It was only June when there were expectations of an El Nino coming. But the sea has cooled rapidly since then — much faster than usual — and now NOAA thinks a La Nina is slightly more likely. If so, global temperatures will decline.
Cold water is upwelling across the Eastern Pacific. Sea Surface Temp Anomaly. | Image Sept 6, 2017
I notice that there is also unusually cold water on the surface of the eastern Indian Ocean near West Australia (see below). One spot is 2.5C cooler than normal. I don’t know the significance…
Hoping for the best for everyone affected.Irma is a mega-blender, may set all time record windspeed for Atlantic storm, and on the way to Florida by Sunday. On twitter the hastag: #Irma
Just as man-made climate change usually causes long droughts in hurricanes, this month it causes #&@Hurricanes*$&*! Not just Irma, but Jose as well.
Ryan Maue:Hurricane expert, skeptic, estimates Irma is so fast, it ought to be called a Cat #6. “Simple physical arg for Category 6 at 170-knots (Haiyan) is power or destructiveness is v³ in knots = 2-times v³ at 140-knots.”
In an update Maue predicts 190mph: “Based on near perfect environment for #IrmaHurricane to intensify, expecting a peak of 900 mb central pressure & 190 mph in next 24-36 hrs.”
Radar simulation from NOAA’s flagship hurricane model (HWRF) for Category 5 Hurricane #Irma for next 5-days. pic.twitter.com/MUtYybVjHV
87% of Australians think a dollar a day is too much. But hey, it’s only the planet at stake.
Most Australians don’t want to pay anything more for renewable power.
The survey is still biased. There was no option to pay “less than zero”. How much are you willing to pay to get rid of renewables?
The sad thing is that most Australian’s don’t realize they’re already paying so much more.
For starters, The Australian calculated that the bill for federal renewable subsidies would be $60 billion by 2030. That’s $2500 per Australian. In a house of four, that’s $10k over 20 years or $200 per year. And that’s only the federal subsidies and schemes, it’s not the state schemes, nor the higher cost of electricity. It doesn’t include the cost of losing your job, or the extra money needed to pay bills to cover the rising electricity costs of Coles, Woolworths, Telstra, and every other company that uses electricity to make or store something you want. Someone has to pay for the blackouts, the lost production, and all the diesel generators ready in the sheds across the nation. Meanwhile the local school pays more for electricity, so you pay more in tax or fees, and so on and on for hospitals, movies, insurance, and anything with aluminium or steel in it, on it, or around it.
The latest Newspoll shows that 45% of Australians understand that renewables make electricity expensive while 24% are confused, and 22% believe that you can store spare electricity in a shoebox under the bed for a rainy day.
The latest Newspoll survey highlights the community divide on energy, with 45 per cent of voters expecting an increase in their bills from the shift to renewables while 22 per cent anticipate a decrease and 24 per cent expect no change. In a warning sign to the government, 60 per cent of Coalition voters believe renewables will increase their bills. Only 31 per cent of Labor voters and 31 per cent of Greens voters believe the same.
We live in a democracy. Let’s hold a plebescite: “Should Australians try to fix the weather in 2100?”
A new coal-power station would take seven to eight years to build and could face fierce competition from wind and solar by the time it starts generating, given the steady fall in the cost of producing renewable energy.
The only competition coal faces is in fierce subsidies. Renewables are so uncompetitive the government mandates a “fee” of 9c/kWh for those who don’t buy enough — twice the price that wholesale coal power sells out. Tell me again about fierce competition when there are no subsidies.
The real story here is that past scares claiming that ocean acidification would create reckless fish were most likely an artefact of an inadequate experiment. There are big swings of CO2 and pH in shallow water environments, and the normal day-night cycle turns out to be good for fish. Putting them in a laboratory tank without these daily changes may create fish that behave badly. So ocean acidification is not only natural, but a good and necessary thing.
Chemical changes in the ocean, as a result of climate change, are leading to a more acidic environment, referred to as ‘ocean acidification’ (OA). In a laboratory setting, these changes have been shown to lead to a range of risky behaviours in the affected fish, with some fish unable to flee from their finned foes effectively.
But, when researchers recalibrated experiments to adjust for natural daily changes in concentrations of dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary chemical driver of OA, they found that the fish were less affected than previously thought.
“Shallow water habitats where reef fish live can experience substantial natural fluctuations in water chemistry throughout the day,” explained senior author Professor Philip Munday, of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoralCoE) at James Cook University.
“For example, carbon dioxide levels on coral reefs are often much lower during the day than they are at night.”
Did you know night time was like man-made global warming? Or more correctly — man-made global warming is like night time (only not as severe).
“Our data suggests that these natural daily changes in water chemistry are enough to provide fish with a recovery period, reducing their sensitivity to higher carbon dioxide levels,” said Michael D. Jarrold, lead author of the study and PhD student at James Cook University.
Who could have known that day time is a recovery period from the ravages of night?
Or thinks Jo, wickedly, perhaps fish already have genes for adapting to climate-change, I mean, the 24 hour cycle? Imagine the poor fish that don’t? Like — what a shock — ocean acidification hits at 7pm again, and I can’t deal with it? Four hundred million years of evolution, and “oh my codfish!” here’s another night I’m not prepared for?
