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Seems some fossils are cheaper than others, and the Big Oil guys are not happy that Asia is buying so much Big Coal. Apparently quite a few Big Oil companies have become predominantly more Big Gas companies, but they are struggling against cheaper coal and lower demand.
It’s just a coincidence that four big oil gas companies are also headed by guys who want to save the Earth (with gas):
June 5th, 2015: Shell, Total, BP Plc and other oil companies said … that they’re banding together to promote gas as more climate friendly than coal.
Here’s the head of French oil supermajor Total this week describing how coal is the competition:
Mr Pouyanne, who last year declared coal was “the enemy” of the gas industry, told the LNG18 conference in Perth that LNG demand was suffering just as a raft of new projects were coming on.
“We face a situation where we have more supply than demand, which has grown slower than expected because of competition between coal and gas,” he said.
“In Asian countries there is a shift from gas to coal because, the coal price has collapsed as well.”
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I call it Met Bureau Bingo. Ultimately there are so many hair-splitting quixotic variants of weather stats that a dedicated team can always find a record. Here are some other trends that didn’t make the media.
We all heard about the record heat in the Arctic, but we didn’t hear about the unusual cold in Antarctica where running twelve month averages are equal to the lowest recorded since satellites began in 1979.
So carbon dioxide causes a hot Arctic and a cold Antarctic, and both at the same time.* Where’s the global warming?
Ken Stewart looked at the UAH 6.0 version of all the major regions. The graph below is a 12 month running average of the Southern Polar area. The last low “dotpoint” covers the whole last year to March. Pretty cold.
Error bars are 0.2C
There’s a bit more error with satellites at the poles, so I won’t crack the second decimal and declare it a “record”. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe records are irrelevant worthless distractions. What’s 40 years out of 4 billion? Nitpicking.
Reader Phill suggests that the cold at the pole may be connect to the El Nino, see his interesting thoughts […]
A new MIT report suggests a better way to use coal in power-stations and potentially cut CO2 emissions by 50%. The process involves gasifying coal and producing electricity in one process at the same site. The coal only has to be heated once, and the electricity comes from a fuel cell, not a fire — it’s a chemical reaction across a membrane. The output is potentially much more efficient, and makes no ash. The researchers argue we could get twice as much electricity for each ton of coal burned. Currently coal fired power pulls out 30% of the chemical energy in coal, but coupling these two processes might increase it to 55-60%.
This report is based on simulations, but the separate processes are already well developed and running. The next step would be a fully functioning pilot plant to put the two together and test the idea. If there was the political will it could be done in a few years. There probably won’t be.
The Greens of course will hate the idea because the Evil-Factor of coal is near 100%.
In the eco-collectivist-world, cutting “carbon” is important, but apparently not as important as propping up a dependent lobby group […]
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Sigmar Gabriel, the German Economy Minister, has announced they’d like to amend the Renewable Energies Act (EEG) in the next few months or so. The plan is for the total amount of renewable energy on the grid to be capped at 40 – 45% by 2025. It was at 33% at the end of 2015 but was still climbing rapidly. Check out the eyewatering transition being planned now:
A study by consultants ERA on behalf of the Green Party’s parliamentary group concludes that under these provisions the development of wind energy will collapse fairly soon: A target of 45 percent would mean that only 1500 megawatts could be installed annually after 2018, according to the study. That’s less than half as the average of wind energy installed in the past five days.
Boom, meet Bust.
This would be such a turnaround, that not only would new wind turbines not be added, there would be less of them:
A 40% cap for wind energy completely stop the construction of new wind farms by of 2019, according to the ERA [consultants] study. Overall, this would reduce onshore wind power by almost 6000 megawatts compared to the […]
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Here on the ball of magma called Earth, there’s a hot plume of rocks under Iceland that stretches right across under Greenland. Those hot rocks are melting the ice from below in a band 1,200 km long and 400 km wide.[1]
I don’t think solar panels are going to stop Greenland melting.
The main part of the plume has been progressing eastward over the last 120 million years, right under Greenland and now lies under Iceland.
