Europe’s once world-beating clean technology industry has fallen into a rapid decline, with investment in low-carbon energy last year plummeting to its lowest level in a decade.
Michael Liebreich, chairman of the BNEF board, said the global financial crisis and its aftermath were to blame only in part. “Europe’s failure to respond [to the crisis was a factor and] global investors, scared about the survival of the euro, had plenty of reason to hesitate about putting money into euro-dominated clean energy projects,” he said.
What bad luck – it’s nearly, almost, really competitive. Any day now:
Liebreich … “The tragedy is that Europe lost its renewable energy mojo just as costs were plummeting to the point where green power is fully competitive without subsidies in more and more parts of the world.”
Shame investors are too stupid to see how renewables are going to make lots of money. Only governments have that kind of vision, right?
The solution to save the industry? Not efficiency. Not competitiveness. It’s “politics”:
Oliver Joy, spokesman for the European Wind Energy Association, told the Guardian: “The outlook for 2016 is not as rosy and we’re likely to see a dip in installations this year. Beyond this, the future for onshore wind is not clear as an uncoordinated patchwork of policies across Europe continues to stifle progress, not least in the UK and Spain. We need to see more political appetite at European and national level, which means putting in place a vision for renewables into the next decade.”
Here’s a detail that tells us how big the malinvestment is here. There are nearly half a million people in Europe working in wind and solar to generate expensive electricity:
Jobs are being lost as a result. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, employment in solar photovoltaics in Europe fell by more than a third to 165,000 jobs in 2013, the last year for which it has yet collated figures. Jobs in wind energy rose slightly, by more than 5% in 2013, to nearly 320,000 across the bloc, with more than half of these in Germany.
Imagine if those people were doing something useful?
Globally $329 Billion is wasted on renewables
Here’s $329 billion very committed dollars worth of vested interests pushing the Climate Scare. Unlike the fossil fuel industry their profits depend almost entirely on government policy.
As Oil Crashed, Renewables Attract Record $329 Billion
…
Media spin to save the day
The financial disaster can be spun to “success” if we ignore the collapse in the EU industry and pretend that what matters is that other countries are picking up the futile baton. If China “overtakes” the EU we can use rose colored glasses and see a hyperbolic “turning point”. We can toss in graphs about increases in capacity which always make renewables sound good, because their theoretical fantasy capacity is so high.
Cheap oil and gas couldn’t stop another record year for renewables, or a turning point for energy investment.
The sun and the wind continue to defy gravity.
Renewables just finished another record-breaking year, with more money invested ($329 billion) and more capacity added (121 gigawatts) than ever before, according to new data released Thursday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Whatever you do, don’t graph renewables output in actual megawatts. Don’t graph it in CO2 tons saved. Never ever even mention the number of global degrees of cooling.
Keeping quiet about the uncertainty of climate prediction has at last come back to bite the climate research community on its collective bottom. The obvious question has finally been asked in public – namely, if the science behind disastrous climate change is so settled, why continue to spend money on it? It is not surprising that CSIRO is now cutting the number of its staff involved in climate research.
May I suggest to the remaining staff that they might profitably spend their time attempting to disprove the theory of disastrous global warming rather than simply finding data to support it? There is more than enough uncertainty about climate change to give them a very good chance of upsetting what must be one of the world’s greatest scientific applecarts. Since the upsetting of applecarts is what scientists are paid to do, it shouldn’t be long before they are once again showered with money and roses. Just think of it – massive reward simply by returning to a research philosophy fundamental to scientific progress. It is known as scepticism.
Garth Paltridge
Sandy Bay, Tasmania
_______________
Garth Paltridge is a former CSIRO Chief Research Scientist and was Director of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre. He wrote The Climate Caper, reviewed here. He’s a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University and Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Oceans Studies (IASOS), which is now called the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Science (IMAS), University of Tasmania. In his career, he worked as an atmospheric physicist, predominantly with CSIRO and briefly with NOAA , and has published more than 100 books and scientific papers.
Commenter Kratoklastes finds this pointed parody of modern peer review.
Kratoklastes:
There is an excellent chapter (Chapter 9) in an excellent book (How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg) that gives a very good description of inherent biases in research – taking John Ioannides’ 2005 paper (“Why Most Published Research Is Wrong”).
The chapter starts with a parable, which is clever and funny…
Imagine yourself a haruspex; that is, your profession is to make predictions about future events by sacrificing sheep and then examining the features of their entrails, especially their livers. You do not, of course, consider your predictions to be reliable merely because you follow the practices commanded by the Etruscan deities. That would be ridiculous. You require evidence. And so you and your colleagues submit all your work to the peer-reviewed International Journal of Haruspicy, which demands without exception that all published results clear the bar of statistical signficance.
