‘We should protect our kids from climate change by not having them’ says Travis Rieder of NPR.
I reckon it seems fairer to have the kids first, then ask them.
Humans have put out 50% of all our emissions of CO2 since 1988, so everyone under 30 may have wished they hadn’t been born during the Anthropocene apocalypse. (All those hot summers, those boring lectures at school). Lets do that survey. How many 28 year olds think their parents made the wrong call in 1987?
Raising offspring is hard work. “Saving the world” might just be the excuse you’re looking for if you are not inclined to do nappies.
NPR Travis Rieder, a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, told NPR. “The situation is bleak, it’s just dark … Population engineering, maybe it’s an extreme move. But it gives us a chance.”
Rieder said America produces a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) per person, and the world’s poorest nations will be most affected by global warming. He suggests rich nations should stop having children to remedy this. Reducing the current birth rate to 0.5 kids per woman could be the “thing that saves us,” he said.
I can see his point. Having less babies might cool the world. There are no babies in Antarctica, and there’s no warming there either.
How many non-babies does it take to stop a flood in Bangladesh? Perhaps the IPCC has an App for that.
The Sierra Club thinks the government should issue licenses for parents:
When you can’t persuade people to fight your imaginary enemy, declare a war.
New Republic
We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.
BY BILL MCKIBBEN August 15, 2016
Translated: Expect 200 million imminent deaths (equivalent to WWII). Give us your firstborn, and lots of your money.
Not quite a dispassionate scientist at work:
In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears. Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the war. “In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,” said a scientist who examined the onslaught. “There doesn’t seem anything able to stop this.”
Panic now? In late 2015, Antarctic sea ice shrank by 13 millionsquare kilometers, and nothing seemed to be able to stop it.
For the last hundred thousand years someone somewhere has been making money, sticks or cowrie shells out of each change. If the Vostok ice cores over the Holocene tell us anything, it is that life on Earth is a continuous opportunity for witchdoctors to get rich scaring people about a climate they can’t predict.
This is 12,000 years of perfect non-man-made weather at Vostok Antarctica:
And here is the South Polar Region during the last 38 years of “unprecedented man-made climate change” — graphed from recent satellite data from UAH. Humans have put out 60% of all man-made CO2 emissions since satellites started recording in 1978. Spot the effect?
Now, Antarctica is only Antarctica. Vostok does not represent the world. But there are graphs from all over the globe with similar stories of continuous change and no acceleration, not even a good correlation following CO2 levels. The climate changed and no climate scientist can explain the small movements in the Vostok graph — the spikes that lasted 250 years. If we were in one of those natural “spikes” now, they wouldn’t know.
“…nearly every proxy that’s ever been proxied suggests there were a lot of warmer times in the period 5,000 – 8,000 years ago. Ice cores say it was hotter in Greenland, barnacles, corals, sea worms, and “swash” tell us sea levels were something like 2 meters higher in stable West Australia* and nearly 1m higher in Hawaii and Polynesia, oceans were 2 degrees warmer around in Indonesia, and 6,000 boreholes sunk in the oceans all over the world show it was a global deal. Australian Aboriginals apparently struggled through a 1,500 year mega drought about 6,000 year ago (see McGowan). CO2 Science lists references from South-East Asia to the Sahara, from Antarctica to America. I am barely skimming the surface.
The horror! The enemy is turning 5,000 year old corals to bone-yards visible from space!
Some Great Barrier Hyperventilation:
“In the Pacific this spring, the enemy staged a daring breakout across thousands of miles of ocean, waging a full-scale assault on the region’s coral reefs. In a matter of months, long stretches of formations like the Great Barrier Reef—dating back past the start of human civilization and visible from space—were reduced to white bone-yards.
McKibben seems to think corals had thousands of years of perfect temperatures until it all fell apart in the 2016 El Nino. Nice fantasy. But at the start of human civilization the world was hotter and seas were higher, and 8,000 years before that the Climate-Enemy caused sea levels to rise 125m over whatever poor sucker coral reef was off Queensland at the time. That’s climate change. Bleaching is common, corals are adapted to it, they swap symbionts when the water warms, and thanks to climate change, corals have been spreading towards the poles — conquering territory as it were. Not shrinking. At the same time green plants have been aggressively invading the deserts too. With bumper crops this war is feeding the hungry.
It’s war, I tell you, and corals and plants are winning!
“…this is no metaphor. By most of the ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal: Carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and panic, racking up casualties, and even destabilizing governments.
Is it a real war? Some people measure wars by the dead. Others see new borders on maps. Lets ask some eighty year olds in London, Berlin and Pearl Harbour what they think. War or not-war?
I have to hand it to Bill, strawman hype doesn’t get bigger than this.
