Today the Paris Agreement jumped from including 1.1% of global emissions to 39%. It’s part of the performance art, the Grand Act. Including those emissions means nothing as far as emissions go (China will keep putting out more), but it carries political leverage unless we expose the game.
Make no mistake: there is nothing at all legally bindingabout the Paris Agreement, but it can be politically binding — like a Chastity Vow. Right now, it’s about shame and social standing, not about megatons, but inasmuch as bluff and bluster can pull it off, the UN will eventually want the shapeshifting chastity vow to be treated as a legal force.
This soft vow has the advantage that is completely two faced — it can be all things to all people. To the green-passionate crowd it will be a historic, landmark agreement of the world working together. That’s “momentum”. To the free world, it may look like a failure, but that’s an advantage — it disarms the protests. Watch the Pea — (it’s really a bee). The sting is hidden. That’s ACT III.
After the Copenhagen disaster, the Global Worriers realized that they would have to sneak in a mechanism to keep the Climate Gravy Train running, despite the will of the voters, and crumbling economies, so here is how the plot goes to conjure obedience, and confuse dissenters:
ACT I was the two week PR cabaret in Paris where countries signed their Carbon Chastity Vows — vows that amounted to no actual outcome, other than coming back to ratify it all again later. The important part in Act I was to manage expectations so that the Paris agreement “looks” successful no matter what. It was easy for countries to sign. Each nation brought its own “To Do” list, and it was not legally binding anyway. Success, was a low bar, just the achievement of signatures, not any reduction of CO2 emissions, or God-forbid any actual change in the climate. What matters is that the junkets and subsidies continue.
ACT II is the “ratification” where people “sign into force” an agreement that has no legal force. (Except potentially through tricky subclauses that tie it to legally enforceable documents in each country. See ACT III).
ACT III is the pincer move with domestic legislation. In the US that’s through things like the EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP). It can also work through things like the TPP — the Trans Pacific Partnership (where it stings Australia too). The sting is hidden in domestic legislation that creates “arbitration tribunals” and effectively commits nations to meet their international “carbon chastity vows”. (Read more about that below)
Politico quotes Inhofe:“This is another attempt by the president to go around Congress in order to achieve his unpopular and widely rejected climate agenda for his legacy. The Senate does not support the Paris Agreement which is why his administration prefers to not call it a treaty.” — Sen. Jim Inhofe, chairman of the Environment Public Works Committee.
“The agreement was crafted to help the U.S. avoid Senate ratification, as is constitutionally required for treaties. Instead the structure of the agreement, which lays out goals but contains few legally binding requirements, allows the U.S. to formally join the agreement by having the president sign documents and then submit them to the U.N.
Republican presidential nominee Trump has threatened to “cancel” the climate agreement if he is elected, but putting it into force could make such an action more complicated.
Myron Ebell explains that this document has no effect until Congress votes on it
No one should be able to sign a chastity vow on your behalf, right? Even the UN themselves quietly call this a treaty, which means Obama cannot just declare it to be so:
Negotiators at COP-21 went along with the charade that it’s not really a treaty for the United States. However, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat considers it a treaty. The relevant UNFCCC web page is headlined: “Paris Agreement—Status of Ratification.” The information note prepared by the UNFCCC Legal Affairs Programme on the Entry into Force of the Paris Agreement: Legal Requirements and Implications begins: “1. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties states that ‘a treaty enters into force in such manner and upon such date as it may provide or as the negotiating States may agree’.”
Moreover, every other country considers it a treaty and is going through its normal procedures for joining a treaty. Patrick Goodenough in CNS News reported recently that even in China, which is ruled by a Communist Party dictatorship, the government has referred the treaty to the Standing Committee of Parliament for its approval.
Article 20.4 of the TPP says: “The Parties [recognize] that multilateral environmental agreements to which they are party play an important role, globally and domestically, in protecting the environment and that their respective implementation of these agreements is critical to achieving the environmental objectives of these agreements. Accordingly, each Party affirms its commitment to implement the multilateral environmental agreementsto which it is a party.“
— Howard Richman, Jesse Richman and Raymond Richman
“Also, chapter 27 of the TPP creates “Arbitration Tribunals.” These tribunals, according to the Richmans, “can impose multi-billion dollar fines upon the U.S. government if the U.S. violates anything that is in the pact.”
“In other words, the tribunals can force whatever Obama negotiates in Paris upon the American people, and Congress will have very little say,” argues the Richmans.”
— Alex Swoyer
What’s the solution?
First, let the voters know that the Paris agreement is a bluff. It is not legally binding unless domestic legislation, or Congress or Parliament makes it so. As Marlo Lewis said the Paris Agreement Is a Real Tiger: recognise that the Paris Agreement is a treaty, and it must pass the US Senate. Marlo Lewis, explains why it is a treaty and not an executive agreement. Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation discusses it too.
Somewhere in the world, a whole town is missing their tea-leaf readers.
