Funny what you see driving home from the shops…. hundreds of thousands of tons of water-vapor had condensed in giant suspended formations. No one seemed to notice.
Click to enlarge. Facing west East (dammit East) over Perth, last night.
“It’s probably the effectiveness of farting in a typhoon”
Should have been referring to the carbon tax. Trying to cut carbon emissions by 5% of 2.5% of the world’s total makes an impact on global temperatures of 0.00 degrees, even under the most alarming scenarios. And there is only one country left in the world that still genuinely endorses such a stupid policy. Unfortunately that in the country I live in – the UK.
Well he was referring to Direct Action, so therefore endorsing the idea that the current government should just save the money.
But the underlying mesaage was really about the effectiveness of a man made gas on a natural disaster.
I marvel at the knowledge that you give freely to Jo’s blog.
Always a great read and I thoroughly enjoy reading your posts.
Thank you.
Some time ago you were talking about the Power Station in Gove
(Nhulunbuy) in the NT running on Diesel.
I worked in that power station for many years and we ran it on Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO),
the stuff left over after many of the other useful things
were refined out. They are still running on HFO.
Gas is supposed to be being piped to the Peninsula, but,
going on past performance, this may be some time off.
To the best of my knowledge Tony has never written about the station at Gove, but I have, several times. Most times I have written about the Steam Power Station (SPS) which runs on HFO, which I have also written about. However, I have also written a couple of times about the backup Diesel Power Station (DPS), which forms part of the overall complex.
Talk of converting SPS to gas predates the G3 expansion and has been on and off ever since.
RIO have resurrected it as they want to flog the place off (now rebranded as Pacific Aluminium), and nobody will touch it owing to compliance issues with using HFO as a fuel in Australia.
RIO are basically trying to get the NT government to pay for the conversion.
Tony was talking about several stations, and the Gove one was part of his chat.
You are correct about the DPS. It has 5 X 2.75MW Allens V16 Diesels which I
had run many times, when that was the only power available, due to problems in the SPS.
Gas was talked about coming to Gove, 99.9% sure, in 1984. One of the boilers even
had it’s burner positioning changed. This has now been changed back.
You sound like you may have been there, also.
.
I was there in 1973 – 74 when it was all just coming online. I worked for Mickey Mouse Airlines.
Back there from 2005 to 2009 writing commissioning and operations procedures for equipment installed as part of the G3 expansion. The last two years were spent in the power station for the commissioning of the two new boilers (updated versions of the original boilers 1, 2 and 3), plus two new turbine + gen sets. Boiler 4 is gone and Boiler 5 was relocated to make room for the new Boilers 6 and 7, as they were designated.
Just after commissioning, over Christmas, the operators managed to boil Boiler 6 dry. That always tickled me. These days you can’t boil a $20.00 kettle dry, but they managed to do it with a $36 million boiler. Repairs cost $4 million.
.
Perhaps the best story to come out of it all was the cost comparison between Boilers 6 and 7. Boiler 6 was built in situ onsite by typical overpaid, underworked, unproductive Australian tradesman, working fly-in, fly out, who demanded a certain level of accommodation and other benefits.
Total cost to commissioning to nameplate – $36 million.
Boiler 7, on the other hand, was built on a beach in Indonesia by unskilled locals who were paid about $2.00 a day, and went back to own their own village at night. All this was to “save money” of course.
Total cost to commissioning to nameplate – $107 million.
Happens EVERY time but the bean counters who now run Australia’s large corporations just can’t be told. So we continue to offshore major construction work to the detriment of local industry, employment and training, then we wonder why we have a shortage of skilled labour, then we bring tradespeople in on 457 visas to fix all the problems with the unserviceable crap we had built overseas in corrupt, third world countries, “to save money”.
.
Somebody recently commented elsewhere that the country was now being “run by adults”.
Hi MV,
Missed each other by a few years each time. we were there ’78 to 2000.
We were going to leave when it snowed on Mt Saunders!
Boiler 5 was located on the sea water channel just west of boiler 4.
6 and 7 I gather were south of 3, which has been de-commissioned.
Boiling a boiler dry should almost lose one their tickets.
Bean counters ALWAYS stuff things up.
You could almost bet on it.
Definitely agree with you about skills. We need to keep it in Australia.
MMA were still there when we arrived, just before Union Picnic weekend.
What an introduction to Gove!
Thoroughly enjoyed our time there.
Boilers 6 and 7 are directly south of Boiler 3 which is completely refurbished and fully operational.
Oh, and nobody got penalised for the melted boiler. It was close to Christmas and engineering advice was to leave commissioning until after the break. But the bean counters wanted it otherwise to impress the new RIO Board of Directors.
And so initial commissioning was carried out then everybody of note, including all the senior engineers, went off on Christmas hols, leaving the as yet unproven boiler in the hands of relatively inexperienced operators. A crucial interlock failed in the middle of the night, a choice of action had to be decided, and they made the wrong choice.
The repair bill was a tad over $4 million.
Fortunately Boiler 7 had just arrived from Indonesia by then, and fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, every gasket in it was made of asbestos, and every nut and bolt was cadmium plated, amongst a long list of faults, so Customs quarantined it, and it had to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up before it could even be moved from the dock area.
Hi MV,
Have got this through from someone still in Gove.
Mate, is he talking about Gove? Boiler 3 hasn’t had a fire in it since G3. The main steam line has been capped, there are no burners on site to fit it, the G9 sootblowers are now on boiler 1 and the whole area is taped off as the lagging is falling off.
I’m not sure when G3 started or finished. Did it finish?
Didn’t know that, and find it hard to believe. They spent millions refurbishing Boiler 3 independently of G3. When I left it was the most efficient of the five commissioned main boilers (boilers 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7). Boilers 6 and 7, the new ones, were still being fine-tuned. Boilers 1 and 2, on the other hand, were falling to bits. They had been scheduled for refurbishment, but G3 costs blew out so badly pretty much all such work was put on hold. I’d have no trouble accepting one of them had been mothballed.
Don’t know when planning for G3 started, but actual physical work commenced around 2002. It was originally estimated at $2.4 billion. By the time RIO bought the company it had blown out to $3 + billion and rising. The cost overruns were hidden at the time of sale. The rest of the expansion was the same. Nothing worked (all built on Indonesian and Thai beaches). That’s why RIO sold a $30 billion chunk of the company to CHINALCO. And they lied about the state of affairs, too.
G3 never actually finished as such. In January 2009 RIO pulled the plug. By then the cost overrun was up to $4.3 billion. Still nothing worked – output was actually down from pre expansion days, due to problems integrating old with new. Nearly 3,000 of us contractors were finished up at the end of our next rotation.
I did some work from home for the SPS in late 2009 – early 2010, when they were becoming Pacific Aluminium. Boiler 3 was still happily chugging along at that stage. That was my last involvement.
PS – Burners for boilers 6 and 7, plus refurbished 3 are close enough to be interchangeable, with a few hours input by a competent machinist with access to a lathe. In fact, the entire burner assembly for each of these boilers could be fabricated from scratch by any one of a number of contracting firms in Darwin, Cairns, and Townsville.
Huh, the sun sets in the west, and this is from Perth, looks a bit like a front heading in off the Indian ocean at dusk to me , that would be looking west, the sun would be just below the horizon with the tops of the cloud illuminated from behind, and the bottom possibly in the earths shadow.
Nice pic
I’ll have a bit of fun and try an analysis. Maybe Jo will tell us how bad I am at it.
Pic taken facing south west with the sun to the mid / upper right well out of the pic.
Photo taken maybe around 6,30 or 7 pm judging by the shadows cast around the LH side of the cloud and the amount of sunlight still shining on the cloud tops. And also the darkness under the lower cloud mass that is nearer and in front of the main cumulous cells .
Ocean is visible straight out in front.
The cumulous cloud formations have formed on the cool shallow wedge of sea air that is forcing it’s way under the warmer land breeze from earlier in the day that had swept out to sea from a ENE direction.
The low thin band of cloud in the foreground is probably the frontal edge of that sea breeze coming in.
The surface wind is from the west judging by the way the palm leaves are leaning which also indicates the arrival of the sea breeze .
The upper winds are from the NNE as can be seen by the way the upper levels of those cumulous clouds are being dragged towards the SSW
Cloud tops around 7000 feet.
Distance perhaps 15 kms out to sea.
The lean of the clouds from the NNE towards the SSW indicates [ without looking at the map ] that there is high pressure back inland behind the photographer and an upper level low pressure out to sea to the west ie Air around a low rotates clockwise so stand with your back to the wind and the low pressure area is on the right hand.
Looking at the lean on clouds due to the upper winds can also, allowing for drift and speeds of that upper air drift, tell you where and how strong the systems are above cloud base of which the circulation patterns are often a lot different to surface systems.
________________
OK have now looked at the 850 HpA charts [ 5000 feet ] and the upper low is today off the Pilbara coast and a big high is over central and eastern Australia
No idea about the curbing Dave as I am two and half thousand Kms from Perth in western Vic. I have been to Perth for a day or so a few years back but never got near the ocean as we were on a 5 day tour to talk to and see some WA farm research groups.
Any of my guesses at cloud formations and the information they hold which is a lot if you know what to look for and how to interpret that information for those who are interested in weather, comes from some 54 years of flying starting in Tiger Moths in 1959 and including over 50 years of flying gliders across a fair bit of SE Australia
Scrub all theories.
Jo says pic taken facing east.
I hereby slink off into the back of the cave from whence I will once again summon the courage to emerge once again to face the opprobrium of the world.
Tree Rings? Nuh!.
No glory and no nice big grants left there as Mannian and Briffa tree ring analysis has already used up all that available space on the right hand side of that graph to try and get that hockey stick to fit in.
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
Located in the Þingvallavatn Lake in the Þingvellir National Park in Iceland, Silfra is crevice between the North American and Eurasian plates.
Silfra, by virtue of its location in the Þingvallavatn Lake, contains clear, cold water that attracts scuba divers drawn to its high visibility and geological importance; divers are literally swimming between continents.
I was looking at the storms when facing east towards the Darling Range. Hence the sun shinning on the face of the clouds, from the sun setting in the west ((: Were we looking at the same storms?
Indeed, a nice photo. I should get my camera out more.
LANZA’S THEORY OF BIOCENTRISM AND THE AFTERLIFE
Biocentrism is classed as the Theory of Everything and comes from the Greek for ‘life centre’. It is the belief that life and biology are central to reality and that life creates the universe, not the other way round.
Lanza uses the example of the way we perceive the world around us.
A person sees a blue sky, and is told that the colour they are seeing is blue, but the cells in a person’s brain could be changed to make the sky look green or red.
Our consciousness makes sense of the world, and can be altered to change this interpretation.
By looking at the universe from a biocentric’s point of view, this also means space and time don’t behave in the hard and fast ways our consciousness tell us it does.
In summary, space and time are ‘simply tools of our mind.’
Once this theory about space and time being mental constructs is accepted, it means death and the idea of immortality exist in a world without spatial or linear boundaries.
Theoretical physicists believe that there is infinite number of universes with different variations of people, and situations taking place, simultaneously.
Lanza added that everything which can possibly happen is occurring at some point across these multiverses and this means death can’t exist in ‘any real sense’ either.
Lanza, instead, said that when we die our life becomes a ‘perennial flower that returns to bloom in the multiverse.’
“There are a lot of people on Earth who seem to believe we have two Earths,”
It’s a great line but what it really means is there’s the real world (just the one) and there are the many cloud cuckoo lands which occupy so much head space.
Hmmm. Would he have to come back to publish ?
Couldn’t he do the peer review in the multiverse?
Perhaps the peer review has only become corrupted in this universe ?
actually the Vikings of Greenland were not far out in this respect. Also, in respect of your post at 4.53, the little ice age nearly did for those of Iceland as well. I visited Pingvellir last year, it is an eerie and awesome place where those early Viking settlers held their parliament. They must have felt the unknown force beneath their feet that pushed a continent 4000 miles! It put the current apocalyptic obsessions into perspective.
Stanford researchers say new materials could help lower the cost of producing fuel with solar energy.
“Solar power, however, could compete with natural gas as a way to make hydrogen if the solar process were somewhere between 15 and 25 percent efficient, says the U.S. Department of Energy.”
“For some time now researchers have known that you could approach 15 to 25 percent efficiency if you combined two solar cell materials in such a system. One solar cell would power half of the water-splitting reaction—forming hydrogen. The other could form oxygen.”
“Using a thin-film silicon solar cell that converts the energy in light with 7 percent efficiency, Nocera says his group achieved 5 percent efficiency for the conversion of sunlight to hydrogen. Natural photosynthesis is less than 1 percent efficient at converting sunlight to energy.”
Now we no longer need to rely on plants for our energy. Especially coal plants.
Seriously, this is stale, stale news. Bockris was keen on the ‘hydrogen economy’ in the 1980’s and estimated 25% minimum efficiency was needed. The CSIRO were over 8% about 20 -25 years ago. As were others.
The drawback is that hydrogen isn’t the ideal fuel. It’s a gas so large volumes needed to power a car. In an internal combustion engine its knock rating is 66, so lower compression and lower efficiency. The usual response is that fuel cells have higher efficiency, which is true and would help offset the 10 tonne weight. Hmm..one way to stop hoons drag racing?
Distributing hydrogen as a household or industrial fuel raises some ‘interesting’ questions about safety, especially given its flammability range and its propensity to leak.
This sounds like another “we can save the planet; send more money” press release.
Climate Change Day Of Action. ABC guesstimates 60,000 people in all across the whole of Australia.
National director of GetUp Sam Mclean says the rallies prove Australians believe climate change is a serious issue.
“From remote country towns to the big cities, Australians have come to their own conclusions after our hottest year on record. And they want action,” he said.
Well, Sam, I’m wondering if the other 99.73% of Australia’s population think the same.
Nothing to do with anything but thought it was kinda cool (at least for us mechanically inclined). Turns out that Jo is smooth, powerful and doesn’t waste time going back and forth 🙂 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonova_engine
[Thank you for sharing this. I will hold it in moderation for Jo to see, and decide if she wants to publish it or not.] -Fly
[Thanks Greame No. ? It’s news to me. Seems very unthreaded. Happy to post. – Jo]
If the ABC Was Relevant (Pt 60).
(The African Beggar.)
