JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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Statistics
We are finally getting some sensible discourse regarding energy.
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Janama,
That would be more heartening if it was happening among the politicians. Unfortunately it is going to have to be a lot of pain felt by a lot of people before there is enough energy in the debate to break the hold that the unelected bureaucrats seem to have built up.
130
With due regard for the anger expressed by the lefties regarding the Australian Government refusing to further fund climate change agenda during the Warsaw conference I argue that our Coalition politicians are displaying energy.
40
Brilliant article.
Someone needs to take it to the ecolunacy meeting in Warsaw and rub the delegates’ noses in it – perhaps, that might make them see some sense.
134
What David Rose does not touch upon is that the Climate Change Act, being merely UK Statute Law, is subordinate to the
“Renewables Obligation” which is a EU directive. This obligation has precipitated the insanity of cutting forests in the USA and burning the wood in South Yorkshire in the middle of a coal field with 300 years of reserves. Under the terms of the RO this is perfectly logical(and even economic!), as is the use of diesel generators as back up to “renewables”. Thus the Renewable obligation actually increases emissions contradicting the CCA, the abolition of which will make no difference!
We urgently need a “winter of discontent” – and one is in the offing.
240
One of the issues brought out by this Spectator article is that British politicians are blaming the rise in energy prices on profiteering by the energy companies. This is lead by Ed Milliband, Labour Party Leader. As Environment Secretary he was responsible for steering through the Climate Change Act 2008, which is responsible for the current situation.
At the Conversation, there is an article “Three visions for reforming the electricity market“. It largely evades the much higher costs of renewables, and the impact of switching to such renewables on the overall price.
This is my reply
181
Jamana
And spelt out in logical arguments with clear, truthful language. When do the greens ever do that?
Cheers,
Speedy
80
Truth is the first things that “liberals” liberate themselves from.
30
At last the walls are tumbling down
WALTER STARCK
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Walter Starck is highly intelligent, highly qualified AND eminently sensible.
Also has the courage to be ethical.
Good for him!
20
Never been into American politics, or given Ronald Reagan a thought but after catching this video from 1964 at Real Science on Thursday, I have a whole new outlook on the man.
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Thanks for that Bob – great speech.
50
“The trouble with our liberal (labor) friends is not that they are ignorant, it is just that – They know so much that isn’t so.”
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Yes Bob, that is a RIPPER of a speech.
Back in 1964 I had other things on my mind than American politics so wasn’t remotely aware of this. But the points and principles so brilliantly enunciated are just as, or even more, germane today, Well, just look how government regulation and fiat power has mushroomed since these times.
Perhaps Abbott should consider some of its observations (standing up to international bullies) in the current drama du jour with Indonesia.
70
In 64 I had just reached my teens, Reagan was a B grader, I must have seen in something but he was just another inconsequential actor. When it came to politics, ideologies were never pushed by our educators and if my parents ever discussed it, I took no interest, other than they eagerly awaited a Labor victory.
Now by the time children reach high school most are well on their way to becoming socialist, all have been made to watch an inconvenient truth, videos of Reagan’s quality would not have been seen by those teaching them, and even the few that may see videos such as these that are not locked on greenies would be banned from showing it in class.
80
So far we only know what the media claims to know, but megaphone diplomacy never works and it is clear that Tony Abbott understands this fact. Therefore we do not know, and should not know, what is being done behind closed doors. After all the alleged phone taps took place in 2009, not on his watch.
20
Here here.Indonesia need us,more than we need them.I would like to see what they would do if we stopped the 650 million a year we donate,or stop the tourism from our country to theirs.I seem to recall after the Bali bombings their economy tanked,not ours.There are plenty of other countries who would welcome our tourism.
00
Excellent speech – thanks for the heads-up Bob.
‘There’s no left or right. Its up or down – freedom or totalitarianism’. RR
40
What a gripping speech! Once I turned it on, I just couldn’t leave it. I’ld like everybody to hear it.
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Exactly the same for me, Rod. When I first started to watch,I intended to give it a couple of minutes, catch the drift, and move on if it didn’t catch my interest. Once I started to watch I was enthralled, It is so relevant to today even a 50 year old warning about schemes such as Obamacare.
It inspired me so much, I actually had been waiting for this unthreaded page since Thursday to post it.
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Were any of us to adopt the methods of public finance in our private affairs we would ignore the total of our income and consider only what we would like to spend. We might decide on a second car, an extension to the home, a motor launch as well as a yacht, a country place in the Cotswolds and a long holiday in Bermuda. All these, we should tell each other, are essential. It would remain only to adjust our income to cover these bare necessities, and if we economize at all, it will be in matters of taxation.
A government … would begin by estimating what its actual income should be. Given so much to spend, how much should be allocated to what? A government which decided on this novel approach …would be responsible for a revolution in public finance.
From C. Northcote Parkinson .. The Law and the Profits published 1960, and ignored by governments everywhere.
10
As we are about to approach summer, I just started to think that I am going to hear
so much about global warming. Particularly on those hot summer days.
It got me thinking about the four seasons and I came up with this idea.
http://youtu.be/HLSYzPDXruA
[This is a 1 min musical video with the seasons Belinda has put together…. Mod]
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I normally don’t watch videos on this blog because of the inane rubbish we get from the trolls.
But this clip is short, sharp, an’ kinda cute – hat-tip to Mod for bringing attention to it.
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Belinda I think it’s great, straight to the point.
You have obvious talent but use it for good and not evil. 🙂
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I wonder how we can get this in a commercial spot on the tele?
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Wow – move over Topher, here comes Typhoon Belinda with a message! Such a powerful use of brevity.
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Well done.
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This subject is not a problem in Australia, but it is set to become a very serious one in Europe, the UK and parts of the USA.
This is the problem of energy balancing in national grids as ‘green’ generating capacity continues to expand.
As we all know, ‘green’ energy is expensive and unreliable and requires substantial subsidies to attract investment.
However, there is a huge hidden problem with ‘green’ energy and the vagaries of the wind and sunshine. It is of little consequence when maybe 1-3% of a nation’s power is ‘green’ energy, but the problem grows steadily worse as the figure approaches a potential (best possible, i.e. the sun is shining and the wind is blowing just right) figure of 20-30%.
This obviously means – as ‘green’ electricity always take priority (and is the most expensive)- you have to switch off the conventional power stations. However, coal, gas and nuclear power stations need to have a steady and sustained output to be profitable and inefficient.
The Germans are slowly waking up up to the disastrous consequences of over-reliance on green energy.
This is all about the balancing of electrical power flowing into a country’s national electricity grid and the profitability of base load suppliers and their willingness to invest in new conventional power generating capacity. As said earlier, renewable, ‘green’, energy is obviously unreliable due to the vagaries of the wind and sun, but conventional gas, coal and nuclear power stations are unable to rapidly reduce, or raise, their output in response to the changing inflows of green energy. The greater the amount of green energy generating facilities that are installed, the worse the problem becomes.
The UK is a classic example: As the sensible, reliable and cheap sources of electricity continue to be phased out there – also, in what world does it make any sense to switch from coal to importing 70,000 tonnes per day of wood chips from the eastern United States to burn in an English power station (Drax)? – the situation is going to become progressively worse. No one is going to make any significant investment in electricity generation, apart from heavily subsidised ‘green’ energy, unless there is both a guaranteed high electricity price and a guaranteed offtake (just like the latest nuclear deal). That means existing suppliers of conventional energy are going to be steadily squeezed out of the market, as they will not be allowed to generate electricity on a steady basis for fear of overloading the National Grid when the wind is blowing.
So over the next 5-7 years, the price of energy in the UK in real terms is going to have to approximately double, if the lights are to stay on. So there goes inward investment, along with an exit of industry overseas to places where more sensible energy policies apply. The current back up plan for the looming black outs in the UK is to have as many as possible of the country’s diesel generators on stand by (at £47,000 per megawatt per year), plus a generating cost 7-10 times that of today’s wholesale prices.
David Cameron was recently reported as saying: “We have got to get rid of this green crap.” For a moment, I thought there was a glimmer of hope for the UK, but apparently Downing Street has denied this statement. In this case, an official denial could well mean it is true.
However, the bottom line is this: growing reliance on ‘green’ energy will cause the cost of all other types of electricity to rise sharply over time.
So, energy poverty and supply unreliability are about the only things you can guarantee from increased supplies of ‘green’ energy. All attempts to solve the non-problem of supposed CAGW, destroy or impoverish your economy. A classic case of The Law of Unintended Consequences.
The article below, from the GWPF, explains this problem better than I have.
http://www.thegwpf.org/unintended-consequences-europes-renewables-push/
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Actually, If the wires from Vic to SA get cut by fire or something, power supply could be a major in Adelaide.
That’s their problem though. I will have zero sympathy if it ever happens.
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Shouldn’t paragraph five read, “However, coal, gas and nuclear power stations need to have a steady and sustained output to be profitable and efficient.”?
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Just testing to see if anyone was being attentive!!!
You get a full point.
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Thank you.
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Peter – You’re just like Obama when he pledged to “increase the inefficiencies in our health care system”!
00
Peter, thank you for your interesting commentary, though I’m considerably less certain about the ‘unintended consequences’ of the ‘The Green Dream’ to which you allude. We have all been witness to discussions on this subject for not an inconsiderable period of time. I don’t know many, at least in this milieu, who are unable or unwilling to read the writing on the wall. I believe that the consequences are entirely intentional. The elite Green theologists that pervade the UN, the European bureaucracies and so many governments absolutely intended that the vital common denominator of all 21st century living, electrical power, became punishingly expensive. This despite the obvious, that cheap and plentiful electrical power is an absolute pre-requisite for flourishing 21st century human society.
At the heart of the Green credo the following is revealed:
And so, when it comes to considering the more recent development of a power straved unterklasse, we once again see the predestination of this outcome, based on the Green primitivising, humanity-crushing polices, to wit:
I don’t doubt that many of the Green followers hardly get beyond phosphate free washing powder, or perhaps locally grown organic vegetables as the panoramic expression of their Green vision. They’re possibly equally vexed and nonplussed by the escalating power prices. Maybe they console themselves with the belief that the rise in the cost of electrical power is the two-fold result of outrageous salaries for the power company CEO’s and the general need to ‘save the planet’. These are the comfortable sheeple with DND stencilled on their foreheads.
