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Turning up the screws
 Ban cars to get better weather! A UK committee of academics and one of MP’s say cars are not compatible with life as we know it:
Ditch cars to meet climate change targets, say MPs
Roger Harrabin, BBC
The Science and Technology Select Committee says technology alone cannot solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions from transport.
In its report, the committee said: “In the long-term, widespread personal vehicle ownership does not appear to be compatible with significant decarbonisation.”
It echoes a report from an Oxford-based group of academics who warned that even electric cars produce pollution through their tyres and brakes.
Naturally, after suggesting a preposterously large, transformative impossibility — the report then just says the government should spend more on more of the same: buses, trains, bikes and ride shares. See the segue? What starts as a huge mission to change the world morphs into an excuse to boost pet projects. The ridiculous gambit claims pave the way to make another round of “more, more, more” look reasonable.
Let’s join the dots that they won’t. How many storms exactly will 1,000 extra buses prevent?
Next, how not to do journalism by Roger Harrabin:
The MP’s go on to say that the big problem is that the punters keep buying big polluting cars because “financial incentives to buy cleaner cars are insufficient.” Which is another way of saying people want big cars and if we don’t punish them enough with punitive taxes they won’t settle for something less. Being a paid PR agent for the government, Harrabin knows which way of phrasing things sounds better for the rulers and he chooses that.
This next line says so much — mostly by what it doesn’t say:
Ministers have held down fuel duty increases in recent years following lobbying from motoring groups.
Obviously, if it weren’t for motoring groups the whole nation would be asking for a higher fuel tax. To a BBC journalist, “the people” might as well not exist.
But the MPs say they should ensure that the annual increase in fuel duty is never lower than the average increase in rail or bus fares.
Give Harrabin a point for mentioning there was a conflict of interest:
The MPs backed many of the recommendations of the government’s official advisory body, the Committee on Climate Change.
But they complained that its chair, Lord Deben, should have declared the interest of his consultancy firm in Drax power station, the largest recipient of renewable energy subsidies in the country, and Johnson Matthey, which is about to make a huge investment in electric vehicles.
Give Harrabin no points for describing this comically absurd conflict of interest as merely “a complaint”. Here’s the Logo of Debens committee:
 … The Committee on Climate Change (the CCC) is an independent, statutory body established under the Climate Change Act 2008.
See especially, Strategic policy 3: “Conduct independent analysis into climate change science, economics and policy.”
Thus it’s essentially an industry lobby group. Other industries have to set up their own and don’t get to call themselves “independent”. The big mystery to me is that Lord Deben’s conflicts have been known for years (thanks to David Rose and Christopher Booker), yet Deben’s still in charge?
Could anyone imagine the CCC employing one skeptical scientist?
UPDATE: Official link to the UK Parliament Select Committee statement, thanks to Eric Worrall.
Car image adapted Andriy Makukha.
9.8 out of 10 based on 66 ratings
New rooftop BBQ known as TeslaKebab
 Photo from the legal paper. Also known as a “money printer” according to Elon. Walmart installed Tesla solar panels on 240 stores across the US. There have been 7 incidences of fire which Walmart claim has cost them $8.2m and were caused by negligence on Tesla’s behalf. After a spate of fires in 2018 Walmart de-energized all the panels. Then one more caught fire. Now it not only wants damages paid, it wants Tesla to remove all of the panels.
It’s not that there is something wrong with solar power, just that it’s complex, unnecessary, unaffordable and the companies that install panels can’t afford to train staff or pay guys who know what they are doing:
Elecktrek @FredericLambert
One of them in 2012, one in 2016, another in 2017, and then three of the fires happened in the first half of 2018 and it eventually led Tesla to de-energize all 240 solar power systems at Walmart stores:
“Fearing for the safety of its customers, its employees, and the general public, and wishing to avoid further damages and store closures, Walmart demanded on May 31, 2018 that Tesla “de-energize” (i.e., disconnect) all of the solar panel systems that Tesla had installed at Walmart sites. Tesla complied, conceding that de-energization of all the sites was “prudent” and recognizing that it could provide no assurances that the deficiencies causing its systems to catch fire were confined to particular sites or particular components.”
However, Walmart says that there was one more fire even after Tesla de-energized the systems.
Elecktrek have a full copy of the lawsuit at their site.
Reuters claim Walmart gave Tesla 30 days to fix the situation in July. By August 15th, nothing had happened, except for Musk relaunching his solar business and saying ““It’s like having a money printer on your roof.”
The lawsuit accuses Tesla of having untrained workers putting up shoddy installations and showing “utter incompetence or callousness, or both,” court papers said.
The lawsuit is the latest blow to Tesla’s struggling solar business, which it acquired through its $2.6 billion purchase of SolarCity in 2016. Quarterly installations have plummeted more than 85 percent since the deal, as Tesla has cut its solar panel sales force and ended a distribution deal with Home Depot Inc .
Remember, solar is the future.
Walmart is such a large emitter of greenhouse gases that in 2013 it was emitting almost as much CO2 as Chevron:
Nilima Choudhury
“If Walmart were included in the Greenhouse 100 Polluters Index,” the report said, “a list that is limited to heavy industrial firms, such as oil companies and power plants, the retailer would take the 33rd spot, just a hair behind Chevron, America’s second largest oil company.”
In related news, in 2014 there was this story:
How Walmart Became A Green Energy Giant, Using Other People’s Money
Christopher Helman, Forbes
Last year President Barack Obama stopped by here to give a speech about his energy plan. Standing before shelves filled with discount lightbulbs, Obama held up Wal-Mart as an exemplar of corporate responsibility.
…And it’s great p.r. for a company that has been lambasted for a range of corporate sins, …
[But] … the retailer has off-loaded the capital investment–and all the risk–onto partners, like SolarCity, that minimize their exposure by taking full advantage of the federal government’s generous subsidies for investing in alternative energy.
