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
“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.
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 …”
“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.”
“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.
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.
‘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.
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:
“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.
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.
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.
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
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”.
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.
Click if you care. All 61 countries (write in the top three yourself.)
I know you’ve all been waiting for the Climate Performance Index of 2017. It’s hitting the headlines today as countries who are falling in the list get officially told off.
A group called CAN have ranked the world (well, 61 countries) according to how much carbon dioxide they emit, and how many degrees they will alter world temperature… sorry, scratch that… and how much they pander to the climate-religion. For a few moments I was proud that Australia ranked 57th out of 61. To reach the top of the malPerformance list (I’m aiming at number 61) Australia only has to outdo Korea, Kazakhstan, Japan and Saudi Arabia. We’re all in the officially “Very Poor” and most naughty bottom rank, along with the almost-as-naughty-Canada at 55th, and Russia, Iran, and Singapore.
At the other end of the scale, the top ranked country is France at number four.
Why “four” you ask? Because there is no one, two or three. Apparently, the top three countries are imaginary. This is so fitting:
* None of the countries achieved positions one to three. No country is doing enough to prevent dangerous climate change.
Righto. Lets call the winners: Atlantis, Pandora, and Neverland.
It’s hard to imagine the US is only down to 43rd, just “Poor” — even after the Trump effect.
The UK (what were you Brits thinking) ranks an abysmal sixth. Sorry about that.
I’d like to say that Australia scoring 57th was impressive so I could invert the whole list and call it the Climate Sanity Index, or Least Gullible Countries on Earth, but we all know it isn’t true — indeed the list appears pretty random. Despite Germans, Danes and Australians doing more to cripple their economies than anyone else I can think of, they scored 29th, 14th and 57th.
Consider Denmark, which broke the world record for the highest percentage of wind farm generation in 2015, (and the highest electricity charges) but can’t place better than 14th. Germany has 25,000 wind turbines and pays practically the second highest electricity charges but ranks 29th. Australia, the largest coal exporter in the world (or close) is crippling its own coal power stations and has run a whole state into blackness, but gets 57th. We live further from everywhere than anywhere, have the lowest population density, and bigger distances to cover, and virtually the highest population growth rate in the western world, but are still pretending we can cut our emissions by an obscene one quarter. We deserve a Golden Hairshirt Award. Instead, we’re scraping the barrel with Saudi Arabia? How many wind farms do they have, is it zero, or have they finished the first one yet?
*Oops on the Headline. We are not third from the top but fifth. Darn. Corrected. Sorry. I know people will be disappointed. – Jo
The BP Statistical Review 2016 revealed on Wednesday that Indonesia’s coal consumption had doubled since 2010. Last year, coal became the country’s dominant source of fuel, accounting for 41 percent of total energy consumption.
Studies show coal consumption remains popular in Indonesia despite its damaging environmental impacts. The government has committed to an ambitious 35,000 megawatt electricity program, in which coal-fueled power plants will still make up the majority of electricity generation, at around 50 percent.
As coal got cheap, Indonesia exported less and used more of it domestically.
Japan’s major conglomerate Itochu Corporation and one of world’s major electricity company, Electric Power Development Co. Ltd (J. Power), have promised to fully support the construction of the coal-fired Batang power plant in Central Java, which will become not only the most efficient but also cleanest thermal power plant in Southeast Asia.
He said that the Batang coal-fired power plant would be the showcase of the company’s latest power generation technology called the ultra-supercritical (USC) technology, which is not only able to improve efficiency but also significantly reduce emission, including carbon dioxide and mercury.
With the USC technology, the power plants operate their boilers at temperatures and pressure above the critical point of water, which results an efficiency of above 45 percent.
Indonesia’s coal fired electricity will be cleaner and more efficient than Australias. (No one is going to invest in better coal plants in an advanced economy like Australia.)
Who’s a quiet coal giant then? Australia provides about 30% of world coal trade, and it’s our largest export industry, but Indonesia digs up about the same amount of coal as Australia exported a few years ago:
Unhappy democrats have started a Twitter campaign and petition to change the election result on December 19th by convincing Republicans in the electoral college to vote for Hillary instead. I think the plan is to riot, throw a hissy fit, and hope everyone “comes to their senses”. Things are not just crazy in the US, in Australia, the media coverage of the US election has been so politically purified that five and six year old’s at a daycare centre were caught chanting death threats about Donald Trump and the after-school club has decided to do “art therapy” to help them cope.