For those on the other hand, bearing the brutish choice of food or fuel through a cold northern hemisphere winter, the discussion surrounding the cost of electrical power together with any finer political points becomes irrelevant. The difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ becomes incandescently clear, difficult to avoid and a call to arms.
The punishing, unimaginative and anti-human costs of Green policies needs to be pointed out over and over again – rational change before we’re reduced to a calamitous assertion of survival of the fittest.
And therein lies another challenge, one which I might add, I think that we respond to well here thanks to Jo and all us hangers-on —- the MSM Green gatekeepers.
Quadrant Online (now paywalled)
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2011/1/the-greens-agenda-in-their-own-words
The Greens’ Agenda, in Their Own Words
Kevin Andrews
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Quadrant Online (now paywalled)
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2011/1/the-greens-agenda-in-their-own-words
The Greens’ Agenda, in Their Own Words
Kevin Andrews
Find unpaywalled version here:
http://www.acna.org.au/blog/34-the-greens-agenda-in-their-own-words.html
30
Suggestion to investors; Get your money out of renewables now while and if you still can.
To bring this renewable energy thing right up to date.
The great back lash against the renewable energy scammers and their extraordinary greed, in Germany at least where such a backlash of this dimension was almost impossible to contemplate by the scammers and an action no doubt soon to followed elsewhere, is just getting under way.
And additional to the newest emerging trend of charging solar owners, including householders, for the use of the power grid to make them also carry some of those grid costs. The grid costs are presently borne by those who don’t have or can’t afford solar so they are heavily subsidising solar [ and wind ] owners both through taxes and also by paying for the entire grid through their power charges and costs.
If the Germans implement this as policy below it probably means the end of the whole renewable energy scam in Germany by making renewable energy, despite immense subsidies, very unprofitable as well as stopping dead any further investment in renewable energy.
Investment in renewable energy, both wind and solar were already leaving the premises fast with wind industry factories out of orders and firing workers in Denmark and other major turbine building sectors.
Solar is suffering increasing quality control problems on their panels as the chinese sub-sub contractors for the big solar panel manufacturers find creative and ever cheaper ways of cutting corners and turning out solar panels that will work for a time at least.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of rip off merchants, thieves and con men.
____________________________________
Quoted from this morning’s GWPF site, a taste of what is to come in renewable energy everywhere.__________________________
COALITION AGREEMENT MAY END GERMANY’S GREEN ENERGY SHIFT
Almost unnoticed by the public, Federal Environment Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU) and North Rhine Westphalia’s Prime Minister Hannelore Kraft (SPD) have agreed upon on a passage in the Energy chapter of the draft coalition agreement that could ensure the end of the green energy transition and seal the fate of the renewable energy industry. “This is massive,” is the comment even in government circles. The decisive statement has allegedly been included in the draft contract under pressure from the bosses of RWE and E.on, Peter Terium and John Teyssen.
The renewable energy lobby has not even noticed the attack on its core business. The decisive statement can be found in line 259 of the 11 November draft agreement. It says: “We will examine whether large producers of electricity from renewable sources must guarantee a base load portion of their maximum feed in order to contribute to supply security.”
This refers to the cardinal problem of solar and wind energy, the intermittency of power generation that depends on the weather. The year has 8,760 hours; wind turbines, however, only produce for 1,530 hours at full power, photovoltaic systems even just for 980 hours. To make matters worse, no one knows in advance when green electricity is fed into the grid, and when it’s not available.
The proposal by Altmaier and Kraft boils down to a requirement for operators of wind and solar power to take out a form of insurance. In principle, they must guarantee the supply of the kilowatt hours usually provided by their systems, regardless of whether the wind blows or the sun is shining. However, this is only possible for wind and solar systems by guaranteed power of conventional power plants. This way, coal or gas power plants would be brought back into the business – and the green power producers would have to pay for it. They would be forced to do business with RWE and Co.
The business model of renewable energy operators would be destroyed. This is made clear by a simple calculation: the cost of conventional power plant capacity in Europe is typically estimated at 60 Euros per kilowatt. Since solar energy systems need the back-up only for about 1,000 hours per year, this would result in a kilowatt-hour price of approximately six cents for the insurance. An operator of solar power systems would have to pay this amount for every kilowatt hour generated by himself to the operators of a coal or gas power plant, so that they hold up the necessary safe plant capacity.
Part of the legally guaranteed EEG feed-in tariff, which has the objective to promote green electricity, would end up with the operators of conventional power plants in this way. It is such a big amount that one could no longer make any profit with green electricity. If they had to shoulder the burden, the development of renewable energies would come to an end – and so would the green energy transition.
Operators of onshore wind turbines would be charged for the usual hours at full load with less than four cents per kilowatt hour. The feed-in tariffs for new wind turbines is currently around nine cents. Take away four cents for back-up and the wind operator would be left with five cents per kilowatt hour. For this amount, however, nobody is building a wind turbine. The green energy transition would be killed instantly. Instead, RWE and Co. could breath again. It cannot be ruled out that their current search for a new corporate image would be undermined as a result.
Whether it will actually get that far is uncertain. After all, the formulation in the draft coalition agreement includes three vague concepts. Firstly, the matter should only be “examined”. Secondly, only “large” green power producers should be obliged, if at all. And thirdly, the back-up insurance should be organized only for a proportion of the base load. Disaster is looming but there is still hope.
The mere fact that the coalition partners are flirting with the idea of promoting old energy at the expense of new one is a revelation. It shows how much the CDU and the SPD are now distancing themselves from the green energy transition.
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Ref my above post.
Don’t underestimate the importance of this German development re renewables if it becomes policy within the context of the whole global warming scam.
The only way that the greens, climate alarmists and activists and the far leftist social re-educators and their running dogs, the media, green bureaucracies and renewable energy scammers could implement their agenda’s was through the energy systems of all countries.
By gaining control of and restricting energy by both limiting the amounts available as well forcing huge cost increases for any energy used, the climate activists and greens using global warming / climate change / extreme weather as the excuse for restricting the use of CO2 producing energy sources could demonstrate their power and influence and gain proxy control of entire national economies to their infinite group and personal benefit and force the implementation of their far left ideological beliefs across whole societies.
This was evident even prior to Copenhagen in late 2009 where the green organisations stated quite openly that they intended to have [quote] “a seat at the table” of the world governing body that was going to be in charge of all emissions from the 2009 Copenhagen signatories.
Had those nations signed on at Copenhagen THAT would of course have implied direct control of all those signatory nation’s energy production and the type and form of that energy production. THAT in turn implied control of all of those nation’s economies. And THAT in turn implied overt proxy political control of each of those nations by the UN and all those around that table including Greenpeace, the WWW, Friends of the Earth, you name it so long as it was politically green.
Nothing to do with the environment at any level at all.
That environment thing is merely an old, tired, thin well shredded veil that some are still hoodwinked by to hide the Green’s pathological leftist lust for power, total power if they could get it,
A green agenda that is about as a ruthless a dictatorial leftist power grabbing agenda as anybody has seen in these recent times.
With the closure of the American Carbon trading desks a couple of years ago and the closure of a large percentage of the European carbon trading desks in London, that green agenda of control through energy usage is under severe threat of being still borne.
If Germany goes ahead with it’s increasing tendency as is also the case in other lesser economic entities in Europe, with it’s further attacks and increased imposts on the profitability on the remaining power centre influence supporting the green’s agenda, the renewable energy industry, then the whole of the green’s agenda for political power grabbing becomes still borne.
And much worse than still borne for the world will start to sit back and analysis just what had happened and why and the role of the political green groups and greenpeace in the whole CAGW shambles and what those radical green groups tried to accomplish in a massive global power grab will become a very large negative against those radicalised left wing organisations which will have very serious long term consequences for their continuing existence.
And THAT ultimately spells the end of the great green dream of global domination by the radical far left green groups.
The world owes the releaser of the climate gate e-mails just prior to Copenhagen a truly enormous debt, the true importance of which will only become fully evident as future historians unravel the entire sorry sequence of deliberate lies, deliberate distortion of climate science, obfuscation and the total corruption of both science and the long claimed but never honored ideals of the UN and it’s corrupt power seeking proxies.
Will all this spell the end of the greens and their radical political agenda?.
Perhaps and some are starting to believe this might well be the case.
From WUWT this morning
Is Greenpeace facing its Warsawgrad?
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ROM – as I understand it the power companies here are pushing for a similar system here. The easiest way to look at is to compare it to your phone landline. With your phone you pay a landline fee then an additional fee for the calls you make. Make no calls and you still have to pay the landline fee. The power companies are intending to do the same with a Grid fee with an additional electricity consumption fee on top.
20
Janama
Yes I saw that reported but only about once in the media a couple of months ago. I think it was the Vic government that was suggesting this in particular referring to domestic solar systems.
Which is why I was very interested in the way this whole renewable energy scam is evolving in Europe.
Seems like the scammers are about to go on the ropes with the number of hits they are now taking and no doubt more coming.
I suggested this paying for the grid use might be the next development in renewable energy on the Alternative Energy Scam thread on the Weather Zone forum site shortly before it was closed down by the administrators.
Wasn’t a happy bunch of solar panel owners at my suggestion as some of them seemed to think everybody else should apparently pick up the bill for their use of the grid when it suited them.
Easy come ! Easy go! But as with renewable energy and all those who were going to make an easy killing out of the tax payer/ consumer. It takes half a lifetime to come to the conclusion that a chocolate coating is no guarantee at all of what is likely to be inside.
By then you’ve done your dough.
51
I wrote on this at: http://whynotwind.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/what-conservation-yields/
The data there is a year old, but no matter how much I try to conserve, the electric company just continues to increase the fees on the account. Years ago, we put a separate meter on the garage because it was much, much cheaper than tying into the house meter. Over the years, the electric company raised the fees–not incrementally, but in huge leaps. Now, it costs more for the second meter than the first. I could tie into the house meter, but that would only save me $600 a year and the construction cost of moving the line, not to mention the inconvenience, would be huge. We would have to bury additional lines, replace the meter (current codes are different than when the box went in), pay an licensed electrician to tie everything into the box, etc. For now, we just eat the cost and laugh at the lie that conservation will save you money.
