Yarloop fire: History repeats — in 1961, a 41 day inferno destroyed 160 buildings and burned a larger area in South-West WA

Fires this week in South West WA have caused two deaths, burned 72,000 hectares and destroyed 143 homes, wiping out 80% Yarloop. But it’s all happened before, and the fires were bigger, worse, and burned a larger area. The ABC have described the infamous fires of 1961 before, but there doesn’t seem to be any mention of the history of these historic fires in their current news. Surely it’s relevant? No one at the $1 billion dollar agency did the internet search that an unfunded blogger did.

Bushfire, Dwellingup, South West, Western Australia, damage.

Dwellingup, 1961

Bushfire, South West, WA, 1961, Dwellingup destroyed.

Dwellingup, January 1961

In January 1961 the remnants of cyclones meant dry thunderstorms lit fires in the hot dry South West of Western Australia. Ten separate fires began in the same area near Dwellingup. They wiped 60 year old small timber towns off the map, and razed 123 houses. Over the next 41 days, fires continued to burn, destroying 160 buildings and burning through hundreds of thousands of hectares of land (134,000 hectares in the Dwellingup Fire, but 1.5 million hectares burned in SW WA that summer -PDF ). The damage bill would come to $35 million. Somehow, incredibly, no lives were lost.

The fires of 1961 in South West Western Australia:

“Temperatures soared to 41C and winds of 60km/hr whipped” the South West.

“Dwellingup sustained considerable damage and had to be virtually rebuilt.

Not so lucky were the small mill communities of Holyoake, Nanga Brook, Marrinup and Banksiadale which were literally wiped off the map. In fact, following the fires, a decision was made not to rebuild these towns.”

South West WA is one of the most fire prone regions of the world, says Bushfire CRC:

South-west Western Australia is one of the most fire-prone regions in the world due to the combination of a Mediterranean-type climate with hot dry summers and the presence of large areas of flammable native vegetation. It is also a biodiversity hotspot where the role of fire is key. Prescribed fire has been used extensively in forest landscapes since the 1960s to mitigate the impacts of bushfires on the community and on environmental values including biodiversity. The ecological implications of prescribed burning, however, remain contentious.

The response to the 1961 devastation was to have a Royal Commission, get radio equipment, and do better prescribed burning.

Prescribed burning in WA became a serious ongoing practice after these shocking 1961 fires and continued until the mid 1990s, but has been reduced in the last two decades. (See below for details).

A group called Bush Fire Front (BFF) describe problems with forest management in WA, pointing out that there were not many major problems from 1962 – 1985 because WA had such an active fire management plan. It was tested when Cyclone Alby swept through WA in April 1978 with winds of up to 130km hour, the lightning igniting as many as 65 wildfires. Despite this extreme situation, the total damage was much lower than either 1961 or 2016 fires because the area was so well prepared with reduced fuel loads. The BFF page (below) may be a few years out of date, I suspect burning off has increased in the last few years, but this is the kind of discussion and the numbers we should be discussing. Where are the investigative journalists at the ABC or the West Australian?

DEC fire management on its forested land in the South West is inadequate because:

Fuel reduction burning cycles are too long
The annual burning target is too low.
1. DEC has an annual target of 200,000 ha for a forest estate of about 2,500,000 ha, which gives an average burning cycle of 12 years. Despite that overall figure there are significant areas of forest carrying fuels older than 20 years. BFF believes that the negligible wildfire losses of the 1961-1985 period, where the average area burnt each year was about 300,000 ha, indicates that a figure closer to that area is necessary to provide adequate protection against major wildfires.
They cannot reach their annual target anyway
1. From 2000 to 2008, the average area of burning each year by DEC was 149,000 ha This means that in the period 2000-2008 alone, the backlog of burning was over 400,000 ha. This backlog will never be made up, so the outlook is for steadily increasing fuel loads in our forests, therefore steadily increasing fire hazards.
Their burn planning processes are too complex
Implementation of burns is ineffective
Smoke minimisation procedures severely limit the amount of burning close to the Metropolitan area
Reserves managed by DEC such as the regional parks, receive very little active fire management.

In January 2014, Peter Law, The Sunday Times (news.com), warned that there was too much unburned forest in WA with a high “fuel age”. Small controlled cool burning fires are easy to manage in forest that has been recently burned, but once the forest has seven years of fuel buildup, even controlled burns become risky.

Areas of SW WA which had not been subject to prescribed burning in the last seven years, as of July 2013

The map reveals the build-up of fuel – combustible trees, shrub and ground litter – aged over seven years near Perth and in the South-West.

As of last July, there was almost 2.1 million hectares of fuel aged seven years and older across WA, the paper reveals. Fuel aged under six years spanned 944,000ha.

Bushfire Front chairman Roger Underwood described the accumulation of older fuel – about eight tonnes per hectare – near poorly prepared residential areas as WA’s “ticking time bomb”.

“This map demonstrates that 80% of South-West forests and national parks are now in a situation where firefighters will not be able to tackle or surpress a fire even in moderate conditions because of the very heavy fuels,” Mr Underwood said.

In 2012/13, DPaW achieved just 23,648ha of its annual prescribed burn target of 200,000ha in the South-West.

This is the age it becomes almost impossible to control on even average summer conditions – let alone catastrophic days with soaring temperatures and fast winds.

“DPaW said its prescribed burning program is governed by a number of factors, including weather conditions.

“However, over the past 20 years, the department has met 79 per cent of its cumulative annual target,” a spokeswoman said.”