Wal-Mart has installed 105 megawatts of solar panels–enough to power about 20,000 houses–on the roofs of 327 stores and distribution centers (about 6% of all their locations). That’s enough to make Wal-Mart the single biggest commercial solar generator in the country. And it intends to double its number of arrays by 2020.
Walmart’s goal is now 50% renewable energy by 2025.
Solar panels are expensive PR.
h/t Andrew V, Pat.
9.9 out of 10 based on 75 ratings
Add another billion to the cost of the Renewable Energy Target?
 In the last few days Bluescope Steel (formerly BHP) has confirmed it will spend US$700m (AU$1b) to expand it’s North Star steel mill in Ohio. So there are multiple headlines. But back in February CEO Mark Vassella explained exactly why they were thinking of it, and his first reason was “energy prices”. Last week, high energy prices were even “a tragedy” for Australian manufacturing. This week however, he’s clarified his position by muddying it up. Now there other reasons and the solution is to fix our gas prices. He’s backpedaling and tossing quotes that happen to help the renewables industry.
Perhaps he’s been heavied by his PR and strategy team? Now he’s saying that energy costs matter, but labor costs do too and “we weren’t ever going to put another steel mill in Australia”. He’s even saying energy costs “did not play a role” — the complete opposite. These will become the quotes the renewable energy fans rely on. Apparently, now what he really wants is cheaper gas — which requires a socialist government-driven solution to fix gas prices, and it’s safe for anyone to mention anything that requires bigger government. It’s not so safe for him to say “get the government out of our electricity market”, “axe the RET”, or “Australia has too much red tape, and too many regulations.” And he doesn’t say that.
Nor does he point out that if we burned more coal, we wouldn’t need to use much expensive gas to make electricity, we’d have cheaper electricity and we could sell more profit-making gas overseas. (But Jo does and you can quote me.)
Which world does Australia get richer in: Burn more coal or fix gas prices?
h/t to Eric Worrall at WUWT, RicDre, and Lance
Feb 25 2019, Simon Evans, Australian Financial Review
The chief executive of Australia’s largest steelmaker, BlueScope, says much cheaper energy in the United States is a major driver of the company’s preparedness to invest in a $1 billion expansion of its star performer, the North Star steel mill in Ohio.
North America was providing far more growth opportunities than Australia, Mr Vassella said.
He said energy prices in the US were only a third of those in Australia and New Zealand, and that was a big plus, along with North Star’s proximity to customers and the strong market for steel products, which has benefited from trade sanctions that favour US steelmakers in supplying automotive companies and building products.
“It’s part of the package of a competitive business model,” he said. “We’re still paying too much for energy in Australia.”
Last week the CEO was still saying that energy prices were a tragedy”
Aug 16 2019, Simon Evans, Australian Financial Review
BlueScope chief executive Mr Vassella said the $1 billion expansion of the North Star mill, to be fully up and running by 2023, was the largest capital investment the steelmaker would likely ever make…
Mr Vassella lamented the state of Australian manufacturing as the sector battled high energy prices and said one of the main drivers of the North Star expansion, which will increase capacity by 40 per cent, was that energy costs in the United States were substantially lower.
“That’s a tragedy quite frankly for Australian manufacturing,” Mr Vassella said.
BlueScope also operates the Port Kembla steelworks in New South Wales, which underwent major cost-cutting and restructuring in 2015. Mr Vassella said he worried a lot about manufacturers in Australia who were BlueScope’s customers and were facing ”demand destruction” because their energy costs were too high.
As Trump would say …”Winning!”
As ScoMo won’t say: “Losing!”
See his latest muddy quotes below where he contradicts himself:
Keep reading →
9.2 out of 10 based on 58 ratings
Guess which state, big business will be headed to next?
Brilliant! Let’s talk about a Quexit of the NEM. Nationals MP, Keith Pitt is suggesting that Queenslanders could cut their power bills if Queensland stands alone and disconnects from the rest of the Australian National Grid. There are concerns from experts within the energy sector that this could result in blackouts in other states… (is there an “e” in electricity?).
Keith Pitt says these are Queensland assets paid by the Queensland people, owned by the Queensland people, but we can’t continue to prop up states that make silly decisions. He’s driven by one motivator, and that’s price for consumers.
Check out the AEMO data dashboard. On any given minute Queensland is probably sending electricity to most of the NEM.
simon holmes à court
@simonahac
The Nationals haven’t decided if they will back this at the next state election. Send them a message.
Just asking the question changes the game
In the long run, it would be silly for Queensland to own large assets that could turn a profit but say “no thanks” and just blow off the excess. But if they seriously threatened to leave, suddenly contracts would be up for negotiation. Perhaps more importantly, an excess wouldn’t last for long if big business from NSW and Victoria moved to Qld to use that excess power. It could work out well for a lot of people.
For decades each state managed its own grid just fine. As I say in my speeches, to truly wreck a grid, it needs to be nationalized. Only a big groupthinky grid can be mismanaged by one sole mismanager. Not mentioning any names, Audrey Zibelman.
But let’s not forget, Queenslanders still need to cut off the RET next.
The NEM formed in 1998. For most of the first 15 years of the NEM, prices stayed around $30/MWh.
9.8 out of 10 based on 70 ratings
 Random power generators. Photo JoNova Wind and solar power are the intermittent freeloaders on the electricity grid. They are treated as if they’re generators, adding power to the grid, but instead they provide something the grid doesn’t need — power that can’t be guaranteed.
Random gigawatts has the illusion of looking useful, but it’s the gift of a spare holiday house you don’t know if you can use til the day before. It’s the spare fridge in the garage that overheats in hot weather, the extra turkey for thanksgiving that might not arrive til the day after. The bills, the storage, the clutter, the chaos.
As I keep saying in RenewablesWorld fuel bills go down, but the land-maintenance-staff-insurance-FCAS-storage-and-capital costs all go up.
RenewablesWorld is a place where a lot more people and machines sit around and watch cat videos on youtube.
