Most Australians Agree: Lack of Hazard Reduction Not Climate to Blame for Bushfires A recent Newspoll has found most Australians – 56 per cent – believe the main cause of the recent devastating bushfires was hazard reduction with 35 per cent saying it was due to climate change. The Institute of Public Affairs’ Gideon Rozner told Sky News host Gemma Tognini the “opportunistic use of these bushfires by climate alarmists” has failed to convince people of the effects of climate change on disasters like the bushfires. “I think it’s turned a lot of people off the broader cause,” Mr Rozner said.
Lately we’ve been hearing reports of how Arctic sea ice has (unexpectedly) reached normal levels this winter. This is a bit of good news which the media avoid mentioning.
But the resurgence of Arctic ice has hardly been good news for global warming alarmists, and especially for the 300 crew members of German high-tech research vessel Polarstern of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), now currently on expedition in the mid Arctic.
Exchange of Polarstern research vessel crew will have to sit tight as Russian supply ice breaker gets held up. Image: Alfred Wegener Institute.
Yesterday NDR German public broadcasting reported that it appears the Polarstern’s crew will have to sit tight for awhile longer because a Russian ice breaker for exchanging the crew has had too much difficulty breaking its way through the ice to the research vessel. The sea ice is thicker than anticipated.
The NDR reports: “There are problems with the Arctic expedition of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven. The crew on the research vessel ‘Polarstern’ have to stay on site longer than expected.”
“Dense ice”
The problem is that the Russian supply icebreaker became bogged in “the dense sea ice of the Arctic” and now “is making little progress”. The ice has been too thick for the Russian ice breaker to make its way as planned.
The Polarstern research vessel of the AWI MOSAiC expedition departed mainland Europe last September and has since lodged itself in the middle of the Arctic ice through the winter as part of an Arctic research expedition. It will return back to its home-port of Bremerhaven in early October of this year.
The “MOSAiC” expedition is one of the largest Arctic expeditions ever with scientists from 20 nations studying “the climate processes of the central Arctic”. The crew of 300 on board the Polarstern is supplied and exchanged at about every three months by “an international fleet of icebreakers, helicopters and aircraft,” Radio Bremen reported.
Thick ice caused breaker to run out of fuel
Just recently Russian supply ice breaker “Captain Dranitsyn” was headed over to carry out a scheduled “crew exchange” but ended up consuming too much fuel trying to break through the “up to 160 centimeters thick” sea ice, Radio Bremen reported. Now the supply icebreaker “no longer has enough fuel for the return trip because of the high energy consumption in the ice.”
There were “few open or thin spots,” one official explained.
“According to a spokesperson, the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven is now looking for solutions, and several options already prepared for such situations are being examined,” writes Radio Bremen.
The cost of the Polarstern MOSAiC expedition is 160 million euros.
A new paper sheds light on how the U.S. science community discourages innovation.
The relationship between scientific effort and scientific impact on four ideas with different potential. Ideas A and B are highly successful if properly developed, whereas ideas C and D do not amount to much, even if properly developed. Ideas that lead to failure in this sense are much more common than successful ideas.
During the Cold War, when rivalry between the capitalist West and communist East shaped international affairs, nonaligned countries were labeled as Third World. A rather vague designation, it came to denote low-income countries with weak states and institutions. When the Soviet Union fell, “developing” became the dominant modifier for such countries. The “first world” — the U.S. and its allies — became, on the other hand, “developed countries.”
The implication was that “development” — economic growth, technological progress, increasing living standards — could take place only in low-income economies. Accordingly, globalization shaped the post–Cold War period. Western policymakers sought to export technologies and governance practices to the undeveloped world, which would spur a convergence in global living standards and growth rates.
The “advanced” countries of the West, by comparison, had supposedly reached steady state. The U.S. and Western Europe could grow only by increasing their populations (which, owing to low native fertility, required immigration) or investing overseas. Developed countries thus paradoxically depended on their undeveloped counterparts. This view took for granted that the developed world was no longer capable of achieving the technological advances that drove economic growth in the 20th century.
