Sunday, March 05, 2017

JoNova : Science,carbon, climate and tax

JoNova: Science, carbon, climate and tax

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Trump takes away EPA “right” to control every puddle in USA: WOTUS executive order
Smile. One more noxious, power-grabbing bit of legislation: fixed. Farmers and land-owners lost control of the puddles and ditches on their land under the guise of environmental protection. Remarks by President Trump at Signing of Waters of the United States (WOTUS) Executive Order The EPA’s so-called “Waters of the United States” rule is one of the worst examples of federal regulation, and it ha
Windy Clean Green Pollution
Looks like the halo is fading. Today-Tonight is a current affairs show in Australia. Today a few more Australians discovered that free energy is not just expensive but creates its own kind of pollution. This hardly a surprise for anyone who can spell cost-benefit, but it’s healthy to see the prime-time media in Australia doing something other than singing the Clean-Green advertising jingle. h/t S
VW eco-scam, official corruption, is killing diesel
News is out that diesel cars which don’t comply with pollution standards will be banned from some roads in Germany on “high pollution” days. Depending on how often those bad news for diesel industry and owners. How useless is a car that you can’t drive when you need it? Stuttgart is being called the “Beijing” of Germany for air pollution. This may apply to as many as 90% of diesels on German road

Yesterday

Weekend Unthreaded
Sorry I am a bit distracted with other things this week. Light postings. Rating: 8.5/10 (22 votes cast) Rating: 8.5/ 10 (22 votes cast)

Mar 03

DiCaprio, Bono, and Al Gore: flying eyebrow artists for the planet
Advertising your virtues sometimes conflicts with advertising your social status. Paul Joseph Watson never minces his words. … The surprising thing is that these guys get away with it. Not laughed out of town for their grandstanding piety at awards nights. h/t Scott of the Pacific Rating: 9.4/10 (82 votes cast) Rating: 9.4/ 10 (82 votes cast)

Mar 02

Climate Change will suck the flavour from your daily bread
Climate Change threatens to make bread less tasty Over at The Conversation the panic is rising. Life is not going to be the same. Get ready for the bland future — if we stop all plant breeding tomorrow, and don’t change our fertilizers at all, it possible, by 2050, in dry years, wheat may have a 6% decrease in protein. It’s that serious. Everyone likes the high protein kind of wheat, and it’s wor

Feb 27

Does Solar PV in half of Europe make more energy than it consumes?
You might think we’d know whether a solar PV system produced energy before we installed 1,000 Megawatts of it. But it’s hard to even know after the fact. Dr John Constable points us at an interesting new paper that discusses the odd creature called EROEI. This stands for energy return on energy invested. If you get back less than “one”, it sucks. That sounds like a fine idea except everyone seems

Feb 25

Weekend Unthreaded
… Rating: 8.2/10 (28 votes cast) Rating: 8.2/ 10 (28 votes cast)

Feb 24

How progressive: ship dead trees 5,000km and burn them (use £450m for kindling)
It would make any hunter gatherer proud. [The Times] Britain is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds subsidizing power stations to burn American wood pellets that do more harm to the climate than the coal they replaced, a study has found. Chopping down trees and transporting wood across the Atlantic Ocean to feed power stations produces more greenhouse gases than much cheaper coal, according to

Feb 23

Solar Homes use more grid electricity than non-solar homes
There are probably more solar panels in QLD than anywhere else in the world. Back in February last year, the boss of the Queensland state power company announced the awkward result that households with solar panels were using more electricity than those without. Apparently people without solar were turning off the air conditioner because electricity cost too much, but the solar users didn’t have

Feb 22

Y’think Donald Trump will bring in a carbon tax? (And pigs will knit socks.)
Bob Inglis is a former Republican congressman who lost out to a Tea Partier (you’ll see why). He’s visiting Australia to talk us into doing climate manipulation. I can’t see his reasoning catching on: Former Republican congressman Bob Inglis says he knows it sounds improbable to say the US president would impose a carbon price, but he thinks reality will force Mr Trump’s hand. “Donald Trump said

Feb 21

Baby corals learn from mummy corals warming lessons
Corals survived through four hundred million years of climate change. Despite that, corals still surprise survivors of four years of academia with their ability to keep dealing with climate change. It’s been known for years that after corals bleach in warmer water, they acclimatize. Here one shiny young researcher shows her carbonnointed worldview. She asks a really interesting question: In one s

