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Good news. The Australian government is cutting out the enviro-middlemen, saying “No” to one $11 billion Green Blob.
Australia stands as the only wealthy country to have ruled out a contribution to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund. As of last week, the fund had received pledges from 22 countries totalling $US9.6 billion ($A11.2 billion) against an initial funding target of $US10 billion.
The UN money making scheme was never about the poor or the environment. If it was they wouldn’t be wasting “aid” on so-called clean energy subsidies, which won’t change the weather:
The fund is a new financing mechanism to help developing countries protect themselves from the impacts of climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It will invest in clean energy generation and distribution, energy-efficient buildings and transport, forest conservation and management, and the “climate-proofing” of infrastructure and agriculture against storms, floods and higher temperatures.
Apparently the Australian government can see that funding these UN agencies is hand-feeding sharks. By paying for environmental aid direct, our tax funds might achieve something useful, and it exposes the hypocritical self-interest of the Green Gravy train. Which environmental groups will praise Abbott and Bishop? All the ones that put the environment and the poor ahead of the Blobby.
That list here …
Instead, the so-called greenies will talk about Australia committing unforgivable social crimes like “falling out of step”, “failing to match international action” and being “mean”.
9.3 out of 10 based on 161 ratings
The headlines are burning around the nation: 2014 was the hottest ever spring! Except it wasn’t. The UAH satellite coverage sees all of Australia, day and night, and are not affected by urban heat, airport tarmacs, “gaps in the stations”, or inexplicable adjustments.
When will the Bureau of Meteorology discover satellites? How many years will it take to train the ABC journalists to ask the BOM if satellite measurements agree or disagree with their highly adjusted, altered, deleted, and homogenised ground stations?
I used exactly no tax dollars to email John Christy of UAH, get the latest data, and graph it to show that in Australia 2014 was not the hottest spring, and not the hottest winter, summer or autumn either. Why can’t the BOM or the $1.1 billion ABC do that?
The obsession with cherry picked, unscientific and irrelevant single season records that are not even records shows how unscientific the Bureau of Met is. By its actions we see a diligent PR and marketing agency. If the BOM served the public, they would make sure the public knew that these records depend entirely on their choice of dataset and on their mysterious homogenization procedures. If the BOM were outstanding and honest, they would provide the full picture instead of activist’s sound-bites. It’s as if the BOM were working for Greenpeace instead of us…
Click to see the other “not hottest” seasons in Australia.
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8.4 out of 10 based on 138 ratings
Today is a big day for the trial of Peter Spencer versus the Commonwealth with Dr David Kemp, Minister for the Environment and Heritage in 2003, appearing as a witness. Bob Katter will give a press conference. Dr Alan Moran, former IPA director will appear too. See times and details below. Public are welcome.
The background: Peter Spencer versus the Commonwealth and why it’s potentially “bigger than Mabo”
Peter Spencer is the farmer in New South Wales who bought a farm and then lost 80% of it when rules changed to stop people clearing native vegetation. Unable to use most of his property, but still owing money on the mortgage for it, he was bankrupted. He broke no law, but lost his life’s work. Farmers all around Australia lost billions of dollars in assets but at the same time the federal government gained billions of dollars in carbon credits and met our Kyoto requirements by counting the carbon in the vegetation that was locked away.
The implications of this case apply to land holders across the continent. Indeed, if any governments can arbitrarily take assets without paying, or force a small minority to bear the burden of the majority, this is not just about property rights, it’s about the kind of country we want to live in.
Testimonies December 4th, 2014:
- 9:30AM, Federal MP Mr Bob Katter will hold a press conference in support of Peter Spencer at the entrance to the Federal Court building in Queens Square, Sydney.
- The valuer for Peter Spencer, Mr Colin Davies, will complete his evidence.
- Followed into the witness box by Dr David Kemp, who was the Minister for Environment & Heritage in the Howard Government at the time of the proclamation of the 2003 Native Vegetation Act. (Scheduled for 10:15am at Court 22B, Federal Court of Australia, Law Courts Building, Queens Square, Sydney.
- Next Dr Alan Moran, former Director of the Institute of Public Affairs as an expert witness for Peter Spencer.
Public visitors welcome — the sessions are 10:15 to 12:15 PM, and 2:15 to 4:15 PM.
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9.4 out of 10 based on 89 ratings
This is tin-tacks taken back from the Green Blob, but cheer it on. The Abbott government apparently wants to use the money to protect rainforests, instead of given to green-bureaucrats. Enjoy the apoplexy among greens and environmentalists. Excuse me, I think your priorities are showing!
ABC news
The Federal Government has slashed funding to a key United Nations environment agency by more than 80 per cent, stunning environmental groups ahead of a global climate change summit in Peru.
The ABC has learned the Government cut $4 million from the UN Environment Program (UNEP), which provides advice on environmental policies and climate change negotiations.
