It’s just another day on the road back to reality.
The New South Wales state government in Australia has announced it will tell its local councils that not only are they not bound by the IPCC sea-level predictions, they must do their own research on their own beaches. It’s the polite way of saying that no one believes the IPCC predictions anymore, worse, that they are so sure the IPCC is wrong that councils have to get different advice. For the IPCC it’s just one more signpost on the path to oblivion.
The NSW government will order councils to study the scientific evidence for sea-level rise on a beach-by-beach basis, amid fears that many local authorities may be undermining property values by imposing punitive planning conditions based on predictions contained in reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
IPCC credibility has crumbled in so many ways. People were suffering real pain — properties near the ocean in some councils were being denied the approvals to renovate or expand, and their values had fallen. Owners were locked into properties they couldn’t improve and couldn’t sell. The NSW state government told councils last year they didn’t have to follow the IPCC recommendations, but some still did. Now they are telling the councils “to adopt a commonsense approach to sea-level rises based in part on the science of what is actually happening in each location.”
“Councils which fail to respond to their communities can ultimately be held accountable by their residents/electors.”
One resident and elector who is outraged by the Great Lakes Council is Beverley Harbutt, whose home is on absolute beachfront at Boomerang Beach.
Ms Harbutt said she had been facing increasing financial pressures due to a marital break-up some years ago and had been forced to move in with her son Mark and his partner and put the house out to holiday rental.
She has tried for several years to sell the house, but prospective buyers lost interest when they found out the local council had designated it as subject to coastal hazard from rising sea levels, and had imposed severe planning restrictions, she said.
“It’s wearing on the soul, on the mind, and on the pocket,” she said.
Mark Harbutt said council policy had debased his mother’s place by $1 million. The house had been valued at $2.7m and the best offer coming in now was only $1.5m.
The real commonsense approach would have been to say that councils have no business telling people they can’t extend their own home on their own property in the first place (assuming the extensions are safe and not be too big an imposition on the neighbors). Owners and investors should be able to decide for themselves if they want to take the risk the sea will rise dramatically. Al Gore and Tim Flannery don’t seem to be selling up to move to higher ground.
This would be a true free market solution — where smart investors who were not fooled by b-grade science reports could step in to buy beachfront properties that gullible patsies were selling.
Where are those advocates of a “free market solution” now?
A special mention here goes to Paul E who helped the Mosman Council get a better grip on sea level projections. That council also deserve kudos for rejecting the CSIRO predictions too. From September 2013:
The Peak Power story is that spikes in electricity occur 6 to 10 days a year and we need to cut back on the power we use at home to ease spikes. In Australia, the spikes are on the hottest days of summer, and commentators tut-tut and blame the profusion of air conditioning in our homes. Their story goes that there is no point in building more power stations because the spikes are short lived. [See Western Power, Reneweconomy,The Queensland government, and Urban Ecology for examples of people making out residential air conditioners are to blame. That last link has this hysterical quote “The big mistake was putting air-conditioning in cars.” If people were not used to being cool in their vehicles, they would not demand it in their homes. (Tony O’Dwyer, National Economics)”. Never let the riff raff use the industrial magic tools eh? Keep the air conditioners for the elite academics, pollies and white collar office workers! — Jo]
But here’s the kicker. There’s one day of the year when more people are at home than any other day, so if home air-conditioners were the problem, then Christmas Day should be a peak electrical headache. Instead, it’s the lowest electrical consumption day of the year. It’s not just the lowest, but far and away the lowest, and not just this year, but every year that power records have been kept.
Power consumption on the Eastern Australia electrical grid on the Christmas Day compared to the Wednesday the week before.
A half a dozen days a year the Summer Power generation in Australia does indeed spike, and demand is sometimes as high as 32,000 to 35,000MW. But the load curves of power use tell us that homes are not the problem. The load curves are always lower over the weekend, and especially on Sundays. Peak power spikes just don’t seem to happen on the weekend. While some workplaces are open on a Sunday, there is only one day a year when almost every workplace is shut–Christmas. Nearly everyone in the country is at home, possibly with the air-con on all day. Arguably there is more cooking than usual, and the fridges get worked pretty hard as well.
The graph above shows two Load Curves. The top line is a normal working day, Wednesday 18th December 2013. The red line below that is the power consumption for Christmas Day 2013 — which looks closer to a typical Winter load curve with a small peak in the morning, then a slight dip and a further small rise again in the late afternoon. On a normal work/school day residential power consumption has a two peaks a day, one in the AM and one in the PM when everyone gets back home.
Compare the two points where both curves dip to their least power consumption. The lowest electricity use on a normal work day minimum is still at least 17,500MW, while on Christmas Day it’s down to 15,500MW.
The peak electricity use on the work day shown is 27,500MW, and the peak for Christmas Day is 19,500MW. The average for the work day is around 22,000 MW, and for Christmas Day around 17,000. Usually, a normal working/school weekday the peak is closer to 30,000MW with the average around 25,000MW. Schools are closed in Australia from mid December to the end of January (many schools have closed before the 18th December).
This Christmas Day load curve can be used as a good indicator of residential power consumption. See how the gap between the dip point around 4AM and the peak for that day is barely 4000MW. On one of the record Peak Power days, the gap between the dip point and the peak is sometimes as high as 14,000MW–with most people at work.
That maximum extra residential consumption for the day of 4,000MW tells us that residential consumption is not the largest contributor on Peak Power days, and that home air conditioning should not shoulder the blame for spikes.
The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution has a new bright idea. Big-Government is going to take £1 each from people using electricity and instead of giving it to people who make electricity, they’re going to give it to people who don’t absolutely have to have electricity. Those people might be paid for doing no useful work, or indeed, in a fabulous twist, they might be paid not to do no work, but just to be prepared to do nothing. It’s a brilliant left-of-center economic move, guaranteed to help the non-essential part of the economy at the expense of the part that does things that matter.
Expect to see the UK doing more non-essential things in future.
Businesses could be paid to shut down from 4pm and 8pm on winter weekdays, under plans approved by regulator Ofgem
by Emily Gosden
Hundreds of businesses could be paid to switch off their power between 4pm and 8pm on winter weekdays as soon as next winter to prevent blackouts, under plans approved by regulator Ofgem.
Mothballed old gas-fired power stations will also be paid to come back to stand-by so they can be fired up to prevent the lights going out when demand is high.
The plans – which together could cost household energy bill-payers about £1 each – were drawn up in the summer after warnings that the risk of blackouts had dramatically increased because old power plants are being shut down and replacements not built.
