I didn’t really know what a blog was then. I had no history of commenting, no experience moderating, and somehow didn’t even have a list of blogs I read daily. For the first year my posts were often two weeks apart and I remember wading into the trenches in comments consuming hours to research and defend arguments. As with many new blogs, there were heated battles. It was a bit of a Grad Dip on steroids in the climate debate. Fortunately the sparks attracted a great class of respondents, and soon I had help to answer questions and help to moderate. Sometime I must write about the processes that seemed to work best with cultivating a good community discussion. In the end, it was useful to imagine we were all in a room, and ask whether that behaviour would be OK face-to-face?
The blog and Skeptics Handbook got me into The Australian, speaking in New York and Washington, (and hopefully Germany and Norway next month). I’ve been in an ABC documentary and on SkyNews. Best of all I met true gems — the insubordinate thinkers; people I admired for years like Mark Steyn, Matt Ridley, James Delingpole. I had a wild time making mischief in the media tent at the UN in Bali and the master climate front liners Marc Morano, Christopher Monckton. I’ve hugged Andrew Bolt.
Thanks to so many who I learned so much from, and thanks to the team of moderators which evolved and made it possible for me to write more posts. They get no public rewards, no pay. I’m so grateful to them and to all of you who share your wit and expertise here.
Thanks especially to everyone who helps support this blog and my work. We still have to pay the bills and every bit helps.
Unfalsifiable theories and no dissenting ideas allowed
A kind of social snakeoil is being pushed upon us….
a culture has developed that make only some conclusions allowed.
Three left wing academics wanted to expose the political corruption in feminist, sexuality, queer, gender, race and fat studies. They hoped to bring back some rigor and reintroduce skepticism to peer review. They submitted 20 outrageously fake papers (like a feminist rewrite of Mein Kampf), got seven accepted so far, but outed themselves. They found they could get ridiculous things published as long as they framed the idea in politically fashionable terminology.
Project Summary: ○ This problem has arisen within a culture in which dissenting ideas have not been admitted or tolerated, often resulting in legitimate criticisms being denigrated on moral grounds. For example, questioning tenets of feminist philosophy might get you branded sexist or accused of carrying internalized misogyny. Questioning critical race scholarship is written off as exhibiting “white fragility” (Robin DiAngelo, 2011, 2018), “white ignore-ance” (Barbara Applebaum, 2006), a form of intentional ignorance, a form of resistance, or seeking white approval. Of note, it is impossible to counter such claims, and attempts to do so are taken as proof of guilt.
Grievance studies does not continue the work of the civil rights movement, it corrupts it…
Their fake study into rape culture of dog parks, was honored as a leading scholarship. Though “The reviewers were worried we did not respect the dogs privacy.”
Fake academic scandal:Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf words used in embarrassing journal hoax
The trio went public with the project after The Wall Street Journal uncovered it, saying a paper which claimed dog parks are “petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’” was ridiculous enough to pique the publication’s interest.
We intentionally made the papers absurd and used faulty methods to see if they could pass scrutiny at the highest level of academia. Concerningly, they did,” James Lindsay, one of the authors of the papers, said.
“A rambling poetic monologue of a bitter, divorced feminist written by a teenage-angst poetry generator shouldn’t be accepted as a scholarly article worthy of publishing.”
In US humanities departments an academic with seven papers published within seven years is awarded tenure, an indefinite academic appointment. The trio completed these seven papers within 10 months.
Boghossian, a professor at Portland State University, said he had been targeted professionally for questioning several of the fields in the past and expected to be fired or disciplined for his role in the papers, but denied he was motivated by a personal grudge.
Professors could today fall from grace,
Causing snowflakes to run for safe space,
If they dared to break free,
From groupthink P.C.,
On climate-change, gender or race.
“Feminist Mein Kampf” Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism Accepted by Adolf Hitler:
Journal of Women and Social Work, leading feminist social work journal
Note: The last two thirds of this paper is based upon a rewriting of roughly 3600 words of Chapter 12 of Volume 1 of Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, though it diverges significantly from the original. This chapter is the one in which Hitler lays out in a multi-point plan which we partially reproduced why the Nazi Party is needed and what it requires of its members. The first one third of the paper is our own theoretical framing to make this attempt possible.
Summary: Feminism which foregrounds individual choice, responsibility, female agency, and strength can be countered by a feminism which unifies in solidarity around the victimhood of the most marginalized women in society.
Purpose: That we could find Theory to make anything (in this case, part of Chapter 12 of Volume 1 of Mein Kampf with buzzwords switched in) acceptable to journals if we put it in terms of politically fashionable arguments and existing scholarship. Of note, while the original language and intent of Mein Kampf has been significantly changed to make this paper publishable and about feminism, the reliance upon the politics of grievance remains clear, helping to justify our use of the term “grievance studies” for these fields
Good news. There is hope for average Americans; not so much for academics.
It’s bad news for the Eco Worriers though who were hoping that constant displays of extreme weather would finally convince conservatives — a flood here, a Cat 6 there, a hottest first Sunday of Lent. It all washes over Conservatives. The weather-porn won’t convince them.
But the most interesting and novel discovery here is buried in the third paragraph from the bottom and barely mentioned. The researchers are only interested in how to “convince conservatives” and not remotely concerned that the media may be misleading a lot of the population by hyping up the weather.
