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Ain’t that the way? When it comes to taking individual action, skeptics are more environmental than the people who call themselves “environmental”.
A new psych study shows that skeptics are more likely to use cloth shopping bags, catch public transport and buy eco-friendly items. Hall et al somehow got 600 people to fill in a survey up to seven times in one year about their belief in “climate change” and their self-reported action. They found there are three types of people: the “highly concerned” about climate change, the “cautiously worried” and the “skeptical”. The “highly convinced” believers may tell the world we have to act, but they were more likely to use plastic bags themselves and drive their car. They were more likely to want government policies to magically solve the problem. Skeptics meanwhile, were more passionately against government meddling than any group was on any issue. It was the single most definitive score.
Skeptics (blue) were more likely to reuse shopping bags, buy eco-friendly things, and catch the bus and train. The highly concerned (red) were more likely to recycle goods and otherwise support government action.
Researchers were pretty much baffled by their results and admitted as […]
Tell me again how solar power is cheaper than fossil fuels
People in the UK have been misled into taking out loans to put solar panels on their roof — they were told the panels would “pay for themselves” but discovered they were losing money. The UK Ombudsman has received around 2,000 complaints.
Barclays bank hit by solar scandal
Solar manufacturers paired up with banks to install and finance solar installations telling customers they’d make money, except many didn’t:
… a common method was to encourage households to buy the panels on credit from a partner lender. Households were often told that the subsidy income, combined with the savings from buying less electricity, would more than cover the loan repayments. In some cases this proved to be false.
Many of those to whom panels were allegedly mis-sold were either “retired or approaching retirement” and some were “left in financial difficulty”, the financial ombudsman said. One customer was left £1,000 a year worse off.
We can all say fair’s fair, do your homework before you buy. But under UK law, the partner-banks are responsible for the financial scam not the solar manufacturers (and not the customers). […]
When investors cry for certainty, what they really want is “no risks” and “your money”
The renewables industry only exists because of government largess. What the government giveth, so can it sucketh.
Now that the bountiful wheel of the Turnbull government is turning slightly toward other beneficiaries, the Australian renewables industry are holding crisis meetings. Feel the entitlement! Sophie Vorrath reports in RenewEconomy on the green industry disappointment with the NEG — (the theoretical new Australian plan for Weather-Management-with-Socialist-Electricity-Grids.)
The government is still picking winners, it’s just different winners:
NEG will block renewables, favour hydro and big retailers Oliver Yates, head of UPC Renewables:
Yates said that setting emissions compliance cost on a path to zero could “pull the carpet out” from under existing solar and wind energy investments and actually stop future investments. “This is very bad for our industry and very bad for the nation as a whole, as this orderly investment and orderly transition towards using new generation assets is required.”
And – “as a banker” – Yates also warned against the mentality that the NEG could be legislated now, and tweaked later, under a future Labor government, or a more enlightened […]
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9.7 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
Obviously, if you are a thirsty solar panel, Australia is the place to be. We have ready-made irrigated high quality agricultural land set to be covered with an uneconomic and unreliable solar panels.
Only collective-coerced taxpayers are stupid enough to pay for this.
It’s so silly, groups of unconnected farmers of all different kinds are rallying together to oppose the flagrant waste.
Prime agricultural land loss or booming future energy? That’s the solar planning conundrum for Victoria
Residents near Shepparton are concerned that farmland the Victorian Government has invested in under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan will be lost to agriculture as the state undergoes a solar farm boom.
Four applications for solar farms in the Greater Shepparton region that could produce up to 243 megawatts of electricity have been proposed for Tatura, Tallygaroopna, Lemnos and Congupna, and have been ‘called in’ by the Victorian planning minister.
Critics say there has been no thought put to where the solar farms are being placed and how much prime agricultural land is being lost, and while there is suitable, more arid land available close by.
At least two of the solar farms have […]
A reminder of what most of our planet is made of.
Volcano, lava spreads across road, Hawaii, May 2018.
The lava has reached Leilani estates. Rock and ash are being thrown into the air. Evacuations are underway. There has been some warning. Small earthquakes have been occurring. Cracks appearing in roads.
See the drone footage of the eruption in Hawaii:
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RT news story on this:
9 out of 10 based on 40 ratings
CFACT has a report from a 40 year career meteorologist who alleges that skeptics are silenced through intimidation and threats at the National Weather Service (NWS). He also says data is “altered for political purposes” and that he was advised nearly forty years ago that he could find fame and fortune with CO2.
““When I was a graduate student I had a professor come up to me, and he said in the late 1970s ‘If you want to make a name in the field, want to be famous, CO₂ is the place to go.’ There is a lot of money to be made, authority and control over people’s lives at stake.””
