Pacific as the Walker circulation shifts westward.’ wiki

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            • #
              Graeme#4

              Peter F, as one of the folks who regularly visits the SW of WA, I can assure you that far from a decreasing rainfall, the SW is currently experiencing very good rainfalls, with green pastures and full farm dams mostly right through summer.
              As somebody has already pointed out, it’s easy to confuse decreasing rainfall with decreasing runoff, and it’s the runoff that’s mostly gone downhill.
              I’m not saying that SW rainfall hasn’t decreased since the 1960s, but in the last couple of years that trend seems to be reversing.

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              • #
                el gordo

                ‘… in the last couple of years that trend seems to be reversing.’

                The loss of intensity in the subtropical ridge in the Austral winter of 2017 means that normal rainfall has returned to SWWA.

                Unfortunately BoM lacks the courage and moral fortitude to admit that climate has changed for the better. We are saved.

                31

            • #
              Kinky Keith

              Maybe we have trouble defining “vacant land” but certainly no trouble defining “vacant mind” as we constantly face a recurring example here on this blog: RoyFitzV.

              KK

              10

              • #
                Kinky Keith

                My apologies to Jo for having doubted her wisdom.

                We needed to see and experience the mind numbing dross that is the SJW movement up close.

                To think that all the world has between SJWs and us is President Trump is frightening.

                KK

                00

            • #
              Graeme No.3

              Peter Fitzroy:

              Please read before commenting. I specified Anak Krakatau – a new volcano that grew with no vegetation yet observers were surprised at the speed of plant colonisation.

              About the desiccation of the Sahara, humans might have had some influence but there is no evidence. It was a process that took thousands of years with some doubt about the early humans having either camels and goats. You are aware aren’t you that the current inhabitants of the desert are descended from migrants from Arabia.

              10

        • #
          AndyG55

          “then it must be at the expense of another”

          RUBBISH !

          The whole system just expands in diversity..

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          • #
            Philo

            Agreed! Species don’t “kill” each other. As conditions change they adapt as much as their genes allow, or they change genetically.
            Millions of species co-exist in the same habitat because they are adapted to it in different ways.
            “survival of the fittest” isn’t a war. It’s the mommies trying to produce as many offspring as possible, each one slightly different, to maximize the number that live to reproduce.

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          • #
            glen Michel

            I pointed out to a few Green backward types that Orcas ambush Dolphins in the Pacific NW. Wide-eyed disbelief.Yeah,I know nature can be like that!

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          • #
            Peter Fitzroy

            Neither of you understand the concepts of carrying capacity or production, if you did, you would not have made such nonsensical comments

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            • #
              AndyG55

              You certainly haven’t got a clue, that is for absolute CERTAIN, Fitz.

              We DO understand that as CO2 increases, carrying capacity and production both INCREASE.

              You should avoid sprouting your base-level IGNORANCE at every post, little boy.

              But….. that is all you have.

              52

          • #
            tom0mason

            AndyG55,

            “then it must be at the expense of another”
            RUBBISH !
            The whole system just expands in diversity..

            But you misunderstand in the lefty world where there are only today’s finite resources.
            Just like lefty economics where there is only a finite amount of wealth, in lefty nature there is only a finite amount of overall life available. Thus to clear a path for something else to live, something has to die.
            Umm, I wonder if NASA has contemplated this when they observed the greening of the planet? 🙂

            30

        • #
          AndyG55

          “Terraforming the plant without knowing the consequences is stupid.”

          NO, anyone that thinks that returning much needed CO2 into the atmosphere is “terraforming” is heading rapidly towards PEAK STUPIDITY.

          We do know the BENEFITS of returning buried carbon back into the carbon cycle where it belongs…

          So far a 15-20% increase in the biosphere., and greater crop yields.

          NO EVIDENCE of any non-beneficial effects.

          Peak stupid seems to be your aim, Fitz, but you are just pushing that peak higher and higher.

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          • #
            tom0mason

            Again AndyG55,

            Peter Fitzroy protest from the lefty idea that humans can plan for everything, even natural changes — like we’ve unsuccessfully managed over the centuries.
            Indirectly he is saying we should not allow natural change to happen without knowing what the consequences are. The way nature works is too haphazard and arbitrary, and thus the lefty logic of the comment “Terraforming the plant without knowing the consequences is stupid.” It presumes humans are in charge of current changes, are knowledgeable enough to manage it — we are not, and besides the majority of CO2 is from natural sources. Human additions to this very small volume of atmospheric CO2 is minuscule.

            Of course Peter Fitzroy you can choose to disagree however please do it with numbers.
            What is the uptake and outflow of CO2 from the worlds oceans (include the margin or error or it be seen as a stupid guess), and the same for plant life, and again for animal life (remembering humans have increased from 1 billion in about 1800 to about 8billion today, that has locked away vast amounts of CO2 and water). And then there is the relentless out-gassing from active and inactive volcanoes and their lava flows.

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        • #
          AndyG55

          “To your second point there would not be the heat stress if CO2 was not rising.”

          More anti-science, zero-evidence BS !!

          Stop making vapid statements that you know you cannot defend with any actual science.

          It looks just like MINDLESS TROLLING. !

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        • #
          AndyG55

          ““To your second point there would not be the heat stress if CO2 was not rising.””

          Hey, I know they are cooling the past, rapidly, but deserts and heat still existed way back whenever, Fitz.

          We are actually at a COOLER part of the last 10,000 years.

          COOLER than the MWP, RWP, first 8000+ years of the Holocene….

          The only period we are slightly warmer than is the Little Ice Age. !

          Move to Canberra over the winter if you want to experience what that was like.

          Feel what “lack-of-heat” stress is all about. (or use LOTS of coal fired heating.)

          Keep pushing the limit of Peak Stupid, Fitz.. there are many helping you. !

          You are talking arrant NONSENSE as always.

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        • #
          tom0mason

          Peter Fitzroy,

          “To your first point if one plant’s range expands, then it must be at the expense of another.”

          To which I’d say look a NASA’s reports on the greening of the planet.

          “To your second point there would not be the heat stress if CO2 was not rising.
          Terraforming the plant without knowing the consequences is stupid.”

          This is utter bunkum! Any warming from CO2 is so slight as to be lost in the noise of all the other sources of heating and cooling in the natural world. Indeed it is so poorly observed that there is no verified measurement of it on the planet.
          It is the sun that heats this planet not CO2, to consider otherwise is crass stupidity.

          See http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/sh1/the_skeptics_handbook_2-3_lq.pdf
          and
          http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/sh2/the_skeptics_handbook_IIj-sml.pdf
          and
          http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/climate_money.pdf

          Of course if you find errors in these handy handbooks please report them to our hosts NOT me.

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    • #
      Robert Swan

      Indeed. I’d like them to name a species which *doesn’t* face extinction. Isn’t a huge mass extinction still a mere button-press away, as we were constantly told when Reagan was in the hot seat?

      Being of the television generation, I’m inclined to look at things by analogy with shows from my formative years. Monty Python comes to mind quite a lot as we seem to be living, in deadly earnest, what once was absurd parody. Star Trek also comes to mind. The swashbuckling, dog eat dog universe of the Kirk show has gone, and we’re now doomed to living in the sterile, social-workers-in-space universe of the next generation. Nature red in tooth and claw is not acceptable. We must be the guardians. Talk about hubris!

      Nature seems able to look after itself pretty well and doesn’t need my help. I’m just doing my best to stave off the day when I get eaten in my turn. These people should do the same.

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      • #
        Peter Fitzroy

        I’m guessing that you would support the removal of all environmental protections, national parks, and just have open slather. After all, if a koala is at risk from a chainsaw, that is just bad luck

        412

        • #
          AndyG55

          NOT CO2 then, hey Fitz…. stop trying to distract from the argument.

          If humans had spent anywhere near as much money as has been wasted on the anti-coal, anti-CO2 farce, the environment could be in far better shape.

          A MASSIVE waste of opportunity, all because of an elaborate socialist totalitarian driven HOAX.

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        • #
          Robert Swan

          The political activist’s ultimate weapon: let’s write another law. Ink in a statute book is cheap and fruitless, much like declaring an “extinction emergency”.

          It is a mistake to think that the ecosystem doesn’t include us and everything we do. The web of life includes the sheep and the farmer who raises them, the truck driver who takes the lambs to the abattoir, the abattoir workers, …, the supermarket workers, and me the buyer, cooker and eater of that tasty lamb rump roast. If we damage that path of supply then maybe I’d become inclined to start taking potshots at koalas, wallabies, etc., regulations or not.

          The path of energy poverty is the path to greater brutality. You may have missed this, though it has been said here in various ways many times.

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          • #
            AndyG55

            ” start taking potshots at koalas, wallabies, etc”

            Nah, go for the bigger stuff.

            With the diet a koala has, I suspect they would taste rather nasty !

            Kangaroo meat is reasonable, albeit a bit gamey compared to steak.

            When I was living out west a bit, a mate shot a wild pig.
            Pit BBQ for several hours, what a feast that was !

            I’ve heard there are plenty of camels around the place, too.

            31

            • #
              sophocles

              I tried kangaroo steak back in 1990 at a restaurant which specialized in odd meats. It was tasty; I liked it.

              Has anyone done a census on the roo population? Ever?

              11

          • #
            Another Ian

            Remember back when we had to have a law on speed that heightened employment of blokes with red flags?

            Not he only law that was enacted, found idiotic and kicked out

            00

        • #
          tom0mason

          Peter Fitzroy,

          “I’m guessing that you would support the removal of all environmental protections, …”

          Like the way bird and bat protection is by-passed for wind-farms.
          Pure Green hypocrisy!

          Building and maintaining these wind-farms generates lots of CO2, more Green hypocrisy!

          Wind-farms are of no benefit to man or beast, remove them, clean-up the land they were on, and allow nature to rein.

          81

  • #
    tom0mason

    Killing the world with wind farms …

    From https://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10176/372_read-32941/#/gallery/33841

    What conclusions can be drawn from your model calculation?

    Trieb: Our model calculation points to an aspect of wind energy that has not yet been comprehensively researched. Approximately 1200 billion flying insects are struck each year as they fly through the rotors of wind farms in Germany. Such a large number of affected insects could be a relevant factor for the stability of the insect population and could thus influence species protection and the food chain.

    Full report in pdf ia at https://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/st/FliWip-Final-Report.pdf

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Meanwhile the UK goes on burning US sourced wood to generate electricity, instead of coal. This arguably causing more damage to the environment than mining coal. Strip felling trees in the US causing loss of natural habitat, affecting the natural food chain, and changing the ex-forests land’s soil structure and water-table and/or flow. Also reducing the amount of forest recycling atmospheric CO2.

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  • #
    MrGrimNasty

    Isn’t it utterly ironic that all the measures designed to combat climate change will make energy generation and farming 100s of times more land intensive, thereby excluding more wild areas for plants and critters and killing more directly.

    Burning clear-cut hardwood and ancient forest from the USA and Europe as bio-fuel, clearing forests for windmills, destroying river eco-systems and flooding land for hydro, bird and insect and bat killing legions of windmill monstrosities, insect and bird frying solar concentration, toxic waste and land destruction for mining rare metals…..

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    • #
      OriginalSteve

      But in the Leftist mind, the end justifies the means….which is a morality free zone in which any and all evil can be excused by the Left.

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    • #
      Sceptical Sam

      Isn’t it utterly ironic that all the measures designed to combat climate change…..

      It is to you and me. But not to the proponents for that action.

      Why?

