Volcano, lava spreads across road, Hawaii, May 2018.
The lava has reached Leilani estates. Rock and ash are being thrown into the air. Evacuations are underway. There has been some warning. Small earthquakes have been occurring. Cracks appearing in roads.
CFACT has a report from a 40 year career meteorologist who alleges that skeptics are silenced through intimidation and threats at the National Weather Service (NWS). He also says data is “altered for political purposes” and that he was advised nearly forty years ago that he could find fame and fortune with CO2.
““When I was a graduate student I had a professor come up to me, and he said in the late 1970s ‘If you want to make a name in the field, want to be famous, CO₂ is the place to go.’ There is a lot of money to be made, authority and control over people’s lives at stake.””
A whole generation of meteorologists and climate scientists have been raised with these incentives, and a culture of fear:
Meteorologist allegedly assaulted by NWS Director Uccellini
Adam Howser, CFACT
“I was giving a talk to fellow NWS staff about the jet stream flow in the upper atmosphere [in 2014]. What it showed was large amplitude waves in both the northern and southern hemispheres. I explained that the only way the jet stream could get to be high amplitude is if the atmosphere was actually cooling.”
“Right at the bathroom break, the Director of NWS, Louis Uccellini, put a hand on my chest and pushed me up against the wall and said ‘Don’t ever mention the word cooling again.’ He did not mean it in a ‘joking’ way, he absolutely violated my personal space and was dead serious.”
The whistleblower, who spoke to CFACT on the condition of anonymity, described a culture of fear and ostracism at NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) against those who dissent from the “global warming” narrative.
The accused NWS Director Uccellini, has responded through a spokeswoman, and claims that “this alleged incident never happened”, and that Uccellini “encourages open discussion on all science issues…”. The whistleblower disagrees saying that the incident described above was not isolated and according to CFACT “describes a culture of fear at the agency in which experts are silenced through intimidation“.
“One coworker who is a fellow ‘skeptic’ and I have to be careful about what we talk about at our desks or the break room,” the NWS employee explained. “We can’t let the word get out that we aren’t buying into the whole ‘the climate is warming’ narrative.”
“It is an almost Orwellian, nasty-type society.”
Read all of it at CFACT –– the meteorologist also describes problems with climate models, says the NWS and NOAA is a “well oiled propaganda machine”. He referred to a study that took ocean buoy data and recalibrated it with measurements taken in ship engine intakes, even though everyone knew that the ocean bouys were more accurate.
During this time, satellite images show that 24% of our beaches shrank, while 28% grew. Thus we can say that thanks to the carbon apocalypse there are 3,660 sq kms more global beaches now than there were thirty years ago. Yes. It’s that bad.
The encroachment of beaches would mean there is less ocean for fishes. Thankfully sea levels have risen too, so it looks like it will all work out.
This study also produced a handy map of where the sandiest beaches are. Clearly Africa wins (unless you prefer rocks and cliffs).
Sandy beaches (yellow) versus Rocky beaches (black). Percentages indicate the proportion of sandy beaches. Source
Presumbly the paradox of how seas can rise unprecedentedly fast at the same time as beaches are growing will be explained through global currents shifting ominously due to rising CO2 levels. Either that, or the paradox and the study will vanish into a subterranean library — like the deeper Asthenosphere Archive, where they will be converted to magma.
Seriously, though, this study appears to be the first to use automated detection with satellite images (nearly 2 million of them) to assess global beaches. Previous studies did things manually, or just interviewed people.
A few outlets have reported this, mainly with the predictable focus on the disappearing beaches and prophecies that “good beaches can’t last”.
When beaches shrink it is climate change, but if they grow, it’s due to nature or activists.
Marine protected areas are also causing “serious concern”, said the report, with the majority of their shorelines are being eroded.
Apparently, Marine Reserves are a threat to beaches.
Projects to maintain and protect coastal areas in countries such as the Netherlands or reclaim land in Dubai, China and Singapore, have contributed to a 3,660 sq kms increase in the world’s beaches over the past three decades. In Namibia, some beaches were growing at rate of 8 meters per year after diamond miners built undersea embankments, said the researchers.
Some beach areas are also growing naturally, with rivers in China taking sand to the coast, and huge dunes migrating towards the sea in Mauritania and Madagascar. However, the US is home to four of the seven fastest eroding beaches, with some coastal areas in Texas and Louisiana receding by up to 15 meters a year, with Mississippi river damming affecting the amount of sand reaching the coast.
