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In trying to be a small target, the Liberals accidentally disappeared
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Tuesday
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Monday
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The best thing about the Australian election was that Nigel Farage’s party won 30% in the UK
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Sunday
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Saturday — Election Day Australia
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Vote for freedom…
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Friday
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Bombshell: Sir Tony Blair says climate policies are unworkable, irrational, and everyone is afraid of being called a denier
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Thursday
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Blackout in Spain to cost 2-4 billion Euro, likely due to solar plants — blind and biased ABC says “cause is a mystery”
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Wednesday
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Days after Spain reaches 100% renewable, mass blackouts hit, due to mysterious “rare atmospheric phenomenon”
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Tuesday
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Help needed: Site under DDoS attack from hundreds of thousands of unique IPs this week — especially China and the USA
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Monday: Election Day Canada
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When the Labor Party talk about “The Science” the Opposition can easily outflank and outgun them with bigger, better science
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Saturday
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UK Gov spends £50 m to dim sun to create slightly less beach weather
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Friday
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The cocoa price crisis is a Big Government price fixing disaster, not a climate change one
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Thursday
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Blame the Vikings! Moss found in East Antarctica lived in warmer summers a thousand years ago.
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Wednesday
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Easter Sunday
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Saturday
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Good Friday
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In crash-test dummy land, we solve teenage girl climate anxiety with $500b in fantasy weather experiments…
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Thursday
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Nothing says “Safe and Effective” like destroying all the data from Australia’s giant abandoned vaccine study
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Wednesday
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Who owns the oceans? The UN wants to tax ships to reduce carbon emissions — a $40b windfall for unaccountable global bureaucrats
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Saturday
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Conservatives promise to axe the car tax that would have added $10k to petrol and diesel cars
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Friday
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The monster Green Tariffs we put on ourselves are worse than a foreign trade war
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Thursday
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Trump goes gangbusters on coal power and coal mining to supply AI energy demand
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Wednesday
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Instead of $8b in rebates, Labor could have built gas and coal plants and actually made cheap electricity
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Tuesday
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Labor wants the working class to help rich people buy batteries
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Monday
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Sunday
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We couldn’t kill the worlds corals if we wanted to: They already suffered for two thousand years and recovered
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Saturday
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The Climate Crisis was Christopher Columbus’s fault — “a mutant offspring of European Scientific racism”
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9.6 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
h/t to Charles the moderator at WUWT
In the latest Pew survey of 6,000 Americans 50% see made-up news as a “very big problem” — on a par with violent crime and income inequality. Sadly 46% don’t realize “climate change” is fake news.
Not surprisingly more Republicans than Democrats worry about fake news. In the “starkest” difference — while many people think the fake news comes from politicans — 60% of Republicans blame the journalists themselves, whereas only 20% of Democrats did.
Pew Research (Google cache link because the proper link wasn’t working).
A solid majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (62%) say made-up news is a very big problem in the country today, compared with fewer than half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (40%). Republicans also register greater exposure to made-up news. About half of Republicans (49%) say they come across it often, 19 percentage points higher than Democrats (30%).
One of the starkest differences, though, is in assigning blame for creating made-up news and information. Republicans are nearly three times as likely as Democrats to say journalists create a lot of it (58% vs. 20%).
Republicans also place more blame on activist groups, with about three-quarters (73%) saying these groups create a lot, close to twice the rate of Democrats (38%).
 … News is so fake people are checking the facts themselves and cancelling subscriptions
Fake news means nearly 90% of politically aware people are checking the facts of news stories themselves (compared to 70% of people who are not so into politics). But half of the people who are not interested in politics are just switching off the news. Most people will also stop getting news from a specific outlet. Trust in American media has been falling for years– especially with Republicans.
Here’s a slightly unnerving stat:
In addition, about eight-in-ten U.S. adults (79%) believe steps should be taken to restrict made-up news, as opposed to 20% who see it as protected communication.
The good news is that only 12% think the government should be fixing this. (Phew). A bit more than half of Americans think journalists should.
For the record, the biggest concerns of US citizens were drug addiction (70%) and affordability of Heath Care (67%).
9.8 out of 10 based on 51 ratings
Media elements in Australia are pushing the myth that aging coal plants are failing and that they can’t handle summer heat as if a plant with an operating temperature of 570°C plus will work at 38°C and fail at 40°C. It’s a hot topic today because AGL has just flagged an extended outage of seven months for one unit at Loy Yang A2. That may linger well into summer — potentially out of action til mid January. Ouch. The outage may wipe $100m off AGL’s profits, though if it pushes up wholesale prices, maybe not. With one more billion-dollar-summer-spike AGL may even come out ahead…
Old coal plants don’t have to die, we can just keep fixing them. The owners of Vales Point coal plant in NSW have a plan to keep it running up to 70 years.