The United Kingdom leads the way in equalizing national wealth of the first world with the third. Rarely has one modern country done so much to reduce its living standards to create a level playing field. The answer to keeping Britain’s lights on is to turn some of them off.
It used to be there was another option, where the energy crisis would be solved by swapping one type of light globe for another. But this is “beyond electrical efficiency”. Nobody is really kidding anyone anymore that switching off the DVD at the wall will keep the heater running. We’ve moved to deep layer efficiency — the hunt for more efficient blackouts.
Where, once, people thought that insurance against power black-outs meant building bigger generators, now the insurance comes from crafting a team in readiness to take the day off.
Is this deindustrialization or postmodern arts graduates taking over?*
Ofgem said at the time that the spare margin – the buffer between peak demand and available supply – could fall as low as 2pc by winter 2015-16 if demand is high.
Under the plans, a large commercial site such as a supermarket complex using two megawatts of power could receive an up-front payment of £20,000 just to guarantee it could switch off if needed – even if it was never actually asked to do so.
But it’s a Free-Market SolutionTM which means it must be good, right. They’re going to find the cheapest going rate to be prepared to be non-productive.
National Grid would hold a reverse auction next spring where companies will offer the lowest price at which they will agree to switch off when needed.
It’s not communism, but it’s not capitalism either. Is it a new kind of thing, a sort of capiommunism? The “other, other plan” perhaps? Where capitalists compete to produce nothing, Greens say “omm”, and nobody builds a better power plant?
“Ofgem said at the time that the spare margin-the buffer between peak demand and available supply-could fall as low as 2% by winter 2015-16 if demand is high.”
I watched our local news last night and Eggborough power station,coal powered, is due to close at the end of 2015.
Eggborough produces 4% (you do the maths) of the UK`s total electricity supply but must close to meet our EU green targets.
Morons in Wasteminster, following morons in Brussels, this green scam will be the ruination of Britain and its people, one more reason to vote UKIP …
Reddit is a social media website which calls itself the “front-page of the Internet”. It’s possible you’ve even heard of it (but not from me.) One Reddit moderator proudly announced on Grist that climate change is the hottest battleground in all of science, and actual debate is too hot for Reddit.
I’d like to thank them for sending more traffic to skeptical bloggers as they stop pretending to be on the “front line” in science. Though to be honest, I don’t expect to notice the difference: their “environment” page is positively raging along, with most posts getting only 1-2 comments. “Front page of the Internet” my foot.
According to Nathan Allen, Reddit-science means following consensus polls and doing pop-psychology on your opponents , while allowing people you like to post conspiracy theories, but protesting when opponents do the same.
Here’s a wild idea, perhaps this debate is the hottest battleground in science because a religious theory about the climate has usurped real science, and thousands of scientists are rising up in protest? (If I’m right, the number of skeptics will be increasing and the tenor of the discussions will get more and more acrimonious. Oh look… UK poll suggests there are nearly five times as many skeptics as there were in 2005. Australian poll showed same trend. * I’m just sayin’…)
I think the real issue here is that Reddit attracts a pretty low base “scientist”, and the flame wars make it pointless. Reddit’s answer was not to raise standards by insisting that both sides stick to logic and reason (which would have blocked most of the fans of man-made global warming as well) but to block one side and allow the other to keep parroting fallacies.
Allen seems to miss that most of the believers commit all the same mistakes as the skeptics he’s blocking. Mistakes that start with himself — he calls people who disagree with him names which guarantees a scientific conversation never even begins. As long as Reddit allows the use of “denier” it isn’t discussing science, but just letting bullies score points.
After some time interacting with the regular denier posters, it became clear that they could not or would not improve their demeanor. These problematic users were not the common “internet trolls” looking to have a little fun upsetting people. Such users are practically the norm on reddit. These people were true believers, blind to the fact that their arguments were hopelessly flawed, the result of cherry-picked data and conspiratorial thinking. They had no idea that the smart-sounding talking points from their preferred climate blog were, even to a casual climate science observer, plainly wrong. They were completely enamored by the emotionally charged and rhetoric-based arguments of pundits on talk radio and Fox News.
As a scientist myself, it became clear to me that the contrarians were not capable of providing the science to support their “skepticism” on climate change. The evidence simply does not exist to justify continued denial that climate change is caused by humans and will be bad. There is always legitimate debate around the cutting edge of research, something we see regularly. But with climate change, science that has been established, constantly tested, and reaffirmed for decades was routinely called into question.
But maybe the problem with Reddit was that it didn’t attract high quality thinkers in the first place. This was the first page I clicked on. Not exactly front line analysis. Look out, Allen says the most important thing is that your comment doesn’t contain any conspiracies – like this right?
This comes from a self described “free market” orientated nonprofit that seeks to limit government in all areas of endeavor. It has been funded by Exxon/Mobile, The Koch brothers, and insurance companies.
This above mentioned bias is clearly expressed in the document. I would not call this science, but rather a presentation of information that supports a viewpoint.
Presumably in Reddit-science, these conspiracies are facts — turn off your brain — recite the litany.
Humans are masters of rationalization. Allen justifies one-sided censorship thus:
Announcing the all new Solar-Insolation Hiroshima Bomb App, thanks to Dale Kent.
Since 1998, Global Warming has been occurring at 4 Hiroshima Bombs per second, not that we can measure that rate to a statistically significant value*, or that it means anything at all. Every second the sun pours 2700 Hiroshima bombs of energy on the Earth at the top of the atmosphere.
As well as missing the big-picture, Cook and Nuccitelli show us they don’t have a good grip on cause and effect. The world may have been warming, but that does not mean that CO2 caused it. Though they would very much like you to think that.
But if you want to scare people out of their money and impress fools, the Skeptical Science widget is just the thing. As SkS say on their page: “ Put a widget on your blog to let people know that climate change is important to you. ” To which JoNova adds, “The Sks widget performs a valuable service, advertising the bloggers who don’t understand big numbers or trends, and who struggle with statistical significance. If someone wants to show they think-with-the-herd, and not with their brain, the SkepticalScience widget is perfect. I thank the team at SkS for helping us to identify the gullible fashion-victims of science.
Just to help people get a grip on just how different those numbers are, I’ve graphed it below, so everyone can see how significant the four extra “bombs are”.
Warning, the thin black line representing the extra heat accumulated since 1998 is so small, subject to error bars, it may disappear, just like your money.
