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The EU has led the way to convert to “clean energy”. But the subsidies ran out. Investment in Europe in renewables is plummeting:
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Thanks to Bloomberg, Euan Mearns and h/t to GWPF for that graph.
Europe’s once world-beating clean technology industry has fallen into a rapid decline, with investment in low-carbon energy last year plummeting to its lowest level in a decade.
Michael Liebreich, chairman of the BNEF board, said the global financial crisis and its aftermath were to blame only in part. “Europe’s failure to respond [to the crisis was a factor and] global investors, scared about the survival of the euro, had plenty of reason to hesitate about putting money into euro-dominated clean energy projects,” he said.
What bad luck – it’s nearly, almost, really competitive. Any day now:
Liebreich … “The tragedy is that Europe lost its renewable energy mojo just as costs were plummeting to the point where green power is fully competitive without subsidies in more and more parts of the world.”
Shame investors are too stupid to see how renewables are going to make lots of money. Only governments have that kind of vision, […]
Letter to The Mercury published 18/3/15
Keeping quiet about the uncertainty of climate prediction has at last come back to bite the climate research community on its collective bottom. The obvious question has finally been asked in public – namely, if the science behind disastrous climate change is so settled, why continue to spend money on it? It is not surprising that CSIRO is now cutting the number of its staff involved in climate research.
May I suggest to the remaining staff that they might profitably spend their time attempting to disprove the theory of disastrous global warming rather than simply finding data to support it? There is more than enough uncertainty about climate change to give them a very good chance of upsetting what must be one of the world’s greatest scientific applecarts. Since the upsetting of applecarts is what scientists are paid to do, it shouldn’t be long before they are once again showered with money and roses. Just think of it – massive reward simply by returning to a research philosophy fundamental to scientific progress. It is known as scepticism.
Garth Paltridge
Sandy Bay, Tasmania
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Garth Paltridge is a former CSIRO Chief […]
Commenter Kratoklastes finds this pointed parody of modern peer review.
Kratoklastes:
There is an excellent chapter (Chapter 9) in an excellent book (How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg) that gives a very good description of inherent biases in research – taking John Ioannides’ 2005 paper (“Why Most Published Research Is Wrong”).
The chapter starts with a parable, which is clever and funny…
Imagine yourself a haruspex; that is, your profession is to make predictions about future events by sacrificing sheep and then examining the features of their entrails, especially their livers. You do not, of course, consider your predictions to be reliable merely because you follow the practices commanded by the Etruscan deities. That would be ridiculous. You require evidence. And so you and your colleagues submit all your work to the peer-reviewed International Journal of Haruspicy, which demands without exception that all published results clear the bar of statistical signficance.
Haruspicy, especially rigorous evidence-based haruspicy, is not an easy gig. For one thing, you spend a lot of your time spattered with blood and bile. For another, a lot of your experiments don’t work. You try to use sheep guts to […]
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7.8 out of 10 based on 29 ratings
The story of three kinds of curiosity — two genuine, one “induced”
Several wise men foresaw the decline of organized science. Here, a man called Gordon Tulloch was inspired by Popper to look at the social organisation of scientists to try to figure out what made it work. He noticed there were three kinds of researchers, one driven by curiosity for the truth, another on a mission to solve a problem, and a third with an “induced” curiosity created by demand from elsewhere — boss or government. He predicted that the system would fail if those who were induced outnumbered the truly curious, as the “induced” curiosity was not well connected to reality, whereas the other two types were. The primary aim of the induced researcher was not to solve a problem or uncover an answer but just to keep their jobs, and there were many ways to “keep their jobs” that did not involve actual discovery. Indeed for some jobs, thinks Jo, actual discovery could be a catastrophic event.
He foresaw a degenerative spiral which appears to have come to pass. Once induced researchers are managed by people without enough skill to read and assess […]
Venezuela Shuts down
In a land where energy makes up 25% of their GDP and most of their exports — it takes some management to run out of electricity. Apparently the land of oil needs some fossil fuel generation.
Venezuela to Shut Down for a Week to Cope With Electricity Crisis
The government has rationed electricity and water supplies across the country for months and urged citizens to avoid waste as Venezuela endures a prolonged drought that has slashed output at hydroelectric dams.