Haruspicy, especially rigorous evidence-based haruspicy, is not an easy gig. For one thing, you spend a lot of your time spattered with blood and bile. For another, a lot of your experiments don’t work. You try to use sheep guts to predict the price of Apple stock, and you fail; you try to model Democratic vote share among Hispanics, and you fail; you try to estimate global oil supply, and you fail again. The gods are very picky and it’s not always clear precisely which arrangement of the internal organs and which precise incantations will reliably unlock the future. Sometimes different haruspices run the same experiment and it works for one but not the other—who knows why? It’s frustrating. Some days you feel like chucking it all and going to law school.
But it’s all worth it for those moments of discovery, where everything works, and you find that the texture and protrusions of the liver really do predict the severity of the following year’s flu season, and, with a silent thank-you to the gods, you publish.
— Jordan Ellenberg
It goes on to wend its way through mechanisms (the ‘file drawer’ problem whereby only positive findings are published; problems of p-hacking – and of statistical inference generally) by which even a genuine researcher can find himself taking the first steps down the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.
I propose that we refer to the High Priests of the Cult of Thermaggeddon as Haruspex Maximus – who somehow claim that their forecasts for the increase in the mean temperature 100 years out has a confidence interval that is less than a tenth of a degree wide… when the forecast for mean temp 10 years out has a wider forecast range than that. Somehow chained uncertainty reduces the forecast envelope – I think it helps if your work is only reviewed by others who think exactly the same as you (I doubt that a similar ‘International Journal of Geocentrism Studies’ would ever have found fault in any papers that fit the data using novel epicycles).
A haruspex warmist,a seer,
Sent some work for review by a peer,
Who replied, “you’ve looked deep,
At the guts of a sheep,
And your climate-change forecasts are clear”.
The story of three kinds of curiosity — two genuine, one “induced”
Several wise men foresaw the decline of organized science. Here, a man called Gordon Tulloch was inspired by Popper to look at the social organisation of scientists to try to figure out what made it work. He noticed there were three kinds of researchers, one driven by curiosity for the truth, another on a mission to solve a problem, and a third with an “induced” curiosity created by demand from elsewhere — boss or government. He predicted that the system would fail if those who were induced outnumbered the truly curious, as the “induced” curiosity was not well connected to reality, whereas the other two types were. The primary aim of the induced researcher was not to solve a problem or uncover an answer but just to keep their jobs, and there were many ways to “keep their jobs” that did not involve actual discovery. Indeed for some jobs, thinks Jo, actual discovery could be a catastrophic event.
He foresaw a degenerative spiral which appears to have come to pass. Once induced researchers are managed by people without enough skill to read and assess their papers, the managers have to rely on publishers and editors to assess the work instead. But the editors of the publications are selling subscriptions to “induced” investigators — “…so a self-perpetuating process might be set in motion to a point where “a journal read only by people motivated by induced curiosity gradually slipped away from reality in the direction of superficially impressive but actually easy research projects”.”
And ain’t it the way… as the number of people with real curiosity are diluted in the field, they cannot possibly review the submissions of the induced. Before long the conclusions of the induced become the only accepted conclusions. In this way thinks Jo, the worst possible thing you can do to discovery is to get the government in and let them throw lots of taxpayers money at it. For that will surely kill real discovery stone dead.
The government is strangling science. The more money it spends the more real scientists are forced out. In the terminal stage the point of a “scientist” becomes inverted 180 degrees. Instead of questioning the orthodoxy, the neo-“scientist” is there to maintain it. — Jo
Why have so many apparently reputable scientists endorsed “the climate caper”? The book of that name by Garth Paltridge provided some clues (scientists like to eat) and it helps to follow the money. But more is required to account for the extent of corruption that has infected parts of the scientific enterprise.
Gordon Tullock in The Organization of Inquiry (1966) helpfully provided an explanation in advance of the event. Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi inspired Tullock to write the book, and Popper himself provided a clue even earlier, in a 1945 paper, later published in The Poverty of Historicism. Popper proposed that some aspects of science should be explained in terms of institutions, traditions and the social context of science. In particular he suggested that scientific progress could be arrested by government control of the laboratories and journals, and by restrictions on free speech. Acute observers might have noticed some of that going on lately.
Under the influence of Popper, Tullock embarked on a project to explore the social organization of science and the way that scientists who he considered to be highly individualistic, nevertheless were highly coordinated. He was impressed by the way the formal and informal rules of science appeared to keep scientists honest and productive
The most effective way of ‘organizing’ science seems to be the most perfect laissez faire. This, however, is a superficial view. Science is not unorganized. There exists a community of scientists, and this community is a functioning social mechanism which co-ordinates the activity of its members.
In a land where energy makes up 25% of their GDP and most of their exports — it takes some management to run out of electricity. Apparently the land of oil needs some fossil fuel generation.
The government has rationed electricity and water supplies across the country for months and urged citizens to avoid waste as Venezuela endures a prolonged drought that has slashed output at hydroelectric dams.
The socialist solution? Blame the weather:
The ruling socialists have blamed the shortage on the El Nino weather phenomena and “sabotage” by their political foes, while critics cite a lack of maintenance and poor planning.
