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Apparently, on May 31, Australia’s targets for emissions cuts tripled overnight.Who knew? Answer: Christine Milne and Julia Gillard.
Australia was aiming for a 5% cut by 2020, but it’s now become a cut of 18% by 2020. The Clean Energy Act of 2011 set that savage goal as a default target that popped into existence if the current government had not jumped through some arbitrary hoop — in this case by setting an emissions cap.
Most likely this is a non-event — presumably the current government can wipe out the carbon legislation after July 1, which depends on Clive Palmer, a coal magnate. (UPDATE: Last night Palmer said he’ll repeal the carbon tax). But even so, I wonder if there is a sting in the cost? Are there contracts that are tied to the target, so that compensation for removing it automatically tripled as well?
And if the tripling of the target is meaningless, why would anyone advertise their deception in sneaking it in?
Could it be Milne and Gillard see themselves as Gods come to save us (damn those stupid voters!). Milne seems positively pleased she was able to trick Australians. The voters may have voted to remove the […]
UPDATED, Ken has now finished the full tally of comparisons and the adjustments to minima increase trends by 47% . (Headline changed from 60% to 50% to reflect the shift.) See the new details of the last few stations at KensKingdom.
Billions of dollars, climate models, predictions, and hundreds of press releases depend on the BOM records of Australian temperatures. There were so many inconsistencies, inexplicable adjustments and errors that we put in a Senate request for the ANAO to audit the records. In response, to dodge the audit, the BOM dumped its HQ (“high quality”) dataset entirely, and established a new “best practise” ACORN dataset.
Independent volunteer auditors have been going through the ACORN records — thanks especially to Ken Stewart who is publishing his findings on his site as he works through the set. He’s analyzed 84 out of 104 sites, and finds that ACORN is just as bad as the HQ set. At Kenskingdom he shows that so far, the adjustments used to create the official Australian temperature record increase the warming trend by13% for maxima and a whopping 66% for minima. (Note the caveats in the conclusions below.)
The raw Australian data suggest the […]
The Australian PM wants Britain to join an anti-carbon pricing alliance with Canada, NZ and India
Tony Abbott, Australian PM, has been shaking hands with Stephen Harper, Canadian PM, saying “it’s like a family”. They are both skeptical of schemes that aim to change the weather through fake markets which don’t do much to reduce emissions, but do enrich financial houses, lawyers and bureaucrats. Harper has applauded Abbott before, now Abbott is returning the favor.
The message is aimed at David Cameron, British PM, who has been quite the friend of the greens — leaving a legacy of “collectivist, bat killing, bird chomping, property-rights-destroying wind farms”, as James Delingpole would say. But Cameron got savaged by the UKIP skeptics in the recent elections. Signing up with Obama won’t solve that headache.
Obama, meanwhile, is trying to swing momentum back to costly climate action with his aim to bypass congress and use an executive order to enforce a 30% cut in US emissions by 2030. He’s on his own. Even the Chinese are watering down expectations (see below). New Zealand abandoned Kyoto II and tied themselves to the lowest value carbon credits there are.
Sydney Morning Herald has the video
All […]
Who would have thought? Antarctic volcanoes are hot after all. Having a volcano under an icesheet makes a difference, and some of the sea level rise blamed on CO2 is more likely to be because 1,000 °C lava is not far from sub-zero ice. Right now, according to scientist Dustin Schroeder and co, it is as if the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctic is sitting on a “stovetop burner”.[1]
Only last week I wondered if West Antarctic volcanoes had something to do with the Antarctic warming and pointed out this strange coincidence below where almost all the warming seems to occur over the volcanic area which is part of the hot “Pacific rim of fire”. I also wondered why some parts of the media don’t seem to mention the volcanoes. Wait and see if this story gets picked up. So far, Fox, and Business Insider have it.
“Using radar data from satellites in orbit, the researchers were able to figure out where these subglacial streams were too full to be explained by flow from upstream. The swollen streams revealed spots of unusually high melt, Schroeder said. Next, the researchers checked out the subglacial geology in the region and found that […]
Most of the results reported in peer reviewed literature in medicine are mere artefacts of poor methodology, despite being done to more exacting standards than climate studies. There are calls in the medical literature for all data to be made public and for higher P values to be required. (Yes please say skeptics everywhere). Miller and Young recommend that observational studies don’t be taken at all seriously until they are replicated at least once. That would have ruled out the original HockeyStick two times over.
