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
Sup dudes and dudettes anmd others not sure
31
Wassuuuuuup?
Prediction: global downturn due to pandemic issues will be celebrated by environmental luddites for giving Gaia a few more weeks before the carbon apocalypse is on us.
71
Ah. yes. Nice timing.
Henry Ergas, always brilliant, out does even himself at page 12 of today’s “The Australian”.
It’s a keeper.
If you’re not an Online subscriber (I’m not) you’ll need to buy the hard copy.
So, so good. Do yourself a fovour. Buy it.
51
Sup. Hru? Wyd?
04
nm disinfectin’ the pool room and big screen tv
11
y? How did day bcome fected?
14
Its the precautionary principle.
11
three points.
1. if his pool room and tv were at risk that means an infected person was in close contact with them.
2. Given point 1. why not the rest of his house
3. Few disinfecting agents have a long lasting affect so they will soon be at risk again.
23
I took his comment as tongue in cheek.
31
One of the interesting sidelines of this coronavirus episode is that we can see things happening and going from zero to relatively enlightened in about six months.
The accumulation of data, interpretation of same, government response, impact on people and media coverage are all interesting aspects to see because in some ways they might help us get a better picture of how these processes are at work in the Catastrophic Global warming disaster.
KK
61
Good point.
I see we have our troll red thumber again…maybe thier school is currently closed….
31
That’s nearly as long as it takes to make a really fresh batch of miso.
10
If we do see a “global” quarantine that in effect shuts down air travel, reduces transport demand and power consumption, it will be very interesting to keep an eye on the Mauna Loa CO2 monitoring site. I wonder what would happen if CO2 continued to rise….
Have a nice weekend and stay calm 🙂
131
They’ll homogenize it.
Just like the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
141
The problem with homogenisation is oxygen gets in. Nothing worse than homogenising a fruit smoothy if O2 gets into it. 🙂
…my blender is made of glass, and that helps.
10
And what is there is a reduction in the rate of CO2 increase ?
51
And an increase to another ‘hottest year evah’.
60
In 1984 ML had a major eruption. Usually there would be a local increase in CO2 levels.
Can you find it here?
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.pdf
10
The F1 GP has been cancelled. Just before practice sessions.
What are the odds that the AFL will not start next week? In fact, will the AFLW finish its comp?
All ORDS now down 50% from its peak a few weeks back.
Unlike the GFC, COVID-19 is impacting the real economy first; just 3 months after it was identified. The GFC took almost 2 years before it had an impact on the real economy and was readily fixed by government guaranteeing those few too big to fail.
It will need to be resolved quickly to avoid a deep recession.
41
NZ’s Corona Piha Pro (international surf comp commencing next week) has, today, been postponed.
Great – more waves for us (without the hordes) plus it’s going to be perfect – six foot & offshore! Silver lining / cloud / irony / etc.
71
Just a clarification. The sharemarket is down ~20%, not 50%. We shouldn’t exaggerate the situation.
10
DNA sequencing is needed on variants of COVID19 that cause only cold symptoms to compare with the killer Iran early version. We need to find a mild version that gives immunity without killing us.
71
There is lots of sequence data out there and more is accumulating
14
I found a mild version while i was having some Vodka 🙂
10
just heard a report on the radio that indicated that levels of CO2 dissolved in ground water were rising because of climate change. Report said that dissolved CO2 in ground water was an issue because, 1/ The population of the planet will come to depend more on ground water supplies as rain fall reduces because of global warming.
2/ It is difficult and expensive to remove CO2 from ground water, so costs to households will lincrease.
Is there nothing this magical gas cannot do? Dont mention Perrier water!
91
Love my soda stream
51
what’s you favourite flavour? Have you ever tried the flavours made by non-soda-stream manufacturers?
24
Lemon lime and bitters… use cordials etc too.
20
…and a fractional still to get the most pure CO2..methane contaminates it 🙁
10
Said “report” has to be a joke; taking the mickey.
52
Of course, rain doesn’t absorb any CO2 at all on its way down. CO2 molecules and rain drops avoid each other as much as they can.
Rain in many storms is melted ice which is why it can feel so cold. Cold water dissolves more CO2. The rain drains into the ground — it becomes the ground water. So how many ground water reservoirs did the `researchers’ (it was so tempting to write `parrots’ – as in Norwegian Blues – there) sample and measure the CO2 concentrations in?
No attempt to establish a baseline?
Or are they worried about fizzy ground water?
Ground water reservoir raises roof: too much dissolved gas for human safety.
Fizzy ground water raises ocean acidification: no coral reef safe.
Soft drink manufacturer sues Government over climate change. Claims illegal competition.
`WE’re the fizzy drink manufacturers!
Yeah, right.
60
Pretty sure Lawn hill gorge is fed by an underground spring that’s high in CO2 .
10
Speaking of fizzy ground water, remember Taurina Spa mineral water (if you’re Ozzie) from the late 80s/early 90s? It was quietly withdrawn from the market and disappeared without a trace after they found it was full of radon. Kind of puts the CO2 issue into perspective. I assume they sourced it from a spring somewhere in the granite belt. I used to love the stuff: that’s why my eyes and fingernails still glow in the dark.
41
Those were the years 🙂
10
I C A N (Informed Consent Action Network) has just won a lawsuit against the CDC.
The CDC says vaccines don’t cause autism. Interesting short video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCckUQgbyd8&feature=emb_logo
21
I keep thinking that I’ve missed something.
So often now, I wrack my brains looking for that thing I’ve missed all these years. The fact that I might actually find it and be shown up to be totally and utterly wrong for all these years is something that does not even bother me. If it’s there and I find it, there’ll be no embarrassment at all, and all I WILL feel is the absolute relief of finding it after so many years.
For the absolute life of me, I can’t figure out why no one shows even the slightest concern about ….. the BASE LOAD I have harped on about for so many years. I keep looking at it,
almoston a daily basis, looking for that thing I’m missing.I check it on a State by State basis, and then add up the figures. It always comes to (a yearly average of) around 18000MW.
That’s the MINIMUM that power consumption gets as low as, every night, day in day out, year in, year out. It varies by as much as minus 1000MW and plus 2500MW, and yes it does get as high as 20500MW, and once or twice, I have seen it over 21000MW.
In the three largest consuming States, it’s usually 6000MW plus in NSW and Queensland, and 4500MW in Victoria, and around 1000MW in SouthAus and Tasmania.
EVERYONE, and here I mean quite literally everyone has no concern about this at all.
If that’s the minimum, then we need that much power ABSOLUTELY for all of 24/7/365 forever.
All the rest is on top of that.
That’s where coal fired power is used, to provide most of that minimum consumption. At that 4AM time each day when it’s at that lowest point, coal fired power is delivering around 82% of that total, always around 14500MW, day in day out.
ALL of the rest of consumption rises from that point.
There is no solar at that time, either from power plants or from rooftops. Wind power delivers an average of 2100MW.
Where do they think the rest of it is supposed to come from?
I know everyone is totally bored to death with the number of times I mention it, and for so long now, but I can’t figure out why no one thinks it’s important.
Please oh please tell me what it is I have missed for so long?
Tony.
331
Your are assuming the despised heavy demand users like smelters will remain. They won’t. They are incompatible with intermittent generation and fraught with hazard from a demand management perspective. A short power outage, even if voluntarily curtailed, is highly disruptive. If nothing goes wrong, it can still take months to recover to normal operation. If something goes wrong then that could result in the smelter closing. About 4 hours in “sleep” mode is the limit between controlled recovery and disaster.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/smelters-stick-out-in-rio-tinto-s-1-5b-push-to-cut-carbon-emissions-20200228-p545b5.html
Taking out smelters will knock about 3GW off the base demand. Also we will inevitably see the base demand shift to daytime as more rooftop solar gets deployed. That situation is now common in SA and is showing up in Queensland. With the NSW libs promoting solar and batteries plus the 800MW link to SA, the base demand will shift to daytime in NSW as well. NSW will be importing intermittency from SA, which will lower base demand in the state.
Given the massive annual increase in Australia’s population, you would expect to see the base demand increasing; not level or reducing. On a per capita basis it is in rapid decline. I cannot imagine EVs will have an impact on base demand unless the government gives much greater “policy certainty”.
52
Yes.
What TonyOz has constantly missed (at least during the earlier time when I read this website regularly) is that the AIM is significantly reduced demand.
Sounds cynical ? Well, that is the aim of the zealots, not mine. Of course it will cause unbelievable disruption … just not too much for the noisy, self-appointed “elite”.
70
Your absolutely correct
You’ve missed nothing
101
It ‘s not YOU in error re required Base Load, 24/7/365, it’s THEM!
81
Because very few people have a basic understanding of what is happening, and even if they did they have no influence as the Uniparty in power is just doing the same thing just at different rates , so what choice/influence do they have anyway.
SA is probably the model. Build , build, build to the brink of disaster (or have a real one) then make out you are a genius fixing the problems that you created, all with taxpayer dollars.
Communicating here doesnt have much reach or exposure. All State and Federal reps and senators , all relevant professional bodies, all related authorities may get the germ of the idea out there but the basic lack of intellect, green bias and filtering by handlers means even if that great effort was made its unlikely to have a noticeable impact (just my opinion). I think we are too far gone , and a largish disaster is the only thing that will get peoples attention.
I support bold targets, 100% renewable by 2025, just do it.
71
Tried that. Emails to three Reps, (one State, two Feds) and two Senators across four years.
They do not reply, other than the almost instant automated response.
Tony.
90
Peter Hannam, writing in “The Age” today declared that renewable electric power (wind and solar) have decreased dramatically in price over the pasty decade. He claims that wind power has halved in cost and solar by 90%.
He further claims that renewable installations are now far cheaper than new coal fired plants, hence no new coal and likely loss of coal exports.
His source is an analysis published in Carbon Tracker.
https://carbontracker.org/reports/how-to-waste-over-half-a-trillion-dollars/
I am sure that both Carbon Tracker and Peter Hannam are being disingenuous here. Things are being left out. Likely they are using name plate and not adjusting for the cost of intermittency.
Hannam should be called to account (not that I expect that to happen)
110
The October edition of The Scientific American reported that solar PV was getting so cheap that within 6 years NO-ONE would build (or think of building) a coal fired power station. Within 8 years large scale solar would be introduced.
Let me think; 1987 was the year.
150
Peter Hannan is a serious scumbag. He has ZERO interest in the reality of the situation. He is simply pushing his climate agenda, which includes spurious arguments of how amazingly “cheap” renewable energy is.
You are right his assessment completely ignore fundamental factors like intermittency.
If renewable power could actually supply continuous reliable energy cheaper than coal then no one in their right mind would use coal. It would die a natural death as of course it should.
These idiots can’t actually grasp the flaws in the “cheap” renewable power.
Some of them do, hence their visions of a vast network of pumped hydro, but again, that’s all nice in theory. Actually building a pumped hydro system and having it anywhere near the price of coal power is another matter entirely.
30
With you 100% Tony.