And hope for help from heaven:
“We’re hoping, God willing, rains will come,” Maduro said in a national address Saturday. “Look, the saving is more than 40 percent when these measures are taken. We’re reaching a difficult place that we’re trying to manage.”
Looks like Venezuela will be doing its bit for the Paris agreement then.
h/t Willie
The Green state — Tasmania — has an electricity crisis and is now running on dirty diesel
Due to profiteering and bad planning the Tasmanian hydro dams are only 15% full. They shut down their “back up” gas power last August, and then the sole cable across the Bass Strait broke in December. Now they’re flying in diesel generators to keep the lights on. (Golly. Don’t those windfarms work?) Indeed the ABC news says they were desperate enough to try cloud seeding too, to hopefully make it rain on the dams. Welcome to the new green energy where we seed clouds to generate electricity.
First they had one cable, and only one cable. Second their own generation relied heavily on hydro. Thirdly, they run down their dams to sell expensive electricity to Victoria when the Carbon Tax made it more profitable. (See: “greed”). Fourthly the government commissioned the Tamar Gas power station as a back up, built it, but then gave it to Tas Hydro, which cannabilized it and then shut it down to sell it off. That project was only started in 2009, yet the new plant was decommissioned in August 2015, deemed “unnecessary”, just four months before the cable broke.
As the Marcus Review says:
“The decision to sell the Tamar Valley gas station’s major operating component in August 2015 was made despite the fact that:
Hydro Tasmania had already savaged the State’s stored hydro energy supply to less than 30% (with summer coming around the corner).
Not to worry, it’s not like the Tamar Valley gas station cost around a quarter of a billion dollars to build and was still in brand new condition or anything. Oh, wait a minute…”
“When you add it all up, Tasmania is now laughably and hopelessly reliant on the dirtiest forms of fossil fuel for its survival. Insane amounts of money have been squandered.”
The cable probably won’t be fixed til June by which time the dams will be down to 6% full, and the eco-greens who don’t want people to burn coal, also don’t want the water used to make electricity calling it “environmental vandalism” to run the dams so low. Perhaps if the Greens had protested against the closure of the gas power station they might have been able to save more flora and fauna in the dam valleys now?
If the Wilderness Society cared about the outcomes for environment, they could start a new campaign and call it: “Fossil Fuels for Flora and Fauna”!
A very striking pattern of records is happening at the moment. Data is going “off the chart” on several factors at once. As well as record high temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere in Feb 2016, the water is far cooler than usual in the Indo Pacific, while there is increased water vapor and cloud all over the world’s oceans. But windspeeds are slow, slow, slow. It has the hallmarks of a very Big El Nino. Bigger by many measures than 1997-98.
The cooler Indo-Pacific
P Gosselin at NotricksZone has got some very interesting graphs about the ocean around the vast Western Pacific. Frank Bosse and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt noticed that ARGO buoys are recording a very unusual cooling in the Indo-Pacific Western Pacific.
Is something fishy and odd going on there? Hard to say, but while the globe set a record last month, it is interesting to know that over the last couple of years temperatures have declined in the Western Pacific by a whole degree. The Indo-Pacific Warm Pool (IPWP) covers 20N to 20S across a full quarter of the circumference of the Earth. According to Bosse and Vahrenholt it’s around “16 million cubic kilometers“.
The blue blob in 2016 in the graph below looks smallish (right hand side), but it represents a large section of the Earth. And the temperature of the IPWP has dropped 1°C since early 2013. Smaller hints of blue blobs occur briefly in 2006-7 and 2009-10, both during small El-Ninos. Is the current cool pool just a big “El Nino” phenomenon? I wish we had data from 1997-98 to compare.
So there is a very large pool of subsurface water that’s cooler than usual across this large slab of water. Bill Kininmonth gave the best description I’ve yet seen on how the world changes during an El Nino. Our oceans are mostly deep and cold — they average 4km deep and most of that is near freezing. Even under the topics the water is only 4C. Above that rests a thin warm top layer which is pushed around by the winds. In an El Nino the trade winds across the Pacific slow down and that keeps the warmer water near the surface of the central Pacific instead of pushing that warm water right across to the Western Indo-Pacific. In a La Nina the extra winds push the warm water far westward, and there is an upwelling of the vast cold pool on the Eastern side of the Pacific. Fingers of cold water reach the surface and draw down the heat from the air above. Think of that massive abyssal cold volume that can reach up and suck the heat out of the sky. That’s why temperatures swing globally.
See the blue cold water in the Indo-Pacific? The scientists who tell us that the February heat records are due to man-made climate change are effectively saying that the cold pool in the IPWP is due to CO2 10,000m above. Follow the chain… cry for cause and effect. (dbar = decibar, and I calculate 100 dbar as about 100 meters, 200 dbar as about 200 meters, and 500 dbar as about 500 meters at the equator.)
