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Trump is rattling the climate cages
Meanwhile Trump is putting the environmental establishment off-guard — romping, as it were, through any semblance of normal. He is not playing by the usual rules: climate change is gone from the website and the EPA have been told to freeze all grants and contracts. As a negotiation technique, this is the hammer blow opening move. He is forcing those he wants to deal with to rewrite entirely what they expect they can get. A gambit. He is reminding them he is the boss, and that they can take nothing for granted, and that he is not afraid of them calling him names like: “a racist anti-science, flat Earth, climate denier”.
Trump rightly calculates that they have already called him all of the above, and they will continue to do so, no matter what he does. They don’t have much ammo, he knows it, and he’s getting them to show their hand, and betting that they haven’t got much left to fire. How big are those protests going to be? Will the public really care? (His popularity might go up.)
Trump is overloading the media. By doing everything at once, immigration, the environment, the […]
When a word that isn’t a word wins Word of the Year prize, we know Macquarie has lost it.
Bowing to the God of Political Correctness, Macquarie Dictionary has just named “Fake News” as Word of the Year.
In real English, “Fake news” is two words, otherwise known as a phrase. Separately both words have real and easy-to-understand meanings. Together they have become the the latest meaningless slur as the mainstream media realize they are losing power and influence to the real news on blogs and in the alt-media. The old-media is trying to stop the bleed by labeling the new media as “fake”. Instead of namecalling, the old-media could win easily if it just reported the real news.
When a word that isn’t a word wins Word of the Year prize, we know Macquarie has lost it. If any Macquarie products are on your back-to-school booklists, buy something else. Who wants to teach our kids fake English?
This is the latest attempt by wordsmiths to destroy the language honest people use. We need accurate words to slice and dice arguments of parasites, freeloaders, and self-serving fools. “News” used to mean the whole story and all the facts that […]
Back in 2011 Anton Lang, Tony Cox, and I wrote here about why Australia would be better off with super critical hot coal generators (which China already uses, and which even Indonesia will get before us). Not only do we get cheap reliable power, but it would be a better way to reduce our emissions (if we want to pretend to change the weather).
Now, finally, in 2017 Malcolm Turnbull is saying the same thing as the skeptics he mocked years ago. This is how the “climate meme” dies, one unacknowledged step at a time. Gradually all the skeptical positions get picked up, years later and after burning billions at the altar of “climate control”. This is a big win for skeptics, but don’t expect Turnbull or the ABC to be honest enough to say so. This marks a major turning point in the discussion about coal in Australia which has mostly never got past the “coal is dying” and the “stranded assets” inanity which implied that coal has no future and our massive coal reserves were useless instead of being our major export industry.
Last week Tony Abbott, former PM, called for stop to subsidies for wind power – […]
A funny thing happens when governments put “free energy” into an electricity grid. Wind turbines force down wholesale prices, but everyone’s electricity bill goes up.
Those cheap green electrons look so seductive, but the advertising hides the effect that intermittent, unstable electricity has on the whole system.
Armada Funds Management manages $400m dollars worth of South Australian shops. Look at the price shock these small business managers are dealing with, like $1200 a month, and only one employee:
Power spike hits South Australian shopping centres
The Australian, Jan 18:
Chris Monaghan, Armada’s managing director [said]…costs for purchasing electricity for shopping centres in South Australia had increased by 87 per cent during peak times last year and 101 per cent in off-peak periods. Costs would increase again this year a further 57 per cent at peak periods and 15 per cent off-peak.
The total extra cost to landlords could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Nino Pilaia, who has been running Meats-N-More Carvery & Spuds … His business was among those affected by power blackouts last year and ever-increasing energy costs. “For this little place here of about 30sq m, it is […]
How fast can we burn millions of dollars trying to stuff a perfectly good fertilizer down a sinkhole? This fast…
Carbon capture must rank as one of the most flagrantly ridiculous ways to spend money (even more pointless than desal). To capture and bury the CO2 of a coal fired plant we have to spend around 60% more to build every new power station and then throw away 40% the electricity it makes. (See TonyfromOz’s calculations in the link below).
Sputnik News reports on the second collapse of UK funding for Carbon Capture:
The UK Government has wasted US$123 million on a competition to develop technology that will capture carbon emissions. The project was cancelled according to a report, after the Energy Department failed to agree the long-term costs of the competition with the Treasury.
Concerns over the price to consumers led to the competitions demise, according to the National Audit Office (NAO).
The report, which was produced by the NAO, warned that it was “currently inconceivable” that the CCS projects would be developed with government support, and that the competition costs did not achieve value for money.