Here’s a great plan by Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann, The Australian, Business Review
If you wish to sell power into the grid, the NEM or National Energy Market, you will have to guarantee a minimum level of supply and guarantee that minimum level of supply 24/7.
And critically, that minimum level can be no lower than 80 per cent of the maximum amount of energy you will be permitted to sell into the grid.
He gives the example of the 1,000MW wind farm that either has to promise 800MW or more like 200MW. If it’s 800 — which means the team has to buy a gas plant out the back (or a fixed deal with a group that owns one), and if you own that gas plant, you’d just run it, who needs the wind turbines? If it’s 200MW, then you the owner can only profit on sales up to 250MW max.
In the simplest example, you would have to build an (at least) 800MW gas power station next to your wind farm, which you would only use intermittently, on the whim of the weather. Suddenly, wind would not look so cheap; it would be exposed as certainly not being “free”.
Critically, you would not be allowed to sell up to that 1800MW into the grid, using both the gas and the wind turbines when the wind did blow.
And if they did generate 1800MW, the same group would need to blow away the 800MW, or pay for the battery or dam to store it.
Which leads to the obvious question:
Why would I build two so-called power stations, the real gas one and the fake wind one? Why wouldn’t I just build the one, the gas one?
Ur, yes. But in a really rational world you’d just build the one coal-fired station…
But the problem with what McCrann is suggesting is that it only works in that old anachronistic thing called a free market. The RET’s got to go. No renewable energy target to force the transition we don’t need to transit to.
The good thing about McCrann’s idea is that we could finally find out what wind and solar cost.
9.5 out of 10 based on 118 ratings
 Solar Road, Normandy, France | Credit: KumKum Would you like to drive slower, add to noise pollution and waste money? Then solar roads are for you:
Ruqayyah Moynihan and Lidia Montes, Business Insider
- Two years after the world’s first solar road — the Normandy road in France — was set up, it’s turned out to be a colossal failure, according to a report by Le Monde.
- The road has deteriorated to a terrible state, it isn’t producing anywhere near the amount of energy it had previously pledged to, and the traffic it has brought with it is causing noise problems.
The original aim was to produce 790 kWh each day, a quantity that could illuminate a population of between 3,000 and 5,000 inhabitants. But the rate produced stands at only about 50% of the original predicted estimates.
Even rotting leaves and thunderstorms appear to pose a risk in terms of damage to the surface of the road. What’s more, the road is very noisy, which is why the traffic limit had to be lowered to 70 kmh.
Despite costing up to roughly $6.1 million, the solar road became operational in 2016.
The 1km road is in Tourouvre-au-Perch, Normandy, France made by Colas.
Leaves fall on the road, then cars grind the leaves on the beautiful polymer surface. The road isn’t angled towards the sun, gets brutally hot, and both reduce efficiency. If the top polymer layer were thicker and tougher, less solar energy would get through. Planting trees beside the road would cool it, but the shade…
Who likes trees anyhow? Not the Greens.
9.7 out of 10 based on 90 ratings
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9.7 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
Skeptics get banned, rejected, blocked and sacked from the mainstream media yet somehow Nature has a paper on Skeptics getting too much media. Believers don’t have to be an expert to control the news agenda, just a Greenpeace activist, or a teenage girl. Skeptics on the other hand, can be Nobel Prize winners, but the BBC won’t even phone them.
Nature, the former science giant, just launched the tenets of science over the event horizon. This paper is Argument from Authority rolled into false equivalence, and powered with cherry-picked errors in both category and in categorization. Nonsense on a rocket. It’s not what science is, and it’s not what journalism should be either. And Nature is supposed to be both. Judith Curry calls it The latest travesty in ‘consensus enforcement’ and the worst paper she has ever seen in a reputable journal.
 …. Both David Evans and I get a mention on what is effectively Nature‘s blacklist. What an honour! No really — there are 386 great names. Even more of an honour is a mention on Judith Curry’s site “blogs she’s learnt something from”. (By some freak, my name comes right after Freeman Dyson and Ivar Giaver, Nobel Prize winner. Career-high I tell you!) But seriously, Marc Morano tops the Nature blacklist, and no man deserves it more. Congratulations Marc!
Methodoggogy
The contrived “study” compares bloggers, commentators and journalists with largely academic scientists, as if the two groups ought have comparable scientific citations or media mentions. Somehow paid scientists get more science citations and professional media personalities get more media. Who would have guessed? Or rather, who couldn’t?
The ratio of “scientific authority” to “media visibility” is pretty much guaranteed by picking scientists-with-funding and comparing them to the rag tag bunch of sacked scientists and independent opinion makers who make their own media channels in order to even get media.
There’s no pretense at symmetry in the way the two groups were picked: the big citation-free media-kings on the believer side don’t even get a mention. As Curry points out — no Al Gore. There are also no teenage girls getting on boats. No Leonardo de Caprio either. Did David Suzuki make it? Bill Nye? Hard to say. Apparently the supplemental information became detrimental information within 48 hours and has been vanished already.
So having constructed a meaningless study they get meaningless results, which appears to be the aim, because it’s an excuse to write headlines complaining that skeptics get too much media.
The press release is what it’s all about
The key point:
“It’s time to stop giving these people visibility, which can be easily spun into false authority,” Professor Alex Petersen said.
– Uni California Merced
Conveniently, they blur new and old media under the one label. The new “research” shows skeptical scientists are all over the new media, while unskeptical scientists get “the same” amount of mentions on the mainstream media. (Sorry about your coffee). Thus with loaded categories, contrived rules, and no principles, they can finally pretend that “media outlets” are interviewing skeptics out of some outdated sense of duty. Skeptics domination of blogs translates into skeptics get too much “media”.
It plays well for their victimhood status — another excuse for why climate scientists can’t seem to convince the world.
Purge the media
If only they could beat skeptics in public debates they wouldn’t need so many media rules:
The proper counterpoint to a climate scientist would be another legitimate scientist who could show competing data from the same experiments or show where the first climate scientist has made mistakes in his or her work. Having a non-expert oil lobbyist or politician respond to a peer-reviewed study or assessment by saying “climate change doesn’t exist” is not a credible argument or a means of balancing, Petersen said.