A whole generation of meteorologists and climate scientists have been raised with these incentives, and a culture of fear:
Meteorologist allegedly assaulted by NWS Director Uccellini
Adam Howser, CFACT
“I was giving a talk to fellow NWS staff about the jet stream flow in the upper atmosphere [in 2014]. What it showed was large amplitude waves in both the northern and southern hemispheres. I explained that the only way the jet stream could get to be high amplitude is if the atmosphere was […]
Since 1984 humans have gushed forth 64% of our entire emissions from fossil fuels. (Fully 282,000 megatons of deplorable carbon “pollution”.)
During this time, satellite images show that 24% of our beaches shrank, while 28% grew. Thus we can say that thanks to the carbon apocalypse there are 3,660 sq kms more global beaches now than there were thirty years ago. Yes. It’s that bad.
The encroachment of beaches would mean there is less ocean for fishes. Thankfully sea levels have risen too, so it looks like it will all work out.
This study also produced a handy map of where the sandiest beaches are. Clearly Africa wins (unless you prefer rocks and cliffs).
h/t GWPF
Sandy beaches (yellow) versus Rocky beaches (black). Percentages indicate the proportion of sandy beaches. Source
Presumbly the paradox of how seas can rise unprecedentedly fast at the same time as beaches are growing will be explained through global currents shifting ominously due to rising CO2 levels. Either that, or the paradox and the study will vanish into a subterranean library — like the deeper Asthenosphere Archive, where they will be converted to magma.
Seriously, though, this study appears to be the first to […]
Wow. Wait til word gets out. This is dynamite.
Chinese Bitcoin miners are reopening the Hunter Valley coal power station called Redbank in NSW. They have a deal that gets around our gargantuan, mismanaged grid by buying coal power direct for 8c/kWh, while Australians in the same place pay 28c/kWh.
This is exactly the nightmare the head of the Australian Energy Management Organisation (AEMO) spoke of just last week — that “big players could abandon the grid”. That’s a degenerate spiral leaving a shrinking pool of suckers to pay for the inefficient, bird-killing, blackout prone, witchdoctor grid.
Bitcoin mining’s growing demand for cheap energy revived a shuttered coal mine
Ashat Rathi, Quartz
Consumers there pay, on average, $A0.28 ($0.22) per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for electricity. But Hunter Energy, which owns Redbank, are offering the crypto miners electricity at a fraction of the cost. The “first-of-its-kind” deal, as the Age puts it, will see the crypto miners pay only A$0.08 per kWh in the day and A$0.05 per kWh at night. Hunter Energy told the Age that the price is feasible because the electricity produced at the coal power plant would go straight to the crypto miners, bypassing—and […]
There are 741 million people in the EU. For years, their supranational government has been spending one fifth of their entire budget (!) on attempts to change the weather. Since that didn’t work, they are going to spend more. What was 20% is rising to 25%.
It says a lot about how irrelevant the EU is that they have nothing more important to do than wave sticks at future storms and promise to hold back the tide with low powered hairdryers.
No other big pressing issues?
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The European Union’s executive is poised to propose spending 25 percent of funds available in next EU multiannual budget on activities related to climate protection, making sure new economic and political challenges don’t weaken the bloc’s resolve to fight pollution.
While Europe’s political priorities are changing, the EU wants to continue leading global efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, which scientists blame for heating up the planet, and seeks to cut dependence on fossil fuels, shifting to cleaner renewable energy sources. The bloc aims to lower carbon emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels and to boost the share of renewables to at least 27 percent of energy […]
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9.3 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
Climate Worriers have the most terrible luck. All the runes were lined up for Solar power — it is nearly free, pours from heaven, and millions of people seem to need energy “pretty often”. Plus universities and governments have gifted twenty years of free advertising about its Glorious Wonderfulness. Solar power is also used by the Celebrity Saints of Gaia thus filling fashionable, spiritual, and tribal needs. On a good day, it fills some megawatt needs too.
Despite all this, without forced payments from unwilling and unwitting non-users of solar power, investors are fleeing and the solar industry in Germany is collapsing. How can that be?!
Lawrence Solomon: Are solar and wind finally cheaper than fossil fuels? Not a chance
Financial Post
After the German government decided to reduce subsidies to the solar industry in 2012, the industry nose-dived. By this year, virtually every major German solar producer had gone under as new capacity declined by 90 per cent and new investment by 92 per cent. Some 80,000 workers — 70 per cent of the solar workforce — lost their jobs. Solar power’s market share is shrinking and solar panels, having outlived their usefulness, are being retired without […]
New research looking at three and a half billion social media posts from tens of millions of individuals showed the very unshocking result that people are happiest on sunny clear days around 25C. Facebook and Twitter comments on those days used more positive, fun terms. Days below 20, above 30, that were cloudy or had a humidity above 80% put people in a less happy mood. So did terrorist events, and the effects of weather were pretty comparable. Temperatures that are below freezing put a real dampener on expressions of positive sentiment. (The next ice age is going to be no fun.)
Peak positive occurs in the mid to high twenties and on days with zero mm of rain.
The effect of temperature and rain on Facebook and Twitter moods in the US.
Some people have a sunny disposition, others have cloudy faces and everyone over two knows what those expressions mean.