Apparently media propaganda has convinced 40% of the US population that they’ve lived through a drought that didn’t happen and 10% think they’ve lived through a hurricane that wasn’t.
I graphed the differences between perceived events and real ones. Below, red columns show the percentage of people who said they had lived through droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes and floods. Blue columns show the percentage of those same people who were living in counties which NOAA said had actually experienced those events.
A lot of people think they’ve been in a drought or a hurricane than NOAA data suggests. Perceived events (red): Real events (green)
Experiencing extreme weather is not enough to convince climate change skeptics
Political bias and partisan news reporting influence whether people report experiencing certain extreme weather events, the research suggests.
But Americans who lived in areas where a variety of extreme events were recorded — flood, tornado, hurricane, and drought — were ultimately no more likely to share the same beliefs about climate change as scientists.
Dr Ben Lyons, from the University of Exeter, who led the research, said: “”Extreme weather plays a limited long-term role in forming people’s beliefs about climate change. Instead, their views and beliefs can alter the way they perceive the weather. We have found when an extreme weather event is ambiguous, as with polar vortex and drought, people are more likely to see the event through a partisan lens. If there is grey area, people are more comfortable applying their preferred label.”
Then Lyons thinks he is testing how people perceive the weather, but he is testing keyword recognition:
The University of Exeter, University of Michigan and University of Texas research found that Republicans were less likely to report experiencing a polar vortex, while those exposed to liberal media were more likely.
All this means is that the Liberal media go on about polar vortexes a lot and poor Liberal viewers repeat the same mistakes. The Polar Vortex was the code for scary weather in 2014 and most of the time the media got it wrong. Every cold blast is not a polar vortex, but Liberal viewers were told it was. Lyons thinks conservatives are denying an extreme weather event that technically didn’t happen. Who’s the denier?
However the weather can be sometimes so extreme that it overshadows personal views — the researchers found that partisanship and media use did not affect the way people in the American Northeast — where the 2014 and 2015 polar vortex events hit hardest — reported the weather they had experienced.
The Liberal media is so partisan some people who watch it think they’re experiencing a drought, even when they’re not:
Those who favoured liberal news sources such as the Huffington Post or the Daily Show reported experiencing drought more often than national weather data would suggest they actually did.
Thank the Liberal media for imaginary droughts. The media release doesn’t mention the imaginary hurricanes and the magnitude of the misinformation on droughts is hidden — the numbers are carefully separated in dense text below. Ninety percent of people who thought they’d lived through a drought, had not.
The researchers keep admitting that media coverage has an effect, but don’t seem to realize the media get things wrong and what they are studying is not Conservatives “denying” extreme weather, but Liberals who are easily tricked. Even partisan biased media can’t fool all the people all the time (though its easier if they have a PhD in mass communication).
Dr Lyons said: “Very extreme weather accompanied by constant media coverage is harder for people to deny. But on the other end of the scale, droughts can take longer to have an effect, so people have some difficulty perceiving their onset and this may allow them to bring their biases to the table.”
It takes constant media coverage to convince people of a fake idea. Here’s the buried numbers:
Academics surveyed 3,057 people in the USA to ask them about the extreme weather they had experienced over a five-year period, and also if they believed in climate change, human causation, and the scientific consensus on the matter. They also asked where they lived. The experts were then able to compare these answers to official weather reports for that region for the same time period.
Data about the weather was taken from the Storm Events Database compiled by NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS). The data included droughts, floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes. A total of 21.7 per cent of respondents reported experiencing a polar vortex, 41.0 per cent a drought, 19.8 per cent a tornado, 29.3 per cent flood, and 16.7 per cent a hurricane in the past five years. However the data shows 21.3 per cent lived in a county where a flood was recorded over the time period, 25.3 per cent a tornado, 4.3 per cent a hurricane, and 4.4 per cent drought.
40% of the US is very skeptical
No wonder they put this at the bottom. Fully 40% of people did not even believe there was solid evidence the world has warmed in the last 30 years — a box even I would tick:
A total of 59.2 per cent of respondents agreed that “there is solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades.” Of respondents who agreed with this statement, 74.2 per cent agreed that the Earth was warming mostly due to “human activity such as burning fossil fuels.”
Dr Lyons said: “This research shows people’s perception of extreme weather can be processed through partisan lenses. This means efforts to connect extreme events with climate change may do more to rally those with liberal beliefs than convince those with more conservative views that humans are having an impact on the climate. “However, it’s important to note that we take a big-picture look rather than focus on specific events. Particularly intense events — a 100-year flood or catastrophic hurricane — might be most capable of influencing attitudes.”
Only a Liberal would think the big-picture is a one in 100 year flood. By definition, since homosapiens started building mud huts on floodplains there have been 100 floods of that caliber everywhere on land on Earth.
This useless analysis was funded by the H2020 European Research Council [grant number 682758].
Another good reason for Brexit. The UK gives good money the EU and then gets back money to do surveys like this.
It is likely to be the most critical and controversial report on climate change in recent years.