Baseload power is vital since without it how are you going to keep all the essential stuff running? That was the godsend of hydroelectric since the force of falling water could turn massive generators to provide baseload power, and, if we could only totally rely on rainfall, would do so very efficiently, forever. But we know we cannot rely on rainfall and so we need something else and that something else, if it isn’t to be fossil fuel sourced, has to be nuclear or a much better way of harnessing tidal energy or the like. Stringing batteries together at their present levels of power and efficiency is simply not going to deliver that threshold of power required.
For sure technology may develop answers in the next few decades but until they do are people prepared to have nuclear power or stick with coal and gas?
40
So I’ll ask the 64,000,000 $ question:
How far away are the urban riots?
20
Tony
Links to a couple of Matt Ridley’s on power and
“a hot tip for nerds”
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2020/03/13/climate-roundup-13-march/
20
Tony, you’ve missed nothing at all.
Those who aren’t cognizant of the necessity for Baseload Generation either don’t understand grid stability, don’t want to understand it, do understand but ignore it, or lastly, are perfect examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect. See:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/dunning-kruger-effect
The “Pols” don’t really care a bit about anything until it becomes a major tragedy or detriment to their re-election probabilities. At present, they can push the RE and gain votes because the grid hasn’t yet collapsed or required rotating brownouts/blackouts on a regular basis. IE: the riots haven’t started yet.
What I wonder about is why no one seems to be talking about the need for frequency and voltage support to provide what the RE community cannot. That would include all dispatchable thermal generation, baseload or peaking. An economy can only afford a finite number of hours where “ancillary and support costs” of $14,500/MwHr are billed.
Further, no one is asking the pertinent question of “Where is the Black Start Plan?” and “What will the Govt do when the lights actually do go out?”.
The word for the day is Politics:
Poly from the Greek meaning “many”, and ticks meaning blood sucking parasites.
90
🙂 🙂
30
“The word for the day is Politics:
Poly from the Greek meaning “many”, and ticks meaning blood sucking parasites.”
Very good
My personal favourite is Parliament
a conjunction of two French verbs, Parler > to speak and Mentir > to lie
I’m also fond of Human Resources , neither Humane nor Resourceful, but I digress into oxymorons.
30
As well, “Progress” vs. “Congress”.
Pro means “for” and “Con” means against.
Therefore, “Progress” is the antithesis of “Congress”.
In the US, this is accepted as general knowledge, unless one is a Progressive, in which case that means one is against the Congress and therefore a traitor.
How odd.
20
I am sure the engineers who operate the grid are concerned, but they are smart enough to keep their mouths shut and their jobs.
40
I hope they are keeping copies of their “I told you so” messages, because the search for scapegoats will be on.
30
That’s the thing that you’re missing Tony.
We’re not. Ever.
🙂
201
I’m with “Sceptical Sam” Tony. I find your analysis fascinating and I agree with your conclusions.
81
I am also fully appreciative and supportive of Anton’s good work.
Base load is no longer important – like “the scientific method”.
Capacity factor is another significant issue which seems to fall on permanently deaf ears.
Oh, and we can just forget about line losses. They are obviously a thing of the past.
How bloody stupid was Ohm?
141
Never bored by your contributions Tony. They are very welcome. Sometimes I flick past on first look at a post and then I go back to read it properly. I always want to go back to yours.
Keep up the good work as long as you are able to, please!
150
Tip for the week…buy big bolt cutters….you may need them.
Use your imagination….
52
test spin the shopping trolley before you rush through the doors nothing worse than going in circles in a rioting looting mob
51
Ah…no…I wasnt think about stealing anything…or doing anything illegal…
[ No nothing illegal going on but this Mod is watching his comments to see if the particular line he is going in goes into tinfoil hat territory. ] AD
31
if so is there any point in being cryptic then?
30
Watching for a run on supermarket alfoil?
30
Share market up 11% during the press conference just then , 40 minutes .
21
Our leader has performed another miracle, calming the ASX.
The PM was already on a war footing after the horrendous bushfire season and the virus came on its tail. So he has achieved what Malcolm could only have dreamed of, bipartisan support and a united country.
11
Due to an unprecedented outbreak of stupidity, many people are going to starve to death surrounded by mountains of toilet paper (thanks to NOX and Friends).
61
surely there is a toilet paper recipe site by now, no?
61
Not seen Yarpos, but there are a few for making your own facemask!
10
I couldn’t find masks to help with the smoke; still none except for a couple I found in Seymour not long ago.
Last week there was plenty of TP in local town supermarket and everybody local seemed to be being sensible. The long weekend saw a huge invasion, from Melbourne presumably, now there isn’t a roll to be seen. 🙁 Luckily we always have a few as we live away from town.
20
Annie
Seems in USA one section immune to panic buying is vegan food
40
I wonder what the flavour would be; depends on the perfume and how aggressive it is! Yerrk.
20
Didn’t somebody show us the link to washable toilet paper?
20
Had this conversation with another shopper at the supermarket while standing in front of empty shelves. He stated “all the idiots had taken all the toilet paper” I replied, funny how the idiots have all the toilet paper and the smart people are wiping their backsides with their hand, reverse logic!
30
I managed to buy a packet of 8 toilet rolls today..
… but I’m not telling yous where. :p
50
Depends on who you know Andy ? No shortage here .
00
Aw, gwan, be a devil Andy
We won’t tell anyone else.
40
Why the rush on toilet paper
Re #12
“Another classic from Willis!
https://mobile.twitter.com/WEschenbach/status/1238192289245065216”
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2020/03/08/7-march-2020-covid-19-california-quarantine-exponential-math/#comment-126506
10
“Why the rush on toilet paper”
Would be perfectly understandable if there was also a rush on backed beans or Indian curries. 😉
I was down to one roll, and none of the local shops had any, lucky to drop in to a supermarket in a small country town, and they had some, but not a lot, on the shelf.. and limiting purchases to one packet per shopper.
20
Decided to check Drudge Report, a sort of internet dumpster, to see what were the distractions and what we are being distracted from.
The distractions come top, of course, and quite often, as with plague and famine in Yemen, the “from” topics are lost in small print. However today the “from” is a bit too large to ignore.
First the distractions, leading as always…
150 MILLION AMERICANS COULD GET INFECTED
FAUCI: SYSTEM ‘FAILING’
Then what we are being distracted from…
FED PUMPS ANOTHER TRILLION (I think that’s supposed to be encouraging, like if you scratch a sore just one more time the itch will go)
WORST DAY ON WALL ST SINCE ’87 (that’s just bad news, hence fourth place).
Also, the ambulance taking Tom Hanks to his special celeb clinic on the Gold Coast was blocked by an overturned truck full of Russian toilet paper. Fortunately an Israeli student, who always carries a Farsi translation device along with an instant COVID-19 tester and an instant Al-Baghdadi DNA tester, was able to identify the driver of the truck as Iranian. Tom is stable and resting, says he isn’t ready to retire and go sip mai-tais with Jeff Epstein yet.
Okay, I made up that last bit. Why not? Everyone else does it.
81
in todays world it all sounded quite credible and in some ways familiar
41
The Chinese stock market is stable and Beijing gives the finger to old world capitalism.
11
And ‘disappearing’ anybody who shorts the market?
20
Beijing is keeping a firm hand on the lever, its the steady state and shorting is frowned upon.
20
So you deplore western globalisation and central bank financial manipulation but it’s ok if China is behind it?
11
I don’t support laissez-faire economics.
10
Further to my questions on tuesday about the ability of Hydo dams to provide true continuous “Base Load” ( as opposed to intermittent peak load and smoothing support )..
I have been watching a doco on the Kölnbrein Dam in Austria..the biggest in the Alps at 200 million cubic meters capacity and over 1000m above sea level.
The series of generation plants feeding from this dam have a total generation capacity of just over 1GW and is able to supply a large city continuously…..for OVER A WEEK !! ..They claim, assuming it starts from 100% full.
Say its 2 weeks, thats 330 GWh ….. thats less than 1 days worth of base load demand for Australia !
Maybe Austria has a very low base load demand ?
And of course in winter time, with much less snow melt etc, it would not be anything like that capacity.
Overall, Austria’s hydro total hydro generation is 14.1 GW, but has a CF of just 31% !
51
Useful comparison.
20
seems like apples and oranges to me, the bottom line is they get 60-70% of their power from Hydro , but are cunning enough to also keep a real power plant close to Vienna.
20
The Italians are saying that corona virus is worse than a BoM.
sarc.
20
The MSM alsmost seem to be almost enjoying the whole amping up of the CoV19 hysteria…..or am I imagining things?
Its like a feeding frenzy for them…is the kindest way I can put it.
90
As an approaching octogenarian, I think the media is generally youthful and
like most younger people feel bulletproof, having been told nobody less than
30yo has died from COVID-19 (up til recently anyway), and , well 60yo is positively
over the top and due for replacement anytime soon.
The overall message that the death rate is ‘only’ 1% is what clicks with youth. I believe
most appreciate the fact that the disease is worse for ‘oldies’ above 60yo – end of story
and interest. My feeling is, these people reporting fail to take on board the
depressing rate of death for the older group seems to increase with age where I read
the rate of deaths is around 10%-15% or higher.
One gets the feeling those reporters haven’t keyed in the reality that if they contract the
disease or have it passed on by their symptomless offspring to their own parents in particular
then they are the cause of what happens to their oldies. One can live with generalities easily,
but if you think a bit deeper into the specifics, you may be lining yourself up for a rest of life
remorse and depression.
20
Of course, if I really wanted to be cynical, taking in the era in which we live
and the fact that our society is becoming unbalanced in numbers between young
and old, with a precarious economy, …………..(giggling emogi failure x4)
00
Some of the media have been shocked by the speed of infection. It will get even closer to home when a few of them are infected with the virus.
It is likely the members of Federal Cabinet and possibly State Premiers are infected after Peter Dutton found to be infected. Similar to Iran. Parliament could well be suspended.
20
Their jobs are safe for another six months.
20
Maybe there needs to be a week long quarantine thrown on people arriving
from beyond our borders immediately, regardless of source and method.
No doubt a shock and inconvenient for the first couple of days. Everyone thereafter
comes in knowing of the close quarantine arrangements if they still need to come or
are coming home. That would give us control and tide us over until our entry points
are closed by government. It would also, no doubt, cause a huge drop off of incoming
people, those not prepared to do the time (I would suggest most).
30
It seems much of the media at present in relation to the Covid-19 virus is poorly informed and casually irresponsible. Deliberately so! From the dystopian ravings of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the London Telegraph to the Trump Hating Bias of Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. The feeling of not being able to trust reporting on the coronavirus in the mainstream media prevails. Moreover, the impression that alarmism, hysteria and deliberate bending of the facts is entirely warranted seems to be implicitly accepted as fairly normal. It is hard to escape the hypothesis that traditional media is struggling unsuccessfully against an internet vanguard that knows none of the pitfalls of post-modernism. This blog has largely sought to separate fact from fiction. There is only so much one can see from Australia however.
What are the politics of self-imposed versus externally imposed quarantine? There are clearly differing ideologies at play in this regard. Some authorities don’t trust their citizenry to impose quarantine upon themselves. Others do. The question is whether the virus can be contained by self-imposed quarantine.
