A fifth of South Australia lost power yesterday due to a nasty storm.
You would think with all the climate models predicting more of every kind of extreme weather that South Australia, of all places, which is spending millions to prevent this sort of weather, would have upgraded their transmission lines to cope with it? Then again, maybe the models didn’t exactly predict these, not-so-extreme 120km/hr gusts.
Still Adelaide has a good desal plant to help them cope with climate change.
That wasn’t the case back in 1948 when a cyclone went through.
Roofs were blown off, flash floods occurred and a frigate washed ashore in 1948. (Click to read it all).
For the poor people of the west coast of SA, this may be their fourth blackout in four months. Some had another blackout last week due to lightning and a wind gust of “up to 111km/hr”. It doesn’t look like this has anything to do with renewables, it appears to be inadequate infrastructure and probably the return of a natural weather cycle (Adelaide was hit by a cyclone in 1948, widespread damage in 1954, much damage in 1927, and in 1910 and 1916):
Polluters will be charged for contributing to air, water and noise pollution, according to a copy of the legislation on the NPC’s official web site.
But CO2 did not make the list, which includes air and water pollutants such as sulphur dioxide and sulfite, taxed at rates beginning at 1.2 yuan ($0.17) and 1.4 yuan ($0.20) per unit respectively.
It also stipulates a monthly tax ranging from 350 to 11,200 yuan ($50 to $1612) for noise pollution.
China is the worlds largest emitter of CO2 and they are happy to do symbolic things for the climate, like sign the Paris agreement where they can commit to do nothing til 2030, and not much after that. But taxing carbon does actual collateral damage on an economy. China is obviously having none of that.
The new law was precipitated after 20 cities in Northeast China went on high smog alerts, which forced the closure of factories and the removal of cars off the road. People were told to wear face masks and roads and schools were closed. Airports canceled flights. The smog alert also prompted renewed calls by China’s President Xi Jinping to research clean energy sources and make factories burn cleaner.
What happened to China — the global climate leader?
On November 15th, Salon.com was worried that the US had been surpassed, and that China was now the global leader in climate change reform. On December 6th, Noam Chomsky was agog at the spectacle that had unfolded in Marrakech: “The hope of the world for saving us from this impending disaster was China—authoritarian, harsh China. “
“… ceding climate leadership to China would be disastrous for the United States, whose diplomatic standing and position in the race to supply the world’s clean-energy needs would fall precipitously as a result.”
Looks like Chomsky et al can relax. Beijing isn’t going to win the Miss Climate Pageant after all.
Expect green protests about China’s lack-of-carbon-tax to start in 3, 2, 1 million years.
It’s a happy Christmas here, thanks to everyone who is chipping in to help cover the costs of science research and commentary that the government won’t fund.
A big thankyou also to the moderators.
Wishing everyone the best of health and happiness.
We Must Maintain the Pressure
Dear Readers and Supporters,
The Moderators have temporarily seized control of the posts. We mods happen to know some big bills are piling up, and the bank account is very low heading into Christmas, and Jo doesn’t like to ask, but your support keeps this work, research and blog going. Please hit the tip jar, buy Jo and David a beer, a steak, a month on the server ($100), or a mini-break.
The Climate Skeptic Movement has had a phenomenal year in 2016, though there is much still to do to slow the trillion dollar juggernaut that takes from the poor and gives to the wealthy. Progress is only happening through the persistent and hard work of prominent skeptics like Jo Nova who’s material is reproduced around the world, who continues to inspire and inform and who takes the brunt of abuse from climate alarmists in politicians and the main stream media.
As you all know Joanne came from a science communication background and once worked with our national publicly funded ABC, the ANU and the National Science and Technology Centre. Jo doesn’t say it on the blog, but asking questions about the ‘accepted’ science created a rift between her and her former colleagues and friends. She stayed true to the science and had the courage to establish this award-winning blog. Unfortunately, contrary to propaganda, Jo is not funded by big oil, coal, or any other fossil fuel interests.
The other half in this extraordinary partnership is Dr David Evans who has sacrificed a comfortable job in government or academia because his work has found inconvenient answers. His work on The Notch-Delay Solar Theory detailed here may well help break through the defences of the UN IPCC’s amateur-hour science when more scientists who are actually skilled in statistical analysis and physics are exposed to it.
Who will ever forget the UK’s leading climate scientist, Dr Phil Jones, head of the UK Climate Research Unit admitting he couldn’t plot a trend using Excel in his Dec 2007 Climategate email? That is what we are dealing with, and once more politicians start demanding answers to the climate skeptics questions, the IPCC will be found wanting.This will only happen if the Climate Skeptic Movement, headed by people like Jo Nova and Dr David Evans, keep raising the questions and reaching the public and main stream media consciousness to prompt the politicians to ask the right questions. We moderators are awed by Joanne and David’s dedication, and what they have been through, to continue this work while trying to pay the bills and raise three lovely young, bright children.