Hillary Clinton was horrified that Donald Trump might not accept the election result. Now that her fans are rioting in the streets many people look forward to her telling them how much they are “denigrating democracy“. Right now there are really only two people who could stop most of the violence if they made an impassioned public plea for their fans to respect the democratic process, and rule of law. Where are their responses?
….
The popular vote was so popular it seems 3 million people from other countries voted too
The main (only) argument keeping the Clinton-camp’s hopes alive is that she won the popular vote by 600,000 votes. But a study by Greg Phillips of VoteFraud.org suggests as many as 3 million votes were cast by illegal immigrants. Who knows, Trump may have won the popular vote if there had been ID checks, something the Democrats do everything they can to stop. Indeed Obama even explained before the election that non-citizens should get out vote. Snopes has tried to claim this is false, but even their “in context” quote shows Obama was responding to a question about “undocumented citizens” and people at risk of being deported. There are apparently 4 million dead people on U.S. voter rolls, and the Democrats don’t want them to stop voting either.
The @realDonaldTrump tweeted “If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily”
Past presidents that won with lower percentages of the popular vote than Trump (47%) include Abraham Lincoln (39%), Woodrow Wilson (42%), and Bill Clinton (43%).
You may not have realized we have the right to a perfect climate. A bunch of kids age 8 to 19 have won the right to take the US government to trial for not protecting the atmosphere. It’s being called the “biggest case on the planet”.
“Right to a stable climate predates Constitution?” If only the auth ors of the Magna Carta could have prevented the Little Ice Age.
If only. In dismissing the dismissal the plaintiffs haven’t proven anything at all except that they have the right to waste a lot of time and money pursuing the idea that humans not only can control the climate, but they should’ve done so, at any cost, and that these children would be better off in a colder world with lower crop yields. I can see about twenty ways this case can die in a ditch. Bring on discovery.
How about the right to a stable economy?
Can our kids sue the government for flagrantly wasting funds borrowed from their future in a pointless quest to change the weather?
Plaintiffs allege defendants have known for more than fifty years that the carbon dioxide (“CO;’) produced by burning fossil fuels was destabilizing the climate system in a way that would “significantly endanger plaintiffs, with the damage persisting for millenia.”
In a letter to John Kerry on November 3rd, fourteen US senators explained that Obama’s commitment to the Paris deal is the legal equivalent of him giving a speech — the “lowest forms of commitment the United States can make…”. It’s worthless. The Senators explained that everyone knows the Paris deal was done to avoid going through Congress (it’s printed in The Guardian) because Congress would never approve it.
Obama said he had ratified the Paris agreement, but it was a bluff.
What one President can proclaim, the next can just as easily wipe out.
The US senators are warning Turnbull, Trudeau, May, Merkel, Hollande and everyone else, that the US is going to fall far short of its carbon commitment, and that the Paris deal is of “no consequence”:
Paris Agreement Parties relying on fulfillment of promised US climate actions should be fully aware that the administrations “commitment” is opposed by the majority of congress, it’s legal soundness is questioned by the US Supreme Court, and under the best of circumstances, the country will fall short of meeting the 26 – 28 percent reduction by a range of forty-five to sixty percent. Most importantly, any future administration will have numerous options to forego President Obama’s political commitments under the Paris Agreement and the fact that it will soon be in force is of no consequence.“
The US Congress, and Donald Trump, have made their position clear all along. Turnbull and Bishop didn’t have to do this. Who were they negotiating for? The Australian population voted twice against carbon schemes.
BREAKING:Massive magnitude 7.9 earthquake hits New Zealand tonight at midnight local time. 90km North of Christchurch. Thankfully, so far there are no reports of injuries or deaths. UPDATE: One Two deaths now reported. The quake was rated 7.4 initially but upgraded to 7.9 by Geoscience Australia. The small tsunami is expected to reach Australia around now (3 – 4am AEST). Many New Zealanders were evacuated and moved to higher ground for fear of the tsunami estimated at 2.5 – 5m. For more see NZ TV News and Twitter: #Earthquake. Maybe it’s connected to the full moon, maybe it isn’t. Best wishes to all our New Zealand readers.