Even the absolute best medical papers are wrong 20% of the time, but mere observational studies (like climate research) failed 80 – 100% of the time. These studies of papers demonstrate why anyone who waves the “Peer Review” red flag is in denial of the evidence — “Peer Review” is not part of the scientific method. It’s a form of argument from authority. A fallacy of reasoning is still a fallacy, no matter how many times it is repeated. Those who claim it is essential or rigorous are not scientists, no matter what their government-given title says.
GEN, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, May 1, 2014, Point of View
Are Medical Articles True on […]
Whatever you do, don’t let those skeptics speak:
Cartoonist accidentally captures intellectual depth of greens
Adrian Raeside ,Victoria Times Colonist on June 4, 2014
Paul McRae was not impressed. Me, meh. It’s another dying publication which just alienated the half sane readers who haven’t already left. Bravo, eh. They whittle away at their base til they will only have teenage low-self-esteem green fans and a few old hippie die-hards left. Not a good business model.
A Letter in the Times Colonist June 5 re: Adrian Raeside cartoon, June 4.
“Does anybody find it ironic that Adrian Raeside’s cartoon gleefully depicting the death of a “climate-change denier” appears on the same page as Naomi Lakritz’s column on the murder of Dr. Mehdi Ali Qamar, motivated by the fact that he was an Ahmadi Muslim, a sect not recognized by the rest of Islam.
Can there be any doubt that climate activism has become the new religion…
Terry Sturgeon
@hockeyschtick
9 out of 10 based on 64 ratings
There’s a fascinating study out this week suggesting that if we fast for three or four days a couple of times a year we can regenerate white blood stem cells. Fasting cuts down the number of white blood cells during the fast, but afterwards they recover, and then some.
This new result comes from both mice and phase I clinical human trials. Probably in paleolithic times, famine or at least hungry days were a part of nearly everyone’s life. Many different philosophies and religions have fasting traditions. Apparently our genes are selected to deal with that, and being short of food makes the immune system do a kind of efficiency sweep. Perhaps access to unnaturally continuous food stops our stem cells from reactivating? Something to think about from Killjoy Jo. 😉 Yes, fasting is not exactly fun, but nor is cancer. For what it’s worth, the hard part of a fast is usually the start.
Obviously, consult your doc, do your own research, etc.
The NZ Herald
Fasting for three days can regenerate the entire immune system, even in the elderly, scientists have found in a breakthrough described as remarkable.
University of Southern California
Fasting triggers stem cell […]
For odd thoughts
6.9 out of 10 based on 11 ratings
The new Lowy Poll has got some commentators arguing that climate fear is rising in Australia. What the survey actually shows is that 55% of Australian don’t want to spend money fighting climate change. The Lowy poll asked loaded questions, didn’t ask people to rank their concerns, and showed nearly everyone was critically worried about nearly everything. Was there a point?
Predictably, one small uptick is portrayed to pretend the climate religion is gaining momentum again.
The SMH leaps to say the climate of dread is heating up (they wish):
“In a striking shift in public opinion, 45% of Australians now see global warming as a ‘serious and pressing problem’, up 5 points since 2013 and 9 points since 2012. 63% of Australians say the government ‘should take a leadership role on reducing emissions’, while only 28% say ‘it should wait for an international consensus before acting’.” — Peter Hannam, Sydney Morning Herald.
How important is a 5 point shift? The survey was of 1,000 adults in Feb 2014. The margin of error is 3.1%.
Peter Hannam doesn’t mention that the level of concern is 22 points down on the high that was recorded in 2006 when 68% of […]
Did you know you can change the weather by not eating deep sea fish? Me neither. But apparently fish and other marine life in the high seas contain $148 billion dollars worth of carbon dioxide. (The carbon price used, which includes mitigation costs, is apparently almost $100/tonne — a tad higher than the current EU carbon price of 5 Euro. The “price” was derived from a US govt agency, wouldn’t you know, not the free market.)
The high seas catch is worth a mere $16 billion and is only 1% of all fish caught. But it follows that either hungry people will have to pay a bit more for their fish, or fishermen will switch to take more fish from the low seas. Either that, or hungry people can just eat more rice, right? And it’s not like anyone cares about the protein content of poor people’s diets is it? (Look who made a hyperbolic fuss about a potential 5% reduction in the mineral content of rice by 2050.)