I don’t know how record breakingly extraordinary it is for the warm-pool to be a cool-pool, because our records with this much detail are so short. But we know Global Climate Models can not predict this. Where are the real scientists who are reminding their colleagues that an El Nino is not man-made?
What’s going on with Water Vapor?
Roy Spencer reports that humidity is very high over the Pacific — remarkably high. Wow, that’s a spike and this graph is the monster vast 60N – 60S across the whole world’s oceans.
It makes sense that if the warm pool of water is not being stirred by winds into the deep cold water, that we would see higher water vapor over the top of it. Interestingly this is so much higher than the 97-98 El Nino.
As an aside: David Evans and I are always harping on about the importance of water vapor, but this graph doesn’t necessarily tell us as much as you might think, because it’s not the total water vapor that matters, it’s only the layer at the top, where the water vapor emits freely to space (that’s from the WVEL, the water vapor emissions layer). Roy Spencer’s graph shows “SSMIS vertically integrated water vapor anomalies”, which includes water vapor low in the troposphere as well as the higher zone. It’s closely tied to the Sea Surface Temperature (SST). The better radiosonde data, from 1973, shows that the humidity trend is of increasing in the lower troposphere even while the upper troposphere is drying out and the WVEL is dropping slightly. As Garth Paltridge suggested in 2009, this is apparently associated with a more stable, moister lower troposphere where less water vapor is entrained and breaking out into the upper troposphere (see here). The climate models are emphatic that the WVEL trend should have been rising and the upper troposphere getting more humid as it warms (the water vapor amplification that amplifies the CO2 warming).
Back to the current record breaking action.
The sea surface is very very warm…
…
…because the winds are very slow
Again, thanks to Roy Spencer — we can see the winds are slower than in the 97-98 El Nino, but it has been as slow in late 87 and late 89. How does the last 30 years compare to the 100 before that? (Data, data, I want more data.) The average line here might not be representative of the real long term average at all.
…
Bottom line – this is a Big El Nino, it’s noise, not global warming
What we have at the moment is a record breaking El Nino. (But it may not be very record breaking if only we had this kind of data for earlier El Nino’s). What does this tell us about the Pause? I don’t know — perhaps it’s over, perhaps it’s not. February is noise, not signal.We can’t tell until we see what happens in a couple of year’s time. Perhaps this is a big shift? Perhaps a spike. History will tell.
See Roy Spencer’s blog for more graphs and an interesting difference with 1998 – where there was a cool ring in the Pacific around the “hot” blob, and that circle of cold is not present this year. Who knows why? Stephen Wilde suggests it is due to the “wavier” jet streams we have now (which may in turn be due to the strange solar activity we have now compared to 1997-98). See Wilde’s post here for more info about those extended jet stream waves which stretch far south and north when the solar activity is low.
Roy Spencer: “The total cloud water anomaly for February was also at a record high, at 13% above average”
Stephen Wilde: Wavier jet stream tracks produce longer lines of air mass mixing, hence more clouds and less solar energy entering the oceans to replenish warmth lost from oceans to air by convection.
Looking at the wind graph, perhaps there is an explanation for the Pause (which has been suggested among the 50 odd excuses) — perhaps wind speeds have been higher than normal for the last 18 years which has “stirred in the heat”. That’s why I ask about the long term average. We just don’t know from this graph.
EXTRA Tidbit: For those who are interested, the Western Pacific pours out around Indonesia into the Indian Ocean. It’s a pretty big deal for us Western Australians. We end up with that warm water running down along the coast past Perth. It’s why the most southern corals in the world grow around the island off the coast here at 32S.
The news is all over the media — Feb 2016 was a record hottest ever month — and the Global Worriers are saying “Meltdown“, “Planetary Crisis” and “Terrifying Milestone.”
One big El Nino didn’t fix the climate models now. (They can’t predict El Nino’s either).
Nothing that happens after 2015 can change the amount of energy that went missing during the Pause that no mainstream modeler predicted. Remember these models are supposed to be coupled ocean and atmosphere models, but none of them understand what causes shifts in the PDO, or many other natural cycles and currents of the ocean. So with every natural spike up, modelers unscientifically leap in glee, and with the other 99% of the data, they blame internal variability. But a real scientist is scientific every month. Trends, guys, trends. That’s what this debate was supposed to be about. Not spikes. Not noise.
During the last whopper El Nino in 1997-98, CO2 levels were 365ppm, They’re now 400ppm. This El Nino should be hotter than the last big one. For a lot of the last 10 years the Global Worriers have been claiming that we can’t start a pause with an El Nino. So why is OK to stop a Pause with one?
…
The heat wasn’t “global” but was an Arctic, Russian, Alaskan thing (see the dark red above and the top graph of the three below). It’s likely the heat has come out of the ocean. So an ocean current may have shifted. Or solar influences may have moved the jet streams….
Graph, UAH, satellite, TEmperatures, 2016
There is no planetary emergency in half the planet.
