Month: September 2017

Poor BOM: Dangerous deniers, amateurs, attacking Australian Bureau of Meteorology, debilitating it by asking questions.

Excellent news. Obviously we are getting to the BoM.

This week, Jen Marohasy and I were mentioned by Maurice Newman in The Australian.“Smoking Gun demands Grilling for the BoM”. In response, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has unleashed a double dummy-popping effort in The Guardian.

The BoM could have answered the questions in The Australian, of course, but it’s so much easier to whine, bluster, raise the conspiracy flag and avoid the questions that matter at the-ask-no-hard-questions-Guardian.

Bureau of Meteorology attacks pushed by ‘fever swamp’ of climate denial

Graham Readfearn

Former weather bureau chief says agency debilitated by climate deniers’ attacks

Michael Slezak

It really is an extraordinary rant as the former head of the BoM admits skeptics are “debilitating” the BoM with these “attacks”. The Guardian is so starved of real news, it runs the one-sided name-calling excuses and another separate story discusses it as if it was actually news. While The Australian asks the BoM for a reply and would publish it, The Guardian didn’t ask a skeptic. One of these newspapers acts like a newspaper…

How debilitating are we skeptics? Jennifer Marohasy tells me she sent the BoM questions in 2015, but hasn’t […]

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September 23, 2017 at 02:17AM

Francis Menton: Reasons For Optimism About Climate Hysteria

The reality of a looming renewable energy disaster can’t be suppressed forever.

Large numbers of my friends and acquaintances are climate skeptics, and many of them spend a good deal of their time feeling down in the dumps about the subject.  Their reasoning goes something like this:  Here we have something that should immediately be identified as baloney by any thinking person.  And yet thousands and millions of people seem to have fallen for it.  And not just random people, but people seemingly among the elites of society — academics and journalists and government bureaucrats.  Most of the media function as propaganda bullhorns to spread the idiocy.  The forces of hysteria have commandeered tens of billions of annual dollars of government funding to pay for their program and spread their message, drowning out and suppressing any opposition.  Their program calls for taking away everyone’s freedom and impoverishing the populace with higher costs for energy.  And yet the program seems to be getting adopted everywhere!

How could a sane person not get depressed about this?  Easy!  Over on the other side of this issue, we have a secret weapon.  The secret weapon is that the supposedly carbon-free energy sources — or, at least, those supposedly carbon-free energy sources that are acceptable to environmentalists (meaning wind and solar and definitely not nuclear and hydro) — don’t work.  Even worse, wind and solar are not even carbon-free, because it takes large amounts of carbon-based energy to make the turbines or panels or whatever.  Put these two problems together, and governments that try to reduce their carbon emissions by heavily subsidizing wind and solar quickly hit a wall where energy prices for the masses soar through the roof even as the carbon emissions don’t go down.  You won’t find the New York Times or Washington Post reporting on this, but it’s getting harder and harder not to notice.

Let’s take a closer look at Germany, which has been the source of quite a bit of news on this subject in the past few days.  On first take Germany would seem more than any place else to be the biggest cause of your depression.  “Transitioning” from fossil fuel energy to wind and solar has been the signature issue for Chancellor Angela Merkel for more than a decade, and as of this moment she seems to be cruising to victory in the election coming up on Sunday.  But don’t get the idea that it would make any difference if one of the other candidates or parties managed to defeat Merkel, because there is no political party in Germany of any size or consequence that offers dissent on the “climate change” issue.  The entire country has fallen into the mass hysteria!  (Has anything like that ever happened before in Germany?  Don’t ask!)  Germany has moved aggressively to cut its carbon emissions, and was a leader in the 2015 Paris negotiations in making aggressive promises of emissions reductions and in strong-arming other countries, including the United States, to commit to aggressive reduction targets.  Germany is part of the EU commitment to 40% emissions reductions (from 1990 levels) by 2030, and in addition has its own internal goals of reaching the 40% reduction by 2020 (coming right up!) and 95% reduction by 2050.  Impressive! […]

Here is a chart of Germany’s year-by-year greenhouse gas emissions changes since 1990.  Source: CleanEnergyWire.

German GHG emission.png

You will quickly see that Germany hit the emissions reduction wall around 2010.  Since then, its emissions have actually increased in 4 of the 7 years.  Multiply out the changes since 2009, and you will find that Germany’s emissions at the end of 2016 were 99.79% of the level they had had at the end of 2009.  This, despite the fact that 2010 was the year they passed the so-called “Energiewende” law.  That’s some “energy transition” — 0.21% emissions reduction in seven years! […]

And what about the cost?

Germany has spent some 650 billion euros ($780 billion) on subsidies for green power in recent decades. But the country will at best get to 30 percent by 2020, according to Berlin climate researcher Agora Energiewende. Emission reductions “won’t be a near miss but a booming failure,” Agora researchers write. 

