Bank of America Pledges $50 Billion to Combat Climate Change
The unholy alliance between bankers and government is on naked display.
It’s the black hole in the kitchen: huge, obvious, and silent. And boy does it suck. As Climate Depot points out, Bank of America got a $45 billion bailout from the government during the global financial crisis. Now it’s promising $50 billion to “address Climate Change”. How Green is your Bankster?
It’s a feeding frenzy:
The bank’s new initiative includes lending, equipment finance, capital markets and advisory activity and carbon finance, as well as advice and investment help.
Bank of America will focus on promoting energy efficiency; renewable energy, including wind, solar and hydropower; lower-carbon transportation like electric and hybrid vehicles; and water and waste treatment and disposal initiatives. [Capitalgr]
They already spend nearly $20bn on climate and did it four years ahead of schedule. So why not $5obn?
The company has spent $17.9 billion toward its initial pledge, including $8.4 billion for energy efficiency activities, including low-cost loans and grants for retrofitting low-income neighborhoods for energy efficiency. It spent $5 billon on renewable energy projects, including helping the San Jose Unified School District in California to run on solar energy. An additional $1 billion went to consumer financing of hybrid vehicles. [WSJ]
A billion here, a billion there, and soon they’ll be talking real money.
Marc Morano asks “is that more than Heartland spends?” / sarc
Well Marc, says Jo, don’t forget it is spread over 10 years. 😉 It’s only a thousand times the Heartland budget. Expect the guys at DeSmog to immediately set up a Bank-of-America-Secrets site to protest at the evil influence large corporates have over democracy. SourceWatch will graphically connect Bank of America to scientists, solar companies, wind investors, Green Foundations, donors to the Democrats and on and on into one spaghetti bunker of vested interests. We look forward to it.
Any day now, the innumerate chanters of the “Big-Oil Funded Deniers” cult will learn to count past 10, and realize that they’ve been the useful idiots for the Money Masters. And pigs will fly (collect their dividends and end-of-year bonuses).
In an extremely worrying development, we can add Nick Drapela’s name to the list of skeptics fired for the heresy of speaking out. This email from Gordon Fulks came around today, and I want to spread the message. I have written before about the scientist of upstanding integrity and action that is Art Robinson — When he ran for Congress, three of his children doing PhD’s were targeted at OSU. The details of Joshua, Bethany and Matthews work are described on the Oregon State Outrage blog. These exemplary students were close to finishing their work towards PhD degrees in nuclear engineering when all three suddenly faced major obstacles and the likelihood of losing all their work to date. (See the Outrage blog for updates).
But the outrageous behaviour continues. Legal action may not be the answer (In Robinson’s case the Uni apparently wants them to sue, so it will be obliged to have “no comment” while OSU would get taxpayer funds to extend the case at length.) What we need is facebook, twitter, letters and emails – a campaign to let the State of Oregon (and especially university donors) know their university has regressed to a feudal religious institute — Jo
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Gordon Fulks writes:
Hello Everyone,
In theory at least Oregon State University (OSU) seems to be a bastion of academic freedom, diversity, and tolerance. A wide range of ideas are openly discussed. The most viable rise to the top and the least viable fade away. But it is all a fairy tale, because OSU operates under a politically correct regimen that dictates what is acceptable to say and what is not. Transgressors who dare to be different are eventually weeded out so that the campus maintains its ideological purity.
OSU is not yet as swift or efficient as the Soviet system when Joseph Stalin was trying to quash dissent among biologists who refused to go along with Trofim Lysenko. If warnings to compromise their integrity were not followed, Stalin simply had biologists shot. That quickly thinned the ranks of all biologists and persuaded the remaining ones to comply with Stalin’s wishes. Of course, it also destroyed Soviet biology, because Lysenko was pedaling nonsense. And Russian biology has never recovered.
We learned over the weekend that chemist Nickolas Drapela, PhD has been summarily fired from his position as a “Senior Instructor” in the Department of Chemistry. The department chairman Richard Carter told him that he was fired but would not provide any reason. Subsequent attempts to extract a reason from the OSU administration have been stonewalled. Drapela appears to have been highly competent and well-liked by his students. Some have even taken up the fight to have him reinstated.
What could possibly have provoked the OSU administration to take precipitous action against one of their academics who has been on their staff for ten years, just bought a house in Corvallis, and has four young children (one with severe medical problems)? Dr. Drapela is an outspoken critic of the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, the official religion of the State of Oregon, the Oregon Democratic Party, and Governor John Kitzhaber.
“Agenda 21″ sounds like a daft-but-harmless-idea you can ignore. I found it hard to get enthused, but I was wrong, and no one sums this up better than James Delingpole in “Watermelons” (aka “Killing the Earth to Save it). To paraphrase James’s brilliant work (forgive me James) from page 190:
Some of you still aren’t convinced that you need to worry about Agenda 21 because you are thinking:
a) Agenda 21 sounds way too much like Area 51, (you know Aliens and the Roswell incident). Nut job stuff.
b) It was signed in 1992. If it was that bad, we’d have heard by now. Surely?
c) What sovereign nation would be so insane as to sign itself up for a binding treaty?
