Lord help us all. Climate change might wreck Ayers Rock, I mean Uluru. It’s been baking in the desert for 550 million years, but another half a degree C and it’s in “peril“. (You had to use the hair-dryer…)
It’s such bad luck. “Climate change” could hit anywhere but it’s going to hit airports, vineyards, national parks, and Bondi Beach? It’s ruining holidays and your favourite symbols. It’s so unfair.
I thought this was surely an AI joke, or a grade school project, but Graham Readfearn put his name on it and the Guardian editors didn’t run away. The whole story is a keyword salad of hot button words and random numbers. 620,000 tourism jobs will be at risk they say mindlessly, as if 26 million Australians will stop having holidays and 10 million international guests will stay home, scared off by a one degree Fahrenheit rise.
Uluru, the Daintree and Bondi beach among iconic Australian locations that could be impacted if planet hits even 2C of warming by 2050
Who comes up with these headlines: “almost 68%”? What is that? They could have said, well ….”67″. They could have said 2 out of 3, but they had to drop some meaningless specificity in there to give these chicken entrails the appearance of “scienctifiiness”. As if the error bars on this analysis don’t reach plus or minus 100.
The basis is that some people who want to sell us insurance have helpfully done a report telling us which industries, towns, airports and businesses will be mercilessly crushed by the Climate Gorgon. Given the dismal state of the climate models, these are the modern equivalent of Shamanic Spells.
I’m sure the Zurich-Mandala team did good work on the economic costs and losses, but they start with IPCC climate models, so they might as well be analyzing the Land at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree.
Even the media know this is a nothing-burger
For some reason even Bloomberg thought there was something newsworthy about this new “index”:
The index calculated for the first time the risk from climate change to Australia’s A$170 billion ($114 billion) tourism sector. It studied 178 sites, ranging from Sydney Airport and Bondi Beach to the Melbourne Cricket Ground and Uluru, using Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change modeling and proprietary impact assessments.
Though hold off with the SWAT Team:
Assuming 2C of warming, by 2050 the proportion of Australia’s tourism sites in the three highest climate-risk categories will rise from 50% to 55%, the report said.
So the writers at Bloomberg know there’s nothing there. To put it bluntly: if half a degree more warming happens by 2050, (and if the models are right, which they rarely are) a big 5% of Australian tourist sites will shift from one arbitrary category to a slightly worse one? That’s as bad as it gets.
So much of what we call news is so absurd, yet repetitive, at best, it’s a kind of trance with a drip drip drip feed…
Finding against Danielle Dixson vindicates whistleblowers
who questioned high-profile work on ocean acidification
A major controversy in marine biology took a new twist last week when the University of Delaware (UD) found one of its star scientists guilty of research misconduct. The university has confirmed to Science that it has accepted an investigative panel’s conclusion that marine ecologist Danielle Dixson committed fabrication and falsification in work on fish behavior and coral reefs. The university is seeking the retraction of three of Dixson’s papers and “has notified the appropriate federal agencies,” a spokesperson says.
Dixson is known as a highly successful scientist and fundraiser. She obtained her Ph.D. at James Cook University (JCU), Townsville in Australia, in 2012; worked as a postdoc and assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology for 4 years; and in 2015 started her own group at UD’s marine biology lab in Lewes, a small town on the Atlantic Coast. She received a $1.05 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2016 and currently has a $750,000 career grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). She presented her research at a 2015 White House meeting and has often been featured in the media, including in a 2019 story in Science.
Together with one of her Ph.D. supervisors, JCU marine biologist Philip Munday, Dixson pioneered research into the effects on fish of rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, which cause the oceans to acidify. In a series of studies published since 2009 they showed that acidification can disorient fish, lead them to swim toward chemical cues emitted by their predators, and affect their hearing and vision. Dixson’s later work focused on coral reef ecology, the subject of her Science paper.
The colorful diversity of coral found at One Tree Island. The structure and diversity of coral we see today is already at risk of dissolution from ocean acidification. Kennedy Wolfe University of Sydney
Among the papers is a study about coral reef recovery that Dixson published in Science in 2014, and for which the journal issued an Editorial Expression of Concern in February. Science—whose News and Editorial teams operate independently of each other—retracted that paper today.
The investigative panel’s draft report, which Science’s News team has seen in heavily redacted form, paints a damning picture of Dixson’s scientific work, which included many studies that appeared to show Earth’s rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels can have dramatic effects on fish behavior and ecology. “The Committee was repeatedly struck by a serial pattern of sloppiness, poor recordkeeping, copying and pasting within spreadsheets, errors within many papers under investigation, and deviation from established animal ethics protocols,” wrote the panel, made up of three UD researchers.
Several former members of Dixson’s lab supported the whistleblowers’ request for an investigation. One of them, former postdoc Zara Cowan, was the first to identify the many duplications in the data file for the now-retracted Science paper. Another, former Ph.D. student Paul Leingang, first brought accusations against Dixson to university officials in January 2020. He left the lab soon after and joined the broader group of whistleblowers.