I think we’ve seen this conversation tactic before — deny the debate and conflate, conflate, conflate:
“The question is not, are we in a world war? The question is, will we fight back? And if we do, can we actually defeat an enemy as powerful and inexorable as the laws of physics?
It’s a spot-reductio to a world in one dimension — a nonsense singularity: the enemy suddenly is as powerful as the laws of physics. Such equivalence! If our knowledge of gravity was like the global climate there would be 23 global gravity models, none of which would work for all the planets. Apollo 11 would have missed the moon and 50 years later they’d still be adjusting the orbit retrospectively to figure out where they went in 1969. Homogenize that signal…
‘Liu Y, Cai Q F, Song H M, et al. Amplitudes, rates, periodicities and causes of temperature variations in the past 2485 years and future trends over the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau. Chinese Sci Bull, 2011, 56: 29862994, doi: 10.1007/s11434-011-4713-7 [ Climate Change over the Past Millennium in China.] …
The key moment making headlines from the Q&A “Science Weak” episode — Brian Cox shows a temperature graph. Malcolm Roberts said the GISS temperature data has been “manipulated”. The Particle Physics Genius’ reply was argument from incredulity: gushing, gratuitous astonishment spread over six attempts to form a complete sentence:
By who? NASA? The people the… Hang on a minute. No, no, see this is quite serious. But can I just – just one thing. NASA, NASA… The people that landed men on the moon?
In a blink of reductio ad absurbum, Cox sweeps aside a potentially useful discussion about thermometers near car-parks, airports, skyscrapers, and mysterious 1,200 km homogenized smoothing. In its place he gives cheap theatrical tricks. Follow his thought to its logical conclusion — everything that NASA does (or presumably will ever do) must be 100% correct. NASA becomes an apostle of the holy order. He treats the brand name as untouchable, but NASA is not just Neil Armstrong and a Big Step, it’s an agency with 17,000 employees. But hey, none of them have ever produced a manipulated graph.
Since experts matter (so Cox tells us) let’s ask the experts — like say, Buzz Aldrin, Charles Duke and Harrison Schmitt — three guys who actually walked on the moon, or another 47 scientists and astronauts that helped them get there. They’re all skeptical. They wrote to NASA to protest at the lax standards of GISS:
“We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.”
Then there are a guys like Roy Spencer and John Christie who didn’t just work at NASA, they won prizes there — and in climate research. To this day, in an enduring mystery GISS (the Goddard Institute of Space Studies) doesn’t use satellites to measure temperatures, but Spencer and Christie do. Using Cox logic, these guys outrank him, he ought be rushing to copy their views… but they are skeptics. In the last 20 years the UAH graph looks quite different to the GISS graph — though it’s more true to say that even the GISS graphs look different to the GISS graphs, as they transform year after year. Amazing how the thermometer readings are still changing 30 years later. (BTW, even the pause is there in the UAH graph. Thanks Ken. Not that it matters whether it still is — the models were already proven wrong).
Things got so far from a science discussion Cox even asked Malcolm Roberts if he believed that “men landed on the moon”. Cox was either fishing for irrelevant ad hominem attack points or it suggests that Cox has read more on climate psychology than on the climate. Being a particle physics guy perhaps he was fooled by studies with only ten anonymous internet responses.Psychology is a bit outside his expertise.
See him flash The Graph at 4:30 on this video.
Cox takes on the role of conversation vandal (with Lily-the-future-PhD-in-eco-something as the backup “the debate is over”). He dumps logical fallacies in, trades on his own media gloss and does his best to stop an open-minded, rational discussion. The ABC fosters this sort of interaction, like a twitter conversation with cameras. Linda Burnley’s “proof” was that people shouldn’t go swimming at Maroubra in August. Like that’s meaningful. (Poms have been coming to Perth and swimming here in July since forever…) Neither Cox, Jones, Hunt or Lily scoff or laugh at that comment. They could’ve done the full Scoff-Scorn and Riotous-Laughs, but …meh… wrong target.
One day Cox will understand cause and effect:
Here’s the most important point in the whole last twenty years of debate — credit to Malcolm Roberts for hammering it home. We need empirical evidence, and we need “cause and effect” links. So here is Cox finally pressed to give his Big Empirical Evidence declaring that climate models are useful:
“Let me just – all right, I’ll just give you one snapshot. So, I took a snapshot of the different bits of evidence for 2015. So global ocean heat content highest on record in 2015; global sea level highest on record in 2015, 70 millimetres higher than that observed in 1993; global surface temperature highest on record, El Nino something like 10 to 40% contribution to that; tropical cyclones well above average overall, as you said and even the anecdotal data. …
…. So the point is you go evidence, evidence, evidence, arctic continue warm, sea ice extent low, artic land surface temperature in 2015, 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit above 1981’s 210 average.