Bad stuff is always just about to hit:
But while reclaiming land from the sea might be one factor helping boost beaches overall, around 70,000km of sandy coastlines are being washed away and erosion in marine reserves may point to a bleaker future for beach lovers.
A quarter of the world’s beaches are being eroded at a rate of more than half a meter (20 inches) a year, said the researchers, who found beaches make up around 30% of the world’s coastline. Some 6,000 kms of beaches are retreating at an even faster rate of 5 meters per year, said Luijendijk, who also works at Deltares, a research institute based in the Netherlands.
However, the United States is home to four of the seven fastest eroding beaches, with some coastal areas in Texas and Louisiana receding by up to 15 metres a year, with Mississippi river damming affecting the amount of sand reaching the coast.
Will Earth run out of sand….
“The main question for the future is whether there will be enough sand available to maintain all beaches,” said a statement from Deltares on the report. — SBS (AAP)
Not my “main” question.
You might not hear about this on CNN or the ABC/BBC/CBC.
Chinese Bitcoin miners are reopening the Hunter Valley coal power station called Redbank in NSW. They have a deal that gets around our gargantuan, mismanaged grid by buying coal power direct for 8c/kWh, while Australians in the same place pay 28c/kWh.
This is exactly the nightmare the head of the Australian Energy Management Organisation (AEMO) spoke of just last week — that “big players could abandon the grid”. That’s a degenerate spiral leaving a shrinking pool of suckers to pay for the inefficient, bird-killing, blackout prone, witchdoctor grid.
Bitcoin mining’s growing demand for cheap energy revived a shuttered coal mine
Ashat Rathi, Quartz
Consumers there pay, on average, $A0.28 ($0.22) per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for electricity. But Hunter Energy, which owns Redbank, are offering the crypto miners electricity at a fraction of the cost. The “first-of-its-kind” deal, as the Age puts it, will see the crypto miners pay only A$0.08 per kWh in the day and A$0.05 per kWh at night. Hunter Energy told the Age that the price is feasible because the electricity produced at the coal power plant would go straight to the crypto miners, bypassing—and thus, presumably, avoiding the costs of using—the grid. (Quartz has reached out to Hunter Energy for a comment.)
This tells everyone all they need to know about “cheap” renewables. Eight cents is the big-commercial retail rate of coal powered reliable electricity in Australia, and anything else is nuts.
The cheap deal will mainly apply to those close to the plant (near Singleton) because building long transmission lines is too expensive. Any day now, the large smelters in NSW will start adding up the cost of either relocating or building a transmission line.
It’s not surprising that this comes from crypto industry first. It must be one of the most transportable high-electricity-need industries there is.
Three messages here:
The free market can solve Australian electricity price hell in a flash.
Coal power is cheap, cheap, cheap, and even small coal plants are viable and valuable. (This one is only 150MW)
Wind and solar are not competitive. Subsidized renewables are the major thing making our grid expensive.
We could run again as a nation using coal for our entire baseload — with some gas to power the peaks. The only thing stopping us is our desire to change the global climate.
Please, someone add up the total octopus-costs of bizarre weather-changing policies.
The Turnbull government will surely try to ban this or tax it to oblivion.
Big implications – 130MW of cheap electricity suddenly available in the Hunter Valley
Here’s a “disrupter” Audrey Zibelman (the AEMO head) didn’t see coming. The Australian market is begging for cheap electricity and right now one place, ONE, can offer it at a third of the price that everyone else pays:
Hunter Energy says cryptocurrency mining will only consume, at most 20 megawatts (MW) of the coal plant’s 150MW capacity. The region “needs more baseload power,” Hunter Energy’s CEO Jim Myatt told the Age. Baseload power is industry jargon for the ability to provide power on demand, which is something solar and wind power cannot do because they are beholden to the vagaries of nature.
Suddenly the land and buildings near Redbank just stepped up in valuation. If you run a small business (or big one) where electricity is a large part of your costs, and you can move to tap into that, why not?
How about our other recently closed coal plants in Australia? What other towns and areas would be reincarnated as cheap manufacturing or “mining” zones? Imagine what this could do for the LaTrobe Valley? Collie in WA? Liddell?
h/t to Peter Rees for this list. Which of these can be reopened, and which have been blown up.?