Fees work on phone costs, electricity and anything else a company can get them added to because you cannot conserve or use little enough to lower the costs of the product. It actively discourages people from saving–what’s the use? I guess that would indicate conservation or reduced usage is not a goal in all of this.
10
It’s a collapsing house of cards. In slow motion.
(NB: links are to German articles except as noted. Use web translation as required.)
A few days after yet another offshore wind subsidy harvester (BARD Offshore) announced that it’s shutting down because of lack of subsidies (orders), the mainstream media finally seem to be cottoning on to the lies and deception.
The “Green Press” in the business weekly Wirtschaftwoche has an article identifying one of the problems with wind power; that too high a density of turbines means that they will be even less effective at electricity production due to wind shadows from other turbines; 33% less effective.
Renewables are revealed to be a German eierlegende Wollmilchsau (egg-laying, wooly, milk sow). Wonkypedia has no translation so here’s the gist:
Sounds like “Energiewende” to me.
As are the law enforcers. RTL in Germany reported yesterday that organized crime syndicates (“Mafia”) have been caught laundering money through investments in the German renewable energy sector; encouraged by German companies. Twenty premises throughout Germany, including one bank (HSB Nordbank) and one wind generator manufacturer (Enercon), were raided by investigators under the direction of the State prosecutor in Osnabrück.
Such is hardly surprising; as lawful subsidies run out for an industry that has no market viability, investments will come from those who don’t necessarily expect a Euro in return for every Euro “invested“.
Pierre Gosselin writes on the increasing blasphemy in German media; in this case the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (NoTrickZone article in English).
You know the drill: Follow the links.
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The Adults have stopped playing with the children, so the children have thrown a mega-hissy fit.
http://www.cfact.org/2013/11/23/cop-19-the-enviro-left-walks-out-on-the-climate-talks/
Looks like it’s time for bath and bed without supper.
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Hilariously, the also accused AUS of “putting brackets around everything” which is apparently the practical equivalent of getting an exatonne of TNT and blowing the world up.
Seems we have immense power – 190 countries there, and when we say “put brackets around it” everyone kowtows.
At the same time, they had CHOGM. Apparently held in the land of war criminals, good enough to chair CHOGM for 2 years but not good enough to give 2 boats we were throwing out anyhow.
So much fun watching lefty heads explode.
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Putting brackets round stuff generally makes it informative or explanatory , rather than substance.
Or was it just cocking a snoop at this bunch, why style themselves Earth in Brackets ?
30
I heard that Kevin. Ironically China and India, the world’s biggest producers of that catastrophic CO2 led the walkout and want reparations from us “rich” countries. The sooks took their toys and went home 😉
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They should keep walking until they fall off the edge of the earth, well if the shoe fits…..
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“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” — John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001
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Also from greenie watch:
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts — Bertrand Russell”
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From the UK’s ‘Independent’, Monday 18th November:
‘It was the evidence that climate change sceptics loved to cite. While the scientific community’s warnings about global warming had become ever more convincing, the critics pointed time and again to graphs showing the rise in the world’s average surface temperatures has slowed down since 1998 – a fact extensively interpreted by many vocal opponents as a fundamental failure in the basic science of climate change. Now the scientists appear to have come up with an explanation. That much-vaunted “pause” in global warming can be largely explained by a failure to record an unprecedented rise in Arctic temperatures over the past 15 years, a study has found.
Two independent scientists have found that global temperatures over the past decade have almost certainly risen two-and-half times faster than Met Office scientists had conservatively assumed when they estimated Arctic warming because of a lack of surface temperature records in the remote region. Moreover, when the latest estimates of Arctic temperatures are included in the global temperatures, the so-called “pause” in global warming all but disappears and temperatures over the past 15 or so years continue to increase as they have done since the 1980s, the scientists said.
Surface temperatures are effectively measured over only 84 per cent of the Earth, and a lack of weather stations in the Arctic in particular has long been recognised as a major gap in the Met Office database of global temperatures.
This led to the Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia to assume for the purpose of their calculations that the Arctic was warming as fast as the rest of the world, which they realised was probably an underestimate of the true position. But now scientists have worked out a way of estimating these surface temperatures in the Arctic from satellite readings of atmospheric temperatures. The study confirmed that the Arctic is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth – and its rapidly rising temperatures easily offset the “pause” in global warming when its temperatures are included in calculations of average global temperatures.
The study, by two researchers who are not climate scientists, is seen as one of the most important insights into the apparent flatlining of global average temperatures over the past 15 years, which has allowed climate sceptics to claim that global warming has “stopped” and that climate change will not be as bad as predicted.
Kevin Cowtan of the University of York and Robert Way of the University of Ottawa used a specialised statistical technique known as “kriging” to extrapolate from satellite temperature data to the ground, in order to circumvent the problem of there being too few weather stations distributed around the Arctic.
Their study, to be published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, found that if these Arctic surface temperatures were included in global temperature estimates, then the average global increase went from 0.05C per decade to 0.12C per decade – effectively eliminating the “pause”.
“We have developed a method for using satellite data to fill in the gaps in the Met Office data. Our global record suggests that surface temperatures have been warming two and a half times faster than Met Office estimates over the past 16 years,” Dr Cowtan said.“The temperature change for any individual year is not very large but together they make a significant difference to recent temperature trends,” he said.
Stefan Rahmstorf, a leading climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said that the new study is “excellent” and is a very convincing explanation for something that has puzzled other researchers for many years.
“The problem with the polar areas lacking data coverage has been known for a long time, but I think this study has basically solved it. People will argue about the details, but I think this will hold up to scrutiny,” Dr Rahmstorf said.
Tim Osborn, of the UEA’s Climatic Research Unit, said that it is clear from the rapidly melting ice in the Arctic, as well as the limited temperature readings from northern Canada and Russia, that the Arctic is warming faster than other places in the world.
“This may explain part of the recent slowdown in warming over the Earth’s surface. The real warming may not have slowed as much as out data showed,” Dr Osborn said.
However, he cautioned against stating that this explains everything. “The slowdown in warming over the last decade may still be there, even if not as pronounced as we previously thought,” he added.
Other research has for instance shown that the deeper layers of the ocean are warming far faster than scientists had thought, indicating that huge amounts of heat from the atmosphere are being stored in the deep sea.
Climate scientists also emphasised that the last 16 years is too short a time frame to judge long-term trends and that there have been similar short-term “pauses” in the past which have not lasted.
Gavin Schmidt of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York said that there is unlikely to be a single, simple explanation for the apparent “pause”.’
012
Carbon 500
Sorry, but I missed the bit where they explained how the “missing heat” got to the bottom of the ocean without warming up the top bits of the oceans.
And maybe they also forgot to tell us why the bottom bit of the ocean could warm up without explanding – manifested as sea level rise. (And conspicuously refusing to accelerate as earth comes out of the Little Ice Age.)
Cheers,
Speedy
160
I’d like to hear ManicBeanCounter weigh in on this “kriging” technique. It looks to me like a statistical method to confirm an assumption. In other words if you take garbage data with gaps, kriging will fill the gaps with more garbage.
121
Mark D–If you take garbage data with gaps and fill in the gaps using virtually any method, the gaps get filled with more garbage, right? The question is whether or not cringing will fill in the gaps in legitimate data accurately.
30
I doesn’t matter if I put useful stuff in the spaces in my garage – it still ends up as being part of the overall junk. QED
50
Sheri seems correct based on an old WUWT comment by someone claiming to be an expert in applying the technique to ore body estimation.
Seems there’s nothing wrong with the Kriging technique itself, but the input measurements have to be authentic in both value and position. If temperatures from one place are used as temperatures for a different location it’s the same as moving the location of a data point, which distorts the scalar gradient being estimated by kriging. It’s GIGO, as Mark says.
Kriging is used at a snapshot in time. As more weather stations were added each year the estimated regional and global averages will be more accurate but the kriging won’t introduce bias because each year’s stations are interpolated across the planet independently of other years. The choice of where to put stations and which ones to close down over time will bias the result more than the kriging technique.
If kriging was itself erroneous, the mining industry wouldn’t use it.
However if stations are removed over time then any interpolation technique will smooth temperatures over a wider area, and if the remaining stations suffer any UHI then interpolation pushes some UHI further into the area outside its local source than it could when station coverage was more dense.
See, if just purely hypothetically, a programmer examined GIStemp and found NCDC had decided to remove a few thousand stations from the official temperature record in the late 1990s and most of them were in higher altitude areas…this could lead to warming biases via ridiculous interpolations such as the the temperature of the Bolivian Andes being awarded the average of Peruvian beaches and the Amazon jungle.
Naww, that would never happen.
40
MarkD,
I would first of all defer to Steve McIntyre on this. His comment (with my emphasis) is
However, I would note a couple of cautions.
First is that at the periphery of the data gaps there are relatively few temperature stations. These include Africa, Siberia as well as the poles. The scientific weighting that can be given to the result strongly depends on these few stations and any adjustments made to the data. It also means that audit checks are not too onerous, as they have been for Anthony Watts in the United States.
Second, given the inherent weakness of infilling, it is even more important to get infilled areas corroborated by other sources. The polar regions used satellite data to infil. Why not also check the kriged areas and the boundary areas against the satellites? The could be supplemented by paleoclimate reconstructions. In the next installment of AR5, it is likely the UNIPCC will include the PAGES2K regional reconstructions. Steve McIntyre did a quick review. Of the Arctic reconstruction he comments:-
Given that the Arctic is where Cowtan and Way get their strongest recent warming, it is an anomaly worth exploring.
10
So two yahoos from the SSSf, sceptical science secret forum, suddenly invent a way to create data, which was unnecessary to the team before the pause,from areas without measurement,claiming to have improved the database?
This is Climate Science (TM IPCC) alright.
150
John
You’re not suggesting they were measuring the global temperatures wrongly before this were you?
Say it isn’t so – the science was settled, apparently.
Cheers,
Speedy
80
This article by the UK Independent is a very ‘optimistic’ interpretation of the Cowtan & Way (2013) paper it is referring to. The journalist draws this conclusion:
“Moreover, when the latest estimates of Arctic temperatures are included in the global temperatures, the so-called “pause” in global warming all but disappears and temperatures over the past 15 or so years continue to increase as they have done since the 1980s, the scientists said.”