The Physics tells us (practical beats us over the head) that more CO2 will mean warmer nights. It is a 97% certified mantra that warm nights are a fingerprint of man-made global warming.*
Well don’t look now, but CO2 causes cold nights too (and get this… on the East Coast).
Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the simultaneous occurrence of extremely cold winter days in the Eastern United States and extremely warm winter days in the West, according to a Stanford-led study published in Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres. Human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are likely driving this trend, the researchers report.
Used to be that single seasons were “weather” and thirty year trends were “science”– now all they need is a single repeated season and half a country:
“Looking back at temperature data from the past 35 years, we’ve found that in fact 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 did have the biggest difference in winter temperature between the East and West.”
This is pretty freaky — can you imagine how smart these guys must be to spot this pattern? We are talking GCM-Rorschach. Coming soon — record differences from 6 – 9am in Spring mornings in States starting with P.
After that, alternating hot-cold weather split north-south, oh wait…
Note the standard press release formula
Part I: Start with two paragraphs of spooky ominous observations.
Part II: it’s onto the mechanism, sorry, the money-request: Mention how we need to understand this better, how this kind of weather costs billions, stretches resources… tick, platitudes, done… “Understanding the physical factors driving extreme weather could provide policymakers with more reliable information…
Part III: wave hands (don’t clap, it’s microagressive) just jazz them. Here’s The Big Evidence:
The Stanford study finds that the occurrence and severity of “warm West, cold East” winter events increased significantly between 1980 and 2015.
…because before 1980 there was a constant 4 billion trendless years.
Look out for the ridge trough pattern as the Moon traverses Jupiter:
This is partly because the winter temperature has warmed more in the West than in the East, increasing the odds that warm days in the West coincide with cold days in the East. Along with warming of the West, a “ridge-trough” pattern of high atmospheric pressure in the West and low atmospheric pressure in the East has also been producing greater numbers of winter days on which large areas of the West and East experience extreme temperatures at the same time.
“What we’ve found is that this particular atmospheric configuration connects the cold extremes in the East to the occurrence of warm extremes in the West,” said lead author Deepti Singh,…
And anomalous patterns jumped over the Moon. Weasel words coming:
Despite long-term warming across most of the globe, some regions can experience colder than normal temperatures associated with anomalous circulation patterns that drive cold air from the poles to the mid-latitudes. In fact, circulation patterns that facilitate such extremes are potentially a response to enhanced warming, the study’s authors point out.
Potentially this type of word-salad waffle can fool gullible editors and useful idiot fans.
“Although the occurrence of cold extremes is often used as evidence to dismiss the existence of human-caused global warming, our work shows that the warm West, cool East trend is actually consistent with the influence of human activities that have modified Earth’s climate in recent decades,” Singh said.
Thus does a mere potential become “actually consistent” with the exact opposite of what the models predicted.
PART IV: the get-me-out-of-jail climate soothsayer clause
A bunch of scientists used tree rings to figure out the streamflow in Bear River, Utah, since the dark ages. This is what a perfect stable climate looks like.
Obviously we need immediate carbon trading to stop whatever is going to happen next:
Figure 1. Reconstructed Bear River decadal-scale drought (brown) and wet (green) periods from cubic smoothing spline with frequency response of 25% at wavelength 10 years. Dashed lines indicate 1 SD from reconstruction mean. Adapted from DeRose et al. (2016).
Thanks to the excellent CO2Science site for analyzing it in their collection.
In 1200 Years of Historic Streamflow we see that there was a dreadful drought in 1210 that lasted 70 years. The worst wet period lasted nearly 50 years and started in 1378. Spot the effect of CO2. Anyone?
Naturally there has already been a Bear River Climate Change Adaptation Workshop, with “thirty-nine representatives of 20 state and federal agencies, local governments, academic institutions, and non-governmental organizations.”
The old 2010 Workshop report tells us we have to let go of the idea that the climate is stable — “stationarity is dead”. *
“ We are no longer working in a world where we can assume climate stability”
Climate stability and persistent ecosystems are no more. Several years ago it became apparent to the conservation community that we are no longer working in a world where we can assume climate stability and persistent ecosystems. Hydrologists now say, for example, that “stationarity is dead.” The assemblages of species we have known as persistent, relatively stable, natural communities will disassemble and reassemble in new and unpredictable ways. In fact, climate change is already causing subtle change, like changes in timing of migrations or leaf-out, and dramatic and sometimes surprising change, such as widespread forest dieback, due to the crossing of temperature and moisture thresholds.
Obviously mums, dads and scout leaders want emissions reductions so we can return to perfect medieval weather:
Welcome to Higher Education 2016: Whatever you do, don’t ask questions, don’t ask for evidence, and don’t discuss your doubts on class forums. “We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change’” All outside sources for research must be peer reviewed by the IPCC.
Students in the University of Colorado expressed concern about the first online lecture in “Medical Humanities in the Digital Age”. All three Professors together replied via email that students shouldDrop class if they dispute man-made climate change
“The point of departure for this course is based on the scientific premise that human induced climate change is valid and occurring. We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change, nor will the ‘other side’ of the climate change debate be taught or discussed in this course,” states the email, a copy of which was provided to The College Fix by a student in the course.