[Scene: A domestic lounge in a suburb somewhere. There is a knock on the front door. BRYAN answers. It is JOHN.]
John: Good day to you sir. My name is Robert Mugabe and I am here to collect your climate debt.
Bryan: Robert Mugabe – the infamous Prime Minister of Zimbabwe?
John: No sir, I am very famous, and was recently re-elected as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe by 109% of the voting public.
Bryan: Congratulations – but what’s this climate debt?
John: It is money you owe the great people of Zimbabwe to compensate them for the damage you have done to their envirionment.
Bryan: What damage?
John: Well, sir, Zimbabwe (formerly the oppressive state of Rhodesia) was the food bowl of Africa until runaway greenhouse gas emissions from Australia threw our economy into bankruptcy and our people into starvation.
Bryan: Didn’t this all happen about the same time that you took over as Prime Minister?
John: Yes sir, it was all very unfortunate.
Bryan: Couldn’t the bankruptcy and the starvation be due to corruption and the collapse of law which accompanied the handover of power to you and your croneys?
John: No, sir, that is very wrong and the United Nations is very sure about that. Ask the IPCC. Five thousand dollars please…
Bryan: Then why didn’t other countries in Africa – ones where you weren’t Prime Minister – have the same problems?
John: I don’t think we should discuss it at this time sir. You are only saying this because I am a black man. Five thousand dollars please…
Bryan: And this money would all go to the good people of Zimbabwe?
John: Oh, yes, sir. All the good people will be rejoicing.
Bryan: You wouldn’t just trouser the dollars – you and your croneys?
John: Oh, no, no, no sir.
Bryan: Not like a conspicuous proportion of foreign aid from the UN and other organisations as soon as it arrives in Zimbabwe?
John: No, sir, not this time. You have my word for that.
Bryan: So, by giving you this money, I will not be supporting a corrupt and croneyistic government and helping them to perpetuate the poverty and misery of the Zimbabwean people?
John: Of course not sir – I promise.
Bryan: OK – Here you go. [Opens wallet]. A hundred trillion dollars – keep the change.
John: Thank you sir! [Looks at banknote.] I can’t accept this!
Bryan: Why not?
John: It’s worthless! It’s Zimbabwean paper money!
Paul Brown an editor for Climate News Network has now reported politicians are the cause for the additional 2 degrees C extra warming.
1. UN bodies & UNFCCC:
Prepare for a world temperature rise of 4°C because scientists no longer believe that politicians are capable of holding the temperature rise below the internationally agreed limit, 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
2. Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College in London:
But there is no evidence at the moment that we have that quality of politicians, so we all have to be prepared for the most likely scenario, which is a 4°C rise in temperature. If we do not prepare to adapt we simply won’t be able to.
Plus this:
Every country, he said, had to reduce their citizens’ emissions to 2 tons per person to avoid dangerous climate change. “That is a big ask, particularly for a country like China which is still growing fast.”
3. Dr. Liz Hanna, from the Australian National University’s National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health:
Parts of Australia were already reaching the threshold° where it was impossible for normal life to continue because of the heat.
And this:
“If employers ask people to continue to work in temperatures above 37°C, they will be killing them in increasing numbers,”
And another one:
Her researches were focusing on how to keep essential services like farming, police, ambulance, district nurses, construction and mining going in a warming world.
Meanwhile 200 million people worldwide risk exposure to toxic pollution.
Here’s the top 10 TOXIC places in the world. And not from CO2.
10 to 15 million affected by mercury poisoning each year.
If it’s CO2 that’s killing everyone from heat, cold, ice, drought, floods, dry, wet, etc – why aren’t the figures out there. Pollution is no longer worried about, because the GANG GREEN world of UNFCCC is after the money and in a big way and no longer concerned about the environment.
These criminals have to bought to justice and very soon.
“Every country, he said, had to reduce their citizens’ emissions to 2 tons per person to avoid dangerous climate change” Simples. Make more babies until there are enough people to make the limit.
Get busy, boys and girls. It’s your duty to the Planet.
So even Catastrophic Climate scientists, hold politician to a higher standard, than they hold themselves.?
What kind of “scientist” believes in the capability of politicians to control climate?
More each day as this activism is revealed and collapses, I am drawn toward retribution for the fools, stupid,or greedy who have enabled this destruction of public treasure.
The take away for me, greens hate humankind, the worlds poor are diseased rats in their minds.
Must exterminate.Give more to greenpeace,help eliminate the worlds poor?
quote”… so we all have to be prepared for the most likely scenario, which is a 4°C rise in temperature. If we do not prepare to adapt we simply won’t be able to.”
Is that like “prepare to fire”, that we see in the sci-fi movies.
I think it’s another version of, We’re climate scientists and you’re not. Give us all your money and volunteer your families unto the 7th generation for perpetual slavery”.
It’s incredible isn’t it, I think the shrill note is bordering on terrorism – after all trying to instill fear of death in a population is terrorism. Greenpeace needs to be designated a terrorist organisation.
1. Well the first 2 degrees the IPCC says will be a Nett benefit.
2. Since just breathing emits a tonne, with 2 tonnes you can exist, along with one cow for food.. No exercise also folks, heavy breathing not allowed … idiots
3. You mean the same Australia that is absorbing an extra quota of CO2 equal to over 60% of it’s emission due to increased bioproductivity alone. .. Mathematically challenged Hanna, recipient of gravy train funds wants us to think it’s a crisis (how surprising), even more suprisingly she thinks it’s somehow a challenge to keep farming going in a warmer, wetter, higher CO2 world, with cheap energy and mechanisation… say like air conditioned tractors. Does she think mine workers go out with picks and shovels istead of sitting in the cab of a nice airconditioned cab – almost fell off my chair laughing.
Earth to Hanna, please come out of the 19th century, there’s a miraculous invention called the fan, known since jesus was a boy of course, back then, fans we eunuch powered, and of course Mechanical refrigeration known since 1850. Not to mention that we have for centuries been able to work in the cool at night due to the magical light bulb, assuming of course you and your mates dont make the electricity too costly– LMAO, how dumb can it get?
Check out this article on DW, aka Deutsche Welle, which is Germany’s version of the ABC. Here’s how the article opens:
Climate change is warming ocean temperature and sea levels are rising. Tornadoes are increasingly intense and there are higher storm surges, which are almost impossible to prepare for.
Looks like a line out of ‘The Goode Family’ an animated tv series from Mike Judge.
-“Global warming increases corporate greed, taking its toll on rising food prices at the pump, feeding hate in third world countries, human rights violations, and so I ask you where are the bees? It’s up to you!”
“The simple truth is this: that we cannot leave a matter as important as climate change to the fickleness and whim of Australia’s politicians,”
So Timmy baby, our vote doesn’t count, you’re smarter and better placed to lead Australia in sending money to the UNFCCC so you can get a higher paid position than you had before.
Well Timmy, you’re out of luck, because the scam is over and Australians are fed up with your junk garbage pumped out every week. You are the laughing stock of all voters, including the Greens.
Given Timmy’s ridiculous statements, I would be surprised, if his money making wasn’t a violation of the criminal code as fraud. Would be an interesting way to test this in court. Sue him for misrepresentation, the court would then have to test the truth of the statements made in support of taking money. If upon success you can get a criminal indictment then they could all go to gaol for fraud. Lots of unfounded and fraudulent statemennts have been made by that lot. The latest lot about the bushfires and cyclones aren’t even backed up by the IPCC – gotta be an open and shut case
I was going to ask about that. Being that he was given a position to “provide an authoritative, independent source of information on climate change to the Australian community” And He Stated “The commission was not set up to comment on particular policies but to explain the facts.”
Which he has never stopped commenting on particular policies and his independent source of information was the same source the government had anyway.
Being that his previous statement of 2007 – Professor Flannery said a price of between $40 and $70 per tonne of carbon emitted was necessary to stem the tide of dangerous climate change.
“If it’s $70 a tonne we’ll probably (avoid) dramatic change,” he said.
Surely he had a preconceived political agenda to implement and falsely used that position to carry out his personal ambition. Is there anything in there that makes him a criminal, or just a morally bankrupt scumbag?
As a guvmint empolyee, he is somewhat protected from liability, there are only some instances you can sue the guvmint for their negligence (mostly in employment disputes). Th guvmint’s general liability is otherwise pretty limited, for example, if you hit a pothole, and careen off the road and paralyse yourself, you can’t sue the state for damages their unfit road caused or for negligence in not fixing it. You can’t sue your council when their clearing policy causes you house to burn down in a bushfire – you should be able, but in fact you can’t.
In the same way you should have redress over the ABC when it lies, but in fact you don’t.
What Timmy forgets is that he got sacked, and so now he DOES wear liability for the statements he uses to secure funding, and they had better be scupulously true or he can now go down for fraud.
So “independent source”, but still covered by government protection? What about using that influence to boost his Geothermal interest? isn’t that ICAC sort of stuff?
Are you thinking that raising money for the Climate Coalition exposes him to
“false and misleading advertising” or “obtaining money under false pretences” ?
In either case I think he (or his lawyer) would claim that it was a political organisation therefore the normal political standards practices should apply.
Tim’s new Climate Council has to be very careful with this.
Is it a political body, is it an educational organisation etc?
But currently they are trying to get it registered as a charity so donations are tax deductible as it states from their website:
7. Is my donation tax deductible?
No. The Climate Council has only just been set up and we are in the process of applying to get Deductible Gift Recipient status. Once we receive DGR status it will be made clear on our donations page.
The new charity descriptions that are available for the Climate Council are as follows:
(a) the purpose of advancing health;
(b) the purpose of advancing education;
(c) the purpose of advancing social or public welfare;
(d) the purpose of advancing religion;
(e) the purpose of advancing culture;
(f) the purpose of promoting reconciliation, mutual respect and tolerance between groups of individuals that are in Australia;
(g) the purpose of promoting or protecting human rights;
(h) the purpose of protecting the safety of the general public;
(i) the purpose of preventing or relieving the suffering of animals;
(j) the purpose of advancing the natural environment;
(k) any other purpose beneficial to the general public that may reasonably be regarded as analogous to, or within the spirit of, any of the purposes mentioned in paragraphs (a) to (j);
(l) the purpose of promoting or opposing a change to any matter established by law, policy or practice in the Commonwealth, a State, a Territory or another country (not sure if all these are in the 2013 bill)
So in the end their lawyers will have to be careful, as it could leave Tim Flannery and Will Stefen open to fraud and misleading statements that cause financial hardships. I think after his rant last Sunday, his lawyers will want to vet every speech he makes.
His only choice in the above choices is (d), in order to cover his lies.
Australian Charities and Not For Profits Commission. (Not registered there yet). ASIC – The company can hold property and can sue and be sued.
Generally, a not-for-profit is an organisation that does not operate for the profit, personal gain or other benefit of particular people.
…Hmmm that might be hard for him.
ABC have turned the story into a blockbuster with a cast of tens of thousands, so it’s worth giving some more excerpts from your link. btw i have no doubt whatsoever the numbers are inflated:
17 Nov: ABC: Climate change rallies held around Australia, with calls for Coalition to keep carbon tax
Tens of thousand of Australians have turned out for climate change rallies across the nation, calling on the Abbott Government to keep the carbon tax.
The National Day of Climate Action was organised by activist groups including GetUp!, the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and the Australian Conservation Foundation.
Organisers say about 60,000 participated at the rallies, which were held in capital cities and more than 130 towns and regional centres.
Emergency workers played a significant role in warning about the dangers of unchecked global warming, while Labor and Greens politicians, along with climate scientists, also participated.
The Climate Council’s Tim Flannery told 30,000 people in Melbourne that Australians must make their voices heard…
Greens deputy leader Adam Bandt evoked the memory of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, while firefighters spoke of their fears of increasingly hotter days.
“There is no sceptic at the end of a fire hose,” said Peter Marshall, secretary of the United Firefighters Union.
In Brisbane, where an estimated 4,000 people came together, firefighter Dean McNulty spoke of the huge concern climate change posed to his colleagues, who battle natural disasters from the front line.
Mr McNulty says scientists were clear that global warming would make extreme weather events more frequent and severe.
“To firefighters, it is not just numbers and statistics, it is very real,” he said…
The Greens have vowed to block the legislation, and leader Christine Milne said there would be more rallies if greater action was not taken.
“Tony Abbott wants to be defined by climate denialism, and the community wants to be defined by climate activism,” she told media in Brisbane.
“This is really a showdown.”…
???In Sydney, deputy federal opposition leader Tanya Plibersek said the Government could not go backwards on climate change as global action galvanised…
“Was a trading emissions scheme working? Yes. Electricity from old brown sources of energy down, renewable up by 30 per cent in the first year of its operation,” she told the crowd.
???”Australia can’t go backwards in the face of global action.”…
Stuart Blanch from the Northern Territory Environment Centre says a price on carbon is the best way to address climate change….
A spokesman for GetUp! said Coalition MPs were invited to all the major rallies, but none responded.
The campaign has been strong on social media, with hundreds of people sharing photos and videos on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-17/thousands-rally-across-australia-for-national-day-climate-action/5097536?google_editors_picks=true
what does it say about people that they would beg for higher bills? are they employed by the taxpayers who, in effect, pay their bills? are they still living at home, at their parents’ expense?
given global action is precisely what is not happening, & given our “carbon” price was so completely over the top & the international carbon market is an abject failure, why would those attending be taken in by such lies?
When I was at University (back in prehistory) the ABC turned up to a “demonstration” of 7 people and with careful editing of films they turned it into a protest of 2-3 thousand students.
It was obviously pre-arranged as nothing happened until the camera crew were there and set up. I was eating lunch and watching along with some others, and wondering why anybody would be protesting to the University Authorities on something that had nothing to do with them (and which they could do nothing about). I made a point of watching theABC News that night.
There wasn’t much action until about 2,000 students left the refectories and headed for the lecture theatres etc. The ABC took general shots of the milling crowd as indicative of support, then a shot of the leader addressing his followers with a loudspeaker, followed by shot from low down showing 6 fists being raised. A final shot of the ABC commentator as the crowd dispersed in the background.
Very informative. Interesting to see them doing the same thing still, except these days I guess the camera wouldn’t linger quite so long on the girl with the big tits. These days the big tits are the ABC commentators.
Cell phone and personal gadgets take nice hi quality video these days,it is stunning to contrast the Presstitutes claims against Utube footage from the same event.