James explains that it’s real, it’s important (like an anti-magna-carta), and its’ a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Governments could sign up because it was “voluntary”, but then those voluntary rules are scrupulously and doggedly enforced by the “labyrinthine, democratically unaccountable behemoth that is the United Nations.”
Furthermore, he points out that it’s not like they’ve bothered to hide their aims — they want to control your resources, your money, your actions and every decision you want to make:
“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”— excerpt from The UN, Agenda 21*
Agenda 21 is very much about property rights (ie. their right to your property). Justice Gilpin-Green quotes Agenda 21:
“Land…cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market,” Agenda 21 says. “Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes. The provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only be achieved if land is used in the interest of the society as a whole.”**
Agenda 21 is so non-threatening, voluntary, and out of date, that Alabama has just written legislation specifically designed to stop it. The legislation has passed. It protects property rights against anything linked to Agenda 21, and also stops the state sending or receiving money to Agenda 21 NGO’s or GONGO’s.
Who knew that Alabama needed legislation to stop private property from being confiscated without due process?
Agenda 21 also appears in other forms like, ICLEI, or the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives. Gilpin-Green says “When countries like the United States fail to adopt the environmentalist agenda promoted by the United Nations, that organization manages to bypass them by providing various incentives to state, county, and municipal organizations.” Apparently some towns get funding from the UN and display their cheques proudly. How does that work — taxpayers pay money to a government, which gives it to a foreign unelected body, which then pays their local council in order to gain influence? So much for your votes. When the chain of voting-to-power becomes so long and distant, it’s a case of your money, used against you.
The paper might have been scientifically invalid, but it was a box-office success.
The headlines were everywhere
“1000 years of climate data confirms Australia’s warming”said the press release from University of Melbourne. It was picked up by The Guardian: “Australasia has hottest 60 years in a millennium, scientists find”; The Age and The Australian led with “Warming since 1950 ‘unprecedented’. The story was on ABC 24 and ABC news where Gergis proclaimed:” there are no other warm periods in the last 1000 years that match the warming experienced in Australasia since 1950.” It was all over the ABC including ABC Radio National, and they were “95% certain“! On ABC AM, “the last five decades years in Australia have been the warmest. ” Plus there were pages in Science Alert,Campus DailyEco news, The Conversation, Real Climate* and Think Progress.
Blog review is where the real science gets tested
Skeptics have been looking through the paper, and three weeks after it was published a team at Climate Audit (kudos to Jean S and Nick Stokes) uncovered a problem so significant that the authors announced that this paper is “on hold”. It has been withdrawn from the American Meteorological Society website.Bishop Hill has probably the best summary of what this means, and how it unfolded.
When Steve McIntyre asked for the full data, she refused. Gergis has an activist past which she has recently tried to hide. She was proud to mention in her biography that her data has been requested from 16 nations: So requests from Tunisia, Cuba, and Brazil are OK; but Canada — not so much. Apparently she didn’t appreciate his expertise with statistics and told him to get the data himself from the original authors, and added ” This is commonly referred to as ‘research’. We will not be entertaining any further correspondence on the matter. “
Will any of these media outlets update their news?
On AM, David Karoly raved about how the study was strong because it relied more on observations not modeling (it is getting to them that skeptics keep pointing out they have no empirical evidence), and claimed he had “high confidence” in the results. (Is that the same kind of high confidence he has in future predictions of warming?)
MATTHEW CARNEY: Professor Karoly says the strength of the study is that it’s relied more on direct observations and measurements than climate modelling.
DAVID KAROLY: Nothing is absolutely certain in science but we say with very high confidence because we have repeated the analysis alone for the uncertainties that the warming in the last 50 years is very unusual and cannot, very likely cannot be explained by natural climate variability alone.
How concerned are they with accuracy? Are all these media outlets happy to leave their readers or viewers with the impression that these results are robust, reliable, and strong? In truth, even before this paper was withdrawn, before it was promoted, investigative reporters had plenty to wonder about.
Did any journalist really ask any hard questions to start with?
Let’s not bother to get into the point that the results of crunching the data 3000 different ways means their “confidence” came from models, not from the 27 proxies, most of which didn’t cover the full 1000 years, or the Australian mainland either.
The litany, the message went on and on and on in the media and apart from Adam Morton in The Age, most investigative journalists never thought to ask the question “How much warmer are we now than 1000 years ago” because if they had, Gergis would have had to say “by a tenth of a degree”. (That much eh?) Technically it was 0.09C.
The certainty of Australia being 0.09 of a degree cooler 1000 years ago comes down to observations from a batch of trees in Tasmania and New Zealand. (If we can calculate the regional temperature so accurately that way, why do we bother with a network of 100 thermometers? We could pop a max-min gauge next to those trees and “interpolate” the rest, No?)
This is one of the star case-studies of the noxious cost of big-government. A pernicious soul-destroying wrecker of livelihoods. This tyranny in action.
Matt and Janet are skeptics who ran a Beef Feedlot from Narrogin, Western Australia (2 hours SE of Perth). When they spoke out against climate change policies, onerous license changes were added that drove them to bankruptcy. Readers here and at Watts Up raised over $30,000 dollars as they faced eviction in Sept 2010. (It was the first time skeptics around the world had been asked to help a cause like this, and the response was so overwhelming that Paypal still can’t list all the donations we received on Sept 18th, 2010. It breaks their site).