Paul McArdle, expert grid generator analyst, who writes at WattClarity, protests at the repeated misinformation and points out that there has been no increase in “sudden trips” as the Australian fleet of coal power stations ages. Nor are these failures more likely in summer. It’s just that we notice them more then. He points out that the failure rate across the whole coal fleet in Australia is not rising, and that there was a six month outage in 2001 at Loy Yang A4 — obviously when it was much younger.
Paul McArdle says we’re playing Russian Roulette with the grid and it’s a world class mess:
As we have explained through the Generator Report Card, that overall level of risk has been escalating in recent years (for a number of reasons). It’s like we’ve been playing Russian Roulette with the grid/market, but with more loaded chambers than there used to be.
Thermal units are not going offline due to aging:
For instance, our deep analysis in the Generator Report Card does not show a clear systemic trend across the 48 operational coal units for them becoming less reliable as a fleet (though readers might like to reference these notes specific AGL units). Here’s that chart from the Report Card again that looks at one measure of “Sudden Failure” in this broader framework of “dependability”:
 Aging coal plants: failure rate is not rising. | Watt Clarity. Coal plants are not more likely to fail in summer heat:
Readers will also note that the highest bars in most years tend not to be during the hottest months of the year, which is also interesting in the context of claims that “coal units break down more in the heat”. What do seem to be the case are two things:
1) Firstly (because there are fewer units, and because demand is increasingly peaky) a small number of outages during times of high demand places much more stress on the grid than used to be the case; and
2) Because there are an increasing number of NEM observers equipped with the latest tools (some of them ours), and because we all know that summer is the critical time, we notice outages a lot more when they happen during summer
McArdle is no climate skeptic but can see how one-eyed and emotive the media are on generators. Perhaps he’ll notice one day that the bias against scientific arguments is even more aggressive, emotive and packed with fake news.
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9.8 out of 10 based on 79 ratings
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9.3 out of 10 based on 23 ratings
How many climate marches does it take to stop a storm?
 Photo by Vlad Tchompalov A new climate model includes “social processes” to predict the climate. They expect the fashionality of hybrid cars or solar PVs will help predict the future climate. So serious researchers are now feeding their models with trends in human behaviour. Though there’s no sign climate models may use the million-mile-an-hour solar wind, nor changes to the solar magnetic field that’s bigger than Earths orbit. They’re also not using solar spectral changes, but who cares about the odd quadrillion joules of ultra violet fritzing or not-fritzing our ozone layer? So much better to track twitter trends on solar panels instead.
The fixation on CO2 is so obsessive compulsive it’s practically a science cult. This kind of work puts the psycho in psychology.
Years from now when everyone agrees it was The Sun, historians are going to fish deep from this well of academic obsession:
Human behavior influences a wide range of complex systems, including ecosystems, social networks, and the climate. Moreover, these systems impact human behavior, creating a feedback loop. Human behavior is a driver of climate change, but climate models often neglect how climate change in turn affects human behavior
So far, results are not looking too good.
Who would have guessed that “social norms do not protect against rising temperatures”?
Their analysis suggests that the rate at which people learn about climate mitigation strategies via social interactions, such as hearing that a friend bought a hybrid car, strongly influences climate outcomes. Social learning takes time, so plausible values of this rate alone could raise warming predictions by over 1 degree Celsius.
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9.5 out of 10 based on 72 ratings
Just another way cheaper electricity saves lives.
It turns out hotter rooms have higher indoor pollution. Levels of formaldehyde are lower in the morning and rise with the temperature. Air conditioning in hot summers, keeps the temperature down and will reduce the amount of formaldehyde and other pollutants from out-gassing from furniture and gypsum walls. Obviously those who can’t afford to run the air conditioner and who live in warmer rooms in summer will be exposed to more pollution.
Though the worst situation was in 1970s homes with radiant heaters installed on gypsum sheets. In that case, people who can’t afford to heat may avoid some fumes.
Opening windows will clear out the indoor pollution, but houses are increasingly being designed to stop draughts to be more energy efficient.
The message: get rich or open windows when it’s nice outside, move those bar heaters off the walls, and buy peace lilies, bamboo palms, and dracaenas.
By Tina Hilding, Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture
PULLMAN, Wash – When most people think about air pollution, they think of summertime haze, traffic or smokestack exhaust, wintertime inversions, or wildfire smoke. They rarely think of the air that they breathe inside their own homes.
In a new study of indoor air quality, a team of WSU researchers has found surprisingly high levels of pollutants, including formaldehyde and possibly mercury, in carefully monitored homes, and that these pollutants vary through the day and increase as temperatures rise. Their study, led by Tom Jobson, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and graduate student Yibo Huangfu, was published in the journal, Building and Environment.
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9.9 out of 10 based on 37 ratings
Hitting the presses today, the vacuous news that lots of companies picked huge numbers out of the air using broken models to guess hyperbolic climate losses coming in the next five years, counter to all the trends for the last hundred years which show declining losses on a GDP basis. The world got warmer but the disasters got less nasty. Less bushfire, less cyclones, less tornadoes, less death per capita. The trends are all good. The only thing that’s up is the number of panic merchants.
