Plastic pollution and climate change may be significantly altering the level of oxygen on our planet. Now, a new study dives into the impact it could have on marine life, including squids, crabs and octopuses – blindness.
The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, highlights how important oxygen is to sight and retinal activity for certain marine larvae. Tiny declines in oxygen levels result in significant vision impairment, including almost total blindness in certain species.
“Using in vivo electroretinogram recordings, we show that there is a decrease in retinal sensitivity to light in marine invertebrates when exposed to reduced oxygen availability,” the study’s abstract reads. “We found a 60-100 [percent] reduction in retinal responses in the larvae of cephalopods and crustaceans…
Or more specifically: Octopuses will go blind if they are suddenly dumped in tanks with reduced oxygen…
To test the theory, the animals were put in reduced oxygen environments for approximately 30 minutes.
Time to legislate against free range low-oxygen tanks.
Every day, octopuses survive swimming up and down through different oxygen levels of water, but a slow change over 200 years will blind them. Really.
The research highlights that it is likely there is a change in oxygen in the daily environment of these animals due to swimming at different depths, but it underscores the concern that a permanent decline could be destructive.
You can’t make this stuff up, but you can buy it with enough government grants.
Scott Morrison in Parliament. Photo, ABC: Nick Haggarty
The Coalition can now form a majority government with no need to do deals with a GetUp candidate. They may win 78 seats. While this is being hailed as a “great” win it’s nothing like Tony Abbott’s 90 seat landslide in 2013. Of the last three elections, the most skeptical PM won hugely, and the biggest believer, Turnbull, almost lost. Morrison-in-the middle, couldn’t fight hard on climate change because his party supports major and expensive action, but at least he didn’t burn off the base like Turnbull did. Luckily for him, the Labor Party had wild ambition and was doomed by overconfidence. (Thank the ABC).
Every time Labor and GetUp reminded Australia that Morrison brought a lump of coal to Parliament, they were helping Morrison.
This was a “climate change” election and Australians voted No
Even ABC commentators admit the central role of climate change and are baffled. (If only they had shown some, any, interest in the opinions of 50% of Australia?). Watch the struggle:
It was supposed to be the big issue of the 2019 Australian federal election: climate change.
A range of polls and surveys had left many analysts, myself included, with the sense that this would be a crucial issue at the ballot box. … ABC’s Vote Compass survey those identifying climate change as the most important issue had risen from 9 per cent in 2016 to 29 per cent in 2019.
Advocacy groups and even media outlets also encouraged the view that 2019 was, and should be, Australia’s climate election.
Voters feared climate policy more than climate change
Andrew Probyn, the ABC’s favourite political “analyst” — who completely missed what was developing — puts personalities, not policies at the top of his list. As if Australians primarily just vote for the guy they like the look of.
Instead, this was unmistakeably a vote for a coal mine:
“I never expected numbers like this,” admitted central Queensland MP Michelle Landry. [Lib-Nat Party]
“Thank you Bob Brown is all I can say. He came up here trying to tell Queenslanders what we should and shouldn’t be doing, and it actually drew together the agriculture and mining sectors — I’ve never seen anything like it.”
In Adani country, Michelle Landry, George Christensen and Ken O’Dowd recorded swings of up to 15 per cent to transform their ultra-marginal electorates into comfortably safe seats.
It’s likely only five of Queensland’s 30 electorates will be held by Labor when the pencil dust has settled.
This was a coal election in Queensland:
There’s little doubt among regional Queensland MPs that coal killed Labor’s chances.
“People up here in central Queensland aren’t stupid, they can work out that [Bill Shorten’s] unsure what’s going to happen in the coal mining industry,” said returned LNP member for Flynn, Ken O’Dowd.
Kerryn Phelps put “climate change at the top of her agenda” says the ABC. And after only 7 months she’s out. Her primary vote was just 33%. Mr Sharma (Liberal) gained 48% of the vote. That’s not much of a honeymoon. Though the end result was extremely close on two-party preferred votes, which is a mark of the great political re-alignment as wealthy formerly Liberal blue-ribbon seats shift to the “inner city” Labor Party while the workers become Liberal conservative voters.
One Nation votes are unmistakeably votes against climate propaganda, and the swings were large. More fool the Liberals, who were so afraid of namecalling attacks by the ABC that they preferenced the Greens ahead of One Nation.
The LNP’s George Christensen kept his seat with a swing towards him of 11 percentage points. Labor lost votes to the One Nation candidate who polled 13 per cent. Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon in the coal mining area of the Hunter Valley may survive the big swing against him, but one Nation candidate Stuart Bonds polled 22 per cent of first-preference votes and clearly took votes from Labor. In Rockhampton the One Nation candidate won 17 per cent of the vote. That meant the swing away from Labor on two-party preferred was more than 10 percentage points.
Against all the polls, the money, advertising, and the non-stop media coverage, against all expectations and the betting agencies — the Extreme Climate Fix was a flop. The Labor Plan to cut Australian emissions by 45% percent is now gone — per capita this would have been a world record sacrifice in a country already increasing their renewable energy faster than any other.