The Thompsons write today with an update: they’ve decided it’s unfeasible to try to run their business under these conditions and with the new carbon tax in Australia, and due to family reasons they’ve reluctantly left Australia, moved back to the USA with their four children (bad for Australia, but good for Uncle Sam). They’ve reached a settlement with the bank but fully intend to pursue their legal case against the Department of Environment in West Australia. I’m delighted to say that Matt and Janet’s indomitable spirits survived these last two years, which pushed them to the brink and they are looking forward with great hope.
Their story in brief – a story I initially couldn’t believe would happen in Australia
This all sounds so unlikely: surely good honest businesses couldn’t go broke in a first world country because their owners spoke their minds? I’ve documented every statement below on this site. No one could run a business under these conditions.
Matt and Janet moved from Texas to Australia to set up a new feedlot farm. Their business was so successful in early 2007 they were turning away customers. After Matt spoke out as a climate skeptic at a greenhouse gas reporting meeting in May 2007 the DEC changed their farming license adding 33 new conditions, one or two which were so impossible, that no bank would loan against them. They had already signed contracts based on the previous license, and the newly reduced head-count drove them to the verge of bankruptcy. DEC even admits it broke it’s own rules. Apparently the Thompsons beef-feedlot didn’t smell right, even though Matt and Janet did everything the department suggested (and more), their closest neighbours wrote letters of support (wanting the farm to grow), 900 townfolk signed a petition for them, 6000 odour tests showed there was no problem, and wait for it, their farm was right next to a piggery which had run for 28 years. But 21 verified complaints from people who wanted to subdivide land and a number of other unchecked, not publicly listed, complaints about odours that can’t be measured were enough to close them down. And you thought Rule of Law applied in Australia? Not so, if you don’t butter up, pander, bow and obey the politically correct dictums set by unelected bureaucrats and the covert green-police, you too could be subject to random arbitrary license changes that insist your business must not offend anyone anywhere (and especially not your Green land-developing neighbours).
Donations for the Thompsons children helped to keep the family in their home for another 18 months, and put them in a much stronger position to fight the ongoing legal case. A large part went towards their move to the US, and the last part was sent a month or so ago to help set them up.
From Matt and Janet:
Dear Readers of WUWT and Jo Nova,
We would like to give an update to all of you who have supported us in a variety of ways, including with donations (in-kind and monetary) for our children, writing letters, and contacting politicians and our bank.
For a refresher on the background to our story, please see the original YouTube we produced, including the important second one, Part 1Part 2: [And/or Anthony and Jo, whatever links to your own blogs on this issue]
We returned to the USA for Christmas in 2011 on frequent flyer tickets given to us by family. Matt’s dad had been having health problems, and had had a major surgery in July. After seeing our parents again, we were moved to reconsider our living situation; namely the fact that since our business was not operating, we could no longer afford to fly our family back to the States should something sudden arise. (Matt’s dad had another surgery in February, and we were thankful to be here for that.)
In addition to the desire to be within driving proximity to our families, we had become acutely concerned over the deterioration in political, legislative and regulatory circumstances in Australia. We worried that even if we were to win our case against the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) (a case that is still in progress), the passage of the Carbon (sic) Tax in 2010 made the possibility of ever operating our feedlot again impossible. It meant that even if we won in court, most of our efforts to profitably operate our business would have gone towards convincing some bureaucrat that we weren’t causing greenhouse gas emissions, when in fact we were. Productive people do.
Global Carbon Market trading climbed to $176 billion in 2011 according to the The World Bank, which has just released it’s annual State and Trends of The Carbon Market in 2012.That makes it about the same value as total global wheat production — which supplies about 20% of the calories consumed by the 7 billion people on planet Earth.
The global carbon market disguises itself as an angel against the greedy corporates. Yet it is, itself, a giant corporate playing field. The mainstream media remains largely silent on the “vested interests” represented by this major industry that did not even exist 10 years ago.
Global Carbon Markets are worth billions
Was 2011 the peak of global carbon trading? Looks all downhill from here.
A record number of emissions products were traded in 2011, even though prices of EU carbon permits and international offsets fells well below $10 a tonne late in the year. The prices have fallen, but the volumes have increased. Look out, the average price in 2011 was $18.80US, but the prices in 2012 are less than half that. It will take a monster increase in volumes in 2012 to keep raising the total market value.
The Global Carbon Market was still growing in 2011, but not exponentially like it was from 2005 – 2009. The bad news (for carbon traders) is about to hit the fan in the next report in 2013. There is a hint of it in the page announcing the report: “the market for primary CDM has dropped to its lowest level since 2004.”
Global means “EU”
The EU is 80% of the total market. Everywhere else is piddlingly small:
The rise in volume lifted the value of the EU market to $148 billion from a revised $134 billion in 2010, even though average EU carbon prices fell 4 percent year on year to $18.80 a tonne.
But front-year EU carbon prices are averaging under $10 a tonne so far this year as the bloc’s sluggish economy dampens demand for carbon permits in a market that analysts say has accumul1ated a surplus near the equivalent of 1 billion tonnes.
Other national and regional carbon schemes showed mixed results. New Zealand’s carbon market value tripled to $351 million, while the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in North America nearly halved to $249 million, the bank said.