Since skeptics are sacked, defunded, and exiled, or even stranded at airports, if debate has to be from only certified approved, and paid gravy-trainers, that will pretty much end all debate, eh? Suits con artists and climate scientists.
Propagate your favourite ad hom conspiracy:
Author LeRoy Westerling lets rip with pure speculation
“It’s well known now that a well-financed propaganda campaign on behalf of conservative fossil fuel interests led mainstream media to frame reporting on climate change science as political reporting rather than science reporting,” he said. “Political reporting focuses its narrative around conflict and looks to highlight competing voices, rather than telling the story of the science.”
This, he said, has led to the false balance between scientists and a handful of climate deniers who have become regular commenters.
I think Nature should own this all the way. By publishing such a dismal paper, they gave all the authors the platform to get media interviews to put forward these baseless claims which he has zero evidence to support. Where was their rigor? Well…
This is their fancy-pants way of saying skeptics win in blogs and social media:
By simultaneously accounting for each individual’s scientific authority, our quantitative analysis contributes to the CC [Climate change] communication literature by revealing the degree to which prominent contrarian voices benefit from the scalability of new media, in particular the large number of second-tier news sources and blogs that do not implement rigorous information quality assessment standards.
…and that blogs are not as rigorous as Nature thinks it is. Except of course, this blog here would never accept a paper as pathetic as this one — except to mock it.
Rigor means 100% complete obedience
The “study” calls Roger Pielke Jnr a “contrarian” and Bjorn Lomborg, even though both accept all the IPCC scientific reasoning, they just don’t buy the disaster or the solution. So any step outside the church and pfft — you’re gone.
Roger Pielke has already pointed that out. Fabius Maximus wonders if that’s why the Supplementary information has disappeared in the last two days, deleted while they get legal advice or think up a better excuse. The data will be available on January 1 next year, long after the media headlines have been and gone.
So @nature has published a paper that includes me on a list of “contrarians” who reject climate science.
I’ve contributed to and defended the IPCC for 25+ years.
Yet such smears pass peer review.
What’s the remedy here?
Letter?
Lawsuit?
Other?
Such BS
What’s troubling is not enemies list,they’ve been around for a long time. What’s troubling is that they are now laundered by academic journals & used by scientists & journos to silence or otherwise cause professional harm to their peers. It is really amazing. And it works.
This paper is cheese food science, the kind Nature increasingly specializes in. Just like cheese food isn’t real food, which tastes good going down but which starts to come back up in a mean way twenty minutes later, this paper has a sciency name but which nauseates minds.
It doesn’t say a damned thing about whether anything any contrarian said was right or wrong, or even whether any expert scientist ever gets anything right or wrong. It only says, over and again, with slick graphics and thunk-tank prose, that contrarians aren’t to be respected solely because they aren’t in the The Club. It’s an article designed to make its cheese food authors, and their cheesy readers, feel well about themselves.
Commiserations to Marcel Croc, John McLean, and the fabulous BOM Audit team here who deserve to be on The Blacklist. Many other great skeptics may also have missed out on the US media focus or the 2016 cut off date. (Nothing after Trump won was included, because Trump distorts gravity fields or something.).
If only Unskeptical scientists had evidence, they wouldn’t need to work so hard to keep skeptical views out of the media
Other blog “Media” posts on the topic: Judith Curry | WattsUp | Fabius Maximus | William Briggs
Posts on Media Bias
- Media bias — ABC, CBS exclude skeptical scientists for 1300 days
- News media networks report global warming 92 times, versus global pause, zero times
- BBC secret exposed: Greenpeace, activists, BP decide what “science” brits see — Hello TwentyEightGate
- Third icebreaker abandons rescue of climate scientists boat in Antarctica, media fog, obscure, don’t say “climate”
- Richard Black — the fastest apologist for misbehaving scientists
- ClimateGate II: Handy Guide to spot whitewash journalism – The top 10 excuses for scientists behaving badly
- The Guardian-the-gullible: blind to whistleblowers, ignoring scandals, defender of feel-good teenage thinking
Keep reading →
9.9 out of 10 based on 108 ratings
It’s self congratulation disguised as “science”. The insults are passed off as universal human failings but the unmistakable message is that those who do believe in “climate change” are exempt. (Only the unbelievers have smaller minds and more selfish cortexes. )
You’d have to be pretty stupid not to get this message:
…We know—at least those of us not in the grips of outright climate denial—how bad it is. But we can’t seem to act to save the future.
The Time readers who haven’t cancelled their subscriptions already may like to read this and give themselves a free shot of mojo, knowing that they can process climate change. Possibly they buy Time because it tells them they’re the gifted, superior beings they hope they might be. This is manna for those with low self esteem and meaningless lives.
This is not just some random author either, Bryan Walsh, who wrote this, was TIME’s International Editor, its energy and environmental correspondent and was the Tokyo bureau chief in 2006 and 2007.
As usual, it’s projection all the way down:
There are many reasons why [we fail to act], ranging from political polarization to the disinformation campaigns of major energy companies to the sheer technical difficulty of replacing carbon-based fossil fuels. But the biggest reason is found within our own minds.
The real victims of disinformation campaigns are those who think storms and floods are “new”, and every kind of weather is a magical omen foretelling doom. And the worst kind of political polarization is the sort which makes a scientific discussion into a tribal war — it’s not 1.2 or 1.5 degrees, it’s good man : bad man, expert and “denier”?
Would you like pity with that?
Bryan Walsh even manages an air of fake compassion and understanding while he soaks in first-class condescension. I mean, those poor normals, their brains really can’t process the risks. Mere deplorables have mental flaws visible in fMRI’s:
When you think about yourself while inside the narrow metal tube of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a certain part of your brain, called the medial prefrontal cortex, or MPFC, will light up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. If you think about a family member, the MPFC will still light up, though less robustly. And if you think about other people whom you feel no connection to—like, say, the inhabitants of the South Asian island nation of the Maldives, which will likely one day be erased by climate-change-driven sea level rise—the MPFC will light up even less.