The study published today in Scientific Reports, utilised state-of-the-art facilities at James Cook University and at the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s National Sea Simulator (SeaSim) to mimic the natural conditions of a coral reef environment.
“It’s the first time these dynamic natural conditions have been reproduced in a laboratory setting to test their potential influence on the behaviour of coral reef fish,” explained Mr. Jarrold.
Similar dynamic natural conditions were presumably available in most of the worlds reefs. Surely scientists knew there were big pH swings in natural shallow water? Unless I’m reading this wrongly (see the numbers below), it would be remarkable if fish could not cope with a man-made change that takes 100 years and is 150 times smaller than what some fish deal with every day?
At least, to their credit, this team admitted this was better news than past releases.
“We are thrilled about what we’ve found,” he added. “Our results provide a greater level of optimism for reef fish populations in the future.”
What they could have said was that previous researchers were too quick to announce dire results, and scientists forget how adaptable life can be.
From the paper itself — look at how large the variation is naturally:
In shallow reef areas, diel variation in pCO2 can range anywhere from ±50 to 600 µatm around the mean…
“Diel” means a 24 hour cycle and 600 microatmospheres is apparently loosely equivalent to a bit less than 600ppm. If I’m reading that correctly, it would mean that some fish are coping with something like 300 years worth of man-made climate change every night. Did someone say man-made climate change is unprecedented? Only since breakfast, and maybe not that long.
When did scientists learn of the large diurnal variation in pH?
I thought, surely scientists have known about the large day-night swings of pH for a long time, but of the four papers Jarrold cites, only one was published before 2012. (I reported on another different paper in 2012 showing large daily pH variations). So it appears to be a recent discovery that pH shifts so quickly.
Way back in 1995, Kayanne et al found “reef waters exhibited large diurnal changes ranging from 160 to 520 microatmospheres”. So the clues were there, but perhaps researchers didn’t realize how widespread it was.
The day–night shift in Kayanne et al, changes according “to the light intensity”, and I’m reminded of the corn fields of Ohio that start sucking the CO2 out of the sky at sunrise and slow down when the atmospheric CO2 falls each day by lunch time. CO2 then rises back up each night over the cornfields and the cycle begins again. (Chapman 1954).
The real story here is buried between the lines. This is written up as a “new discovery” shows things won’t be so bad for fish with climate change, but the real story is that scientists are just realizing how much water conditions vary on a daily basis and how well adapted fish are to those big natural swings. Past papers issued dire warnings about fish living under stable low pH conditions, but put fish in tanks with low pH and wild swings, and the fish cope much better.
Ask not if your tank is stable enough, but if it varies enough?
Instrument errors, noise, may account for a quarter to one half of our national warming trend in the last century.
When the newspapers run a headline with Sydney hits, say, 44.4 degrees and that number gets engraved in history, who realizes that the extreme heat may have only lasted one second? You might think the maximum temperatures were above 44 for at least ten minutes, but the BOM will write it into the record books even if that heat lasts one second, and if the temperature a minute before was more than a whole degree cooler. We’re writing puffs of jet emissions, car exhaust, or random packets of hot (or cold) air into history books, and comparing these new records with old ones done in slow reacting liquid in glass thermometers. No wonder we are setting records!
In the last twenty years, electronic sensors have replaced most of the old fashioned thermometers. It’s for exactly this reason that we need the side-by-side comparison data that Bill Johnston asked for and which the BOM can’t supply because it is deleting the data – as a matter of routine practice.
Back in 1910, or even 1990, thermometers were not able to record a spike of heat (or cold) that lasted for such a short time. Liquid-in-glass thermometers just can’t react that fast (who remembers waiting with a thermometer under their tongue as a child?)
This is not just about headline grabbing records, but about temperatures recorded every day and used to calculate long term trends. The effect of bringing in newer more sensitive thermometers in the mid nineties could cause a “step up” in maximum temperatures.
Any politician who cares about the climate would order one immediately.
Meteorologists debate whether it should be 5 minute or 7 minute averaging, not 1 second
A paper by Lin & Hubbard in 2008, argued that, even 5 minute averaging was not long enough to avoid some warming bias in maximums (and cooling biases in minima). We don’t have to ask what they would think of one-second “averaging” or sampling rates:
“Commonly-used 5 min average was not sufficient for the fast-response thermometers in surface climate networks while the WMO standard thermometer (20 s time constant) should have a 7-min running average for reporting daily maximum and minimum temperatures. The surface temperature sensors with smaller time constant than the standard LIG [Liquid in glass] thermometers must implement a follow-up running average algorithm.”
The story of strange temperature mismatches appearing
A few months ago, Ken Stewart and others in the independent BOM Audit team (like Lance, Phill, Ian, Chris, Bill, Geoff, Bob and Tony) were watching the various BOM data channels when they noticed strange mismatches. The live update BOM observations page records temperatures every 30 minutes at hundreds of sites across Australia. Sometimes though, the daily maximum temperature would lie far above any of the 30-minute observations. Stewart wrote to the BOM to find out why, and was shocked to hear that the 30 minute data was not the average of the last 10 minutes, or even the last single minute. It was just a random sample of the data the second before.