Current government fire management just does not understand the reasons that fires get “beyond control”. Here’s the current Dept of Fire and Emergency Services Commissioner saying that nothing could have stopped this damage. There is no mention of fuel loads:

DFES Commissioner Wayne Gregson…

“Over the past four or five days we have been at full-on war with mother nature, I’m told we have not seen a firestorm of this magnitude, in terms of the size,” he told 6PR radio on Monday.

Mr Gregson said residents were told not to stay to defend their properties without a plan and to not rely on the local water and electricity supply, adding the blaze could not be defended with a garden hose.

“I sometimes think people don’t recognise the enormity of the fire front,” he said.

“I don’t believe anything could have stopped that fire impacting Yarloop.

“Fires get to a point where they just cannot be defended, either from a frontal attack or by the air.”

Yes, they get too big to defend when we haven’t done the burning off to reduce fuel loads. The fire boss is being criticized for all kinds of things, but the real problem that we ought to be trying to prevent the uncontrollable fires in the first place.

We keep learning the same lessons

Nearly 70 years ago, even the Women’s Weekly understood we needed to clear the underbrush. The December 1957 issue warned that Australia’s worst enemies are fire and flood, and people keep forgetting to prepare for them.

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9.3 out of 10 based on 105 ratings

EU scientists say Volcanoes, Asteroids are unimaginably worse than climate change

Experts say that climate change is the worst threat we face, except for the worse ones.

Scientists warn over super-volcano threat

Experts at the European Science Foundation said volcanoes – especially super-volcanoes like the one at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, which has a caldera measuring 34 by 45 miles (55 by 72 km) – pose more threat to Earth and the survival of humans than asteroids, earthquakes, nuclear war and global warming.

What could be worse than 1.5 degrees of warming?

[After] … a major eruption, the team said, millions of people would die and earth’s atmosphere would be poisoned with ash and other toxins “beyond the imagination of anything man’s activity and global warming could do over 1,000 years.

We are talking about an “extinction-level event”:

But the UN and Obama will save us right?

There are few real contingency plans in place to deal with the ticking time bomb, which they conclude is likely to go off within the next 80 years.

40,000 people met in Paris last month to solve the greatest threat to Life On Earth.

The chance of such as eruption happening at one of the major volcanoes within 80 years is put at five to ten per cent by the experts.

Looks like there’s a 90% consensus that we don’t have to do anything?

The report makes for interesting reading (perfect for disaster-nerds, and catastrophe-spotters). This is not just about supervolcanoes, but asteroids, Spanish flu, and Ebola too.

Keep reading →

8.9 out of 10 based on 84 ratings

Nevada reversal: solar earnings rate drops from 12c to 2c — May “destroy rooftop solar power”

If only solar generation was affordable?

In Nevada there is a lot of sunlight and a lot of solar panels, but they generate electricity at a cost of 25 – 30c per kWhr. With subsidies and tax benefits, the cost “falls” to 15c. (In this context, the word “falls” means “is dropped on other people”.) But the retail rate for electricity is 12.5c. So having solar panels doesn’t help you much unless you can sell that excess electricity, which the state of Nevada was buying at 12.5c. That price sounds fine and dandy til we find out that they could have bought the same electricity at wholesale rate of around two cents.

So Nevada has decided that’s what the state will pay… 2c, not 12.5c. The latest decision is to apply normal free market rules. Nevada will now pay wholesale rates for electricity. No more shopping for boutique electrons.

Taking into account all the tax cuts, subsidies and total costs, who would have thought that paying 15 times the wholesale rate for electricity would be economically unsustainable?

Battles Over Net Metering Cloud the Future of Rooftop Solar

One of the fastest-growing markets for residential solar, Nevada is the first state to drastically revise its policies on net metering—wherein owners of residential solar arrays are compensated for the power they send onto the utility power grid, usually at retail rates. All but a handful of states have instituted net metering. Claiming that these fees represent an unfair transfer of costs to the utilities and non-solar customers, utilities have mounted a well-funded campaign to reduce or eliminate the payments. The Nevada Public Utilities Commission concurred, calling on utilities to cut the compensation for solar providers from retail to wholesale rates.

Naturally, this has been a campaign by utility companies. Residents would not be expected to protest against high electricity prices.

Not surprisingly, the solar industry disagrees. Calling the net metering decision “unethical, unprecedented, and possibly unlawful,” SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive predicted that it will “destroy the rooftop solar industry in one of the states with the most sunshine.”

Rive missed how people who want fair market rates for solar power are not just unethical, and unlawful, but ugly selfish and funded by fossils. Listen to Leonardo, whatever you do, don’t date them.

Events in Nevada, though, could signal a major reshaping of the eonomics of solar power for homeowners. The retail rate of electricity in Nevada is 12.39 cents per kilowatt-hour; the wholesale price for electricity in the region that includes Nevada averaged around two cents per kilowatt-hour in December. According to a report from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the cost of a residential solar system has fallen to around 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour.

9.6 out of 10 based on 102 ratings

Another way life adapts to climate change: fathers pass on climate lessons through epigenetics

Life on Earth is proving to be so uncannily adaptive to climate change, you’d almost think that a half a billion years of climate change mattered. Perhaps the precambrian clutter is not just junk, but handy tools from past lives that we may or may not need to use. Last week it was salt-water fish that got cast out of the sea by an Earthquake, and adapted to fresh water.

