Australia is a wonderful living experiment for nations worldwide of how a people with more energy resources per capita than anywhere else in the world can sabotage a perfectly good electricity grid in the hope of appeasing the Weather Gods.
At the request of Senator Malcolm Roberts, Alan Moran slices up our “Chief Scientists” report (known as the Finkel Review) and gives us some home truths. Electricity costs have doubled in Australia, Finkel’s plan would take what isn’t working, and do more of it — in the process pretty much destroying one fifth of our manufacturing base, costing us thousands of jobs, and adding almost $588-$768 per household annually to energy bills. Let’s ask Australian voters if they want cheap coal power or if they’d rather spend $600 a year to make the weather unmeasureably nicer in 2100? Why don’t we have a plebescite on that?
In other basic truths Moran points out that while Finkel seems to think new coal fired plants are uneconomic, everyone else is building them around the world. Old plants don’t have to be blown up on their 50th Birthday either. They can be maintained instead, like lots of other perfectly good 50 year old industrial workhorses.
The big cost of Electrons-for-the-climate is not just the higher electricity bill consumers pay, but the awful effect that expensive electricity has on our manufacturing sector (leading to the double whammy where people have higher bills at home, and no job to pay them). Moran points out that higher costs eat directly into profit margins. A 2% rise in costs can wipe out 13% of the total profits. This is why businesses flee from high-cost countries.
How do we fix it? Let the free market solve it for us
Moran recommends we return to a free market in electricity, dump the Renewable Energy Target, abolish subsidies, stop the SRES scheme and state based plans giving money to roof top solar with preferential feed-in tariffs, and stop tossing taxpayer money to the Clean Energy Regulator and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. All new generators should pay the costs of the transmission lines required to connect them to the grid, and ensure they can operate “reliably”.
Cheap electricity: How Australia went from the top of the list to the bottom
In 1999 Australians had some of the cheapest electricity in the world:
….
By 2015 Australia has a lot more renewables, and a lot more expensive electricity.
..
Working out the lifetime cost of electricity is difficult. It is even more difficult to find a nation with lots of wind and solar power that also has cheap electricity.
Electricity prices skyrocket in Australia
Graph Electricity prices
Thsoe government subsidies $4.9 billion
Specifically $3.7billion from the Feds, $1.2b from states
…
Finkel Myth: The old Coal fired fleet has to close
Alan Moran replies:
“Some argue that many of these power stations are old, and the Finkel report contemplated a forced closure of power stations over 50 years old. The absurdity of such notions should be clear: US global military power is dependent on its 10 Nimitz class aircraft carriers which were first launched in 1972, and many rail lines and ports are over 100 years old. Even most of Australia’s commercial hydro power stations are over 50 years old. In all cases, older established plant has been renewed and revitalised over the years. While totally new facilities can be lower cost, it is wasteful to scrap facilities which continue to be competitive.
Companies will leave if electricity costs add just 2% to their total costs
I thought the devastating effect of a small rise in costs was particularly well explained.
“It might be said that even if electricity comprises 20 per cent of costs, a price rise that brings as much as a 50 per cent increase in these costs might be affordable. After all this would be an arithmetic increase in overall costs of a mere 10 per cent.
Such logic however overlooks the drivers of industry location in a market economy. One sees global brands like Adidas and Puma relocating their manufacturing source in response to two or three percentage points of costs. The reason behind this is the amplification effect of costs on profits, the driver of firms’ decision making. Profits are the residual benefit to the owner and decision maker after all other costs are covered. If profit comprises 15 per cent of the overall cost, a 10 per cent increase in costs eliminates two thirds of the income of the owner.
This amplification is the key to the creation of efficient economies the world over. Firms strive for seemingly tiny cost savings because of the effect of these in the income of the firm’s owner and decision maker. Even a two per cent cost increase would, where profit is 15 per cent of total cost bring a 13.5 per cent reduction in profits. Such a loss of income to the owners would, where the loss was being experienced in only one location, cause a shift away from that location.
A key competitive strength of Australian industry has been the cheap energy endowment that its mining and energy utility businesses have successfully tapped. p35 – 36
Tony Thomas finds an academic (Matthew Liao) who suggests that given the climate change risk it might be more ethical to shrink our kids by 6 inches, or drug people with oxytoxin to make them more compliant. Jo Nova thinks it might be more ethical to fund skeptical scientists instead of unskeptical ones and figure out whether a man-made disaster is actually coming before we start shrinking kids.
The idea is that people would accept bizarre climate-saving imposts willingly if only we could give them the “love drug” oxytocin. He calls it “Pharmacologically induced altruism”. Oxytocin increases altruism and empathy, but I would guess that only altruistic or empathetic people would willingly take it “for the sake of the planet”. The rest of the population might be a little suspect that they might be more prone to being duped and conned while “under the influence”.
The initial paper Human Engineering and Climate Change, came out five years ago. But in academic circles, Liao wasn’t laughed out of town, and hasn’t apparently issued a more comprehensive update.
Tony Thomas spots a few ethical problems:
Liao insists his human engineering is all voluntary, but should be incentivised by tax breaks and health-cost discounts. What he failed to explain is how toddlers could volunteer to restrict their adult height to say, 5ft (152cm).