Instead of giving $1.2m a year, we are giving $200,000. True to form, the green-blobby is “stunned” and immediately responds with a higher ambit claim. There is a scale for everything, and too much is never enough:
Environmental groups are stunned, especially because according to UNEP’s Voluntary Indicative Scale of Assessments, Australia should have contributed around $2.2 million next year.
The money is going to the environment, and environmental groups hate that:
Environment Minister Greg Hunt said the Government had to “make choices in a difficult budget environment”.
“I would imagine that most Australians would see putting $12 million into coral reef protection within our region and combating illegal logging of the great rainforests of the Asia-Pacific as a pretty good investment compared with $4 million for bureaucratic support within the UN system,” Mr Hunt said.
The appropriate response when the government takes money from bureaucrats and uses it to protect reefs and rainforest is to call it “anti-environment”, “anti-nature”, “anti-science”, and “denier”.
Christine Milne is aghast:
The Greens leader, Christine Milne, labelled the funding cut “a slap in the face”. “Australia is a global pariah on the climate front,” Milne said on Tuesday. “This sleight of hand is just extraordinary.”
The denier-pariahs want to do what?
She accused the government of using money taken from UNEP to fund its commitment to stop illegal logging of rainforests, made at the World Parks Congress in Sydney in November.
What’s more important than rainforest to a Green? Our social standing among the global thought police!
“This is really Australia on a world stage behaving badly on the climate. We are so out of step as a nation with the rest of the world. We are not only risking the environment, but Australia’s standing in the world is seriously diminished by the Abbott government,” Milne said.
Keep talking Christine.
9.5 out of 10 based on 133 ratings
What’s better than Pravda? When Pravda is controlled by big government but masquerades as “commercial” and, even better, when it competes with and sucks money from independent competitors–making it harder for journalists who do ask the government hard questions to be heard at all.
Who needs the ABC? The BBC has arrived to provide the propaganda for free and wants to compete with commercial news outlets. They’ve appointed the most gullible journalists they could find (who’ll believe any official edict). Their new Australian Editor, Wendy Frew, accidentally revealed that while she’s good at rearranging a press release and calling it news, she is not too good with numbers.
In a BBC article yesterday by Wendy Frew titled “Australia has hottest spring on record as temperatures soar” comes the extraordinary news that Australia has warmed by 90C since 1910.
“Australia has been warming up by about 0.9C [a year] since 1910,” Dr Braganza told the BBC.
The online article was fixed this morning (with no mention of the mistake), though copies of the error appear elsewhere. It says something that Frew went out of her way to add “[a year]” into Braganza’s quote without doing the numbers and realizing what that meant. Despite her history of reporting climate news, evidently she did not know that all the climate fuss was about a total warming in Australia of only a tiny 0.9C in 100 years. (And that’s all the BOM can find even after sweeping adjustments that throw out the hottest original records, ignore the hot decades of the late 1800s, and artificially cool old temperatures down and make trends warmer by as much as 2C.) Was she surprised? We’ll never know.
BBC Global want Australian audiences and Australian advertising dollars too
The BBC announced on October 2, 2014 that they want Australian marketshare online — ratings matter, and so does the money:
BBC Global News Ltd, the world’s most trusted international news brand, is extending their local coverage in Australia by launching a dedicated Australian news service on BBC.com from October 21 and producing a series of programs called Australia Direct to air on BBC World News throughout the period of the G20 Summit.
BBC wants to beat commercial rivals:
“…director of advertising sales Alistair McEwan said. “We’ve got to increase our positioning up that ranking. We wouldn’t want to put a number on what rank we’re looking to achieve.
“We have growth international growth objectives for audience, traffic and revenue.
“We’ll aim to commercialise that growth across desktop and mobiles.”
“We’re the most globally tweeted news source in the world,” Davies said. “What we are seeing globally is that people will go to a trusted news source.”
Naturally, the BBC is filling all the holes left by the private media:
In addition to news, untold Australian stories on a range of topics will be commissioned for the BBC.com verticals: Future, Culture, Autos, Capital and Travel, as well as the newly launched BBC Earth.
Evidently there are not enough stories on cars and holidays.
Wendy Frew’s role is to “drive the news agenda” in a “priority market”:
BBC News has appointed Wendy Frew as Australia Editor, Online. Wendy is a former SMH journalist and Chief of Staff and her remit will be to drive the news agenda of the day and work with our global correspondents and growing team of freelancers on news features and analysis. She will be joined by another journalist who together will work with the BBC’s Sydney correspondent Jon Donnison, and regular contributors Phil Mercer and Katie Beck.
Chris Davies, Director of Sales and Marketing, BBC Global News Limited said: ‘Australia is a priority market for us and with this local market investment together with our large network of international journalists, we are uniquely placed to offer readers stories they don’t normally hear from local media, giving them the full picture on news that affects them.’
