A year-longBuzzFeed investigation accuses the WWF of horrific human rights abuses.
via Big Picture News, Informed Analysis
March 18, 2019 at 06:21AM
Month: March 2019
For those serious about taking concerted action to combat climate change, implications from a 2018 study suggest that the widespread abandonment of smartphone use — which is collectively on track to add 125 megatons of CO2 equivalent per year by 2020 — may be key to preventing the planet’s catastrophic demise.
Image Source (adapted): Press-Herald
The question, then, is this: Would those protesting political inaction on climate change today be willing to do their part and permanently give up smartphone use to save the planet?
Most people haven’t considered their smartphones to be significant contributors to global CO2 emissions.
But they are. And they are poised to become one of the more prominent obstacles to global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions in the coming decades.
The unsustainable expansion of smartphone emissions
A recent analysis by Belkhir and Elmeligi (2018) determined that the greenhouse gas emissions from the Information and Communication Industry (ICT) – smartphones and mobile devices, prominently – will grow from 1% of total global emissions in 2007 to 14% by 2040. That’s more than half of today’s relative contribution from the globe’s entire transportation sector.
In 2010, smartphone use added 17 megatons of CO2 equivalent (17 MT-CO2-e) to annual global emissions. By next year (2020), smartphone emissions are expected to reach 125 MT-CO2-e/year – a 730% explosion in just 10 years.
Last year (2018), there were 2.5 billion smartphone users. Belkhir and Elmeligi suggest that if there aren’t serious efforts to reduce or eliminate smartphone use in the near future, the number of smartphone units across the globe may reach 8.7 billion by 2040.
This is unsustainable, dramatically undermining global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.
Image Source: The Conversation
Protesters demand climate action
This past weekend, climate change protesters took to the streets across the world by the hundreds of thousands.
Many of these protesters were children and youth. They decided to skip school last Friday to demonstrate just how deeply concerned they are about the Earth’s climate.
There is little these young people can do to save the planet from extinction as far as directly influencing government policy.
However, there is something that they – and we – can do that would make a difference in reducing our CO2 emissions impact: give up our smartphones.
Permanently.
And encourage all our friends and family members to do the same.
Widespread smartphone renunciation would be a symbolic testament to our commitment to rescuing the planet from the oncoming climate catastrophe.
It’s not too late…yet. Shall we begin?
Image Source: Belkhir and Elmeligi, 2018
via NoTricksZone
March 18, 2019 at 05:28AM
If these ‘striking’ school- children were at all informed about CO2 emissions, they would be demonstrating not in Parliament Square but outside the London embassy of the People’s Republic of China.
The marching season seems to be upon us. Last week there was (another) so-called strike by schoolchildren ‘against climate change’.
The former UKIP leader Nigel Farage is now leading a march from the North East to London, protesting against the ‘betrayal’ of Brexit by Theresa May. And on Saturday, the campaign known as ‘The People’s Vote’ is to descend on Whitehall and Parliament Square.
The latter is bound to be much more numerous than Farage’s demo. Whatever he says, if Mrs May wins the parliamentary vote on the Withdrawal Agreement this week, the UK will have Brexit.
And it’s when people are not getting what they want from Parliament that they protest in the largest numbers. Though they wildly exaggerate their support, even then.
Those who want a second referendum (to cancel out the first) insisted that their march on Parliament last October was joined by ‘more than 700,000 people’.
It was only months later that a freedom of information request unearthed a debriefing document by the Greater London Authority which put the number of People’s Vote marchers at no more than 250,000.
And these days, when the social media can whip up a firestorm of outrage over nothing and everything, it is remarkably easy to get people to join a campaign.
This was demonstrated by one Anders Colding-Jorgensen of the University of Copenhagen. In 2009 he created a Facebook group to protest against the demolition of the Stork Fountain (which adorns a square in the Danish capital).
No fewer than 10,000 people joined in the first week; after a fortnight, the group had over 27,000 pledging fealty. Then Colding-Jorgensen revealed that he had been conducting a social experiment to show how easy it was to mobilise people via false claims on the social media: there never was a plan to knock down the Stork Fountain.