Lets think for a minute about how anyone would make a global oceanic ban work? Since people only catch deep sea fish for fun, I suppose we just ask them to […]
John Cook’s 97% consensus paper was never going to tell us anything about climate science, so it does seem somewhat pointless to analyze the entrails. It was always a marketing ploy. If it had been done well it might have been useful as a proxy for government funding in science. But it wasn’t, so all we’re left with is some insight about the state of academic competence.
Finding a consensus should have been easy. After all, billions of dollars of funding has gone to find some evidence (any evidence) that CO2 causes a crisis, and entire research departments have been set up to produce papers to discuss that. And if they didn’t find evidence (they didn’t), they could still write papers discussing the bias of instruments, the error bars, the adjustments, and so on and so forth. What are the chances that hordes of scientists would not find anything to publish? We also know that while believers were being employed left, far-left, and center, quite a few skeptics were sacked. Sometimes skeptical papers got delayed by up to two years, while there was usually a rapid-print option for believers. Once, a whole journal was even shut down for publishing skeptical […]
How many people will die in order to reduce world temperatures by possibly, maybe, something a lot less than 0.05 F? Commiserations to the people of the USA.
Obama said almost nothing about climate change in the 2012 election campaign. Ain’t that the way? He can’t persuade the people to take the medicine they don’t need. Congress won’t pass it, so he’s going around the voters entirely and doing it through EPA regulations.
Rothbard and Rucker look at the toll of Obama’s EPA plan to slash CO2 emissions by a pointless 30%:
224,000 more lost jobs every year (U.S. Chamber of Commerce figures). Cost to every American household $3,400 per year (U.S. Chamber of Commerce figures).
What’s the point of electing a congress if the President rules by executive order ?
“Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., went so far as to describe it as an unconstitutional power grab.”
— Jo
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EPA’s next wave of job-killing CO2 regulations
Unleashing EPA bureaucrats on American livelihoods, living standards and liberties
David Rothbard and Craig Rucker [CFACT]
Supported by nothing but assumptions, faulty computer models and outright falsifications of what is […]
So much for the consensus. In 2012 The Geological Society of Australia (GSA) was one of the few associations to make a slightly skeptical position on climate. For poking their heads above the parapet they’ve had years of headache and debate, and finally have issued a statement saying they have given up entirely on putting out any statement. The debate is so furious and divisive that no position could be agreed on. (I wonder exactly how many of their members are fans of climate models? Was this the work of just a few zealous believers?) I think I’ve hardly ever met a geologist who wasn’t somewhat skeptical.
The back story is that, like most science associations, in 2009 the GSA chanted the litany. (Their 2009 statement is here). They wrote that governments should take strong action to reduce CO2 and that meant paying geologists more to do research and sit on plum advisory committees. How predictable…
1. That strong action be taken at all levels, including government, industry, and individuals to substantially reduce the current levels of greenhouse gas emissions and to mitigate the likely social and environmental effects of increasing atmospheric CO2.
2. That Earth Scientists with appropriate expertise […]
Australia is one of the most stable land masses on the planet, and has more gauges than anywhere else in the southern hemisphere, so it’s very useful for sea-level measurements. It also had a couple of rare continuous long records “… the two longest sea-level records in the southern hemisphere, Sydney Fort Denison from 1886 and Fremantle from 1897″ .
A new paper by White et al, concludes that Australian sea level rises are similar to global measurements (so not a bad proxy for the world), and that during times when CO2 levels were much lower — like before World War II, sea levels were rising at the same speed (or possibly faster) than they are today.
A generalized additive model of Australia’s two longest records (Fremantle and Sydney) reveals the presence of both linear and non-linear long-term sea-level trends, with both records showing larger rates of rise between 1920 and 1950, relatively stable mean sea levels between 1960 and 1990 and an increased rate of rise from the early 1990s.
Does a “larger rate of rise” mean larger than today, or larger than average — I think, given the error margins, that we could only be sure it […]
Bad news for the environment. Obama has a plan.
Obama’s power plant rule leaked: EPA seeks 30 percent reduction in emissions
The proposal will aim for a 30 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2030, according to the WSJ
The Obama administration is set to announce its draft proposal to cut carbon emissions from existing power plants at 10:30 am ET Monday morning, but the Wall Street Journal claims to have the early scoop on the basics.
The Environmental Protection Agency is seeking a 30 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 from existing power plants based on emission levels from 2005, “two people who have been briefed on the rule” told the WSJ. That’s considerably higher than the 20 percent cut that had been predicted – although, because CO2 emissions have already been on the decline in recent years, not as stringent as it would have been should the administration chosen 2010 or 2012 as a baseline. The EPA refused to comment before tomorrow’s release. [read more]
I’m sure China, Brazil and India are grateful…
Source UNEP
Source: UNEP
American ingenuity may yet win the day despite the pointless ball and chain.