Will the media take a million years to catch on?
Presumably, being world class journalists, from now on all ABC/BBC/CBC stories will not mention melting Greenland ice-sheets without also noting that geothermal heat may be causing it instead of your long hot showers.
But a similar study published in Nature Geoscience 3 years ago was the forerunner to this one with similar conclusions and the mainstream media don’t seem to have noticed yet.[2] No mention of magma, tectonics and hot rocks here: ABC — Antarctica’s melting ice alone could lift sea levels one metre by 2100, March 31st, 2016. Or here: ABC — Global warming melts last stable edge of Greenland’s Zachariae ice stream, March 17th, 2014. Or on the BBC – […]
About a third of the sunlight that hits Earth gets reflected back out to space mainly by clouds, ice or bare earth. A small change in this can make a big difference to the global energy balance. And the energy balance is kinda “everything” in the climate debate. So this new paper by Palle et al really ought to attract quite a bit of interest. But for lots of reasons real data was never going to provide much joy for most climate scientists.
Image of the moon taken by Bob King of Sky and Telescope.
The thing is, climate models predict that CO2 will cause warming, which will in turn cause ice to melt and the albedo to get smaller, which will cause more warming… it’s a positive feedback. So if albedo was shrinking during the last 2 decades, the Crisis Team could say the models were right about albedo, but then, golly, they were even more wrong about that warming that didn’t happen. On the other hand, if albedo was growing, they could add it to the list of excuses for The Pause and write headlines like: Global clouds increase — hiding the effect of CO2! But then […]
Kudos to Myles Allen. He might think CO2 is a problem, but at least he is being honest and slightly practical about dealing with it. That’s a big step up from those who urge us to panic about CO2, but then choose the most useless and expensive options to reduce it. Allen effectively gives Abbott’s Direct Action plan a big tick. Finally (indirectly) Tony Abbott gets some credit for out-greening the EU, and offering a more effective and cheaper way to achieve what the Greens said they want. Like I said, Abbott got reductions for $14 a ton, the Greens should have loved him.
Anyway, Myles Allen’s done a study, published in Nature Climate Change, suggesting that there is no point in a few western nations driving in their economies into the dust to reduce their emissions when the rest of the world isn’t. So here’s one of the IPCC team repeating an argument that skeptics have said so many times: if we make ourselves a third world nation, we won’t be able to afford to look after the environment. Our children will have to burn the environment for breakfast.
In the end though Allen thinks the answer is to […]
The Reef took 6000 years to form. Suddenly it is bleached white, but the media are not putting it on page one. Oh the gnashing of teeth!
Peter Hartcher Sydney Morning Herald –– Tony Abbotts Harmful Legacy
‘…the news of its most severe bleaching didn’t even rate in the top five news topics.
‘Why? “It’s only a hypothesis, but I think there’s been a peaking of interest or concern” in matters related to climate change [says iSentia’s Patrick Baume.]
Peak Climate? Yes, please…
“It’s seen as something a bit from the past, as if getting rid of the carbon tax meant we’d got rid of climate change. It’s a funny one.”
Or maybe people are bored of climate ghost stories? Maybe people realized climate change is always here.
The reef survived the Holocene Horrible Warming Period. (Formerly called The Holocene Optimum 😉 ). Things were even hotter then and seas around Queensland were 1 – 2 whole meters higher. Apocalyptic stuff, yet somehow the reef made it without a single carbon trading scheme.
The last 8000 years of sea levels off Queensland
Source: S Lewis et al […]
No matter which way we slice and dice it, China is The-CO2-Player that matters. India is forecast for a larger percentage-wise increase, but it’s starting from a small base. By 2030 even after doubling its output, it will still be barely a quarter of China’s total mega-ton production. The Congo and Indonesia are among countries forecast to ramp up production of CO2 massively, yet both of them are but a spec. The hard numbers show that if CO2 actually mattered, and the eco-greens really cared about it, they be talking about “The China Problem”.
