Big Gov Octopus squeezes Russia into sending very mixed messages

Putin doesn’t think humans control the climate, and has said so openly. Now, he’s finally agreed to ratify the Paris agreement, though with very low targets. He even did it by a government order (which means he has bypassed the house — the State Duma) — presumably to avoid the people who would voice “the same kinds of arguments against the need for collective action that he himself has frequently expounded.”.

The Cold Calculus Behind Putin’s Lukewarm Embrace of Paris Pact

By Natasha Doff, Ilya Arkhipov, and Yuliya Fedorinova, Bloomberg

Putin, who presides over the world’s fourth-largest emitter, is trying to position himself as a leader of the same transnational regulatory movement that his first economic adviser compared to fascism. After three and half years of foot-dragging, Putin has finally decided to ratify the 2015 Paris Agreement — and the reasons have less to do with the fate of the planet than with geopolitics and gross domestic product.

Mark it in your diary. Straight answer coming:

In fact, when asked if embracing the Paris pact means Putin now agrees with the scientific consensus on the primary cause of planetary heating, his spokesman […]

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The unseen danger of declaring fake “climate emergencies”

A declaration of a fake emergency is just like yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre

Photo by Takver.

A couple of days after skeptics were banned by The Conversation, came an article advising how people who do illegal, potentially dangerous things can use the “climate emergency” as a legal defense. Skeptics and scientists might rub their hands with glee, waiting for the climate emergency to be vaporised by any half decent prosecuting lawyer. But that won’t happen — the alleged law breakers don’t have to prove there is a climate emergency, they just have to prove that a reasonable person would think there is. So when East Widgiemooltha declares a “mergency”, that is enough.

So when a local council succumbs to fashion whims or gets heckled into declaring an emergency it’s effectively encouraging vandals, tyrants, and paranoid eco-terrorists.

Activists are using the climate emergency as a new legal defence to justify law-breaking

Nicole Rogers, Senior lecturer, School of Law and Justice, Southern Cross University

The defence permits law-breaking in circumstances of “sudden or extraordinary emergency” if:

an ordinary person possessing ordinary power of self-control could not reasonably be […]

Eco-worriers new strategy: use Greta as a human shield against debate

The only reason Climate Scare Machine played the Child card was because they’ve given up the adult contest of persuasion.

As a marketing tactic it has a lot going for it. Playing the “girl under seige” card brings out protectors. Holding the “girlie hype” card whips the gullible and emotional into a frenzy. The people who don’t do numbers but rather assess the world via indignation-hope-and-fear can be galvanized into action. They may not be able to add up the megawatts to keep the lights on, but they can leverage emotional barbs to control whole dinner parties. In a gregarious species, that matters.

Strategically, best of all, the kiddie card means most adults will pull their punches, and anyone who tries to reply can be framed as an instant bully. As Laurie Atlas (on 4RO radio) said today, “she’s like a human shield” — the UN put her up there to stop people firing shots back. Just like terrorists hide behind civilians, Eco-terrorists hide behind children.

The UN can fire shots from behind her, and then hold up the Greta-shield to deflect returning missives. “How dare you!”

So the girl too-young-to-own-her-own-home can tell whole nations how to run their economies. […]

Bubble pops: Australian renewables investment down 80% as RET subsidy ends

After billions of dollars of “gifts” to the renewables industry, and a doubling of the wholesale electricity price, wind and solar power are still so inefficient and uneconomic that investors can’t make a profit without getting more free money. After the wild bonanza of the last two years the RET scheme has completed the large scale targets that were set so long ago, and that’s it, ppft.

What was 4,300 MW of new projects per quarter is now just 800MW: 83% less

From the Clean Energy Council

After a record breaking two years of investment in large-scale wind and solar projects, the pace of projects reaching financial close has slowed dramatically over the past two quarters. The Clean Energy Regulator announced this month that the large-scale 2020 Renewable Energy Target (RET) has now been met. What happens next is unclear.