CLOSED COAL PLANTS
Year
Name
State
MW
Company
2011
Munmorah
NSW
1400
Delta electricity
2012
Colllinsville
QLD
190
Ratch-Australia
Playford B
SA
240
Alinta energy
Swanbank B
QLD
480
CS energy
2014
Morwell
VIC
189
Energy Aust.
Redbank
NSW
151
Redbank energy
Wallerawang
NSW
1000
Energy Australia
2015
Anglesea
VIC
160
Alcoa
2016
Northern
SA
520
Alinta Energy
2017
Hazelwood
VIC
1600
Engie
5930
I’ve suggested this scenario on the blog before — in a free market people would band together to fund their own coal power. I wondered if large miners could do it, but I assumed it would be illegal.
Redbank, small, “carbon polluting” and newish coal plant
According to Wikipedia — Redbank is a small coal plant commissioned in 2001. It used coal tailings, was theoretically the least efficient most greenhouse gas generating plant in Australia, was (maybe) hurt by carbon taxing policies, closed in 2014 and will be reopened in early 2019.
Redbank was fuelled by beneficiated, dewatered tailings from the Mount Thorley Warkworth mine at Warkworth, delivered by conveyor. In lay terms this is the part of the coal waste which would otherwise not be utilised, and simply buried as the mines progress.
(Note that no data from the actual plant, operator or Australian Government is actually used to base these approximate assumptions on. CARMA uses a statistical model that predicts CO2 emissions given the size, age, fuel type, estimated capacity utilization, and engineering specifications of individual plants.)
Like all NSW coal plants Redback was hard hit by the carbon tax:
The state-owned power generator has cut asset values by more than a third, to $1.1 billion from $1.86 billion, by booking a heavy $700 million write-off in the first such big financial hit due to the looming carbon tax introduction. As the nation’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, Macquarie Generation faces a direct annual tax of $460 million, which will flow into the government’s coffers, if it maintains electricity output at present levels….
Victoria has dirtier coal-fired power stations as they use brown coal, which emits more carbon dioxide. As a result, its generators will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from the federal government, which will allow them to continue polluting.
The only NSW power station to receive support from the federal government is a small producer, Redbank, which is to receive just $8.8 million. ”This loss of value is a direct hit to New South Wales as a result of federal Labor’s carbon tax,” said NSW Finance Minister and Acting Treasurer Greg Pearce.
Victorian brown coal plants received $2b in compensation for the carbon tax. Many of these were owned by foreign companies. The NSW government owned Macquarie and got almost nothing.
In any case, why give compensation for a tax designed to put the same businesses out of business? Insanity.
There are 741 million people in the EU. For years, their supranational government has been spending one fifth of their entire budget (!) on attempts to change the weather. Since that didn’t work, they are going to spend more. What was 20% is rising to 25%.
While Europe’s political priorities are changing, the EU wants to continue leading global efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, which scientists blame for heating up the planet, and seeks to cut dependence on fossil fuels, shifting to cleaner renewable energy sources. The bloc aims to lower carbon emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels and to boost the share of renewables to at least 27 percent of energy consumption.
— Bloomberg
In the past, this kind of ludicrous total has appeared to be mere accounting hocus — where money that was going to be spent on something just gets rebadged as “climate action”. But back in 2013 this still equated to €180 billion on climate stuff between then and 2020. Even if most of it is “rebadged”, the mere breadcrumb trail it leaves would feed ten thousand activists.
A billion here, a billion there — pretty soon we’ll be talking about money for jam for the Green Blob.
The only real surprise is that the EU thinks this is something worth bragging about. Historians will have a field day with this.
The E.U.’s most profligate plan,
Is to spend every cent that it can,
Not on social welfare,
Or more medical care,
But to try and change climate by man.
Climate Worriers have the most terrible luck. All the runes were lined up for Solar power — it is nearly free, pours from heaven, and millions of people seem to need energy “pretty often”. Plus universities and governments have gifted twenty years of free advertising about its Glorious Wonderfulness. Solar power is also used by the Celebrity Saints of Gaia thus filling fashionable, spiritual, and tribal needs. On a good day, it fills some megawatt needs too.
Despite all this, without forced payments from unwilling and unwitting non-users of solar power, investors are fleeing and the solar industry in Germany is collapsing. How can that be?!