All of that would happen no matter what caused the warming. Cox hasn’t even thought this one through at a baby basic level. If the solar wind changed clouds and warmed the world, the seas also rise, the ice also melts, blah blah blah. Same for magnetic fields changing cloud nucleation. Same for UV solar cycle changes shifting jet streams and altering cloud formation.
O’but it’s hot says Cox. It’s hot! Yet correlation is not causation. It’s fallacy after fallacy.
And some people call this man a “renown” scientist. Embarrassing.
As usual it is 6 against 1 the skeptical views that 54% of Australians share. Glaciers will form in hell before the ratio on the ABC would run 1:6 the other way. For Groupthinkers it’s very important that the group discussing a “controversial” topic agrees with each other. This neutralizes any damaging effects of hearing a lone voice put forward counter arguments.
Cook points at “less heat escaping to space” – Jo says –this doesn’t mean anything. We assume he means less heat escapes at certain frequencies (which he should have said). Sections of the outgoing spectrum are missing (e.g. Harries et al), which shows that CO2 is stopping some outgoing radiation and is a greenhouse gas (and we knew that already), but it doesn’t show that overall extra heat is staying in the system. The heat absorbed by CO2 is probably just rerouting out from other wavelengths (say, for example through emissions from the dominant greenhouse gas — water vapor). Indeed 28 million radiosondes suggest this is happening. The water vapor emissions layer is falling (not rising as the models predicted with the “hot spot”). We live on The Water Planet — the climate is driven by clouds, humidity, and our oceans — changes in these swamp the tiny effect of a trace gas. [This paragraph was edited for clarity, see notes below*]
The rate of warming in the 1980s peaked at the same rate that the globe warmed at in the 1920s and the 1880s (0.16C per decade). Ask Phil Jones. All that CO2 did not make any difference to the peak rate of global warming per decade. After World War II temperatures fell as CO2 rose. In the ice cores there are many examples of warmer temperatures causing CO2 to rise, and no clear examples of the opposite.
“Using the existing CSIRO model the aim of my project is to develop an understanding of how pesticides move through the Fitzroy Estuary system in order to mitigate impacts on the Great Barrier Reef in light of predictions about climate change. The model also aims to describe the impact of increased or decreased pesticide usage on this fragile environment.“
According to Wikipedia “Serna intends to complete a Ph.D. in environmental science”
For other viewers, theoretically, if you can find it, the show should appear on iview (sorry for overseas readers, I don’t know if that plays for you. Though hear the “Modify Headers” App for Firefox may work for Ex-pats if they use their Australian IP). Last weeks episode includes PJ O Rourke.
Global warming could make 2016 Games ‘the last Olympics in the history of mankind’, says Tokyo governor.
“Global warming is getting worse. We have to come up with measures without which Olympic Games could not last long.
“Scientists have said we have passed the point of no return,” said Ishihara.
August 2016: The 2080 Games predicted to be the last
Move that disaster by 60 years:
“A sobering new study shows that by the 2084 Olympics, rising temperatures will make it practically impossible for most cities to host the summer games.
How will the Olympics cope with a 1.5C rise?
Answer, easily. Assuming the world warms, the IOC could shift games a whole 400km from Rio, where the average max is 28C in August to Sao Paulo where it’s 3 degrees cooler. Or they could shift the timing by all of eight weeks. If Moscow held the Olympics in September instead of July the event could survive an apocalyptic nine degree future rise. (Moscow in July has a 24C average max temperature, by September that has fallen to 15C average.)
The government funded 97%-groupthink scientists are allowed to get away with this (they might deny they predicted the death of the Olympics, but did any of them speak out against the frivolous scare?).
Reading Cod Red in the Sydney Morning Herald, the real problem of the 2016 census is laid bare. Budget cuts and DDOS attacks are not the issue. If the ABS had not been greedy for too much information, or totalitarian with threats of fines, their servers could have coped on the night. In a single day the big achievers trashed the reputation of the ABS and the Census, and of IBM.
A former head of the ABS described the grab for names as the “without doubt, the most significant invasion of privacy ever perpetrated by the ABS” — like an “Australia Card”.
Because of the invasive private information they demanded, some Senators (Greens and Xenophon) refused to comply. So the ABS threatened the public with $180 a day fines, and advertised that threat. They knew that they were asking too much, risking the good name of the ABS and of the census, and feared that citizens might object. That’s why they aggressively took the totalitarian route, threatening punishment to reduce conscientious objections. This combination created a recipe for millions of people to dutifully hit the site at the same time, crashing their servers. This is over-reach and incompetence, and on so many levels.