Scientists are meeting this week, right now, to try to save the world or to produce a PR and marketing excuse, whichever comes first. After 20 meetings just like this one even slow journalists like Matt McGrath at the BBC know exactly what the scientists will say before they have said it.
When is news not news:
After a week of deliberations in the city of Incheon, the researchers’ new report is likely to say that keeping below this limit will require urgent and dramatic action from governments and individuals alike.
When is news totally fake news:
These researchers, who are unpaid, have reviewed the available scientific literature on the feasibility, impacts and costs of staying under 1.5C.
This is true Pravda quality press. Does any one of these 86 researchers, getting a paid trip to South Korea to write a 15 page document, not have a fully paid up job at home? Time to tell Ofcomm, or better yet, cancel some salaries. The IPCC may not be paying them, but government grants almost certainly do, yet here is McGrath making out that they are some kind of volunteers?
Be swept away by accidental new insights:
One scientist told BBC News that our lives would never be the same if the world changed course to stay under 1.5C.
So true it must be a misprint.
If we changed course to obey the IPCC, life would change as we razed even more forests, eliminated Western manufacturing, and wiped out the last untouched wilderness to grow palm oil and soy beans. The old folks can die of pneumonia in cold rooms while the young clean the solar panels.
86 people will work all week on a 15 page report and we already know what it says?
It’s a banal committee meeting, no skeptics invited, but Matt McGrath is constructing epic mythology. With industrial sniveling like this below, what are the odds that he will ever ask one hard question?
The IPCC has been in existence for 30 years and produces detailed assessments of the state of the climate every six or seven years. This special report has been almost three years in the making.
Schmoozing unlimited:
“What is really important for the work of the IPCC is the respect for the integrity and scientific rigour of the authors – that is at the heart of the work of the author teams,” said Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a co-chair of the body.
“If one can imagine the governments holding the hands of the scientists, this means you don’t know how science works!”
Someone tell McGrath about ClimateGate and Michael Mann’s “Respect for integrity”.
Because so many people are involved, and all these review comments have been taken on board, the IPCC has a reputation for being rather conservative, producing reports that have a very broad consensus.
A reputation according to who?
This week in Incheon, the scientists and government delegates will go through the final, short, 15-page Summary for Policymakers, the key distillation of the underlying scientific reports.
This will be done word by word, to ensure everyone – scientists and governments alike – are in agreement on the text.
And anyone who doesn’t agree gets sacked at dawn.
Spot the science
As usual, the entire scientific premise is that its been hot lately compared to the last 1% of human civilization.
McGrath is so excited about the flashy graphics, he forgets 4 billion years of history:
Source: Robert A. Rohde/Berkeley Earth. Map built using Carto
Note all the new evidence that coal changes the weather:
1. All new flashy moving graphics. Those graphs don’t just say “warming” they wriggle it and hide all those awkward pauses.
2. The gender nearly-neutrality: there are (wow) 86 lead authors from 39 countries, of which 39% are female (which curiously, is 33.5 women). Worryingly, LGBT percent and melanin content of the team are unstated. (If they were 61% white men, would that make them wrong?)
4. New twist on old conspiracies: “This has led some critics to conclude that important aspects are being downplayed to suit the interests of countries with major fossil fuel industries, such as the United States, Saudi Arabia and Australia.” Isn’t this just business-as-usual at every international trade meeting since the Neanderthal era? So some countries downplay things to look after their own interests. This is called “negotiating”. Australia probably won’t.
How do we know this is agitprop?
The BBC interviews the science experts at Greenpeace, but forgets to phone Nobel Laureates who are skeptics.
“The overall big question in this report is how we can still get to that 1.5C goal? What does it take?”, said Kaisa Kosonen from Greenpeace.
“There are those for whom 1.5C is a matter of life or death and they want the message to be clear. Others might want to suggest that there is not scientific certainty and the messages, for example on rapid fossil-fuel phase-out, should not be so straightforward.”
Everyone knows what they will decide, but they will hammer it out anyway. Oh the drama!
Will sparks fly at this meeting?
Quite likely, yes!
IPCC sessions are closed from the public, to allow governments and scientists to speak freely.
Governments often seek to make changes to the text – the scientists are there to ensure that if changes are made, they are consistent with the research.
“I’ve never been to an approval session that didn’t go well after hours; it’s kind of IPCC working practice now,” said Prof Skea.
Closed sessions? Because thermometer readings and weather balloons need to be concealed? Or lest the public finds out how uncertain, debatable, and politically contrived it is.
While Elon is charging up the EV to save the world, in China somewhere coal-fired steam trains live on, burning coal, hauling coal, spewing coal up in the air.
Get a load of this industrial marvel. This is the Fossil Fuel Nightmare Express. Raining live climate destruction at 6pm.
This display, while incredible, shows how desperately ill-maintained these steamers are. The coal burning steamers tend to build up ash, especially with the kind of coal that’s dug up in Sandaoling. These ashes get collected in the ash pan underneath the firebox and also tend to get caught in the flues, especially when the locomotive is working hard. Standard procedure dictates that the ashes get dumped every 12-24 hrs. and the flues get cleaned about every year or so. With these locomotives sparking the way they are, I’d venture to guess that they almost never get their ash pans dumped as evidenced by the way these “eruptions” occur only when the engineer throws the throttle open and the flues get cleaned very rarely.