They called this a climate election and the people voted “No”
Activists thought it was safe to piggy back on a “sure thing”, and they went in hard. Volunteers even wore bright orange “I’m a climate voter” T-shirts.
If Labor had won, they would be crowing right now about how it proved the people wanted action.
Political pollsters and bullied and badgered voters
Labor was tipped to win decisively in every poll. Even in the exit polls. So thousands of people told pollsters one thing, then they voted the other way, and hid that again on the way out the polling door.
This was not just the abject failure of climate change as a vote winner, it was also a crashing fail for the pollsters. Australians have been badgered and bullied into saying they believe in climate change and prefer the left-leaning parties. (They knew it was uncool to vote “right”.) But when the time came, they voted against them both.
The latest Ipsos poll predicted Labor would win 78 lower house seats on Saturday… Betting on seven commercial marketspredicted Labor would win 83… the chances of 12 polls getting it wrong is 0.024 per cent.
Even though recent opinion polls have put the two sides within the margin of error, 44 polls since Scott Morrison became prime minister have pointed in the same direction: a narrowing contest, but one which Labor has exclusively led.
A Coalition win would represent one of the great upsets of modern Australian polling…”It’s virtually impossible for them to win,” says Andy Marks, a political scientist at Western Sydney University.
So much for academics.
The only seat that went with the climate spin-masters was the massive battle at Warringah, where GetUp threw everything they had at ousting leading “climate denier”, Tony Abbott. They may have succeeded at throwing out one of the best men in Australian politics, but I wonder if the people of Warringah will feel a bit used when they wake up and realize that the rest of the nation didn’t come with them.
Imagine the sweeping phase change if people felt free to share their thoughts and ask curious questions without penalty about a science topic? Imagine if the polls and momentum rolled the same way?
This will be a brutal shake for the Labor Party. A tough pill. They believed the polls and pushed aggressive, risky policies, doomed by their overconfidence.
Also potentially Liberals like Julie Bishop and Christopher Pyne were victims of the polls. They who left the party were probably assuming a big loss. Nice clean sweep for Scott Morrison. A few less Turnbull fans.
Australia missed a bullet today.
Let’s build another coal mine.
__________________
*Sportsbet are taking it well tweeting“Yep, we blew $1.3million. Could have been $80million though eh Clive?, referring to Clive Palmer, who spent that much trying to win a seat for himself.
LOOK OUT for die-hard skeptics David Archibald running for the Senate in WA (Fraser Anning), also for Malcolm Roberts in QLD (One Nation). For Australian Conservatives (Cory Bernardi’s Party) Jonathan Crabtree, WA.
In Borneo, the Dypterocarp forest, one of the species-richest in the world (F), is being replaced by oil palm plantations (G). These changes are irreversible for all practical purposes (H).
Under the radar: In a trade dispute with the EU, about six weeks ago, Indonesia threatened to leave the Paris Agreement. Just like that. —
Where was the ABC News? Showing orangutan rescues…
Two hundred and seventy million people live in Indonesia. It’s the fourth largest population in the world – only 20% fewer than the USA. It’s also the second largest coal exporter in the world, and perversely, one of only 16 countries that are even trying to meet their Paris commitment.
But Indonesia is the world’s biggest palm oil producer and around 16 – 20 million people rely on the sector, so the government sent a sharp message back to Europe:
As the European Union proceeds with a plan to ban crude palm oil (CPO) from use in raw bio-fuel materials, the government of Indonesia is threatening to back out of the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Indonesia’s Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan referenced the United States and Brazil’s withdrawal from the accord saying, “if the United States and Brazil can exit from the climate deal, we will consider it as well, because it is linked with the interests of the Indonesian people.”
“The U.S. was not sanctioned at all by the EU (after leaving the Paris accord),” said Peter Gontha, special staff at Indonesia’s foreign ministry.
He also said Indonesia faced EU pressure over palm oil despite the government declaring a moratorium on permits for new estates.
Indonesia claims palm is being discriminated against by the EU to protect the market of European oils such as sunflower and rapeseed oils. — March 27th, Reuters
Where’s the news?
Imagine an Australian politician negotiating like that? Or even the ABC mentioning it? It’s not like Australians would want to know how fragile this sacred agreement isn’t — how some countries are peeling away — or how other nations have leaders brave enough to talk back to the EU.
It’s not like Indonesia is a major competitor and trading partner, which is ten times our size and closer to Perth than Sydney. Shh!
Google “ABC News indonesia palm oil” — Find an Orangutang. Seriously, ABC News has turned into a lifestyle magazine. Rejoice! Indonesian rescuers managed to save a mother orangutan.” “Zoos Victoria has announced it’s going to stop selling products that sell palm oil.” Add “Paris” and keep searching. Eventually I found a relevant story from Canada News on youtube.
Once upon a time we had “Foreign Affairs” now we have animal rescue.