The socialist solution? Blame the weather:
The ruling socialists have blamed the shortage on the El Nino weather phenomena and “sabotage” by their political foes, while critics cite a lack of maintenance and poor planning.
And hope for help from heaven:
“We’re hoping, God willing, rains will come,” Maduro said in a national address Saturday. “Look, the saving is more than 40 percent when these measures are taken. We’re reaching a difficult place that we’re trying to manage.”
Looks like Venezuela will be doing its bit for the Paris agreement then.
h/t Willie
The Green state — Tasmania — has an electricity crisis and is now running on dirty diesel
Due […]
Indo-pacific-warm-pool (IPWP) | NotricksZone
A very striking pattern of records is happening at the moment. Data is going “off the chart” on several factors at once. As well as record high temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere in Feb 2016, the water is far cooler than usual in the Indo Pacific, while there is increased water vapor and cloud all over the world’s oceans. But windspeeds are slow, slow, slow. It has the hallmarks of a very Big El Nino. Bigger by many measures than 1997-98.
The cooler Indo-Pacific
P Gosselin at NotricksZone has got some very interesting graphs about the ocean around the vast Western Pacific. Frank Bosse and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt noticed that ARGO buoys are recording a very unusual cooling in the Indo-Pacific Western Pacific.
Is something fishy and odd going on there? Hard to say, but while the globe set a record last month, it is interesting to know that over the last couple of years temperatures have declined in the Western Pacific by a whole degree. The Indo-Pacific Warm Pool (IPWP) covers 20N to 20S across a full quarter of the circumference of the Earth. According to Bosse and Vahrenholt it’s around “16 million cubic […]
Who needs a trend when you can have a hot month?
The news is all over the media — Feb 2016 was a record hottest ever month — and the Global Worriers are saying “Meltdown“, “Planetary Crisis” and “Terrifying Milestone.”
But the Pause is still there. No matter what happens now, the world didn’t warm for 18 years, and that shows the models can’t predict a thing. (Unless they take solar factors into account, which they don’t).
One big El Nino didn’t fix the climate models now. (They can’t predict El Nino’s either).
Nothing that happens after 2015 can change the amount of energy that went missing during the Pause that no mainstream modeler predicted. Remember these models are supposed to be coupled ocean and atmosphere models, but none of them understand what causes shifts in the PDO, or many other natural cycles and currents of the ocean. So with every natural spike up, modelers unscientifically leap in glee, and with the other 99% of the data, they blame internal variability. But a real scientist is scientific every month. Trends, guys, trends. That’s what this debate was supposed to be about. Not spikes. Not noise.
During the last whopper El […]
The headlines are out, telling us the unnerving news that the climate has changed, “zones are on the march”. How ominous.
Too-tricky graphs show how different everything is in the last 16 years “compared to the 99 before that”. But since our weather comes in cycles of 30, 60 or 200 years, as well as longer ones, almost any 16 year period is likely to be not the average of the century beforehand. Thus this technique can be applied to any noisy cyclical dataset as a Handy Headline Generator.
It’s a tad shameless to present it as if it means something given our short knowledge of the Australian climate and the hyper variability within. You’d think our last century had a constant climate, then there was a “shift”. Spot the hockeystick?
AEGIC — New Australian Climate Developing
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Is someone graphing noise?
In thousands of kilometers across the pink “summer dominant” areas of central Australia, it might rain more in summer, but it mostly doesn’t rain at all and when it does rain properly, it’s once in a decade. See Alice Springs in January. How’s that for noise? Did a remnant cyclone rain on Alice this year?
How […]
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8.6 out of 10 based on 25 ratings
<img height=”1″ width=”1″ alt=”” style=”display:none” src=”https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=1626507807583041&ev=PixelInitialized” />
You are not allowed to discuss climate science, nor have another opinion. Our airconditioners are heating the world, our cars make snow, and heaters cause droughts. If you question these Factoids, you may go to jail. Even if the investigation or “case” never gets any further, the message is lit in fire. It’s practically a crime to doubt man-made global warming. From MichaelSmithNews and Daily Mail:
Attorney General Loretta Lynch has considered taking legal action against climate change deniers.