“We think we now have optimal height, and that we should not do anything to mess with our height, but the reality (can be) much more fluid,” he said, noting that everyone was much shorter in the 19thcentury with no harm done.
No harm done, apart from maybe a shorter life expectancy.
Ethically, some might wonder why Liao didn’t spend five minutes doing an internet search before publishing his work.
He said height is seen by many as a social advantage but that was not a reason to scratch the shortness-creating idea. As his paper says, bungee jumping, tattoos and running marathons are also minority tastes but legitimate activities.
Ever-hopeful, Liao believes that once a few people started shortening their children, others might be similarly inspired, especially if given tax breaks. He conceded that poorer people are already shorter on average, and should not be encouraged to further shrink their offspring.
Drugs to give up meat?
He told his audience that many people wanted to give up eating meat but enjoyed the taste too much. To assist, their immune systems could be primed to react to meat “and induce some sort of unpleasant experience, very mild. (Laughter). Even if the effect was not for a lifetime, the learning effect could persist a long time.”
A safe way to induce such intolerance could involve a “meat patch”, akin to a nicotine patch, that people could wear before going out to eat, he said.
Note the powerful fear of breaching political correctness:
He agreed that bio-engineering against obesity would be climate-effective, “but I focus on height because the issue of obesity is very politically sensitive, raising a lot of issues and, on top, some discriminatory aspects – talk about obesity, you know…a tricky situation.” So Liao put this planet-saving measure aside because of potential backlash from “obesity identity” activists. Anti-height measures, however, are politically safe because tall people are already advantaged.
It may offend obese people to suggest that we engineer skinnier kids to save the planet. But 99% of doctors suggest we are healthier if we avoid obesity, and few people voluntarily choose to be obese. So in Liao-ethics, rather than risk offending Social Justice Warriors, it is better to save the planet by risking children’s health in an unconsenting, permanent change that few doctors recommend and few people voluntarily seek.
Marvel that Matthew Liao is still in his job five years after he released this paper despite his apparent lack of rigor, research and … ethics. Is he government funded? Hard to say, there’s no mention of any funding on the paper, or for his role as Arthur Zitrin Chair of Bioethics.
But his work is a great example of why we need to get academic research out of the hands of academics.
The Incredible Shrinking Man,
Is of much shorter people, a fan,
And through drugs has devised,
To make all kids pint-sized,
Which he thinks is an Earth saving plan.
Peter Ridd: Coral Reefs recover — “the scientists make hay when it dies in a spectacular way but they are quiet when it recovers.”
On symbionts — “There is a large variety of symbionts and some allow coral to grow faster but are more sensitive to bleaching.”
All the corals on the Great Barrier Reef live and grow much faster in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Thailand where the water is much hotter than it is on the reef and the corals just juggle these symbionts. 4:20
Corals have a little thermometer built in them, when you take a core of them from many years ago we know what the temperature of the water was back when Captain Cook sailed up the coast, it was actually about the same temperature then. It was colder 100 years ago, but it has recovered from that. The temperatures on the reef are not even significantly warmer than average on a hundred year timescale.
Corals that bleach in one year will be less susceptible to bleaching in following years.
On the failure of modern science:
Peter Ridd:We can no longer rely on our science institutions. This is a very sad thing.
We are like a ship upon the ocean when our science fails and we need to do something about it. … This science is almost never checked.
Alan Jones:All these things [bleaching, crown of thorns] have been around for millennia, I love this line, as you write “long before scientists got hold of any scuba gear.”
Peter Ridd:These things only became a problem when scientists pop up on the scene.
Scientists are trying to close down, or affect adversely the sugar cane, the cattle, and the coal industry, and they are also telling the world the reef is dead which affects the tourist industry in Queensland.
Like a bushfire… It [bleaching] looks terrible when it happens but it grows back.
Feel the hate. Martin Lukacs in The Guardian blames “corporates” for everything. It’s all a big 40 year neoliberalist plot to trick you, make you feel guilty, and worst of all, to fool you into thinking you are an individual instead of, err… a group. What could be worse?
In the declining stage of the Climate Wars, the excuses are running amok. The Lukacs “analysis” tries to foment an us-n-them class warfare, but will offend quite a lot of believers by tossing their individual actions (their plastic bag penance) under a bus.
He is so busy looking at the world through marxist-colored-glasses he doesn’t seem to have noticed that many of the “big polluters” — the oil and gas giants — all lobby and profit from carbon action. Big Oil and Big Gas want carbon rules and carbon subsidies because it helps them compete with their real rival, Big Coal. Meanwhile Lukacs wants everything back under government ownership, but the worst real polluters on the planet are the wasteful communist regimes and socialist dictators, not the free West and the publicly listed corporations.
The saddest thing is that The Guardian editors thought this was worth publishing as is, and that the feisty, good Guardian commenters that used to turn up to mock this kind of vacuous philosophy are nowhere to be seen.
Lukacs argues that most individual green eco-actions are just pointless busywork to distract people from the real task, which is “taking on corporate power”:
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.
The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it.
We are all Thatcher’s children, he cries. Exploited, duped by the ” insidious anti-social toxin” called neoliberalism. Save the workers!