Stick male guinea pigs into a zone a full ten degrees hotter, and after a couple of months, his future sons and daughters will be better adapted to hot weather. Thank epi-genetics: the genes don’t change, but some get labelled “hot”, some not. Dad’s body sticks methyl groups on choice genes which upregulates them, and the pattern of activation gets passed on in genes. It’s a way of taking his lessons in life and giving his offspring a head start.

In any case, it appears in guinea pigs that there not only can this mammal cope with changes in the climate on a daily and seasonal basis, but the machiney is in place to cope with longer term changes too.

Like father like son: Epigenetics in wild guinea pigs

Fathers are able to adjust to increasing temperatures within their own lifetime and do transmit this information to their offspring. This has now been shown for the first time in a wild animal. The findings were the result of a project within the Joint Initiative for Research and Innovation and have been published in the scientific journal Molecular Ecology.

Male wild guinea pigs respond to increasing temperatures with biochemical modifications attached to their genome and pass this “epigenetic” information to the next generation, and most likely even the following one.

Keep reading →

9.3 out of 10 based on 62 ratings

Australians don’t want to pay more for Green-power. What was a pitiful 1% of the grid, shrank by half.

What could possibly go wrong? According to badly done, ambiguous surveys, everyone in Australia “loves” green energy, and believes in climate change. But according to actual payments, hardly anyone wants to cough up any cash for it, (unless the government is waving a big stick). Poor Greenpower appears to have gotten its business advice from the ABC, or the CSIRO.

How much of the Australian grid is voluntarily green? Would that be 28% (our target for 2030)? Nope. It’s not even five percent. Instead a mere one electron in every 200 is voluntarily “green”. It’s a pathetic half a percent.

All Australians are free to pay an extra 5 or 6 cents per kilowatt to get their energy “green” from GreenPower. But even at the height of the 2008 -Gore-Rudd era only 1% of all the electricity was bought up by green consumers willing to voluntarily pay more for “clean” energy. Since then, though the volunteers have left in droves.

But I’m sure the Greens are happy. They always wanted a free market solution.

Speaking of free markets, I say let’s have more. How about we allow people the choice to buy dirty energy too. I want pure coal fired electrons delivered direct, and I’m willing to pay for it. 😉 (How does 10 cents per KWhr sound? )

Climate change fatigue, cost hits renewable GreenPower scheme

The Australian

A scheme under which people volunteer to pay more for renewable energy is losing customers and sales as the price of a green conscience rises dramatically.

GreenPower, a scheme run by state governments in which people and businesses pay more for their power to buy non-fossil-fuel electricity, has been hit by up to a 40 per cent increase in cost as retailers pass on the rising price of large-scale renewable energy certificates.

Retailers have increased their prices for GreenPower, ranging from 5.23c to 6.6c per kWh.

The scheme has gone from more than 900,000 customers in 2008 who bought about 1 per cent of total generation to just over 500,000 who bought just 0.6 per cent of all the electricity generated in 2013. Since, sales have dropped a further 21 per cent.

Some will say that the massive uptake of solar panels is voluntary green power, but without the government payments forced from taxpayers, how many solar panels would have been “voluntarily” bought?

In this case, a UTS researcher doesn’t even see any difference between paying more, or taking more:

A report by UTS’s Institute of Sustainable Futures for the NSW Department of Resources and Energy — which administers the scheme on behalf of all the states — said the rise in roof- top solar panels had contributed to the demise of GreenPower. “It seems that once customers have ‘done their bit’ by paying for solar PV, they no longer see the need to pay extra for GreenPower.”

People aren’t getting solar to “do their bit”. They choose solar because the government was paying them too. Or more accurately, they choose solar because it’s the only way out of paying exorbitant electricity prices in a market managed by bureucrats.

UPDATE: 42% of US adults don’t want to pay even $12 a year to stop climate change

9.1 out of 10 based on 109 ratings

NOAA scientists admit in private that they can’t name any place affected by ocean acidification

There’s the truth, then there’s the whole truth.

From a climate expert at NOAA, the study of ocean acidification is so young “they don’t have any data sets that show a direct effect of OA on population health” and they can’t name any place in the world that is definitely affected by it.

Steve Milloy at Junkscience.com FOI’d emails among NOAA scientists discussing a NY times op-ed draft.The editor was serving up an apocalyse:

…and he wanted all the dirt:

Can the authors give us more specific, descriptive images about how acidification has already affected the oceans?

Tony Thomas writes that Dr Shallin Busch, who works for NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program discussed the draft of the article with fellow scientist Ms Applebaum. She warns that they can’t say that OA (Ocean Acidification) was definitely a problem anywhere at the moment:

Unfortunately, I can’t provide this information to you because it doesn’t exist. As I said in my last email, currently there are NO areas of the world that are severely degraded because of OA or even areas that we know are definitely affected by OA right now. If you want to use this type of language, you could write about the CO2 vent sites in Italy or Polynesia as examples of things to come. Sorry that I can’t be more helpful on this!

Busch admits that ocean acidification studies are immature, and the evidence is not there “yet”:

2) I think it is really important to resist the NYT editor’s impulse to say that OA is wreaking all sorts of havoc RIGHT NOW, because for ecological systems, we don’t yet have the evidence to say that. OA is a problem today because it is changing ocean chemistry so quickly. The vast majority of the biological impacts of OA will only occur under projected future chemistry conditions. Also, the study of the biological impacts of OA is so young that we don’t have any data sets that show a direct effect of OA on population health or trajectory. Best, Shallin..[4]

It’s good that Busch is trying to make the article more accurate, but when she does public Q and A’s on ocean acidification she doesn’t say things quite the same way:

NF: What is the single most important thing for people to know about ocean acidification?