UPDATE: Clarence River got blocked, a lake formed, and has breached due to the quake. There were possibly two simultaneous quakes at midnight last night. In 2010 the fault rupture was about 30km long. This time it was about four times as long (about 3:30ish on the video). There have been over 400 aftershocks small earthquakes. h/t Tom.
UPDATE: NZ Geo’s say the big quake was 7.5. They are clocking up the aftershocks by the minute here! Two near 6.0 in the last five minutes. The islands are shaking. h/t to Rereke.
_______________________
Supermoon Monday
Monday night the moon will rise about 2 hours after it is at the closest point in its loopy orbit (for Australians). Officially it’s called a perigee moon.
ABC – The event, known as the supermoon, occurs when a full or new moon passes closer to Earth in its monthly orbit.
The coincidence will take place three times in 2016 — October 16, November 14 and December 14.
But the November supermoon is special because it will be “the closest full moon to date in the 21st century”, according to NASA.
It will become full just two hours after its closest approach to Earth, arguably making it an “extra-super Moon”.
It is not expected to appear again until November 25, 2034.
Photo: taken tonight from a handheld click-n-shoot camera by me (Canon SX50). It’s not even an SLR. Remarkable technology that lets us see things with a click that the worlds best thinkers could only dream of a few hundred years ago.
Is the quake in NZ connected to (or exacerbated by) the moon?
Ide et al (2016) suggests it might be:
“In particular, a clear causal relationship between small earthquakes and the phase of tidal stress is elusive. However, tectonic tremors deep within subduction zones are highly sensitive to tidal stress levels, with tremor rate increasing at an exponential rate with rising tidal stress.
… This suggests that the probability of a tiny rock failure expanding to a gigantic rupture increases with increasing tidal stress levels. We conclude that large earthquakes are more probable during periods of high tidal stress.”
Drew Creighton at the Sydney Morning Herald gets excited: Climate Change affects all levels of life. (By crikey, the banality! It would be legendary if a scientist found one form of life on Earth that wasn’t “affected” by temperature, clouds, frost, ice, storms or rain. How low is this bar?)
First a Prof somewhere notices fish are getting smaller:
Professor John Pandolfi of the ARC Centre of Excellence Coral Reef Studies said while the study encompassed all ecosystems, his particular interest was the sea.
But which fish are shrinking exactly — “commercial fish” — could be a clue?
“We’re seeing decreased yields in fisheries, for example in the North Sea commercial fish have undergone reductions in body size, all of them, simultaneously.”
So how do we know this shrinkage is not due to bigger boats and the increased fish-and-chips factor?
He said the study factored in over-fishing and fisheries induced evolution and separated the two results. “This in in response to ocean warming over the last forty years.”
Well that’s alright then. It must be a pretty hot fisheries model to separate the the multifactorial uncontrolled nightmare of predator-prey changes and temperature shifts too-small-to-measure, spread over decades in an ocean where hot and cold water swirls in eddies right next to each other.
How much warming does it take to shrink fish?
The story mentions “one degree of warming since the industrial revolution.” But that’s air temperature, and fish don’t fly much. Creighton doesn’t tell poor SMH readers how much the water itself warmed. Globally we’re talking about a fifth of a degree C over 40 years (plus or minus 0.5C). We can’t even measure something that small with the equipment we use now, let alone the buckets of 40 years ago.
As far as the North Sea itself goes, see the image above, right. There is a six degree normal variation across the surface of the North Sea but panic now, because fish are shrinking due to water warming at two to five hundredths of a degree per year. (A trend estimated by the European Environmental agency).
The miracle is that life on Earth survived meteor strikes, super volcanoes, continental shifts and lived for hundreds of millions of years, but if the oceans warm 0.2 degrees Celsius “commercial” fish can’t adapt.
Apparently 100% confidence in unverified models is a broad view:
Is there anyone online that hasn’t seen angry Democrats rioting, and beating up voters who made the “wrong” choice? In the land of meaningless slogans, this must be what happens when Love Trumps Hate. Presumably they are teaching Hitler’s disciples a lesson. As Mark Steyn says, every Republican candidate is called Hitler, and when everyone’s Hitler, nobody’s Hitler.