      Because, for them, it’s not about the environment. The environment is merely the stalking horse used by the international socialists and their anti-Capitalist comrades to bring down the Capitalist democratic free-market system and replace it with a globally coordinated socialist technocracy. Think EU on steroids.

      They have all manner of supporters. Most are just ignorant “useful idiots”. Some three or four of them post their inanities on this site from time to time.

      31

  • #
    Another Ian

    Detection services like this?

    “Y2Kyoto: “My daughter can see CO2 with the naked eye” ”

    http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2019/05/06/my-daughter-can-see-co2-with-the-naked-eye/

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    • #
      Ian Hill

      I’m told I breathe out CO2. On a frosty morning I often see what I exhale.

      What’s the big deal? Just don’t mention that I breathe out other things such as water vapour, like those naughty smokestacks at power stations!

      60

  • #
    Travis T. Jones

    Guess you can scrub out locusts as one of the harbingers of the apocalypse on the nightly news …

    Gore: “Every night, through the TV news, is a major hike through the Book of Revelation,” he said.

    http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2017/10/14/al-gore-talks-climate-change-southern-festival-books/754619001/

    Wait. What?

    May 2, 2019: SWARM OF LOCUSTS DARKENS SKIES OF SAUDIA ARABIA

    “The infestation started on Sunday, when masses of the insect were reported to have come from Sudan and Eritrea following unusually heavy rainfall in the region.”

    https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Swarm-of-locust-darkens-the-skies-of-Saudia-Arabia-588526

    >> Turns out emitting an invisible trace gas is a truly lousy way of preventing drought breaking rains, fuelling plagues of extinct locusts.

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  • #
    MrGrimNasty

    Has anybody asked how many species there are on earth? I’ve found several reports, all with an error margin greater than 1 million.

    Suddenly it doesn’t sound so bad. 5 +/- 3 million, 8.7 +/- 1.3 million etc. In the extreme some suggest 100 million, only 1.3 million have been recorded.

    The earth currently has by far its greatest diversity in geological history (going by graphs of family numbers anyway).

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    • #
      Graeme No.3

      As posted by Gator in realclimatescience.
      As long as species have been evolving, species have been going extinct. It is estimated that over 99.9% of all species that ever lived are extinct.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction

      List of all species that may have gone extinct since the invention of “CAGW”…

      1979 – Last sightings of the Javan tiger. **
      1981 – The Puhielelu hibiscadelphus becomes extinct.
      1981 – Last sighting of the green-blossom pearlymussel
      – The 24-rayed sunstar.
      1985 – The platypus frog
      1989 – The golden toad
      – The Atitlán grebe
      1990 – The dusky seaside sparrow
      1994 – Saint Croix racer
      1997 – The Hainan ormosia

      Ten in forty years. How many species are there? Good question!

      About 8.7 million (give or take 1.3 million) is the new, estimated total number of species on Earth.

      http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110823180459.htm

      So they are predicting 1,450,000 species extinctions? Well, at the current rate, that would take 5,800,000 years.

      Alarmists just aren’t real good with math. Maybe instead of using models, they should try a calculator.

      ** I should add that my sister was living in Java in 2004 when 2 tigers strolled through the local town. Must have been tourists.

      30

  • #
    Bruce of Newcastle

    I was amused that a bunch of trapdoor spiders new to science were recently found in Queensland.
    They were immediately described as under threat of extinction.
    If a million species which never existed cry out in terror and are suddenly silent were humans responsible for their demise?

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  • #
    David Wojick

    A bit of trivia. Note the quote referenced to “Watson” at the end of the post. That is Robert W, who heads up this new UN scare machine. He was also an original founder of the IPCC. Before that he helped produce the big sciency report on ozone depletion that put the Montreal Treaty over the top. So he is literally a father of this whole strategy, which sad to say works very well.

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  • #
    el gordo

    The black throated Adani finch needs removal to a safe place for its survival, then bred up to avoid extinction. Which proves that enlightened self interest can bring about a good environmental outcomes.

    My question, how did humanity wipe out the megafauna?

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    • #
      Graeme No.3

      Answer – hoons in 4 wheelers with high powered rifles. It was the CO2 from the exhaust that did it.

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    • #
      theRealUniverse

      Heres another one for meat lovers. Imagine hunting a Woolly Mammoth with spears, but our ancestors did it! Yep why, because they wanted MEAT!.

      81

    • #
      Sceptical Sam

      Flannery’s human blitzkrieg versus Wroe, Field, Fullagar and Jermiin’s climate change hypothesis.

      https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03115510408619286

      Page 301

      The long lead up to the LGM in Australia was
      prefaced by a decline in overall humidity from
      around 45,000 years ago (Tumey et al. 2001). This
      may have been exacerbated by the onset o fintense
      variability in the El Nifio Southern Oscillation
      (ENSO) at around 40,000 BP, although most hold
      that this was a Holocene event (Kershaw et al.
      2000).
      We posit that the last two glacial cycles in
      Australia were particularly harsh and that the
      majority of Pleistocene megafaanal extinctions were
      driven by these events, with a possible temporary
      reprieve during the Stage 5 pluvial (120 ka- 90 ka).
      Consistent with this interpretation are results of a
      recent analysis suggesting that eight genera of
      megafauna may have become extinct by 80 ka, i.e.
      almost certainly prior to settlement of the
      Australian continent by Homo sapiens (Roberts et
      a/. 2001).”

      50

  • #
    tom0mason

    So do we know what has gone extinct?
    And can we ever be sure?

    From https://wryheat.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/thought-to-be-extinct-when-science-is-wrong/
    Long-lost Tasmanian tiger may have been found.
    Boy finds ‘extinct’ frog in Ecuador and helps revive species.
    Frog not sighted in 30 years and declared extinct reappears in Costa Rica.
    Seychelles snail, believed extinct due to climate change, found ‘alive and well,’ says group.
    ‘Extinct’ corpse-eating fly back from the dead.
    Biologists find rare snake near Gila River.
    After 60 years an ‘extinct’ frog make’s a comeback in Israel.
    … and on and on it goes.

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  • #
    yarpos

    It will be interesting to see if a turf war starts between the extinction alarmists vs the climate alarmists as they batlle for MSM attention.

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  • #
    robert rosicka

    If I’ve told them once I’ve told them a hundred billion million times to stop exaggerating!

    Also extinction is the norm , survival is the exception.

    131

    • #
      yarpos

      If species arent allowed to go exctinct does that mean someone has decided that we have reached the Goldilocks level of species and that evolution is no longer required, or is perhaps a manifestion of the Darwinian patriarchy?

      Is this Goldilocks species number somehow related or linked to the Goldilocks “pre industrial” temperature number or whatever the ideal Goldilocks CO2 number is? (seeing the last couple of unprecedented topping points have passed unnoticed) I am sure studies are underway as we speak and the model that explains everything is not far off.

      31

  • #
    tom0mason

    Also at https://wryheat.wordpress.com/2014/11/24/habitat-niche-modeling-predictions-of-extinction-and-a-dose-of-reality/ is a synopsis of a report on previous extinction model report.

    Quotes —
    One of the researchers commented in a press release about the short-tailed shrew, one of the species studied:

    “It’s almost as though it is living in all of the places that the model says it shouldn’t be living in and not in any of the places that the model says it should be living in,” said Davis, who also is manager of the paleontological collection at the UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History. “This suggests to me that whatever the model is keying on is not actually important to the shrew.”

    The conclusion is —

    As with climate models, we see here, too, that modeling in other areas of science often diverges from actual observation. This occurs either because the modeled systems are too complex or the modelers work with erroneous assumptions. Remember that the next time you see headlines which proclaim extinction of species X due to global warming.

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  • #
    Graeme No.3

    The worst mass extinction was the end Permian with about 90% of species becoming extinct. Probably caused by the massive volcanic eruption of the Siberian Traps (lava flows 2-3 km. thick over an area bigger than Australia).
    The second worst was the End Ordovician Ice Age (when the CO2 level was about 3,000 p.p.m.)
    The third was the End Cretaceous wipe out of the dinosaurs (and Pterosaurs and Mosasaurs). Cause still debated between an asteroid strike and asteroid strike AND vast volcanic eruptions in the Deccan traps.

    As for the actions of man there is a sorry trail of extinctions on isolated islands and in Australia, but the number of animals and birds wiped out seems to be less than 1,000. And I am sceptical about the claim of human involvement in the extinction of the megafauna when they had cohabited for tens of thousands of years, but they died out just when the climate turned warmer.

    If there is going to be a sixth mass extinction the probable cause is mass hysteria among gulible humans.

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  • #
    Jonesy

    Are we approaching peak stupid?

    110

    • #
      Annie

      It won’t have a peak, it’s infinite.

      141

    • #
      Kinky Keith

      It must be very close.

      20

      • #
        AndyG55

        “It must be very close.”

        I thought so..

        .. but Fitzy and his fellow AGW CO2-haters just keep pushing the ceiling higher and higher.

        I think Annie is correct.. their stupidity is essentially limitless. !

        30

  • #
    Robber

    Looking forward to the announcement from all the Extinction Rebellion crowd that they have decided not to breed.

    120

  • #
    Peter Fitzroy

    So what should the species list be? How much of the earth should be used to provide ecosystem services? What is natural anyway, with the amount of CO2 dumping there can be no natural ecosystem anywhere on the planet.

    419

    • #
      el gordo

      CO2 dumping is good for the environment, although we do run the risk of over greening the planet.

      Salmon thrive with acidification, so we can leave them off the list.

      Australian democracy is endangered.

      ‘Only 41 per cent of Australians are satisfied with the way democracy is working today.’ ABC

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      • #
        Peter Fitzroy

        how can you say that CO2 dumping os good for the planet? You imply that there is a eden which can only be achieved with man’s intervention. I think we should leave that sort of hubris behind, after all our ancient recorded history is littered with stories about how bad an idea this is.

        419

        • #
          AndyG55

          “how can you say that CO2 dumping is good for the planet?”

          BECAUSE IT IS. !

          There is MASSES of evidence that plant life and all life that depends on it, functions and grows BETTER at higher atmospheric CO2 levels

          There is ZERO EVIDENCE that enhancing the level of atmospheric CO2 will do any damage at all to anything.

          We are NOT dumping CO2 we are returning it to where it should be.

          STOP your mindless anti-science TROLLING fits. !

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        • #
          el gordo

          ‘You imply that there is a eden …’

          Its terraforming, do not be afraid.

          51

        • #
          el gordo

          I see where you are coming from.

          ‘The Holocene has ended. The Garden of Eden is no more.’

          Sir David Attenborough

          60

        • #
          el gordo

          The biblical garden of eden was real and came to an end thousands of years ago.

          ‘The end of the African humid period came about 6,000–5,000 years ago during the Piora Oscillation cold period when the Sahara occupied its present position.’ wiki

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        • #
          theRealUniverse

          PF that remark is idotic and has NO ZERO scientific basis.

          71

        • #
          Kinky Keith

          CO bad, CO bad, CO bad.

          CO2 good, CO2 good, CO2 good.

          What do Roy FitzP and Anastasia Occasional Cortex have in common?

          Nothing! Absolument Rien.

          KK

          31

    • #
      AndyG55

      ” What is natural anyway”

      FAR higher than current.

      All that coal USED to be in the atmosphere and got accidentally buried.

      We have been returning a very small proportion of it back into the atmosphere WHERE IT BELONGS.

      And plant life is LUVING it and returning the favour with higher crop yields etc.

