The March for Science is on Saturday.
Will J Grant and Rod Lambert struggled with the message behind the “March for Science” at The Conversation. We should march, they said a month ago, because “science is a human process”, which will be news to people who thought science was about evidence and reason instead. On Saturday they will be marching for the kind of science that is “passion” and “belief”. Don’t turn up thinking this is about the dispassionate Laws of Physics. You’ll be at the wrong rally.
Is the March to solve a problem or create one?
The March seems to be fighting strawmen. It is supposedly about “Encouraging scientists to share their research” (as if scientists like to hide their research). We know they hide their data, their methods and their adjustments, but when the ABC turns up to interview them, they don’t seem to hide their opinions. They hide their declines but don’t hide their Nobel Prizes (even if they didn’t get them). Do they need encouragement?
And the March is there, apparently, “affirming science as a vital feature of a working democracy”, who says it isn’t? Like voters have been asking for witchdoctors instead? Absolutely no one is questioning science’s role in democracy. Science has such an incredible halo, it is considered to be so-above-question that everyone wants to brand their version of reality as “science”. There are no marches for stone-age solutions, no “anti-science” movements (except inadvertently by those who think models produce evidence). But those who falsely cloak themselves in the science flag want us to think there is an anti-science movement, so this feeds their own comfortable delusion.
There is major muddying going on here
What does it mean to “advocate for open and accessible science?” . These are the same people who fight to the death to prevent heretics from publishing a paper, or from doing a radio interview, or from opening a research centre. The point of including statements like that is to blur the reality for onlookers and fool the puppet marchers. It’s just more “fog”.
It’s a march for “robust funding” (give us the money)
Those who can’t discover something useful have to march in the streets instead. The March is one big Pat-on-The-Back for the crusaders for taxpayer funds.
It’s a feel good March: feel good about your IQ
The organisers want Marchers to feel like they have the high ground, the smarts, but check out the advice to the noble superior mind:
Don’t pick fights (either verbal, physical or metaphorical) with people who you think are dumb, wrong, dangerous or unpleasant.
That ugly sentiment gets repeated (in case you missed it):
But do stick to your guns. [Whatever they are, eh?.] Appealing to broader interests doesn’t have to mean pandering to interests that you think are dumb, wrong, dangerous or just plain unpleasant.
People with a different scientific opinion are obviously dumb, wrong, dangerous or just unpleasant. Plenty of smug warfare going on here.
Grant and Lamberts advice includes telling Marchers “Now is not the time to try to “correct” the misconceptions and “woo” of people who might not be as scientifically informed as you. ” He might as well put out a clickbait advertisement for a free booster shot of scientific ego. This march is for the A+ science students who never got A but know they should have. Come march with us, we are all so clevah.
And they’ll need to be clever if they are going to simultaneously follow his advice and “not correct misconceptions” while they also “stick to their guns”.
Advice, point 7, is to bring sex workers:
Publicly embrace others, and get them to embrace you. If anyone should stand out at this march, it’s people who aren’t scientists. Do you know a group of firefighters, senior citizens or sex-workers who’d be prepared to march with signs saying “[non-science group of people] for science”? Give them a call and get them on board. Maybe get them to dress in uniform!
Lamberts and Grant wrote this article a month ago but openly admit they were struggling to explain why they were marching.
Don’t miss the clarity in the closer:
Now get out there
There’s still a bit of time to think about this and get it right. Of course, what “right” means will differ from person to person, so let’s get that clear before rushing out on April 22 and making all kinds of different noises.
For skeptical scientists, if we were Marching for Science we wouldn’t have to work out what we were marching for with four weeks to go.
It’s a wonderful feeling to unite with like-minded people, but let’s strive to show we are united for something that non-science people can relate to as well, or we’ll be portrayed as being united against those very same folks.
So even when you are making “different noises” in a march that no one knows what the mission is, it’s good to unite with “like-minds” — people who are just as confused.
As for being afraid of being portrayed as being united against “those very same folks” — the Marchers might stop calling them dumb, wrong, dangerous and unpleasant maybe?
Well, if I could get there my placard would say —
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the heck you say …
UP WITH GRAVITY
NOW!
it could be completely gone in 5 years if we don’t stop jumping immediately
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Gravity Sucks!
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No. No, iy is the earth that sucks.
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Science is just a social construct created by rich and old, white, men. Science should be about feelings.
If you feel that gravity doesn’t exist, then it doesn’t exist. Suggesting anything else is, something or another. 🙂
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It is about time that “scientists” homogenised gravity.
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Gravity only works on objects that identify as having mass. In order to defy gravity all you need to is identify as having no mass.
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Or in other words an air head!
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A vacuum more like…
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Why march for science, unless you are trying to create an “artifcial horizon” ( i.e. lie )?
Something truthful is self evident and obvious and logical.
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That’s not altogether true, OS, try marching for Nuclear power instead of “renewables.”. Chances are it won’t be accepted most places as self evident, obvious, and logical.
This isn’t a march “for science,” it is a march for “self-defined scientists,” most of which aren’t actually truly working in the fields of “science,” and take exceptional “artist’s license” in their “models.”
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Otherwise known as a March for Science-U-Like.
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I’m marching for Science Awareness a new group of non-scientists I formed yesterday after my fourteenth beer.
Our placard for the march:
“Friction doesn’t exist – it’s a figment of your imagination”
Cheers,
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Maybe try the slogan “Repeal scientific laws now!”
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They should be proud to march and succeed such a long line of humanitarian traditions, the great leap forward, then night of broken glass, the inquisition…..ah the memories.
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I wonder if they will be handing out the usual raised clenched fist posters to all marchers?
The Left will always make things about rascism, or some other “ism” to create a conflict point – they are just conflict monkeys, they cant help themselves….hey, maybe science is the alleged preserve of rich white guys, and needs to be, you know,… “democratized”….?
When was the last tie you saw quiet guys in white lab coats marching loudly to proclaim science as…well….logical and academic?
None of this makes any sense…unless its an overt way of politicising legit ( non-climate ) science….
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If the marchers and professional CAGW converts showed such energy and passion towards openly debating the ‘scientifically misinformed’ this whole climate debacle could have been settled years ago, hmm I wonder why this would be so vehemently avoided…….
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Tomorrow (Sat 22 Apr 2017), President Trump will experience the treacherous methods of his opponents in a March for Science in Washington, DC.
A historical warning on intrinsic danger of internal government conflicts:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/March_for_Science.pdf
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The weather forecast is falling temperatures and showers in Washington, DC on Saturday.
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Hope it snows on them. Heh.
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Saturday’s weather will contribute this “message of reality!”
https://weather.com/weather/today/l/38.89,-77.02?temp=f
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“Science is a human process” is one of those deep-and-meaningless utterances nobody can fathom so nobody can challenge. Do you think science is not a human process? What, are you saying it’s a vegetable process? A mineral process? An inhuman process? Or are you saying it’s human but a wigwam for a goose’s bridle rather than a process? How dare you deny that science is a human process! It’s why we march!
These preening ratbags really must be the children of Darwin. Charles Darwin married his first cousin.
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Nothing wrong with that- then. Happened a lot in those days. My great-great-grandparents were first cousins. But their (Irish) son married a German fraulein, and their son married an Aussie girl, and their son married a Yorkshire/Scottish lass, and their son is me. So I think I’ve got enough genetic variety.
I’d march against di-hydrogen monoxide if I could find anyone to care. Do you think anyone except the ABC will notice these’preening ratbags’?
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First cousin SBS will be parading almost certainly.
Question: How do you tell the difference between an ABC reporter and one from the SBS?
Answer: Both speak nonsense but with the SBS reporter speaking it in another language, whereas the ABC reporter uses plain english drivel.
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You should be marching because you are genetically confused.
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Mixed yes; with a grandfather from Shetland, and Scottish, English, Irish, German and Portuguese ancestors (and a New Zealander, but we always hush up about that one ).
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Ah, but can you do a Haka?
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Ken Stewart said:
but would you march for oxygen di-hydride? It’s a very close relative and the trees need it.
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Is that a fake or alternative chemical? You can’t be too careful.
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Left-handed water?
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It is a generic copy.
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You’re right and it’s been out of patent for a long time.
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Try oxidane.
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I fill old tonic bottles with the rainwater version of dihydrogen monoxide, oh, oxygen di-hydride if you must, and use them to fill spaces in the old workshop ‘fridge. They are labelled dihydrogen monoxide.
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“Science is a human process”
My dog does the scientific method better than most of this mob. ” … systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses … “. Also “first do no harm” eventually prevails over testing to destruction.
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Actually I do NOT believe “science is a human process.” The truth is, “science is,” where as a human process might be defecating. No, “science” is not a human process, but trying to understand and quantify science would be a human “mental” process, or the understanding of science might be considered the product of a human process.
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Mosomo,
I was going to say that phrases such as “deep-and-meaningless utterances nobody can fathom” are called platitudes. Then, I wanted to make sure that that was the correct term and useage, which sent me on a mini-etymological journey (in other words, I looked up “platitude”).
Anyway, one definition/synonym is “cliche,” so I looked up cliche out of curiosity and found an interesting term, “thought-terminating cliché,” that I had never heard before, but the definition seems to be applicable to typical warmist/environmentalist arguments when they want to close down discussion or shut down debate.
From Wikipedia (reference numbers removed):
Thought-terminating cliché
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Hmm, that warrants some more research. I was not aware of Robert Jay Lifton, nor his book, Thank you for the reference.
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Reference was included in the quote, but you’re welcome. 🙂
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Very good Jo.
PS: the first link ‘March for Science at the Conversation’ is broken.
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“‘March for Science at the Conversation’ ”
Very little science exists at the CONversation.
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Probably why there’s nothing at the link …
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Maybe the link points to the Lefts relevence?
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Is there a placard for this/
http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2017/04/muslim-phd-candidate-has-flat-earth-thesis-accepted-spent-5-years-with-supervisors-working-on-it-.html
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I will do my part by asking Trump to remove the US NAS from annual review of programs and budgets of the US DOE and NASA unless . . . .
Scientists from the US NAS itself responds, or instructs scientists from the US DOE and NASA to respond to obvious and well-documented errors in the nuclear models proposed by Weizsacker in July 1935 and endorsed by Chadwick in his Noble Lecture in Dec 1935
It is time to end eighty-two years of NAS-guided deceit of the public
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On Saturday, the US NAS (National Academy of Sciences) will sponsor this fake, false, phony “March for Science“ to try to keep President Trump from correcting NAS misuse of government research agencies to promote the UN’s Agenda 21, a danger Eisenhower first warned about in his departing speech to the nation on 17 Jan 1961:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOLld5PR4ts
Eisenhower’s complete address is available here: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm
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Funny…I saw “NAS” and my mind flicked to “NUS”…coincidence?
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Four months after Eisenhower’s final address to the nation on 17 Jan 1961,
John F. Kennedy Kennedy announced a decision to start the Apollo Space Program on 25 May 1961,
To protect the US national security from the USSR’s surprise launch of the Sputnik satellite on 4 Oct 1957.
John Glenn Jr. first orbited the Earth on 20 Feb 1962,
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on 22 Nov 1963, and
Kissinger accepted China/USSR demands to end the Apollo Space program on ~11 Jul 1971,
President Richard M. Nixon announced the end of the Apollo Space Program on 5 Jan 1972.
“No more dreams, Mr. President” http://claudelafleur.qc.ca/Nomoredreams.html
A brief history of the US Apollo program: https://judithcurry.com/2012/08/15/9412/#comment-229636
Conclusion: DOE and NASA must be removed from control by the US National Academy of Sciences to restore America’s independence from the United Nations
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I am a little intrigued by your implication that the Apollo program was axed by the Russians and Chinese and not by the budget cuts caused by the Vietnam war and an American Congress turning its eyes away from space exploration. Yet another shot at Nixon, I guess. Can’t seem to find enough “bad stuff” to blame on the man. Certainly the essay you point to doesn’t exactly seem to support your point though the comment you made on the Curry site alludes to the same things. Would you mind showing me a link to the material that proves your statement of Kissinger accepting the demands and Nixon acting upon them?
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Thanks, Tom O, for your question. Details of the rise and fall of US space science program (1945-1972) were posted on my new web page, [email protected], after Climategate emails surfaced in Nov 2009.
Many honest, talented, hard working Apollo engineers and astronauts realized, too late, that the US Apollo Space Program was cancelled in Jan 1972 to resume the world-wide peace program at the end of WWII, when nations and national Academies of Sciences were united under UN on 24 OCT 1945.
The March on Washington is sponsored by Trump’s most treacherous opponent, the US National Academy of Sciences aka UN’s Agenda 21, under cover of a charitable 501(c)3 organization.
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I was very slow to start connecting the dots that led from the uniting of nations on 24 OCT 1945 to release of the Climategate emails sixty-four (64) years later in Late Nov 2009
https://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-35
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“The “March for Science”–No Laughing Matter? Says Who?”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/20/the-march-for-science-no-laughing-matter-says-who/
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If I can get to a march, my placard will be “It’s Models all the way down!”
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RicDre, perhaps somebody will take a “Hide the decline!” sign.
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Well, it’s the PEOPLE’S CLIMATE MARCH
the other animals appear not to be invited
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Interesting though. The phrase, “The People’s” in regard to something, is a very communist ideation.
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If you pay attention, liars and thieves always give themselves away. They have to boast about how clever they.
The People Republic… Yep, it sure is.
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It reminds me of Tony Blair’s nauseating naming of Princess Diana as ‘The People’s Princess’…..bleuurrgh.
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March for Science’ admits to being ‘explicitly a political movement.’
Q: How does the march define being political?
A: The march is explicitly a political movement,
https://www.marchforscience.com/faq/
Sammy Kata, who is headed to the San Francisco march with a group of up to 100 colleagues and friends, said the marchers want to be clear about their purpose: “It is a political march.”
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/04/19/science-fights-back-the-advancing-march-for-science/
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Saul Alynski, the same who wrote the Left play book “Rules for Radicals” ( and dedicated the book to Lucifer/The Devil… ) always sdaid “the issue isnt th eissue” – namely these protests are about creating a fracture for the left to exploit.
Take away the agro and dissent, and the Left have nothing to wrok with. They thrive on people being cranky, as once in an emotive state, logic the brain pretty much switches off.