Around the world many people remain baffled as to how 60 million US citizens could vote for the sexist, racist, trash talking Trump. In one survey only 4% of Germans said they would vote for him. Here in Australia I don’t know the numbers, but The Flummoxed are everywhere. Thank the media for the one-dimensional caricature they sell.
Things are so bad here that The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) put out a story saying there were “reports from Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday evening” with crowds of thousands chanting: “We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back”. Michael Smith found a tweet pointing out that their entire source for this was a guy who runs a known parody account on Twitter @sRowntreeNews. Smith clocked up the screenshot, sure that the newspaper would correct their inflammatory uber embarassing mistake in minutes. But hours ticked by with nothing. Tonight, long after Smith did the last update on his site, apparently the SMH page has gone 404. Is that it? Will the SMH let their readers know, or leave the entirely false impression out there to fester in the minds of people looking for an excuse to get violent?
Here’s a view of Trump and blacks you won’t see on the ABC / BBC / CNN
These video shorts, give us some idea of how different the story could look if 96% of media donations were going to the Trump campaign. Granted, all these videos star people employed by Trump, so run that through your mental filter as you watch. Bias, bias, bias. But the narrative they create is a parallel universe to the one running in the mainstream press. These adverts (I assume they are ads) are great examples of the power of editing…
It follows that if the media had higher standards, we’d get better politicians. The media IS the problem.
We can’t force the media to do the right thing, but we can make sure people are aware of the bias. We can teach our children to seek out both sides of every story.
William Campudoni’s story about how Trump hired him off the street, gave him suits and said “welcome to the family”.
“The film was made by political filmmaker Lucas Baiano without the backing of any political action committee or major donors because he felt like the story needed to be told.”
The divisive people are the ones dividing by race.
Brunell Donald-Kyei, is vice-chair of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump. Probably Australians would have never seen anything like her on any of our “national talk programs”.
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Trump the sexist-racist hires non-white woman as executive.
She seems pretty happy about it.
How to dehypnotise a nation?
Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, writes about De-Hitlerization and also has suggestions on on ways to dehypnotize. Sounds like some fun party tricks, though Adams is not suggesting you wear Trump T-shirts and try these out in dangerous neighborhoods.
Finally, a leader says No to refueling the Global Green Gravy Train. It will still take years to slow and unpack, because it is a pagan religion and a 1.5 Trillion Dollar industrial freight machine. But yesterday the gargantuan train split at a junction and the people stuck on Big-Green roller will be able to watch the other train take off as it dumps the dead-weight carbon truck with square wheels.
As Marc Morano says: “Trump is right on climate science and Trump rightly scares the hell out of the warmists.”
No wonder they are in tears. The two main weapons of carbon-believers are the free money from government treasure chests, and coercion through namecalling. Trump has control of the biggest treasure chest in the world and isn’t afraid of being called names.
“Ebell, the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a prominent climate-change skeptic, was chosen at the end of September to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s transition team…” — Newsweek
Ebell is a complete skeptic. I’ve met him at Heartland Climate Change conferences and he’s a good man. A great choice.
In May Trump offered up the Skeptics Christmas Wish List:
1) Trump pledged to rip up Paris climate agreement in energy speech –
2) Trump railed against “draconian climate rules” –
3) and withdraw any funding for United Nations programs related to global warming.
Has anyone in politics ever laid it out so bare? Read the last three promises written under “Seven actions to protect American Workers”:
★ FIFTH, I will lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal.
★ SIXTH, lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward.
★ SEVENTH, cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure.
In the long run, the movement will never completely go away, the religion will transmogrify. The freeloaders will find other ways to enrich themselves off the public purse and people who are not-too-good-with-numbers will seek alternatives to feel useful, and assuage their guilt for living in the best countries on Earth.
But yesterday honest hardworking people had a win. Rejoice, they are rare. Democracy is not dead.
POST NOTE: to clarify a point discussed in comments with RAH and Peter:
Is this the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?
IMHO Peak frenzy was circa 2007, and the end of the beginning was Dec 2009 with Climategate and Copenhagen. Seven years later, this is the largest hurdle the climate movement has faced.
PS: Climate-frenzy (definition): money x “worry”. See opinion polls
Bigger than Brexit: This is a win for workers and the middle class.