Are you a journalist thinking of using the John Cook Widget and PR? Here is a comment from Jo Nova you can use:
“Cook’s Hiroshima bomb units are a parody of science, not to mention gratuitously inconsiderate towards the bomb victims. An atomic-bomb delivers all the energy in one spot, while the sun spreads it out. Science becomes mindless if you mash up things like volume and area. A million square miles is not like two square feet. McDonalds sells a Hiroshima Bomb worth of Big-Macs every 8.6 days. It’s like a bomb in the same sense that black is like white, 1 is like 2, being alive is like being dead. Things can be equated-to-inanity. Cook has achieved that.
Plus there has been no significant warming in the last sixteen years, so technically the rate is almost as likely to be zero bombs a second, not four. And in any case, the models predicted a lot more than four-bombs-a-second –- a more useful App would show how many bombs-a-second the climate models missed reality by. Have you asked Cook if he can do one of those?” — Jo Nova
That quote is adapted from a previous post: Climate scientists move to atom-bomb number system, give up on exponentials. There, the figure was 1950 H-e (Hiroshima equivalents) of solar energy arriving, but that applies to the surface of the Earth, so includes losses due to albedo (where light is reflected of the planet and clouds), and 2700H-e applies at the top of the atmosphere before the losses. The pie chart above compares 4 bombs to 1950. The black line would be even skinnier with 4 compared to 2700 figure. I’m being as generous as I can…
How accurate is “4 bombs” a second?
1. Ask yourself if we can measure the temperature of the global oceans with all their churning currents to 0.01 degrees C. (Ask yourself if we can measure a lake to one hundredth of a degree.) Exactly.
2. Ponder that CO2 levels were rising relentlessly from 2003-2011**, yet there is no sign of warming in the oceans or the atmosphere during this 8 year period. Some will scoff that 8 years is too short to be meaningful. These are the same people that make Apps measured in seconds. There are a lot of seconds in 8 years, and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so where did all those extra bombs go? If the energy was hidden in the noise, that tells you all you need to know about how accurate the measurements are. Perhaps it’s 4±4 bombs? Perhaps it’s 4±10? If the measurements are accurate, and some other factor was causing the energy to head out to space, why did none of the climate models predict this flatness? Could it be they don’t understand the climate and the forces more powerful than CO2 remain a mystery to them? It could.
3. Remember that the 4-bombs-a-second crowd are 95% certain, based on these numbers, that you must obey them and pay them (or their “cause”) a lot of your money. If you ask questions about the numbers, you’re called a denier. If you don’t pay, they’ll put you in jail.
UPDATE: I added the caveats below, but made the font too small, and evidently people didn’t read them. So I’ve boosted them back up, added some bold, because they matter. Please read them all. :- )
** Why pick 2003-2011? Measurements before 2003 are highly inaccurate (see “ARGO” and links directly above). Over the next 8 years 9 x 1011 seconds worth of Hiroshima-bombs is missing from the global energy measurements. It will be called cherry picking by those who don’t understand cause and effect, but it matters, in terms of global energy budgets. Repeat after me: energy shalt not be created nor destroyed. The missing joules will not be found in graphs back to 1880, they can’t vanish from 2005 and appear in 1950. Nor can they appear in 2014 either.
***Just to make it blindingly obvious – I’m not suggesting a real imbalance (if it exists) would not be important. It would matter if there was a persistent long term artificial energy imbalance like the black line in the big pie. But 1. Our measurements are not accurate enough to detect it. 2. There is no evidence that it is unnatural, or caused by CO2. The models are proven failures.
A reader Russell writes in to tell me his Year 9 son Jordan and his friend, Tom, took on their teacher’s sacred belief in man-made global warming. Given no warning, and called insulting names in front of the class, they took up the challenge with gusto and stayed up til 1am that night to put the presentation together. Not surprisingly the teacher tried to pull out the next day, but the class would not let her.
One of the slides quotes Al Gore mocking “the tiny minority”, like the ones “who still believe that the moon landing was faked…”. Then it shows and quotes four Apollo Astronauts and Burt Rutan (the first private astronaut).
One of the ten slides
From reader Russell:
The other week at school my eldest son (15) was challenged by his teacher to present to the class why he is a ”climate change denier”. He had to do this presentation the next day.
At the start of his class the next day he advised the teacher he was ready. She told him she wasn’t interested now, maybe another day. His classmates started heckling her saying ”You Chicken Miss”. She eventually agreed and got another teacher to sit in as well. Before my son spoke she showed the class the promo to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. After his presentation the class gave him a standing ovation. There is a lot more to this story, the above overview sort of explains what occurred.
To start his talk he read out five quotes from the ”US Senate Minority Report” below, then his power point. She made him stop the Prof Carter video 3min into it, the Prof Ball podcast about 5min in and let the class watch the other 10min video all the way through.
May there be a thousand young rebels following in their footsteps, says Jo.
Russell explained his son and friends get a hard time at school, though it seems, give their teachers a pretty hard time in return:
“…They [the boys] question everything they being taught and who’s the messenger. They know the truth about AGW, Sustainable Development, UNESCO,OECD, over population, open borders, media, communism, politics, the list goes on. One his mates sent the 10min video ”Agenda 21 for Dummies” reply all on the schools email, even the teachers received the link.”
“… there is some history with the boys and this teacher, she is a true socialist. One example of this is she told Jordan ‘His opinion is irrelevant, and only when you become an adult people will listen to what you have to say. Shut up, I am the TEACHER and you’re here to learn.’
I expect the teacher in question will not forget this lesson (though possibly she will interpret her mistake as being to let students speak).
Russell says that skepticism is alive and well in teenagers, despite them being raised on the climate dogma:
“Children are waking up to this hoax. I know of at least 50 kids in year 9 that realise this. I coach an under 15 rugby team and all 20 of them don’t believe in AGW, plus his large group of friends that attend different high schools in the area. Sustainable Development has overtaken AGW. AGW is still pushed in the classroom but SD is across every subject.’
Another cycle of the Climate Change Scare Machine is laid bare. David Rose explains how those lobbying and advising the government on green policies are benefiting from green projects. It’s all in the Daily Mail. The Green Industrial Complex has simply bought everyone off, and, cleverly, done it with your money.
It’s the new business model really. Why work for customers and compete in the free market? Instead scare the public, sell them the “answer”, and to make sure they pay, convince the government that you need grants and gravy (or you’ll call them names). Pretty soon, the government forces the public to pay, disguises and splits the payments into a thousand parts, and tells the people it is for their own good. The fun ramps up when the government hires you back to advise it on how to keep the gravy flowing to you.