You don’t need a $3 million MRI machine to know that human beings are self-centered creatures.
You don’t need a $2 MRI machine to know that this article is buttering up the needy with baseless speculation based on imaginary brain scans. Who needs data when you can just fake it up?
Let’s take the easy risk-free conformist path but pretend we are above it all, smarter than the riff raff.
Adapted from END TIMES: A Brief Guide to the End of the World by Bryan Walsh.
Image: Cerebral Hemisphere: wikimedia, Polygon data were generated by Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS)
9.5 out of 10 based on 107 ratings
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9.4 out of 10 based on 20 ratings
An idea so dumb big government just might do it.
John Naish, Daily Mail
 This initial $3 million test, known as Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) would use a high-altitude scientific balloon (pictured) to raise around 2kg of calcium carbonate dust — the size of a bag of flour — into the atmosphere 12 miles above the desert of New Mexico Spraying 2 kilo of dust costs how much?
This initial $3 million test, known as Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) would use a high-altitude scientific balloon (pictured) to raise around 2kg of calcium carbonate dust — the size of a bag of flour — into the atmosphere 12 miles above the desert of New Mexico
Indeed, the plans are so well advanced that the initial ‘sky-clouding’ experiments were meant to have begun months ago. … (to) seed a tube-shaped area of sky half a mile long and 100 yards in diameter.
Here comes the precautionary principle on steriods:
SCoPEx is, however, on hold, amid fears that it could trigger a disastrous series of chain reactions, creating climate havoc in the form of serious droughts and hurricanes, and bring death to millions of people around the world.
So 2kg of dust could kill millions of people and we still let planes fly? Surely they are talking about the “big” version of this, not the 2kg test? And the big version needs to be gargantuan, with 800 planes working to lift “millions of tons” of chalk dust to 18 kilometers or 12 miles up. How much money can someone waste?
Why not just spend the budget for just one plane to “audit the science”. That’d be a first.
But follow the reasoning:
There is no way of predicting how the world’s long-term weather may respond to having a gigantic chemical sunshade plonked on top of it. Climatologists are also concerned that such tinkering could unintentionally disrupt the circulation of ocean currents that regulate our weather.
This itself could unleash a global outbreak of extreme climatic events that might devastate farmland, wipe out entire species and foster disease epidemics.
The technology may even spark terrible wars. For tinkering with our climate could send sky-high the potential for international suspicion and armed conflict.
They are professional climate spooks and they’ve totally spooked themselves.
But ponder: here’s a group of people who think climate models can predict exactly what happens when we add two parts per million of a trace gas to the sky, but the same models have “no way of predicting” what happens when we add an aerosol even though we know the exact composition and placement of said dust?
I’m with them this time, it’s bound to end badly. If it cools the world it’s bad, and if it doesn’t it’s a “waste of money”. It’s just odd to hear them admit their models are useless.
In the end, even though the UN has Global Dumbness boxed and packed, this’ll never be rolled out. All the two-bit worrier nations want the money, not the cooling. And every government, surely, has one scientist that knows that cooling the planet will kill crops and people. Besides the Chinese and Russians will surely hate it.
The whole project looks like just another excuse for more Global Panic PR. Cheap advertising for the cause.
h/t Marvin, Greg in NZ, Pat, Original Steve.
9.5 out of 10 based on 68 ratings
It’s being hailed as a “soaring investment” but it’s just the fake fiat carbon scheme that has been fiddled back to life. The EU ETS market had too many credits and crashed down to 5 Euro or less by 2013. On deaths door, the EU decided to cull a quarter of the credits for the EU ETS every year starting in 2019 and the price predictably went back up. The big success of this unnecessary unfree market is that it has added a tariff to cheap coal to make it just as expensive as gas, and pushed up electricity prices in the EU.
Any illusion of generating economic wealth, or energy efficiency is purely coincidental. There’s no supply and no demand, no extra products or productivity — and without government force, no market at all for imaginary carbon penances. It draws money from every consumer and hands it to gas, and renewables giants, as well as bankers, crooks and VAT Tax cheats. And if this market goes global it’s potentially a $7 Trillion dollar money-making racket for bankers. No wonder HSBC, Deutche Bank, Goldman Sachs, BBVA and Citigroup want to “save the world”.
Back to 2008:
 Government decisions largely set the EU ETS Prices, 2008 – 2019 Carbon credits are not an investment. They are a speculative bet on what the worlds governments will do. If the public turns against carbon reduction, and the mood changes, the market is a dead-man walking. There’s a lot of money here that has an interest in keeping skeptical views out of the public light. Just saying…
We can tell this is not a real market. Real free markets make things cheaper. Communist markets just make things worse.
By DAVID HODARI, Wall Street Journal (The Australian)
Carbon-emission credits, long shunned by traders, are now one of the world’s best-performing investments.
The big players are still financial houses and speculators not generators:
Back in 2013 Banks and trading houses bought two-thirds of carbon permits. Now not much has changed:
The recovery has drawn back investors who largely abandoned the market when prices collapsed last decade.
“It’s attracting hedge-fund speculators,” said Norbert Rücker, head of economics at Swiss private bank Julius Baer. “With this move, carbon has really come back to life this year and it’s attracted a lot of interest — we have clients reaching out to us asking about it.”
Orwellian Translation: “free market” = fake market, and industrial “polluters” = global free fertilizers:
The higher prices mean that it now costs industrial polluters almost as much to use coal as it does to use cleaner natural gas. Putting the two markets on an equal footing means carbon prices are driven by factors similar to the ones that affect gas prices, such as high summer temperatures.
They’re taxing one fuel more than the other so “Equal footing” means “unequal footing.”
Fake markets attract frauds. When you’re selling a product no one needs, no one even cares if it’s fake.
