Australian auto manufacturers should be "retooled to produce wind turbines"

11 February, 2012 by

We don't need cars. Build more of these!

The Socialist Alliance is an extreme anti-capitalist rag-tag bunch that strives for a “socialist Australia”. Fortunately for the rest of us, they will never see it. But they do provide plenty of Looney Left amusement. Their latest press release will cheer up the struggling motor vehicle manufacturers in Australia no end:

Workers in the car industry have the skills and expertise in logistics, production, engineering, designing for production and quality control that could be applied to help us break from a fossil fuel dependent economy. This is urgently needed to address the climate change crisis.

The industry can be retooled to produce wind turbines and other equipment for renewable energy production, as well as trams, trains and other vehicles and infrastructure for a sustainable transport system.

You have to laugh!

Read it here (Webcite archive – not giving them any of my traffic…)

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Ice core data shows Greenland warmer in the past

11 February, 2012 by

Greenland temperatures (click to enlarge)

It appears that in Greenland at least, the current warming cannot be said to be “unprecedented”, since similar magnitudes and rates of warming are present in several previous eras. Man certainly didn’t cause those warming periods, so natural climate change obviously had a significant effect on Greenland temperatures over the past 4000 years.

In a paper entitled “High variability of Greenland surface temperature over the past 4000 years estimated from trapped air in an ice core” the authors state:

… we reconstruct Greenland surface snow temperature variability over the past 4000 years at the GISP2 site (near the Summit of the Greenland ice sheet; hereafter referred to as Greenland temperature) with a new method that utilises argon and nitrogen isotopic ratios from occluded air bubbles. The estimated average Greenland snow temperature over the past 4000 years was −30.7°C with a standard deviation of 1.0°C and exhibited a long-term decrease of roughly 1.5°C, which is consistent with earlier studies. The current decadal average surface temperature (2001–2010) at the GISP2 site is −29.9°C. The record indicates that warmer temperatures were the norm in the earlier part of the past 4000 years, including century-long intervals nearly 1°C warmer than the present decade (2001–2010). Therefore, we conclude that the current decadal mean temperature in Greenland has not exceeded the envelope of natural variability over the past 4000 years, a period that seems to include part of the Holocene Thermal Maximum. 

However, in order to get it past the pal-review system, the following caveat was inserted to appease the headbangers:

Notwithstanding this conclusion, climate models project that if anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions continue, the Greenland temperature would exceed the natural variability of the past 4000 years sometime before the year 2100.

Unfortunately, it does little to dampen the effect of the preceding paragraph. Namely even with the additional CO2 presently in the atmosphere and its accepted small warming effect, Greenland was still warmer in the past.

Abstract is here.

(h/t Climate Depot and C3 Headlines)

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Man-made climate change "began 3,500 years ago"

11 February, 2012 by

The Congo

From The Science is Settled Department comes news that man may have been affecting the climate for far longer than the last 40 years or so. From Scientific American, so you’ll have to wade through the alarmist phraseology:

Humans may have been causing climate change for much longer than we’ve been burning fossil fuels. In fact, the agrarian revolution may have started human-induced climate changes long before the industrial revolution began to sully the skies. How? Through the clearing of forests, which still remains the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.

Sediment cores from the mouth of the Congo River—the deepest river in the world—suggest that humans may have played a significant role in changing the landscapes of Central Africa. That river curves through the world’s second-biggest lingering tropical forest, but it and its tributaries also flow through the savannas so prized by modern-day safaris.

Scientists had previously thought that a climate shift from warm and humid to seasonally cooler and drier had helped create those savannas, which covered even more of Central Africa in the past. But the 40,000-year-old record preserved in the sediment cores tells a different story. Roughly 3,500 years ago the Congo River suddenly began dumping a lot more muck without any appreciable increase in rainfall to explain such weathering. One plausible explanation is the simultaneous arrival of the so-called Bantu people, who brought farming into the region.