“Opening up a debate that 98% of climate scientists unequivocally agree to be a non-debate would detract from the central concerns of environment and health addressed in this course,” the professors’ email continued.
“… If you believe this premise to be an issue for you, we respectfully ask that you do not take this course… — signed Professors, Rebecca Laroche, Wendy Haggren and Eileen Skahill
The ban included discussions on online forums among students (we wouldn’t want people polluting the thoughts of believers, would we?) And no thoughts or arguments outside of those approved by an unelected, unaccountable foreign committee shall be considered.
Oh the futility. Australia’s entire annual production of carbon from all that mining, construction, industry and everything is replicated in China every 18 days.
If we cut our emissions by an obscene, bleeding 25%, we will spend billions and yet China will undo all our hair-shirt “savings” in just 5 normal days. (And that’s at current rates, it gets worse by 2030).
Australia is a giant coal and iron quarry built at the far end of the Earth, with a tiny, but rapidly growing population spread across a vast land. Transport distances are eye-watering. We run 94% of everything off fossil fuels and there are no more easy cuts to be made. Gaia gave us more uranium than any other country but we are religiously opposed to nuclear power. (What would it take to change that — a bomb from China?). We’ve got more Sun, hot rocks and empty space than anywhere, so if solar, wind or geothermal were going to work on Planet Earth, it would be here. We are God’s Gift to the renewable industry — yet they all fail. (Today, Flannery’s Geothermal project crashed, last week Windorah’s solar farm shut, and last month, the whole state of South Australia nearly closed.) Earlier this year Tasmania — the renewables wonderland was flying in emergency diesel generators and seeding clouds to make electricity.
If China’s emissions increase (how could they not) then by 2030 it will only take China 8 days to outdo a 100% cut in Australian emissions.
In other words — by 2030, for all the pain it takes us to achieve a 25% cut in our current emissions. It will only China 2 days to undo our “gain”.
Thanks to Tom Quirk for graphing these from the COP 21 data (Paris UN meeting) — Jo
————————————————————–
Guest post by Tom Quirk
Australian target for annual CO2 emissions in 2030 is equal to the annual increase in emissions from China in 2030. At that time China will match Australia’s annual emissions in 8 days.
The data for China for 1970 to 2013 comes from CDIAC, For the year 2014 Edgar[i] reports that the emissions increase is one third of the increase in 2013.
…
Each year China adds “another Australia” to its output.
Matt Ridley in The Australian explains how every man and his dog is forecasting the doom of the Arctic sea ice, and not only have they been wrong year after year, but they all assume that if the ice all melts it’ll be a global disaster. But Earth’s already been-there done-that, and for years, and it was no-biggie. Polar bears obviously got through it, as did seals. Humans without protective solar panels somehow spread far and wide, and generally flourished.
I suspect the main climate refugees from the Arctic would have names like Donner and Blitzen. This is the one thing Matt doesn’t explain — in 8,000BC when the ice melted, what the heck happened with Santa?
This was a period known as the “early Holocene insolation maximum” (EHIM). Because the Earth’s axis was tilted away from the vertical more than today (known as obliquity), and because we were then closer to the Sun in July than in January (known as precession), the amount of the Sun’s energy hitting the far north in summer was much greater than today. This “great summer” effect was the chief reason the Earth had emerged from an ice age, because hot northern summers had melted the great ice caps of North America and Eurasia, exposing darker land and sea to absorb more sunlight and warm the whole planet.
The effect was huge: about an extra 50 watts per square metre 80 degrees north in June. By contrast, the total effect of man-made global warming will reach 3.5 watts per square metre (but globally) only by the end of this century.
To put it in context, the EHIM was the period during which agriculture was invented in about seven different parts of the globe at once. Copper smelting began; cattle and sheep were domesticated; wine and cheese were developed; the first towns appeared. The seas being warmer, the climate was generally wet so the Sahara had rivers and forests, hippos and people.
Barring one especially cold snap 8200 years ago, the coldest spell of the past 10 millennia was the very recent “little ice age” of AD1300-1850, when glaciers advanced, tree lines descended and the Greenland Norse died out.
UPDATE: This graph shows the ice-core data up until 1855. The last 150 years (1705 to 1855) are highlighted in red to show the warming as the Earth began coming out of the LIA.
Created by Cuffy and Clow in 1997, and based on Greenland ice core records, this chart shows global temperatures for the past 15,000 years. | h/t Don Easterbrook. *
It is pretty hard to measure sea-ice that might have melted 8,000 years ago. But the Greenland Ice cores show temperatures there were hotter than today, and there are some proxies to estimate the extent of the sea ice. Ridley refers to a paper (Stranne 2013) which uses 8 different proxies that suggest extended periods of hundreds of years where there was no perennial sea ice. With models (yeah, yeah) they say the Holocene warm period is all explained with extra sunlight coming in due to the orbital shift at the time (I don’t think that is controversial). They speculate that the earlier instability and temperature gyrations of 12-15,000 years ago in Greenland were due to the ice shifting from a phases of regular sea ice, to being regularly ice free. The albedo of sea ice is a reasonably important feedback.