What is really mindboggling is that it’s so blatant. Many of these connections “exposed” by Rose are listed on the CCC website, the conflicts are obvious. Why it wasn’t exposed years ago? As I keep saying, the problem is not so much that there are people on the take (there always will be) the real issue IS the media. Someone tell me why the British Public pays the BBC news service?
David Rose, Daily Mail
“The fatcat ecocrats exposed: Web of ‘green’ politicians, tycoons and power brokers who help each other benefit from billions raised on your bills
Four of nine-person Climate Change Committee, official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions
“No institution plays a greater role in dictating green energy policy than the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) – the body set up by Ed Miliband when he was Labour Energy Secretary through his 2008 Climate Change Act.”
“Amazingly, almost half the CCC’s members, whose decisions affect every UK citizen and the entire economy, have been paid by firms with green interests. They are all paid £800 a day for their part-time CCC work, except for chairman Lord Deben, who gets £1,000.”
“Among the most astonishing features exposed by our investigation is the way in which vehement advocates for radical policies designed to curb global warming are making huge sums of money from their work. Here are some of the key figures among the new breed of fat-cat Ecocrats…”
The Rt. Hon John Gummer, Lord Deben, Chairman established and chairs Sancroft, a Corporate Responsibility consultancy working with bluechip companies around the world on environmental, social and ethical issues.
David Rose writes: CCC chairman Lord Deben, 74, was until recently chairman of Veolia Water UK PLC, which connects windfarms to the National Grid. According to energy expert Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University, the drive to renewables means new grid investment will reach £25 billion by 2020. Deben has refused to state how much Veolia paid him. Company records say he resigned on November 12. His spokeswoman said that this was because the firm was being merged with a sister firm.
He remains chairman of his family consultancy firm Sancroft, which advises companies on ‘global environmental policy’. When he took up his CCC post, he resigned as chairman of offshore wind firm Forewinds.
David Kennedy (Chief Executive) Was an economist with the World Bank and the European Bank.
Jo notes that the World Bank clearly loves the idea that it needs to get money from taxpayers and hand it out to friends to save the planet. As I said before: Why would the World Bank be interested in promoting fear of man-made emissions? Could it be that they manage millions of dollars of funds and facilities, all of which would be pointless if man-made emissions are not a catastrophe waiting-to-happen. The World Bank published an annual report on the State of the Carbon Market and generated much PR and many headlines in the media, that is, until the carbon market collapsed and the World Bank didn’t want the world to notice, so they canceled the report.
Professor Samuel Fankhauser Co-Director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics and a Director at Vivid Economics.
Rose writes:“Sam Fankhauser, 49, is a professor at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Institute on Climate Change, funded by the radical green billionaire Jeremy Grantham – the world’s most generous donor to green activist groups.Prof Fankhauser admits he is paid an undisclosed sum as a director of Vivid Economics, which offers business clients advice on how to respond to green Government policies – such as those set by the CCC.”
Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, CBE, FRS
Sir Brian Hoskins, a fierce critic of climate sceptics, is a climatologist at Imperial College, London, where he is director of another institute funded by Grantham.
Jo notes that The Grantham Institute is an activist group founded by Jeremy Grantham with a £12m donation in 2007 from his foundation. His green views are well known and he also donates to The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and WWF. The Grantham crowd call people they disagree with “deniers” and they dodge debates. We can safely guess that anyone paid by The Grantham Institute would not be popular at the office if they pointed out some flaws in climate policy or renewable energy. The Grantham Institute employs Bob Ward who has been caught promoting untruths with rank hypocrisy and who used his previous position at The Royal Society to pretend he spoke on behalf of UK’s top Scientists in order intimidate Exxon and stop them funding people with different views to himself. Hey it was a good way to close down free speech on science. Shame about the reputation of The Royal Society.
The Grantham Institute also gets government grants, and we can assume it would not exist at all if it were widely believed that CO2 had little effect on the climate. The Institute is widely referred to as “independent” by the media — though I defy anyone to find one rational reason why it should be.
Professor Dame Julia King DBE FREng “an NED of the Green Investment Bank”
Rose reports: “Dame Julia King, 59, is also a director of the Green Investment Bank, for which she is paid £30,000 a year on top of her £272,000 salary as vice chancellor of Aston University. The bank, funded by taxpayers to the tune of £3.8 billion, has investment in offshore wind as a ‘top priority’. The more the CCC’s rulings favour renewable subsidies, the better the bank is likely to do.”
Professor Lord Krebs Kt FRS, A zoologist who from 1994- 1999, was Chief Executive of the Natural Environment Research Council. He is chairman of the House of Lords Science & Technology Select Committee.
Rose writes: “…a former Government chief scientific adviser, is paid an undisclosed amount as a member of the ‘Sustainability Board’ of the global banking giant HSBC. In the section of its website that deals with its ‘sustainability’ work, the bank lists its four biggest green business opportunities. Top of the list is ‘low-carbon energy production such as bio-energy, nuclear, solar and wind’ – all directly affected by the CCC’s edicts.”
JoNova says: What chance did the Royal Society have? Picture HSBC’s enthusiasm for paying him if he announced the climate models were useless, and the empirical evidence disagreed.
Professor Jim Skea, CBE
Jim Skea is also at Imperial, where he is Professor of Sustainable Energy, and was launch director of the Low Carbon Vehicle Project.
Jo Nova says: Hypothetically, imagine the situation where sustainable energy was expensive, unreliable, and not that sustainable either. On what planet would a Prof of Sustainable Energy be personally as well off if he advised the UK not to waste money on sustainable energy?
Probably my favorite line in Rose’s article was “A CCC spokeswoman said it had ‘rigorous checks and balances to ensure that there are no conflicts of interests for committee members’.” That, I think, tells you all you need to know about the integrity and honesty of the CCC.
Many are saying it’s the first snow in 112 years, see News.com. Though there are reports the Egyptian Meteorological Authority disagrees that it has been that long. As a cold snap hits the Middle East, snow is falling in many places, including Israel, where it is said to have been the heaviest snow since 1953.
LA Times: “In Cairo, where local news reports said the last recorded snowfall was more than 100 years ago, children in outlying districts capered in white-covered streets, and adults marveled at the sight, tweeting pictures of snow-dusted parks and squares.”
