Midweek Unthreaded

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Could dimming the sun with stratospheric “sky clouds” save Earth (or starve people)

An idea so dumb big government just might do it.

Bill Gates has a plan to cool the Earth with chalk dust

John Naish, Daily Mail

This initial $3 million test, known as Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) would use a high-altitude scientific balloon (pictured) to raise around 2kg of calcium carbonate dust — the size of a bag of flour — into the atmosphere 12 miles above the desert of New Mexico

Spraying 2 kilo of dust costs how much?

This initial $3 million test, known as Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) would use a high-altitude scientific balloon (pictured) to raise around 2kg of calcium carbonate dust — the size of a bag of flour — into the atmosphere 12 miles above the desert of New Mexico

Indeed, the plans are so well advanced that the initial ‘sky-clouding’ experiments were meant to have begun months ago. … (to) seed a tube-shaped area of sky half a mile long and 100 yards in diameter.

Here comes the precautionary principle on steriods:

SCoPEx is, however, on hold, amid fears that it could trigger a disastrous series of chain reactions, creating climate havoc in the […]

Bonanza, not: With govt manipulation carbon credits rise back to 2008 levels

It’s being hailed as a “soaring investment” but it’s just the fake fiat carbon scheme that has been fiddled back to life. The EU ETS market had too many credits and crashed down to 5 Euro or less by 2013. On deaths door, the EU decided to cull a quarter of the credits for the EU ETS every year starting in 2019 and the price predictably went back up. The big success of this unnecessary unfree market is that it has added a tariff to cheap coal to make it just as expensive as gas, and pushed up electricity prices in the EU.

Any illusion of generating economic wealth, or energy efficiency is purely coincidental. There’s no supply and no demand, no extra products or productivity — and without government force, no market at all for imaginary carbon penances. It draws money from every consumer and hands it to gas, and renewables giants, as well as bankers, crooks and VAT Tax cheats. And if this market goes global it’s potentially a $7 Trillion dollar money-making racket for bankers. No wonder HSBC, Deutche Bank, Goldman Sachs, BBVA and Citigroup want to “save the world”.

Back to 2008:

Government decisions largely […]

Prof Andy Pitman admits droughts are not worse and not linked to climate change

Drought Panic Over

h/t to Jim Sternhill, Frank Brus, via Jim Simpson.

Professor Andy Pitman, UNSW

In June Professor Andy Pitman quietly dropped a bomb:

“…as far as the climate scientists know there is no link between climate change and drought.”

“…there is no reason a priori why climate change should made the landscape more arid.“

He’s admitting there’s never been a scientific basis for the endless climate drought scares? He went on to say that in Australia, droughts are not increasing, and there’s no drying trend in one hundred years of data. He’s also admitting the models can’t predict extremes in rain either. Where are the press releases?

It’s great to hear him speaking like a skeptical scientist, with candor and care, but 52% of Australians (including many of our politicians) think “climate change” is already causing more frequent droughts. So half the country is not only convinced droughts are increasing, but they think climate change is causing an effect that isn’t happening. And the world is spending $330b a year on windmills and solar panels […]

Weekend Unthreaded

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Widespread snow all over the East Coast of Australia – first time in decades

Not what the climate models predicted

This weekend it’s snowing within 90 minutes of Melbourne and Sydney. It’s snowing in far south Queensland. In the Alps Thredbo recorded an amazing 117cm of fresh snow in two days, while snow fell in towns that rarely get snow like Gordon near Ballarat, Tumut, Crookwell. The highway through the Blue Mountains was blocked. The airport was closed in Orange.

TA polar blast has whipped across New South Wales, dumping unprecedented levels of snow on parts of the state. From the rugged terrain of the Blue Mountains to streets in Bathurst, whole towns were completed whited out as the freezing weather took hold. @lizzybryan1 #9News pic.twitter.com/elgLlbQiD0

— Nine News Sydney (@9NewsSyd) August 10, 2019

The ABC makes sure to embed their best excuses for the Global Warming.

