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Thanks to the IPA we can see just how fast green tape multiplies. In 1971 the first environmental laws covered just 57 pages. But now there are 4669 pages of laws. The IPA estimates that costs the nation $176b a year in lost economic opportunity. That’s a lot of jobs, and a lot of trees. Dennis Shanahan, The Australian Green tape’s 80-fold explosion, costing $176b a yearThat’s a curve that looks like the CO2 emissions. Does extra CO2 cause environmental laws? Could be…  … A tale of economic destruction: The Adani central mining project application has been running for seven years and faced more than 10 court challenges. It includes a 22,000-page environmental impact statement. In the Pilbara in Western Australia, the Roy Hill iron ore mine had to obtain 4000 separate licences, approvals and permits just for the pre-construction phase. The Turnbull government vowed to review environmental laws to prevent activist groups’ legal challenges to development projects ranging from dams and roads to coalmines. It said challenges under section 487 of the Environment Act, which allows anyone with a “special interest in the environment” the right to challenge, were becoming more “vexatious and frivolous” . Of 32 legal challenges under the act that went to court, developers spent a cumulative 7500 days — or 20 years — in court even though 28 of the environmental cases were defeated and three required only minor technical changes to go ahead. In 2016 67% of meteorologists said that humans have caused most or all climate change and The Guardian headlined that there was a Growing Consensus among Meteorologists. In 2017 that fell to only 49%. The Guardian said nothing.  …. In 2016 29% of meteorologists thought climate change was largely or entirely man-made, but that fell to only 15% this year. Figure how this result fits with the idea of the overwhelming evidence and 97% consensus. Which group on the planet after climate scientists should be the second profession to “get it” — how about meteorologists? So either: 1. meteorologists are really stupid, or 2. meteorologists know how hard it is to predict the climate. Keep reading → April 28th, 2017 | Tags: Consensus, Survey | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming |  Print This Post | | A trace gas in our atmosphere hit 410ppm for the millionth day on Earth says Grist and this turned the planet in to something different. Who knew 410 was that exciting? We just hit 410 ppm of CO2. Welcome to a whole new world.This is not normal: We’re on track to witness a climate unseen in 50 million years by mid-century. In pre-industrial times, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stood at 280 parts per million. And that number has been rising ever since, warming the planet by 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C) along the way. It’s Big Number Fear Mongering which works so well on the innumerate. It might be the first time CO2 was this high in 50 million years, but if CO2 is so important, how come temperatures haven’t gone “to a whole new world”? Kate Yoder on Grist has the usual calm dispassionate analysis: As fictional carb-thief Aladdin once said: “Unbelievable sights/Indescribable feeling/Soaring, tumbling, freewheeling/Through an endless diamond sky.” Frankly, I think Grist missed that in Base 3 this is the incredibly important 120,012 ppm. Spooky eh? PS: Find numbers in other bases here. How much fun can you have?