SB: That ocean acidification is a problem for today, not just for the future. We know from earth’s history and from experiments that we’re doing in the lab that many marine species are sensitive to changes in ocean chemistry. So, acidification is a problem for marine ecosystems. We can take that a step further and say, well, why should we care about marine ecosystems? First of all, many societies value biodiversity. Furthermore, acidification’s potential effects on marine ecosystems are an economic concern. Acidification may impact fisheries and the jobs and revenue that depend on fisheries. This may raise food security issues. Ocean acidification is an environmental problem, it’s a potential economic issue, and it’s a potential food security issue. And it’s all those things today, not some distant day in the future.

Busch is probably speaking only her honest convictions, but we need more from scientists. It’s not enough to be technically correct, we need scientists who convey what we don’t know, what the present state is, and provide the uncertainties in the same terms, no matter who the audience is.

If scientists think headlines are gratuitous and exaggerated, they need to say so publicly. If editors are not publicly shamed for the hype, they will keep doing it.

Art Robinson discussed the special kind of honesty required for science:

At Caltech, in the 1950s and 1960s, intellectual honesty was rigorously taught – by example. There were no courses in this. The student was simply surrounded by people who always approached their work with complete honesty. Dishonesty in any action meant immediate expulsion from the campus by one’s peers. Sadly, this is no longer the case at Caltech today.

When a true scientist makes a statement to his nonscientist fellow citizens, he speaks only the truth as he perceives it and as it has been verified – not by hypothesis or by computer simulations, but by actual experiments and observations. Moreover, he strives to simultaneously express all of the weaknesses his statement may have as a result of the always limited data available and the ever present chance that his hypothetical interpretation of that data may be in error.

What was science is now grantmanship:

Gradually, over the next two generations, the private capital that had heretofore funded science, endowed scientific institutions and provided the intellectual freedom that is crucially important to successful scientific enquiry was seized through taxation and part of it was then passed to scientists in government “grants” and contracts.

Grantsmanship gradually became the most important “scientific” skill, and the amount of grant money a scientist commands is now, in most institutions, the most important parameter that determines his advancement. The new “scientist” rushes from meeting to meeting, furiously writes grant proposals, and strives to obtain news coverage of his latest “discoveries,” while leaving the actual research to technicians and students.

If scientists were telling the whole truth all the time, they wouldn’t mind if the public saw more of their emails.

9.5 out of 10 based on 138 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

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8.6 out of 10 based on 20 ratings

Carbon causes PTSD (Stressed, anxious, violent? Blame climate change)

Once there were no storms, the climate was perfect and everyone was nice to each other. Then people got air conditioners to make the climate even more perfect, and God was not happy. Along came droughts, floods and plagues and everyone got post traumatic stress disorder.

Humans are just not designed to live in a world where the seas rise 1mm a year. (What,we can’t run fast enough?)

The news on our mental health is dire according to a report from the National Wildlife Foundation (on climate change only the Experts are right, but in other fields, anyone can have a stab, right?).

In America, 200 Million People Will Suffer ‘Psychological Distress’ From Climate Change

So Grok hid in a cave and made it through an ice age, but the modern pajama-boy will have a panic attack if the world warms by one degree.

Hands up who wants a paleolithic health-plan? Their babies died of dysentery. They ate snake soup or they starved, but somehow the tough-nuts who survived evolved into Five Star Pansies.

“The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States,” examines the hitherto undiscussed effects of increasingly prevalent extreme weather, sea level rise, drought and other impacts of climate change on mental health. How will we cope with a changing world?

But really cyclones were so much more fun when we lived in bark-huts. No one cared if the house blew away — they just popped up another one. It was like that with babies too right?

The climate hasn’t changed in the last 18 years, imagine the damage that sort of “change” can do? Seems more likely to cause deep disillusionment as so many heroes turned out to be gullible patsies or people on the take. There’s a scenario for depression when today’s teen finds out the ABC, the CSIRO and “profs” were all selling schemes to change the weather which had no chance of success.

Since we’re talking about mental suffering, how about the stress caused right now to sufferers of real PTSD whose condition is now being used for political points. “I got my PTSD because it didn’t rain, how about you?”

Are you feeling uneasy? It could be the first signs of Climate change.

H.t Climate Depot, and see also Eric Worrall at WUWT.

9.4 out of 10 based on 102 ratings

Happy New Year 2016

Feel free to document your predictions here…

8 out of 10 based on 37 ratings

Green Electricity in Denmark, Germany, costs three times as much as US

It’s a bit costly trying to control the weather:

“Germany has been paying over $26 billion per year for electricity that has a wholesale market value of just $5 billion (see here).”

That’s $21 billion that could have been spent on health or education that was used instead to feed the Green Machine.

A few handy facts to memorize. The cost of electricity per kilowatt-hour:

Denmark, 42c; Germany 40c, and the USA, 12.5c. ( — Forbes)

Wind and solar power supplies 28% of electricity in Germany (is it really that high?) This is what Australia is aiming for?

Industrial energy prices, electricity, germany, US, UK

Graph from Forbes (link below)

Europe is a “green energy” basket case. Washington Post

“Germany’s Energy Poverty: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good.” — Der Spiegel

Europe’s Energy and Electricity Policies are a Bad Model, Jude Clement, Forbes

Keep reading →

9.1 out of 10 based on 104 ratings

Paris was an enviro-fail, but a PR success, and political win — it’s a non-binding, non-treaty, but real commitment.