Forget all the fluff of cyber attacks parroted by the ABC . Those faults may be real as well, but the only number that matters is that the site was tested to manage 1 million submissions an hour – or 280 per second. All the officials admit that was the target, no one is contesting that, and for anyone who passed primary school maths, its obvious that was never going to be enough to meet the demand when 10 million households had been bullied into responding. This is the grand point of rank incompetence. It was all so predictable. Worse, now we have the cover up of the bleeding obvious.
The 2016 Census should be trashed completely.
Retaining “names and addresses” was unprecedentedly risky
Directed to actually conduct the census, and keen to extract some value from it, Kali
If you imagine climate change as a flu that the world is coming down with, then you could probably say that the physical symptoms are only just starting to be felt.
On the other hand, thinks Jo, if you imagine climate change as like the tide, then you don’t bother trying to stop it.
On the third hand (which is really my foot) I don’t imagine anything. Instead I hop along to a tide gauge and check the data. At 1mm a year, this is a flu that will hit in 3016. Panic in 500 years then.
….interventions to fight the symptoms of ‘Climate Flu’ still touch on a raw nerve for so many today.
No sir. “Interventions” to fight Climate Flu don’t touch any raw nerves at all. Skeptics couldn’t care less if someone wants to hand-wash their hair shirt and drive a hybrid. What touches a nerve are the way people with imaginary illnesses want to force everyone else to buy a hair shirt and wear it.
And so it’s worth revisiting the question; why such a persistent resistance to these interventions?
Why? Because the salesman is selling a dead duck (with a hair shirt). They want us to pay thousands to set up infrasonic shaking towers that might slow floods in Zaire? — We don’t want one thank you.
Besides the interventions were only ever going to fight “symptoms” (that’s your word Evan). We all know Aspirin doesn’t cure influenza, and we all know solar panels don’t stop storms.
I defy anyone to rewrite this next para as one meaningful sentence:
One obvious explanation is that as Climate Flu remains relatively asymptomatic it also remains convenient to ignore the progressive onset of its symptoms, even deny its very existence. And this bias towards denialism is reinforced by the fact that Climate Flu has become an incredibly inconvenient problem to deal with.
Somehow climate flu remains “relatively asymptomatic” but has become “incredibly inconvenient” at the same time. Call it Schrodinger’s Flu. Somehow, this is “obvious”? Look out, the hint of sniffle is SARS; activate the isolation ward, and lock down the nation! That would be asymptomatic and inconvenient…
It’s a keyword salad. The only burning question is if Evan Stamatiou is real or a robot.
I could go on (he does) but the gist is that the magical cure is a rare herb called bipartisan politicus.
Bipartisan politicus apparently acts to simultaneously reduce debt and stimulate the economy by attacking waste and dysfunction created in toxic political environments (think Australia’s energy market). It also prevents ‘pop-up’ government schemes and programs from being designed and implemented – only then to be binned, thereby saving the Government countless more millions.
He has the right idea. If only he could see the field full of bipartisan politicus growing on the Plains of Common Sense. Hardly any politician ever visits the Great Plains where 61% of the population lives. There they’d find that Bipartisan flowers could bloom when policies are designed to tackle actual diseases instead of imaginary ones.
A warmist, when feeling quite blue,
Presented with climate-change flu,
To a doctor, a skeptic,
Who went near apoplectic,
When the patient blamed more CO2.
Most people don’t believe, despite all the 97% consensus surveys, all the two week junkets, billlions in government funding, and speeches by Leonardo Di Caprio. What tactic is left? Double the bullying and namecalling?
These are pretty dreadful numbers for the Global Worriers.
And look at the breakdown by political party:
Just 26 percent of Republicans and 28 percent of Democrats agree that the debate about global warming is “over,” as opposed to 19 percent of unaffiliated voters.
There are almost as many obedient, trusting Republicans as there are obedient, trusting Democrats. At least on this question, there is not the usual polarization along political lines. We can see why polls paid for by Climate Worriers rarely ask this question about the debate.
“Do you believe in climate change” is a better thing to ask if you want a “certain kind of result”.
Skeptics are winning.
A climate debate could begin,
When those who oppose are let in,
To argue their case,
Which the warmists can’t face,
As they know that the skeptics would win.
— Ruairi
Nearly 7 out of 10 US voters don’t want skeptics prosecuted
When asked, “Should the government investigate and prosecute scientists and others including major corporations who question global warming?” 69% opposed it.
There are hours of entertainment today with the radioactive fallout from Australia’s “census night”. In terms of Australian drama, running an online census produces more laughs than anything ScreenAustralia is subsizing. The 2016 Australian CensusFail is the stuff of legend.