So The EU can keep Indonesia in the Paris deal by paying them for products that destroy forests and risk fires, or it can keep Greenpeace happy and risk losing yet another major player. Dilemma, dilemma.
One more nation jumps and it might start a trend…
h/t Pat who notes that Xinhau noticed the Indonesian play.
In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro is “dismantling” environmental agencies and missions. Brazil pulled out of hosting the 2019 U.N. climate summit, and has now canceled a United Nations climate change event that was to be held in August.
Environment Minister Ricardo Salles … said he was more interested in dealing with the problems that affect Brazilians who aren’t concerned about “climate change in Paris” or “meetings in Stockholm.”
“It’s an industry,” he said of the environmental movement. “It’s an industry of consultants, an industry of lectures, an industry of seminars.”
— Anna Jean Kaiser, Washington Post
A few days ago Bolsonaro also sacked the “militant” activist appointed by his predecessor as head of The Brazil Forum for Climate Change. I can’t think why…
[Former President] Temer appointed Alfredo Sirkis to lead the forum. Sirkis, who describes himself as a “militant environmentalist,” is a co-founder of the country’s Green Party and a former congressman, as well as a former guerilla fighter who fought against Brazil’s military dictatorship.
Sirkis told Reuters he was fired on Friday. He said the firing was probably related to the forum’s initiative to organize 12 Brazilian states to create a council on climate change that would act independently from the federal government.
— Jake Spring, Reuters, May 10
Sirkis was being paid by the government to organize a group to do exactly what the voters didn’t want.
Jair Bolsonaro, a 63-year-old former paratrooper who built his campaign around pledges to crush corruption, crime and a supposed communist threat, secured 55.1% of the votes after 99.9% were counted and was therefore elected Brazil’s next president, electoral authorities said on Sunday.
“We cannot continue flirting with communism … We are going to change the destiny of Brazil,” he said.
Tom Phillips and Dom Phillips –-The Guardian
As Australia hurtles headlong into the fastest renewables transition in the world. Bigger fish are moving out.
This election has been run on the lowest base primal tactics in Australian history. National policy has become a cult-like hate campaign. Which moderate centrist politician do we despise the most? The Alinsky-ite targeted smear campaign doesn’t attack a party, it isolates individuals, reducing voting to Good person: Bad person. The marked men and sole woman are those who question any part of the permitted agenda, especially on climate change. GetUp trashes their reputations with raining hate, manufactured scorn and lies that get cynically get “retracted” but never undone. GetUp also target the young and uninformed — using children as political activists. It only works because most of the Australian media repeats the toxic lines, and edits out the most informed views of half the electorate to be aired and debated. To be sure the ABC will seek out the odd conservative truckie or farmer (and the odder the better), but they won’t ask Australians with doctorates who disagree with their own political ideals.
Perversely if GetUp succeeds in outing the strongest skeptics from Parliament, they may become the core of a real centre-right force after the election, and freed from the Establishment grip, they may find their feet uncensored. But candidates are human. They need to hear from supporters. They need help.
Prime Skeptic Targets in the Liberal-National coalition: NSW, Tony Abbott, Craig Kelly. QLD – Keith Pitt, George Christian and Ken O’Dowd (all Nationals) VICTORIA – Kevin Andrews. WA – Andrew Hastie.
I’m sharing in the spirit of filling the hole that the billion dollar national broadcaster won’t:
…
…
CULT LIKE METHODS AND CULTURE
GetUp recently released a “hit list” of 16 MPs they want out of Parliament at the coming federal election. These are MPs who support strong border protection laws, lower energy prices, and literacy testing for migrants. They are being targeted because GetUp don’t like their views.
GetUp claim to be independent but not a single Labor MP is on their hit list. Every one of them is a Coalition Member.
You can sign up to AdvanceAustralia if you haven’t already. Share info, help candidates. Get involved. If you feel disconsolate, unmotivated, cynical, that’s exactly what GetUp want.
There’s a message to parties that ignore their base:
EU Election Poll Has Farage’s Brexit Party Beating Labour and Tories COMBINED
Jack Montgomery, Breitbart
New polling for the upcoming European Parliament elections shows another astonishing surge in support for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, while the governing Conservatives have crashed to fourth place on just 11 per cent.
The Opinium poll of 2,004 people, conducted online between the 8th and 10th of May, showed support for Mr Farage’s weeks-old party up 6 points to 34 per cent, more than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour — down seven points to 21 per cent — and Theresa May’s Conservatives — down three points to just 11 per cent — combined.
The remainers have their own splinter party… at 3%.
Change UK (CUK), comprised of EU loyalist defectors from Labour and the Conservatives, and intended as Remain diehards’ answer to the Brexit Party, is also struggling, down four points to a mere 3 per cent.
The lack of CUK support is hardly surprising since they are competing with the Tories and Labor which both apparently stand for remainers.
Australia votes on Saturday. Australian Liberal and National conservatives don’t seem that different from the Tories. Their driving mission seems to be to manage the economy less badly than the Labor Party. There are few principles at stake. The new non-party-party called Independents is playing off that same dissatisfaction with the major parties. Though they are known to call themselves conservative voters, they like policies to the left of The Labor Party.