If our aim is to maximize human happiness and productivity, shouldn’t the UN Weather Control Committee (IPCC) be aiming to reduce freezing days and maximize the zone of 25C days on areas with the highest population density?
Judging by this awesome Hedonometer graph, during the hottest ever […]
Two researchers looked at the ten main countries in East Africa in the last fifty years and compared global temperatures to a database of wars, conflicts and refugees.
They found that regional drought and global temperatures didn’t cause wars or drive the total number of displaced people. The things that did were rapid population growth, poor economic times, and political instability.
“What our study suggests is the failure of political systems is the primary cause of conflict and displacement of large numbers of people.”
Thus, if you love peace, it’s better to defend free speech and the constitution than to use cloth shopping bags and change your light globes.
Climate change is not a key cause of conflict
The Conversation, Mark Maslin
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Probably the most surprising thing about this study is that sometimes academics test hypotheses and publish sensible conclusions.
In our recent paper, my student Erin Owain and I decided to test the climate-conflict hypothesis, using East Africa as our focus. The region is already very hot and very poor, making it especially vulnerable to climate change (in fact neighbouring Chad is by some measures the single most vulnerable country in the […]
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9.6 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
The land of the sunburnt country finds that the rapid uptake of solar is a headache, disrupting the grid, adding variability, making management more complicated. Read right through. The head of the AEMO gives an upbeat talk, but the ominous message is that solar panels are flooding in, there are lots of problems, and not only are baseload generators leaving the market, but there may come a day when things are so ludicrously expensive that big energy customers leave to generate their own too. Is that what the death of a grid looks like?
Audrey Zibelman is the head of the AEMO – Australian Energy Market Operator – which has the responsibility of managing the electricity and gas market and grid stability for all Australians. To hear her, you’d think the future is renewable, the transition is not being artificially forced on the market, and there is no alternative to alternative energy.
Zibelman tosses out pat free-market lines with a straight face, saying at 17:20 that we never really want governments to “pick a technology”, ignoring that this whole transition, all of it, is only happening because governments “picked a technology”.
Listen at 21:30 to get an […]
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A new paper finds that there is already enough genetic variety spread across the Great Barrier Reef to adapt to the imagined “unprecedented” warming coming in the next two centuries. We don’t need to rely on random mutations or consider fantasy solutions of man-made oceanic sunscreens, mass sunshades, or giant reef fans. Corals already have a major immigration program running pretty effectively to juggle 200 million years of genetic material and then spread the successes far and wide. Meddling humans can help things (maybe) by moving a few bits of coral around. That’s it. Cancel the scare please.
Skeptics have been saying this for years — who needs a computer model to predict that the Barrier Reef will adapt? How bad could global warming be? The global oceans span a 32C range and corals prefer the hottest five degrees of that. Indeed, there is a five degree temperature range from one end of the Great Barrier Reef to the other, and corals are clearly, obviously pretty happy about it. Meanwhile, the atmosphere is warming at a mere tenth of a degree per decade. Then there is the well known phenomenon that corals spawn in vast clouds that are […]
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8.8 out of 10 based on 24 ratings
What destroys a grid faster than than a socialist electricity system? A semi-socialist system that pretends to be a free market.
This hybrid monster combines the worst of both socialism and capitalism at the same time. Socialists get the power to destroy, then capitalists can use self serving interest to make it happen faster.
The socialist managers can pick loser options (wind and solar), rig the market, and also conveniently blame the market when things go wrong. In a pure socialist system, at least the public know who created the mess.
What socialism created — socialism can partly solve
In a free market Liddell’s cheap coal power would not be closing in 2022. Since we have no free market, and can’t suddenly create one, the only band-aid option is to buy the damn asset back:
Ron Boswell gets it:
If someone suggested that $3 billion in consumer-funded subsidies be paid to one energy source every year for the next 12 years, and if that one energy source was guaranteed significant market share for every one of those years, and if there were hundreds of millions of dollars available in grants and concessional loans to projects limited to that […]
Hands up who knew that Greenland has been pretty much the same temperature for the last hundred and forty years?
We know that there has been massive melting ice, shrinking ice sheets, a dark zone that is a huge problem, that the melting is accelerating, faster than at any time in the last 400 years. We all know “this is scary”, and due to climate change and could raise sea levels by 20 feet. And that’s just the news stories in the last two weeks.
At NoTricksZone, Kenneth Richards has found an up to date graph of Greenland temperatures buried in the supplement of a new paper by Mikkelsen et al., 2018:
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So Greenland hasn’t been showing signs of warming since man made CO2 started rapidly rising after World War II. Indeed Greenland has been not responding to CO2 for 140 years or maybe a million.
Serious researchers have known this for years. It’s not like a flat trend suddenly popped up to surprise us.
Hat tip to Bob FJ for sending graphs and links of earlier studies last year. Even far back in 2004, it was obvious Greenland was not warming like it was supposed to. That […]
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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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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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