Repeat after me: The Science is Complex. Two “leading” researchers say blah, blah, attribution, models. They argue that unverified, unvalidated models that ignore the solar wind, solar spectral changes, and solar magnetic changes can tell us how much effect CO2 has because there’s a mysterious gap between what their models predict the natural climate would do and what really happened — especially according to […]

Unexpected UK EarthHour at peak time Friday — just after Wind Power hits new high?

Fragile grids

Over a million people customers lost power in the UK yesterday thanks to the sudden outage of a gas and a wind plant. Some of the country’s biggest railway stations were inoperable. Passengers were stuck on trains for up to seven hours. Others stayed in hotels, walked miles or paid “hundreds” for taxis. The outpatient sections of Ipswich Hospital were blacked out for 15 minutes when backup generators failed. “At the height of the Friday rush hour, all trains out of King’s Cross were suspended and remained so for most of the evening.” — BBC. Commuters resorted to using their phones as torches to get out of tunnels in the dark.

Urgent Investigation called for into “fiasco”

According to headlines, at this early stage before the investigation all we know for sure is that wind power is definitely not to blame, but Boris might be. (Seriously, it’s the no-deal Brexit that hasn’t happened).

Officially, people are saying in solemn knowing tones that it is “extremely rare” for two generators to go out at once. But the odd thing about this is how small the loss was. Barfield Gas power is only a 730 MW generator, and Hornsea Wind […]

Feast your eyes on Streaky Bay’s thermometer — over bitumen for 31 long hot years

Ken Stewart rates the Streaky Bay site as one of the worst he has seen This is an influential site because it’s in a remote area, is used to “correct” official ACORN sites, and has been running for a long time. Last October the BOM finally moved it to a completely new (and much better site) — only three decades too late. Strangely, they didn’t give the new site a new station number? Normally the old and new sites would be run concurrently with two different numbers so the data from both could be compared and the differences in temperature between them could be worked out. Is that an accident? Does it hide the terrible quality of the previous site?

The Streaky Bay information (site 018079) tells us it opened in 1865 but the site only has monthly data from 1926 and daily data from an even shorter period. The rest presumably hasn’t been digitized yet. As best as I can tell, the station metadata appear to mark this site as being at the post office from 1865 to 2018, and record the ground cover as becoming asphalt in July 1987. That means for 31 years the Australian Bureau of […]

IPCC announces Fatwa on meat eating

The Steak is coming to get you.

Good news, the Intergovernmental Holy Panel has finally released the new World-Saving IPCC Diet (WSID) which will stop storms, volcanoes and the spread of jellyfish. It also solves all those difficult dietary questions — instead of worrying about your weight, your blood pressure, or your brain, you can sip on a soy latte and know that even if you get dementia from the B12 deficiency or the tofu, you are A Virtuous Signaller. Lucky you.

And even though an atmospheric physicist supposedly can’t advise us on the climate, it’s fine for a climate scientist to tell us what to eat. They already tell us what car to drive and how many kids we should have. Why not?

Vegetarian diets and a “sin” tax on unsustainable meat could help to limit climate change, a major new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says.

–The Australian

Sinning with meat for 2 million years?

Humans have been eating meat for 2.6 million years at least, or about 100,000 generations, but it’s time to take the precautionary principle and toss that genetic heritage to the wind.

Meat is a good […]

So hot that we can see those Urban Heat Islands from space

During the June heatwaves in Europe NASA was studying the “Ecostress” of various cities.

