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Historic documents warn us that cold times bring death, starvation, disease. Winters were long, the crops failed, trade patterns and prices changed. Rivers froze over in Europe. The detail in this paper is fascinating. The world’s expert climate models (that’ll be NASA GISS, NCAR] don’t know what caused that extreme cold and can’t model it. If something like this were coming in the near future, they couldn’t predict it. Apparently it was due to “natural variation” which is scientific code for “we don’t know”. But the paper discusses the Spörer Minimum (SPM) in depth, and admits they don’t understand the mechanism of solar forcing which may include solar UV, or energetic particle flows. The SPM lasted from 1421 – 1550. They pretty much rule out volcanoes as the cause because the big ones in that era went off in 1453 and 1458.
Figure 2. Individual paleoclimate reconstructions for summer temperature, winter temperature and summer precipitation. Left: dots are specific sites considered by the different authors (listed from 1 to 16; Table 1). Right: decadal-scale (10-year mean) summer temperature, winter temperature and summer precipitation for the 16 climate reconstructions, standardised with reference to the period 1300–1700 (datasets 6, 11 and 16: 1400–1500). The black lines enclose the decade 1430–1440.
They combined proxies like tree rings, lake sediments, and stalagmites with historical documentation. Only proxies that were able to give yearly data were used. They were able to split up summer, winter and spring to give an extraordinary amount of detail. The whole decade of the 1430’s had bitterly cold winters, but normal to warm summers. There were a series of floods on the Danuabe, in Transylvania, Austria and Hungary.
While searching through historical archives to find out more about the 15th-century climate of what is now Belgium, northern France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, Chantal Camenisch noticed something odd. “I realised that there was something extraordinary going on regarding the climate during the 1430s,” says the historian from the University of Bern in Switzerland.
Compared with other decades of the last millennium, many of the 1430s’ winters and some springs were extremely cold in the Low Countries, as well as in other parts of Europe. In the winter of 1432-33, people in Scotland had to use fire to melt wine in bottles before drinking it. In central Europe, many rivers and lakes froze over. In the usually mild regions of southern France, northern and central Italy, some winters lasted until April, often with late frosts. This affected food production and food prices in many parts of Europe. “For the people, it meant that they were suffering from hunger, they were sick and many of them died,” says Camenisch.
The green line in this graph represents grain prices (upside down). Hungry people had to pay a lot more in 1438.
 Figure 8. Crop yields from southern England (wheat, barley, oats), Durham tithes, English grain prices and English salt prices for the years 1420–1460 (values are given as anomalies with reference to (w.r.t.) the period 1400–1479). Shown are the years 1437 and 1438 in the back-to-back grain harvest failure in southern England, the massive reduction in Durham tithe receipts and the marked inflation of grain prices for 3 consecutive years. In 1442, the harvests in southern England are again poor. As far as the agricultural impacts of the Spörer Minimum are concerned in England, 1432–1442 stands out as the worst period, especially 1436–1438 (adapted from Campbell, 2012). She joined forces with Kathrin Keller, a climate modeller at the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research in Bern, and other researchers, to find out more about the 1430s climate and how it impacted societies in northwestern and central Europe. Their results are published in Climate of the Past, a journal of the European Geosciences Union.
They looked into climate archives, data such as tree rings, ice cores, lake sediments and historical documents, to reconstruct the climate of the time. “The reconstructions show that the climatic conditions during the 1430s were very special. With its very cold winters and normal to warm summers, this decade is a one of a kind in the 400 years of data we were investigating, from 1300 to 1700 CE,” says Keller. “What cannot be answered by the reconstructions alone, however, is its origin — was the anomalous climate forced by external influences, such as volcanism or changes in solar activity, or was it simply the random result of natural variability inherent to the climate system?”
There have been other cold periods in Europe’s history. In 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora spewed large quantities of ash and particles into the atmosphere, blocking enough sunlight to significantly reduce temperatures in Europe and other parts of the world. But the 1430s were different, not only in what caused the cooling but also because they hadn’t been studied in detail until now.
The world’s expert climate models don’t work:
The climate simulations ran by Keller and her team showed that, while there were some volcanic eruptions and changes in solar activity around that time, these could not explain the climate pattern of the 1430s. The climate models showed instead that these conditions were due to natural variations in the climate system, a combination of natural factors that occurred by chance and meant Europe had very cold winters and normal to warm summers. [See note]
Regardless of the underlying causes of the odd climate, the 1430s were “a cruel period” for those who lived through those years, says Camenisch. “Due to this cluster of extremely cold winters with low temperatures lasting until April and May, the growing grain was damaged, as well as the vineyards and other agricultural production. Therefore, there were considerable harvest failures in many places in northwestern and central Europe. These harvest failures led to rising food prices and consequently subsistence crisis and famine. Furthermore, epidemic diseases raged in many places. Famine and epidemics led to an increase of the mortality rate.” In the paper, the authors also mention other impacts: “In the context of the crisis, minorities were blamed for harsh climatic conditions, rising food prices, famine and plague.” However, in some cities, such as Basel, Strasbourg, Cologne or London, societies adapted more constructively to the crisis by building communal granaries that made them more resilient to future food shortages.
Keller says another decade of very cold winters could happen again. “However, such temperature variations have to be seen in the context of the state of the climate system. Compared to the 15th century we live in a distinctly warmer world. As a consequence, we are affected by climate extremes in a different way — cold extremes are less cold, hot extremes are even hotter.”
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9.2 out of 10 based on 78 ratings
More news that the little people are fed up. A big 70% of Italy’s voters turned out to turn down the referendum. The Italian PM will resign. Like Brexit and Trump, the opinion polls got it wrong underestimated the size of the “No” vote, predicting the No win with a 6% gap, which ended up being a 19% for Italians in Italy. (Italians living overseas voted very differently — 65% for Yes). The proposal was to reduce the power of the Senate and of the regional governments. The Euro has dipped.
The global anti-establishment backlash has claimed another scalp in a result that will send shockwaves through financial markets and European capitals today.
Opposition was spearheaded by Beppe Grillo, a comedian and Eurosceptic founder of the populist Five Star Movement. He accused Mr Renzi of trying to wreck Italy’s system of checks and balances to push through laws favouring big business.
Renzi was elected as an anti-establishment man, but clearly wasn’t that at all:
Renzi, 41, took office in 2014 promising to shake up hidebound Italy and presenting himself as an anti-establishment “demolition man” determined to crash through a smothering bureaucracy and redraw the nation’s creaking institutions.
The referendum, designed to hasten the legislative process by reducing the powers of the upper house Senate and regional authorities, was to have been his crowning achievement.
Chris Kenny calls the current political climate correctly when he points out that Brexit and Trump show that Tony Abbott would have won here in Australia if he had been PM running against Shorten in July.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 80 ratings
The fallout from the small blackout last week will cost jobs and reduce production for months to come. In Victoria, the Alcoa smelter in Portland was hit at the same time as 200,000 customers in South Australia. But the short power outage meant that hot metal turned solid at the smelter, damaging equipment. One potline is totally shut down, the other hobbles along.
Manager of Portland Aluminium, Peter Chellis, said crews had been working tirelessly to stabilise the plant since it was taken offline.
“Obviously a long power interruption freezes the metal, and when you bring the power back on that creates what we call ‘burn offs’,” he said. “So we’ve been taking the pots that can’t be fixed out of circuit, and at this point in time line two is looking quite stable.”
He said the smelter was operating at just 27 per cent of its capacity. “At the moment we haven’t started to work on any scenario other than stabilising the plant,” he said. “But I think in three to six months we can turn around lines one and two.”