      Why are you INCAPABLE of learning these basic FACTS, Fitz?

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    • #
      AndyG55

      Do you have a list of animals that have gone extinct over the last 100 or even 1000 years due to increased atmospheric CO2?

      Like you, it would be an EMPTY list.

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      • #
        robert rosicka

        Andy I’d like to see the list of the one million species at risk and the causes attributed, we all know that polar bears will be on the list .

        81

        • #
          AndyG55

          Even 10, which are at risk because of “human induced climate change”.

          Still an EMPTY list.

          61

    • #
      AndyG55

      Poor fits,

      What has atmospheric CO2 ever done to you except feed you and nurture you.

      Why such bilious hatred toward CO2 ?

      Peak stupidity… you are pushing that peak higher and HIGHER with each post, Fitz.

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    • #

      Some piffling, less than two degree Celsius warming over centuries from global warming to cause, gasp, ‘Sixth Great Extinction of Species,’ o-ooh scarey, and it completely disregards problems of landscape destruction caused by widespread change to renewable technology. This from Matt Ridley, ‘The Rational Optimist,’ a surprising fact ‘that fossil fuels have spared much of the landscape from industrialization. Before fossil fuels, energy was grown on land and it needed lots of land to grow it.’

      And renewable alternatives to fossil fuels will have similar destruction of landscape and species that inhabit those landscapes. Says Ridley:

      ‘To get an idea just how landscape –eating the renewable alternatives are, consider that to supply the current 300 million inhabitants of the United States with their current power demand … would require:

      * Solar panels the size of Spain,
      *or wind farms the size of Kazakhstan
      *or woodland the size of India and Pakistan
      *or hydro electric dams with catchments one-third larger than all the continents together.’

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      • #
        Peter Fitzroy

        How much of the landscape is now pits due to mining? how many cities face smog pollution, and how many people have reduced health because of the burning of fossil fuels?
        Again if you know what the optimum is let everyone in on the answer.

        416

        • #

          There’d have to be a lotta’ pits to equal the stats I posted above, Peter, lol. Re health and mortality, it was ol’ King Coal that rescued serfs in the West from slavery and regular subjection to famine.Famine was a widespread and common occurrence. Wikipedia has collated a long list of famines from way back. There are the great famines of India, 1022-1033-1052, fer example, that wiped out entire provinces, the 1064 famine and outbreak of the plague in France which killed 100 000 people.In Europe in 1816-17, the year without a summer, 65000 people died, and as recently as the 1840’s, four famines in China killed 45 million people. The last famine in the west occured in Sweden in 1867 and despite the doomsday predictions of Malthus and Ehrlich, the west continues to feed a growing population and produce ever increasing longevity stats. Let’s hear it fer fossil energy- Hip, hip hooray!

          141

          • #
            Peter Fitzroy

            There are 14,000 odd surface mines active in the USA, each degreadiing several square miles of formally pristine land, which is way more than all the solar, and wind combined.

            411

            • #
              AndyG55

              It provide MAGNITUDES more energy and infrastructure than wind and solar EVER will.

              Wind and solar provide ZERO to modern infrastructure and only an IRREGULAR, UNRELIABLE supply of electricity

              Modern infrastructure, including ALL wind and solar is there BECAUSE OF the use of coal.

              111

            • #
              AndyG55

              60,000 wind turbines, each mutilating about 1 km of land.

              Not to mention the avian devastation wrought by concentrating wind farms

              and the massive pollution left in the ground or rotting husks of toxic materials left when wind turbines die after 10-15 years

              Coal mines can at least can be rehabilitated, NOTHING will bring back all the birds bats and insects killed by wind turbines, upsetting the whole ecosystem.

              And wind and solar provide basically NOTHING for a fair amount of the time.

              Coal fired power. Its there, 24/7/52.

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            • #
              • #
                AndyG55

                I remember a couple of years ago some troll posted a picture of what it would be WITHOUT coal mines. (some other forum)

                Turned out it was actually a picture of a reclaimed coal mine, lake and all.

                So FUNNY.. the poor unfortunate sod sort of disappeared after that. 🙂

                70

            • #
              MudCrab

              If people stopped building so many wind and solar plants then maybe they could close some of these mines you seem to hate so much.

              Wind farms don’t grow on trees. They are, in real terms, mined.

              81

            • #
              tom0mason

              Peter Fitzroy,

              “There are 14,000 odd surface mines active in the USA, each degreadiing several square miles of formally pristine land…”

              Please define “formally pristine land”, as it is obvious from your comments you barely understand how nature works.

              41

          • #
            tom0mason

            And beththeserf, I would argue that it is part of human nature to dig stuff up, we have often found it to be advantageous to our survival. We have after-all been doing that since the Stone Age and before.

            Humans, the primate species with a natural inclination to dig and use what is found.

            31

        • #
          AndyG55

          “how many cities face smog pollution”

          In modern cities. VERY FEW.

          And those that do, its REAL pollution, NOT CO2

          Do you really think smog is CO2, are you really that DUMB?

          111

          • #
            tom0mason

            AndyG55,

            You ask of Peter Fitzroy “Do you really think smog is CO2, are you really that DUMB?”

            Obviously the answer is a resounding YES to both cases!

            41

        • #
          AndyG55

          “and how many people have reduced health because of the burning of fossil fuels?”

          How many have abysmal health because they burn cow dung, and other crap.

          Coal fired power has made the world a FAR safer place form human habitation , and allows the MASSIVE HEALTH BENEFITS we have from massive fog reduction in cities.

          Why do you continue to display your abject IGNORANCE of the benefits of coal to modern society, Fitz.

          Basically EVERY facet of modern civilisation is absolutely dependant on cheap RELIABLE power that only COAL, NUCLEAR or hydro (if you have the right rainfall and terrain) can provide.

          Basically EVERYTHING around you is there BECAUSE of coal and it use in electricity production and steel and other material production and fabrication.

          The world CANNOT exist without it.

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        • #
          Graeme#4

          PF, you ask how much of the land is pits due to mining.
          The challenge I present to you is to use Google Earth to immediately visually zoom in on an iron ore mine in the Pilbara, without using location or GPS coordinate data. It can’t be done, as these mines occupy a minute proportion of the actual land.
          Also I can show you where bauxite was strip mined in the Perth Hills. Again, no visible evidence of the thousands of hectares that were mined due to the very successful rehabilitation of the land.
          Have you ever travelled in our vast outback at all?

          101

          • #
            Peter Fitzroy

            What are you trying to say? I did as you asked, found about 3 on the Robe river. The idea that only wind and solar are a blot on the landscape is false.

            211

            • #
              AndyG55

              How much around you is sourced or made using materials from these mines, Fitz?

              I DARE you to get rid of everything in your life that is sourced from mining activity. They GIVE to all facets of civilisation.

              People have lived for ages without wind and solar, the whole of society developed WITHOUT THEM..

              Wind and solar, and the people pushing these inadequate, unreliable waste of time and money are slowly destroying society with their totalitarian hatred of basically ANYTHING that helped society develop.

              Wind and solar do NOTHING BUT TAKE from society, from subsidy to increasing costs to irregular supplies damaging equipment, to avian destruction form the insect to the largest bird.

              They really are a terrible WASTE of human resources as well as being highly destructive to the environment..

              60

            • #
              tom0mason

              Peter Fitzroy,

              “The idea that only wind and solar are a blot on the landscape is false.”

              The decision as to what is and is not a ‘blot on the landscape’ is purely an aesthetic one — beauty in the eye of the beholder — and as these industrial machine are an encroachment onto countryside. I define them as the very essence of a vile blot on the landscape.
              They are neither aesthetically elegant and attractive, nor in harmony with their surroundings. They kill and maim avian life. They also ensure that the electrical grid becomes overly complex, less efficient, while electricity cost rise precipitously.

              All-in-all industrialization of the landscape with wind and solar generation is plant man-made ugly and inefficient, monstrosities cause excess expense while offer so very little (if any) benefit to man and many drawback for nature.

              WIND and SOLAR ARE AN UGLY BLOT ON THE LANDSCAPE!

              41

        • #
          yarpos

          lot less, due energy density

          11

    • #
      AndyG55

      “with the amount of CO2 dumping there can be no natural ecosystem anywhere on the planet.”

      PEAK STUPIDITY.. Fitz is there !!

      CO2 IS NATURAL

      Higher levels of CO2 ARE NATURAL

      We are actually far below the average CO2 level that was while nature developed,

      DANGEROUSLY LOW actually.

      All that carbon that unfortunately got buried and taken out of the Carbon Cycle,

      and we are doing the whole planet a favour by returning a small proportion of it.

      Plants have been on starvation rations for such a long time !

      WHY do you HATE nature so much that you wish to continue STARVING it, Fitz?

      Why this UNNATURAL HATRED of the very molecule that provides for ALL LIFE ON EARTH ?

      It really is bizarrely stupid…. but seems to be all you have in your life.

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      • #
        Peter Fitzroy

        So what should the level of CO2 be? And you miss the point, we are dumping CO2 – it can not be natural — you claim to know what is the optimum, so tell me what it is.

        314

        • #
          AndyG55

          “we are dumping CO2 – it can not be natural”

          RUBBISH, junk anti-science yet again from fits.

          The CO2 we return to the atmosphere is from TOTALLY NATURAL COAL

          It BELONGS in the atmosphere.

          CO2 levels of 700-2000ppm would be far preferable for plant life and the planet .

          But you HATE plant life, and want it on starvation rations.

          That’s just SICK !

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          • #
            Peter Fitzroy

            What will be the species list at that level of CO2 (last time it got above 800 we were in the carboniferous – hint). One thing we can say is that humans did not evolve in a high CO2 environment, so we would be out competed by those species that did (mostly poikilotherms)

            412

            • #
              theRealUniverse

              “last time it got above 800 we were in the carboniferous ” that wasnt 800ppm it was SEVEN percent!! (Prof. Bob Carter lecture said that).

              131

              • #
                Peter Fitzroy

                That 7% was in the Cambrian according to Geocraft.com, musch lower in the carboniferous, which is when all the coal deposit were formed, and as a consequence lowered the CO2 level levels in which we evolved.

                38

              • #
                AndyG55

                800ppm will not hurt ANYTHING, stop having fits. !

                Your life must be one humungous PANIC

                So funny

                So pathetically SAD.

                82

              • #
                theRealUniverse

                Nit picking ok Cambrian then, doesnt matter too much. It was 7% AND temps were similar to now!

                101

            • #
              AndyG55

              Poor fits display his ABJECT IGNORANCE , yet again

              The world will be far more fertile and abundant at 800ppm

              Far more food for feeding all the diverse life on the planet.

              103

            • #
              tom0mason

              Peter Fitzroy,

              So you must agree with AndyG55 as you offer no counter to his statement —
              “CO2 levels of 700-2000ppm would be far preferable for plant life and the planet .

              But you HATE plant life, and want it on starvation rations.”

              Do plants prefer high CO2 levels?

              Do you (Peter Fitzroy) hate plant life? If so why do you hate it so. Was it caused by a plant related trauma in you early life?

              41

            • #
              Graeme No.3

              Peter Fitzroy:

              Surely you cannot be that stupid?
              What of the Mesozoic as an example. Jurassic 2200-2700 p.p.m. Cretaceous 1650-1900 p.p.m. Throw in the Triassic and nealy 200 million years of high CO2, lots of luxurious vegetation eaten by dinosaurs (I assume your “knowledge” of science extends to knowing of them).

              And a lot of Australia’s coal was laid down in the Permian.