This Covid-19 virus seems to have been successful for the reason that it possesses a combination of attributes that exploit human physiology. It can’t be simply detected for an extended period whilst its host is contagious. It has a long duration. It binds to the proteins in all human excretions. It takes advantage of our sociable disposition to replicate. Clearly some societies are more susceptible to these attributes than others.
The authoritarian regimes of the world quite uncannily were the first to experience the virus. Their response was predictably authoritarian. The least authoritarian regime of the early receivers was undoubtedly South Korea. Their results speak for themselves despite JN’s reasonable doubts. The Italian experience is hardly a surprise.
First hand experience whilst travelling in northern Italy; experience that included an extended stay a number of years ago in a venetian hospital for A.R.D.S. is not something i’d speak highly of. Regular visits to Italy since suggest a culture that is not thoroughly hygienic in many areas (including Lombardy). A culture that relishes interpersonal contact. The Italians are particularly culturally susceptible to this virus’s modus operandi. It is for this reason the Italian government, despite not being authoritarian, have taken the authoritarian route. In doing so they are protecting an ageing population at the expense of the young. Accelerating the trashing of an economy that is already in trouble.
The Chinese situation seems far worse though. The Chinese have so far given us SARS, Swine Flu, A new version of Swine Flu presently limited to pigs and now Covid-19. All the while knowing their proximate bat populations harbour hundreds of unstable novel viruses. Clearly to begin with, their animal husbandry practice is extremely bio-hazardous. It may be China’s moment in time to deal with issues the west dealt with hundreds of years ago. Nonetheless, their claim of an authoritarian system that is superior to democracy just doesn’t seem to add up on the epidemiological front.
The big question now seems to be whether the remaining democratic nations of the world will follow the authoritarian lead or simply encourage people to self-quarantine and protect themselves. It seems self-quarantine will work in societies where hygiene and sanitation are good, where citizens avoid transmission via close contact groups, and where oral/nasal contagion is mitigated via usage of protective masks/glasses. Much as is the practice in hospitals.
The one area that does not seem to make any sense is the recommendation to not wear a mask. If the virus is contagious yet not easily detectable during the first phase, would it not be sensible to advise people to wear masks pre-emptively? Perhaps the rates of infection will force this approach shortly?
Self-quarantine and/or personal mitigating measures would certainly prevent an economic disaster. Some selfless common sense in using masks/glasses pre-emptively might be the missing link in bringing the virus under control. If this didn’t work, you might might ask why hospitals are adopting this approach. It seems this is yet another area where the authoritarians are winning again in yet another example of elite authority trumping personal responsibility. The question is though; do we really need to be locking our borders to reduce the R0 to less than one? Doing so would undoubtedly cause great financial disruption and prolong the effects of the virus in every way.
It would not be surprising to see much of the 90% of people who will experience this virus as nothing greater than a bad common cold simply going about their daily affairs. For this is just another coronavirus, albeit a nasty one; and most people will asses the risk rationally and get on with their daily lives.
From Climate Change to Drought to Coronavirus, and the coalescing of all these “urgent” matters into a metanarrative, the story that stands out is the determination of the left to use post-modernism to achieve their destructive ends.
Just waiting to hear of the Coronavirus linkage to climate Change next……………..
[ Well written and informative but too long , – Jo ? ]AD
110
A couple of minutes to read that. We all have time now.
But the “financial disruption” was locked in when fiat currency was adopted. When banks were free to lend money they just created there was no way back.
10
Totally agree that Beijing should face up to their disastrous animal husbandry. China has been at the epicentre of plagues over the centuries and enough is enough.
20
misery:
13 Mar: Guardian: Coronavirus poses threat to climate action, says watchdog
IEA warns that Covid-19 could cause a slowdown in world’s clean energy transition
by Jillian Ambrose
But Fatih Birol, IEA’s executive director, has warned the outbreak could spell a slowdown in the world’s clean energy transition unless governments use green investments to help support economic growth through the global slowdown.
“There is nothing to celebrate in a likely decline in emissions driven by economic crisis because in the absence of the right policies and structural measures this decline will not be sustainable,” he said…
The economic contagion is likely to stall many infrastructure projects, including the multibillion-dollar investments in clean energy needed to avert a climate catastrophe by the end of the decade…
The year ahead could mark the first time the world’s solar power growth falls since the 1980s, according to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The analysts on Thursday slashed forecasts for new solar power projects by 8%. It expected sales of electric vehicles to stall too…
“We should not allow today’s crisis to compromise the clean energy transition,” Birol said. He said global governments should use the economic stimulus packages which are being planned to help countries weather the downturn to invest in clean energy technologies…
“A well designed stimulus package could offer economic benefits and facilitate a turnover of energy capital which have huge benefits for the clean energy transition.”…
“If the right policies are put in place there are opportunities to make the best of this situation,” he added.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/12/coronovirus-poses-threat-to-climate-action-says-watchdog
12 Mar: BusinessGreen: Coronavirus dampens 2020 outlook for clean energy and electric vehicles
by Michael Holder
The coronavirus crisis gripping the global economy has forced clean energy analyst BloombergNEF (BNEF) to downgrade its expectations for the solar, battery, and electric vehicle (EV) markets, in one of the first signals that the escalating pandemic could undermine urgent efforts to combat climate change.
The influential analyst firm today released fresh projections looking at the likely effects of Covid-19 – which was officially declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation this week – on markets for renewable electricity, EVs, heating, cooling, and the circular economy.
With the impacts of the virus worsening around the world and governments deploying increasingly desperate measures to curb its advance, the analyst said it had cut its forecast for global solar demand in 2020 by 16 per cent, noting that the sector is heavily reliant on demand in China where strict limits on movement and commercial activity are being put in place to try and halt the virus spreading further.
As a result, while BNEF had previously expected solar demand to reach around 121-152GW in 2020, it has now downgraded its forecast to between 108-143GW, which it said would mark the first annual fall in solar capacity additions in at least three decades…
… it warned there was still considerable downside risk on its original 2020 forecasts for wind capacity deployment, which had estimated new onshore and offshore installations could reach 75.4GW this year.
Moreover, the analyst expects Covid-19 headwinds to hit both the global car market as well as the burgeoning battery market, together spelling a potentially bumpy year of growth for EVs…
In addition, the global car market is set to be hit particularly hard by coronavirus impacts – particularly in China – which “will have ramifications for electric vehicles and battery demand”, the update added…
https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4012368/coronavirus-dampens-2020-outlook-clean-energy-electric-vehicles
30
misery likes company:
12 Mar: ClimateChangeNews: Coronavirus and climate change are two crises that need humanity to unite
By Andrew Norton
(Andrew Norton is the director of the International Institute for Environment and Development IIED)
Obviously, a drop in emissions is not a bad thing from a purely climate change perspective. But what counts in terms of meaningful action to address the climate crisis is long-term structural change, in particular replacing fossil fuels as fast as possible from all sectors…
If handled badly, the pandemic could suck the energy out of public action and public policy as prosperity declines…
One way could be to fund elements of the green transition, thereby creating jobs…
A short-term focus on coronavirus is obviously necessary but must not distract from investment in climate action. Otherwise valuable time needed to build momentum for Cop26 could be lost.
The pandemic could also affect social movements’ ability to organise to demand climate action…
Even if COP26 can be held as planned, much time for essential groundwork may have been lost…
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-climate-change-two-crises-need-humanity-unite/
12 Mar: NYT: What Climate Change Can Teach Us About Fighting the Coronavirus
By Somini Sengupta
Scientists like Dr. Cobb have, for years, urged world leaders to bend the curve of planet-warming emissions. Instead, emissions have raced upward. Now the consequences are being felt: a three-month-long flood in the Florida Keys, wildfires across a record hot and dry Australia, deadly heat waves in Europe.
Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University, called the virus “climate change on warp speed.”
Why have we not taken climate risks to heart? Politics and psychology play a role.
Change is hard when there’s a powerful industry blocking it. The fossil fuel industry has pushed climate science denial into the public consciousness. It has lobbied against policies that could rein in the emissions of planet-warming gases. And, it has succeeded: The United States, history’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, is the only country in the world to have withdrawn from the Paris accord, designed to stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change…
Then, there’s human psychology. As with climate change, our collective ability to confront the pandemic is shaped by our brains. We are bad at thinking about tomorrow…
Elke Weber, a behavioral scientist at Princeton University, said that makes climate science, which deals in future probabilities, “hard to process and hard for us to be afraid of.”…
In a speech this week, Mr. Guterres hinted at another deficit faced by both the health and climate crises.
“In the months ahead, we need to rebuild trust,” he said. “We need to demonstrate that international cooperation is the only way to deliver meaningful results.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/climate/climate-change-coronavirus-lessons.html
20
hilarious, but inevitable:
13 Mar: TheConversation: There is no evidence that ‘global warming’ was rebranded as ‘climate change’
by Giulio Corsi, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge
Disclosure: Giulio Corsi receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership at the University of Cambridge and from the Cambridge Trust.
Climate change denial is a moving target. In the past, it consisted of a fully fledged denial of any scientific evidence that the world was warming. More recently, it has evolved into a creative mix of strategies. Deniers today often contradict part of the scientific basis for climate change, while pinning the blame for the rest – anything completely undeniable, even to them – on developing countries, particularly India and China.
Over the past few weeks, a new figure has emerged: Naomi Seibt. Seibt, the so-called anti-Greta Thunberg, a 19-year-old from Münster in Germany, rapidly gained media attention for her call for “climate realism”, claiming that climate change science really is not science at all, and for this reason, there is no need to panic…
As an academic who researches climate disinformation strategies, I found her sudden emergence very interesting. Combing through Seibst’s speeches available online, I had a chance to analyse her own style of denial, coming across a number of cliched “skeptical” arguments that have been repeatedly debunked in the past…
What was perhaps most interesting, was her use of a recurrent argument on the supposed “historical rebranding” of climate change. The theory goes as follows: in the past, everyone used the term global warming to describe this phenomenon, but seeing that the planet was, in fact, not heating, global warming was “rebranded” to climate change in a sophisticated cover-up.
Clearly, this hypothesis is flawed, as the Earth is unequivocally warming. Despite this, the idea appears to be widely held in the denialist scene – to take one prominent example, Donald Trump tweeted it more than 20 times in the two years before he became president…
To find out whether there is some truth underlying the “rebranding theory”, I analysed 30 years (1990-2019) of data containing the terms global warming and climate change from five sources: the academic literature repositories Scopus and Web of Science, the British newspapers The Times and The Guardian, and the articles published by the Heartland Institute itself…
First, the academic literature has always preferred the more comprehensive term climate change, and there is no single point in time where articles mentioning global warming exceed those mentioning climate change on Scopus and Web of Science. Yet the gap between the two terms increases significantly after the Kyoto Protocol entered into force in 2005, a watershed year for climate governance…
In both The Guardian and The Times, climate change is generally the most common term, but the two are used interchangeably until 2005 when again we see a breaking point. Despite this, climate change was in use long before any possible rebranding.
Yet the most interesting findings come from looking at data from the Heartland Institute. In fact, the thinktank used the two terms with roughly the same frequency until 2013, when we finally see a decoupling as the use of global warming dropped while the use of climate change remained constant.