Quarterly investment commitments in new renewable energy projects reached a high of over 4500 MW in late 2018, but has since collapsed to less than 800MW in each of the first two quarters of 2019.

All bad things are associated with Tony Abbott

This was the first line in the Clean Energy Council announcement:

[…]

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UN climate summit flops despite the childrens rent-a-crowd crusade

The Childrens Rent-a-crowd Crusade didn’t bring in the money

We all know why the climate picnic last Friday was not held on the weekend — hardly anyone would have come. When adults are too bored to go out and save the world, the only option is children. Butter them up, tell them they are heroes and rebels if they do what they want to do anyway and take the day off school. Climate protests have been shrinking for years, so the adults in charge needed to change strategies, and with a compliant media, it worked — it was a grand theatre.

Great PR. But it came to nothing today anyhow The UN asked for climate plans. Major economies failed to answer

Chloé Farand, Climate Home News

World leaders were asked to come to the UN with concrete plans to cut emissions to net zero.

But on Monday, the presidents and prime ministers of the world’s largest emitting economies stumbled. Signalling just how difficult the work of removing CO2 will be compared to setting targets.

The tougher 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement, backed by UN chief António Guterres and the majority of the world’s nations, requires achieving net […]

How to create panic by cherry picking the start date. Lessons from NOAA and NASA

Tony Heller does a fantastic video of the cherry picking done by US propaganda agencies formerly known as “scientific”. It’s an excellent collection of graphs, mostly US based ones, all showing rising trends but all starting in different years. Somehow the warming effect of CO2 starts at different times in different datasets.

Unskeptical Scientists have an excuse for starting every dataset when they do, but there is no excuse for the pattern of continually picking the low point and hiding the hotter-drier past. Heller is calmly scathing about Arctic Sea Ice data. How many people know the early satellite data shows lower Arctic Sea ice in the 1970s?

It’s the pattern that matters. The US is only a small part of the surface of Earth, but it’s a large part of the propaganda. Formerly great institutions are deceiving the people who pay their salaries. A lie by omission is still a lie…

Before anyone asks: the graphs for Australia don’t necessarily look the same or start at the same date. Though the pattern of behaviour of our “scientists” is — and scary graphs usually start either in 1910 or “the 70s”. The wild heat of the 1890’s and the […]

JCU appeals Ridd decision: James Cook Uni vows to waste more funds in quest to stamp out opinions

JCU protects reputations not the reef

….

Despite losing on all 17 points in a case that should never have gone to trial —

Sarah Elks, The Australian:

James Cook University is appealing a decision … Federal Court documents reveal JCU has briefed one of Australia’s top barristers, Bret Walker SC, to argue it was legal for the north Queensland university to sack Dr Ridd last year after he publicly criticised its climate change science.

Physics professor Dr Ridd will on Monday launch an online bid for crowd-funding to help pay his legal costs, asking for an extra $1.5m, after supporters already tipped in $260,000 to help fund his unfair dismissal claim. Dr Ridd has spent $200,000 of his own money.

“It’s diabolically expensive because we expect it to go all the way to the High Court,” he said. “In the end, this is a battle for academic freedom. It’s about not allowing universities to stifle free speech.

James Cook Uni will dig deeper into taxpayer funds instead of doing research, in order to protect the reputation of overpaid bureaucrats:

Liberal senator James Paterson tells Alan Jones: “It looks like, so […]

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It was a Global Climate Picnic Day: Go on — Show us you mean it guys — cut the cord to the coal fired grid

Anyone can say fossil fuels are evil. But let’s count the protestors living without them?

Every kind of motherhood spirit and mass delusion was at the Global Climate Picnic today. It was all things to all people, a day to absolve guilt about living rich, while simultaneously earning social status miles in the Flying Socialite Program. (Or perhaps that’s the Flying Socialist Program). The Climate Picnic was green and fluffy, nice and sunny, and a walk in the park with the distant promise of free perpetual motion machines. What’s not to like about a day off school feeling like a rebel for conforming with the throng?