Feb 20

If Greens cared about CO2 they would dump renewable targets
Those who say they want a “free market” in carbon still don’t understand what a free market is. RET’s or Renewable Energy Targets are screwed (in the head): If Tony Abbotts Direct Action plan was useless, RETS are five times more useless. In Australia the Renewable Energy Target (RET) in theory, helps wind and solar, so we lower CO2 emissions and cool the world, slow storms, things like that. But

Feb 19

Weekend Unthreaded
… Rating: 7.9/10 (27 votes cast) Rating: 7.9/ 10 (27 votes cast)

Feb 18

Big-gov-brain wants “half a trillion” to add ice to the Arctic
Sometimes an idea comes along that adds another chapter to the Book of Stupid. You might think windmills on land are an indulgent, pointless fantasy, but take that idea and make it worse: (CNN) A team of scientists has a surprisingly simple solution to saving the Arctic: We need to make more ice. A team at Arizona State University has proposed building 10 million wind-powered pumps to draw up wat

Feb 17

WA State Election Tidbit: Bill Crabtree. Wheatbelt. Launch in Northam Sunday
Click to read. I’m happy to help a few dedicated skeptics and sane candidates with the gumption to try to improve the system from within. So this is a quick note for residents of the Central Wheatbelt WA. Check out Bill Crabtree, the no-till farming expert running for the Liberal Party at the State election in three weeks, he’s as honest and hardworking as they get. I know Bill personally, and he
Australia “invented airconditioning” but can’t keep them running
James Harrison (click to enlarge) Peter Hartcher points out that the country that invented refrigeration and thus airconditioning can no longer guarantee to keep them working. In 1854 [James Harrison of Geelong] invented a commercial ice-making machine. He expanded it into a vapour compression refrigeration system, the basis for modern refrigeration. “That’s right – an Aussie invented the fridge

Feb 16

SA Blackout: a grid crippled by complexity
South Australia suffered it’s fifth blackout in five months last week. The AEMO report on that incident came out today. There are lots of faults, errors and small problems, and one overriding theme — it’s too complex: AEMO (Grid market managers) thought they’d have more wind power. It fell to only 2% of “total output.” There was a computer glitch which “load shed” more people than necessary. Oops

Feb 15

Kelloggs sells Social Justice Cereal, calls half the population names and posts $53m loss
The new marketing move by Kelloggs to insult half its customers doesn’t seem to be working out too well. Last year Kelloggs jumped into politics by loudly cancelling advertising on Breitbart saying the new media outlet didn’t fit their values. It was an attempt to punish the big winner in the new media for reporting politically incorrect news. Breitbart responded with the DumpKelloggs petition, a
Help failing sad climate scientists deal with their dark moods
What happens when your world view is wrong and you can’t deal with reality? Climate change: Scientists sad, frustrated as extreme weather becomes the new norm “There is definitely what you would call ‘climate fatigue’ on the part of scientists,” said Dr Andrew Glikson, from the Australian National University’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology. “There were hundreds of scientists there, and m

Feb 14

Prediction in 1941 — the gradual end of democracy in Europe
Thierry Baudet, leader of the Dutch political party “Forum for Democracy” writes about the inexorable attrition of democracy, as predicted 75 years ago. James Burnham, 1941 foresaw so much in “The Managerial Revolution. It’s a book that George Orwell used for inspiration. According to Burnham, the civil democracies of the second half of the 20th century would – more or less gradually – be overgrow

Feb 13

Pause-deniers finally get busted by mainstream media
It’s been a rotten week for Pause denial David Rose and the Daily Mail let rip, telling the world that retired NOAA insider, John Bates, was blowing the whistle on how global warming was being exaggerated by scientists to score political points. The hallowed pause-buster paper (Karl et al) broke practically every rule: it was based on misleading “unverified” data processed with a highly experiment

Feb 12

California: Oroville Dam emergency, evacuations underway
UPDATE #2: While the imminent threat is lower, the evacuations are still underway and now include 188,000 people. See what alarmed dam management: (Shots from the 7SanDiego News footage.) Oroville Dam erosion on the emergency spillway. The road washed away. Oroville Dam Spillway erosion (the arrow points at the people inspecting one part of the erosion which was headed for the spillway wall. A cl
Asian sea levels changed rapidly 6,000 years ago — natural sea level rise “unprecedented”
If you thought seas were constant 6,000 years ago… Microatolls are apparently very accurate proxy for sea levels, giving a higher resolution estimate of sea levels. But the extra data suggests more natural oscillations in seas than the experts used to think. Six thousand years ago, near Indonesia, seas apparently rose and fell twice by as much as 60 centimeters in a 250 year period. A similar patt