They cultivated oil palm, pearl millet and yams, crops that need plenty of sunlight, which, of course, necessitated clearing forests. They also cut down trees for charcoal and as fuel for the fires of iron-smelting, which enabled them to make tools and weapons. Coupled with climate change, the result was savannas—and mutually reinforcing climate change.

At the same time, the presence of crops such as millet and yams suggests that climate had already changed given that they require alternating seasons of wet and dry. So it remains unclear whether changing climate conditions created the savannas that made Bantu-style farming possible or if Bantu-style farming created the conditions for savannas and changed the climate. What is clear is that “the environmental impact of human population in the central African rainforest was already significant about 2,500 years ago,” as the researchers write in the paper presenting their findings published online in Science on February 9. (source)

Ockham’s Razor would suggest the much simpler explanation: the climate changes by itself, without the need for any man-made intervention. But that would be slightly too inconvenient to contemplate.

Filed Under: Climate

Rio Earth Summit "doomed to fail"

11 February, 2012 by

Non-event

New Scientist analyses 20 years of climate inaction since the original Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, blaming “government systems” for the failure. Just the incentive we need to “suspend the democratic process” in order to save the planet, perhaps, as extremist Clive Hamilton has suggested.

Climate change has already been airbrushed out of the Rio 2012 summit, and adding this to the embarrassing failures in Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban, it’s pretty clear that the appetite for tackling climate change has all but disappeared. Not surprising really when the economies of Europe and the US are on shaky ground.

And people are slowly waking up to the political machinations and interference which have corrupted the supposedly impartial and unbiased investigation and reporting of climate science. Combine all these factors and further failure is a foregone conclusion:

We can forget about fixing the planet’s ecosystems and climate until we have fixed government systems, a panel of leading international environmental scientists declared in London on Friday. The solution, they said, may not lie with governments at all.

“We are disillusioned. The current political system is broken,” said Bob Watson, the UK government’s chief environmental science advisor, who chaired the meeting.

The panel, all winners of the prestigious Blue Planet prize, often seen as the Nobel prize for environmental science, were meeting to prepare a statement for the Earth Summit 2012, to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June – 20 years after the original Earth Summit in that city.

The world has wasted the intervening years, the group said. Ecosystems are disappearing ever faster, the world is still warming, and two 1992 treaties, on climate change and species loss, have failed to achieve their aims. Governments, the group said, were largely to blame.

“Last time in Rio we had an unreasonable faith in governments. Since then we’ve lost our innocence in believing government was wise and benevolent and far-sighted. That’s been blown completely out of the water,” said Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, a non-profit organisation based in London.

“Essentially nothing has changed in 20 years. We are not remotely on a course to be sustainable,” Watson said.

“What’s most discouraging is a loss of feeling that government would help us,” said Harold Mooney, a veteran biologist from Stanford University.

No one held out much hope that the forthcoming summit would usher in a new era. Politicians do not seem interested. The 1992 summit lasted two weeks, attracted most of the world’s leaders and garnered huge headlines. But this year’s event will last just three days, and so far China’s president Hu Jintao is the only head of state scheduled to attend. 

Never mind. I’m sure the delegates will have a wonderful time at someone else’s expense. And hints at “changing the system” sneak in:

“We do believe that the political system can be reformed, and that there will be technical solutions. But time is not on our side,” Watson said. (source)

Wonder what that means…

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US approves first new nuclear power plant in 34 years

10 February, 2012 by

Constructing the containment vessel

Why? Because nuclear power is safe, clean, reliable and efficient – and produces zero CO2 emissions. Contrast with “renewables” which are horrifically expensive, unreliable and inefficient, and require CO2-belching fossil fuel backup. And wind turbines shred rare birds.

And with the hysteria surrounding Fukushima, which resulted in the most astonishing fear-through-ignorance anti-nuclear knee-jerk reaction from many countries, it demonstrates that at least the US is taking its energy security seriously, and is not prepared to rely on hopeless renewables to keep the lights on.