The darker blue times in the graph below are when proxies suggest there was “low” sea ice (6,000 to 12,000 years ago).
Arctic Ocean sea ice proxies generally suggest a reduction in sea ice during parts of the early and middle Holocene (∼6000–10,000 years Before the Present) compared to present day conditions. This sea ice minimum has been attributed to the northern hemisphere Early Holocene Insolation Maximum (EHIM) associated with Earth’s orbital cycles. Here we investigate the transient effect of insolation variations during the final part of the last glaciation and the Holocene by means of continuous climate simulations with the coupled atmosphere–sea ice–ocean column model CCAM. We show that the increased insolation during EHIM has the potential to push the Arctic Ocean sea ice cover into a regime dominated by seasonal ice, i.e. ice free summers. The strong sea ice thickness response is caused by the positive sea ice albedo feedback. Studies of the GRIP ice cores and high latitude North Atlantic sediment cores show that the Bølling–Allerød period (c. 12,700–14,700 years BP) was a climatically unstable period in the northern high latitudes and we speculate that this instability may be linked to dual stability modes of the Arctic sea ice cover characterized by e.g. transitions between periods with and without perennial sea ice cover.
* h/t to Craig Thomas for pointing out and that the word “global” in Graph 2, was better off not being there. h/t to Michael for spotting that the arrows on graph 2 for the MWP and LIA were incorrect. Both fixed. Thanks to both.
A “Weather Bomb” storm in the Atlantic generates pounding seismic waves that can be detected through the Earth as far away as Japan. They used 200+ stations and could detect the distance and direction of these microseismic waves. This could be pretty useful to figure out more about what’s under the crust in the same way that an “X-ray” works on us.
Credit: Kiwamu Nishida and Ryota Takagi
Press Release: An Atlantic “weather bomb,” or a severe, fast-developing storm, causes ocean swells that incite faint and deep tremors into the oceanic crust. These subtle waves run through the earth and can be detected in places as far away as Japan, where facilities using a method called “Hi-net” measure the amplitude of the storm’s P and S waves for the first time.
It’s a do or die moment for The Cause. Brexit has hit them hard, and the Trump factor threatens to wreck everything. The Paris agreement has stalled pathetically at 1.1% of all human emissions (they need 55% to come into force). They need a gamechanger or the illusion of one.
Next week expect a grand performance from US and China — or rather from two men who look solemn and can sign important looking carbon chastity vows on behalf of 1.8 billion people. Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping will say they have ratified the Paris agreement. Expect triumphant parades, and smiles, handshakes and talk of a historic moment. It’s all for show. China will agree to do nothing different until 2030 when its population growth peaks, and Obama can’t get the support of Congress.
But the gala performance may work if enough other countries fall for it — especially the stupidly obedient Anglosphere, and the trapped EU. India, Russia and Brazil will only buy into it they are fed enough pork. But the pork has to come from somewhere, and that’s us — The West. That’s who this show is for — western voters.
The Paris agreement has only won over 23 tin pot nations responsible for 1.1% of human emissions. They are doomed to failure without the US and China, which together control 38%. Once the largest two economies of the world are nominally, “technically”, signed — expect other countries to fall into line all over the world. That’s why it’s so important we make sure everyone knows that there is nothing real about this deal. The Chinese deal is symbolic, and an Obama deal has legal questions all over it.
In the real world, changing the planet’s weather costs a fortune. The US voters don’t care and won’t pay. The US Congress will never allow a meaningful economic hit to occur, so no real treaty, with real teeth, could get through.
No wonder Obama didn’t talk about the climate leading up to elections, he knew he couldn’t win a mandate for it, and the Congress wouldn’t agree. Instead he’s going through the rogue EPA, and using regulations rather than legislation. The Paris agreement was not called a “treaty” and had to be “non-binding” so it could avoid the bomb of getting Congressional approval. But the bomb still ticks.
Here is the language from Article Two, Section Two, Clause Two of the U. S. Constitution: “[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.”
The article by Li Jing references this curious requirement: “There are still some uncertainties from the US side due to the complicated US system in ratifying such a treaty, but the announcement is still quite likely to be ready by Sept 2,” said a source, who declined to be named.
Skeptics can still do a lot to stop this trainwreck
One: Spread the word to newspaper editors, journalists and everyone that the Obama-Xi Jinping deal will be a symbolic sham. The Paris Agreement will never change the weather, but it could wreck western economies.
Two: Help US voters understand what a Hillary election means. For all his faults, Trump may trash the climate gravy train. But Hillary is promising to outdo Obama.
In Australia, treaty ratification does have to be reviewed by parliament but the final decision is the prerogative of the government, meaning Turnbull and Frydenberg may face an arm wrestle with their right-wing cabinet colleagues.