This is not the first time a competition run by the government […]
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8.8 out of 10 based on 23 ratings
The Morning After: This is probably the best day for sane, honest, skeptical citizens in the last 30 years. In the long climate debate, this is the most significant political event — with more potential to restore science and free speech back to their rightful place. Ain’t democracy a great thing? Those who don’t like Trump say it was “populist” and a repeat of his campaign speech. Other people say “it’s about time”.
Trump is putting together a package for his customers, and telling the competition the US won’t be giving anything away.
UPDATE: and climate change disappears from the whitehouse website. Already Trump is in control of the Whitehouse.gov site and according to Jason Koebler “climate change has been deleted“. He writes: “It’s customary for www.whitehouse.gov to flip over to the new administration exactly at noon, but the only mention of climate on President Trump’s new website is under his “America First Energy Plan” page, in which he vows to destroy President Obama’s Climate Action Plan. A search of the website found no mention of “global warming,“…
From his inauguration speech:
“Today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or […]
Don’t mention the trend The warming in the last two decades is 0.06C/decade not 0.22C.
The hottest ever year tells us nothing about the cause of global warming, but the 20 year trend does — and the message from the trend is “the models are wrong”.
Despite the Chinese releasing gigatons of coal fired CO2 into the air, the warming that has happened has been tiny compared to what their models predict. It is so low the Global Worriers won’t talk about the trend. Gone are the days when they would discuss degrees per decade. Meh! The same people who scoffed at skeptics for mentioning one freak season are now reduced to picking on one freak El Nino, and pumping annual tiny fractions of “record” after “record”. If the sun caused global warming (the evidence is there) we’d still be getting warm records, especially in El Nino years. What’s amazing is that after a record El Nino the world hit pretty much the same temperature as it did in 1998.
Dr David Evans has just recalculated the warming trend for the last two decades and found that the warming effect is a big six […]
The same modelers were predicting drought and letting their friends nail their reputation to statements about how the dams would never fill, and Perth would be a ghost town. When Australia wasted billions on desal, they said nothing about the “extreme rain” coming. Then the endless drought broke, the rains returned, and now, years later, they’ve rejigged and tweaked their skillless models and put forward ambiguous, vague, yes-no-maybe, scare-scare-scary predictions that could have come from a tarot card reader.
Get ready for the full genius of expert modelling:
“There is no chance that rainfall in Australia will remain the same as the climate warms,” said an author of the paper UNSW Professor Steve Sherwood.
“The only way that this intensification of extreme rainfall falls at the lower end of the scale is if the continent becomes drier overall. The long and the short of it is that with 2°C of global warming Australia is stuck with either more aridity, much heavier extreme rains, or some combination of the two,” said Sherwood, from UNSW’s Climate Change Research Centre.
— A hard rain to fall in Australia, Phys org.
Other, less astrological climate […]
Eric Worrall notified me of Obama’s parting present to the UN Gravy Train. By handing cash to the UN he can put it beyond Trump (and the voters) control. Obama gave a billion dollars to the UN to tackle Global Warming President Barack Obama has made one final contribution to the fight against global warming on his way out the White House door. On Tuesday, Obama transferred $500 million to the UN’s Green Climate Fund, a key program set up to finance climate change adaptation and renewable energy projects in developing countries. I predict this will reduce sea levels by a factor too small for anyone to detect, even in 2100. But it’s very effective advertising for the Obama brand. Who knows what UN Department head, University, or Foundation is out there right now looking for a former US Pres?
Call me cynical, Obama may really believe he can hold back the tide, but obviously this is not what US voters just voted for. (But who cares what they want, right?)
As a form of resume-building, the gifting approach seemed to work well for Julia Gillard who donated $88million of our tax dollars and lo and behold, became Chairman of […]
Wind farm in Xinjiang viewed from the Lanxin railway. | Image by “Train to Xinjiang Provnice” (sic)
The command economy strikes again. China is touted as the renewables leader, installing a gobsmacking one third of all the worlds wind towers. But with a recent economic slowdown, when push comes to shove, coal power is used and wind farms are not.
It Can Power a Small Nation. But This Wind Farm in China Is Mostly Idle.
[NY Times] — More than 92,000 wind turbines have been built across the country, capable of generating 145 gigawatts of electricity, nearly double the capacity of wind farms in the United States. One out of every three turbines in the world is now in China, and the government is adding them at a rate of more than one per hour.