              00

        • #
          robert rosicka

          So the water coming from the exhaust of a hydrogen fuelled car is also pollution and nasty and should be stopped at all costs .

          70

        • #

          Dumping CO2?

          Take a glass of water, and for the sake of keeping it a relatively even amount, say it holds 500mL of water.

          Take an eyedropper and fill that with water from an independent source.

          Add four drops of water into the glass. (0.2mL)

          That’s the equivalent of how many parts per million increase in CO2 since 2005.

          Doesn’t sound anywhere near as dramatic as ….. ‘dumping’ to me.

          Tony.

          161

          • #

            See, even I make errors with the maths sometimes.

            That four drops of water is the total CO2 content of the atmosphere. (400PPM)

            So, what we have added in those last 15 years (20PPM) comes in at a twentieth of four drops of water, so one fifth of one drop of water.

            Still, that’s not quite like ‘dumping’ at all.

            Alarmists have to make their memes BIG, because when placed in context, it’s minute to say the least.

            Tony.

            181

            • #
              robert rosicka

              Try it as a percentage Tony and it’s so insignificant it’s virtually irrelevant.

              71

              • #
                robert rosicka

                I’m told there’s no such thing as a dumb question but in this case Fitz I’ll make an exception .

                53

            • #
              Peter Fitzroy

              I see, the old reductio ad absurdum argument. How about you explain how slow moving electrons (a miniscule part of an aluminium wire) can power a city?

              412

              • #
                AndyG55

                absurd-DUMB arguments are your forte, Fitz.

                And please stop digging deeper and deeper into a FAILED argument.

                It too hilariously bizarre watching your attempts and NON-SCIENCE.

                You have nothing and nowhere to go but down.

                63

              • #
                AndyG55

                Switching from one DUMB FAILED argument, with a moronic distraction, isn’t going to fool anyone except YOU, fits.

                72

              • #

                Peter Fitzroy,

                see, there you go again.

                It’s not slow moving electrons.

                It’s a difference in potential.

                Tony.

                132

              • #
                Crakar24

                SHUT UP,YOU ARE SO DUMB YOU MAKE MY HEAD HURT,…..

                Electrons move at near on the speed if light through aluminium cables!!!!!

                92

              • #
                Crakar24

                Pete when will you learn everything and I mean everything you experience in your life time is orders of magnitude more complex than your cognitive ability to understand them

                62

              • #

                Take an imaginary wire, and stretch it from Muswellbrook (Bayswater power Station) to Sydney.

                One electron moves out of the atom into the start of the wire figuratively attached to the ‘end’ of the generator, and into the very next atom alongside it, and it does that in 2.7 microseconds, and then immediately moves back to the atom where it came from in a further 2.7 microseconds. At the other end of that wire in Sydney, the second last atom before the Load does exactly the same thing. That happens 800 microseconds later.

                It takes 800 microseconds for the generated power leaving Bayswater to arrive in Sydney.

                THAT’S how slow moving electrons figuratively power a city.

                Tony.

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              • #
                Peter Fitzroy

                so the wire transfers energy and is unchanged by this process, yet you deny that CO2 can transfer energy? If you had a thicker wire would you be able to transfer more energy? It would seem so just by looking at the HV lines.

                38

              • #
                Crakar24

                FFS NO Pete.

                Electricity flows because the electrons in the outer shell of the atom be it copper or aluminum move from one atom to another, this process constantly happens when you current or potential as mentioned above.

                A co2 molecule will absorb ir energy which raises its energy state but the electrons do not speed up no kinetic energy or heat is created. The co2 atom then releases this energy and goes back to it’s lower energy state. Its really not that hard to understand if you have an open mind rather than a closed bias mind.

                90

              • #
                theRealUniverse

                I think Tony that probably should be nanoseconds for those e’s out of the atom. Just checking..
                The potential propagation is close to C yes. 800uS would be about right.

                31

              • #
                Peter Fitzroy

                Both are transferring energy, increase the size of the wire and more energy is transferred, more CO2, more energy transferred. What I’m trying to point out is that only a small proportion of the mass of the wire is involved in that energy transfer. Same with the proportionate mass of CO2 in the atmosphere. You guys do not really understand similes do you.

                29

              • #
                AndyG55

                “so the wire transfers energy and is unchanged by this process”

                Yep, just like the atmosphere transfers energy and remains unchanged.

                “yet you deny that CO2 can transfer energy”

                Yep it does.. UPWARDS.. just like a wire. !

                Follows the potential difference.

                “If you had a thicker wire would you be able to transfer more energy?”

                So you are saying that having more atmospheric CO2 INCREASES the atmospheric conductance. I think you could be correct.

                Keep digging deeper and deeper, fits, its funny 😉

                70

              • #
                AndyG55

                “The CO2 atom then releases this energy “

                And the release of that energy will always be in the direction of the potential difference. Basic Physics, you might say.

                Except that mostly it releases the energy by collision rather than re-emittance, because collisions happen a couple of magnitudes more often that re-emittance.

                60

              • #
                AndyG55

                “more CO2, more energy transferred. ”

                Great Fitz, we now agree

                Increasing atmospheric CO2 INCREASES the energy potential out of the system.

                WELL DONE little fella !!

                You have just proven to yourself that increased CO2 increases COOLING !!

                80

              • #
                AndyG55

                Poor Fitz.

                You really did stuff up that attempted simile, didn’t you.

                So FUNNY !!

                51

              • #
                AndyG55

                ” You guys do not really understand similes do you.”

                Yes we do 🙂 😉 😛 😮

                61

              • #
                tom0mason

                Peter Fitzroy,
                “How about you explain how slow moving electrons (a miniscule part of an aluminium wire) can power a city?”

                “slow moving electrons” ? Your piled high and deep is showing PF. Explain!

                AFAIK the movement of electrons is what powers our electrical world and the elemental make-up of the wires does not speed-up or slow the speed of these electrons, it merely reduces the number of them that that can transfer charge through a circuit.

                Aluminum is a relatively less good conductor than say silver or copper, i.e. is has more resistance. This resistance does not ‘slow’ the electrons but is a property of an electric circuit, or part of a circuit, that transforms electric energy into heat energy in opposing electric current (aka electron movement). Resistance involves collisions of the current-carrying charged particles with fixed particles that make up the structure of the conductors.

                In A.C mains circuits that means the charged particles are pushed and pull at a rate of 50Hz (or maybe 60Hz in other locations, or 400Hz on many transport vessels) This A.C. mains is distributed on grid distribution cables, these have resistance and cause a voltage drop (a voltage loss) between the generator and the substation. At the substation there are simple methods to overcome this (e.g. changing tap on a transformer) to ensure that the local customer is supplied with the correct voltage. The only downside is that the ultimate overall capacity of the circuit from generator to customer is reduced as some of the electrical energy is transferred to heat energy. However on a properly engineered system the losses are fully accounted and adjusted for so that the customer gets the correct voltage.

                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

                As to your blather about CO2, you like the CO2 active frequencies in the atmosphere, are fully saturated. That is to say increasing CO2 does not increase warming as that frequency band has next to nothing left in it, it’s all used-up, it’s saturated.
                And even if it could increase it is not a linear relationship between CO2 levels and the amount of warming but a logarithmic one. Look it up Mr PhD!

                41

              • #
                Crakar24

                Peter……the size of the wire matters none it is the resistance of the wire that counts

                Ohms law knowledge would good for you about now and no you cannot compare current flow down a wire with it exchange with co2

                40

              • #
                AndyG55

                Wire also has inductive and capacitive facets. Its not just the resistance.

                So even the way in which the wire is wound can make a difference.

                A very interesting field of study that I have only just touched the surface of .

                As you say, Crakar, a simile between wire and atmospheric CO2 is one displaying a deep level of basic ignorance of science and physics.

                10

            • #
              Annie

              I guessed what you really meant 😉

              91

    • #
      tom0mason

      The basis of your comment,
      “So what should the species list be? How much of the earth should be used to provide ecosystem services? What is natural anyway, with the amount of CO2 dumping there can be no natural ecosystem anywhere on the planet.” presumes that we humans are in charge of the planet.
      NO we are not, nature is!
      Your thinking is a gross error. The majority of CO2 is from natural sources and not man-made.
      Like all life we affect the environment but we do not control it. Extinctions are a result of natural processes even if humans cause it — as we are a part of nature. And nature has infinitely more ways to seek equilibrium (and that is all it can do ‘seek equilibrium’) than we can imagine. We can choose to ‘save’ this or that species but ultimately nature decides what will survive or perish, not us.

      A reality check for you is the Cheetah and it’s probable extinction – see https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/160201_cheetahs .

      41

  • #

    As our school children are telling us that we will all be dead within 12 years, surely there is nothing to worry about. The rest of life can go on evolving to cope with the environment as they always have. The plants will love all of that CO2 and bloom profusely.
    “The Day of the Trifids” will have arrived.

    150

  • #
    Bill in Oz

    Jo this is amusing
    Nonsense
    Straight out of
    A Monty Python script.
    It’s all a good big joke !
    But surely there are other issues
    That are far more important
    To discuss
    Than satirical comedy

    71

    • #
      Bill in Oz

      The bumbling Beebe
      Gives this fake Mythical tale
      Headline ‘news’ on
      It’s online site 3 times
      The World
      Scence
      Europe ( ???? )
      But nothing where it belongs
      In the Comedy pages ….
      Ohhhhhh I forgot
      The Beebe doesn’t do
      Comedy !

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  • #
    OriginalSteve

    The UN is increasing the biodiversity of the junket-addicted UN flunkies who thrive amongst the steaming pile of dung eco system that has sprung up around the UN….

    Junketus Guanous are the first species that will bever die out…

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  • #
    Dennis

    School girl actor/models used for street theatre calling for more action to be taken on climate change.

    Hired and from an opportunity school in the Sydney western suburbs for young people seeking training to become future actors and models.

    One shown on television and photo opportunities wearing plain clothes while “protesting” and bursting into tears when questioned and wearing a “Independent” supported by GetUp blue shirt with the candidate.

    And then the teenager presented to the UN and to the Pope who we are now informed can see CO2.

    Fake has become an art form perfected by UN IPCC fellow travellers, con artists.

    151

  • #
    Roy Hogue

    One more time down the garden path…as usual this time it’s even more dire than in the past. A million species are going down the drain because of humans. I wonder what would happen if I asked…

    — Lest’s see the list of species that are soon to be no more, could they give me a list of all 1 million or even approximately a million?

    — If I wanted to know where the climate has changed and by how much, could they tell me?

    — If I asked for a list of those who stand to profit in some way from hurting their fellow man with more global warming terrors and the draconian measures to stop the extinction, would they tell me?

    I didn’t think so. And if I said I have a list of species I would gladly do without, what would they say? And don’t bother, I already know I’d be a pariah worse than Jack the Ripper.

    And if I refined my list to say I could do without Humanus Politicus, Humanus Scientificus and humanus selfimporticus and all their sub species, could the world survive it or would everything turn upside down?

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    • #
      Roy Hogue

      I do know one thing; that life on this planet has been around for, well I’ll be honest and say I don’t know but certainly millions of years during which species came and went again in huge numbers, are still doing that now and more importantly, will continue to do that in the future.

      Life has proved to be tougher than anything the world ever threw at it and I can’t see a single reason to believe it will be otherwise in the future. So why should I get all lathered up over one more dire prediction?

      We have real problems to solve. We do pollute air water and land and need to decide to do something practical about it. One more AOC howling about X number of years to save the world will only convince me that the AOCs of this world are worthless and should be ignored.