Watch the pea. What does it mean to have a non-binding non-treaty, at the same time as a real “commitment”? It’s all semantics, and, as usual, word games are the weapons of big-bureaucrats. Don’t be fooled into thinking Paris was no threat to the free West.

As I keep saying, the climate conference in Paris was not trying to reduce CO2 or change the climate. The real aim is an endless free lunch for freeloaders. The Politicites didn’t get the legally binding agreement they dream of, but what they got may turn out to be almost as good. Marlo Lewis explains it may yet be politically binding on the target rich Western nations, which is all that really matters. It’s the best strategic review I’ve seen of what happened in Paris.

It was no accident that it was “non-binding”. That was part of the plan.

They were never going to get a legal treaty through the US Congress, so the aim became a deal that was “non-binding” and not a “treaty” because things that are overtly legal have to go through Congress. Instead, the bureaucrat class want to go around the voters. By simply declaring that Obama’s promises mean something, with the help of a compliant patsy media they may become effectively binding — the promises enforced with political “name and shame” punishment and pressure instead of with legislation. This would be a new means of getting around Congress.

US State Department regulations describe “eight factors for distinguishing treaties from other types of international agreements. ” Lewis describes the analysis of Heritage Foundation’s Steve Groves: they lay out eight reasons why Paris was a treaty, despite being described as not one. It has detailed requirements which affect every state of the US and would have costly implications if followed, and all similar agreements would have gone through Congress in the past. It was a “decision of the parties”, formal, and with intent and has a short timeframe to reach a conclusion. Ominously, it involves an automatic ongoing ratchet mechanism to increase the aims every five years from now to perpetuity. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Marlo Lewis on the implications of this deceptive grab for power:

Nor do we find “legally binding” among the State Department’s eight factors for distinguishing treaties from other agreements not subject to the Senate’s advice and consent (such as “sole executive agreements”).

More importantly, where is it written that the president gets to decide unilaterally whether or not a particular agreement is a treaty? The executive and legislative branches are co-equal, and treaty making is a shared power. If the President can by his sole voice declare a treaty not to be treaty because acknowledging it is a treaty would effectively kill it, then he can gut Article 2, neuter the Senate, and enact almost any policy he wants just by negotiating a sole executive agreement with foreign leaders.

The US may have the only political system strong enough to withstand the relentless assault from the army of selfish big-gov dependent enviro-pretenders (the “EnviroPo’s”). But it will take determination and effort. In Australia I’m not aware of any equivalent analysis like this, and given how different our political system is, we need one. Likewise, the UK, NZ, Germany and Canada. Start strategizing…

Paris Agreement Is a Real Tiger: Lock and Load

Marlo Lewis

Summary: The Paris climate agreement is “non-binding, underfunded, and unenforceable,” as one conservative commentator put it. However, Paris is a “paper tiger” only on paper. The treaty’s core purpose is not to impose legal obligations but to establish the multi-decade framework for a global political pressure campaign. The pressure will be directed chiefly at those who oppose EPA’s unlawful Clean Power Plan and other elements of the President’s climate agenda. Republicans will get rolled unless GOP leaders organize a political counter-offensive centered around a Byrd-Hagel 2.0 resolution. Key message point: Contrary to President Obama, the Paris agreement is a treaty, hence it is not a policy of the United States until the Senate ratifies it.

The Paris agreement is “politically” rather than “legally” binding in two ways. First, each country’s core commitments are self-chosen (“nationally determined”) rather than specified by the agreement itself. Second, commitments are to be enforced via political pressure (“naming and shaming”) rather than through international tribunals or economic sanctions.

Obama wanted a politically-binding agreement for two reasons. First, he gets to pretend the Paris agreement is not a treaty, hence does not have to be submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent…

Second, an agreement in which each country promises to implement its own “nationally determined contribution” (NDC) to limiting global emissions allows Obama to pretend EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) and other elements of his domestic climate agenda are “commitments” America has made to the world.

The solution — pass a Byrd-Hagel 2.0

….watershed event in that battle was the Senate’s passage of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution in July 1997. Byrd-Hagel preemptively nixed any climate agreement, like Kyoto, that would either exempt developing countries from emission-reduction targets and timetables or harm the U.S. economy.

GOP leaders and their allies must mount their own campaign to undercut the global political pressure regime Obama plans to construct via the Paris treaty. The most important thing they can do is pass a Byrd-Hagel 2.0, such as the concurrent resolution introduced by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Penn.). For maximum effect, they should pass it before April 22, 2016, when the Paris treaty is officially open for “ratification, acceptance, accession, or approval.”

The resolution and accompanying outreach should resoundingly affirm the following basic points:

(1) The legislative and executive branches are co-equal and treaty making is a shared power. The President does not get to decide unilaterally what is and is not a treaty subject to Senate review.

(2) The Paris agreement, by virtue of its detail, the extent of its commitments, previous national practice, and other factors, is a treaty.

(3) The United States is not a party to a treaty until and unless the Senate ratifies it.

(4) The President cannot unilaterally adopt U.S. emission-reduction targets and timetables as part of an international climate agreement, without violating the terms on which the Senate ratified the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

(5) Evading Senate review by falsely claiming Paris is not a treaty would make executive agencies less accountable to Congress and the American people and more beholden to foreign leaders, U.N. bureaucrats, and unaccountable NGOs.

Read the whole analysis at Cooler Heads.

9.4 out of 10 based on 75 ratings

10 reasons that show global warming is not man-made. Physics Prof explains his switch to skepticism.