In theory, last night 10 million Australian Households were meant to log in to one site, and fill out sensitive personal details which the government would guard in perpetuity. We were threatened with 180 dollar per day fines for not filling out the form and told the site was secure and private and could not fail. The system was tested to handle a million submissions an hour which was supposedly “twice as many as needed“. But do the numbers — it was utterly predictable that five million households would try to fill out the form between 7 and 9 pm on the East Coast. By 7:30pm Australia’s first online census had collapsed, the site was closed. “The service won’t be restored tonight. ” As of lunch time the next day, it’s still down. h/t ColA, Dave B.
The ABS tells us proudly that “2 million people” were able to fill in the form. Bravo for the 20% success rate, eh?
This morning the embarrassed ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) tweeted that it was an attack:
@ABSCensus: We apologise for the inconvenience. The 2016 online Census form was subject to four Denial of Service attacks of varying nature & severity.
Mr McCormack gave a detailed timeline of each “denial of service” incident, the first of which occurred at 10.08am yesterday when the ABS “detected a significant increase in traffic”.
So at 10am on census day the ABS was surprised by an “increase in traffic”?
When is an attack, not a hack, not an attack, and possibly not even a Denial of Service (DDOS) — when 5 million people try to obey the government?
Matthew Hackling, a cybersecurity expert, said on Twitter today that there was no evidence of a DDOS attack, with international data maps showing no suspicious activity in Australia in that time.
The government has also failed to explain why, if the reason for shutting down the servers was to stop a DDOS attack, why the servers continue to be down today. The ABS this morning described it as a foreign attack, yet the ABS blocked traffic to international IP addresses at 11am yesterday.
People were already having fun with the Census before the debacle: There’s a site to generate fake names for people who didn’t want to hand over their name and address. As one tweeter said: “..why do they need our names to build the right number of hospitals?” As Chris Kenny: said: If they can fine me for not putting my name on it, surely they can just put my name on it.” If you are wondering how to fill out the census form (like most of Australia) then consider Topher Fields approach. He’s calculating the likely costs of civil disobedience, and calculating how long you can take to avoid answering. Mind you, as Sinclair Davidson says: The government already has your name, address, tax file number, banking details, and browsing information.
It’s going global. A Russian guy in California who uses the @ABS handle has woken up to a storm of grumpy tweeters. He’s smiling, but at least one Australian suggested the nation should buy him some Tim Tams to say sorry. Seems fair to me.
UPDATE: A group called IDI claims it can provide data on all Americans for as little as $10 a head — it includes groceries, photos of cars, political donations. Instead of running a census it’s cheaper if the Australian Government just pays the Chinese for the data. It can probably get a bulk deal.
Lord Wentworth: Invading your privacy is important to us, so please be patient. You are number 21,000,002 in the queue.
Peter Wu @pihao — How to engineer the perfect DDoS attack? Send out letters to 16m households telling them to hit http://census.abs.gov.au on Tuesday evening
When my kids ask why I haven’t made dinner tonight, I’m going to tell them it’s not a failure, just a denial of service. #CensusFail
“PETA launches bid to change Eggs and Bacon Bay to healthy alternative”
The ABC can’t find a single local who wants the change, but they treat the fantasy to a three-photo feature, complete with expert opinions and interviews. The locals think the idea is a bad joke. Listen to Doug:
…Doug said locals were perfectly happy with the name.
“These single-interest groups ought to go overseas and annoy the shit out of ISIS,” he said.
The only person outside the ABC who thinks this issue is worth discussing is some poor chicken mayor who is happy to sell out the locals for fear of offending the busybody control-freaks:
Huon Valley Mayor Peter Coad is willing to consider the idea.
“Obviously these issues should be taken seriously and have some merit,” he said.
Dear Mayor Coad, PETA are demanding a meat-free map. You think this is serious?
One type of Eggs And Bacon Flower.
The town, by the way, is named after a flower. That’ll be next on the hit list, and before long Australia will be converted to the Most Boring Nation on Earth. Tourists will stop visiting. Businesses will die, and no children will remember the name of the town or the flower.
Only a registered peer reviewed approved climatologist can speak about the climate on the ABC, but animal activists can tell us what we should eat. It’s just a part of the non-stop promotion of the nanny-state tribe.
The ABC works hard to keep the national conversation hyperventilating about irrelevancies. It’s why they have to be sold off, the people who want this kind of bread-n-circus pap crap can pay for it.
This is what we pay the ABC a billion dollars for, so they can investigate the really big questions we were all asking, like why Malcolm Roberts used such odd grammar five years ago, and is he connected with other groups that use odd grammar?
The big breakthrough was that Malcolm Roberts wrote some letters five years ago with highly suspicious grammar:
The senator has been quizzed about his knowledge of the Sovereign Citizens movement because of the existence of documents he began writing five years ago in a style similar to that used by the group’s adherents.
