Electric cars "may accelerate global warming"

6 January, 2011 by

Because I REALLY want to drive something that looks like THAT...

Oops – the law of unintended consequences at work – again. What they mean, of course, is that electric cars may cause more emissions of harmless carbon dioxide, which may (or may not) have a significant and/or dangerous effect on the climate. Either way, it’s hilarious, because governments are pushing electric cars as yet another panacea for saving the planet, but just like wind farms, it turns out to be an illusion:

Electric cars are not a silver bullet solution for global warming, but could they actually be part of the problem?  In some developing countries, the answer is likely “yes,” according to the results of a modeling exercise conducted by Oxford University’s Reed Doucette and Malcolm McCullocha.

The results, which appeared in a paper published in Energy Policy last Fall, found that for countries with dirty power supplies – like India and China – widespread adoption of electric vehicles could lead to more – not less – CO2 emissions compared to widespread adoption of gasoline based vehicles, unless dramatically less CO2 intensive.

“Given the state of their power generation mixes in 2010, the case for widespread adoption of [electric vehicles] in both China and India solely on the basis of potential CO2 emissions reductions is not too compelling, especially when the generally higher capital cost of [electric vehicles] relative to [gasoline]-based vehicles is considered,” Doucette and Malcolm McCulloch concluded. (source)

It’s isn’t compelling anywhere else, either…

(h/t Climate Change Dispatch)

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UK Climate Madness

5 January, 2011 by

Green in oh so many ways

A couple of stories from my home country to raise a smile, and perchance, a chuckle into the bargain:

  • Eco-totalitarian George Monbiot wants to force people with big houses to take in lodgers, to save the planet, I guess. Would it apply to his own massive pile? Ed West in the UK Telegraph rips Moonbat a new one. Ed calls it fascism, but I think it’s closer to Marxism. What do you think?
  • The Met Office is in damage control mode, as it tries to spin its way out of failing to forecast the UK’s coldest winter in 300 years. Apparently, they did tell the government, but didn’t make a public announcement as the nasty general public were mean and horrid to them the last time they screwed up with the “barbecue summer” prediction. Sound credible? No, doesn’t to me either.
  • Louise Gray, eco-loony environment reporter for the Telegraph discovers that wind turbines are useless when the wind doesn’t blow. Maybe the government will also realise this in time, before the UK’s lights go out for good.
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"Suspicion" of link to global warming is enough

5 January, 2011 by

All that's required

The SBS headline this morning screamed “‘Drastic shifts’ in Atlantic sea currents”, a quote lifted directly from a press release from EAWAG Aquatic Research in Switzerland. So why is SBS news interested in an arcane paper about ocean currents? Because the press release contains the magic words “global warming”, which sets off all the alarm bells at SBS (and every other news network on the planet – there are over 600 hits on Google for “drastic shift in ocean current” in the last week). Here’s part of the press release from EAWAG:

Examination of deep sea corals reveals that there have been drastic changes to oceanic currents in the western North Atlantic since the 1970s. The influence of the cold water Labrador Current, which is in periodic interchange with the warm Gulf Stream, has been decreasing continually since the 1970s. Occurring at the same time as Global Warming this phenomenon is unique in the past 2000 years. These results are reported by researchers from the University of Basel and Eawag in the current edition of the scientific journal «PNAS».

One of the oldest known weather systems in the world is the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the periodic variation of atmospheric pressure difference between the Azores and Iceland. It dictates not only whether the winters in Europe will be cold and dry or wet and warm, but also influences the oceanic currents in the North Atlantic. On the continental shelf off Nova Scotia, the NAO seems to control the interaction between different water masses. During positive phases, the oceanography of the north-west American continental shelf is dictated by a relatively warm water mass at 10 degrees Celsius which is salty and nutrient-rich, originating from the Gulf Stream. If the NAO is in a negative phase, the Labrador Current is dominant, a relatively cold water mass at 6 degrees Celsius, which is relatively nutrient-poor scarce and originates from sub-polar regions.

Using new geochemical methods, an international team of researchers including the biogeochemists Prof. Moritz Lehmann (University of Basel) and Dr. Carsten Schubert (Eawag – Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology) were able to prove that a drastic change to a «warm water mode» occurred in the western North Atlantic in the early 1970s. This change, the timing of which coincides with and may be directly related to Global Warming, is unique in the last 2000 years.