Huffington Post: ” In Jerusalem, local media reported that schools and roads were closed, and transport suspended after four inches of snow – the most since 1953. “
I hear snow in Amman is not that unusual. Still, that’s a decent kind of snowfall.
Washington Post reports that “Jerusalem was last snow-covered about 50 years ago. As these photos show, the snow has brought delight to some in the region but has exacerbated the misery of others, particularly those in the vast Syrian refugee camps,..”. The Washington Post article has many photos. Twitchy also has many shots of camels in the snow.
Safety Warning: This information may be misinterpreted. It is weather, not climate and it’s 95% likely a climate scientist predicted this would happen due to global warming, within non-standard variant deviations of undefined uncertainties.
Things have to go “radical” now, because there are no sensible pragmatic or long term solutions left:
“About the conference
Today, in 2013, we face an unavoidably radical future. We either continue with rising emissions and reap the radical repercussions of severe climate change, or we acknowledge that we have a choice and pursue radical emission reductions: No longer is there a non- radical option. Moreover, low-carbon supply technologies cannot deliver the necessary rate of emission reductions – they need to be complemented with rapid, deep and early reductions in energy consumption – the rationale for this conference.
These people are seriously discussing reductions of energy of 8%, not just by 2020, but every year.
“… More specifically the conference will consider how to deliver reductions in energy consumption of at least 8% per year (~60% across a decade). It will foster an up-beat and can-do mentality.
“For conservatives, a focus on free markets and personal responsibility sits awkwardly with climate politics, which requires a long-term, collectivist response.”
JoNova replies:
“For collectivists, a focus on opinions and social popularity sits awkwardly with plans to change global climate which requires an understanding of maths and numbers.”
At least no one is pretending cheap solar will save the day. Now the aim is to make coal as expensive as solar (which is much more achievable, sadly).
It’s one rule for you, and another for their friends. If a coal plant was wiping out thousands of birds and bats you can be sure Greenpeace would be launching a campaign. But when an industrial turbine with blade-tips travelling at 180mph does the killing, who cares?
The law for normals makes it expensive to kill birds and bats:
“Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, BP was fined $100 million for the damage it caused to bird populations in the area, both migratory and resident. — AlaskaDispatch
“Exxon Mobil has agreed to pay $600,000 in penalties after approximately 85 migratory birds died of exposure to hydrocarbons at some of its natural gas facilities across the Midwest. — NY Times
And it was going to get expensive for windfarms:
“Nov 22 2013 Duke Energy has agreed to pay a $1 million fine for killing 14 eagles and 149 other birds at two Wyoming wind farms. — audublog
That was the first time a windfarm got pinged. And it works out to be about $6000 a bird. Could get expensive, eh?
“The Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that 440,000 birds are killed by wind turbines every year in the U.S. However, that number is said to be a low-ball estimate by independent researchers. Each year 573,000 birds and 888,000 bats are killed by wind turbines in the U.S., according a study by K. Shawn Smallwood that was published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin. — dailycaller.com
Killing 400,000 birds at $6k each would make windpower in the US about $2 billion* more expensive, and less viable, than it already is. But industrial wind turbines are special friends of big-government and they were given licenses to kill “accidentally” for up to five years. But I guess the five year licenses were expiring, so the Obama administration reassessed the rule and now says it’s OK to kill them for 30 years.
“The Interior Department on Friday unveiled a final rule extending the length of permits that allow facilities to unintentionally kill protected bald and golden eagles.The regulations are a major victory for the wind and solar industry, among others, which will now be able to obtain permits for as long as 30 years — a sixfold increase from the previous five-year limit.
I like the newspeak from the Department of Bird-Killing explaining why 30 years of carcasses is a good thing:
“This change will facilitate the responsible development of renewable energy and other projects designed to operate for decades, while continuing to protect eagles consistent with our statutory mandates,” the department said in its regulation. –– The Hill
Five years of bird deaths was not responsible, but 30 years of deaths is? Anyone would protect eagles like this, of course.
In the end it amounts to another $20$2 billion dollar subsidy for renewables (and a lot more dead birds). But it’s all for the sake of the planet.
But there is a bigger issue at stake here. When is a law not a law? When the government can issue licenses to break it. Selective enforcement anyone? Since Duke Energy may be one of the only wind operators to have to pay the bird-killing tithe, I have to ask, what did they do wrong? Perhaps they didn’t butter up the right people on the right day?
WWF would be outraged if coal fired plants got 30 year exemptions for busting bald eagles.
When is a dead bird a tragedy for an eco-green? Only when it scores a political point.
As usual, it’s not about the environment. It’s only power and politics.
The pursuit of knowledge does not fit well into human institutions, the 9 – 5 regime, career plans, nor the profit motive. Cracks are everywhere. The message grows that science is being exploited and distorted.
Randy Schekman received his Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine yesterday. At the same time he has declared that his lab will not be sending papers to the top-tier journals Nature, Science and Cell because they are damaging science. He calls for more open access papers saying “science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals”
“I am a scientist. Mine is a professional world that achieves great things for humanity. But it is disfigured by inappropriate incentives. The prevailing structures of personal reputation and career advancement mean the biggest rewards often follow the flashiest work, not the best. Those of us who follow these incentives are being entirely rational – I have followed them myself – but we do not always best serve our profession’s interests, let alone those of humanity and society.
Chiefly, he points out that the “luxury” journals manage themselves as brand-names, and choose papers for reasons other than their scientific advances. The journals seek “sexy”, provocative papers that will improve their citation rating and impact factor.
The exclusive brands are then marketed with a gimmick called “impact factor” – a score for each journal, measuring the number of times its papers are cited by subsequent research. Better papers, the theory goes, are cited more often, so better journals boast higher scores. Yet it is a deeply flawed measure, pursuing which has become an end in itself – and is as damaging to science as the bonus culture is to banking.
Scientists pursue research that will be rewarded through publication in the brand-name journals, and the vital work of replication falls by the wayside.
A paper can become highly cited because it is good science – or because it is eye-catching, provocative or wrong. Luxury-journal editors know this, so they accept papers that will make waves because they explore sexy subjects or make challenging claims. This influences the science that scientists do. It builds bubbles in fashionable fields where researchers can make the bold claims these journals want, while discouraging other important work, such as replication studies.
Poor quality papers means more retractions, or worse, no retraction at all…
In extreme cases, the lure of the luxury journal can encourage the cutting of corners, and contribute to the escalating number of papers that are retracted as flawed or fraudulent. Science alone has recently retracted high-profile papers reporting cloned human embryos, links between littering and violence, and the genetic profiles of centenarians. Perhaps worse, it has not retracted claims that a microbe is able to use arsenic in its DNA instead of phosphorus, despite overwhelming scientific criticism.
