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Yesterday lots of people died and made the climate change. Today climate change is causing more AIDS and killing people. It all goes to show that climate change is the most useless phrase in the English language. It’s able to be used in so many contradictory ambiguous ways, as to mean everything, and therefore, nothing. It’s useless to anyone who wants to convey information, but pretty handy for those who want to convey fog instead. Anyone want to prey on the good-but-confused? How climate change is undermining the war against HIV in AfricaWidespread poverty and worsening droughts, floods and other climate risks make Africa particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate changeClimate change is always 50 shades of evil: Yaounde — Teenage girls growing up in Lesotho in areas hit by harsh drought and other climate shocks are more likely to drop out of school, start having sex earlier and contract HIV, researchers say. Even the IPCC doesn’t really pretend in their scientific hearts that we can predict or attribute the causes of drought and flood, yet here it gets bundled in with “climate change” as if everyone knows that droughts are getting worse (they’re not) and are caused by coal plants. In a study looking at the link between climate change and HIV infection since antiretroviral (ARV) treatment drugs became widely available in Sub-Saharan Africa, researchers found that severe drought threatens to drive new HIV infections. And here was everyone thinking that droughts would prevent AIDS. In the urban areas of Lesotho researchers looked at, droughts were linked to an almost five-fold increase in the number of girls selling sex and a three-fold increase in those being forced into sexual relations. In Lesotho more than half the population lives on less than $1.90 a day according to World Bank, and 55% grow their own food, making them particularly vulnerable to drought. So poor people will suffer more from bad weather than rich people. We needed a study for this? UN dilemma: Should we try to reduce AIDS by changing the weather, or helping the poor get richer. Hands up who wants to stop AIDS with solar panels? Is it April 1st in London? The BBC is reporting that academics from University College London have discovered that the Little Ice Age was not caused by the record low solar activity of the Maunder Minima, instead it was due to the colonization of the Americas. Thanks mostly to measles and small pox the death toll was so enormous that about 9% of the global population died, supposedly leaving empty farmlands. These were swiftly covered in forests causing a deadly fall in CO2 which cooled the world. This is an Apocryphal story that virtue signals in so many ways. A kind of triple-point scrabble maneuver combining climate, race, war, forests and imperial colonization in the one story. The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas caused the Little Ice AgeColonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth’s climate. That’s the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK. The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation. This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet. It’s a cooling period often referred to in the history books as the “Little Ice Age”… The implications of this are pretty staggering. Firstly, we’re only talking of the regrowth of an area the size of France. What if carbon reduction programs overdo things, then, biffo — ice-age, here we come? It was only a reduction of 7 – 10ppm. And think of the paradox, if we reforest the world, it will become so cold we’re looking at snowball Earth, which will kill all the forests. If a mere 10ppm loss of CO2 caused a mini ice age, it’s a wonder we’ve survived the 120ppm rise since then. All that extra CO2 seems to only have warmed us back to where we were in the Medieval Warm Period. There is a kind of wormhole here in the maths where negative CO2 units are far more powerful than positive ones. POST NOTE: Commenter Francis Lacan follows this through on “colonizing Africa”. February 1, 2019 at 5:38 am Some clever scientists at University College London are suggesting that re-colonising Africa would completely offset the effects of global warming. If you follow there maths, suppressing only a few hundred millions inhabitants would allow vegetation to reclaim land, and “pull down enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet”. QED.