The official said Australia’s decision to accept the invitation of UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon to a special event for ratification on September 21 of this year was “under consideration”. (H/t Dennis A)
Entrance is open to anyone, and there is no registration fee — just a donation. If this were a government funded gravy train, it would cost hundreds to see lame predictable presentations by researchers who aren’t brave enough to question the dogma. Come to London, and watch the scientists and contributors who are pushing the bounds of science.
See the full programme and the extended abstracts in this 35 Mb document for full details.
“Humans are the most voracious consumers planet Earth has ever seen. With our land-use, hunting and other exploitative activities, we are now directly impacting three-quarters of the Earth’s land surface,” said Professor Laurance.
And three-quarters of 30% of the world is a fifth of the world. But algae will be feeling pretty cheezed right now. They wrecked up the whole atmosphere — but get no credit. Algae define the term “voracious consumer”. The pristine state of the atmosphere was transformed forever, plus the schmucks made oil.
Note the magical 97% appears again — a sacred number of “certainty”:
A James Cook University scientist says a new map of the ecological footprint of humankind shows 97 per cent of the most species-rich places on Earth have been seriously altered.
Finally, expert climate modelers are “surprised” to discover this:
“…their study had detected warming in the Arctic and tropical oceans from around the 1830s, just 80 years after the Industrial Revolution started in England. “It was an extraordinary finding,” she said. “It was one of those moments where science really surprised us. But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago.”
How many grant dollars did it take to figure out what skeptical scientists have been saying for years?
The correlation with global temperatures and actual numerical human emissions is abysmal, so now Abrams et al ignore the numbers and appear to suggest that “The Industrial Revolution” itself started the warming — as if the mere invention of the steam engine heated the world.
[Dr Abram] said the study attributed the gradual warming to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions linked to the move from an agricultural to industrialised society.
“The climate system did respond quite quickly to industrialisation …. it was a small response, but it’s a measurable one.”
Global warming started 200 years ago, but human emissions of CO2 were bugger-all-of-nothing until after World War II. Humans have put out nearly 90% of all our CO2 molecules ever since the War started. We’ve put out 30% of all our emissions ever since the year 2000. The message hammered home over and over, is that temperatures don’t correlate at all well with our CO2 emissions and never have.
Planes, cars and coal power plants make no difference to global warming
Phil Jones told us that global temperatures kept heating at the same rate in the 1880s as they did in the 1920s as they did in the 1980s. (See that graph below).
The warming isn’t any different when human CO2 emissions are small or massive. The rate of warming was the same in the 1920s when nearly half of all horsepower still came from horses. Indeed without any electricity at all, and no cars, humans “caused” warming which was as fast as a decade when a billion people flew in the sky.
Then, when the Industrial Revolution hit China, the global temperatures “paused”.
Here is a new pretty graph (click to enlarge) from Abrams et al showing what skeptics have said all along, that the world is warming out of a little ice age:
CO2 is supposed to warm the whole globe. It isn’t working out like that.
…
The warming started long before our emissions became important
The correlation looks “good” from 1979- 1999, but there are contradictions in every other time period. . Everything about this graph tells us that CO2 is not a major controller. Other forces are more important and the mainstream climate modelers don’t know what those drivers are — they are not even looking for them. (On the other hand, people free of government funded groupthink are — see Seven possible ways the sun could change our cloud cover, and Is that one new Solar force, or two? The Force-ND Hypothesis.)
…
Global warming delayed in the Southern Hemisphere:
Interestingly, the study found sustained warming was delayed in the southern hemisphere by about 50 years.
Dr Abram said this could be linked to the circulation patterns in the southern oceans that move warmer waters away from the Antarctic and into the sub-surface ocean.
Maybe it’s because there’s more ocean in the South? Dear Dr Abram, did any of the “global atmosphere and circulation” models model that circulation accurately before your discovery? Since you were so surprised, I guess not. (The abstract confirms that).
The immovable wall
Note the usual mindless caveat:
Dr Abram said the study did not alter “anything we know about how climate has changed during the 20th century”.
Nothing ever does. That’s exactly why government-strangled-climate-science is in an endless rut, predicts nothing, and is “surprised” by the inanely obvious.
In a nutshell: a government funded group finds some bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef, and repackages the stats to come up with the apocalyptic statistic that only 7% of the reef is not bleached! The SMH reported that “93% of the corals” are damaged. The reef is 2,000 kilometers long. Did anyone really think about these headlines?
Then in a development that “no one” could see coming, local tourism is damaged, potentially costing a lot of jobs.
“And the loss of these tourists could cost our tourism industry a whopping $1 billion a year, a report out today by The Australia Institute warned.”
This inspires local dive operators (who possibly know what the reef looks like) to pay for a two week expedition to survey 28 sites. They find about 5% damage and describe the difference as phenomenal. Indeed, they say the reef is pretty much just like it was 20 years ago when they last did a survey.