It’s a major loss for the old media and political correctness. Corruption finally gets pegged back.
Trump beat both political parties, almost every government organisation, Wall Street, and media outlets. — Jo
UPDATE: Listening to the ABC, commentators are talking about the fear of a Trump victory. But the only people who ought to be afraid are the corrupt, the freeloaders and the illegal immigrants. People phoning in were talking about the grassroots movement of those who are fed up with the establishment. The ABC academic, given the last word, replied that this wasn’t a real grassroots movement –“that narrative is false” — because “political parties have been trying to seed doubts about institutions for years”. Sure thing. Which political party supported Trump?
The Trump victory is a win for democracy. This is as grassroots as it gets. Without the internet and a passionate crowd of people on the street how could Trump have defeated the non-stop demonization from the media?
Podesta just spoke to Hillary Campaign “Victory” Party – “Hillary will be back, let’s get these votes counted and bring this home!”
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3pm AEST: Things are shifting fast. In the last hour it appears the markets and now news commentators are suddenly realizing a Trump presidency is likely. NY Times commentators are starting to discuss how the modeling by the Clinton team must have been “way off” and there seem to be signs of the “hidden vote” that Trumps team were mocked for discussing.
NYTimes predicts Trump likely to take the Presidency AND the Senate and House
Note that the Florida margin is only +1% to Trump. Things could still change. (UPDATE: But 98% of the vote is counted. )
The Wall Street Journal reports that stock markets are falling and currencies shifting as a Trump win becomes more likely. With about a quarter of the US GDP tied up in the government, many businesses are aligned with government agencies, grants, and policies. Trump represents a threat to that gravy train.
Big bankers are helping to save the poor from nasty storms. Sure…
In the climate debate, not much is bigger than this US election. If Clinton wins, it’s more of the same tax-funded gravy train supporting a trillion dollar industry that aims to change the weather and hold back the tide in a hundred years with special electrons from windmills and solar panels. Historians will giggle and mock us for falling into the grip of the pagan religion that sapped so much of our productive blood, sweat and tears.
Trump is promising to turn off that tap, though this “nuclear-wipe-out-option” (which is common sense) is barely even noticed about the furious noise of this election. Clinton wont mention it because she knows most voters would like the climate swamp drained too. But the effect could mark the beginning of the end for this particular shade of taxpayer-parasite. The effect on the EU voters of watching Trump pull back and demolish the industry would be electric and infectious as industry, money and jobs fled the EU to the US. Even if Trump doesn’t win, he’s changed politics and made it so much easier for other candidates to stand up and say the bleeding obvious. The emperor is naked.
Spot the virtue signalling conflict
Curiously Trump wants to use the climate funds to help black Americans instead. Strangely the social-justice-eco-worriers are not leaping at this opportunity to show how culturally concerned they are. I mean, renewables is pretty much an old white guy industry, pushed and pumped by large financial houses and corporates like Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Royal Dutch Shell, GE, Panasonic, and large multinational groups. Most renewables are completely dependent on taxpayers, or the investors run away. Money is sucked from people of all colors through tax and electricity bills to feed non-profitable, uncompetitive corporates and a massive bureaucracy. Where are the protests as the money is drained from the poor and fed to largely rich whites?
Poor Joe Romm, it’s doing his head in. Unfunding the climate apostles is unthinkable:
He’d end all research on solar, wind, efficiency, batteries, clean cars, and climate science, too.
Romm clearly doesn’t think this is really going to happen or he would be apoplectic. Instead he analyzes the claims as if it’s just another unfunded, badly thought out bubble. After machinations over many paragraphs, he discovers that there really is spending close to $100 billion over 8 years that Trump could axe.
Malcolm Roberts, Tim Ball and Tony Heller held a press conference to release Roberts 42-page reply to the CSIRO. [OR download the PDF here]. Essentially, despite us spending billions of dollars to reduce CO2 in the hope we change the weather, the CSIRO can only provide irrelevant and weak evidence, and nothing that demonstrates consistent cause and effect. CSIRO can provide nothing to show that they are not just exploiting natural climate cycles for political purposes. (See here, models based on solar factors predict temperature changes very well and most turning points. Solar models explains the missing hot spot, solves many other problems, something that none of the major GCM’s can do.)
“The onus is on CSIRO to prove its climate advice and claim.”