This shows that “global warming” was widely used by climate change deniers over this 30-year period…
Climate change deniers are known to often misrepresent innocuous facts and use them to their advantage, and this case was no exception: a simple evolution in language was transformed into an unfounded conspiracy theory…
https://theconversation.com/there-is-no-evidence-that-global-warming-was-rebranded-as-climate-change-133213
10
how typical of Snopes to carry it!
12 Mar: Snopes: No Evidence ‘Global Warming’ Was Rebranded as ‘Climate Change’
Climate change deniers are often known to misrepresent innocuous facts and use those misrepresentations to their advantage.
by Giulio Corsi, The Conversation
https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/03/12/no-evidence-global-warming-was-rebranded-as-climate-change
10
I do have to wonder,
HOW THE HECK could that ever be a PhD topic !!
20
shame on DM. how long will they continue to rile their readers with rubbish like this?
13 Mar: Daily Mail: Climate change could see up to 1.2 BILLION people suffer from unsafe temperatures – leading to exhaustion or even crippling heat stroke – by 2100
•Researchers from the US modelled where extreme heat and humidity will occur
•They found that heat stress could plague four times as many people as today
•This is the likely outcome in a future in which greenhouse gases are not curbed
•Heat stress harms human and animal health and also impacts the environment
By Ian Randall
Researcher from Rutgers University in New Jersey found that four times as many people could end up being impacted by heat stress than are today…
Previous studies into projected future climates and heat stress have typically focused on heat extremes, but overlooked another key driver — humidity…
In their study, the researchers used 40 different climate simulations to examine how combined extremes of heat and humidity would occur on a warming Earth…
The full findings of the study were published in the journal Environmental Research Letters (LINK)…
FROM COMMENTS:
Pyrmeus: Future weather articles should be on the same page as the horoscopes.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8105579/Rising-temperatures-1-2-BILLION-people-suffer-heat-stress-2100.html
20
12 Mar: ClimateChangeNews: Coronavirus: IMO postpones key meeting on reducing shipping emissions
The international shipping body has postponed five meetings due to take place at its London headquarters
By Chloé Farand
The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has postponed a significant meeting on environmental protection a day after the World Health Organisation declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.
The UN body responsible for global shipping, which is based in London, also closed its headquarters to staff and visitors on Thursday and Friday as a precautionary measure…
The IMO put off talks by the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC), which had been due to meet in London from 30 March to 3 April…
A total of five IMO meetings have now been cancelled, including a working group on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from ships from 23-27 March…
This is the latest global climate meeting to be affected by the spread of the virus, also known as Covid-19.
On Wednesday, the UN General Assembly agreed to postpone a key meeting when countries were due to finalise a global ocean treaty that would enable the creation of marine protected areas in the high seas.
UN Climate Change has also cancelled or postponed all physical meetings until the end of April.
The spread of the virus is putting increasing pressure on the climate and biodiversity timetable this year, with a number of high-level meetings likely pushed back to the summer and the second half of the year.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-imo-postpones-key-meeting-reducing-shipping-emissions/
20
Yeah Doc, this was the message loud and clear from Jo for weeks now. No one was listening. If they were,then the decision to keep allowing tourists and students onto our island had to be for the almighty dollar. 2 weeks quarantine was recommended at least. Speaking of $$ news on Current Affairs tonight with some businesses not wanting to handle cash. From my church days, reminds me of “the mark of the beast on the forehead or right hand, without such one cannot buy or sell” Rev 13:16 – 17 More control of the people is underway and this Wuhan Virus is the excuse.
50
Sprigdam. Yes, I have followed Jo’s argument along. AS I see it, the government is tardy
probably due to political,economic and media screens that temper how far it is willing to
go or how quickly it gets to where it has to get to try to control the rate of spread.
The quarantine demanded by the situation and Jo is a complete shut down by law and the
government has to be sure it can defend it ‘politically’. We already see its ‘self isolation’
doesn’t work. There’s the woman who was tested, didn’t wait for results and went to a concert.
In the USA a homeless person was s’i’ed in a motel, took off, held up a store and disappeared.
Another person was s’i’ed and immediately went shopping (understandably, actually).
Official quarantine is immutable and full legal confinement but the government carries the odium
(in the eyes of some and an unfriendly media). My idea spins the responsibility to the person to
cover the time the government takes to wait until things are bad enough for ‘official advice’
to recommend shutdown.
My system means people fiying, sailing in or coming home have to make
the choice, knowing to move is to have a week’s entertainment in a government enclosure to
have time for the disease to declare itself. A positive test would extend the stay until the person
was cleared and non infectious. The government isn’t then the arbiter of a total shutdown of
international travel, until it has to make that decision. The extra cost would be very limited
because most people would choose not to come. There might be an attraction to those of less well
off countries to enjoy a stay and better health care ‘just in case’, but that should be controllable.
Just a thought.
20
JOKE, folks! JOKE!
Adern must have read my suggestion. That’s the joke.
However, she has made the choice self-isolation. Won’t work, but it may be enough to deter
entry to NZ and worth a trial. It has already worked on sporting sides. Will it work on
individuals? Mavbe it could be bolstered by requiring daily testing of those self-isolating.
It will certainly be cheaper if everyone obeyed the s-i order, but the evidence is they won’t.
It only takes one or two to disobey for a packet of smokes or a drink to throw the s-i system
in the bin.
10
When opposites collide.
The globalist narrative versus the localist narrative
The globalist view and perspective
– Nation states are obsolet, temporary, nationalistic, jingoistic and negative.
– Don’t feel obliged to honor any borders, have no real roots, don’t attach themselves to any location, don’t feel committed to the local community and often feel as though they don’t have to abide by the local laws. The will often live in your community but you’ll never really see them actively participate in any local activities. They want open boarders and as much immigration as possible.
The localist* view and perspective
– This is home, where I work, pay taxes, serve the community, speak the same language, have a vote, obey the laws and have a citizenship.
– Doesn’t really care about about what’s beyond their own boarders and tend to be more insular. Are more critical of outside intervention that could water down their own local culture. Are very active in their local communities by supporting and helping when needed. Are only open to immigration when it’s needed and want stricker control of who comes.
What has happened in the last 40 years is a strong movement towards a globalist view, which is not at all aware of what is happening on the ground. The globalist disdain and contempt for what is considered a backward concept of local thinking has created an extreme split. This shift has never been so striking until the turn of the 21st century. Since then, the technological drive and a new generation of younger globalists, who believe that everything local is bad, have only made the situation worse. Going global but thinking local was the motto of the 1990s. Today everything is global and ignores the local, and if you can get away with it, so much the better. This view and this exaggerated thinking creates an atmosphere of contempt that builds walls between people instead of bringing them together. This proves that the globalists are not building bridges, but walls in the false belief there is justification for mowing down everything that stands in the way of the movement.
* I’ve switched the term to „localist“ verses „nationalist“. I think this is the better term to use.
60
Good, one little comment.
” Doesn’t really care about about what’s beyond their own boarders and tend to be more insular. ”
Might change that to ;
“Cares about about what’s beyond their own borders but don’t feel obliged to submit to slavery Mk 111 to boost other nations in different circumstances which are being shafted by the management.
” and tend to be more insular”; not necessarily.
The new globalists prancing around the world mouthing platitudes about equality and fairness are in it for one thing; themselves.
The United Bloody Nations, originally set up to better the world, stop wars and oppression, has not done its job.
Those running it have found a wonderful life for themselves; ugly cynics All.
Kristy Fig. Koffee A. K. Rudd. Julie. Julia. MalEx444. Ted the Tardy.
And the mob in the EEU send a big wave and hello, although things have become a little bit rocky there lately.
KK
40
If nothing else, COVID-19 blows globalisation out of the water every day
the drama lasts. The EU as a template displays the entire false edifice
on which ‘globalisation’ is built. Poor old Italy has had every worst scenario
tossed at it over all its problems since the GFC. Greece also would have
learned a hard lesson. The French rebel even as their government persists
with the delusion in seeking more power.
Note also. The globalisation crew, just like their Climate scam, totally ignore
any strong nation that they know will not bow to their demands eg Russia, China,
India, North Korea etc. The longer they persist the more evident is the fact that
the whole idea is a mirage, an idea ‘they’ will take control of the WEstern
nations that they so abhor. They actually hate themselves and their own societies,
on the one hand, and if they are wealthy from such globalisation as we have
experienced in trade, they will do anything, kiss any rings or feet, to keep the
ball rolling.
Trump is hated because he stopped them in their tracks when he obeyed
the requirement of office that he governs for his own people and the USA.He also
stopped the bludging on the US taxpayers which really hurt the globalists more than
anything else. New, fairer trade deals and no more failing to pay their own defence
bills.
50
Apparent good news from Israel.
“JERUSALEM: Scientists in Israel are expected to announce in the coming days that they have completed development of a vaccine for the new coronavirus COVID-19, according to a media report here.”
Read more at:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/science/scientists-in-israel-likely-to-announce-it-developed-coronavirus-vaccine/articleshow/74592807.cms
10
Oh the irony !!
https://facts4eu.org/news/2020_mar_greenhouse#
That stupid woman now leading the EU Commission and pushing the big Green Deal, as well as not knowing the basic facts linked in the link has now come out saying the EU disapproves in Trump’s travel ban decision and the EU was not consulted –the arrogance!!!
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/03/12/the-eu-disapproves-brussels-angry-trump-acted-on-coronavirus-without-their-permission/
10
An excellent overview of Biofuels:
Biofuels
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/13/biofuels/
20
13 Mar: BBC: RHI: ‘Corruption did not cause’ energy scheme failure
Corrupt or malicious activity was not the cause of what went wrong with Northern Ireland’s failed energy scheme.
The findings into the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) (LINK) scheme were published on Friday.
It found the scheme was a “project too far” for the NI Executive and “should never have been adopted”.
The scheme, which opened in 2012, paid businesses to switch from oil and gas to environmentally-friendly heating.
The 656-page report said that while there was “unacceptable” behaviour by some officials, ministers and special advisers, what went wrong was a “compounding of errors and omissions over time and a failure of attention”…
Set up to encourage the use of renewable energy sources, the RHI closed to new entrants in 2016 amid concerns about the potential cost.
Those boilers used wood pellets, but the subsidy payment was higher than the cost of the fuel, creating an incentive to use the boilers to generate income.
It became known as “cash for ash”…
The financial scandal led to the collapse of Northern Ireland’s political institutions in 2017 and caused a three-year political stalemate. The political institutions were only reinstated in January 2020…
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-51840287
656 page report, 3 year inquiry, and I can’t find a single article that lays out the cost, and am definitely not poring thru the report.
however, BBC does have a chart about halfway through their article stating:
RHI scheme in numbers
£30m
The amount Stormont had to pay to cover the actual overspend
£490-700m Cost of 20-year projected overspend before RHI was reformed
—
Wikipedia: Renewable Heat Incentive scandal
The Renewable Heat Incentive scandal (RHI scandal), also referred to as RHIgate and the Cash for Ash scandal, is a political scandal in Northern Ireland that centres on a failed renewable energy (wood pellet burning) incentive scheme that has been reported to potentially cost the public purse almost £500 million…
—
MSM doesn’t like to quantify CAGW policy failures/scandals.