These people are truly bonkers: Listen to the co-author talk about the implications. Co-author Dr Chris Brierley believes there is [a lesson for modern climate policy]. He said the fall-out from the terrible population crash and re-wilding of the Americas illustrated the challenge faced by some global warming solutions. “There is a lot of talk around ‘negative emissions’ approaches and using tree-planting to take CO₂ out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate change,” he told BBC News. What matters here, is it the actual temperature “outcome” or the level of a trace gas? “And what we see from this study is the scale of what’s required, because the Great Dying resulted in an area the size of France being reforested and that gave us only a few ppm. This is useful; it shows us what reforestation can do. But at the same, that kind of reduction is worth perhaps just two years of fossil fuel emissions at the present rate.” The lesson is always “more”: more reductions, more money, more rules. What’s more scary — the amount of the Earth we’d have to reforest to get a perfect climate; the amount of people who have to die; or the lax, one sided training of BBC reporter Johnathon Amos? What about the 50 million killed in the Black Death? If human population controls the climate what did Earth do for the first 4.5 billion years? If the Earth were to freeze or to fry, –Ruairi h/t to George (Aprils fools day indeed@!) and Bill H. Thank you both. February 2nd, 2019 | Tags: Junk Science, Little Ice Age, Racism | Category: Global Warming, Junk Science, Pseudoscience |  Print This Post | | Sudden Stratospheric WarmingsWho knew? The polar vortices are the two strongest and largest “storms” on the planet. These continent scale storms are 600 miles across with winds raging at 300km per hour. Simon Clark is doing (or has done) a PhD in polar vortexes. He describes how each winter they form high over the poles. These are stratospheric, circling far above jet streams and planes. The tight circular pattern keeps the coldest air corralled. But every now again, the neat circle falls apart. In the polar stratosphere sometimes temperatures warm in days by stupid amounts, like 50 degrees C. It’s called a Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW) and one started around Christmas time. As Clark describes it, these are easily the most violent weather events on the planet. (They sound fascinating). As with unbalanced centrifuges, when things unravel, as the high speed system unravels, the arctic cold could spin off anywhere — this week it’s the US, but Europe and Russia are often targets too. There is a lag involved — after an SSW it may take two weeks for things to hit the fan on the surface, so to speak. Generally, when an SSW hits it presages a brutal winter with outbreaks of super-cold blobs down for the next month or two. I’m reminded of Stephen Wilde’s prediction years ago that we would see more meandering jet streams with a less active Sun. Hypothetically, if he were right, this is what it might look like. The American Midwest is colder than Antarctica, temperatures are hitting minus 50C. Eight people have died (even an 18 year old student). Instead of using electricity, some places are keeping the poor warm by letting them ride on buses. Railways tracks are being set alight to keep trains running and Hell really has frozen over. Naturally, the Eco-worriers are saying it was misplaced Moroccan warm air. Knowledge is ignorance, Pain is bliss, and warm air causes cold air. Simon Clark | Watch especially from 1:20 But really it’s climate change, trust me, and besides, how can you argue with this: Some scientists—but by no means most—see a connection between human-caused climate change and difference in atmospheric pressure that causes slower moving waves in the air. “It’s a complicated story that involves a hefty dose of chaos and an interplay among multiple influences, so extracting a clear signal of the Arctic’s role is challenging,” said Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. Several recent papers have made the case for the connection, she noted. “This symptom of global warming is counterintuitive for those in the cross-hairs of these extreme cold spells,” Francis said in an email. “But these events provide an excellent opportunity to help the public understand some of the ‘interesting’ ways that climate change will unfold.” Trust The Guardian to fall for the post hoc genius and ask a question they already knew the answer to in 1990: Is this weather event linked to climate change?Studies have pointed to a recent increase in instances where the polar vortex has bulged down into heavily populated areas. Scientists are gaining a better understanding of why this is happening, with many identifying climate change as an influence. There’s some evidence that the jet stream, a meandering air current that flows over North America and Europe, is slowing and becoming wavier as the planet warms. The jet stream interacts with the polar vortex, helping bring numbing temperatures further south. And the “evidence” they link too is a Michael Mann et al paper from 2018. Having noticed that polar vortex disturbances are on the increase, they find a way to link it to your SUV: Examining state-of-the-art [Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5)] climate model projections, we find that QRA events are likely to increase by ~50% this century under business-as-usual carbon emissions, but there is considerable variation among climate models. Some predict a near tripling of QRA events by the end of the century, while others predict a potential decrease. Even