The crime:
Among the documents’ distinctive characteristics was an unusual style of punctuation.
593,000 people voted for One Nation, but the ABC wants to ask about semi-colons.
Similar stylisation of names is often employed by those within the Sovereign Citizen movement, in the belief that hyphens and colons can help them evade governments’ use of grammar to enslave their citizens.
And it takes three people write up about some tenuous grammar connections…
Story bv Nick Grimm, Peta Donald and Francis Keany
Malcolm does a great job. Emma Alberici just doesn’t understand what empirical evidence is. Instead she cites consensus, opinions, a hot run of years, and resorts to the big-coal smear, fishes for the banking family conspiracy, and hauls out the grammar entrails too. No wonder she runs out of time. Anything but topics that matter.
Alan Jones interviews Malcolm Roberts on 2GB
For those who want to hear from the new Senator, instead just “about him” here’s a radio interview today. At least one media outlet wants to talk about policies that matter instead of grammar entrails. For foreign readers, Alan Jones is one of the most influential talk back radio hosts in Australia.
It’s everything the Green revolution was supposed to offer — jobs, energy independence, money money money, and massive reductions in CO2. Australians hear how bad fracking is but not much about the transformation of the US. h/t GWPF…
Exploitation of new oil and gas reserves by fracking shale rock has transformed the US economy since it started just 11 years ago – creating at least a million jobs and slashing electricity bills and greenhouse gas emissions.
The scale of this energy revolution is almost unimaginable.
The Marcellus shale bed in Pennsylvania is thought by geologists to contain enough gas to power and heat every home in America for 50 to 100 years. Yet a few hundred feet beneath it lies another giant formation, the Utica, that contains enough gas for a further century. — Daily Mail UK.
Emissions from electric power in the USA are back to 1987 levels
There’s a message here about how Australia could meet its obscene 28% reduction targets for carbon emissions. A caring Greenie would say No to more gifts for windfarms — and get cracking on the fracking. (Do they want to save the world or not?)
Mid 2017, the USA will be the Worlds largest oil and gas exporter
“For the first time since Ike was in the White House and lead was in gasoline, exports of U.S. natural gas will outstrip imports in a shift that could occur as soon as the end of this year. The change will mark a significant milestone – the latest in America’s transformation into the world’s biggest oil and gas producer…” — US News
Some in the love media have real trouble understanding preferential voting. Big numbers seem to confuse them.
There are headlines that Malcolm Roberts “only got 77 votes” as if to delegitamize the skeptic. The Courier Mail put it on the front page. What they couldn’t find was one voter who voted for Pauline Hanson who was unhappy about where their vote went. And there were plenty to ask: Hanson’s party got 593,000 first preference votes nationally and won four Senate seats.
Apparently to be considered a real senator the magic number of first preference votes this year is “100″.
In South Australia, Stirling Griff of the Nick Xenophon Team won “103″ votes, and Sky Kakosche-Moore won “129″. Alex Gallacher, Australian Labor Party, won with “330 votes”. No newspapers seem to be suggesting that they don’t deserve to be there, or that their success is a reason to axe preferential voting.
In WA, the Liberal Party won fully 3 of their 5 Senate seats on a average of just 600 “votes” each. Let’s ignore that the Liberal group ticket in WA had 510,000 votes. They ended up getting five senators elected with less votes than the Hanson party got. Welcome to Senate voting. So?
The AEC site tells me that at least 12 Senators were elected on less than 1,000 first preference votes. Who cares?
The media didn’t mention Malcolm Roberts or air his views before the election, but they now criticize him for the low profile that they created.
The media are the problem. They are not even trying to hide their bias.
UPDATE: For some mystery reason another post two days later replaced this one for a few hours. Fixed now.
Back in February, the new head of CSIRO, Larry Marshall, agreed that the “debate was over” and sacked 350 pointless climate researchers who were studying stuff that was already settled. Marshall’s crime was to hire people to solve the climate problem rather than just keep the cheer squad. But the eco-carers were outraged. Seems that a cheer squad is important.
What does this mean? Not much for climate science or skeptics, its only fifteen jobs and $37 million over 10 years. It’s just another line of press releases advertising The Blob. More government waste.
Mr Hunt has announced an extra 15 jobs focusing on climate science, as well as additional support, costing $3.7 million a year. He said it would increase the number of climate researchers from 100 to 115 after the latest round of job cuts is taken into account.
These researchers are being paid to find a crisis, so they will only find the truth if it happens to coincide with a crisis. Imagine the outcry if Hunt had hired 15 full time skeptical scientists for ten years? Imagine what a difference that would make.