Despite Silicon Valley’s public-relations efforts, which tout the transformative potential of new software, more and more thinkers argue that we are experiencing technological stagnation. Citing disappointing productivity numbers and the comparatively low impact of recent information-technology innovations, Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowen, Larry Summers, and others have made this case in recent years, but theories abound as to why it is happening. On one popular view, expressed most comprehensively by Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, Western researchers have picked all the technological “low-hanging fruit,” such as indoor plumbing, automobiles, and air travel. According to this theory, there are diminishing returns to science; once you’ve discovered fire and electricity, all future innovations will pale in comparison.
Economists Jay Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen push back on this view in a new paper. “New ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did,” they acknowledge, but rather than resulting from the laws of physics, the dearth of new ideas is a consequence of the incentives faced by scientists.
Because academic papers are evaluated by how many citations they receive, scientists choose low-risk projects that are certain to get attention rather than novel experiments that may fail. Academics cluster into crowded fields because papers in such fields are guaranteed to be read by a high number of researchers.
This is a relatively new phenomenon, as citation analysis of scientific research was introduced only in the 1950s and did not become common until the 1970s. Eugene Garfield, who developed the idea of using citation quantity to evaluate the impact of journals, came to regret its use as a performance indicator for individual researchers.
Novel ideas are inherently unlikely to score well on measures of scientific impact, “since ideas develop slowly in their infancy,” the authors assert. The lag between “exploration” of a new idea and the discovery of its impact means that innovators will have to wait years before seeing the fruits of their labor (see graph below).
More likely, though, scientists exploring new ideas will fail to produce meaningful results at all. For every breakthrough idea, there are countless dead ends. A paper in the American Sociological Review concludes, “An innovative publication is more likely to achieve high impact than a conservative one, but the additional reward does not compensate for the risk of failing to publish.” But when researchers neglect new ideas, innovation cannot take place.
CRISPR gene editing, one of few recent breakthroughs in biotechnology, was developed by scientists over a 20-year period. When the DNA sequences behind CRISPR were first discovered in 1987, their significance was unclear. Over the ensuing decades, papers on CRISPR that are now considered major advances were rejected by leading journals. Only after 25 years of tinkering, with few tangible results, did scientists discover the use of CRISPR DNA segments for genome editing.
Had Yoshizumi Ishino, who discovered the CRISPR sequence, prioritized impact over exploration, CRISPR would not have been possible. But Ishino is the exception that proves the rule. Bhattacharya and Packalen find that the vast majority of researchers aim for incremental advances.
They are not the first to present this hypothesis, but by formalizing it in a model, they have demonstrated the paradoxical dynamics behind scientific breakthroughs: The most important ideas are least likely to be recognized in their nascent states.
A couple of days ago, CTM forwarded a reader suggestion to me. “Cassandra” wanted to know what the carbon footprint of the movie industry was, from movie production to the theater. With “all those annoyingly loud celebrities going on about the dangers of CO2,” it would be fun to see how big their carbon footprint was.
I found a couple of articles from 2019 and 2020, both of which linked to a 2006 paper, which appears to be the only “scientific” study of this subject.
Oil Price Dot Com, October 2019
An Inconvenient Truth: Hollywood’s Huge Carbon Footprint By Julianne Geiger – Oct 17, 2019
Leonardo DiCaprio may have devoted his celebrity platform to zealously cheerleading on behalf of the environment, but he has fallen prey to criticism about his own carbon footprint – which is rather extensive and includes traveling around the world in private jets and yachts to educate us on how we are wrecking the planet. But DiCaprio is being upstaged by another hypocritical climate crusader – one with even deeper pockets: Hollywood. And when it comes to carbon footprints, it is giving even the oil industry a run for its money.
[…]
Hollywood cheered. After all, they are one of the loudest voices on the planet when it comes to environmental causes, and their message is sandwiched into many of the movies and much of the TV that we watch every day.
But Hollywood, more specifically the film industry, is a significant source of pollution and is considered one of the least green industries. And Leo is only part of the problem.
The movie industry is huge, complete with its own pollution. But this hasn’t stopped them from lecturing movie-goers on a wide range of issues including income disparity, social injustices, mining, and its new favorite – the environment. And if this sanctimony seems like a new trend, a quick browse through IMDB should set you right.
According to a 2006 two-year study by UCLA, the Hollywood film and television industry produces more air pollution in the five-county Los Angeles region than almost all of the other five sectors studied. In other words, Hollywood creates more pollution than individually produced by aerospace manufacturing, apparel, hotels, and even semiconductor manufacturing. Only the petroleum industry and its fuel refineries contributed more emissions.