The ‘Fossil Fuel Nightmare Express’,
Must cause warmists unbearable stress,
A fire spitting dragon,
Full of coal in each wagon,
But all lovers of steam trains impress.
Ex-chairman of BHP (1997-99), Jerry Ellis (left) ex-chancellor of Monash University, and an ex-director of ANZ Bank, has called for Australia to dump the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Ellis’s intervention puts cat among climate pigeons.
The alarmists like to lie that sceptics are a fringe group. Ellis is hardly fringe. His former BHP continues to promote the story about human-caused catastrophic CO2 warming, as does Monash University. Ellis is an awkwardness for both.
By coming out against climate alarmism, Ellis, 81, is giving added respectability to scepticism, much as ex-PM Tony Abbott did with his London sceptic speech of last October.[i] The credibility of the sceptic case, of course, rests not on authority figures but data such as the more than two-fold exaggeration of warming since 1980 by the climate models on which the CO2 scare is based.
Here is Ellis’s statement on Paris.
Why Australia should Clexit Paris Treaty
It is clear that the push to meet the Paris carbon dioxide emission targets is leading to higher power costs, and hence prices, and unreliable supply.
It is also a fact that the predictions of the warmists have not happened.
One of the fieriest and most apt speeches in Washington was surely from Senator Graham. Since ABC viewers have missed this, I thought I would help out.
If the Democrats get away with this (so they can do it again) only a kevlar-coated-narcissist would want to run for public office.
Question for the #Metoo movement. When the mob rules and evidence is irrelevant, which gender will be less likely to want to play the game?
Weapons grade bullying is a good way to keep good men out of politics but it’s even better at keeping good women out. Good one gals.
Americans may wonder why other nations don’t understand them:
Today tens of thousands of Australians will feel certain that they saw the key moments of the hearing and they will know that Kavanaugh is an abuser because the ABC told them so, right in the first line. Ford was there to warn Senators, Kavanaugh was an abuser. (The ABC actually said that). Her claims were portrayed in graphic detail, and she was painted as a victim from the second line. In contrast, Kavanaugh’s words were only “what he sees”. He is a guy who said she was mistaken, but then (by implication) was proved totally wrong, the doofus, because she was “100% sure” and the ABC played that twice. Case closed.
Sure enough they showed Kavanaugh emphatically denying the claims. But if Ford was asked any hard questions about her 36 year old uncorroborated allegations, the ABC left them on the cutting room floor.
Those same Australians who get their news from the ABC will be baffled by US Republicans or convinced they must be spawn of the devil to vote for this terrible man.
Such is how a national propaganda outlet creates polarization and misunderstanding.
Selected transcripts from the Australian ABC correspondent Phillip Williams:
Dr Blasey Ford came to Washington to warn senators Brett Kavenaugh was an abuser.
She was terrified but determined to tell a story that’s already taken its toll. “My family and I have already been the target of constant harassment and death threats. I have been called the most vile and hateful names imaginable…”
“I believed he was going to rape me, … he put his hand over my mouth… I thought he was accidentally going to kill me…”
Before this hearing President Trump and Brett Kavanaugh had suggested Dr Ford might have been confused about the identity of the attacker. Question to Ford: With what degree of certainty do you believe Brett K assaulted you? Ford: “One hundred percent.”
Brett Kavanaugh arrived seething with what he sees as a Democrat character assassination…
Some points here that the national media may not have shared. Supreme Court Justices in the most powerful Democracy on Earth may be at the point of being selected by character assassination. Evidence is so old fashioned…
Truth, due process, evidence, rights of the accused: All are swept aside in pursuit of the progressive agenda.
In Orwell’s world of 1984 Oceania, there is no longer a sense of due process, free inquiry, rules of evidence and cross examination, much less a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Instead, regimented ideology — the supremacy of state power to control all aspects of one’s life to enforce a fossilized idea of mandated quality — warps everything from the use of language to private life.
Newspeak and Doublethink
Statute of limitations? It does not exist. An incident 36 years ago apparently is as fresh today as it was when Kavanaugh was 17 and Ford 15.
Presumption of Innocence? Not at all. Kavanaugh is accused and thereby guilty. The accuser faces no doubt. In Orwellian America, the accused must first present his defense, even though he does not quite know what he is being charged with. Then the accuser and her legal team pour over his testimony to prepare her accusation.
Evidence? That too is a fossilized concept. Ford could name neither the location of the alleged assault nor the date or time. She had no idea how she arrived or left the scene of the alleged crime. There is no physical evidence of an attack. And such lacunae in her memory mattered no longer at all.
The ABC reports that finally the people of SA can find out what the emergency Tesla battery cost — $56 per person, or $220 per family, just for the purchase, not for the operation. Hands up South Australians, who would have rushed to sign up to be the Star Renewable State if they had to sign the checks themselves and their electricity bill had a item called: “The price of renewables”.
South Australia didn’t need a battery when it had coal power:
A 505-page report released by Neoen this month ahead of an initial public offering suggested the battery cost around $90 million, at the current exchange rate.
The giant 100-megawatt lithium ion battery near Jamestown in the state’s mid-north commenced operation late last year.