LONDON (Reuters) – More than 200 of the world’s largest listed companies forecast that climate change could cost them a combined total of almost $1 trillion, with much of the pain due in the next five years, according to a report published on Tuesday.
So hundreds of companies have offered the climate world a free hit for PR by making a guess. They fall into two kinds of companies –The badgered and harried and the profiteers. See below for examples. Firstly, here’s the only chart that matters.
Global Weather losses are down:
If CO2 causes climate events we need more of it. The costs of disasters is rising (like everything else) but it’s a smaller part of our GDP.
 Global weather losses are decreasing (note the 2018 bars are only to June 30th 2018). Roger Pielke In constant 2017 US dollars, both weather-related and non-weather related catastrophe losses have increased, with a 74% increase in the former and 182% increase in the latter since 1990. However, since 1990 both overall and weather/climate losses have decreased as proportion of global GDP, indicating progress with respect to the SDG indicator…
— See Pielke 2018 for more info or his blog ClimateFix or twitter account.
The Global Death Rate from natural disasters is down
Our World in Data shows deaths are down per capita from fire, landslide, storm, flood, extreme temperatures and drought.
Companies are adding up costs because they profit or they’re badgered
There are two types of companies responding to the activists.
1/ The badgered and harried who fear a legal or PR fail if they don’t “pick a number” and join the cheer squad. What CEO wants to fight this? It’s so much easier just to comply, and make something up. We know they don’t believe it or they’d be selling low-lying land, building sea walls, lobbying for nuclear power etc, which they’re not.
2/ The profiteers — The Green industry is worth at least $1.5 trillion annually (Climate Change Business Journal, 2015). The potential global carbon market is worth $7 trillion. That’s a lot of carrot.
There are four flavours of money-makers in this:
- Insurance companies. Wouldn’t they love to scare the customers. Tick yes. How can they lose?
- People who want to broker a global carbon market (that’s every financial house and banker known to man),
- Corporates that sell wind, solar, batteries, electric cars, etc (GE, Panasonic, Tesla, Vestas) It’s a $300b industry.
- Groups that have invested in renewables (like Google, Apple, even the BBC superannuation fund).
All of these groups profit from fear.
Storms, tornadoes, wildfires, they’re either the same or less common
The trend in tornadoes is down, and when there are more its due to cold weather
Roy Spencer explains that the unusually cold mass of air over central USA means lately there are more tornadoes. It’s the strong wind shear at the border between warm and cold air bodies that causes it.
 Tornadoes, 1954-2018, Graph. AEI. NOAA.
 Figure 2. Wildfire occurrence (a) and corresponding area burnt (b) in the European Mediterranean region for the period 1980 – 2010. Source: San-Miguel-Ayanz et al. [37]. REFERENCES
9.9 out of 10 based on 60 ratings
Solar subsidies were scrapped in the UK in April, and new solar installations promptly dropped from 79MW a month to 5MW last month, in a 94% fall.
Jillian Ambrose, The Guardian:
The Labor party accused the government of “actively dismantling” the UK’s solar power industry…
…showing that they don’t understand what “actively” means. If the government was active, solar panel owners would be charged for using the grid as back up, and asked to pay back the subsidy. They could use a feed-in-tariff equal to wholesale coal rates (4c KWh) to pay down their debt. Perhaps one day they’ll compensate other users for voltage surges, damaged equipment, and higher electricity bills too.
It’s not just English, Labor is also struggling to understand “supply and demand”:
Standing in for Jeremy Corbyn, Long-Bailey said solar power had the potential to cut household bills and carbon emissions while creating thousands of jobs.
Studies show every green job created caused two useful jobs to go away, or possibly even four. In Scotland the VERSO study showed for each Green Job created, 3.7 were lost. When electricity costs more, every other business in the country makes less, does less or has less money to pay workers.
“But the government, for some reason, appears to be determined to kill it off, while continuing to cheerlead for fracking,” [Long-Bailey] said.
The Solar industry was a zombie business from the get-go. How can the government kill something that never had a life of its own?
[David Lidington, the Cabinet Office minister] said: “There are 400,000 jobs already in low-carbon businesses and their supply chains throughout the UK and scope for much larger low-carbon growth to support up to 2m jobs in the future.
What’s worse than one green job — 2 million green jobs. Lidington is promising to fix the climate and create green jobs, but he should be explaining why real jobs are so much more useful than green ones.
REFERENCE
VERSO 2011: Richard Marsh and Tom Miers, Worth the Candle? The Economic Impact of Renewable Energy Policy in Scotland and the UK(Kirkcaldy, Scotland: Verso Economics, March 2011), www.versoeconomics.com/verso-0311B.pdf (accessed March 17, 2011)
h.t GWPF
9.9 out of 10 based on 73 ratings
Does anyone think China or India will rush to point out how stupid we are? They laugh at us quietly, as we hobble ourselves with unreliable infrastructure that produces green electrons and vandalizes our cheap baseload power.