But according to the CW13 paper, the adjustments they make to the HadCRUT4 data set for the deficiencies they feel exist in the Arctic temperature measurements (something I note they aren’t in a hurry to adjust for in Antarctica), only leads to a very small gross adjustment. Reading the ‘Independent’ article you would imagine they have found some hitherto unknown substantial warming.
In the words of the indomitable statistician Steve McIntyre who is ‘all over this’ at ‘Climate Audit’:
“In the context of IPCC SOD FIgure 1.5 (or similar comparison of models and observations), CW13 is slightly warmer than HadCRUT4 but the difference is small relative to the discrepancy between models and observations; the CW13 variation is also outside the Figure 1.5 envelope.”
In other words, even if you take the Arctic adjusted CW13 figures instead of the Hadcrut4 data set, as the ‘observed’ temperatures, they are still outside the climate models projections.
100
None of it matters anyway. If you plot temps in whole degrees (something we might actually feel) the whole thing is a straight line:
No panic.
171
So we should all be alarmed that the temperature in the arctic where no-one lives might rise from -50 to -49 or massive amounts of heat might raise the temperature of the deep oceans (where nobody lives) by 0.001 degree. One must remember here that heat flows only one way, -49 degrees only in the Arctic can’t manifest as 35 degrees in the tropics. Why is this ignored all the time. If all the warming occurs only where no-one lives (and where there are conveniently no thermometers) then warming is reduced to a mildly interesting physical phenomenon, worthy of passing interest only. An academic inconsequential interest. Game over for CAGW
PS.. I have made this point many times before, the scientist need to not only prove harm, they need to show how when and where warming will occur, and they need to show Net harm to people.
If warming all happens where no-one lives then frankly I don’t give a rat’s about it. There’s much bigger problems to solve.
70
Now we Know how this scam has gotten this far.With fools like Carbon 500 around.
00
Clive: I’m interested in the reason why you consider me to be a fool.
Is it because I posted the article (#8) from the Independent?
Notice I made no comment after the piece. I put the article there simply to see what people thought of it, and to add something to the weekend discussion.
Or do you think I’m a fool because of my comment at #9.1?
00
Carbon500 – most of the warming has been in the Northern Hemisphere.
HERE
Most of that has been in the arctic so a pause means a pause in the Arctic.
So what you are saying is that Arctic represents the globe? Com’on!
70
No worries Janama! I’m not saying that the Arctic represents the globe.
My view is that this article from the ‘Independent’ appears to be yet another piece of data fiddling, typical of ‘climate science’.
We can either measure global temperatures directly or we can’t. I worked in medical laboratory science for many years, and we certainly didn’t estimate patients’ blood chemistry results by statistical methods in the absence of real measurements!
Personally I think that the whole idea of measuring ‘global’ temperatures is nonsense, given regional variability from one year to the next – particularly when so much is made of supposed differences of hundredths of a degree.
120
The Australian BOM insists on using a relatively few surface temperature gauges to estimate Australia’s average temperature and refuses to access the much more ubiquitous and accurate satellite temperature data which of course doesn’t show the ‘hot’ records they want.
Either we have confidence in satellite temperature measurements or we don’t. If we don’t, then why use them at all? If we do, then why use land based temperature gauges at all? The land based gauges must be incredibly influenced by local factors and require maintenance and upkeep yet provide insufficient coverage.
Climate scientists are not being honest with us.
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There is no (or very little) actual temperature data from north of 80 degrees.
Extrapolating data from south of 80 degree over the north pole is guesswork.
It was guesswork before Cowtan and Way, and its still guesswork.
Cowtan and Way just took false data and doubled the amount of statistics being used
on the non-existent data. 1 x zero is zero and 2 x zero is also zero.
By my god it looks good in a computer program.
80
North of 80 degrees North is less than 1 % of the Earth so how can this area affect the global temperature?
60
The warmists say it is the other way around–the climate change warming is affecting the Arctic. Most of the time, they say that anyway. They compare it to a canary in a coal mine–indicative of bad things to come. So they are trying to quantify the “bad” to come. Not saying I believe this, just relating what I am usually told about the reason to be worried about the Arctic and melting ice.
40
I think the warmists have a point. If you take a caged canary to the Artic, and leave it exposed to the atmosphere, it will die. That must tell you something. 🙂
90
Rereke, if you take a canary north of the Mason Dixon line it would not survive if exposed to the atmosphere in November.
20
Pretty much – and no matter how much they tortured it, they only managed to squeeze out an extra bees dick’s difference in the data which does nothing to the credibility of the climate models, the fact that the UN IPCC have been wrong on climate sensitivity to CO2 and the statement that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1998.
70
Heres a model which estimates temps north of the 80th parallel.
Notice all the above average temps are like -15 instead of -25 degrees celcius.
Mmmm – a bees dick – is that an imperial unit of measurement ??
20
Yep, The Danish data has used pretty much the same process, and shows basically no warming for a long time. I fact this year had one of the shortest periods above 0C for quite a long time.
Cowtan (or whoever) wants to “invent” a new way that only adjusts temps over the last 15 years, JUST to CREATE a tiny positive trend in HadCrud 4.
50
As a chemist measuring emissions from kiln stacks in the 90s, I often quantified the output with the SI unit Bee’s Dick …
20
Claim: CO2 levels in the atmosphere began rising in the middle of the nineteenth century (1850-1860) from around 285 to their present level of 395 ppm.
But if one compares changes in CO2-levels (for example: per year) against human emissions of CO2 one can see that human emissions were not large enough (alone) to drive the rises in levels of CO2 until after the second world war.
1850 – 1950: Human emissions (2x) atmospheric increase in CO2.
Conclusion: There are other factors involved (Henrys law).
Comments please.
30
The following disappeared from my post:
1850 — 1950: Human emissions less than atmospheric increase in CO2
1950 — 1985: Human emissions equal to atmospheric increase in CO2
1985 — 2013: Human emissions greater(2x) than atmospheric increase in CO2.
50
Haven’t you heard? Nature repealed some of its laws in the 1950’s and installed some new ones.
40
It’s now post-modern Henryism.
20
Thank Goodness for Melting Ice!
Climate alarmists talk about melting ice and glaciers as if that is something which should be feared. Our ancestors who lived through a colder climates would think they are nuts!
It is true unfortunately that the more natural state of the earth is in ‘ice-age’. This is based on the last 450,000 years of proxy temperature records which we can gather from ice core data and other sources such as geological records which is not considered controversial in any way within the science community. But a ‘dwindling’ polar ice cap has never before in human history been considered something to fear. It would have been something celebrated had they known it was occurring, as this graph since the last glacial period shows:
It is no coincidence that in the last 11,000 years the warm periods (warmer than today) are referred to as ‘climate optimums’. If you read the descriptions from historical documents living during those times was bliss compared to living in the colder periods. As LW Hancock writes: http://www.lwhancock.com/Blog_120706.aspx
“The Roman Warm Period (RWP) – This is this period of time that Jesus lived in. It was a period of considerable agricultural expansion and cultural development. Vineyards in the south of England were plenty. Date trees grew in Greece. Olive presses were found in the Roman cities of Sagalassos in Anatolia, where it remains too cold to grow olives there today (Scheidel et al., 2007).
The Dark Ages Cold Period (DACP) – This was a time where history documents a great retreat of agriculture and depression of human activity, punctuated with starvation and plagues in many regions. Food was more scarce and there was considerable migration of people away from former farm lands which led to reforestation in large areas of central Europe and Scandinavia. It was a period of rapid cooling associated with the first Bond event identified in the North Atlantic sediments (Bond et al., 1997).
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP)– The Vikings established farms and grew wheat on Greenland, where today the land is covered mostly by ice and is too cold to be suited to agriculture. The industrial revolution began during the MWP. There was considerable agricultural expansion as well as expansion of warmer climate fauna. The summer of 1130 was so dry that you could wade through the river Rhine. In 1135, the Danube flow was so low that people could cross it on foot (Behringer 2008). Wineries sprang up in Germany and citrus orchards sprang up in parts of Asia where it is too cool to exist today (Lamb 1989).
The Little Ice Age (LIA) – This was a period of great upheaval and misery in human history. Fur trappers reported that Hudson Bay remained frozen long into the spring. Eskimos were seen paddling canoes off of the coast of England, Alpine glaciers engulfed mountain villages, cold and wet weather killed farm animals and destroyed crops, the bubonic plague killed more than a third of Europeans, farms and villages in Northern Europe were deserted due to persistent crop failures, bread was made from the bark of trees because grains wouldn’t grow (Windows2Universe 2008), and the famous potato famine starved over 1 million people in Ireland and caused a mass emigration of another 1 million people out of Ireland (Kinealy 1995). It was too wet and cold for the Irish to grow their staple crop, potatoes.
The Current Warm Period (CWP) – Rebounding from the LIA, we’re gradually warming up again. We are in a period where satellite imagery across 30 years shows a significant greening of the earth (Liu et al., 2010), Northern latitudes have seen higher productivity in agriculture, wineries exist in upper New York, Arctic ice is at a historic low, and human population has exploded along with technology and agriculture (I don’t need to cite this – just check out your cell phone and pay a visit to the grocery store).”
Unfortunately, at some stage this current climate optimum will cease and it is likely we will revert back to the Earth’s more normal glacial period as shown in the 450,000 year ice core record here: http://www.thelivingmoon.com/47brotherthebig/04images/Antarctica/415k-year-temp-graph.jpg
Some scientist think that the recent low solar activity could be a sign that we are heading that way now. Let’s hope they are wrong!
PS: I know the the Arctic sea ice has rebound somewhat from the lows in the late 2000’s, and that total Antarctic Ice reached its highest recorded extent this past winter and total ice volume in Antarctica does not appear to be declining. However Greenland Ice is melting which is continuing the trend from the end of the Little Ice Age. This item is written just to stop those who worry that a warmer temperature is actually a bad thing. I believe that not only have the UN IPCC not shown that most of the warming is caused by human CO2 emissions rather than natural variability, they have not established that the amount of warming, if it is man made, is a net negative rather than a net positive. They only look at one side of the equation.