When the government runs a commercial media outlet
Is the British taxpayer funding it? Hard to say, but it’s wholly owned by the BBC, and its aim is “commercial returns”. What’s better than Pravda? When Pravda is controlled by big government but masquerades as “commercial” and, even better, when it competes with and sucks money from independent competitors–making it harder for journalists who do ask the government hard questions to be heard at all. The Green Blob expands.
In Australia we think of the ABC as being a media octopus:
It is now easily the biggest media outlet in the country, with five radio stations, four TV stations, an online newspaper, a huge social media presence, a publishing house and a string of bookshops promoting ABC-approved writers and journalists. — Andrew Bolt
But the BBC is really the giant deep sea squid. Look at the reach:
BBC World News and BBC.com, the BBC’s commercially funded international 24-hour English news platforms, are owned and operated by BBC Global News Ltd. BBC World News television is available in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, and over 380 million households and 1.8 million hotel rooms. The channel’s content is also available on 178 cruise ships, 53 airlines and 23 mobile phone networks. BBC.com offers up-to-the minute international news and in-depth analysis for PCs, tablets and mobile devices to more than 76 million unique browsers each month.
“BBC Worldwide is the main commercial arm and a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Its vision is to build the BBC’s brands, audiences, commercial returns “
Wendy Frew has been producing climate “news” for years (without realizing all the fuss was about 0.9C of warming). Check out this article from 2007 in the SMH (an excellent training ground for unskeptical reporters).
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9.4 out of 10 based on 87 ratings
The UN Department of Pointless Statistics tells us that 250,000 extra people will die every year from 2030 – 2050 because of climate change. This is assuming that the climate models which have never worked, start to, and that people behave like gladioli, staying put, not building walls, farms or inventing better gladioli homes. It also assumes that a 60% increase global atmospheric plant fertilizer will make no difference to crops.
Indur Goklany tries to help the UN by checking some of their assumptions in his new report: “Unhealthy Exaggeration” GWPF
“He argues that the health organisation wrongly assumed that people would not take practical steps to protect themselves. These include improving water supplies and hygiene to reduce disease and relocating away from stretches of coast most vulnerable to flooding. The assumptions used by WHO are not mentioned in its fact sheet but instead relegated to the third column of a table in the full report, which is based on computer models. The column, headed “potential options not included in model”, reveals that the forecast for deaths from diarrhoea does not include “improved water, sanitation and hygiene”. The forecast for coastal flooding victims does not include “population relocation” and heatwave deaths does not take into account “improved heat health protection measures; early warning systems”. — The Times (via GWPF)
I would add that at the moment the current rate of global death is about 55 million people a year, so the theoretical “climate” toll would be an extra 0.4% above that. Unless, of course, the global death rate falls.
The trend so far during mass human CO2 output:
 All that warming and global death rates (dark blue) decreased. UNICEF record the effect of climate change on infant mortality to date:
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9.1 out of 10 based on 88 ratings
Prof Penny Sackett, Herald Sun December 04, 2009
We’ve got 5 years to save world says Australia’s chief scientist Professor Penny Sackett
THE planet has just five years to avoid disastrous global warming, says the Federal Government’s chief scientist.
Prof Penny Sackett yesterday urged all Australians to reduce their carbon footprint.
The professor said even if all the world stopped producing carbon dioxide immediately, temperature increases of 1.3C were unavoidable.
Asked to explain data that showed the earth had been cooling in recent years, the trained astrophysicist acknowledged air temperatures had leveled during the La Nina weather pattern, now nearing an end.”
Disastrous Global Warming will be locked in by Thursday I would say. Start packing the bunker.
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9 out of 10 based on 166 ratings
A Sunday change of pace, for those who are musically inclined. – Jo
The Vicar of Bray (probably now preaching at a college in upstate New York)
An updated version[1] by William York (who is looking for a singer, or group. A counter tenor or others?)
In George Bush Senior’s golden days when climate no harm meant,
A zealous scientist was I, and so I gained preferment.
I saw the rise of CO2
might be a source of funding
And so I wrote computer code that soon defied unbundling.
…
chorus: And this be law, I shall insist
Until my dying day, sir
That what so ere the weather ist,
The climate is at fault, sir.
…
When William Clinton came to power, then climate was in fashion,
And bold Al Gore bestrode the world whose climate was his passion
The IPCC, I found, did fit
Full well my own projections
And I had been a Wall Street quant, but for these good connections.