So Ken asked for the detailed data (and paid for it) so he could graph and see how long the temperature spikes were lasting. But what he found was that readings would sometimes erratically rise and fall, chopping up, down and up, and the spikes — were often outliers, far beyond normal variation. And there was no apparent mechanism to remove these noisy errors either (at least, not on the high side). And normally noise is not so important – it cancels out when numbers are averaged — but when only the highest moment (or the lowest) is recorded, there is no averaging among the Maxes, and nor the Mins — though the cooler extremes are less affected by the spikes and rapid changes that are going on in the hottest part of the day.
Sometimes a temperature two whole degrees above the rest of the readings was being recorded for posterity as the the daily max, which may theoretically be also recorded as the hottest day ever… See these graphs below and be prepared to change the way you think about “record temperatures”.
To find out how often these spikes occur, Ken graphed how fast temperatures changed within one minute of the daily maximum temperature being reached — and fully 44% of all the readings he looked at, the temperature fell more than 0.3C within one minute. In theory these electronic thermometers are supposed accurate to 0.2C, so swings this fast could be due to pockets of warm air coming and going (like a jet turbine) or they could be errors (or both). In 200 cases Ken found five situations where the one minute drop after the peak temperature was reached was 0.6C – 1.5C!
More importantly — the entire 20th century warming trend — as Ken points out — is only 0.9C. If these thermometers are picking up noise spikes as big as two degrees, it’s no wonder the BOM doesn’t put error bars on the century long trends.
There have been no studies published of automatic electronic thermometer probes and the old fashioned liquid in glass thermometers side by side.
Record temperatures, maximum and minimum temperatures, and monthly, seasonal, and annual analyses are based not on daily values but on ONE SECOND VALUES.
The Bureau reports daily maximum and minimum temperatures at Climate Data Online, but also gives a daily summary for each site in more detail on the State summary observations page , and a continuous 72 hour record of 30 minute observations (examples below), issued every 30 minutes, with the page automatically refreshed every 10 minutes, also handily graphed.
In Maryborough on the fifteenth of February this year the daily maximum was recorded as 1.5C above the highest 30 minute data point.
At Harvey Bay, the temperature was 2.1 C below the reading at 6am.
I sent a query to the Bureau about Hervey Bay, and the explanation from the Bureau’s officer was enlightening:
Firstly, we receive AWS data every minute. There are 3 temperature values:
1. Most recent one second measurement
2. Highest one second measurement (for the previous 60 secs)
3. Lowest one second measurement (for the previous 60 secs)
In Stewart’s words:
The temperature reported each half hour on the station Latest Observations page is the instantaneous temperature at that exact second, in this case 06:00:00, and the High Temp or Low Temp for the day is the highest or lowest one second temperature out of every minute for the whole day so far. There is no filtering or averaging.
The BOM tries to explain why:
The explanation for the large discrepancy was that “Sometimes the initial heating from the sun causes cooler air closer to the ground to mix up to the temperature probe (1.2m above ground).”
However… it can be seen that the wind was south east at 17 km/hr, gusting to 26 km/hr, and had been like that all night, over flat ground at the airport, so an unmixed cooler surface layer mixing up to the probe seems very unlikely.
You will also note that the temperatures in the final second of every half hour period from 12.30 to 6.30 ranged from 25C to 25.5C, yet in some second in the final minute before 6.00 a.m. it was at 23.2C.
How to spot natural versus unnatural temperature changes
In Part 2, How Temperature is “Measured” in Australia Stewart describes what the differences are between natural and unnatural temperature fluctuations, and looks at the noise levels on minima compared to noise levels on maxima.
Not all quick changes are unnatural.
Temperatures can change quite rapidly in a natural setting — for example, as the sun rises over an inland spot (like Urandangi) temperature rise 5.1C in 24 minutes. So that’s a sustained rapid rise of 0.2C a minute. Fast! But we wouldn’t expect to find rises that are faster than that in coastal situations, or ones that happen during the middle of the day. We also wouldn’t expect to find cool changes that come and go in a minute – flip flopping from warm to cold to warm. We know that cold fronts and other changes can come through and drop temperatures rapidly (as Ken describes, like a 1.2C fall over 1 minute in Rockhampton) — but these are step up or step down changes that are sustained after the shift.
What’s not natural are spikes like this in Maryborough where temperatures rise 3 degrees in ten minutes then fall 1.5 degrees in just one minute straight afterwards.
” …rogue outliers are being captured as maxima and minima.”
Doesn’t noise just cancel out and won’t this make minima cooler too?
The errors don’t cancel out — high spikes are recorded as the max of the day. The noise that trends downwards (and is cooler) during the hot part of the day is not recorded in the long term climate records. (As is hot noise during the coolest part of the day). As Stewart points out during the warm part of the day “only the highest upwards spike, with or without positive error, is reported. Negative error can never balance any positive error.”
Stewart analyzed both the hot and cold parts of the day and found that there is a lot more variation during the hot part of the day. As well, the Bureau was caught clipping low side “noise” (and even low side real measurements) at Goulburn and Thredbo a couple of months ago. They have not answered questions about when this clipping started, and which stations it applies to. They are doing an inhouse review instead.
Ironically, because there will be a smaller cooling effect, as well as the larger warming one, it will mean the DTR (Diurnal Temperature Range) will be increased. This is not what the CO2 modelers are looking for. They expect CO2 to shrink that diurnal range by keeping the heat in at night and bringing up the minima.