Australia is irrelevant, except in some symbolic sacrificial way. The 28% massive reduction, at great cost, will amount to nothing globally (assuming it can even be achieved). Though Tasmania may win the global race for the fastest transition from first to third world. (North Korea here we come).
In the end, the real drivers of global CO2 may or may not be things like forest and peat fires, ocean currents, phytoplankton in any case. Won’t it be a great day when we figure exactly where all that CO2 is coming from and going to?
— Jo
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It’s another month of BOM Bingo. The ABC and BOM are trumpeting a “hottest” ever headline yet again, and Warwick Hughes is onto them already.
Conveniently the ABC forgets to mention that March Maximum Temps have been hotter before many times and with a pattern that has nothing to do with CO2. How many in the ABC audience would know that?
March temperatures sets record as hottest ever, Bureau of Meteorology says
“You could be forgiven for not noticing the end of summer — March was a hot one.” says Sara Phillips. But actually, if you are human, you could be forgiven for thinking this was just another hot March like so many before. For SE Australia where most humans live, the hottest March, and wildly so, was in 1940. Across the whole of Australia these kinds of maximum temperatures in March have been occurring for decades and 1986 was much much hotter. See the BOM graph below.
Hands up who can spot the horrid effect of CO2 in this graph?
Stick with the logic. Must be CO2 that caused the cold spike in 2011 (and 1967, 1942 and 1913). This is witchcraft.
You could be forgiven […]
April 1. A new anthropology paper looks at the Academic Ape and the way it guards its territory and resources, not surprisingly rejecting unpaid contributions from outside academia as a threat to their perceived status and income. The hypothesis predicts that the more qualified and erudite the outsider is, the more vicious the response will be, especially if the highly qualified outsider gives their labor freely.
The Academic Ape: Instinctive aggression and boundary enforcing behaviour in academia
Published on Amazon in Kindle version.
Two areas of territorial aggression are offered as examples — archaeology and climate (you couldn’t see that coming). This new paper looks at how the academic boundary enforcement compares to things like union disputes, and patterns of ape behaviour (See Table 1). An interesting paper.
The climate debate is so hostile people don’t even speak English — “denier”
There is no accurate definition of “denier” in English in a climate science debate, yet professors use it, and importantly other professors in virtually every other field don’t seem to mind. A survey of 5,000 skeptics shows almost all agree with most mainstream statements used in the climate debate — i.e. that CO2 is increasing, […]
This is your brain on government funding (pace Mark Steyn). The government of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) gave $18k to a theatre group to put on a play called “Kill the Deniers”. Now, lucky us, we can read the e-book. Because the climate debate really needs more guns, hostages, brute force, and threats right?
Well, it does if you don’t have any evidence.
“Kill the Deniers” — All the wit and wisdom of government funded “arts”. Can’t persuade the voters? Shoot their representatives.
The Kill the Deniers e-book is coming:
…writer and theatre-maker whose work sits at the intersection of art and science, [David] Finnigan said Kill Climate Deniers grew out of discussions with Aspen Island Theatre Company’s Julian Hobba.
‘We got really interested in talking about the climate debate, and we were wondering why it was that in Australia the debate had stalled so badly; what is it about this country? And then we moved on to asking what would it take to shift the debate forward again – what would it actually take to generate real political change?’ said Finnigan.
Why did the debate stall? They could have done some research and […]
Everything is a gender equity issue. Who knew the climate was sexist?
“…women have good reason to be worried, given that climate change will affect women around the world the most. Climate change is often framed as an ecological disaster, less frequently as a key crisis for global gender equality.”
In the current climate men have shorter lifespans and higher suicide rates. The very caring women at “Women’s Agenda” don’t seem to care about that. Nevermind.
Why do women care more? They’re more obedient, less willing to take risks
Even the writers and editors of a “liberated” emancipated women’s magazine reveal more than they realize about their own belief. They’ve been told last year was the hottest year on record, and parts of the Great Barrier Reef are bleached. These things would happen no matter what caused climate change, but Annika Blau is an obedient woman and she believes that our power stations and cars cause the bleaching. Indeed she is so well trained, she is even convinced her position is “logical” and says so, without providing any logical reason that events which probably occurred hundreds of times before are proof of anything. (It’s been hotter for thousands […]
Looking back to Feb 7th, check that vision:
Obama orders military to prioritize climate change
Because guns should be carbon neutral right?