It was a chance to complain about corporate greed, and do a cathartic exorcism of smoke and black stuff, which everyone knows must be bad. It was a spiritual event, a social event, and faked up as a science event too. The dumb could feel smart, the rich could feel pious, and everyone could feel so important. They were of course superheroes saving the whole goddam planet.

Fighting Climate Change is morally right, just like the battle against slavery — says someone in The Guardian, as if setting people free is like liberating electrons. […]

Under seige: The Conversation pulls the weak “trust your doctor or Climate God” excuse

Today, for your amusement, Misha Ketchell, ex-ABC journalist, editor and ED of The Conversation scrambles to justify why banning half the population from speaking is not censorship. It’s almost a form of satire, but it’s not that clever.

He pulls out the old Argument from Authority and Ad Hom fallacies, known since Aristotle. He’s only 2,300 years behind the leading edge of rhetoric. Worse, the journalist doesn’t even understand the basics of journalism — as in, to research, present the best of both sides, and let the readers decide. Instead Ketchell, whose top scientific qualification is watching the ABC for twenty years, has decided that climate sensitivity of CO2 on planet Earth is 3.3C give or take nothing.

The biggest scandal of university research and science is there waiting to be told, but Ketchell-the-journo is 100% obedient to a collection of unaccountable foreign committee members who do unaudited work with unvalidated models.

Here come the excuses:

There’s a good reason we’re moderating climate change deniers: uninformed comments undermine expertise’

Real experts just answer the questions, they aren’t scared of the uninformed. Why is it only climate science where we need to protect the public from know-nothing comments? Either the […]

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“The Conversation” gives up conversing, admits defeat on climate, bans all skeptical scientists from commenting!

What kind of conversation only has one side? Paid propaganda.

The Conversation is a site established** by your taxpayer dollars, in countries where 50 – 60% of the entire population don’t agree with the IPCC’s dominant mantra. Yet no matter how qualified you are, no matter how good your argument, your evidence and your data, you, we, half the population, is now banned. The editor Misha Ketchell has officially blocked unbelievers, and thus effectively admitted that they can’t reply to skeptics, and that skeptics are posing too many questions they can’t answer. They’ve been deleting skeptical comments for years, so it’s good that they finally have the honesty to admit it.

The irony of a site called “The Conversation” which won’t allow a conversation is perfect Owellian Newspeak. Let’s just call it The Conversion from now on (thanks Travis) — the mission is to help converts keep the faith. Yesterday they published hatemail from Tim Flannery calling scientists who disagreed, deniers who are “predatory threats” to his own children. Today they’re banning half the population.

If only they had evidence they wouldn’t need to ban people:

….

The poor snowflake believers of the Windmills-change-the-weather religion can’t cope with hearing […]

“Climate deniers are immediate threat to our children” — Ranting, Tim Flannery admits his “colossal failure”

Like the death throes of a religion…

I’d like to see the errors bars on that says Jo

Tim Flannery unhinged. What a rant. Apparently people who deny that Earth has a climate are coming to eat his children or something. It must be awful inside his head:

…the climate crisis has now grown so severe that the actions of the denialists have turned predatory: they are now an immediate threat to our children.

After all his predictions went wrong years ago, now he feels like a failure?

No climate report or warning, no political agreement nor technological innovation has altered the ever-upward trajectory of the pollution. This simple fact forces me to look back on my 20 years of climate activism as a colossal failure.

I say, not at all Tim. You were paid to sell carbon credits and industrial renewables and I’m sure Panasonic are very happy.

Flannery and his institutions may never have been funded by Vestas, GE, HSBC, Deutche Bank, Goldman Sachs, BBVA and Citigroup or Communist China but they’re happy too. I mean they’d like to be happier still, but Flannery did his best. And a lot of feudal bureaucrats […]

Most people in the West are still skeptics of climate change and the IPCC position

A large Yougov Climate Change survey has questioned about 1,000 people in 30 different countries. Despite being loaded and biased towards the IPCC religious position, and despite 30 years of non-stop propaganda, most of the population in major western countries are not obedient believers in the IPCC message.

h/t GWPF

Who do this half of the population vote for? Which mainstream major party even says humans are only partly responsible?