A new graph of Law Dome temperatures in the last 2000 years shows there is nothing unusual about current climate changes (just like almost every other long proxy also does which we’ve all seen 20 times before).
No need to panic about the penguins.
Law Dome Antarctica compared to Hadley Met centre (Click to enlarge with sources)
An independent inquiry should be held into the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, which have been unable to provide empirical evidence linking human activity to climate change, One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts says.
Senator Roberts has rejected CSIRO assurances on climate science and called for a due diligence audit of the organisation’s research and methods. — Graham Lloyd
Jo would add that the independent inquiry must be staffed with scientists from other fields of science — ones which have a record of making predictions which are useful. Let’s get some brains who know physics, maths and engineering. Unlike climate models that don’t work, real scientists and engineers research and design bridges that stand up, planes that fly, and mobile phones that let two people talk on opposite sides of the world. If these people aren’t convinced by the CSIRO explanations (and they aren’t) it’s not because they are dumb, but because CSIRO is hasn’t got the goods.
..
Other newspaper journalists struggled to remember what the topic was
Strangely, despite the evidence being “so overwhelming”, not one newspaper even tries to discuss it. The best Sydney Morning Herald science reporting by Amy Remeikis includes the bizarre climate-science terms: “conspiracy”, “Jew”, and “birther”. Do Jew’s change the weather, or is Remekis just trying a pathetic attempt at character assassination?
Roberts knows that “conspiracy theorist” is the wordsmith-weapon used by those without any evidence. Science-by-denigration won’t save the climate.
Malcolm summarizes the flaws:
PROBLEMS WITH CSIRO’S METHODOLOGY page 30
[The CSIRO]:
Relied on varied, arbitrary and inconsistent time periods and scales;
Used periods of varied duration yet ignored earth’s history;
Showed poor understanding of variation, especially cyclical variation and inexplicably it assumed linear trends for part of data sets;
Used assumptions based on a presumption that we will see significant impact within a lifetime;
Grossly misled in not showing the entire temperature data set from 1860;
Excluded reliable data showing Australia was warmer in the 1880’s and 1890’s and excluded periods that were wetter and with more floods and excluded Australia’s most severe drought.
When questioned about using land-based temperatures from before 1910 despite admitting they were from just a few ships. When questioned about using land-based temperatures only from 1910 onwards CSIRO said that it
omits land-based temperatures before 1910 because they are unreliable, yet CSIRO uses sea-surface.
CSIRO’s graph presented mean temperatures. That shows warming. Yet temperature maximums are
generally considered a better measure of regional temperature variability and shows much less
warming. That reduces the trend to 0.4ºC per century. Further, CSIRO did not mention the included
urban heat island effect.
UPDATE: In a feat of public service the FBI conclusively reviewed 650,000 emails in 9 days and clears Clinton, and say they repeat their July determination which found that she was “extremely careless” with “highly classified information” and will not be charged. The Clinton’s made $57 million while Hillary was Secretary of State. Over half the people who met with Clinton paid money to the Clinton Foundation as well which has received over $2 billion in donations in total. Despite these obvious possible conflicts of interest, she used insecure private computers to email foreign leaders and companies that she arranged deals with on behalf of the USA, then destroyed 33,000 emails with Bleachbit after they were subpoenaed. The FBI is not confident there was intent to obstruct justice.
The completely unconfirmed but very interesting scuttlebutt is that the emails are staggeringly incriminating and the FBI re-investigation is being driven by whistleblowers within the US — specifically at the NYPD.
As I said before, books will be written about this week. Great movie plot.
Here’s a man speaking below called Steve Pieczenik, who talks of a coup and a counter coup going on in the US at the moment (“coup” meaning a play for power and control which is peaceful at present). He’s a former deputy assistant secretary of state. None of this is confirmed, and some of the claims coming about about the Weiner cache are the most radioactive hairy stuff, which I won’t repeat here. See the Breitbart article. “NYPD Ready to Make Arrests in Anthony Weiner Case”. There were 15,000 comments under it last time I looked, but no other outlets are picking up the story.