post hoc, the models are useless. h/t Tallbloke, See Extreme rainfall events. February 1st, 2019 | Tags: Cooling & cold snaps, Polar Vortex | Category: Atmosphere, Global Warming, Meteorology | Print This Post | | … In parts of the US schools are closed, flights are cancelled, and USPS has even stopped deliveries. Frostbite can occur in ten minutes or less, and police stations have opened their doors to the homeless… Once in a generation blast of cold weather: From the BBCDeadly cold weather has brought what meteorologists call a “once-in-a-generation” deep freeze to the US. The extreme Arctic blasts, caused by a spinning pool of cold air known as the polar vortex, could bring wind chill temperatures as low as -53C (-64F). Weather officials in the state of Iowa have warned people to “avoid taking deep breaths, and to minimise talking” if they go outside. Chicago police say people are being robbed at gunpoint of their coats. This may be the beast from the Sudden Stratospheric Warming that was raging a month or so ago high above the Arctic jet streams. Forecasters are attributing this cold snap to a sudden warming above the North Pole, caused by a blast of hot air from Morocco last month. Grand Forks, North Dakota, has so far seen the lowest wind chill at -54C on Wednesday morning. Freezing weather will chill 250 million Americans, and 90 million will experience -17C (0F) or colder temperatures. “This could possibly be history-making,” said Ricky Castro, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Illinois. Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Jan 28 In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you! NOAA Tweeted a link to an article about record snowstorms in reply, or rather, as the BBC says “in what was widely interpreted as a rebuttal to the president.” In other words, if you find this convincing, it was a reply. If you know it’s irrelevant… nevermind.  Oops. Did NOAA just imply that warm water leads to cold air? Steve Goddard @SteveSGoddard 16h16 hours ago Replying to @NOAAClimate
This is complete nonsense. The record cold air has an extremely low dew point, meaning it contains very small amounts of moisture. It is sad that government agencies like Steve Goddard @SteveSGoddard 16h16 hours ago Anyone who believes record cold air is coming from a warm melting Arctic, has no business discussing climate. The thing is, super cold and record snowstorms are not necessarily the same thing. If only NOAA knew more about the climate… Was there any climate model that predicted we would get record cold temperatures? Best wishes to our US friends. h/t Pat John Cook tries to attack skeptics for their savage jokes about cold spells. Go for it John, we’ll believe you when you when you stop publishing stories about single hot days and tell PhD’s they shouldn’t harp on about random noise like heat waves: Forecast: flurries of shivering climate-change deniersWhen a cold spell struck the east coast recently, US President Donald Trump tweeted “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” The argument he is sarcastically implying and often makes—that global warming isn’t happening because it’s cold outside—possesses an obvious logical flaw. [No kidding]. It’s like arguing that the sun no longer exists when it gets dark at night. Of course, Trump didn’t invent this argument—it’s commonly brought up on denier blogs and social media threads whenever the weather turns cold. This type of fallacious reasoning is not just common on believer blogs, it’s their bread and butter. Trump was being sarcastic. Skeptics are making jokes — but what excuse can anyone make for paid PhD’s who are serious? Let’s swap the hot’s and cold’s of Cooks own words (mine bolded): The argument PhD’s seriously imply and often make—that global warming is happening because it’s hot, flooding, extreme, drought-striken, rainy, windy, wavy or otherwise not exactly average outside—possesses an obvious logical flaw. It’s like arguing that any weather we get must be caused by our coal plants because we can’t think what else might have caused it. Worse, it’s like saying that every bushfire, bleached reef and reckless fish is evidence that your car is changing the climate. Believers are, after all, the true stars in this world of turning random noise and spurious correlation into pretend evidence. It’s not just something they do anymore, it’s their main strategy. After telling us for years that weather is not climate all the half baked evidence they had fell apart. The ice core result came out backwards. The hot spot went missing. The temperature trends slowed. The seas didn’t accelerate and Antarctica ignored them. All they have left now is relentless Pavlovian hammering of the “hottest X years of the last ten years”. That, and the agitprop linking every change in local beach sand, migrating crocodiles and jellyfish plagues to fossil fuel emissions. Perhaps Cook is worried that skeptics might get serious about doing what alarmists do, and beat them at their own game. Keep reading → January 30th, 2019 | Tags: Cook (John), Logic & Reason | Category: FakeNews, Global Warming, Logic & Reason | Print This Post | | Greens et al want to add €12 or $20 AUD to the cost of filling a car in order to stop jellyfish plagues, sharks and droughts in Ireland in 2100. Hello, Yellow Vests…. Ireland’s main political parties show no sign of agreement over 2030 climate change targetsStephen O’Brien, The Times, UK. TDs and senators are split over plans for a fourfold increase in carbon tax … Fine Gael and Green Party members of the Oireachtas climate action committee want a report next month