They can’t do it without your help.We know Joanne and David don’t like to ask, but they live frugally and they and their children have missed out on a lifestyle they could have enjoyed had they not ‘bucked’ the system.We are asking you to ensure Joanne and David continue this important fight to stop the waste of trillions of dollars in taxpayer funds and economic opportunity costs. We know some people make regular or occasional contributions, but it isn’t paying the mortgage. Please make a contribution today, no matter how big or small, to the ‘Tip Jar’ via Pay Pal or credit card (or located at the top right of the page). There are non-paypal, non-credit card options .This really shouldn’t be called a ‘Tip Jar’, it is their ‘existence fund’! We hope you believe their existence in the climate debate is as important and valuable as we do.
All the Moderators would like to take this opportunity to thank contributors for your patience and understanding that we Moderators are all volunteers working at the site on an ‘as available’ basis. Fortunately for us, most contributors do follow the rules of the site, and ‘play nice’ with those they may disagree with. We look forward to your continued participation for the rest of 2016 and in the New Year.
May you all have a very safe and happy holidays season and 2017. The Moderators
Mod, Ed, AZ, Fly, CTS and Oggi
(Click on the currency button, and write in the quantity).
After requests seemed only fair to make a button for Canada, NZ and the EU. 🙂
These are Enercon wind turbines in Germany, Lower Saxony. Image: Philip May
UPDATE 3: In the washup, these updates #1 and #2 show the fierce battle to control a message. The Wind Industry denies everything, but reports say the plaintiffs are delighted. If the story spread that wind farms were paying out to homes nearby without even contesting liability, it could go viral in a very bad way for the wind industry. Settling out of court with confidentiality agreements would be a gambit to stop a flood of similar claims. Perhaps the wind industry lost control of the message when the Irish Examiner reported it?
UPDATE #1:Hmm. Industry Body says it is all false? It’s a strange one. The original link has vanished from The Irish Examiner,and a pro renewables site SeeNews which covered their story has disappeared their copy too [cached here, screencap copy too]. SeeNews has posted an update which totally contradicts the news. Did The Irish Examiner get it wrong? Removing the story suggests they did, but they have not issued a correction yet. News of the update comes not from the court, but from the Irish Wind Energy Association, not exactly an impartial source. The IWEA flatly says that no one admitted liability, no families were forced from their homes, and there was no judgement or ruling? Yet the original story claimed all these things.
UPDATE 2: It appears to be a case of industry wordsmithing and damage control. From Pat and Phil and commenters at StopTheseThings: The plaintiffs allegedly are delighted with the result and say liability was conceded from the start, so it was never contested, and no judgement on liability needed to be issued, but the court will decide on damages in April. StopTheseThings hopes to release court papers next month. — Jo
Families forced from homes due to wind farm noise win court case
Irish Examiner
11 December 2016
The case was taken against wind turbine manufacturer Enercon who has accepted full liability for causing nuisance to seven families who live up to 1 km from the wind farm. A number of families in Co Cork who were forced to leave their homes because of noise from a nearby wind farm have won a significant case in the High Court this week. The families claim they have been severely impacted by noise since the wind farm began operating in 2011.
This is the first action of its kind in Ireland…
According to acoustic expert Steven Cooper this morning, this case applies to many other families around the world. In Australia wind farms have been built as close as 680 meters from homes. But his research suggests that the gap needs to be at least five kilometers on flat terrain. In hilly areas it may need to be ten kilometers.
In a submission in relation to the draft NSW Wind Farm Guidelines Cooper raises the issue of sleep disturbance and the absence of any criteria to protect the community. In a recent presentation at the Acoustical Society of America Steven discussed the use of heart rate monitoring (by fitbits and other systems) in conjunction with noise monitoring for correlation with complaints and sleep disturbance.
Research on the impact of wind towers is so pathetically immature that governments are not even sure what to measure and what threshold to set. In SA they apparently don’t even have criteria to identify “an adverse impact”.
The sorcerers say they can stop volcanoes with light globes. They come dressed as scientists, but chant fantasies about “deniers”.The Global Bullying has cowed whole nations into coughing up money for lost causes. But as I’ve said before, bullying is brittle, and once the cracks appear in the veneer, it can come apart very fast.
Just asking these questions in the public domain will change everything:
Now the backers of the global warming alarm will not only be called upon to debate, but will face the likelihood of being called before a highly skeptical if not hostile EPA to answer all of the hard questions that they have avoided answering for the last eight years. Questions like: Why are recorded temperatures, particularly from satellites and weather balloons, so much lower than the alarmist models had predicted? How do you explain an almost-20-year “pause” in increasing temperatures even as CO2 emissions have accelerated? What are the details of the adjustments to the surface temperature record that have somehow reduced recorded temperatures from the 1930s and 40s, and thereby enabled continued claims of “warmest year ever” when raw temperature data show warmer years 70 and 80 years ago? Suddenly, the usual hand-waving (“the science is settled”) is not going to be good enough any more. What now?