Open access science is the way to go:
There is a better way, through the new breed of open-access journals that are free for anybody to read, and have no expensive subscriptions to promote. Born on the web, they can accept all papers that meet quality standards, with no artificial caps. Many are edited by working scientists, who can assess the worth of papers without regard for citations. As I know from my editorship of eLife, an open access journal funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Max Planck Society, they are publishing world-class science every week.
In my opinion the real problem is death-by-committee — at every point individual responsibility is turned over to a group. Peer review becomes a committee decision, government grants are all committee recommendations and only when one person is held responsible for deciding an outcome will we get better processes and better outcomes.
Funders and universities, too, have a role to play. They must tell the committees that decide on grants and positions not to judge papers by where they are published. It is the quality of the science, not the journal’s brand, that matters. Most importantly of all, we scientists need to take action. Like many successful researchers, I have published in the big brands, including the papers that won me the Nobel prize for medicine, which I will be honoured to collect tomorrow. But no longer. I have now committed my lab to avoiding luxury journals, and I encourage others to do likewise.
Just as Wall Street needs to break the hold of the bonus culture, which drives risk-taking that is rational for individuals but damaging to the financial system, so science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals. The result will be better research that better serves science and society.
To correct the groupthink that is destroying science, editors who publish rubbish (like MBH98) need to be held accountable. Government Ministers which allow “bodies” like the ARC to approve junk applications need to feel the heat. As usual, The Media IS the Problem. If Nature‘s failings were investigated by “science” journalists and exposed in features, they would quickly change their attitude. But few science journalists even know what science is.
Note that Schekman is editor of an open access journal called eLife, so there is a potential conflict of interest and a motive to complain. But there are no shortage of others who agree, and it does not make his words less true.
Daniel Sirkis, a postdoc in Schekman’s lab, said many scientists wasted a lot of time trying to get their work into Cell, Science and Nature. “It’s true I could have a harder time getting my foot in the door of certain elite institutions without papers in these journals during my postdoc, but I don’t think I’d want to do science at a place that had this as one of their most important criteria for hiring anyway,” he told the Guardian.
Sebastian Springer, a biochemist at Jacobs University in Bremen, who worked with Schekman at the University of California, Berkeley, said he agreed there were major problems in scientific publishing, but no better model yet existed. “The system is not meritocratic. You don’t necessarily see the best papers published in those journals. The editors are not professional scientists, they are journalists which isn’t necessarily the greatest problem, but they emphasise novelty over solid work,” he said
Schekman also claims the brand names artificially limit the number of articles they publish, though I find that point unconvincing. I’m more interested in getting science beyond the tyranny of peer review and government dependency. In my opinion the brand name of Nature has been hopeless compromised by its open activism, rather than it’s open attitude. That they will publish name-calling, hypocritical and pointless papers, yet turn down important corrections, tells us all we need to know about the quality of this once great publication.
Nature is the journal of UnScience.
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My posts on the scandal of Nature pretending “denier” is a scientific term
I consider these to be among of the best posts I’ve written. As I said “All this mess could be cleared up with an email.” I asked Bain to name the observations that deniers deny. He never did.
“If those papers (God forbid) do not exist, then the true deniers would turn out to be the researchers who denied that empirical evidence is key to scientific confidence in a theory. The true deniers would not be the skeptics who asked for evidence, but the name-calling researchers who did not test their own assumptions.” – Jo
The IPCC Synthesis Report first order draft has been leaked (h/t Tallbloke) . It is part of the big Fifth Assessment report see the parts already released here. The Synthesis Report supposedly summarizes the science. In the real world the topic du jour is the plateau, pause, or hiatus in warming which the IPCC can no longer ignore. Instead the masters of keyword phrases test new bounds in saying things that are technically correct, while not stating the bleeding obvious. Luckily we are here to help them. : -)
Translating IPCC-spin:
“The rate of warming of the observed global-mean surface temperature has been smaller over the past 15 years (1998-2012) than over the past 30 to 60 years (Figure SYR.1a; Box SYR.1) and is estimated to be around one-third to one-half of the trend over the period 1951–2012. Nevertheless, the decade of the 2000s has been the warmest in the instrumental record (Figure SYR.1a).”
Translated: Yes temperatures are not rising faster as we predicted, even though more CO2 was pumped out faster than ever. Let’s ignore that this shows the models were wrong, the important thing is to use the words “warmest” and “record” as often as possible.
“The radiative forcing of the climate system has continued to increase during the 2000s, as has its largest contributor, the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Consistent with this radiative forcing, the climate system has very likely continued to accumulate heat since 1998, and sea level has continued to rise. The radiative forcing of the climate system has been increasing to a lesser rate over the period 1998-2011 compared to 1984 to 1998 or 1951-2011, due to a negative forcing trend from volcanic eruptions and the downward phase of the solar cycle over 2000-2009. However, there is low confidence in quantifying the role of forcing trend in causing the surface-warming hiatus, because of uncertainty in the magnitude of the volcanic forcing trend and low confidence in the forcing trend due to tropospheric aerosol. {WG1 8.5; WG1 Box 9.2}”
Translated: Despite the fact that the rate of warming is slower than it was before, theoretically CO2 is warming us faster. This is a fatal contradiction, but we hope you won’t notice. We will distract you by mentioning that the rate of increase in theoretical forcing has slowed in our estimates of volcanoes and solar stuff and hope this sounds like it sort of matches, and we know what we are talking about. But we do admit we really have no idea why the warming didn’t occur. Read between the lines — we know CO2 is important because our models don’t work without it — but our models don’t work anyway, we don’t understand the other forcings. The science is settled, except for the inconvenient, unpredictable bits that are not settled. Give us your money.
“For the period 1998–2012, 111 of the 114 climate-model simulations show a surface-warming trend larger than the observations (Box SYR.1, Figure 1a). There is medium confidence that this difference between models and observations is to a substantial degree caused by unpredictable internal climate variability. Variability sometimes enhances and sometimes counteracts the long-term externally forced warming trend (Figure Box SYR.1). Internal variability thus diminishes the relevance of short trends for long-term climate change. There are also possible contributions from inadequacies in the solar, volcanic, and aerosol forcings used by the models and, in some models, from too strong a response to increasing greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic factors. {WG1 2.4, 9.3, 9.4; 10.3, 11.2, 11.3, WG1 Box 9.2}
Translated: This is what 95% certainty looks like: 97% of our models are wrong. (See also here). We blame that on unpredictable stuff that goes on inside the climate. Maybe we are also incorrect on solar, volcanic and dust too.