Allegedly the NYPD got Weiner’s laptop first, and it was they who pushed the FBI to go public “or else.” Blackwater founder and former Navy SEAL Erik Prince told Breitbart that he has a source in the NYPD, who claims they found “damning information” and if ” Hillary Clinton is elected president, we will have a constitutional crisis that we have not seen since, I believe, 1860.” The Dept of Justice is allegedly pushing back fiercely to stop the NYPD going public.
If the Clintons have been very naughty we would expect some of the patriots in the FBI and groups like the NYPD to be outraged and motivated to expose that — they risk their lives for their country and fellow citizens. That doesn’t mean the claims are true… but if the emails are incriminating, and players within both the NYPD and the FBI have copies it will be impossible to put this genie back in the bottle.
And we thought this election could not get any hotter.
Who is Pieczenik?
From Wikipedia on Steve R. Pieczenik, MD, PhD. He is an American psychiatrist and former United States Department of State official. He comes with Harvard training and an MIT doctorate in international relations. Apparently his specialty at one time was hostage negotiations. A slice of his Wikipedia entry suggests he really might be very well connected to the insiders at the FBI. He speaks Russian, Spanish and French, apparently knows Assad, and has treated CIA employees.
“Pieczenik was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and James Baker. His expertise includes foreign policy, international crisis management and psychological warfare. He served the presidential administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the capacity of deputy assistant secretary.“
h/t pickabelief , real universe, Gail Combs, dinn.
McIntyre has looked closely at the legality of deleted emails with regard to Steyn and Mann. So he was already well prepped. He remarks on an interesting case where the law was interpreted very strictly, and the DOJ attorney was none other than James Comey who is now the FBI head. The case was U.S. v Quattrone (which McIntyre discussed in detail here). He notes that in that case Quattrone sent a fairly tame email which the legal department advised against the very next day. No emails were deleted, yet Quattrone was charged with obstruction of justice, and after some years “an appeal court ruled that a trier of fact could have concluded that Quattrone acted with a “corrupt intent”. McIntyre notes that “the DOJ attorney who had found corrupt intent in Quattrone’s actions was James Comey, the present director of the FBI.”
McIntyre also comments on the way these emails may have ended up on Weiner’s laptop:
Information on the provenance of these emails is thus far sketchy, but the following seems plausible:
A source close to Anthony Weiner’s legal team tells Bret Baier that it seems the laptop containing those emails was used to backup his estranged wife’s Smartphone contacts. In the process, the computer apparently backed up all of the emails as well.
There has been speculation that they might include 32K Hillary emails that had been deleted. However, it seems to me that it is far more plausible that they will turn out to include (or even be) the Huma emails from clintonemail.com, accidentally backed up prior to their deletion from the Clinton server in March 2015…
I note JeffID at the AirVent is also writing on the US election dramas too. Skeptics don’t like corruption…
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BREAKING: UNEXPLAINED: CNN even seem impressed with Trump: Trump rushed off stage by body guards due to possible gun threat in the audience. Returned soon after to continue the speech. Man in custody. CNN approve? h/t AndyG
1. Trump delivers his lines perfectly, like an experienced actor. We haven’t heard him like this before. You probably didn’t think he had this in him. He stays calm and assured, but not cocky. That is an effective counter-framing to Clinton’s framing of Trump as an unpredictable madman. Here Trump comes off as perfectly reasonable and deeply empathetic.
2. The timing is perfect. This race went so low that even the trolls were starting to gasp for oxygen. Trump made us wait for relief – Hollywood style. He made us crave civility and sanity. And just when we thought it was out of reach, he goes ultra-positive.
But here’s the best part. Clinton has no good options to counter this message.
My analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he has had every establishment off his side. Trump does not have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment. Banks, intelligence, arms companies, foreign money, etc. are all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well. Media owners, and the journalists themselves.
The establishment players have trillions of dollars staked on the election, and 3 decades of schmoozing. Trump threatens all that. Can the people beat the corruption?
Think about what else we have now — a press corps that colludes with a campaign, allowing figures in the Clinton campaign to edit what they publish. Television reporters who send the questions apt to be asked at the presidential debates to one campaign. A media that is totally in the tank for one party, downplaying or suppressing news that might make trouble for that party, inventing false stories about the candidates nominated by the other party, managing the news, manipulating the public, promoting in the party not favored the nomination of a clown, protecting the utterly corrupt nominee of the other party from scrutiny.
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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 …”
Peter Boyer
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