to recommend a carbon tax of at least €80 a ton over the next decade, which would add €12 to the cost of filling a car with diesel or petrol and €7.20 to a bag of coal. Sinn Fein is opposing increases in carbon tax until there is better public transport, grant aid for retrofitting houses, and lower costs for electric vehicles. Fianna Fail is also against recommending a carbon tax rise in the climate action report. The Greens want the tax to be doubled to €40 next year, with annual increases of €5 over the next decade until it reaches €90. As usual, the theft is disguised as a gift. Will the people fall for the “free lunch” yet again? Eamon Ryan, the Green Party leader, said the money raised should be paid back to households as a carbon dividend. The rebate would begin at about €200 per household — based on the Greens’ proposed €20 carbon tax increase in next year’s budget — rising to €600 by 2030 if the tax reaches at least €80 per ton. Someone needs to tell the poor that “the money” doesn’t come back when someone adds a stupid burden to the economy. The only people who benefit are the bureaucrats, lawyers and accountants (and bank shareholders) who manage the pointless merry-go-round of money. h/t GWPF
… The Electro-pyre conflagration escalates. The cost of electricity on Thursday in two states of Australia reached a tally of $932 million dollars for a single day of electricity. Thanks to David Bidstrup on Catallaxy for calculating it. As Bruce of Newcastle says “ “Three days and you could buy a HELE plant with the money wasted.” That’s a power plant that could last 70 years, and provide electricity at under $50/MW. (Forget all the high charges for 30 years to pay of the capital (in red below), we could just buy the damn thing outright, paid off in full from day one.)  Cost of old coal plants in the USA. From the report by Stacy and Taylor, of the Institute for Energy Research (IER) Burned at the stake: $500 per familyIn Victoria, per capita, that means it cost $110 for one day’s electricity. For South Australians, Thursday’s electricity bill was $140 per person. (So each household of four just effectively lost $565.) In both these states those charges will presumably be paid in future price rises, shared unevenly between subsidized solar users and suffering non-solar hostages. The costs will be buried such that duped householders will not be aware of what happened. Coles and Woolworths will have to add a few cents to everything to cover their bills, and the government will have to cut services or increase taxes. No one will know how many jobs are not offered or opportunities lost. This is the road to Venezuela. If Hazelwood had still been open, the whole bidstack would have changed, quite probably saving electricity consumers in those two states hundreds of dollars. Eight million Australians could have had a weekend away, gone to a ball, or bought brand new fishing gear. And this is just one single day of electricity. If Liddell closes, things will get worse, no matter how much unreliable not-there-when-you-need-it capacity we add to the system. Indeed, the more fairy capacity we add, the worse it gets. NSW will soon join the SA-Vic club. This is what happens when an electricity grid is run by kindergarten arts graduates who struggle with numbers bigger than two. This is utterly and completely a renewables failThe socialist Labor-Greens are already trying to blame it on coal, but we ran coal plants for decades without these disasters. Right now, no one is investing in coal because of bipartisan stupidity. What company would pay the maintenance fees on infrastructure so hated by the political class? The coal plants are being run into the ground. Maintenance is even being delayed to keep the plants running through peaks like this. No country on Earth with lots of unreliable renewables has cheap electricity. How many times do I have to repeat it? This is my mantra for 2019. In Australia when we had mainly coal and no renewables our electricity was cheap and reliable. Now we are still mainly coal, but all it takes is a poisonous small infiltration of subsidized unreliable renewables to destroy the former economic incentives, the whole market, the system: our lifestyle. The Liberal Party needs to grow a spineThis is surely a crisis. As long as the Liberals are a Tweedledum version of the Labor party, they can’t solve this and deserve to lose. New renewables installations must be stopped immediately — put on hold indefinitely — until they no longer need forced subsidies, until the RET is gone, the carbon taxes, the hidden emissions trading scheme and we have a proper free market. Then new renewables can be permitted to compete with all generation alternatives, though all new generators will also have to be responsible for paying for extra transmission lines, back up batteries, and any other frequency stabilization required. On net a generator must be able to guarantee that when the people call on it, it can provide, lets say, 80% of total nameplate capacity. When that day comes (thirty, fifty, years from now or maybe never) I will be happy to support renewables. Until then, we are global patsies handing over glorious profits to energy giants, renewables companies, Chinese manufacturers, and large financial institutions. Lets have a plebescite: How many Australians would rather have a weekend away with their family or make the world 0.00 degrees cooler in 100 years in a symbolic display to assuage the Gods of Storms? Happy Australia Day! h/t to Ian B *Added the word unreliable post hoc. It’s more accurate. We are talking about Wind and Solar, not Hydro. h/t Claude.