The best way to defeat the Left is to stay calm, dont rise to their taunts. Their comfort zone is conflict.
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As they say.” The only thing a Greenie/ Lefty understands is a placard”
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Brilliant, Glen! Thanks for the laugh, it’s made my morning!
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In all these things, the best way to defeat the left is with humour.
Those, not of the left will laugh and join in with the humour.
Those of the left, who are seriously serious, will not get the humour, and will not understand why other people are laughing, presumably at them.
In the Harry Potter books/movies the magic word was “Riduculus”.
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“RIDUCULUS” Now, there’s a placard for this silly march. Just think of these plonkers as a boggart and laugh at them.
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The March for Science. – John Cook
How scientists can fight for science without losing trust
http://thebulletin.org/how-scientists-can-fight-science-without-losing-trust10694#comment-3263813889
The first comment from Barry Wood is interesting.
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Quiz. Identify the group/association that has done the most good for the planet.
1)Climate science
2)Climate seance
3)Cargo Cults
4)Howler Monkeys
5)The little old lady who washes clothes for a living
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Hmm, the little old lady could be a winner, if she got together with other little old ladies, and formed a movement for “clean clothes, every day – smelly clothes, no way.”
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Well, since it’s best for “The Planet”, it’s probably the Howler Monkey.
If it’s the best for society in general, and furtherance of the human condition; the little old wash lady wins hands down.
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The march is to protect the social consensus, against the the real world evidence. A few days ago Ron Clutz at Science Matters posted on Michelle Stirling’s paper Consensus Nonsensus on 97%: Science is not a Democracy
. From the paper:-
For proper scientists – those who want to understand the real world – the ultimate reference point has to be empirical data of the real world. For the socialist academics / wannabe scientists the reference point is the opinion of like-minded people. From the perspective of wannabe scientists the proper scientists are consensus deniers. From the perspective of proper scientists, the wannabe scientists are irrelevant.
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“To compound the psychological impact upon the dissenting 3% of the population….”
3% – yeah, really, says who? Some bunch self appointed bunch of irrelevent odious lefties?
Who died and made them king?
“Tell ’em they’re dreaming”
– Darryl Kerrigan
“The Castle”
As to the “97% of scientists” – standard leftist propaganda technique….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
“A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
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To tell a “big lie” you first need to know the truth. Jo mentions about hiding the data, the methods and the adjustments. I suggest that the principle reason that the climate alarmists for doing so is not to deceive others, but because have got science back to front. Their view is that the world out there is something to be molded to the higher reality of their consensus opinions. A prime example is in an email from Kevin Trenberth to Micheal Mann on Mon, 12 Oct 2009 and copied to most of the leading academics.
(my emphasis)
It is the real world that needs to be adjusted to belief. One of those copied to was Thomas Karl, lead author on the infamous Karl et al 2015 that allegedly found reasons for eliminating the pause hiatus. But in Climate Delusions 1, I found that the elimination of any downward trend was only through comparing 1950-2000 to 1950-2014. Compare 1975-2000 with 2000-2014 and even by their own figures the rate of warming halved. More significant in Climate Delusions 2, I find that if the CO2 is a major cause of warming, then post 2000 the rate of warming should have accelerated. Using long-term linear rates is the collective deluding themselves, just as using consensus messaging, signing petitions and going on mass marches.
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Well put Kevin, in particular your last paragraph.
GeoffW
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March for cli-science,
march for 18C,
march for gate-keeping
‘n more constraints on liberty.
March for Tiljander
and hide the decline,*
the right to refuse data
because it’s mine.
*Of course, each of us has to decide what
the right balance is between
being effective and being honest.
H/t Stephen Schneider.
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Very nicely put, Beth.
You will be in danger of attracting groupies, if you keep that up.
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Why thank ‘ee Rereke,
but I walk alone…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKxH0X7DaVY
Say, nice voice. 🙂
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Perhaps white hoods and coats and flaming plus signs and chants of burn the Climate Deniers would give the right flavour?
Placards. Consensus Science. Mann Up. Nobel Cause. Curry Curry. Hydro without Dams. Wonderful Wind. More Cash/Taxes/Grants.
Even throw an effigy of Trump off a pier? Pier Pressure and Pier Review in one.
Then go home and turn off all the lights in a show of solidarity with South Australia.
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SAVE ACCESS
https://www.csiro.au/en/Research/OandA/Areas/Assessing-our-climate/CAWCR/ACCESS
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Why should people stand up for science when too many of the climate scientists do not and instead stand up for a hoax?
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I put this link up on the previous thread, it seems Australian climate science has been saved, so marching down under is a waste of time and energy.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/horrible-time-csiro-climate-science-proves-its-worth-one-year-after-deep-cuts-20170202-gu4hyl.html
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“involves the Chinese counterpart providing $2 million annually for five years”
The Chinese, Indians etc. were hoping to make billions of dollars per year to encourage them to close some plants. Promising $2 million annually (which they can stop at any time) is a small price to pay for the PR.
The Magic Disappearing $100 Billion Climate Fund
Obama’s promises are cheap. 🙂
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China is spitting chips, they don’t understand democracy, its not a steady state. They planned on using the monies from the fund to supply the Third World with wind and solar farms, which they would have provided at a reasonable cost.
Beijing swallowed the hoax (for commercial and strategic reasons) and are going to get burnt.
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Ah, that makes some sense.
I thought they had faux rage to try to twist some arms, but you’re saying they really believed Obama’s promises meant something. LOL is all I’ve got for them.
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Can I wear my 1970s T-shirt to the march, the one that says “Keep the whales in the ground”.
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Or my favorite, Land Rights for Gay Whales.
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I have seen a few of them walking around.
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Which ones – T-shirts or whales?
Cheers,
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Land Rights for Radioactive Gay Whales
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I wonder how much CO2, methane and dihydrogen monoxide whales emit to the atmosphere. 🙂
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You do not want to be in the immediate vicinity when it happens. My partner went on a whale spotting trip, and experienced whale flatulence, at first nose, as it were. She is responding to treatment, and showing positive improvement.
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Oh yeah,the beached ones.
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“Keep geraniums in the ground” would be my placard.
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I will be going there – and wearing my “Global
WarmingHoax” t-shirt81
Check the weather before going. You could get an unexpected Climate Change. These are random events apparently. Or go to a low CO2 area.
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Let’s hope there is global warming induced “river piracy” which washes the marchers away.
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I haven’t heard that Gore is going, so they might get some fine weather.
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OT – Wind power generation
In SA has been hovering around the 5% capacity factor area since about 10pm AEST last night
Nationally has been hovering around the 10% capacity factor area since about 6am AEST this morning
http://anero.id/energy/wind-energy/2017/april/21
And NSW had ZERO wind powered generation between 12pm and 2pm yesterday
http://anero.id/energy/wind-energy/2017/april/20
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And the current output of the 3,891 windmills is under 1 gigawatts at present. What folly. They replaced Robert Stevenson with Captain James Cook.
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Not a good connection there. Cpt. Cook sailed around the world and back, knew where he was going and got there. Also there were numerous scientific ideas resulting from his voyages. True, he ran aground on an uncharted reef but he didn’t react by claiming the reef didn’t exist, but charted it to warn future sailors.
But it is difficult to think of someone who could properly represent those who believe in wind turbines. The best I could find is Drongo, which you may think of as a bird but my dictionary claims it also refers back to “a spectacularly unsuccessful australian racehorse”.
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Sorry Aussies. I did not mean to run down Captain Cook in any way. I much admire his navigational and managerial skills.
By the same token, I am not pretending that Stephenson’s “Rocket” is comparable to the latest HELE coal-fired power stations.
I am simply pointing out that we have been moving towards more dense forms of energy for 200 years – but now the trend is the other way.
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You’re right. We are being pushed into less dense sources of energy by the hysterical more dense mob.
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Who fail to recognize that we live in a world of see-saw,
Marjorie-Daw-whether…
https://media1.britannica.com/eb-media/15/149415-004-3FCD1F93.jpg
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Captain Cook would sail rings around the adventures of scientists who venture to the South Pole in search of melting ice, and banana smoothies.
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Real time update from AEMO. To meet SA demand of 1450 MW, they are producing 200 MW from gas, and importing 600 MW of electricity from Vic as the wind isn’t blowing. But with the closure of Hazelwood, Vic is producing 700 MW from gas, and importing 440 MW of power from NSW (which NSW is importing from Qld) and 450 MW from Tassie.
A crisis is imminent – just needs one more “evil” coal-fired station to close, and the lights will go out. Meanwhile we are all paying more for electricity and gas because of dumb federal and state government policies.
But fear not, the ACCC is on the job. “The study will run for three years and make formal reports every six months, with the first in October. The ACCC’s previous inquiry yielded no quick fix, delivering recommendations yet to be acted on. It recommended state-based restrictions be lifted, tighter gas pipeline regulation, more market transparency”.
Mr Sims admits it’s a crisis, but the study will take three more years?? The ACCC is a toothless termite.
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The “study” will do nothing but employ a bunch if brain dead public serpents “employed” for another three years.
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That should have read:
The “study” will do nothing but keep a bunch of brain dead public serpents “employed” for another three years.
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“And NSW had ZERO wind powered generation between 12pm and 2pm yesterday”
Since the ACT gets ALL of its electricity from renewables (located NOT in the ACT)..
.. that must have meant a blackout for all Canberra.
Did anyone hear about this?
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This is what actually what passes for Science these days.
The ACT consumes (X) GigaWattHours (GWH) of electricity each year.
So, what they did was this, using taxpayer dollars.
The contributed funds to 4 renewable power plants, one in Northern NSW, one in South Australia, and two in Victoria. Those funds covered enough output from those four plants to equal the (X) GWH consumed by the ACT.
So now, the ACT can very artfully say, hand on heart, that they are 100% pwered by renewables.
No actual extension cord from the ACT to those four plants. Nup! They just pay for the electricity generated from those plants.
The ACT is actually connected to the NSW grid, of which 76% is supplied by coal fired power.
I drove into a garage the other day to get petrol. The driver of the car parked at the bowser I was going to use walked out of the Office, got into his car and drove off. That car was a Porsche 911. I was just so d@mned happy. I filled up my own car, using the same petrol he had just consumed. I’m happy because now, my Holden Astra is finally the Porsche 911 I always wanted as a young feller, all because I have the same fuel in my car that he does.
Same principle.
And the people of the ACT, well, they swallowed it hook line and sinker.
That’s what now passes for reality.
Tony.
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Dealing with APS-employed canberrans is interesting – its like a whole population suffereing from Stockholm Syndrome, where anything said agaisnt the Left is not tolerated.
But wait – the ACT has the highest average education level….
And so the proclamation of “100% renewables powered” makes sense….living proof intelligence doesnt actual equal common sense……
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I shoudl also say I have met some very pleasant APS people, I do find the red mist can appear though when you criticise the
Leftsource of employment…60
The ACCC took exception to HT’s propaganda on the same basis.
However, in the scheme of things, 54 grand is but a slap with a wet noodle.
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No Rod, seriously, that’s a pretty big fine.
They would have to sell 14 minutes worth of electricity just to cover that fine.
Just think, the fine was paid off before they even reached the steps of the courthouse on the way
down to the pubout.(really, you can only laugh)
Tony.
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I think most of their renewable electricity contracts are from SA and Victorian wind farms. But nothing much seems to be flowing up to them…
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Analitik mentions this very important fact:
The sneaky thing about all of this is perception.
Because the ACT is connected to the grid only, they will always have power 24/7/365.
Now, because that furphy has been spread about so many times that the ACT is now 100% renewable, people actually believe that renewables can in fact supply 24/7/365 power. No one is actually going to go and check the truth of it.
The ACT consumes (X) GWH of power in a year, and they just purchase that equal amount of power from their 4 renewable power plants, hence A=B, and the people just blindly believe it’s true.
Perish the person who actually tries to explain it. Watch the flamers come out thick and fast.
Some of the electric power retailers actually offer (and at a premium no less) that you, in the actual home you live in, can purchase all of your power as renewable, in other words supplied only from renewable sources.
The power comes down the line, supplied only by what is there at the grid, and here in Oz, almost 80% of that total generated power is coal fired power.
I have actually heard people proudly proclaim that they only consume renewable power in their homes.
I have also heard anecdotal stories that some of those power retailers have sold more renewable power than is actually being generated here in Australia ….. at a premium cost don’t you know, so they’re laughing all the way to the bank, the umm, retailers that is. The gullible are easily led, and just as easily believe that this is being done for altruistic purposes, and is a very good environmentally conscious thing to do.
It’s really only about the money.
Tony.
191
Tony,
“It’s really only about the money.”
PLEASE don’t forget the other purpose either.
Agenda 21 – is the purpose –
Global WarmingClimate Change is the vehicle.We owe George Soros such a lot don’t we? – sarc
Cheers,
60
Tony, love the comment about people consumingmore renewable power than produced – where did you find those figures?
I will look forward to letting a few eco tragics I know of, know this little point…..
80
OriginalSteve, as I mentioned, it was only anecdotal.
I was at a family barbecue here in Rocky, and while I didn’t know half the people there, I still circulated and made small talk. One of the wives said that she worked at the local Ergon building. As part of the small talk I just casually mentioned the advertising info booklets they include with every power bill. She looked at me and said ….. do you actually read that stuff?
I mentioned that coming from a background in the electrical trade, some of it was pretty amusing, which got a smile. I then mentioned the small article that if you paid extra, you could ensure that only renewable power was supplied to your home. She said that was one of the jokes at work, and then asked me if I knew much about renewable power. I replied, well, a little, and she asked me where was the closest renewable power plant to where we lived here in Rocky, and I replied that there wasn’t one.
She then said, (prefaced with ….. you didn’t hear this from me) that the number of people actually taking up that offer meant that they had actually got people to pay for more renewable power than what was actually being generated, and that it was a similar situation for all the power retailers. People just loved paying extra for something like that.
I just mentioned that all the power was just what was on the grid anyway, and she said hey, you really do know stuff.
Luckily my daughter interrupted me right about then.
Interesting chat really.
Tony.
141
What does the ACT do with electricity?
They do nothing with everything else they are blessed with.
Bunch of loafers.