The anti-carbon industry is in trouble — both Al Gore, and The World Bank are doing the hard-sell on “climate investments”. The Fin Review used to be able to spot a chain letter… Climate change offers huge investment opportunity, Al Gore tells World BankHow did the worlds bankers miss something this big? “It’s the biggest opportunity in the history of the world – it’s the biggest investment opportunity, but we have to have a clear vision, we have to have policy leadership… to bring the world community together to get the financing that is needed to move the momentum more quickly,” former US Vice President Al Gore told the discussion. Any day now, this is going to be huge. (Right after they get that “strategy hammered out” yeah.) World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said financing climate action could offer a more lucrative home for $US8.5 trillion ($11.2 trillion) in negative interest rate bonds, $US24.5 trillion in very low-yielding government-type bonds and a further $US8 trillion in cash, though a clear strategy still needed to be hammered out. Try not to think about what it means when the government is borrowing money from people and Good-Friends-of-Government are suggesting we park the bonds in an industry that depends on government help — which is supplied by issuing more bonds. Welcome to the carbon ponzi scheme“Quite apart from what you think about climate change, there are opportunities for investments that will give you higher yield than any of those investments in which over $US40 trillion is sitting right now,” Kim said. Ask yourself why all those trillions of dollars are not already leaping into higher returns. Could be the unhammered strategy thing maybe…
News just coming in suggests someone took some pot shots at the building the UAH satellite data is analyzed in. Shots Fired into the Christy/Spencer Building at UAHApril 24th, 2017 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. A total of seven shots were fired into our National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) building here at UAH over the weekend. All bullets hit the 4th floor, which is where John Christy’s office is (my office is in another part of the building). Given that this was Earth Day weekend, with a March for Science passing right past our building on Saturday afternoon, I think this is more than coincidence. When some people cannot argue facts, they resort to violence to get their way. Maybe the “March For Science” should have been called the “March To Silence”. More discussion at Roy Spencers Blog and also at WUWT. Roy Spencer adds in an email: I doubt any media have covered it yet. I doubt the police have even written a report yet. From what I’ve heard, it sounds like the police believe the shots were fired from a passing car, and some shell casings were recovered, as well as fragments of bullets inside the building. You can quote me.
Things that feed mindless hate: Namecalling, poor science education and mangled English. When the old accurate meanings are destroyed, there is almost no chance of a proper conversation. How can two views be reconciled when people don’t speak the same language?
Best wishes to Roy, John and the whole team. If this suspicious event happened to a believer it would be front page hyperbole, “Death Threats to Climate Scientists.”
h/t Marc Morano, Climate Depot.
A survey of Dept of Agriculture (USDA) scientists by the agency’s inspector general suggests some very fishy things are going on in government science: [Darryl Fears, Washington Post] According to the survey’s findings, nearly 10 percent said their research has been tampered with or altered by superiors “for reasons other than technical merit,” possibly because of political considerations. Looks like Monopsony Trouble: When almost all the research in some fields is done by government funding (one buyer), there is no competition. In answer to that, instead of finding ways to encourage competition, the government set up an agency instead — the SIP. That didn’t work either. In the survey, 85 percent of the 1,300 scientists who responded said the Scientific Integrity Policy established to protect their work didn’t benefit them, or offered no opinion. Nearly 20 percent said they didn’t know the policy existed. Nearly 40 percent didn’t bother to take the survey, according to findings released April 13. Of those who did, more than half said they didn’t know how to file a complaint and some said they didn’t do so because they feared retaliation. “You do not need to have many cases to create a strong chilling effect, and the current science climate inside USDA is quite nippy,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which represented Lundgren. The real story is no free speech, because when the biggest employer in town wants a certain kind of answer, there are ways to find it: The USDA has said it doesn’t retaliate against any employee, and disputed Lundgren’s claim that he was targeted to suppress his science. Lundgren had been with the agency 11 years, ran his own lab with a staff and wrote a well-regarded book on predator insects, but his career began to fall apart when he published research that cautioned against the use of pesticides approved by the agency. The story goes on to describe Lundgren’s 2014 whistleblower experience of suddenly having odd rules selectively enforced against him, but not against other researchers. Et Voila… And this is only agriculture. You might think it would be tame. Today, the misnomer “March for Science” is trying to take over the aging faded Earth Day. It’s an attempt to steal the good brand “Science” yet again for other causes. Once