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8 out of 10 based on 58 ratings
…
8.7 out of 10 based on 30 ratings
The word revolution is overused and done to death. But in the case of medicine, we are in the midst of one. Here are three stories just out this week. It’s possibly none of these will end up being useful clinically, but the sheer volume of results like these mean that sooner or later getting a diagnoses of cancer will mean something very different. It’s time for good news stories. Let’s redirect the gravy train of pointless climate and renewables research. (Sell the ABC and use the money to double our medical research budget. How many lives might we change?*)
These are not instant miracles, but potential ones. The bladder cancer drug ultimately helped about a quarter of all patients. It was a small trial. Two patients of 68 appeared to reach the holy grail: to be tested free of cancer (though it doesn’t mean they are). The second news report talks about a small study targeting a similar mechanism to stop melanoma that only helps about 30% of patients — the study successfully predicted which ones. In both cases the idea is to stop the cancer from hiding from the immune system. Some cancer cells produce molecules called PD-1 or PD-L1 (I don’t know if they are related) to trick the immune system into leaving them alone. The powerful thing about this is the offer of the holy grail for more people: if the immune system recognizes cancer cells as dangerous, even some late stage disseminated cancers could be cleared in a few months and with few of the side effects of the poisonous chemotherapy drugs. Our cellular soldiers can seek out and destroy the problem cells.
The third news story is an early stage “proof of concept” study. It shows that we can already identify cancer markers to an individual cancer (in mice) and make a vaccine to train the immune system to find it. It’s risky — if we vaccinate people against a marker which is also present on healthy cells we unleash an autoimmune disease. Theoretically with DNA tests we should be able to isolate specific tumor mutations that do not appear in healthy cells. It’s a question of cost. But cancer treatment is currently very expensive and costs of DNA analysis and vaccine creation have fallen dramatically in the last 20 years. Sooner or later this will probably be realistic — perhaps as the last resort for people with rarer cancers that don’t respond to other treatments, or who knows?
9.1 out of 10 based on 62 ratings
If you suffer from an uncontrollable urge to claim that peer review is a part of The Scientific Method (that’s you Matthew Bailes, Pro VC of Swinburne), the bad news just keeps on coming. Now, we can add the terms “Peer Review Rigging” to “Peer-review tampering”, and “Citation Rings”.
Not only do personal biases and self-serving interests mean good papers are slowed for years and rejected for inane reasons, but gibberish gets published, and in some fields most results can’t be replicated. Now we find (is anyone surprised?) that some authors are even reviewing their own work. It’s called Peer-Review-Rigging. When the editor asks for suggestions of reviewers, you provide pseudonyms and bogus emails. The editor sends the review to a gmail type address, you pick it up, and voila, you can pretend to be an independent reviewer.
One researcher, Hyung-In Moon, was doing this to review his own submissions. He was caught because he sent the reviews back in less than 24 hours. Presumably if he’d waiting a week, no one would have noticed.
Authors: Cat Ferguson, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky are the staff writer and two co-founders, respectively, of Retraction Watch in New York City.
Moon’s was not an isolated case. In the past 2 years, journals have been forced to retract more than 110 papers in at least 6 instances of peer-review rigging. What all these cases had in common was that researchers exploited vulnerabilities in the publishers’ computerized systems to dupe editors into accepting manuscripts, often by doing their own reviews. The cases involved publishing behemoths Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, SAGE and Wiley, as well as Informa, and they exploited security flaws that — in at least one of the systems — could make researchers vulnerable to even more serious identity theft. “For a piece of software that’s used by hundreds of thousands of academics worldwide, it really is appalling,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen,
Even Moon himself thinks the editors should “police the system against people like him”.
“editors are supposed to check they are not from the same institution or co-authors on previous papers.”
That would rule out half the publications in the climate science world.
The worst case involved 130 papers:
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8.8 out of 10 based on 118 ratings
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have looked at drag-reducing devices on semi-trucks, and say they can conserve billions of gallons of fuel plus tens of billions of dollars. This not exactly rocket science.
 Boat-tailed bullet (left) The researchers estimate that trailer-skirts and boat-tails (see the pic below) could reduce drag on trucks by as much as 25%, which means they would save about 13% on their fuel bill. Apparently only a few percent of US trucks use these devices at the moment, and the researchers claim they can make up to a 19% improvement in fuel economy.
If these work that well (and are not too expensive or painful on carrying capacity), the free market will take care of this pretty quickly.
Boat tails means a tapered shape at the back of the vehicle. They are already used on bullets (and boats, obviously). There are pics of “boat-tails” on trucks below, but my favourite shot is this boat-tail on a car. A DIY masterpiece. It’s a “Pontiac Firefly (Canadian Geo Metro). The maker Darin Cosgrove says “the Firefly squeezed out 64 miles per gallon during testing.” I can’t see mums rushing to go food shopping in it though. Boat tails on trucks are a lot less ambitious.