George Clooney, climate smearist, is here with a slick advert to train Useful Idiots on what they should say.
George explains that because science can cure diseases, make phones work, and fly planes, therefore, the equilibrium climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide is 3.3 degrees Celcius. Ergo prompter sockpost hoc, and all that. Sure.
Who’s the dumbcluck?
You might almost think Clooney is doing a parody of climate schmucks:
“Tragically, the volumes of knowledge gathered over centuries are now threatened by an epidemic of dumbf***ing idiots saying dumbf***ing things.”
Exactly, while tens of thousands of scientists protest about the death of science, Clooney is working to make it happen. Some people just fail their science tests at school, others make a global informercial.
Skip Jimmy and jump to George at 54 sec:
United to Defeat Untruthful Misinformation and Support Science, aka UDUMASS
The brand name “Science” was ripe for stealing, and if you can pronounce “subatomic particle” you can do it too.
Welcome to the drone-age where thousands of 13 year old girls are impressed by a movie star who knows how to swear.
How much do Australians have to pay to change the global weather?
….
First, Bill Shorten called those who ask “dumb”. Then when that was described as his Hillary “Deplorables” moment he changed the insult from “dumb” to “liar”.
Here’s Bill Shorten in the third leaders debate:
“I accept the cost question is not a dumb question, …it’s a dishonest question.
The idea that you only look at the investment in new energy without looking at the consequences of not acting on climate change is a charlatans argument, it’s a crooked charlatans argument.”
Do you want to discuss the cost benefit ratio of a $500 billion dollar scheme the Labor Party is proposing to stop droughts and hold back the tide? Shorten doesn’t have an answer, instead he claims you shouldn’t even ask the question. You, sir, are a conniving cheat and a liar.
A charlatan (also called a swindler or mountebank) is a person practicing quackery or some similar confidence trick or deception in order to obtain money, fame or other advantages via some form of pretense or deception. Synonyms for “charlatan” include “shyster“, “quack”, or “faker”.. – (wikipedia)
Who’s the quack, the faker and the swindler here? The one who is selling a scheme to change the global temperature or the people who want to find out what it will cost?
Welcome to national debate in Australia where the snake-oil salesman weasels out of answering basic questions and the audience and ABC cheers, fooled by the oldest trick in the book. Bill is selling a product “at any cost”. Would you buy health insurance for a million dollars a year? How dare you ask, you stupid liar. You’re not considering the consequences.
It’s all a strawman dodge. Those who ask about the cost have never shied away from discussing the consequences. The cost is one question. The benefit is another. But both get reduced into one meaningless Yes:No “hands-up” moment. Our national debate is nothing more than Quacks selling a cure for the planet.
Are you a good person or a bad one? Bill says: Shut up and give me your vote and your money.
Once again, bad luck for renewables. The AEMO put out their report for the first quarter of 2019. Despite a massive growth in renewables, power prices are still not falling as predicted.
The report highlights that record high spot wholesale electricity prices were set in Victoria and South Australia, and nearly in everywhere else as well:
• Victoria and South Australia’s quarterly average spot wholesale electricity prices of $166/MWh and $163/MWh were their highest on record.
• Victoria and New South Wales recorded their highest underlying energy price on record, while Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania recorded their seconded highest energy prices on record.
These record highs were not just billion dollar price spikes, but the actual underlying energy prices as well.
Power prices in NSW and Victoria soared to their highest level on record in the first quarter of 2019, with the jump blamed on high coal and gas tariffs and searing summer temperatures which cut output from hydro-generators.
Significantly, solar partly soothed grid pressures over that period with rooftop units soaking up some of the demand.
Nice theory, but intermittent energy is a burden on the grid that forces up the prices of all the baseload providers. It simply eats into their profits, but doesn’t reduce their costs, so they charge more the rest of the day.
Again, coal gets blamed:
Coal, often cited as the cheapest form of generation in the market, also contributed to the cost hike, with 800MW of supply moved to a price above $100/MWh in the first quarter after being offered below $100/MWh last year.
Firstly, the cheapest form of generation by far is brown coal, which we are cutting back the fastest. Black coal is often twice the price. And if black coal is charging even more (and it appears to be), it’s partly to compensate for the “intermittent burden” on the grid, and partly because it can. Less competition means … less competition.
It was of course, bad luck that the snowy hydro dams are so low. But relying on hydro to get us through very hot summers was never going to be a great idea in Australia.
Gas prices were also high, but then, if we didn’t need so much gas, the gas prices might not be as high. And if we used some of our 300 years supply of coal instead, we wouldn’t care less about the gas price.
Cheaper prices are just around the corner, except when they aren’t
More bad news (for consumers). The traders buying futures contracts don’t see prices coming down.
• Forward wholesale prices also continued their upward climb: the price of calendar year (Cal) 2020 electricity swap contracts traded on the ASX rose between 12-23% over Q1 2019 and have risen by 49% in Victoria since July 2018.