— Source: Alcoa smelter to run at 27% due to unexplained power failure
“”[If Alcoa closes] this will be a much bigger impact on the local economy, due to the small size of the town, and the large number of jobs.” says (ironically) Victorian Greens leader who wants a taskforce set up to manage the “transition”, as if talking heads can generate MW of spinning reserve.
h/t David B
9.4 out of 10 based on 67 ratings
Probably not what Senator Hansen-Young had in mind for South Australia:
SA irrigators, farmers turn to generators for electricity stability
By Lauren Waldhuter
Irrigators and farmers are buying diesel generators to secure their power supply, as price and stability issues continue to plague South Australia’s energy grid, industry experts have said.
Susie Green, head of the state’s apple and pear grower and cherry grower associations, said some farmers were now investing in generators for stability. “More and more I’m hearing that people are looking at forms of back-up generation for irrigation pumps and all different systems around their orchards,” she said. — ABC
One more cost to add to the price of wind and solar powered electrons. It’s not just the cost of a blackout, it’s the dollar volatility too. As the spot price soared to $13,000 MWh power companies tell irrigators to turn off their pumps.
How much capital is tied up in fuel and generators that are bought as insurance against government mandated grid failures which are themselves the price of “insurance” against the weather changing.
h/t David B
9.5 out of 10 based on 90 ratings
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8.4 out of 10 based on 9 ratings
Emails released by wikileaks show that Roger Pielke was the target of an organized political effort to stop him speaking on climate issues. Remember, Pielke is largely an IPCC type guy — supporting most of their consensus including even carbon trading. Yet straying a tiny bit from the approved line made him a major threat — the IPCC message is a whole package and a flaw in any part of it could unravel the whole kit and caboodle.
Roger Pielke was surprised to find his name in the Podesta emails:
“The multi-year campaign against me by CAP was partially funded by billionaire Tom Steyer, and involved 7 writers at CAP who collectively wrote more than 160 articles about me, trashing my work and my reputation. Over the years, several of those writers moved on to new venues, including The Guardian, Vox and ClimateTruth.org where they continued their campaign focused on creating an evil, cartoon version of me and my research.”
Collectively, they were quite successful. The campaign ultimately led to me being investigated by a member of Congress and pushed out of the field.
That story has been told in the Wall Street Journal today:
My Unhappy Life as a Climate Heretic
My research was attacked by thought police in journalism, activist groups funded by billionaires and even the White House.
The relentless combination of trial by media, combined with the RICO threat (more on that below), and the loss of his regular role at 538 , wore down Roger Pielke (and no doubt deterred many others that we will never hear from). He stopped his climate research, stopped doing interviews, and stopped his blog.
How we protect the heretics? Pielke doesn’t have much to suggest:
If academics—in any subject—are to play a meaningful role in public debate, the country will have to do a better job supporting good-faith researchers, even when their results are unwelcome. This goes for Republicans and Democrats alike, and to the administration of President-elect Trump.
He’s missing the point though. Academia is a rotting wasteland and we need to do a lot more than fight for free speech for academics. If we support all good-faith researchers, academia will keep wallowing along. (Many poor climate scientists are still doing it in “good faith”.) What we need is competence — we need researchers who understand logic and reason, and know what the scientific method is, and who will debate publicly, defend their views and fix their errors.
This is not about “Republicans and Democrats alike”. It’s not “alike”, there is no equivalence — academia has become a politburo of regressive-progressives and bias. But none of them need be fired for their political beliefs, because that would be wrong. Let’s just fire the incompetent ones. Fire people because they don’t know what science is, because they refuse to debate, won’t reply to questions, and don’t admit their errors. Each prof that argues from authority or launches a cheap ad hom ought get a warning: three strikes and they’re out. Furthermore, they need to teach the proper basics too — let’s test all their students to see if they understand the scientific method — and if the students fail, the prof must get the sack. If it so happens that all the regressives get the chop, it’ll be the best thing for universities, for research, and for left wing politics, because others will come to fill their shoes and bring some intellectual rigor back.
Alright, so that’s a bit of a long term goal. In the meantime, we can support the people who are on the front line with messages, comments and letters to the editor and protests to the university. Since most of these attacks are nothing more than social stings and barbs themselves, then every grateful, supportive message is an arrow in return. Every letter demanding an explanation from their superior, the VC, or a journalist is a flanking move. Never underestimate how much this kind of work helps bolster people against the tide of ill will. We can help carry people through the attacks.
Pielke talks about the troubles that drove him out of the climate debate:
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9.5 out of 10 based on 121 ratings
It’s a novel marketing ploy to reach all the people who buy their breakfast cereals according to where they don’t advertise. It’s bound to appeal to at least three or four people, but at the risk of offending half the population.
I suspect that not too many kids plague mom and dad to buy Fruit Loops because it doesn’t support the evil Breitbart news outlet. (That’s the same one whose leading editor was so disconnected from the cereal-buying-masses that he backed the winning candidate for leader of the free world, and got a job as his right hand man. A media group on “the fringe”, eh?)
Politics is the new religion. What else explains this this latest marketing disaster, which will appeal to all the people who buy Wheeties because it’s a Democrat cereal. Investors are running. Kelloggs stocks dropped another 1.4% today.
It started when Kelloggs announced it wouldn’t advertise on Breitbart because of “values”:
Kellogg on Tuesday said it would pull its ads from Breitbart News after consumers notified the manufacturer that its products were appearing on the site. A company spokesperson told the Associated Press, “We regularly work with our media buying partners to ensure our ads do not appear on sites that aren’t aligned with our values as a company.”
Breitbart responded with #DumpKelloggs and declared the breakfast brand hates 45 million readers:
Breitbart News, one of the world’s top news publishers, has launched a #DumpKelloggs petition and called for a boycott of the ubiquitous food manufacturer.
Kellogg’s offered no examples of how Breitbart’s 45 million monthly readers fail to align with the breakfast maker’s values. Indeed, the move appears to be one more example of anout-of-touch corporation embracing false left-wing narratives used to cynically smear the hard working Americans that populate this nation’s heartland.
Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alexander Marlow encouraged the boycott of Kellogg’s products, describing their war against Breitbart News as bigoted and anti-American: “Breitbart News is the largest platform for pro-family content anywhere on the Internet. We are fearless advocates for traditional American values, perhaps most important among them is freedom of speech, or our motto ‘more voices, not less.’ For Kellogg’s, an American brand, to blacklist Breitbart News in order to placate left-wing totalitarians is a disgraceful act of cowardice. They insult our incredibly diverse staff and spit in the face of our 45,000,000 highly engaged, highly perceptive, highly loyal readers, many of whom are Kellogg’s customers. Boycotting Breitbart News for presenting mainstream American ideas is an act of discrimination and intense prejudice. If you serve Kellogg’s products to your family, you are serving up bigotry at your breakfast table.”
This kind of politico-bash is going on in lots of places where it makes no sense at all. Which marketing guide recommends turning a children’s toy into a political statement at Christmas?
It follows Danish multinational Lego pulling Daily Mail advertising because the newspaper promoted “hatred, discrimination and demonisation”.
Expect more marketing bombs from the hate-throwers in the new Trumpocene Era as closeted big-government fans, who happen to be CEO’s, struggle to remember what logical arguments look like.
9.5 out of 10 based on 125 ratings
Just another day with a grid on the edge
 Adelaide and surrounds It was only 200,000 “customers”, only for an hour or so in the middle of the night. But yet again the Great Green Experiment that is SA ran out of electricity. Olympic Dam (the largest uranium deposit in the world and fourth largest copper deposit) was not operating properly for four hours. A fault at the Victorian interconnector meant 220MW of load had to “shed” — a fancy term for throwing the switch so the whole system didn’t break. SA was “islanded” — cut off from the rest of the national grid for about 3 hours, and clearly it can’t make it on its own. Total power lost was about a fifth of the SA grid.