January 26th, 2019 | Tags: AEMO, Electricity Cost, SA (South Australia), Victoria | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | ***UPDATED: Melbourne has been 42C or more around 50 times since 1855. That’s one in three years. Thanks to Bob Fernley-Jones for the correction. They were only 250 million watts short: Loy Yang, powering Victoria, and soon probably “taking the blame” too. Rachel Baxendale, The Australian h/t Des Moore More than 200,000 Victorian households had their power cut off yesterday in a bid to protect the state’s energy system from shutting down, as the Andrews government was forced to admit there was not enough power to keep up with soaring demand in sweltering summer heat. Homes were blacked out, traffic lights across Melbourne were switched off and businesses were forced to close for up to two hours after the Australian Energy Market Operator enforced rolling power outages to make up a 250 megawatt shortfall in supply. The State Energy Minister (Lily D’Ambrosio) said there would “absolutely” be no blackouts this morning and the rolling blackouts started 90 minutes later. Welcome to the USSAustralia where we hope to make your 150th Birthday Party 0.001 degrees cooler but we can’t predict our electricity grid for the next hour and a half. Dark ages — get used to it: Greens leader Richard Di Natale blamed an over-reliance on coal for the heatwave and backed Ms D’Ambrosio’s calls for people to stop using their dishwashers and washing machines and to turn up the temperature on their air-conditioners. Senator Di Natale said Australians experiencing power outages were being unreasonable if they complained about not being able to use home appliances… That’s right, the man who thinks solar panels will protect your children from storms wants you to “be reasonable”. We were told renewables would be cheap, would save the world, and power the nation. Now we’re told the lights will go out, we shouldn’t expect to run the dishwasher or air-conditioner at 7pm every day, and burning hundreds of millions of dollars for an afternoons electricity is just “part of the price”. I have seen your future and your future is load shedding:Once we were going to lead the world, now we are happy to be failing like everyone else. Ms Zibelman said load shedding was common practice around the world. “All countries that I’m aware of, and again, I have been in the business for 30 years, and over periods of time you run into these systems like you have, where you have generators that go off and you have to do load shedding,” she said. “We can’t afford … 100 per cent reliability over all hours and all circumstances, but we do like to plan that for what we see these extreme weather events that we have enough reserves available. That’s really what we’re working towards.” Victoria used to be able to “afford” reliable energy, until they got lots of cheap wind and solar power. Now business can’t afford to set up in Victoria. Australia used to be able to maintain coal plants too: AEMO blamed the failure of two generators at the Yallourn coal-fired power station and another at Loy Yang A, all in the Latrobe Valley, for reducing supply by 1800MW. For forty years Australia had cheaper and more reliable energy than this, and it was powered by what four letter word? Melbourne has been this hot or hotter about
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50C temperatures have occurred all over Australia before
Australians have been recording temperatures of over 50C since 1828, right across the country. In 1896 the heat was so bad for weeks that people fled on emergency trains to escape the inland heat. Millions of birds fell from the sky in 1932 due to the savage hot spell.
In 1939 outer Sydney reached 122F or over 50C — recorded at Windsor Observatory — a place that had had a Stevenson screen for around 40 years at that stage. Without fanfare, the Ballarat Star in January 1898 notes that there was a “genuine heat wave” in Blanchetown SA in November the year before. Temperatures of 120 and 121 are recorded on four days that month.
All these measurements are wrong?
click to enlarge.
Contrast that with last week when towns in the outback reached 48 and 49C and the Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Michael Efron said — “They are pretty incredible temperatures.” Seriously. It’s hard to believe that after a quadrillion megatons of emissions we are nearly as hot as we were in 1896? It’s as if hundreds of measurements of similar temperatures across four states of Australia and on many occasions from 1828 to 1939 don’t even exist.
The worst heatwave was probably January 1896 when the nation was “like a furnace”.
From a post in 2012: All these measurements are wrong too?
Extreme heat in 1896: Panic stricken people fled the outback on special trains as hundreds die.
It is as if history is being erased. For all that we hear about recent record-breaking climate extremes, records that are equally extreme, and sometimes even more so, are ignored.
In January 1896 a savage blast “like a furnace” stretched across Australia from east to west and lasted for weeks. The death toll reached 437 people in the eastern states. Newspaper reports showed that in Bourke the heat approached 120°F (48.9°C) on three days (1)(2)(3). The maximumun at or above 102 degrees F (38.9°C) for 24 days straight.