The reason that the salad-days of electricity are gone — not enough Brown coal:
In our auction system, generators bid, say 1GW at $50. The AEMO says “yes please” to all the cheapest bids until the demand is met. That final “highest” accepted winning bid, sets the price that every successful bidder gets paid. A few short years ago, brown coal used to win bids and set low prices like, even, $13/MWh. Now there just isn’t enough brown coal generation to supply all the demand very often. So the winning bids are set by black coal instead, and they are at far higher prices. Remember, all the generators get paid at the highest wining bid price too, even if they offered to do it for less. So if we close even more brown coal plants, it’s happy days for all the other generators. Not so for consumers.
Click to enlarge.
See the graph below to understand bidding better. Loy Yang (bottom left) a brown coal plant in Victoria, put in the cheapest bid on this graph from 2014. Bayswater and Liddell are black coal putting in higher bids. Typically the AEMO will need to accept all the bids in the sweep from the left up to say 25,000MW. As demand rises for MW (the horizontal axis) the AEMO has to accept higher and higher bids.
Soon, Australians are likely to be sending real money overseas and getting back paper certificates at prices set by the EU.
The legislation was snuck through just before Christmas 2015, buried under the name “Safeguard Mechanism”. It cost about $7m in the first year. But sits ticking, ready to blow-up into a billion-dollar monster any day. If Labor is elected, it won’t matter whether it has Senate control or not, the minister can just “press a button”, change the caps, and lo, the money will flow to foreigners for certificates based on intentions about atmospheric nullities — for emissions they might have made but didn’t. We’re paying to change the global weather. We could be the stupidest rich nation on Earth. But really, we’re just not paying attention.
The 35 billion dollars we will spend on these useless, fraud–prone certificates is $35 billion we are taking out of the Australian labor market, or not spending on medicine, books or holidays in Bali. Angus Taylor, Minister for Energy, has noticed that this means $10b less tax will be paid too, which means less money for hospitals and schools.
There’s nothing wrong with payments to foreigners for real goods and services. But carbon credits buy us 0.0001C of theoretical cooling we don’t need and won’t be able to measure 100 years from now. It’s the dumbest deal Australia has ever made. Frausters and bankers will love it.
Tony Abbott won 90 seats on a promise to Axe The Carbon Tax in 2013. But, without any election, Australians still got exactly the carbon tax they voted overwhelmingly to stop. It’s one of the biggest lies in politics. It was brought in deceptively and is still being hidden by the Labor-lite unreformed Liberals. Turnbull finally achieved what Rudd and Gillard tried to do for years, but strangely Turnbull didn’t want to brag about it. He knew the voters would hate it.
Company tax deductions for international carbon credits purchased to meet Labor’s climate change ambitions could punch a $10 billion hole in the federal budget over the next 10 years due to the potential loss of tax revenue.
Under Labor’s policy, 250 companies that have emission reduction obligations under an expanded safeguard mechanism would be allowed to purchase domestic and international carbon credits to offset those emissions they could not reduce.
The government claims a conservative estimate of a 25 per cent allowance for international credits based on a carbon price of between $70 and $145 by 2030 would require an estimated $35bn in credits to be purchased by Australian companies over the decade.
This would lead to a loss of tax revenue to the government of $10.5bn based on the current 30 per cent company tax rate that applies to the largest companies.
Independent modeling suggests the 45% emissions target of the Labor party will cost at least $264bn and as high as $542bn by 2030. The Liberal Party will “only” waste $50 – $80b.
To be a broken record, there are cheaper carbon credits at home (thanks to Abbott666), and they’re only semi-worthless. At least we might improve our soil and add to our forests.
If the Liberals lose this election it’s because they killed off their own best weapon against the Labor Party. Lord help us if the Labor Party win.
Clive could only get my vote if he tells Australians why this tax exists and apologizes profusely, and grovelling for it.
Suddenly there’s a whole lot of independent candidates running in Australia looking to copy the Kerryn Phelps success in taking the blue-ribbon conservative seat of Wentworth. They all say they are independent, but they are all sworn to climate action and GetUp supports most if not all of them. So if and when they say they’ll support a Liberal National Coalition government, ask yourself if GetUp is being fooled, or are Australian voters?
“If they band together to promote their cause, they’ve effectively created a new political party,” Mr Abbott said.
“It’s a climate change party — it’s essentially a small-‘g’ green party. But because in seats like these the Greens would not get elected, they’re pretending to be something else in the hope of removing Coalition members of parliament.”
“It’s absolutely crystal clear in this electorate: vote Steggall, get Shorten. And around the country: vote independent, get Labor,” he said. “All of their protestations to the contrary are bunkum, absolutely bollocks, and the fact that GetUp is supporting nearly all of them, I think, further demonstrates the point.”
Mr Abbott said the group was “plainly targeting Liberal members of parliament” and wanted to see “Labor-Green governments”. Mr Wilkie and Mr Oakeshott had “form” in supporting the Gillard government.