The heat coming off Charles DeGualle’s Orly Airport’s runways is easily visible from space. (As are all the other ideal locations for putting climate change thermometers.) CORRECTED Charles de Gaulle airport runways are (I think) beyond the top right of the heat map.

h/t To AndyG

The NASA Ecostress map for Paris | Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

Hands up who thinks thermometers in 1880 were reading too warm? Anyone…

The shots were taken in the early morning:

They show how the central core of each city is much hotter than the surrounding natural landscape due to the urban heat island effect – a result of urban surfaces storing and re-radiating heat throughout the day.

he fact that surface temperatures were as high as 77-86 degrees Fahrenheit (25-30 degrees Celsius) in the early morning indicates that much of the heat from previous days was stored by surfaces with high heat capacity (such as asphalt, concrete and water bodies) and unable to dissipate before the next day. The trapped heat resulted in even higher midday temperatures, in the high 40s (Celsius) in some places, […]

The diesel generator behind the electric car charging point

It’s a diesel powered electric car point:

The fossil fueled electric car…

It’s becoming a joke all around the world — the EVs in Australia powered by dirty diesel. But what’s the difference? Most EV’s in Australia are running on fossil fuel — the generators are just hidden behind longer extension cords. (Ones that carry 240,000V). EV’s on our grid are running on 80% fossil fuels every day.

The sign on the charger above says “Nullarbor” — the vast treeless and grid-free centre of Australia — but this is actually a test site in Perth (the trees were the giveaway).

The 3,000 kilometer trip across the Nullarbor from Perth to Adelaide is such an achievement for an EV that it’s practically a news story each time one makes it. Electric Car owners carry a chip about not being able to drive across the country like any real car owner could. So Jon Edwards, a retired engineer from Perth, set up this test site in his backyard. He wanted to know if it could be a realistic stop-gap for our far remote roads.

To me, this looks like a chain of efficiency losses going from diesel to mechanical to electrical […]

How to destroy the solar industry — lesson from the Socialist republic of Victoria

Showing their mastery of business, the Victorian Government is helping the local Solar industry to death. To prop up the failing, uneconomic but “fashionable” industry the Andrews government decreed that they will throw an extra $2,225 at homes earning less than $180,000 that want to install solar. (This is on top of the Federal subsidies). Because free money is always popular, they decided to limit this to 3,333 rebates per month but now it’s a stop-start monthly bloodbath out there.

The applications for this months allocation went online on the first of August and were all gone in 106 minutes. Some people had waited all month but their internet connections were too slow, and according to them “the orange wheel of death” kept spinning, but no magic money appeared. Now they have to wait another month. Who’s going to install solar now, if you might get two thousand dollars off it by waiting a few weeks?

It’s all utterly predictable, but killing small solar installers. For some, not one of their customers scored a rebate. So they’re saying they have no work for the next month now, no more will come in, and no way to pay their staff.

Climate Expert or UN certified Seer? Joelle Gergis does “gut-wrenching” grieving horror, volcanic rage

Remember when scientists were dispassionate, cautious people? Well, forget that.

h/t ClimateDepot, Travis T, Jones

@joellegergis

Joelle Gergis unleashes a message of full gut-wrenching, stomach sinking, terrible truth and brutality. Lordy, 50 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef is dead. Sometimes she cries after her talks. She has a vision, a precognition of awful events, but only she and a few other UN certified seers can see. Climate change is the terrifying eco-disaster that sounds more and more like a Stephen King novel. How does a scientist sell climate change? — with pools of blood. It’s like a brain haemorrhage. Seriously.

Her grief is rapidly being superseded by rage. “Volcanically explosive rage”.

What are the odds that a scientist like this would consider her results impartially — would be willing to toss out her pet ideas if 28 million radiosondes, 3,000 ocean buoys, 120 proxies, 1,000 tide gauges and 40 years of satellite data were all wrong, and all wrong in the same direction? This is the same woman who whipped up a storm of headlines about how Australia was warmer now than 800 […]

Weekend Unthreaded

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Maitland SA: Another expert thermometer site — and with incinerator “forcing”

Some days in Maitland are hotter than others.

The very non-compliant Maitland, SA, thermometer site #022008 | Imagery ©2019 Google, Oct 2014.

Thanks to Ken Stewart, the tour through the Great sites of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology continues.