Instrument errors may account for a quarter to one half of our national warming trend in the last century:
There is some ambiguity about the error margins of the electronic AWS sensors, is it +/- 0.2 or +/- 0.5? In 2011, the BOM mentioned that 10% of electronic thermometers are functioning outside the +/- 0.2 range that is more than 50 probes in the network.
Stewart concludes that because these one-minute differences are so common he thinks it’s likely nearly half of the high temperatures recorded may be 0.2C too high, saying that “Instrument error may account for between 22% and 55% of the national trend for maxima.”
Stewart has a wish list of things that need fixing which include replacing automatic electronic sensors at at least 50 sites. Obviously the Australian BOM should not be using one-second samples but something more like ten minute averaging. He wants the BOM to show error bars on all it’s long term trend calculations. He wants the BOM to redo their filters so they can identify their spurious spikes.
I naively thought that the ‘raw data’ was mostly good data. But now I am even sceptical of this.
As someone who values data above most else – this is a stomach-churning revelation.
Indeed, it could be that the last 20-years of temperature recordings by the Bureau will be found not fit for purpose, and will eventually need to be discarded.
Just yesterday I wrote a rather long letter to Craig Kelly MP detailing these and other concerns. That letter can be downloaded here: TMinIssues-JenMarohasy-20170831
Corals first appeared 540 million years ago, but having made it through supervolcanoes, mass extinctions, and an asteroid impact equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima A-bombs, it’s now likely they will be wiped out because a trace gas has risen from 20% up to 25% of levels common for half of the last 300 million years.
Source: www.geocraft, Scotese and Berner 2001
Having made it through the volatile last 65 million years, and multiple ice ages where the oceans rose and fell by as much as 125m repeatedly, it will be tragic if the current man-made warming phase wipes them out. According to one thousand tide gauges the worlds oceans are relentlessly rising by 1mm every year. While corals coped with the last 125,000mm of sea level rise, it’s not clear they will still be around if it rises another 20mm.
Current climate change marked in
The team of 22 researchers admit “there is still a lot to understand about corals,” and “there are major knowledge gaps”. But despite not knowing much, the experts on marine ecosystems advise that “our only real chance for their survival” is to control the global climate.
While they don’t actually predict the exact year the world will be coral-free, they do say “The time to act is now, as the window of opportunity to save coral reefs is rapidly closing…”
Looks like that’s it for 542 million years of the evolution of corals. Pfft. A world without coral?
The cost of Going Green, The Australian, Cover, September 1, 2017.
The Australian calculates the total bill will be in the order of $60b for green electricity.
It’s not like we could have done something better with that.
Read it all (if you can), then write to your MP and Senator. Ask why — if they are serious about helping reduce CO2 — we don’t have a USC coal plant like so many other countries, and why we don’t have nuclear power. Then ask why, if they are concerned about the poor, about health, about education, we are wasting $60b dollars to try to change the weather in 2100 that we could be spending on these critical areas right now?
Taxpayers will have paid more than $60 billion through federal renewable energy subsidies by 2030, about twice what the crumbling car industry received over 15 years and enough to build about 10 large nuclear reactors.
The government’s large and small-scale renewable energy targets, which will compel energy retailers to buy 33 terawatt hours of wind, solar and hydro energy by 2030, will deliver about $45bn of subsidies to renewable energy producers over 20 years, according to analysis by The Australian.
If it’s improving and getting cheap, whatever you do, don’t buy it yet:
It’s hard to argue with ACIL Allen Consulting chief executive Paul Hyslop:
“Solar costs have probably fallen 75 to 80 per cent in the last six or seven years,” Mr Hyslop told the energy and environment committee. “If we had not done anything seven years ago and today we then did all those things, we could have … two to three times as much solar (energy generation) in roofs for the same amount of investment over that period.
“If you think that the cost of renewables and low-emission technology is falling rapidly, absolutely put it off for as long as possible.”
Economist Geoffrey Carmody, a founder of Deloitte Access Economics:
“If we sweep nuclear energy off the table in favour of renewables, achieving these three conflicting objectives with one instrument — renewable energy — is numerical nonsense,” Mr Carmody said.
Australia is the only G20 country to have banned nuclear power.
Read it all….
PS: USC = Ultra super critical coal. Hot burning generators are so much more efficient. They cut emissions but without the pain of intermittent unreliable generators. Japan, China, India have lots of them.
If we started planning one now we might catch up in the advanced technology stakes with Indonesia.
Malcolm Turnbull cannot afford to fiddle around any longer before tackling Australia’s energy crisis. Handled well, the issue would be an election winner for the Coalition…
That [the $60b] is twice what our crumbling car industry received in the 15 years to 2012. It would build 10 large nuclear reactors, an option long dismissed by politicians as too expensive. Present policies provide an exorbitant taxpayer-funded windfall for renewable energy producers for little if any public benefit. However inefficient, car industry subsidies protected about 40,000 jobs. By comparison, 39 renewable energy projects under construction or being completed this year have created 4400 jobs, according to the Clean Energy Council.
We allowed a free market in gas, but didn’t allow one in coal generation.
If we had true free markets, we wouldn’t worry about high gas prices. We’d just profit from the high priced gas sales, and get cheap electricity from coal. We wouldn’t need so much gas if we didn’t have so many intermittent wind generators.