      For a change Humanus Politicus, Humanus Scientificus and humanus selfimporticus should settle down and quit blaming someone else for what they don’t like and actually get involved in fixing something. That lake of toxic waste behind the wind turbine magnetic core manufacturing plant in China would be a good place to start. And I can suggest a method for at least preventing more toxic waste in that lake — stop building wind turbines.

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      • #
        Kinky Keith

        That’s a very hard hitting piece there Roy.

        Following your lead I might even describe it as Info Robusticus.

        KK

        70

      • #
        AndyG55

        “We do pollute air water and land “

        If the amounts WASTED on doing NOTHING about beneficial atmospheric CO2 had been spent trying to cut down on REAL pollution, the world would be a MUCH cleaner and better place.

        82

        • #
          Kinky Keith

          And that’s the Truth from Any engineering or scientific or environmental point of view.

          As two red thumbers have shown, it’s not true from the modern political vantage point which big bucks can be made from the “belief” that the gas of life, CO2, is Pollution.

          It’s a weird, weird world.

          KK

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      • #
        theRealUniverse

        Yes and us Hominoids nearly became extinct too in the last BIG Ice Age.

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  • #
    ScienceABC123

    The UN says a million species face extinction. Can they specifically name them? Can they name 10% of them? 1% of them? How about just 100 of them, surely they could name 100? No, … I didn’t think so.

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  • #
    pat

    AUDIO: 3min21sec: 7 May: ABC AM: The world is “sleepwalking into an extinction crisis”
    By Lexi Metherell
    The report, three years in the making, was based on systematic reviews of 15,000 scientific and government sources.
    Global talks are planned next year to chart a post-2020 plan to prevent further damage to biodiversity – but Australia is accused of being missing in action.
    Featured:
    Tim Beshara, federal policy director, The Wilderness Society
    Professor James Watson, director, Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, University of Queensland
    Dr Kirsten Davies, senior lecturer, Macquarie University Law School, expert adviser and co-ordinating lead author, Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
    https://www.abc.net.au/radio/adelaide/programs/am/the-world-is-sleepwalking-into-an-extinction-crisis/11086110

    AUDIO: 6min14sec: 7 May: ABC AM: We must be “stewards, not pillagers”: Tim Flannery
    with Sabra Lane
    The United Nations-commissioned report on biodiversity is a “dire warning,” according to scientist, climate expert and former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery.
    Speaking with AM’s Sabra Lane, he says the report indicates that a quarter of the planet’s species are facing extinction and that humanity’s patterns of land exploitation and ocean use are unsustainable – but that industries are capable of adapting.
    Featured:
    Professor Tim Flannery, chief councillor, Climate Council
    TRANSCRIPT:
    TIM FLANNERY: Look, I think it’s a very dire warning. You know, the report: it’s an enormously long report with 1,800 references, so it’s completely comprehensive.
    But it’s telling us that a quarter of species are facing extinction; that the human patterns of land exploitation and the way we use our oceans are really unsustainable; and that we need to change course very soon if we hope to have a habitable planet.

    SABRA LANE: We hear a lot about the risks of climate change, but not about biodiversity. Why do you think that’s sod (sic)? And what kind of global action is needed to respond to it?…
    The report says, you know, we just can’t continue mining the planet’s wealth without consequences. We need changes in legislation, regulation. We need new ways of financing more sustainable technologies.
    And we just need to make that shift: a complete shift from a system where we’re acting as rapers and pillagers, really, of the Earth, through to one where we’re stewards…
    So we have to stop subsidising things like fossil fuels. We have to incentivise the uptake of more sustainable technologies if we want to have a future; and they include wind and solar and other renewable forms of energy…

    SABRA LANE: Next year, China is hosting what is described as the most important biodiversity talks in a decade, where signatories to the United Nations Biodiversity Treaty will plan a future strategy to stem losses in ecosystems beyond 2020.
    We’ve heard in a report on AM that Australia has been accused of being missing in action in those talks. Why isn’t there a greater priority?

    TIM FLANNERY: Well, that I just do not get.
    Are there any Australians who don’t care that our tropical rainforests are being devastated, or that the Great Barrier Reef is being devasted by climate change? Is there anyone who doesn’t want a better outcome there?
    When you get China, which is home to about a quarter to a fifth of the world’s population and historically has been one of the great drivers of biodiversity loss through things like the ivory trade: when you get them changing course and inviting you to participate, wouldn’t you jump at the opportunity?…
    https://www.abc.net.au/radio/adelaide/programs/am/we-must-be-stewards-not-pillagers-tim-flannery/11086274

    60

    • #
      pat

      AUDIO: 10min28sec: 7 May: ABC Breakfast: Fran Kelly: UN report warns one million species face extinction
      A damning new United Nations report has warned up to one million plants and animal species are on the verge of extinction…
      The report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilisation.
      Guest: Sandra Diaz, Co-author, ‘UN Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services report’
      https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/un-report-warns-one-million-species-face-extinction/11086132

      ABC’s climate elections rolls on:

      7 May: ABC Analysis: Climate change is a federal election issue for voters, so how do the policies stack up?
      By Michael Slezak
      Photo: Voters are sceptical of Scott Morrison’s climate change policies (mock Morrison student protest)
      “Right now, we are facing a man-made disaster of global scale. Our greatest threat in thousands of years. Climate change.”
      This was a message recently delivered by renowned naturalist Sir David Attenborough. And he meant it for our politicians…
      Globally this message — and others like it — seem to have been heard by the community. School students are striking. People are marching. Authorities are issuing warnings and businesses are doing what they can to adapt to changes already seen and predicted…

      Bill Shorten is offering stronger targets and policies, while Scott Morrison is proposing taking less action, on the grounds that this will be cheaper.
      The Greens are calling for much stronger action and other parties have a range of views…
      With the fundamental science of climate change settled, what does that science tell us about the adequacy of those policies?…

      Can the policies cut all emissions?
      Another important measure is whether the policies offered are scalable to help Australia eliminate greenhouse gas emissions entirely in the next few decades…
      Professor Pitman concedes that if Australia eliminated its emissions completely, and every other country did nothing, it would have virtually no impact on global warming.
      But that’s not the point, he says. “If we’re not cutting emissions we have no leverage, no influence, no moral right to ask other countries to do the same.”
      Professor Jotzo says this is the approach Australia takes to a range of other issues…
      https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-07/climate-change-federal-election-morrison-shorten-policies-votes/11084580

      40

    • #
      Another Ian

      After that –

      “Climate Statistician Dr. Caleb Rossiter: ‘We are trying to save the people of the planet from the people ‘saving the planet.’”

      https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/05/01/skeptical-scientist-hijacks-aoc-congressional-climate-hearing/

      31

  • #
    Larry W

    Note that in Iceland tomatoes are produced year-round … prolifically. Large tanks of Co2 are used to pump in the gas. And, by the way, bees are imported from the Netherlands.

    80

  • #
    NB

    ‘We’ll all be rooned’ said Hanrahan.

    81

  • #
    Kinky Keith

    Land in New York is extremely valuable.

    As a token of sincerity and an example to the rest of the world, the United Nations™ has decided to sell up its holdings in New York and relocate to Venezuela.

    Two reasons given for this action were that the profit from the sale of the U.N. Complex could pay for the new setup in Venezuela and leave approximately $10 billion free to help the poor worldwide.

    This is a wonderful change in attitude from an organisation which, up to now has shown little interest in helping anybody but themselves.
    I hope I got this right because the ABC radio in my car was hard to hear with the large diesel powered semi trailer overtaking at the time.

    Is it possible that it’s real and happening because they want to get away from President Trump, not sure

    KK

    141

    • #
      Bill in Oz

      The Un is fleeing to Venzuela !
      From Trump ?
      Well I’m sure that Maduro will
      Give them a warm welcome
      And demand a
      Big share of any profits .
      He’s broke poor dopey Maduro
      And trump ?
      I think he will be please
      To see them leave.

      91

  • #
    PeterS

    Again the alarmists scream out and they propose no real solution to the alleged problem. So even if a million species were in danger of extinction what can we do about it? Absolutely nothing. It proves these alarmists are just that and nothing more, except for an elect few who are also scam artists to profit greatly from the alarmist nonsense. The latter clearly ought to be put behind bars for life as was Bernie Madoff for a financial scam of far smaller significance.

    81

  • #
    theRealUniverse

    So the great plan is..to chop down more forests to put up use-less windmills and cover more arable productive land with use-less solar.
    Yes there is real pollution not CO2) but the planet can deal with it.
    Half million is peanuts to the ice-age and earlier extinctions.

    81

    • #
      ivan

      Don’t forget the increase of windmills will help the killing off of habitats, the killing of more birds and insects, therefore what they are saying becomes self for-filling – their actions to stop it are the very things causing the extinction. That is why they are useful idiots.

      71

  • #
    theRealUniverse

    I love this one..
    Austria “Day of Sun” called off because of bad weather
    https://www.iceagenow.info/austria-day-of-sun-called-off-because-of-bad-weather/
    Italy – “Hasn’t snowed like this May for 70 years!!”

    91

  • #
    robert rosicka

    99 % of all animals that have ever lived are extinct, so what the fuss .

    81

  • #
    pat

    a search just now shows the most comprehensive FakeNewsMSM coverage of this topic, without a single headline that suggests any questioning of the claims whatsoever.
    have never seen it so bad.
    best one can do is post the funniest headline:

    VIDEO: 2min05sec: 6 May: CNN: Is nature over? Maybe
    Analysis by John D. Sutter
    https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/06/world/un-biodiversity-report-end-of-nature-sutter-scn/

    6 May: Washington Examiner: CNN says 100 employees accepted voluntary buyouts in response to layoffs ‘rumor’
    by Claude Thompson
    CNN says roughly 100 employees have accepted voluntary buyouts a month after an overhaul by parent company AT&T.
    According to Deadline, AT&T’s decision to offer buyouts, similar to those offered at HBO and the remnants of Turner, was in an effort to chip away at approximately $170 billion in outstanding debt, which AT&T agreed to take on as a result of their acquisition of Time Warner announced in 2016. In March, AT&T restructured the majority of their TV assets under the umbrella of WarnerMedia, including CNN…
    WarnerMedia and CNN claim there have been no layoffs and the only exits from the company have been through the buyout process, although it is unclear if the program has a threshold of participants to prevent layoffs.
    The buyouts also coincide with the first official broadcast of CNN from their new home base at 30 Hudson Yards in New York. CNN’s move to the new location consolidates almost all of WarnerMedia together in a single building…
    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cnn-says-100-employees-accepted-voluntary-buyouts-in-response-to-layoffs-rumor

    6 May: Daily Beast: Politics Editor Vernon Loeb Out at The Atlantic, the Latest in a Long String of High-Profile Exits
    The iconic magazine is flush with cash and new hirings, but many of its most prominent writers have departed in recent months.
    by Maxwell Tani
    One of The Atlantic’s top editors left the magazine last week—the latest in a recent string of high-profile departures from the hundred-year-old-publication.
    Politics editor Vernon Loeb left The Atlantic on Friday, less than a year after he was hired to oversee the magazine’s politics section. Loeb confirmed his departure in a statement to The Daily Beast.
    “I enjoyed my time at The Atlantic. I felt really privileged to work there,” he said in an email. “I left to follow a passion of mine and have taken a job as senior editor for investigations, enterprise and innovations at ***Inside Climate News, the Brooklyn-based non-profit that won the Pulitzer several years back for national reporting.”…

    Loeb’s hiring was announced last June in an interview with the Washington Post, in which he specifically cited the appeal of the The Atlantic’s vast financial resources.
    “I have … spent decades at this point working for shrinking newspapers and to suddenly go work for a news organization that’s aggressively and ambitiously expanding was almost mind-bending for me,” Loeb told Post media critic Erik Wemple at the time.
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-atlantic-politics-editor-vernon-loeb-out-the-latest-in-a-long-string-of-high-profile-exits

    is reporting CAGW even more financially attractive!