The team who aren’t a party (so they keep saying) are helped by journalist Margo Kingston, who writes at NoFibs.
The 15 independents have banded together with a new advert. (Which you can see at Their ABC. Does our national broadcaster show the other parties ads too I wonder?).
Independents can turn elections. In 2010, Tony Abbott would have won the election instead of Julia Gillard and the Labor party if Rob Oakshott and Tony Windsor had chosen to vote with the predominant political choices of their electorates and the parties they used to represent.
Skeptical MP’s are being targeted. You may have no urge to support any political party, but you can make a difference to the few MPs who’ve been brave enough to stand up to the Renewables Religion. They need all the help they can get.
Two different models predict two totally different futures. On the left, catastrophic extinction. On the right, happy bats. Click to enlarge
Yesterday a UN supercommittee of 145 scientists from 50 countries declared that one million species are set for extinction. The same day, ten other scientists published a paper pointing out that most modelers forget to allow for genetic variation and thus overestimate the extinction rate. (It’s like they’re modelling the World of Clones – take one small study, pretend they’re all the same — extrapolate globally.) Have a look at the big difference in model outcomes in figure 1 (right).
My favourite all time Global Adaptability Prize goes to the saltwater ocean fish that were landlocked by an earthquake in 1964. Fifty years later, the descendants of those fish are freshwater fish. Nothing gets much more adaptable than that.
Razgour et al looked at 300 bats in Italy which had adapted to either hot and dry or cool and wet conditions. They took gene samples and found so much variation that they calculate that as long as the different bats can do long distance dating across the different forests their kids will cope just fine with a lot of climate change. They looked at habitat loss, but even in over-developed capitalist Europe they estimate the hot-n-dry bats won’t have any trouble meeting cold-n-wet ones.
So much for the extinction disaster:
Genetic adaptation to climate change
Failure to account for genetic variation can result in overestimating extinction risk
The new 145-expert-committee has just uttered its first words, and the headlines are Hollywood-apocalyptic: A million species face extinction. Daddy-UN is proud.
Nature is in more trouble now than at any other time in human history, with extinction looming over one million species of plants and animals, scientists said Monday in the UN’s first comprehensive report on biodiversity.
Naturally, these are estimates from unverified models that count species we haven’t even discovered yet. This is truly a scare-based-on-air, except air is real and has weight, and this isn’t that substantial.
Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, explains how vaporous this really is:
“Since species extinction became a broad social concern, coinciding with the extinction of the passenger pigeon, we have done a pretty good job of preventing species extinctions.”
Moore bluntly mocked species extinction claims made by biologist Edward O. Wilson from Harvard University. Wilson estimated that up to 50,000 species go extinct every year based on computer models of the number of potential but as yet undiscovered species in the world. Moore: “There’s no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct. The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson’s computer at Harvard University. They’re actually electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species.”
Consider that the only mammal extinction officially due to “man-made” climate change was a little brown rat colony which had washed up on a sand dune a few hundred meters long in the middle of the ocean. The hapless rats survived for unknown years 50 km off Papua New Guinea. More rats will wash up there again sometime and the cycle will start over. The entirety of mankind’s industrial revolution disaster and that’s it, that’s the only actual mammal anyone can name as “caused by climate change”?
The species scare is bigger than just “climate change”. But in an era when we have more land protected in national parks and more funding to guard and research natural spaces, arguably we’re at a high point in human history. Humans have been wiping out species for 100,000 years, possibly mammoths, mastadons, giant sloths, cave lions, and sabre tooth tigers.
The UN is reviving the old Species Extinction Scare. It’s a handy excuse to get power, increase regulations, demand money, and launch twenty years of nice annual junkets:
The UN has now officially expanded its mission now to include the “climate change” species extinction scare. The UN is once again calling for putting itself in charge of “solving” the newly hyped species “crisis.” “A huge transformation is needed across the economy and society to protect and restore nature, which provides people with food, medicines, and other materials, crop pollination, fresh water, and quality of life,” according to the new UN report. The AP quoted one of the activist scientists claiming “this is really our last chance to address all of that.” Hmmm. This is the same tactic the UN has used on climate for years. See:Every climate summit is hailed as the ‘last chance!’
The solution is cheap energy and spare wealth:
For the first time in human evolution we’ve reached a point where we can finally plan and save and study life on Earth. Three things we know for sure —
1. The worst pollution is in countries with a low income per capita — when people are hungry they raze forests. The most polluted cities are in places like Ghana, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Zambia, Argentina, and Nigeria. The most deforestation occurs in Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, and Mexico. The worst air is in India and China.
2. Only rich nations have the resources to save the environment.
3. Countries that produce more CO2 are richer.
Findings of the Report include a lot of big meaningless numbers
Three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions. On average these trends have been less severe or avoided in areas held or managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.
Trends in indigenous controlled lands are only less now because prehistoric indigenous people wiped out the mega fauna years ago. The trends just reached an equilibrium.
More than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production.
We’ve tied up lots of land, so the last thing we want is to use wilderness for useless solar and wind farms, or palm oil plantations. Why keep coal and uranium underground when we can save forest instead?