60
SA wind generation has now been below 5% capacity (100MW) for 6 hours now.
The geographically correlated Victorian wind generation output has been between 10% and 18% (150MW – 250MW) for the same period.
This will be a total train wreck when the same calm occurs in July with temperatures another 10 deg C lower. With Hazelwood gone, South Australians will be recalling last July’s price spikes with fond memories.
130
The lack of wind is due to CO2 – the wonder gas.
31
So the NATIONAL (OK, SA, Vic, NSW and Tas) wind generation has been 10% (around 400MW of 4GW nameplate) for the past 18 hours now. Victoria has been around 15% for this period and NSW has been around 10% (meandering between 5% and 15%)
SA has been 5% or less for most of the last 24 hours and has only ramped up to 10% for the last 5 hours.
It looks like south and mid eastern Australia is too small a geographic area for the “somewhere” where the wind will always be blowing. Dan, Jay, Anna, Gladys – is this really the future you want for us?
http://anero.id/energy/wind-energy/2017/april/21
50
Meanwhile, back at the ranch:
Malcolm has used his own patented scientific method to determine that the solution to Australia’s energy dilemma is to use some of the country’s hydroelectricity to pump water uphill.
While Victoria and New South Whales refuse to use the natural gas the lies underfoot, Colin Barnett proposes a five billion dollar pipeline to import gas from WA, to replace the Bass Strait and Cooper Basin gas that is being inefficiently liquefied for export.
This must be political science.
100
The ecological tragedy was the destruction of Shannon’s rise, a famous trout fishing spot with unique larvae, a fishing spot so famous that the emperor of Japan was a frequent visitor. It was pumped out to store water for hydro in the 1980s without a word said.
The very idea that we can dramatically increase dam storage in Tasmania, spend another billion on a cable, send all our power as far away as possible and then push it back to Queensland or WA without losses shows how utterly uninformed Turnbull is. All so we can reduce the world’s CO2, apparently. How’s that going?
130
Hobart is 700km from Melbourne and 1600km from Sydney. So instead of burning brown coal locally, we will have to send wind power to Hobart in a round trip of say 2000 and 4000km? This is Malcolm Turnbull’s new vision of Tasmania as an offshore battery for Australia. Perhap Turnbull can join a march for science or engineering advisers for his latest thought bubble?
170
He shares “thought bubbles” with Kevin the ETS pusher.
50
Same league as the Catholic Church versus Galileo, politics will create the Perpetual Motion Power Supply. It’s Sustainable they tell us … It took the Church 400 years to apologise to Galileo, so I’m not going to hold my breath about the PMPS. It may take 4billion dollars before it’s quietly abandoned …
OMGA. (Oh My Giddy Aunt).
41
With the collapse in Australia of students doing Physics in their final year from 25% in 2000 to a record low of 6%, perhaps a march for science is appropriate, but not an anti science, anti Trump march.
Soon Australia will have no scientists or engineers, just hordes of people flying around looking at stuff, putting on scuba gear in paradise and looking at more stuff, writing papers with no mathematics or chemistry or physics and going to international conferences on Ocean Acidification when all the oceans are alkali. The only certainty is that they will all agree with each other or no paper will be published.
211
Sheesh, that’s so scary. I’ll have to check the figures for NZ. Something tells me they won’t be much, if any, better.
20
Their march for ‘science’- a sham,
A junk message like internet spam,
Just another false flag,
By the warmist ragtag,
Wanting taxpayer money for jam.
290
A climate march from times past.
Prolonged Drought in Northern China During the Maunder Minimum and Its Relation to Peasant Rebellions and Fall of the Ming Dynasty
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2005ScienceMeeting/presentations/fri_am/Hameed_China_Drought.pdf
41
This is basically an anti-Trump, anti-science march. The insanity of the Trump haters knows no limit. In the linked story I paste below, a dying man, a Trump hater, is falsely told that Trump was impeached, and then the man dies happily.
When he gets to hell, I’m sure he’ll find the truth…
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-oregon-man-dies-trump-impeached-20170418-story,amp.html
81
The Anthropological Carbon Dioxide Global Warming marching song
(with apologies to Irving Gordon for basing it on his “Delaware” song.)
Now just imagine Perry Como trying to sing it…
Oh, what did UN do, boy,
What did UN do?
What did UN do, boy,
What did UN do?
They outlawed CO2,
They outlawed CO2,
They outlawed CO2,
That’s what they did do.
One, two, three, four!
Oh, what a con-sen-sus
What a con sent.
What a con they sent us.
Was science all alone?
She sent back radiation,
She sent back radiation,
She sent back radiation.
That’s what she did send.
Uno, due, tre, quattro!
Oh why the big decline, Mann
Why the big decline,
Oh why the big decline, Mann
Through a nature trick.
He used his Yamal tree.
He used his Yamal tree,
He used his Yamal tree,
To make a hockey stick.
Un, deux, trois, quatre!
The Medieval Warmth, boy
Where’s that oldtime warmth?
Modeled a new reality,
Remodeled where it’s gone!
Gore’s stuck in a hiatus
Gore’s stuck in a hiatus
Gore’s stuck in a hiatus
An Inconvenient Truth has gone!
Eins, zwei, drei, vier!
Oh, what do grant troughers do, boy.
What do those troughers do?
So what did grant troughers do? Boy.
Do for me and you?
They cost a pretty penny,
They cost a pretty penny,
Cost us pretty penny,
To show haven’t got a clue!
90
In theory science is self-correcting if the scientific method is followed but I wonder if science has been now so politicised by corrupt pseudo-scientists that it is beyond recovery?
101
With due consideration for government manipulation, BoM & CSIRO immediately come to mind, can future governments recover faith from intelligent voters?
92
Never give up. Never!
41
Interestingly enough, the “art” of political science is still using the traditional scientific method.
Apparently, politicians can stuff around with physics, but will not mess with the statistical analysis of public opinion.
20
Oh, come now, it’s not that bad.
Read Phys.org, Science Daily, etc.
Plenty of real Science – even, occasionally, in Climate studies.
10
Science is what the government dictates as fact, and as with Catholics the congregation must accept what the priest/politician dictates without question or be excommunicated.
53
As I was never baptised I can’t be excommunicated but I suspect I might be a candidate for the George Bernard Shaw policy of a humane departure from this mortal coil.
40
Its not just the catlicks, all religions have a hierarchy of some sort.
Modellers are the high priests who write the AGW bible and should be preserved for the time being.
41
A religion without beliefs is not a religion. As for excommunication, that is not a common practice. However I would not try and leave the one religion the moderator program forbids to be mentioned. An amazing 86% of even moderate people in that religion believe the sin of ‘apostasy’ merits capital punishment. So with Climate Global Warming Change pollution. Deniers need to be denied their right of free speech. It is always so when you disagree with the herd, as every inventive scientist in history as done. As in Life of Brian, only the true messiah would deny his divinity. 2:15 in.
41
‘A religion without beliefs is not a religion.’
Waemists believe the end of the world is nigh, but we can thank our lucky stars there is no deity involved.
41
Gaia
40
Thank God for athiests
40
The single deity concept may have reached its used by date, bring back the pantheon.
21
The Pantheon in Rome was turned into a single God Christian Church. Amazing place with a stone roof make from pumice to be super light. I have a theory that the hole in the roof, the oculus, was a single piece of alabaster which is now in St. Peters Basilica, but at least the Pantheon is still standing, if single God.
50
You may have heard the urban myth that men are from Mars and women from Venus, its a cultural trait. This from wiki.
In describing the lectisternium of the Twelve Great gods in 217 BC, the Augustan historian Livy places the deities in gender-balanced pairs:
Jupiter-Juno.
Neptune-Minerva.
Mars-Venus.
Apollo-Diana.
Vulcan-Vesta.
Mercury-Ceres.
20
Of course, tomorrow is Erf Day! Looneys parading their self-identified looniness.
61
I hope someone is going to issue participation certificates to all the marchers.
51
I wonder how many marching have a science or science related degree?
From the SMH:
51
None. They are against scientists having an opinion. Tomorrow is flat Erf day.
51
What did the ground say to the earthquake?
You crack me up.
50
Last night my timber farm cottage rose and fell as an earth tremor passed below ground, 3.3 the experts reported. The wood heater stove moved slightly off centre, the hearth lifted at one end, some cracks appeared on walls and where the ceiling meets the walls and some other minor damage.
It reminded me of the Newcastle earthquake of 5.6 and related widespread damage to buildings and injuries to people.
50
A wise crack?
50
Definitely not wise, but my builder son reports that the building remains secure and damage is superficial.
60
O/T
Here is a link stating that the true maintenance cost for windmills is about $25 per MWh.
There is also some beautiful pictures of crashed, smashed and burning windmills.
https://stopthesethings.com/tag/hepburn-wind-farm/
91
**** Wind power outfits still make wild claims about these things running on the smell of an oily rag and lasting for 25 years or more, needing little more than a hug from time to time. However, the operations and maintenance cost of these things is around $25 per MWh – hardly the zero marginal […]
50
O/T
It’s hard to come across financial statements for windfarms but here is a set for the Hepburn Wind subsidy farm. It is a small farm with only 2 windmills owned by communal investors.
I would be interested in what financial oriented people think of the results.
https://www.hepburnwind.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/FY2015_Hepburn_Wind_Annual_Report.pdf
80
This financial year we continued to focus on riding out the impacts of the least favourable energy policy environment since our project was conceived. Similar to last year, the board’s priority was to pay down debt and reduce operating expenses, whilst ensuring that we had sufficient reserves to manage any unplanned mechanical issues. This strategy proved very successful, with the co-operative successfully navigating a year of very challenging market conditions.
The fracturing of 16 years of bipartisan support for renewable energy was finally resolved in June this year when the Federal Government and Opposition finally agreed on a reduced Renewable Energy Target. The resulting uplift in renewable energy certificate prices since then has been a welcome relief. We continue to watch the market closely.
30
No recommendation for payment of dividends has been made
for the 2015 financial year. The directors continue to direct surplus funds to pay down debt and position Hepburn Wind for unpredictable market conditions. Operating expenses were reduced by $84,408 (19%) on FY2014, demonstrating the effectiveness of our cost control efforts.
The continuing efforts to reduce our loan in conjunction with lower interest rates saved $16,090 in interest compared to FY2014.
During the year $215,111 (2014: $430,000) was applied against Hepburn Wind’s loan facility and our total debt now stands at 42% of the total original loan of $3.1 million. In addition, our debt management has enabled the release of security bonds requested by a our key stakeholders.
We are grateful to Red Energy for the return of $50,000 from term deposit, which we paid back into our loan at the time of writing. In this way our debt reduction strategy has paid multiple returns to Hepburn Wind, which is in the interests of all member shareholders.
20
Thanks for that Hepburn link DM.
So for 2015 electricity sales were $316,362 dollars, renewable energy certificate sales were $429,612 and total outgoing expenses were $493,401.
Lucky they had those certificate thingies!
80
Without subsidies wind energy is not worth going into business with.
90
But it is worth it for the subsidies. Warren Buffett, one of the biggest investors in wind:
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/nancy-pfotenhauer/2014/05/12/even-warren-buffet-admits-wind-energy-is-a-bad-investment?context=amp
60
Well, maybe, but from the link above to Hepburn that wind operation is making losses despite government subsidies.
60
Almost 2000 co-operative members have contributed $9.8 million to the construction of the Hepburn wind farm. The Victorian state government has provided grants totaling $1.725m and the Bendigo Bank a $3.1m loan.
So capital of $14.6 million for 4.1 MW nameplate capacity, and operating at about 30% capacity factor.
That compares with a much larger facility at Ararat, $450 million for 240 MW nameplate capacity, so about $2 million/MW compared to $3.6 million/MW for Hepburn.
The 2015 report shows electricity prices of $28.63/MWhr in 2015 and $52.35 in 2014. Current Victorian prices are over $90/MWhr so income will have risen substantially. In addition, those renewable certificates that were priced at $41.64 in 2015 and $30.40 in 2014 are now providing income of $82/MWhr.
The financial statements show EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) of $369,000 in 2015 and $495,000 in 2014.
The 2015/16 annual report shows EBITDA of $0.8 million with an increase in price of the RECs to $74. Operating expenses are reported as $330,000 or about 2.2% of capital cost.
Given current prices, I estimate 2016/17 EBITDA will be about $1 million. That gives about a 7% return on the $14.6 million capital investment.
They depreciated the asset by $459,000 in 2015, or about 3.1% of capital – that seems very low. I would have thought that amortization over about 20 years would be more appropriate (about $0.7 million pa). However it may be that the tax office allows accelerated depreciation.
In summary, doesn’t seem like a great return for shareholders, given it will have zero value at the end of its life.
40
I wonder how much Soros is paying the marchers.
102
No money but they get a nice drink of Kool-Aid and a Soylent Green wafer afterwards.
31
“Do you know a group of … or sex-workers who’d be prepared to march…Maybe get them to dress in uniform!”
This sounds like a good reason for joining the march. And perhaps they could give the scientists some tips on how to get funding.
52
Sex workers only sell their bodies, climate scientists sell their souls.
123
Sex worker speaking to Climate Scientist….. “So, then how much do you get paid?”
“Every year the Government pays us a couple million.”
“What, you’re paid by the taxpayer.”
“Yep!”
“Hmm! How do I become a Climate Scientist?”
“You’re here at the march, aren’t you? Say what are you doing after the march finishes?”
“Going back to work I guess.”
“Umm, might I employ you for, let’s say two minutes.”
“Yep, that’ll be fifty grand.”
“Wot, for just two minutes. How much for a full hour.”
“That’ll be a hundred grand, after all, you can afford it, with all those Government grants.”
“Come on, who do you think I am. I’m not the prostitute here.”
“Really. We all know what you are sonny, all we’re doing here is haggling about the price!!!!!”
Tony.
132
A group of women standing on a street corner are called:
a) a firm of solicitors
b) a rack of whores
42
I once knew a lady barrister who took down her briefs and became a solicitor.
101
I once knew a girl who worked in a warehouse.
. . I think that’s how you pronounce it.
41
Soliciting is generally illegal.
20
Did you hear about the two women who walked into a large office building?
You’d have thought one of the would have seen it.
41
I, for one, will be sorely disappointed if Ashley Judd does not do a screaming vagina poem at this march. You can never have too much of that.