After the German government decided to reduce subsidies to the solar industry in 2012, the industry nose-dived. By this year, virtually every major German solar producer had gone under as new capacity declined by 90 per cent and new investment by 92 per cent. Some 80,000 workers — 70 per cent of the solar workforce — lost their jobs. Solar power’s market share is shrinking and solar panels, having outlived their usefulness, are being retired without being replaced.
Wind power faces a similar fate. Germany has some 29,000 wind turbines, almost all of which have been benefitting from a 20-year subsidy program that began in 2000. Starting in 2020, when subsidies run out for some 5,700 wind turbines, thousands of them each year will lose government support, making the continued operation of most of them uneconomic based on current market prices. To make matters worse, with many of the turbines failing and becoming uneconomic to maintain, they represent an environmental liability and pose the possibility of abandonment. No funds have been set aside to dispose of the blades, which are unrecyclable, or to remove the turbines’ 3,000-tonne reinforced concrete bases, which reach depths of 20 metres, making them a hazard to the aquifers they pierce.
On the plus side, 80,000 Germans can now do something productive.
Funny thing, something similar happened in Australia in July 2014:
We’re told “clean” energy is a viable and cost effective. But cut the government subsidies, and 97 percent of investors vanish (in Australia it’s collapsed from $2.6b annually to $80m).
In Australia this brief lapse into something resembling a free market was due to policy “uncertainty” at the time. The dead hand of Government Certainty has since returned to pick the loser winners.
New research looking at three and a half billion social media posts from tens of millions of individuals showed the very unshocking result that people are happiest on sunny clear days around 25C. Facebook and Twitter comments on those days used more positive, fun terms. Days below 20, above 30, that were cloudy or had a humidity above 80% put people in a less happy mood. So did terrorist events, and the effects of weather were pretty comparable. Temperatures that are below freezing put a real dampener on expressions of positive sentiment. (The next ice age is going to be no fun.)
Peak positive occurs in the mid to high twenties and on days with zero mm of rain.
The effect of temperature and rain on Facebook and Twitter moods in the US.
Some people have a sunny disposition, others have cloudy faces and everyone over two knows what those expressions mean.
If our aim is to maximize human happiness and productivity, shouldn’t the UN Weather Control Committee (IPCC) be aiming to reduce freezing days and maximize the zone of 25C days on areas with the highest population density?
Judging by this awesome Hedonometer graph, during the hottest ever year of 2016, people were pretty happy.
…Hedonometer, Happiness, Twitter, graph.
Just cross checking that with the ENSO effect, perhaps we should also be working to increase El Nino years?
As for terrorism, conditions that were below freezing were comparable to the Sept 11 anniversary (in the US) and actual attacks, floods and earthquakes were even worse. Clearly, Daylight Savings time should only start, and never end. We all need the extra hour of sleep.
…
But keep in mind the y axis scale on the top graph. We’re talking about 2 percent less “happy thoughts” on a zero degree day. It sounds tiny, though on a national scale I expect it would translate to slightly higher cortisol levels, more stress, less health, and lower productivity.
Alan Martin at Alphr warns us about the heat: High temperatures make us hotheads: Study finds the weather impacts how we “talk” on Twitter and Facebook. “Blame it on the sunshine”.
Two researchers looked at the ten main countries in East Africa in the last fifty years and compared global temperatures to a database of wars, conflicts and refugees.
They found that regional drought and global temperatures didn’t cause wars or drive the total number of displaced people. The things that did were rapid population growth, poor economic times, and political instability.
“What our study suggests is the failure of political systems is the primary cause of conflict and displacement of large numbers of people.”
Thus, if you love peace, it’s better to defend free speech and the constitution than to use cloth shopping bags and change your light globes.
Probably the most surprising thing about this study is that sometimes academics test hypotheses and publish sensible conclusions.
In our recent paper, my student Erin Owain and I decided to test the climate-conflict hypothesis, using East Africa as our focus. The region is already very hot and very poor, making it especially vulnerable to climate change (in fact neighbouring Chad is by some measures the single most vulnerable country in the world).
As the planet warms, East Africa’s seasonal rains are expected to become much more unpredictable. … One study led by the European Commission found that declining rainfall over the past century may have reduced GDP across Africa by 15-40% compared with the rest of the developing world.