Posts from long ago about the EU ETS
9.7 out of 10 based on 52 ratings
Drought Panic Over
h/t to Jim Sternhill, Frank Brus, via Jim Simpson.
 Professor Andy Pitman, UNSW In June Professor Andy Pitman quietly dropped a bomb:
“…as far as the climate scientists know there is no link between climate change and drought.”
“…there is no reason a priori why climate change should made the landscape more arid.“
He’s admitting there’s never been a scientific basis for the endless climate drought scares? He went on to say that in Australia, droughts are not increasing, and there’s no drying trend in one hundred years of data. He’s also admitting the models can’t predict extremes in rain either. Where are the press releases?
It’s great to hear him speaking like a skeptical scientist, with candor and care, but 52% of Australians (including many of our politicians) think “climate change” is already causing more frequent droughts. So half the country is not only convinced droughts are increasing, but they think climate change is causing an effect that isn’t happening. And the world is spending $330b a year on windmills and solar panels in the hope of stopping droughts, among other things.
 There’s no link? Has Andy Pitman told the Climate Council? Pitman follows this with: “this may not be what you read in newspapers…” No, Sir. And the 64 billion dollar question (which isn’t asked) is — why not? And what are you doing about that?
Does Andy Pitman keep trying to tell journalists the full and accurate story and they won’t print it? (Well, we know what that’s like.) Given his roles as Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, and as a Lead Author for the IPCC, does it bother him when he sees his specialty misreported over and over again? Since the taxpayer funds him, isn’t there an obligation to correct the record?; to flick an email to the ABC journalists who keep saying climate change is linked to drought, or drop a five minute phone call to Peter Hannam of the Sydney Morning Herald who is still getting it wrong? He may even want to call his own researcher at the centre where he is a director. Andrew King advised Hannam on that last link which is filled with “human fingerprints” of “drought” and emerging “greenhouse signals”. The article even says — completely incorrectly —“Australia is among the regions of the world where the drying trend is clearest”.
Wednesday 19 June, 2019, Sydney Environment Institute (SEI), University of Sydney.
At 1:11:20
Professor Andy Pitman:
“…this may not be what you expect to hear. but as far as the climate scientists know there is no link between climate change and drought.
That may not be what you read in the newspapers and sometimes hear commented, but there is no reason a priori why climate change should made the landscape more arid.
If you look at the Bureau of Meteorology data over the whole of the last one hundred years there’s no trend in data. There is no drying trend. There’s been a trend in the last twenty years, but there’s been no trend in the last hundred years, and that’s an expression on how variable Australian rainfall climate is.
There are in some regions but not in other regions.
So the fundamental problem we have is that we don’t understand what causes droughts.
Much more interesting, We don’t know what stops a drought. We know it’s rain, but we don’t know what lines up to create drought breaking rains.”
Bookmark this page. I’ll be referring back to these quotes.
Just trying to help Prof Andy Pitman get his message out — the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
As I’ve been saying, the Federation drought was worse than anything modern. The worst droughts in Australia were 1,000 to 2,000 years ago and there’s no trend in Australian droughts. And who could forget the recent study by Ashcroft showing that 178 years of Australian rain has nothing to do with CO2?
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9.3 out of 10 based on 121 ratings
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8.1 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
Not what the climate models predicted
This weekend it’s snowing within 90 minutes of Melbourne and Sydney. It’s snowing in far south Queensland. In the Alps Thredbo recorded an amazing 117cm of fresh snow in two days, while snow fell in towns that rarely get snow like Gordon near Ballarat, Tumut, Crookwell. The highway through the Blue Mountains was blocked. The airport was closed in Orange.
The ABC makes sure to embed their best excuses for the Global Warming.
Repeat after me: The Science is Complex. Two “leading” researchers say blah, blah, attribution, models. They argue that unverified, unvalidated models that ignore the solar wind, solar spectral changes, and solar magnetic changes can tell us how much effect CO2 has because there’s a mysterious gap between what their models predict the natural climate would do and what really happened — especially according to thermometers installed over asphalt and next to incinerators. They forget to mention that their models fail on temperature trends, and on the local, regional, and continental scale, the pause, the upper troposphere, the humidity, the fingerprint they said mattered, the medieval warm period, the little ice age, the oceans, down boreholes, and for sea levels, as well as for the temperature of Antarctica, and the Southern Ocean. Lucky we have Seers who can interpret the failures of broken models to explain why CO2 really does cause all the things their models didn’t predict.
–ABC Saturday afternoon
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9.4 out of 10 based on 71 ratings
Fragile grids
 Over a million people customers lost power in the UK yesterday thanks to the sudden outage of a gas and a wind plant. Some of the country’s biggest railway stations were inoperable. Passengers were stuck on trains for up to seven hours. Others stayed in hotels, walked miles or paid “hundreds” for taxis. The outpatient sections of Ipswich Hospital were blacked out for 15 minutes when backup generators failed. “At the height of the Friday rush hour, all trains out of King’s Cross were suspended and remained so for most of the evening.” — BBC. Commuters resorted to using their phones as torches to get out of tunnels in the dark.
According to headlines, at this early stage before the investigation all we know for sure is that wind power is definitely not to blame, but Boris might be. (Seriously, it’s the no-deal Brexit that hasn’t happened).
Officially, people are saying in solemn knowing tones that it is “extremely rare” for two generators to go out at once. But the odd thing about this is how small the loss was. Barfield Gas power is only a 730 MW generator, and Hornsea Wind “Farm” is, at most, 1.2 GW. The whole UK grid is more in the order of 60-80GW. The word on twitter was that this was only a 1.4MW loss. If so — wow. For some reason this small loss meant the grid frequency fell from the usual 50 Hz to a heartache 48.889 Hz (disastrous in grid terms). At that point, pre-programmed emergency “load shedding” kicked in.