The eco-Worriers are pushing the message that the USA risks being a rogue state, a “backward nation”, a “pariah” — but the truth is, the USA is leading the way out of political correctness, and every nation on Earth will want to follow it to cheap energy. The little kid is saying we need fridges and phones in a house full of teenagers showing off their candles made of coconut fat. Trump has broken the spell — he’s not pandering. As the US grows rich with cheap energy, other nations will be left waving last years mental-disco-pants, and threatening not to play.
Observations early on 7/Dec/2016 in Maroondah Reservoir Park Photo: Bob Fernley-Jones
In 2009 things were dry, the drought was endless, and in a panic, billions were spent on desalination plants for Victoria (not to mention for Sydney, Adelaide, and Brisbane). Then the rains returned, the desal plants were mothballed. In Victoria alone, up to $18 billion will continue to be spent regardless of whether any water is used.
(Amazing what a desal plant can do for water storage. 😉 )
There is water overflowing from the full dam below. As Bob says: “Not the greatest overflow it’s ever been but positive, and its only part of an interconnected system that is currently a very healthy collective.”
It doesn’t get much better than this. Mazin Sidahmed at The Guardian has posted a handy list of Trumps Cabinet Picks. The times have changed so much that it’s not a case of “spot the skeptic” but a hunt to find any believers in the climate doctrine. Make no mistake, things are very, very bad for the fans of human-caused-weather. Almost every name on this list would be the “top target” of green protests if they had been the one appointee among the standard Obama-Clinton picks. But almost all of them are drawing fire. People who have taken the toxic, unforgivable position of personally investing in oil and gas projects seem neutral now, compared to people who have run lawsuits against the government department they’ve been told to manage. If only The Guardian could find someone who was not in the bottom 10% of the Conservation scorecard!
Climate change denial in the Trump cabinet: where do his nominees stand?
Scott Pruitt: Environmental Protection Agency
Pruitt is the anti-christ for the EPA. He has led lawsuits against their unconstitutional grab for power. What’s not to like?
A skeptic for sure who has called climate change “an unproven scientific theory”.
Rex Tillerson: Department of State
Tillerson is a mixed bag. He’s said some pro-Paris-agreement things, yet run the company that was threatened with a RICO investigation for funding non-government approved views on climate. He didn’t turn Exxon in to a BP or a Shell version of a carbon trading lobby group. He’s probably a skeptic, but perhaps it’s not a high priority?
James N Mattis: Department of Defense
The Guardian haven’t got much. There is an ambiguous hint that Mattis may be more concerned about the military having energy. But there’s also the suggestion from a very worried fan of the Man-made-crisis-meme” that General James “Mad Dog” Mattis would be a better pick than most other Generals on the shortlist.
Ben Carson: Department of Housing and Urban Development
When Carson talks about climate change he’s the perfect skeptic: “I know there are a lot of people who say ‘overwhelming science’, but then when you ask them to show the overwhelming science they never can show it”
Mike Pompeo: CIA
Sounds like a good man: “Pompeo is among the most the outspoken critics of climate change legislation. ” “He derided Barack Obama last year for describing climate change as a national security threat. Pompeo referred to the Paris agreement as a “radical climate change deal”.”
Michael Flynn: National security adviser
Flynn also told off Obama for talking about climate change after the Orlando terrorist attack. At least Flynn has his priorities straight.
Jeff Sessions: Attorney general
Sessions is very much a skeptic. Smile. He voted in the Senate against climate action. The League of Conservation Voters giving him a scorecard of 7%. (High praise indeed!) He knows that there are “legitimate disputes” about global warming, and that CO2 feeds plants and is not harmful. “Sessions reportedly said last year that the fight against climate change hurts poor people.” In 2015, he conceded CO2 might cause temperature increases, but still said it wasn’t a pollutant and was plant food.
John F Kelly: Department of Homeland Security
There is not much to go on. Kelly has at least given a neutral statement on climate change “… whether one agrees or disagrees with the cause-and-effect claims – all are at least fully aware of the issue. Even those who reject the science have reduced their energy consumption and know it is good for the environment.”
Tom Price: Department of Health and Human Services
Price supported a bill to stop the EPA and spoke of “recent revelations of errors and obfuscation in the allegedly ‘settled science’ of global warming.” He has consistently voted against incentivizing renewable energy sources… He signed a pledge to oppose climate legislation.”
Wilbur Ross: Department of Commerce
Ross will be managing NOAA. His views on climate change are not clear, but he has invested in oil and gas.
Steven Mnuchin: Department of the Treasury
He’s a Goldman Sachs guy. No public statements on climate. Hmm.