“In summary, the observed recent surface-warming hiatus is attributable in roughly equal measure to a cooling contribution from internal variability and a reduced trend in external forcing (expert judgment, medium confidence). {WG1 8.5, Box 9.2}
Translated: This sentence looks quite confident because we are attributing the pause to something. Don’t look closely, it’s cooling from something we didn’t predict beforehand, still can’t predict now, and can’t measure, even if we could predict it. “Internal variability” is the new catch all term that covers all the things we don’t know. It’s is the multi-purpose-fudge for all occasions. We hope no one asks us if internal variability could have caused the warming before it caused the cooling.
Bonus: We like the words “expert judgment”. This makes us feel important.
“Footnote: The connection of the heat budget to equilibrium climate sensitivity, which is the long-term surface warming under an assumed doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration, arises because a warmer surface causes enhanced radiation to space, which counteracts the increase in Earth’s heat content. How much the radiation to space increases for a given increase in surface temperature, depends on the same feedback processes that determine equilibrium climate sensitivity.
Translated: Feedback processes are the downfall of the whole scare, so we use the phrase only once and in a footnote on page 21 of a 92 page document (that right now has “Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute” written on every page). We don’t expect any journalists to understand what this paragraph means, nor to ask about it, but if skeptics claim we deny that the feedbacks determine the end result we can point to this to show we are completely transparent.
Flannery and the Climate Council are at it again — trying to scare money out of people with their prophecies of bushfires. They are milking the fear factor from the October fires in the Blue Mountains, telling us disaster planning means we have to get “the facts straight”.
Let’s get the facts straight on exactly how human emissions of CO2 have affected the temperature and rainfall in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. How much hotter and drier is the climate? Ninety percent of human emissions have been produced since WWII. Katoomba has the longest running temperature series I could find in the BOM records -see below. But where is that rising trend? The string of hot years in the late 1930s appears to be just as hot as the last decade. The 1920s and 30s look a lot like the 1980 and 90s.
But wait, the Climate Council tells us “Hot, dry conditions create conditions favourable for bushfires. Australia has just experienced its hottest 12 months ever recorded.” Any sane person would assume the Blue Mountains must be getting drier — strange the Climate Council don’t provide a graph on that. Let’s look at the drying climate in Katoomba.
In other words Katoomba has a noisy annual rainfall, there is no obvious trend, there have been dry years and wet years, and if heat and dryness make fires worse, then there is no sign that CO2 makes any difference.
In Katoomba at least, the late 30s and 40s appear to be a bit hotter, and also drier than the last few years.That was when CO2 levels were ideal.
Climate scientists used to tell us that only the long term trends mattered. What the Climate Council does is not science. They are simply stringing keywords together, confounding concepts, and cherry picking any disaster anywhere, to whip up a scare just like the local tribal witchdoctors used to. There is no chain-of-evidence to link CO2 to bushfires. Mere conjecture and broken models. But don’t wait for the Climate Council to tell you the facts that matter.
Severe bushfires in October are not unusual. The ferocity of the fires was not unprecedented. The ignition points for some of the Blue Mountains fires were not due to CO2 but to arson and an accident in the Army. Fuel loads are the factor we most need to discuss.
I took this flying from Denpasar to Perth. Glorious ancient landscape in the dry season north-west WA. Click for a larger broader image.
UPDATE: thanks to help from Steve R W, I think I’ve found the location. It appears to be part of a long ridge in The Barlee Range, just north of the Frederick River in the Pilbara area of Western Australia. It is so remote, Google Earth tells me “you can’t get here from where you are”.
Rain rain go away, let’s chop a forest down today?
Mark Andrich and Jorg Imberger compare the rainfall patterns in different regions of southwest Western Australia. The areas where the most land was cleared show the greatest decline. They estimate that as much as 50 – 80% of the observed decline in rainfall is the result of land clearing, which doesn’t leave much to blame on CO2. The paper came out in 2012.
This fits with other researchers working on the Amazon who estimated chopping down the forests could reduce rain by as much as 90%. Once again: it’s not so much that trees grow where the rain falls, but that the rain falls where the trees grow, and the taller the trees, the better.
So the good news for Greenies is that we ought to plant more trees (and I’m all for that). But driving a Prius, building windmills, and using solar panels won’t do much for our rainfall. (It’s so strange anyone thought it would. The witchdoctors have them completely bamboozled.) The Abbott government’s plan to plant trees to sequester carbon may work, but by accident, not because of anything to do with CO2.
Oh the irony. The evil climate skeptics want more trees, while the good and earth-loving gullible Greens want a forced financial markets of fake goods (sounds more like bank-loving!).
If you are a rainfall analyst, WA (where I live) is a bit of a prize spot because, unlike most of the world, the flora was mostly chopped down after long-term rainfall data started being collected. So it’s possible to analyze the effect clearing has on rainfall patterns. The rainfall has declined by 30% since 1970 in the inland areas of southwest Western Australia, as climate activists like to remind us at every opportunity. Instead of being a prime example of a global warming disaster, it turns out that southwest WA is a bit of a poster-child to show the effects of land clearing.
The many ways land clearing can affect rainfall
To gloss over a complicated array of effects: clearing land increases the albedo (which means the surface reflects more light), and there are lower transpiration rates (the air is drier and there is less latent heat flux in the boundary layer). Trees affect something called the Biotic Pump (see here as well), and produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that seed cloud nuclei, so there are less cloud seeding particles if there are less trees.
Taller trees break up the surface, and without them the surface profile is flatter, so the wind flows faster. Inland WA is a pretty flat region, mostly around 300 m above sea level, and trees as high as 100m tall would make a big difference to the profile. Indeed rainfall increases by 40mm for every 100m in altitude between Fremantle (the port) and the hills. This is known as the orographic effect. We don’t just want trees, apparently, we want tall trees.