By Tuesday Jan 14, people were reported falling dead in the streets. Unable to sleep, people in Brewarrina walked the streets at night for hours, the thermometer recording 109F at midnight. Overnight, the temperature did not fall below 103°F. On Jan 18 in Wilcannia, five deaths were recorded in one day, the hospitals were overcrowded and reports said that “more deaths are hourly expected”. By January 24, in Bourke, many businesses had shut down (almost everything bar the hotels). Panic stricken Australians were fleeing to the hills in climate refugee trains.
It got hotter and hotter and the crowded trains ran on more days of the week…
To get a feel for how widespread and devastating it was, read through just one report in one paper (there are scores more).
The Warwick Examiner, Jan 29, 1896. Click to enlarge.
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Thanks to Chris Gillham, Lance Pidgeon, Ken Stewart, Warwick Hughes, and all the BOM audit team.
Photo: Jo Nova
January 24th, 2019 | Tags: Australian temperatures, Evidence, Extreme weather, Heatwaves, History | Category: Australia, Global Warming, History, Meteorology | Print This Post | |
Print This Post | | Where is your carbon footprint when you need it?
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This week the same people who advertise their virtue with climate cloaks are advertising their status with a Bombardier 7500.
Don’t call them hypocrites, it’s completely consistent. Both are pretentious attempts to peck up the order.
More And Bigger Private Jets Landing at Davos as Leaders Discuss Climate Change
Erin Corbett, Fortune
Perhaps its all because of jet envy.
At least 1,500 private jets are slated to arrive in Davos. The number is up from last year’s estimated 1,300, according to the Air Charter Service, which also found that this year’s jets are larger and more expensive.
Why more and bigger jets?
“This is at least in part due to some of the long distances traveled, but also possibly due to business rivals not wanting to be seen to be outdone by one another,” Andy Christie, the private jets director at ACS said in a statement.
Would you like a helicopter with that?
Keep reading →
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Look out, another knot of tortured researchers just went past. All this time we’ve been pouring money into planting trees and stealing land from farmers because we were sure that trees would cool the world. (Just like solar panels do, yeah?) But life is so complicated — for years now some researchers have been quietly wondering if more trees were actually going to warm the planet instead, but they didn’t want to say much. It turns out that while trees absorb the sacred CO2 (that’s cooling!) they also emit methane (that’s warming!), and terpenes (cooling) and isoprene (warming and cooling!) If that’s not complicated enough, then there is the albedo effect. Trees are dark, they absorb more sunlight than bare ground and snow. So depending on where they are planted, that makes for “warming”. Then some VOCs or volatile organic compounds also seed clouds.
So what’s the net effect? Who knows, it’s not like there are whole industries dependent on it…
Now they ask?
How much can forests fight climate change?
Trees are supposed to slow global warming, but growing evidence suggests they might not always be climate saviours.
Gabrielle Popkin, Nature
As usual, the debate is based on logic and death threats:
At the same time, some researchers worry about publishing results challenging the idea that forests cool the planet. One scientist even received death threats after writing a commentary that argued against planting trees to prevent climate change.
It doesn’t matter if the planet dies, editors don’t want to look stupid:
“I have heard scientists say that if we found forest loss cooled the planet, we wouldn’t publish it.”
Yay, free speech!
To greener types, it doesn’t matter if trees warm the world on net, because they cool the world as well. And if that makes sense to you, the UN has a job waiting for you:
Although the analysis relies on big assumptions, such as the availability of funding mechanisms and political will, its authors say that forests can be an important stopgap while the world tackles the main source of carbon emissions: the burning of fossil fuels. “This is a rope that nature is throwing us,” says Peter Ellis, a forest-carbon scientist at The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia, and one of the paper’s authors.
Australians should — in theory — care more about this than almost anyone. We are one of the countries that did count carbon storage. If it turns out that land clearing cools the planet, Australia is stuffed (carbon accounting-wise): Our emissions per person fell 28% since 1990, but the largest single factor there was “land use” — meaning we stopped clearing and let regrowth take over some farms and paddocks. Then we shafted the farmers who owned the land and couldnt use it.