Malcolm Turnbull has seized on energy spokesman Mark Butler’s admission that Labor was warned that customers would be hit with higher energy prices from the gas exports it authorised in government five years ago, blaming the Gillard government for the spike in gas prices which has seen energy bills rise dramatically.
Mr Turnbull said the Gillard government had made a “reckless” decision in allowing gas to be exported from the east coast of Australia without putting in any protection for Australian families, households and businesses.
The coalition is taking the wrong tack. Real free markets produce better cheaper outcomes. The problem is the regulations in the electricity market.
How many people have died prematurely because they swapped their fats for carbohydrates?
More fat meant less death (left). More carbs (right) meant the opposite (at least above 60%). (Click to see the full table of Figure 1 results).
New research published in the Lancet shows that low fat diets could increase your risk of death.
Specifically, those who are in the top fifth of carbohydrate-eaters are also about 28% more likely to die than the fifth eating the lowest amount. This is a correlation (only), but the PURE* study was tracking the thing that matters most — all-cause mortality — and they followed the diets of 135,000 people in 18 countries for 5 – 9 years. Loosely, if people avoided high carbohydrate diets, they were less likely to die.
The graph flattens off below “60% carbs” (that’s a percentage of total calories). However, the mortality numbers keep improving for the highest fat intakes which rather skewers 40 years of headlines. I’m guessing that some people who kept carbs below 60% ate more protein instead, which, judging by the “fat” graph, wasn’t as useful.
The McMaster University team announced this quiet bomb, slightly obscured, in a press release about three papers at once under a tame headline, “Moderate consumption of fats, carbohydrates best for health, international study shows.”
Read carefully:
…higher fat consumption was associated with lower mortality; this was seen for all major types of fats (saturated fats, polyunsaturated fats and mono unsaturated fats), with saturated fats being associated with lower stroke risk.
So saturated fats might reduce strokes?
Total fat and individual types of fat were not associated with risk of heart attacks or death due to cardiovascular disease.
This is not the dietary approach that 97% of experts and officials recommend.
The current government consensus, backed by thousands of scientists and doctors, and running for decades, tells people to limit fat and eat a high grain diet (which means carbohydrates). See the US Dietary Guidelines.
The message has generally been to “limit fat”, be careful with protein, and fill up all the empty spaces with carbs.
The current US Food guidelines puts a big emphasis on grains (carbs).
Guideline 2 recommends “Milk, yoghurt, cheese and/or their alternatives, mostly reduced fat“. Guideline 3 tells us to Limit intake of foods containing saturated fat,…
Australian experts remark that “Low fat diets are not suitable for children under the age of 2 years.” They don’t say that low fat diets may increase the risk of death in people over 2.
Grains make up the largest part of the food plate in Australian Government Recommendations. | Click to enlarge
The news that fat is no demon, will come as no surprise to people who have been looking at medical papers, internet forums, and some popular diet books for the last twenty years. (Though notably, the percentages assessed in the PURE study are not remotely “keto” levels of low carb which are in the 5% carb range and 75% fat as per the Atkins, or Keto-style diets.)
Presumably the mainstream consensus and recommendations will shift in the next 5 – 10 years to soften up on the anti-fat dogma, and start to warn people that just making your bread wholemeal doesn’t neutralize the carbs and turn it into a superfood. When will food pyramids and guiding-plates drop the non-essential “essential grains” meme?
In the meantime, the people who obediently follow the official experts can be sure that “consensus” is self correcting eventually — but the process can still be deadly.
For those who want the gritty details, the lowest quintile of carbohydrate intake ate about 46% or less of their calories from carbohydrates. The highest quintile — 77% or more. So most people won’t have a clue, (or an inclination) but if you do, there is good software available online to estimate these numbers (and a lot more). It’s easier than you think.
On saturated fats, the researchers write that things are complicated, but we appear to need some small base level:
Collectively, the available data do not support the recommendation to limit saturated fatty acids to less than 10% of intake and that a very low intake (ie, below about 7% of energy) might even be harmful.
Sat-fats might not be so bad, but at 10% of daily intake we are only talking of 20 grams a day in a 2000 calorie diet. It’s still not a lot.
On monounsaturated fats, the finding is consistent across many big studies:
We found an inverse association between monounsaturated fatty acid intake and total mortality. Consistent with our findings, two large cohort studies of the Health Professionals Follow up and the Nurses’ Health Study showed lower total mortality by higher monounsaturated fatty acid intake.46
Monounsaturated fats means olives, avocados and some nuts.
And of course things can be confounded by the fact that carbs are cheap, cheap, cheap, and maybe some people who are eating lots of carbs just don’t have the money to afford the more expensive fats and especially proteins. (Though they did adjust for income, education, wealth, etc to try to consider that).
Finally, at least they do recommend that the consensus shifts, and it’s worth mentioning that they refer to other enormous separate studies (Health Professionals Follow up and the Nurses’ Health Study) as well as some randomized trials:
Global dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of the consistency of findings from the present study, with the conclusions from meta-analyses of other observational studies and the results of recent randomised controlled trials.
This is a good sign. Fifteen Ivy league professors have offered advice and a warning to students everywhere –to recapture the spirit of truthseeking and free debate. The message might just catch on, because although the young strive to conform to fashionable norms, approximately none of them want to be seen doing so. Who wants to be a the weak minded conformist?