Figure 7. Rainfall zones. Moving from east to west, Zone 1 includes the uncleared region east of SWWA, Zone 2 includes the wheatbelt, Zone 3 includes the hills region, and Zone 4 covers rainfall station locations along the coast. The station location details and rainfall data are available from BOM [2012]. The station locations are as follows: 1.1 Bullfinch; 1.2 Lake Carmody; 1.3 Ravensthorpe; 2.1 Northampton; 2.2 Beverley; 2.3 Duranillin; 2.4 Broomehill; 2.5 Deeside; 2.6 Merredin; 3.1 Mundaring Weir; 3.2 Dwellingup; 3.3 Brunswick Junction; 3.4 Collie; 3.5 Nannup; 3.6 Wilgarrup; 3.7 Manjimup; 3.8 Pemberton; 4.1 Mandurah; 4.2 Cape Naturaliste; 4.3 Busselton; 4.4 Cape Leeuwin; and 4.5 Albany. All zone station location numbering corresponds with the rainfall at station locations shown in Figure 8.
Zone 1 above is the most arid and furthest inland, but also the least cleared, and it hasn’t lost rainfall (though it didn’t have much to start with). Zone 4 is the wettest area close to the coast. But Zone 3 is the hilly escarpment where the biggest trees live, which has the highest annual rainfall, and it shows the largest decline in rainfall. Zone 2 (the wheatbelt) was drier to begin with and was more heathland and forest.
Note the scale changes. Zone 1 gets about 20 cm (8 inches) in winter which is the “wet” season. Zone 3, the wettest, gets five times as much.
Figure 8. 9-year moving average of winter rainfall. Zone 1 has a slight increase in rainfall over time, Zone 2 rainfall declines, Zone 3 rainfall has the largest decline, and Zone 4 also declines, but by less than Zones 2 and 3. The zones are shown in Figure 7 and exact locations are available from the BOM [2012]. (Click to enlarge)
Most of the clearing happened from 1950 – 1980
In 1910 around 90% of the wheatbelt was covered in native vegetation. Clearing accelerated from 1950 to 1980 when 40% of the land was cleared. By 1980 a mere 20% of natural cover remained.
Andrich and Imberger calculate the dollar effect of deforestation on water resources: “if deforestation had been managed in a way that did notreduce rainfall at reservoirs or increase streamflow salinity, then SWWA residents could bepaying as little as $765 M/year for their water (instead of $1,165 M/year).” The additional expenses on water work out to be around $250 – $300 dollars a year per household.
The CDM is one of the only truly global carbon markets. It’s been the main mechanism for “mitigation” in developing countries, (China says “thank you”). Born with the Kyoto agreement, it was in a sick state last year and was even said to have collapsed. Now however it’s reached a state of “coma”.
Each CDM was worth 20 euros in 2008. Now they are selling for 50c.
Reuters: Investment under the U.N.’s $315 billion Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has ground to a halt as the value of the credits they generate has plunged 95 percent in five years to around 0.30 euros, crushing profits that investors count on to set up carbon-cutting schemes in the developing world.
“As a tradable commodity, it’s in a coma and will be unless and until a 2015 agreement wakes it up,” said Jorund Buen, co-founder and partner at consultancy and project developer Differ.
A lot of things could be said about the last UNFCCC meeting in Warsaw. Here’s the one that matters:
“…no major nation offered to set or deepen emission targets, while Japan scaled down its 2020 goal.”
The language of death:
“…almost 200 nations “expressed concern” over the state of the CDM market, but measures that could have helped prop up the scheme were removed…”
There’s a paltry rescue effort which only makes it look more sick, and more pointless:
“In the absence of new targets, several European nations firmed up pledges in Warsaw to pay a premium over market rates for a handful of CDM projects in the world’s poorest countries to keep the scheme alive.”
Norway’s government is sending $30m of taxpayer funds to buy CDM credits. Lucky UK Taxpayers are tossing in 50 million pounds. Do I read this correctly — of the 50 million, only 33 is going to buy of the credits, the other 17million is going to train people on getting through UN red tape. Those compliance costs… really? And people call this a “free” market.
I guess it is winter. In a cold snap last week nearly 1,400 records were broken in the US. 886 places recorded the lowest maximum, 325 recorded the coldest minimum, and 127 places recorded the highest snowfall.
A few days ago the records for that seven day period were even higher: 205 snowfall records. 969 Low Max. 203 Low temps. 17 High Temp. 61 High minimum.
Media coverage of the record cold? Almost non-existent
It’s just another day tracking the decline of the global warming meme.
Things were so pear-shaped for global carbon trading markets in 2012 that the World Bank canceled its annual State of the Carbon Market report. But how bad were they? In their last report in 2012 the grand global total was $176b USD for the 2011 year. Since the World Bank figure are not publishing their tally any more, I’ve switched to the Reuters Point Carbon figures instead, which are issued in Euro.
Rather devastatingly, despite the fact the FTSE grew 6% in 2012 and Euro Stoxx grew by 13% in 2012, the global carbon market (which is mostly an EU market) fell by a whopping 36% in 2012. Money printing is running rife and new money is pouring into asset markets worldwide, yet globally the money is running from invisible, rortable, pointless carbon certificates. We are past the peak, and over the hill. This parrot is almost dead.
Back in the heady days of 2008 the growth was described as “explosive” and it was predicted it would grow to $1.2 trillion by 2020 (about 880 billion €) .
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These figures are different to previous USD ones, but since most of the trading is in euro it is probably more useful. In the USD graphs there were some spurious “rises” due to shifts in exchange rates. Even though a record in US dollars was claimed then the reality is that the carbon markets were flat for nearly four years.
Look out for new publicity claims saying market volume is growing, or even, more pointlessly, that the number of markets is growing. There is almost always a way to spin a “growing” headline.
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It’s the new business model really. Why work for customers and compete in the free market? Instead scare the public, sell them the “answer”, and to make sure they pay, convince the government that you need grants and gravy (or you’ll call them names). Pretty soon, the government forces the public to pay, disguises and splits the payments into a thousand parts, and tells the people it is for their own good. The fun ramps up when the government hires you back to advise it on how to keep the gravy flowing to you.
David Kennedy (Chief Executive) Was an economist with the World Bank and the European Bank.
Professor Lord Krebs Kt FRS, A zoologist who from 1994- 1999, was Chief Executive of the Natural Environment Research Council. He is chairman of the House of Lords Science & Technology Select Committee.
It’s one rule for you, and another for their friends. If a coal plant was wiping out thousands of birds and bats you can be sure Greenpeace would be launching a campaign. But when an industrial turbine with blade-tips travelling at 180mph does the killing, who cares?
The CDM is one of the only truly global carbon markets. It’s been the main mechanism for “mitigation” in developing countries, (China says “thank you”). Born with the Kyoto agreement, it was 
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