We know that both sides have an interest finding a healthy or unhealthy reef. The problem starts with self-serving taxpayer funded scientists who are paid to find a crisis. But they would not get away with it if the media didn’t let them. Blame sloppy gullible journalists like Tom Arup (SMH), and Stephanie Smail (ABC) who should have asked some hard questions, and protested at the surreal headlines. Will the job-destroying ABC report the new survey?
Only higher education could produce something this silly.
The University of Sussex gets the credit for a paper that argues that countries that are committed to nuclear energy are progressing slower towards the holy grail of meeting “climate targets”. This discovery coincidentally comes exactly as the UK Hinkley Point “hangs in the balance”. What were the odds?
The Newspeak starts in the headline — what’s a “climate target”. My personal climate target is to move into the tropics each winter, but the EU climate target is not about reducing temperatures over Spain, but about “more windmills”. The climate target of the EU has apparently got nothing much to do with the climate:
…the EU’s 2020 Strategy — to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, increase the share of renewable energy to at least 20% of consumption, and achieve energy savings of 20% or more by 2020…
They cluster countries in to 3 groups and discover that the countries that plan to maintain or expand nuclear energy (eg Bulgaria, Hungary and the UK) are not cutting emissions as fast as countries that have no nukes (Denmark, Ireland, and Norway).
Could it be, I wonder, because countries that have nukes have already cut their emissions (they only start counting the reductions from 2005). I scoff, I must be missing something. That’s too obvious.
But then the paper proves me wrong and does national psychoanalysis:
The team say that the gigantic investments of time, money and expertise in nuclear power plants, such as the proposed Hinckley Point C in the UK, can create dependency and ‘lock-in’ — a sense of ‘no turning back’ in the nation’s psyche.
I turn to the actual paper, thinking this must be a marketing mistake. Not so.
You may have thought energy production was about joules per megawatt hour, but it’s really a conditioning system of governance.
Whereas nuclear is nowadays often regarded simply as one type of sociotechnical regime among many, several decades ago theorists recognized that the way they operate is quintessential of the deeply political self-reinforcing dynamics in infrastructures and institutions – and even more widely, in economies, cultures, and political discourse – that are better understood as conditioning systems of governance themselves.
The researchers don’t say it, but this is obviously the beginnings of cricket. (David says “baseball”).
Archaeologists found lots of round rocks like this that are around 70,000 – 1.8 million years old in a cave in South Africa. They thought they might be tools, but now reckon that they were used as a weapon for hunting. With models (yeah, yeah) these are apparently the ideal size and weight to score maximum high speed damage at 20-30m distance given the mechanics of a human arm. So before spears, people probably throw rocks overhand to hunt. We are the only animals that can do this — which might explain why a million years later people are still so enthused about cricket (and baseball).
Maybe the South Africans have an unfair advantage playing the game so much longer than everyone else. (David doesn’t think much of my theory, but cricket suddenly makes a lot more sense to me now).
‘We should protect our kids from climate change by not having them’ says Travis Rieder of NPR.
I reckon it seems fairer to have the kids first, then ask them.
Humans have put out 50% of all our emissions of CO2 since 1988, so everyone under 30 may have wished they hadn’t been born during the Anthropocene apocalypse. (All those hot summers, those boring lectures at school). Lets do that survey. How many 28 year olds think their parents made the wrong call in 1987?
Raising offspring is hard work. “Saving the world” might just be the excuse you’re looking for if you are not inclined to do nappies.
NPR Travis Rieder, a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, told NPR. “The situation is bleak, it’s just dark … Population engineering, maybe it’s an extreme move. But it gives us a chance.”
Rieder said America produces a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) per person, and the world’s poorest nations will be most affected by global warming. He suggests rich nations should stop having children to remedy this. Reducing the current birth rate to 0.5 kids per woman could be the “thing that saves us,” he said.
I can see his point. Having less babies might cool the world. There are no babies in Antarctica, and there’s no warming there either.
How many non-babies does it take to stop a flood in Bangladesh? Perhaps the IPCC has an App for that.
The Sierra Club thinks the government should issue licenses for parents:
When you can’t persuade people to fight your imaginary enemy, declare a war.
New Republic
We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.
BY BILL MCKIBBEN August 15, 2016
Translated: Expect 200 million imminent deaths (equivalent to WWII). Give us your firstborn, and lots of your money.
Not quite a dispassionate scientist at work:
In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears. Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the war. “In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,” said a scientist who examined the onslaught. “There doesn’t seem anything able to stop this.”
Panic now? In late 2015, Antarctic sea ice shrank by 13 millionsquare kilometers, and nothing seemed to be able to stop it.
For the last hundred thousand years someone somewhere has been making money, sticks or cowrie shells out of each change. If the Vostok ice cores over the Holocene tell us anything, it is that life on Earth is a continuous opportunity for witchdoctors to get rich scaring people about a climate they can’t predict.
This is 12,000 years of perfect non-man-made weather at Vostok Antarctica:
And here is the South Polar Region during the last 38 years of “unprecedented man-made climate change” — graphed from recent satellite data from UAH. Humans have put out 60% of all man-made CO2 emissions since satellites started recording in 1978. Spot the effect?
Now, Antarctica is only Antarctica. Vostok does not represent the world. But there are graphs from all over the globe with similar stories of continuous change and no acceleration, not even a good correlation following CO2 levels. The climate changed and no climate scientist can explain the small movements in the Vostok graph — the spikes that lasted 250 years. If we were in one of those natural “spikes” now, they wouldn’t know.
“…nearly every proxy that’s ever been proxied suggests there were a lot of warmer times in the period 5,000 – 8,000 years ago. Ice cores say it was hotter in Greenland, barnacles, corals, sea worms, and “swash” tell us sea levels were something like 2 meters higher in stable West Australia* and nearly 1m higher in Hawaii and Polynesia, oceans were 2 degrees warmer around in Indonesia, and 6,000 boreholes sunk in the oceans all over the world show it was a global deal. Australian Aboriginals apparently struggled through a 1,500 year mega drought about 6,000 year ago (see McGowan). CO2 Science lists references from South-East Asia to the Sahara, from Antarctica to America. I am barely skimming the surface.
The horror! The enemy is turning 5,000 year old corals to bone-yards visible from space!
Some Great Barrier Hyperventilation:
“In the Pacific this spring, the enemy staged a daring breakout across thousands of miles of ocean, waging a full-scale assault on the region’s coral reefs. In a matter of months, long stretches of formations like the Great Barrier Reef—dating back past the start of human civilization and visible from space—were reduced to white bone-yards.
McKibben seems to think corals had thousands of years of perfect temperatures until it all fell apart in the 2016 El Nino. Nice fantasy. But at the start of human civilization the world was hotter and seas were higher, and 8,000 years before that the Climate-Enemy caused sea levels to rise 125m over whatever poor sucker coral reef was off Queensland at the time. That’s climate change. Bleaching is common, corals are adapted to it, they swap symbionts when the water warms, and thanks to climate change, corals have been spreading towards the poles — conquering territory as it were. Not shrinking. At the same time green plants have been aggressively invading the deserts too. With bumper crops this war is feeding the hungry.
It’s war, I tell you, and corals and plants are winning!
“…this is no metaphor. By most of the ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal: Carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and panic, racking up casualties, and even destabilizing governments.
Is it a real war? Some people measure wars by the dead. Others see new borders on maps. Lets ask some eighty year olds in London, Berlin and Pearl Harbour what they think. War or not-war?
I have to hand it to Bill, strawman hype doesn’t get bigger than this.
I think we’ve seen this conversation tactic before — deny the debate and conflate, conflate, conflate:
“The question is not, are we in a world war? The question is, will we fight back? And if we do, can we actually defeat an enemy as powerful and inexorable as the laws of physics?
It’s a spot-reductio to a world in one dimension — a nonsense singularity: the enemy suddenly is as powerful as the laws of physics. Such equivalence! If our knowledge of gravity was like the global climate there would be 23 global gravity models, none of which would work for all the planets. Apollo 11 would have missed the moon and 50 years later they’d still be adjusting the orbit retrospectively to figure out where they went in 1969. Homogenize that signal…
‘Liu Y, Cai Q F, Song H M, et al. Amplitudes, rates, periodicities and causes of temperature variations in the past 2485 years and future trends over the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau. Chinese Sci Bull, 2011, 56: 29862994, doi: 10.1007/s11434-011-4713-7 [ Climate Change over the Past Millennium in China.] …
The key moment making headlines from the Q&A “Science Weak” episode — Brian Cox shows a temperature graph. Malcolm Roberts said the GISS temperature data has been “manipulated”. The Particle Physics Genius’ reply was argument from incredulity: gushing, gratuitous astonishment spread over six attempts to form a complete sentence:
By who? NASA? The people the… Hang on a minute. No, no, see this is quite serious. But can I just – just one thing. NASA, NASA… The people that landed men on the moon?
In a blink of reductio ad absurbum, Cox sweeps aside a potentially useful discussion about thermometers near car-parks, airports, skyscrapers, and mysterious 1,200 km homogenized smoothing. In its place he gives cheap theatrical tricks. Follow his thought to its logical conclusion — everything that NASA does (or presumably will ever do) must be 100% correct. NASA becomes an apostle of the holy order. He treats the brand name as untouchable, but NASA is not just Neil Armstrong and a Big Step, it’s an agency with 17,000 employees. But hey, none of them have ever produced a manipulated graph.
Since experts matter (so Cox tells us) let’s ask the experts — like say, Buzz Aldrin, Charles Duke and Harrison Schmitt — three guys who actually walked on the moon, or another 47 scientists and astronauts that helped them get there. They’re all skeptical. They wrote to NASA to protest at the lax standards of GISS:
“We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.”