PPS: Also worth watching is Bjorn Lomborg’s 11 minute Youtube video presentation from the IPA where he talks about all the economic benefits of warming and the microscopic costs in comparison to any potential increased cost from global warming. Lomborg does generally accept the IPCC position on human caused global warming, but he rejects the IPCC’s proposals to ‘fix’ warming by dramatic and damaging reductions in CO2 emissions. See the video here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUV2aRwPpIQ&list=UU0VXp0q5i8o-CxL_8Q3HOtQ
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Jaymez:
I agree mostly.
1. No eskimos off the coast of England. Apparently 6 cases of them off the coast of Scotland, and thought that on 2 occasions some contact (although the eskimos couldn’t understand the scottish accent).
2. Not sure if the Vikings grew wheat in Greenland. It may be the case, but there is much confusion because of the use of the word “corn” to describe grain crops in Europe until late in the nineteenth century. Certainly there was wheat grown in Iceland around 1100, as there was further north in Norway than today, but after 1300 they grew oats and barley only in Iceland, and after around 1520 neither of those. The growing of barley and oats resumed in Iceland gradually in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
3. There was definitely a roman vineyard near York, in what would now be again a frost hollow. There is slight evidence that grapes were grown near Hadrian’s wall. In medieval times the Bishop of Durham was getting 3 times the price of French wine for his production. (2 mentions in official documents). There is a reference (supposedly, I haven’t looked for it) by Chaucer about grapes growing in Scotland. This may have been a vineyard associated with a monastery mentioned elsewhere.
German sources talk of vines growing on the shores of the Baltic, and more importantly of the importance of 2 varieties (Gouais and Gansfusser) in north german wines. Both varieties are noted for there heat resistance (only Gouais in Australia is old plot at Rutherglen).
4. Arctic ice reduction is known from approx. 1660 and again 1810-1840, both cold times. It does reduce in some warm times also, but I cannot see a reduction in extent as a reliable indicator of global warming.
60
File under: idiots never learn
Monday 20 March 2000:
Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
.
November 21, 2013
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) warns sports stadiums are at risk from the “sea level rise effects of climate change,” and that climate change specifically threatens hockey and skiing.
He said the threat to hockey is that people will no longer be able to play outdoors on frozen ponds:
“Without cold enough weather for frozen ponds, the kind of hockey that you play out of doors with your friends gets a little bit harder to achieve.”
Whitehouse also suggested climate change will prevent his family from continuing to go skiing in Rhode Island.
.
handjive calls climate fraud.
120
For those in America or interested in America, two things happened this week that virtually seal the Obama administration’s grip on the entire country.
1. Journalists will no longer be allowed to take pictures and video of White House events. Instead the White House will release it’s own PR versions of what happened… …instant suppression of a supposedly free press. Even the networks favoring Obama are protesting. And if this isn’t bad enough…
2. The senate voted to change 200 + years of rules and no longer require a 2/3 vote to close debate (stops the filibuster), thus reducing Republicans who have 48 seats, a significant presence to the status of an annoying bug flying around the senate chamber. Democrats will now completely control confirmation of federal judges and any other matter before the senate. These, by the way, are the same democrats who, when Republicans tried the same thing, wrapped themselves in the righteous cloak of history, precedent, decency and everything else they could find to get the Republican majority to back down. I hope they rot in Hell for this one.
There is no longer any doubt, we live in a dictatorship. 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁
All hail King Obama!
The one bright spot, at least politically, is that Obama care, his “signature achievement”, his legacy, is coming unglued so fast that Democrats are running not just scared but in panic mode. I wish them all the trouble they can get on the next couple of Election Days.
Unfortunately the trouble caused to our medical care system and our budget by all this, will hurt a lot of people before it gets fixed, if it can be fixed.
The American people are waking up… …finally. Get very angry, America. I am and you should be too.
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Roy–I disagree. The white house not allowing pictures, etc, is virtually no different than how FDR was treated. The press voluntarily hid his disabilities. Actually, the “free press” idea has not been true during much of the US history. We just get upset about it now.
I don’t see that the rule change amounts to much. The Republicans had virtually no say in the senate, don’t seem to actually care that they don’t, and now they have virtually no say in the Senate. Status quo.
From our least favorite source, Wikipedia:The cloture rule originally required a supermajority of two-thirds of all senators “present and voting” to be considered filibuster-proof.[7][8] For example, if all 100 Senators voted on a cloture motion, 67 of those votes would have to be for cloture for it to pass; however if some Senators were absent and only 80 Senators voted on a cloture motion, only 54 would have to vote in favor.[9] However, it proved very difficult to achieve this; the Senate tried eleven times between 1927 and 1962 to invoke cloture but failed each time. Filibuster was particularly heavily used by Democratic Senators from Southern states to block civil rights legislation.[10]
In 1975, the Democratic Senate majority, having achieved a net gain of four seats in the 1974 Senate elections to a strength of 61 (with an additional Independent caucusing with them for a total of 62), reduced the necessary supermajority to three-fifths (60 out of 100).[11] However, as a compromise to those who were against the revision, the new rule also changed the requirement for determining the number of votes needed for a cloture motion’s passage from those Senators “present and voting” to those Senators “duly chosen and sworn”. Thus, 60 votes for cloture would be necessary regardless of whether every Senator voted. The only time a lesser number would become acceptable is when a Senate seat is vacant. (For example, if there were two vacancies in the Senate, thereby making 98 Senators “duly chosen and sworn”, it would only take 59 votes for a cloture motion to pass.)[9]
Remember, too, that Democrats may not be in control of the Senate forever. What works to punish Republicans now can certainly be used against them later, assuming any of our Republicans grow a set.
It is interesting to note that the rule is not 200 years old, that Democrats from the south used filibusters to block civil rights legislation (Oh, they do really love minorities–when it’s convenient and to their advantage), and the number was modified once already. If you want to be upset about anything, be upset that the Dems hoped this would draw attention away from the disaster of Obamacare. Sadly, it seems you can’t take people’s minds of “renewal” notices that say you have to find a new insurer, pay way more money for coverage and find a new doctor. Even the clever use of the term “nuclear” didn’t help. One supposes that lying to people and messing with their health care may not have been the best choice if you want to remain the darling of the American public.
31
Yes, Sheri, the filibuster has been misused. Nothing is perfect!!!! But FDR and Obama are not the same animal. FDR was not malicious. Obama is!!!!
I sincerely hope that Democrats will not be in control of the Senate forever. I suspect they now fear the end of their domination of that house come November, 2014. But none of this changes the magnitude, the sheer audacity of the power grab we have just seen. Where are the patriots who will speak out? Where are those who will fight this?
Evil now runs this country from its perch in the White House. Obama can now get anything he wants, regardless of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Who will make a move to stop him? No one, that’s who!!!!
50
Yes, Obama is malicious. I still don’t see how this change means Obama can get anything he wants. Actually, he seems to pretty much have everything he wants except loving admirers (who lost their health care plans but will forgive him sooner or later). The House is still Republican.
So far, Obama has just ignored parts of laws he doesn’t like and no one spoke up or took action. He uses executive orders if laws don’t pass. He destroys industry using the EPA and now it looks like the FDA will start banning things (thank you Mayor Bloomberg). All of this has been going on since the election of 2008 and now we should wake up and worry? The “nuclear option” was nothing more than an item in a long string of power grabs.
It’s just a guess, but since Obama has very conveniently crossed the line of common sense and decency and is now seen as a liar and a sleaze, letting the remaining Democrats run wild until they meet the same fate may be the best course of action. The time to stand up was 30 years ago and everyone was busy saying this can’t happen in the US. It could and it did and now it’s a bit late to start the battle. Probably best just to let the opposition do itself in–liberal policies always self-destruct. It’s just a matter of time.
40
And when liberal policies self destruct, how much real harm will have been done to very real people? He intends to reduce this country to a state where neither it nor anyone in it will be able to oppress anyone again. You should go back and read DREAMS FROM MY FATHER and THE ROOTS OF OBAMA’S RAGE again and compare what he does and the result of what he does with those two very prophetic books. In other words, the liberal ideal of “social justice”. As long as everyone is equal it doesn’t matter if you’re all suffering equally. He can now stack the federal courts with enough of his like minded buddies to simply stop any legal challenge to what he’s doing, dead in its tracks.
And as far as the right time to speak out, it was not 30 years ago but over 100 years. 100 years that they have worked to subvert this country.
Do you watch Hannity on Fox News? I saw remarkable thing last night. He had a panel of “millenials”, 18 -34 year olds. They’re starting to be disappointed in Obama for sure. But what they’re disappointed in is not the loss of liberty but the failure of all his promised goodies, lower tuition, better school loans, free medical care… It’s not the loss of their liberty they don’t like, it’s the failure of the government to provide for them. Never mind that the availability of insurance is part of what has pushed up medical prices. Never mind that the availability of those coveted school loans has allowed schools to boost their prices. Yes, prices, to the consumer, not cost of doing business but price that can be charged to the end user. This is a snake eating its tail and it ends in disaster, not correction of the course we’re on. Correction comes only after the fall — then those who’re left get to try to pick up the pieces and make something out of them again.
To be sure there were some on that panel of about 25 or 30 who get it. But I’m sure about only 3 of them understanding what’s really wrong.
We have lost our way and we’re suffering for it.
60
Yes, we have lost our way. Now we deal with it. I do understand exactly who and what Obama is. It’s been clear from day one. People just did not want to believe. The millenials are in for a rough time–especially when mommy and daddy die and the government deserts them. However, it’s really quite late now to stop the mess. If you were to try now, I suspect actual war could break out, or at least the riots we saw in Greece. Eventually, that may be the outcome no matter what we do.
Yes, we will suffer for this. As I repeat often, we have a brain to think with and figure things out and nature to smack us back to reality when we don’t. The brain is usually kinder than nature. At this point, nature is really the only way this will change. You can find that depressing or sad, but it is what it is. This is how people work. There’s a window of opportunity and if you miss that, things get very bad.
50
I keep remembering John Kennedy’s saying, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.”
We need people now who realize what’s required is to rock the political boat the right way, damn the consequences. We need people who can inspire others to a goal larger than themselves. Where is Patrick Henry when you need him? Where is the leader we need?