Leingang, who had been at Dixson’s lab since 2016, says he had become increasingly suspicious of her findings, in part because she usually collected her fluming data alone. In November 2019 he decided to secretly track some of Dixson’s activities. He supplied the investigation with detailed notes, chat conversations, and tweets by Dixson to show that she did not spend enough time on her fluming studies to collect the data she was jotting down in her lab notebooks.
The investigative panel found Leingang’s account convincing and singled him out for praise. “It is very difficult for a young scholar seeking a Ph.D. to challenge their advisor on ethical grounds,” the draft report says. “The Committee believes it took great bravery for him to come forward so explicitly. The same is true of the other members of the laboratory who backed the Complainant’s action.”
UD “did a decent investigation. I think it’s one of the first universities that we’ve seen actually do that,” says ecophysiologist Fredrik Jutfelt of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, one of the whistleblowers. “So that’s really encouraging.” But he and others in the group are disappointed that the committee appears to have looked at only seven of the 20 Dixson papers they had flagged as suspicious. They also had hoped UD would release the committee’s final report and detail any sanctions against Dixson. “That is a shame,” Jutfelt says.
Inventing Facts to Promote an Imaginary Crisis
Legacy and social media are awash with warnings about hydrocarbon emissions making the oceans acidic and threatening all ocean life from plankton up to whales. For example:
Ocean acidification: A wake-up call in our waters – NOAA
Canada’s oceans are becoming more acidic – Pêches et Océans Canada
The Ocean Is Getting More Acidic—What That Actually Means– National Geographic
What Is Ocean Acidification? – NASA Climate Kids
Ocean acidification: why the Earth’s oceans are turning to acid – OA-ICC
Etc, etc., etc.
With the climatism hype far ahead of any observations, marine biologists have stepped up to make an industry out of false evidence. They are forced to do so because reality does not conform to their beliefs. A good summary of acidification hoaxes comes from Jim Steele Un-refutable Evidence of Alarmists’ Ocean Acidification Misinformation in 3 Easy Lessons posted at WUWT. Points covered include:
“Transformation means change. Change means often consolidation. Companies need to shrink in order to be able to invest and develop new technologies,”
More job cuts on the way as German economy struggles to recover
By Liv Stroud
Published on 06/09/2024 – 14:10 GMT+2•Updated 14:55
…
“German companies have located already a lot of production to China, to India, elsewhere, and this will continue,” Fratzscher said.
,,,
Can the German government help?
Fratzscher said he doesn’t think the government should interfere to retain workers.
“Transformation means change. Change means often consolidation. Companies need to shrink in order to be able to invest and develop new technologies,” he said.
Fratzscher also noted the government trying to keep the old structures in big companies is not just limited to Germany, but also a European phenomenon.
“Often old parts, redundant parts of an economy need to disappear for new parts to be able to happen and to to reappear or to be developed,” he added, suggesting that these crises do not have short-term solutions.
Marcel Fratzscher, despite his no doubt impressive economic qualifications, has misunderstood the situation.
The Germany companies aren’t “disappearing” redundant parts of their businesses, they are relocating them to Asia. If those business activities were truly no longer useful, they would disappear worldwide.
The only thing preventing automobile manufacturers and other energy intensive businesses from prospering in Germany is German politicians. Germany companies have no problem recovering at least some measure of economic competitiveness after they relocate to nations with cheaper energy.
As for Fratzscher’s prediction that the Germany economy will recover in a few years, why should the German economy ever recover? A shop which charges too much, and which refuses to accept the direction of the free market, has no hope of ever achieving future prosperity.
There is no chance green energy will ever be competitive, there is no economically viable means to transform unreliable green energy into dispatchable energy, which is what a modern economy needs. The German economy will continue to decline until politicians who have set this disastrous economic direction are replaced by politicians who are less ignorant of real world economics.
Given the current UK government’s eagerness to show to the rest of the world what a progressive, eco-enlightened and righteous country would look like, it is only natural that some of us who lack the required credulity might want to question the utopian vision they have painted for us all. And who could blame us, considering how much these moral leaders are emphasising the transformative, difficult and radical nature of the endeavour? Unfortunately, for those of us who lack the conviction and zeal of a Miliband, there seems to be no real prospect of an effective political challenge emerging any day soon. Even so, it remains the case that whilst one group of individuals peddles the case for a Big Rock Candy Mountain, and others warn of trouble brewin’, none of us really has a crystal ball.
Except for one thing, because actually there is no need for any clairvoyance in this instance. That’s because the UK is not the first country to have made a bid to lead the peloton frantically racing its way towards glorious oblivion. That honour goes to Germany, who got there long before Miliband and company had the grand idea of pursuing their grand ideas. Yes, they’ve been there, done that and got the T-Shirt.