Bit by bit, smart and influential thinkers are shifting. We’re seeing more and more of this type of exposition from people who are becoming skeptical. How much longer can the big bluff be maintained in the face of this kind of deep, considered and independent analysis?

Mike Van Biezen is a physics, maths and astronomy lecturer in the US. Until seven years ago, he accepted the premise that adding massive amounts of CO2 to the air would cause temperatures to rise. Then he noticed the slip in global temperatures from 1940-1980 and “could not ignore this subtle hint”. He did a lot of investigating over the ensuing years and has condensed that into ten very well written points. Like point 9: “It was so warm 4000 years ago that many of the glaciers around the world didn’t exist.” But things got so cold 150 years ago, people were afraid of glaciers and were asking “local bishops and even the Pope in Rome to come and pray in front of these glaciers in the hope of stopping their unrelenting advance.”

I also found point 7, and 10 particularly worth discussing. Point 10 is the one that he says captures the attention of his students.

The Most Comprehensive Assault On ‘Global Warming’ Ever

10. “Data adjustment” is used to continue the perception of global warming:

For the first several years of my research I relied on the climate data banks of NASA and GISS, two of the most prestigious scientific bodies of our country. After years of painstaking gathering of data, and relentless graphing of that data, I discovered that I was not looking at the originally gathered data, but data that had been “adjusted” for what was deemed “scientific reasons.” Unadjusted data is simply not available from these data banks. Fortunately I was able to find the original weather station data from over 7000 weather stations from around the world in the KNMI database. (Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute). There I was able to review both the adjusted and unadjusted data as well as the breakout of the daytime and nighttime data. The results were astounding. I found that data from many stations around the world had been systematically “adjusted” to make it seem that global warming was happening when, in fact, for many places around the world the opposite was true. Following will be a few of the myriad of examples of this data adjustment. When I present my material during presentations at local colleges, these are the charts that have some of the greatest impact in affecting the opinion of the students, especially when they realize that there is a concerted effort to misrepresent what is actually happening. Another amazing result was that when only graphing the daily highs from around the country, a very different picture arises from the historical temperature data.

…

7. The CO₂ cannot, from a scientific perspective, be the cause of significant global temperature changes:

The CO₂ molecule is a linear molecule and thus only has limited natural vibrational frequencies, which in turn give this molecule only limited capability of absorbing radiation that is radiated from the Earth’s surface. The three main wavelengths that can be absorbed by CO₂ are 4.26 micrometers, 7.2 micrometers, and 15.0 micrometers. Of those 3, only the 15-micrometer is significant because it falls right in range of the infrared frequencies emitted by Earth. However, the H₂O molecule which is much more prevalent in the Earth’s atmosphere, and which is a bend molecule, thus having many more vibrational modes, absorbs many more frequencies emitted by the Earth, including to some extent the radiation absorbed by CO₂. It turns out that between water vapor and CO_2, nearly all of the radiation that can be absorbed by CO₂ is already being absorbed. Thus increasing the CO₂ levels should have very minimal impact on the atmosphere’s ability to retain heat radiated from the Earth. That explains why there appears to be a very weak correlation at best between CO₂ levels and global temperatures…

Once I started reading it was easy to keep going. He has quite the knack for writing.

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9.2 out of 10 based on 196 ratings

Where is the due diligence on 600 billion dollars invested in “decarbonisation”?

According to Nicholas Stern, the climate industry is set to rival the Industrial Revolution. Graham Lloyd of The Australian asked the obvious question that nobody at the COP 21 Flop thought to ask in Paris: “if [the] $650 billion a year being promised by US banking institutions will ever be expected to make a profit and, if so, will it need public support to do so.”

“US Secretary of State John Kerry sees it as “the most extraordinary market opportunity in the history of humankind”

Michael Kile expands on the little conflict of interest in the UN’s decarbonisation mission

It seems the UN is co-founding groups for money managers to get large funds to “decarbonize”. That’s code for chiseling investments out of coal and forcing them into the pointless, inefficient and uncompetitive “renewables”. But of course, renewables are only worth investing in if governments keep demanding people use them. If the darn voters vote muck it up, by voting for leaders who will stop wasting their money, the renewables industry is a dead dog. So the UN project (which is probably funded by taxpayers) aims to remove the risk for investors by lobbying governments to keep the regulations friendly to green investors (and not so much to taxpayers).

For the Green Machine, “due diligence” means putting the risks onto the taxpayer and citizen. For the free market, “due diligence” means assessing the scientific credibility of those who say they can control the weather. What are the odds that the debate can be kept out of the mainstream media, and this bizarre meme (man-made global warming) will still be running in a few decades? The risk is that voters will get sick of being called names for asking good questions, and they chuck out the gullible fools and parasites. How long has the Golden Gravy Train got?

As Michael Kile notes, the UN’s Portfolio Decarbonisation Initiative talk about Fiduciary Duty, but…

“…there was no mention that changes in outlook could arise due, say, to a decline in scientific ‘consensus’ about climate theory; the continuing lack of empirical validation for climate-model ‘predictions’; doubts about public statements claiming quantifiable links between atmospheric carbon dioxide, anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and future global temperatures; more revelations about the accuracy of agency data collection over time, and so on.”

The regulatory climate is what matters:

Oliver Bäte [Allianz’s CEO,]: “FD is not the real issue (24min.) The real issue in Allianz’s mind is often the legal frameworks for investing in RE infrastructure that are spanning decades – so you need to commit money for several decades – are not properly protecting long-term investors.”