The evidence from East Africa is that no single factor can fully explain conflict and the displacement of people. Instead, conflict seems to be linked primarily to long-term population growth, short-term economic recessions and extreme political instability.
If they had compared human CO2 emissions as well, they’d probably find that CO2 causes peace. Since CO2 emissions are linked to higher GDPs (especially in poor nations) it’s not much of a leap to say that in Africa, producing CO2 would probably lead to better economies (more economic development) and less conflict.
As CO2 rose, life expectancy increased too. (Perhaps they can study that in their next paper?).
Does climate change cause refugees?
“As for refugees, over 90% can be explained by PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] lagged by 1 year was significant, population growth lagged by 10 years, economic growth lagged by a year and political stability lagged by 2 years.”
The land of the sunburnt country finds that the rapid uptake of solar is a headache, disrupting the grid, adding variability, making management more complicated. Read right through. The head of the AEMO gives an upbeat talk, but the ominous message is that solar panels are flooding in, there are lots of problems, and not only are baseload generators leaving the market, but there may come a day when things are so ludicrously expensive that big energy customers leave to generate their own too. Is that what the death of a grid looks like?
Audrey Zibelman is the head of the AEMO – Australian Energy Market Operator – which has the responsibility of managing the electricity and gas market and grid stability for all Australians. To hear her, you’d think the future is renewable, the transition is not being artificially forced on the market, and there is no alternative to alternative energy.
Zibelman tosses out pat free-market lines with a straight face, saying at 17:20 that we never really want governments to “pick a technology”, ignoring that this whole transition, all of it, is only happening because governments “picked a technology”.
Listen at 21:30 to get an idea of the diabolical complexity of trying to craft new price signals to make up for the damage done by dumb artificial price signals. This octopus of conflicting price signals would never occur in a real free market. If players could do the deals they wanted, they would pay for forward contracts on cheap electricity that they could guarantee next week, next year, every hour and every day. The other ten people in Australia that wanted to buy weather-changing-electrons would be free to pay ten times as much. I say “let them!”. That’s what freedom means.
I’d like to be free not to buy solar panels, and free not to pay for everyone else’s.
This is all spun as a world-leading success along the lines that disruption is a mark of success — mobile phones worked, so solar panels will. Hello? The government didn’t force us to pay $600 a household for other people’s “transition” iphones.
Glenda Korporaal, The Australian:
“Australia has the biggest pick-up of roof top solar anywhere,” Ms Zibelman said in a speech to the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. “We are seeing the equivalent of a power plant being built every season with people putting on more and more rooftop solar.”
She said the increasing role of solar power in Australia meant the energy market could suddenly lose 200-300 megawatts of power if the sky clouded over in a major city.
Too much solar power doesn’t just make supply more unpredictable, it means demand is more variable too. The peaks are steeper and the troughs are lower.
In the past there was a gradual increase in demand for energy during the day, but with the increasing role of solar power there were now often spikes in demand in the evenings.
“It is a very variable system that we have to manage which is very different than before,” she said. “It’s a big disrupter.”
So let’s add 20GW of headaches and complexity and see what happens?
Wrap your head around these numbers. Apparently right now the AEMO are dealing with requests to consider adding another 20,000MW of unreliable, intermittent, subsidy-sucking energy to the Australian grid. This is the same grid that has a total peak summer demand in the order of 35,000MW. The total generation capacity of the grid is 54,000MW, which already includes more wind and solar than any nation built on a coal-gas-and-uranium quarry needs. How are any unsubsidized sensible baseload providers going to survive in this socialist market where crazy-brave squads of new entrants are still being drawn to fill gaps that aren’t there, weren’t there, and aren’t projected to open up soon? To everyone who says that renewables are nearly competitive (so sayeth Audrey), I say axe the next twelve years of Renewable Energy Targets then.
Windpower doesn’t make electricity cheap or reliable, so lets do more of it?
Sometimes one high pressure cell crashes our whole wind generation:
Wind power generation in Australia dropping off every week or two.
Sometimes a high pressure cell crashes our wind generation.
Sometimes clouds crash our solar power:
Sometimes clouds blocks 1000MW of solar power across Australia. Satellite image.
Likewise, adding more solar probably won’t add more hours of sunlight, nor change the clouds. But then, I could be wrong.
Not all of those new 20,000 disruptive megawatts will be built. Phew!