But some of its most ambitious wind projects are underused. Many are grappling with a nationwide economic slowdown that has dampened demand for electricity. Others are stymied by persistent favoritism toward the coal industry by local officials and a dearth of transmission lines to carry electricity from rural areas in the north and west to China’s fastest-growing cities.
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It’s cold up there in Canada, Alaska, Siberia. The Green circle marked over Greenland. (Purple means “minus 30” or colder). | Map Nullschool.
Wholesale gas and electricity prices have risen between 30 and 40 per cent over the past three-to-five months in the UK according to Bobby Kalar, the boss of Yu energy.
Not surprisingly, pensioners in the UK say they are cutting back on food so they can afford to keep the heat on. Still, their sacrifices will mean the world will be 0.00C cooler in 2100. Hard to argue with that.
Express UK
WINTER CRISIS: One MILLION pensioners fear they cannot afford to heat their homes
And a third will be forced to ration their heating in a bid to keep the bills down, according to a new survey.
Of Britain’s 11.5m over 65s, nearly one in ten (nine per cent) are anticipating either a new health problem or the worsening of a current condition, like arthritis, as they struggle with the cold.
As many as 90 per cent of the 2,000 pensioners surveyed by comparison website comparethemarket.com believe the high cost of gas and electricity presents a real […]
UPDATE: Watch the proceedings live Weds morning US time
Donald Trump nominated the man who is the expert at running lawsuits against the EPA to run it. Naturally this threatens a lot of sacred totems, not to mention a very big trough. Protests are raging. In reply, people are speaking up in support of Pruitt.
Those who think his nomination should be opposed are confused saying that “Mr. Pruitt’s backers tout it as a virtue that he has sued the EPA. … In every instance, Mr. Pruitt has joined forces with polluting industries seeking to avoid clean up responsibilities.”
The EPA is so lost, it doesn’t know what real pollution is anymore. Opposing the EPA is what any good environmentalist would do.
The EPA is so lost, it doesn’t know what real pollution is anymore. Opposing the EPA is what any good environmentalist would do.
The religious mission against plant fertilizer in the hope of holding back the tide by half a millimeter in 2100 is noxious, damaging, dangerous in so many ways. It deprives the poor of cheap energy, good jobs, and warm houses. It hurts the environment because it makes the EPA, the US, so much less effective […]
Now this is climate change. If you can believe this study, wow:
“In the tropics, annual mean temperature fell from 27 to 5 degrees Celsius”
And we worry about a warming of one degree in a century.
“It became cold, I mean, really cold,” says Brugger. Global annual mean surface air temperature dropped by at least 26 degrees Celsius. The dinosaurs were used to living in a lush climate. After the asteroid’s impact, the annual average temperature was below freezing point for about 3 years. Evidently, the ice caps expanded. Even in the tropics, annual mean temperatures went from 27 degrees to mere 5 degrees. “The long-term cooling caused by the sulfate aerosols was much more important for the mass extinction than the dust that stays in the atmosphere for only a relatively short time. It was also more important than local events like the extreme heat close to the impact, wildfires or tsunamis,” says co-author Georg Feulner who leads the research team at PIK. It took the climate about 30 years to recover, the scientists found.
The real threats are not fertilizer and balmy weather, but rocks from space, and cold, cold, cold…
How the […]
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Who knew the US government accepted loan repayments in peanuts? And what happens to the $74 million dollars worth of peanuts that come in? They could pay politicians with it…
Other waste identified by Senator Flake in Wastebook: PORKémon Go, includes a study that found girls are more likely to play with Barbie dolls than boys are. Nearly $2m was spent on holograms of dead comedians. The IRS, not so surprisingly, says the IRS doesn’t waste tax dollars. Flake points out they spend $12m on an email archiving service in 2014 that they never even installed.
If the US government spent $12 million on using the sun to model the climate instead, it would be about 0.1% of what they’ve spent on models driven by CO2 which still don’t work after 20 years of tweaking.
Public relations and advertising amounted to a total of $1.4 billion. US national Debt is nearly $20 trillion.
Press Release
Among the 50 examples of egregious federal spending uncovered in Flake’s 2017 report are a program that accepts peanuts for loan repayments, a computer that binge-watches Desperate Housewives, and a study into what happens when you put a fish […]
(Click for the full advert)
The Climate Study Group is trying a new approach with an Advert in The Australian on page 7 today. Or rather, you might say this is a very old approach…:
Socrates Nice to meet you Mr Smith. I hear you are very concerned about dangerous global warming.
Mr Smith Yes, we are facing an alarming prospect of a global warming catastrophe.