“One source at a local energy network said: “I’ve never heard of anything like this in 20 years.”…” – Financial Times
Hmm. This could be a clue – a storm was sweeping through and wind farms were running full tilt just before things fell apart. Half an hour before the crash the National Grid was bragging about a new wind power record:
At 16 minutes past four on Friday a press officer at National Grid put out a tweet which seemed to signal Britain’s progress towards its much-vaunted zero-carbon economy. The proportion of UK electricity generated by wind power, ‘it boasted, had just reached a record high of 47.6 per cent.
–Ross Clark, Spectator.
With such a high proportion of wind power the system inertia would have been very low, which would mean the system was much less able to adapt to any disruption. (And if that is the case then this is a renewables problem. Too many intermittent generators, not enough spinning reserve). Large baseload turbines have spinning weights in the order of 200 – 600 tons, and they turn at 3,000 rpm. Solar and wind power just can’t provide that stability. Wait and see, but there are similarities with the South Australian blackout of 2016.
9.4 out of 10 based on 78 ratings
Ken Stewart rates the Streaky Bay site as one of the worst he has seen This is an influential site because it’s in a remote area, is used to “correct” official ACORN sites, and has been running for a long time. Last October the BOM finally moved it to a completely new (and much better site) — only three decades too late. Strangely, they didn’t give the new site a new station number? Normally the old and new sites would be run concurrently with two different numbers so the data from both could be compared and the differences in temperature between them could be worked out. Is that an accident? Does it hide the terrible quality of the previous site?
The Streaky Bay information (site 018079) tells us it opened in 1865 but the site only has monthly data from 1926 and daily data from an even shorter period. The rest presumably hasn’t been digitized yet. As best as I can tell, the station metadata appear to mark this site as being at the post office from 1865 to 2018, and record the ground cover as becoming asphalt in July 1987. That means for 31 years the Australian Bureau of Meteorology knew the site was sitting on hot bitumen and couldn’t be bothered to move it? The BOM gets more than a million dollars a day, and claims there’s a dire crisis running, and they don’t even care enough to measure climate change properly? They’re not even trying.
According to Stewart, Streaky Bay’s artificially hot data was used to “correct” the Acorn sites at Adelaide, Ceduna, Eucla, Forrest, Kyancutta, and Port Lincoln.
 Streaky Bay, Bureau of Meteorology, Screen on Asphalt, SA. | ©2019 Google. Image Capture Mar 2010. Was any of this infrastructure there in 1865? We all know the answer to that.
The aerial view shows just how much asphalt surrounded the site in the centre of town last year.
 There was sea of asphalt surrounding the thermometer. | Imagery ©2019 CNES / Airbus, Map data, Google The site history: Please check…
The detailed site information here indicates the site moved on 26 OCT 2018: “STATION Changed to Open farmland, grassland or tundra”. See page 31. But how long was it at the Post Office? On 12/JUN/1980 the metadata records “Changed to Town 1000 to 10,000” which possibly just means a category change as the population grew, not a site change. There is no concurrent longitude or latitude change. Am I right?
On 12/JUN/1980 STATION surface_type Changed to bare ground. On the 08/JUL/1987 the STATION surface_type was “Changed to asphalt.”. On the 16/MAR/2000, the STATION soil_type was changed to “unable to determine”. Why? Because the soil was under bitumen and no one knew what was there?
The Bureau of Meteorology needs an independent audit
There are many questions this site raises. It’s very odd that the site number stays the same — even though the site moved to a dramatically different area. I wonder if that means their “secret algorithm” will treat the old hot data here as if it came from the new grassed site? It’s hard to believe that would be useful for them, since the new readings will be cooler. Usually when a site moves to a cooler location it allow the BOM to post hoc “cool” all the previous readings. Site moves are an excuse to cool data from the original good sites in paddocks which slowly became polluted with urban infill as buildings and roads were added around and under it. The UHI and site effects will have gradually increased temperatures in lots of little steps, but the correction for that rising trend is a backwards single “step” adjustment, which rewrites history, and lowers all the decades before the move down in one flat brutal step. Thus are the original old good sites deemed to be reading falsely hot.
How about a Royal Commission?
Ken’s post: The Wacky World of Weather Stations: No. 11- Streaky Bay (SA)
Go and see his work on this and so many other stations.
Rutherglen, | Viewbank | Nuriootpa | Roseworthy | Robe | Ararat Prison | Echuca Airport | Albury Airport | Dartmouth
Why is this important work being left to volunteers if the planet is at stake?
9.7 out of 10 based on 81 ratings
 The Steak is coming to get you. Good news, the Intergovernmental Holy Panel has finally released the new World-Saving IPCC Diet (WSID) which will stop storms, volcanoes and the spread of jellyfish. It also solves all those difficult dietary questions — instead of worrying about your weight, your blood pressure, or your brain, you can sip on a soy latte and know that even if you get dementia from the B12 deficiency or the tofu, you are A Virtuous Signaller. Lucky you.
And even though an atmospheric physicist supposedly can’t advise us on the climate, it’s fine for a climate scientist to tell us what to eat. They already tell us what car to drive and how many kids we should have. Why not?
Vegetarian diets and a “sin” tax on unsustainable meat could help to limit climate change, a major new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says.
–The Australian
Sinning with meat for 2 million years?
Humans have been eating meat for 2.6 million years at least, or about 100,000 generations, but it’s time to take the precautionary principle and toss that genetic heritage to the wind.
Meat is a good (as in “the only”) source of Cobalamin, known as vitamin B12, which your body uses to make the myelin sheath on nerves among other things (it’s the insulation on your personal electricity grid). The side effects of not getting enough include:
…demyelinisation of peripheral nerves, the spinal cord, cranial nerves and the brain, resulting in nerve damage and neuropsychiatric abnormalities. Neurological symptoms of vitamin B12 deficiency include numbness and tingling of the hands and feet, decreased sensation, difficulties walking, loss of bowel and bladder control, memory loss, dementia, depression, general weakness and psychosis.3,4 Unless detected and treated early, these symptoms can be irreversible. — Zeuschner et al 2013
Meat is also the best source for creatine, carnitine, methionine, DHA, taurine and iron. Obviously millions of people do fine without meat, but it’s a bit of a bummer for those with defective enzymes or SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) in any of these pathways. Some people just shouldn’t be vegetarians. (I know, I was one).
