Weekend Unthreaded

7.1 out of 10 based on 32 ratings

Birds using aerial bombing with firesticks to light fires and flush out prey

By Crikey! Birds are deliberately using fire as a tool. Humans are not the only animals on Earth setting things on fire.

Aerial arsonists are on the loose. Sneaky Australian raptors have been spotted picking up burning sticks, or even stealing them from a campfire and then deliberately dropping them on grass so they can feast on rodents fleeing from the fire. Apparently they do this in hunting packs, and will drop the burning stick half a mile away on the far side of waterways or roads. Aboriginal people have been talking about this for years, but no one quite believed it.

This really puts a spanner in the works of the fire management plans. So much for firebreaks.

Someone is going to have to get these birds to apply for permits.

Australian raptors can spread fires. Credit: Bob Gosford

Australian Birds Steal Fire to Smoke Out Prey

Live Science, Mindy Weisberger

Three species of raptors — predatory birds with sharp beaks and talons, and keen eyesight — are widely known not only for lurking on the fringes of fires but also for snatching up smoldering grasses or branches and using them to kindle […]

Earth doomed! Hawking offers to pay deniers fares to Venus: Jo says he can send himself to Mars

Forget 2 degrees of warming, Hawking says “460”.

Oh, look, there goes another attention-seeking celebrity scientist — flaming out –watch the arc:

In the second episode of his new series “Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places,” the British physicist warns Earth could soon become as hot as Venus if action to halt climate change is not taken immediately.

Now temperatures on Venus reach 250°C with powerful 300mph winds. Hawking says a greenhouse effect burned the planet’s oceans and lands, and that something similar could happen right here on Earth if climate change continues unabated.

“Next time you meet a climate-change denier, tell them to take a trip to Venus; I will pay the fare,” says the physicist in his show.

Sadly, Hawking is an atmosphere-denier. Venus’s atmosphere is ninety times denser than the Earths. The lapse rate* just goes on and on through 60 kilometers of “air” and Venus ends up with a 467 degree surface, just like Earth would if it had an atmosphere this thick. (See these calculations.)

When Hawking yells “Venus”, I yell back “Mars”. Both have atmospheres of 95% CO2, but one is 467 degrees and the other is minus 40. Hawking […]

Germany drops carbon target

Compare the outrage: Germany abandons carbon target, but stays in Paris agreement. US abandons Paris, but makes actual “carbon” cuts. One of these nations is a global pariah.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s would-be coalition partners have agreed to drop plans to lower carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, sources familiar with negotiations said on Monday —

And this is a problem, how?

— a potential embarrassment for Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Oh.? Well, it’s only dates and numbers anyway:

Instead, they would aim to hit the 40 percent target in the early 2020s, the sources said, adding that both parties are still sticking to their goal of achieving a 55 percent cut in emissions by 2030.

Which is more important, paper promises you don’t keep, or lower outputs of “planet destroying gas”? Nevermind about CO2.

Source: Washington Times

US Outshines other countries in CO2 emission reduction.

In other unrelated news: Wind energy is taking over the world, highly competitve and in Germany — collapsing.

The German wind market is “threatening to implode”:

In the past year alone, more than 2,000 employees in this sector […]

Wet Dream of climate dictators: Skeptics exiled to convict camps on Antarctic Islands

Tony Thomas has unearthed a ten year old document that reads like a wet dream for mini-climate dictators. It envisages, by 2028, that the first climate skeptics will be convicted of denying the existence of climate change and exiled to three penal colonies in, wait for it, Kerguelen Island, South Georgia and New Zealand’s South Island. Magically, these are “International convict settlements.” So it’s globalist prisons for the deplorables who say unpermitted things, because they are so bad, we wouldn’t want them mixing with normal criminals back home who believe in climate change but rort the carbon markets.

Luckily their fantasy fiction is even less accurate than climate models. By 2030 they are tipping Africa as an economic powerhouse:

2030 … the global economy today is less dominated by the big three of China, India and the US. Instead, economic blocs such as the African Union, the Latin American Trade Council and the Alliance of Turkic States have emerged as powerful players on the scene.

As Tony Thomas points out they also estimated oil would rise from $150 in 2008 to $400 by 2022. So far it has risen all the way to $60. They also predicted a […]

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Tips and homeless ideas…

7.6 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

Sydney before “climate change” — over 50C, 122F recorded at Windsor Observatory, 1939

This was Sydney before “Climate Change” hit — fifty degrees:

Jan, 12, 1939, The Northern Star

Penrith may have recorded 47.3C for at least one-second this week, but Windsor is only 23 km north-east of Penrith, and on January 13th, 1939, it recorded 122F or 50.5C with an old fashioned liquid thermometer, not a modern noisy electronic one.

Apparently, climate change makes our extreme heat less extreme.