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    pat

    don’t see a link in Jo’s write-up for the CBC “die-off” quote from Watson, so just want to point out it’s from Seth Borenstein’s AP piece, which is carried elsewhere:

    6 May: ChristianScienceMonitor: Humans may cause extinction of 1 million species, UN report says
    Scientists say it’s not too late to fix the problem. Many of the worst effects can be prevented by changing the way we grow food, produce energy, deal with climate change, and dispose of waste
    PIC: night-time, chimney, “smoke”
    By Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
    The report comes up with 1 million species in trouble by extrapolating the IUCN’s 25% threatened rate to the rest of the world’s species and using a lower rate for the estimated 5.5 million species of insects, Dr. Watson said.
    Outside scientists, such as Dr. Lovejoy and others, said that’s a reasonable assessment.
    The report gives only a generic “within decades” time frame for species loss because it is dependent on many variables, including taking the problem seriously, which can reduce the severity of the projections, Dr. Watson said…

    Dr. Watson said the report was careful not to call what’s going on now as a sixth big die-off ETC…
    (This story was reported by The Associated Press. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education)
    https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2019/0506/Humans-may-cause-extinction-of-1-million-species-UN-report-says

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    pat

    7 May: Daily Mail: Antarctic blast to send temperatures plunging 10C across the entire country – as Melbourne and Sydney brace for a week of biting winds and rainfall
    •Cold fronts will move across Australia with chilly effects lasting into the weekend
    •Rain, storms, hail and even snow are expected as winter begins to settle in
    •’Very cold air mass’ will make its way across the country from Antarctica
    •The cold snap will bring up to 20cm of snow at ski resorts in the Australian Alps
    By Ben Hill
    An Antarctic cold front is set to bring an icy chill right across Australia – with temperatures up to 10C lower than average.
    Two cold fronts will make their way across New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania this week, and their effects are expected to linger well into the weekend.
    Rain, storms, hail and even snow in some places are expected as winter begins to settle in – with Canberra tipped to dip below freezing on the weekend.

    The first cold front will bring strong winds, rain, and storms to South Australia early on Tuesday before hitting Victoria in the evening.
    The second, stronger cold front will move from Antarctica towards Tasmania and then Victoria and South Australia on Thursday, slowly making its way north.

    Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Sarah Scully said the chill is expected to blanket most of the continent.
    ‘Very cold air mass is moving from the Antarctic right over the country,’ Ms Scully said.
    ‘Temperatures will be 8 to 10C lower than the average, even in the Northern Territory and Queensland.
    ‘It’s a cold snap affecting the whole country, it’s a big one. The effects will be felt right into the weekend.’

    The stronger cold front will bring snow to Victoria at elevations above 800m.
    Up to 20cm of snow is expected to fall at ski resorts in the alps on the border of NSW and Victoria…
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6999537/Antarctic-cold-send-temperatures-plummeting-10C-lower-average-Sydney-Melbourne.html

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      Maptram

      While looking at BOM temperature and rainfall data in various places I notice that on some days, not all data has been recorded. Perhaps there will be some missing data on BOM climate online pages over the next few days. Wouldn’t want lower temperatures to lower monthly means or cause record minimums would we.

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    Crakar24

    It’s here now in SA perhaps we should ask our resident expert on how CO2 has caused the jet stream to move allowing antarctic to travel so far north to cause this “cold snap” so what do you say Pete?

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      Bill in Oz

      Crakar, he doesn’t live in SA.
      He’s way up North
      Where the sun always shines.
      But if we ask the
      Weather Gods
      Very politely
      They will send an icy cold blast
      Just to his front door
      To remind him of Winter

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      el gordo

      Crakar, its the collapse of the high pressure belt and I suspect a wayward jetstream is involved.

      http://www.bom.gov.au/fwo/IDY65100.pdf

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        Bill in Oz

        E G Winter has come
        It’s as simple as that.
        To cold & wet
        Even to be in the garden
        But there is a solution
        A warm fire
        And a good book
        There I’ll be after
        Finishing this.

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        Bill in Oz

        Eg Is there a sequence of this type of charts showing how the lows cycle around Antarctica ?

        It occurs to me that these Lows do not die & disappear. The same 5-6 Low pressure systems constantly cycle around Antarctica..

        Another thought : Antarctica itself is shown as having no weather systems..highs or Lows..But that is no correct.

        Bill

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      el gordo

      Came across this at the Hockey Schtick, its a clear solar mechanism impacting the high pressure belt.

      ‘The authors describe a solar amplification mechanism by which solar minima favor the development of high-pressure blocking systems which block the jet stream and cause increased jet stream dips of the polar vortex [just like we have seen over the past few record cold winters in the US and Europe].

      ‘Many other papers have described this solar amplification mechanism via solar effects on the stratosphere, which in turn affect the QBO, which in turn affects large scale planetary waves such as Rossby Waves and the jet stream. This is only one of many solar amplification mechanisms described in the scientific literature.’

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    pat

    6 May: MountainDemocrat: Final snow survey measures a cold and dense snowpack
    By Dawn Hodson
    The Department of Water Resources conducted the fifth and final Phillips Station snow survey of 2019 Thursday, measuring 47 inches of snow depth and a snow water equivalent of 27.5 inches, which is 188 percent of average for that location.
    Statewide, California’s snowpack is at 31 inches of snow water equivalent, which is 144 percent of average for this time of year…
    “California’s cities and farms can expect ample water supplies this summer,” said DWR Director Karla Nemeth…

    “2019 has been an extremely good year in terms of snowpack,” said Jon Ericson, DWR Chief of the Division of Flood Management. “Based on our surveys, we are seeing a very dense, cold snowpack that will continue to produce run-off into late summer.”
    The 2019 snowpack reached its peak on March 31 and is the fifth largest on record, based on more than 250 manual snow surveys conducted each month by the California Cooperative Snow Survey Program.
    Both rain and snowpack runoff feed California’s reservoirs. The state’s largest six reservoirs currently hold between 96 percent and 128 percent of their historical averages for this date. Lake Shasta, California’s largest surface reservoir, is 108 percent of its historical average and sits at 93 percent of capacity…

    As far as snow depth, as of April 1 the snowpack was 144 percent of normal in the Northern Sierra, 147 percent of normal in the Central Sierra, 139 percent of normal in the Southern Sierra and 143 percent of normal statewide.
    https://www.mtdemocrat.com/news/final-snow-survey-measures-a-cold-and-dense-snowpack/

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    neil

    Every few decades the UN comes up with a new scare campaign and tries to convince western governments that they need to pay 0.7% of their GDP to the UN because they are the only ones who can fix it.
    In the 1940’s it was War Reconstruction, in the 70’s Global Poverty, 90’s Global Warming and for the 2020’s it’s Global Extinction as AGW has run it’s course and they again failed to get the money, with the exception of Australia, Julia Gillard was the only western leader stupid enough to pay.

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    pat

    VIDEO: 53sec: 7 May: AdelaideAdvertiser: May Snow Storm Leaves Italian Mountain Towns Blanketed
    An estimated 67 centimeters of snow fell in the mountains of Italy’s Veneto region on Sunday, May 5, Nuova Venezia reported. The late season storm delivered winds and flurries throughout the southern Dolomite region and broke local records for spring snowfall, Italian media said. Video posted to Instagram and is described as showing heavy flurries and snow-laden trees near Crespano del Grappa
    https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/national/may-snow-storm-leaves-italian-mountain-towns-blanketed/video/4e877ed0f1e302ee8da5af27c5ffcb21

    7 May: Il Globo: One dead one missing in Italy following a weekend of wild weather
    Three French mountaineers were rescued from Monte Rosa in the Alps at around 4,000 metres altitude as temperatures fell as low as -15˚C, Italian media reported…

    6 May: LocalFrance: AFP: Icy storms blast France leaving one woman dead and 30 suffering from hypothermia
    Temperatures across Europe plunged over the weekend with ice, snow and strong winds hitting France.
    At the Tekvinal music festival in the Creuse region near Limoges, snow fell and at least 30 people were treated for hypothermia.
    Emergency services handed out 500 survival blankets and two people were hospitalised, reported French newspaper Le Parisien…

    video doesn’t work in Australia it seems, so no need for the link:

    VIDEO: 6 May: San Luis Obispo Tribune: Watch: They’re working hard blowing 8 feet of snow off Tioga Road near Yosemite
    Road crews are working on Tioga Road about one mile west of White Wolf in about eight feet of snow, in this video shot May 3, 2019. Too deep for the rotary plows, a dozer goes out ahead to remove some snow so the rotary plows can get to work.

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    theRealUniverse

    icecap.us
    Sweden’s Lack of Electricity Capacity Is Threatening Growth
    Bloomberg
    “A shift toward renewables is overwhelming the nation’s grid, leaving a potential Olympic Games in 2026 relying on.”
    So doesnt that send a warning (sure to be ignored if QLD is relying on un-renewables) if Brissy gets the 2032 Olympics.

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    WXcycles

    Saw a snippet of this ludicrous new scam on the box this morning and it was too silly and affronting to intelligence or a modern science education to watch. But I did watch just long enough to see the spokeswoman state, “… I do not know the key statistics involved but … blah-blah-blah … the world is coming to an end … blah-blah-blah … ’cause humans …“.

    She really said that. This ‘sciencey‘-type person who had volunteered to put their hand-up and be interviewed by the ABC on the topic almost immediately also volunteered that she had no personal knowledge about the basic alleged ‘facts’ she would be discussing.

    Color me unimpressed with that damned fool, I’ll take that as a sign of things to come from the climate-derangement-syndrome mental-illness vector at the ABC.

    Anyway, this morning produced the first dry winter-like chill in the air on the shore of Townsville, as it dipped to a nippy 15.2C (officially) just before dawn but felt a bit colder than that to me under my two blankies. It made for a beautiful morning walk.

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    WXcycles

    The hapless rats survived for unknown years 50 km off Papua New Guinea. More rats will wash up there again sometime and the cycle will start over. The entirety of mankind’s industrial revolution disaster and that’s it, that’s the only actual mammal anyone can name as “caused by climate change”?

    Even that’s complete horse schist because as any geologist knows actual climate-change occurs globally over periods of multiples of centuries before you can detect a change, not over merely one or two decades of weather natural variability at a local island. So why is this lethal ‘change’ not seen anywhere else?

    Because it was mere local short-term weather variability only that killed a very special sort of … rat.

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    • #
      theRealUniverse

      Yep, weather events of any proportion are NOT ‘climate’ changing events. Solar cycles may produce changes in types of ‘events’ and frequencies. Real climate is long term. The period change to a full iceage from interglacial is still up for argument.

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  • #

    There is no Gaia, nothing is pristine, the Earth is not our mother. We live in a period of fluctuations between heavy and partial glaciation, and the present warm epoch is not extraordinary and its impending end will not be extraordinary. Common and predictable for Quaternary climate. The only difference is the development of complex and static built communities for enormous populations in the last few thousand years of comparative warmth.