Too-tricky graphs show how different everything is in the last 16 years “compared to the 99 before that”. But since our weather comes in cycles of 30, 60 or 200 years, as well as longer ones, almost any 16 year period is likely to be not the average of the century beforehand. Thus this technique can be applied to any noisy cyclical dataset as a Handy Headline Generator.
It’s a tad shameless to present it as if it means something given our short knowledge of the Australian climate and the hyper variability within. You’d think our last century had a constant climate, then there was a “shift”. Spot the hockeystick?
In thousands of kilometers across the pink “summer dominant” areas of central Australia, it might rain more in summer, but it mostly doesn’t rain at all and when it does rain properly, it’s once in a decade. See Alice Springs in January. How’s that for noise? Did a remnant cyclone rain on Alice this year?
How do we spot this zone “moving” — with a Ouija board?
…
Here’s the winter rain across Australia — look at the whipsaw — to see a real shift in the Australian climate we’d need a lot more data to deal with the noise.
The flatter part recently looks a bit like the 1920s and 30s. Is it really a new climate, or just a cycle in the old one? If it has changed, how do we know it’s not due to land clearance, or some other factor?
…
About the only area that appears to show a trend is winter in South West WA and some bumper summer rain across the top half. The trend in SW WA seems ot be partly due to land clearing, (See do forests drive wind and rain?). Otherwise, check the cycles for yourself, there’s nothing that unusual going on in the Winter Rain in the Murray Darlin Basin, Tasmania, South Australia, Queensland and Eastern Australia. Rain goes up and down.
If you do enough permutations of months, years, seasons and regions, there’s bound to be a few with slopes.
Striking changes?
Dr Stephens said the new analysis revealed striking changes to the Australian climate over the past 16 years.
“Since 2000, there has been a general increase in summer rainfall across Australia, and a corresponding decrease in winter rainfall, leading to shifts in rainfall zones extending for hundreds of kilometres,” Dr Stephens said.
“Rainfall between May to October over much of the heavily populated regions of southern Australia has decreased 10-30%, while summer rain has increased up to 40% in some areas.
“This change in climate has major implications for farming and pastoral systems as the profitability of different crop types changes, disease risk changes, and the composition of rangeland grasses changes with stocking rates.”
You are not allowed to discuss climate science, nor have another opinion. Our airconditioners are heating the world, our cars make snow, and heaters cause droughts. If you question these Factoids, you may go to jail.
Even if the investigation or “case” never gets any further, the message is lit in fire. It’s practically a crime to doubt man-made global warming.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch has considered taking legal action against climate change deniers.
The United States’ top lawyer told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the Justice Department has ‘discussed’ the possibility of a civil lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry.
She said any information her office has received has been sent to the FBI in a bid to build a case.
Daily mail has the footage. Steel yourself for the usual fantasy about the fossil fuel apparatus and reasoning-by-tobacco-slur. The people inventing mythical theories of conspiracies are right at the top…
Charles Krauthammer estimates that if skeptics are prosecuted, ”It would be an impeachable action.”
He also has a great turn of phrase about the use of the namecalling “Denier.”
“The left already has won this argument just on the basis of syntax. Denial is used with the Holocaust. Holocaust is a historical fact; if you deny it, yes, you are doing something extraordinary. Climate change is a projection into the future. The idea that it is the equivalent of, say, consideration of the Holocaust is absurd…”
It’s just another way the bureaucracy is throttling science. In grant applications the government asks scientists to tell us what impact the discoveries they haven’t made yet will have on the world. The scientists dutifully make something up, knowing the whole process is unscientific, but what does it matter? A little lie here, a little lie there and pretty soon we’re rewarding corruption.
Does Government-science punish the honest? Everyone behaves as if it does:
Another professor in Australia said: “It’s really virtually impossible to write an (Australian Research Council) ARC grant now without lying.”
Scholars in the UK and Australia contemptuous of impact statements and often exaggerate them, study suggests
A new study anonymously interviewed 50 senior academics from two research-intensive universities – one in the UK and one in Australia – who had experience writing “pathways to impact” (PIS) statements, as they are called in the UK, and in some cases had also reviewed such statements.
It was normal to sensationalise and embellish impact claims, the study published in Studies in Higher Education found.
We reward those who exaggerate, then wonder what happened to the straight-talkers.
Respondents said that future projections of impact were “charades” or “made-up stories”. As one UK professor put it: “would I believe it? No, would it help me get the money – yes.”
The whole idea of predicting the impact of the undiscovered is “unscientific”. One scientist lamented that “authors would require skills of clairvoyance …”
Would it help if that impact statement was printed in the Sydney Morning Herald?
If scientists want this to change they need to protest, not pander. But after decades of the grant game, how many real scientists are left?
How convenient?! A new study shows that human influence on the climate started just before the major (and unerasable) heatwaves of the late 1930s, thus wrapping those awkward years under the banner of Man Made Climate. This study provides the handy peer reviewed link-bomb “answer” to that.