This makes me wonder what has been told to the schoolchildren who have deserted their classrooms — with the encouragement of their teachers — to protest about alleged government inaction ‘against climate change’.
They have been led to believe that British politicians have been doing ‘nothing’ to reduce emissions of CO2.
Whoever taught them that is either ignorant, or deliberately covering up the fact that UK CO2 emissions have fallen consistently in each of the past six years (the result of government-mandated action to shut coal-powered power stations).
Last year, or so scientists tell us, UK CO2 emissions were at the lowest levels in more than 120 years, despite the fact that our population and output is vastly higher.
Add to this that the UK contributes little more than one per cent of global CO2 emissions, and you wonder — again — what these children have been told by their teachers.
Have they been told, for example, that China is building almost 260 gigawatts of new coal-fired power generating capacity (equivalent to roughly the entire U.S. coal power station fleet)?
Have they been told that last year China also financed more than a quarter of worldwide coal plant construction (to the tune of $36bn)?
If these ‘striking’ school- children were at all informed on the matter that exercises them so much, they would be demonstrating not in Parliament Square but outside the London embassy of the People’s Republic of China.
That’s the one with the red flag, as its government still claims to be faithful to Marxism. In fact, Communism is also fashionable among young would-be saviours of the planet.
A number of those demonstrating last week were waving the red flag complete with hammer and sickle. One of them was standing on the plinth with the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square. He had doubtless never been told by his teachers that the late Soviet regime and its Eastern European satellites made Donald Trump look like an ecologist.
The Chernobyl nuclear blow-out was only the most spectacular example of its environmental blight — and the only one which the Soviet government was unable to cover up or prevent being known about in the West.
But since the collapse of Soviet Communism we have learned much more. In 2013 a Russian scientist from Murmansk disclosed that, despite official denials, the Soviet navy had been dumping nuclear waste in the Barents Sea, several hundred miles from the Norwegian coast in a known fishing area.
Apparently the Soviet fleet punctured the protective containers, so the barrels of radioactive waste would fill with seawater and sink, rather than risk them floating and being discovered.
The real environmental gap between the West (so despised by those who fill pupils’ minds with the joys of Marxism) and the Soviet system was most clearly revealed in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
At the time of reunification, only half of the East’s domestic sewage was receiving treatment: half of the country’s lakes were considered dead or dying. And in some parts of Communist East Germany the level of air pollution was between eight and 12 times greater than found in ‘capitalist’ West Germany.
I fear the ‘striking’ schoolchildren — many of whom were chanting ‘f*** Theresa May’ outside Downing Street — have been taught to think that Jeremy Corbyn was right that East Germany was a workers’ paradise (the Labour leader holidayed there, he admired it so much).
Perhaps it’s time for a march against Communism. Ending up outside the offices of the National Union of Teachers.
The post Dominic Lawson: Brainwashed At the Blackboard appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
March 18, 2019 at 05:22AM
As Australia push-pumps “renewables” into remote locations their incomes are suddenly being cut because the losses (as they transmit across long lines) are higher than they expected. On March 8th the AEMO rerated many generators and this year it’s being called a bloodbath for wind and solar. Some of them, like AGL’s Silverton wind farm face losses of 20%.
It all revolves around something called Marginal Loss Factors, a value are set by the AEMO each year. The rating is reduced by losses across distance and also by “congestion” from other renewables which are popping up in the same remote locations far from the cities and industries that need the electricity they make. This sudden loss of expected income threatens new wind and solar projects (as it should — hello market signal!) Sometimes the loss factors are hard to predict years in advance which makes it difficult to also predict whether a project will return a profit (even despite the guaranteed subsidies).
Another renewable inefficiency strikes — “marginal loss factors”
Generators are paid according to the electricity that arrives rather than what they produce at the plant. (Seems fair). This is called the Marginal Loss Factor (MLF). Ideally they’d get paid […]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
via JoNova
March 18, 2019 at 05:19AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 