The world has 150 years of coal, and China and India are going to use it (unless they get cheap nukes, in which case, coal really will be worthless). Meanwhile the West puts white-elephants on every roof…
By Todd Royal, Eurasia Review
Without energy you have nothing. China and India understand this better than the west since their citizenry and leaders view energy through the lens of what will help over two-billion-combined-citizens; join the prosperous, western, consumer-driven world…
Naïve-thinking, bordering on western suicide, believes China and India will stop using fossil fuels, led by coal. Each country understands coal is plentiful (“estimated 1.1 trillion tonnes of proven coal reserves worldwide that at current rates of production will last 150 years”), and it is scalable, reliable, cost-effective to the end user, and has the best energy density of all fossil fuels or renewables available.
China is currently building hundreds of new, coal-fired power plants. To counter China, “India has 589 coal-fired power plants, they are building 446 more, bringing their total to 1,036.” These figures are after both governments signed the Paris Climate Agreement, and touted their green credentials.
Since the US, Russia, China and India have the largest global coal reserves, and each country is vying for geopolitical dominance, they will continue using coal in record amounts. Energy is then a geopolitical weapon.
Read it all at Eurasia news….
h/t Pat
9.6 out of 10 based on 69 ratings
Biblical doom coming says prophesy
A new report by a “Breakthrough” think tank has arrived to leave no stone, or cliche, unturned in scaring the kiddies. Whole thesauruses have been ransacked: the threat is existential, lethal, and not survivable. The End Days include choas, collapsing ecosystems, with devastating wildfires. “Nuclear War is possible”. (Yes, just like it was in 1962 when CO2 was 317 perfect ppm.). Will zero emissions bring World Peace? Why not. It can solve everything else.
The Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration is run by two men from Melbourne who apparently long for the little ice age. To get back there they take the climate models that don’t work and amplify their worst guesses into an apocalypse. They pluck the most ominous quotes they can find to create a sense that the IPCC are just another bunch of bureaucrats hiding the awful truth. As if Big-government is on the side of skeptics.
It’s not about observational evidence so much as quote-mining. If a professor once said something ominous, suggestive of oppression or of censorship, that’s grist for the carbon-mill. Naturally, they focus on Arctic Sea Ice since it’s about the only thing the models accidentally succeeded on. Though if we adjust up satellite measurements of sea levels and ignore 1,000 tide gauges, hundreds of papers and thousands of years, then sea levels are worth mentioning too. Shame about the Antarctic, the Southern Oceans, the missing hot spot, and the missing heat. Shhh.
The new report is called What Lies Beneath, reminiscent of Jaws
Their job is to make the IPCC look halfway sensible
Even though the IPCC has overestimated the risks and warming of practically everything since 1990, the Breakthrough team want to create the fantasy that the IPCC are “conservative” and underestimate the dangers. In marketing terms, this team is the lunar priced vanity item that makes the obscenely priced standard model look like “value”.
[Carly Cassella] Without immediate and drastic action, reminiscent of efforts during World War II, a new analysis predicts that by 2050, climate change could become an “existential threat to human civilisation” that can never be undone.
The new report, co-written by a former executive in the fossil fuel industry, is a harrowing follow-up to the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration’s 2018 paper, which found that climate models often underestimate the most extreme scenarios.
Endorsed by former Australian defence chief Admiral Chris Barrie, the message is simple: if we do not take climate action in the next 30 years, it is entirely plausible that our planet warms by 3°C and that human civilisation as we know it collapses.
And the lord sayth 55% would die:
Under this scenario, the authors explain, the world will be locked into a “hothouse Earth” scenario, where 35 percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, will be subject to more than 20 days a year of “lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability.”
I guess no one has air-conditioners in 2050. Probably can’t afford the electricity.
Humans survive from -50 to +40 C but a 3 degree rise will wipe us out.
So who are the The Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration? One of the prophets wrote a book, and he’s now The Research Director. His 2008 book, Climate Code Red, has glowing reviews on Amazon (all four of them) and sits at #252 for Environmental policy. Wikipedia warns that the group may not meet notability guidelines, though they did once win a Community Environment Recognition Award. Good for them.
UPDATE:Tony Thomas watched David Spratt (the “code red” author) promote his catastrophism at a council sponsored anti-conservative “non-partisan” event 5 years ago. Ratepayers and Ratbaggery. That’s Mooney Valley Victoria.
Here’s Spratt at his scientific best: “Climate denial is not about science. What interests me is that very few young people are deniers and very few women are. Very few are under 60, they are just grumpy old men.”
Not that their credentials matter. But The Guardian et al used to care a lot about that sort of thing til five minutes ago. Now if you can pair up with a Star Army man, you too could be a weather wizard and all over the media.