The final Australian Senate was announced today with 11 wildcard “cross benchers” (people who are not in the four largest parties). Turnbull is going to have to choose to go conservative or go left. For foreign readers — sorry about more Australian politics but this finally maps out who holds the power in the Australian government.
Senators include: Hanson, 4. Nick Xenophon, 3.
plus Bob Day, David Leyonhjelm, Jackie Lambie, Derryn Hinch.
The Coalition needs 9 of them to get legislation through the Senate. Somehow Turnbull has to deal with both Hanson and Xenophon candidates, an impossible combination on any climate or environmental issue. Turnbull will have to do deals with the Greens to get through any pro-climate-industry legislation The Greens have exactly the number of Senators that the Coalition needs. But a Greens deal risks a Liberal party room revolt for a weak PM. Potentially the Hanson team could up the ante in protest at a climate deal by holding out on approving other legislation as a price.
Skeptics, Defcons must keep the pressure on Coalition members to stop Turnbull doing Green deals.
In this messy senate, Turnbull cannot hold the threat of an election over recalcitrant senators because he barely won the last election. That dynamic would be upended if Turnbull was tossed out and a new Liberal PM installed (see my bold point above again). We need a list of all Coalition members in marginals seats that the Defcon votes can influence.
In the cross bench, Xenophon holds a lot of power because they can “go left” and block things. To stop legislation the Labor-Green combination just needs 3 of the crossbench list (which means the Xenophon team). The Xenophon team lean closer to the Green-Labor set on many issues and are more likely to stick together with votes. The Coalition have to get one of their votes in any cross bench deal.
The Hanson story is a remarkable achievement — Welcome Malcolm Roberts to the Senate
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With little funding, and no favourable media coverage, they have achieved a remarkable success. One of their team includes Malcolm Roberts, an absolute die-hard skeptic who has been fighting in the climate trenches for years. So a big congratulations to him, finally rewarded after years of work. He has a masters degree in business administration from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and many skeptics will be familiar with his dedicated work with the Galileo Movement.
Malcolm Roberts has obviously been central to setting up the One Nation Climate Policy, which contains the Christmas wish-list of many a skeptic. Good on him:
One Nation: WHAT IS THE CLIMATE CHANGE AGENDA?
Climate change has and will continue to be used as a political agenda by politicians and self interest groups or individuals for their own gain. We cannot allow scare mongering by people such as Tim Flannery, who make outlandish statements and are not held accountable. Climate change should not be about making money for a lot of people and giving scientists money. Lets know the facts and scientific evidence to make a well informed decision as to how best to look after our environment.
Brexit was seismic. Even Nature can see the threat — The UK was big promoter of Climate witchcraft, but it’s gone now:
“Brexit might be an excuse for some EU countries to withhold their signature,” says Oliver Geden, head of the EU Research Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. Before the Paris talks, the EU had pledged to cut its greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030, relative to 1990 levels.
“The UK not being part of the negotiating mix means there is likely to be less pressure for ambitious targets and ensuring that the EU delivers on its Paris agreement commitments,” says Martin Nesbit, a policy expert at the Institute for European Environmental Policy in London.
But don’t relax, the Clexit movement is needed more than ever
Czech President Dr. Václav Klaus recognises this, and he Monckton, Morano, I and many others from 60 countries have joined the new Clexit movement started by Viv Forbes. Check it out. Brexit gave us a big advantage but we must press it home.
There are lots of reasons Paris may still succeed
The Paris agreement may appear to be struggling with just 22 tin-pot countries (sorry Norway) and 1% of man-made emissions signed up, but watch the pea. We all know if the emissions cuts were supposed to be same for every nation it would never get off the ground, but like the Paris UN convention, it’s all theater — the signing of the “agreement” was just for show. And many ratifications can be too. Not for the West, but for countries like India, China, or Russia — they can ratify their weak promises to do almost nothing. If they do, they will bring their 4%, 20% and 7% of human emissions under the Paris agreement umbrella which will cost those countries little, but be a major PR victory for the UN. It would inflict real pain on the Western nations stupid enough to sign and ratify, but most of the rest of the world would be agreeing to nothing much, and benefiting from competing with a hobbled West. Let’s shut down a few more factories in Birmingham, Adelaide or Austin.
China, India and Russia want to be bought off by the UN. View their protests now as a part of their negotiating ploys to wring more Pork. Few developing countries face much electoral backlash, and all of them have something to gain from the Climate Gravy Train. China, especially, has been getting rich on carbon credits for dams it was going to build, and factories that it made dirty just to get the credits for cleaning up. And there are other non-climate playing cards that any of these countries could be bought off for — consider India, which says it will delay signing the deal, but really wants to get membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) saying: “An early positive decision by the NSG would have allowed us to move forward on the Paris Agreement.”