Betsy DeVos: Department of Education
She is chairman of the Windquest Group which started in 1989 and invests in “clean energy technology”. That was a long time ago. We sure hope that doesn’t get in the way of repairing the education system. The Guardian doesn’t mention that she is active in promoting a bigger role for parents in education through school vouchers. E’Gad! Imagine public schools having to compete with private schools, and being judged by actual taxpayers. So even if public schools still push the one sided propaganda on climate, at least parents will get more choice to avoid it:
For nearly 30 years, as a philanthropist, activist and Republican fund-raiser, she has pushed to give families taxpayer money in the form of vouchers to attend private and parochial schools, pressed to expand publicly funded but privately run charter schools, and tried to strip teacher unions of their influence.
But Ms. DeVos’s efforts to expand educational opportunity in her home state of Michigan and across the country have focused little on existing public schools, and almost entirely on establishing newer, more entrepreneurial models to compete with traditional schools for students and money. Her donations and advocacy go almost entirely toward groups seeking to move students and money away from what Mr. Trump calls “failing government schools.”
Elaine Chao: Department of Transportation
She’s been a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which would be unforgivable in the Obama-world. In 2009 she “derided a proposed cap-and-trade system” as a way to deal with carbon emissions.
Right now, the hottest year ever appears to be causing an extra 4 billion tons a day or so of frozen stuff on Greenland.
Thanks to Patrick Moore, @EcoSenseNow, who tweeted: “Holy Shomoly, look what’s going down on Greenland. Ice World” after Richard Cowley posted the DMI link.
Top: The total daily contribution to the surface mass balance from the entire ice sheet (blue line, Gt/day). Bottom: The accumulated surface mass balance from September 1st to now (blue line, Gt) and the season 2011-12 (red) which had very high summer melt in Greenland. For comparison, the mean curve from the period 1990-2013 is shown (dark grey). The same calendar day in each of the 24 years (in the period 1990-2013) will have its own value. These differences from year to year are illustrated by the light grey band. For each calendar day, however, the lowest and highest values of the 24 years have been left out.
Over the last decade the Greenland Ice Sheet may have been losing 200Gt per year, but evidently, this winter it’s making some of that back. The Danish Climate Centre describes the graph:
The solar wind is is coming at us at a million miles an hour, but we really don’t know much about what happens when it weaves and buffets past us. In a news release NASA GISS describe how their traditional understanding of what is going on 150 miles up can sometimes just turn inside out. That’s “Revolutions in Understanding the Ionosphere, Earth’s Interface to Space”. It describes how energy from space weather can get into the ionosphere, and also muck up some of our satellites.
Despite climate models being sure that the Sun has hardly any effect, even NASA Giss admits there are some pretty wild things going on up there, and they are mostly due to the Sun. As the solar wind blasts in, it can set up a voltage difference between the upper layers of the atmosphere and the “magnetosphere”. A current will flow, discharging this energy into the ionosphere. They call it “lightning” but say it can take hours, making it hard to visualize without a few beers. Rather significantly they also warn that “the amount of energy transferred is hundreds to thousands of times greater”. Ooh?
This type of lightning is more likely during solar storms, and not surprisingly, can heat up the ionosphere and upper atmosphere. That effect can slow satellites, but it doesn’t always work like that. I gather the new finding is that sometimes these geomagnetic storms can make nitric oxide in the upper atmosphere and this would dump heat into space and cool things. Indeed the NASA experts talk about “overcooling” and say the upper atmosphere collapses down instead of puffing up (as it does when it warms). The poor satellites end up speeding up. It must play havoc with the orbits. (I wonder if the Grace satellites, which assess ice loss through changes in the speed of the satellites, are at the right height to be affected.)
“Overcooling is most likely to happen when very fast and magnetically-organized ejecta from the sun rattle Earth’s magnetic field,” said Knipp. “Slow clouds or poorly-organized clouds just don’t have the same effect.”
This means that, counterintuitively, the most energetic solar storms are likely to provide a net cooling and shrinking effect on the upper atmosphere, rather than heating and expanding it as had been previously understood.
Apparently there is an effect from ground level storms that changes things up high (and anyone want to bet that there is an effect back down…)
It’s all very poorly understood, but the big climate models are 95% certain it has no effect at all. Sounds to me like we’re getting a little bit closer to figuring out another mechanism whereby the sun can change the Earth’s climate through magnetic fields and solar winds. Perhaps this is the “notching effect” or Force N or if one of these parameters lags solar TSI (total solar irradiance) by 11 years, it may be Force D, the delayed effect. Or it might be neither, and have little effect down on the ground… these overcooled patches seem to be “localized” and obviously we’ve got very little data to guess with. What kind of proxy tells us about atmospheric temperatures 150 miles off the ground, and 150 years ago?
Scientists from NASA and three universities have presented new discoveries about the way heat and energy move and manifest in the ionosphere, a region of Earth’s atmosphere that reacts to changes from both space above and Earth below.
After human pumped out 90% of all the CO2 they’ve ever made, the oceans might be a whole fifth of a degree warmer, tops, in the last 60 years. So when water that was a whopping 5.5 degrees warmer rolled over some giant kelp, researchers got excited. (This is like 1,650 years of climate change right?!) But the kelp pretty much did nothing, and you might say that researchers were shocked the kelp coped:
They expected forests of giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), known to be sensitive to such increases as well as to the resulting low-nutrient conditions, to respond quite rapidly to a rise in water temperature.