 A homemade boat tail on a car from cardboard and duct tape. Researchers estimate it could save $26b in fuel
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8.6 out of 10 based on 82 ratings
How big is the Green B-lobby? So big, whole research projects are devoted to better ways to push propaganda onto voters. In this case, it turns out that despite an international PR blitz to unscientifically link your car exhaust to extreme floods in Bangladesh (etc and so forth), 65% of the US public just aren’t buying it. Instead the study finds that people are actually not too bad at judging whether a season was warmer than usual. (Was anyone surprised at this after 500 million years of evolution?). Disappointingly, though, for those pushing the climate propaganda, the meme that man-made global warming is to blame for all heatwaves, snowfalls, floods, hurricanes, and reckless fish is not working.
“Only 35 percent of U.S. citizens believe global warming was the main cause of the abnormally high temperatures during the winter of 2012”
This is a cruel blow to climate change activists. They had pinned their hopes on generating fear among voters by trying to associate every storm and bad-hair day to man-made global warming. But two-thirds of the public are not fooled. Even when they “personally experience” abnormally warm winters, or even hear news of a whole series of severe events, 65% of people don’t believe it was man-made.
The abnormally warm winter was just one in an ongoing series of severe weather events — including the 2010 Russian heat wave, Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the 2013 typhoon in the Philippines — that many believed would help start convincing global warming skeptics.
“There’s been a lot of talk among climate scientists, politicians and journalists that warmer winters like this would change people’s minds,” McCright said. “That the more people are exposed to climate change, the more they’ll be convinced. This study suggests this is not the case.”
Perhaps the population is growing more propaganda-weary?
This study further finds that state-level mean temperature anomalies do not influence whether or not people attribute warmer- than-normal local winter temperatures to global warming.
Naturally, when you struggle with cause-and-effect in the climate, you also struggle with cause-and-effect in psychology. Does political orientation influence climate belief, or does climate belief influence political orientation? That is not a question McCright asks.
Given the politicization of climate science and political polarization on climate change beliefs in the US, it is not surprising that attribution of warmer-than-usual winter temperatures to global warming is filtered through partisan and ideological lenses.
Or maybe people’s voting habits are filtered through logical-lenses and they turned away from parties which pushed stupid ideas? How about that hypothesis?
[Science Daily]
Global warming skeptics unmoved by extreme weather
What will it take to convince skeptics of global warming that the phenomenon is real? Surely, many scientists believe, enough droughts, floods and heat waves will begin to change minds.
But a new study led by a Michigan State University scholar throws cold water on that theory.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 81 ratings
Somewhere in the country that led the Industrial Revolution, hundreds of the best and brightest most-productive workers work full time at predicting, gaming, marketing and compensating for the complex modern laws of electricity. And during winter months, thousands of other productive workers have to stop work because the electricity they need might be too expensive. With the UK’s spare electrical generation capacity down to a razor thin 4% this winter, UK manufacturers are warning they will have to shut down even more often than they already do.
Someone thought it would be a good idea to use the UK electricity grid to control global weather, which turned out to be expensive. In a plan to contain electricity costs, someone else had the bright idea to trim back electricity peaks by charging a lot lot more during the worst three half hour periods of energy demand, known as triads. The mysterious triad spikes are subject to the weather and human circadian timetables and hit a bit randomly, though most often on a Monday to Thursday from 5 – 5.30pm. By definition they occur in winter months, and must be separated from the last triad by 10 days (though I didn’t think the weather worked like that?).
No one is exactly sure when the next dreaded triad will hit and contractor services and online calculators have sprung up to try to predict them. Even after they’ve hit, no one can be sure they had a triad, because they won’t officially find out ’til the end of February when those peakiest of peak winter days can be identified. When businesses guess that a triad might be about to happen they can shut down or crank up the spare diesel generators. By doing this a large corporation might save £50,000 of its electricity bill.
In a mild winter, when electricity demand is flatish, the expensive triad times are only little spikes and are very hard to predict. So, this genius of bureaucratic planning creates a situation where mild winters with lower electricity demand may mean more shutdowns. Go figure.
Green Britain: UK Manufacturers Warn Of Shutdowns Amid Energy Emergency Measures
Date: 23/11/14 Tanya Powley, Financial Times
Britain’s heavy manufacturers have warned they may be forced to shut down more often this winter to avoid high power costs because of emergency measures to cut demand.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 102 ratings
Channel Nine asked it’s readers “Do you believe in man-made global warming?” Over 122,000 people responded.
The final tally emailed to me this morning was: Yes: 38,311 No: 84,240
 The tally at 1:50pm EST. As far as I know, the link to it was not posted on any major skeptical blog except possibly in comments (correct me if I’m wrong). In other words, the poll may be a reasonable representation of the web audience of one of our major free-to-air TV Channels.
A few weeks ago ABC Radio national did an online poll asking their readers if the IPCC was right about a four or five degree warming this century. That was too extreme, even for ABC readers: 91% of 3101 voters said “No”.