Now I am no expert in ocean currents, and for all I know, their research may have been carefully undertaken and of a high standard. But look at the flimsy and tenuous links to “global warming” thrown in:

  • “Occurring at the same time as Global Warming this phenomenon is unique in the past 2000 years” – in other words, the researchers have made a temporal association with GW, but haven’t any evidence to show causation
  • “the timing of which coincides with and may be directly related to Global Warming” – again, a coincidence, and surely might it also not be directly related to GW? Apparently that option wasn’t considered.

And they can’t seem to get the story straight. On the one hand, the Labrador current has been decreasing continually since the 1970s, but later, they claim there has been a drastic change in the warm water mode in the early 1970s. And the last paragraph sweeps away any remnants of scientific impartiality:

The researchers suspect there is a direct connection between the changes in the oceanic currents in the North Atlantic and Global Warming primarily caused by human activities.

Let me get this straigh:

  • “suspect” – so a hunch is enough now, is it? Apparently so when we’re talking about global warming…
  • “direct connection” – where’s the evidence?
  • “primarily caused by human activities” – this is a peach, and completely exposes the agenda, since even if the changes in the ocean currents were linked to changes in climate, why single out changes allegedly caused by human activities? Why wouldn’t the ocean currents respond to natural climate changes? The currents can’t exactly tell what is causing those changes, can they?

This is another perfect example of decent science being compromised by researchers desperate to play the global warming joker – for publicity I expect. And it worked. But if all these changes happened in the 1970s, surely it would have been caused by global cooling… wasn’t that the scare du jour back then?

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US: GHG regulation by the back door

4 January, 2011 by

Sign at EPA offices

Somebody once said climate change was too important to be left to democratic processes [Anybody remember who? It was probably said by hundreds of different people, all of them wishing to rule the world through climate change regulation – Ed] and that’s exactly what has now happened in the US. Despite there being no congressional approval for legislation regulating greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last year, in a moment of politically-motivated insanity, classified the harmless trace gas carbon dioxide a “dangerous pollutant“. Now the EPA has begun to regulate emissions:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is beginning to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from energy plants and factories despite vows from Republicans in Congress to stop or slow the regulators.

President Barack Obama, who has pledged the United States will cut the emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, wants Congress to pass limits on the gases blamed for warming the planet. There’s virtually no chance that will happen before Obama’s first term ends in 2012, so he has pushed the EPA to move.

The EPA paved the way for the rules in late 2009 when it declared greenhouse gas emissions a threat to human health.

But Republicans, who are taking control of the House of Representatives and who gained seats in the Senate, want to stop or delay the EPA from acting. They say the regulations will hurt job recovery in states heavily dependent on coal, oil and natural gas. (source)

And it’s blatantly undemocratic. But with luck, a Republican House will squeeze the EPA’s funding until they come to their senses… maybe.

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Climate sense from Bob Carter

4 January, 2011 by

Climate sense

Professor Carter is a breath of fresh air in the stale fog of climate alarmism. Writing in Quadrant, he skewers Greg Combet’s crusade (for that is what it is) for a price on carbon, when the rest of the world is putting on the brakes:

Following the failure of the UN’s Cancun talkfest, Climate Minister Greg Combet, displaying what Paul Keating would doubtless term remarkable intransigence, commented that it was still “very important from the government’s point of view that a market mechanism is adopted” to put a price on carbon dioxide.

Scrabbling to regain similar lost ground, EU Commissioner for Climate Action (a real, and not satirical, title) Connie Hedegaard has now started to spin up the outcome of the Cancun conference as being a great success (“Cancun deal puts climate action back on track”, The Australian, Dec. 27).

According to Ms. Hedegaard, the major Cancun achievements were an agreement to limit future global temperature increase to 2 deg. C (a policy ambition that represents an astonishing mixture of scientific ignorance and political hubris), and the agreement of a package of climate-related financial aid to third world countries that is forecast as attaining $100 billion annually by 2020; to believe that this money will be well spent, or even provided at all, represents the triumph of UN hope over likely reality.

Ms. Hedegaard was the former Minister for the Environment who approved the conditions under which Danish financial traders were able to rip-off the European carbon dioxide trading market of an amount estimated by the auditor general to be 38 billion kroner. In 2007, she allowed a Danish carbon dioxide registry to be set up with lax rules, amongst other things removing the requirement for trader identification. One result of this was that more than 1100 of 1256 traders registered in Denmark (almost 90%) were set up with fraudulent intent, and have subsequently been delisted as their crimes became apparent. [ACM posted on Hedegaard’s Australian article, and the Danish ETS scam here – Ed]

Ms. Hedegaard, therefore, is scarcely the type of public official whose advice Australia should be seeking, and that she and Mr. Combet are hand-in-glove in their attitudes regarding the still entirely hypothetical “dangerous global warming” is a matter for concern.