The most vile dictator cannot stand without support, not just failure to oppose but support from many many people. Which is more important, life or freedom and the future of the greatest nation on Earth? It’s time to fight, Sheri; it’s time to fight. We may have only words with which to do it but if that be all we have then we must use words.
30
I will continue to write and so forth, but at this point, the car is off the cliff and catching air. The only thing to do now is wait at the bottom and see if there are survivors.
30
Oh, and build the compound in Colorado.
30
Unfortunately we, you and I, are in that car. And I don’t know how to assure that we’re among the survivors. Those who depend on medical care to keep going will be some of the first casualties I suspect.
We’ve no way to wait at the bottom to see who crawls out of the wreck.
A lifetime of work, of attending to your responsibility to family, yourself and to your country, none of it counts for anything. Suddenly you and I are the bad guys. When I saw the video I’ve mentioned previously of the Obamas behind their bulletproof glass at a flag day ceremony and Michelle was caught clearly saying, “All this for a flag?” And the president replied with a resigned look on his face, “Yeah.” I said to myself, the first couple of the United States of America just pissed all over the flag of their country. We must not let this go without fighting it. We must fight!
Have I missed something?
20
The reference to the compound in Colorado will be understood by those who read a specific book.
00
Interesting title without a doubt, even provocative but Amazon doesn’t list it. 😉
00
There were so many books with title it got confusing to people so they dropped it! 🙂
00
Try “Atlas Shrugged”.
20
Interesting conversation, thanks.
Here’s a poem you probably know and like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to6TjJdUSfs
It’s a favorite of mine.
20
It has intrigued me that Americans would ever even consider electing a Chicago democrat as president, Chicago democrats having the reputation of being arguably one of the most corrupt political groups in all of the USA.
Not only that but electing a Chicago democrat who had almost no record of merit during his entire period in the Senate. Reading Obama’s political time line it seems he got to power primarily by ensuring any and every scandal of any sort by his competitors for any position was duly reported and widely published to force them to withdraw from any political race Obama was involved in.
In short he seems to have had little or no previous political record of note but rather used scandal to shame any potential opposing candidates to stand down.
And it and his record so far shows that in spades.!
Now here in a politically lily white Australia we have a somewhat different system that allows us to have a known fraudster who regularly and openly lied to the public as the Labour party elected Prime Minister
And it showed in spades
eerrr! ummm! Maybe I’ll change the subject!
________________________
More seriously.
Rooseveldt was a great President
Harry Truman, the Vice president who assumed office when Rooseveldt died in office in April 1945 who is ignored by most was a really great president.
He was left with the decision on dropping the atomic bomb on Japan.
He also had to clean up after Rooseveldt who trusted Stalin far too much to hold to his word and that left a legacy of the west being badly duped and stripped naked militarily as it disbanded it’s armies while Stalin’s [ Stalin – Man of steel ; real name Joseph Besarionis dze Djugashvili from Georgia. He wasn’t even Russian. I’ve got his daughter’s [ Svetlana Alliluyeva ] biography kicking around in my collection somewhere . His son died in a german POW camp despite the Germans offering to do a swap ] Soviets moved into all the central european countries or refused to leave after the end of WW2.
And then they tried to extend their power acrosss defeated Germany by imposing the 1948 Berlin ban on all supplies form the west getting through to the 2 million Berliners in the western sectors of Berlin. this resulted in the famous Berlin airlift which broke the back of the soviet attempts to force the west out of Berlin. The soviets very nearly got control of europe right through to the Atlantic though the Soviet controlled French communist party which came close to nearly taking control of France.
Only the american threat of a nuclear war stopped Stalin whose Russians through mostly espionage by Klaus Fuchs developed the atomic bomb far faster than the allies could believe and exploded the first Soviet bomb on the 29th August 1949
Eisenhower is regarded with great affection by Americans as he is seen as the architect of the wests along with the soviets of the final defeat of nazi Germany.
But Eisenhower usually would far sooner have played golf than acted in his presidential duties.
His short farewell address is completely relevant to today and perhaps displays a prescience of the future that is uncanny.
It is one of the great presidential speeches.
Quoted from Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation
January 17, 1961
Kennedy gave the americans and the world hope and he faced down the Soviet ‘s first secretary Nikita Khrushchev over the soviets stationing of nuclear missiles in America’s back yard in Cuba.
But Kennedy was assassinated at the height of his powers and influence.
As Lyndon Johnson his VP who took over as president found, Vietnam became a political and military cess pit which it most likely would have done also with Kennedy as well,
Kennedy’s reputation is intact but he still had further conflicts ahead which he never had to ,resolve or deal with. That became the problem for his VP Lyndon Johnson who never stood for president when Kennedy’s / Johnson’s term had finished .
Reagan was a great president as he drove the Soviet empire into bankruptcy through forcing the Soviet Politburu to spend over 50% of their entire government revenues on the military in their attempts to keep up with the allies.
And that led to the economic destruction of the USSR and the eventual downfall of the USSR and it’s communist party system. and it’s WW2 and long established hegemony over the countries of eastern Europe
I was in Soviet Russia a year or so before it broke up and the locals knew that something was going to break politically but they did not know where and exactly when.
There is an old reputedly Chinese curse; “May you live in interesting times.”
Viewed at a safe distance from the golden country and living through what for us older Australians, has been a golden age, it has been very interesting times indeed in world history.
50
Roy, Sheri, you both need to read and understand Alinsky. The way radicals operate is by purposely creating an upset. The current BamyCare situation has the outward appearance of government SNAFU. It isn’t a SNAFU, rather an intentional upset. Beware the next three months.
We are in deep shi_
40
I don’t need Alinsky (though I have read some of Alinsky just so I would know what people were talking about). I have decades of accurate predictions and interpretations of human behaviour.
20
So I’m vindicated then? Glenn Beck was right after all.
The problem is that not even the grand plans of Saul Alinsky can force the future to go the way he thought it should. But yes, we’re in deep shit (might as well say it, everyone knows what the word is). Our job now is to accept the challenge and FIGHT BACK.
00
Updates for the catastrophic global warming lunatics (you know who you are):
✈ Climatic tipping points, stories about our possible future
✈ New York Set to Reach Climate Point-of-No-Return in 2047
✈ Will the world end in 100 days? Sounding of ancient trumpet in York warns of Viking apocalypse on 22 February 2014 (dated: 15 November 2013)
.
For some serious virgin sacrifices or carbon taxes & other ‘precautionary principle’ preparations:
✈ Comet Holmes is returning in 2014
Last perihelion was just prior to the beginning of the present solar grand minimum, and 6 months later the comet’s coma became the largest object in the solar system, in Nov. 2007.
This seems interesting because usually the comets become brighter when the approach the Sun, not 6 months after perihelion.
The next perihelion of Comet Holmes will occur on March 27, 2014.
It will be the first of many comets in 2014. It won’t have an easy act to follow.
This appearance of Comet Holmes will follow in the immediate wake of what several astronomers feel will be one of the brightest comets in history, Comet ISON.
On October 23rd and 24th of 2007, as Comet Holmes was moving away from the Sun, it flared unexpectedly. Why did this outburst occur? Nobody is quite certain.
Regardless of the reason, less than a month after the initial outburst, Comet Holmes had increased in brightness by a factor of 1,000,000 times.
It was the third brightest object in the constellation Perseus, from Earth’s perspective.
This outgassing briefly made the coma, one of the parts of a comet, 869,900 miles (1.4 million km) in diameter.
In other words, by November of 2007, Comet Holmes was the largest object in the entire solar system even larger than our Sun.
.
Let’s see what will happen next year.
Doomsday bedwetting climate alarmists have been warned.
✈ Taiwan man fined over flopped apocalypse
60
“A couple of hours north of Perth. It’s not snow.”
====
It’s the wonder.
When did that become not enough ?
20
When it became necessary to have other people tell you that it was.
10
If it’s not snow, it isn’t a more potent GHG than CO2, so what is it ? Salt ?
20
I’d say it’s almost pure silica, SiO2, from the beaches of Lancelin. At a guess.
Cheers,
Speedy
30
Lancelin ? What a beach !
http://spoolphotography.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/lancelin-dunes.jpg
00
Sand …
10
Could be cocaine…
10
iPhones® before harvest.
20
One of the issues that came up this week, and which appears to reveal a division in the skeptic community, is whether or not the ABC should be abolished. This actually has exact parallels with the issue whether government funding of science should be abolished.
The argument that both should be abolished is that support for them both cannot be rationally justified. By ‘rationally justified’ I don’t mean whether they agree with my opinion. I mean they can’t be demonstrated to satisfy their own definition of a successful outcome.
Take government funding of science for example. Suggest abolishing it and many people feel a sense of unease, an inchoate sense that something valuable would be taken away and replaced with nothing. We would be worse off.
So it’s an economic proposition. What they’re saying is that society as a whole would be more productive by holding resources in commons.
Now the question is whether that is an irrational belief system. In order to demonstrate that it’s rational, you would need to show that the government funding of science confers net benefits on society.
To do that, you would need to show that it’s ethically justified to get the funding by threatening people with imprisonment in the first place: you need to take into account the coercive nature of taxation when asserting that the fruits thereof are positive rather than negative. You can’t just assume it.
And it’s not enough to justify government funding of science by pointing to the benefits of it that are seen. You have to also take into account the detriments that may be unseen but still real: http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
However you define costs and benefits, or the ultimate human welfare criterion, the question is always the ratio of benefits to costs in the scenario under examination (government funding of science) versus in the counter-factual (no government funding of science). It is this *ratio* that makes possible a discussion that is *rational*.
The argument is this. The advocates of government funding of science are not capable of showing what they would need to show, in order to justify it. All their argument ever consists of, is assuming that government funding of science confers a net benefit on society, without ever showing, or being able to show it, by any rational demonstration even in theory let alone in practice.
For example they often say that without government funding there would be not enough support for basic science. But (quite apart from the question what’s basic) the issue is precisely how do we know whether government funding is enough, too much or too little? By what rational criterion is this to be known? They only ever assume it, which is to assume what is in issue, which is circular, which is a logical fallacy, which is irrational.