20
12 Mar: BusinessGreen: EDF, Kaluza, and Dimplex team up for flexible electric home heating trial
by Business Green staff
More than 100 homes fitted with smart electric storage heaters to be controlled remotely via AI software in bid to cut CO2 and bills…
The trial will utilise over 100 internet-connected storage heaters built by appliance manufacturer Glen Dimplex Heating and Ventilation that can charge overnight using off-peak electricity when prices are at their lowest and then use the power to generate heat during the day, the firms explained.
The electric storage heating devices can also monitor local weather and home heating habits, using that information to automatically adjust in order to deliver an optimal temperature inside a building throughout the day and night, according to Dimplex.
Under the new trial, the heating systems are set to be remotely controlled via an AI platform built by Kaluza, the intelligent software arm of energy supplier OVO, which will harness EDF’s electricity grid price data and live information from the heaters to optimise their performance.
By bringing together weather, historic usage, and live data from the storage heaters and the grid the firms hope to more flexibly manage each home’s electricity use in order to reduce pressure on the grid and maximise the use of power when the grid’s carbon output is at its lowest, curbing both carbon emissions and energy bills in the process.
Conor Maher-McWilliams, head of flexibility at Kaluza, said heating homes with fossil fuel gas would have to end in order to meet the UK’s 2050 net zero target, and that flexible, electric forms of heating could provide a solution…
“The only way to create an efficient and resilient grid able to handle this new demand will be through smart technologies in people’s homes. This way we can intelligently spread demand throughout the day, helping to reduce grid stress, carbon emissions and energy costs.”…
https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4012325/edf-kaluza-dimplex-team-flexible-electric-home-heating-trial
20
“Conor Maher-McWilliams, head of flexibility at Kaluza, said heating homes with fossil fuel gas would have to end in order to meet the UK’s 2050 net zero target…”
Some questions about this:
1) Have they determined how much this conversion to all electric heat will cost, who will pay for it and how they will pay for it?
2) Will people be able to afford to heat their homes after they are converted to all electric heating?
3) Have they determined how much extra electrical generation will be required after everyone in the UK is converted to electric heat?
4) Do they have a plan for where this extra electric power will come from?
50
behind paywall:
13 Mar: UK Times: Cost of policing climate summit falls after rethink
The expected cost of policing the Cop26 UN climate change summit in Glasgow has fallen to £180 million, with fewer officers now expected to be needed…
13 Mar: HeraldScotland: Police Scotland making plans to deal with up to 300 arrests a day during COP26
By David Bol
POLICE Scotland are drawing up plans to be able to deal with 300 arrests each day at the COP26 conference – but estimated security costs have been cut to £180 million…
He also confirmed that Police Scotland believe up to 150 heads of state could attend the two-week event, which could include a large-scale demonstration in the middle weekend in Glasgow city centre…
“To be clear, it is not my expectation that will happen over the course of a 14-day period, given the ebb and flow of the conference, but there may be days when the level of protest moves from peaceful protest to direct action and we will have to step in and take a more robust approach to it.”…
(Assistant Chief Constable Bernie) Higgins told MSPs the force had originally anticipated using between 4,000 and 6,000 officers each day to deal with the global event.
While he still expects “several thousand officers to be deployed” daily, he said a change in planning assumptions has been agreed following a meeting with the Cop UK unit in London.
Under a “worst-case scenario”, the bill for policing the gathering had previously been estimated to be as high as £250 million…
He told Holyrood’s Justice Sub-Committee on Policing it is now anticipated the cost will be £180 million.
Mr Higgins said: “That’s simply because of the decision I took, ratified and endorsed by the Chief Constable, about the actual level of resources we need.”…
Mr Higgins was also quizzed on the potential impact on coronavirus on the COP26 event going ahead and he is still “working on the presumption that the conference will still go ahead”.
He said: “It currently forms part of our thinking around contingency.
“You could reasonably expect to lose 30 per cent of your workforce.”
He added: “It may have no impact at all, it may cause a delay, a postponement or it may cause the conference to be slimmed down in terms of who attends.
“Instead of having 30,000 delegates, we may find the conference only has the key policy-makers.”
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18302336.police-scotland-making-plans-deal-300-arrests-day-cop26/
20
“The expected cost of policing the Cop26 UN climate change summit in Glasgow has fallen to £180 million…”
They could reduce the cost of policing to zero if they did the summit by video conferencing.
40
who are you, Greenpeace?
13 Mar: EuroNews: EU meat consumption ‘should drop by 71%’ to help fight climate change
Greenpeace is calling on Europeans to drastically cut their meat and dairy consumption in the coming years in order to help fight climate breakdown.
With EU leaders discussing agricultural policy ahead of the bloc’s “Farm to Fork” strategy, set to be published later this month, the environmental campaign group wants meat consumption in the EU to drop by 71% by 2030, and 81% by 2050.
The organisation claims the calculation of a reduction of consumption to 24kg per person per year by 2030, and then further to 16kg per person per year by 2050, is based on levels that scientists say would ensure food security, while keeping global heating below 1.5°C…
Greenpeace wants people to eat no more than 300 grams of meat a week by 2050.
“The science is overwhelming at this stage – overconsumption of meat and dairy is wrecking forests, crushing nature and heating the planet,” said Eräjää…
Currently, Spain has the highest per capita meat consumption in the EU at over 100kg per person per year, with Bulgaria consuming the least at 58kg per person.
https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/13/eu-meat-consumption-should-drop-by-71-to-help-fight-climate-change
20
“Greenpeace is calling on Europeans to drastically cut their meat and dairy consumption in the coming years in order to help fight climate breakdown…”
“Climate Breakdown”? Is this worse than “Climate Emergency”?
20
When a building breaks down, in my mind I have a physical image of the result. When my computer breaks down, although I don’t have a physical image of the result, I do have an image–i.e., nothing is working. For the life of me, I can’t form an image of a climate breakdown. Anyone?
20
6 comments when posting; half are amusing:
13 Mar: HeraldScotland: UN climate summit could change the way Glaswegians eat forever
By Cate Devine, Food Writer and Columnist
The gathering, which is the largest summit ever held in the UK, will see world leaders along with 90,000 environmental campaigners and scientists descend on the city, many with high expectations of finding ethically sourced and sustainable food to keep them going through the 11-day event.
As a result, demand is expected to soar in the city for hyper-local, high-welfare and ethical food which meets the delegates’ vision for less damaging manner of food production.
At the same time, the climate change conference will coincide with the launch of a major city-wide food plan, designed to help Glasgow become carbon neutral by 2030.
The timing of the unveiling of Glasgow’s City Food Plan, the first plan of its kind in Scotland – just as delegates descend for COP26 – has raised expectations that it will include highly ambitious ideas for feeding the city in the future.
That could include visionary concepts, such as the creation of allotments on former municipal golf courses, rooftops, cemeteries, hospitals, schools and the grounds of historic buildings.
Those have all been mooted in Glasgow Food Growing Strategy’s draft paper which looks at how the city can produce a more diverse range of produce to meet diet trends and climate pressure…READ ON
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18302623.un-climate-summit-change-way-glaswegians-eat-forever/
20
behind paywall, but happy to see CAGW sceptics in the Jakarta Post:
14 Mar: Jakarta Post: Time to end UN climate fiasco
by Jay Lehr and Tom Harris, Ottawa
For years now, the United Nations has been using the climate change crusade as a vehicle to increase its power across the world. Starting in 1995, they began holding massive annual conferences focused on stopping the “planet’s temperature” from rising. That such a temperature was merely a statistical computation that had little or no significance in the real world made no difference — “we must stop global warming” became the clarion call of the yearly Conferences of the Parties (COP) to 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty.
The 1995 Berlin COP was the first and so was designated COP1. COP3 was held in Kyoto where the Kyoto Protocol was created. And so it continued year after year until COP21 met in Paris in 2015 when the Paris Agreement was adopted. Last December COP25 was held in Madrid and, this November, COP26 will be held in Glasgow, Scotland. The Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL) is planning a major debate on climate change to coincide with the Glasgow UN event. It’s about time…
read it all here:
12 Mar: CanadaFreePress: Time to end the UN Climate fiasco
Does man really influence climate?
by Dr. Jay Lehr & Tom Harris
All this is based on the hypothesis that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from burning fossil fuels was increasing the so-called greenhouse effect and this would warm the Earth to dangerous levels.
When the data showed that the Earth was no longer warming, they simply changed the topic from global warming to climate change, allowing them to attribute any natural variation in climate – warming, cooling, drought, floods, whatever they wanted – to man’s influence…
There is a huge impetus by most countries’ bureaucrats to continue holding these useless conferences. More than 190 nations send delegations which in total number more than 20,000 folks living in luxury hotels and dining at fine restaurants in attractive locations at tax-payer expense, ironically producing vast amounts of CO2 in the process…READ ON
https://canadafreepress.com/article/time-to-end-the-un-climate-fiasco
20
Zeke Emanuel is brother of Rahm Emanuel, Obama Chief of Staff. both worked with the Clinton Admin as well:
12 Mar: National Review: Biden’s Coronavirus Adviser Wants to Die at 75
By Wesley J. Smith
(Wesley J. Smith is an author and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism)
Joe Biden has announced the creation of a “Public Health Advisory Committee, (LINK)” consisting of Democratic experts to advise him about how to best grapple with the coronavirus during the campaign. Okay. Good public-health practices are worthy goals for any candidate…
The bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel — a prime architect of Obamacare — is the most famous person on the committee. Why is that important? Emanuel made headlines a few years ago by writing in The Atlantic (LINK) that he wants to die at age 75 — younger than Joe Biden is today — and he thinks we should want that too. From his piece:
(excerpt) Here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic…
And here’s the irony. Who are most at risk of death or serious illness from the coronavirus? The very elderly Emanuel sees as having lives that are “feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.”…
(excerpts) What about simple stuff? Flu shots are out. Certainly if there were to be a flu pandemic, a younger person who has yet to live a complete life ought to get the vaccine or any antiviral drugs.
A big challenge is antibiotics for pneumonia or skin and urinary infections. Antibiotics are cheap and largely effective in curing infections. It is really hard for us to say no. Indeed, even people who are sure they don’t want life-extending treatments find it hard to refuse antibiotics. But, as Osler reminds us, unlike the decays associated with chronic conditions, death from these infections is quick and relatively painless. So, no to antibiotics…
Finally, illustrating why Emanuel is an odd choice for being on Biden’s advisory committee, here’s what he wrote about the cognitive abilities of people his candidate’s age:
(excerpt) Even if we aren’t demented, our mental functioning deteriorates as we grow older. Age-associated declines in mental-processing speed, working and long-term memory, and problem-solving are well established. Conversely, distractibility increases. We cannot focus and stay with a project as well as we could when we were young. As we move slower with age, we also think slower…
That seems painfully apt, given Biden’s recent performance.