Mr Combet’s continued, and unrealistic, support for the introduction of a carbon dioxide tax or trading system was announced on Dec. 21st, together with the results of the third meeting of the Prime Minister’s Multi-Party Committee on Climate Change (MCCC).

Read it all.

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Natural disasters 2010: Munich Re blames climate change

4 January, 2011 by

Moonbats

It’s that time of year again, and as the end of year bell rings, Pavlov’s dog begins to slaver, and the ecotards at Munich Re start yelping at the moon. Munich Re are long-term climate alarmists (see here) blaming everything and anything on climate change – remember they are an insurance company, so therefore spreading fear and alarm in the community is good for business. And the Sydney Morning Herald falls for it every year:

The Haiti earthquake and floods in Pakistan and China helped make 2010 an exceptional year for natural disasters, killing 295,000 and costing $130 billion, the world’s top reinsurer said Monday.

“The high number of weather-related natural catastrophes and record temperatures both globally and in different regions of the world provide further indications of advancing climate change,” said Munich Re in a report.

And which natural disaster contributed most of those deaths?

The earthquake in Haiti in January was by far the worst disaster in terms of human cost, killing 222,570 people, Munich Re said. (source)

So unless Munich Re somehow blames earthquakes on climate change, you can forget over 75% of the total straight away. Whilst there were significant deaths from a heatwave and forest fires in Russia, there is no link to “climate change” – it’s just weather – but there is a clear link to drainage of peat bogs in the 1960s which made them susceptible to serious fire, and to the abolition of the national fire service in 2007 which crippled Russia’s ability to deal with the outbreaks. But as always, never let the facts get in the way of a good story (or a good marketing tactic).

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More supercomputers!

3 January, 2011 by

Steam computing at the Met Office?

All that’s standing between the UK Met Office and better forecasts is bigger and more expensive supercomputers. So says chief scientist Julia Slingo, in an interview in Nature:

What’s the biggest obstacle to creating better, hazard-relevant weather forecasts?

Access to supercomputers. The science is well ahead of our ability to implement it. It’s quite clear that if we could run our models at a higher resolution we could do a much better job — tomorrow — in terms of our seasonal and decadal predictions. It’s so frustrating. We keep saying we need four times the computing power. We’re talking just 10 or 20 million a year — dollars or pounds — which is tiny compared to the damage done by disasters. Yet it’s a difficult argument to win. You just think: why is this so hard? (source)

So here’s a report from the BBC in May 2009 which the Met Office would probably like to stay posted down the memory hole:

One of the most powerful computers to predict the weather in the UK is being tested in Devon.

The giant IBM machine fills two special halls, said to be about the size of two football pitches, at the Met Office headquarters in Exeter.

By 2011, the computer should have a peak performance of about one PetaFlop – equivalent to more than 100,000 PCs.

It is 30 times more powerful than what is currently in place and will give more accurate and detailed forecasts.

The Met Office “supercomputer” will offer 15 million megabytes of memory and requires 1.2 megawatts of energy to run.

The system, which is expected to be fully up and running by August, will also be used for research on climate change and its impacts on society and the economy.

Met Office chief executive John Hirst said the new computer was an important step.

“In a world where the effect of extreme weather events is becoming more severe and the potential impact of global warming is becoming ever more apparent, the Met Office plays an increasingly vital role in researching and forecasting these events,” he said. (source)

And getting them spectacularly wrong. It doesn’t matter how many Petaflops your supercomputer can crunch through, if the models suck (which they do, since they have been warm-mongerized to minimise natural climatic forces and maximise the effect of anthropogenic CO2) then the output will suck too. And here’s another from the UK Telegraph in 2007:

The Met Office wants to buy a super computer costing as much as £200m to make its forecasts more accurate.

It said a bigger and more sophisticated computer was a key element of being able to predict severe weather events – such as the Great Storm of 1987 – earlier and more accurately.

In a briefing to mark the 20th anniversary of the storm on October 15 the Met Office said the use of satellite imagery and modelling by computers meant the mistakes made then would not be repeated. [Ha, ha, my aching sides – Ed]

Much of the country was unaware of the huge storm that was to sweep across the southern half of the country on the night of October 15/16.

Although the Met Office had been warning of severe weather in the days before they “lost sight” of the severity and path of the storm in the final few hours. (source)

And another, from 2004:

The Met Office is celebrating 150 years by unveiling a new supercomputer which they predict will put them at the forefront of weather forecasting.

It will allow meteorologists to provide more accurate advice to the government and the public in the face of increasingly extreme weather patterns.