Feb 11

Weekend Unthreaded
…. Rating: 8.4/10 (24 votes cast) Rating: 8.4/ 10 (24 votes cast)

Feb 10

It’s that bad — talk of “declaring emergencies” and nationalizing South Australian electricity
Smell the desperation Here in Oz, political lives are in turmoil. Suddenly “load shedding” is the topic de jour, and there are hit lists of suburbs in the firing line. It’s a long list. Welcome to your green future. The language is ramping up. The SA state government is talking of a “dramatic intervention in the electricity market”. The plans are “advanced” but they apparently don’t know what that

Feb 09

Climate Change means Perth smashes the coldest ever record for February
Plan for Ghost Town has been delayed Yesterday Perth had it’s coldest ever February day (since 1910) with temperatures only making it up to 17.4C. This is not just 0.1 or 0.2C below the previous coldest record in February, but a whole 1.7C colder. Perth also got its second wettest February Day (of any season) with a 106mm of rain. This is peak summer. So much for Tim Flannery’s Ghost Town prophesy
South Australian electricity is coming your way
Yesterday 90,000 customers lost power in SA (making it Blackout Round 5 since the big one last September). This time it was due to load shedding. SA power woes to spread nation-wide, starting with Victoria, Australian Energy Council warns The Federal Government needs to take urgent action to improve its energy policies before the rest of Australia falls victim to the type of large-scale blackouts

Feb 08

Rolling blackouts ordered in SA in 40C heat
South Australia, with 40% renewables, is lucky this has been a mild summer.* Welcome to your load-shedding future: Rolling blackouts ordered in Adelaide as city swelters Widespread power blackouts were imposed across Adelaide and parts of South Australia with heatwave conditions forcing authorities to impose load shedding. About 40,000 properties were without electricity supplies for about 30 min
Dear Climate Alarmists, we will never forget…
Got ten years of frustration after being mocked, scorned, and treated like dirt for talking about data? Adam Pigott unleashes some mockery back at the parody blog XYZ: Dear Climate Alarmists, We will never forget nor forgive. “…here’s the thing. Once this all unravels, and it will unravel very quickly as soon as the money stops flowing, those of us on the side that is ludicrously described as bei

Feb 06

Australian chief scientist says Trump is like Stalin, totally missing left’s war on science
Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, is blind to the rampant censorship that’s been going on for 30 years: Australia’s chief scientist has slammed Donald Trump’s attempt to censor environmental data, saying the US president’s behaviour was comparable to the manipulation of science by the Soviet Union. Speaking at a scientific roundtable in Canberra on Monday, Alan Finkel warned science was “
Cory Bernardi to quit Liberal Party — What do the Libs stand for?
With no mainstream alternative party standing up for freedom, free speech, small government, and free markets, Cory is about to make a speech to let Parliament know why he is quitting the Liberal Party and will now be an independent senator. He is one of the many anti-establishment representatives out there. Australia has no Trump, but the vacuum left by the Liberal Party’s slide to the far left

Feb 05

NOAA whistleblower tells how they used bad data to rub out “pause” for Paris
The abominable Karl et al paper came out in the nick of time to pretend that the “pause” didn’t happen. We knew the paper was junk thanks to hard sleuthing, especially from Ross McKitrick, now Dr John Bates, a pal of Judith Curry is speaking up from the inside to confirm that the paper used bad and unapproved datasets which were so flawed they have already been revised. The data wasn’t archived e

Feb 04

Weekend Unthreaded
… Rating: 8.2/10 (27 votes cast) Rating: 8.2/ 10 (27 votes cast)

Feb 03

Japan building 45 HELE coal plants, Australia 1 (maybe)
Japan will use Australian coal to build 45 modern coal fired plants: Japan is the largest overseas market for Australian coal producers, taking more than a third of all exports. Why coal? It’s cheaper than gas: Tom O’Sullivan, a Tokyo based energy consultant with Mathyos Global Advisory, said in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Japan started importing more liquefied natural gas

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