Remember, this has absolutely, definitely nothing to do with the last blackout or renewables says the SA Energy Minister:
Mr Koutsantonis said there was no way renewable energy generation in SA could be blamed for the loss of power.
Andrew Dillon from AusNet said the overnight outage had no link to factors that caused a recent state-wide blackout in SA, and this time was hindered by the timing of the maintenance work.
“There were some assets out of service for maintenance at that stage so unfortunately the fault couldn’t have come at a worse time,” he said.
If the interconnector had only broken during a windy, sunny day, it would have been fine, right? Just bad luck.
90% of SA windfarms were producing no electricity when the state needed it
TonyFromOz points out that wind farms were only generating at 6% of their rated capacity when the fault hit.
Wind power in South Australia was delivering 100MW of its (almost) 1600MW Nameplate, around 6.25% of total Capacity*. So, one turbine in every sixteen with it’s blades actually moving. Total Demand for South Australia at that time, even with almost everyone tucked up in bed asleep was 1150MW. Lucky this outage from Victoria (South Australia’s main electricity supplier) happened when it did, and not during the day with Total Demand up around 1500MW.
 (This chart is was WA time. Sigh! So “21:00” was midnight Eastern Daylight Savings Time.UPDATED, if you see one black “subtotal line” and the graph starts at 15:00 you are looking at the updated AEST time new graph) The SA Energy Minister thinks he can blame Victoria and BHP:
Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said the problems were on the Victorian side of the border and “South Australia’s grid operated effectively as an island and load began to be restored within half an hour”.
He said BHP built back-up power at its mines across the world.
“Why they haven’t done so at Olympic Dam is a matter for them,” he said.
The SA Government’s message to investors is pretty clear: don’t expect SA to provide reliable electricity.
The BHP Chief was scathing:
BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie issued an urgent warning to policy-makers after the latest incident, which comes two months after the statewide blackout led to about two weeks of lost production at Olympic Dam.
“Olympic Dam’s latest outage shows Australia’s investability and jobs are placed in peril by the failure of policy to both reduce emissions and secure affordable, dispatchable and uninterrupted power,” he said in a statement.
“The challenge to reduce emissions and grow the economy cannot fall to renewables alone.
“This is a wake-up call ahead of the COAG meeting and power supply and security must be top of the agenda and urgently addressed.”
The incident also cut power to a Victorian smelter for about three hours.
If BHP wanted to make a coal fired ultra super critical plant nearby, it could probably sell electricity to South Australians at half what they currently pay, still make a profit, cut emissions (not that that matters) and have its own guaranteed supply. But the SA government won’t let it do that. If SA Customers want to buy that cheap electricity, the SA government won’t let them.
The only thing standing in the way of cheap, reliable electricity is the SA Government.
A South Australian glassblowing business says this will cost him about $10,000 to replace equipment broken by the blackout:
“Back in September we had 14 hours of outage. It did a lot of damage to my equipment,” Mr Vereker said.
“Now I had the same thing again last night and while we were back on in a few hours, that few hours of downtime does irreplaceable damage to our furnaces and to our production. Mr Vereker said it was the busiest time of year but he had to send three of his six staff home. He was concerned there might be more damaging blackouts during summer.
“I’d be out of business in six months time…”
We are so “looking forward” to when Victoria shuts the Hazelwood coal plant next April:
“Victoria’s outage put the Alcoa smelter near Portland offline for just over three hours, authorities said.”
Did that spot price hit $13,533 MW/hr from 1.30 – 2am last night? Apparently so. Source AEMO site.
 … The SA partial blackout happened at 1.16am AEDT (which means at 12:45am in SA).
h/t David B, redress, TonyfromOz.
* UPDATE: I had doubts about the 6% figure but Tony was right. The wind power across the whole eastern grid was working at 10-12% at the time. In SA it was a pathetic 6%.
9.6 out of 10 based on 114 ratings
The World Wildlife Fund tells us that global CO2 is bad for global fish stocks, but ponder that professional fish farms can reach levels of CO2 twenty or even seventy five times higher, and the fish appear to be doing OK. Current guidelines for fish farms even suggest that “safe limits of CO2 range from >5000 to >30 000 µatm*” which are “12.5 to 75 times higher than current atmospheric levels”.
So in another few thousand years we might really get into trouble with fish farms and climate change then? (Or maybe we won’t. James Hansen estimates if we burn every last barrel of fossil fuel on Earth we’ll get to 1,400ppm. The experience of fish farms all over the world is that fish can apparently adapt to levels ten times higher even than this worst case scenario.)
We have a situation where there are scores of reports fish suffering from ocean acidification and high CO2 levels, but they don’t mesh with the reality that fish farms have been dealing with for decades. A new paper tries to figure out why this is so. The study doesn’t prove that there are no bad effects from higher CO2, but it puts the panic into a whole new perspective.
Current global CO2 levels are 400ppm, they’re projected to rise to 1,000ppm by 2100. Aquaculture only tells us about a certain kind of fish, but as far as dinner fish go, and the fear of humankind running out of fish and chips, I think it’s safe to say we have at least a thousand years to go before it’s a hot item. Chalk it up on the program for the 3016 Paris conference. Whatever.
 Aquaculture puts the panic into a whole new perspective. The studies and the real world contradiction
Lots of academics have published papers that suggest that a mere doubling of CO2 will seriously muck up fish (to be technical) making them smaller, less viable, slowing their metabolic rate, etc etc. Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS) are very intense. If you were inclined to worry about CO2 you might describe the loads of CO2 at RAS as “apocalyptic”. And this is not just RAS systems but aquaculture of all sorts:
“…elevated CO2 levels appear synonymous with intensive aquaculture more generally.”
“For example, over 40% of Norwegian salmon smolt hatcheries (flow-through and RAS) report CO2 levels >5400 latm (Noble et al., 2012), whereas Bangladeshi shrimp ponds are shown to experience CO2 levels averaging >17 000 latm (Saksena et al., 2006; Sahu et al., 2013).”
Here’s a big clue – Natural CO2 varies a lot — life adapts
In 2007, some oysters were hit with high CO2 levels and a pH as low as 7.6 and it did matter — but, but, but this was no man-made disaster — it was natural thanks to an upwelling of deep water with lots of CO2 in it.
In 2007, these impacts were realized with the upwelling of elevated CO2, aragonite undersaturated sea water off the US west coast,
significantly impacting oyster hatchery production as a direct result of changing climatic conditions — Barton et al 2015, PDF paper.
The message is that the ocean has a lot of pH variation in it, and ocean life has probably been hit with high CO2 levels a lot of times since time began. I’ve been conversing with Patrick Moore, who’s done years of salmon farming himself and has been looking closely at the issue. There’s a lot more to come, but he and I agree that the most important message here is that life is adaptable. Within the gene pool are probably a lot of variations for coping with big changes, and a few generations of heavy selection transforms the population. We don’t need to wait for a big rare mutation. Life is probably tapping into a gene pool that has gone through major variations many times before.
Fish selected for aquaculture are obviously the kind of fish that do well in aquaculture. But there is a greater truth here and that is “multigenerational adaptation” which occurs in both fish farms and in the wild, but would be missed in short term studies.
“…strong and rapid evolutionary response. It is highly likely therefore that aquaculture practices operating at elevated CO2 concentrations would elicit sufficient selection pressure to directly select for CO2 tolerance during early life stages, leading to the rapid evolution of the population in just a few generations.”