..
Then […]
Litchfield National Park, Northern Territory, Australia | Photo Jo Nova
7.8 out of 10 based on 26 ratings
Something different to discuss – for the medical-revolution cynics among us. Cells from a human triple-negative breast cancer were implanted in mice under their mammary fat pads. Triple negative breast cancer is a nastier form of breast cancer which is harder to treat because these cells don’t respond to the usual anti-estrogenic drugs.
The mice were then allowed to eat only 70% as many calories as they would normally freely choose to eat. This is a particularly interesting study because it shows that calorie restriction inhibited the expression of certain micro RNAs even from foreign (non mouse) implanted breast cancer cells, and this apparently kept the cancer from spreading. Notably fatalities from cancers don’t usually come from the initial solid tumor but from the metastasized version, so this is potentially very useful.
The mechanism involves strengthening the matrix around the cancer cells. When these cancer cells have metastasized they produce more of these particular micro RNA’s which in turn appear to stop production of proteins that strengthen the extracellular matrix. In other words, the cancer cells probably use the micro RNA’s to degrade the cellular matrix around them in order to spread. The implications of this are both that the […]
Earth from the Moon | NASA
Thanks to the Earth’s gravitational pull, the Moon is slightly egg shaped. The closest part bulges out by 51cm towards the Earth, and here’s the weirdest thing, the bulge moves. The same side of the Moon always faces Earth, but if you stood on the Moon, the Earth would appear to wobble around a particular patch of “moon-sky”. And like a tide of rock, the bulge in the surface, slowly rolls around on the Moon — following the pull from the Earth.
The ball of rock called the Moon is 3,474 km in diameter. I’m guessing the Man-on-the-Moon would not notice the tide much.
Though I imagine it will be a right headache for future Moonville Skyscrapers.
Despite the force required to deform a ball of rock that large, and from such a distance, climate models in their infinite wisdom know that the science is settled and the Moon has no significant effect on Earth.
You might recall that Ian Wilson has other ideas, and suggests lunar cycles set up atmospheric standing waves which may seed ENSO patterns.
And we wonder why those models don’t work?
8.4 out of 10 based on 59 […]
We’re all doomed:
West Antarctic ice sheet collapse ‘unstoppable’ [ABC]
Irreversible Changes Now Affect Antarctica and the World [Live-science]
‘Nothing can stop retreat’ of West Antarctic glaciers [BBC, By Jonathan Amos]
West Antarctic ice collapse ‘could drown Middle East and Asia crops’ [The Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg]
Antarctica’s ice collapse threatens metres of sea level rise within decades [The Ecologist]
Global warming: it’s a point of no return in West Antarctica. [The Guardian Eric Rignot]
“Last week saw a ‘holy shit’ moment in climate change science. A landmark report revealed that the collapse of a large part of Antarctica is now unstoppable”
What else is going on in West Antarctica? Oh. Look where those volcanoes are…
Guess which science correspondent mentioned the word “volcano”? None of the above. Did any of those responsible publicly funded climate scientists mentioned it in their press releases? (A gold star to anyone who can find one). Lucky Antarctic volcanoes are not hot.
Thanks especially to Janama, Jaypac, John, Sophocles and Tom. That is what comments are for!
Locations of volcanoes in Antarctica known to have been active since […]
What’s the point of language — especially in science? If you are naive, you might think it’s to communicate a fixed concept so everyone understands and can voice an opinion on the same thing. You would be wrong. The real purpose of scientific terms is to motivate the punters to behave differently (especially if that means “give us more money”). That’s why the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication has assigned 5 PhD’s and a guy called Feinberg to spend days, weeks and months analyzing surveys to find out which propaganda term is more “effective”. The simple answer is “global warming” ekes out more fear and pain among democrats than “climate change”; therefore expect to see its use rocket.
The Guardian
The survey sample of 1,657 people, compiled over a two-week period late last year, found a large swathe of Americans turned off by the words “climate change”.
“The use of the term climate change appears to actually reduce issue engagement by Democrats, Independents, liberals, and moderates, as well as a variety of subgroups within American society, including men, women, minorities, different generations, and across political and partisan lines,” the researchers said.
Americans in general were 13% more likely to […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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