And the T-shirt says ‘Aargh!!!”
A sorry tale
Yes, I’m sorry to rain on Mr Miliband’s parade, but Germany’s bid for eco-glory was already up and running way back in 2010. Christened ‘Energiewende’, Germany’s bid for the moral vanguard promised a brave new world and yet delivered a dog’s dinner of failed policies and targets. It was the baby of the Green Party, who hitched up with the SDP to concoct a scheme which entailed an early phase out of nuclear power, leading the way for a complete transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. The target was, and still is, ‘climate neutrality’ by 2045. And with climate neutrality would come lower domestic bills, increased security of supply, a revitalised economy, a green jobs bonanza and the unending admiration and gratitude of the rest of the world. And it might still do so were it not for the failure to understand the importance of nuclear supply, the physics of intermittency, the economics of subsidised technologies, the realities of grid expansion and the German weather.
Frankly, the track record of Energiewende just doesn’t make for good optics. Let’s start with that push for the speedy removal of nuclear energy from the equation. The fact that this was pursued ahead of the establishment of a suitable renewables alternative, betrays the real objective of the Greens. Unlike the Swedes, who were genuinely focused upon reducing greenhouse gases and saw the promotion of nuclear power as a key element of their strategy, the German Green Party were primarily concerned with the eradication of nuclear power – whatever the cost. Wind and solar power were important to the Greens, but only for that reason. Sure, a transition from reliance upon fossil fuels was on the table, but with far less urgency. The upshot was to initially create an increased reliance upon fossil fuels to bridge the gap between nuclear’s departure and renewable’s arrival. As Chancellor Merkel conceded at the 49th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos on 23 January 2019:
We will have phased out nuclear energy by 2022. We have a very difficult problem, namely that almost the only sources of energy that will be able to provide baseload power are coal and lignite. Naturally, we cannot do without baseload energy. Natural gas will therefore play a greater role for another few decades. I believe we would be well advised to admit that if we phase out coal and nuclear energy then we have to be honest and tell people that we’ll need more natural gas.
Worse still, by the time the realisation dawned that wind and solar are too unreliable to service Germany’s industrial demand for dispatchable energy, it was too late. Far from improving upon energy security, brownouts, which had been previously unknown, became increasingly commonplace as renewables penetration progressed. And far from reducing bills, prices soared in order to cover the grid upgrade costs and the grotesquely subsidised new technologies; neither of which delivered the promised green jobs bonanza as China stepped in to dominate the supply chain. And it’s not as if any of this had any impact on Europe’s emissions record, since a combination of domestic renewables targets and cap-and-trade policies simply encouraged the export of emission allowances to countries such as Spain and Italy. Germany was trashing its economy for no environmental benefit whatsoever.
You’d think that Energiewende’s parlous history and unremitting failure to meet its emissions targets would mean that the German government’s appetite for ‘climate neutrality’ by 2045 would have waned by now, but that is not the case. And the clue for why this should be so lies in a statement that can be found on the Agora Energiewende think tank’s website, which explains exactly what Energiewende is:
It is a large-scale economic and ecological project motivated by scientific insights and ethical considerations with far-reaching economic and societal impacts.
Given the Green Party’s genesis as an unholy alliance between a far-right with its nostalgic feelings towards the Nazi Party’s take on environmentalism, and a far-left licking its Marxist wounds following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, one need not guess at the extent to which the ‘ethical considerations’ and desired ‘economic and societal impacts’ would entail the deindustrialisation of a capitalist West. From a technical perspective, Energiewende has been, and will continue to be, an unmitigated disaster. But from an ideological perspective, it is still right on schedule, if not a bit ahead, in bringing about a return to a pre-industrial scenario that is ideal only in the minds of those with the ‘right’ ideological leanings.
When is a failure a success?
The definition of madness is the expectation that simply repeating a failed strategy would somehow yield different results. On the presumption that the UK government is seeking a technically successful Net Zero transition, the fact that they are just blindly following the Germanic formula (complete with the same ground-working of false promises) looks like sheer lunacy. But that is a massive presumption I just made there. Just as Germany is pursuing an ideological dream dressed up as scientifically justifiable risk management, so is the current UK government. And just as Germany will stubbornly continue whilst the ideology burns strong, so will we. It is for that reason that I fear that rational arguments based upon engineering and physical realities are likely falling on the deaf ears of a self-deceptive political class, particularly now that the current class is majoring in left-wing ideology whilst flunking technology. If the lessons of Energiewende are not enough to dissuade the powers that be, then you just know that there is a deeper motivation at play than simply tackling climate change. Maybe it is the underlying values rather than the science and economics that drive the thinking. And maybe we need to reconsider what our opponents might define as failure before we try to persuade them that they are doomed to fail.
The Undisputed Science
Iowa Climate Science Education 