However, to the scientists’ surprise, that was not the case. The kelp, they discovered, was all right. Their findings appear in the journal Nature Communications.
“The response that we saw in kelp was really no different than what we’d seen in our temporal record,” explained lead author Daniel Reed, deputy director of UCSB’s Marine Science Institute (MSI). “The values were low but not necessarily lower than what we’d seen during cool-water years.”
A lot of other underwater things were not bothered either:
The team also examined changes in understory algae, invertebrates and fishes of the giant kelp ecosystem and found that they didn’t show much of a response to the warming event either. Sea urchins and sea stars were the exception as they declined dramatically due to a disease that was linked to the warm-water event.
Could it be that natural variations of temperature are normal and have been going on for millions of years. Perhaps kelp has been hit with this sort of rapid shift many times? Have a look at this churning video below. The worlds oceans have streams of warmer water and colder water forming turbulent eddies.
The global oceans might be warming by 0.2C but marine life lives in water that isn’t average.
BAckground: They have 34 years of data about kelp off California:
The researchers used kelp records from a 34-year time series of data taken by Landsat satellites, which — among many other characteristics — measured kelp canopies. The investigators analyzed kelp biomass from Santa Barbara to San Diego through time and related it to sea surface temperatures at those sites.
The warming was unusual in the 34 year history:
The data showed some large positive temperature anomalies that were unprecedented. For example, in September 2015, the water in the Santa Barbara Channel averaged 4.5 degrees Celsius higher than normal for the entire month. Daily anomalies went as high as 5.5 degrees Celsius. Despite these high temperatures, the team saw no dramatic response by giant kelp whose biomass remained within the range observed during the decades-long time series when the water was cooler.
Naturally if temperatures change by 5 massive degrees, and nothing happens, we need to investigate that:
“Nobody knows how this warming event relates to climate change, other than we’ve not seen this before,” said co-author Libe Washburn, an oceanographer at the MSI and a professor in UCSB’s Department of Geography. “That’s somewhat alarming, but this work may provide some insight into how these kelp forests would respond to future climate warming.”
The money grab:
“The fact that we did not see drastic responses in the rest of the community tells us that we don’t know everything we think we know about this system and about its ecology,” Reed noted. “The results have caused us to pursue lines of research that try to understand how this happens. More importantly, the findings underscore the value of long-term data in terms of trying to tease apart these trends.”
REFERENCE
Daniel Reed, Libe Washburn, Andrew Rassweiler, Robert Miller, Tom Bell, Shannon Harrer. (2016) Extreme warming challenges sentinel status of kelp forests as indicators of climate change. Nature Communications, vo 7: 13757 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms13757
ABC news tells us intrepid researchers are in a race for the sacred key. The news is a sexed up advert for climate funding done in the theme of Raiders of the Lost Ice:
“It’s the “holy grail of climate science”, a piece of ice so old that it might be able to reveal the climate of the past and help predict the future of Earth’s atmosphere.
And Australia’s Antarctic scientists are now part of an international race to find the ancient time capsule.
So, what is it?
Somewhere deep below the surface of Antarctica, ice has laid untouched for a million years or more — it’s believed to be the world’s oldest ice“
I don’t know why scientists think the million year mark is so holy, they’ve pretty much ignored the message in the first 800,000 years. They hunted and drilled but the telex from prehistory kept saying temperature controls CO2, not the other way around.
Either CO2 followed the temp, or CO2 stayed high, but temp did its own thing. (See the spot from circa 130,000BC, for about 15,000 years? CO2 was at “record highs” unseen for 120,000 years, but that didn’t stop temperatures falling by a eight degree blitzkreig. So much for that “warming” ability.
Deny this. Fifteen thousand years of high CO2 that has no detectable effect.
ABC still pushing the Al Gore cheat-speak on the ice cores
After 1999 many papers were published showing that CO2 levels lagged behind temperature by hundreds of years. By 2003 Caillon et al calculated it as 800 years. Now 13 years later, the ABC is still in denial of the 800 year lag. Note the pravda-lingo, are you still beating your wife and can scientists make more accurate predictions:
“The idea is that by studying the past climate, scientists will able to make more accurate predictions about how it will change in the future.
For example, ice core research has proven that up until industrialisation, the Earth’s temperature and carbon dioxide levels rose and fell in lockstep.”
So “lockstep” and “800 years” are the same number in ABC maths. Let’s take that nuance and run with it: The ABC is in “lockstep” with Australians in 2016, or was that 1216 AD, and who cares anyway?
The ABC wants your money now to save the world, not in 800 years time. Pay now, pay twice, and if we’re lucky we might stop CO2 from rising and prevent the medieval warm period.
I say, let’s pay them in lockstep. The cheques in the mail, and it’s coming in 2800.