Primary project-based transactions in the voluntary offset market were valued at $569 million in 2011, up 37 percent, the bank said. ($1 = 0.7977 euros)
Remember that someone somewhere is paying this money that is poured into a trading scheme we don’t need to solve a problem for which there is no supporting evidence. The voluntary market is one three hundredth of the total. Without forced legislation this market would vanish. (Let the people vote, eh?). This is $176 billion of economic activity wasted, mostly in the economic disaster zone that is the EU. People are rioting in the streets. That’s blood, sweat and tears to build things and do things the people on this planet would not choose to do if they were not forced to.
Excellent video. This man is good. The message is spot on.
This is an edgy fast paced narrative about why we owe the most to some of the most unpopular people in history. It’s about free speech: why it matters, why we may lose it. About the threat that Finkelstein poses.
“It’s about arrogance, it’s about powerful people here in Australia who believe that they are smarter than you, that their opinion is worth more than your opinion, and that their thinking is better than your thinking, and if you think they’re wrong, you should just shut up.”
There have been nutters in history who were reviled, derided, hated, and spat on. A few of these held the answers that saved countless lives — including quite possibly, yours and mine.
Paul Homewood follows the money to find Royal Society funding.
(Figures are rounded)
…
Even if we acknowledge that most of the money goes straight to research, there is a slab of money that goes straight to the Society:
So government funding (Parliamentary Grant in Aid) amounts to 67% of total income. Similar amounts have been fixed for a 5 year period to allow the Society to plan ahead properly. It is also worth noting the income generated from commercial activities, such as investment income and publications.
Government money is channelled through the Dept of Business, who insist that it is allocated to specific projects and programmes. Most of this is therefore paid out by the Royal Society in the form of research grants etc. However in 2010/11 £2,265,000 was allocated to “Support and Central Expenses”, in other words overheads costs.
Reader Mike passed me a note that Canberra/ ACT residents may be interested in. The Climate Sceptics party has changed its name to the No Carbon Tax Climate Sceptics and is working to establish a branch for the ACT elections. The party needs another 70 members by June 30th, so it can register in time for the ACT Election in October. Perhaps you know someone who can help out?
The world is so poised on the edge. The jitters are sweeping through tonight.
Just suppose you have $100m in assets that you are nervous about. You cannot stick that amount in a bank, because government guarantees only cover the first $1m or whatever, and banks are all risky now. So you buy into the biggest, most liquid market in the world — US Treasury bonds, that is, the debt of the US Government. Sure, you risk losing a few percent as bond prices jostle up in the panic, but at least you preserve your wealth. So you sell your assets, convert the proceeds to US dollars, and buy US Treasuries.
So much money had run to US Treasury bonds that the yield — which was at a record low yesterday — just got a lot lower. People are happy to give their money to the US government for an historically low yield.
On Thursday, benchmark 10-year Treasuries yields fell to a historic low of 1.5326 percent, according to Tradeweb. The previous low was in November 1945 when yields ended that month at 1.55 percent.
Tonight, things are more scary than any time since Napoleon:
Benchmark 10-year Treasury notes were up as much as 1-4/32 in price with a yield of 1.442 percent, the lowest level since records going back to the early 1800s according to Reuters data.
Gold just zoomed up nearly $70 in two hours as the NY exchange opened. German and Australian bonds are also attracting refugee money.
Harold Ambler (Don’t Sell Your Coat) points to a conflict of interest that hadn’t hit my radar til now (golly):
“In the newspaper business, and other journalistic domains as well, fires are of note. Non-fires aren’t. Fair enough. But something very insidious has taken place. The selling of weather disasters as entertainment has led to a state in which big business stands to gain handsomely from the perception that the planet has gone meteorologically mad. Specifically, General Electric stands to profit. When in 2008 NBC (owned by General Electric) purchased The Weather Channel, an interesting thing took place: the largest domestic producer of wind turbines became the owner of the best-positioned purveyor of images of destructive weather. The same year, NBC’s Today Show continued its longstanding practice of “showing” the great destruction to the ocean-atmosphere system caused by manmade global warming, with story after story: fires, floods, melting Kilimanjaro, you name it. The rest of NBC News, and the Weather Channel, meanwhile, keep the same pieces of videotape on nearly infinite repeat.”
How “Green” is GE I wonder?
GE Australia explains that the company focus is so green they have a special word for it: “Ecomagination is GE’s business strategy to help meet customers’ demand for products that improve their bottom line and reduce their impact on the environment. This will also drive growth for GE that delivers for our investors.”
How much money does GE make from green philosophies? I don’t know, but GE wind explains that their most widely used wind turbine has produced no less than 16,500 bird killing, bat chopping versions planted around the globe, though they don’t say it quite like that. They have big plans for it. Their “ecomagination commitments for 2010 – 2015” are planned to “double R&D to $10 Billion…” So that’s just $2 billion a year that GE will spend on green R & D for the next 5 years?
Remember, Exxon have been controlling this debate by funding deniers with a measly $2 million a year (which stopped years ago). It just puts things in perspective…
What else is part of the business plan? The media
“NBC Universal is GE’s media arm, which operates locally through CNBC, broadcasting relevant business news 24 hours a day, 7 days a week…” [From the GE Australian factsheet]
It puts a new tint on the phrase “business news” — is that news relevant to your business or mine? For the record, GE owns Universal Studios, Telemundo, NBC Universal Global Networks (MSNBC, CNBC, NBC WeatherPlus, WeatherPlus, and WeatherChannel plus lots more.)