I think this is one reason the press doesn’t even try to hide their bias anymore.
Graeme back in high school we were shown a video/doco of how this media manipulation can be done, I never looked at news footage the same after that.
Another great video was a mockumentary on how insects will slowly take over the planet, it was so well done that some students were genuinely scared to the point of tears but at the end explained how the theory was flawed and taught us the virtues of skepticism.
That reminds me of this paragraph I wrote before the infamous day in December last year when doom was supposed to happen …
“Would you believe me if I made a wild claim that a huge, very deep hole five miles across is going to appear in the South Island of New Zealand on May 30 next year? Would it make any difference to you if I said that the May 30 date is when the ancient Martian calendar ends one cycle and starts another? …. Since I haven’t said how or why that is possible I hope you won’t just assume that I am correct. Most people need some proof, or evidence, that backs up these wild claims. Otherwise, I could say something like: ‘I’ve found a new species of apple tree that has the apples falling upwards!’ and everybody would believe me without question.”
… By the way, I very much doubt that any skeptics would have believed the hype about doom in December, precisely because they *are skeptics. They can definitely reject the crazy claims with scientific knowledge, common sense, and knowing that there is a complete lack of empirical evidence for any of it.
I have correctly applied the Precautionary Principle to this situation and I have determined that, since we cannot guarantee that Russell’s Teapot is completely harmless, and since by definition we do not know the precise location of Russell’s Teapot and cannot target it with a missile, we must save ourselves and our planet from any possible harm from Russell’s Teapot by building an enormous concrete shell 30ft thick around the entire planet.
An appropriate contribution to the UN Earth Stability Fund will be deducted from your bank accounts shortly.
Indeed it may be the first and only time the UN supports a war against “china”.
Reminds me of the days when Greenpeace protested against a wolf cull in Northern British Columbia.
For years the BC ministry of the environment has controlled the wolf population by culling. This prevents the alternating cycles of moose and wolves starving.
The CBC rocked into Fort Nelson and produced the illusion that the courageous Greenpeaceers went off into the frozen wilderness, relentlessly chasing the Ministry of Environment cullers.
In fact Paul Watson and his gang of thieves were comfortably bedded down in the Fort Nelson Hotel.
Every wolf pack has a matriarch. Standard practise is to fit this animal with a radio collar. Each wolf pack has a “Judas wolf”. This allows the ministry to locate wolf packs for counting, and also to keep total wolf population, and thereby moose population as well, relatively constant.
US was also planning to oppose govt funding, but so far no US reporting on this at all:
17 Nov: Sky News: Australia baulks at climate fund
Australia has joined Canada in rejecting a decision by Commonwealth leaders to make funds available for programs to tackle climate change.
In the final communique of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting released in Colombo on Sunday, the leaders agreed to set up a ‘green capital fund’.
But the statement noted that ‘Australia and Canada … indicated that they could not support a green capital fund at this time’…
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, who agreed to the fund in principle, said Tony Abbott and the Canadian delegate had ‘said they can’t agree to fund their contribution’.
‘There’s quite a long way to go,’ Mr Key said of the final arrangement.
‘They need to be able to demonstrate to us that it’s going to make a difference.’
Mr Key told reporters the Australian prime minister ‘does believe in climate change’.
‘But Australia is going to have to establish as a government how it will approach these international issues,’ Mr Key said.
‘We are taking the middle path, but the right path.’
New Zealand has an emissions trading scheme, but the Abbott government is in the process of repealing the former Labor government’s scheme.
Mauritius agreed to host a Commonwealth Climate Finance Skills Hub, which will be discussed in detail at the next CHOGM in Malta in 2015. http://www.skynews.com.au/eco/article.aspx?id=925355
14 Nov: IPS: Claudia Ciobanu: U.S. Fights G77 on Most Counts at Climate Meet, Leaked Doc Shows
The U.S. delegation negotiating at the U.N. international climate change conference in Poland is pushing an agenda of minimising the role of “Loss and Damage” in the UNFCCC framework, prioritising private finance in the Green Climate Fund, and delaying the deadline for post-2020 emission reduction commitments, according to a State Department negotiating strategy which IPS has seen.
The document, which has been leaked to a pair of journalists covering the Nov. 11-22 COP in Warsaw, outlines the U.S. strategy for the negotiations to diplomats at their various embassies as well as ‘talking points’ for them to push with their respective countries before the talks began.
The paper makes it clear that, despite President Barack Obama’s progressive stances on climate issues over the past year, the U.S. continues to pose difficulties to closing an international global climate deal by strongly resisting the concept of historical responsibility for emissions and positioning itself in opposition to developing countries on the main issues at stake…
But according to the U.S. State Department position, any work on Loss and Damage should be done under the already existing framework for dealing with adaptation to climate change, not as a third, separate pillar (in addition to the two existing ones, mitigation and adaptation), as the G77+China submission requests.
“A third pillar,” says the U.S. position, “would lead the UNFCCC to focus increasingly on blame and liability which in turn could be counterproductive from the standpoint of public support for the conference.
“We are strongly in favour of creating an institutional arrangement on loss and damage that is under the Convention’s adaptation track, rather than creating a third stream of action that’s separate from mitigation and adaptation,” writes the leaked U.S. document.
The U.S. fears an increased “focus on liability” during the international negotiations on climate because that would de facto translate into an admission of historical responsibility by developed countries for emissions leading to climate change and a subsequent legal obligation to pay a price for this responsibility…
When it comes to the Green Climate Fund, meant to assist developing countries with adaptation and mitigation and on whose set-up and financing progress is expected in Warsaw, the U.S. position writes, “We’re also working to intensify our coordination in the context of the Green Climate Fund board to shape an institution that could leverage private investment more effectively than any other multilateral climate fund.”
Yet some developing countries are extremely wary of financial assistance promised by developed countries being translated into private investments as opposed to grants and aid…
***“Already in the pre-COP summit organised by Poland, one and a half days out of three were dedicated to companies which were there to present to developing countries technology which they could buy to help with mitigation,” said Rene Orellana, head of the Bolivian delegation, on the first day of the COP. “Linking markets to the financial provisions [under UNFCCC] means a diluted responsibility for developed countries.”… http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/11/u-s-fights-g77-on-most-counts-at-climate-meet-leaked-doc-shows/
Odd. The wildly popular carbon tax didn’t seem to have led to an increase in popularity of Gillard when she backflipped, bowing to the overwhelming will of the AUS people who were converging on Canberra demanding that we move straight to quadruple the EU price.
They were also strangely shy about using this incredibly popular tax in their campaigning with Swan calling reports “hysterical” and “lies.” One also wonders why they wasted 10 s of $billions on “compensation” schemes for doing the population a massive service, or why there weren’t rallies of thanks from the 100,000 people freed from having to work in heavy consuming industries.
Watched Bolta this morning. The plain talking from Ridley is what’s needed… from the Liberals. They are still caked in the emissions reduction furphy. If ocean acidification is ever going to be a problem then let’s hear the evidence for that, but at the very least the Libs should stop flogging the warming argument which is now a dead horse.
Afterwards on Meet The Press the Wongbot was still monotonously repeating the same old howlers about climate change.
She made a good point about government transparency, though. They can’t run on a platform of transparency and then give us a limited menu of issues they will be open about. Illegal immigration is not on that menu. Fortnightly summary information could be given without sacrificing individual OPSEC.
Funniest part of Meet The Press had to be the young journo chap they had to comment on political and economic issues. In the closing minute of the show the host asks some vague question about what else might be expected to result from Rudd’s resignation (or some such unprovable question about the future). The young chap suddenly gets all candid and says
“Well politics is a funny old game, there’s no telling what will happen next.”
Host: “Thanks for your insight.”
Yeah thanks, kid, great insight!
Well seeing as they had such large “crowds” & you would have to assume being hip & trendy GetUp types, they would have been passing the plate around for “Crowd Funding”.
I can see it now:- Uncle Tim’s benevolent fund had a real kick over the weekend ( after a “small” administrative charge by GetUp )
As I understand it, the average rate of ocean evaporation is 1.2 meters per year(http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/512638.html). Taking into account the surface area of the oceans (4.1 x 10^14 square meters), the density of sea water (1030 kilograms per cubic meter), and the heat of vaporization of water (2.23 x 10^6 Joules per kilogram), a back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that the energy rate required to support ocean evaporation is 3.58 x 10^16 Watts, which is a significant fraction of the rate (1.95 x 10^17 Watts) solar energy impinges on the Earth at the top of the Earth atmosphere. The energy required to evaporate the oceans is released when the water vapor condenses. But condensation takes place at altitudes removed from the Earth’s surface where the returned energy can more efficiently be radiated to space. I don’t know about you, but as far as the surface of the Earth is concerned, this process seems somewhat akin to a massive evaporative air conditioner.
Yes, this is a point I continually make, if you want the feedback to happen, that is an increase in humidity, you have to accept a higher cycling rate for water, first you have to evaporate the extra, then you have to transport it to 3-10 km, those storm clouds in Jo’s picture have Gigajoules of potential and electrostatic energy in them. I saw a paper once that said rainfall would increase 20 percent, which I calculated would consume far more than 3W / m2 implying that the world was cooling. Some of these nutcases writing climate papers, need to learn the law of conservation of energy. I reckoned that the loss of energy due to the kinetic energy of 20% extra rain hitting the earth at terminal velocity alone was of the order 6W/m2 almost double the driving force – another green perpetual motion machine in the making
What a lot of people miss is that this extra energy we are sooooo frightened of is the equivalent of shining a small (3w) torch at the ground to give a 1/2 metre circle at midday, 80 % of which is immediately reradiated to space via the IR transparent region and then worrying that the retained 20 % (0.6 watts shining on that 1/2 m circle) is gonna somehow overheat the surface due to some mystery feedback.. it’s absurd.
Do it, go out and set up your small 3w torch, shine it on a 1/2 m circle at midday on a sunny day and measure the temperature rise as to turn it on.
The average speed (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2007/EvanKaplan.shtml) of large raindrops just before they strike the surface of the Earth is 10 meters per second. The average mass-rate of ocean evaporation is 1.6 x 10^10 kilograms per second. If all of the water evaporated from the ocean returned to the Earth’s surface as large rain drops and all of the kinetic energy contained in the falling rain were converted to Earth surface heat, then each second approximately 8 x 10^11 Joules of energy would be returned to the Earth’s surface as heat. This corresponds to 8 x 10^11 Watts. Averaged over the Earth’s surface area (both land and ocean) of 5.7 x 10^14 square meters, this equates to heat entering the surface at a rate of 0.0014 Watts per meter squared. As the nursery rhyme goes:
Where or where has all the heat gone?
Where or where can it be?
I don’t know where all the heat went;
But it’s nowhere that Trenberth can see.
Ok, it was from memory … but I didn’t quite do it that way, I presumed that the potential energy of the water at an average of (I think 3 km) was returned to the earth as predominately non heat energy. It has to go somewhere.
Kinetic energy into the earth isn’t returned as only heat of friction, it is also returned as drag on the orbit and lost into the gravitational system, potential energy gained from heat is not returned only as heat.
Lets see what happens when I use your numbers
PE = MGH = 1.6 e10 kg/sec x 9.8 x 3000 m = 4.8 x 10^14 J/ sec of PE or about 1 Watt per m2 of area at the surface.
raindrops using your 10 m/s & e = 1/2 x m x v2
0.5 x 1.6 e10 x 10 ^2 = 2.3 e13 J/s or 0.04 Watts per meter squared
So the loss to kinetic energy lies somewhere between 0.04 watts and 1 watt per meter squared. This explains somewhere between 1/10 th and all of the energy imbalance of 0.6W / m2 at TOA
If this loss is returned as heat then it is thermalised and lost by convection and broadband IR emission anyway, it can’t back radiated. We can essentially say all the PE is lost to the system. As I understand it climate models don’t account for the potentialisations and loss to the thermal system of this energy, it’s upper bound represents all the energy imbalance, you’d think there would be some interest.
Looking at evaporation ( which is accounted in the models, albeit probably incorrectly)
2257 + 4.18 × 1000 × 85/1000 kj = 2257 + 355 kj / kg at 15 C (2613 kj / kg)
1.6 × 10 ^ 10 × 2613000 = 4.18 e16 equivalent to
4.18e16/5.7e14 or 73 W/m2
gives a total energy requurement of
73 + 1 = 74 W/ m2
to sustain evaporation and rainfall
Now the paper I looked at claimed 20 % increased rainfall due to CO2 doubling implying an energy consumption of 0.2 x 74 or 14.8 Watts per square meter which is greater than the energy supposedly driving the warming.
Since we only have a driving force of 0.6 W per square meter no more than an increase in evaporation/ precipitation of 0.6 / 14.8 × 20 = 0.8 % can be sustained, and that’s if every last bit of the radiative imbalance were converted into rainfall which of course leaves zero energy over to warm the atmosphere and the oceans.
Kinda puts the claims about wild storms and floods into perspective
Now folks, let’s look at the other losses, eg
the loss represented by a 6 percent increase in global photosynthesis for a 20 ppm CO2 increase. Photosythesis is endothermic.
The loss due to kinetic energy of wind, including wind driven waves.
The loss due to increased irreversable chemical endothermic reactions
The energy loss from lighning
The energy loss from irreversable thermal weathering of the surface
How long do you think it would take to make up 0.6W per meter squared…
I, like you, made many simplifying assumptions. I completely ignored the power required to raise 1.6 x 10^10 kilograms of water every second from 0 altitude to 3000 meters altitude–i.e., I ignored potential energy considerations. Note two things: First, this energy rate (1.6 x 10^10 kilograms per second times 9.8 meters per second^2 times 3000 meters = 4.7 x 10^14 Watts or approximately 0.8 Watts per square meter of Earth surface) is in addition to the energy required to convert water to water vapor. Second, the energy-rate required to raise the evaporated water from 0 to 3000 meters is considerably smaller than the energy rate required to convert the water to water vapor (approximately 63 Watts per square meter of Earth surface). In some sense the energy required to raise the water to 3000 meter altitude will be recovered in some form when the water falls back to the Earth’s surface. If there were no friction, water dropped from an altitude of 3000 meters would be traveling at a speed of approximately 242.5 meters per second when it reached the surface of the Earth. The fact that large rain drops travel at about 10 meters per second at the Earth’s surface implies that most of the potential energy has been converted to heat via friction as the drops pass through the air. But this heat is created as the rain drops fall–hence this heat is transferred to the atmosphere between 0 and 3000 meters altitude. As such, very little of this heat is transferred directly to the Earth’s surface. I took the simple, although incorrect, position that the kinetic energy of the rain immediately above the Earth’s surface would be converted to heat at the Earth’s surface. The resulting power was 0.0014 Watts per square meter. [Note: For this power you have a calculation
0.5 x 1.6 e10 x 10 ^2 = 2.3 e13 J/s or 0.04 Watts per meter squared
that doesn’t seem right to me. I get
0.5 x 1.6 e10 x 10 ^2 = 8 e12 J/s or 0.0014 Watts per meter squared. Am I missing something?]