upon a time, Earth Day used to mean something. Back in 1970, 20 million people took part, 12,000 events were held: Congress took the day off, and two-thirds of its members — Democrat and Republican alike — spoke at Earth Day events. The Today show devoted 10 hours of airtime to Earth Day. Can anyone imagine both sides of politics cheering the March for Science? By 2013, Time Magazine noted how irrelevant it was: Earth Daze, what happened to the environmental movement?It’s Earth Day, though you could be forgiven if you missed it So, lo, along comes another name “March for Science”. Same political motivations, different guise. The March for Science is on Saturday. Will J Grant and Rod Lambert struggled with the message behind the “March for Science” at The Conversation. We should march, they said a month ago, because “science is a human process”, which will be news to people who thought science was about evidence and reason instead. On Saturday they will be marching for the kind of science that is “passion” and “belief”. Don’t turn up thinking this is about the dispassionate Laws of Physics. You’ll be at the wrong rally. Is the March to solve a problem or create one?The March seems to be fighting strawmen. It is supposedly about “Encouraging scientists to share their research” (as if scientists like to hide their research). We know they hide their data, their methods and their adjustments, but when the ABC turns up to interview them, they don’t seem to hide their opinions. They hide their declines but don’t hide their Nobel Prizes (even if they didn’t get them). Do they need encouragement? And the March is there, apparently, “affirming science as a vital feature of a working democracy”, who says it isn’t? Like voters have been asking for witchdoctors instead? Absolutely no one is questioning science’s role in democracy. Science has such an incredible halo, it is considered to be so-above-question that everyone wants to brand their version of reality as “science”. There are no marches for stone-age solutions, no “anti-science” movements (except inadvertently by those who think models produce evidence). But those who falsely cloak themselves in the science flag want us to think there is an anti-science movement, so this feeds their own comfortable delusion. There is major muddying going on hereWhat does it mean to “advocate for open and accessible science?” . These are the same people who fight to the death to prevent heretics from publishing a paper, or from doing a radio interview, or from opening a research centre. The point of including statements like that is to blur the reality for onlookers and fool the puppet marchers. It’s just more “fog”. It’s a march for “robust funding” (give us the money)Those who can’t discover something useful have to march in the streets instead. The March is one big Pat-on-The-Back for the crusaders for taxpayer funds. It’s a feel good March: feel good about your IQThe organisers want Marchers to feel like they have the high ground, the smarts, but check out the advice to the noble superior mind: Don’t pick fights (either verbal, physical or metaphorical) with people who you think are dumb, wrong, dangerous or unpleasant. That ugly sentiment gets repeated (in case you missed it): But do stick to your guns. [Whatever they are, eh?.] Appealing to broader interests doesn’t have to mean pandering to interests that you think are dumb, wrong, dangerous or just plain unpleasant. People with a different scientific opinion are obviously dumb, wrong, dangerous or just unpleasant. Plenty of smug warfare going on here. Grant and Lamberts advice includes telling Marchers “Now is not the time to try to “correct” the misconceptions and “woo” of people who might not be as scientifically informed as you. ” He might as well put out a clickbait advertisement for a free booster shot of scientific ego. This march is for the A+ science students who never got A but know they should have. Come march with us, we are all so clevah. And they’ll need to be clever if they are going to simultaneously follow his advice and “not correct misconceptions” while they also “stick to their guns”. Advice, point 7, is to bring sex workers: Publicly embrace others, and get them to embrace you. If anyone should stand out at this march, it’s people who aren’t scientists. Do you know a group of firefighters, senior citizens or sex-workers who’d be prepared to march with signs saying “[non-science group of people] for science”? Give them a call and get them on board. Maybe get them to dress in uniform! Lamberts and Grant wrote this article a month ago but openly admit they were struggling to explain why they were marching. Don’t miss the clarity in the closer: Now get out thereThere’s still a bit of time to think about this and get it right. Of course, what “right” means will differ from person to person, so let’s get that clear before rushing out on April 22 and making all kinds of different noises. For skeptical scientists, if we were Marching for Science we wouldn’t have to work out what we were marching for with four weeks to go. It’s a wonderful feeling to unite with like-minded people, but let’s strive to show we are united for something that non-science people can relate to as well, or we’ll be portrayed as being united against those very same folks. So even when you are making “different noises” in a march that no one knows what the mission is, it’s good to unite with “like-minds” — people who are just as confused. As for being afraid of being portrayed as being united against “those very same folks” — the Marchers might stop calling them dumb, wrong, dangerous and unpleasant maybe?