The United States’ first new nuclear power plant in a generation has won approval after federal regulators voted on Thursday to grant a licence for two new reactors at a site in eastern Georgia.

Atlanta’s Southern Co hopes to begin operating the $14 billion reactors at its Vogtle site, south of Augusta, as soon as 2016. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved the company’s plans on a 4-1 vote.

The NRC last approved construction of a nuclear plant in 1978, a year before a partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. That accident raised fears of a radiation release and brought new reactor orders to a near halt.

The planned reactors, along with two others in South Carolina expected to win approval in coming months, are the remnants of a once-anticipated building boom that the power industry dubbed the “nuclear renaissance”. The head of an industry lobbying group said the Vogtle project could be the start of a smaller renaissance that expands nuclear power in the United States.

“This is a historic day,” said Marvin Fertel, president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute. He said the NRC vote “sounds a clarion call to the world that the United States recognises the importance of expanding nuclear energy as a key component of a low-carbon energy future that is central to job creation, diversity of electricity supply and energy security”.

President Barack Obama and other proponents say greater use of nuclear power could cut the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels and create energy without producing emissions blamed for global warming. The Obama administration has offered the Vogtle project $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees as part of its pledge to expand nuclear power. (source)

If the climate catastrophe is half as serious as claimed, nuclear is the ONLY option for energy security.

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Quotes of the Day: Michael Mann

10 February, 2012 by

Quote of the Day

Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann has a new book out, the title of which, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines“, hints at the valiant warrior for truth, battling against the evil enemy (sceptics). As we know, this is standard fare for alarmists, donning the mantle of victimhood at the drop of an FOI request.

But this quote takes the biscuit:

“Perhaps “climategate” was the moment when the climate change denial movement conceded the legitimate debate, choosing instead to double down on smear and disinformation, a tacit acceptance that an honest, science-based case for denying the reality of human-caused climate change and the threat it presents could no longer be made.”

Wow, this guy’s been hanging around with trees for too long. And this as well:

“In any case, there is no evidence that Jones actually deleted any e-mails. Nor is there any evidence of any impropriety in his e-mails.”

And they accuse the sceptics of being delusional… Thanks to Tom Nelson for the quotes.

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Himalayan glaciers "melting ten times more slowly than feared"

9 February, 2012 by

Embarrassing

UDPATE: Cartoon by Josh, right.

Remember the IPCC melting glacier scare? Gone by 2035? Glaciergate? It made great publicity for the alarmists. Sadly it was total rubbish. And now further studies reveal that the melting is fully ten times slower than previously thought.

But it’s still bad news, naturally. They’re still melting. Just an order of magnitude more slowly than we had previously been led to believe, as the ABC reports:

Himalayan glaciers and ice caps that supply water to more than a billion people in Asia are losing mass up to 10 times less quickly than once feared, according to a new study.

Based on an improved analysis of satellite data from 2003 to 2010, the findings offer a reprieve for a region already feeling the impacts of global warming.

But they do not mean that the threat of disruptive change has disappeared, the researchers warn. [Of course, any good news has to be tempered with a reminder that the planet is going to hell in a handcart – Ed]

“The good news is that the glaciers are not losing mass as fast as we thought,” says Professor Tad Pfeffer of theUniversity of Colorado‘s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and a co-author of the study.

“The bad news is that they are still losing a lot of water. There is still definitely a serious problem for the Himalayas.”

Much of that loss, it turns out, is taking place in the huge plains immediately south of the towering mountain range, where pumping from wells is draining ancient aquifers far faster than precipitation can replenish them.

Earlier estimates, also based on satellite data, mistakenly attributed much of the draining of these water tables to glacier melt-off, says Pfeffer.

So the attribution of the cause was wrong too.

Other calculations now thought to be off the mark were based on scaled-up extrapolations from lower-elevation glaciers that were more accessible to observation, but also more subject to warming trends.