When we kill people we still care about the footprint.
[Washington Post]
The Pentagon is ordering the top brass to incorporate climate change into virtually everything they do, from testing weapons to training troops to war planning to joint exercises with allies.
A new directive’s theme: The U.S. Armed Forces must show “resilience” and beat back the threat based on “actionable science.”
Yes, previously the Armed Forces only had to be resilient across a 90 degree range. Now it could be 91.
The answer is a new layer of bureaucrats (it’s always a new layer of bureaucrats):
It says the military will not be able to maintain effectiveness unless the directive is followed. It orders the establishment of a new layer of bureaucracy — a wide array of “climate change boards, councils and working groups” to infuse climate change into “programs, plans and policies.
Perhaps bureaucrats make a better layer of insulation.
Though not all military types were enthused:
Dakota Wood, a retired Marine Corps officer and U.S. […]
What is Force x? The Sun could influence Earths climate through magnetic fields, solar particle flows, or spectral changes. | Image: ESA
What’s going on with the Sun?
In the last post in the climate research series we described David’s major finding that changes in total sunlight lead Earth’s temperature by one sunspot cycle. But what’s going on with the Sun — what is the mechanism? In this post David lays out four puzzling clues about solar influence on our global temperature, then puts forward a hypothesis. What force (or forces) are required to resolve all these odd points?
To recap: Both his Fourier analysis and many independent papers suggest there is a delay between total solar irradiation (TSI) and global temperature. David reasoned that the delay is a true delay, not just a smoothing effect while increased heat propagates around the planet. Because the timing is so tied to solar cycles, the trigger for the delay must start on the Sun, not on the Earth. This is not just a case of our oceans slowly absorbing the extra energy from the Sun — and there simply isn’t enough, in any case. Something quite different […]
Wishing a Happy Easter to everyone.
Jo
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We can always rely on Peter Hannam of the Sydney Morning Herald to accidentally advertise the unscientific stars of the Climate Church.
“Spike in global temperature fuels climate change fears”
It used to be that science was symmetrical — the laws of physics worked every day. You know, thou shalt not create nor destroy energy, it’s one of those unarguable things. But UNSW has a new “special” kind of science where the global temperature can pause for years and billions of quadrillions of joules of energy can disappear and who cares? In politically correct science this is noise. But one hot month, caused by an El Nino and strap yourself in, glue on the Armageddon-helmet. Panic-now, Panic-later, Fear and Hellfire. The Mystical Sign has cometh!
Prof Rahmstorf seems a bit confused about what’s “noise” and what’s “signal”:
“It’s important to take this hot spike as a reminder that this is a really urgent problem” said Professor Rahmstorf, who until last week was also a visiting professorial fellow at the University of NSW. “We are running out of time to avoid a 2-degree world.”
Try and imagine him saying […]
Welcome to the cult of climate control where it’s responsible to spend $10 billion of Taxpayer dollars to change the weather with windfarms and such, but it’s irresponsible to spend $3.3 million to check if that harms anyone.
I hear that in houses kilometers away from a wind tower, the water in a glass can ripple, along with the water in the toilet bowl. Obviously since humans have no water molecules it couldn’t possibly …
Is it news that this research will finally be done? Not according to the ABC where the headline is about how much money is being wasted.
Millions in funding for research into wind farm illness criticized
IMOGEN BRENNAN: Sheep farmer Donald Thomas has lived near Waubra in Victoria for more than 50 years.
Since wind turbines were erected nearby about seven years ago, he says he and his family have had headaches, pressure in their ears and many sleepless nights.
DONALD THOMAS: It’s extremely frustrating. But the thing is, what the point they’re missing is the fact that yes, it is affecting us and it’s extremely unpleasant and so many of my neighbours have actually had to leave. It’s […]
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