50
An Annie Sprinkle performance would really set the tone for this gathering, she’d be doing climate change a public cervix……
21
The Washington, D. C. area will be cool and likely wet — slight chance early, increasing chance as the day goes on.
I’ve no intention of checking on the 499 other places claiming to have marches. I think much of Europe is having a cold spell.
Also, it is Earth Day, so the silliness will be widespread.
61
I read an article a couple of years ago that claimed fifty per cent of the adult population have the comprehension level of an average primary school student.
30
Wot ???
30
If global warming opponents think they have science on their side, go march. The march is about support for science.
28
From the ‘March for Science’ mission statement:
That and given “high profile chairman of Solastor” John Hewson’s involvement, it’s more a ‘March for Money’ — other people’s money.
92
Voting for Trump is more effective. Leave the march to the warmists who hate Trump.
51
The power of Fake news on display. Anticipate more.
41
It’s largely the ‘is/ought problem’, a very old issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
10
O/T historical question.
At what point in the past did Australia transition from having a bright future with planning for new thermal generators to the present situation where new generators cannot be built and old ones are being actively destroyed?
102
When much of the public has been brainwashed into believing socialism is not evil.
71
Few realise that the Australian Labor Party Constitution refers to them being a socialist party, they don’t bother to hide this.
And of course their code buzz words are: social justice – we are the party of.
51
The same year building new dams was banned, our fishing rights were taken away and forests were illegal to harvest and gas and coal are being kept in the ground. Places which could be dammed or logged are all now National Parks and Australia’s biggest timber processor is being forced to close because the Victorian government does not agree with any form of wood processing. Meanwhile in America old growth forests are being turned into wood pellets for Drax in the UK because it is carbon neutral, which is not true. It’s what happens when public servants decide to get rid of everyone else because the government pays for everything.
51
On the NSW mid north coast fishing cooperatives have fewer trawlers operating or have closed down altogether because of the Agenda 21 (now Agenda 30) rules and Labor when last in government creating many marine national parks where fishing is banned offshore.
So quite a lot of seafood is now imported from Asia.
Australia is renowned for its clean ocean conditions and related high quality seafood !!!
Meanwhile the mantra of politicians is that they are busy creating jobs.
52
A few years ago the figure was 40% of our seafood from Asia, largely Vietnam. I would suggest it is much higher now. We buy it with the money we earn from coal. The Greens buy fish with the money they get from the Government.
41
Which is why if the vast majority of people don’t wake up soon we will have to suffer the crash and burn scenario, and deservedly so for being so dumb and blind. Why this country is so in love with socialism is beyond me. Anyone with a thinking brain would immediately refuse to vote for a party such as the ALP who partners with such a destructive party as the Greens. Also anyone who votes for a party such as the LNP who are almost as bad must also hate Australia.
21
the FakeNewsMSM have provided so much publicity for this farce:
20 Apr: Hartford Courant: Russell Blair: Scientists to Rally on Earth Day to Protest Trump Cuts, Views
Diane Krause, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine, is heading up a New Haven event, which starts at 1 p.m. in East Rock Park and will include a science fair and rally followed by a march.
Trump’s campaign slogan was Make America Great Again, and “we know that our science is one of the things that has made us great,” Krause said. She admitted that it was a little “weird” that people will be marching in the streets for science, and particularly for conclusions “we thought were obvious” and that have had bipartisan support.
“Facts have been questioned,” Krause said, referring to statements Trump administration officials have made regarding scientific conclusions about climate change. “Hard facts are being questioned.”…
Hayward said it’s unfortunate that it appears support for science has become a partisan issue with Democrats in support and Republicans opposed.
“We can have meaningful discourse on the results of science or how to apply our scientific discoveries but to view science itself with partisanship is not productive for anybody,” he said…
The Hartford and New Haven events coincide with a national march on Washington. A week later, April 29, another large gathering — the People’s Climate March — is planned in Washington.
Diane Lentakis, an organizer with the Connecticut Sierra Club and climate advocacy group 350 Connecticut, is helping to coordinate about a half-dozen buses from Connecticut to D.C. for the People’s Climate March. She said both groups have seen an increase in activism “and I think it’s because people are angry,” Lentakis said. “People are really angry at the current administration.”
Trump and his team, including Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency who has challenged scientific findings showing a connection between human activity and global warming, are being “totally irresponsible” with their approach to climate change, Lentakis said.
“We are not going to have a planet if this administration goes on thinking that climate change is a hoax and tries to convince people that climate change is a hoax,” she said. “We will not have a planet.”…
http://www.courant.com/politics/hc-trump-science-march-connecticut-20170418-story.html
23
I can see why climatologists would invite “sex workers”. Some of them belong to the oldest profession.
32
Weather Channel is in on the act:
Weather Channel
Warming Seas and Your Seafood
Apr 20, 2017, 11:15 am EDT
Warming oceans are affecting the seafood we eat. Ocean explorer, Fabien Cousteau explains.
Booming Solar Business Helps Vets
Apr 19, 2017, 1:00 pm EDT
It’s Science Week & today we’re talking solar. Caleb started a solar energy company that goes beyond reducing his carbon footprint.
Weather VS Climate
Apr 19, 2017, 1:04 pm EDT
Think weather & climate are interchangeable? That’s not the case. Mark Elliot explains the difference.
Warm Waters and Whale Watching
Apr 18, 2017, 10:01 am EDT
Right whales are endangered, but more than 20% of the population has been spotted off the coast of MA. Jim & Stephanie find out why.
Rising seas could impact Boston
Apr 17, 2017, 12:30 pm EDT
This week is Science Week on the Weather Channel. Sea level changes are coming to America’s biggest cities. Jen Carfagno takes a look at how Boston might be affected.
https://weather.com/tv/shows/amhq
22
I’m afraid since we don’t have many politicians nor scientists speaking the truth about the AGW hoax/scam, it will only get worse for us skeptics when Al Gore’s new film comes out later this year; Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Apparently he has an even greater backing this time around to make sure we are forced to follow the AGW agenda, and the feedback thus far is very supportive. Oh well, let’s get it over and done with. Crash and burn here we come.
Trailer here
31
Pretty slick.
The show won’t make our predicament any worse than it is, they are preaching to the converted. Of course it may sway some normally sensible grandmothers to join the throng of brainwashed people, this is unavoidable.
31
not about Trump:
21 Apr: 7News: AFP: Kerry Sheridan: March for Science not about Trump, organizers say
TRUMP PHOTO CAPTION: March for Science not about Trump, organizers say
Budget cuts and political assaults on science are expected to draw thousands of demonstrators to the streets in more than 500 cities worldwide Saturday for the first March for Science.
Organizers insist that the demonstrations — anchored by a major rally in Washington on Earth Day, April 22 — are not aimed specifically at US President Donald Trump or any political party…
“The organizers of the march have taken great pains to say this is not partisan, it is not about any particular public official or political figure,” Rush Holt, a physicist and former US congressman told reporters on a conference call, noting that scientists are “often reticent” to wade into the political fray…
– Trump ‘catalyzed’ march -…
Trump declared climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese…
He has signed, however, an executive order to roll back environmental protections enacted by his predecessor Barack Obama, and has nominated climate-science skeptics to top posts in his administration.
Trump has also kept people guessing on whether or not the United States will remain committed to the Paris Climate Accord…
One of Trump’s most alarming moves…
Lydia Villa-Komaroff, a molecular cellular biologist and honorary national co-chair of the March for Science, said the problem is not new, and that federal support for research has been declining since the 1960s.
“I think it is fair to say that this administration catalyzed the happening of this march, there is no doubt about that,” she told reporters.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/35112681/march-for-science-not-about-trump-organizers-say/#page1
20 Apr: ScientificAmericanBlog: March for Science or March for Reality?
Hostility toward the former is troublesome, but hostility toward the latter is the underlying issue
By Lawrence M. Krauss
Shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump as President, it was announced that a March for Science would be held Washington DC and in a host of other cities in the United States and around the world to protest the new Administration’s apparent anti-science agenda—from denial of climate change to dismantling the EPA…
TRUMP, TRUMP, TRUMP
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/march-for-science-or-march-for-reality/
13
RE RUSH HOLT, FORMER CONGRESSMAN, IN THE 7NEWS/AFP LINK – HE’S A DEMOCRAT, OF COURSE.
WHY NOT SAY SO, AFP?
12
21 Apr: Harvard Crimson: Join the March for Science
By Katie L. Blanton, Evan MacKay, and Shayla B. Partridge
Dear Harvard Professors of All Disciplines,
We, members of the Global Health & AIDS Coalition, expect to see you at the March for Science on April 22 in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C, or any of the other march sites where you may find yourselves that day. We urge you to be there because we know ― we have learned from you ― that science is principled, health is political, and knowledge is powerful.
We hope that many of you will be in attendance on Saturday, and we are proud to hear that President Drew Faust and Professor ***Naomi Oreskes will be speaking at the Harvard rally on the morning of the March…
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/4/21/blanton-partridge-mackay-march-for-science/
20 Apr: Quartz: Katherine Ellen Foley: The March for Science isn’t about what you think it’s about
The Facebook group dedicated to the march was created days after US president Donald Trump’s inauguration, and despite being invitation-only has since gathered more than 838,000 members…
The idea for the march appeared to have developed in response to Trump’s blatant disregard for science…
Others—including local organizers—are taking this notion of science appreciation a step further, and calling for specific advocacy in opposition to the Trump administration…
But the organizers of the main event—the DC march say it won’t take a political stance. In fact, it’s not really about policy at all…
“Science is above politics,” says Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist at Princeton University. “But politicians are not ashamed to muddle in science.” …
Naughton herself ran for congressional office in Pennsylvania in both 2014 and 2016…QUARTZ FAILS TO MENTION “AS A DEMOCRAT” & LOST BOTH TIMES, IN THE PRIMARIES.
https://qz.com/963470/the-march-for-science-isnt-about-what-you-think-its-about/
33
so many CAGW signs! lol:
19 Apr: Quartz: In honor of the March for Science, here are the best science-themed protest signs
Written by Corinne Purtill, Katherine Ellen Foley, Zoë Schlanger, Elijah Wolfson and Ephrat Livni
Scientists are naturals at the protest-sign game, which favors the clever and creative. But for marchers more used to expressing their ideas in multipage research papers, Quartz is here to help. We’ve compiled our favorite science-themed protest signs from previous marches. Go get some poster board (you might want to hurry) and start painting…
https://qz.com/963703/the-best-protest-signs-for-the-march-for-science/
all the usual PBS tricks in play in this one:
21 Apr: PBS Newshour: Why these people are joining — or skipping — the March for Science
By Nsikan Akpan, Andrew Wagner, Kristin Hugo and Julia Griffin
Washington, D.C., will serve as the epicenter for the demonstrations, billed as a response to those who challenge widely accepted facts and scientific consensus across the globe.
Yet the marches represent more than a rebuke of climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers…
Editor’s note: Out of the more than 1,200 responses we got to our callout across platforms, 19 were from people who said they do not support the March for Science and will not attend. Our profiles here reflect that breakdown…
Whiteman grew up in a rural, white area in the rust belt, surrounded by “the kind of people who voted for Donald Trump, frankly.” After deciding to be a scientist, he got a grant from the National Science Foundation and a fellowship from the National Institute of Health. “My route through life was supported by grants and fellowships from the federal government,” he said.
“Without those, as someone from the rust belt, I would have never got to where I am,” said Whiteman, who is now a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley…ETC
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/people-joining-skipping-march-science/
23
Over here in the UK, I’ve not seen or heard a thing from the media about the ‘March for Science’.
I think it’ll be a well-deserved flop.
Let’s wait and see.
61
I’m not sure how you get onto the rent-a-crowd mailing list but if you go to a march somewhere you might be able to find out.
Then you can find out where to buy the calendar that lets you know which PC day today is. Essential for those who want to avoid planting weeds on world weed eradication day, or pulling out weeds on world weed appreciation day and similar un-PC offenses.
51
Meanwhile … at the CSIRO …
it’s crafternoon in aid of #marchforscience
https://twitter.com/CSIROStaff/status/855343972205477888
42
A sheltered workshop.
22
Public Service science. They find nothing, discover nothing and largely do nothing but at least they have a great superannuation deal and only cost this country a billion dollars a year. Never forget the CSIRO diet.
62
TdeF: It seemed like a good moment to fish this out of my archives.
This resignation letter by Dr. Lewis from the American Physical Society pretty much sums it up:
Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).
Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics and former Chairman of the Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara; former Member and Chairman of Technology Panel, Defense Science Board; Chairman, DSB Study on Nuclear Winter; former Member, Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; former Member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman, APS Study on Nuclear Reactor Safety; Chairman, Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; former Member, USAF Scientific Advisory Board; and author of the books, Technological Risk and Why Flip a Coin.
81
Many thanks. I never joined such an organization. I was right. Political physics? Scientology.
It attracts people who are more interested in power than in physics or anything else and fame and buckets of cash can corrupt even the best. Climate nonsense is channelling $200million every hour into private hands to attempt control the world’s CO2 with no result at all.
Generally our politicians are the same, people like ex PM Gillard who were thrown out of the legal profession but found a welcome place in politics for themselves and their friends and rose to the top by all means possible. Avowed communist Green Adam Bandt as well. Promise anything and when you get power, do what you want, as he said to me. Whatever it takes, the motto of Graham Richardson, now lecturing everyone.
Politics is simply not a meritocracy and the people leading committees, councils, governments are often the worst of the worst but as Churchill said, it is the worst form of government except for all others. Perhaps the only saving grace is the fixed term. Most dictators remove this. A fixed term would work for groups like the APS too. At least that way you get the occasional sensible leaders by serendipity.
30
Politicians rely on the short memories of voters.
No doubt by the time the babies of today are adults the politicians will be presenting a new way forward to secure energy and cheaper electricity prices … based on fossil fuel fired “new technology” power stations. And the hoarders of mining rights and shares in mines will step forward to fulfil the politician’s policy.
And sadly most parents do not know much about the subject and cannot enlighten their children about RET and other nonsense political agenda.
31
We need to get the conversation back to climate change, the reason for the RET in the first place. The warmists have moved the goal posts because of the hiatus, its been a couple of decades and they don’t have any answers.