“It actually costs taxpayers’ money. There’s a cost of $4-5 million a year to have the battery in place.
“There are more costs than that involved.
Where does Giles Parkinson think these “revenues” come from?
However, Giles Parkinson said the battery was on track to “make revenues of about $25-26 million in its first year”
The battery makes no electricity. All it does is shift supply at the wrong time to the right time, a problem the state didn’t have til it tried to run off the wind.
China said it would stop coal power construction, but CoalSwarm activists have caught it restarting construction at many plants it said it would close. It’s a tsunami of coal plants according to EndCoal. We’re talking about new capacity of 259GW, equivalent to the entire US coal fleet or more than ten times the total Australian coal fleet (23GW).
Newly released satellite photos appear to show continuing construction of coal plants that China said it was cancelling last year, according to CoalSwarm.
In January 2017, China announced that it was canceling more than 100 coal plants across 13 provinces. At the time, a researcher familiar with Chinese politics said that regional officials might try to skirt the central government’s order.
The Huadian Plant was suspended in Jan 2017, but look at those cooling towers…. (Slide the centre line left and right).
Building work has restarted at hundreds of Chinese coal-fired power stations, according to an analysis of satellite imagery.
The research, carried out by green campaigners CoalSwarm, suggests that 259 gigawatts of new capacity are under development in China. The authors say this is the same capacity to produce electricity as the entire US coal fleet. The study says government attempts to cancel many plants have failed. … there was a surge in new coal projects approved at provincial level in China between 2014 and 2016. This happened because of a decentralisation programme that shifted authority over coal plant construction approvals to local authorities. The report says that at present China has 993 gigawatts of coal power capacity, but the approved new plants would increase this by 25%.
The surge in new projects will exceed China’s current Five-year-plan coal cap of 1100 GW.
Apparently this will create more white-elephants. The genius of communist planning:
“Given that China’s coal fleet operates less than half the time, 259 GW additional coal power capacity is unneeded and represents US$210 billion in capital expenditures that could instead fund nearly 300 GW of solar PV or 175 GW of onshore wind power.”
Coal prices are not supposed to be rising as governments tighten environmental controls, but that’s precisely what is happening at the premium end of the coal market where prices have soared.
Over the past six months, the price of top quality thermal coal exported from the Australian port of Newcastle has risen by 25% to $115 a ton, a move reflected in the share prices of Australian coal exporters, such as Whitehaven Coal, which is up 27% over the same time, and Stanmore Coal, which is up 16%.
From the headlines you might think Australia is going to stop giving free money to Renewables shareholders from 2020:
Australia abandons plan to cut carbon emissions
Scientists say this move amounts to walking away from the Paris Climate agreement.
— Adam Morton, Nature, Sept 2018, vol 561, page 293
Australian energy policy vacuum beyond 2020 officially confirmed
An energy policy vacuum in Australia beyond 2020 is now looking inevitable, with the baseload-focused reliability guarantee the sole remaining piece of the shelved National Energy Guarantee the Coalition government is hanging onto.
My reading is that this is wild exaggerated spin (and that Natureused to be a science journal). Remember that Kevin Rudd signed away $7 billion dollars in a flick just before he left Parliament. He extended the RET subsidies to keep drawing from your electricity bills til 2030:
Electricity customers face an extra burden of between $3.8 billion and $7.5bn in “windfall” subsidies for renewable power generators in the next decade because of the stroke of a pen in the last months of Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership. Against advice from consultants, energy companies and the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Rudd government in 2010 extended the phasing out of the renewable subsidies for existing operators from 2020 to 2030. The 10-year extension beyond the contracted 2020 phase-out under the Howard government is estimated to cost households and businesses up to an extra $7.5bn. — Dennis Shanahan, The Australian
Addressing the parliament on Tuesday, Energy Minister Angus Taylor confirmed the Morrison government will not be replacing the Renewable Energy Target (RET) “with anything“ when it expires in 2020.
“The truth of the matter is the renewable energy target is going to wind down from 2020, it reaches its peak in 2020, and we won’t be replacing that with anything,“ said Taylor answering an MP’s Adam Bandt’s question.
What he did not say was that there were no subsidies after 2020 or that Australia would axe the RET, or walk away from the Paris agreement. Clearly, in Greenspeak $7,500,000,000 is the same thing as “a policy vacuum.”
My reading is that there will not be even more freeloading gravy-train riders destroying the grid than there already is.
Methinks Angus Taylor is trying to whip up false hope to satisfy the sensible deplorables but the collectivist folk are spinning his spin back to fire up their own team. The truth lies seven billion dollars to the left of center.
The trade minister, Simon Birmingham, has claimed Australia will honour its Paris climate agreement commitments but failed to name a mechanism for emissions reduction in government policy.
A more accurate question is Will we or wont we meet that target? A better question — Why Bother?
As for Nature, the same magazine that would never interview a skeptic who was a physicist because they are not a “climate expert” is happy to quote a climate scientist’s opinion on economic policy. John Church is a specialist in sea level research, but he’s the goto man for Nature on the National Energy Guarantee and a political analyst on the passage of laws on that through parliament.
When is an expert not an expert — when they stand between a scientist and a bucket of money.