Even in a country with a GDP of almost $3.5 trillion per year, that $780 billion of “green” energy subsidies is real money.

Germany’s stated goals of emissions reductions are just fantasies.  They will not be achieved, but meanwhile the prices that their people pay for electricity and gasoline and heating oil will soar.

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September 23, 2017 at 02:12AM

Rex Murphy: All Global Warming Predictions Are Infallible… Until They’re Not

Could even a smidgen of the skepticism some have been urging, some of the warnings that science and politics are a terrible blend, be justified?

There is a disturbance in the troposphere, much perturbation. The little Gore molecules that do so much to keep everybody in the climate change industry in a sweat are slacking off. The results are—let me coin a word—undeniable. The world’s leading climate entrepreneur’s new PowerPoint agitprop, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, hasn’t stirred the waters or warmed the air.

Take note of that bathetic subtitle, Truth to Power. With just about every government and sub-sovereign government in the world on side, every progressive university in full harmony, every pseudo-science radio and TV program treating global warming with the reverence only found these days among Scientologists and faith healing sorcerers, and every celebrity that owns a yacht and a private jet willing to swear, “It’s real and it’s happening,” which side do you think has the “Power?”

Not to mention the annual mass march of the penguins—sorry, my mistake—the annual trek (by jet) of the hordes of NGOs, Greenpeace camp followers, Green parties, and bureaucrats to Rio or Paris or Beijing or Marrakesh to piously intone The End is Near under the illustrious banner of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Conference of the Parties. All, of course, are lathered and lubricated by billions and billions of dollars in the fight against global warming, a.k.a., climate change, a.k.a. (for a little while there) global weirding. I think it’s fair to say the power and the publicity and the loot are squarely with the doomsayers of Camp Gore.

However, no Academy trinket, no Nobel olive leaf for the boring update—I don’t think it even made a showing at the Toronto International Film Festival (which is an omission worth noting when you consider that TIFF, the emporium of films fashionable, was willing to highlight the dreadful mother!, one of the bleakest flops of our time).

None of this, however, has cooled the troposphere as has the real news from an infinitely more prestigious source. From a number of venues normally in robotic lockstep with the great consensus of settled science, the London Times, the Washington Post, and even the maniacally warmist The Independent, a story emerges that the famous models of the global warming industry may have overstated the degree of global warming in the past two decades.

They do not say this on their own, mind you. That would localize the heresy, and no organ of respectable journalistic opinion is willing to go full apostate on the creed of the Ecopocalypse without external backup.

Instead, they issue the findings of the prestigious scientific oracle, Nature Geoscience, and the published work of two acknowledged experts in the field, Messers Myles Allen, professor of geo-system science at the University of Oxford, and Michael Grubb, a professor of international energy and climate change at University College London.

Be it noted: these two are not “deniers,” that being the vile term that those who champion global warming fling out with reckless ease at those who disagree with them. They deliberately, knowingly, associate their opponents with Holocaust denialism, without so much as an arched eyebrow of rebuke from the censors of political correctness. This stands in contrast to the stern policing from the commentariat when it comes to instances of “sexist” rhetoric. If we’re going to have standards on “correct” rhetoric, let’s have standards for all of it. No deniers, no Barbies.

The Geoscience article has it all. The models were wrong. They “were on the hot side.” They “overstated the impact of emissions.” From The Independent: “Michael Grubb… admitted his earlier forecasting models had overplayed how temperatures would rise.” As a consequence, the world now has a “larger carbon budget” than previously thought. There is, in other words, more time—the end is not as near as every crusader for the cause has insisted for the last 20 or 30 years.

One global warming scientist made a point everybody should pay attention to:

“Did the IPCC get it wrong? Just let me leave that question hanging for a while… While you ponder that question, it is worth noting that the authors of this paper developed the idea of carbon budgets, are the world leading experts on carbon budgets, and derived the carbon budgets in the IPCC process…” (my emphasis).

Can these things be? Could even a smidgen of the skepticism some have been urging, some of the warnings that science and politics are a terrible blend, be justified? If those who design the models find the models have “overstated” matters, that the models “were too hot,” could we not find room to pause awhile before we redesign industrial civilization according to the imperatives of Al “The science is settled” Gore?

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September 23, 2017 at 02:12AM

Climate / Energy: What if we come back down to Earth?

Contributed by Drieu Godefridi © 2017

drieu godefridi

Belgian philosopher, jurist, author of “Le GIEC etMort; Vive le Science” (The IPCC is Dead: Long Live Science) published in English under the title “The IPCC: A Scientific Body?”

Important information has emerged in … Continue reading

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September 23, 2017 at 02:11AM