Overnight a river in Northern Canada disappeared. A glacier had retreated and allowed the water upstream to sneak out via a different path. The water now ends up in the Pacific 1300 km away from the Bering sea where it used to emerge.
A close-up view of the ice-walled canyon at the terminus of the Kaskawulsh Glacier, with recently collapsed ice blocks. This canyon now carries almost all meltwater from the toe of the glacier down the Kaskawulsh Valley and toward the Gulf of Alaska.
Credit: Jim Best/University of Illinois
You might think this event has happened every time glaciers retreated in the last 30 million years, but you would be wrong. Really, this is due to coal-fired power stations. In a report published on Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, Dr. Shugar and his colleagues provide a detailed analysis of how an atmosphere warmed by fossil-fuel emissions has led to the river’s dramatic disappearance. “To me, it’s kind of a metaphor for what can happen with sudden change induced by climate,” said John Clague, who holds a chair in natural hazard research at Simon Fraser University and was a co-author on the report. Let’s play River-trivia — all the other times the world warmed, the river rerouted more slowly because:
How do we know it’s different this time? Keep reading → CO2Science found a 1999 paper done in China that shows just how awful climate change is for cotton. It’s a major global crop for fibre and oil and when the researchers warmed daytime growing conditions from 27C to 34C the plants seemed pretty happy about it as they grew faster and bigger. But if CO2 levels doubled as well, in hot conditions plant growth was up 60%. (Panic now. It’s a international emergency).  … Don’t change your cotton futures portfolio just yet. At the current rate of warming (0.13C/decade) it will take about 500 years for Earth to get seven degrees warmer. Keep reading → Wishing you an enjoyable Easter… Don’t panic now, but all the coal burnt in China has been cooling the Antarctic Peninsula. For the last twenty years, The Antarctic Peninsula was the poster-peninsula for the Global Worriers as they calculate how many meters the oceans will rise when it melts, but all across it, temperatures are going down, not up. We can knock half to one degree off: This cooling has amounted to a 0.5 to 0.9 °C decrease in temperatures in most of the Antarctic Peninsula region, the only exception being three stations located in the southwest sector of the peninsula that experienced a slight delay in their thermal turning point, declining only over the shorter period of the past decade. Thanks to CO2Science: The Antarctic Peninsula: No Longer the Canary in the Coal Mine for Climate Alarmists  …. … The start points matter. The cooling started after 1998, which was an El Nino, and we can see there was a similar downward slope from 1983 to 1993. As usual, with a climate graph, there are steps and stairs, and there is a trend up in the last 50 years (but probably down in the last 7,000).Whatever. What there isn’t, most definitely, is a trend that fits carbon emissions. Not that the media seem to mention that. Here’s The Independent, UK, March 2nd, 2017: The Antarctic Peninsula is among the most rapidly warming areas of the planet, with temperatures having increased by almost 3C over the last 50 years. There also isn’t a trend that fits the climate models which told us it would be the most rapidly warming place on Earth. From CO2Science — other studies also came to the same conclusion: However, in recent years two studies have challenged this assessment. Carrasco (2013) reported finding a decrease in the warming rate from stations on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula between 2001 and 2010, as well as a slight cooling trend for King George Island (in the South Shetland Islands just off the peninsula). Similarly, in an analysis of the regional stacked temperature record over the period 1979-2014, Turner et al. (2016) reported a switch from warming during 1979-1997 to cooling thereafter (1999-2014). And now, in 2017, we have a third assessment of recent temperature trends on the Antarctic Peninsula confirming that the canary is alive and well! No hockeystick happening there then. h/t to GWPF REFERENCEOliva, M., Navarro, F, Hrbácek, F., Hernández, A., Nývlt, D., Pereira, P., Ruiz-Fernández, J. and Trigo, R. 2017. Recent regional climate cooling on the Antarctic Peninsula and associated impacts on the cryosphere. Science of the Total Environment 580: 210-223. Crazy World Quiz #2349: Let’s close the cheapest