Furthermore, this was not measured on a beer crate in someones back-yard, but on the historic Windsor Observatory which was built in 1863 by John Tebbutt F.R.A.S who had discovered The 1861 comet, and published many scientific reports in Astronomical Journals. His meteorological observations are published at Harvard in 1899 (among others). Tebbutt died in 1916, so it’s not clear what instrument the 122 F was recorded on in 1939, but a Stevenson Screen had been installed around 40 years earlier, and the measurement was made by Mr Keith Tebbutt, presumably his son.

Tebbutt’s portrait graced the back of our 100 dollar note from 1984 -1996.

See, Many Collapse in the Heat: Thursday Jan, 12, 1939, The Northern Star

Windsor Observatory | Photo: Winston M. Yang Wyp

All part of Greater […]

Fake News Media: Would you like the hole truth or fake mud with that?

The decrepit legacy media is now so low there are competing stories in the same week discussing which form of decay is the worst.

Is it that the media suppresses the good news, or that it amplifies the bad — throwing fake mud that is never cleaned up? It’s two sides of the same corrupt, self serving coin. Pass on these links to friends who think the legacy media still has journalists with , a) a backbone or b) ethics.

Suppressing the Good News is the media’s dirtiest tactic

Steve Sheldon

Here are headlines you won’t read in almost any major American newspaper, hear on any of the evening news programs, or see in your Yahoo “news” feed:

Dow Hits 87 Record Closes Since Trump Elected

Texas Hero Was NRA Instructor

Dow Reaches Four 1,000 Point Milestones in One Year for the First Time Ever

ISIS on the Run, Almost Completely Destroyed

New Home Sales Highest in a Decade

Texas Hero Uses AR-15 to Save the Day

Dow Hits Two Streaks Lasting More Than Ten Days, First Time Since 1959

Trump Donates […]

Sydney “hottest ever” mistake generates fake news

The BOM announced it was the hottest ever day in Sydney today, then realized it had it wrong, but not before headlines spread across the country. For a million dollars a day you’d think the BOM would check their own “high quality” database. A scientific agency would take great care before announcing “historic all time records”for a city of five million people. A shameless PR agency might see that sort of mistake as an advantage.

It’s careless, piled on rank neglect

Even if the day had been “a record”, the temperatures are often artificially inflated due to site changes, thermometer changes, and the one-second-record effect thanks to the introduction of electronic thermometers, all of which are a product of careless BOM management and analysis. And even over and above that, past temperatures have been adjusted or homogenised downwards — often years after they are recorded — and by secret methods that the BOM will not disclose. I’ll have more information soon on changes at Sydney Observatory, that the BOM don’t make any allowance for.

Looks like another one second record?

The BOM announced the record after Penrith hit 47.1 at 1:55pm, the BOM tweet wrongly claimed it had “broken the […]

Weekend Unthreaded

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8.4 out of 10 based on 18 ratings

Here is what’s holding back China’s plans for world domination

Australia may be the worlds largest exporter of coal, sending out 388 million tons in 2015, but China’s production of coal the same year was 3,747 million tons — nearly ten times as much, and nearly half of global coal production. But the Chinese coal boom is turning. David Archibald describes the geopolitical ramifications. For me, the next question is what stops China doing nukes? — Jo

PS: There is a rumor that Australia has only 4-5 days of fuel stocks today, and is especially low on aviation fuel. Anyone with info, please comment or email joanne AT this site.

________________________________________________________

Here is what’s holding back China’s plans for world domination

Guest post By David Archibald

One of the reasons that China produces the world’s cheapest solar panels, for example, is because it has some of the world’s cheapest coal-fired power

There is no doubt that China wants to subjugate Asia, echoing Japan’s role during World War II. For those who think China’s economy might overtake the United States economy, and thus make China a more formidable adversary, this article aims to provide detail on China’s main constraint in that ambition: that its domestic coal production is near its peak […]

Renewables rise and Australians are getting poorer — “Bill Shock” and falling living standards

Strangely, the more free, clean, green energy we get the more household incomes fail to keep up with inflation. Who would have thought that using inefficient energy in an artificial government-picks-the-winner market could possibly reduce our living standards?

Of course, this is not all due to electricity efficiency and pricing. Bill Shock only affects things that need to heat, cool or move.

Bill Shock as Standard of Living Slumps

David Uren, The Australian

Australians have endured their longest period of falling living standards in more than a quarter of a century as growth in costs outstripped earnings for the fifth consecutive quarter, leaving households worse off than they were six years ago.

After allowing for inflation, taxes and interest costs, average household incomes dropped 1.6 per cent in the year to September, capping a sustained fall in ­living standards that has not been seen since the 1990-91 recession.

Economists say more than half the cost increases for households are being driven by electricity, rent, health, new housing and tobacco, while modest wage rises are being partially absorbed by workers being pushed into higher tax brackets.

 

 

Energy prices feed […]

Bombcyclone — “a bad storm with good branding”

” The Bomb Cyclone isn’t a winter hurricane — just a bad storm with good branding” — Vox

A “Bombcyclone” off the East Coast of the USA is verging on, or has broken a record for the fastest drops in pressure. It’s now at 965mb. It’s not a bomb, nor a cyclone, just a common winter storm. Though this one is a bad one which has already dumped snow on Florida– “most snow in three decades”. The hastag #BombCyclone is exploding.