Emanuel better hope that Biden doesn’t read his Atlantic piece. I suspect if Good Old Joe ever did, he would yell that Emanuel was full of smelly stuff and demand that his public-health adviser step outside.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-biden-coronavirus-adviser-ezekiel-emanuel-wants-to-die-at-75/
10 Mar: Newsbusters: Twisted Strategy: CNN Fantasizes How Virus Can Help Dems Win 2020
By Nicholas Fondacaro
CNN’s America’s Choice 2020: Super Tuesday (host Anderson Cooper)
ANDREW YANG (former 2020 hopeful): Nothing makes you appreciate a functional government like a global pandemic.
DAVID AXELROD (chief strategist for Obama campaigns): Yes, I’ve always said that
Yang, who had endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden earlier in the night, argued that a Biden presidency wouldn’t just be “a return to moral normalcy, but it’s also going to begin to look like a return to competence because Trump and the Republicans have been running the government in sort of an anti-government frame, which is not what you want when you’re dealing with a health crisis.”
***“And we all know when Joe becomes our president, he’s going to bring back many of the Obama alums who are really, really competent and technocratic,” Yang added. “And there’s going to be a real hunger for that in the days to come among many, many Americans if the coronavirus crisis continues to grow.”…
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/nicholas-fondacaro/2020/03/10/twisted-strategy-cnn-fantasizes-how-virus-can-help-dems-win
20
National Review should have excerpted the following re VENTILATORS, because MSM is making a huge deal about their availability –
This is the coronavirus math that has experts so worried
Washington Post-14 hours ago
Consider the ventilators. For those severely ill with a respiratory disease such as covid-19, ventilators are a matter of life or death…
Oct 2014: TheAtlantic: Why I Hope to Die at 75
An argument that society and families — and you — will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly
Story by Ezekiel J. Emanuel
Obviously, a do-not-resuscitate order and a complete advance directive indicating no VENTILATORS, dialysis, surgery, antibiotics, or any other medication—nothing except palliative care even if I am conscious but not mentally competent—have been written and recorded. In short, no life-sustaining interventions. I will die when whatever comes first takes me…
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75/379329/
MSM are well aware of this infamous piece by Ezekiel, yet none have mentioned it since Joe announced his Coronavirus Advisory Committee, which they report as if it’s perfectly fine.
nice when MSM has your back.
20
The wet-season is pretty much over at this point.
A large High above Australia extends from the lower stratosphere down to 6,000 ft level during the next 10 days, and this lower stratospheric High drops copious amounts of ultra-dry air over the continent down to fairly low levels. Plus extension to a surface High in the Bight, is doing the same thing further south, and pushing dry air north. All the bright pink air shown here at 18,000 ft has less than 5% relative humidity and is steadily sinking into the convective mixing below 15k ft.
Relative-humidity forecast over Australia in 10 days time:
https://i.ibb.co/FDjt5H3/Screenshot-2020-03-14-Windy-as-forecasted.png
This very persistent ultra-dry air coincides also with a large High in the stratosphere and upper troposphere over Antarctica, which is doing the same thing there. The result of this is that the surface temp is already at -62 C as Summer fades over the icesheet. The temp is forecast to drop to -70C for the first time next week, on the 21st March.
Antarctica temp today:
https://i.ibb.co/GctHTQR/Screenshot-2020-03-14-Windy-as-forecasted-4.jpg
Antarctica temp 1 week from now:
https://i.ibb.co/fpphdgY/Screenshot-2020-03-14-Windy-as-forecasted-2.jpg
These Antarctic temps began to steadily fall in January. In other words, seasonality is completely out the window this year, sinking stratosphere does not pay heed to seasonal norms, it over powers them and does what it pleases to the troposphere’s weather. Far from the stratosphere having little effect on the seasonal troposphere, we can now clearly see that it easily over-powers the troposphere’s cyclicity and completely alters the prior decades of prosaic seasonal weather patterns. It’s effect is profound, completely unexpected, I would not have thought it possible before to November 2019.
The post-Summer –70C icesheet temp for most of this coming week makes that clear. Temps that low normally don’t show up until full Winter has developed. It’s so cold is this post-summer that it has already reached down to temps rarely seen in the northern hemisphere during a full Winter. I’ve repeatedly pointed out during this southern Summer that the temperatures over Antarctica have been extremely low, around –40C, and just as cold as Greenland’s icesheet was for most of the northern Winter. Same sort of surface elevation.
Here’s Greenland’s icesheet today at the end of winter and it’s ~15C warmer than post-summer Antarctic icesheet is today:
https://i.ibb.co/F3DncHS/Screenshot-2020-03-14-Windy-as-forecasted-1.jpg
Why is it so? And now the Southern icesheet is switching to a winter temperature regime about 2 to 3 months earlier than it should be.
The southern icesheet cold is due to a large stratospheric High above the icesheet, which is continually dropping colder air from the lower stratosphere and upper troposphere down to the ice surface, at 12,000 to 14,000 feet (ASL). There was not much of a ‘Summer’ this year. It got to the conditions of late Spring and never got any warmer. The High currently extends at least 15,000 ft into the lower stratosphere and even extends above the temperature inversion level (around 42,500 ft).
Here is that High at 45,000 ft on the temperature map. The core is warmer then the surrounds because it’s compressing as it sinks lower. But its air remains cooler than the surrounds within the lower troposphere (black is lower than –70C).
https://i.ibb.co/zPdYKX6/Screenshot-2020-03-14-Windy-as-forecasted-12.jpg
So the stratosphere is sinking into the troposphere and is cooling and drying it out in the upper and mid levels.
JETSTREAM:
As for the Jetstream after March began it gradually fell back to a more ‘normal’ speed range currently. Except, while the maximum speed may have become ‘normal’ the Southern hemisphere still looks identical to the northern hemisphere–it is still very excited and expanded out of season. It’s still looking like a Winter Jetstream. The usual seasonal pattern is gone from the upper and mid-levels in southern troposphere. But seasonality still exists in the lower troposphere. So I can now see how it’s possible for seasonality to be overridden even within the lower troposphere, to produce a “year without a Summer”, periodically. No volcanic eruptions required.
The result would of course be a drought and famine, with few people left to talk about it within earlier millennia, before books and printing presses began to capture this level of notable weather variability, but also extreme seasonal variability.
The “Zonal Jetstream” structure which has extended from the tropical Atlantic then across Africa to Asia and into the western Pacific (since about Christmas) remains in place. It’s weaker but is not actually breaking up, it is stable, but it perhaps has gotten a bit longer on its western end, and is beginning to cross over the Caribbean and central America in the upper levels.
39k ft global jetstream
https://i.ibb.co/gyvpwkb/39k-Screenshot-2020-03-14-Windy-as-forecasted-7.png
The Pacific Equatorial-Jetstream remains stubbornly in place but is weaker. However, it’s migrated westward, nearer to the north of Fiji. But the original parts of it East of there and West of South America have not fully disappeared, they instead got longer (but weaker for now). Keep in mind that the Equatorial-Jets are driven by a pair of cold-core lows extending down from the stratosphere, on either side of the Equator, so the only way equatorial jets can get longer is if more cold-core Lows forming from the stratosphere further west across the Pacific. And that’s what is taking place. Indeed in the upper levels the wind is blowing across the equator in most locations. It is not easing, it’s become more established. The air is net moving from the hotter hemisphere to the colder hemisphere. So some seasonal difference influencing does remain within the upper level over the tropical zones. Though that flow is likely to fade as the seasons begin to swap.
It will be very interesting to see if the equatorial jet, currently above the warmest part of the equatorial Pacific, can survive the seasonal change in wind flows across the equator.
The other major change is that the fastest jets are no longer occurring at 34k, where they have been for decades, nor at 39k feet, like some were last month. They’re all at 30k feet now which is itself unusual as they should be at 34k feet. This suggests either less tropical and subtropical convection is occurring (understandable if the air is drier and denser), or a denser lower stratosphere pushing down on the tropopause, or more likely both.
45k ft global jetstream annotated
https://i.ibb.co/pZPCMBS/45k-Screenshot-2020-03-14-Windy-as-forecasted-1.png
30k ft global jetstream annotated
https://i.ibb.co/9GC6nrK/30k-Screenshot-2020-03-14-Windy-as-forecasted-6.png
Plus the jets have all slowed down to more normal max speeds. This is because they also generally became broader, or even split into two large parallel or diverging jets. This means roughly the same air and energy flow is still circulating but it’s now more spread out. The result is that the cores of all the jets are being less squeezed by close strong adjacent pressure systems. What appears to have occurred is the opposing pressure systems remained strong, but that they moved further away from each other (i.e. the mid-latitudes got wider in latitude range as the tropics narrowed), so that the air is now being squeezed less between the strongest of the pressure systems. Thus there is less ‘jet’ acceleration occurring between the pressure systems. They didn’t weaken, they just moved a bit further apart, which made the jets slower, but also widened them.
The major factor which seems to explain the decreased speed of broader jets is that the in-falling ultra-dry stratosphere is now so widely distributed in the mid and lower tropospheric levels that the gradients between ultra-dry cold air, and humid warm air has decreased. In other words, more dry air and less humid air, and they are mixing more. i.e.
Global Relative Humidity at 18,000 ft at same time and location as the jetstream images above. This is ultra dry infiltrated air just under the base of the jetstream flow. It moves net equatorwards as it falls lower and displaces the more humid air there in the lower troposphere, which is what causes OLR to rise so dramatically wherever it intrudes the lower most atmosphere.
https://i.ibb.co/mTgCwCT/Screenshot-2020-03-14-Windy-as-forecasted-8.jpg
The troposphere above about 6,000 ft has been steadily dried out due to this continuous rapid influx of sinking stratospheric air to sub tropics and tropics. It’s everywhere now from +/-45 degrees of the equator to about +/-10 deg of the equator. Thus the T, rh and pressure gradients have all relaxed as the Lows and Highs have moved apart more as this air shrank the tropics some and expanded the mid latitude cell area. This allowed the jet’s air to rush between the Highs and Lows with less acceleration necessary to get through. So the jets dropped back to a normal WINTER max-speed range despite the Stratosphere continuing to sink rapidly and diluting to surface level, overland after sundown, and to 2,000 ft over tropical oceans during the night.
We all know the saying, “When it’s dry you fry.”
This is what’s occurring globally, temperature is up globally without the usual El-Nino simply because the tropospheric moisture has fallen away during the past 6 months, especially to past 2 months, and especially during the last month. This is why the GBR had low-cloud, still-air and dry high temps approaching bleaching conditions sans any El-Nino, during the past. The lower troposphere was infiltrated with drier air, and when it gets dry, you fry.
We’re apparently in the transition into a cooling La Nina phase, but there’s no cooling as yet because humidity has fallen prior to it and La Nina’s increased cooling rainfall has not yet begun (if it does continue in that trend). That rain may not begin until the end of the year.