The value of agricultural crop production has increased by about 300% since 1970, raw timber harvest has risen by 45% and approximately 60 billion tons of renewable and nonrenewable resources are now extracted globally every year – having nearly doubled since 1980.
And this is bad, how? Better yields means we need less land to feed more people.
Land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of the global land surface, up to US$577 billion in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss and 100-300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of loss of coastal habitats and protection.
And wealthy countries are solving all of these problems faster than poor countries are. The best way to save wilderness is to increase the GDP of those in poverty. Free trade, fair agricultural markets. Less red tape. Less corruption.
In 2015, 33% of marine fish stocks were being harvested at unsustainable levels; 60% were maximally sustainably fished, with just 7% harvested at levels lower than what can be sustainably fished.
Again, in nations where there are healthy economies, fish stocks are being protected and are recovering. Whales too. Even great white sharks.
Plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, 300-400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes from industrial facilities are dumped annually into the world’s waters, and fertilizers entering coastal ecosystems have produced more than 400 ocean ‘dead zones’, totalling more than 245,000 km2 (591-595) – a combined area greater than that of the United Kingdom.
The oceans cover 510 million square kilometers. So those dead zones cover 1 part in 2,081 parts — or 0.05%. Sure, we should fix it. Let’s do that. Isn’t that problem mostly in South East Asia? Again, rich countries clean up pollution…
Don’t mention the Sixth Great Extinction
The UN team learnt that calling this the “Sixth Great Extinction” was an invitation for skeptics to mock them with reminders of real death and destruction which made their current scare seem pathetically light. To get around that now the blob somehow gets people who were”not part of the report” to mention it, then they can discuss how they are not discussing it. This is the “have cake, eat cake” Psychology 101 rule — if you want people to think of an elephant but have plausible deniability (so you can quash discussion of said-elephant), tell the people not to think of an elephant.
[CBC] “We’re in the middle of the sixth great extinction crisis, but it’s happening in slow motion,” said Conservation International and University of California Santa Barbara ecologist Lee Hannah, who was not part of the report.
Five times in the past, Earth has undergone mass extinctions where much of life on Earth blinked out, like the one that killed the dinosaurs. Watson said the report was careful not to call what’s going on now as a sixth big die-off because current levels don’t come close to the 75 per cent level in past mass extinctions.
h/t to Marc Morano and CFACT
REFERENCE
Media Release: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
Friday April 19th set more records than anyone realized. Not only was it the earliest recorded snowfall at Bluff Knoll and WA, but it was also the coldest ever April day in Albany and many other towns in south-west Western Australia. It may also be the largest single day temperature mystery I’ve ever seen in the official “raw” data.
Days like the 19th are extremely unusual in Western Australia — it’s a state that often doesn’t get any snow all year and when it does, the length of the entire snow season is measured in hours. So you might think the million-dollar-a-day Bureau of Meteorology would be paying extra attention. Instead it appears they have lost that day’s data in Albany, despite having two thermometers there to record it. One station is in the city itself and there’s an official “expert” ACORN station at the airport about 10km away.
Luckily Chris Gillham, unpaid volunteer, was watching the live half hour observations roll in at and saw that thermometers at the airport recorded a maximum of only 10.4°C at 11am that day, which he remarks is the lowest April maximum the BOM has ever recorded there. Strangely, the 10.4°C seems to have disappeared. Somehow, the BOM has estimated that April 19th in the city of Albany was 25.1°C on Friday April 19th, which is what is now entered as “raw data” in their Climate Data Online. This is despite temperatures in almost all the surrounding towns being similarly low, and often lowest ever records (for April) as well.
This single day’s omission is so large, it raises the monthly average of Albany Airport by 0.7°C— that’s equivalent to 70 years of “global warming”. Chris reports below that the airport thermometer was also missing four days following Good Friday, which were reasonably cool (according to the City thermometer). He estimates that if the airport thermometer had worked, the official monthly average would have been nearly a whole degree, or 0.9°C cooler than what was officially recorded. (Jo, meanwhile, wonders if any planes took off at Albany Airport over Easter and whether they missed having weather data?)
The big issue here is not a few days of data — it’s the quality control. If the BOM isn’t even checking days that are record extremes, how many other errors like this go unnoticed all around Australia. Volunteers are only picking up the obvious outliers on days of extreme weather. Fortunately we can supply the BoM with the observations they seem to have lost. I’m sure they’ll rush to fix it and thank us. 😉
We know they throw away data all the time, maybe because they can’t afford the memory sticks at Officeworks? (A million dollars a day is not enough.) Perhaps we should run a GoFundMe campaign to buy them a spare hard disc?
The map below shows all the southern WA stations that set record low April daily maxima on the 19th. Chris recorded screen captures of the observations of the day at various stations in the South West. The cold blast was everywhere apparently, except Albany?