In any event, I believe we both think AGW proponents are cavalier when it comes to analyzing energy transfer within the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system.
I’ve tried doing similar calculations on the energy of global evaporation in response to a favourite claim of warmists that CO2 is so strong as a GHG it is the only thing saving us from an iceball earth. Their claim is based on Lacis et al 2010: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Lacis_etal.pdf
They say water vapour is just amplifying the effect of CO2 and CO2 starts the process by evaporating water and without the CO2 the condensing water would not be replaced. It seemed to me the implication of their theory is that almost no water would evaporate from the surface of the earth without the DWLWIR from CO2.
On that basis and using their estimates of CO2 IR, the result I calculated was that the GISS estimate of CO2 back-radiation was around 200 times too small to be responsible for the portion of evaporation they say it does.
If you can find any mistake or unfair assumptions in that calculation, or if you devise your own calculation method and get a very different result, I would like to know more about it.
It’s surprising that such seemingly complex theories on climate change espoused by such prestigious institutions as NASA can be checked by such simple calculations and found to be impossible, but so far that’s been my experience too.
On a quick review of your calculation, I have to disagree with you. You claim The global averaged daily rainfall is 990L/m^2 which I interpret to mean 990 liters of rainfall per square meter of Earth surface area each and every day. This seems to me to be too large by a factor of on the order of 500. Specifically, 990 liters is equivalent to 0.99 cubic meters. Thus a rate of 990 liters per square meter per day is the same as 0.99 cubic meters per square meter per day, or approximately one vertical meter of rainfall per day. This seems like an awful lot or rain. One source (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-is-the-Daily-Rainfall-on-Earth-and-More-Questions-From-Our-Readers-169816686.html) claims an average daily rainfall of 2 millimeters per day (0.002 meters per day), which seems a lot more realistic.
BTW, in my opinion the belief that the existence of backradiation to a surface always produces an increased surface temperature is nonsense. I can show that it is possible for backradiation and lower surface temperatures to simultaneously exist. Furthermore, using a common vacuum thermos bottle, I believe I can make a good argument that surrounding matter possessing an internal source of thermal energy with a heat-trapping gas does not guarantee an increase in the temperature of the matter. However, those calculations are too detailed and probably inappropriate for a “comment discussion” on this blog. If you’re interested in those calculations, please e-mail Joanne, show her this comment where I give her approval to send you my e-mail address, and ask Joanne to send you that address.
Dammit, I’ve just realised where my mistake was. Where the WP article on Precipitation says “the globally averaged annual precipitation is 990 millimetres” I misinterpreted that as an annually averaged global daily precipitation, since I was doing my calculation on daily radiation dose.
The daily average is therefore 2.7mm which is approximately the Smithsonian answer.
So it’s overstated by 365 times, not 500, but either way it’s just as fatal to the end result.
Thanks for checking, I have to go back and correct the record.
BTW, you’re completely mistaken about the heat-trapping gas, and in the same way as most Slayers are deluded. You completely misunderstand the greenhouse effect, so you’re fighting a strawman. The so-called “backradiation” is just radiation, no different, so you’re actually arguing that no radiation of any kind can lead to a higher surface equilibrium temperature of anything. The Thermos bottle is *not* analogous to the Sun-Earth system because you’re missing a Sun, the water has to be heated by an external source otherwise it is just going to cool off no matter what you do to its surroundings. I’m not saying your desired conclusion is impossible, but if you want to argue there’s no greenhouse effect (ie that H2O and CO2 do not have a net effect of increasing surface temperature) you are going to have to find a different way of arguing it, because pretending radiation does nothing to temperature is insane. For one thing you imply the earth knows the difference between energy absorbed direct from the sun versus the energy re-emitted from GHGs and does not respond thermally to the latter. Because that is so clearly insane I will not be drawn any further into discussion about it.
I am not, repeat not, a greenhouse effect slayer. I do not, repeat not, argue that there is no such thing as a greenhouse effect. In fact, I believe, without much conviction but I still believe, CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere will increase the Earth’s surface temperature. What I do argue, and can demonstrate, is that it is possible for backradiation and lower surface temperatures to exist simultaneously. If my argument is correct, it negates the stand-alone argument that “when backradiation is present, the temperature of the surface receiving the backradiation must be higher than the temperature in the absence of the backradiation.” I know this sounds impossible, but what I believe you are forgetting is the fact that the presence of material that radiates energy back to an active object (an active object is an object with an internal source of thermal energy), may also permit heat transfer away from the active object via conduction/convection. If the material that provides backradiation to the active object also provides heat transfer via conduction/convection away from the active object, then the issue of whether the temperature of the active object increases or decreases in the presence of the backradiating material boils down to which energy rate is greater (a) backradiation to the active object or (b) thermal conduction/convection away from the object.
Radiation is not, repeat not, the only way for heat to leave the Earth’s surface. It may be the only (or at least the overwhelmingly dominant) way for heat (energy) to leave the Earth/Earth atmosphere system, but I’m talking about the stand-alone claim that backradiation to the Earth’s surface warms the Earth’s surface, not backradiation to the Earth’s atmosphere warms the Earth’s atmosphere.
Furthermore, I disagree with you when you say: “so you’re actually arguing that no radiation of any kind can lead to a higher surface equilibrium temperature of anything.” I’m arguing no such thing. I’m arguing that to determine the temperature of an object, all forms of heat transfer (conduction, radiation, convection coupled with evaporation) must be considered. It is possible that inert material can be added to a system such that the rate energy is being backradiated from that inert material to the surface of an object in the system is less than the rate energy is being conducted away from the object’s surface to the inert material. When that happens, the temperature of the object will be lowered relative to its temperature in the absence of the added material.
I am not as you claim: “pretending radiation does nothing to temperature”. It does. What I’m claiming is that radiation is not the only thing that affects temperature. What is insane is to take the position that the temperature of an object can be determined solely by analyzing the radiation entering the object and that if more radiation enters the object the temperature of the object must increase.
I don’t as you say: “imply the earth knows the difference between energy absorbed direct from the sun versus the energy re-emitted from GHGs and does not respond thermally to the latter.” As you point out, that is insane. Energy is energy. But if the addition of material to a system (a) induces backradiation to an object in that system where none existed before and (b) simultaneously permits conduction/convection of energy away from that object where none existed before, then when considering the net effect of that material on the temperature of the object, all forms of energy transfer (not just radiation) must be considered.
Finally you argue that the thermos bottle example is not analogous to the sun/Earth system because I’m missing a sun. I agree I’m missing a sun; and in the sense that the sun is the source of energy, I am missing an energy source. However, what if in place of the sun I insert a heat source in the material inside the thermos bottle. It’s true that this heat source is inside the thermos where the sun is external to the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system; but at least now the contents of the thermos bottle have a heat source and hence will not “cool off” to room temperature. I strongly believe that to maintain coffee at some fixed temperature above room temperature, the rate heat will have to be injected into a CO2 thermos will be higher than the rate heat will have to be injected into a vacuum thermos bottle. If true, then the rate heat leaves the coffee in the vacuum thermos is less than the rate heat leaves the coffee in the CO2 thermos–i.e., CO2 acts to enhance the release of heat.
I close with the following contention (which is documented in a word file that I would be happy to send you): Assume we have a solid spherical object with an internal source of energy spread uniformly over the surface of the object, and the object exists in the vacuum of cold space. The object surface will eventually come to a temperature at which energy-rate-equilibrium (ERE) is established–i.e., the rate energy enters the object or any and all subportions of the object will equal the rate energy leaves the object or the subportions. The shape of the sphere is such that in isolation no radiation of any kind (back or direct) impinges on the surface of the sphere. Now surround the solid sphere with a non-touching, thin, inert (i.e., no internal source of thermal energy), concentric spherical shell. When ERE is established, the shell’s temperature will be non-zero and hence both its inner and outer surfaces will radiate energy. Some of the energy radiated from the shell’s inner surface will be directed towards and absorbed by the solid sphere. Thus, when the shell is present, backradiation to the solid sphere exists. For this case (solid sphere and shell, but no heat transfer via conduction and/or convection), the temperature of the solid sphere in the presence of the shell will be higher than the temperature of the solid sphere in the absence of the shell. Now insert a few (not many) thin highly thermally conducting rods that connect the solid sphere to the shell. Depending on the size (length, area) and thermal conduction properties of the conducting rods, the ERE temperature of the solid sphere can be made to be less than the ERE temperature of the solid sphere in isolation. This will be possible if the conduction heat current from the solid sphere to the shell via the connecting rods is sufficiently high. Note that even in the presence of the connecting rods, the shell’s temperature will be non-zero (in fact, the shell’s ERE temperature with conducting rods will be the same as the shell’s ERE temperature without conducting rods–i.e., the rate of backradiation energy to the solid sphere will at most only be slightly changed by the addition of the connecting rods) and thus the shell’s inner and outer surfaces will radiate energy. Some of the energy radiated by the inner surface of the shell will be directed towards and absorbed by the solid sphere. Thus, when the rods are present, we have backradiation to the solid sphere and possibly lower solid sphere surface temperature. Bottom line, I contend that a situation can be created where backradiation and lower solid sphere surface temperatures exist simultaneously.
Stephan Lewandowsky seems to have reached new depths of unsubstantiated claims. At the Conversation he wrote:-
While consistency is a hallmark of science, conspiracy theorists often subscribe to contradictory beliefs at the same time – for example, that MI6 killed Princess Diana, and that she also faked her own death.
Steve McIntyre tracked down the original data. Out of 137 respondents to a questionnaire precisely 0 believed both. The reason for a correlation was explained in a subsequent posting:-
In a setup where nearly all the responses are identical and at one extreme, these responses make a positive contribution to the correlation coefficient.
This posting – “Another Absurd Lewandowsky Correlation” – investigated the correlation in the “hoax” paper between those who rejected the strongly-supported hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS and those who believed “US Government created AIDS”. This time there were two who agreed with both – the same two “fake” responses that agreed with every conspiracy theory, firmly rejected climatology along with rejecting other scientific hypotheses that have strong evidence. There appears to be no genuine responses out of 1145 that support the AIDS questions.
It gets worse.
The title of the hoax paper began “NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax“.
There were 3 out of 1145 responses that supported both. In fact they supported all 13 conspiracy theories. This 3 included the fake responses above. With 13 responses there are 312 possible combinations of inferring if A is true then B is also true. There were no questioning of respondents, so even 3 out of 1145 respondents were genuine, there is no basis for making this claim. This I lay out in more detail here.
Stephan Lewandowsky and Klaus Oberauer, in defending their “hoax” paper called the use of Excel for statistical analysis “drilling into noise”. They further said that “number-crunching ability that’s unaccompanied by informed judgment can often do more harm than good.” I had earlier used Excel pivot tables to show the very things that Steve McIntyre is now demonstrating. Claims by Lewandowsky (for he is the clear ringleader)that those who question the climate hegemony should be viewed as nutters, is an attempt block any delving into either a CAGW hypothesis for which there is no evidence and policy that is not only useless, but positively harmful. He does this on the basis of zero or near-zero evidence. He then questions the competence and judgement of who expose this fact.
Any complex data set may, to some extent or other, confirm any number of incompatible theories, or none. A number of different statistical methods are needed to draw out if a particular interpretation clearly stands out. Given that all of us like to defend our own interpretation, getting the best results that requires pluralism.
Oh, what a lovely view.
And those clouds, the conveyors of heat energy around the globe. And an essential for human life too, and with the human population getting on for 10 billion, and each of us is about 55% water, that’s an awful lot of stuff we have in those many bodies.
Of course humans also burn many types of fuels and all of these release yet more water into the atmosphere. I wonder if any of these things have an effect on the biosphere we inhabit?
I’m sure lots of research must have been done on it by someone somewhere…
Yep, even Kevin Trenberth gave it as the greatest heat loss from the surface at 46% in the 4AR (and radiation not escaping directly to space due GHG as rather small). I’ve not checked the draft 5AR.
Seems to me that a small percentage increase in evapotranspiration would result in a substantial negative feedback but no one seems to be interested.
It is.
Plus the much higher albedo of low level clouds , the reflective properties of low level clouds which reflects a lot more solar visible and infra red [ heat ] spectrum radiation back into space.
It only needs about a 2% to 3 % change in low level global cloud cover to make the difference between a warming planet and a cooling planet. And the evidence is that the relative humidity in the troposphere has increased over the last couple of decades and the relative humidity of the Stratosphere has fallen slightly.
An excellent description in layman’s language on clouds and the effect of different cloud types on the global temperatures along with a very comprehensive range of other climate data and graphs can be found on [ Norwegian ?] Prof Ole Humlum’s Climate4you site.
The links on this site also provide some very interesting reading on various exploration and historical episodes from the past as well.
The third graph down on the Climate and clouds [ LH menu ] section of the site shows the changes in the atmospheric water vapour content at different levels and the way in which that WV content has changed since 1948.
Following the end of WW2, peace time weather research, [ we only had a “climate” in those days which explained why it got hot and cold and rained and dried out, how, when and where you lived ] started using balloon based atmospheric sounding technology to start to measure the various attributes including WV of the upper levels of the atmosphere.
I remember reading about some of this early work in the National Geographic back in the 1950’s
CO2 effects are miniscule compared to the impact of changes in atmospheric WV content and those change’s effects on the trends of the global climate.
18 Nov: Economic Times, India: Urmi A Goswami: Impasse in Warsaw climate talks as developing nations stay united
A deal at Warsaw will, therefore, require the developed countries to come up with meaningful measures to deal with climate change in the period up to 2020.
