|
|
Someone needs to manage the Internet, and come September 30, no one is quite sure who will be. Sounds bizarre — an entity worth millions?
Once upon a time, a guy called Jon Postel managed the Net (all the domain names) but he died in 1998 and that job went to ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Since 1998, that’s been a part of the US Dept of Commerce. They get to decide who gets to use all the dot-somethings (eg, .com, .au, .cpa). ICANN can award them to groups or run an auction and pocket that cash. It is a monopoly, and there are conflicts there. The contract with the Dept of Commerce expires on Sept 30. In a normal world you’d expect the superpower-in-charge to roll that one over unless there was a big payoff for letting it go, or a foreign army on the beaches.
If the US government isn’t in control of ICANN, it can’t run as a separate monopoly thanks to US antitrust laws. So immediately ICANN is set “free” it will need to find a government to adopt it, so it has exemption from anti-trust laws (and more to the point, […]
The current state of play in the EU, thanks to the GWPF: The Germans have quietly given up on their own hard climate targets. They have 30% renewables, the most expensive electrons in the world, and their emissions are about the same as five years ago. The EU, climate champion, can’t even agree among the member states about how to ratify the Paris Agreement. Meanwhile the Turks are planning to build 80 new coal fired power stations (eighty!) and are subsidizing them up the kazoo. Turkey wants to use its low grade lignite deposits instead of Russian gas. After the recent purges, no one wants to criticize Erdogan, plus the energy minister happens to be President Erdogans son-in-law.
The E.U.’s over-arching ambitions, To change climate by cutting emissions, Is a pointless own-goal, When others use coal, As they please,and with no inhibitions.
— Ruairi
Greens are angry that Germany dropped real targets in Climate Action Plan — call new plan a “Toothless-tiger-skin-rug”:
[CleanEnergyWire] The final version of the German Environment Ministry’s Climate Action Plan has been published. But concrete targets included in previous drafts have been removed, prompting the Green Party to describe the […]
It’s “depressing”, “hopeless” and “dismal”
The climate debate is more polarised than ever. David Roberts at Vox is very honest about the challenges believers face to solve the deep partisan political divide. But despite all the grants and funding to solve this problem, the experts miss the obvious. I explain below why polarization will solve itself. Indeed, all their best efforts to reduce polarization in the climate debate are creating the polarization. It takes a sustained effort and millions of dollars to keep a false belief alive.
Now Dunlap and McCright (along with Oklahoma State’s Jerrod Yarosh) have updated their study, giving us a fresh look at public opinion on climate change at the end of the Obama era.
The findings are dismal, if not very surprising: Polarization only accelerated after 2008, the gap between the parties is wider than ever, and the trend shows no sign of stopping.
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) scores politicians. It tracks the voting records of members of Congress. Way back in 1970 both sides of politics wanted to approve environmental legislation about equally.
(Dunlap et al, Environment)
Public opinion has a similar trend. Here are Gallup poll […]
A survey in Asia found that 69% of financial institutions there don’t bother with assessing climate change risks when considering financing projects. Either these bankers have missed the last 20 years of IPCC messaging (careless inattentive bankers), or they’ve seen it and they know it’s baloney (skeptical bankers). Hmmm. What’s more likely?
Looks like two thirds of Asian banks don’t believe the IPCC:
[The new survey] …undertaken by Asia Research and Engagement with support of Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited, … found that 31 per cent of the institutions factored climate change risks into their financing operations, with 61 per cent of banks referring to green products and 56 per cent providing some quantification of their exposure.
It said financial institution were factoring climate change risks into their policies and offered green finance products. But only over a quarter of banks referred to climate change factors as a reason to limit financing .…
The bottom line is always where the money goes.
So over two thirds of financial institutions couldn’t care less about those forecasts of beachside apartments sinking under the waves, or cities becoming unlivable, nor of coal mines supposedly going broke. Nor […]
Last year there were warnings from crop modelers in Nature that heat kills wheat and yields were going to fall in the “near future”, if temperatures rose. In fact global warming was “already slowing wheat gains”. What followed was a record El Nino, and 2015 was the hottest ever year, with 2016 vying to beat it. But instead of wheat doom, this month the USDA forecasts a record yield of wheat with bumper crops globally. Wheat output has grown in Australia, the US, Russia, Ukraine, everywhere pretty much, except the EU where it has been too rainy. Where are the mea culpas? h/t to the GWPF
Jan 2015, published in Nature. “Global Wheat Yield May Drop as Temperatures Rise”
“… researchers are now letting farmers know that the world’s wheat yields are excepted decline in the near future, with the world standing to lose six percent of its wheat crop for every degree Celsius that the annual global temperature increases.