The United States’ top lawyer told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the Justice Department has ‘discussed’ the possibility of a civil lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry.
She said any information her office has received has been sent to the FBI in a bid to build a case.
Daily mail has the footage. Steel yourself for the usual fantasy about the fossil fuel apparatus and reasoning-by-tobacco-slur. The people inventing mythical theories of conspiracies are right at the top… Charles Krauthammer estimates that if skeptics are prosecuted, ”It would be an impeachable action.” He also has a great turn of phrase about the use of the namecalling […]
It’s just another way the bureaucracy is throttling science. In grant applications the government asks scientists to tell us what impact the discoveries they haven’t made yet will have on the world. The scientists dutifully make something up, knowing the whole process is unscientific, but what does it matter? A little lie here, a little lie there and pretty soon we’re rewarding corruption.
Does Government-science punish the honest? Everyone behaves as if it does:
Another professor in Australia said: “It’s really virtually impossible to write an (Australian Research Council) ARC grant now without lying.”
Times Higher Education
Academics ‘regularly lie to get research grants’
Scholars in the UK and Australia contemptuous of impact statements and often exaggerate them, study suggests
A new study anonymously interviewed 50 senior academics from two research-intensive universities – one in the UK and one in Australia – who had experience writing “pathways to impact” (PIS) statements, as they are called in the UK, and in some cases had also reviewed such statements.
It was normal to sensationalise and embellish impact claims, the study published in Studies in Higher Education found.
We reward those who exaggerate, then […]
How convenient?! A new study shows that human influence on the climate started just before the major (and unerasable) heatwaves of the late 1930s, thus wrapping those awkward years under the banner of Man Made Climate. This study provides the handy peer reviewed link-bomb “answer” to that.
The inexplicable heat of the 1930s and 40s has been a constant source of pain for Global Worriers. Skeptics can point out that the decadal rate of warming was pretty much the same back then, even though CO2 was at the ideal, clima-perfecto level, of 310ppm. How could it be that massive 400ppm of CO2 was barely able to break the heat records set when CO2 was almost 25% lower?
Well, finally, mystery solved. A new Australian study compares models that don’t-explain-the-climate with CO2, to ones that-don’t-explain-the-climate without CO2. These models assume CO2 causes warming, so when they take out the CO2 factor that was added in to produce “the climate”, the models prove, ipso gloriousi, that CO2 causes warming. Indeed their method is so good, it can’t fail. As Anthony Watts says “it seems clear to me that the conclusion existed before the paper was written.” Quite.
Say hello to Climate Numerology […]
As with the US, Australian conservatives are fed up with the pandering to the pompous climate scare. Our PM might “believe” but many conservatives and libertarians don’t. There is growing unrest.
Here is the NSW state branch calling for real debate — trying to rein in Turnbull:
NSW Liberals call for national debates on climate change science
Fairfax Media understands the motion passed with support of more than 70 per cent of delegates at the state council meeting held on the Central Coast last weekend.
A motion passed at the party’s state council calls on the government to “arrange and hold public debates/discussions” between scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and “independent climate scientists”.
The motion says the events should cover “the global warming/climate change debate”; “the claims by the IPCC”; and the statement “is all the science settled”.
The motions – which were debated after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had left the room following his speech – reveal the level of climate change scepticism among the Liberal base in NSW.
Sources say Mr Turnbull – known to strongly support action on climate change – was heckled by […]
It’s panic stations over at Believer Central. They are losing their grip on the media. And 2015 was a bumper year for Climate Scares – the hottest ever year, the giant Paris Junket, The El Nino, The Pope! (The Pope?) Despite all that, the media spent less time on the climate. It doesn’t get any better than 2015 for the Global Worriers — there is no higher level of panic. But the free propaganda machine is slowing…
Lookout, climate denial is on the rise (don’t ask about the error bars):
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Dana Nuccitelli, The Guardian
During the most important year for climate news, TV coverage fell
A report by Media Matters for America reveals that the media are failing to inform the American public on the most important issue of our time.