“We are very often at the mercy of the public mainstream [voters] and courts that in hindsight declare some of these contracts invalid and therefore make it very difficult for long-term investors to justify committing money for decades.”

“So let me summarise. It is not a problem of financiers not wanting to put the money in, or a lack of liquidity. It is the wrong incentives from the public [voters] – and the wrong legal frameworks for funding infrastructure – that make it very difficult in practice.” (25min.)

Of course, if only renewables were really cheaper than coal, everyone would want them, they’d be a great investment, and who cares about voters?

It’s big bucks:

“Allianz is one of the leading private investors in renewable energy, with more than EUR 2.5
billion committed and plans to at least double these investments.”

Not big bucks, it’s massive bucks:

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8.3 out of 10 based on 76 ratings

Merry Christmas

To you, your friends and family, wishing you all the best, wherever you.

The clock is turning, and it’s Christmas in New Zealand… Australia, Japan, China, …

A house around the corner generating some CO2 for Christmas.

Cheers!

— Jo

9.5 out of 10 based on 107 ratings

ABC is not a state broadcaster, it’s “independent” says new boss Ms Guthrie. O’Really?

For the incoming ABC boss, the first priority is to keep up the pretense that the public broadcaster is “independent”.

Independent of what, you may ask? It’s independent of public accountability. We can’t vote for programs or presenters; we can’t choose not to pay for it. We can’t choose to sell it, or even to send our tax funds to a different broadcaster.

The organization that depends on big-government for funds wants you to believe it’s in-dependent of big-gov.

When BP sponsors art, it’s an outrageous reputational risk (stage a sit in!). In that case the offensive BP donations to Tate were a mere one fortieth of the membership income. When Big-Gov provides almost all the income for the national broadcaster we’re supposed to laud it’s independence?

SMH: ABC boss defends independence of public broadcaster

Ms Guthrie was officially announced on Monday morning as the replacement for outgoing managing director Mr Scott. She will begin the role in May after a month-long handover period with Mr Scott.

In an interview with ABC 24 she said the essence of the ABC as an institution was its independence.

Watch Guthrie turn truth upside down:

“The important thing for me around the ABC is that sense of being an independent public broadcaster rather than a state broadcaster and I think that’s an important distinction.”

More than any other priority Guthrie and the ABC need the public to believe it is not an advertising agency for big-government and all the co-dependent bureaucrats, businesses, and lobby groups that also feed off the public teat. The ABC loses much of its goodwill and “advertising” value if viewers recognize it for the one billion dollar partisan political lobby group that it seems to have become. It’s not that the reporters are biased, they just call it as they see it. (But reporters who see it another way are not employed by the ABC.)

Dear Ms Guthrie, we’ll believe the ABC is independent when they say “No thanks” to government funding, and rely on voluntary direct payments from Australian citizens.

If the ABC is so popular, so trusted, and so wanted, then there’ll be no problem raising that billion bucks, right? Let’s make paying for the ABC optional on our tax returns: tick-a-box, or cross it off.

As I wrote five years ago:

The real problem won’t be solved until the funding issue is.

How could we expect the ABC to do anything other than softly pander to government tastes when the government is the gatekeeper for public money and both institutions live off public largess?

In the end could anyone imagine a publicly funded broadcaster, which is paid by the government, being biased in favour of a small government?

ADDENDUM: Over at Quadrant yesterday, Tony Thomas sums up the current state of ABC-ness. He describes how ABC celebrity Kerry O’Brien keeps busy reading 200 words of autocue each week for an “undisclosed” sum. O’Brien’s gems of wisdom pretty much amount to guessing what Paul Keating would have done if he was still PM… (Remember the fuss when the lavish salaries of ABC “Stars” was exposed. It was so ghastly, the ABC burned through taxpayer money to hide how it uses taxpayer money.

I’ve written a lot about their ABC:

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9.1 out of 10 based on 94 ratings

No Yackandandah, wind farms will not stop bush fires

In less than 24 hours The Guardian can turn personal disasters into political advertising:

Climate change and the Victorian bushfires: this is not a coincidence

Cambell Klose

Klose tells us climate change is too complicated for stupid people:

“The issue of bushfires can’t be divorced from climate change. For too many people climate change remains an esoteric concept – something that may happen to someone else in the hazy, far-off future.”

Luckily gifted people, like Cambell Klose (political adviser) can “feel” the causes of climate change.

“Clearly this isn’t the case. The effects of climate change are being felt right now and it is having real impacts on Australians and people all across the world.”

Who needs computer models? (Or for that matter, thermometers?)

What not to do when faced with infernos:

“Yackandandah is trying to do something about this. The community has committed to powering themselves entirely by renewable energy by 2022.”

Some people reduce fuel-loads, others fight off the flames with a solar panel.

Wind farms may reduce bush fires if we have to chop down large tracts of forest to install them. Otherwise they make expensive fire-breaks.

What warming?

The region around Yackandanda hasn’t had much warming, or even possibly, any warming.

Yackandandah is 37 km away from Rutherglen, where the annual mean maximum is not that different now to what it was 100 years ago. In mean temperatures, the raw data showed a slight cooling trend, which was similar in neighbours like Deniliquin.

Rutherglen, Yackendandah, Wagga, Sale, Kerange, Cabramurra

Rutherglen raw compared to raw data from neighbours Wagga, Sale, Kerang, Cabramurra. This is before homogenisation which creates warming trends.

Thanks to Ken Stewart

My sympathies go out to the families affected by the bushfires in Victoria. What they need is clear thinking and real data.

9.6 out of 10 based on 120 ratings

It’s “The Fright before Christmas”. Can we scare the kiddies?