Also known as a Blizzard, the National Weather Service forecasting winds as high as 70 miles per hour (113 km per hour), and more than 3,300 flights have been cancelled. — Reuters

BombCyclone, NE USA, Jan 4th.

Record breaking?

Rarely do you get to see such perfection w/ the structure of a winter storm. Running out of adjectives for this one. Our blizzard has dropped 54 mb’s in 24 hours, making it not only a “meteorological bomb,” but one of the fastest stengthening winter storms in modern history. — @WeatherOptics

Roy Spencer explains the Bomb term:

The term “bomb” was coined by meteorologist Fred Sanders in 1980 to refer to a non-tropical low […]

German solar: 10 hours of sun in December makes 40 Gigawatts of nothing

From Pierre Gosselin at No Tricks Zone:

Germany needs 80GW of electricity. It has 40GW of installed solar PV.

See the graph: The red line is what the country used, and the orange bumps are the solar contribution.

Clearly, solar power will take over the world.

In December, Germany got ten hours of sunlight. That’s not a daily figure, that’s the whole month. So in summer on a sunny day, solar PV can make half the electricity the nation needs for lunch. In winter, almost nothing. From fifty percent, to five percent.

Imagine what kind of havoc this kind of energy flux can do. Not one piece of baseload capital equipment can be retired, despite the fact that half of it is randomly unprofitable depending on cloud cover. Solar PV eats away the low cost competitive advantage. Capital sits there unused, spinning on standby, while wages, interest, and other costs keep accruing. So hapless baseload suppliers charge more for the hours that they do run, making electricity more expensive.

They just need batteries with three months supply. It will be fine once Germany turns the state of Thuringia into a redox unit.

Read about it: Dark Days […]

Midweek Unthreaded

Tips and tricks for 2018…

7.5 out of 10 based on 26 ratings

You mean the ABC isn’t telling us all the news on Iran?

It’s a shame Australia’s billion-dollar-ABC apparently can’t afford a Wall St Journal subscription. In long coverage of the Iranian unrest ABC prime time news tonight said the protesters “wanted the government to create jobs”. (Sounds like an Australian election) But The Wall St Journal, puts it differently. Farnaz Fassihi describes the slogans being chanted:

“We don’t want an Islamic Republic, we don’t want it, we don’t want it.”

“They are using Islam as an excuse to drive people crazy.

Breitbart:

Despite the threats of physical violence, women in the Islamic republic have used the opportunity to call out for more personal freedom and a relaxation of strict Islamic rule and sharia law:

In a different article Caroline Glick sees dismal coverage in the US too and speculates on a much bigger picture.

I’m just letting people know there is another side. Best wishes for the brave people seeking freedom.

There is an epic battle going on, with lives of workers and families at stake, and the only subheader the ABC can find is” ‘Trump should focus on America’.

8.8 out of 10 based on 108 ratings […]

Australia overdoes carbon reduction by 294Mt: could cool world by 0.0002C extra (maybe)

Absolutely best possible reduction in global temperature because of the latest announcement of a Australian carbon mitigation surplus.

Other countries are failing to meet their targets, but we’re not only achieving them, we’re overdoing it. And this is despite our obvious handicaps: like that we have rapid population growth, are further from everywhere and anywhere* except for Antarctica, and we’re the largest coal exporter in the world.

The latest Australian Greenhouse emissions figures are out, and the Energy Minister is very excited:

Emissions are now the lowest on a per capita and GDP basis in 28 years, having fallen 34 per cent and 58 per cent respectively since 1990. Just as Australia beat its first Kyoto target by 128 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, we are on track to easily surpass our 2020 target.

The latest data indicates we will overachieve by 294 million tonnes, a 30 per cent improvement on the year prior. When one considers one million tonnes of carbon abatement is equivalent to taking 300,000 cars off the road for a year, this is substantial.

Substantial?- Don’t undersell this — that’s like taking 88 million cars off the road! Holy hat! That’s […]

This extreme cold is just weather but all heat waves are climate change

There is a deep asymmetry in science. Don’t take it from me, take it from the former President of American Meteorological Society (AMS) and a current Director of the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Atmospheric Sciences Program. Marshall Sheppard would know, he has written over “80 peer reviewed papers” which gives him secret weather knowledge. It’s a kind of smarts that people who analyze MRI scans, design aerofoils or find minerals 3,000m underground can only aspire to.

He’s worried that people are mocking climate change, just because snap-frozen sharks are washing up on the beach, and it’s hitting minus 50C in Canada. In the last twenty years mankind has put out more than a third of all the CO2 homo sapiens has ever made since Homo Erectus lit their last fire. Despite that whole extra blanket on the planet, the last time it was this cold was, like 1917.

So to help train believers Marshall Sheppard has written a handy retort to skeptical cynics:

Step One: It’s only cold where you are:

Girls and boys, global weather is hills and valleys. You are in a valley, but the crest of the wave is coming (or something like that).

Near surface […]