Once again, the experts have carefully graphed, diagrammed, checked and ignored all the things that shouldn’t be within 30 meters of a thermometer. See Maitland Site Info. That fence is described as “Galvanised iron”. The ground is bitumen. The incinerator is labeled “incinerator”. And there are two tanks just out of view to the right, not to mention the tin sheds, trees, buildings and wind breaks.

In 1967 the site only had two tin sheds within a 30 meter radius, which was still not compliant, but vastly cooler than present. The incinerator is about 6 or 7 meters from the Stevenson Screen, and only appears on the maps in 2014.

As Ken says “the site is a heat sink”. It’s not an official “ACORN” star site, but records here get mentions in the media. Worse, Maitland is one of the sites used to adjust official ACORN data in Adelaide, Cape Borda, Ceduna, Kyancutta, Port Lincoln, and Snowtown.

Ken has also […]

Animals’ body sizes shrinking from climate change, study finds, based on a group of wagtails?

Another climate classic today: Animals’ body sizes shrinking from climate change, study finds by University of Cape Town

Nice theory if you can get funding for it:

“All else being equal, larger animals can tolerate cold conditions better than smaller animals, so one could expect that a warming climate is relatively more advantageous for smaller animals,” said Professor Altwegg.

There are 8.7 million species on Earth and this is based on “one” of them:

To investigate this idea and whether it could be true, the research team looked at a group of wagtails living along the Palmiet River.

It’s “a” group — just the one — and a temperature change of less than one fifth of a degree over 23 years:

Based on data from a local weather station near the Palmiet River, the researchers knew that temperatures in the area had increased by 0.18 °C. But they didn’t know how this had affected the birds’ size.

What they found supports the idea that climate change can shrink Earth’s animals.

“Supports” the idea? The study’s big achievement was only that it didn’t extinguish the idea at the “back of envelope” stage…

How many silent skeptics are there at NOAA? Dr. Rex Fleming speaks out after years of working there

Dr Rex Fleming has a PhD in Meteorology and spent years at NOAA, as he said involved with climate research from the beginning, and responsible for funding scientists who “pushed” the theory of man-made global warming. He’s written a book called The Rise and Fall of the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change (2019) and has just done a podcast with James Delingpole.

When David Evans first spoke out as a skeptic we were contacted by someone inside NOAA who said there were many skeptics there, but none of them could speak. We know there are others out there, still silent.

h.t Climate Depot

NOAA Atmospheric scientist Dr. Rex Fleming

My rough notes: Dr Fleming did a PhD in uncertainty in climate and was involved in something called “The weather experiment in 1979.”. He talks about “people who fiddled with the data — ocean data, atmospheric data..”, and about how they “won’t admit they put their temperature sensors too close to cities.”

James Delingpole asks what motivates these researchers and Fleming replies along the lines of soft corruption, how people just want to keep the funds coming in. That people are just not willing to fight it. He repeats […]

114 Private Jets flying into Google Global Summer Camp Party thing

It’s so much fun saving the planet 114 private jets at a time

The glitterati are descending on a ritzy Sicilian seaside resort this weekend to discuss how to save the world. As usual, a bit of wrecking-the-world on the way is fine if it’s “for a good cause” — meaning fame, status, and hot three day summer camps in an Italian resort.

It’s known as Google Camp — the place where famous VIP’s get some training and incentives not to stray off the Google Groupthink-Ranch:

The billionaire creators of Google have invited a who’s who of A-list names— including former President Barack Obama, Prince Harry, Leonardo DiCaprio and Katy Perry — to the Sicilian seaside for a mega-party they’ve dubbed Google Camp.

The three-day event will focus on fighting climate change — though it’s unknown how much time the attendees will spend discussing their own effect on the environment, such as the scores of private jets they arrived in and the mega yachts many have been staying on.

It’s only going to cost Google $20 million or so. It’s a small investment in their pet team of lobbyists for Big Government.

Small governments, after […]