Several industrialised countries including Japan and Australia have, however, gone back on their commitments to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases for the pre-2020 period.
***Funding for developing countries to tackle climate change is virtually not available…
Two years on, there has been little progress on the issues raised by the vulnerable countries. “The pre-2020 period is about implementation and greater efforts to reduce emissions, but there is no action or talk about this. Instead, industrialised countries only want to talk about what to do in post-2020 agreement,” a senior G-77 negotiator said… http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/et-cetera/impasse-in-warsaw-climate-talks-as-developing-nations-stay-united/articleshow/25963220.cms
17 Nov: UK Guardian: Climate change pledges: rich nations face fury over moves to renege
Typhoon Haiyan raises fear over global warming threat as Philippines leads attack on eve of key talks
Developing nations have launched an impassioned attack on the failure of the world’s richest countries to live up to their climate change pledges in the wake of the disaster in the Philippines…
The diplomat, on the sixth day of a hunger strike in solidarity for those affected by Haiyan, including his own family, told the Observer: “We are very concerned. Public announcements from some countries about lowering targets are not conducive to building trust. We must acknowledge the new climate reality and put forward a new system to help us manage the risks and deal with the losses to which we cannot adjust.”
Munjurul Hannan Khan, representing the world’s 47 least affluent countries, said: “They are behaving irrationally and unacceptably. The way they are talking to the most vulnerable countries is not acceptable. Today the poor are suffering from climate change. But tomorrow the rich countries will be. It starts with us but it goes to them.”
Recent decisions by the governments of Australia, Japan and Canada to downgrade their efforts over climate change have caused panic among those states most affected by global warming, who fear others will follow as they rearrange their priorities during the downturn…
When the highest-level talks start at the summit on Monday, due to be attended by representatives from 195 countries, including energy secretary Ed Davey, the developing world will seek confirmation from states such as Britain that they will not follow the path of Japan and others. David Cameron’s comments this weekend in which he backed carbon emission cuts and suggested that there was growing evidence of a link between manmade climate change and disasters such as Typhoon Haiyan, will inevitably be used to pressure others to offer similar assurances.
The developing world also wants the rich western nations to commit to establishing a compensation scheme for future extreme weather events, as the impact of global warming is increasingly felt. And they want firm signals that rich countries intend to find at least $100bn a year by 2020 to help them to adapt their countries to severe climate extremes…
China and 132 nations that are part of the G77 block of developing countries have expressed dismay that rich countries had refused to discuss a proposal for scientists to calculate emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Ambassador Jose Antonio Marcondes de Carvalho of Brazil, who initially proposed the talks, said: “We were shocked, very much surprised by their rejection and dismissal. It is puzzling. We need to understand why they have rejected it.
“Developing countries are doing vastly more to reduce their emissions than Annexe 1 [rich] countries.”… http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/16/climate-change-pledges-rich-nations
developing nations should simply walk out. suckered into this CAGW scam by the promise of $$$, they were willing to go along with the scam, wasting millions on attending these endless talkfests, while they could have been taking care of business at home.
17 Nov: WUWT: Climate and Human Civilization over the last 18,000 years
Guest essay by Andy May
You might just be able to see that the middle graph (Carbon Dioxide concentration) slight lags the temperature by about 800 years on average. This suggests that the changes in temperature might cause the Carbon Dioxide changes rather than the other way around… http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/17/climate-and-human-civilization-over-the-last-18000-years/#comment-1477930
i posted the following at WUWT & suggested someone send the graph to Carnahan; maybe the thread itself should be sent to the developing nations G77 reps in Warsaw. if lord monckton is there, perhaps he could spread it about!
heard the last call-in part of this, which is not on the audio at the link.
99% of scientists (not even climate scientists) agree it’s real, says a guest. Cleary doesn’t dispute the claim. after a single caller – from what i heard – complains they’ve talked all nite about this subject, Cleary & guest spend inordinate time bemoaning how people don’t believe the scientists etc; Cleary bemoans time is gone when people believed the priest & the teacher:
AUDIO: ABC Sunday Night Religion with John Cleary: The Issue: Faith and Climate Change
Around Australia today thousands of people have gathered to call for increased action in the cause of climate change. It marks the end of a week where from the tragedy of Typhoon Hiayan in the Philippines, through to the global politics of the UN Warsaw Conference, climate has been at the forefront of the news.
Just a week ago Australia’s former Prime Minister, John Howard speaking in London suggested that for some Climate Change was something akin to a religion.
This remark was not meant to be complimentary. Religion was used here as illustrative of blind faith triumphing over evidence and rationality. It is fuelled by observations that for some, Environmentalism, does have elements of nature worship and animist paganism, running counter to Christianity.
Paradoxically this kind of ‘religion’ argument is also deployed by supporters of climate change against the climate change deniers. They argue that for many years, fundamentalist Christians have been associated with the idea that since God gave us charge of the planet, we were free to exploit, until God decided otherwise; and that would probably herald the End Times, anyway, so there was no need for us to take action…
In this week’s Issue, we take a look at faith and climate Change. Are religions part of the problem or the solution?
GUESTS
Matthew Sleeth, founder of Blessed Earth
Steve Bradbury, director of the Micah Centre, set up across churches to keep the government on track with the Millenium Goals
Miriam Pepper, founding member of the Uniting Church’s ecology network, Uniting Earthweb http://www.abc.net.au/sundaynights/stories/s3892730.htm
for years, the CAGW meme has mocked creationist evangelicals/fundamentalists as CAGW deniers in much the same way they mocked Big Oil; wrongfully – in both cases – as it turned out when you did the research:
13 Nov: PlainView Daily Herald: Jonathan Petty: Lowe challenges listeners on climate change issues
Wayland Baptist University students, faculty and staff were challenged by guest speaker Ben Lowe during the university’s fourth annual Creation Care Week. Lowe, founder of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, was on campus to speak about taking care of God’s creation.
The author of “Green Revolution: Coming Together to Care for Creation,” Lowe was on campus Tuesday and Wednesday interacting with students and visiting classes to discuss climate change…
Lowe majored in environmental studies at Wheaton College where he helped organize the school’s first national Climate Change Summit… http://www.myplainview.com/news/article_c2b69cc2-4ccd-11e3-b8e6-0019bb2963f4.html
Young Evangelicals for Climate Action: Who we are
Senior Advisor:
Rev. Dr. Jim Ball is Executive Vice-President for Policy and Climate Change at the Evangelical Environmental Network, the author of Global Warming and the Risen LORD, the architect of the “What Would Jesus Drive” educational campaign, and the key organizer and national spokesperson for the Evangelical Climate Initiative. Jim has testified before Congress and appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America, Fox, CNN, and NPR. He has been featured in the New York Times, and honored by Rolling Stone magazine as one of their environmental “Warriors and Heroes,” and by Time magazine as one of its climate change “innovators.”
ALLIES
The Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) is the organizational sponsor of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action and is a ministry dedicated to equipping, inspiring, discipling, and mobilizing God’s people in their efforts to care for God’s creation. EEN publishes Creation Care Magazine and also sponsored the Evangelical Climate Initiative in 2006, which included over 300 senior evangelical leaders across the United States. CreationCare.org…
***350.org is building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. Their campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions are led from the bottom up by thousands of volunteer organizers in over 188 countries… http://www.yecaction.org/about/who-we-are/
8 Nov: Huffington Post: Jim Wallis: A Problem with the Climate in Texas
(Christian leader for social change; Author, ‘On God’s Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn’t Learned About Serving the Common Good’)
In Texas, the State Board of Education will recommend new textbooks for all its students–and because it has such a large population, what they decide could determine what students in other states learn about science. There are several ideologues submitting textbook critiques to the board and their reviews will factor into each book’s overall score and likelihood of being approved by the school board. These ideologues could block the use of textbooks that teach the reality of climate change for the whole country’s public school students.
Climate science is being attacked by deniers who want to sow seeds of doubt as we try to educate our children about how our way of life — including our fossil fuel habit — is affecting God’s earth through climate change. Children, the ones who will most be affected by climate change, are the ones who most need to how to combat it…
One such leader is Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and professor at Texas Tech University. Hayhoe is also an evangelical and married to a pastor. She has been a leading voice in both the scientific community and the church, calling for action on climate change. For Hayhoe, action comes not from guilt over past behavior, but out of love for God and God’s people. Hayhoe writes in her book, A Climate for Change, “Using our God-given wisdom to comprehend the climate change issue and making decisions that we believe will help the poor and disadvantaged certainly fall within the attitude of Christ in us, Christ through us, and Christ toward others. And we believe that making these choices is a loving thing to do.”
And many evangelicals — particularly young adults — would agree. In a recently commissioned survey by Sojourners, we found that 60 percent of evangelicals acknowledge the reality of climate change. Climate deniers are a minority, not the majority that they often claim to be… http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-wallis/a-problem-with-the-climat_b_4239973.html
Wallis is so obnoxious. “Climate deniers are a minority” – what the hell does that mean, Wallis?
TO YESTERDAY’S RIGHTEOUS PROTESTORS, PLUS THE RIGHTEOUS JOHN CLEARY AT ABC, HIS GUESTS & ALL THE RELIGIOUS GROUPS STILL PUSHING THE CAGW SCAM:
17 Nov: ThisIsMoneyUK: Adam Uren: Energy bills have risen at EIGHT times the rate of earnings in the last three years
The charity has found that the ‘Big Six’ suppliers have increased their gas and electricity prices by on average 36 per cent since October 2010, during which time earnings have risen by a measly 4.4 per cent.
Prices have also easily outstripped the (FAKE) rate of inflation as well, almost four times the 10.2 per cent increase in the last three years…
Energy firms have shown no sign of putting a stopper on rises either, with recent announcements seeing rises of up to 10.4 per cent set to come in this winter, and Citizens Advice fears that people are racking up serious debts to pay for their winter energy bills…
Chief executive Gillian Guy said: ‘Enormous escalations in energy prices are creating a desperate situation in many households.
‘People find they do not have enough money coming in to pay for everyday essentials as increases in daily costs are outstripping low rises in earnings.
‘As we head into winter, and the latest price rises begin to kick in, more and more people are likely to reach crisis point as they struggle to heat their homes and feed their families.
‘People should not have to get into debt in order to have a warm home. Energy companies and the Government need to look at how they can reduce the pressure energy bills are putting on people’s finances.’…
***Ms Guy thinks green levies on energy companies should instead be raised via taxation to make it fairer on those struggling to stay afloat.
She said: ‘It’s absolutely essential that families on low incomes and pensioners get the necessary help to stay warm so I urge the Government not to cut the support that is currently available.
‘Levies are adding an unfair financial burden to poorer households. Paying for these costs through taxation would be a much fairer approach and would avoid low income households funding.’ http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-2508782/Energy-bills-risen-EIGHT-times-rate-average-earnings.html
I have heard an argument articulated in NZ (where else) that individuals should pay their power bill in the form of an income related consumption levy. If this particular bridge is crossed then I imagine there’s no reason why the same redistributive reasoning couldn’t be applied to food and fuel.
As Lisa Minelli once was reported to say upon leaving NZ: ‘will the last person to leave turn out the lights’
***As much as two-thirds of the Department for Energy and Climate Change’s budget is gobbled up by decommissioning nuclear waste. TO THE CAGW RIGHTEOUS: ISN’T IT IRONIC???
15 Nov: ThisIsMoneyUK: Rachel Rickard Straus: Taxpayers’ money scattered ‘like confetti’: How two-thirds of the government’s energy budget is guzzled by nuclear waste projects
Nuclear waste projects are years behind schedule and hundreds of millions of pounds over budget
Budget has jumped to £1.9billion in the last year alone
MPs warn of an ‘appalling waste of public money’
***As much as two-thirds of the Department for Energy and Climate Change’s budget is gobbled up by decommissioning nuclear waste – a staggering £1.9billion in the last year alone.
But at a time when every penny spent on energy and climate change costs is being counted, projects to decommission nuclear waste are years behind schedule and going hundreds of millions of pounds over budget, a report seen by This is Money reveals…
Britain has an expensive legacy of nuclear waste, left over from a post-war era in which little thought was given to how nuclear weapons would be decommissioned.
Successive governments have failed to deal with the waste, the vast majority of which is at Sellafield in Cumbria, leaving current taxpayers facing a bill that has reached £67billion and is rising…
The job of decontaminating the Sellafield facility has been entrusted to a private company for the past five years – Nuclear Management Partners.
But a new report by KPMG exposes a litany of rising costs, missed deadlines and poor management…
One project – Separation Area Ventilation – which was initially estimated to cost £120million and be completed by June is now expected to cost £229million and not be completed for another three years. This alone marks an extra cost of £109million and a 92.3 per cent increase in scheduled deadline.
The report also warns that Sellafield projects are being managed in the interests of shareholders – not taxpayers. It is ‘driven by the pursuit of value for its shareholders,’ the report states. ‘This is not aligned with Nuclear Decommissioning Authority objectives under current incentive structures.’…
***The panel of MPs expressed surprise that the damning KPMG report had not been shared with them until the day of the evidence session, nor was it shared with the National Audit Office. Indeed the MPs only got hold of the report as a result of a Freedom of Information request…
???But Stephen Lovegrove argued that renewing the contract was still the best option. ‘We felt that, despite the poor performance on a number of the projects on the Sellafield site, there is a lot of other good work going on in Sellafield,’ he said. ‘Looking at the alternative courses that we could have taken in discussion with the NDA, we felt that the best likelihood of achieving our outcomes and value for money was to renew the contract.’…
Chief executive of the NDA John Clarke explained the organisation’s decision to renew the contract… http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2507159/Nuclear-decommissioning-budget-scattered-like-confetti-warn-MPs.html
I am currently listening to the debate in Federal Parliament about introducing the removal of the “Carbon Tax” and “carbon pollution”. Where is Nick Minchin when we need him? Why can’t we find one intelligent politician who has the intestinal fortitude to answer all the stock talking points being parroted by the Labor member now speaking?
Yes I understand the “tactical” thrust of the Abbott Govt. in not confronting the issue directly.
Anyone who has followed your blog and Anthony Watts blog for some time must understand the flaw in this strategy. It will only lead to accusations of not being truthful to the Australian people when the whole proposal of CO2 being a pollutant is eventually seen by the majority to be demonstrably false. Can we not educate someone like Malcolm Turnbull and convince him of the foolishness of trying to control climate by reducing carbon dioxide emissions? (I have written to him about this but I don’t think my arguments were compelling – if in fact he actually read what I wrote – you might have a better chance :-).