    Someone has been pleading for “real scientists”. Well that is what “real scientists” can tell us…but only under their breath in this age of dogma.

    Conservation is the key to staying sane amidst change. Environmentalism (aka White Elephantitis) is the key to going insane before change even occurs.

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    • #
      theRealUniverse

      ‘There is no Gaia, nothing is pristine, the Earth is not our mother’ very true, it never has been. Ishy wishy hand rubbing trys to say otherwise. if there is an impactor or mega eruption, see how gaia copes then. AND life will survive, as it has done for a few hundred millenia, but not in the same form, as has been observed.

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    • #
      AndyG55

      …. goes

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    • #
      Maptram

      I think Shorten believes the cost of inaction is the cost to repair any damage caused by floods, cyclones etc because they are caused by climate change and that if we spend $10 billion on stopping climate change we will also stop the cost of inaction.

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      • #
        AndyG55

        I’m not even going to guess at what Shorten actually thinks, if he does at all.

        Would be a complete technicolour yawn of balderdash !

        We see snippets of it from Fitz.

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        • #
          WXcycles

          He knows it’s all BS Andy, they’re all aware it’s BS, even the greens (it is their BS after all). They’re just pandering to fools who already drank the koolaide, and are already in a blind-panic over something that’s not discernable above background noise, unless you adjust the noise to make it seem like there’s a signal.

          So when in Rome, do as the Romans do, pass around the koolaide and talk more drivel about “climate” like you’re any other local Roman hysteric.

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        theRealUniverse

        Circular thought only from an idiot.

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  • #
    Serp

    No uninterested party with half a brain gives any credence to this tranche of UN claptrap and among Australia’s usual suspects it is Climate Council’s Tim Flannery first out of the starting gates with an alarmist supporting statement to the ABC in confirmation of the saw often expressed on these threads that there is no Peak Stupid.

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  • #
    theRealUniverse

    More science garbage from the NZ govt, as expected run by a labor party with strong ties to the green insanity.
    https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/112538093/details-of-how-the-govt-will-fight-climate-change-to-finally-be-revealed
    “Carbon dioxide, from industry and transport, and nitrous oxide, mainly from synthetic fertilisers and animal manures, remain in the atmosphere for much longer than methane (total scientific lie and garbage misleading comment), produced mainly by belching livestock.

    “New Zealand’s methane emissions are six times the global average (so what). Farming groups would prefer to stabilise methane levels – environmentalists want them slashed. ”
    Of course they just twant to STOP NZ’s reliable great (so far) agricultural industry.

    Greg in NZ please email that idiot science climate fool for a minister if you havent already, before NZ labor destroy the NZ economy, like Labor will here if elected.

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    • #
      Greg in NZ

      Tried, not long ago, and the interweb machine replied, and I quote:

      “Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server www•greens•org•nz”. Russkies? Canoodling collusionals? Dodgy bots? Patsies?

      The minister with the highest travel costs and most kms spent in the air f-LYING = James Shaw (Greens), Minister of Cuckoo Crimate Cringe, ex-banker, also Minister of Statistics. My grandfather and great uncle returned from The Wars shaking their heads in disgust… they’d be mortified now (well, they are, RIP) or called De••••s or Te•••••••s or old white men. It still is a mad, mad world.

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    robert rosicka

    Just seen a photo on faceache of a massive sign on a tandem trailer that smashed into a low bridge , the sign was a labor one about Scott Morrison and has extensive damage .

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    yarpos

    The UN has forms with its predictions and deadlines, none of it good. I sure lists like this one abound, and the this will just be added to them.

    http://donaitkin.com/25-years-of-failed-predictions/

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    pat

    6 May: LocalSwitzerland: Winter makes dramatic May return in Switzerland
    The Swiss capital of Bern saw four centimetres of snow on Sunday – a new record for the latest date for fresh snow in the city. The previous latest date for new snow was on May 1st in 1945…
    The eastern city of St Gallen, which is 669 metres above sea level, also saw its latest snow ever. The cathedral city saw total snowfall of 19 centimetres…
    The week has also got off to an icy start in Switzerland, even in low-lying areas, with forecasters issuing a frost warning…
    The temperature in Bern on Monday morning was a decidedly chilly –2.3C, while in Mathod in the canton of Vaud, that was –2.6C…
    https://www.thelocal.ch/20190506/winter-makes-dramatic-may-return-in-switzerland-winter

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    pat

    lots of waffle in between, but a few points worth noting:

    7 May: Correctiv: Grand Theft Europe
    A Cross-Border Investigation
    Fraudsters are every year robbing Europe’s citizens of 50 billion euros in tax money. A Europe-wide investigation by 63 journalists from 30 countries, coordinated by CORRECTIV.
    •Fraudsters are now eyeing the market for green power certificates…
    •CORRECTIV has followed in the footsteps of one fraudster who played a major role in a high profile VAT fraud carousel. Our investigation reveals how this type of organized crime works and how governments in Europe struggle to combat it…

    This kind of crime, dubbed ‘VAT carousels’ or Missing Trader Intra-Community (MTIC) fraud, is costing Germany from €5 billion at the low end of estimates to anything up to €14 billion annually. As Europe’s largest economy, the losses are higher than elsewhere. But VAT fraud carousels are an EU-wide problem with the EU commission fixing the total annual tax loss at around €50 billion…

    The emission certificates were designed to manage climate-harming industrial emissions following the 1992 Kyoto Protocol. But they were also perfect for fraudsters because they were digital and could be traded at high speed.

    “Ninety percent of the carbon trade in Europe was fraudulent,” says Stone, the former UK tax investigator. He says that the fraud moves like the waves of the oceans, flowing back and forth between different products and countries.
    When Baha caught one of these waves, his business expanded dramatically.
    He was still 19 when he first heard about emission certificates. He was attending the huge IT tradeshow Cebit in the German city of Hanover where he had his own stand with a new company. This time, he’d registered the company in the name of a cousin who was honoured that Baha trusted them.

    During the tradeshow, Baha happened to meet an Indian businessman calling himself Adam Hicks. A few months later, when they met again in the lobby of a Dubai hotel, ‘Hicks’ would convince Baha to enter the emission certificates scam.

    “They were talking about a lot of money, really a lot of money,” Baha remembered later. “That really intrigued me.” Baha’s company was meant to act as a ‘buffer’, a middleman which made the network more difficult to penetrate. And he would contract with customers such as… Deutsche Bank. “The less I knew the better,” Baha said. On advice from Hicks, Baha also set up an account to trade emission certificates on the EU emissions trading system (ETS).

    But even as Baha was preparing to enter the emissions racket, every single EU member state was already aware of the issues, says Stone. It was discussed both at Europol and Eurofisc, a European-wide body of tax experts where Stone represented the UK. All member states knew of the new VAT fraud scheme by July 2009 at the latest, Stone says. “After that, it was up to individual member states to stop it.”…

    In Britain, the authorities could see it coming as registrations for emissions trading spiked dramatically, especially from companies that had previously been involved in fraudulent mobile phone trades. The authorities realized that British firms were selling certificates to a France-based trader on a large scale. They warned their French counterparts…READ ON
    https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories-en/2019/05/07/grand-theft-europe/

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    David Wojick

    Garth Paltridge has a good post on Curry’s blog, on how useless climate models are when it comes to predicting adverse impacts. Here is a useful paragraph:

    “While the forecasts of future global average climate are not really trustworthy and would probably not be very useful even if they were, the potentially much more useful forecasts of regional climates are perhaps just nonsense. A good example supporting this rather negative view of the matter is the variability of the set of hundred-year forecasts of the average rainfall over Australia. Each forecast was produced by one of the many climate models from around the world. The present-day measured average is about 450 millimetres per year. The forecasts for the next century range from less than 200 mm to more than 1000 mm per year. That sort of thing makes finding a model to support a particular narrative just too easy.”

    https://judithcurry.com/2019/05/06/climates-uncertainty-principle/

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    pat

    7 May: Forbes: The Trouble With Carbon Taxes: Lessons For Asian Policymakers
    by Tilak Doshi
    As some of the world’s largest carbon emitters, the major emerging Asian economies such as China, India and Indonesia as well as the developed countries Japan and South Korea have been under pressure in international climate change forums to adopt carbon pricing. Asian energy planners, however, are not likely to be encouraged by the experience of carbon tax legislation in a number of countries in the West which have been at the fore-front of “decarbonizing”. Many voters in the developed countries have become increasingly resentful of expensive climate change policies predicated on model-based projections of impending environmental catastrophe. There is no reason to believe that the average Asian citizen, generally poorer than his Western counterpart, will be any less opposed to policies which increase energy prices in his household budget…

    China, Japan and South Korea are experimenting with voluntary ETS in some cities and provinces while Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan are “considering” future ETS or carbon taxes. The tiny city-state of Singapore is the first on record implementing a nation-wide carbon tax of just under $4.00/tCO2e (ton of carbon dioxide equivalent, a measure of GHGs emitted) on large industrial emitters from 2019 onward.

    But these early moves on carbon pricing in Asia are likely to remain limited, as the unfolding political revolt against burdensome energy policies has become increasingly apparent in the West. On May 3rd, the German magazine Spiegel reported that the leader of the Christian Democratic party rejected the call for nationwide carbon taxes, as the interests of the German economy trumped climate change concerns of its partners in the governing coalition. This occurred only days after it was claimed that Germany was moving towards a carbon tax as senior officials from the coalition government had reached a seeming consensus.

    The German U-turn is only the latest in a series of set-backs that carbon tax policies have faced in Europe. In March and April, two fledgling political parties on the right (the Finns Party and Forum for Democracy) surged electorally in Finland and Holland on campaign platforms that featured calls for lower fuel prices and an end to funding for international climate change agreements. The national protests in France by the yellow vests garnered a global media audience that witnessed the fury of voters’ reaction against fuel taxes among other issues. In December 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron was forced to suspend increases in petrol and diesel taxes.

    In mid-April, Albertan voters in Canada elected a conservative government by a landslide — in a campaign that focused on repealing the carbon tax imposed by the incumbent New Democratic Party which supported Prime Minister Trudeau’s climate change policy ambitions. Alberta’s voters mostly agreed that the imposition of the carbon tax was “all economic pain, no measurable environmental gain” as the premier-to-be Jason Kenney put it. In June 2018, less than a year before Kenney’s big win, the new Ontario government led by Doug Ford promised that its first act in office would be to “fight any efforts by the Federal government to impose a carbon tax on the people of Ontario in court”. Unlike Canada, carbon tax or cap-and-trade schemes have long been political non-starters at the federal level in the US despite bipartisan efforts over the years. At the state level, voters in Washington defeated a carbon tax for the second time in November last year.

    In August 2018, Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull endured a humiliating back-down over efforts to fund the country’s Paris Agreement pledges, ceding leadership to his party’s conservative faction which called for higher investments in the country’s coal sector as well as energy policies to lower Australians’ electricity bills. (Note that Australia had repealed its national carbon tax in 2014, less than two years after it was first instituted).

    These set-backs to carbon pricing legislation follow a typical pattern. In voting constituencies where “green” policy initiatives are favored, campaign promises are followed up by newly-elected officials initiating ambitious carbon pricing schemes along with non-price measures such as technology-based regulations, subsidies and mandates favoring solar and wind power and electric vehicles. Unsurprisingly, retail energy prices have escalated in many countries and localities – from Germany to California, Australia to Canada. Green policies driving up the price of heating, cooling, transport and electricity then emerge as important bread-and-butter issues in many constituencies. The argument that higher energy costs are necessary to avoid potential environmental catastrophes in the future did not seem persuasive in many electoral contests.