The result of all this drier air is an increasing variability trend. Indeed during the past month we’ve seen the sudden return of very strong tornadoes and storms to North America, at the end of Winter. The warming southern state air met cold Canadian air, which increased weather variability (which is of course not “climate change”). And anyone monitoring the dry air would have seen it has been falling on the US west coast, US Mid West states, Mexico, Caribbean and North Atlantic. Dry air there created warmer conditions which moved north earlier, which met cold air moving south, which created severe tornadoes. The dry air created the unseasonable increase in variability, expressed as severe tornadoes. Russia had record cold in November. The UK was smashed by a jet-driven increase in WX variability during the past 6 weeks. Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Iran were hit by increased snow and cold variability in January, by the locked zonal jet structure over Asia and Africa. Russia has been getting a large warm thermal anomaly all winter from the same locked jet structure. Europe has had one of its warmest winters as a result as well. Yet south of there (closer to the equator and the jet flow), in North Africa, middle east and central Asia, it was much colder for longer and massively snowier.
All increased variability range of events.
This is from just the first 4 months of this sudden increase in sinking stratosphere.
Such variability will be enhanced further if a strong La Nina develops later this year. Currently the surface heat layer in the equatorial pacific is decreasing, while the cold pool under it and eastwards near the surface is growing and becoming colder. Remember that this is taking place squarely under the novel Equatorial Jetstream structure, and this change became established just as that jet structure locked itself into place straddling the equator in the same place as El-Nino and La-Nina bloom. That may be a coincidence, and it may not, I don’t know, but this stable equatorial jet structure is forcing me to think in ways I otherwise wouldn’t, to try and explain how it can be there at all.
Sub-surface ENSO trend:
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/oceanography/wrap_ocean_analysis.pl?id=IDYOC007&year=2020&month=03
I suspect we’ll see a strong La-Nina develop this year, as part of the process of switching from a wet middle troposphere to drier middle troposphere.
Keep in mind too that we have a hot planet right now in the tropics, and we have –70C developing in the south polar region this week. Coarsely speaking our weather is the net result of the steepness of that equator to pole temperature gradient. It is currently becoming very steep out of season. Now add a strong La Nina to that sort of mix.
Increased variability ranges are coming, don’t be surprised when that appears.
Over the next few years as the troposphere transitions from the very humid (warmer minimum temps phase that we just lived through) of prior decades, to the drier lower humidity (lower minimum temps phase) in the decades to come, this sort of thing should develop:
Expect colder winter minimums, and hotter summer maximums.
Expect longer droughts and sharper flash floods.
Expect longer periods with no storms, and more intense thunderstorms when they do occur.
Expect wet seasons and dry seasons to become more distinct and on-off.
Expect more cyclones each cyclone season (perhaps with less rain but more variability in intensity levels during life-cycle).
Expect more intense frontal activity.
Expect more dust storms.
Expect the freezing layer to become lower, and stronger T, rh and wind contrasts, vertically.
Expect the southern winter “ozone hole” to continue to self-heal.
Expect a more active swollen jetstream flows with more mobile energy to power the variability.
Expect more blocking-Highs and associated Lows, as their prevalence and locations are apparently ultimately controlled by the rate and structurally preferred locations of in-falling stratospheric air.
It is my suspicion that blocking-Highs are held in place by prevailing geomagnetic flux patterns that are being expressed more strongly during a quiescent solar cycle which distorts the field’s features less. This less distorted field may be what regulates the volume per unit time and location of in-falling stratospheric air, and thus what regulates the persistence and strength of blocking-Highs. Note that blocking Highs have a strong influence on jetstream paths as the jet always skirts around them. This will be important if swollen faster and deeper jets also oscillating vertically as they travel, increasingly bring their winds and WX alteration to the surface. The last thing you want is months to years of blocked aggressive jetstream variability occurring repeatedly down to the surface levels over your home.
If there’s truth in the notion that the Sun drives such regular multi-decadal global ‘cycles’ of sinking stratospheric air keep in mind that the last time we got such sharply increased cooler variability, combined with a strong La-Nina was in the mid 1970s. The Sun was in the middle of a much more active phase then, than now. So the variability range of weather events to come may be more than during the early to mid 1970s.
Expect increased talk of ‘tipping-points’ and extremes from Met-Agency snowflakes, media morons and greenie panic-merchants, as actual strong weather variability and storminess returns.
A global regime of cooler minimums with on average colder winters, with an increase in sea ice, does not mean our summers will be cooling off. They may get much drier and the tropical humidity will tend to fall and rainfall and soil moisture will decrease with that (except during La Nina) so expect “hottest evah” BOM temps of around 47C to be eclipsed by UHI-affected 52C temps due to much drier air and soil and longer periods of lower cloud cover in the tropics and mid-lats. (I lived in Roebourne WA during the early 1970s, I assure you that Summers were not cooler during the cool period) We’ve had the greening of the planet and we will be revisiting a cooler drier WX global browning and “desertification”, which was occurring apace in the decades prior to 1980.
The “warming period” was actually the wet period, and the cooler period will really be the drier period. And that drier cooler phase will not lack for counterbalancing hot days. Only the variability range will become higher, but which nets out to this:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QaSfJP6rzEQ/WWpYMxiW-gI/AAAAAAAACgM/kqD1Ef2iJ-MFSFTiHpeeduSzg6JIrCyFQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/RedThermometerChart%2Bfor%2Bcover%2Bpage.png
Source: http://elonionbloggle.blogspot.com/
Only a fool would claim to see a ‘climate-change’ within that graph’s time interval.
The ‘changes’ we see are routine global weather cycles which bringing changed VARIABILITY RANGES to our weather. Actual climate change is entirely different, it occurs on the scale of centuries to thousands of years. The geology of our planet shows that modern humans will never see a ‘climate-change’ during their lifetime, as climate changes do not occur on the time scales of ultra-short lives of humans.
Humans only experience cyclic changes to the VARIABILITY RANGE of weather cycles during their life times. But opportunistic deceivers and corrupt UN liars assert the change in variability is a global “Climate-Change™”. All such shamelessly crooked and corrupt organizations need to be eliminated. They have no valid place in a modern educated world.
The graph above is the glaring scientific truth about the total lack of climate-change during our life times.
Yet the variability ranges of weather have strongly and continually changed during our life times, but netted-out to no global change whatsoever. Like algebra it always cancels both sides of the equation. Clearly this graph shows that the increase in the trace-gas CO2 has netted-out to no net climate change at all. And yet the variability range continues to change like it always has, and like it always will.
Variability range cyclicity is the only ‘change’ humans can notice within the time scale of a human life. It is that multi-decade weather cycle variability which we have to cope with, but we will not need to cope with an actual global climate change anytime within the next 250 years.
70
WXcycles. Thanks for that. With little knowledge to offer anything, I get the gist of what you
are saying. To me, that is a window into the complexity of weather and climate. It also provides
a grounding lecture on variability in weather cycles and their causes which over many years amount
to what is Climate.
It’s a pity it is difficult for all that to be condensed for the climate illiterate like myself so
many more would have the weapon of argument or, if partial understanding such that most people would
easily call out the AGW hoax. The purveyors of that hoax wouldn’t dare continue the argument which
they are fully supported in totally refusing to debate. It’s people understanding the huge normal variations
-the variability factor – that is needed to kill off this great waste of human resources fighting off that which
doesn’t exist.
IMO, AGW theory’s effect is to destroy western economies, weaken western societies and gain political autocratic
power over western democracies. If one thinks about it, that is what would be needed for the western world at least,
to succumb to full globalisation.
50
‘ … drops copious amounts of ultra-dry air over the continent down to fairly low levels.’
Damn, Covid-19 will thrive.
‘It is my suspicion that blocking-Highs are held in place by prevailing geomagnetic flux patterns …’
It makes sense, I’ll it follow up.
20
Yeah, I think so, in fact I’ve been thinking that since January.
10
Unlike me, I meant to say I’ll follow it up.
20
‘Finally, let me say that I’ve long held that the electromagnetic aspect of the weather is the least understood of all six of the main climate subsystems (ocean, atmosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, and electromagnetosphere).’
Willis Eschenbach 2014
20
Elgordo there are hundreds of variables that control our weather only a few are accounted for , the more they look with unhindered eyes the more they find .
20
Nice quote from Willis (where do you dig this stuff up?).
I’ve got nothing but the observation of a stable structure emerging from what I have formerly presumed was a random fluid jetstream flow, resulting from its formative pressure patterns. But those standing stable pressure patterns constitute the jetstream ‘structure’, and something that we can’t see, or capture with a photon imaging device, is holding that pressure pattern in place for 2.5 months now. I don’t currently see what else it can be but a geomagnetic field that becomes more effective at altering WX as the solar activity falls to its lowest activity levels.
What does amaze me currently is that the existing physics within ECMWF is successfully sniffing-out that trend and is iteratively predicting the outcome so accurately from the current observational inputs to each run. Which indicates to me that this can be and will be figured out.
PS: Robert, hope you’re doing well mate.
20
Which one does carbon dioxide react with again? The absent hotspot and the reflection of
IR? It obviously overwhelms all those other factors making ‘climate’.(irony).
00
The Great Climate Shift of 1976 was solar driven.
https://electroverse.net/sunspot-similarities-between-1976-and-2018-coincidence/
20
Thank you Gordo, I did not realize the early to mid-1970s strong La-Nina was preceded by a weaker solar cycle activity level.
10
Wonderful insights WXcycles. That Redthermometer graph is the best, and can we say Chicken Little was finally right?.
10
Neither did I, we are enlightened. Found this on my rounds, its over twenty years old but is worth a read.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364682697001193
10
Yep, thanks for that, very interesting.
10
Here is a link if anyone is interested to the Medical Journal, The Lancet on the Chinese virologists study into the Wuhan Virus.
It clearly shows that the Virus did not originate in the markets, but originated outside of the markets and then was taken in.
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820%2930183-5
Cheers
M
20
Can you please cite the part of the text you’re referring to. I’ve read that paper three times,once just now and twice when it was first published, and I can’t see it.
20
Clearly not so clear.
page 500 point 27
27 (66%) patients had direct exposure to Huanan
seafood market (figure 1B).
34% had no exposure to the market, which means the virus came into the market from outside spread and came back out. 34% is a large group. No exposure generally includes no contact with people who had exposure, in this case the market.
Statistics
Cheers
20
The question therefore remains. Did the virus escape from the Military biological
Sciences site in the same city and then spread. Could /should we then ask: Is this a synthetic
virus in-so-far as the labs developed it’s ability to jump species. They would have had plenty
of template material to study from the former odd viruses we’ve had over the years that did the same thing.
Note: I’m not saying the virus was deliberately released, but it might explain China’s reticence
in owning up to their virus epidemic problem which then led to ours. What is known in general terms
is, many major nations have biological warfare institutes of their own. We don’t know what they do,
just as our leaders seemed unaware Russia was into hypersonic missiles.
21
A rogue actor within the MBS is highly improbable.
MP makes a strong argument that its origin wasn’t the wet market and I’ll go with that.
00
13 Mar: CNBC: Coronavirus could weaken climate change action and hit clean energy investment, researchers warn
by Emma Newburger
While the crisis has led to a temporary decline in global carbon dioxide emissions, experts are warning it poses a serious threat to long-term climate change action by compromising global investments in clean energy and weakening industry environmental goals to reduce emissions.
The International Energy Agency, or IEA, has warned the virus outbreak will likely undermine clean energy investment and is urging governments to offer economic stimulus packages that invest in clean energy technologies.
“If the lesson learned is, let’s get back to the status quo ante, then [the virus] probably will slow down the energy transition,” author and climate activist Bill McKibben told CNBC.