Media Matters for America has published a report detailing US broadcast news coverage of climate change in 2015, and their findings are stunning.
Stunning eh? Or not.
Dana might be knocked over, but I see ABC down 20, Fox up 20, and some “other stuff”. It’s not really much of a trend. The thing that really bugs Dana seems to […]
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8.4 out of 10 based on 29 ratings
UPDATE: For those who can’t see the ABC footage we have a copy at dropbox, thanks to Panda.
UPDATE #2: This episode has now been pulled from the ABC website 13 days early. The ABC, with its billion dollar budget, has a website to show all its programs for 14 days after they run. But for no stated reason this one has been deleted after just one day. Did the ABC not like us discussing it? (H/t to Panda). Thank goodness we have a copy. [Screencap of current ABC page here.]
h/t to Peter Q. Thanks to Andrew M as well.
Dennis Jensen has a lot to say on matters of national importance, but the ABC doesn’t ask him very often about those.
Tonight Dr Dennis Jensen was just the “Climate denier” target who had stepped over the line on another topic — breaking a sacred taboo. He might lose pre-selection. He might be out of a job. The ABC seem to think we care about the party political machinations more than the suffering of Australian citizens, which Jensen had been trying to get us to discuss. Instead the ABC went into great details of […]
“Half a million deaths by 2050!”
The Lancet study in a nutshell: Take climate models that don’t work, and guesstimate what might happen to agriculture because of the climate we probably won’t get. Then use those guesses of food production in 2050 to fantasize what that means for human mortality. After all, we don’t know how many people are killed today by “4% less fruit and vege and 0.7% less meat”, but we can estimate what that dietary change will do in 2050 after a medical revolution, 35 years of plant breeding and agricultural changes. Not to mention a few more rounds of global food fads and phases of Vegan, Paleo, Atkins, and 5:2 Fasting. (But how did they factor in the mortality effect from another 2,000 episodes of MasterChef?)
Seriously, CO2 has increased crop yields, and will continue to do so until we hit 1000ppm (or maybe 2000). Around the planet, plants grow in warm places, and shrivel up and die in cold ones. So do people. Cold kills 20 times as many people as heat does. It must take a lot of modeling to calculate “more deaths” from two good outcomes.
Look at where fruit grows. […]
The media hype and the story of the false Penguin Panic
Image: UNSW/Chris Turney
Much fuss was made of 150,000 missing penguins in Antarctica as if climate change had killed them. A monster iceberg had washed in, stopping the cute swimming tuxedos from getting to dinner and the colony of 160,000 suddenly shrank to 10,000. Where did all those penguins go? In previous tough times, when they could be tracked they just split up and went to different colonies.
Given that the penguins have survived repeated ice ages and warming for millions of years who would have thought that they would have a strategy for dealing with the odd big iceberg?
The penguin catastrophe:
[Grist] Researchers found that a colony of Adélie penguins in Antartica’s Cape Denison has decreased from 160,000 to just 10,000 since 2011, when a huge iceberg ominously named B09B became grounded in nearby Commonwealth Bay. The penguins were once a short waddle from their food source, but the arrival of the iceberg — which is nearly the size of Rhode Island — has turned that jaunt into a 75-mile round trip. Talk about a long lunch.
Cry for those penguins:
“It’s […]
Why are we still wasting money trying to change the weather?
We’ve cracked the code to program biology and there are so many better things we can do. We can read the four letter alphabet, and now we’re in the early days of unpacking the operating systems. One team (below) has just reprogrammed skin cells to hunt down one particular type of brain cancer and found a way to get the cells to stick around long enough to deliver killer drug doses to the cancer cells. It’s at proof of concept stage — we can extend the life of mice with this cancer by about 200%, but we haven’t tried this in people. This may be years off, or not. Cancer is an information problem.
In one form or another this concept will change the world. Sooner or later we will figure out how to reprogram cells to seek out and destroy every last difficult-to-get cancer cell. No more mass collateral damage that kills healthy cells too. Then we’ll teach the immune system to stay alert and keep picking off any recidivists. No more recurrences.
This is just the beginning of customized, individualized medicine. Early days.
Groundbreaking discovery made […]
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