What could make climate change more real for the kiddies than to get rid of Santa and drown the deer. No more presents, little ones!

Inspiration from Tim Blair. who writes: If you enjoy making small children cry – and who doesn’t? – then Fairfax has the perfect Christmas gift idea.

An Australian scientist has written a new children’s book, just in time for Christmas, that weaves the impacts of climate change into a story about Santa Claus, his reindeers and an evil billionaire.

Children's book, climate change, global warming, Santa

…

Because billionaires are always evil. It’s important to teach kids that only nasty people get rich.

Author Dr Ian Irvine, who has been a scientist for over three decades, first came up with the idea of marrying Christmas and climate change together for his eBook The Last Christmas, The North Pole is melting! two years ago.

Dr Ian Irvine is a specialist in the management of sediments, which may explain why he doesn’t seem up to date with sea ice trends.

“The ice at the North Pole isn’t very thick and over the last 30 years or so it has been getting a lot thinner, it is shrinking.

“It used to cover millions of square kilometres but now there is much less than that because of climate change.”

The story focuses on the littlest reindeer, Vixen, and her challenge to save Santa’s village and workshop from billionaire villain Mr Sneer who wants to steal Christmas for himself. In the background of the story, the ice at the North Pole slowly melts away.

Awkwardly the ice in the Arctic is not going along with the scare program. It’s only slightly below average for this time of year.

But don’t let the facts get in the way:

Tell the kiddies that somehow Santa and the reindeer survived 1959 when submarines from the US Navy surfaced at the North Pole. (They even did it in winter too).

Arctic, Sea Ice, 1959, 1962, Thinning ice, submarines, climate change.

You can read excerpts here, where Vixen, Dancer and what not struggle through predictable sentence structure and plodding conversation.

9.1 out of 10 based on 98 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

…

7.7 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

The IPCC doesn’t believe its own models. The 1.5C ambitious target = 400ppm. We’re already there!

Apparently we want to set Earth’s climate control knob at 1.5C above the Little Ice Age. If the IPCC is right, we can use cars, hairdryers and air-conditioners to do it. All we need to know is equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and then we can work out the right atmospheric level of CO2 to aim at. Easy, right?

Now I don’t believe the IPCC claims, but the IPCC believes the IPCC, and therefore they’ve done this calculation. It’s what the whole Paris convention was for, eh? But something doesn’t add up. If the climate modelers are right, and equilibrium climate sensitivity is 3C, the CO2 concentration we need to aim for is … wait… 400 ppm. How many years have we got to change the whole “human emissions” equilibrium and discover 100% clean energy? Answer: No years.

If CO2 is the dominant climate driver, we are already at the “max” set point that 40,000 people in Paris just decided was the holy grail new ambitious target. Turn off the lights, stop the planes, get on your bike. The warming is in the can already.

Bear in mind that it is “equilibrium” climate sensitivity, so the warming is not all here yet. We’ve warmed some 0.9C since 1910 (and something before that too) , but the rest of the heat is trolling about in the ocean or somewhere for a few more decades until the system settles down.

Strangely, the rejoicing UN crowd in Paris didn’t mention that the 1.5C target means switching it all off, or doing a massive terraforming kind of global engineering project to pack away CO2 — and it really needs to start sooner than is possible, like, you know, 1990.

400 ppm means 1.5C warming doesn’t it?

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9.1 out of 10 based on 99 ratings

Anthony Watts at AGU2015 shows that hot air rises off concrete (it does affect thermometers)

Who would have thought that temperature stations near concrete are warming faster than those over grass?

Anthony Watts carefully analyzed all 1,218 surface stations in the USA and managed to find 410 good ones in the last 35 years (1979 onwards) — which is an achievement in itself. But the real point of his paper is to see if the best stations show less warming than the rest. (The good ones are the ones that are not near artificial heat sources, and haven’t been moved around). Watts finds (again) that the NOAA homogenisation practice appears to be adjusting the good stations up to the bad ones.

About a third of the US recorded warming trend in the last 35 years may have just disappeared…

Watts presents it today at the AGU 2015 conference.

Congratulations to Anthony Watts for what must have been a mammoth amount of work. The irony is that the conclusion — that hot air radiates or rises off concrete, asphalt, and from bricks affects thermometers is banal, yet so few can demonstrate it across such a big network. We have to wonder why no one else was looking… Maybe the Earth’s climate doesn’t matter that much to NOAA? – Jo

_______________________

The Press Release

NEW STUDY OF NOAA’S U.S. CLIMATE NETWORK SHOWS A LOWER 30-YEAR TEMPERATURE TREND WHEN HIGH QUALITY TEMPERATURE STATIONS UNPERTURBED BY URBANIZATION ARE CONSIDERED

Figure 1 – Comparisons of 30 year trend for compliant Class 1,2 USHCN stations to non-compliant, Class 3,4,5 USHCN stations to NOAA final adjusted V2.5 USHCN data in the Continental United States
December 17th, 2015

SAN FRANCISO, CA – A new study about the surface temperature record presented at the 2015 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union suggests that the 30-year trend of temperatures for the Continental United States (CONUS) since 1979 are about two thirds as strong as officially NOAA temperature trends.

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9.2 out of 10 based on 103 ratings

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It’s big bucks:

The real problem won’t be solved until the funding issue is.

I’ve written a lot about their ABC: Keep reading →

What warming?

400 ppm means 1.5C warming doesn’t it? Keep reading →

JoNova

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I’ve written a lot about their ABC:

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