Socrates What gives you such concern?
Mr Smith Emissions of CO2 from burning fossil fuels.
Socrates How were these fossil fuels formed?
Mr Smith Various plant forms grew, died and formed fossil fuels before and during the Carboniferous Period.
Socrates Was there dangerous global warming prior to the Carboniferous Period?
Mr Smith No. There’s no evidence of dangerous global warming prior to the Carboniferous period.
Socrates So where did the carbon in fossil fuels originate?
Mr Smith Plants absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere prior to the formation of fossil fuels.
Socrates So the CO2 absorbed by plants is now being released from burning fossil fuels.
Mr Smith It must […]
David Archibald writes” From some sort of parallel universe, this is part of a speech given by the Chief of Army, as in Australia’s army.
Campbell appears to be completely duped by the weather-doctors — not the kind of gullible guy you’d put in charge of heavy machinery (and y’know, national security):
For the first time in mankind’s history our planet may become unsuitable for habitation in many of the places where large populations presently live. The Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University (ANU) asserts; changes would be irreversible on the time scale of human civilisation and would dramatically change the planet as we know it.
This is an unprecedented problem – the global population and its actions are bumping up hard against the capacity of the planet to sustain us in the present form.
He appears to have done no minutes of cross-checking, just swallowed the academics and paparazzi opinions holus. Why fight the climate? Campbell’s reasoning amounts to saying that the US is doing climate stuff (Jo notes they were then, but they won’t be soon.). It’s not too good when the head of your army hasn’t figured out the big secret […]
The Fake Conversation where Bill’s informative, polite comments are removed, but the replies are left there.
Last week Bill Johnston posted a detailed, comprehensive analysis of Sydney Observatory thermometer record here that shows that most of the warming recorded there is due to buildings and freeways. But photo’s and graphs are “denier” stuff, and The Conversation is so afraid some its readers might see those historic photos they ban links to Bill’s work and joannenova.com.au. Apparently when the Bureau of Meteorology discusses “Australia’s hottest decade” it is off topic to discuss the condition of their thermometers.
Bill Johnston was happy to defend his work in comments at The Conversation, but Blair Trewin, who wrote the post itself, was entirely absent. Cory Zanoni had to close the dangerous thread. He removed scores of comments, but left replies to Bill Johnston intact. Some “conversation”.
At least 46 of Bill Johnston’s comments were deleted from Australia’s climate in 2016 – a year of two halves as El Niño unwound and 19 deleted from Australian climate politics in 2017: a guide for the perplexed. As Bill says: They obviously want to stay perplexed; uninformed; scary-cats, without a paddle for their leaky canoe.
[…]
These are Enercon wind turbines in Germany, Lower Saxony. Image: Philip May
This could be a watershed — if word gets out that turbine manufacturers will not even contest claims of noise damage, there could be many more claims around the world. There are rumors these cases are often settled out of court with confidentiality agreements, but who would know?
In an update to the Irish court case we discussed last month, the latest news confirms that the wind turbine manufacturer has admitted liability without contesting it. The court will be deciding damages in April. As I deduced at the time, the wind industry was using desperate wordsmithing to minimize attention on the story. The news item related to it even disappeared from the Irish Examiner. The turbine industry must be hoping no one notices this story.
Stop These Things has an update:
Wind company admits nuisance damage to neighbours Irish Farmers Journal Paul Mooney 5 January 2017
High Court to determine compensation for seven families in April hearing.
9.2 out of 10 based on 91 ratings […]
It’s another warmy story:
Worst year in NSW for Salmonella, E.Coli as global temperatures increase
NSW recorded its worst figures in at least five years for diseases caused by food poisoning and mosquito bites, as doctors warn climate change is looming as a public health emergency.
Statistics released last week show 2016 was the worst year on record for diseases including legionnaires’ disease, salmonellosis, listeriosis, E. coli and dengue fever, which flourish in warmer conditions.
–-Harriet Alexander, Sydney Morning Herald
More scary than 4000 cases of salmonella is the state of intellectual rigor among medico-unions:
The Royal Australasian College of Physicians [RACP] has released a position paper that described climate change as a “global public health emergency”.
The RACP called for a national climate and health strategy and reduced emissions of greenhouse gases.
With reasoning like that, they could make a lot more people very sick. Are they advocating we use solar panels to stop salmonella?
There has hardly been any warming in the last 20 years anyhow. And if we are doing cosmic epidemiology, so far global warming seems to come with longer lifespans, health, wealth, food, […]
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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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