In other words with a big pot of UN pork up for grabs, the thing stopping the “ratification” of expensive energy and the collective hair-shirt of The West are western voters, specifically, US voters. If Hillary wins the only thing stopping the agreement will be the US congress.
The point of the Paris agreement is not to change world temperatures, or even to cut emissions of CO2, it’s to prop up the Green Industrial Complex of renewable-energy (worth $300b plus just in the EU), and the $2 Trillion global carbon trading schemes that financial houses stand to profit from. If the UN cared about CO2 emissions we all know they would choose the most cost effective way to reduce them (super critical coal, nuclear power, and programs like Direct Action which cost a mere $14/ton in reduction as opposed to the $50 – $120 per ton that wind “farms” cost.
It was all a grand theater. Greens brag that the Paris agreement was signed by “179 countries”, but it means nothing until they get 55 nations controlling 55% of the worlds (man-made) emissions. Right now, they’ve had a resounding response from no country that matters. (Forgive me Norway, with 0.14% of man-made emissions, right now, you are in a small group which includes Palestine, Palau, and North Korea.)
In accordance with Article 21, paragraph 1, of the Paris Agreement, the Agreement shall enter into force on the thirtieth day after the date on which at least 55 Parties to the Convention accounting in total for at least an estimated 55 % of the total global greenhouse gas emissions have deposited their instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession with the Depositary.
What they’ve got: 22 states which produce 1% of man-made emissions.
As of 2 August 2016, there are 179 signatories to the Paris Agreement. Of these, 22 States have also deposited their instruments of ratification, acceptance or approval accounting in total for 1.08 % of the total global greenhouse gas emissions.
So only 33 countries and 54% of global emissions to go. (And they obviously mean “human emissions”, not “global emissions” or they’ll have to get Nero, Davy Jones, and the Union of Phytoplankton to sign up. )
So the UN has promises that cover 1% of the 3 to 4% of global emissions that mankind makes — a grand total 0.04% of total global emissions being as generous as possible.
The ratified list: Barbados, Belize, Cameroon, North Korea, Fiji, Grenada, Guyana, Maldives, Mauritius, Nauru, Norway, Palau, Palestine, Peru, St Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Seychelles, Somalia and Tuvalu.
Note that Climate Analytics points out that the number was not set higher at 60% because then a block could have formed to stop it. The biggest emitters are: China, 20%; USA, 18%; EU, 12%; Russia, 7%; India, 4%; Japan, 4%. Think of it the other way, it’s a challenge to organize a block of 45% refuseniks — whatever China and the US do will make or break this. Presumably all the little countries can be bought off with UN pork or threats, and the world is waiting til the US election.
For anyone who wants to know the fine print of the agreement:
On 17 March 2016, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, acting in his capacity as Depositary of the Paris Agreement, transmitted certified true copies of the Agreement to all Member States of the United Nations and Parties to the Convention.
UPDATE: Thanks to questions from commenters I found out which countries are in that club and added the map. :- )
The Onion, ahead of the worlds scientific societies, reports on a “watershed moment” in scientific history:
Scientists Trace Heat Wave To Massive Star At Center Of Solar System
PASADENA, CA—Groundbreaking new findings announced Monday suggest the record-setting heat wave plaguing much of the United States may be due to radiation emitted from an enormous star located in the center of the solar system.
Scientists believe the star, which they have named G2V65, may in fact be the same bright yellow orb seen arcing over the sky day after day, and given its extreme heat and proximity to Earth, it is likely not only to have caused the heat wave, but to be responsible for every warm day in human history.
The “tremendous ball of energy” may explain everything from drying puddles to hot car seats.
Governments will have to act, though the path is unclear:
When asked if anything could be done to prevent or counteract the star’s heat production, Kivens expressed skepticism.
“No, for the foreseeable future, I think we’re locked into orbit with this thing,” he said. “Although the star seems to disappear every night, 24-hour reports from around the world seem to indicate the star never leaves Earth entirely.”
Residents of heat- and drought-stricken regions welcomed the findings, thankful to finally have an explanation for the high temperatures, if no relief from them.
“That makes sense, because it’s usually hotter when that [star] is up in the air,” said Stillwater, OK resident Asher Arps, … “The big star heats the earth, and the moon cools it—I get it,” he added.
Many mysteries still to solve:
…renewable energy specialist Dr. Martin Flint said “We still don’t understand how it’s possible for that thing to be up in the sky in January when it’s freezing outside.”
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There are hours of entertainment today with the radioactive fallout from Australia’s “census night”. In terms of Australian drama, running an online census produces more laughs than anything 
The Head of the ABS David Kalisch, who earns a 
Thanks to Prof Peter Ridd for the nice one-liner.
The final 
certified true copies of the Agreement
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