Either Katla in Iceland is about to blow or it isn’t. It is a subglacial volcano giving off five to ten times more CO2 than vulcanologists expected. This has some experts spooked, though others are saying it’s not that unusual.
UPDATE: The lead researcher herself adds that her work does not suggest an eruption is imminent, nor that it would be like the theEyjafjallajokull eruption in any case. h/t Pat for the new take. Apparently The Sunday Times has been exaggerating… “Ilyinskaya tweeted that she has previously told the Sunday Times that “the severity of Eyjafjallajökull air traffic disruption was very unusual and unlikely to happen if Katla erupts, and still, they quote me as saying exactly the opposite!”
Icelandic and British volcanologists have detected Katla— Icelandic for “kettle” or “boiler” — is emitting carbon dioxide on a huge scale which suggests magma chambers are filling up fast.
According to the Sunday Times, the scientists believe it could be an indicator that an eruption could be brewing which would overshadow the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in 2010.
The emissions are in the order of 12 to 24 kilotons a day which means 4 to 8 megatons a year. That’s the same output as an extra 1 – 2 million cars on the road each year.
————————————————-
UPDATE #2 from TonyfromOz This volcano is equivalent to 50 new coal plants!
A new UltraSuperCritical coal fired power plant (a HELE plant) with two 1200MW units (so, a Nameplate of 2400MW) will emit around 12 million tonnes of CO2 each year, so taking that upper limit for Volcanic CO2 emissions of 600 Million tonnes per year, then the volcanic emissions alone equal around FIFTY of those plants each year.
Shutting down one coal fired power plant is akin to a f@rt in a cyclone.
We discovered that Katla volcano in Iceland is a globally important source of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in spite of being previously assumed to be a minor gas emitter. Volcanoes are a key natural source of atmospheric CO2 but estimates of the total global amount of CO2 that volcanoes emit are based on only a small number of active volcanoes. Very few volcanoes which are covered by glacial ice have been measured for gas emissions, probably because they tend to be difficult to access and often do not have obvious degassing vents. Through high‐precision airborne measurements and atmospheric dispersion modelling, we show that Katla, a highly hazardous subglacial volcano which last erupted 100 years ago, is one of the largest volcanic sources of CO2 on Earth, releasing up to 5% of total global volcanic emissions. This is significant in a context of a growing awareness that natural CO2 sources have to be more accurately quantified in climate assessments and we recommend urgent investigations of other subglacial volcanoes world‐wide.
This is just one volcano of thousands
Katla is one of the largest volcanic sources of CO2 on the planet, contributing up to 4% of global emissions from non‐erupting volcanoes.
I wondered how much CO2 volcanoes give off in the big scheme (doesn’t everyone?). But total estimates of emissions of CO2 from volcanoes vary a lot: The United States Geological Survey (USGS), estimates 200 million tons, the British Geological Survey estimates volcanoes emit 300 million tonnes CO2and Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology estimates 600 million tons.
For perspective, if those numbers are remotely correct, then that’s about the same as Australia’s total emissions per annum (which means “not much”.) Total human emissions globally are around 10 Gigatons per annum.
Take it with a grain of basalt
No one really knows how much CO2 is coming off each volcano, or even how many volcanoes there are, or if the gas is sneaking out in fields and valleys round the back:
In 1992, it was thought that volcanic degassing released something like 100 million tons of CO2 each year. Around the turn of the millennium, this figure was getting closer to 200. The most recent estimate, released this February, comes from a team led by Mike Burton, of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology – and it’s just shy of 600 million tons. It caps a staggering trend: A six-fold increase in just two decades.
The silent, silvery plumes which are currently winding their way skyward above the 150 or so active volcanoes on our planet also carry with them the bulk of its carbon dioxide. Their coughing fits might catch the eye — but in between tantrums, the steady breathing of volcanoes quietly sheds upwards of a quarter of a billion tons of CO2every year.
We think. Scientists’ best estimates, however, are based on an assumption. It might surprise you to learn that, well into the new century, of the 150 smokers I mentioned, almost 80 percent are still as mysterious, in terms of the quantity of CO2 they emit, as they were a generation ago: We’ve only actually measured 33.
Then there is invisible CO2 and no one has any idea
When volcanoes outgas CO2 they usually give off steam which helps everyone spot that something is going on, but what if colorless and odorless CO2 is just oozing quietly through whole valleys and hillsides. Robin Wylie again:
Without the water, though, it’s a different story. The new poster-child of planetary degassing is diffuse CO2 — invisible emanations which can occur across vast areas surrounding the main vents of a volcano, rising through the bulk of the mountains.
… we have very little idea of how much it might contribute…
…we know more about the moon than the bottom of the Mariana, and it’s only 11km “away”.
Climate scientists must be hoping for a decent eruption. When the Earth doesn’t warm as predicted one good volcano could provide great cover for failing models. Look for the Blame the Volcano Game, coming to your public broadcaster soon.
It’s Projection — the ABC fantasize about Murdoch and Stokes because the ABC wants that power themselves
Turnbull was the ABC’s pick for least-worst Conservative PM. They didn’t predict nor craft his demise, 45 elected representatives did. The People foiled the ABC, but instead of admitting that conservative voters matter, the ABC staff project their own desire to pick PM’s onto Murdoch and Stokes — which feeds the self serving fantasy that Australians need to pay for a national broadcaster to oppose big nasty corporates and their fake power.