generators of electricity. Will electricity bills: a/ go down, b/ go up, or c/ be paid by The Tooth Fairy? A quarter of Australians don’t know. A half think the answer is “b” or “c”. It’s that bad. A new survey came out this week which fans of renewables are using to argue we need more renewables, but hidden in the data is the big misinformation that underlies this attitude. Coalition supporters back quicker shift to renewable energy[Sydney Morning Herald] Adam Morton says: The wisdom of a campaign by the Turnbull government emphasising the risks of moving too rapidly to renewable energy has been thrown into question by polling that suggests a majority of its supporters don’t agree. Not at all. The real issue, that Adam Morton misses, is that so much of the country is horribly misinformed. All the key questions in the survey depend on what would happen to electricity prices, and nearly half the country lives under the delusion that “renewables” make our electricity prices cheaper. All Malcolm Turnbull has to do to turn these figures around is to tell the fact that coal fired electricity is generated for 3 – 4 cents a kilowatt hour. Then run this survey again, and see support for a renewables target crash. Most Australians have no idea that coal fired power is the cheapest power by far. The Tooth Fairy subsidies mean that some people with solar panels on their roof think they are getting “cheap electricity” when really someone else is paying part of their bill. Just find us one nation running on wind and solar that has cheap electricity. They don’t exist. The only cost effective renewable energy comes from hydro. Wind and solar theoretically provide cheap electrons sometimes, but we need electricity all day every day, and the net effect the intermittent sources have on the whole grid makes for expensive electricity. The intermittent generators stop us from getting cheap electricity. The subsidies to pander to them (like the RET) force the cheap generators out of the market. .. If the Australia Institute really wanted to understand what Australians think, they would have told Australians the price of coal fired electricity, told them the cost of the subsidy (RET = 8c/KWhr) and asked people how many dollars extra they are willing to pay for the RET, instead of quizzing them with loaded questions about situations that don’t exist anywhere in the world. These push-polling type surveys that miss the key facts in the debate are measuring the success of PR campaigns, or the ignorance of respondents. INFO: The Large scale RET (renewable energy target) h/t David B
Spot the effect of man-made CO2 in this graph. Terror, terror I tell you — as the accumulated energy of cyclones in the southern half of the planet reaches a new low, far below anything seen in records that go back to 1971.
From the Daily Caller, and @Ryan Maue Meteorologist Ryan Maue of Weatherbell Analytics noted tropical cyclone activity in the Southern Hemisphere for the 2016-2017 season is the “quietest on record, by far” based on records going back nearly five decades. So far, the Southern Hemisphere has seen 13 named storms, including four hurricane-strength storms. Only two of those storms became major hurricanes, Category 3 or higher, according to data compiled by Colorado State University. I don’t think Al Gore will be mentioning this in his inconvenient advertising. h/t GWPF April 12th, 2017 | Tags: Southern Hemisphere, Storms | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | |  Check out the book for yourself :- ) The Heartland Institute sent a round of 25,000 books to science teachers across the US. Knowing Heartland, the book Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming is loaded with dangerous material — peer reviewed references, graphs with both axes, stuff like that. Because it will have been checked, cross checked and subjected to twenty years of non-stop criticism it will be packed with facts. And that’s why the Climate Religion is so terribly, awfully scared of it. The NSTC took the extraordinary step of writing to teachers and naming all the errors they could find, which was none. In lieu of that, they said it was false information anyway because, hey, they could still spell both words. NSTC warns of an unprecedented attack:David L. Evans (no relation) sets out his best three reasons: “First, scientists don’t disagree about climate change or its causes,”
“Second, labeling propaganda as science does not make it so.
Third, science teachers are the critical bastion in the war against reason. And the special interests know it.”