While on the one hand, the advocates of government funding of science or the ABC are unable to demonstrate a rational justification for these interventions, on the other hand, Ludwig von Mises has categorically and irrefutably demonstrated the irrationality of their claims in “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” http://mises.org/pdf/econcalc.pdf
In this short essay Mises completely explodes the entire intellectual foundation of socialism. Although directed at full socialism, the arguments apply, mutatis mutandis, to part socialism. Unless the climate-skeptic advocates of government funding of science can answer the Misesian argument, they cannot demonstrate the rationality of their argument; and that’s the situation we have now. And the justification of the ABC is certainly not in any better position!
You would think that nothing could be more innocuous to society than measuring temperatures, and so think the advocates of government funding of climate science. To them, the obscene amounts of corruption and waste that government funding of climate science has generated must seem like some kind of strange coincidence. They don’t permit themselves to turn their minds to the cost in human deaths, now, or if they really got their way.
They are exactly like the advocates of socialism a century ago. From the socialists point of view, the 100 million deaths in the countries that attempted socialism must be some kind of strange coincidence.
But it’s not a strange coincidence. It’s the logical, necessary, and inevitable result of an irrational belief system, and Mises has shown exactly the reasons why.
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Justin
A very thought-provoking post – thanks. In a nutshell, for every case where we are confronted with risk or return, then it bevolves to a qualitative assessment of that risk or return. It becomes down to individual perceptions. (e.g. People will want nuclear energy banned, but are comfortable to continue smoking.)
In the case of government funded science, the risk is that “science” gets redefined by the paymasters – it becomes politicised and ceases to be science. Examples of this are found in the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology. And in their British and US counterparts, at least for the meteorology reporting.
The problem has been that these institutions have forgotten the scientific discipline which is supposed to be their first priority, their mistress, their reason for being. Instead, they have become the harlots of government.
Same goes, in spades, for the media – and a big “hello” to all you ABC “intellectuals” out there.
Cheers,
Speedy
90
I see Timmy is up to his compulsive lying, yet again!
Timmy says that the Tesla is the best selling car at the moment in Norway.
Tim Blair has outed him, most probably ten minutes at most, of research would have been required.
Timmy forgot to cite these facts also.
40
Makes ferpect sense for a country floating on oil to heavily tax those who would use the single most substantial resource bringing prospertiy to the country.
50
Do Australians really want to be ‘The Lucky Country.’
I suspect if many knew of the origin of the phrase and true meaning they would refrain.
Have we changed much since the sixties or was it a polar reversal.
50
the MSM has portrayed developing nations at COP19 as the ones claiming extreme weather events are caused by CAGW. no-one mentioned the shameful claims of our own “climte experts” & the MSM itself, in pushing just such a connection for years.
today, with COP19 over, the BBC’s Julian Marshall began his piece on Warsaw with mention of the Haiyan/Yolanda typhoon, and then followed the COP19 piece with Matt McGrath & Connie Hedegaard, with a lengthy Philippines Haiyan/Yolanda piece.
as for Matt McGrath’s dishonest write-up, (note the further exploitation of typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda), all we need to know is nothing came out of COP19, except “commitments” is now “contributions”:
23 Nov: BBC: Matt McGrath: Last-minute deal saves fractious UN climate talks
UN climate talks in Poland have ended with delegates reaching a compromise on how to fight global warming.
After 30 hours of deadlock, they approved a pathway to a new global climate treaty in Paris in 2015.
The agreement was achieved after a series of last minute compromises often involving single words in draft texts.
Negotiators also made progress on the contentious issue of loss and damage that developing countries are expected to suffer in a warming world.
Green groups were angry about the lack of specific commitments on finance.
The Conference of the Parties (Cop) started two weeks ago in the shadow of Typhoon Haiyan.
Speaking at the time, the lead delegate from the Philippines, Yeb Sano, drew tears in the auditorium with a heartfelt plea to “stop this climate madness…
2b or not 2b?
The battle centred on a single word in the pathway document.
Paragraph 2b of the text originally spoke of “commitments” by all parties. But in a plenary session, delegates from China and India ripped into this and said they could not accept the language.
“Only developed countries should have commitments,” said China’s lead negotiator Su Wei.
Emerging economies could merely be expected to “enhance action”, he said.
With time running out, desperate ministers and their advisers huddled in the corner of the hall to work out a compromise.
After an hour, they agreed to change “commitments” to “contributions”…
The more flexible word allows the US and EU to insist that everyone is on the same page, while also allowing China and India to insist that they are doing something different from the richer countries.
EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard was relieved that this key element had been agreed…
Another key battle was over the issue of loss and damage. This was crucial for developing countries which say that money to help them adapt to climate change is all well and good, but they need something extra to cope with extreme events such as Typhoon Haiyan.
They had argued for a new institution called a loss-and-damage mechanism that would have the financial clout to deal with the impacts of events that had been clearly affected by climate change.
But in the text the new mechanism would have to sit “under” an existing part of the UN body that dealt with adaptation.
This one word stuck in the throats of delegates from developing countries, including Filipino Yeb Sano who again made a moving intervention.
“It has boiled down to one word and I would say this is a defining moment for this process. Let us take that bold step and get that word out of the way.”
After another huddle the word was changed and the text accepted.
Not everyone was happy…
Harjeet Singh from Action Aid said the new mechanism was merely fulfilling a pledge made last year.
“It is the barest minimum that was supposed to be achieved at Warsaw on loss and damage anyway. A few rich countries including the US held it hostage till the very end,” he said…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25067180
00
23 Nov: Deutsche Welle: Greens approve coalition talks with Merkel’s conservatives in Hesse
Green Party members voted 51-6 on Saturday in favor of holding coalition talks with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said the Greens leader for Hesse, Tarek al-Wazir…
The SPD are considered the more traditional partners to form a so-called “grand coalition.” Such an alliance is currently being negotiated between the two parties at the national level. A potential partnership between the CDU and Greens in the Bundestag was ruled out not long after the conservatives’ postelection victory exploratory coalition talks began.
Saturday’s vote indicates such an alliance is increasingly possible on the state level. The two parties previously formed a coalition government in the Hamburg parliament from 2008 to 2010.
http://www.dw.de/greens-approve-coalition-talks-with-merkels-conservatives-in-hesse/a-17247977
00
btw meant to say BBC’s Matt McGrath actually said they want the numbers PRE-COOKED before Paris 2015. PRE-COOKED IS SO CAGW.
LISTEN TO FIRST SEVEN MINUTES:
AUDIO: 1:30: BBC: Newshour: UN Climate Change Talks
Julian Marshall: worth remembering the climate talks began with Typhoon Haiyan etc etc etc etc…
Matt McGrath: i put it to Connie Hedegaard:
3:30: Hedegaard: they have to go straight home, do their homework, decide their contributions, in good time for Paris…
6:09: McGrath to Julian Marshall: they are talking about having committments(??) from all countries…all the big countries(?)… nobody wants repeat of Copenhagen; they want it all PRE-COOKED in the terminology, they want it PRE-COOKED when they go to Paris, so they just sign the deal then.
Marshall: Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda story begins…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/newshour
NYT’s Jolly also exploits Haiyan/Yolanda:
23 Nov: NYT: David Jolly: Deals at Climate Meeting Advance Global Effort
The conference, known as the 19th annual meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, got underway two weeks ago in the shadow of the giant Philippine typhoon…
The death and destruction brought by the Philippine storm helped to highlight the question of “climate justice.” …
Final agreement on Saturday was held up by a thorny dispute over a proposal by developing nations for the creation of a “loss and damage mechanism” under the treaty. The United States, the European Union and other developed nations opposed the measure, fearing new financial claims…
The United States hailed the agreement on calculating emissions reductions, which was along lines proposed by Todd S. Stern, President Obama’s climate envoy. Mr. Stern had called for each nation to make a public offer early enough to be evaluated for the Paris summit meeting…
***Lead negotiators eventually worked out compromise language — changing the word “commitments” to “contributions” — for 2015 to allow some wiggle room…
The deal Saturday came less than a year before a “climate summit” of leaders called by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for September in New York, where world leaders will be asked to show progress on cutting emissions in the full glare of the United States and the world news media.
Despite relief that a Copenhagen-type failure was averted, treaty members remain far from any serious, concerted action to cut emissions. And developing nations complained that promises of financial help remain unmet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/world/deals-at-climate-meeting-advance-global-effort.html?_r=0
00
DISGRACEFUL – especially as no-one was offering bigger cuts at Warsaw, & nothing was achieved:
24 Nov: ABC: ABC/wires: Warsaw climate talks: Principles of global deal agreed on after deadlock over ‘contributions’
John Connor from the Sydney-based Climate Institute was an observer at the talks.
He told the ABC that while Australia’s credibility on climate change was affected by the Federal Government’s decision not send an elected member, there were some positive outcomes.
“There is no way which we can quietly or secretly backslide on any of our ambition,” he said.
“What we should do is actually lift our game and be much clearer so that we’re serious about climate action, and that we’re going to make strong emissions reductions of up to 25 per cent by 2020 and much more beyond.”…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-24/deadlock-broken-at-un-climate-talks/5113188
10
Rhetoric of the week: “backslide”.
Meaning that our gullibility is evaporating.
40
I have been reading Bill Gammage’s book The Biggest Estate On Earth, Australia before colonisation and for a while afterwards. Over the past month I have spoken to cattlemen in Victoria, Snowy Mountains high country experienced who have explained that the now rapidly deteriorating pastures due to a ban on cattle grazing and related land management in recent years who explained that open country is being taken over by weeds including Blackberry and small trees and shrubs. They told me that the grassland was there before white people came to this country and had been well managed by the Aborigines.
The reason I decided to post this is about seasons, Gammage indicates that Australia is a land of many different conditions and that the northern hemisphere seasons really do not apply to most of Australia.
Today I discovered a Bureau Of Meteorology website on the indigenous seasons and other information that may be of interest to others here: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/?ref=marketing
40
The first fining of a wind company for killing eagles. These wind plants are visible from my subdivision, even though they are 10 miles away. They stand along the horizon for miles. In an area where raptors hunt–and as winter approaches, hunting increases. Let’s hope this at least wakes up some people to the reality the wind is not environmentally benign.
http://trib.com/business/energy/duke-energy-renewables-agrees-to-million-in-fines-for-wyoming/article_d2f76fff-e2f2-5e82-9998-4524891aa326.html
Can you imagine if Anschutz ever gets the 1000 turbines he wants in south central Wyoming how many raptors and bats will die? It’s unreal.