    Asia’s carbon imperative
    A defining feature of the rapidly growing Asian economies has been the race to rapidly expand fossil fuel use to support industrialization, urbanization and increasing the living standards of citizens as the quid pro quo for political legitimacy. This holds across the political spectrum, whether in chaotically democratic India or authoritarian China. Yet, in their attempt to meet the aspirations of citizens by rapidly “carbonizing” their economies with reliable grid electricity, automotive transport, and cleaner cooking fuels (rather than charcoal, cow-dung and wood), Asian leaders have been lectured on their countries’ rapidly increasing “carbon footprint”.

    Some Asian planners have reacted against the “carbon imperialism” of the West in a call for the continued importance of fossil fuels for economic development and poverty alleviation. But it is the wider voter reaction in the developed countries against costly climate change policies, fought out in electoral contests at local, provincial and national levels, that provide Asian leaders valuable lessons on the trouble with carbon taxes.
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/tilakdoshi/2019/05/07/the-trouble-with-carbon-taxes-lessons-for-asian-policymakers/#52fd77086a9f

    re the writer Tilak Doshi:
    I have worked in the oil and gas sector as an economist in both private industry and in think tanks, in Asia, the Middle East and the US over the past 25 years. I focus on global energy developments from the perspective of Asian countries that remain large markets for oil, gas and coal. I have written extensively on the areas of economic development, environment and energy economics. My publications include “Singapore in a Post-Kyoto World: Energy, Environment and the Economy” published by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (2015). I won the 1984 Robert S. McNamara Research Fellow award of the World Bank and received my Ph.D. in Economics in 1992.

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    pat

    Weather Service says its upgraded American forecasting model is about ready for prime time
    Washington Post – 20 hours ago
    Pending a successful test over the next 30 days, the Weather Service will replace its GFS (Global Forecast System) model, often referred to as the American model, with an upgraded version around mid-June…
    The Weather Service had planned to launch the FV3 model in March but paused implementation after users of the test version of the model reported that its forecasts were unrealistically cold and snowy. Since February, the Weather Service has worked to fix these problems…

    19 Feb: Wired: The Government’s New Weather Model Faces a Storm of Protest
    by Eric Niler
    The government’s new weather forecast model (LINK) has a slight problem: It predicts that outside temperatures will be a few degrees colder than what nature delivers. This “cold bias” means that local meteorologists are abandoning the National Weather Service in favor of forecasts produced by British and European weather agencies.
    For the past few weeks, the National Weather Service has been forecasting snowfall that ends up disappearing, according to Doug Kammerer, chief meteorologist at WRC-TV in Washington, DC. “It’s just not performing well,” Kammerer says. “It has continued to show us getting big-time snowstorms in this area, where the European model will not show it.”

    The new model, known as GFS-FV3 (Finite Volume on a Cubed Sphere dynamical core), has often overpredicted snow in the Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston, a region where incorrect forecasts affect the lives of tens of millions of people.
    The existing NWS forecast model, called the Global Forecast System, or GFS, has long been considered second in accuracy to the European models. Now Kammerer and others say the new FV3 upgrade is worse than the forecast model put out by our neighbors to the north. “The running joke now among meteorologists is that [the FV3] is looking more like the Canadian model,” Kammerer says. For those not plugged into weather humor, apparently the Canadian model also predicts big snowstorms that ultimately vanish.

    The FV3 was developed over the past three years by NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. FV3 forecasts were released a few weeks ago for testing by local meteorologists, and many of them took to Twitter to complain about the results. “I have no faith in the FV3 [for snowfall]”, tweeted Boston-based Judah Cohen, a meteorologist at Atmospheric Environmental Research, a private firm that provides forecasts to commercial and government clients.
    On Wednesday, the National Weather Service tweeted that the FV3 will be fully operational on March 20. But a NWS official told WIRED on Friday that the agency might push it back a few weeks because of all the complaints.

    The FV3 upgrade uses an enhanced set of algorithms that have been developed in the past few years by climate scientists to describe the interaction between the atmosphere and the oceans. These algorithms, which capture the physics of cloud formation, tropical storms, and polar winds, among other things, are then populated with temperature data from satellites and surface observations to generate a three- or 10-day forecast

    “No model is perfect,” says David Novak, acting director of the NWS’ National Center for Environmental Prediction. “The weather community knows this.” Novak acknowledges that the FV3 has a “cold bias” and that the agency is working to fix it. “It tends to be colder than what is observed. It appears to be a systematic issue, we are doing our due diligence and investigating these reports.”…
    He argues, however, that the FV3 isn’t all bad. He says it produces more accurate forecasts of hurricane intensity and the jet stream, the current of high-altitude air around the northern hemisphere that drives much of the United States’ weather patterns. “We found a lot of the good things,” Novak says. “We do know there are some areas that may need additional improvement.”

    NOAA recently signed an agreement with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a Boulder-based research facility that also develops forecast models. Antonio Busalacchi, director of NCAR’s parent agency, says he’s optimistic that the new NWS model will get better over time. “It’s premature to evaluate any one modeling system based on a snapshot with snowfall forecasts,” Busalacchi says. “One needs to look at the totality of the system.”
    At the same time, Busalacchi says that NWS and its parent agency, NOAA, might want to rely on help from academic scientists who are developing their own forecast models…
    https://www.wired.com/story/the-governments-new-weather-model-faces-a-storm-of-protest/

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    pat

    7 May: UK Times: Wind farm industry is about to score a damaging own goal
    by Clive Aslet
    (Clive Aslet is a writer on British architecture and life, and a campaigner on countryside and other issues. He was for many years editor of Country Life magazine)
    Britain’s capacity for generating electricity by this means puts us at an advantage over other countries in meeting green energy targets. We’re on course to do so; they aren’t.

    However, the industry is about to score a spectacular own goal, which could alienate public sympathy at a stroke. ScottishPower Renewables (which, despite its name, is Spanish-owned) has fingered Friston, on the Suffolk coast, as the “most appropriate location for development” for the base required for its offshore windfarms in the North Sea…

    Here, covering 30 acres, will be the infrastructure necessary to connect the powerlines with the national grid. I can’t think of any more heinously inappropriate site: a towering industrial horror that, in that flat, sandy landscape, will be visible for miles. The Suffolk coast is an area of exceptional beauty and fragility, first settled in the Bronze Age. Villages are still small. The local towns, such as Aldeburgh and Southwold, are famous for their charm, and much visited. Often the tallest thing to be seen across Suffolk’s marshes and sandlings is the tower of a medieval church. The loudest noise at the RSPB reserve of Minsmere is the boom of the bittern. Next door is the Suffolk coast and heaths area of outstanding natural beauty: the impact of the development could be so adverse that it could lose its protected status.

    The local roads are little more than lanes but the construction of the substation will require hundreds of lorry movements a day. This scheme would fail under normal planning criteria but may be fast-tracked as a nationally significant infrastructure project.

    For ScottishPower Renewables, the Friston site is convenient because Sizewell A and B are five miles away. Why not aggregate? Critics answer that the cumulative effect of industrialisation will destroy something precious, uniquely English and irreplaceable. A similar monstrosity is being attempted in north Norfolk. There’s an alternative. Lay a single Offshore Ring Main cable to which all the wind turbines can connect and run it to the Thames Estuary, where a substation could be absorbed into the scenery of container ports and industry. I’ve not been tempted to join the eco-protesters in London but I’d man the barricades for Suffolk…
    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/wind-farm-industry-is-about-to-score-a-damaging-own-goal-0dh9wxklb

    25 March: EastAnglianDailyTimes: ‘Tsunami’ of energy projects could blight life in east Suffolk – warning
    by Richard Cornwell
    Campaigners fighting plans for a huge wind farm substation say they fear a “tsunami of major energy projects” over the next decade which will wreck life for people living in coastal Suffolk.
    As well as proposals for the 30-acre site at Grove Wood, Friston, and a seven-mile cable trench across countryside, plans are afoot for a twin reactor nuclear power plant at Sizewell, plus two major industrial-scale National Grid projects called Nautilus and Eurolink to share power with Belgium and Holland, and a number of other projects.

    Campaign group Substation Action / Save East Suffolk (SASES) say the substation will have a “massive impact” on the area and are deeply worried about the cumulative impact of all the projects being planned as part of the east coast being marketed as an “energy hub”.
    A spokesman for the group said: “We still need answers as to why East Suffolk is facing a tsunami of seven major energy projects over the next 10-plus years.
    “ScottishPower are calling this their ‘final’ consultation, but it seems like nothing has changed, it’s getting worse.

    “ScottishPower’s paperstorm of over 16,000 pages, is a case of quantity over quality. The Planning Inspectorate, which is meant to be the guardian of the planning process, is failing to hold ScottishPower or National Grid to account.
    “Energy companies need to show they can respect the unique landscape of East Suffolk, the Suffolk coast and the communities that choose to live and work here.”

    SASES claims the energy sector has “no long-term strategic plan for the transmission of electricity whether generated by wind, nuclear or other sources” and this will blight east Suffolk unless tackled urgently…
    Suffolk Coastal deputy leader Geoff Holdcroft said the Friston site would have “significant adverse impacts on the landscape, heritage assets and the local community”, while Suffolk County Council said it was “gravely concerned”.
    https://www.eadt.co.uk/business/scottishpower-wind-farm-consultation-sases-worries-1-5955116

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  • #
    Ruairi

    The U.N. paints a picture of gloom,
    That one million species face doom,
    So it’s time to embark,
    On a new Noah’s Ark,
    Bringing two of each kind, if there’s room.

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    • #
      Bill in Oz

      Yes ruairi !

      set up a Go fund me site !

      Ruairi’s Ark

      For 1,000,0000 species

      All officially approved

      By the (dis) United Nations !

      Sarc/ off

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  • #
    TdeF

    Amazingly even Tim Flannery would agree that the sudden wiping out of the ancient megafauna and the halving of Australia’s rainfall occurred 50,000 years ago and coincided with the arrival of the *boriginal people. They brought two gifts, fire and dogs and remained top predator for the 50,000 years. They were the original invaders and wiped out millions of years of independent species development of both fauna and flora.

    However we are told that only the development of fossil fuels is the problem. Only CO2 is the problem. Only conservatives are the problem. Real progressives care and vote Green because only the Greens have all the answers, as in Venezuela. And all the guns. As in Lenin’s day.

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    • #
      Sceptical Sam

      See 13.3 above.

      Wroe, Field, Fullagar and Jermiin disagree with Flannery and his Blitzkrieg hypothesis.

      TheAborigines didn’t have the technology and probably arrived after the Megafauna had gone extinct. The Australia Dingo didn’t arrive until 6,000 BP apparently.

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      • #
        Kinky Keith

        Yes, and if I remember correctly the present “first people” arrived here about 25,000 years ago and this had an impact on the existing inhabitants.
        Continuity of occupation is thought not to be the 40 or 50 thousand years claimed, but still, 20,000 years is a long time.
        It would be a fitting exercise to have a serious attempt to discover more about ancient cultures here while sea levels are at their lowest point for the last 7,000 years.
        Inland lake areas, now exposed, and shoreline habitats are a ripe field for exploration.

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  • #
    gene

    Please!
    There are not likely to be a million species on earth at present. But, then, crazy ideas do get published, and sworn to by the crazies of the world. As Shakespeare’s Puck said, “What fools these mortals be”.

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