Right now, the NSTC needs to hear from people who do know what the scientific method is, and who can explain how empirical evidence does not come from a climate model. Inside Climate News found Brandie Freeman, an environmental science and chemistry teacher who won a National Science Teachers Association STEM award. So apparently the best of the best. So what did she do when she was given a free science book that disagreed with the dogma? She was insulted. Keep reading → … I nearly headlined this: Climate grief group meets at someone’s house, Grist covers it. That’s pretty much all this program is. No one even counts to nine in this story. Depressed about climate change? There’s a 9-step program for that.Imagine Alcoholics Anonymous mixed with an environmental humanities course, and you’ll begin to get a sense of the “good grief” group started by Schmidt. Its goal is to help people cope with what’s been called “climate grief” — anxiety, sadness, depression, and other emotions provoked by awareness of the planet’s march toward a hotter,… future… What she found was that feelings of sadness and anxiety, and even literal nightmares, were common. Last year, with the help of her partner, Aimee Reau, Schmidt developed a nine-step program for building resiliency loosely modeled on AA… But this is big: About a dozen people attend each session and 50 subscribe to its mailings. If I get 12 people to my house, and have 12,000 subscribers, do you think Grist will write it up? Perhaps they have some good results? Perhaps not: Schmidt, who now works as an outreach coordinator at the environmental group HEAL Utah, hopes to soon evaluate the pilot, incorporate the program as a nonprofit… I predict she’ll make much more profit as a nonprofit. The article tells the story of Keira Bitter, who has it tough. Her family are all Trump voters. She felt alone, even broke down in tears at the first session. So what did the team do — made her feel worse: The group has been educating her about the consequences of climate change, which has caused her more short-term anxiety,… One climate grief victim finds it hard to stay in a shop filled with poisonous packaging: The meetings have been held at the home of Alli Harbertson, who met Schmidt three years ago through a wilderness “vision fast” program. Harbertson works as a caterer, and she recalls once standing in a Costco aisle, surrounded by carts with packaged foods up to people’s shoulders. She retreated to her car for a while before she could face the store again. Jokes aside about the snowflake shoppers, these people are acting with integrity (if you believe in the climate models and labcoat curses). If the climate scientists are right, and the public believed them, there would be millions of people with these fears and anxieties. Here’s the bitter Take Home Message for one Climate Griever: Dick Meyer: “We all live, don’t we, with the notion that if we need it, someone will come save us?” he says. “Well, no one is coming to save you. Certainly not someone from Washington.” This is the religion of the US President as Messiah — and the discovery of the ugly truth that there are no Gods in Washington. While presidents look like they are giving bread and fishes, it’s an illusion: they have no bread and fishes to give, they take from some and give that to others. I’d like to suggest a four step program to end Climate Grief:
Stop Climate Grief at the source! But seriously folks — how do we help the Gullible?
April 9th, 2017 | Tags: Junk Science, Mental Health, Psychology, Satire & Parody | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming, Junk Science, Pseudoscience, Psychology, The Skeptics Handbook | Print This Post | | The Arctic is the most sensitive place to man-made emissions on Earth, which is why it has barely warmed since 1944? Well, it makes sense if CO2 is largely irrelevant. Humans have made 90% of all their CO2 in the last 70 years and nothing much happened in the place where it was supposed to hurt the most. The WMO apparently missed the first 30 years of data. But Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt are here to help them out. : -) “Heat waves in the Arctic – climate scientists sound the alarm“  Area weighted Arctic (70-90N) monthly surface air temperature anomalies (HadCRUT4) since 1920 in relation to the WMO normal period 1961-1990. Fig. 2: Arctic temperature since 1920. Data: HadCRUT4, Chart: Climate4You. These heat waves look a lot like the last heat waves. Read it all thanks to Pierre Gosselins translation: Learning from the climate’s history: the Arctic heat waves of the 1930s and 40s
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