The three pillars holding up the theory of catastrophic global warming (politicians, scientists and MSM) must crumble at some point, but I cannot perceive in what order.
41
Off Topic
But Tasmania is selling heaps of HYDRO Power to the mainland!
Have a look at the levels of GWh left after each week or day!
If they don’t get water/snow between now and Christmas, the diesel GEN-SETS will start up!
They will be making a FORTUNE out of Victoria!
Today hardly any wind!
51
The dark ages in our history were bought about by people with fixed mind sets. Book burning and witchcraft[same same propaganda and mind control in our education system] these deluded people marching think they know but in reality have no idea why they are marching.
Sadly those that spread and enforce the propaganda no not what they do. These poor souls are so taken in that they are passionate about their teaching. We can blame them not, it is much further up the food chain that we have to look for those to blame,politicians are too dumb by half so the blame lies above them.
Tar feathers and ropes should be saved for the mongrels causing all this are starting to hold their hands up, for they think they have won. Take notes.
42
‘…politicians are too dumb by half so the blame lies above them.’
Ignorance is no excuse and they will suffer at the ballot box, mainly because they forced the AGW theory through the education system and came up with the RET, but the most culpable are the Klimatariat and ABC for disseminating millenarian propaganda,
41
Late to the party again!
So I decided to check out some data on the major scientific discoveries of the 20th and early 21st century.
My criteria used below is that the scientific discovery had to have had a significant influence on our human species and the way we live.
As well as having had a significant impact on our lives and then lives of the peoples of this Earth as well as technology through the development of a particular scientific discovery.
I have used a list from Wiki; Timeline on scientific discoveries
Many / most will disagree with some of the selections I have used below.
I have run the delete line through the scientific advances that are very interesting scientitifically but have had minimal or no impact on the daily lives of earth’s peoples.
Unfortunately nearly all of the listed major science discoveries are in Cosmology and I like reading and am very interested in cosmology and the science around it.
But cosmology has a minimal impact on the day to day lives of our citizens so out it goes.
And the piece of information that I was interested in and had a strong suspicion about as I have read extensively on science for 70 years out of my 79 years about to be, including reading encyclopaedias at school as I was bored spit-less with most of the stuff served up and wasn’t much good or very interested in sport where you threw things, kicked things, often the other sides players or hit things. ditto.!
Below are Wiki’s list and time line of scientific discoveries of the 20th century and the 21st century so far.
I make it 74 major and significant scientific discoveries listed during the 20th and 21 st centuries.
Now the part that got my attention and that I had strongly suspected for a long time and a part that is very, very relevant to the scientist’s march and the abjectly narcissistic preening, and abject self delusion by those same scientists as to their importance and impact on society is as follows;
Not counting the items I have put a line through ie deleted , as irrelevant to human advancement.
.
From 1901 to 1965. a period of 65 years from the beginning of the 20th century to 1965, there are 34 scientific discoveries that I rate as extraordinarily important and the scientific base towards our advancement as a civilisation and to the health and welfare of earth’s peoples, all of them!
.
From 1965 to 2016 , a period of 51 years from 1965 on there are just 13 major scientific discoveries that are proving to be the essential base for further advancement of our civilisation and our people.
.
This drop off in scientific advances of a major impact on society and earth’s people and outr technological and societal advancement has occurred despite I would estimate a four fold increase in both the amount of resources and funding going into scientific research as well as a quadrupling of the numbers of scientists supposedly practiing some sort of science today.
Science at its most basic and productive levels today is sick, very sick from gorging endlessly on ever more public funds whilst stridently demanding still more of the very limited public resources to produce ever less relevant and useful science that wil be of significant benefit to our people into the future.
——————-
20th century[edit]
1901 – Annie Jump Cannon: stellar classification1905 – Albert Einstein: theory of special relativity, explanation of Brownian motion, and photoelectric effect
1906 – Walther Nernst: Third law of thermodynamics
1907 – Alfred Bertheim: Arsphenamine, the first modern chemotherapeutic agent
1909 – Fritz Haber: Haber Process for industrial production of ammonia
1909 – Robert Andrews Millikan: conducts the oil drop experiment and determines the charge on an electron
1910 – Williamina Fleming: the first white dwarf, 40 Eridani B1911 – Ernest Rutherford: Atomic nucleus
1911 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes: Superconductivity
1912 – Alfred Wegener: Continental drift
1912 – Max von Laue : x-ray diffraction
1912 – Vesto Slipher : galactic redshifts1912 – Henrietta Swan Leavitt: Cepheid variable period luminosity relation1913 – Henry Moseley: defined atomic number
1913 – Niels Bohr: Model of the atom
1915 – Albert Einstein: theory of general relativity – also David Hilbert
1915 – Karl Schwarzschild: discovery of the Schwarzschild radius leading to the identification of black holes1918 – Emmy Noether: Noether’s theorem – conditions under which the conservation laws are valid1920 – Arthur Eddington: Stellar nucleosynthesis
1922 – Frederick Banting, Charles Best, James Collip, John Macleod: isolation and production of insulin to control diabetes
1924 – Wolfgang Pauli: quantum Pauli exclusion principle
1924 – Edwin Hubble: the discovery that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies1925 – Erwin Schrödinger: Schrödinger equation (Quantum mechanics)
1925 – Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: Discovery of the composition of the Sun and that Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe
1927 – Werner Heisenberg: Uncertainty principle (Quantum mechanics)
1927 – Georges Lemaître: Theory of the Big Bang1928 – Paul Dirac: Dirac equation (Quantum mechanics)
1929 – Edwin Hubble: Hubble’s law of the expanding universe1928 – Alexander Fleming: Penicillin, the first beta-lactam antibiotic
1929 – Lars Onsager’s reciprocal relations, a potential fourth law of thermodynamics1930 – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar discovers his eponymous limit of the maximum mass of a white dwarf star1932 – James Chadwick: Discovery of the neutron
1932 – Karl Guthe Jansky discovers the first astronomical radio source, Sagittarius A1934 – Clive McCay: Calorie restriction extends the maximum lifespan of another species
1938 – Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann: Nuclear fission
1938 – Isidor Rabi: Nuclear magnetic resonance
1943 – Oswald Avery proves that DNA is the genetic material of the chromosome
1945 – Howard Florey Mass production of penicillin
1947 – William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invent the first transistor
1948 – Claude Elwood Shannon: ‘A mathematical theory of communication’ a seminal paper in Information theory.
1948 – Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Freeman Dyson: Quantum electrodynamics
1951 – George Otto Gey propagates first cancer cell line, HeLa
1952 – Jonas Salk: developed and tested first polio vaccine
1953 – Crick and Watson: helical structure of DNA, basis for molecular biology
1962 – Riccardo Giacconi and his team discover the first cosmic x-ray source, Scorpius X-11963 – Lawrence Morley, Fred Vine, and Drummond Matthews: Paleomagnetic stripes in ocean crust as evidence of plate tectonics (Vine-Matthews-Morley hypothesis).1964 – Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig: postulates quarks leading to the standard model
1964 – Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson: detection of CMBR providing experimental evidence for the Big Bang1965 – Leonard Hayflick: normal cells divide only a certain number of times: the Hayflick limit
1967 – Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish discover first pulsar1967 – Vela nuclear test detection satellites discover the first gamma-ray burst1971 – Place cells in the brain are discovered by John O’Keefe
1974 – Russell Alan Hulse and Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. discover indirect evidence for gravitational wave radiation in the Hulse–Taylor binary1982 – Becker et al. discover the first millisecond pulsar1983 – Kary Mullis invents the polymerase chain reaction, a key discovery in molecular biology.
1986 – Karl Müller and Johannes Bednorz: Discovery of High-temperature superconductivity
1994 – Andrew Wiles proves Fermat’s Last Theorem
1995 – Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz definitively observe the first extrasolar planet around a main sequence star1995 – Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle attained the first Bose-Einstein Condensate with atomic gases, so called fifth state of matter at an extremely low temperature.
1996 – Roslin Institute: Dolly the sheep was cloned.[6]
1997 – CDF and DØ experiments at Fermilab: Top quark.1998 – Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Z Supernova Search Team: discovery of the accelerated expansion of the Universe / Dark Energy.2000 – The Tau neutrino is discovered by the DONUT collaboration21st century[edit]
2001 – The first draft of the Human Genome Project is published.
2003 – Grigori Perelman presents proof of the Poincaré Conjecture.2005 – Grid cells in the brain are discovered by Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser.
2006 – Shinya Yamanaka generates first induced pluripotent stem cells
2007 – The first fast radio burst is discovered in archival data taken in 2001 by Parkes Radio Telescope2010 – J. Craig Venter Institute creates the first synthetic genome for a bacterial cell.[7]
2010 – The Neanderthal Genome Project presented preliminary genetic evidence that interbreeding did likely take place and that a small but significant portion of Neanderthal admixture is present in modern non-African populations.[citation needed]
2012 – Higgs boson is discovered at CERN (confirmed to 99.999% certainty)2012 – Photonic molecules are discovered at MIT
2014 – Exotic hadrons are discovered at the LHCb
2015 – Traces of liquid water discovered on Mars[8]2016 – The LIGO team detected gravitational waves from a black hole merger.41
I cannot agree with striking anyone off. Especially astronomical and ongoing nuclear research as you have done.
Sure, the space race, space exploration was a cover for the development of ICBMs but where would we be without satellites, minituarization of electronics, new materials, solar panels. It was as productive of new ideas as major wars. The cover was astronomy and still is. Serendipity is like that.
Understanding of deep nuclear reactions might just lead us to a solution for world power and that is the key to everything. We will run out of fossil fuel. Fission is dirty and just as limited ultimately as coal. Without such research, we are stuck with windmills, waterwheels and coal.
Fusion is well known and billions are being spent to master it. Who knows what will come of it, but if, the $1,500 Billion per year spent trying to uselessly reduce the world’s CO2 level was spent on fundamental research, we could only be better off. It is when all the scientists are being diverted to useless occupations like the 350 scientists at the CSIRO who spent hundreds of millions ‘studying’ Climate Change, we would rather they did something more useless with the hope we might actually discover something. Or go home.
20
TdeF @ # 54.1
.
I / We cannot predict the future although a lot of purported to be climate scientists and climate modellers and climate “experts” strive endlessly to give the impression that they can.
Most of those scientific advances I have drawn a line through have not, so far, been shown to be contributing in a visible manner to the advancement of civilisation.
Nearly all of those items particularly from the 20th century that I have listed can be shown to be significant to the absolutely and totally basic advancement of civilisation, societies and the individuals personal well fare and health.
Missing from that list are a number of items that I myself would have classed as absolutely basic to civilisations advancement.
1 / The invention of the Laser in 1960 by Theodore H. Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories. the Laser was first called , an invention looking for an application. The Laser is now fundamental to the operation and even existence of the world wide communications and data network.
2 / Optical fibres; .
Kapany was born to a Sikh family in Moga, Punjab, India and was educated in India. In 1952 Kapany conducted studies that led to the invention of optical fibre.
Optical fibres are the technological backbone of the WWW.
Optical fibres along with the Laser have given us the WWW internet which has given our civilisation the same boost to the civilisation of our times as did the invention of the printing press and moveable type by the German Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 did for the advancement of civilisation in the 15th and 16th centuries right on down through to, today and no doubt long into the future as well..
Many folks list the internet as the major invention of the 20th century .
But the internet in its developed format is merely the end product and outcome of the combination of the laser and optical fibres.
Without those two 20th century inventions and developments any internet at best would have remained a rudimentary, wire dependent and very limited network of data transfer ports between a few elite academic and military organisations.
Which the first versions of what was to become the Internet actually were when it was first created as the University and military based based ARPANET in Sept of 1968 when the first packets of data were sent between computers over the system that was eventually to become the Internet of the World Wide Web.
3 / The invention and development of herbicides and insecticides to protect humanities food production resources from disease and insect and fungal attack.
The synthetic compounds 2,4-D and MCPA, the first herbicides, were invented by E.J. Kraus, a botanist at the University of Chicago, working with doctoral students J.W. Mitchell and C.L. Hamner at the USDA in Beltsville, Maryland. In 1943 and 1944, Mitchell and Hamner successfully tested 2,4-D as a way to kill dandelions in a lawn in Beltsville.
Without the invention and development of those 1943 crop herbicides and eventually insecticides and fungicides to protect mankind’s food crops from disease and pests and as somebody who is old enough to have seen farming by my father just before the herbicides and insecticides and fungicides first appeared here in Australia and as one who himself used those first 24D herbicides as a youth working on our farm, without the invention of those crop protectant chemicals on an affordable world wide basis the world’s farmers would be battling to produce even half the amount of food products that we are now regularly producing with the probable outcome that Professor Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 “Population Bomb” doom laden prediction of global mass starvation would be a very nasty and disastrous reality.
[ we had the first aerial spraying operation using 24D sprayed from WW2 surplus Tiger Moths from a paddock on our property in about 1954. A family of very forward thinking brothers , our near neighbours used 24D in its then very hard to handle crystalline form the year or so before hand ]
4 / And of course the Green Revolution. a food crop genetic revolution begun and kicked off by Nobel Peace prize recipient Norman Bourlag who introduced the genes from a Japanese developed Dwarf wheat into the Mexican wheat varieties which enabled Mexico to be able to finally feed itself and even export grain.
The Dwarf gene which was then shown to be highly beneficial in increasing yields and increasing tolerances to disease when introduced into the other wheat varieties across the world leading to very large increases in yields and food availability every where it was introduced too..
From wheat the genetically based Green Revolution was then researched and developed in all of the other food crops that feed humanity today .
Far too often we get completely tied up in all sorts of highly sophisticated technological advancements from science done in laboratories, advances that will change the way we live and perhaps even think .
We as a society lose sight almost completely of the apparently very low profile and apparently modest advances in the most basic of industries that are unlike so many highly publicised technologically based advances, are given little or no publicity such as the advances in the food production industries of grains and oil seeds and rice and meat and etc. the absolute fundamentals to mankind’s very survival as individuals and civilisation of billions and perhaps even as a species .