The real bigots are those who fear open-minded enquiry…
It’s sad that it needs to be said, but we don’t train children to question fashionable truths and always look at both sides.
Our advice can be distilled to three words:
Think for yourself.
Now, that might sound easy. But you will find—as you may have discovered already in high school—that thinking for yourself can be a challenge. It always demands self-discipline and these days can require courage.
In today’s climate, it’s all-too-easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion on your campus or in the broader academic culture. The danger any student—or faculty member—faces today is falling into the vice of conformism, yielding to groupthink.
It is great to see them stepping into the fray:
Thinking for yourself means questioning dominant ideas even when others insist on their being treated as unquestionable. It means deciding what one believes not by conforming to fashionable opinions, but by taking the trouble to learn and honestly consider the strongest arguments to be advanced on both or all sides of questions—including arguments for positions that others revile and want to stigmatize and against positions others seek to immunize from critical scrutiny.
The love of truth and the desire to attain it should motivate you to think for yourself.
They are calling out the namecallers who have distorted the meaning of the word “bigot” and use it to shut down questions:
Merriam-Webster’s first definition of the word “bigot” is a person “who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices.” The only people who need fear open-minded inquiry and robust debate are the actual bigots,…
“These views should probably come with a trigger warning on Ivy League campuses, but are likely to be celebrated by parental check-writers from sea to shining sea.”
It’s a very well written article: Bonackers vs. Big Wind by Robert Bryce. h/t Andrew. The good news is that opponents of wind power are having a lot of success onshore. The bad news is that the renewables industry is pushing offshore instead, but fishermen don’t want them either, and families that have been fishing the same areas for 300 years are up in arms.
“The South Fork fishermen are fighting to preserve their access to some of the most productive fisheries in the world.”
Some eye-opening numbers:
Obama set a target of 10GW of offshore wind power by 2020. But right now there is only 30 MW. It’s 9,970MW short. The offshore push is on.
To replace a single nuclear generator will take 45 offshore wind plants.
Offshore generation costs as much as three times what gas power costs per KWh.
They face big money renewables proponents — not just rich beachfront homeowners, but large corporations who want tax credits worth millions, and groups like Norwegian oil giant Statoil ASA, plus the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Governor Andrew Cuomo has a goal of “producing 50 percent of the state’s electricity from renewables by 2030.” But to do it, bills will go up for the poor.
The backlash on land:
“The backlash against Big Wind is evident in the numbers: since 2015, about 160 government entities, from Maine to California, have rejected or restricted wind projects. One recent example: on May 2, voters in three Michigan counties went to the polls to vote on wind-related ballot initiatives. Big Wind lost on every initiative.
An analysis of media stories shows that, over the past decade or so, about 40 New York communities have shot down or curbed wind projects.”
Onshore wind is becoming unviable due to opposition. So New York Governor wants it offshore. But fishermen don’t want wind power either.
“Alex. Beckwith traces his family’s roots in the region back more than 300 years. “I’m totally opposed” to the wind project, he said. “It’s going to be a hazard to navigation.”
Expanding offshore wind to the 2.4 gigawatts that Cuomo has pledged will require covering about 300 square miles of offshore territory with turbines.
… fishermen are facing “permanent denial” of their labor in the areas in and around the proposed projects. “We can’t go anywhere else,” she tells me. Asked about the politics of offshore wind, Paul Farnham, who owns the Montauk Fish Dock, which packs fish for shipment and sale (on consignment) to the New Fulton Fish Market at Hunts Point in the Bronx, replies: “I’ll guarantee you, 90 percent or more of all these fishermen voted for Trump. It wasn’t because they liked him. It was because they wanted less regulation.”
Professor Peter Ridd has made the mistake of putting scientific standards ahead of collegial comfort. What was he thinking? He seems to feel he should serve the people of the Queensland instead of helping the careers of co-workers and admin staff.
Ridd is being accused of “Not acting in a collegial way” (or something like that, no one is allowed to say for sure) and is now under investigation for serious misconduct.
The federal government is set to spend more than $1 billion on the Great Barrier Reef in the next few years to mitigate the effects of climate change, based largely on research that is claimed not to have been subjected to proper scrutiny.
James Cook University physics professor Peter Ridd writes in a new book that the credibility of key research papers driving investments in the reef rest on “a total reliance on the demonstrably inadequate peer-review process’’.
Professor Ridd argues for the establishment of a properly funded group of scientists whose sole job is to find fault in the science “upon which we are basing expensive public policy decisions regarding the Great Barrier Reef’’.
Ridd wants to get the Barrier Reef science (and policy) right:
“It’s [the Great Barrier Reef policy] affecting the sugar industry, the cattle industry, the mining industry, the tourism industry…”
“there is a certain duty of care on scientists to make sure they get it right. I don’t think they are..”
…in other areas of science when they do proper checking about half of it is wrong, so why aren’t they trying to check it.
They want to shoot the messenger…”
Peer review is a cursory look at the science, they don’t review the data, but if you are going to spend a billion dollars…
As Jennifer Marohasy says:
Rather than James Cook University sacking Peter Ridd for having the courage to speak out, it would be good if they would get behind him, and his calls for urgent reform.
The question is whether JCU care about getting the answers right?