And who knows? GE is a huge multinational company, and I’ve seen no evidence that GE management makes any editorial demands about green articles, but then, there is no evidence that MSNBC, CNBC or the Weather Channel are reporting both sides of the climate change news either, is there? It’s a point to bring up next time someone tells you Big-Oil funded deniers control the debate.
Lately GE has sold some of NBC. Now, it’s only a 49% stake. Perhaps that’s alright then?
But when Gina owns 13% of Fairfax, it’s a national crisis, “Democracy is doomed”?
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Don’t Sell Your Coat by Harold Ambler
Thanks to Harold for sending me a copy, and for being so patient… 🙂
A few weeks ago, “Don’t Sell Your Coat” was doing so well, it was topping the list of Climatology best sellers on Amazon (beating out Mann and co). Ambler is a professional journalist, and very much the story teller, and it shows. The book is a smooth read that flows easily. It has beautiful sentence construction (and you’re wondering why I’d even mention that, but predictable sentences are a pet hate of mine). Ambler works his craft with skill. I like it. Relaxing.
Alarmists rarely attack, or even mention the Climate Money paper I did in 2009. It’s an own goal to draw attention to the fact that skeptics are paid a pittance, while the alarm industry soaks in extended baths of cash, grants, and junkets, and the vested interests are a magnitude larger. Exxon might lose some money if a carbon tax comes in, but the world will still need oil. The same can’t be said for ACME-Solar. If a carbon scheme falls over, so does a Solyndra.
So yes, let’s do talk about The Money. As Climate Money pointed out: all Greenpeace could find from Exxon was a mere $23 million for skeptics over a decade, while the cash cow that is catastrophic climate change roped in $2,000 million a year every year during the same period for the scientists who called other scientists “deniers”.
John Timmer tried to debunk it with words like “bogus”, and “false” but lacked things like evidence and numbers to back up his case. As far as I can tell the arguments amount to saying that a massive wall of money doesn’t influence the scientific process because scientists are incorruptible, the peer review process is faultless, and the human process of science works in ways that no other human process does. There are no political aims, personal ambitions, or human failings in *The Science!*™
Here’s why each excuse doesn’t pan out:
Excuse 1/”this is not how science works”
If money doesn’t have any influence on researchers, by implication, climate scientists are not like the rest of the human race. (Why do we pay them at all, one wonders?) It would take a truly angelic mature being to welcome awkward results with a smile. Who would enjoy finding data that showed that they’d been barking up the wrong tree for two decades and was now an expert in a dead-end irrelevant topic? If the results did not support their theory, which superhuman scientists would willingly work to ensure that their own specialty would plummet off the public agenda from “The Greatest Moral Threat” down to 193rd on the list of hot topics needing public attention? After we figured out that CO2 was of minor importance, the funding would slow, the red carpet events would dry up, and the two week long annual UN coordinated junkets in exotic countries would invite other experts from other fields.
Periodically an alarmist will claim that “mainstream science” would welcome the discovery that man-made emissions were irrelevant. But we don’t need to do that thought experiment, we’ve tested it already. Scientists who publish papers supporting non-catastrophic conclusions get called Deniers, they quickly get a DeSmog/SourceWatch/Exxon Secrets smear page that investigates contracts they may or may not have made 20 years ago, makes fun of their religious beliefs, dissects their biography, and if they persist, Greenpeace sends letters to their employer suggesting they ought not have a job. What’s not to like about that?
The price for speaking out against global warming is exile from your peers, even if you are at the top of your field.
Excuse 2/ The funding was mostly for “Climate Technology”
Funding for “technology” will not affect the science, says Timmer. Apparently Jo Nova misread her own graph (and “spectacularly too!”) Except JoNova labelled the graph accurately, read it correctly and just drew different conclusions. Technology isn’t science research, but as far as the media, politicians and press are concerned, the difference is moot. The IPCC was happy to count those solar, wind power, biomass and geothermal scientists as “science experts” that made a consensus. (Remember 4000 scientists support the IPCC conclusions.) No one complained that the solar engineers were “not climate scientists” when they made statements on press releases saying “climate change is real”. Money for solar, wind and carbon sequestration fueled many press conferences and expo’s where the “threat” that CO2 poses was taken for granted. In universities those research groups added to the pressure on science faculties to “keep the alarm running”, if only because they adopted the same disdainful culture to scorn dissenters. None of any of these researchers spent ten minutes checking the modelers assumptions on water vapor feedback. Neither did any of the zoology majors who report on iguana habitats shifting either. They all became mindless cheerleaders for the message. Can someone explain how any of those technology (or biology) researchers had an interest in announcing flaws in the theory of man-made climate funding?
Excuse 3/ It’s incomprehensible that money could affect science. Ergo science is uncorruptible?