“Many of the high glaciers would still be too cold to lose mass even in the presence of atmospheric warming,” says co-author John Wahr, a physicist at the University of Colorado. (source)

And of course, none of this says anything about the cause of the warming. Amazing that the ABC reported this, but at least the spin cycle made sure that any good news was diluted by more hectoring warnings of disaster.

Even more dire warnings at the press release here.

More at the UK Guardian here, where it is claimed that “the worlds greatest snow-capped peaks have lost no ice in the last ten years”.

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Challenge to UK's Royal Society

9 February, 2012 by

Sold out?

The Royal Society is (was?) one of the most respected scientific institutions. However, in recent years, and like many other similar organisations around the world, it has sold out to climate alarmism and has abandoned its guiding principles of championing impartial scientific enquiry. Even its motto, Nullius in verba, meaning “take no one’s word for it”, looks forlorn and lost surrounded as it is by a fog of political posturing and environmental advocacy.

Andrew Montford, the author behind the Bishop Hill blog and The Hockey Stick Illusion has prepared a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation:

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is calling on the Royal Society to restore a culture of open-mindedness and balanced assessment of climate science and climate policy.

In a new GWPF report, written by science author Andrew Montford, the Royal Society is urged to ensure that genuine controversies are reflected in its public debates and reports and that the full range of reputable scientific views are being considered.

“As the Society’s independence has disappeared, so has its former adherence to hard-nosed empirical science and a sober detachment from the political process. Gone are the doubts and uncertainties that afflict any real scientist, to be replaced with the dull certainties of the politician and the public relations man,” said Andrew Montford, author of the new report.

In his report, Andrew Montford describes the development of the Royal Society’s role in the climate debates since the 1980s. He shows the Society’s gradual closing of critical scrutiny and scientific impartiality and the emergence of an almost dogmatic confidence that climate science is all but settled.

In recent years, the Society has issued a series of highly political statements demanding drastic action on energy and climate policies from policy makers and governments. On the issue of climate change, it has adopted an increasingly political rather than scientific tone. Instead of being an open forum for informed scientific debate, the Society is at risk of turning into a quasi-political campaign group.

The GWPF report criticises the Society for being too narrow minded in its assessment of climate change and for failing to take into account views of eminent scientists and policy experts that do not accord with its own position.

In his foreword to the report, Professor Richard Lindzen (MIT), one of the world’s most eminent atmospheric scientists, warns that “the legitimate role of science as a powerful mode of inquiry has been replaced by the pretence of science to a position of political authority.”

The report can be downloaded here (PDF).

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Media ownership: lefties good, conservatives bad

9 February, 2012 by

Global wail

The hypocrisy of the media knows no bounds. Whilst the liberal elite have been hyperventilating over Gina Rinehart’s purchase of a share in Fairfax, with Left-wing media outlets such as the Silly Moaning Herald and Crikey publishing acres of copy criticising and smearing as only the Left can, there is a deafening silence when Graeme Wood, founder of travel website wotif.com and bankroller of the Greens, rounds up a bunch of ex-Fairfax and ex-ABC journos to launch, er, a media organisation.

The excellent blog Bunyipitude has exposed this hypocrisy beautifully:

The incantation worked, Monica Attard’s portal finally opened and allowed The Professor to slip in and find …. why leftists love Malcolm Turnbull, the scourge of air conditioning, why Occupisants need to make more noise, and how Bob’s little boy, Eric Ellis, is eating Europe. (Ellis deserves a nice jaunt, by the way. He must be exhausted after churning out the sophistries needed to elevate Wayne Swan’s reputation with a 32-quid tin plate and the title of the World’s Hottest Treasurer.)