Bolt has a thread mocking the “stop climate change” placard being held by one of the pro-carbon-tax “protestors”. the re-branding of CAGW as “climate change” should not have been allowed to stand, because it has led to such idiocy. who pushes such a ridiculous meme:
“stop climate change” is Greenpeace’s top campaign story:
Aug 2013: ABC: The Drum: Can social change stop climate change?
By Kearnes and Kuch
(Matthew Kearnes is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales where he lectures on the ‘Politics of Climate Change’… Declan Kuch is a Research Fellow in the School of Law at the University of New South Wales.) http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-21/kearneskuch—climate/4902334
30 Oct: Time Mag: Obama to Hecklers: “That’s the Wrong Rally!”
“Mr. President! (Inaudible)! Stop climate change! For our generation! Stop the pipeline!” the group shouted in unison.
“Okay, we’re talking about healthcare today, but we will,” Obama said. The group was met with boos as it continued to chant… http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/30/obama-to-hecklers-that-is-the-wrong-rally/
this is a tawdry little CAGW saga. i posted about this bank at one time because it needed a “bail-in”:
Wikipedia: The Co-operative Bank
In March 2013 the bank reported losses of £600m. In May Moody’s downgraded its credit rating by six notches to junk and the chief executive Barry Tootell resigned.
Over the weekend of 15–16 June 2013 negotiations between the Co-operative Group and its regulator the Prudential Regulation Authority culminated in reports that the Bank had a shortfall in its capital of about £1.5 billion, and that this would be filled by a procedure known as a “bail-in” scheme…
Ethical Policy
***The Co-operative Bank operates an Ethical Policy which excludes the provision of any banking services to businesses which take part in certain business activities or sectors. These include a commitment not to finance “the manufacture or transfer of armaments to oppressive regimes” or “any business whose core activity contributes to global climate change, via the extraction or production of fossil fuels”. The bank estimates that it has declined finance totalling in excess of £1bn since the policy was introduced in 1992…
The Policy only applies to the balance sheet of The Co-operative Bank…
In June 2005, the bank closed the account of a Christian evangelical group (Christian Voice) because of its standpoint on homosexuality, specifically the group’s “discriminatory pronouncements on grounds of sexual orientation”. They said the group was “incompatible with the position of the Co-operative Bank, which publicly supports diversity and dignity”. Christian Voice said the bank was discriminating against it on religious grounds. Gay Times subsequently selected the Co-operative Bank for its Ethical Corporate Stance Award… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Co-operative_Bank
well…
17 Nov: UK Mirror: Former Co-op Bank boss in drugs confession: Job pressure drove me to ketamine, cocaine and crystal meth
The Rev Paul Flowers, who is also a Methodist minister, last night said the pressure of his job and a family tragedy drove him to buy crack cocaine, crystal meth and ketamine…
The former Co-op Bank chairman who oversaw the organisation’s near collapse has been caught using hard drugs…
Text messages also prove that Flowers was buying and taking drugs in the days surrounding his testimony to the Treasury Committee on November 6…
After his grilling by MPs on how his bank had managed to lose £700 million in six months Flowers, who is gay, headed back to Manchester to “get wasted” with friends.
He boasts in another text how his plans for a party were “turning into a two-day, drug -fuelled gay orgy”… http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/rev-paul-flowers-drugs-confession-2801064
18 Nov: UK Mirror: Co-op bank ex-boss Paul Flowers framed and shamed as a secret drug-taker
The 63-year-old minister was in hiding last night, possibly abroad, as he faced a police quiz over his use of crystal meth, crack cocaine and ketamine
It was filmed earlier this month – just days after he was grilled in Parliament about disastrous £700million losses at the Co-op bank, which prides itself on its “ETHICAL” policies… http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/co-op-bank-ex-boss-paul-flowers-2803420
Co-Operative Group: Sustainability Report 2012
pdf. Climate Change 1.0MB
Context
Climate change is widely regarded as humanity’s greatest challenge.
If left unchecked, global atmospheric temperature is forecast to rise between 1°C and 6.4°C by the end of this century, severely disrupting the economic and ecological systems on which we rely. We recognised the need to act on climate change long before most businesses. For example, since 1998, The Co-operative Bank has declined finance for the extraction or production of fossil fuels…
Our overall strategy for addressing climate change includes energy efficiency, renewable energy, carbon offsetting, the provision of sustainable finance and lobbying to influence public policy.
Climate change is a major focus of our Ethical Plan (page 101)… http://www.co-operative.coop/corporate/ethics-and-sustainability/sustainability-report/ecological-sustainability/
18 Nov: Australian: AAP: Nick Perry: Govt could be stuck with climate building
The headquarters of the former climate change department has come under fire again in parliament, after it was revealed it would cost as much to ditch the building as it would to hold onto it.
The fancy digs in Canberra’s hip New Acton region have been a magnet for criticisms by coalition MPs, who have painted it as a symbol of Labor waste on climate change bureaucracy.
The former Labor government has been blasted for spending $20,000 on coffee machines and leaving dozens of work terminals vacant in the modern complex…
When asked by Liberal Senator Anne Ruston on Monday what the penalty would be for terminating the $150 million lease on the building, the environment department had a sobering response.
“I understand it’s in the order of $150 million,” chief operating officer Dianne Carlos told a senate estimates hearing on Monday.
Senator Ruston said taxpayers had been lumped with a “green lemon”, and criticised Labor for locking in a 15-year lease at above average rental prices.
“Labor effectively left taxpayers a $150 million bill for a lease taxpayers do not need,” she said in a statement…
The former department is saving money in some regards.
(LOL)The bulk of envelopes, business cards and other stationery branded with the Climate Change Department logo are still being used, despite the department being scrapped by the Abbott government… http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-news/govt-could-be-stuck-with-climate-building/story-fn3dxiwe-1226762616685
I find it absolutely disgusting and despicable that Julie Bishop, the current Foreign Minister in this Abbott Government, barely in office for less than 3 Months now, found a way to go back in time more than 3 years to spy on a valued and trusted friend that the Government of that time was so friendly with. This is utterly reprehensible that the Rudd Government of the day could be slimed because of this time travel that the current Government has seemingly perfected.
I expect the Kevin Rudd and his foreign minister at that time, Stephen Smith, should both come out and condemn not only the current foreign minister, but Tony Abbott as Prime Minister, who quite obviously approved this act of time travel!
The ABC is totally justified in dropping this at the feet of the Abbott Government. How dare they do this so soon after assuming Office!
Tony I am shocked too, the last government were the time travelers, their thoughts and policies, their words and behaviour were 1930 ties Marxist nonsense. The idiots thought that lying, bullying and media control would see them firmly ensconced in control of Australia.
Academia the so called elite, the plethora of left wing bleeding heart journos and the stacking of the judiciary would see to their protection as icons and protected species.
Strange how invention can get in the way of decades long planning of the revolution, simple little things like computers and the internet, bypassing the feeding of the chooks. They did try hard to control information, I think the NBN may have been a try at control of the internet.
Sadly for them their business sense was about as clever as a box of hammers, ensuring the internet remains free of tampering will ensure freedom of thought and speech. Regards
My son linked to a news story about the Hornsby cyclone today, one of his friends left the following comment.
So glad climate change is just a myth , because when I was a kid this used to happen all the time………..said no one ever
Getting sick of people who claim these things have never happened before, I posted the following:
When you was a kid this used to happen never, you say.
January 1991
On 21 January 1991 severe thunderstorms moved across the northern suburbs of Sydney during the afternoon. Strong winds and large hail stones caused extensive damage. Hail stones up to 7 cm in diameter and flash flooding was reported in several locations. Some areas received more than 35 mm of rain in 6 minutes and more than 60 mm in half an hour. Areas of most severe damage stretched from the Warrawee-Turramurra area to Duffys Forest, with significant damage occurring to property in the Ku-ring-gai, Hornsby and Warringah council areas. More than 7,000 houses were damaged. The total estimated insurance payout for the storm was estimated at $215 million.[10]
April 1999
Australia’s most costly natural disaster in dollar terms was a severe hail storm over Sydney on 14 April 1999. Hail the size of cricket balls fell in a damage path that extended from Bundeena in the south to Darling Point in the North and from Sydenham in the west to Bondi Junction in the east. In total, over 20,000 properties and 40,000 vehicles were damaged during the storm with more than 25 aircraft damaged at Sydney Airport.
Then there was February 1904.
From the archives of the Sydney Morning Herald
The cyclone which resulted in such extreme weather in Melbourne on Saturday and Sunday gave Sydney a short but sharp sample of its severity early yesterday morning, when a violent storm swept over the city and suburbs. Fortunately the disturbance is now leaving Australia for New Zealand, but shipping in it’s track are likely to be roughly handled, as its strength does not appear to be diminishing
The Government Meteorologist, when spoken to yesterday afternoon, stated that the storm was due to teo outer whirl of the cyclone overlapping the south-east districts, and this resulted m a succession of squalls and thunderstorms travelling from north to west to .south east. The first of these, very mild in character, occurred at about 5pm yesterday, the second, slightly more pronounced, at 7 p.m , and a squall with little thunder but very heavy ruin passed over Sydney at 10.15 p m., 20 points being registered in six minutes. This same storm tore the funnel of the steamer Age on its way to Sydney.
The first two quotes come from wiki,the info for 1904 I found on Trove. People that make statements about weather over time without checking the facts first are really starting to s!*t me.
It’s glowing. It’s hot! It’s the missing hot spot!
There, I beat Michael the Loony and Blackbladder.
130
Lovely photos, they look like cooling in action. 🙂
80
Awesome. Ghost metropolis.
50
Apparently there was some “National day of climate action” http://www.thecourier.com.au/story/1913470/big-turnout-at-ballarats-national-day-of-climate-change-action/?cs=62 quite ironic Jo shows a great photo of a real driver of climate while these tools carp on about CO2, I knew nothing of this gathering and would have loved to have shown up, all but briefly 🙂
140
The link is to an image from Brisbane, with the caption:
A crowd of thousands turned out for the Brisbane rally at Queen’s Park.
Thousands!
What the! as Sergeant Swell of the Mounties would say.
Tony.
160
Well the weather/climate decided to demonstrate that it isn’t particularly interested in them in Sydney 🙂
The earlier report claimed over 10,000.
🙂
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/breaking-news/climate-change-rally-withstands-rain/story-fnihsfrf-1226761943192
50
That picture isn’t from the rally, it’s just a picture taken at one of those free range sheeple farms.
60
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/crowd-braves-rain-for-climate-change-rally-20131117-2xosu.html
Here’s the report that claimed 10,000 at the Sydney rally
30
I always figured heat makes people go a bit loopy….
20
I like this comment from an 18 year-old.
Should have been referring to the carbon tax. Trying to cut carbon emissions by 5% of 2.5% of the world’s total makes an impact on global temperatures of 0.00 degrees, even under the most alarming scenarios. And there is only one country left in the world that still genuinely endorses such a stupid policy. Unfortunately that in the country I live in – the UK.
70
Well he was referring to Direct Action, so therefore endorsing the idea that the current government should just save the money.
But the underlying mesaage was really about the effectiveness of a man made gas on a natural disaster.
30
grid square the photo – est. 500 – 1,000 ……perhaps
90
I made it roughly 500 placards, so agree with your estimate.
50
Sunshine Coast had
thousands,hundreds, tens at the tree at Quota park in Nambour.90
And an IQ of hundreds…
100
They counted toes and forgot to divide by 10. 😉
130
I think they modelled the crowd numbers … nuff said.
170
Hi Tony,
I marvel at the knowledge that you give freely to Jo’s blog.
Always a great read and I thoroughly enjoy reading your posts.
Thank you.
Some time ago you were talking about the Power Station in Gove
(Nhulunbuy) in the NT running on Diesel.
I worked in that power station for many years and we ran it on Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO),
the stuff left over after many of the other useful things
were refined out. They are still running on HFO.
Gas is supposed to be being piped to the Peninsula, but,
going on past performance, this may be some time off.
21
I think you may have your wires crossed, JT.
To the best of my knowledge Tony has never written about the station at Gove, but I have, several times. Most times I have written about the Steam Power Station (SPS) which runs on HFO, which I have also written about. However, I have also written a couple of times about the backup Diesel Power Station (DPS), which forms part of the overall complex.
Talk of converting SPS to gas predates the G3 expansion and has been on and off ever since.
RIO have resurrected it as they want to flog the place off (now rebranded as Pacific Aluminium), and nobody will touch it owing to compliance issues with using HFO as a fuel in Australia.
RIO are basically trying to get the NT government to pay for the conversion.
10
Hi MV,
Tony was talking about several stations, and the Gove one was part of his chat.
You are correct about the DPS. It has 5 X 2.75MW Allens V16 Diesels which I
had run many times, when that was the only power available, due to problems in the SPS.
Gas was talked about coming to Gove, 99.9% sure, in 1984. One of the boilers even
had it’s burner positioning changed. This has now been changed back.
You sound like you may have been there, also.
10
.
I was there in 1973 – 74 when it was all just coming online. I worked for Mickey Mouse Airlines.
Back there from 2005 to 2009 writing commissioning and operations procedures for equipment installed as part of the G3 expansion. The last two years were spent in the power station for the commissioning of the two new boilers (updated versions of the original boilers 1, 2 and 3), plus two new turbine + gen sets. Boiler 4 is gone and Boiler 5 was relocated to make room for the new Boilers 6 and 7, as they were designated.
Just after commissioning, over Christmas, the operators managed to boil Boiler 6 dry. That always tickled me. These days you can’t boil a $20.00 kettle dry, but they managed to do it with a $36 million boiler. Repairs cost $4 million.
.
Perhaps the best story to come out of it all was the cost comparison between Boilers 6 and 7. Boiler 6 was built in situ onsite by typical overpaid, underworked, unproductive Australian tradesman, working fly-in, fly out, who demanded a certain level of accommodation and other benefits.
Total cost to commissioning to nameplate – $36 million.
Boiler 7, on the other hand, was built on a beach in Indonesia by unskilled locals who were paid about $2.00 a day, and went back to own their own village at night. All this was to “save money” of course.