If CO2 levels are naturally all over the place it’s reasonable to assume that the genes for coping with it are naturally all over the place too. Fish managed to evolve from salt to fresh water in a mere fifty years, adapting to higher CO2 is probably easier. As Patrick Moore pointed out to me, the out — the implications of aquaculture species doing fine in much higher CO2 than could ever be prevalent as an average in the global ocean “are staggering”:
“The author surmises that species or varieties used in aquaculture may have become adapted to CO2 at 5,000 ppm or higher within a few generations. If so there is no plausible reason why this could not also take place in nature. It appears as though marine and freshwater species have about the same tolerance for atmospheric CO2 as air breathing animals do, i.e. >20,000 ppm (which translates to about 25ppm in the water)“
— Patrick Moore is “The sensible environmentalist”
For more info on the details of the effect of high CO2 levels on humans read this link. (h/t Tomomason for that link.)
Aquaculture is not the global ocean — obviously
There are other obvious reasons why studies on wild fish or lab fish are different to farmed fish:
“…animals reared in many aquaculture settings are living in a relatively benign environment, being provided with abundant food, relatively constant environmental conditions, protection against disease and absence of a predation threat.
And fish farm managers are not doing pscyh surveys looking for reckless fish either.
Can’t think why the media haven’t interviewed some fish farmers…
Obviously fish farms are not the same as the whole ocean ecosystem — we might be picking fish that like CO2 or having bred them to be happy in it, and these farmed fish don’t have predators. Still, if fish farms had found their yields suffered at 400ppm rather than 4,000 or 40,000, perhaps the media might have mentioned it?
What this means and does not mean
So finfish seem to adapt pretty well to crazy levels of CO2. Shell fish are a more complicated, and I’ll go in to more detail another time. This study does not mean that adding CO2 has no effect, and that there won’t be some winners and losers. Just because a fish can make a happy meal does not mean it was a happy fish. But the scale of the fear mongering on ocean acidification needs a big reality check, and if the public knew that CO2 levels were a magnitude higher in working fish farms they might not need therapy and trigger spaces to cope with the nightly news.
With CO2, 400 is max,
In p.p.m. for most climate quacks,
But, when fish stay alive,
At 8,000 and thrive,
Then, what warmists hold true aren’t facts.
–Ruairi
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9.4 out of 10 based on 60 ratings
All the sensible people have left the room.What’s left, double or nothing?
 In the religion that is “climate change” all correlations point to the CO2 God. Bill McGuire is professor emeritus in geophysical and climate hazards at UCL and he hath written a book of imminent quakes, shakes and eruptions. Turn off your heater for it feeds the volcano.
Let us read from Climate-Psalm-101:
Global warming may not only be causing more destructive hurricanes, it could also be shaking the ground beneath our feet
Be very afraid little bunny:
… it does not stretch the imagination to appreciate that a warmer atmosphere promotes greater melting of the polar ice caps, thereby raising sea levels and increasing the risk of coastal flooding. But, more extraordinarily, the thin layer of gases that hosts the weather and fosters global warming really does interact with the solid Earth – the so-called geosphere — in such a way as to make climate change an even bigger threat.
Thus and verily will the continental plates dance to the tune of the magical CO2.
Pagan civilization found the Dog Star caused flooding in the Nile. So is it that McGuire finds papers with weak correlations to storms, quakes and volcanoes. The cause and effect link is the fairy-fantasy conjecture of broken climate models that things like “hand-shake” changes in air pressure might induce a quake.
…In the [Nature 2009] paper, Liu and his colleagues provided convincing evidence for a link between typhoons barrelling across Taiwan and the timing of small earthquakes beneath the island. Their take on the connection is that the reduced atmospheric pressure that characterises these powerful Pacific equivalents of hurricanes is sufficient to allow earthquake faults deep within the crust to move more easily and release accumulated strain. This may sound far fetched, but an earthquake fault that is primed and ready to go is like a coiled spring, and as geophysicist John McCloskey of the University of Ulster is fond of pointing out, all that is needed to set it off is – quite literally – “the pressure of a handshake”.
If the pressure of a “hand-shake” can trigger a quake, how do we know that dynamic flows of the solar wind which varies from 300 -800 km a second past earth in different directions is not causing both the air pressure change and the quake? Solar Wind speed correlates with the sea surface temperature and the North Atlantic Oscillation.
Nearly all of the changes he blames on CO2 also correlate to changes in the solar cycle — like ice melting, atmospheric pressure, quakes, jet streams, storms, rainfall, and floods. Unlike CO2, the correlations go back to Egyptian times rather than just to 1975.
McGuire suffers from the usual Total-Solar-Blindness (TSB): his entire article is predicated on the assumption that sun does nothing.
The Guardian, of course, laps up the preposterous fantasy as if it meant something and the editors do zero minutes of research, ask no hard questions, and phone no skeptical scientists.
And the litany of weak associations goes on. All paths lead to the God of Carbon Dioxide:
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9.2 out of 10 based on 85 ratings
 A week ago, the grip of the old-school media elite was busted, but few seemed to have noticed this remarkable shift.
The top dogs in the media came to him expecting to discuss their access to him, instead he blasted them as deceitful, dishonest liars who should be ashamed.
Over the last forty years the mainstream media have degenerated into naked, unashamed political advocacy, yet conservative leaders still felt they had to pander for fear that they would get an even worse treatment if they called it for what it was. Not Donald Trump. Has there ever been a more powerful US president? They called him every name under the sun, and he took the insults and used them to win.
What other US president didn’t need to pander or even be polite to media royalty? Only a billionaire who got elected despite the old media could afford to blow them away. For the first time in US history, the top gatekeepers of the national discussion were named and shamed… The Kings and Queens of the media finally overplayed their hand to the point where the people elected someone so powerful, so rich, and so independent that he has no fear at all of them. This is the extraordinary promise of the Trump election. Is he the first president that is seemingly owned by no one — not donors, or a party machine, not industry, and not newspaper editors.
What other US president didn’t need to pander or even be polite to media royalty?
Trump doesn’t need them. Don’t underestimate what a big shift in media power this is.
[NY Post, Nov 21, 2016]
“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing-down,” the source added.
 The media broke their contract with their readers, feeding them one-sided fawning advertising for Clinton dressed as “news”. In return the people elected Trump, possibly one of the very few who could break the degenerate system.
“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful, dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room, calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the source said.
“Trump didn’t say [NBC reporter] Katy Tur by name, but talked about an NBC female correspondent who got it wrong, then he referred to a horrible network correspondent who cried when Hillary lost who hosted a debate — which was Martha Raddatz, who was also in the room.”
The royalty gets what’s coming:
It had all the trappings of a high-level rapprochement: President-elect Donald J. Trump, now the nation’s press critic in chief, inviting the leading anchors and executives of television news to join him on Monday for a private meeting of minds.
On-air stars like Lester Holt, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopoulos and Wolf Blitzer headed to Trump Tower for the off-the-record gathering, typically the kind of event where journalists and politicians clear the air after a hard-fought campaign.
— NYpost
After blasting them, he managed the next day to offer them hope that if they improved he would change his mind:
“To me,” Mr. Trump said at one point, “it would be a great achievement if I could come back here in a year or two, and have a lot of folks here say, ‘You’ve done a great job.’” — New York Times
The NY Times was the main target, along with CNN. The next day the Times sold it as “a less defiant Trump”, and called him “chameleon-like” but he was not backing down from his criticisms, nor apologizing. He was acting like a coach who yelled at the team, but then offered them a chance to redeem themselves:
“I think I’ve been treated very rough,” Mr. Trump said, as he spent the first several minutes of the session criticizing The Times’s coverage. “I’ve been treated extremely unfairly, in a sense, in a true sense.”