The inexplicable heat of the 1930s and 40s has been a constant source of pain for Global Worriers. Skeptics can point out that the decadal rate of warming was pretty much the same back then, even though CO2 was at the ideal, clima-perfecto level, of 310ppm. How could it be that massive 400ppm of CO2 was barely able to break the heat records set when CO2 was almost 25% lower?
Well, finally, mystery solved. A new Australian study compares models that don’t-explain-the-climate with CO2, to ones that-don’t-explain-the-climate without CO2. These models assume CO2 causes warming, so when they take out the CO2 factor that was added in to produce “the climate”, the models prove, ipso gloriousi, that CO2 causes warming. Indeed their method is so good, it can’t fail. As Anthony Watts says “it seems clear to me that the conclusion existed before the paper was written.” Quite.
Say hello to Climate Numerology and the power of “4”
The researchers seem to think that aerosols explain the cooling in the 1950s — 1970s (and the “pause” too?). But I think the study reveals that man-made CO2 is especially potent in years with threes, fours, eights and nines.
The lucky numbers are: 1937, 1940, 1941, 1943-44, 1980-1981, 1987-1988, 1990, 1995, 1997-98, 2010 and 2014. These are called “record-breaking hot years attributable to climate change globally.” As opposed to millions of hotter other years which no one can explain.
The authors seem to have missed that we now know that CO2 has the most effect in years associated with the number 4. In 1937, for example, the CO2 concentration was 309ppm at Law Dome Antarctica. Adding the digits, three, zero and nine produces 14, a hot number. The heat of the 40s is obvious, as is the 80s. In 1998, not only is the year divisible by 4 (if you add 2), but CO2 was 366m and 3 plus 6 plus 6 equals 14!
Climate numerology has as much scientific validity as models that predict nothing. Soothsayers never had it so good.
Human influence on climate dates back to 1930s, new research finds
As with the US, Australian conservatives are fed up with the pandering to the pompous climate scare. Our PM might “believe” but many conservatives and libertarians don’t. There is growing unrest.
Here is the NSW state branch calling for real debate — trying to rein in Turnbull:
Fairfax Media understands the motion passed with support of more than 70 per cent of delegates at the state council meeting held on the Central Coast last weekend.
A motion passed at the party’s state council calls on the government to “arrange and hold public debates/discussions” between scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and “independent climate scientists”.
The motion says the events should cover “the global warming/climate change debate”; “the claims by the IPCC”; and the statement “is all the science settled”.
The motions – which were debated after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had left the room following his speech – reveal the level of climate change scepticism among the Liberal base in NSW.
Sources say Mr Turnbull – known to strongly support action on climate change – was heckled by sections of the party during his speech and a large section of delegates refused to rise when he was given a standing ovation.
It’s panic stations over at Believer Central. They are losing their grip on the media. And 2015 was a bumper year for Climate Scares – the hottest ever year, the giant Paris Junket, The El Nino, The Pope! (The Pope?) Despite all that, the media spent less time on the climate. It doesn’t get any better than 2015 for the Global Worriers — there is no higher level of panic. But the free propaganda machine is slowing…
Lookout, climate denial is on the rise (don’t ask about the error bars):
Dana might be knocked over, but I see ABC down 20, Fox up 20, and some “other stuff”. It’s not really much of a trend. The thing that really bugs Dana seems to be that the minutes shifted from a friendly channel to the evil Fox.
…
But that is the point. The total number of minutes is not as important as the “purity” of the coverage. Skeptical stories are on the rise, believer ones are falling.
Maybe ABC (USA) has realized that indoctrination is not much fun for viewers? Maybe they care about ratings?
Peak news is behind us — nothing matches the frenzy of 2009:
2009 was the peak year for climate media interest.
But, in the end, don’t forget this is annual airtime recorded in minutes.
…
PBS equals public broadcasting service. Which station loves big-government the most?
Cause and Effect?
As with other things, Nuccitelli struggles with the chain of reasoning.
UPDATE #2: This episode has now been pulled from the ABC website 13 days early. The ABC, with its billion dollar budget, has a website to show all its programs for 14 days after they run. But for no stated reason this one has been deleted after just one day. Did the ABC not like us discussing it? (H/t to Panda). Thank goodness we have a copy. [Screencap of current ABC page here.]
h/t to Peter Q. Thanks to Andrew M as well.
Dennis Jensen has a lot to say on matters of national importance, but the ABC doesn’t ask him very often about those.
Tonight Dr Dennis Jensen was just the “Climate denier” target who had stepped over the line on another topic — breaking a sacred taboo. He might lose pre-selection. He might be out of a job. The ABC seem to think we care about the party political machinations more than the suffering of Australian citizens, which Jensen had been trying to get us to discuss. Instead the ABC went into great details of his dire career plight. That apparently was “the message”.