Without the invention and introduction of fertilisers, herbicides and insecticides, genetic improvements of varieties, and the mechanisation of agricultural production and transport over long distances via train and ship which thereby eliminated the historical need for 80% of the population to be involved in food production, it is doubtful that the earth and its food production industries could support more than the billion or so people that it did right through history until the latter part of the 19th century when farm mechanisation with Australia and its inventors leading the way and around two decades ahead of America in farm industrialisation.
Ref for Australian agricultural invention history [ The Push Button Combine Forum posts by ROM ; post 85 for the history of australian harvesting inventions and links [ some now broken unfortunately ] to resources. ]
12
Interesting points.
The only one with which I would totally disagree is
“But the internet in its developed format is merely the end product and outcome of the combination of the laser and optical fibres.”
The internet has nothing to do with fibre optics as an essential invention or the essential invention. Electricity travels at the same speed as light. The problem is only attenuation. Satellite would be more appropriate for Australia than all the cable in the ground.
The critical inventions included Arpanet, TCP/IP, HTML, XML, Eudora/Mosaic, Netscape, Google’s search engine, massive hard discs, rampant CPU speeds from Mhz to Ghz, extensions of MIME to graphics, NIC, www, @, Unicode, streaming, torrent and many more including the profound impact of mobile devices like the iPhone which grew out of the iPod, iTunes and so much more.
Fibre has its place, but it is not the internet which is the sum of all the protocols, applications and ideas since 1973.
10
Essential inventions not mentioned would include all the developmetns in WWII which are limitless from Radar, nylon, jet engines, microwave, mass manufacture, refrigeration, mass antibiotics, lithium batteries, rockets. I have made a list before and it went to many pages.
An interesting story was the death of Joseph Kennedy, the Kennedy son who was destined to be President, not John. Joseph after 50 bomber missions volunteered to pilot a radio controlled drone bomber stacked with plastic explosive to take out the German Rail gun in France. It exploded before he left the drone. The drone was guided by another bomber and radio controlled and included two television cameras for the remote pilot. So remote controlled drone aircraft with TV cameras were part of WWII. The war killed perhaps 100 million people, but saved billions through antiobiotics. So many medical inventions too.
Back on topic, without war, we need to create urgency. The quest to put a man on mars or find the secrets of the nuclues and sub atomic particles cannot be discarded. They result directly in pushing the limits of technology beyond windmills and solar panels. To judge what research is appropriate in advance is to decide in advance what can be discovered and we cannot possibly know that. Direct benefit is also not a measure. Serendipity has taught us much more than we could guess. Stainless steel, penicillin, titanium teeth implants and many more were a case of observation while looking for something else.
You cannot measure research with a cheque book and a list of demands. Marching for science makes no sense. Spend the $1,500 Billion a year on real research and the world will be better off. Spend it on hot rocks and better boilers and it is wasted.
21
Thanks, ROM, for the list of great discoveries.
I believe the 2000 discovery of neutron repulsion as a powerful, short-range nuclear force will eventually qualify for this list, despite current opposition from worldwide national academies of sciences.
See:
2000: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1012290028638
2001: http://www.springerlink.com/content/x1n87370x6685079/
2017: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/HIGHER-POWERZ.pdf and references #27-38
10
Earth Day’s Journey
into Night…
From the land
down under,
here’s hoping Trump
comes up trumps,
drains the Swamp
of Despond; those
Alinsky-ite
attacks on
human liberty
and productivity
via controls on
what we’re allowed
to think or utter:
‘Four legs good,
two legs better,’
… or vice versa,
depending on
raison d’etat.
40
The US NAS plays a risky, high-stakes game today in sponsoring the “March for Science in Washington, DC to try to keep Trump from “draining the swamp that destroyed our government.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/The_Rise-Fall_of_Science-Democracy.pdf
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21 Apr: Eco-Business: Vaidehi Shah: What to read, watch and listen to this Earth Day
This Earth Day will see the launch of a campaign calling for greater environmental and climate literacy, and thousands of scientists marching for fact-based governance. Here’s everything you need to boost your environmental knowledge.
At the same time, the Earth Day Network is launching a three-year campaign focusing on environmental and climate literacy, with the goal that every student around the world graduates high school with a sound knowledge of environmental issues.
Kathleen Rogers, president of the Earth Day Network, said in a statement: “We need to build a global citizenry fluent in the concepts of climate change and aware of its unprecedented threat to our planet.”
“Environmental and climate literacy is the engine not only for creating green voters and advancing environmental and climate laws and policies but also for accelerating green technologies and jobs,” she added…
But if you can’t organise or attend a teach-in; or participate in one of the many March for Science events happening globally, here’s a list of things you can watch, listen to, and read to learn more about the world’s most pressing challenges, and how to make a difference…GUESS WHAT’S ON THE LIST
http://www.eco-business.com/news/what-to-read-watch-and-listen-to-this-earth-day/
21 Apr: CNN: Christina Zdanowicz: ‘We’re not going to be silent’: Why scientists are marching this weekend
There are a lot of reasons scientists, educators, parents and supporters will march.
For conservation scientist Rachel Golden Kroner, she’s marching not only for science, but for people that depend on science, which is all of us.
“If we do nothing, we face a crisis for biodiversity and people,” she said. “Extreme weather events will be the norm, sea level rise will force people to migrate, diseases with certain vectors will spread to more people; the list goes on and on.”…
The march may have started because of politics, but it’s bigger than that, Villa-Komaroff said. It’s no longer just a public display of dissatisfaction over Trump’s proposed budget cuts and the executive order cutting down on the EPA’s climate change enforcement.
“It might have been ignited by Trump, but it’s not about Trump,” Villa-Komaroff said. “It’s about the importance of science in society and continuing the support for the science community in keeping our edge.”…
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/21/health/march-for-science-walkup-trnd/
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20 Apr: ABC7: Adrienne Alpert: Billionaire, activist Tom Steyer urges participation in LA’s March for Science
STEYER VIDEO
“I never thought in the United States of America that we would have to have a protest on behalf of truth, on behalf of science, on behalf of rational analysis,” he said.
In Santa Barbara Monday, protesters greeted Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke who was there to explain the president’s plan to expand offshore oil drilling.
“This is an administration that is funded by the oil and gas companies to lie,” Steyer said…
http://abc7.com/politics/billionaire-activist-tom-steyer-urges-participation-in-march-for-science/1897289/
21 Apr: Federalist: Robert Tracinski: The ‘March For Science’ Shows How Carl Sagan Ruined Science
The organizers of the ‘March for Science’ follow the legacy of substituting a political narrative for the distinctive language and methods of science.
All you really need to know about the “March for Science” is that it is scheduled for Earth Day. The organizers may say the march is nonpartisan and has a variety of goals, but it’s mostly just about global warming. It’s not just about whether global warming is actually happening, or whether it is caused by human activity, but about a specific political program for dealing with global warming…
The “March for Science” is an attempt to equate the Left’s political goals with Science Itself, claiming the intellectual and moral authority of science for the Left’s agenda…READ ON
http://thefederalist.com/2017/04/21/the-march-for-science-shows-how-carl-sagan-ruined-science/
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They never publicise the fact that there is always an oil slick on the Beach at Santa Barbara. It seeps from the Santa Catalina trough. It is about time someone chastised Mother Nature about her irresponsible use of hydrocarbons.
The field has never been developed – marine national park.
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21 Apr: Deutsche Welle: Ruby Russell: Imagine America’s next generation are climate deniers
A fight is being waged to ensure the science behind global warming is taught in US schools as some states move to wipe it from the curriculum.
Brandie Freeman is a high school science teacher in the southern US state of Georgia. She recently opened her mailbox one morning to find something unpleasant lurking inside: A book, ostensibly a teaching guide, with the title “Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming.”
It wasn’t entirely a surprise. Freeman had a heard about the publication – produced by the Heartland Institute, a climate-change denial group with links to the fossil fuel industry – from fellow teachers…
Freeman says most of her colleagues in “more liberal” states chucked their copies “straight in the recycling bin.” But in Georgia, which she describes as “very conservative,” Freeman felt the book posed a real danger.
“As soon as you just even open the door to your students that there is doubt among scientists – which there isn’t – then that allows them to have the seed planted that ***THEY CAN GO TO THESE CLIMATE-SKEPTIC WEBSITES.”…
Lawmakers in Texas, Florida, Indiana and Oklahoma are considering bills that would allow, or even encourage, teachers to present climate change as just one – albeit controversial – interpretation of the facts.
“Those kinds of bills try to play on the positive connotations of academic freedom and critical thinking,” Branch says. “In fact, they are anti-democratic bills that allow teachers with ***FUNNY IDEAS to teach anything they want – creationism, climate-change denial, geo-centrism, you name it – on the taxpayers’ dollar.”…
Last year, an NCSE survey found that only 39 percent of US school science teachers were aware of the extent of the scientific consensus over climate change…
Freeman is a member of Georgia Science Teachers Association’s board of directors, which helped write a new curriculum for her state’s high schools that weaves climate change into biology classes for all students…
The new syllabus will be taught from next year, having being passed by Georgia lawmakers – no small victory in a state where climate-skeptic Donald Trump won the presidential election with ease…
http://www.dw.com/en/imagine-americas-next-generation-are-climate-deniers/a-38482126
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Schools ought to teach basic physics- conservation of energy, etc., astronomy, and leave out propaganda like “catastrophic anthropological global warming.”
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At first glance, I thought you had written “catastrophic anthropological global warning.” Which seemed to me to be a very appropriate description of the widely spread propaganda we have been bombarded with for decades.
I agree that we can do without so many stories of catastrophic global anthropomorphic this or that. Replace such things with the classical fables such as “The boy who cried wolf” and “The emperor’s new cloths”. That would be the start of teaching wisdom rather than so much fear of non existent things that go bump in the night.
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Armies march.
Real scientists ask questions.
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Abstract
Coral reefs form the most diverse of all marine ecosystems on the Earth. Corals are among their main components and owe their bioconstructing abilities to a symbiosis with algae (Symbiodinium). The coral–algae symbiosis had been traced back to the Triassic (ca 240 Ma). Modern reef-building corals (Scleractinia) appeared after the Permian–Triassic crisis; in the Palaeozoic, some of the main reef constructors were extinct tabulate corals. The calcium carbonate secreted by extant photosymbiotic corals bears characteristic isotope (C and O) signatures. The analysis of tabulate corals belonging to four orders (Favositida, Heliolitida, Syringoporida and Auloporida) from Silurian to Permian strata of Europe and Africa shows these characteristic carbon and oxygen stable isotope signatures. The δ18O to δ13C ratios in recent photosymbiotic scleractinians are very similar to those of Palaeozoic tabulates, thus providing strong evidence of such symbioses as early as the Middle Silurian (ca 430 Ma). Corals in Palaeozoic reefs used the same cellular mechanisms for carbonate secretion as recent reefs, and thus contributed to reef formation.
Conclusion
Stable isotope analysis shows that most tabulate corals had δ18O to δ13C ratios very similar to those of modern photosymbiotic scleractinians and differing visibly from the corresponding isotope ratios in modern non-photosymbiotic corals. Such an observation evidences the coral–algal symbiosis in Palaeozoic tabulate corals, thus pushing back the appearance of such a type of mutualism as early as the Middle Silurian. Therefore, this discovery pushes back the appearance of this ecological interaction about 190 Myr earlier than previously indicated.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1775/20132663.short
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Our results show that changes in coral reef calcification associated with ocean warming outweigh those associated with decreases in Ωarag (Figure 3). In our model, coral reef calcification decreases by up to 7% from pre-industrial levels up until 1964 as the CO2 effects outweighs the temperature effect. After 1964 however, ocean warming far outweighs the CO2 effect and stimulates recovery of coral reef calcification.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1029/2004GL021541/asset/image_n/grl19117-fig-0003.png?v=1&t=j1ryfbpy&s=0b4f36bdf029210bc7789e88f0577de439051268
Lough and Barnes [2000] show an increase in coral reef calcification on the Great Barrier Reef of about 4% between 1900 and 1979 which is slightly different to our model results that suggest only minor changes (∼0–1%) for that period. It is important to emphasise however that our results represent an average over the entire coral reef community and therefore cannot be solely compared with results from the Great Barrier Reef. Regional changes to coral reef calcification will vary considerably depending on local CO2 conditions and ocean warming. It will be important to undertake more specific regional analysis of models so as to better understand future changes to regions such as the Great Barrier Reef. It is also important to recognize that coral reef calcification and the changes suggested here are separate to the adverse future effects of coral bleaching which is associated with the corals symbiotic micro-algae (zooanthallae) [Hoegh-Guldberg, 1999].
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2004GL021541/full
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/ocean/cb/hotspots/anim.html
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Ozone depletion increases the amount of UVR reaching the Earth’s surface, and possibly causing coral bleaching events.
Total Ozone – Globe – 2017-April-20
http://exp-studies.tor.ec.gc.ca/tmp/tm-g-to-e-9577205039tm20170420.gif
Deviation from Normal – Globe – 2017-April-20
http://exp-studies.tor.ec.gc.ca/tmp/tm-g-de-e-9577205039dm20170420.gif
Coral bleaching was reported to have occurred during periods of low wind velocity, clear skies, calm seas and low turbidity, when conditions favor localized heating and high penetration of short wave length (UV) radiation. Also less oxygen is held by water at higher temperatures. Potentially stressful high sea temperatures and UV radiation flux could conceivably cause coral reef bleaching on a global scale with suspected greenhouse warming and the thinning of the ozone layer.
http://www.marinebiology.org/coralbleaching.htm
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http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/contour/global_small.fc.gif
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Was in Sanibel Island (for those down under its a small island off of Forth Meyer Florida and the very very rice live there). My wife and I were at a restaurant and these 4 older ladies were sitting next to us. All had diamonds on, that weighted in the pounds and had of course Louis Vuitton purses. The 4 were bragging to each other about houses, they all had multiple houses. The talk eventual turned to one women daughter who was getting her Ph.D and was working at Woods Hole. The daughter had invited her mom and dad to Massachusetts to march with her in the “March for Science” because the daughter was worried that the government might take funding for a project she had submitted. The woman said she and her husband were going to take “the jet” and asked any of the other women if they would like a trip, two of the women said they would love to go.