The ABC sells the idea that even though CO2 hasn’t done anything conclusive for 800,000 years, it might have before that:
Besides one million is a really big number:
Why is it the Holy Grail of climate research?
While the 800,000 year ice core has revealed a lot about climate history, something strange happened about a million years ago; the cycle of ice ages slowed down.
Rather than happening every 40,000 years, they started happening every 100,000 years.
Scientists believe carbon dioxide played a role but the only way to prove that theory is by finding the oldest possible record of the Earth’s atmosphere.
I predict when they get to the million-year-mark, the holy grail will be at 1.5 million.
REFERENCES
Petit et all 1999 — analysed 420,000 years of Vostok, and found that as the world cools into an ice age, the delay before carbon falls is several thousand years.
Fischer et al 1999 — described a lag of 600 plus or minus 400 years as the world warms up from an ice age.
Monnin et al 2001 – looked at Dome Concordia (also in Antarctica) – and found a delay on the recent rise out of the last major ice age to be 800 ± 600
Mudelsee (2001) – Over the full 420,000 year Vostok history Co2 variations lag temperature by 1,300 years ± 1000.
Caillon et al 2003 analysed the Vostok data and found a lag (where CO2 rises after temperature) of 800 ± 200 years.
At the moment Rex Tillerson is the hot favourite for Secretary of State. He runs the worlds largest oil and gas company, Exxon, which is also the ninth largest company in the world, and has had a near perfect credit rating since, ooo, the Great Depression. Not too shabby at negotiating deals then?
As a mark of his character, consider that while Tillerson ran Exxon, the company was one of the only ones that donated money to skeptics* — yet Exxon is an oil and gas company, not a coal miner — so it would profit from anti-carbon schemes that it was exposing. Big-Gas benefits from anti-coal rules, because coal is so cheap. For all the talk of “fossil fuels funding skeptics” all the other Big Gas majors like BP and Shell have ridden the green wave, picking up government subsidies, lobbying for carbon trading and wind farms (which need gas backup).
So if Tillerson wanted to take the easy road, he would never have funded skeptics. He’s been on the “top-ten” enemy-list for the EcoWorriers for having actually given some money to skeptics (a tiny fraction of what Exxon gave to renewables, but a sin of the first order nonetheless.) There aren’t many people who’ve borne more flack from the fans of Big Government.
The vitriol against Exxon reached fever pitch in 2005-2008. Environmental groups urged a boycott of Exxon for its views on Global Warming7. It was labeled An Enemy of the Planet. 8 James Hansen called for CEOs of fossil energy companies to be “tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”9 In the next breath he mentioned Exxon.
Even The Royal Society, which ought to stand up for scientists and also for impeccable standards of logic, joined the chorus to implore Exxon to censor its speech10.
Exxon funding to skeptics ended in 2007, but Exxon even faced a potential RICO probe this year. The “stain” of funding skeptics is spun out for years.
Perhaps Trump just like Tillerson’s efficiency — when it comes to funding skeptics Exxon paid a mere 0.8% of what the US government spent on the climate industry at the same time — yet Exxon was accused of “distorting the debate”. That’s value for money.
So what job will Trump give the Koch’s I wonder.
PS: while Desmog ties everyone to Exxon, they tie Tillerson to Russia —proving in DeSmogland that everyone is tied to something other than the things they are tied too.
*Not to me!
UPDATE: On second thoughts, maybe Tillerson doesn’t deserve quite so much credit for funding skeptics. He was VP from 1999-2004, then President til 2006, and CEO thereafter. Lee Redmond was CEO before him and as Alan Moran suggests – might be more the guy who deserves the credit. Tillerson has apparently said some things lately that don’t sound at all skeptical, like saying we need to reduce emissions and sign up for Paris. Hmm.
The geniuses in the UK government decided to take £10,800 from every UK household to cool the world by a figure which, rounded to the nearest tenth of a degree, is 0.0 degrees C a century from now.
Hot air: Bombshell report shows green levies backed by government will cost the economy £319bn by 2030
The radical shift to green, renewable energy will have cost £319bn by 2030
The huge sum is three times the annual NHS budget for England
The policy will be adding an average burden of £584 a year to every household by 2020 and £875 by 2030
Shocking report takes its calculations from official figures issued by government
The real cost to poorer families paying vastly higher electricity bills might be measured in terms of people choosing second best health options, putting off treatments, foregone holidays, going cold, and for some on the brink, perhaps divorce or worse. (It’s hard to imagine how forcing people to do £10k of pointless work will improve mental health stats). If the UK government came knocking at doors asking for cash, how many households would choose to spend £500 – £800 a year to slow storms and hold back the tide for their grandchildren by a factor too small to measure?
Judging by what western citizens willingly donate to green causes and to offset their flights, we’re talking about very small number. Only half a percent of Australians are willing to voluntarily pay 5 or 6 c KWh more for Green energy.