While the ABC has no conservative commentators, as in zero, some other media outlets allow both sides of politics to speak — which clearly threatens the ABC bubble. Therefore it serves the ABC entirely to delegitimize the competition and to paint them as mindless corporate sock puppets.
The whole fake news conspiracy theory is bizarre beyond analysis. Rupert Murdoch supposedly picked PM’s by demanding his national masthead paper run no editorials calling for Turnbull’s demise, and silence no commentator that defended him. Meanwhile the ABC runs editorials disguised as news every night at 7pm. One time ABC management effectively called Tony Abbott “the most destructive politician of his generation.” ACMA eventually censured them. The ABC called it a “slap”. The fake journalist-cum-opinionator, Andrew Probyn, continues his job. Smart voices that support Abbott or Dutton go unheard. There is no accountability inside the ABC bubble.
Foreigners wonder how a rich country with more resources per capita, no land borders, and brilliant weather can screw things up in Oscar Winning Style. Look no further than the billion dollar gift with no strings attached for a neo-marxist collective to masquerade as the nation’s most trusted news source.
All the other news providers have to compete for audience and advertisers. They can’t afford to ignore half the nation — R.I.P. Fairfax.
Imagine if you had been stranded on an island for the past few years with nothing to watch, listen to or read from but Australia’s public broadcaster.
You would be under the false apprehension that our navy tortured asylum-seekers who were then raped on Nauru. You would think the people-smuggling trade was impossible to stop and that if boats were turned back there would be a conflict with Indonesia. You would think climate change was the greatest threat to the country, region and the world, and that it was already making our lives worse; on the bright side you would have faith that a carbon tax, emissions trading scheme or national energy guarantee would put an end to droughts, floods and bushfires while saving the Great Barrier Reef. You might be under the impression that our dams were dry and $12 billion of desalination plants were supplying us with water.
For a moment, you would have believed that the Donald Trump “nightmare” ended on the day he lost the election…
There is no reforming the ABC. It takes a billion dollars but costs the nation countless billions more as it hides the failure of the most stupid and expensive policies.
Tony Heller at RealClimateScience found a photo of what happened when “an actual category four hurricane hit Miami” — as opposed to an almost Cat 6 that became an almost Cat-Nothing.
The people of Miami didn’t have satellites or TV or helicopters or mobile phones, or perhaps any phones.
Apocalypse 1926
“Hundreds of children separated from their families and hungry, their health endangered by the scarcity of water and the lack of sanitary facilities, are wandering among the ruins of Miami City today.
The tornado which wrecked the place at the week-end, twisting concrete steel buildings on their bases, smashing the city to smithereens, caused the worst disaster America has known since the San Francisco earthquake. All towns in the south eastern coastal belt of Florida have been more or less smashed. No definite estimate of the dead can be made, but the toll is somewhere between 600 and 1500, and there are thousands of injured. How many are buried beneath the ruins is not known.
In Miami alone there are 30,000 homeless, and the loss of property amounts to £20,000,000. The disaster has been aggravated by a hurricane which today struck Pensacola, at the head of the Gulf of Mexico. The wind blew at 100 miles an hour. The place is isolated.
BOATS WASHED INTO PARK
Most of the wooden structures of the city had been unroofed or had collapsed. Practically every piece of plate-glass in thc city was broken.
If the 1926 Hurricane hit now, the cost might be $200 billion
The toll for the storm in the United States was $100 million ($1.38 billion 2018 USD). It is estimated that if an identical storm hit in the year 2005, with modern development and prices, the storm would have caused $140–157 billion in damage ($196 billion in 2016); this would make the storm the costliest on record in the United States, adjusted for inflation, if it were to occur in contemporary times.[1][2]
The lowest pressure recorded in the eye in 1926 was 930mbar. Highest winds 150mph or 240 kmh.
Over the last century there was a remarkable decline in deaths due to hot days and heatwaves. (Not that the media seem keen to say so). Mortality on a hot day declined by fully 75% in the decades after 1960 when air conditioners started to be rolled out.
In the words of the authors from this 2016 study, the people of the US have largely adapted in ways that protect them from extreme heat. The kind of hot days they are talking about happen on average 20 days a year in the US.
There has not been a similar reduction in deaths from cold snaps.
First, we document a remarkable decline in the mortality effect of temperature extremes: The impact of days with a mean temperature exceeding 80°F (26.6C) has declined by about 75 percent over the course of the twentieth century in the United States, with almost the entire decline occurring after 1960. The result is that there are about 20,000 fewer fatalities annually than if the pre-1960 impacts of mortality still prevailed.
We achieved a lot of things in the 20th century, but when Barreca went through the statistics, it wasn’t the introduction of electricity that prevented most deaths — even though it brought fridges, and water, and fans — almost the entire effect was due to air conditioners. The researchers also considered health care access with doctors per capita, but that didn’t do it either.
In terms of money — Air conditioners add about 11% to the average household’s electricity bill, but in the long run save money.
“The present value of US consumer surplus from the introduction of residential AC in 1960, which is the first year in which we measure the AC penetration rate, ranges from $85 to $185 billion (2012 dollars) with a 5 percent discount rate.