As Zibelman says at one point — (to paraphrase) when demand was 1000MW during the day, solar has reduced that demand to 500MW. But if your coal power station is more than 500MW, how do you keep that in business? Indeed. The answer is — with uber-complex government regulated pricing schemes apparently.
Worked for the USSR.
It’s so bad, big-players may abandon the grid
Ms Zibelman says we need to send the right “provide the right price signals” and the “market will respond”. The bad news is that the market is already responding, the price signals are a dog’s breakfast, and even diesel looks like the fuel of the future now.
Her big fear now is that the big players might get so fed up they go “off grid”. Oh No. No more cash cows:
Ms Zibelman said one of her biggest worries was the potential for “uneconomic bypass” in Australia, where major energy users could start leaving the existing energy system because they found it too expensive, instead using their own energy supply systems. — [Listen at 36:30]
The “uneconomic bypass” has already happened — it was back when Australian governments thought it was a good idea to use our power stations to change global temperatures. Now our whole grid is an uneconomic bypass.
Things could spiral downhill:
She said this could lead to the cost of electricity having to be borne by a decreasing number of customers.
–it’s a good thing for the individual when they disconnect. Horrible for the rest of us…
Zibelman talks of free markets but doesn’t seem to realize the market she runs is so unfree it has been screwed inside out. For the last hundred years people were not “better off” if they left the grid. Other customers didn’t care if big players left to do their own thing (more supply, less demand, lower costs, right?). Big players stayed because mass electricity production in centralized generators was so bountifully, beautifully cheap that nothing else could beat it.
Australians are putting panels on their roofs in desperation
She didn’t say that because electricity is obscenely expensive, even subsidized, uncompetitive renewables look appealing to bleeding customers.
Think of solar panels on roof tops as a form of palliative care for a dying grid.
Watching Zibelman, you might also think that complexity has no price, simplicity has no value, and the Bureau of Meteorology has an important role in driving our energy policy.
A new paper finds that there is already enough genetic variety spread across the Great Barrier Reef to adapt to the imagined “unprecedented” warming coming in the next two centuries. We don’t need to rely on random mutations or consider fantasy solutions of man-made oceanic sunscreens, mass sunshades, or giant reef fans. Corals already have a major immigration program running pretty effectively to juggle 200 million years of genetic material and then spread the successes far and wide. Meddling humans can help things (maybe) by moving a few bits of coral around. That’s it. Cancel the scare please.
Skeptics have been saying this for years — who needs a computer model to predict that the Barrier Reef will adapt? How bad could global warming be? The global oceans span a 32C range and corals prefer the hottest five degrees of that. Indeed, there is a five degree temperature range from one end of the Great Barrier Reef to the other, and corals are clearly, obviously pretty happy about it. Meanwhile, the atmosphere is warming at a mere tenth of a degree per decade. Then there is the well known phenomenon that corals spawn in vast clouds that are so big they can be seen from space and there is a whole new generation of corals every five years. You don’t need to be Nostradamus to figure out that survivors from some parts of the reef will reseed other parts, as they have done for eons. Half of the coral genera around today have been around since the Oligocene (23-34 million years ago).
Corals also adapt to heatwaves by chucking out the algal symbionts that don’t thrive in higher temperatures. So on top of their own genetic adaptability, they can “gear up” in different ways too. In the unlikely event that IPCC climate models are right for the first time in history, corals will cope.
Climate change just shifts this large range slightly south. So what?
Corals are already happy coping across a five degree range of water temperature.
If the water gets warmer to the South, Great Barrier Reef corals will probably spread further.
Keppel Island at the far south end has quite a different population:
(A) Locations of sampled populations where mean midsummer month sea surface temperature differed by up to ~3°C. (B) Principal component analysis of water quality and temperature parameters at the sampled locations. Winter.T—10% quantile of winter temperature, Summer.T– 90% quantile of summer temperature, Daily.T– 90% quantile of daily temperature range, Phos–total dissolved phosphorus, Chl–chlorophyll, NO3 –nitrate, Secchi–Secchi depth (water clarity). Locations are colored according to summer temperature as in panel A. (C) Principal component analysis of genome-wide genetic variation (inset–Acropora millepora). Centroid labels are initial letters of population names as in panel A. (D) ADMIXTURE plot of ancestry proportions with K = 2 (the lowest cross-validation error was observed with K = 1). Analyses on panels C and D were based on 11,426 SNPs spaced at least 2.5 kb apart and not including FST outliers.