Anything resembling a collective check on corporate power has become a target of the elite: lobbying and corporate donations, hollowing out democracies, have obstructed green policies and kept fossil fuel subsidies flowing; and the rights of associations like unions, the most effective means for workers to wield power together, have been undercut whenever possible.
Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is politically unrealistic: it has also tried to make it culturally unthinkable. Its celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective bonds. It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin, what Margaret Thatcher preached: “there is no such thing as society.”
Apparently you give power to the people by taking away their individual choices:
At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who can afford it.
Are you a global parasite, contributing nothing, living off welfare and destroying the planet too? If you feel guilty about that, blame the ideology that provides everything for you:
Neoliberalism has taken this internalized self-blame and turbocharged it. It tells you that you should not merely feel guilt and shame if you can’t secure a good job, are deep in debt, and are too stressed or overworked for time with friends. You are now also responsible for bearing the burden of potential ecological collapse.
And if the worst polluters are not China, or Exxon, but The Pacific Ocean, or the Siberian forests? Can they be Unionized?
Since 1988, a mere 100 companies have been responsible for 71 percent of the entire world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions.
This data comes from an inaugural report published by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an environmental non-profit. Charting the rapid expansion of the fossil fuel industry in the last 28 years, they have now released some truly staggering numbers on the world’s major carbon polluters.
Tess Riley of The Guardian tells us that “A relatively small number of fossil fuel producers and their investors could hold the key to tackling climate change”. She goes on to name the worst corporations: “ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron are identified as among the highest emitting investor-owned companies since 1988″. It’s not til the ninth paragraph we find that: “A fifth of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions are backed by public investment, according to the report.”
Only a fifth?
Look closely — the Worst corporate “polluters” are Big Government, not the Capitalist Pigs.
Forget for a moment that “pollution” is a plant fertilizer. Check out the top ten on the list. The largest corporate producer by far is the communist government of China, followed by a Saudi owned entity (Aramco), not to mention the also state-owned National Iranian oil Co, Coal India, Permex (Mexico), Russia (Coal) and China National Petroleum Corp. Fully seven out of the top ten are not private corporations, but Big-government entities.
Click to enlarge.
Riley doesn’t talk about how much influence investors can have on these. The message is “divest”. Go on, sell your Chinese bonds.
Alarmists call plant food ‘pollution’,
Which now needs their Marxist solution,
Which would force the reduction,
Of fossil fuel production,
In the West for the Green Revolution.
Apparently human emissions of CO2 have stopped growing in the last few years, but atmospheric levels of CO2 are rising anyway.
IEA data shows CO2 emissions stopped rising:
Global Carbon Emissions, 2017, IEA, Graph.
Pop-Quiz — The correct conclusion from this is:
1/ Human emissions are irrelevant — global CO2 is controlled by ocean currents, phytoplankton, other stuff. Efforts to control global CO2 through windmills and electric cars are a complete waste of money.
2/ Natural sinks have suddenly filled up, the ocean is full, and we are near a tipping point. Panic. Give us your money.
3/ Pretend not to notice, instead, rejoice that Global GDP isstill increasing which means that for the first time in 100,000 years, humans have disconnected economic development from burning carbon based stuff. This is proof finally, in your faith that renewables will not cripple economies. (See Scientific American.)
4/ Declare that global emissions are still rising rapidly anyway. (Here is the same award-winning Peter Boyer not researching his claims in 2016. When will he start?)
Global atmospheric CO2 levels at Mauna Loa are still rising:
Global CO2 Levels, Mauna Loa, graph, 2017, NOAA. | Source NY Times
….
Carbon in Atmosphere Is Rising, Even as Emissions Stabilize
Justin Gillis, NY Times.
… a bank of sophisticated machines sniffs that air day and night, revealing telltale indicators of the way human activity is altering the planet on a major scale.
For more than two years, the monitoring station here, along with its counterparts across the world, has been flashing a warning: The excess carbon dioxide scorching the planet rose at the highest rate on record in 2015 and 2016. A slightly slower but still unusual rate of increase has continued into 2017.
Scientists are concerned about the cause of the rapid rises because, in one of the most hopeful signs since the global climate crisis became widely understood in the 1980s, the amount of carbon dioxide that people are pumping into the air seems to have stabilized in recent years, at least judging from the data that countries compile on their own emissions.
That raises a conundrum: If the amount of the gas that people are putting out has stopped rising, how can the amount that stays in the air be going up faster than ever? Does it mean the natural sponges that have been absorbing carbon dioxide are now changing?
A 500 trillion, gazillion dollar bill is coming for you unless you buy my solar-panel-techno-wind-battery gizmo NOW! Don’t miss out. You too, can be a world saving star for a bargain price. Free planet with nice weather thrown in. Offer ends at midnight.
Seriously, have you always wanted to stop storms, vermin, disease, plagues, hunger, poverty, droughts, floods, and shrinking fish and chips?
All of this and much more if you just pay up now, pay today, pay tomorrow, and hock your children’s future.
Hands up who wants to be a hero?
Who needs an economist to calculate the biggest bill you’ve ever seen? (It’s a record, the Largest Ever Bill in Four Million Years! )
The next generation will have to pay a $535 trillion bill to tackle climate change, relying on unproven and speculative technology.