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9.4 out of 10 based on 76 ratings
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9.6 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
 Al Gore is here in Australia to train 1,0o0 useful idiots on Unscience, neolithic reasoning and witchcraft. The man with no climate science expertise, and a huge vested interest is being paid by taxpayers to train people to chant “consensus” and pretend that wind and solar can stop storms and hold back the tide. These obedient fools help to destroy any conversation about science by reciting anti-science bumperstickers like “the science is settled”, “gravity is real” and “tobacco, tobacco, tobacco”. Because, hey, the tobacco industry funded merchants of doubt, and they were wrong, so therefore Ergo Prompter Upchuck, all government scientists are right on Everything, All Of The Time, and you are an idiot denier.
Repeat after me: There were no storms in 1703. Droughts didn’t exist. It wasnt hotter, colder, deadlier and more extreme for most of human history and 20 times as many people didn’t die of cold.
Global Bullies Unite and ask Anna Palaszczuk for money. Suffer the Queensland taxpayer. The Labor Party in Queensland should pay this money back, it’s an advertising expense.
Fittingly, The Gore effect strikes again. Snow fell in Queensland. (The last time it fell was 2015.)
Taxpayers will fork out more than $320,000 for the Climate Week conference, where form US vice president Al Gore will “communicate the urgency of the climate crisis”.
“It is not believable,” says Alan, “that the Queensland government can be so awash with money as to bring this hypocrite Al Gore to Australia for a conference.
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9.4 out of 10 based on 110 ratings
Several National MP’s have pushed for the Australian Parliament to discuss whether the land with more uranium than anywhere else should use nuclear power. Typical how it takes conservative politicians to raise the question about one of the most successful low-carbon generations there is. On the one hand a million animals might go extinct, seas will swallow up our cities and children won’t know what snow is. On the other hand, one forty year old plant in a modern democracy came unstuck when a 13 m tidal wave hit and at least one person died. The Greens are more afraid of nuclear power than they are of climate change.
If there really was a problem with global warming, we’d want conservatives in charge, because they’d solve the problem, and more cost effectively.
Unbeknown to most Australians there are 451 nuclear plants around the world. The only advanced nations that are truly without it are Australia and New Zealand. Nations like Norway, Ireland, and Poland don’t have nuclear power plants but are connected via a grid to countries which do.
The IEA last week published a report titled “Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System”. I’ll say more about that soon. I used the IEA data to create this graph.
Spot the superpower:
 Nuclear power, capacity, country, IEA 2019. (Click to enlarge) It helps to have a second graph. France looks very impressive above, but nuclear power provides 70% of its electricity. In the USA, that large spike is a mere 20% of total power (see below).
The USA is using every source of energy it can…
 Nuclear power, share by generation fuel. (Click to enlarge)
So nearly everyone else has nukes. Though a consensus is only so useful. It doesn’t mean it’s cost effective for a wide brown isolated grid which has other options. We do, after all, have 300 years of coal power (and exports) at our disposal. And as we’ve seen in past studies, coal was still cheaper.
Should we have a discussion? What kind of crazy-land would not?
9.6 out of 10 based on 72 ratings
Mysterious CO2 activity in New Zealand shows Phytoplankton at work
Tom Quirk both finds a mystery and solves it.
Carbon dioxide is a “well mixed gas” yet CO2 levels over New Zealand start rising there each year in March — a whole month before we see it CO2 start to rise over Tasmania. Air over Cape Grim in Tasmania will be blown by the prevailing wind over to New Zealand about five days later. So these two stations should be showing similar numbers throughout the year. Instead some process in NZ is pushing up CO2 early. Levels also peak earlier in New Zealand, and by September, in early spring, some process around NZ is pulling the CO2 out of the sky. Both NZ and Tasmania share large forested areas, so that wouldn’t explain the difference.
Quirk wondered if it had something do with phytoplankton, so he searched for satellite data that measures chlorophyll in the ocean and shows, voila, that there is major activity right around the Baring Head station at the same time as CO2 levels are falling. Indeed, the station is smack in the middle of a mass phytoplankton bloom.
He calculates that each year about one quarter of a ppm is removed by phytoplankton around Baring Head in NZ. Put into context, the total rise of CO2 each year is around six times that in NZ which makes the effect of plankton seem modest — but the bloom in NZ is but a tiny part of the global rises and falls of phytoplankton all around the world. So the most important question remains unanswered — just how much of the yearly rise and fall of CO2 globally is driven by plankton?
Previously Quirk found a huge 2.5Gt carbon spike in 1990 (which is 9Gt of CO2) — as if three extra China’s were suddenly emitting CO2 that year. The best explanation was that changes in wind patterns and ocean currents meant it was a bad year for phytoplankton. When phytoplankton struggle, they don’t draw down the usual CO2, hence the spike.