You could be forgiven for thinking the main point of the ABC news was not to discuss matters of national importance, to inform us of what we are allowed to talk about, and to let us know our sentence should we let slip the wrong phrase. Watch out, you too might get sacked, be exiled, and called nasty names “denier”. (Have you done a PhD? The ABC can erase that — not a doctor, just the brain-of-a-dog, a man who barks.)
As the only Federal MP who did a PhD in a science and engineering area, Jensen was one of the first to speak up, years ahead, about problems with climate science and our energy policies. He was right. He also has a lot to say on defence. But on climate, defense and energy policy, the ABC is more likely to ask Sarah Hanson Young.
There was no discussion at all today of the problem Dennis Jensen was trying to get the nation to talk about, nor about his experience in South Africa. It’s a crime we can’t discuss that here (sorry)– it’s SNIP 18C and all — lest we offend.
Some Australians have shorter lifespans, poor health, and lower employment. The intolerant racists appear to be the ones distracting us from the real issues and stopping discussions that might help them.
Dennis grew up in South Africa. He fought against apartheid then, and he fights against it now.
Note to commenters. You can discuss the ABC and the point of namecalling public broadcasters, or the marvel of free speech and how Australia doesn’t have it. On other matters, moderation may be unbelievably slow and comments may be deleted or fester in the moderation queue for days. Apologies. OpenAustralia (Dennis’s speech link) appear to want comments on those other topics there…
PS: Any youtube geniuses out there who can convert the ABC video to something that people overseas can watch? Thanks 🙂
The Lancet study in a nutshell: Take climate models that don’t work, and guesstimate what might happen to agriculture because of the climate we probably won’t get. Then use those guesses of food production in 2050 to fantasize what that means for human mortality. After all, we don’t know how many people are killed today by “4% less fruit and vege and 0.7% less meat”, but we can estimate what that dietary change will do in 2050 after a medical revolution, 35 years of plant breeding and agricultural changes. Not to mention a few more rounds of global food fads and phases of Vegan, Paleo, Atkins, and 5:2 Fasting. (But how did they factor in the mortality effect from another 2,000 episodes of MasterChef?)
Seriously, CO2 has increased crop yields, and will continue to do so until we hit 1000ppm (or maybe 2000). Around the planet, plants grow in warm places, and shrivel up and die in cold ones. So do people. Cold kills 20 times as many people as heat does. It must take a lot of modeling to calculate “more deaths” from two good outcomes.
Look at where fruit grows. In a warmer world, the tropics will stay a similar temperature (thanks to the evaporative air conditioner taking heat off the oceans in the tropics) but I guess the current Arctic fruit industry will be wiped out by nicer weather. Could it be the deathknell for the Siberian Strawberry industry and the Grapes of Greenland?
Global warming will hit productive fruit growing areas like this one particularly hard…
Food scarcity caused by climate change could cause 500,000 deaths by 2050, study suggests
The effects of climate change on food production around the world could lead to more than 500,000 deaths by the year 2050, according to a grim new study. Climate-related impacts on agriculture could lead to an overall global decline in food availability, the research suggests, forcing people to eat fewer fruits and vegetables and less meat. And the public health impacts of these changes could be severe.
Proving you can find any outcome you want if you have the right model:
Importantly, say the authors, cutting emissions could have substantial health benefits, reducing the number of climate-related deaths by 29-71% depending on the strength of the interventions. For example, in a medium emission scenario (increases in global average surface air temp of 1.3-1.4°C in 2046-65 compared to1986-2005), the numbers of diet- and weight-related deaths could be reduced by about a third (30%) compared with the worst-case, high-emission scenario.
Can someone look up this crew?
This study was funded by the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food.
As for nutrition-panic where plants are protein deficient in a high -CO2 world. I showed before that the total losses of protein in 100 grams of rice is compensated for by eating one extra chick pea. People will plant different crops and eat different meals. So?
Marco Springmann, Daniel Mason-D’Croz, Sherman Robinson, Tara Garnett, H Charles J Godfray, Douglas Gollin, Mike Rayner, Paola Ballon, Peter Scarborough. Global and regional health effects of future food production under climate change: a modelling study.. The Lancet, March 2, 2016 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(15)01156-3
The media hype and the story of the false Penguin Panic
Image: UNSW/Chris Turney
Much fuss was made of 150,000 missing penguins in Antarctica as if climate change had killed them. A monster iceberg had washed in, stopping the cute swimming tuxedos from getting to dinner and the colony of 160,000 suddenly shrank to 10,000. Where did all those penguins go? In previous tough times, when they could be tracked they just split up and went to different colonies.
Given that the penguins have survived repeated ice ages and warming for millions of years who would have thought that they would have a strategy for dealing with the odd big iceberg?
[Grist] Researchers found that a colony of Adélie penguins in Antartica’s Cape Denison has decreased from 160,000 to just 10,000 since 2011, when a huge iceberg ominously named B09B became grounded in nearby Commonwealth Bay. The penguins were once a short waddle from their food source, but the arrival of the iceberg — which is nearly the size of Rhode Island — has turned that jaunt into a 75-mile round trip. Talk about a long lunch.