I pointed out that “Thousands of scientists have been funded to find a connection between human carbon emissions and the climate. Hardly any have been funded to find the opposite.” Timmer responds that this is “an almost incomprehensible misunderstanding” (and there goes Adam Smith in the bin) but the effect of only funding one side of a theory is not just “comprehensible” but documented in peer reviewed journals. Anyone with eyes can see how adjustments to the data progressively shift the graphs in one direction. (See these sea level graphs for example.) The adjustments are non-random, just like the adjustments to global temperature sets, and ocean heat content. The trend is always shifted to be more like the models. That’s exactly what you’d expect if you funded hundreds of people to look for one answer. You get what you paid for.
Excuse 4/ Timmer points out that some people are looking for solar effects on the climate.
True, a scattering of scientists funded through other areas are looking for natural causes of climate change, but they are not necessarily free to find it. Funding for climate change is so large, and the anti-skeptic culture is so strong that even in astronomy researchers know better than to speak their skeptical minds freely. The grants panels of national research committees almost always include someone who is a fan of the man-made theory, and when competition for a grant is so fierce that making one enemy on an assessment panel can make the difference between success and failure, researchers know that keeping their skeptical opinions to themselves is important. Hence, even distant fields are affected by the rivers of money flowing in the Climate Change Stream. I’m relaying this story direct from a researcher, though for obvious reasons I cannot name them.
Excuse 5/ The government had been throwing lots of money at climate science for decades.
(So?) Timmer claims climate funding had not expanded out of nothing in 1989 though he has no numbers (that is always the way isn’t it?). Certainly, the US government had been studying climate science under many different agencies before then. But what the graph unmistakably shows is that money directed towards man-made global warming issue was expanding fast. The new “climate change” label plastered over hundreds of research grants, and underlying billions of dollars of spending, tells us that the emphasis, the motives, and the aim of international research had shifted. There was no “climate change” research project before then. In those days, people were mostly just trying to understand the climate.
Major Research Programs were created to solve preordained problems
Whole programs were created around 1990 to deal with a “risk” and “danger” from climate change. What previously was called “climate science” (or geography, geology, meteorology, and oceanography) now became part of a large campaign called the “climate change science program”. Note, sec 204 of the legislation that created the Global Change Research Act of 1990. Paraphrased:
The President shall establish an Office of Global Change Research Information. The purpose of the office is to supply information about the research and development related to:
reducing energy use,
promoting renewables,
solving the ozone hole,
reducing the amount of CO2,
helping poor countries use agricultural and industrial chemicals,
promoting recycling and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.
In other words, before the research was even done, the government was funding it so that results could help them achieve policy goals that were already decided. The questions were not: 1. Figure out if reducing CO2 is worth the cost, or is even beneficial. 2. Make climate models that will predict the weather and help agriculture and town planning. The science was decidedly unsettled in 1990, yet the government knew that it wanted to reduce CO2, burn less fossil fuel, and promote renewables.
Excuse 6/ Science is done by peer review, not auditing
Christopher Essex wrote to me to point out that when billions of dollars rests on research results, peer review is not enough, the work ought to be audited:
“Timmer is right that there is a difference between auditing and peer review. These things are very different and they have different purposes. Peer review is cursory in some sense. It is a compromise at best, but it is not intended to check or reproduce everything in a study, but provides an author and editor some feedback on the merit of a piece. The problem is that the peers are not school teachers marking a student’s assignment, because they are peers. They do not necessarily know better than the author. In fact even a peer with great reputation can be wrong, which is why publication is not adding to holy scripture, but an opportunity to allow peers to respond with their own papers. Peer reviewed papers can thus be terrible, while non-peer-reviewed papers of high quality can experience a very rough ride.
Independent auditing is an entirely different matter. It has limited place in normal scientific give and take. But it is crucial from a corporate or policy point of view. If you aim to adopt something out of the scientific literature as a basis of a business or government strategy or policy, the executive has a fiduciary responsibility to be sure that the work adopted is correct in terms of its internal consistency and credibility of the assumptions and interpretations. Peer reviewed literature must be subjected to that from a liability point of view. That means everything needs to be checked, with caveats fully discovered and reported. This is not science except in as much as reproducibility is legitimately important to science.
The problem here is that most adoptions of peer reviewed literature by the UN were not audited. That makes those responsible for the various UN IPCC howlers liable for the costs that have arisen as a result. Of course there is always a question of whether the UN can be sued, but that is the principle of it. All of the government policy stuff needs to be audited as some level, peer review is not sufficient. On that other hand non-peer-reviewed material might also be audited, and be fine.
One does not want suits over peer reviewed material in the science literature, because it is important that scientists do not get a chill over making mistakes. That would compromise the ability of the scientific community to work things out and to advance. But this caveat does not apply to corporate or government uses of science where people may be hurt financially or physically because of mistakes or bias. “
Cheap Shots that prove my point
The bottom line is that Timmer is so short of real arguments that he scratches for slurs, even resorting to associating a climate change skeptic to a HIV skeptic: “Like many other self-proclaimed skeptics, Nova …” (follow the link). There is no connection between the two topics. John Timmer’s attempt at denigration by association (of the non-existent kind) is more proof of just how unscientific, unenquiring and desperate the world of climate groupthink is. Why does the team that claims to do *The Science!* have to resort to baseless character attacks instead of reasoned arguments? Could it be they have no evidence?
Then there’s the standard of research”: Timmer claims I’m an “Australian journalist” but if he’d done ten seconds of research and read the “About” page on my site, he’d have seen that I’m not and have never been a journalist. It’s irrelevant in the big scheme of things, but emblematic of a sloppy mind. If he didn’t know or care what Jo Nova does, why say anything?