The Met Office made the announcement at the British Association’s Festival of Science at the University of Exeter.

The new system is one of the most sophisticated in Europe.

It allows forecasters to track weather patterns across the world – from a massive dust storm to a single cloud.

Such technology makes it easy to forget how far forecasting has come, the Met Office says. (source)

The list goes on. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. You’d get better forecasts on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum if the models actually represented the climate system realistically. Autonomous Mind asked what kind of supercomputers Piers Corbyn and Joe Bastardi use… and got a reply from both.

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What does "in history" mean?

2 January, 2011 by

The Age-of-Earth Ruler, where 1cm = 150 million years

This is a short post about time. Like distances in the universe, be they large (like the distance to the nearest star – 4 light years, or 40 trillion kilometers), or small (like the width of an average atom – a few hundred picometres, or less than a billionth of a metre), most people cannot comprehend the sheer enormousness of time. Climate alarmists and the media play on this understandable ignorance (especially at this time of year) by continually using terms like “in history” or “on record”, which are calculated to make people believe that a particular climate record has some great historical significance, and that therefore it carries weight in the argument about whether current climate conditions are unusual or “unprecedented”. Such weight is then used to justify drastic action to “tackle climate change” and tax our Western economies out of existence.

Climate records generally extend back 150 years or so, with the longest being the Central England Temperature record, which dates back to the mid-1600s. So I thought it would be interesting to put this in some kind of geological context. The earth is considered to have been formed about 4.5 billion years ago, so let’s make that period of time equal to a standard 30cm ruler – let’s call it the Age-of-Earth Ruler. How much is 150 years on that scale?

  • 1cm = 150 million years
  • 1mm = 15 million years
  • 1 micron (0.001mm) = 15,000 years
  • 10 nanometres (0.00001mm) = 150 years

So on that scale, 150 years equates to 10 nanometres, or 10 billionths of a metre. So “in history” or “on record” actually refers to a distance of about 50 atoms across at the very end of the ruler, yet we are constantly reminded by climate scientists, governments and media that this year or that year is the “warmest year in history” or “the warmest year on record”. A little perspective on these superficial statements is therefore essential when we are dealing with politicians who, like the public, have no understanding of scale – climate scientists however, should know better, but it is often only geologists who have that necessary comprehension of universal timescales.

Don Easterbrook, writing on Watts Up With That, shows a graph of a Greenland ice core derived temperatures for the last 10,000 years, which shows that the majority of that period was warmer than today (2010 ranks about 9000th):

Greenland ice core temperatures

But even this period is less than a thousandth of a millimetre on our Age-of-Earth ruler, and still cannot be regarded as significant.

Moral of the Story: be sceptical when anyone uses the terms “in history” or “on record”. Ask yourself, what does it really mean? Often the answer will be a big, fat NOTHING.

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Chairman of UK Met Office awarded CBE

1 January, 2011 by

Once proud organisation

For “public service” – Robert Napier is the head of the UK’s Met Office, you know, the one that couldn’t predict the outcome of a one-horse race, the “barbecue summer” Met Office, the “warmer winters” Met Office that somehow missed the coldest UK winter in 300 years (possibly longer). It is an organisation so blinded by global warming theology that it now spectacularly fails to do what it is supposed to do: forecast the weather. It’s the Meteorological Office after all.

As commenter Froggy UK reminded me a few days ago, Napier is an eco-fruitcake, totally conflicted out of his role at the Met Office, as is evident from his appointments:

  • Chairman of the Green Fiscal Trust
  • Chairman of the trustees of the World Centre of Monitoring of Conservation
  • a director of the Carbon Disclosure Project
  • a director of the Carbon Group
  • Chief executive of the World Wildlife Fund UK

He clearly has an environmentalist agenda to push, which, sadly he is doing very well, at the expense of timely and accurate weather forecasting. The Met Office’s flawed advice to the government, which as a result failed to prepare adequately for the extreme cold, has resulted in the unnecessary suffering of millions of people in the UK. And on top of all that, he is handed a gong in the New Year’s Honours List. Someone is playing a very sick joke on the British public.

(h/t Richard North)

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Happy New Year from ACM

31 December, 2010 by

New Year's Eve at Sydney Harbour, 2010

Just back from the 9pm fireworks at Sydney Harbour in time to wish all ACM readers a very happy and prosperous 2011.

To quote from Doug L Hoffman on The Resilient Earth:

Be safe, enjoy the interglacial (while it lasts) and, most importantly, stay sceptical.

Now for some champagne!

Simon

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