LONDON, 19 July, 2017 – One of the world’s most famous climate scientists has just calculated the financial burden that tomorrow’s young citizens will face to keep the globe at a habitable temperature and contain global warming and climate change – a $535 trillion bill.
And much of that will go on expensive technologies engineered to suck 1,000 billion metric tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the air by the year 2100.
Of course, if humans started to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6% a year right now, the end of the century challenge would be to take 150 billion tonnes from the atmosphere, and most of this could be achieved simply by better forest and agricultural management, according to a new study in the journal Earth System Dynamics.
People who don’t buy up this great offer are Selfish, Scumbag Deniers, who are hurting their children, practically pedophiles, and definitely fools who should never be invited to your dinner parties, ever! Mankind controls the Climate. This is Science, totally scientific, as certain as Gravity, Penicillin and Planes, and only a charlatan shill for fossil fuels would even ask about the error bars. Don’t trust anyone who does!
Only days to go before the Sale of the Century closes.
PS: Readers, please suggest your own posters. I’ll make the best ones into posters. :- )
Poor Bill Nye -he’s thinks somehow most people are as religious about climate change as he is, and will keep their naively unscientific beliefs about our ability to control the climate with power stations, wind mills and light bulbs, into their old age. Instead, the reality is Bill’s biggest nightmare, skeptics are not dying out at all — there is a never ending source of skeptics, as young gullible believers grow up to be old and wise.
It just sounds like people are scared. It just sounds like people are afraid. And the people who are afraid in general — with due respect, and I am now one of them — are older. Climate change deniers, by way of example, are older. It’s generational. So we’re just going to have to wait for those people to “age out,” as they say. “Age out” is a euphemism for “die.” But it’ll happen, I guarantee you — that’ll happen. — Bill Nye
Here’s that data. For starters, we know that Republican voters are older than Democrat voters. So consider what happened to “people identifying as “environmentalists”. If people carried their beliefs with them as they grew older, we would see the term appearing increasingly among Republican voters — converging towards the Democrats. Instead, over the last twenty five years, “environmentalist” became a dirty word for lots of people, but especially for Republican voters.
…
In terms of worries about Global Warming, spot the Republican transformation over the last 16 years as half a generation passed. Exactly.
The rise in belief as the “hottest ever El Nino year” hit the headlines came in Democrat and Independent voting groups, not in Republican voters who remain unmoved by the sensationalist repeats of yet more “records”. Older voters are more likely to recognize that it’s all been done before.
What’s the word for competitive-but-needs-a-subsidy? Broke…
One hundred solar PV companies are forecast to collapse in Japan this year alone.
Up to 100 solar PV firms in Japan could face bankruptcy this year, with more than double the number of firms going bust in the first half of this year than the same period in 2016.
According to corporate credit research company Teikoku Databank, which surveys companies across various industries and has produced its third report on solar PV company bankruptcies, 50 companies in Japan’s solar sector have already gone out of business in the first six months of 2017.
While the market overall has rapidly expanded from the launch of the feed-in tariff (FiT) in July 2012, Teikoku Databank acknowledged that there has been a slowdown in deployment in the past couple of years as the government successively made cuts of 10% or more on an annual basis to the premium prices paid for solar energy fed into the grid.
Bankruptcies have doubled in the industry since last year.
Current operating coal fired plants in Japan, 2017.
Current operating coal fired plants in Japan, 2017.
Coal seems to be doing just fine.
h/t Marvin.
PS: The EndCoal Tracker is published by “CoalSwarm“. Where the global EndSolarSubsidies Tracker? All that fossil fuel funding, and no activist group to track the parasites?
Some 3,200 people lost their lives to disasters between January and June, the German group found — well short of the 10-year average of 47,000 for the period or the 5,100 deaths in the first half of 2016.
April floods and landslides in Colombia that claimed 329 lives were the deadliest single event.
Elsewhere, an April-June heatwave in India killed 264 people, while floods, landslides and avalanches claimed around 200 lives in Sri Lanka, 200 in Afghanistan and 200 Bangladesh.
In terms of costs — that’s 60 billion “saved” this year:
Disasters inflicted a financial cost of around $41 billion in the first six months, Munich Re reported.
That was less than half of the $111 billion toll in the same period last year, or the average of $102 billion over the past 10 years.
The most costly single event was flooding in Peru between January and March, which killed 113 people and inflicted damage worth around $3.1 billion, followed by Cyclone Debbie’s toll of 12 lives and $2.7 billion in Australia.
No one is suggesting one-year stats and ten year averages are meaningful. Unless you are Al Gore, then you need even less.
In Australia, there may be less rain overall but much more in these big storm events.
A couple of months ago, there was a 1 in 500 year flood in NZ and similar in Brisbane a couple of years ago. Last week in Lagos Nigeria, this (slide) was in my state just two months ago and another 1 in 1000 years.
I was in Houston Texas last year training climate activists , there was 240b gallons came down, equivalent of 3 days of Niagara Falls flowing right into the middle of Houston. In one calendar year they had two 1 in 500 years and one in one 1000 years. [Footage of flood slides from Quebec, Guatemale, Columbia, Rio, Lima, Chile, Bangladesh, Guangzhou, UK, Spain, Madagascar].