A new US poll finds that even though most Americans identify with what would be called environmental values, hardly anyone thought climate change mattered. The Washington Post:
…”64 percent ‘feel a deep connection with nature and the Earth.'”
Just 5 percent of Americans thought climate change was the most important issue in the U.S. today.”
Amber comments on climatechangedespatch: “5% must be the university profs and the donation seeking green blob to get it that high.”
Believers may have the run of the old media, but Skeptics are all over the new media. And that’s no accident. (Think preaching from the pulpit versus the printing press, when the latter appeared a few hundred years ago.)
h/t to Matty, Chris and Jim
9.4 out of 10 based on 154 ratings
Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will?“
Two engineers who worked on the Google RE<C project admit with candour that they used to think that renewable technologies could help prevent climate change, but they now know that was wrong, saying “Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will?” The brutal answer eventually is “we don’t know”. The RE<C project started in 2007 and was buried in 2011. Google invested $850 million in clean energy. (For a tiny $100,000 I could have saved Google $850 million dollars. If they only asked skeptics instead of Al Gore…)
Ross Koningstein & David Fork admit with admirable honesty that their assumptions about renewables were wrong. But they still haven’t realized their assumptions about climate models are wrong too. Next year perhaps?
Most of their article is about the engineering hurdles of dispatchable and distributed energy. But they also talk about the Google time management philosophy, their 70-20-10 rule (70% core work, 20% cutting edge but viable, 10% “crazy” possibilities). What they don’t seem to realize 70:20:10 is pointless if 100% of their time is spent solving a problem that doesn’t exist. The Google innovation approach is a pot-luck dip. Five percent of any project — and it’s the first 5% — should be about testing all the assumptions and right back to the very first one. If Google did this research it would have been obvious, and years ago, that not only were renewables unlikely to reduce CO2, but that reducing CO2 was pointless, and indeed, probably counter-productive.
It’s not just about wasting time and money. What if you spend years trying to improve the weather, and not only failed to do that, but had the perverse side-effect of reductions in crop growth, and increases in food and energy prices? What if your main success was to increase the size of deserts — CO2 feeds plants and extra CO2 has the biggest effect on plants in arid zones. How would you feel if you tried to hold back the tide (which is barely rising) but children died of starvation instead?
For the record, the assumptions they should have tested were 1/ whether climate models are better at predicting the climate than any roulette wheel. 2/ whether there is any empirical evidence that climate feedbacks (especially water vapor in the upper atmosphere) are positive and amplify the effect of CO2 (they aren’t and they don’t). The evidence has been there for years that temperatures drive carbon dioxide, and that if carbon dioxide amplifies the temperature the effect is so small it can’t be measured with modern technology and the best data we have.
Spectrum IEEE
Google’s boldest energy move was an effort known asRE<C, which aimed to develop renewable energy sources that would generate electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power plants do. The company announced that Google would help promising technologies mature by investing in start-ups and conducting its own internal R&D. Its aspirational goal: to produce a gigawatt of renewable power more cheaply than a coal-fired plant could, and to achieve this in years, not decades.
As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach. So we’re issuing a call to action.
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8.9 out of 10 based on 95 ratings
Government, Opposition, what’s the difference? It’s all become shades of “bigness”. With the UK Big-Government orbiting in the shadow of the Mega-Government in the EU, is it any wonder an alternative had to spring forth? And Lo…
In case you haven’t heard, Mr Reckless left the UK Tories, joined UKIP (the UK Independence Party) and just won the byelection becoming UKIP’s second member of Parliament. It surprised quite a lot of people. Analysts are abuzz: the electorate was not as old or white as the first seat UKIP won, and it was ranked 271st on the list of seats UKIP “might win”. Labor won just 16% of the vote.
People seem to like the idea of small government, lower taxes, and politicians who don’t promise to change the weather. Who would have thought?
Perhaps the mighty English will one day even win the right to buy powerful hairdryers, and serious vacuums? We dare hope!
BBC News
UKIP’s victory was in many ways even more impressive than their triumph in Clacton. The ease with which they demolished a 9,000 Tory majority was striking and this after the Conservatives had strained every sinew to halt the UKIP bandwagon.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 114 ratings
It’s a trial described as potentially “bigger than Mabo”
Peter Spencer’s story is one I didn’t think could happen in Australia. He is the farmer in New South Wales who bought a farm and then lost 80% of it when rules changed to stop people clearing native vegetation. Unable to use most of his property, he was slowly bankrupted. Though he broke no law, he lost his life’s work and his beloved farm in late 2010. There was no way out. He couldn’t sell the property — who would buy a piece of land that could not be used? Farmers all around Australia lost billions of dollars in assets as the value of their land and produce declined. The legality of this is finally being tested in the Federal Court in Sydney starting this Monday, November 24, and continuing for the next three weeks. Hold your breath. This could be an enormous case, with implications for land holders across the continent.