Then there is the infamous Honolulu Heart Study and the dementia-increasing effect of soy, which appears to be replicated in elderly Chinese, Indonesians and Japanese Americans. Other researchers say soy consumption may be a significant contributor to Alzheimer’s dementia. (So may a lot of other things, it has to be said). We could call this side effect “Global Dumbing”. If only it were a joke.
There looks like some unfortunate trade-offs in trying to reduce global temperatures with our dinner plates. I have barely got started on the health effects, the risks, the costs involved.
If only the ABC / BBC / CBC had well funded specialist science units which could ask those kind of questions. Oh wait…
As it is, dieticians have a torrid time trying to figure out what humans should eat, only a cult fanatic would think climate models would do it better.
In the IPCC SRCCL (Book of Chapter 7 titled: Risk management and decision making in relation to sustainable development they talk about trade-offs, and poverty, but don’t mention SNPs, or cobalamin, or B12, or even the word “vitamin”. Perhaps it’s in some other chapter? It’s not in the Summary for Policymakers, and not in Chapter 1. Nevermind.
Tax the oceans instead
In any case the reason cows and sheep are being targeted in the first place were because of methane emissions, and as Tom Quirk found here, global methane levels appear to be mostly due to El Ninos, rainfall and leaky Russian pipes.
How many healthy people do we sacrifice to the weather Gods this time?
Save the forests, burn more coal
If the IPCC are so concerned about forest destruction the best thing they could suggest is to cut back solar and wind power and biofuels which use up to 500 times as much land area as fossil fuels or nuclear power does.
And if people are concerned about food security ponder that the IPCC says that about a third of food is lost or wasted. (Quoting Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project and a researcher at CSIRO). Sounds like we have plenty to spare then, especially if we stop trying to feed good food to cars instead of people .
The IPCC Press release is titled — Land is A Critical Resource. Like we didn’t know that.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 78 ratings
During the June heatwaves in Europe NASA was studying the “Ecostress” of various cities.
The heat coming off Charles DeGualle’s Orly Airport’s runways is easily visible from space. (As are all the other ideal locations for putting climate change thermometers.) CORRECTED Charles de Gaulle airport runways are (I think) beyond the top right of the heat map.
h/t To AndyG
 The NASA Ecostress map for Paris | Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Hands up who thinks thermometers in 1880 were reading too warm? Anyone…
The shots were taken in the early morning:
They show how the central core of each city is much hotter than the surrounding natural landscape due to the urban heat island effect – a result of urban surfaces storing and re-radiating heat throughout the day.
he fact that surface temperatures were as high as 77-86 degrees Fahrenheit (25-30 degrees Celsius) in the early morning indicates that much of the heat from previous days was stored by surfaces with high heat capacity (such as asphalt, concrete and water bodies) and unable to dissipate before the next day. The trapped heat resulted in even higher midday temperatures, in the high 40s (Celsius) in some places, as the heat wave continued.
So these heat sinks have had all night to lose their extra heat yet here they are still radiating. Even at lunch time the next day.
 Rome- Ecostress Heat map | Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Nice of them to mark the airports.
See Milan and Madrid below.
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9.6 out of 10 based on 105 ratings
It’s a diesel powered electric car point:
 The fossil fueled electric car… It’s becoming a joke all around the world — the EVs in Australia powered by dirty diesel. But what’s the difference? Most EV’s in Australia are running on fossil fuel — the generators are just hidden behind longer extension cords. (Ones that carry 240,000V). EV’s on our grid are running on 80% fossil fuels every day.
The sign on the charger above says “Nullarbor” — the vast treeless and grid-free centre of Australia — but this is actually a test site in Perth (the trees were the giveaway).
The 3,000 kilometer trip across the Nullarbor from Perth to Adelaide is such an achievement for an EV that it’s practically a news story each time one makes it. Electric Car owners carry a chip about not being able to drive across the country like any real car owner could. So Jon Edwards, a retired engineer from Perth, set up this test site in his backyard. He wanted to know if it could be a realistic stop-gap for our far remote roads.
To me, this looks like a chain of efficiency losses going from diesel to mechanical to electrical to battery to mechanical, but Edwards tested it with ten friend’s cars last December and estimates it works out slightly better on fuel use than just driving a diesel. Readers can check out all his calculations and tables on his page — at a glance it’s a respectable effort. He is an engineer. The charger is a Tritium Veefil 50kW DC (a big fast one) and took 9 hours to charge all 10 cars and used 108L of fuel. Good for fuel. Bad for time. (The 6,600km return trip across the Nullabor took 13 days in case you were wondering, though they were not in a race).
There’s a good reason EV’s are only 0.2% of all new Australian car purchases — with vast distances, a fragile grid, expensive electricity and heavy towing loads. Plus these fast chargers are like adding “20 houses” to our grid, so will cripple the system or require billions of dollars of infrastructure costs. The dumbest thing is that as long as they run off fossil fuels, they’ll probably increase our CO2 emissions, doing the exact opposite of what they’re supposed to be doing, but yet perversely helping plants grow. Their big environmental benefit being mainly achieved by failing to do what they are intended to do.
Good for Jon Edwards for financing his own experiment. but there was one funny moment when he mentioned tax:
…he tells The Driven that driving to Adelaide and back in an electric car, “I felt like a third class citizen.”
“I’m a tax paying citizen and I’m driving an EV, why haven’t we got infrastructure to service us?” he says.
…and the first commenter, Pedro, reminded him that EV owners don’t pay the fuel taxes that maintain the roads the EV’s drive on.
But, hey, he’s in the comments there explaining himself. Give him points, just please don’t give him more of our taxes.
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9.6 out of 10 based on 116 ratings
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