Subsidies squared – when you need subsidies to rescue you from your subsidies
The artificial pricing for renewables has made the reliable cheap coal fired electricity uneconomic. So Britain now has to subsidize coal in order to keep the lights on over winter.
The Government on Friday awarded £1.2bn of subsidy contracts through its capacity market auction to companies that could help ensure Britain has the power it needs in four years’ time at the lowest cost.
Well, it’s nothing really. Just a billion here, a billion there…
Coral spawning is visible from the air | Vimeo Biopixel
From the Bolt Report, Professor Peter Ridd points out how little we know about the history of bleaching of corals. Corals have been around for 200 million years, but we only discovered coral bleaching and coral spawning in the 1980s, even though the synchronized slicks are so vast they are visible in satellite shots. When discussing whether the Great Barrier Reef going to die he says “everything that I look at says the opposite”.
“Terry Hughes is on record as saying Bleaching is a new phenomena — it never happened before the 1980s. It is an absurdity –we just discovered it to science in the 1980s.
There is another thing the reef does that is equally spectacular — and that’s coral spawning — three days after the full moon in November every year the whole barrier reef, every coral virtually, releases egg bundles that float to the surface and from the air we can see these massive slicks of coral spawn on the surface. It’s incredible. we only discovered that in 1982.
Are we really suggesting that “it never happened before” that corals only discovered sex in 1982?
Of course, it’s been going on for 200 million years.
Yet, when we discovered coral bleaching in the 1980s that its anthropogenic, it’s bad, it’s us…
The results of a comprehensive survey of Business SA members of the impact of the September 28 blackout released today also found many did not have business interruption insurance and, of those who did, more than half were not covered for losses resulting from the outage.
The overall financial impact on South Australia was a loss of $367m but, in occurring late in the trading day, the effect of the blackout was lower than it would have been if it had happened first thing in the morning.
“Considering 70 per cent of respondents had power restored within 24 hours we are looking at a cost of close to $120,000 per minute for business in the state,” the report found. –The Australian
Only 12% of businesses surveyed had backup generators.
Who wants electricity at twice the price? Judith Sloan:
The Australian Energy Market Operator says average electricity prices in South Australia next year will be 1.7 times higher than in NSW and 2.4 times higher than in Victoria. So what sane business person would consider investing in South Australia?
Perhaps they can make the submarines with bullocks and drays?
Risky times coming for SA, count the weeks…
This is an ideal moment to post up the latest graph of forecast “shortfalls” in reserve electricity in SA. If this graph means what I think it does, SA grid managers must be hoping for a cool summer. The red lines are labelled “Reserve Shortfall”, and it seems rather significant that no other state (see that source link) has any red lines at all… (Thanks to Warwick Hughes for the tip about this page).
The red line days are around Jan 10th, Jan 16th, Jan 24th. (But what’s a 150MW between friends? As it happens, it’s about the same size as the Olympic Dam mine which uses 170MW). The Heywood interconnect from Victoria can supply 500MW, so the 150MW gap may not be an issue, assuming that Victoria doesn’t need those megawatts itself. I suppose SA might get by?) Once SA had two coal fired plants, Northern Power Station (520MW, which stopped in May 2016) and Playford B (240MW), which ceased in 2012, and was blown up last September).
As Warwick Hughes notes, if you think this summer is going to be fun in SA, wait til you see 2018:
SA Electricity, AEMO: Medium Term Outlook, Reserve Shortfall for Oct 2016 – Oct 2018.
For a state with the most expensive electricity, and that was “islanded” again this week (isolated from the national grid) the Premier of SA made possibly the weakest negotiation ploy ever seen. This week, he bravely threatened to “go it alone” and isolate himself with a burdensome, expensive, carbon-scheme-to-change-the-weather if the Libs didn’t do a national one first. Strangely no other states leapt to join him, and nor did the national government.
Even the greenest theme Premiers were running away:
It’s an eco-Worriers nightmare. Donald Trump appointed the man who’s been suing the EPA as its new chief. Scott Pruitt The Oklahoma Attorney General has been a leading figure in working to stop Obama’s EPA’s Clean Power Plan, an executive order that tried to circumvent Congress.
Trump heard Al Gore’s best arguments on Monday and acted accordingly.
Pruitt obviously knows the worst flaws of the EPA and in detail. He might even be able to get the EPA to tackle real environmental problems instead of fake ones. Who could be better? (Marc Morano, Nigel Farage? Hard to say).
Donald Trump will name Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, an ardent opponent of President Barack Obama’s measures to curb climate change, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, a Trump transition team official said on Wednesday, a choice that enraged green activists and cheered the oil industry.
Trump’s choice of Pruitt fits neatly with the Republican president-elect’s promise to cut back the EPA and free up drilling and coal mining, and signals the likely rollback of much of Obama’s environmental agenda.
Since becoming the top prosecutor for the major oil- and gas-producing state in 2011, Pruitt, 48, has launched multiple lawsuits against regulations put forward by the agency he is now poised to lead, suing to block federal measures to reduce smog and curb toxic emissions from power plants. — Globe and Mail
The EPA has 17,000 employees and an $8b budget that costs the US hundreds of billions more in regulatory burdens. Pruitt has his work cut out for him to change the culture of that behemoth.