After about 20 more minutes of other conversations one of the women then started in on how her and her husband’s taxes were going up because they had too much income on some stock that they had sold. All of the women in turn then shared their own horror story about how much more in tax they were going to have to pay. The woman with the daughter getting her Ph.D was the most vocal in her complain of taxes. None of these women made the connection between public funding and taxes not to mention the taking of a private jet to go to a protest.
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Thanks for that story Scott, its got my blood boiling. nicely.
40
Sort of fits imo
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/unlimiting-growth/
Maybe we’ll see the Australian electricity mines opening up?
20
Google has an Earth Day doodle today which consists of a series of pictures.
The third last one celebrates the contribution that electricity has made to our lives!
20
We might as well face it. Science, that thing defined by the letters s-c-i-e-n-c-e juxtaposed in that order, has always always had an uphill battle. From Galileo’s clash with the Pope to global warming, science has always said something antithetical to someone’s interest. And they don’t like it.
The kind of science these people want to march for should be called political-science, all one hyphenated word, because that’s what it is, the art of getting someone, usually the taxpayers, to send lots of money to researchers whose real interest is in making a name for themselves and assuring their survival in research even when the don’t make a name for themselves. Oh! And don’t forget the need to get and then keep the respect of their peers, who are, by the way, also cut from the same cloth.
Is that about right?
I think a real scientist wouldn’t be interested in or at least wouldn’t be worried about the respect of his peers because he would already have it, just for being known as honest. But of course the need for financial support would still be there and it grows because boy oh boy, climate change is the hot button field and who would not want to get into the search to prove global warming is true with everyone else?
I’ll not be out marching for science. And if by the off chance the march goes by my house I may go out and flip them the birdie. Yep, they get my contempt.
In the meantime we’re going down the garden path in the company of those we would never let our daughters get anywhere near. The average American citizen is so ignorant of science that all I get from talking to some of them is to be called a denier — the term is now in the public domain. And even an engineer, someone with the qualifications and experience to figure out what’s going on disagrees with me 180 degrees.
But there is hope. A few people have thanked me for trying to put a sensible perspective on the matter. So some are skeptical.
Local neighborhood forums are so much fun…
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That’s probably a little bit unfair because science, the kind defined by s-c-i-e-n-c-e, is very much alive in the commercial and military arenas where you have to make products that compete with others who do good science or die in the marketplace. But when you aren’t accountable for a contribution to the bottom line, it’s abysmal.
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And I’m forgetting, we already have political science (not hyphenated), don’t we. What can I say? 😉
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When Scientists Donate To Politicians, It’s Usually To Democrats https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/when-scientists-donate-to-politicians-its-usually-to-democrats/
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An analysis using engineering science demonstrates why CO2 has no significant effect on climate and identifies the three factors which do (98% match with measured 1895-2016). http://globalclimatedrivers2.blogspot.com
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subscription reqd:
21 Apr: WSJ: Steven Koonin: A ‘Red Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science
(Mr. Koonin, a theoretical physicist, is director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. He served as undersecretary of energy for science during President Obama’s first term)
Put the ‘consensus’ to a test, and improve public understanding, through an open, adversarial process.
Tomorrow’s March for Science will draw many thousands in support of evidence-based policy making and against the politicization of science. A concrete step toward those worthy goals would be to convene a “Red Team/Blue Team” process for climate science, one of the most important and contentious issues of our age.
The national-security community pioneered the “Red Team” methodology to test assumptions and analyses, identify risks, and reduce—or at least understand—uncertainties. The process is now considered a best practice in high-consequence situations such as intelligence assessments, spacecraft design and major industrial operations. It is very different and more rigorous than traditional peer review, which is usually confidential and always adjudicated, rather than public and moderated…
21 Apr: WUWT: Commentary: A ‘Red Team/Blue Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science
By Steven Koonin (originally published in the Wall Street Journal, sent to WUWT by the author)
We scientists must better portray not only our certainties but also our uncertainties, and even things we may never know. Not doing so is an advisory malpractice that usurps society’s right to make choices fully informed by risk, economics and values…
Here’s how it might work…READ ON
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/21/commentary-a-red-teamblue-team-exercise-would-strengthen-climate-science/
21 Apr: Judith Curry: A ‘Red Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science
https://judithcurry.com/2017/04/21/a-red-team-exercise-would-strengthen-climate-science/
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true, but not in the way Nature sees it:
20 Apr: Nature Editorial: Fake news threatens a climate literate world
As the challenges and environmental consequences of climate change manifest, the need for a society of science-literate citizens is becoming increasingly apparent. Achieving this, however, is no easy task, particularly given the proliferation of fake news and the seeds of confusion it can sow
The public’s awareness of the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change is a prime example of the consequences of scientific misinformation. With 97% of scientific experts in agreement that modern-day climate change is the result of human activity, the consensus is clear (Cook, J. et al. Environ. Res. Lett. 8, 024024 (2013)). Yet, a 2016 survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication showed that more than half of American adults are unaware that a consensus exists, with 28% believing a great deal of uncertainty remains…
Educators are planning to install media literacy curricula to equip students with skills in critical thinking, independent verification and fact checking. Some media sectors are moving away from false balance and adopting a more interpretive approach where opinions are contextualized (Bruggemann, M. & Engesser, S. Glob. Environ. Chang. 42, 58–67 (2017)), while Facebook and other social media platforms are collaborating with third-party fact-checking organizations in an effort to flag disputed content…
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15460
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child abuse:
VIDEO: 21 Apr: CBS: John Blackstone: “Bring it on”: Students sue Trump administration over climate change
EUGENE, Ore. – Avery McRae has been passionate about the environment for half a lifetime, and she’s been worried about climate change since kindergarten.
Now, at 11, she is really getting serious. She recently signed on to sue President Trump and the U.S. government.
“Trump is not doing anything to help stop climate change,” she says. “He’s a climate change denier, and we’re gonna prove that to the world!”…
“It’s a disgrace that the government has put its citizens and its younger generation into a position where we have to go to court,” McRae says…
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/our-childrens-trust-students-sue-trump-administration-over-climate-change/
VIDEO: 22 Apr: CNET: Bill Nye wants to save the world from science deniers
The Science Guy stops by CNET to talk about his new Netflix show…and we roast marshmallows (for science!).
by Bridget Carey
In the 13 episodes, Nye collaborates with celebrities like Alton Brown, Tim Gunn, and Joel McHale to explore basic, proven science that has become politicized and debated.
“I don’t think this will last, the antiscience thing.” Nye told CNET. “And the big example right now is climate change…There are very few young climate change deniers. So these people are going to age out. Are we going to replace them with enlightened people that want to do something about climate change fast enough?”…
https://www.cnet.com/au/news/bill-nye-saves-the-world-climate-change/
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22 Apr: TVNZ: NZ Super Fund writes off US wind turbine venture
The New Zealand Superannuation Fund has completely written off the value of its investment in US wind turbine company Ogin which is in the process of being wound down.
The Super Fund invested $US55 million ($NZ78 million) in Massachusetts-based Ogin in 2013 to give the US start-up capital to develop new products before going public, of which $US25 million was debt and $US30 million was equity.
Those plans didn’t come to fruition and after Ogin failed to raise more capital last year, the Super Fund wrote down the investment to nil in June 2016, which had been valued at $NZ47.5 million…
The Ogin investment barely dented the fund’s returns, representing just 0.2 per cent of its $30.1 billion portfolio at the time of the write-off…
Mr Whineray said the fund still sees long-term value in alternative energy.
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/nz-super-fund-writes-off-us-wind-turbine-venture
21 Apr: MichiganCapitolConfidential: Tom Gantert: Wind Industry Titan Soaks Up Billions in Tax Subsidies
887 turbines here already; NextEra Energy sues Michigan rural townships for more
A renewable energy company that is worth $60 billion — and hasn’t paid federal income taxes for the last seven years — is among the country’s largest recipients of federal subsidies. It’s also suing a small Michigan township as it seeks to take advantage of a state law for its financial gain.
NextEra Energy, based in Florida, has filed lawsuits in Michigan against Ellington Township and Almer Township seeking to compel the municipalities to allow its wind turbine towers to be erected. The company has wind farm projects in 19 states and four Canadian provinces and has built more than 8,700 wind turbines in 110 wind farm facilities…
NextEra is also seeking a zoning change on the May 2 ballot in neighboring Huron County. A favorable vote could add many more turbine towers to the 473 already there…
NextEra Energy had corporate profits of $21.5 billion from 2008 to 2015. The company paid no federal income taxes on this amount but instead received a net credit of $313 million due to government subsidies.
Almer Township, by comparison, had a general fund budget of $600,000 in 2016…
NextEra has received about $1.9 billion in federal grants and tax credits since 2000, according to a March 2015 report by GoodJobsFirst.org, an organization that tracks federal subsidies. NextEra was second only to the energy company Iberdrola in collecting federal subsidies since 2000; Iberdrola has received $2.2 billion…
The federal government does not track its subsidies for renewable energy companies on an annual basis. But the wind industry received $5.9 billion in federal subsidies in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available from the Energy Information Administration.
“NextEra may produce wind energy, but its real business is subsidy mining,” said Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an expert on the energy sector…
https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/wind-industry-titan-soaks-up-billions-in-tax-subsidies
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21 Apr: Time: Mahita Gajanan: Google’s Earth Day Doodle Sends an Urgent Message About Climate Change
Google’s doodle for Earth Day sends a pertinent message about climate change as scientists and others gear up for the March for Science on Saturday.
In a series of illustrations, the Google doodle tells the story of a sleeping fox that has a nightmare about the consequences of climate change, featuring melted icebergs and dead plants. Disturbed, the fox enlists two friends to be more thoughtful about conservation—the trio eat vegetables, grow plants, ride bikes and use solar energy.
Google also offered conservation tips for Earth Day, reminding people to turn off lights, plant trees, eat locally sourced food and avoid driving.
http://time.com/4751376/google-doodle-earth-day-tips-climate-change/
16 Apr: Inquisitr: No Google Doodle For Easter: Google Snubs Easter For 17th Year In A Row
by Monika Zoltany
Google featured an Easter Doodle only once, in 2000, two years after the company started in 1998…
few years ago, Google published an explanation for why they routinely snub Easter…
http://www.inquisitr.com/4151594/no-google-doodle-for-easter-google-snubs-easter-for-17th-year-in-a-row/
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can’t copy and paste, but quite a story…worth reading all:
19 Apr: MansfieldNewsJournal: Ontario schools address broken wind turbine
ONTARIO – Ontario Local Schools is telling the company that owns the wind turbine at Stingel Elementary to fix the turbine or lose the schools’ business and remove the equipment.
The turbine has sat idle since November 2016, when its transformer stopped working…READ ALL
http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/story/news/local/2017/04/19/ontario-schools-address-broken-wind-turbine/100641650/
21 Apr: E&E News: Christa Marshall: Trump admin overhauls webpages for wind, vehicles
The Trump administration has removed language on the Department of Energy website that emphasized wind as an emissions-free replacement for fossil fuels.
The website changes come as DOE conducts a study of whether policies favoring wind and solar power are accelerating coal and nuclear plant closures. The administration is also proposing budget cuts to DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which could hit wind programs.
Documented by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, the website changes include the removal of this statement: “Wind power is an emission-free and water-free renewable energy source that is a key component to the administration’s renewable electricity goals.” …
DOE didn’t respond to a request for comment about the website changes by press time.
In other parts of the website, DOE removed text comparing wind with fossil fuels.
DOE replaced the statement about its leadership “in making wind energy technologies more competitive with traditional sources of energy and a larger part of our nation’s renewable energy portfolio,” instead touting the United States’ position as a “leading global market for wind energy due to its vast domestic resources, low cost and highly skilled workforce.” The agency also removed an entire section on how wind energy is a clean power source that creates no air pollution…
The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative documented similar changes between January and February on webpages for the vehicle technologies and bioenergy sections in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Both sections altered language emphasizing clean energy technologies as a replacement for fossil fuels and boosted emphasis on job creation.
The mission statement of the vehicle office was changed from reducing the use of petroleum to strengthening “U.S. energy security, economic vitality, and quality of life.”…
Earlier this month, DOE changed its climate change website and removed references to the Paris climate agreement and Mission Innovation, a plan to address climate change by doubling clean energy research and development spending (E&E Daily, April 6)…
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/stories/1060053418
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VIDEO: 13 MINUTES?: 21 Apr: Yahoo: Michael Walsh: Bill Nye: Trump would win reelection if he embraced climate change action
In an interview with Yahoo News anchor Bianna Golodryga Friday afternoon, Nye encouraged Trump to think for himself because the people influencing his decision making are “from the old days.”
“If you want to be reelected and if you want to have an eight-year legacy instead of a less than four-year legacy, embrace the future. Consider the electoral map as presented if only millennials voted, and take climate change into account,” said Nye, who is popular among young Americans thanks to his ‘90s TV show “Bill Nye the Science Guy.”…
Exit polls indicate that if only millennials had voted in bigger numbers in last year’s presidential election, then Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would have won in a landslide.
Golodryga suggested that winning might be the only factor motivating Trump’s actions. She asked Nye whether he thinks embracing the battle against climate change would, in fact, get him another term in the Oval Office.
“Yeah, actually yes. No one’s ever asked the question quite so succinctly, thank you,” Nye said. “The people who deny climate change are almost exclusively old, like me. … And they will age out of the electorate. So if you want to be elected by future voters — people coming of age right now — you’re going to have to embrace climate change and especially you’re going to have to embrace science.”…
He said Trump would benefit from dismissing what some of his current advisers are telling him and listening to forward-thinking, younger people who are concerned about the environment and the world that their children and grandchildren will inherit…
CLICK ‘READ MORE’
For Nye, acknowledging the reality of climate change and the legitimacy of scientific evidence would put Trump on track for a positive presidential legacy.
“Climate change is the most serious issue facing humankind, for sure,” Nye said. “I strongly encourage the president to consider that science is universal. It’s for everybody on earth. The climate is for everybody on earth. Space exploration is for everybody on earth. Clean water, renewably produced reliable electricity and access to electronic information [is] for everyone on earth. And then, Mr. President, you could have a remarkable legacy.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/bill-nye-trump-win-reelection-embraced-climate-change-action-201300544.html
01
overkill. as if Bloomberg isn’t saturated with CAGW nonsense already:
20 Apr: HuffPo: Bloomberg Adds Climate Change Site To Its Financial News Empire
by Alexander C. Kaufman, Business & Environment Reporter
Now, Bloomberg, the titan of business and financial journalism, is adding a site devoted to climate science and the future of energy to its sprawling news empire.