Another study (Martiny, 2013) found that phytoplankton might be drawing up twice as much carbon as modelers thought. While Guidi et al 2015 looked at viruses and discovered that only 10 out of 5,000 were predictive of CO2 levels and these were viruses that infected plankton.
Humans put out only 4% of global CO2, so in terms of whether humans can outcompete cyanobacteria et al, the answer appears to be “no”.
 Scanning electron microscope image of Syracosphaera azureaplaneta.. | Jeremy Young. What this means is 1/ that there is a lot we don’t know about the CO2 cycle, and 2/ there are very big players out there that have nothing to do with our airconditioners and cars. It means 3/ that there is another large force that can’t be managed with carbon taxes.
There are still mysteries: Quirk notes that something else was going on around Baring Head in the 70s and 80s when there was an even larger difference between the two stations. Perhaps this was due to ocean currents shifting? Until we understand the global carbon cycle why are we even pretending to control it?
— Jo
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A comparison of atmospheric CO2 measurements at Cape Grim and Baring Head
Guest Post by Tom Quirk
Cape Grim 41 S, 145 E and Baring Head 41 S, 175 E have provided long running measurements of atmospheric CO2 made by the CSIRO[1] and the Scripps Institute for Oceanography[2] (SIO). Cape Grim is on the north-west tip of Tasmania and some 2,500 km from Baring Head on the south-east tip of the North Island of New Zealand.
Seasonal Variations
Seasonal variations are easily extracted from the SIO data as monthly measurements and monthly seasonally adjusted values are provided. The CSIRO data is not as helpful but it is possible by smoothing the monthly measurements to get seasonally adjusted values. The difference on a monthly basis gives the seasonal variations.
The seasonal variations of atmospheric CO2 for Cape Grim agree with the observed seasonal variations at the South Pole 90 S but differ from the seasonal variations at Baring Head by of order one month. This can be seen in Figure 1 where the mid-year rise in CO2 comes at Baring Head before Cape Grim. The westerly winds in the “roaring forties” are 20 to 40 km per hour so CO2 at Cape Grim would arrive at Baring Head some 5 days later but this is not seen in the measurements.
 Figure 1: Average seasonal variations for the South Pole, Baring Head and Cape Grim derived from Scripps and CSIRO monthly measurements from 1985 to 2015
There may be an explanation for this as Baring Head is surrounded by oceans that experience chlorophyll-blooms as phytoplankton numbers increase and remove CO2 from the ocean which then rebalances CO2 with the atmosphere through exchange. The phytoplankton bloom is shown in Figure 2 from a fascinating paper by Murphy et al using satellite measurements to detect the ocean surface changes in chlorophyll[3]
 Figure 2: Location of Baring Head on a satellite image of chlorophyll-a concentrations around New Zealand (25°-55°S 155°E-170°W) in November 1997. . Extract from Murphy et al SeaWiFS NZ chlorophyll3
The variations in chlorophyll through the year are shown for 9 months in Figure 3 for September 1997 to August 1998. There are seasonal variations and regional variations around the North and South islands of New Zealand.
 ….  Figure 3: SeaWiFS monthly-composite images of chlorophyll-a concentrations around New Zealand (25°-55°S 155°E-170°W) between September 1997 and August 1998. Extract from Murphy et al SeaWiFS NZ chlorophyll3
The composite average chlorophyll-a concentrations for regions around New Zealand are shown in Figure 4. The regions are the Central Tasman Sea (CTS) and the subtropical water east of North Island (STE) to cover east and west of the North Island while the South Island is covered by Subtropical Front regions east (SFE) and west (SFW).
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10 out of 10 based on 59 ratings
Two weeks later, and the excuses are still flowing.
 The left lost because: a/ their policies were stupidly ambitious and unfundable, or 2/ Tasmanian greens went too far north.
The ABC says “2”.
If only Bob Brown had got some Queenslanders to do the Adani protest instead, Bill Shorten would be PM:
Michael Slezak, ABC Enviroment and Science Ad Writer:
Like many Australians, green groups were surprised by the federal election result.
Underlying much of their campaigning was the belief that the majority of voters wanted stronger climate action.
But the results did not seem to bear that out.
Did environmental groups fail to read public sentiment? And did they, in fact, help the Coalition to victory?
It’s all so easy in hindsight:
One of Australia’s leading social researchers, Rebecca Huntley, said the Stop Adani Convoy strategy was bound to fail.
“People from outside the area coming in — that just pisses people off,” said Dr Huntley, who heads up Vox Populi Research.
ABC Staff can always find someone to say what the journalists are thinking: in this case, that people might vote for a coal mine, but there’s no way they like coal:
Paul Williams is a senior lecturer in politics at Griffith University in Queensland and is one of the country’s foremost experts on elections in that state. He said the Stop Adani Convoy probably cost Labor at least “tens of thousands of votes” in Queensland, if not “hundreds of thousands”.