After ten years of hearing how Big-Oil was controlling the debate by funding experts, it took him two and half years to come up with the idea that money has no influence. Is he sending a memo to DeSmog? Is he telling them to call off the Exxon attack dogs?
More signs Australia is leaping onto a burning ship as it starts carbon taxing, just as the largest carbon markets are winding up:
(Reuters) – Bavaria’s stock exchange will abandon its carbon emissions certificate trading operations in the EU-traded CO2 market on June 30 after volumes in Europe “plunged to practically zero” in recent months, it said on Tuesday.
The EU’s emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) limits the carbon dioxide emissions of the 27-nation bloc’s factories and power plants and covers nearly half of EU emissions.
EU prices are down 60% over the last 12 months
“Emissions trading will never find its feet again without radical political action,” said Christine Bortenlaenger, the head of the exchange…
The Borse management claim they were closing because of the fraud and hacking as well as the market downturn:
Bayerische Borse listed a number of other contributory factors in its decision to quit the carbon market, including current macroeconomic and policy uncertainty and the instances of VAT fraud and hacking attacks on national emissions registries between 2009 and 2011 that tarnished the image of emissions markets.
A Bayerische Borse spokesman Tuesday told Platts that it held less than a 1% share of the European carbon market. [Source: Platts]
The Industry Group IETA hit back at the German Bourse, and tried to salvage something:
The International Emissions Trading Association Wednesday denied that Europe’s carbon trading system is broken, dismissing suggestions by a German exchange operator Tuesday that industry does not support the scheme.
But the fact that they are even talking about whether it is “broken” or not says all you need to know.
Meanwhile — one of the suspended trading schemes (ICE Futures) will remain suspended. 16 months and counting…
Could the Irish bureaucrats have made this more complex? Was that a levy on a tax?
The Irish are closing off a lucrative carbon rort. Irish Energy companies were told they needed to pay for carbon emissions, but were given free carbon credits during the start up phase (they are supposed to start buying them for real soon). The companies were passing on the theoretical cost of the carbon credits to customers, and thus netting a nice profit with customers paying for a credit that the companies got for free. To stop these naughty companies from making a windfall, the Irish government had the bright idea to …remove the EU trading scheme? No. They decided to add a levy onto these companies to make the trading scheme even more complex. The levy raised €75 million for the exchequer last year. But now, the carbon revenue levy has been dumped though the carbon tax on fuels remains.
The cash cow that is “Climate Change” is so loaded that over a six year period, $718,000 dollars of ARC funds has flowed to “believers” (their terminology) to study and convert dissenters.
The death threat that wasn’t (by the kangaroo culler — John Coochey) was made at an event that deserves more attention. The “Deliberative Democracy” turns out to be part of a project funded by the Australian Research Council to the tune of $378,500. It’s title: Social Adaptation to Climate Change in the Australian Public Sphere: A comparison of individual and group deliberative responses to scenarios of future climate change. This year, a new version of the same project has been awarded another $340,000.
“The project sought to engage with the full range of positions from people who are sceptical about climate change through to those who are very concerned. We do not endorse any particular point of view – it is the aim of the project to find out what these views might be.”
But the team included known alarmist Will Steffen. Andrew Bolt discussed the Forum and eye witnesses of the project report tell how skeptics were treated:
Mondo: Messrs Steffen and his team delivered presentations on various aspects of climate change. We were not allowed to ask questions, or to challenge the multifarious false statements made. Instead, we broke out into groups, with the idea that a group could ask a question. Of course, each group was dominated by “warmists”, and the lone sceptic in each group was a) abused, b) derided, c) not listened to.
The result was that Steffen and co were presented with soft questions that were based largely on ill-informed views, convenient to the organisers.
John Coochey: … they hired a comedian [Rod Quantock] previously trading as Mr Snooze (to be fair he was not bad modern style of humor) to ridicule anyone who was not a believer. That is not even an attempt at deliberation.”
In the name of research they had to listen to Rod Quantock tell jokes about skeptics at dinner? Was his speaking fee paid by the ARC grant?
The proposals always look so noble. The leading researcher, Dr Simon Niemeyer, describes his philosophy:
The solution is not to dazzle unbelievers with science, but to engage everybody in a mature debate
How mature is it to hire comedians to mock the unbelievers? How unbiased are the researchers who refer to one half of the public as “unbelievers” — implying not that they hold a different opinion, but that that some scientists know “the truth”, the one and only permitted view, and anyone who disagrees gets “dazzled” by the light.
But he doesn’t want to browbeat skeptics:
So the task now is to see if a more considered approach to debate is possible in the wider public sphere and to engage with people with different views rather than try to harangue them
Frank Lansner’s first graph surprised me. It’s well known and often quoted that sea levels have been rising by 2-3mm a year every year for the last 20 years. But it’s not well known that the original raw satellite data doesn’t show that at all.
What astonished me was the sea levels first recorded by the Topex Poseidon satellite array showed virtually no rise at all from 1993-2001. Surely not, I thought. I asked sea-level expert Nils Axel-Morner, and he confirmed: “Yes, it is as bad as that.” Now, given that Envisat (the European satellite) showed no rise from 2003-2011 (until it was adjusted) that means we have almost 20 years of raw satellite data showing very little rise.