The data and media giant on Thursday launched ClimateChanged.com, a hub for coverage of how rising global temperatures are changing the planet and moving financial markets.
“Climate change is fundamentally an economic story, it’s an economic problem,” Eric Roston, Bloomberg’s sustainability editor, told The Huffington Post in an interview on Tuesday. “It’s naturally a business story and it’s naturally a concern to rationally minded executives in any sized enterprise.”…
Droves of reporters at Bloomberg’s more than 150 bureaus around the world regularly file stories on climate change. Climate Changed will collect those stories in one, sleekly designed location…
Climate Changed gives Bloomberg a leg up on The Wall Street Journal, arguably its chief competitor in the market for prestige journalism. The Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper’s hard-line conservativism appears to have bled over from the opinion pages to the news section…
“It’s the mother of all risk,” (Jared Sandberg, senior executive editor in Bloomberg’s digital division) added. “If you have intelligence agencies around the world identifying climate change as one of the great, destabilizing forces, there’s a massive risk to contend with for any business and any investor behind it.”…
***Climate Changed won’t be focused on debunking fringe voices ― the sort that might show on the pages of the far-right news site Breitbart ― who seek to undermine climate science by depicting it as some kind of conspiracy.
“Comparing what people say to data, then stepping out of the room, is sort of the best thing journalists can do,” Roston said. “We don’t have a social mission other than transparency and fact-checking.” …
The site has yet to lock down advertisers to sponsor the launch. But it shouldn’t have much trouble finding bidders. Nearly every company in the S&P 500 now issues regular reports on sustainability efforts…
“The business community absolutely demands this, the investor community demands this,” Sandberg said…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/bloomberg-climate-change_us_58f7e640e4b0cb086d7dd9e5
01
***It’s Climate Change Week at CNN MoneyStream!
21 Apr: CNN Money: Danielle Wiener-Bronner: If Trump wants to save U.S. infrastructure, he needs to care about climate change
Extreme heat could cause pipes to crack, or melt asphalt. Airports below sea level could be flooded. Communities could relocate because of drought or heat, putting pressure on transportation systems and reducing the relevancy of others. Extreme weather could cause flooding of inland roads, and storm surges could flood highways on the coasts.
“Infrastructure has largely been designed for historical weather and climate conditions,” Mikhail Chester, assistant professor of civil, environmental, and sustainable engineering at Arizona State University, explains.
So far the models have served us well. But the potential impacts of climate change could make those systems less reliable down the road.
Climate scientists predict more bouts of extreme weather and larger swings in temperature, “which upends how we have to think about designing,” Chester added…
In some cases, the infrastructure failures predicted by climate models have already happened. For example, New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority estimates that Hurricane Sandy, which flooded the New York City subway system, caused $4.75 billion in infrastructure damage.
There’s some debate over whether the hurricane itself was caused by climate change — but scientists agree that we can expect to see weather events like Sandy more frequently as a result of global warming…
***(It’s Climate Change Week at CNN MoneyStream. For more stories about how global warming is impacting business, follow the Climate Change stream in the CNN MoneyStream app)
http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/21/news/trump-infrastructure-climate-change/
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it’s CAGW all the way at NY’sT Mag:
21 Apr: NYT: David Leonhardt: Climate Change Is Now
The damage from climate change isn’t just coming in the future. It’s part of the present, as this weekend’s issue (LINK) of The New York Times Magazine points out.
“Last year, melting permafrost in Siberia released a strain of anthrax, which had been sealed in a frozen reindeer carcass, sickening 100 people and killing one child,” Jon Mooallem writes. “Parts of Washington now experience flooding 30 days a year, a figure that has roughly quadrupled since 1960. In Wilmington, N.C., the number is 90 days.”
Yet in the face of this urgent challenge — one that affects all of humanity, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, America and the rest of the world — President Trump has chosen to accelerate climate change. He and his aides are encouraging pollution.
What can you do about it?
You can get involved politically, and you should…
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/opinion/climate-change-is-now.html?_r=0
from LINK in above:
New York Times Magazine: The Climate Issue: Our Climate Future Is Actually Our Climate Present
How do we live with the fact that the world we knew is going and, in some cases, already gone?
By JON MOOALLEM
Why the Menace of Mosquitoes Will Only Get Worse …
How Singapore Is Creating More Land for Itself …
Is It O.K. to Tinker With the Environment to Fight Climate Change?
How a Warming Planet Drives Human Migration
Behind the Cover: 4.23.17
(COVER ILLUSTRATION)
Jake Silverstein, editor in chief: “Humans are adaptive, and as the climate changes, our behavior will, too. This clever illustration takes that idea of the new ‘normal’ to an absurd extreme. I imagine that this commuter, rather than thinking, ‘Oh, no, a flood!’ is simply muttering, ‘Mondays.’”
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21 Apr: Harvard Gazette: Pick climate or economics
To aid the former, Naomi Klein says, government and business would have to change the latter, and likely won’t
By Michelle Nicholasen, Weatherhead Center Communications
When it comes to acting on climate change, there are two choices, author and activist Naomi Klein told a full house at First Parish Church in Cambridge Wednesday, “We can give up — wait for the apocalypse. That’s one option. The other option is to stand up in a truly unprecedented way.”
The 45-minute talk, sponsored by the Canada Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, referenced her 2014 book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.”…
She highlighted one visible example of destruction: the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, which has lost a quarter of its coral due to a rise in ocean temperature…
“Climate change is the essence of a collective crisis,” she stated. “We need collective action and massive investments in the public sphere.”
One way to do this, she offered, would be by breaking down silos between interest groups and uniting disparate movements, for example labor with science, to help create decent jobs in an economy that could be transformed by a robust renewable energy market…
“The fossil fuel frontier is closed,” she said, even as she sees a troubling sign in the apparent “merging of the oil and gas industries with the Trump White House.”
A few hours before her public talk, Klein met with a group of students from the Graduate School of Design for an informal Q&A session. There, Klein leveled criticisms against President Trump’s positions on the climate in her characteristic colorful, pointed style.
“He embodies the extractivist mindset so perfectly,” she said. “He thinks he can grab anything, women, oil, land. The way he sees any relationship is for maximum extraction … the opposite of any kind of reciprocity or interconnection.”…
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/to-slow-climate-change-naomi-klein-looks-to-government-business/
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So many words. So little valid knowledge. This is a prime example of how lack of engineering science skill can make a person gullible to misguided indoctrination.
Climate has always changed . . . naturally. And always will. The compelling evidence is CO2 has no significant influence.
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Where does John Hewson get his Scientific Facts? He is interviewed this morning after speaking to a group before March for Science. As a politician he was a poor persuader. As an Economist he was ?.? As good as any other. Maybe as an investor in batteries he has an inside track on Pure science?
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[…] there will be lots of pussy hats and angry anti-Trump signs. As Jo Nova explains The March for Science is on […]
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I can’t wait for Weekend Unthreaded. I will post some links to some wonderful fossil fuel related videos.
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Up with gravity as a remaining force after electro-magnetism has stabilized the universe.
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Silly Marxists.
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Too much time on their hands
Saturday came and went and looking at the numbers who turned up ( thousands , not tens or hundreds of thousands) for the march, it can be said that it was about as effective as a solar panel at night.
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1883 words, ~6.5 minutes’ read.
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It is now Sunday and surely it is time for reflection on the pomp and ceremony of yesterday’s March for Science.
A March for Science… which was held in April? What a missed opportunity! Perhaps March was still too cold in the populous northern hemisphere to get any global traction for a March March for Science. Anyhow, what did the punters actually say and do yesterday?
Their ABC is about as good a place to start as any. For a slightly less filtered view of the event you can search for pictures posted on twitter by account @ScienceMarchMel or under hashtags #marchforacienceau and #marchforsciencebne
There is a grab-bag of subtly different issues being paraded by the punters, who seem to relish the chance to get out in the sunshine and piggy-back on this publicity event.
You’ve got it half right, Angela. The scientific method can be used to check if a problem claiming an evidential basis is also supported empirically with certainty. That is not the major decision making process. As soon as you feel the need to make any action-oriented decision, it is because there is a gap between how you perceive the world and what you desire the world to be. Preferences, values, and beliefs, are then an intrinsic part of the decision making process because it does not decide what has happened, nor even particularly what will happen on present trajectory, but rather what should and ought to be done to achieve a desired outcome.
I completely agree with Angela that politicians should give importance to the scientific underpinnings of any potential policy, but ensuring that models are criticized rather than defended is an important but recently underused step in that policy process.
I disagree with Angela that the solution to politicians not knowing what to do with our taxpayer money is to hire more scientists, as I would rather the government just take less money to begin with, as they do not know how to spend our money better than we do.
Well, Taylor, if you were pro-science you wouldn’t be making an appeal to consensus.
I’m sure this person knows that the money for publicly-funded scientists comes from taxes on business. They do not seem to understand that Science is a method and an idea and it does not receive money, people receive money. A recurring theme in this protest is that scientists are agitating to be paid by the taxpayer, at least with greater certainty if not with greater volume.
In some hypothetical universe that the Liberal party shows no signs of inhabiting, if the government were to cut its total spend (haha) then the various science grants would be somewhere in the list of priorities for cuts, it’s only a question of how low. It is a clearly economic question.
Business has a return on investment, this is tested by voluntary transactions every year, they generate wealth, that’s why they are still in business. If several businesses decided to sell cheap dodgy products rather than compete with each other, a more efficient startup could (and would) capture their market share in the absence of any barrier to market entry. It is not clear how this analogy applies to government funded scientists whose output is admittedly politically useful. The normal competitiveness that occurs amongst scientists, and which peer review attempts to harness, is somewhat disabled when all players are given a materially vested interest in supporting a hypothesis useful to all governments.
If most papers in a narrow field are dodgy and the perverse result is that those authors become a protected species rather than endangered, this creates the opposite to normal evolutionary forces in the business arena. Not only are scientists’ funding paid involuntarily (i.e. through taxes) but funding in this peculiar case would not support proper science, only a club of players.
Imagine the equal but opposite placard to this: “Investments in wealth generation, not handouts for boffins.”
In abstract, would that really be anti-science, or would it merely be anti-scientist?
I think both in general, and under actual present circumstance in Cli-Sci, such a statement would not be anti-science, it would merely push funding away from questions which the public find no great need to solve.
If I were being nasty I’d interpret his placard as an implicitly totalitarian view on fighting against climate change, but the word “participation” does seem to mean the changing of the climate rather than resistance against it. He appears to be saying that you are changing the Earth’s climate by your actions regardless of whether you believe you are. Of course I have to agree as a technicality simply because there is a greenhouse effect and CO2 is one small part of it, BUT (and there has to be a major but) this is insufficient to justify going out in the street to hold up traffic and loudly agitate for social change. I would turn this placard right back on the guy.
I would say, you don’t want to add CO2 to the atmosphere and this implies a roll back of fossil-fuel powered electricity and transportation, which requires political force because the market isn’t choosing to do that.
Fossil fuels are currently the cheapest form of energy, that’s been decided by the market regardless of whether you believe it.
Fossil fuels provide somewhere in the vicinity of 60% to 80% of the energy used in the world. To replace this requires renewable installations vastly greater than anything anyone has contemplated, and would necessarily cover vast areas for wind/solar collection. This will result in a much greater batch of fried or sliced avians every year, regardless of whether you believe that. Renewables cannot provide power reliably without an economical large scale energy storage, that’s also an observed fact regardless of whether you believe it. Pumped hydro storage incurs habitat destruction, and near the majority of populated areas even that is not topographically possible, which is why no such storage technology is permissible for most the world.
The belief that phasing out fossil fuels in the absence of any credible energy alternative will destroy our civilisation may be an optional belief, but participation is not.
This one has a lot of merit to it. Surely the biggest contributors to the prolonging of our lifespan have been the invention of hygiene practices, vaccinations, and labour saving devices that run on cheap energy.
The discovery that many illnesses were caused by some sort of infective material agent was a discovery proven scientifically by Ignaz Semmelweiss long before he knew anything of bacteria and certainly well before the majority of medical doctors could accept that they’d been unwittingly killing their patients. But that was an 1850s discovery. The industrial revolution, fueled by coal and wood, had begun 100 years earlier and was already using energy to cut the amount of human labour required for production, leading to increases in production and subsequent affordability of higher quality goods and lifestyle. This economic revolution was made possible by a technological revolution, and the design of such technology was made possible by a scientific understanding of the forces of nature and by capitalist patronage in supporting the conversion of knowledge into useful works. There are just so many facets to why we live past 47, but I’ll agree that Science is one of them because even with the other practical factors we’d live shorter lives without the products of scientific inquiry.
As mortal beings we must necessarily act with imperfect information and without any facts sent from the future. The degree to which we believe we can exercise foresight flows directly from our confidence that our present model of the world will remain valid in the future, implying the inputs we predict and the rules we know now are sufficient for predicting future outcomes. In other words, foresight is typically hubris. All expertise is in fact expertise on past events. When science itself is predicated on the ignorance of experts and scientific discoveries by definition are natural structures people did not know before, why on EarthDay would anyone think that foresight is produced by science? Science usually shows us how much we don’t know. The scientific method fights against the hubris that produces foresight.
Presumably the lack of respect for science, and the consequent spread of hubris, is so bad that it led the protester to mistakenly believe they did not need to consult a dictionary and had the foresight to leave enough room to spell ‘foresight’ correctly, yet the “e” obviously had to be hastily inserted after the error in their model of the English language was discovered. It just reinforces my point.
Well I guess that is taking an evidence-based approach to finding an answer. But if Trump’s tax returns are the answer, what on EarthDay is the driving question and why would that question be related to the value of Science in society at MarchForScience?
Well, as a matter of fact, she’s not wrong, but then she is not trying to make predictions of the future like the IPCC does.
Okay, which one of you was this? 😀
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Nine hyperlinks, that will get me auto-moderated for sure, so I’ve snipped the http-colon-slash-slash from most of them.
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[…] As Jo Nova explains. […]
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[…] more at joannenova.com.au Share […]
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All hail the Marx for Science!
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