Apparently most of the money saved comes from “avoided deaths” — and an economist might need to explain to me what that really translates into. In the 2015 version they admit there are a lot of benefits and costs that are not included — like improvements to worker productivity, or increases in pollution.
The paper is freely available. It’s an interesting history of mortality and technology in the last hundred years.
The graphs of how temperature affects the mortality rate
a/ 1904-2004 b/ 1931-2004 Click to enlarge
The big difference shows when the data is divided into pre 1960 (c) and post 1960 (d) curves below. Then the increase in mortality for hotter days is more obvious.
c/ 1931-1959 d/ 1960 – 2004 | Click to enlarge
If we want to save the poor in Africa from dying of heat waves, the best thing we can do is help them get air conditioning and the cheap electricity to run it.
Abstract
This paper examines the temperature-mortality relationship over the course of the twentieth-century United States both for its own interest and to identify potentially useful adaptations for coming decades. There are three primary findings.
Cropped from The Great Storm by Goodwin Sands, 1703
While we soak in storm footage this week, imagine this storm!
Back when CO2 levels were ideal, the UK was hit by a monster nine-day storm: at least 8,000 dead, maybe as many as 15,000 people. Some 2,000 chimney stacks were blown down and 4,000 oak trees were lost in the New Forest alone. About 400 windmills were destroyed, with “the wind driving their wooden gears so fast that some burst into flames”. The worst toll was probably on ships — with some 6,000 sailors thought to be lost. As many as 700 ships were heaped together in the Pool of London, one ship was found 15 miles (24 km) inland. A ship torn from its moorings in the Helford River in Cornwall was blown for 200 miles (320 km) before grounding eight hours later on the Isle of Wight.
Back then, people blamed the “crying sins of the nation” and saw it as punishment by God. The government declared 19 January 1704 a day of fasting, saying that it “loudly calls for the deepest and most solemn humiliation of our people”. Apparently, it remained a topic of preachy sermons well into the 19th century — until it was more useful to forget it and pretend the weather was always nice until people drove SUVs.
Ponder that if cooler conditions prevail we may end up with a more extreme climate, worse storms and more extremes both up and down. Then the Eco-Worriers will claim they were right about everything (except for “average temperatures”).
The storm uprooted thousands of trees; blew tiles from rooftops, which smashed windows in their paths; and flung ships from their moorings in the River Thames. A boat in Whitstable, Kent was blown 250m inland from the water’s edge.
….
As Britain slept, the wind lifted and dropped chimney stacks, killing people in their beds. It blew fish out of the ponds and onto the banks in London’s St James’s Park, beat birds to the ground and swept farm animals away to their deaths. Oaks collapsed and pieces of timber, iron and lead blasted through the streets. The gales blew a man into the air and over a hedge. A cow was blown into the high branches of a tree. Lightning kindled fires in Whitehall and Greenwich. From the hours of five in the morning until half past six, the storm roared at its strongest. It is thought between 8,000 and 15,000 people in total were killed.
Strong and persistent winds had already blown through the country for 14 days leading up to the storm. Those winds were already fierce enough to topple chimneys, destroy ships and blow tiles from the roofs of houses.
“In terms of its dramatic impact, it’s up there with the best of them,” says Dennis Wheeler, emeritus professor of climatology at the University of Sunderland. “Thousands of sailors died. The number was put at about 6,000. At the time, we were engaged with the War of the Spanish Succession, so we could ill afford to lose them. We lost a lot of ships, a lot of trade, and there was horrendous damage.”
At the time, the country was in the so-called Little Ice Age.
“It’s quite possible that the chilliness may well have contributed to the storm, but like all these things they are multi-causal,” says Wheeler. “Certainly as far as the British Isles were concerned, the 1680s and 1690s were arguably the coldest two decades since the ice retreated about 12,000 years ago.”
With “Robinson Crusoe” still sixteen years in his future, Daniel Defoe was at this time a minor poet and pamphleteer. Defoe was freshly out of prison in 1703, having served his sentence for criticizing the religious intolerance of High Church Anglicans. Hearing the collapse of brick chimneys, the Defoes and their six children sought refuge in their gardens, but were soon driven inside to “trust the will of Providence”. “Whatever the danger was within doors”, he said, “”twas worse without; the bricks, tiles, and stones, from the tops of the houses, flew with such force, and so thick in the streets, that no one thought fit to venture out, tho’ their houses were near demolish’d within.”
Nearly one third of the British Navy drowned
Close to a third of the entire British Navy were drowned during the storm, as ships were driven as much as 15 miles inland. Many ships disappeared forever. Others washed up on the shores of Denmark and Norway.
The most miraculous tale of survival was that of Thomas Atkins, a sailor aboard the HMS Mary. As Mary broke up, Atkins watched as Rear Admiral Beaumont climbed aboard a piece of its quarter deck, only to be washed away as Atkins himself was lifted high on a wave and deposited on the decks of another ship, the HMS Stirling Castle. Atkins was soon in the water again as Stirling Castle sank, when he was again thrown by a wave, this time landing in a small boat. He alone would survive of the 269 men aboard the Mary.
See Wikipedia for the references. (Link at the top)
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