“If the lesson learned is, you have to take the physical world and its risks seriously, it could make governments more likely to move fast — especially since interest rates in much of the world are now effectively zero,” he said…
Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford University and chair of the Global Carbon Project, said the virus will hinder climate change action from corporations and countries despite the short-term drop in carbon emissions from the outbreak.
“If the global economy crashes, emissions will drop short term as we produce fewer goods, but climate action will slow. Employment trumps environment in politics,” Jackson said. “If companies are hurting, they may delay or even cancel climate-friendly policies that require investments up front.”…
“For companies, the outbreak is already introducing doubt into renewable-energy global supply chains and challenging company balance sheets,” said Dr. Melissa Lott, a researcher at the Center of Global Energy Policy at Columbia University…
In the U.S., the Trump administration has considered providing assistance for hard-hit industries such as the cruise ships and airlines, as well as offering low-interest loans to oil and gas producers that have seen declines in oil prices — a move that would further lock in carbon-intensive investments…
“If economic stimulus packages drive money away from clean energy investments by infusing fossil fuels industries with short-term capital while ignoring clean energy supply chains … we could see a domino effect that would push us further away from our clean energy goals,” she added.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/13/coronavirus-could-weaken-climate-change-action-hit-clean-energy.html
20
If I was a lonely COVIF-19 sitting in someone’s nasopharynx, with nowhere to go after my parent birthed me
in my carrier’s lung, I would love the hoarders!
The actions of the hysterical hoarders, so fearful of me, simply provide the best circumstances for me
to jump across space to my next friendly environment down their throats. People all heated up, pulses racing,
competing and pushing and shoving in a mass of humanity, arguing,yelling and spitting (unintentionally of course)
to get that last pack of loo paper, handwash and masks. What a delightful smorgasboard for me and my friends
to find another destination and transport ourselves direct to the next pair of lungs.
If someone wants to have some fun, just find a group of competing hoarders, give a pretend cough and pretend
shortness of breath. Guaranteed to clear the aisle in a flash and shop at your leisure.
If I was a COVID-19 string of RNA.
32
I see an interpretation is needed for my gallows humour.
I point out that the actions of those racing into stores and competing and arguing over what’s left
on near empty shelves are doing precisely the worst things they can do for themselves and society
in general. They form a close milling crowd, perform personal interactions that if any one of them
is infective will chance infecting many in range at once. That then has the potential for the virus to
be taken into their own homes and infecting whoever they come in close contact with or from contaminated
surfaces. Its stupidity at the highest level. Even the act of hoarding, taking gross amount more than one
needs is itself stupid. It deprives others from having available wipes, tissues and handwash which then makes
them less able to defend themselves and ‘theirs’ and hence increases the susceptible pool. The hoarders in fact
are weakening the societal defence system that is hoped to slow the spread of the bug. There are repeated
instances of the elderly unable to get these resources or to compete for them. It’s the elderly that die.
50
LOL, Swiss Post dumps it electric delivery vehicles.
https://notrickszone.com/2020/03/14/back-to-reality-electric-mobility-gets-dose-of-shock-therapy-german-swiss-post-to-end-electric-fleet/
40
Has Elon heard this news yet.
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“The Math Of Epidemics”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/13/the-math-of-epidemics/
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BBC invites this man on to “Hardtalk”, then pretends to be concerned he might be a scaremonger – see audio link at bottom:
12 Mar: BBC Business: Ian Goldin: Coronavirus will hit economy like 2008 crash
Six years ago globalisation and development expert ***Ian Goldin predicted that the next economic crash would be caused by a pandemic.
Mr Goldin told Hardtalk’s Zeinab Badawi that the economic effects of the coronavirus are probably going to be equivalent to the 2008 financial crash.
If countries responded by rapidly addressing the crisis and transferring money to those that most needed it, it might be possible to avoid the worst of effects, he explained, but there were many unknowns and it was not clear how quickly the economy might recover…
***Goldin has been scaremongering continually:
7 Jan 2019: WorldEconomicForum: How to survive and thrive in our age of uncertainty
(Robert Muggah and Ian Goldin are authoring a book on global challenges to be published by Penguin, Random House, later in 2019)
While there are many reasons to be optimistic about the future (especially if you are Asian), interdependency and acceleration are making it harder, not easier, to work on solving common global problems, ranging from climate change and financial collapse to the spread of weapons of mass destruction or deadly pandemics…
To make matters worse, many political parties around the world are in crisis. ***Most of them are wedded to an outdated 20th-century paradigm that envisions the world through the prism of left and right, or capitalism versus socialism…
Faced with uncertainty, many decision-makers will be tempted to stop the clock, peddle simplistic solutions and retreat to the past. This is incredibly dangerous…
While bold narratives advanced by populists may offer comfort, they can also lead us disastrously down the wrong path…
***NYT, like most MSM, – wedded “to an outdated 20th-century paradigm that envisions the world through the prism of left and right”:
5 Mar: NYT: A Global Outbreak is Fueling the Backlash to Globalization
As the coronavirus spreads around the world, companies are seeking alternatives to making goods in China, while right-wing political parties fulminate against open borders
By Peter S. Goodman
The epidemic has supplied Europe’s right-wing parties a fresh opportunity to sound the alarm about open borders…
“It reinforces all the fears about open borders,” said Ian Goldin, a professor of globalization and development at Oxford University and an author of a 2014 book that anticipated a backlash to liberalism via a pandemic, “The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It.”…
From the worldwide financial crisis of 2008 to climate change, ordinary people have concluded that the authorities cannot be trusted to keep them secure. That has allowed politicians to attack legitimate problems with simplistic solutions, like trade protectionism and armored borders…
Now the coronavirus scare has aggravated the trend. “I don’t think any wall can be high enough to keep out a pandemic, or climate change, or any of the other big threats that face humanity in the future, so I think it’s counterproductive,” Mr. Goldin said…
—
from about halfway through, Goldin pivots to CAGW and barely says anything for the rest of the interview, without referencing “climate change”:
AUDIO: 23m: 13 Mar: BBC Hardtalk: Ian Goldin: Will Covid-19 cause a new recession?
Zeinab Badawi interviews Ian Goldin, a professor on globalisation and development, who six years ago predicted that the next financial crash would be caused by a pandemic. Will his prophesy come to pass, or can this be averted?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3csy94q
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part of what BBC’s Zeinab Badawi doesn’t tell her worldwide audience about Goldin:
Wikipedia: Ian Goldin
Ian Andrew Goldin is a professor at the University of Oxford in England, and was the founding director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. He is Professor of Globalisation and Development, holds a professorial fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford, is director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technological and Economic Change and is Senior Fellow at the Oxford Martin School…
(he has) a Master of Science from the London School of Economics, and a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford…
(he was) program director at the OECD in Paris, where he directed the Development Centre’s Programs on Trade, Environment and Sustainable Development…
Goldin was director of development policy at the World Bank (2001–2003) and then vice president of the World Bank (2003–2006). He served on the Bank’s senior management team, and was directly responsible for its relationship with the UK and all other European, North American and developed countries. Goldin led the Bank’s collaboration with the United Nations and other partners. As Director of Development Policy, Goldin played a central role in the research and strategy agenda of the Bank, working closely with the Chief Economist, Lord Nicholas Stern, under the leadership of James Wolfensohn. During this period, Goldin was special representative at the United Nations and served on the chief executive board of the UN and the UN Reform Task Force…
In 2006, Goldin became founding director of the Oxford Martin School. Under his leadership, the school established 45 programmes of research, bringing together more than 500 academics from over 100 disciplines, and becoming the world’s leading centre for interdisciplinary research into critical global challenges. He remained the School’s director until September 2016 when Achim Steiner followed him in this position…
He is the writer and presenter of the BBC Series ‘After the Crash”…
As a visiting lecturer, he has given lectures, workshops and seminars at the Universities of Oxford, Harvard, MIT, Columbia (New York), UC Berkeley, LSE, Sussex, Sorbonne (Paris 1), SciencesPo., Toulouse, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Tokyo, Cape Town, Witwatersrand, Dar es Salaam, Accra, Beijing, Tsinghua, Shanghai, Singapore, Thailand (TDRI), Rome, Rio de Janeiro, Santa Fe, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Managua, Mexico DF, and to numerous foundations, think tanks and others.
He has initiated and directed a wide range of collaborative research programs including OECD/CEPR/Rockefeller Programs on “The Economics of Sustainable Development” and “Economic Reform, Trade and Development”.
He is an acclaimed author and has published 21 books and over 50 journal articles…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Goldin
irrelevant whether or not the podcasts work; just picked a couple of entries to show what Oxford Martin promotes, incl the latest, which is on REs:
Oxford Martin School: Public Lectues & Seminar episodes
02.18.2020
Powering the future: switching on the renewables
Globally, renewable energy has a foot in the door. But significant challenges remain. Will we be able to execute on the rapid deployment of zero carbon energy required to meet a 1.5C future? This presentation highlights the major challenges and …
08.18.2015
Climate change: what science and the IPCC report has to say
Nick Eyre and Myles Allen give a talk for the Oxford Martin School on climate change and the IPCC report. One of the key objectives of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), completed in …
https://podcast.app/oxford-martin-school-public-lectures-and-seminars-p652277/
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What better way to highlight for the not already convinced what Trump means by “bringing manufacturing back to US”.
“Hayward: China Threatens to Cut Off Medicine, Throw America into ‘Mighty Sea of Coronavirus’ ”
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/03/13/hayward-china-threatens-to-cut-off-medicine-throw-america-into-mighty-sea-of-coronavirus/
Andrew Bolt also has an item this morning if you can get around the Murdoch wall
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Gen Z not alone?
13 Mar: World Nuclear: EU nuclear sustainability needs expert review, utilities say
Seven utilities have written to the European Commission, urging it to create an independent group of scientists and experts to evaluate whether nuclear power is a low-carbon and sustainable source of electricity. One of the seven, Czech utility ČEZ, said yesterday that it had “joined the challenge” facing the main European energy companies to gain the EC’s agreement that the nuclear industry ought to benefit from future sustainable financing.
On 9 March, the technical expert group advising the European Commission on sustainable finance published its final recommendations on the EU taxonomy, including “substantial new user guidance” to help investors and companies meet obligations for reporting against the framework. In response, ČEZ said that France’s EDF and Orano, Finland’s Fortum, Romania’s Nuclearelectrica, Poland’s PGE, and Slovakia’s Slovenské Elektrárne had jointly urged an independent evaluation of nuclear energy.
“The technical expert group itself acknowledges that nuclear is too complex to evaluate. If the European Commission and its Joint Research Centre lack expertise in this field, then an independent expert assessment is logically needed. And from my point of view also the participation of national nuclear regulators, who have exclusive insight into nuclear facilities,” said ČEZ CEO Daniel Beneš.
In addition, the introduction of new sustainability assessment criteria goes against the meaning of the current European legal framework, he said…
Nuclear power already accounts for one-fifth of the European Union’s electricity generation, the statement noted, and can make a significant contribution to the bloc’s climate objectives.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EU-nuclear-sustainability-needs-expert-review,-uti
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