The 1997 climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol allowed rich countries to count carbon storage in forests towards their targets for limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. In practice, few nations did so because of the agreement’s unwieldy accounting mechanisms and other factors.
The albedo effect:
Researchers have known for decades that tree leaves absorb more sunlight than do other types of land cover, such as fields or bare ground. Forests can reduce Earth’s surface albedo, meaning that the planet reflects less incoming sunlight back into space, leading to warming. This effect is especially pronounced at higher latitudes and in mountainous or dry regions, where slower-growing coniferous trees with dark leaves cover light-coloured ground or snow that would otherwise reflect sunlight. Most scientists agree, however, that tropical forests are clear climate coolers: trees there grow relatively fast and transpire massive amounts of water that forms clouds, two effects that help to cool the climate.
This chemistry is so complicated, if only we had climate models that worked, we could figure out how much all this mattered:
Keep reading →
January 23rd, 2019 | Tags: CO2 emissions, Emissions (CO2), Forest, Methane | Category: Biology, Flora, Global Warming | Print This Post | |
Print This Post | | Another family friendly picnic day in Australia where nice people spend their leisure time advertising an industry worth more than $476,000,000,000.
A bunch of Australians do free corporate advertising
They would kick themselves if they knew…
Blue Mountains residents to make ‘human sign’ for climate change action
The message will say: Renewable energy, make the switch now, 100% renewables… imagine.
Blue Mountains residents will stand side by side to form the word “SWITCH” which will then be photographed from the air.
Imagine if this was an advert for Coke, or Exxon? It would be so much better. Coke and Exxon produce something that people want voluntarily.
One hundred years from now, people will look back and marvel at the Great Renewables Marketing scam known as “climate change”.
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The terror. Sit down I tell you. The ABC tells us that you should “Grab a latte while you still can”.
Coffee beans |Image wiki Hesham Raouf
In full, the true catastrophe is that if the models that are always wrong get something right, some wild coffee relatives, but not actual coffee crop plants, might go extinct. We don’t use them for coffee but you never know, we might one day use them as breeding stock. It’s that serious.
And we can’t save the seeds because apparently liquid nitrogen is too expensive. Wail. Gnash. Fawn.
Since bulk liquid nitrogen is cheaper than spring water, I rank this one as a Prime SkyWhale Class Scare, it’s all hot-air and scary for the wrong reason. You are meant to be afraid of the end of coffee, but what’s really frightening is that science journalism is dead instead.
By Belinda Smith and Nick Kilvert, ABC Australia
Most coffee species at risk of extinction due to climate change, scientists warn
The set up:
You might also want to sit down before reading this. And maybe grab another latte while you still can.
Of the 124 wild coffee species worldwide, UK researchers have declared at least 60 per cent of them in danger of dying out.
There might be science there:
In a paper published in Science Advances today, the researchers warn we need to beef up existing conservation plans, because the ones we have in place now are “inadequate”.
Stick to Climate 101 reporting rule: Good things die, Bad things go viral.
But with deforestation and a changing climate, which brings unpredictable rain, pests and fungal diseases, coffee farmers will be hit hard.
A 2016 report by The Climate Institute found worldwide coffee production could be cut in half by 2050.
We’re already seeing declining production and quality in some traditional coffee-growing regions, said Robert Henry, a plant geneticist at the University of Queensland who was not involved in the research.
Need some condescension?
So why not store coffee beans in a seed bank? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
“It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to conserve coffee using conventional seed storage methods,” Dr Davis said.
This is because seed bank storage freezers, even at -20 degrees Celsius, don’t cut it when it comes to preserving coffee beans.
They need to be chilled by liquid nitrogen — a costly process.
Price of liquid nitrogen: allow for doubling since 2007 and it’s still $1 per gallon. Less than coke.
If the government stopped funding renewables for 24 hours they could save wild coffee seeds.
Let’s check. Here’s what excess fossil fuel emissions have done to coffee production
Looks like coffee has been relentlessly increasing. It has doubled since 1977. Another 100 years of this kind of climate change and we will be drowning in the stuff. Get out your life jackets.
Global Coffee Production, Graph, FAO
.Ho hum.
Scary like the SkyWhale
Skywhale image by Nick-D | Coffee beans Image Hesham Raouf
h/t Dave B, Bill, George.
January 18th, 2019 | Tags: ABC, Media bias | Category: FakeNews, Global Warming, Media-matters | Print This Post | |
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