Note the paper does not suggest we need to set up a carbon trading scheme to improve coral genetic fitness. We might consider picking up a few bits of coral and spreading them around:
Implications for Reef Management
We found that genetic diversity of Acropora millepora was not yet strongly affected by climate change and that the migration patterns were well positioned to facilitate persistence of the GBR metapopulation for a century or more. Our results underscore the pivotal role of standing genetic variation and migrant exchange in the future metapopulation persistence, suggesting management interventions such as assisted gene flow [41] by moving adult reproductively active colonies or by outplanting lab-reared offspring produced by crossing corals from different populations. With the estimated natural migration rates on the order of 0.1–1% (10–100) migrants per generation, human-assisted genotype exchange could appreciably contribute to the genetic rescue without risking disruption of the natural local adaptation patterns [42]
The authors stress that they underestimated the adaptability of the coral populations in most of their estimates. The only bad news part of their model analysis was that populations might become more sensitive to random heatwaves. Given that this relies on IPCC model forecasts of ocean temperatures, I remain unconcerned.
Despite this capacity for adaptation, our model predicts that coral populations would become increasingly sensitive to random thermal fluctuations such as ENSO cycles or heat waves, which corresponds well with the recent increase in frequency of catastrophic coral bleaching events.
What recent increase in “catastrophic” coral bleaching events? We have no long term good data on historic bleaching events, the extent of bleaching is hotly contested, and corals are already recovering. If there was mass coral bleaching in 1066, and corals didn’t recover til 1086, how would we know?
What destroys a grid faster than than a socialist electricity system? A semi-socialist system that pretends to be a free market.
This hybrid monster combines the worst of both socialism and capitalism at the same time. Socialists get the power to destroy, then capitalists can use self serving interest to make it happen faster.
The socialist managers can pick loser options (wind and solar), rig the market, and also conveniently blame the market when things go wrong. In a pure socialist system, at least the public know who created the mess.
What socialism created — socialism can partly solve
In a free market Liddell’s cheap coal power would not be closing in 2022. Since we have no free market, and can’t suddenly create one, the only band-aid option is to buy the damn asset back:
If someone suggested that $3 billion in consumer-funded subsidies be paid to one energy source every year for the next 12 years, and if that one energy source was guaranteed significant market share for every one of those years, and if there were hundreds of millions of dollars available in grants and concessional loans to projects limited to that one energy source, would that policy approach qualify as a technology-neutral?
The millstone around the neck of Australia’s energy policy is the renewable energy target. It is a remarkably generous gift to wind and solar energy, and one that will keep on giving until 2030. It is impossible to debate energy policy sensibly without reference to the gold-plated pipeline of tens of billions of dollars of consumer and taxpayer-funded subsidies to the renewable sector.
Socialists cry “socialism” to stop government buying up coal asset (where were they when the government started forcing us to buy wind power?). Ron Boswell again:
Some have likened the option to socialism. Rubbish. The energy market was socialised by intervention a long time ago. A $45bn subsidy and guaranteed market share for renewables is not socialism? Would the car market be a real market if the government said 23 per cent of cars sold had to be a Tesla and that Tesla would receive a subsidy of $30,000 for every car sold?
The government’s cornerstone energy policy has passed its latest hurdle, with a commitment from states and territories to continue detailed design work. It gives ministers who identified concerns with aspects of the National Energy Guarantee a four month reprieve to push for changes before the federal government’s deadline for a decision in August.
So we get the “shock” result that no state in Australia wanted to secede, and State Ministers are happy to keep attending meetings.
So Greenland hasn’t been showing signs of warming since man made CO2 started rapidly rising after World War II. Indeed Greenland has been not responding to CO2 for 140 years or maybe a million.
Serious researchers have known this for years. It’s not like a flat trend suddenly popped up to surprise us.
Hat tip to Bob FJ for sending graphs and links of earlier studies last year. Even far back in 2004, it was obvious Greenland was not warming like it was supposed to. That hasn’t stopped flocks of researchers and journalists from not mentioning it. This story is just as much about the media as it is about Greenland.
Figure 1 shows the IPCC near-surface air temperature record for Greenland, which includes a highly statistically significant cooling of 0.11°C (0.20°F) per decade over the past 64 years!