40
Amazing it’s the first,
Should of happened years ago, now they’ve racked up over between 500,00 and 1 million bird kills world wide per year, every year. The there are the bat kills, and the plant biodiversity change under every wind mincer.
Didn’t Duke Energy contribute to the Obama Political Fund?
30
Technically, Duke “loaned” the DNC $10 million plus other costs for the Denver Democratic convention. After the election, the “loan” was promptly written off and stockholders took the hit, allowing Obama to claim the DNC does not take contributions from corporations, as he continues to do. This makes them look like they aren’t capitalists but instead liars and thieves. In America, apparently the unwashed masses prefer liars to capitalists.
30
If it isn’t snow brought on by Global Warming, it must be creeping desertification brought on by Global Warming.
20
Nice photo. Looks like snow. Must be a sign of global cooling. Not a bad piece of road though the seal is getting a bit traffic polished and a couple of Chevron Alignment Markers at the curve wouldn’t go astray.
20
23 Nov: Reuters: Factbox: Main decisions at U.N. climate talks in Warsaw
(Compiled by Nina Chestney, Stian Reklev, Alister Doyle, Megan Rowling, Susanna Twidale and Michael Szabo)
Developed nations promised in 2009 to increase their aid to poorer countries to help them cope with climate change to $100 billion a year after 2020, from $10 billion a year in 2010-12. But in Warsaw they rejected calls to set targets for 2013-19.
A draft text merely urged developed nations to set “increasing levels” of aid, to be reviewed every two years…
Countries agreed to announce plans for curbs on greenhouse gases beyond 2020 “well in advance” of a summit in Paris in December 2015 and “by the first quarter of 2015 for those ***in a position to do so”***.
It called the submissions “intended nationally determined contributions” – the word “intended” hinting they are open to change…
PRE-2020 AMBITION
The conference did not outline new targets for more near-term action to reduce emissions…
***MARKETS
Talks on how to set up new market-based mechanisms to curb emissions failed because developing nations refused to advance the process unless rich countries take on tougher emissions targets. Talks will resume in the first half of next year…
CLEAN DEVELOPMENT MECHANISM (CDM)
The conference agreed on a measure that could boost demand for the ailing mechanism, encouraging countries without legally binding emissions targets to use carbon credits called Certified Emission Reductions (CERs).
A proposal to implement a floor price for CERs was removed from a technical paper while a wider review of the CDM by a technical board was pushed to talks in Bonn in March 2014…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/23/us-climate-talks-factbox-idUSBRE9AM0CA20131123
btw abc has their abc/wires article up on all abc websites, with the John Connor “25%” quote given double exposure each time, as a highlighted extract.
i have found no coverage anywhere in the world that includes abc’s positive spin “consensus” opening para:
“Negotiators from about 195 countries have reached consensus on some of the cornerstones of an ambitious climate pact to combat global warming.”
nor have i found this in any coverage whatsoever:
“Negotiators agreed that all countries should work to curb emissions from burning coal, oil and gas as soon as possible, and ideally by the first quarter of 2015.”
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/2013-11-24/warsaw-climate-talks-principles-of-global-deal-agreed-on-after-deadlock-over-contributions/1224386
who wrote those two lines, ABC? John Connor, by any chance?
00
I have been enjoying the irony of listening to the Australian director of Oxfam in the media this morning, giving Australia a tongue lashing over its performance at the conference. Motivation? Hmmm let me see…. wouldn’t be anything to do with reduced access to the taxpayer trough as the myth loses momentum would it?
Na… just me being cynical…
Also working at Launceston Airport, I see a few people come and go. Noticed Peter Wish-Wilson about to hop on a plane Friday, soooo tempted to saunter up and say “clocking up a few carbon miles Pete?” but my employer is closely associated with the Tas Gov. So Id say my boss would have been less than pleased. Still, nice to see Pete is not too proud to benefit from a few fossil fuel technologies such as air travel. Personally I think he should have the courage of his convictions and swim across Bass Strait, but that’s just me.
91
Wise move S66 – not worth risking paid employment for.
If he didn’t want to swim he could paddle across on a surf ski. That would also be carbon almost neutral.
He may even encounter one of those big white pointy nose thingies and he could commune with nature.
Just dreaming.
🙂
60
David:
those big white pointy nose thingies eat seals raw, rubber boots, tin cans, bits of surfboards and nylon ropes but they might draw the line at greenies as too hard to swallow. (Many people would know that feeling).
Besides, greenies would only allow themselves to be swallowed by a government controlled or subsidised entity.
71
We could always coat them with a Remoulade Sauce!
Tony.
50
We may have to experiment.
Step forward Michael the Realist, Blackbladder and Margot.
41
G3 – good point about not eating Greenies but would they, the Greenies, be considered as Gummint subsidised if they were munched in a Marine Park?
31
Only if served with mint sauce
41
Droll, very droll. Love it. 🙂
20
My Mum owns the caravan park at Cervantes, sure looks like home!
30
The issue this week in Ft. St. John BC is the review of the Site C dam.
This has been going on for what seems like forever. The project was controversial twenty years ago.
The argument is that the reservoir will destroy farmland.
Peace River country is far enough North that it is marginal farmland at best when the climate is at the nadir i.e. 1910 and 1970. It’s only good for farming jackrabbits. However, with earlier maturing grain, it has been quite productive through the late twentieth century warming.
40
ok – it looks like abc’s opening para is a doctored version of this AFP headline & opening para, which is the only report using “consensus” & “cornerstone”:
24 Nov: AFP: Mariette Le Roux: Fraught UN talks reach climate deal consensus
UN negotiators agreed in fraught overtime talks Saturday on cornerstone issues of an ambitious, global climate pact to stave off dangerous Earth warming
http://news.yahoo.com/gloves-come-off-un-climate-talks-194527240.html
the following AFP line is more accurate cos all that was agreed was on elements “for the road”, not for the pact itself:
AFP: “UN climate negotiators reached agreement in Warsaw on Saturday, November 23, on cornerstone elements for the road to a new 2015 deal to curb global warming.”
http://www.rappler.com/science-nature/44468-un-climate-key-points-warsaw-consensus
from this AFP piece, we get a “ready” to do so, as opposed to Reuters “in a position to do so”, and the Forest details – it’s REDD+, $280m:
“Parties should volunteer targets for curbing climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions “well in advance” of a Paris conference where the deal must be inked in two years’ time.
*** Those “ready” to do so, must announce their contributions by the first quarter of 2015…”
FORESTS
Negotiators also made progress in the design of a program called REDD+, which aims to fund poor country projects for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, with pledges of $280 million in financing.
10
Ok here’s a few photos of one of my favorite places locally to walk the dogs, Mount Buninyong http://s1295.photobucket.com/user/Yonniestone/library/Mount%20Buninyong?sort=3&page=1
the ones looking down are from the road looking North towards Mt Warrenheip and the others are around the volcanic crater.
30
the abc’s –
“Negotiators agreed that all countries should work to curb emissions from burning coal, oil and gas as soon as possible, and ideally by the first quarter of 2015.”
seems to be an abc only version of the following from Le Roux’s AFP piece too, tho the meaning is quite different once again:
“Due to enter into effect in 2020, the Paris deal will be the first to bind all nations to curbing atmosphere-polluting greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil and gas.”
http://news.yahoo.com/gloves-come-off-un-climate-talks-194527240.html
00
Australian twists the AFP headline even further than ABC. shocking lie, Australian. not surprised, tho:
24 Nov: Australian: AFP: Fraught UN talks end in climate pact to stave off global warming
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/fraught-un-talks-end-in-climate-pact-to-stave-off-global-warming/story-e6frg6so-1226767108907
00
Jo, FYI from comments at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/23/is-greenpeace-facing-its-warsawgrad/#comments
“Col Mosby says:
November 23, 2013 at 12:22 pm
There ‘s an exceedingly simple reason for the firming up of uranium prices – the world has begun building nucler power plants after a decades’ long hiatus. For the first time since 1985, a nuclear plant is under construction in the U.S. and not just one, ,but 5 of them, with more to follow. Worldwide there are 70 nuclear plants under construction (and 500 more in the pipeline) and the fixed price cost per plant is almost aways the same – $5 billion, which if one does the math, knowing the current price utilities are paying for uranium fuel ( 3/4 of a cent per kilowatthour) , will pay for ultimate storage of wastes (less than 1/10th of a cent per kiowatthour) , have to pay for operations and maintenance ( 1 /1/4th to 1 1/2 cent per kWhr) and finally, for the cost of the guaranteed 60 year plant itself ( 7/10ths to 9/10ths of a cent per kWhr), you’ll find that nuclear power costs less than gas or coal. And Gen 3 designs WILL NOT have core meltdowns, so there is little financial risk from accidents.”
50
Isn’t it odd.
The cheapest methods to generate electrical power are the only ones that friends of the dirt and their green followers want banned.
Just shows how little they care for their fellow man.
Tony.
121
Except that the Greens burn wood the old fashion way to avoid paying the high cost of Green energy. They are such hypocrites.
40
Mixed messages. What sort of a Walkout is it where you leave chanting “We will be back” in Spanish and emblazoned across your back ?
We would hate to miss the free food , entertainment & foreign travel opportunities at next years boondoggle .
30
Watch the head of GreenPiece call for a ‘fair and ‘viscious’ and legally binding treaty in front of his ‘comrades’ as they stage a ‘walkout’ on the hospitality of the coal industry that they have been enjoying for the last fortnight at COP19 in Warsaw.
GreenPiece COPs out
I guess that’s why he’s not Communications Director, being prone to such Freudian slips.
30
We respect ‘the Process’ so that’s why we are leaving (just not this one Eh!).
At bit of excitement for the youth, that cann’t handle the tedium, the hard work , the patience and disappointment of negotiation.
Oh we’ve been so naughty and we’re like so out a here.
Christopher Monckton’s ejection from ‘the Process’ at COP18 last year, for so soberly enlightening the audience, had a much bigger impact on the whole process than this petulant, staged, mass dummy spit by assorted NGOs and hangers on.
The influence of the Deep Green’s on Governments begins to be vanquished as the message is getting through about who they really are.
30