“I will say The Times is about the roughest of all,” Mr. Trump said. Then, referring to his relationship with the paper, he added: “I would like to turn it around. I think it would make the job I am doing much easier.”
h/t Jim S
9.5 out of 10 based on 174 ratings
We walked through a great sunset today on the river not far from home. A few hundred thousand people were within fifteen minutes drive, but almost no one was there.
 … Amazing how cities can have patches of tranquility.
We could all go wandering more often:
Walking in nature changes our brains
Does experiencing nature actually change our brains in some way that affects our emotional health?
…City dwellers also have a higher risk for anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses than people living outside urban centers, studies show.
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8.6 out of 10 based on 58 ratings
A hundred years of cars, planes, wars, and five billion more polluting people, and there’s nothing to show for it. Old log books kept by Scott and Shackleton show that Antarctic sea ice hasn’t changed much since 1912. Right now, at least three ecowarriors are rejoicing that perhaps there is a future for penguins after all.
 Click to enlarge Scott and Shackleton logbooks prove Antarctic sea ice is not shrinking 100 years after expeditions
“The missions of Scott and Shackleton are remembered in history as heroic failures, yet the data collected by these and other explorers could profoundly change the way we view the ebb and flow of Antarctic sea ice,” said Dr Jonathan Day, who led the study, which was published in the journal The Cryosphere.
“We know that sea ice in the Antarctic has increased slightly over the past 30 years, since satellite observations began. Scientists have been grappling to understand this trend in the context of global warming, but these new findings suggest it may not be anything new.
“If ice levels were as low a century ago as estimated in this research, then a similar increase may have occurred between then and the middle of the century, when previous studies suggest ice levels were far higher.”
Read it all at the Telegraph. Daily Mail has even more.
The BBC quietly headlines that ‘Heroic’ Antarctic explorers left sea-ice clues“.Would they have said something so vague and un-sensationalist if the old logs had showed sea ice was declining? Hard to imagine that just being a “clue”. A couple of weeks ago the BBC were telling us that ice cores from Antarctica would help tell us about conditions on the whole planet. But this news about sea ice apparently has no global relevance, it’s is just a local issue and anyway the Arctic ice loss has been really bad.
“The study suggests that Antarctic sea-ice is much less sensitive to climate change than the Arctic, which has declined dramatically”
When the Antarctic Peninsula melts, it’s “unprecedented” and “in response to climate change”. When Antarctic sea ice stays, climate change is melting the Arctic.
On wikimedia there are a lot of pages from Scott’s journal.
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9.1 out of 10 based on 62 ratings
Victoria is driving down Blackout Drive. They have reports from South Australia up ahead, they know where the road goes, but the state is paying for the first class ticket on a trip to RiskyGrid.
Victoria has 5.7 million people, over three times bigger than South Australia. Right now SA relies on the Victorian grid stability to keep running, and gets up to 800MW of reliable electrons from the state-next-door. But Victoria wants to add more wind power — theoretically the equivalent of a big coal fired plant (like Hazelwood).
Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly looked closely at the numbers and patterns and see the writing on the wall. To help expensive, unreliable, intermittent green energy survive the government subsidizes it by around 9c per KWhr (bear in mind the wholesale rate for coal fired power is 3 – 4c per kWhr.) The government also demands retailers have a 12.5% mix of renewables, and that they accept most electrons from wind power whenever and wherever it is available. This strange anti-free market rule is called “nondispatchable” power, meaning the system can’t just throw it away if there is any demand at all. Whereas coal and gas are dispatchable, meaning they have to compete on price to meet what’s left of the shifting demand curve and if they produce more than what’s needed, that electricity gets… well thrown away.
The one thing we know for sure is that extra wind turbines in Victoria are not going to add stability — wind patterns across Australia flow East West, and with no mountain range to split the states, most days all the turbines are behaving similarly. There are already wind farms spread right across Victoria, so adding more is not going to stabilize or smooth out the volatility, it will amplify it.
Tom and Paul look closely and found that when averaged over a month there is a pattern to daily wind (despite the noise). I haven’t seen these graphs before (see figure 3, 4 and 5). Right now there is a point in the SA average day when windpower supplies 50% of the minimum daily load. In Victoria, right now it’s only 10%. But after Victoria adds 4000MW of wind the maximum wind farm output will be close to meeting all the states electricity needs during it’s lowest electricity point of the day (4am). During that time the retailers will be forced to accept the wind power, and any coal and gas power will have to be “spun off”, wasted. Gas turbines can adapt somewhat, but the 600 ton coal turbines spinning at 3000rpm are not going to stop easily. They disconnect from the “load” which means the turbines are easier to spin, and they do need less coal, but they are still burning some coal.
In September 2016, the gas capacity factor of Victoria was a dismal, devastating, tiny 1%, meaning that the gas stations could have produced 99 times more electricity
The cheapest form of electricity is most efficient when it just purrs along like a car in the country. It’s at 4am that coal is at it’s best — providing the super cheap, super reliable energy that keeps all the freezers at Coles running and the air in skyscraper’s circulating. Even while we sleep, modern economies are constantly demanding about 60% as much electricity as when it peaks which happens when everyone gets home from work and collectively turns on the oven, the kettle, the heater and takes a hot shower. You might think electricity use was 10% at 4am, but millions of machines in our modern economies hum through the darkness.
And the strange unfree market affect gas power too. The government is still forcing customers to buy the expensive wind-electrons at a higher price than gas fired ones. This will force out gas-fired plants as well. In September 2016, the gas capacity factor of Victoria was a dismal, devastating, tiny 1%, meaning that the gas stations could have produced 99 times more electricity. States with high wind content need to have a lot of infrastructure sitting around, ready to go, but mostly being underutilized. The Soviets were not this good at government driven inefficiency.
There are already plans in Victoria to close Hazelwood (a large old coal generator). After the extra wind is added, it makes it much harder for other coal fired stations to run economically, yet the state will need them more than ever to cope with the volatility of supply. They will have to draw more power from New South Wales — and the black coal generators there which are more expensive than the brown coal ones in Victoria. But all three states will have to deal with more volatility of supply. The system will have to handle 4000MW variations.
As more investors give up on cheap baseload generators, so will investors give up on manufacturing and production. The risk of blackouts and the high cost of electricity every single day makes “anywhere else” look appealling. How many jobs, how much income is Victoria throwing away in the quest to make storms nicer in 2100? — Jo
More renewables into the mix,
Is Victoria’s rash politics,
And will fail to be able,
To keep the grid stable,
Which their neighbours S.A. couldn’t fix.
— Ruairi
____________________________________
Will the lights go out in Victoria or just industry?
Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly
The government of Victoria has a target of 40 % renewable electricity by 2025. This would require the construction of new wind farms with a total capacity of some 7000 to 8000 MW. A more modest approach is taken here by analyzing the consequences of an extra 4000 MW of wind power and looking at what might happen following the example of South Australia.
There are two difficulties, intermittency and the same winds blowing across state borders causing correlated variations in the supply of wind power .
Victorian generators are presently supplying the balancing power to the South Australian electricity market with as much as 800 MW and in return very occasionally South Australian wind farms send their surplus back to Victoria. This can be seen in Figure 1 where the two interconnectors, Heywood and Murraylink, can be seen supplying power when there is little wind in South Australia.