If political parties represented the voters, one of the two major parties in every country would be willing to say “the IPCC exaggerates the problem”. Only the USA (at the moment) has a leader that doesn’t repeat the IPCC line, even though many Republicans still do. In most western nations both sides of politics are competing for the 40 – 50% of the population that thinks humans are mainly responsible. As Donald Trump, Tony Abbott, Doug Ford and Jason Kenny show, most voters are easily inspired to vote against the climate dogma.

These numbers are typical of bigger and better studies over the years. Though the UK figure shows more believers than an ITV Newrs poll in 2014 showed. (Fully 62% of the UK were skeptical then and may […]

Greens “science” means calling you names and telling you to shut up

The Greens religious beliefs are so fragile that they have to defend their science by stamping out any discussion at all. You either believe in their God or you are a despicable child killer denying that the Earth is round. How many senators will fall for this naked bullying? The Greens realize that their fantasy belief that windmills and solar panels control storms and hold back the tide, will fall apart under the most gentle of questioning. So they have to stop every question.

Reverend Adam Bandt thinks climate sensitivity is a yes no question, and that if man landed on the moon therefore upper tropospheric water-vapor feedbacks are positive and dangerous even though 28 million radiosondes say otherwise.

This is a dummy-spit of kindergarden proportions. Which of our elected leaders will call them out, or are they all so underconfident in their scientific knowledge that they are too afraid to admit moon landings and cloud microphysics are actually different topics, and that “yes” and “no” are not numbers?

Greens equate climate denial to conspiracy

Matt Couglan and Rebecca Gredley, AAP

The Australian Greens will urge the Senate to put the denial that burning […]

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Fires in August in 1951 in Queensland were described as “catastrophic” when CO2 was 311ppm

The Bushfire season started in August in 1951 in Queensland

In 1946 in August “Mt Archer, in the Kilcoy district, was a 1500 ft torch tonight”. The 1951 fires did £2m of damage, and within three years the people of Queensland responded by creating six times as many fire teams and more firebreaks. One farmer put in 500 miles of firebreaks on his own property.

Since then humans have put out 85% of all the CO2 emissions we have ever put out, showing that cutting our emissions by 85% (in reality, even going wildly negative to get back to 311ppm) won’t stop fires in August in Queensland.

We don’t have a climate emergency, we have a history emergency. It’s like hundreds of years and the effort of thousands of people just doesn’t exist.

16 Aug 1951: Adelaide Advertiser: Bushfire out of control in Queensland.

11 Aug 1951: Townsville Daily Bulletin: Bush Fires Rage Over Wide Areas

 

The outbreaks hare been the worst for years. The fire risk is being maintained by westerly winds and the tinder-dry nature of the land.

Flames are laping 60 ft high and whirlwinds carrying blazing foliage […]

Ecological Grief – when scientists think they need therapy, but what they really need is debate

Once upon a time, scientists had colleagues that brought them back to earth. Then sensible scientists were sacked and the only people left in the department were the hyperbolic dramatists. Is it any wonder that what’s left of university departments thinks they need therapy? Every time one of them hits the panic button they all panic together.

‘Ecological grief’ grips scientists witnessing Great Barrier Reef’s decline

Barnes, who is still analysing her results, was surprised that many of the scientists whom she interviewed felt intense grief and sadness about the reef’s deterioration. Nature has also spoken to several coral-reef scientists not involved in Barnes’s study who echo those sentiments.

“I now feel much more hopeless, and there’s a deeper anxiety breaking through,” says John Pandolfi, a marine ecologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

David Suggett, a coral physiologist at the University of Technology Sydney. “Nothing can prepare you for seeing it play out in real time,” he says.

Nothing can prepare you — unless of course a wiser older colleague reminds you when it all happened before. “No biggie.”

Suggett says that he finds it difficult to set his emotions […]