 Much of his farm was native forest. This is the northern edge of Spencer’s property (Saarahnlee) The Federal Government can’t take your assets without paying, but the state governments can
The Native Vegetation Acts were brought in by the states to stop farmers clearing native plants — but no compensation was ever paid to farmers. The Federal Government used the carbon credits contained in that vegetation to meet Australia’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, yet the burden of supplying these credits fell on some farmers and not on other Australians.
The Commonwealth is not allowed to confiscate assets without due compensation — it’s in the Australian Constitution. But states can do it. So what if the Federal Government makes an arrangement with the states for the states to make the confiscatory laws instead — does that get around the Constitution, is that ok?
Carbon credits stored on farms are worth a lot of money
If Australia had emitted more than it was allowed to under the Kyoto Treaty then the Federal Government would supposedly have had to purchase carbon credits from overseas. As it happens Australia did meet its Kyoto obligations — our average emissions during 2008 through 2012 did not exceed 108% of the emissions in 1990 (the base year). In the event, after 2012, the countries that failed to meet their Kyoto obligations did not actually purchase credits, but when the Treaty was signed and when the Native Vegetation Acts were passed it was widely thought that they would have to. Some of the touted carbon credit prices were quite high– the recent Carbon Tax was $24.15 per tonne, for instance — and national emissions are measured in billions of tonnes.
Australia met its Kyoto obligations by stopping land clearing, but otherwise pretty much pursuing business-as-usual. The cost of meeting Australia’s obligations thus fell almost entirely on those farmers who were prevented from land clearing, and it was the Native Vegetation Acts of the states that did the preventing. In the 1990 base year, about 23% of Australia’s emissions were due to land clearing. By stopping land clearing, Australia could emit about 31% (= 8% + 23% ) more in the average year in 2008 to 2012 than in 1990, in all other sectors combined.
The Native Vegetation Act also has the perverse incentive of discouraging farmers from planting native plants. It now makes more sense to plant foreign species. What farmer could afford to let Australian trees grow?
Peter Spencer is doing this on behalf of all property owners in Australia and is determined not to give in
 Peter Spencer The funding ran out mid year, so he is representing himself. Spencer applied to the judge in October for more time to raise funds and find a lawyer to represent him, but the judge decided that the case was of public importance, had been delayed far too long already and he should go ahead without a lawyer. Spencer feels he has no choice but to make the most of it.
 A satellite image of Saarahnlee It is almost all mountainous native bushland. Yellow markers show significant points on his farm. (Click to enlarge). Peter Spencer’s fight has been going on for years. Remarkably, he soldiers on, undaunted, long after most men would have given up. Read this ABC interview from 2005 for a little background.
His farm, Saarahnlee, was possibly the highest altitude working farm in Australia, near Adaminaby at 1,500m. Spencer was involved in research and development toward high altitude projects like Merino breeding programs with CSIRO, trout farming, Korean Ginseng, and forest harvesting of Mountain Gum and Mountain Ash. At the highest point of his property a study on wind farming with a hydro pump system was under development with the ANZ Bank. The aim was to make it profitable without government subsidies. Spencer was pursuing creative and experimental projects related high altitude farming in Australia.
Should Australia be a country where honest work and personal assets can be randomly destroyed without compensation by the government? Should a few citizens be forced to bear the costs of the many, or do we share the load fairly?
If we want Australia to be a free and fair land, we need to do something: to draw the line — and stand up for what we know is right. The creeping power of capricious bureaucrats must be halted.
What kind of country do we want to live in?
He needs our help.
 Saarahnlee is just south of the ACT (Click to enlarge). ———————————————————-
More information:
Peter Spencer’s new blog: (add your voice)
Support Peter Spencer on Facebook.
Details of the Federal Court Case in Sydney Please go if you can!
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9.2 out of 10 based on 101 ratings
Fossils show those dang mammals lived in all the spots they weren’t supposed to live in. Climate models don’t predict the climate, and animal distribution models don’t predict (or in this case hindcast) animal distribution either. How little we know, and how adaptable is biology?
This calls into question all the headline prophecies about the extinction of cute furry critters due to climate change.
The modelers were sure that animals would be unable to cope with temperature changes and would not have lived in the same places as they do now during a climate so different. By crikey, it was an ice age! Yet those small mammals, whose defining biology is that regulate their own temperature, flummoxed the models by living nearer the glacier sheets where the models predicted they would not live.
All the alarming forecasts of local extinctions of mammals come from assumptions built into modern models that fail in multiple ways. The temperature changes from the last 20,000 years show that these mammals have already survived massive shifts, both colder and warmer, and that anything we face in the next century is but a flea on a hippo.