 Figure 1: 30 minute supply from South Australian wind farms and two Victorian interconnectors, Heywood (600 MW) and Murraylink (200 MW), for part of September 2016. At times, usually in the early morning, wind power is sent into the Victorian electricity market (as shown by the negative-going excursions in the Heywood and Murraylink curves above). The same prevailing winds flow from SA to Victoria
There is a clear correlation of wind farm output between South Australia and Victoria. In statistical terms it is 40% and given the already wide geographical spread of the present wind farms in Victoria then building more there should not make a significant difference to this correlation.
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9.2 out of 10 based on 58 ratings
Trump is going to slash funds for NASA’s politicized climate program
In the last 20 years NASA has been turned from a space agency to one that ignores satellite data in favour of doing statistical tricks with badly placed ground thermometers and relies on Russia to do things in space.
Former NASA stars have been protesting for year at the dismal standards in NASA climate research. The same guys who walked on the moon, worked on the Apollo missions, and ran the shuttle program were fed up with NASA’s excellent brand name being exploited by junk scientists to do political promotions. Under Obama NASA was told to do three things –– inspire kids, help international relationships and help Muslim nations “feel good”. So much for space exploration and science.
Obama slashed former President George W. Bush’s Constellation program, designed to take humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars, by leaking information to the press and threatening to veto the projects. NASA astronauts now rely on Russia to reach space, and NASA has been forced by the Obama administration to delay the Mars mission until 2030.
 Apollo 11 Launch. Photo. 1969. That’s about to change:
Today the guy who Trump appointed to chair the NASA transition team said “there was no need for NASA to do what he has previously described as “politically correct environmental monitoring”.”He went on to say “We see Nasa in an exploration role, in deep space research,” and “Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission.”
Trump could slash the more than $2 billion NASA spends on its Earth Science Mission Directorate, which covers global warming science like improved climate modeling and weather prediction. Comparatively, NASA plans to spend roughly $2.8 billion on space exploration next year. NASA’s other functions, such as astrophysics and space technology, are currently only getting a mere $781.5 and $826.7 million, respectively.
— from the Daily Caller, “Trump Will Scrap NASA’s Global Warming Research”.
Don’t underestimate how important this is
NASA always should have been the first and foremost agency to remind everyone of how important solar and astronomical events were on our climate. NASA could have killed the green machine stone dead anytime in the last 20 years. Capturing NASA GISS was one of the most vital of PR tools for the regressive-progressives to damp down any suggestion that the Sun has a big influence on our climate. Look at the way Brian Cox used NASA’s good name to mock Malcolm Roberts on national television even though Cox was absurdly pretending that NASA always produces perfect graphs and never gets anything, ever wrong. NASA has a “God like” status, above question. Or it did. That’s over.
Can you imagine if the head of NASA had got out three of the guys who walked on the moon, Harrison Schmitt, Buzz Aldrin and Charles Duke and held a press conference saying that the links between the sun and our climate were recorded all over the planet. Imagine if NASA rolled out its prizewinning former employees John Christy and Roy Spencer to tell us how satellites showed the models were abject failures. If that had happened ten years ago, the world could have been saved billions (probably trillions) of dollars.
When Lewandowsky got headlines claiming that skeptics are moon landing deniers, NASA could have got headlines that skeptics have walked on the moon. In so many ways, NASA can neutralize bad science.
Trump, total skeptic, has “open mind” on climate, but open does not mean ignorant
24 hours is a long time in politics. So many commmentators still have no idea where Trump is coming from. A few fans of the man-made crisis got excited when Trump said “he has an open mind” on the Paris deal. (As if he would say his mind was closed.) But having an open mind is not an uninformed mind. He already knows enough to spot junk politicized “science” and shut it down. Hallelujah.
Some commentators thought for a moment that he was “softening his stance”: Donald Trump just backtracked on man-made climate change: ‘I think there is some connectivity‘. That was so yesterday. Today his skeptical hand stomped all over that bubble.
On climate Trump already knows too much to be fooled by “experts”
Trump knows engineers, he is even related to one. How deadly for the climate faith. He also knows the Climategate emails were “terrible”. There is no undoing that…
Transcript
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9.5 out of 10 based on 131 ratings
Lately the Five Star Free Market label is just a fake seal of approval for something Unfree
Just as carbon trading has nothing to do with a free market, so it is with monster free trade deals like the TPP. The free market meme won the intellectual debate of the 20th Century, but now its good name gets used and abused to sell the idea it defeated — bigger-government.
A real free market deal has only one page and a bunch of signatures. But it takes a lot of pages to list all the unfree parts and to spell it out in sub-sub-clauses that hurt or help thousands of businesses around the world. Who gets the sweetest deal out of the complexity — the card carrying networkers — those who schmooze up to the right minister or bureaucrat. The people who compete on price or quality alone would win in a real free market, and so would we as customers. Instead the document rewards the gatekeepers, the rulemakers, the industry with the best lobbyists and the monied set who can donate enough to the right causes to get a better deal.
Tipping the scales at 5,544 pages — and an astonishing 2,056,560 words — the trade agreement is one of the longest documents The Daily Caller has ever encountered. … The Bible: Authorized King James Version is 1,746 pages.
If it were printed Breitbart estimates it would weigh 100 pounds.
Monster Documents have to stop. The TPP is a hundred pound weapon. There is no single citizen in the West alive today that even knows what the law is that they are supposed to obey — they don’t know if they are breaking the law without paying a lawyer, and often the lawyers are just giving it their best damn guess anyway.
No Senator nor Member could read the document they vote on. Just say “No” to unreadable deals.
Every extra page is a win for the regulating class, the polaracites, the political freeloaders.
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9.7 out of 10 based on 94 ratings
The seismic shift continues.
In the new Trumpocene, executives have suddenly realized that there is whole other world out there. This is pretty big stuff. People in Manhattan are even thinking they might need to hire country folk, or, crikey, set up country offices. They are suggesting maybe Big Data from internet surveys is missing the point (and half the country), and wait for it… they may have to really talk to rural people, and (pause, because this is so profound) … face to face.
Even possibly in their homes.
Trump’s Win Has Ad Agencies Rethink How They Collect Data, Recruit staff
Wall Street Journal
“This election is a seminal moment for marketers” says Joe Tripodi, Subway sandwich chain.
Trump’s win spurs concerns that ad agencies are out of touch with consumers
In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, advertisers are reflecting on whether they are out of touch
with the same people who propelled the businessman into the White House.
By ALEXANDRA BRUELL and SUZANNE VRANICA
A few days after the Nov. 8 election, the chief executive of the ad agency giant McCann Worldgroup summoned top executives to discuss
what the company could learn from the surprising outcome. One takeaway for him and his staff was that too much advertising falsely
assumes that all U.S. consumers desire to be like coastal elites.
“Every so often you have to reset what is the aspirational goal the public has with regard to the products we sell,” said Harris Diamond,
McCann’s CEO. “So many marketing programs are oriented toward metro elite imagery.” Marketing needs to reflect less of New York and
Los Angeles culture, he said, and more of “Des Moines and Scranton.”
I predict the ABC in Australia will miss this seismic shift entirely, though they need it so desperately. A lot of the ABC problems would be solved if we booted them out of Ultimo in Sydney and asked them to live in Bourke, Mildura, or Wagga… you name it. Indeed, how about Orange (where the Nationals just lost a seat they’ve held forever to the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party, a result that zero ABC commentators predicted. The Trump effect has reached 16,000 kilometers across the ocean. It appears the electors have discovered they can vote in people who are not politicians.
Some marketers, concerned that data isn’t telling them everything they need to know, are considering increasing their use of personal
interviews in research. Meanwhile, some ad agencies are looking to hire more people from rural areas as they rethink the popular use of
aspirational messaging showcasing a ritzy life on the two metropolitan coasts. One company is also weighing whether to open more local
offices around the world, where the people who create ads are closer to the people who see them.