“The simulations with the multi-crop models showed that warming is already slowing yield gains, despite observed yield increases in the past, at a majority of wheat-growing locations across the globe,” researcher Senthold Asseng, at the University […]
…
7.8 out of 10 based on 24 ratings
Today the Paris Agreement jumped from including 1.1% of global emissions to 39%. It’s part of the performance art, the Grand Act. Including those emissions means nothing as far as emissions go (China will keep putting out more), but it carries political leverage unless we expose the game.
Make no mistake: there is nothing at all legally binding about the Paris Agreement, but it can be politically binding — like a Chastity Vow. Right now, it’s about shame and social standing, not about megatons, but inasmuch as bluff and bluster can pull it off, the UN will eventually want the shapeshifting chastity vow to be treated as a legal force.
This soft vow has the advantage that is completely two faced — it can be all things to all people. To the green-passionate crowd it will be a historic, landmark agreement of the world working together. That’s “momentum”. To the free world, it may look like a failure, but that’s an advantage — it disarms the protests. Watch the Pea — (it’s really a bee). The sting is hidden. That’s ACT III.
After the Copenhagen disaster, the Global Worriers realized that they would have to sneak in a mechanism to […]
Somewhere in the world, a whole town is missing their tea-leaf readers.
The Physics tells us (practical beats us over the head) that more CO2 will mean warmer nights. It is a 97% certified mantra that warm nights are a fingerprint of man-made global warming.*
Well don’t look now, but CO2 causes cold nights too (and get this… on the East Coast).
Extreme-weather winters are becoming more common in US
Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the simultaneous occurrence of extremely cold winter days in the Eastern United States and extremely warm winter days in the West, according to a Stanford-led study published in Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres. Human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are likely driving this trend, the researchers report.
Used to be that single seasons were “weather” and thirty year trends were “science”– now all they need is a single repeated season and half a country:
“Looking back at temperature data from the past 35 years, we’ve found that in fact 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 did have the biggest difference in winter temperature between the East and West.”
This is pretty freaky — can you imagine how smart these guys must […]
A bunch of scientists used tree rings to figure out the streamflow in Bear River, Utah, since the dark ages. This is what a perfect stable climate looks like.
Obviously we need immediate carbon trading to stop whatever is going to happen next:
Figure 1. Reconstructed Bear River decadal-scale drought (brown) and wet (green) periods from cubic smoothing spline with frequency response of 25% at wavelength 10 years. Dashed lines indicate 1 SD from reconstruction mean. Adapted from DeRose et al. (2016).
Thanks to the excellent CO2Science site for analyzing it in their collection.
In 1200 Years of Historic Streamflow we see that there was a dreadful drought in 1210 that lasted 70 years. The worst wet period lasted nearly 50 years and started in 1378. Spot the effect of CO2. Anyone?
Naturally there has already been a Bear River Climate Change Adaptation Workshop, with “thirty-nine representatives of 20 state and federal agencies, local governments, academic institutions, and non-governmental organizations.”
The old 2010 Workshop report tells us we have to let go of the idea that the climate is stable — “stationarity is dead”. *
“ We are no longer working in a world where we can assume […]
Welcome to Higher Education 2016: Whatever you do, don’t ask questions, don’t ask for evidence, and don’t discuss your doubts on class forums. “We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change’” All outside sources for research must be peer reviewed by the IPCC.
Students in the University of Colorado expressed concern about the first online lecture in “Medical Humanities in the Digital Age”. All three Professors together replied via email that students should Drop class if they dispute man-made climate change
“The point of departure for this course is based on the scientific premise that human induced climate change is valid and occurring. We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change, nor will the ‘other side’ of the climate change debate be taught or discussed in this course,” states the email, a copy of which was provided to The College Fix by a student in the course.
“Opening up a debate that 98% of climate scientists unequivocally agree to be a non-debate would detract from the central concerns of environment and health addressed in this course,” the professors’ email continued.
“… If you believe this premise […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support AT joannenova.com.au
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments