Month: April 2017

Uncategorized 24 Apr 2017

WISHFUL THINKING BY LEADING UN CLIMATE ALARMIST

via climate science
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Here is a laughable piece of nonsense about an initiative by Christiana Figueres, a leading figure in the UN. I draw it to your attention to demonstrate the feeble arguments being made to bolster the flagging climate alarmists argument. Here is a short extract:

"During the conference, Figueres reiterated the “clear parallel” between progress on gender equality and on climate change over the last six years. She noted evidence suggests that a greater presence of women in the boardroom and in senior leadership roles can help increase the corporate focus on climate change, and emphasized that the UNFCCC has recognized the important role of women in addressing climate change through its ‘Momentum for Change: Women for Results’ initiative. The ‘Two Degrees of Change’ initiative aims to encourage women to raise climate issues with their company boards and to call on companies and investors to act on climate change".

So what is Figueres saying – that women are more likely to buy into the climate alarmist argument? She has put forward no evidence for this. She simply trots it out as a fact and then assumes the rest of her ideas as following on from this unproven fact. The women she meets are probably all on her wavelength, or, more likely too polite to argue with her, or too in awe of her status to challenge her. But, out in the real world she would find there are plenty of women who are just as sceptical as a good deal of men.

via climate science http://ift.tt/2jXH2Ie

April 23, 2017 at 06:30PM

Uncategorized 24 Apr 2017

A Diesel in the Shed

via Master Resource
http://ift.tt/1o3KEE1

You can have your solar panels … and your turbines on the hills;

You can use the warmth of sunshine … to reduce your heating bills.

You can dream you’re self-sufficient … as you weed your vegie bed;

As long as you make sure to keep … a diesel in the shed.

When I was a kid on a dairy farm in Queensland, Australia, we relied on green energy: horses and human muscles for motive power; fire-wood and beeswax candles for heat and light; windmills to pump water; and the sun to grow crops, vegetables, and pastures.

The only “non-green” energy used was a bit of kerosene for the kitchen lamp, and petrol for a small Ford utility.

Our life changed dramatically when we put a diesel in the dairy shed. This single-cylinder engine drove the milking machines, the cream separator and an electricity generator, which charged 16 lead-acid 2 volt batteries sitting on the veranda. This 32 volt DC system powered a modern marvel – bright light, at any time, in every room, at the touch of a switch.

There were no electric self-starters for diesels in those days – just a heavy crank handle. But all that effort, noise and fumes were superseded when every house and dairy got connected to clean silent “coal power by wire”. Suddenly the trusty “Southern Cross” diesel engines disappeared from Australian sheds and dairies.

In just one life-time, candles and kerosene were replaced by diesel, which was then replaced by clean silent ever-ready electricity.

Today, after Aussies have enjoyed decades of abundant reliable cheap electricity from coal, green energy gambling has taken Australia back to the era which kept a diesel in the shed.

Tasmania is the greenest state in Australia. It once had a vibrant economy that created mines, saw-mills, farms, orchards, oil and metal refineries, dams, hydro-power and railways. It is now a green no-go land. Greens have stopped new hydro developments, opposed mining, crippled the timber industry, prevented new wood-chip developments and will probably celebrate when their last refinery closes.

Tasmanians get their electricity mainly from hydro assets created long ago by their more productive ancestors. But recently a long drought caused a shortage of Tasmanian hydro-energy – they became reliant for up to 40% of their electricity needs on the Bass-link undersea cable bringing electricity from reliable coal-fired stations in Victoria and NSW.

However the overloaded Bass Link cable failed, and an old gas-powered station was brought back into service (importing gas from Victoria) to keep the lights on. Subsequently their politicians hurriedly put 150 diesel generators in their shed (costing A$11 million per month).

South Australia is the next greenest state in Australia, hosting about 35% of Australia’s wind turbines. These were force-fed into existence by mandatory green energy targets and tax benefits. In a burst of green destruction they also closed their gas-fired power stations and demolished their coal-fired station.

However wind power failed recently and a storm tore down their life-line bringing reliable coal power from Victoria. Now Premier Weatherill is planning to install up to 200 megawatts of diesel generators in his shed. Many residents are following his lead.

Question: “What did South Australians have before candles?” Answer: “Electricity”.

The UK has been badly infected by the green energy virus. Engineers warned that this intermittent and unpredictable supply had increased the risk of blackouts, so the UK government offered subsidies for emergency backup power. This subsidy, plus consumer concerns, put so many diesels in British sheds that they now provide a major backup capacity for UK electricity.

Many Spaniards found a diesel in the shed was very profitable. Their government had been drinking green-ale and offered attractive subsidies for solar power produced. The subsidy was very successful – so successful that someone eventually noticed that some suppliers were even producing “solar” power at night. It was coming from diesels in their sheds.

Finally, our green media likes to feature some green energy enthusiast who is “off the grid”. But it usually emerges later in the show that there is a diesel in their shed too.

Those who remember the days of relying on a noisy smelly diesel in the shed have no wish to be dragged back there by green zealots using the powers of government.

———

Vic Forbes is the founder of The Carbon Sense Coalition, a voluntary group of people concerned about the extent to which carbon is wrongly vilified in Western societies, particularly in government, the media, and in business circles that aims to restore balance and reason to the carbon debate, and to explain and defend the key role of carbon in production of most of our energy for heat, light, and transportation, and all of our food.

Further Reading

Tasmania’s Bass Link cable fails. Gas imports boom: http://ift.tt/2paae4Z

Tasmania puts some diesels in the shed: http://ift.tt/1PFPomK

South Australia demolishes their last coal power station: http://ift.tt/2pa3c0h

South Australia puts some diesels in the shed: http://ift.tt/2pa2zDK

UK offers subsidies to put some diesels in the shed: http://ift.tt/2efjQno

The Sun in Spain shines better at night: http://ift.tt/2pSWw4J

All about diesel back-up Generators: http://ift.tt/2pT8tXZ

The post A Diesel in the Shed appeared first on Master Resource.

via Master Resource http://ift.tt/1o3KEE1

April 23, 2017 at 06:05PM

Uncategorized 24 Apr 2017

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Elected Science Deniers Are a Threat to Democracy

via Watts Up With That?
http://ift.tt/1Viafi3

Bill Nye, Barack Obama, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson selfie

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Neil deGrasse Tyson has claimed that the refusal of the Trump administration to bow to every scientific demand presented to politicians is a threat to democracy.

Neil deGrasse Tyson says science deniers in White House are a profound threat to democracy

The scientist spoke out as thousands around the world prepare to march

One of America’s most influential and popular scientists has issued a stark warning over what he termed the Trump administration’s rejection of science – saying it is a threat to the country’s “informed democracy”.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the StarTalk podcast and TV show and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, said when he grew up, the US had relied on science to drive its innovation. But no longer.

“People have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not, what is reliable, what is not reliable,” he says in a video posted on Facebook. “That’s not the country I remember growing up in. I don’t remember any other time where people were standing in denial of what science was.”

…

Second Edition of Pathbreaking Research Report Shows the Orwellian Nature of the “March for Science”

via Carlin Economics and Science
http://ift.tt/1gVT2t3

Despite Saturday’s so-called “March for Science,” the almost simultaneous release of a Second Edition of a Research Report showing the exact opposite of what some of the marchers claim to be the conclusions of climate science has brought home the Orwellian reality that the marchers have gotten their claims concerning what the science says exactly backwards. The Climate March website says their forces of “The Resistance” won’t tolerate institutions that try to “skew, ignore, misuse or interfere with science.” If the marchers really support science, they should be supporting climate skeptics, not the climate alarmists. How Orwellian can you get? The science is clear.