Gore and others are using events that are happening anyway to imply that every flood/drought/storm/landslide/sticky-road is worse than it would have been unless we buy his snake oil. Where’s the ACCC when you need them?
Hearts go out to the actual victims of these events.
Wouldn’t it be something if we had models that worked that could predict them?
___________________________________________
*ACCC: Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ie consumer rights in Australia)
As long as “climate change” is on the agenda in Western politics it will keep tearing the right-conservative side of politics apart. Because it is built on a mistake, the only stability for the right (and eventually the left) will be resolute skepticism. Truth will out in the end. Til then, the right side hobbles along with the exception of a few like Abbott, then moreso, Trump. Trump is the only politician to laugh at the snake oil salesmen and he won the most powerful democratic battle on Earth. When will other non-leftie politicans get the message?
The legacy media keep telling us “the science” is all one way so they are baffled that so many in politics don’t get it. What the media hide from themselves is that skeptical scientists vastly outnumber and outrank the believers, and that most of the public doesn’t buy the message either (see these climate polls). If politicans truly represented the public on this, over half would be skeptical.
John Roskam, the executive director of the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs, said he hadn’t conducted a formal count but found most Liberal politicians shared his doubts about what many experts say is the greatest global threat to mankind.
“More than 50 per cent are solid sceptics and more than 50 per cent feel they need to be seen to do something,” he said in an interview. “The science is not settled.”
Journalist Aaron Patrick drops the usual line in about “climate scientists” as the gospel:
The overwhelming majority of climate change scientists accept the atmosphere is warming and humans are responsible.
What he probably has no idea of, is how that small sub branch of science has failed utterly to convince any other branch of it’s central thesis. Surely if climate scientists were right, the first people to recognise that would be meteorologists, followed by engineers, geologists, chemists, etc.
The fact is (and any genuine reporter would find this out easily) almost half of meteorologists — fergoodnesssake — are skeptics, survey after survey shows that two-thirds of geoscientists and engineers are skeptics, and most readers of skeptical blogs (who chose to respond to surveys and list their qualifications in comments^) have hard science degrees. Of the twelve astronauts who ever walked on the moon, three are outspoken skeptics (Harrison Schmidt, Buzz Aldrin, and Charles Duke). Not to mention that some skeptics have Nobel prizes (the real kind in Physics, not “Peace”). If we had to name a list of skeptics versus believers, the skeptics number 31,000, yet there is no list of named scientists who believe that comes close — let alone a list of 300,000 which would imply some truth to the statement that the science is settled, and the world’s scientists agree.
The one sided reporting leaves us open to these kinds of myths — as if a large part of conservative politics disagrees with “science”:
But many right-wing politicians, commentators and voters aren’t convinced the scientists are correct, or suspect the consequences of global warming are being exaggerated for ideological or economic reasons. Some Liberals unenthusiastically support climate change policies in the hope scientific opinion will shift in future years, Mr Roskam said.
Top marks to Peta Credlin
The Coalition backbench is “deeply sceptical about climate theology,” the former chief of staff to Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Peta Credlin, wrote in the Daily Telegraph last week.
“Make no mistake, even his strongest supporters in Cabinet understand that climate change remains Malcolm Turnbull’s kryptonite,” Ms Credlin wrote.
Nick Cater is brilliant, when asked what his think tanks climate position was he said “Should we have one?”
CNN is “freaking out” about the latest large iceberg. But John Sutter doesn’t mention that there was an iceberg twice its size in the year 2000 which was 11,000km2, and that as long ago as 1967, two other icebergs of a similar size were recorded. Thanks to John McLean for the links.
UPDATE #2: Monster bergs are everywhere. Lazzara lists two other massive icebergs as well as B15 that occurred in just 18 months: A38 in Oct 1998 was 7,600km2 and A43 in May 2000 was almost as big as B15, being 9,250km2. h/t WS All three of these were larger than the current “freak”.
When it comes to long term trends in iceberg sizes, the only scientific answer is “who knows”. Satellite records are so short, if a bigger iceberg broke off in say, 1811, how the heck would we find out? Not much is left of an iceberg 100 years later. What kind of proxy could show it ever existed — ancient stone carvings of satellite pics from ancient Greece?
Swithinbank (1969), basing on analysis of the ESSA-3 satellite imageries, reports that in 1967—68 two giant icebergs were seen in the eastern part of the Weddell Sea, measuring 70 by 100 km, and 45 by 100 km respectively, with total area of about 11.000 km.
— Birkenmajer, 1980
Apparently the smaller of these two was called “Trolltunga” and floated around til 1978. (See the map far below). Sadly, the real Trolltunga was pre-youtube, no photos I can find, except of the region in question.
This is the Trolltunga region. The little iceberg on the left is not “Trolltunga 1967” which was around 45km x 100km.
But an even larger iceberg apparently was B15 — nearly 11,000 square kilometers in the year 2000:
B-15 iceberg, largest satellite recorded iceberg, photo.