Then there are a guys like Roy Spencer and John Christie who didn’t just work at NASA, they won prizes there — and in climate research. To this day, in an enduring mystery GISS (the Goddard Institute of Space Studies) doesn’t use satellites to measure temperatures, but Spencer and Christie do. Using Cox logic, these guys outrank him, he ought be rushing to copy their views… but they are skeptics. In the last 20 years the UAH graph looks quite different to the GISS graph — though it’s more true to say that even the GISS graphs look different to the GISS graphs, as they transform year after year. Amazing how the thermometer readings are still changing 30 years later. (BTW, even the pause is there in the UAH graph. Thanks Ken. Not that it matters whether it still is — the models were already proven wrong).
Things got so far from a science discussion Cox even asked Malcolm Roberts if he believed that “men landed on the moon”. Cox was either fishing for irrelevant ad hominem attack points or it suggests that Cox has read more on climate psychology than on the climate. Being a particle physics guy perhaps he was fooled by studies with only ten anonymous internet responses.Psychology is a bit outside his expertise.
See him flash The Graph at 4:30 on this video.
Cox takes on the role of conversation vandal (with Lily-the-future-PhD-in-eco-something as the backup “the debate is over”). He dumps logical fallacies in, trades on his own media gloss and does his best to stop an open-minded, rational discussion. The ABC fosters this sort of interaction, like a twitter conversation with cameras. Linda Burnley’s “proof” was that people shouldn’t go swimming at Maroubra in August. Like that’s meaningful. (Poms have been coming to Perth and swimming here in July since forever…) Neither Cox, Jones, Hunt or Lily scoff or laugh at that comment. They could’ve done the full Scoff-Scorn and Riotous-Laughs, but …meh… wrong target.
One day Cox will understand cause and effect:
Here’s the most important point in the whole last twenty years of debate — credit to Malcolm Roberts for hammering it home. We need empirical evidence, and we need “cause and effect” links. So here is Cox finally pressed to give his Big Empirical Evidence declaring that climate models are useful:
“Let me just – all right, I’ll just give you one snapshot. So, I took a snapshot of the different bits of evidence for 2015. So global ocean heat content highest on record in 2015; global sea level highest on record in 2015, 70 millimetres higher than that observed in 1993; global surface temperature highest on record, El Nino something like 10 to 40% contribution to that; tropical cyclones well above average overall, as you said and even the anecdotal data. …
…. So the point is you go evidence, evidence, evidence, arctic continue warm, sea ice extent low, artic land surface temperature in 2015, 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit above 1981’s 210 average.
All of that would happen no matter what caused the warming. Cox hasn’t even thought this one through at a baby basic level. If the solar wind changed clouds and warmed the world, the seas also rise, the ice also melts, blah blah blah. Same for magnetic fields changing cloud nucleation. Same for UV solar cycle changes shifting jet streams and altering cloud formation.
O’but it’s hot says Cox. It’s hot! Yet correlation is not causation. It’s fallacy after fallacy.
And some people call this man a “renown” scientist. Embarrassing.
As usual it is 6 against 1 the skeptical views that 54% of Australians share. Glaciers will form in hell before the ratio on the ABC would run 1:6 the other way. For Groupthinkers it’s very important that the group discussing a “controversial” topic agrees with each other. This neutralizes any damaging effects of hearing a lone voice put forward counter arguments.
Cook points at “less heat escaping to space” – Jo says –this doesn’t mean anything. We assume he means less heat escapes at certain frequencies (which he should have said). Sections of the outgoing spectrum are missing (e.g. Harries et al), which shows that CO2 is stopping some outgoing radiation and is a greenhouse gas (and we knew that already), but it doesn’t show that overall extra heat is staying in the system. The heat absorbed by CO2 is probably just rerouting out from other wavelengths (say, for example through emissions from the dominant greenhouse gas — water vapor). Indeed 28 million radiosondes suggest this is happening. The water vapor emissions layer is falling (not rising as the models predicted with the “hot spot”). We live on The Water Planet — the climate is driven by clouds, humidity, and our oceans — changes in these swamp the tiny effect of a trace gas. [This paragraph was edited for clarity, see notes below*]
The rate of warming in the 1980s peaked at the same rate that the globe warmed at in the 1920s and the 1880s (0.16C per decade). Ask Phil Jones. All that CO2 did not make any difference to the peak rate of global warming per decade. After World War II temperatures fell as CO2 rose. In the ice cores there are many examples of warmer temperatures causing CO2 to rise, and no clear examples of the opposite.
“Using the existing CSIRO model the aim of my project is to develop an understanding of how pesticides move through the Fitzroy Estuary system in order to mitigate impacts on the Great Barrier Reef in light of predictions about climate change. The model also aims to describe the impact of increased or decreased pesticide usage on this fragile environment.“
According to Wikipedia “Serna intends to complete a Ph.D. in environmental science”
For other viewers, theoretically, if you can find it, the show should appear on iview (sorry for overseas readers, I don’t know if that plays for you. Though hear the “Modify Headers” App for Firefox may work for Ex-pats if they use their Australian IP). Last weeks episode includes PJ O Rourke.
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In a nutshell: a government funded group finds some bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef, and repackages the stats to come up with the apocalyptic statistic that only 
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