No point pandering to the namecallers
In the arsenal of insults there’s nothing more to toss. Anyone Trump appointed would be called the planet-wrecking devil incarnate, so Trump might as well install someone really worthwhile.
Predictably, on twitter at #EPA, people who want to look like they care about the environment have run out of new names.
Chad Nielsen: Trump’s pick of #pruitt to lead the #epa is like appointing ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to lead Homeland Security
Henry Marx : Picking @AGScottPruitt to head up the #EPA is like putting Josef Mengele in charge of a medical ethics panel.
FHSCorrection: Pruitt is the Attorney General of Okla. His appt. is like “Putting an arsonist in charge of putting out fires.”
FieryAdvocateSixFour : .Scott Pruitt Your big business greed & myopic reckless views R revolting. ALL living beings need this planet not just Koch.
Ryan MitchellPruitt is dangerous for our world. The #EPA needs a scientist to lead it, not a guy who thinks climate change is fake.
Dan Abrahams: Unless he also starts World War III, appointing #Pruitt as #EPA head may be Trump ‘s most apocalyptically destructive act.
James Delingpole thinks it’s great news for the environment and does a nice summary of past EPA “stars”
Probably the worst were Obama’s appointments. First, was Lisa Jackson who had previously had a disastrous stint as commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
If you listen to the full AM program from 9 – 10:30mins he absolutely rules out an economy wide approach, but when asked about an electricity sector “emissions intensity scheme” he does say “wait and see”. Was it a bizarre slip of the tongue, or was he fishing to find out the strength of the opposition to bringing in a carbon price on electricity?
9 mins: He is asked about an energy “emission intensity scheme”.
Josh rejects any “economy wide approach”. “”What this review has indicated is we will look at a sector-by-sector approach. The electricity sector is the one which produces the most emissions — around a third of Australia’s emissions come from that sector.”
OhOH:
Frydenberg: We know that a large number of bodies have recommended an emissions intensity scheme a baseline and credit scheme.
Any chance of that happening?
10 minutes Frydenberg “Wait and see… we want to hear from the experts on the lowest cost of abatement… thats what we owe the Australian households and businesses.”
FairFax and the ABC promptly amplified that to “Carbon price for power generators back on the table “.
To which Liberal members and skeptics unleashed their scorn. This is the exact issue that got Turnbull chucked out as leader of the opposition in 2009, and the backlash is stronger now:
Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff Peta Credlin claimed she had never seen such a reaction from backbenchers on an issue like she had yesterday.
“My phone has not stopped all day. People are really angry that they sense the party will re-litigate those issues which they had considered closed and dealt with,” she told Sky News last night.
Fairfax Media spoke to 10 Coalition MPs on Monday about the prospect of an emissions intensity scheme for the electricity sector and all of them were scathing at the prospect of what is, in effect, a carbon price being re-introduced in Australia, regardless of the relative cost.
Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi, said it was “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. … To get back on the right economic track, we need the cheapest electricity in the world.”
West Australian MP Andrew Hastie said his overriding concern was the cost of living for families and asked: “Why would we unilaterally, economically disarm [by adopting a price on carbon]?”
The Turnbull government will maintain its blanket ban on the introduction of an emissions trading scheme and has ruled out an increase to the renewable energy target ahead of its long-awaited review of its climate change policy next year.
Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg will today announce the government’s terms of reference for its review, which will look at how Australia can meet and expand on its target to reduce emissions by 26 per cent to 28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030.
We could believe this might be a slip and a Love Media beat up, but then Barnaby Joyce appears to confirm the Coalition was thinking of putting a carbon price on electricity, saying “He said there was potential for a scheme where power generators could pay for emissions above a particular level.” Which is all a bit bizarre, since there already is a scheme that does this kind of cap N trade. It’s called the Safeguard Mechanism, and applies to our biggest 150 corporate emitters, though at a very low level (which could always be ramped up).
Which is, of course, just another kind of tax, though it only applies to people who use electricity.
Homes with candles and Coolgardie safes will be exempt.
In US politics they talk about “third rail” issues, based on the extra rail that supplies electricity to New York subway trains; touch it and you are zapped.
Carbon pricing is Malcolm Turnbull’s third rail and this week he voluntarily grasped it, again.
Seven years ago last Thursday Turnbull lost the leadership of the Liberal Party because he wanted to put a price on carbon and Tony Abbott organised a revolt.
In the biggest shock since the election we returned to this divisive debate for a crazy 24 hours.
This was unfathomable for Turnbull — resistance within the Coalition was so strong it brought a similar fallout into the realms of possibility (although with a one-seat majority Turnbull has in-built insurance against insurgency). But he did — knowingly — reignite the Coalition’s most inflammatory debate.
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Merry Christmas to everyone.
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