If I read this correctly, we are talking about ice that takes a century or even 2,000 years to go from the “grounding line” to the front. The Grounding line is the last point that the ice sheet touches land. The part beyond that is hanging out over the ocean:
We were mainly interested in the differences of residence times dependent on the density of surface patterns on the 15 km strip along the ice front. In case of very dense patterns we found that the ice needs between 78 and 968 years to move from the grounding line to the ice front. For less dense patterns we obtained a range between 140 and 2,764 years. — Wesche 2013
In Table 3 of Wesche, there are ten potential calving fronts greater than 200km wide spread over four sectors of Antarctica. It’s just a matter of time before another big berg breaks off.
For the curious, Encycploedia Britannica has this map and path of Trolltunga, which bounced around near the Antarctic coast for years before heading into the Atlantic Ocean, where it still took a year to melt. Strangely Encyclopedia Britannica has no article any more.
Lazzara, M.A.; Jezek, K.C.; Scambos, T.A.; MacAyeal, D.R.; van der Veen, C.J. On the recent calving of icebergs from the Ross ice shelf. Polar Geogr 2008, 31, 15–26.
Some are scoffing at the idea that rising heating costs will kill people. But check out the number-one temperature-killer in 74 million deaths across 13 countries. It’s not the extremes that we need to worry about, the deadly phrase is “mildly suboptimal temperatures”. Look at the blue finger of death in the graph below, starkly showing how irrelevant “extreme heat”, or any other ambient temperature zone, is.
Do you need an excuse to turn the heater on in winter? Low ambient room temperatures will thicken your blood.
Moderate cold accounted for as many as 6.6% of all deaths. Extreme temperatures (either cold or hot) were responsible for only 0·86%.
Join the dots — will we save more lives by:
a) making homes cold now in the hope that lower “carbon” emissions will,
b) mean less deaths from heat in 90 years time despite people probably having better access to heaters and air conditioners?
Would you sacrifice ten years of your life…
Note the big killer “moderate cold” | Click to enlarge
Cold is more likely to kill you in Sydney than in Sweden
Check out the curves below. As a percentage of the population, there are more deaths in Sydney than in Bejing at 5C.
Australian houses are not designed to be warm. Sweden’s are.
Figure 1 shows overall cumulative exposure-response curves (best linear unbiased predictions) for 13 cities selected to represent each country, with the corresponding minimum mortality temperature and the cutoff s to defi ne extreme temperatures. |. Click to enlarge
Professor Adrian Barnett, a researcher based at the Queensland University of Technology, has studied death rates associated with abnormal weather conditions plus occupant access to heating and cooling, and has established a link to the quality of housing in Australia and a corresponding increase in death rates during cold spells.
Professor Barnett’s studies have concluded that Australia’s death rate due to cold weather, which at 6.5% is almost double that of Sweden’s at 3.9%, is almost entirely due to the poor quality to which we build our homes.
Swedish homes are designed and built to stay comfortable during all weather conditions, whereas comfort in Australian homes is often an afterthought, usually covered by an oversized air conditioner which continually battles poorly insulated walls, leaky doors and windows. Australian homes are referred to as “glorified tents” due to this phenomenon, which particularly affects less affluent homeowners and of course, renters.
The internal temperatures of Federation or Queenslander style homes in winter often drop well below 17°C, while Swedish homes usually remain at a stable 22-23°C whatever the weather. According to Barnett, “Many Australian homes are just glorified tents and we expose ourselves to far colder temperatures than the Scandinavians do.”
In the Energy + Illawarra program the University of Wollongong’s Sustainable Buildings Research Centre team recently identified surprisingly cold living conditions in 158 households across the Illawarra, Shoalhaven & Wingecarribee regions of NSW. Researchers found that approximately half of all households studied were experiencing extended periods (>25% of the time) when the living room temperatures were well below 16°C.In fact some houses did not exceed 14°C throughout a number of days, some occupants reported being too anxious to turn heating on due to the cost of energy and ‘bill anxiety’.
Save carbon emissions and raise your blood pressure
In the cold, the naked ape suffers from thickened blood, local inflammation, weakened immunity, bronchoconstriction:
The biological processes that underlie cold-related mortality mainly have cardio vascular and respiratory effects. Exposure to cold has been associated with cardiovascular stress by aff ecting factors such as blood pressure and plasma fibrinogen, vasoconstriction and blood viscosity, and inflammatory responses. Similarly, cold induces bronchoconstriction and suppresses mucociliary defences and other immunological reactions, resulting in local inflammation and increased risk of respiratory infections. These physiological responses can persist for longer than those attributed to heat, and seem to produce mortality risks that follow a smooth, close-to-linear response, with most of the attributable risk occurring in moderately cold days.
I wrote about this enormous study, on 74 million deaths across Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, UK & USA: Cold weather kills 20 times more than heat does. But the paper is now fully available with more detail, and hardly any politician seems to have got the message the first time around. Hence the revisit.
The benefits we can derive,
From warming, helps keep us alive,
While our true foe is cold,
Killing both young and old,
Who with warming would otherwise thrive.
Thanks to CFACT I was lucky enough to get to see Al Gore in Melbourne yesterday (and even luckier to see Climate Hustle the night before and meet some great people!). Gore wanted everyone to spread the word, but banned anyone recording him. (The staff actively patrolled for wayward cameras. We’d love to have helped share Gore’s message, but we would have been kicked out for doing so).