In the graph, the dots are the fossils, the blue marks the hypothesis — the zone where they were supposed to be confined. The stripes mark the ominous ice-cap-from-hell. (Where will those Canadians go?)
 Figure 1. Paleodistribution maps for the five mammal species under consideration. Points highlight fossil occurrences, blue-shaded areas indicate ENM hindcasts, hashed area indicates extent of glacial ice. Red points are from the high confidence window (both maximum and minimum ages within 40–17 ka) and yellow points are added in the inclusive window (only maximum age estimate within 40–17 ka).
Panel (A) shows the distribution of all LGM fossil sites in the conterminous USA from the FAUNMAP II database.
How devastating are these results?
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8.8 out of 10 based on 76 ratings
UPDATE: See Tony Thomas’s views on the course as it runs: UQ’s Denial 101x : Putting the stink in distinction. The course is living up to all expectations!
Would you too like to learn how to misinform people, mangle English, and toss cherry-picked factoids that avoid the real point? How about studying to be an apologist for scientists who take your taxes, but hide their data? Or perhaps you’ve always dreamed of being an obedient useful fool for the State, to help promote propaganda that governments can change the weather if the people just pay enough money?
Are you looking for a cause to pick up that you can brag about at parties to prove your social superiority, impress teenage girls, or hide your low self-esteem? Do you crave an outlet where you get the thrill of being a namecalling bully, but with the excuse that you are “saving the planet” and “being scientific”?
Good news, Queensland University is dumping any pretense that its science faculty uses logic or reason or has an interest in observable evidence. The university is advertising that abusing English definitions and words meets its standards of higher education. After all, no one denies we have climate, and “climate deniers” don’t exist, but it’s a useful propaganda term to fog, veil and clog up the public debate about climate science. John Cook who runs the course even admits that it’s an inaccurate term, but he won’t stop namecalling. The last thing we want of course, is a polite discussion of a complex topic. If fans of the man-made climate crisis have to provide evidence, or answer questions, the facade would crumble.
The best defense is offense, and the best offense is to be really offensive. Bring on the namecalling, derision, and character assassination. Skeptics are scum like holocaust deniers, and have a brain like a lizard. Don’t listen to them whatever you do!
Come learn these stone-age techniques: serve the names up with half-truths, lies by omission, and be a better useful idiot. Big bankers, parasitic industries, and self-serving politicians need you!
Calling all bullies, sign up now for Making Sense of Climate Science Denial at UQ.
Tony Thomas can’t wait: “I’ve only about 120 sleeps to the start of my Denial 101X course. I hope to be a John Cook Laureate.” Reader, Pat has signed up too.
Denial101X is a MOOC – massive online open course. It’s free for you, but sucks money from workers around Australia.
 … About this Course
In public discussions, climate change is a highly controversial topic. However, in the scientific community, there is little controversy with 97% of climate scientists concluding humans are causing global warming.
In the climate science community there is little controversy, because most people who question the hypothesis have been sacked, attacked, find it hard to publish papers and are subject to name-calling, exile, intimidation, and “climate apostasy“. There are no grants for skeptics, and monopolistic funding has purchased a “consensus”.
John Cook’s unscientific 97% study started as a logical fallacy, and ended by using irrelevant and mis-assigned papers to claim that a 0.3% consensus by their own definition was actually a 97% consensus (by quietly using a different definition). Nonetheless it is a quasi proxy for funding ratios in climate science, though it overestimates skeptical funding because many skeptical papers are written by volunteers. The real funding ratio is not 97 to 3 but more like 3500 to 1.
- The study can’t be replicated. (Legates et al)
- The data is hidden. Either Cook et al didn’t keep it (and are incompetent) or they did but it does not reflect well on them and they won’t release it (they are incompetent and deceptive too?).
- The definitions changed between the claims in the abstract and those in the paper. (Legates et a;)
- The raters were not independent. 7% of the ratings were wrong, and biased.
- The ratings data shows inexplicable patterns.
- Cook et al fail to report that their data fail their own validation test.
- Most of the papers were irrelevant. Those authors were writing about “impacts” or “mitigation” of climate change and not about the cause of climate change. Obviously skeptical scientists will not write about “mitigation” or “impacts” of climate change, so including these papers (and there are thousands) served the purpose of increasing the total number of papers claimed to be surveyed and also increases the percentage of “consensus”. That is an utterly predictable outcome. Good PR, lousy design.
- It’s not a representative sample, and Cook did not test to see if it was.
- The paper is used to make profoundly unscientific statements in the media. Cook et al endorse the fallacies.
In the wider scientific community there is so much controversy that skeptics outnumber believers, scientific associations have had revolts about climate change, scientists have quit their failing institutions, protested by hundreds on blogs.
I’ll help John with his course:
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9.3 out of 10 based on 119 ratings
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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