Peter Ridd writes a lot more in his chapter in the new book Climate Change: The Facts 2017. Co-authors include yours truly, Clive James, Matt Ridley, Willie Soon, Roy Spencer, and Anthony Watts. Pre-order your copy now, the first edition, released last week, has sold out.
h/t Jennifer M
Of professors, there are only a few,
Who dare challenge or doubt peer-review,
Of all topics climatic,
Which is so problematic,
For alarmists who think it taboo.
Remember the Electrical Eclipse-Fear? For months, people were coached to use less electricity during the eclipse for fear that the grid might fall over as marvelous new-revolution-solar stopped working. The media were selling the message that we might not cope without solar. I figured this would be as big a threat as a cloudy day (but easier to prepare for.).
So after all the spin, what happened? Electricity was massively oversupplied, and spot prices went negative.
Apparently people went outside to watch the sky. (At least that’s Southwest Power’s excuse.)
Most of the groups that hyped the fear don’t seem to have mentioned the failure so much:
Grid operators and traders thought they were totally prepped for the historic U.S. solar eclipse. There was just this one thing they didn’t completely factor in: “irregular human-behavior patterns.”
That’s the technical definition, from the folks who manage the electricity network at the Southwest Power Pool, for the conduct of millions of Americans who were outdoors ogling the moon shadowing the sun instead of cranking up the A/C in homes and offices.
This was a bummer for traders who’d bet prices would jump as a whole load of solar-produced megawatts faded to black.
Spot power in California fell to negative levels as the eclipse wiped out and restarted thousands of megawatts of solar power, and they also dipped from Texas to New York.
Then at 11:50 a.m. local time — as the sun started to reappear from behind the moon — the ramp-up in solar power sent prices to a low of minus $15.97.
…the next total eclipse in the U.S.: April 8, 2024.
The normal unpredictable variation of solar and wind power is far harder to deal with than the predictable dips from a solar eclipse.
Justin Gillis, writer for The New York Times used the recent eclipse to sell something I’d call Sciencemagic. Essentially, if some Scientists™ can calculate orbital mechanics to a fine art, it follows, ipso nonfacto, that all people who use the same job title are also always right.
Thanks to the work of scientists, people will know exactly what time to expect the eclipse. In less entertaining but more important ways, we respond to scientific predictions all the time, even though we have no independent capacity to verify the calculations. We tend to trust scientists.
If Scientists™ say that solar panels will stop malaria, then buy some! Save lives in Ghana. (What are you waiting for?)
The implications stretch far. Clearly, we can chuck out the whole research thing (labs, who needs em?) Why test predictions, if Scientists™ are 100% accurate? We’ve been wasting money. We don’t need more large hadron colliders, we just need to survey more particle physicists.
This idea that job titles have a kind of truth-telling power is not much different to astrology where truth comes from birthdates.
Preacher-Gillis struggles with cause and effect:
So what predictions has climate science made, and have they come true?
The earliest, made by a Swede named Svante Arrhenius in 1897, was simply that the Earth would heat up in response to emissions. That has been proved: The global average temperature has risen more than 1 degree Celsius, or almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit, a substantial change for a whole planet.
It’s the most tritely obvious thing that any cause of warming would cause… warming. Was it CO2, or solar spectral changes, solar magnetic effects, or solar particle flows? Gillis seems to think that warming itself is evidence that CO2 is the problem. It’s magical short-term thinking. But turning points, dammit, tell another story. If CO2 was the major driver there wouldn’t be major turning points that we can’t explain. For half the decades since Arrhenius made that prediction, global temperatures have been not-behaving as Arrhenius predicted – CO2 was on the rise, and global temperatures weren’t.
Hadley Global Temperature Graph with Phil Jones trends annotated on top.
Gillis provides a cherry picked random-hits list (Not only are these signs of any warming but if you make forty predictions — some will work out, it’s quite difficult to fail on all forty):
The scientists told us that the Arctic would warm especially fast. They told us to expect heavier rainstorms. They told us heat waves would soar. They told us that the oceans would rise. All of those things have come to pass.
Considering this most basic test of a scientific theory, the test of prediction, climate science has established its validity.
The globe has two poles, and the Arctic warmed but the Antarctic did the opposite. On a yes-no question, a 50% success rate is not “success” but random luck.
As evidence, Gillis links to model predictions of “heatwaves” that haven’t even happened yet. For “heavier rain” he links to a story from 2014 that he wrote that is almost cut n paste identical to the current story — same cause and effect problem. Hello Justin — what kind of warming will not cause water to evaporate from the ocean leading to more rain? (What goes up must come down). If the solar dynamo was warming Earth, we’d see these exact same events. The only difference is that solar theories explain more of the turning points, and far more of the history.
Then there is the old warming-troposphere-cooling-stratosphere fingerprint which shows that CO2 is increasing (which we already knew from measurements) but not that CO2 causes global warming:
By the 1960s and ’70s, climate scientists were making more detailed predictions. They said that as the surface of the Earth warmed, the temperature in the highest reaches of the atmosphere would fall. That is exactly what happened.
Applying exact tests, inexactly:
If the science were brand new, that might make sense, but climate scientists have been making predictions since the end of the 19th century. This is the acid test of any scientific theory: Does it make predictions that ultimately come true?
What kind of “acid test” is not an acid test? The Gillis kind:
Considering this most basic test of a scientific theory, the test of prediction, climate science has established its validity.