This is revolutionary stuff. Brave, courageous, daring to go where only the Phage [The Age], Silly [SMH], The Conversation, SBS, The Drum, Q&A, Lateline, New Matilda, Lavatorius Pronto [Larvatus Prodeo], Crikey and poor Margo have gone before. (source)

Wonderful. And there’s plenty more:

THE Globular Mail isn’t impressing the pros. No comments, no links to source material, and its crab-like sideways crawl is rated a huge annoyance. Here is one observation from the Technology Spectator’s critique:

If Global Mail readers wish to provide feedback or comment or add to a story they must email the publisher. “Please note that while we appreciate all feedback, we do not guarantee all letters will appear on the website,” proclaims the site – as if it’s readers had dipped nib into ink and crafted their comment on parchment. The Global Mail’s stated desire to step back from the “breathless 24/7 news cycle” is admirable and should help ensure a high standard of quality. But applying old media models that drive one-way conversation to a new media platform won’t help the Global Mail build a loyal following.

Also interesting is author Chris Palmer’s news that patron Graeme Wood owns most of Hunted Media, the outfit responsible for the Global Mail’s, er, innovative horizontal design. So, not only does Wood list the “impartial” Global Mail as his email address on forms declaring seven-figure donations to the Greens, he also is supporting the site out of one pocket and slipping the development cash into another.

If Gina Rinehart begins to make her presence felt at Fairfax, we can expect to hear lots of luvvie suggestions that the company be wrested from her control and run as an employee co-operative. Few luvvies have to balance books, pay taxes or meet a weekly payroll, but they always imagine their unique brand of competence would see things done better. This may be because luvvies enjoy nothing so much as a good meeting, but their compulsion to rabbit on in the company of the like-minded is a topic for another day.

They should keep an eye on the developing, gold-plated debacle that is the Global Crab and think again — if they have ever thought before, that is. (source)

I highly recommend a bookmark.

UPDATE: And of course the Leftard lemmings at GetUp! are in on the action as well… see here.

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Varhrenholt: "I feel duped on climate change"

9 February, 2012 by

Fritz Vahrenholt

More spectacular publicity from Germany for a high profile convert to scepticism. We posted on Fritz Vahrenholt, and his book, “The Cold Sun”, at the end of last month. Now Spiegel Online carries an interview with the renewable energy executive and former global warming disciple:

SPIEGEL: Do you seriously believe that all 2,000 scientists involved in the IPCC are deluded or staying true to the official line?

Vahrenholt: It’s not like that. However, I am critical of the role played by the handful of lead authors who take on the final editing of the report. They claim that they are using 18,000 publications evaluated by their peers. But 5,000 of them are so-called gray literature, which are not peer-reviewed sources. These mistakes come out in the end, just like the absurd claim that there will no longer be any glaciers in the Himalayas in 30 years. Such exaggerations don’t surprise me. Of the 34 supposedly independent members who write the synthesis report for politicians, almost a third are associated with environmental organizations like Greenpeace or the WWF. Strange, isn’t it?

SPIEGEL: Why are you taking on the role of the climate rebel with such passion? Where does this rage come from?

Vahrenholt: For years, I disseminated the hypotheses of the IPCC, and I feel duped. Renewable energy is near and dear to me, and I’ve been fighting for its expansion for more than 30 years. My concern is that if citizens discover that the people who warn of a climate disaster are only telling half the truth, they will no longer be prepared to pay higher electricity costs for wind and solar (energy). Then the conversion of our energy supply will lack the necessary acceptance.

SPIEGEL: If we take your book to its logical conclusion, it will be unnecessary to reduce CO2 emissions at all.

Vahrenholt: No. Even a temperature increase of only one degree would be a noticeable change. But I am indeed saying that climate change is manageable because the cooling effects of the sun and the ocean currents give us enough time to prepare. In any case, it will be easy for us in Germany to adjust.

SPIEGEL: So, is it a mistake to concentrate exclusively on the reduction of carbon dioxide?

Vahrenholt: Yes. In addition to carbon dioxide, we also have black soot, for example. It creates 55 percent of the warming effect of CO2, but it could be filtered out with little effort within a few years, especially in emerging and developing countries. And, in doing so, we would achieve huge benefits for human health.

Read it all here.

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