“That doesn’t mean the Queenslanders are in love with Adani — they’re not,” said Dr Williams.
Sure. Queenslanders couldn’t possibly like money or jobs.
“Adani became totemic — it was a totem for development and for blue-collar job creation.”
Stupid workers just like totems.
No Queenslanders, miners, or workers were interviewed. The ABC is one-billion-dollars of pop-psychology.
The answer is always “go left”
Labor lost because it wasn’t green enough says Greenpeace chief:
Chief of Greenpeace Australia David Ritter said if Labor had strengthened its environmental policies, the environmental movement would have been fully behind the party — a sentiment more-or-less echoed by all the environmental groups the ABC spoke to.
If only Greenpeace had endorsed Labor instead of putting them below One Nation in preferences… oh wait. Nevermind.
Trusting politicians to deliver
But the environmental movement does not accept its actions were a major reason for Labor’s loss.
What does investigative reporting mean? Michael Slezak asked all his friends:
Most people the ABC spoke to pointed to the money spent by coal miner Clive Palmer, utter distrust of mainstream politics and what they described as scare campaigns run by the Coalition.
If the ABC were the PR wing of the Greens party could they have written a better press release? Hardly. A press release from the Greens would have the Greens logo on it. ABC “News” masquerades as third party endorsement.
If you live in a nation with public broadcasting. Sell. It. Now.
9.8 out of 10 based on 69 ratings
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10 out of 10 based on 8 ratings
 A big new study by electricity grid nerds (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) shows that after all the money and pain of 20 years of forced transition Australia’s electricity has shifted from 85% coal powered to 75% coal powered, which cost billions and as a bonus, made electricity more expensive and unstable. We drove out some brown coal, but swapped it for black coal. Instead of ousting coal power, the extra solar and wind power replaced some gas and hydro.
The authors are genuine independent experts, and the report is incredibly detailed — so this is rare — but still suffers from serious drawbacks:
- The team doesn’t question the need for an artificial expensive transition. Almost all the problems they describe are caused by government policies that task our grid with changing the climate as well as producing cheap and reliable electricity.
- In a grid being ruined by inept policy, the implied solutions almost all involve more regulation and government policy. If our gas prices are too high we could ban sales overseas, but then we lose the export income. The left hand steals from the right. The free market solution is to use another fuel, like coal or nukes, or explore for more gas. When the new report says “Thermal plants are aging and are highly unlikely to be replaced by new coal plants” they don’t add — but only because government policy prevents this.
- Changing markets and scheme “Design” won’t save us — it won’t make low density energy more dense, it won’t make intermittent supply more reliable, or batteries cheaper, or open up vast land near the demand for electricity. All these are structural problems — and every solution involves throwing money.
This report is very useful for identifying problems but not so much for figuring out solutions — to be fair, Paul McArdle and team are not selling their report as such. That’s not their job — that’s Angus Taylor’s.
Stephen Letts, ABC
Australia’s National Electricity Market and power generators are struggling to come up with a coherent plan “to keep the lights on” due to policy and pricing limitations, according to a major independent study of the sector.
No. The problems are due to policy ambitions — do we want 50Hz or fluffy clouds? Holistic thinking starts with checking those boring assumptions that underlie the whole gig: “is there a cause and effect link” or is our energy policy driven by twitter hashtags and namecalling moviestars? Can anyone, anywhere on Earth find observations recorded by actual instruments that shows that the humble Australian 50GW grid will stop the seas rising? There probably isn’t a validated model on Earth that shows that, or even an unvalidated one.
What they show is that the whole system is chaotic, contradictory, has perverse incentives and isn’t achieving much. Say hello to Problems With Centralized Planning v101.
Keep reading →
9.7 out of 10 based on 86 ratings
Could the ABC be more incompetent? Not only do they deny linguistic history, fail to do basic research, have no data, nor cogent argument, they don’t come up with any new words in common use, and they resort to kindergarten name-calling as if it was “scientific”.
Here’s a group of paid propaganda workers who have destroyed basic English — now pretending that the distortion of the language was somehow a natural grassroots progression instead of their own sloppy tool to silence debate.
Climate change has started to influence our language. Here’s how
by someone called “ABC News Breakfast”
Climate change isn’t just affecting our planet, it’s also shifting the language we use, as idioms take on new meaning and words are created to express the unique phenomenon.
Some words have been popularised by musicians and filmmakers, while the rather grandly named Bureau of Linguistic Reality has started crowdsourcing new terms and definitions.
The Guardian media outlet also announced this month it was updating its style guide on climate, suggesting “climate sceptic” be swapped for “climate science denier”, and “global warming” for “global heating”.
Let’s be real, the term “denier” has been in use for 544 years and means essentially the same now as it did then. In 1475, to be a denier meant to reject a religion, and so it is today. If you don’t have faith that solar panels can stop storms you are a denier — a lizard brain robot fool that can’t “see” the light.