Raw thermometer records show Albany Airport reached 10.4C on the 19th of April. Towns for hundreds of kilometers around recorded similar cool maximums. Instead officially the City of Albany is listed as 25.1C — a temperature recorded the day before at the Airport, and the Airport has no reading at all.
Here is the image (below, left) that Chris Gillham recorded with the half hour observations compared to the now official “raw” daily data for the “top 100” ACORN rated site of Albany Airport and Albany City.
There is a 15°C discrepancy. What on Earth is going on?
Clearly the maximum for the day was set at 11am at 10.4°C. Click to see the full screen of observations on April 19th at Albany airport. Those measurements are not available on the BoM site now. The official daily records for the month of April comes from the Bureau of Met here: Albany Airport 9999, and Albany City 9500.
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UPDATE: Lance Pidgeon copied another site’s observations of the day — Timeanddate.com. This is what he recorded on April 23 which matches what Chris copied from the BOM site. The timeanddate site has since been edited and the Easter data has vanished as per BoM official records.
Time and Date data for Albany over Easter shows data that has disappeared since then. (Click to enlarge)
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WA’s south coastal city of Albany appears to have been robbed of its coldest ever April maximum temperature.
Guest post by Chris Gillham, who tracks temperatures in Western Australia at WAClimate.net
On April 19thwhile Bluff Knoll to the north was experiencing its earliest recorded snowfall, Albany Airport was experiencing its coldest ever April day.As it happened, I was monitoring the current half hourly observations at Albany Airport on the 19th of April. Fortunately I left my browser tab open and a couple of days later reloaded that page (which is why the full half hourly observations graphic says it was issued by the BoM on 21stApril).The half hourly observations screenshot shows the airport thermometer struggled to get to a 10.4°C maximum at 11am on the 19thof April, maybe creeping a few decimal points higher sometime between the 9.0°C at 10.30am and 8.9C at 11.28am.10.4°C was the lowest ever April maximum ever recorded at Albany. The prior records were 12.2°C in 1928 at Albany township dating back to 1907, 15.4°C in 2014 at the current Albany Airport, and 12.9°C in 1970 at the previous airport screen that operated from 1965 to 2014.
However, the Bureau of Meteorology appears to have mislaid this year’s observations and Climate Data Online shows no maximum temperature for Albany Airport on the 19th of April or the following four days.
About 15 kilometres south at Albany itself, CDO lists the maximum temperature on the 19th of April as 25.1°C. Oddly, 25.1°C was the maximum temperature at the airport the day before, the 18th of April.
For hundreds of surrounding kilometres, lowest April maximum temperature records were set at currently operating weather stations in Rocky Gully, North Walpole, Shannon, Katanning, Bridgetown, Lake Grace, Collie East and Busselton Aero.
Over the three nights from April 20th to April 23rd, new April minimum temperature records were also set at currently operating weather stations in Rocky Gully, Ongerup, Katanning and Newdegate, with North Walpole having its coldest ever night at 6.3°C on April 20th but then setting a new record at 6.2°C the following night, April 21st.
Record cold Easter in South West WA
Coldest April maximum and minimum records, South West Western Australia.
Unlike record hot days and nights that confirm global warming, there has been no media mention of these record cold days and nights.
The true maximum temperature in the City of Albany on the 19th of April is unknown. However, it wasn’t 25.1°C.
Albany Airport is an ACORN weather station that contributes to the bureau’s estimate of national average temperatures. The BoM’s official average maximum temperature at the airport for April 2019, without any listing for 19th April, is 22.2°C. If the 10.4°C for 19th April is included, the April monthly average drops to 21.5°C.
It seems Albany Airport’s April monthly average will be up to 0.7°C warmer than it really was and would have been if the bureau hadn’t lost its temperature readings on the coldest ever April day ever recorded there (did the thermometer freeze?).
Through a remarkable coincidence further south in Albany itself, it appears somebody also forgot to take temperatures on what was almost certainly the city’s coldest ever April day, and instead the bureau has inserted 25.1°C – which was either the maximum the previous day (also missing) or it’s been transplanted from the 18th of April at the airport.
In fact, Albany Airport had no observations from April 20th to April 23rd and if the airport had the same daily maxima as Albany itself on those days (14.5°C, 20.4°C, 24.9°C, 21.1°C), the ACORN station’s April maximum would have been 21.3°C, which is 0.9°C cooler than the official monthly average maximum of 22.2°C.
April minimum daily temperature records weren’t set at either station but a comparison with the coastal city’s observations over the missing five days suggests the airport’s monthly average minimum would also have been a fair bit cooler than the official average of 11.0°C.
Since the airport’s new screen started in 2012, the average April maximum has been 22.3°C and the average April minimum has been 11.9°C.
It’s been over two weeks since the temperatures mysteriously disappeared and/or appeared, and it seems two locations have been robbed of their coldest ever April day – Albany Airport where there is no temperature for the 19th of April and the City of Albany where it’s been replaced by a fictitious 25.1°C.
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The new 145-expert-committee has just uttered its first words, and the headlines are Hollywood-apocalyptic: A million species face extinction. Daddy-UN is proud.
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