[…]
But it’s not just Hollywood. According to BAFTA, the British film organization, one hour of UK television—fiction or nonfiction—produces 13 metric tons of carbon dioxide. This is about what the average American uses every year.
As a petroleum geologist, I have no doubt that our industry, particularly refining, contributes more GHG emissions than Hollywood, but we actually produce a useful product, essential to our economy and human well-being. While I am a YUGE fan of Marvel’s The Avengers and the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, given a choice between oil, gasoline, natural gas & petrochemicals vs. Marvel movies, I’d give up the movies in a heartbeat. It’s difficult to watch movies while freezing in the dark… Although, most movie theaters are dark and cold… hmmm.
The other article was actually from the Grauniad…
The Grauniad, January 2020
Vegan food, recycled tuxedos – and billions of tonnes of CO2: can Hollywood ever go green?
Phil Hoad Thu 9 Jan 2020
Two schools of thought regarding Hollywood environmentalism were on display at last weekend’s Golden Globes ceremony. In the blue corner were those determined not to stand idly by in the face of the mounting climate crisis, such as Cate Blanchett and Russell Crowe drawing attention to the Australian bushfires. Or Joaquin Phoenix, “not always a virtuous man”, who urged his fellow stars to look at themselves, too, and ditch the private jets.
In the red corner was the lone, but unfailingly hectoring voice of host Ricky Gervais, railing against Hollywood hypocrisy. Should any of the winners find their minds drifting to politics while on the podium, they should “accept your little award, thank your agent and your God, and [frack] off”.
It could be that the now near-regulation Gervais Golden Globes roast, playing to the court, is in fact an added layer of hypocrisy in the great Hollywood pageant. But it did at least draw attention again to the gap between good intentions and daily practice in the entertainment industry. Film and TV production has a hefty ecological footprint: a landmark 2006 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) study estimated that the industry produced 15m tonnes of CO2 a year. That might seem piddling next to the several billion tonnes emitted by the US economy that year, but in its principal sites of operation, such as Los Angeles, Hollywood was a big polluter – more so than the aerospace, clothing, hotel and semiconductor industries.
[…]
Who knows what something like Avengers: Infinity War racks up in production and beyond? If everyone’s favourite mauve Malthusian, Thanos, had really wanted to do his part for the environment, then finger-snapping half the people on the film’s jet-setting international press tour would have been a good start.
[…]
Unfortunately, it remains virtually impossible to meaningfully audit Hollywood’s eco-credentials because of a lack of overarching information. Only two of the big six traditional studios made their emissions totals freely available online in 2018: Disney (1.93m tonnes) and Sony-Columbia (1.34m). Along with those two, the others make varying corporation-wide pledges, but they remain as airily aspirational as a J Lo romcom: Universal, for example, touts its fuel-efficient transportation fleet as leading its zero-emissions drive, but will not put a date on zero-hour. Before its buyout by Disney, 21st Century Fox announced it was carbon-neutral in 2011, but the term then disappeared from later reports on the subject.
The UCLA study, 14 years old and predating the recent sustainability boom, is still the only major overview available.
[…]
In the meantime, the disconnect between publicly declared environmentalism and daily practice in Hollywood continues. Not only is blockbuster film-making a resource-intensive activity, but it is part of a bigger superstructure of capitalist enterprise that is inherently ecologically costly.
[…]
“The thing you have to remember is that entertainment is market-driven. Frankly, [audiences] don’t want to hear about climate change,” the director James Cameron – who is planning to make his Avatar sequels solar-powered and vegan-catered – recently told Variety. He remains doubtful about the impact of ecologically themed films: “I think you can insinuate these ideas into your storytelling. I’ve certainly done that with Avatar, but, frankly, Avatar came out 10 years ago. And in that time our population has grown by almost a billion people, and the effects of that alone on our environment and climate change are devastating. Does [storytelling] do that much good?”
Perhaps the problem is the kind of storytelling. Maybe ecologically progressive thinking is too challenging to the capitalist paradigm of which Hollywood remains a central part.
Comrade Hoad was doing OK right up until he declared that the only solution is the get capitalism out of the movie industry. Clearly, instead of making movies the public will pay hard-earned money to see, Hollywood should make instruction videos to teach us how to fix the weather… Instruction videos we would be forced to watch… Probably in reeducation camps.