Cry for those penguins:
“It’s eerily silent now,” expedition leader Chris Turney told The Sydney Morning Herald. He goes on to describe an alarmingly sedated — and depleted — community of penguins…. are clearly struggling. They can barely survive themselves, let alone hatch the next generation. We saw lots of dead birds on the ground … it’s just heartbreaking to see.”
Credit to Becky Oskin at Live Science for unpacking the hype, getting two points of view and finding a researcher who knew something:
But there’s no proof yet that the birds are dead. No one has actually found 150,000 frozen penguins. In fact, experts think there’s a less horrific explanation for the missing birds: When the fishing gets tough, penguins simply pick up and move. It wouldn’t be the first time Adélie penguins marched to new digs. When an iceberg grounded in the southern Ross Sea in 2001, penguins on Ross Island relocated to nearby colonies until the ice broke up.
“Just because there are a lot fewer birds observed doesn’t automatically mean the ones that were there before have perished,” said Michelle LaRue, a penguin population researcher at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who was not involved in the study. “They easily could have moved elsewhere, which would make sense if nearby colonies are thriving,” LaRue told Live Science in an email interview.
As for the dead birds, La Rue explained that there are always carcasses lying around Antarctica because it’s so cold and dry (they don’t decompose in the freezer so to speak). You might think an expert like Chris Turney might know that? It appears Eric Worrall, non-penguin-researcher, and not published at all in the peer review literature on Antarctica thought the non-migration of Penguins facing disaster was “ridiculous”. (WUWT)
Why did pretty much all of them fall for the story and say the same thing?
After all, as they say, there was nothing in the paper itself to justify the scare, or for that matter the press release, which only carried the statement of the lead author, Kerry-Jayne Wilson.
So, step forward co-author, Chris Turney, leader of the Ship of Fools expedition which carried out the penguin count. He is quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald and other newspapers:
… Professor Turney said the Cape Denison penguins could face a grim future. “They don’t migrate,” he said. “They’re stuck there. They’re dying.”
The Gullible Guardian and Grist and SMH would not get caught if they just did a bit more research. They might even seek out some skeptics to get a different point of view.
The Sydney Morning Herald led the panic, and a week later issued a quiet reassessment. How many SMH readers might still think that more solar panels could prevent mass penguin death? On Feb 12 the story was that a Giant iceberg could wipe out Adelie Penguin colony at Cape Denison, Antarctica. Chris Turney was interviewed at length, and we were told that as the planet warms things were going to get worse. But in the aftermath, writer Kim Arlington must have realized that Turney and Fogwill of UNSW were making her look a bit silly. She wrote another article on Feb 23 with the sedate unsensational headline “Scientists assess icebergs impact on Adelie penguins.” There, Michael LaRue and his more sensible view are heard. Turney gets a paragraph and this time he suggests the birds are missing, and maybe at sea. There’s no mention of climate change or global warming. There’s also no mention of how misleading the first story was, though there is a link to it (which doesn’t work. Bad luck?).
The real news is being thrashed out on the web. No wonder subscriptions are not going well for the mainstream propaganda units.
The last word on penguins:
At the end of the day, Adelie penguins seem to do well in the warmth. One recent study found that their population size has increased by 135 fold since 14,000 years ago. LaRue also points out there are 7 million Adélie penguins in Antarctica. They are not near extinction.
Why are we still wasting money trying to change the weather?
We’ve cracked the code to program biology and there are so many better things we can do. We can read the four letter alphabet, and now we’re in the early days of unpacking the operating systems. One team (below) has just reprogrammed skin cells to hunt down one particular type of brain cancer and found a way to get the cells to stick around long enough to deliver killer drug doses to the cancer cells. It’s at proof of concept stage — we can extend the life of mice with this cancer by about 200%, but we haven’t tried this in people. This may be years off, or not. Cancer is an information problem.
In one form or another this concept will change the world. Sooner or later we will figure out how to reprogram cells to seek out and destroy every last difficult-to-get cancer cell. No more mass collateral damage that kills healthy cells too. Then we’ll teach the immune system to stay alert and keep picking off any recidivists. No more recurrences.
This is just the beginning of customized, individualized medicine. Early days.
Groundbreaking discovery made use skin cells to kill cancer
ScienceDaily: In a first for medical science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pharmacy researchers turn skin cells into cancer-hunting stem cells that destroy brain tumors known as glioblastoma — a discovery that can offer, for the first time in more than 30 years, a new and more effective treatment for the disease.
The technique, reported in Nature Communications, builds upon the newest version of the Nobel Prize-winning technology from 2007, which allowed researchers to turn skin cells into embryonic-like stem cells. Researchers hailed the possibilities for use in regenerative medicine and drug screening. Now, researchers have found a new use: killing brain cancer.
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