The authors of a pathbreaking August 2916 research report, discussed here, released today a Second Edition of their report. The conclusions disproving the validity of USEPA’s three lines of evidence for their 2009 Endangerment Finding for Greenhouse Gases and the lack of a statistically significant effect of increasing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) on global and tropical temperatures remain the same. The analysis, however, is both more elegant and easier to understand. It demonstrates that natural factors involving solar, volcanic and oceanic activity fully explain the Earth’s tropospheric and surface temperatures and that atmospheric CO₂ plays no significant role.

Research Report Disproves the Alarmists’ Basic Claim

This report and the earlier edition go far beyond this by disproving the alarmists’ basic claim that increases in atmospheric CO₂ result in global warming. The Research Report results can be replicated using the basic data that the authors are willing to provide, most unlike the elaborate global climate models relied on by climate alarmists. Both the First and Second Editions have been extensively peer reviewed by experts in the relevant fields. So the reports have all the characteristics of good science, and should have the support of anyone who supports science, which the marchers claim to represent.

Climate skeptics have long argued that fluctuations in global temperatures are not primarily due to human-caused emissions of CO₂ from using fossil fuels to improve their lives, and have generally attributed these fluctuations to changes in the sun, our source of heat and light. The importance of solar variations and other natural fluctuations has now been shown to be the case despite many tens of billions of taxpayer dollars spent by the US and other governments to try to disprove the obvious and mislead the public on this central scientific issue in the climate debate.

So the new Edition does not contradict any of the conclusions reached last fall, but now provides a more understandable and common sense explanation for fluctuations in global and tropical temperatures. Nothing that USEPA, the UN, or even President Obama have done, or even could have done, could have any significant effect on Earth’s temperatures. The effect of their attempts to do so will be to line the pockets of “renewable” energy sources at the expense primarily of the less well-off both in the US and the rest of the world and of decreasing the productivity of green plants and humans by discouraging the use of fossil fuel energy and thus CO₂ emissions.

Previously climate skeptics have raised myriad reasons why reducing human emissions would have little effect on global temperatures despite alarmist arguments based on elaborate computer models that are inherently incapable of accurately representing the climate and have never been validated. These climate models invariably predict that higher CO₂ levels will lead to higher temperatures. The Research Report invalidates this conclusion 14 separate times using different databases. It robustly invalidates the argument that reductions in CO₂ emissions as advocated by the UN and the Obama Administration will have a significant effect on global temperatures. So government-decreed reductions are a total waste of taxpayer and ratepayer dollars and very harmful to job creation, economic growth, and the poor.

Official Press Release on Second Edition

On the Existence of a “Tropical Hot Spot” & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding
James P. Wallace III, John R. Christy, and Joseph S. d’Aleo
Abridged Research Report
Second Edition, April 2017

A just released peer reviewed climate science Research Report has proven that it is all but certain that EPA’s basic claim that CO₂ is a pollutant is totally false. All research was done pro bono.

This research failed to find that the steadily rising atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 14 temperature data sets that were analyzed. The tropospheric and surface temperature data measurements that were analyzed were taken by many different entities using balloons, satellites, buoys and various land based techniques. Needless to say, if regardless of data source, the analysis results are the same, the analysis findings should be considered highly credible.

The analysis results invalidate EPA’s CO₂ Endangerment Finding, including the climate models that EPA has claimed can be relied upon for policy analysis purposes. Moreover, these research results clearly demonstrate that once the solar, volcanic and oceanic activity, that is, natural factor, impacts on temperature data are accounted for, there is no “record setting” warming to be concerned about. In fact, there is no Natural Factor Adjusted Warming at all. The authors of this report claim that there is no published, peer reviewed, statistically valid proof that past increases in atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have caused the officially reported rising, even claimed record setting temperatures. And, EPA’s climate models fail to meet this test.

via Carlin Economics and Science http://ift.tt/1gVT2t3

April 23, 2017 at 04:21PM