The Guardian only swapped “climate denier” for “climate science denier” because they looked so stupid when skeptics said (as I have been saying for years) Which person on Earth denies we have a climate? The phrase was literal rank nonsense with no practical definition in English or science. But who cares? Is language a tool to communicate via accurate shared defined meanings or a self-serving tool to confuse and fool?
As for “global warming” becoming “global heating” — this is just the usual progression of propaganda terms. Once a phrase becomes a joke cliche, it’s time to invent a new phrase. On a cold day the masses now say “we could use some global warming”. No shock value left for agitprop, so bring in “global heating”.
This is mere projection of their Christmas wish list
Who needs evidence, when you can just make up a fantasy:
“There are a lot of words and phrases that are coming into English that are becoming part of the new dialect,” crossword creator and self-confessed word nerd David Astle said.
“It’s looking at the fact this is a changing world, so what are the words we need?”
Let’s talk “facts”. So what exactly are the “lots” of “new words” the ABC is talking about — There’s Cli-fi, a term that almost no normal person uses. Plus solastalgia, both of which are not included in the top 86,800 words in the English language. So about 0.0001% of the population uses these words and they both work at the ABC.
Other words include “Greenwashing”, envirocrime, ecocide, “Green economy” and “closed loop”?
How about some terms the ABC missed:
Like ClimateGate, Green Tape, Green Greed, The Green Blob, junk science, carbonista‘s, EcoWorriers, the Adjustoscene and the Gore Phenomena. How about “children won’t know what science is”.
The Urban Dictionary has a couple of others:
Mannian: “The act of declaring an event or occurrence as unprecedented without having examined the necessary evidence to substantiate the claim.
Or Cli-mate: A combination of the words climate and primate to signify the primitive (primate like) views of the world climate situation. Instead of thinking for themselves, doing research or even investigating both sides of the story, these Cli-mates follow the new religion of environmentalism blindly based on falsified data from Climategate. Sadly, you cannot debate with Cli-mates about the issue despite various climate experts testifying that there is no “global warming”.
What’s evidence? Whatever you want.
Which genius linguists or data sources did the ABC “interview”? Their own pet activists, and data — what’s that?
The ABC quotes “word nerd” David Astle who writes crosswords, and the The Bureau of Linguistical Reality (BLR). Apparently the latter is worthy of a subheader and half a page of descriptors. The BLR is a website set up by two women who got funding from the bizarrely named: “Invoking the Pause” which partners with 350.org, and pretty much the entire Green Blob. BLR is so popular most posts still have zero comments. Hey, but it’s only been running five years. I think some skeptics should pop in and help them get started.
10 out of 10 based on 82 ratings
 Back in the unpoliticized Pliocene it’s possible that cosmic rays bombarded Earth and triggered lightning which started fires all around the Earth. This may (warning: speculation) have pushed human ancestors to stand on two legs. In the politicized Holocene, however cosmic rays are “irrelevant”. Ancient cosmic rays can set the Earth on fire apparently, change dominant species, and leave a charcoal layer around the Earth. But changes in cosmic rays lately can *not* cause any changes in modern lightning and cloud cover.
Color me skeptical that there is a cause and effect link between fires and homo-four-legs becoming homo-two-legs. It’s possible, and interesting, but a little bit “just so”. There are many advantages in standing upright — seeing further, reaching higher, standing in water, and carrying booty or babies. Some dinosaurs also evolved to be bipedal.
The study reminds us that for most of human history Space Weather was important. It’s only modern climate models that decree astronomical-stuff = zero.
Another previous study showed that lightning strikes occur in time with the spinning Sun in 150 year old Japanese farm records.
Supernovae bombarded Earth with cosmic energy starting as many as 8 million years ago, with a peak some 2.6 million years ago, initiating an avalanche of electrons in the lower atmosphere…
The authors believe atmospheric ionization probably triggered an enormous upsurge in cloud-to-ground lightning strikes that ignited forest fires around the globe. These infernos could be one reason ancestors of Homo sapiens developed bipedalism — to adapt in savannas that replaced torched forests in northeast Africa.
“It is thought there was already some tendency for hominins to walk on two legs, even before this event,” said lead author Adrian Melott, professor emeritus of physics & astronomy at the University of Kansas. “But they were mainly adapted for climbing around in trees. After this conversion to savanna, they would much more often have to walk from one tree to another across the grassland, and so they become better at walking upright. They could see over the tops of grass and watch for predators. It’s thought this conversion to savanna contributed to bipedalism as it became more and more dominant in human ancestors.”
Based on a “telltale” layer of iron-60 deposits lining the world’s sea beds, astronomers have high confidence supernovae exploded in Earth’s immediate cosmic neighborhood — between 100 and only 50 parsecs (163 light years) away — during the transition from the Pliocene Epoch to the Ice Age.
Keep reading →
8.9 out of 10 based on 38 ratings
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9.3 out of 10 based on 15 ratings
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