Total cost to commissioning to nameplate – $107 million.
Happens EVERY time but the bean counters who now run Australia’s large corporations just can’t be told. So we continue to offshore major construction work to the detriment of local industry, employment and training, then we wonder why we have a shortage of skilled labour, then we bring tradespeople in on 457 visas to fix all the problems with the unserviceable crap we had built overseas in corrupt, third world countries, “to save money”.
.
Somebody recently commented elsewhere that the country was now being “run by adults”.
Yeah, right.
40
Hi MV,
Missed each other by a few years each time. we were there ’78 to 2000.
We were going to leave when it snowed on Mt Saunders!
Boiler 5 was located on the sea water channel just west of boiler 4.
6 and 7 I gather were south of 3, which has been de-commissioned.
Boiling a boiler dry should almost lose one their tickets.
Bean counters ALWAYS stuff things up.
You could almost bet on it.
Definitely agree with you about skills. We need to keep it in Australia.
MMA were still there when we arrived, just before Union Picnic weekend.
What an introduction to Gove!
Thoroughly enjoyed our time there.
20
Yes to all that except –
Boilers 6 and 7 are directly south of Boiler 3 which is completely refurbished and fully operational.
Oh, and nobody got penalised for the melted boiler. It was close to Christmas and engineering advice was to leave commissioning until after the break. But the bean counters wanted it otherwise to impress the new RIO Board of Directors.
And so initial commissioning was carried out then everybody of note, including all the senior engineers, went off on Christmas hols, leaving the as yet unproven boiler in the hands of relatively inexperienced operators. A crucial interlock failed in the middle of the night, a choice of action had to be decided, and they made the wrong choice.
The repair bill was a tad over $4 million.
Fortunately Boiler 7 had just arrived from Indonesia by then, and fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, every gasket in it was made of asbestos, and every nut and bolt was cadmium plated, amongst a long list of faults, so Customs quarantined it, and it had to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up before it could even be moved from the dock area.
So we had plenty of spare parts for Boiler 6.
30
Hi MV,
Have got this through from someone still in Gove.
Mate, is he talking about Gove? Boiler 3 hasn’t had a fire in it since G3. The main steam line has been capped, there are no burners on site to fit it, the G9 sootblowers are now on boiler 1 and the whole area is taped off as the lagging is falling off.
I’m not sure when G3 started or finished. Did it finish?
00
Hi JT,
Didn’t know that, and find it hard to believe. They spent millions refurbishing Boiler 3 independently of G3. When I left it was the most efficient of the five commissioned main boilers (boilers 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7). Boilers 6 and 7, the new ones, were still being fine-tuned. Boilers 1 and 2, on the other hand, were falling to bits. They had been scheduled for refurbishment, but G3 costs blew out so badly pretty much all such work was put on hold. I’d have no trouble accepting one of them had been mothballed.
Don’t know when planning for G3 started, but actual physical work commenced around 2002. It was originally estimated at $2.4 billion. By the time RIO bought the company it had blown out to $3 + billion and rising. The cost overruns were hidden at the time of sale. The rest of the expansion was the same. Nothing worked (all built on Indonesian and Thai beaches). That’s why RIO sold a $30 billion chunk of the company to CHINALCO. And they lied about the state of affairs, too.
G3 never actually finished as such. In January 2009 RIO pulled the plug. By then the cost overrun was up to $4.3 billion. Still nothing worked – output was actually down from pre expansion days, due to problems integrating old with new. Nearly 3,000 of us contractors were finished up at the end of our next rotation.
I did some work from home for the SPS in late 2009 – early 2010, when they were becoming Pacific Aluminium. Boiler 3 was still happily chugging along at that stage. That was my last involvement.
PS – Burners for boilers 6 and 7, plus refurbished 3 are close enough to be interchangeable, with a few hours input by a competent machinist with access to a lathe. In fact, the entire burner assembly for each of these boilers could be fabricated from scratch by any one of a number of contracting firms in Darwin, Cairns, and Townsville.
10
Don’t let the ALPBC get hold of that picture, please.
80
You did mean…facing east…that cloud looks lit up by the setting sun.
—–
Yes! Of course. Fingers typing. Brain elsewhere. – Jo
80
Huh, the sun sets in the west, and this is from Perth, looks a bit like a front heading in off the Indian ocean at dusk to me , that would be looking west, the sun would be just below the horizon with the tops of the cloud illuminated from behind, and the bottom possibly in the earths shadow.
Stunning Photo Jo.
52
I concede… should have read closer duh….
10
Nice pic
I’ll have a bit of fun and try an analysis. Maybe Jo will tell us how bad I am at it.
Pic taken facing south west with the sun to the mid / upper right well out of the pic.
Photo taken maybe around 6,30 or 7 pm judging by the shadows cast around the LH side of the cloud and the amount of sunlight still shining on the cloud tops. And also the darkness under the lower cloud mass that is nearer and in front of the main cumulous cells .
Ocean is visible straight out in front.
The cumulous cloud formations have formed on the cool shallow wedge of sea air that is forcing it’s way under the warmer land breeze from earlier in the day that had swept out to sea from a ENE direction.
The low thin band of cloud in the foreground is probably the frontal edge of that sea breeze coming in.
The surface wind is from the west judging by the way the palm leaves are leaning which also indicates the arrival of the sea breeze .
The upper winds are from the NNE as can be seen by the way the upper levels of those cumulous clouds are being dragged towards the SSW
Cloud tops around 7000 feet.
Distance perhaps 15 kms out to sea.
The lean of the clouds from the NNE towards the SSW indicates [ without looking at the map ] that there is high pressure back inland behind the photographer and an upper level low pressure out to sea to the west ie Air around a low rotates clockwise so stand with your back to the wind and the low pressure area is on the right hand.
Looking at the lean on clouds due to the upper winds can also, allowing for drift and speeds of that upper air drift, tell you where and how strong the systems are above cloud base of which the circulation patterns are often a lot different to surface systems.
________________
OK have now looked at the 850 HpA charts [ 5000 feet ] and the upper low is today off the Pilbara coast and a big high is over central and eastern Australia
20
And here’s me, thinking they were clouds over Perth.
40
Well done,
I could guess at the vehicles in the photo, but nothing like the stuff you’ve done.
1st Car. Ford Focus 2006.
2nd Car. Honda Civic maybe early 2000’s (hard one this).
3rd Car. Holden Commodore 1999.
Who know’s the second vehicle?
And the majority of those palms look like the cocos palm Syagrus romanzoffiana (a weed) which should be removed prior to any action on CO2.
00
I think the rear most car is a Ford Fairlane. Any further suggestions?
20
They look like foxtails (Wodyetia bifurcata) to me.
Can’t agree about cocos palms being weeds (maybe to a greenie native plant nazi), but plant foxtails at your peril.
20
Rom,
Also there’s no curbing and channeling on the road, is this usual for Perth?
00
No idea about the curbing Dave as I am two and half thousand Kms from Perth in western Vic. I have been to Perth for a day or so a few years back but never got near the ocean as we were on a 5 day tour to talk to and see some WA farm research groups.
Any of my guesses at cloud formations and the information they hold which is a lot if you know what to look for and how to interpret that information for those who are interested in weather, comes from some 54 years of flying starting in Tiger Moths in 1959 and including over 50 years of flying gliders across a fair bit of SE Australia
20
Scrub all theories.
Jo says pic taken facing east.
I hereby slink off into the back of the cave from whence I will once again summon the courage to emerge once again to face the opprobrium of the world.
40
What you guys can tell from a photograph. Just think what you could do with the tree rings.
80
Tree Rings? Nuh!.
No glory and no nice big grants left there as Mannian and Briffa tree ring analysis has already used up all that available space on the right hand side of that graph to try and get that hockey stick to fit in.
50
Did I say West? Doh. Oops!
30
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
William Henry Davis
90
Travel Time.
Tectonic Boundary Between the North American and Eurasian Plates
Located in the Þingvallavatn Lake in the Þingvellir National Park in Iceland, Silfra is crevice between the North American and Eurasian plates.
Silfra, by virtue of its location in the Þingvallavatn Lake, contains clear, cold water that attracts scuba divers drawn to its high visibility and geological importance; divers are literally swimming between continents.
40
Underwater assports needed?
10
I was wondering what an ‘ation’ was 🙂 I certainly noticed the beautiful sky.
30
150 people,turned out for the day.These Green Taliban,still don’t seem to realize,we know it’s a Scam.
91
Nice photo.
20
Hi Jo.
I was looking at the storms when facing east towards the Darling Range. Hence the sun shinning on the face of the clouds, from the sun setting in the west ((: Were we looking at the same storms?
Indeed, a nice photo. I should get my camera out more.
—
Yes. Silly me. Over the hills, of course…. Jo
40
Darn! and Doh!
You just blew me and all my theorising about those clouds right out of the water, Jo.
20
Forget UN-IPCC 95% confidence the world is doomed!
100% confidence the world will end in 100 days!
30
Don’t worry, death doesn’t really exist .
Scientist clams quantum physics proves there is an afterlife
LANZA’S THEORY OF BIOCENTRISM AND THE AFTERLIFE
Biocentrism is classed as the Theory of Everything and comes from the Greek for ‘life centre’. It is the belief that life and biology are central to reality and that life creates the universe, not the other way round.
Lanza uses the example of the way we perceive the world around us.
A person sees a blue sky, and is told that the colour they are seeing is blue, but the cells in a person’s brain could be changed to make the sky look green or red.
Our consciousness makes sense of the world, and can be altered to change this interpretation.
By looking at the universe from a biocentric’s point of view, this also means space and time don’t behave in the hard and fast ways our consciousness tell us it does.
In summary, space and time are ‘simply tools of our mind.’
Once this theory about space and time being mental constructs is accepted, it means death and the idea of immortality exist in a world without spatial or linear boundaries.
Theoretical physicists believe that there is infinite number of universes with different variations of people, and situations taking place, simultaneously.
Lanza added that everything which can possibly happen is occurring at some point across these multiverses and this means death can’t exist in ‘any real sense’ either.
Lanza, instead, said that when we die our life becomes a ‘perennial flower that returns to bloom in the multiverse.’
40
Isn’t that like what Ban Ki Moon says ?
“There are a lot of people on Earth who seem to believe we have two Earths,”
It’s a great line but what it really means is there’s the real world (just the one) and there are the many cloud cuckoo lands which occupy so much head space.
90
Hang on Joe for absolute proof he would need to die, take observations, come back and peer review his findings in a reputable science journal.
Has he done that ?
Otherwise it is a thesis, interesting but unproven.
40
Hmmm. Would he have to come back to publish ?
Couldn’t he do the peer review in the multiverse?
Perhaps the peer review has only become corrupted in this universe ?
30
actually the Vikings of Greenland were not far out in this respect. Also, in respect of your post at 4.53, the little ice age nearly did for those of Iceland as well. I visited Pingvellir last year, it is an eerie and awesome place where those early Viking settlers held their parliament. They must have felt the unknown force beneath their feet that pushed a continent 4000 miles! It put the current apocalyptic obsessions into perspective.
40
Stanford researchers say new materials could help lower the cost of producing fuel with solar energy.
“Solar power, however, could compete with natural gas as a way to make hydrogen if the solar process were somewhere between 15 and 25 percent efficient, says the U.S. Department of Energy.”
“For some time now researchers have known that you could approach 15 to 25 percent efficiency if you combined two solar cell materials in such a system. One solar cell would power half of the water-splitting reaction—forming hydrogen. The other could form oxygen.”
“Using a thin-film silicon solar cell that converts the energy in light with 7 percent efficiency, Nocera says his group achieved 5 percent efficiency for the conversion of sunlight to hydrogen. Natural photosynthesis is less than 1 percent efficient at converting sunlight to energy.”
Now we no longer need to rely on plants for our energy. Especially coal plants.
20
That’s a shame. I’ve just applied for my EU bio-fuels grant after planting 150 hectares of GM coal seeds for the German market.
100
But would they get enough to power a flying pig?
Seriously, this is stale, stale news. Bockris was keen on the ‘hydrogen economy’ in the 1980’s and estimated 25% minimum efficiency was needed. The CSIRO were over 8% about 20 -25 years ago. As were others.
The drawback is that hydrogen isn’t the ideal fuel. It’s a gas so large volumes needed to power a car. In an internal combustion engine its knock rating is 66, so lower compression and lower efficiency. The usual response is that fuel cells have higher efficiency, which is true and would help offset the 10 tonne weight. Hmm..one way to stop hoons drag racing?
Distributing hydrogen as a household or industrial fuel raises some ‘interesting’ questions about safety, especially given its flammability range and its propensity to leak.
This sounds like another “we can save the planet; send more money” press release.
10
Ok seeing as it’s National day of we hate CO2 or something? here’s some photos of my ss ute and my old Harley FXR just for the eco loons, enjoy. 🙂
http://s1295.photobucket.com/user/Yonniestone/library/yonnie%20photo?sort=3&page=1
50
How about a song to go with the Harley?
http://youtu.be/HTDjD_UdJYs?t=2m
40
Good on ya 🙂
40
Climate Change Day Of Action. ABC guesstimates 60,000 people in all across the whole of Australia.
Well, Sam, I’m wondering if the other 99.73% of Australia’s population think the same.
Tony.
250
Well they just about have the numbers, you only need 0.3% to have a consensus.
212
Dangerous words there- once you let them claim consensus it becomes unanimity in the despatches.
20
And where, prey, is this written?
20
Nothing to do with anything but thought it was kinda cool (at least for us mechanically inclined). Turns out that Jo is smooth, powerful and doesn’t waste time going back and forth 🙂 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonova_engine
[Thank you for sharing this. I will hold it in moderation for Jo to see, and decide if she wants to publish it or not.] -Fly
[Thanks Greame No. ? It’s news to me. Seems very unthreaded. Happy to post. – Jo]
30
Interesting idea dating back to 1825 but never commercial. Sealing problems among others. If you are interested
Innovative Engine Mixes Rotary, Internal Combustion Technology
By Ed Stiles, August 28, 2003
http://uanews.org/story/innovative-engine-mixes-rotary-internal-combustion-technology
gives more info than the wikipedia link.
Also for fun http://www.animatedengines.com/ but it doesn’t have a Jonova.
30
Thanks for that Graeme. The animated page will come in handy for my students.