If we abandoned the country and talked our Kiwi and Canadian friends into moving to Mars with us, we could not make up the carbon credits this decision just vaporized.
The Financial Express, one of India’s major newspapers, reports that the Narendra Modi government, which had set an ambitious 63,000 MW nuclear power capacity addition target by the year 2031-32, has cut it to 22,480 MW, or by roughly two-thirds.
The drastic reduction in planned construction of new reactors will diminish India’s plans to rely on nuclear energy from 25% of electrical generation to about 8-10%. The balance of new power requirements will likely be met by use of India’s enormous coal deposits.
Please tell us again how coal is a stranded asset?
The country accounts for eight percent of world’s total coal consumption. About two-thirds of India’s electricity generation comes from coal.
India holds the fifth biggest coal reserves in the world. The country’s proved coal reserves are estimated at 61 billion tonnes. India accounts for about seven percent of the world’s total proved coal reserves.
Perhaps there was some other cause, or mental health issue and the man would have taken his life somehow, someway and left a different note. But if we take him at his word, this was a desperate end. He was chasing the impossible wisp — planetary climate control through CO2. Destined to fail, overwhelmed with the futility, he apparently saw his life as worth more dead than alive, perhaps as some inspirational saint.
Alas, true saints may sacrifice themselves for a greater cause, but they don’t issue press releases. They don’t pick the time and place.
There is a desperately hollow emptiness about trying to inspire people through suicide PR.It’s not like you want children to grow up to copy you. (The danger is — some might).
Mr. Buckel left a note in a shopping cart not far from his body and also emailed it to several news media outlets, including The New York Times.
“Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather,” he wrote in the email sent to The Times. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
In his note, which was received by The Times at 5:55 a.m., Mr. Buckel discussed the difficulty of improving the world even for those who make vigorous efforts to do so.
Privilege, he said, was derived from the suffering of others.
“Many who drive their own lives to help others often realize that they do not change what causes the need for their help,” Mr. Buckel wrote, adding that donating to organizations was not enough.
Noting that he was privileged with “good health to the final moment,” Mr. Buckel said he wanted his death to lead to increased action. “Honorable purpose in life invites honorable purpose in death,” he wrote.
There is no honor in choosing unnecessary death, as a kind of global billboard, only tragedy.
The one sided blind media chant painted a quandry — the science was settled and obvious yet most of the world didn’t care, wouldn’t act, were selfish or stupid. That’s not much of a world to live for.
It is all so pointless. If wall-to-wall catastrophe reporting didn’t persuade the crowd, why would a suicide? “We’re all gonna drown, who cares?A guy killed himself with fossil fuels — time to give up the SUV and catch a train?”
This photo is patched together from the SBS news pan across the crowd in the centre of the largest city in Australia.
The turnout was so small, journalists didn’t even try to make up a number. They just said “demonstrators” plural, “rallied in eight cities across Australia”. So there were at least two people at each city. “Congrats”.
The Sydney rally even had Triple J celebrity, Adam Spencer. They presumably also had free advertising on the ABC beforehand. It didn’t help much.
Science without debate is just propaganda, it’s no wonder no one cares
Having taken all the public passion, controversy and competition out of science, the masters of Groupthink have destroyed it as a spectator sport. Who wants to watch a football game where the result is fixed and everyone knows it? Public interest in science was settled in 1990 — at zero.
If the Academy of Science wanted to make science a million times more popular it would arrange real televised debates, with the best from both sides on actual important controversial issues. That would inspire debates in schools. Kids would learn more about the scientific method in one hour of debate than in thirty years of approved consensus litany.
In Melbourne, apparently the biggest threat to the planet looks like steak and eggs.
March for Science, Melbourne.
Unkind impartial commentators might have described these protests as small fringe groups, with far lower than expected numbers and a disappointing turnout. Though there were no unkind commentators at SBS, and there was no aerial crowd shot either.
Despite that, with cameras kept at half mast, the lackluster event was still used as an excuse to rerun the agitprop message on prime time news and share how one random firefighty person is sure fires are different now. More free advertising for the importance of Big Government by a Big-Government broadcaster. (SBS is our baby ABC).
If it had been skeptics instead, that got less than 100 people to a major event, TV cameras would have turned up to tell the world how dismal it was.
Group-thinkers on science should stop,
And ask why their rallies all flop,
And try to relate,
To a reasoned debate,
Perhaps then, the penny would drop.
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