What I saw was nearly a whole hour of primal weather-porn – gratuitous, non-stop, scenes from the apocalypse, glowing clouds boiled about incandescent forests, and giant drains in the sky emptied massive clouds in a flash. Glaciers crumbled before our eyes. Poor victims were stuck in boiling tar on hot roads, they crawled out of mud slides, and were dragged in spectacular rescues from cars being swallowed by turbulent floods. Biblical is the word.
Gullible, naïve devotees gushed, awed, and murmured collective fear as Al spun a story of record doom and disaster with a google hit-list of extreme weather snaps. Al offered almost no graphs, long term data, or paleostudies. Few in the audience seemed to realize it was just a grab bag of the latest disaster-fest, and if a million people had had mobile phones in 10,000BC, the footage from then might have looked exactly the same or even worse, as Gore milked pretty much every weather event in the news to sell the salvation of renewables. Few seemed to wonder how Gore could know that floods were not worse in 1598, or that droughts were not longer and nastier in, say, 1174, or during the summer of 2 million BC. But the all-seeing, all-knowing Al knew.
Through tricky double-negative convoluted sentences Al effectively sends the message that fossil fuels cause extreme weather (but whatever you do, don’t quote him):
Scientists used to say you cannot attribute any single extreme weather event to the climate crisis. But you have to say the odds of extremes increase, but now they are saying it very differently …
If you have a complex system causing a lot of consequences and you radically change it, every one of the consequences is different. With all this extra water vapour in the sky and all the extra heat energy in the atmosphere, every storm is different now.
And they are making advances in how much to attribute to the climate crisis but increasingly more of it is directly contributed.
This is what the reinsurance industry measures with climate related extreme weather events. The only plausible explanation of course is the climate crisis. —
Following in the footsteps of a million years of witchdoctors, the message was that the weather is worse than ever and he know how to stop it. His only effort to scientifically connect those dots was to quote a few scientists opinions, while ignoring thousands of others, most historical accounts and 2 billion years of paleohistory. Cherry-picked extremes.
The long tenous chain of cause and effect was glossed over repeatedly with handwaving. The system was the most complex on earth, yet somehow scientists know what causes what. The chain of influence goes like this: fossil fuels make CO2, CO2 makes heat, heat causes droughts and more humidity, which in turn causes floods, intense rain, nastier storms, stickier roads, sliding mud, rising seas, etc etc blah-de-blah.
Has there ever been a year on Earth when there wasn’t a drought somewhere and a flood somewhere else? This is a never ending game for Gore. Until we get perfect weather on Earth, on all 150 million square kilometers terra firma, he will always be able to say “boo”.
This video was typical of the scientific depth — “drowning dogs can be saved”:
I think the message here is that if you use petrol you cause women and dogs to be trapped in sinking cars.
If only she had driven a hybrid.
Roads are melting in India!
NDTV shows a video where this man’s shoes stick to the hot road and fall off. (Watch the video at the link). Call me a skeptic. I’ve bounded across searing bitumen roads here in Australia, and this man is not behaving as if the pavement is blisteringly hot. Would you put your hand down?
Note the “Highlights” in the NDTV story: “Tar on roads melts in Valsad, Gujarat, temperature was only 36 degrees”.
Most likely the melting roads are due to sloppy road construction and cheap materials instead of our fossil fuel emissions. Tar was melting at just 40C in India, according to the Times of India, due to “improper mixing of bituminous” materials.
“According to the UK-based Road Surfaces Treatment Association, most roads will start melting at a temperature of 50 degrees celsius. Roads in the United Arab Emirates are made of special “polymer modified binders“ which keep them solid up until around 80 degrees celsius.”
Watch as floods wash away cars in Spain!
I bet that didn’t happen 300 years ago.
Gore has a talent for finding spectacular footage and uses it to argue for renewable power (because mudslides are not about building codes or land management, and preindustrial mudslides were much nicer, right.)
Remember one piece of extreme-weather he couldn’t get? Gore asked for the Firenado footage of a mini-tornado sucking up a bushfire, but photographer Chris Tangney wouldn’t give him a licence to use it. Thank you Chris.
There was a spirit of salvation.
All ye peasants gather hither, for ye are the leaders, the chosen ones who see the light, only you can save the poor and downtrodden from the evils of fossil fuels. Unless we build enough windfarms we will never stop mudslides. Hail for a mudslide-free-future!
Your house will be washed away, unless you give up air-conditioning.
Gore had so many images, the onslaught ran at subliminal pace. He spoke of storm surges north of Sydney. I’m pretty sure I saw the infamous lost swimming pool at Collaroy.
Collaroy 2016, a storm surge washes away houses in NSW. | ABC News
The speech finished by telling the world how renewables are cheap, competitive, and are taking over, which, if it were true, pretty much neutralizes the need for Al to do these tours, right? And who need subsidies.
Gore made much of closing coal fired stations, but unlike yours truly who showed the same maps, Gore didn’t show the massive number of new coal stations to his audience. The lies by omission tell you all you need to know about his interest in the climate.