That does not mean it is perfect, nor that every single prediction is correct. While climate scientists have forecast the long-term rise of global temperatures pretty accurately, they have not been as good — yet — about predicting the short-term jitters.
In other fields, we do not demand absolute certainty from our scientists, because that is an impossible standard.
The acid test used to separate gold from base metals, it gave a definitive answer, but in Gillis-world copper is gold is nickel. Who cares? This is sloppy language — so sloppy it’s meaningless. If a salesman spoke like this we’d call it deceptive marketing.
There are no Gods of Science
Lots of eminent and otherwise sensible scientists still say things that are wrong:
Gillis would protest that I miss the point. Individual scientists can be wrong, but this is a C.o.n.s.e.n.s.u.s. as if group thinking crosses some magical line into truth. Despite all the evidence that experts get things wrong and for decades, Gillis helps to propagate those mistakes by being an apologist for B-grade thinking, asking no hard questions, doing no investigation and pandering to unscientific excuses.
The Andrews government this morning unveiled a new renewable energy target with a commitment to power up to 25 per cent of the state from renewables by 2020 and 40 per cent by 2025.
The government has backed the construction of two large scale solar farms in regional Victoria which will provide another 140MW to the state’s supply, and has set up a reverse energy auction system to bring forward an additional 650MW to the state’s supply.
Victorian households will allegedly each save around $30 annually on power bills under the new plan, while medium sized businesses have been projected to save up to $2400 a year under the legislation which will be introduced to parliament today.
It’s almost like Victoria plans to make electricity from legislation (hey, it’s renewable, and will never run out). By making electricity shockingly expensive, Government ministers can talk of “savings”, even though prices will be far higher than the average price of electricity for the last twenty years.
Do the maths. A few months ago, a major Victorian coal generator shut down. Hazelwood provided 1,600 megawatts, 22% of the state’s electricity at $30/MWhr. South Australia just signed a deal for solar power averaging a price of $70-plus-per-megawatt-hour (plus RET scheme, government loans, and who knows what other subsidies).
This is Soviet-style electricity management:
The plan would deliver an increase to the state’s energy supply because it gives investors the certainty they need commit to large-scale renewable energy projects, according to Energy and Climate Change Minister Lily D’Ambrosio.
The word certainty is code for guaranteed profits from forced customers who are not permitted to buy the cheaper alternative.
Strangely coal investors don’t seem to need “certainty” from legislation (governments and investors are building 1600 new plants in 62 countries, but not one in Australia.) Coal power investors get certainty by selling a product that they know freely consenting adults will always want to buy. One version of certainty is driven by the free market, the other by government dictat.
There was no Medieval Warm Period in China. No little ice age either. Not warm in Roman times either.
Obviously CO2 controls this climate.
(Click to enlarge)
Quansheng et al show that weather is lumpy, that modern warming is a lot like past warming. They go so far as to say that there are regular cycles and hint that sun might have something to do with it, and volcanoes.
“…centenial variation is significantly correlated with long-term changes in solar radiation—especially cold periods, which correspond approximately to sunspot minima, as well as the frequency of large volcanic eruptions.”
They go on to say that rate of warming was about half a degree per century lately. It may have been the fastest rate, but then again, it may not. It was hard to tell with the error bars being so wide. It was all done with proxies and has a ten year resolution. Obviously it is in need of having homogenadjustoided thermometer data added after 1960 as is the custom in climate science.
Grid operators, utilities and electricity generators are bracing for more than 12,000 megawatts of solar power to start falling offline as the moon blocks out the sun across a 70-mile-wide (113-kilometer) corridor stretching from Oregon to South Carolina.
This is the first major test of the power grid since America started bringing large amounts of intermittent solar and wind resources onto the system. It comes just as the grid is undergoing an unprecedented transformation whereby flexible resources such as battery storage will complement growing supplies of solar and wind.
Reader Andrew writes: “The path of totality is trivially narrow although the partial eclipse is quite wide. But they mustn’t have clouds in the US.”
Indeed.
Looks like it is being marketed as some kind of dummy run to “prove” intermittent energy will not hurt the grid when it “takes over”?
The celestial event provides an opportunity to test plants, software and markets refined in recent years in anticipation of the day when renewable energy becomes the dominant source of power.
Or perhaps it’s just the faithful reassuring themselves that the eclipse won’t end up being another disastrous blackout other people can blame on renewables. Look at how much trouble they have to go to:
California, home to more solar power than any other state, will tap into its network of hydropower generators and gas plants that can ramp up quickly to fill a 6,000-megawatt gap in solar energy. The state also embarked upon a public relations campaign to convince residents to conserve energy to minimize greenhouse-gas emissions while solar plants are down.
These stories of fear of a grid breakdown or “whiplash” have been going on for months:
The Australian National grid deals with about 3,500MW of wind power coming and going all the time and without 3 months to plan for it. Surely California can cope with 6,000?
I predict happy stories tomorrow of how the-solar-grid survived the test.
Wind-farms and solar thermal plants will prey,
On birds of every size who fly their way.
The public, to pay less per kilowatt hour,
Must vote to drive the zealot Greens from power.
Australia’s constitution has a flaw,
When politicians wish to change the law,
By referendum, have the flaw corrected,
That very flaw will rule their wish rejected.
Bad-tempered glass can have a snap eruption,
Like children’s tantrums cause a quick disruption.
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