Read it all (though it may be behind the paywall) Wall Street Journal
h/t a friend in the Alps and David B.
The U.S. now needs to decide,
That the urban-rural divide,
Between city adorables,
And country deplorables,
Should end and be swept to one side.
— Ruairi
9.4 out of 10 based on 64 ratings
Here’s the washup on the end of yet another UN COP junket. Marrakech, struck by panic, ends with a whimper, did anyone notice?
“My only worry is the money.”
 Way back in that other era before the US election, delegates to the latest two-week-Olympic-junket with 200 nations in Morocco knew things could go badly. On November 4, Reuters said there was “…widespread unease”. But it wasn’t about the climate, it was “about finance …”
One delegate accidentally summed it up:
“My only worry is the money,” said Tosi Mpanu Mpanu of Democratic Republic of Congo, who heads a group of the 48 least developed nations. “It’s worrying when you know that Trump is a climate change sceptic,” he told Reuters.
Who cares about the weather, eh? The rest of the article is about the type of cash cows at stake.
Then the unthinkable happened: Trump. The panic began. Things were thrown into “disarray”. Everything was “imperiled”:
People were walking around looking pretty shellshocked,” says Dr Bill Hare, perched on a chair in the cavernous media tent at the United Nations climate talks in Morocco. “If you hugged an American there was a good chance they’d burst into tears.”
— An emotional ride, The Guardian.
Michael Kile documents some of the derailing of this gravy train:
“A third of the people here are walking around like zombies, like the walking dead, not sure what to do,” said UC Berkeley Professor Daniel Kammen, speaking from Morocco. Many believe the honeymoon is over.
In the end, there is nothing but spin, and all the momentum that $28 billion dollars a week can buy:
Each year $1.5 trillion dollars is spent on the green industry. That momentum means the Green scare machine will keep rolling for now, but it has taken a hit like no other. The Trump effect can’t be underestimated.
“Campaigners react with ‘extreme disappointment'”
‘This year’s inaction brings us one step closer to a future with a climate that is incompatible with dignified life’
Indignity, here we come.
In most media articles Paris is described as a “success”. Yet as far as the wind and oceans are concerned, the outcome in Marrakech is no different. Practically nothing.
Paris was always an enviro-fail, that achieved nothing much more than a non-binding, non-treaty, with voluntary commitments. (Although there was potentially a sting if the toothless wonder was tied to “other” legally binding deals like the TPP or domestic legislation). Paris was, however, a PR success, and Marrakech is not even that. They bluffed and puffed, and rushed to beat the Donald, but Paris “coming into force” means nothing except to the few rich silly patsy nations which are still volunteering to pay.
Even the kings of hype are struggling to make out that COP 22 was any kind of win
The pro-pro-crisis ClimateChangeNews site admit Trump owned the agenda.
It will go down in history as the Trump COP…
Wait for it: the big two successes…
Here are the top takeaways from two weeks of crunching over the nitty-gritty of how to put the Paris Agreement into practice.
Message to Trump
On the penultimate scheduled day, the conference adopted a call for all nations (yes, you too Donald) to honour promises made in Paris and renew their attempts to stave off disaster.
The one-page document contained little new information. But it was absolutely necessary, said observers, for the conference to make a political statement of resolve after the election of a climate sceptic to the US presidency.
Righto. Top takeaway looks pretty “big” then — a one page plea to play nice?
Then there are “Ratifications galore“:
Here’s one for lovers of palindromic numbers. During the conference, 11 governments ratified the Paris climate agreement – Australia, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Finland, Gambia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan and the UK. They brought the total for November to 22 and since the beginning of September a cavalcade of 88 nations have joined the party.
Remembering that “ratification” means countries agree to turn up and put in a plan and write a report. They will get the naughty finger waived if they do not live up to the promises they set themselves. It’s that serious. And of those 88 nations, they are probably including the USA. Which as we all know will likely chop up all of Obama’s empty promises.
This is as good it gets: RenewEconomy lay out the success in all its glory:
Marrakech COP22: Climate deal emerges stronger from Trump shock, but plenty to do
They find a fellow Green traveller to quote:
“This has been a remarkable meeting of nations. Countries, states, cities, companies and others have responded with grace, vigour and guts to the election of President Trump which could have been a massive blow to climate action,” said John Connor, CEO The Climate Institute from the talks in Marrakech.
And these meetings are remarkable (I went to Bali). They are a remarkable two week funded gala love in, with a few dinners and dances too. I’m sure lots of the dedicated scientists and NGO’s people there feel like they are working hard (and listening to boring speeches), but what other science stream, industry, anything, gets a two week overseas trip with friends every single year? Olympians have to work for four years, and have no guarantees of anything.
How many degrees of warming did they prevent and how many storms did they slow?
The outcome — plans, fantasies, proclamations, and promises to “do stuff” 30 years from now:
My favourite is number 2, where Germany, Canada, and the US will have cake, eat cake, give cake, all for free… and be “competitive”.
In the aftermath of the Trump election a range of commitments and actions were taken including:
- Australia, UK, Italy, Japan, Pakistan, Malaysia and others ratified the Paris Agreement;
- Germany, Canada and the U.S published their 2050 plans to reduce their economies to near net zero emissions, manage the transition, and maximise their competitiveness in a decarbonising world;
- A 2050 platform was launched for countries, cities and companies as part of an emerging inclusive UN architecture of accountability and assistance;
- The UK published proposals to phase out its coal-fired generators by 2025, Germany’s plans include reducing 2030 emissions from energy by 61 per cent and a commission to manage the transition;
- The Climate Vulnerable Forum, 48 countries representing 1 billion people, issued a Marrakesh Vision, a plan to achieve 100 per cent domestic renewable energy as well as update post 2020 commitments and prepare 2050 strategies;
- 196 countries supported the Marrakech Action Proclamation championing the Paris Agreement as well as highlighting the urgency of action;
- Almost 400 companies, joined separately by BHP, called on President Trump not to walk away from the Paris Agreement.
Most of all, they agreed to do it all again
The most important thing for the green machine is that there will be another couple of two-week gala events paid for mostly by taxpayers all around the world. These grand theatres are important rewards for volunteers, dutiful journalists, and scientists, and a good source of press releases. Not that any nation will reveal what their taxpayers have to stump up to make this happen. I did try. But the money drains from taxpayers, is split like the Amazon delta, and then funnels back in the to UNFCCC events from a thousand directions. It would take a PhD thesis to dissect all the grants, travel allowances and departmental donations. I once asked Christopher Monckton if he could pose a question in Parliament about the size of the UK’s budget for the IPCC, which he did, but the answer was that “it would cost too much to find out” or something similarly vague.
Image Credit: Original Photo Youxue Hong
9.7 out of 10 based on 88 ratings
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8.5 out of 10 based on 22 ratings
Peter Boyer seems to think Myron Ebell owes him an apology, but it’s the other way around. And Boyer ought say sorry to his readers.
“Science Communication” is a pretty dismal, immature profession. It’s so bad that an award-winning science communicator can talk about “blunt denial” even while denying basic tenets of logic and appearing to have done almost no research on the global warming debate. If he was ever taught the basics of reasoning, like “correlation is not causation” or “all models are wrong but some are useful,” he’s long forgotten them. What’s an Order of Australia worth these days? Apparently not much.
If he had the open mind he talks about, he might have bothered to read the skeptical sites before he wrote an article. We’d have provided all the evidence an open mind could need to know that Myron Ebell is right on the money. So here Peter, with all due respect, is the red pill — the stuff the UNSW profs of climate crisis won’t tell you even if you dared to ask them.