We thought satellites would finally give us a definitive answer on sea levels. Instead, like the tide gauges, and every other tool available to mankind, apparently satellites systematically underestimate the rising trends. And despite the speed of light being quite quick and all, it can take years for the data to finally arrive. Sometimes 4 or 5 (or 10 years) after the measurement was made scientists “discover” that it was wrong.
Now of course, any one of these adjustments could be for very legitimate reasons and give us results closer to the truth. But the adjustments always bring data closer to the modeled trend. It’s decidedly non-random. Either there is a God who thinks teasing climate scientists is spiffy, or else there is something fishy going on, and some investigative journalists need to ask some investigative questions. Is that sea-level rise due to global warming or is it due to global adjustments?
Sea levels – the raw data is always adjusted upwards
The raw data on sea levels is repeatedly adjusted “up”
Fig 1 The data for recent years has gone through significant changes. In Morner 2004 the raw satellite data for sea level rise was shown with the original slope (the grey line with dots named “Topex/Poseidon as of 2001” above).
The data was shown in the Morner 2004 peer reviewed article. It does seem that Morner was simply presenting data on sea levels as they were known at the time. In addition, Holgate’s data from 2006-7 also seems to show a similar flat trend after 1994.
Holgate’s flat sea level graph ends in 2004 – when Envisat starts out with yet another dataset showing flat trend. The Envisat data is stitched so that 2004-6 overlaps with the satellite data. (But it could have been aligned with the original raw data of Topex/Poseidon, so that Envisat continues where Holgate 2007 ended.)
Sea Levels
Fig 2.The original red graph is from the IPCC AR4 dataset (Church and White 2006). Other datasets for sea level rise have been added to show the trends as they were reported at the time with the year each one was released.
Something happened to the sea level data from satellites around 2004-2005 it seems, because in 2005 Morner points out that the satellite data has been changed significantly. The trends don’t look like they did before 2004.
This is part of a series that Tony Cox and I are doing that references the most important points and papers, as a definitive resource about the evidence. The missing hotspot is not just another flaw in the theory, it proves the models are wrong: not just “unverified”, not just “uncertain”, but failed. Apologies to those who feel I harp on about this! This is a condensed review, squishing years of a scientific battleground down to it’s bare bones… — Jo
It is not well known that even the IPCC agrees that the direct effects of CO2 will only increase world temperatures by 1.2°C. All of the projections above that (3.3°C , 6°C etc) come from model projections based on assumptions of what water vapor and clouds will do (these are the feedback effects of the original 1.2°C).[i] Are the feedbacks correct?
If the IPCC models are right about the feedbacks, we would see a hot spot 10km above the tropics. The theory is that with more heat, more water will evaporate and rise, keeping relative humidity constant at all heights in the troposphere. The point has been conclusively tested with 28 million weather balloons since 1959.[ii]
The CCSP (Climate Change Science Project) published the predictions and observations as graphs in separate parts of its large 2006 report
The CCSP (Climate Change Science Project) published the predictions and observations as graphs in separate parts of its large 2006 report.[iii] ,[iv]
Back when the climate was perfect, and there was no internet, no cars, no electricity lines, and not a single evil coal fired station — ominously, the Australian climate was changing.
Back in 1846, the population of Australia was essentially just the size of the city of Canberra (a mere 340,000 people). They all rode bikes, or horses, or walked to work; it was “Earth Hour” every hour; every plasma screen was not just on standby, it was permanently unplugged.
Yet the flooding rains were giving way to droughts, and the creeks were drying up. Aboriginals said that the climate has undergone this change “since white-man came in country.”
I’ve returned from two weeks away around some old haunts in Canberra. It’s been fascinating.
Thanks to David T for dedicatedly migrating my whole blog to a new more secure and less expensive location (PS David, I have that visual editor again. Ta!). I have 1846 emails (and that’s after several days worth were lost). Apologies for the delays in replying and apologies to those whose messages bounced.
I’m away, so this is a good time for Guest posts. Here Tony explains that we need lots of electricity even while we sleep. I didn’t realize our electricity needs were so high at night. The lowest power use each day is still as much as 60% of the peak. That’s the base load at 3am, and solar panels and wind farms just can’t provide it. We can burn the odd $500 billion building hundreds of solar plants, but even then, we would have to go “medieval” for about 8 hours each night. Candles anyone? — Jo
Guest post by Anton Lang
AUSTRALIAN POWER CONSUMPTION LOAD CURVES
There’s a message in these two diagrams that underlies every decision about national energy.
Summer power curve - Time of Day versus power consumption (MW)
These two diagrams are the most misunderstood images in the whole debate — the Load Curves for actual power consumption. These two shown here are for the whole of eastern Australia (including Tasmania and South Australia).
The top diagram shows typical consumption for a day in mid summer (Monday 30th January 2012) and the second is for a typical mid winter day (Friday 22nd July 2011). (Usually peak winter consumption is a bit higher).
Consumption dips at 3AM to 4 AM on both diagrams to 18,000MW. So even when asleep, eastern Australia is consumes 18,000MW of power, basically 60% to 65% of every Watt of power that could be generated (generation capacity is about equal to the peak load).
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