So, I downloaded the “landmark” 2006 “study” and found a few interesting things.
To put this in perspective, consider the following. As we discuss later, in the environmental best practice section on The Day After Tomorrow, the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of that film were estimated (by Future Forests) to be 10,000 tons CO2-equivalent.26 Using data from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Vogel (2001) shows that the MPAA member companies released 218 films in 199927, at an average cost of $51.5 million.28 The budget for The Day After Tomorrow was estimated at $125 million. Scaling greenhouse gas emissions proportionately to the films’ budgets would mean that the average release in 1999 caused 10,000 x 51.5/125 = 4120 tons of GHG emissions; multiplying this by the 218 releases in 1999 would give an estimated total of 898,160 tons of GHG emissions directly associated with production of feature films. This estimate is clearly extremely rough and possibly an underestimate; for instance, it is possible that the methodology used by Future Forests only counts GHG emissions that are directly caused by a project, not the indirect emissions associated with office space for ancillary services and other indirect emissions.
Note from the graph that the total GHG emissions of the motion picture (and television) industry in the Los Angeles metropolitan area are approximately 8 million tons of CO2 equivalent. The figures for California and the U.S. are 8.4 million tons and 15 million tons respectively.
The difference between the estimate of 898,160 tons of GHG emissions associated with feature films in 1999 and that of almost 8 million tons of GHG emissions associated with the motion picture industry’s activity in the Los Angeles metropolitan area suggests several causes. First, television production is most likely a significant factor that is not included in the estimate of GHG emissions associated with feature films. Second, GHG emissions that are caused by the industry but not associated with specific films or television shows are likely to be a significant factor. This would include GHG emissions associated with studio offices, buildings and other offices operated by other service providers (lawyers, advertising agencies, catering firms, etc.), possibly employee commuting, etc.
The movie ultimately grossed over $550 million worldwide, but almost half of its domestic gross occurred that first long weekend, when it took in $85.8 million.
Projection and sound system
The energy consumption of a theater’s sound system largely depends on its age. In the last 15 years or so, manufacturers have cut the amount of energy their systems consume in half, mostly by converting electricity to noise more efficiently. The best models now consume about 1.7 kwh during the course of a 105-minute movie. Unfortunately, few theaters have adopted the new technology. More probably, your local theater is using the previous-generation system, which would use about 2.8 kwh. The combined projector and system therefore account for 12.4 kwh, and 16 pounds of CO2.
The example above was for Green Lantern… (I have heard it was awful… So awful, that in the post-credits scene of Deadpool 2, Ryan Reynolds goes back in time to hilariously prevent himself from making it). Applying these numbers to The Day After Tomorrow, each screening put 18.9 lbs of evil CO2 into the air.
Moviegoers
In 2004, the average movie ticket price was $6.21. Using that average price, about 13.8 million tickets were sold over the first four days. That’s about 1,000 tickets per theater per day. If we assume the average cineplex offered 10 showings per day, about 100 tickets were sold for each screening. Most people drive to the movie theater… at least most people in the real world do. If we assume an average of four movie-goers per vehicle, driving a 10-mile round trip to the theater and back, the first four days of The Day After Tomorrow triggered almost 3.5 million 10-mile round trips, or 34.5 million vehicle-miles.
Assuming my ballpark math is right, the theater carbon footprint of The Day After Tomorrow was 1.5 times as large as the production’s carbon footprint. Referring back to this quote:
Scaling greenhouse gas emissions proportionately to the films’ budgets would mean that the average release in 1999 caused 10,000 x 51.5/125 = 4120 tons of GHG emissions; multiplying this by the 218 releases in 1999 would give an estimated total of 898,160 tons of GHG emissions directly associated with production of feature films.
Factoring in theaters and moviegoers, 898,160 tons of CO2 emissions from movie production would equate to 2.2 million tons of CO2 emissions. Is that a lot? If the average car is driven 12,000 miles per year, it equates to 472,561 car-years. And that’s not even factoring in the carbon footprints of popcorn, hot dogs, Cheese Whiz nachos and 128 ounce carbonated soft drinks.
Disclaimer: This post was intended to be humorous. I threw it together very quickly and it is loaded with assumptions. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there were at least a few math errors. My spreadsheet is here: https://ift.tt/2v8Kvj6
Iowa Climate Science Education 