 Peter Boyer
Asked in 2012 what he would do if he found he was wrong about climate change, [Myron] Ebell said he would say sorry and try to undo policies he had supported. Since then we have had the two warmest years on record, with 2016 all but certain to be the third in a row.
Seriously, is that it? Two record El Nino years in 130 is “evidence” that something has warmed us in the last 130 years? But all forms of warming cause, er, warming. Two warm years tell us nothing about the cause. Keep an open mind — and think about the nearest monster nuclear reactor, eight minutes away as the photon flies, that is 300,000 times bigger than Earth. Did you know that all the government funded climate models assume that the solar magnetic field, the changing UV spectrum, cosmic rays, and the solar wind have zero effect on our climate, and definitely don’t change our cloud cover, yet solar activity was at a record high in the later half of the 20th century, and that it is a not a bad predictor of global temperature on Earth? Read here about the seven ways the sun could affect cloud cover on Earth. At least one climate modeler knows how to do proper Fourier transforms, create real models, and gross and obvious architecture errors. Not that he can get a government grant for that.
Moreover solar activity correlates with everything from jet streams in the Atlantic, to floods in Europe, groundwater recharge rates in China, Asian and Australian rainfall, wind and rain in Chile, etc. etc. etc.. Solar activity correlates with the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, but Co2 does not. Co2 has been essentially constant since the last ice age, ten thousand years ago, yet the world has warmed and cooled a couple of degrees several times since then.
But how can extra CO2 not make much difference?
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and it does absorb infra-red radiation. If Earth had no water, extra CO2 might warm us, but the heat trapped by CO2 likely just reroutes out through water vapor molecules. We are The Water Planet. The extra energy just finds another way to escape to space, probably through humidity in the upper troposphere. That’s why adding CO2 doesn’t matter — except to hungry people who like more food, and Greens who like more greenery.
We are carbon life forms, so what is not to like about carbon? Burn oil to feed the world, but don’t burn oil to make the planet warmer — it doesn’t work.
Not only is correlation not causation, but the correlation is lousy anyway
The rate of warming on Earth, according to climate guru Phil Jones in the UK East Anglia CRU, was just the same in the 1870s as it was at its peak in the last forty years. All that coal that was burnt after World War II and there is nothing to show for it. Thirty percent of all human emissions have had no effect at all on the climate. The warming started around 1700, and it has just kept going (see 120 proxies and 6,000 boreholes). CO2 is irrelevant.
 Hadley Global Temperature Graph with Phil Jones trends annotated on top.  Just another 20 warm peaks the current models can’t explain. Here’s just one study, of a thousand I could name: Rosenthal et al found that the waters around Indonesia were a bit warmer 1,000 years ago and an eye-popping two whole degrees warmer 8,000 years ago. Another group found it was also two degrees warmer near Peru. Somehow the Great Barrier Reef survived. We are panicking over the statistically insignificant ocean warming today of a whole fifth of a degree over fifty years, but all indications suggest it was just as warm 1000 years ago, and zero, none, not one of the fantastico Global Coupled Atmospheric and Oceanic Models can tell you why that was. Thirty billion dollars in climate research has given us International Grade Ignorance. Failure this complete in any modern science is a rare thing.
There has been 65 million years of climate variations and current expert models can’t explain 64,999,950 years of it (and I’m being generous about the last 50).
Skeptics won the science debate years ago:
Over those four years the science supporting a climate crisis has only strengthened, underlined in a research paper about unmitigated emissions — the scenario envisaged by Ebell and Trump — published the day after the election in the journal Science Advances.
The evidence in favour of skeptics was already definitive before 2012 and each year things get better for us. Skeptics won the science debate years ago, but no one seems to know that — thanks to lazy science writers with closed minds, and to gutless professors who won’t debate skeptics in public because they know what will happen. By 2003 the ice core data showed that CO2 levels lagged behind temperature by hundreds of years, and even climate scientists stopped arguing with that (they just started pretending it didn’t matter). By 2006 the top group in the the US climate science program published graphs [iii] showing that the main feedback in climate models — which has more effect that CO2 does in the climate models — was utterly completely wrong, and twenty eight million radiosondes showed that the central assumption about water vapor was a pathetically bad guess that washed out totally when tested: yellow is not red, there is no missing hot spot, and no amount of fidgideling the results, or faking the color scale on graphs would make it so. The only climate model that predicts the current warm period correctly with no hot spot uses solar factors to explain the Earth’s temperature, not CO2. Bummer eh? I have a tutorial for science writers about the ocean heat content here. I will bet you have never asked your favourite scientists those questions. If you would like some help with hot spot questions, just ask. I’m all yours.
 Yellow is not red. Observations don’t fit the predictions. Twenty eight million radiosondes disagree with twenty eight million climate models.
The US-German study found the impact of greenhouse gases on temperature grows as Earth’s surface warms. Its modelling showed “business as usual” emissions warming the planet between 4.78C and 7.36C — far above previous calculations of a 4.8C maximum.
So that model you cite is even more wrong than 98% of all the other models which predicted less warming and still failed the “pause” test. “Congrats”.
The “better” models Boyer doesn’t cite are still tragic failures: they not only fail on global scales, but on regional, local, short term[1] [2], polar[3], and upper tropospheric scales[4] [5]too. They fail on humidity[6], rainfall[7], drought[8] and they fail on clouds[9].
Give me five variables, one model and a million dollars, and I can predict any number from 10 down to 10 up. What would you like? Just don’t ask me about model validation (and definitely don’t ask the modelers at UNSW about it). Climate scientists stopped mentioning the word “validation” decades ago.
Do tell, is that evidence that matters or ideology?
None of the above matters to Ebell. It is not scientific evidence that moves him, but ideology. There has been no apology from him, but plenty of spin.
Exactly. Does any of the above matter to Peter Boyer? Is his view based on evidence or ideology?
 Yet Trump might not prove the ogre many of us envisage. His motivators are neither evidence nor ideology, but the art of the deal. We are used to thinking of pre-election statements as promises to be kept or broken, but Trump treats them as bargaining positions. Perhaps climate is another one.
Maybe all political establishments need a Trump shock now and again, as a reminder not to take power for granted. Maybe this political novice with a short attention span and a distrust of all things intellectual will prove an antidote to the toxic ideologies that have dogged us so long.
The reckless appointment of Ebell to the Trump team need not be the whole story.
Ebell could be the best thing to happen to environmental science in 50 years. As a skeptical scientist, I’m thrilled. Unskeptical scientists aren’t so happy, but who wants to be an Oxymoron for the Climate?
At least Boyer is right about Hillary’s best moment — this was it:
Hillary Clinton’s best moment was her election-night advice to keep an open mind on Trump, and that is what I intend to do. Because right now the alternative is too awful to contemplate.
Peter Boyer began his journalism career at the Mercury in the 1960s. In 2014 he was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for services to science communication.
Dear Peter, you’ve been in this game long enough to spot groupthink and government strangled science. Open your mind, and look at the evidence.
Science is in a rut, a hole, and being abused and exploited by a trillion dollar industry, and we need real science communicators to help shake it out. You will however, lose lots of friends with ideologues, not get any awards, face exile, namecalling, threats to be sacked, evicted, blackballed, terminated, punished, vilified and generally get bullied, not to mention government funded fun aimed at blowing up your kids (as a joke), as well as songs and plays about killing people like you, and in some cases, talk of a RICO investigation. So I’ll understand if you don’t want to play, but you don’t have to feed the fake crisis with unresearched pop psychology. Thanks.
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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