Gore argues that renewables creates jobs, but Jo asks whether we want our electricity grids to provide electricity instead. If the aim was “jobs” first, we would create more if we shut down all the renewables, let industry “go wild” with cheap electricity and then use the savings to bury bottles of cash for the unemployed to dig up.
h/t Craig, Marc, Chris, Tony and Debbie, what a great trip.
I was taken by the way Chiefio slices away the clutter to leave bare the most pertinent point. From day to day, the sun, the latitude, our orbit, and the CO2 levels are the same as the day before, yet the temperature can swing wildly. Over a whole month, most variables are constant, yet one obviously dominates the monthly average, a factor we don’t even have good data one in the long run.
Now the one big thing I can add to the graph itself is simple. I watched the sky during that time, closely. The cool days were cloudy to overcast. The hot days were clear blue sky. Temperature directly matched to degree of clouds. Cloudy days are cool. Clear days are hot.
During these three weeks of data, there is nearly zero change of any of the Milankovitch parameters. Insolation is a functional constant to a large number of decimal places. Our latitude and longitude and distance to water do not change. All manner of variables in this complex soup are held constant by the nature of their 1000s of year rate of change. On the scale of a couple of weeks, geologic time scale events ARE constants.
Even the slow rise of CO2 on a decadal scale is a constant and the seasonal change similarly near zero. CO2 is also a functional constant.
NONE of these temperature changes can be attributed to anything solar, celestial, gas composition changes, volcanic, etc. etc. What changed was the clouds, as observed.
So where is CO2 in all this? Nowhere to be found. It didn’t change the clouds. It didn’t change the sun. It didn’t change the light on the ground. It didn’t change anything. So IF we have a 20 degrees F to 30 degrees F change of temperatures from clouds, and then ignore changes in clouds, how can we say ANYTHING about CO2? If we average all those daily temperatures for this month, it tells us about clouds, not about CO2.
Then, given such a daily Average Of Global Temperatures is driven by clouds, how can one assert that changes over years, of a fraction of the daily changes of temperature, can not also be entirely explained by changes of cloud cover (that is poorly tracked at all, and completely ignored in vast areas of the planet)? Hmmm?
Cloud levels and precipitation are shown to control temperature ranges in the short run, so averages of them over long runs will also be dominant. Yet we do NOT have good data for changes of clouds or precipitation over time…
Ergodan does his own climate maths — decides that the most significant inflatable cash cow has disappeared from the sky. The global climate suddenly looks clearer, and so Turkey pulls back from Paris accord:
(Reuters) The U.S. decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement means Turkey is less inclined to ratify the deal because the U.S. move jeopardizes compensation promised to developing countries, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday.
“Therefore, after this step taken by the United States, our position steers a course towards not passing this from the parliament,” he said. (link)
Turkey, saving the planet, one bank account at a time.
How many other nations do the same maths but are aren’t quite so, ahem, honest?
There are two main groups that use essentially the same NASA and NOAA satellites to estimate global temperatures. In the last year, they’ve both made adjustments, one down, and one up, getting further apart in their estimates. In ClimateWorld this is a big deal. Believers are excited that now a satellite set agrees a bit better with the maligned “hot” surface thermometers. But UAH still agrees more with millions of weather balloons. The debate continues. Here’s my short synopsis of the Roy Spencer (and John Christy) from the “Comments on the new RSS lower tropospheric temperature set.” (If something is wrong here, blame me).
The Bottom Line:
1. Both data-sets show far less warming than what climate models estimate. UAH shows +0.12 C/decade, the new RSS trend is up to +0.17 C/decade. But climate models estimate +0.27 C/decade in the lower troposphere.
2. The headline suggesting that the RSS revisions found “140% faster warming since 1998” is the usual hype. The warming trend was tiny to start with. The headlines didn’t tell us that RSS is now warming a few hundreds of a degree per decade faster, because “who cares”?
Five reasons UAH is different to RSS
UAH agrees with millions of calibrated weather balloons released around the world. RSS now agrees more with surface data from equipment placed near airports, concrete, airconditioners and which is itself wildly adjusted.
In the latest adjustments UAH uses empirical comparisons from satellites that aren’t affected by diurnal drift to estimate the errors of those that are. RSS starts with model estimates instead.
Two particular satellites disagree with each other (NOAA-14 and 15). The UAH team remove the one they think is incorrect. RSS keeps both inconsistent measurements.
Diurnal drift probably created artificial warming in the RSS set prior to 2002, but created artificial cooling after that. The new version of RSS keeps the warming error before 2002, but fixes the error after then. The upshot is a warmer overall trend.
UAH uses a more advanced method with three channels. RSS is still using the original method Roy Spencer and JohnChristy developed with only one channel (which is viewed from three angles).
The Future — more good data will be adjusted to match bad data
In January Roy Spencer predicted that RSS would be revised upwards, that he and John Christy would not be asked to review the paper (despite them being the longest running experts in this area), it would sail through peer review quickly, and would have multiple authors. Roy was right on almost all of that. h/t to Tony Heller at RealClimateScience.
Roy now predicts that the radiosondes will be adjusted to “agree” with the RSS version. This pattern of good data series being adjusted to agree with bad ones is a continuation of what happened to surface thermometers, where the worst sites are not removed from the series, but used to adjust the better sites.
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