20
It’s another record, Wettest November ever recorded. We’re doomed I tell ya, doooomed.
90
Correction, wettest November in Sydney on record. One of these days I’ll get this preview thing right.
50
If the ABC Was Relevant (Pt 60).
(The African Beggar.)
[Scene: A domestic lounge in a suburb somewhere. There is a knock on the front door. BRYAN answers. It is JOHN.]
John: Good day to you sir. My name is Robert Mugabe and I am here to collect your climate debt.
Bryan: Robert Mugabe – the infamous Prime Minister of Zimbabwe?
John: No sir, I am very famous, and was recently re-elected as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe by 109% of the voting public.
Bryan: Congratulations – but what’s this climate debt?
John: It is money you owe the great people of Zimbabwe to compensate them for the damage you have done to their envirionment.
Bryan: What damage?
John: Well, sir, Zimbabwe (formerly the oppressive state of Rhodesia) was the food bowl of Africa until runaway greenhouse gas emissions from Australia threw our economy into bankruptcy and our people into starvation.
Bryan: Didn’t this all happen about the same time that you took over as Prime Minister?
John: Yes sir, it was all very unfortunate.
Bryan: Couldn’t the bankruptcy and the starvation be due to corruption and the collapse of law which accompanied the handover of power to you and your croneys?
John: No, sir, that is very wrong and the United Nations is very sure about that. Ask the IPCC. Five thousand dollars please…
Bryan: Then why didn’t other countries in Africa – ones where you weren’t Prime Minister – have the same problems?
John: I don’t think we should discuss it at this time sir. You are only saying this because I am a black man. Five thousand dollars please…
Bryan: And this money would all go to the good people of Zimbabwe?
John: Oh, yes, sir. All the good people will be rejoicing.
Bryan: You wouldn’t just trouser the dollars – you and your croneys?
John: Oh, no, no, no sir.
Bryan: Not like a conspicuous proportion of foreign aid from the UN and other organisations as soon as it arrives in Zimbabwe?
John: No, sir, not this time. You have my word for that.
Bryan: So, by giving you this money, I will not be supporting a corrupt and croneyistic government and helping them to perpetuate the poverty and misery of the Zimbabwean people?
John: Of course not sir – I promise.
Bryan: OK – Here you go. [Opens wallet]. A hundred trillion dollars – keep the change.
John: Thank you sir! [Looks at banknote.] I can’t accept this!
Bryan: Why not?
John: It’s worthless! It’s Zimbabwean paper money!
Bryan: My point exactly. Goodbye. [Shuts door.]
See also…
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=100+trillion+dollar+note&qpvt=100+trillion+dollar+note&FORM=IGRE
Cheers,
Speedy
180
Day 6 at Warsaw Climate Catastrophic Cat-fest.
Paul Brown an editor for Climate News Network has now reported politicians are the cause for the additional 2 degrees C extra warming.
1. UN bodies & UNFCCC:
2. Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College in London:
Plus this:
3. Dr. Liz Hanna, from the Australian National University’s National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health:
And this:
And another one:
Meanwhile 200 million people worldwide risk exposure to toxic pollution.
Here’s the top 10 TOXIC places in the world. And not from CO2.
10 to 15 million affected by mercury poisoning each year.
If it’s CO2 that’s killing everyone from heat, cold, ice, drought, floods, dry, wet, etc – why aren’t the figures out there. Pollution is no longer worried about, because the GANG GREEN world of UNFCCC is after the money and in a big way and no longer concerned about the environment.
These criminals have to bought to justice and very soon.
170
“Every country, he said, had to reduce their citizens’ emissions to 2 tons per person to avoid dangerous climate change” Simples. Make more babies until there are enough people to make the limit.
Get busy, boys and girls. It’s your duty to the Planet.
50
So even Catastrophic Climate scientists, hold politician to a higher standard, than they hold themselves.?
What kind of “scientist” believes in the capability of politicians to control climate?
More each day as this activism is revealed and collapses, I am drawn toward retribution for the fools, stupid,or greedy who have enabled this destruction of public treasure.
The take away for me, greens hate humankind, the worlds poor are diseased rats in their minds.
Must exterminate.Give more to greenpeace,help eliminate the worlds poor?
80
quote”… so we all have to be prepared for the most likely scenario, which is a 4°C rise in temperature. If we do not prepare to adapt we simply won’t be able to.”
Is that like “prepare to fire”, that we see in the sci-fi movies.
50
I think it’s another version of, We’re climate scientists and you’re not. Give us all your money and volunteer your families unto the 7th generation for perpetual slavery”.
40
It’s incredible isn’t it, I think the shrill note is bordering on terrorism – after all trying to instill fear of death in a population is terrorism. Greenpeace needs to be designated a terrorist organisation.
1. Well the first 2 degrees the IPCC says will be a Nett benefit.
2. Since just breathing emits a tonne, with 2 tonnes you can exist, along with one cow for food.. No exercise also folks, heavy breathing not allowed … idiots
3. You mean the same Australia that is absorbing an extra quota of CO2 equal to over 60% of it’s emission due to increased bioproductivity alone. .. Mathematically challenged Hanna, recipient of gravy train funds wants us to think it’s a crisis (how surprising), even more suprisingly she thinks it’s somehow a challenge to keep farming going in a warmer, wetter, higher CO2 world, with cheap energy and mechanisation… say like air conditioned tractors. Does she think mine workers go out with picks and shovels istead of sitting in the cab of a nice airconditioned cab – almost fell off my chair laughing.
Earth to Hanna, please come out of the 19th century, there’s a miraculous invention called the fan, known since jesus was a boy of course, back then, fans we eunuch powered, and of course Mechanical refrigeration known since 1850. Not to mention that we have for centuries been able to work in the cool at night due to the magical light bulb, assuming of course you and your mates dont make the electricity too costly– LMAO, how dumb can it get?
80
“back then, fans we(re) eunuch powered”
Don’t give her any ideas, bobl. Sounds like her preferred option, methinks.
30
“10 to 15 million affected by mercury poisoning each year.”
But we need mercury for the new light bulbs that are going to save the Earth from pollution.
90
Check out this article on DW, aka Deutsche Welle, which is Germany’s version of the ABC. Here’s how the article opens:
Climate change is warming ocean temperature and sea levels are rising. Tornadoes are increasingly intense and there are higher storm surges, which are almost impossible to prepare for.
Look familiar?
40
Looks like a line out of ‘The Goode Family’ an animated tv series from Mike Judge.
-“Global warming increases corporate greed, taking its toll on rising food prices at the pump, feeding hate in third world countries, human rights violations, and so I ask you where are the bees? It’s up to you!”
40
Tim Flannery promoted by the Climate Change ABC News Special Coverage.
This non stop coverage of CAGW GANG GREEN garbage is getting worse.
Here’s Tim Flannery telling us this:
So Timmy baby, our vote doesn’t count, you’re smarter and better placed to lead Australia in sending money to the UNFCCC so you can get a higher paid position than you had before.
Well Timmy, you’re out of luck, because the scam is over and Australians are fed up with your junk garbage pumped out every week. You are the laughing stock of all voters, including the Greens.
241
What a great country. The kids and those who have never grown up can protest all they want, but the adults are back in charge.
150
We shall see, Franny, we shall see.
56
MV,
They are definitely adults, but just not adults that you always agree with.
72
Physically adult, almost certainly. Emotional and intellectual maturity is a moot point.
10
Maybe Timmy is suggesting that if pollies can’t be trusted, they assign all decisions to mammalologists?
90
Greens have no sense of humour and no sense of the ridiculous, so Tim the Flanbrain will be their darling for some time yet.
Look at Paul Erhlich, consistently wrong in his predictions for nearly 50 years, but still regarded as a guru/sage/leader etc. in green circles.
Call them environmental and you’d be right.
100
It seems to be more about the prediction, than about being correct.
40
BUT he gets the last laugh, because he is still making money out of it.
40
Given Timmy’s ridiculous statements, I would be surprised, if his money making wasn’t a violation of the criminal code as fraud. Would be an interesting way to test this in court. Sue him for misrepresentation, the court would then have to test the truth of the statements made in support of taking money. If upon success you can get a criminal indictment then they could all go to gaol for fraud. Lots of unfounded and fraudulent statemennts have been made by that lot. The latest lot about the bushfires and cyclones aren’t even backed up by the IPCC – gotta be an open and shut case
60
I was going to ask about that. Being that he was given a position to “provide an authoritative, independent source of information on climate change to the Australian community” And He Stated “The commission was not set up to comment on particular policies but to explain the facts.”
Which he has never stopped commenting on particular policies and his independent source of information was the same source the government had anyway.
Being that his previous statement of 2007 – Professor Flannery said a price of between $40 and $70 per tonne of carbon emitted was necessary to stem the tide of dangerous climate change.
“If it’s $70 a tonne we’ll probably (avoid) dramatic change,” he said.
Surely he had a preconceived political agenda to implement and falsely used that position to carry out his personal ambition. Is there anything in there that makes him a criminal, or just a morally bankrupt scumbag?
50
As a guvmint empolyee, he is somewhat protected from liability, there are only some instances you can sue the guvmint for their negligence (mostly in employment disputes). Th guvmint’s general liability is otherwise pretty limited, for example, if you hit a pothole, and careen off the road and paralyse yourself, you can’t sue the state for damages their unfit road caused or for negligence in not fixing it. You can’t sue your council when their clearing policy causes you house to burn down in a bushfire – you should be able, but in fact you can’t.
In the same way you should have redress over the ABC when it lies, but in fact you don’t.
What Timmy forgets is that he got sacked, and so now he DOES wear liability for the statements he uses to secure funding, and they had better be scupulously true or he can now go down for fraud.
40
So “independent source”, but still covered by government protection? What about using that influence to boost his Geothermal interest? isn’t that ICAC sort of stuff?
30
bobl:
Are you thinking that raising money for the Climate Coalition exposes him to
“false and misleading advertising” or “obtaining money under false pretences” ?
In either case I think he (or his lawyer) would claim that it was a political organisation therefore the normal political
standardspractices should apply.20
Tim’s new Climate Council has to be very careful with this.
Is it a political body, is it an educational organisation etc?
But currently they are trying to get it registered as a charity so donations are tax deductible as it states from their website:
The new charity descriptions that are available for the Climate Council are as follows:
(a) the purpose of advancing health;
(b) the purpose of advancing education;
(c) the purpose of advancing social or public welfare;
(d) the purpose of advancing religion;
(e) the purpose of advancing culture;
(f) the purpose of promoting reconciliation, mutual respect and tolerance between groups of individuals that are in Australia;
(g) the purpose of promoting or protecting human rights;
(h) the purpose of protecting the safety of the general public;
(i) the purpose of preventing or relieving the suffering of animals;
(j) the purpose of advancing the natural environment;
(k) any other purpose beneficial to the general public that may reasonably be regarded as analogous to, or within the spirit of, any of the purposes mentioned in paragraphs (a) to (j);
(l) the purpose of promoting or opposing a change to any matter established by law, policy or practice in the Commonwealth, a State, a Territory or another country (not sure if all these are in the 2013 bill)
So in the end their lawyers will have to be careful, as it could leave Tim Flannery and Will Stefen open to fraud and misleading statements that cause financial hardships. I think after his rant last Sunday, his lawyers will want to vet every speech he makes.
His only choice in the above choices is (d), in order to cover his lies.
10
Dave. Timmy would probably go for, (j)(k) and (l).
10
Australian Charities and Not For Profits Commission. (Not registered there yet).
ASIC – The company can hold property and can sue and be sued.
Generally, a not-for-profit is an organisation that does not operate for the profit, personal gain or other benefit of particular people.
…Hmmm that might be hard for him.
10
Dave –
ABC have turned the story into a blockbuster with a cast of tens of thousands, so it’s worth giving some more excerpts from your link. btw i have no doubt whatsoever the numbers are inflated:
17 Nov: ABC: Climate change rallies held around Australia, with calls for Coalition to keep carbon tax
Tens of thousand of Australians have turned out for climate change rallies across the nation, calling on the Abbott Government to keep the carbon tax.
The National Day of Climate Action was organised by activist groups including GetUp!, the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and the Australian Conservation Foundation.
Organisers say about 60,000 participated at the rallies, which were held in capital cities and more than 130 towns and regional centres.
Emergency workers played a significant role in warning about the dangers of unchecked global warming, while Labor and Greens politicians, along with climate scientists, also participated.
The Climate Council’s Tim Flannery told 30,000 people in Melbourne that Australians must make their voices heard…
Greens deputy leader Adam Bandt evoked the memory of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, while firefighters spoke of their fears of increasingly hotter days.
“There is no sceptic at the end of a fire hose,” said Peter Marshall, secretary of the United Firefighters Union.
In Brisbane, where an estimated 4,000 people came together, firefighter Dean McNulty spoke of the huge concern climate change posed to his colleagues, who battle natural disasters from the front line.
Mr McNulty says scientists were clear that global warming would make extreme weather events more frequent and severe.
“To firefighters, it is not just numbers and statistics, it is very real,” he said…
The Greens have vowed to block the legislation, and leader Christine Milne said there would be more rallies if greater action was not taken.
“Tony Abbott wants to be defined by climate denialism, and the community wants to be defined by climate activism,” she told media in Brisbane.
“This is really a showdown.”…
???In Sydney, deputy federal opposition leader Tanya Plibersek said the Government could not go backwards on climate change as global action galvanised…
“Was a trading emissions scheme working? Yes. Electricity from old brown sources of energy down, renewable up by 30 per cent in the first year of its operation,” she told the crowd.
???”Australia can’t go backwards in the face of global action.”…
Stuart Blanch from the Northern Territory Environment Centre says a price on carbon is the best way to address climate change….
A spokesman for GetUp! said Coalition MPs were invited to all the major rallies, but none responded.
The campaign has been strong on social media, with hundreds of people sharing photos and videos on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-17/thousands-rally-across-australia-for-national-day-climate-action/5097536?google_editors_picks=true
what does it say about people that they would beg for higher bills? are they employed by the taxpayers who, in effect, pay their bills? are they still living at home, at their parents’ expense?
given global action is precisely what is not happening, & given our “carbon” price was so completely over the top & the international carbon market is an abject failure, why would those attending be taken in by such lies?
80
When I was at University (back in prehistory) the ABC turned up to a “demonstration” of 7 people and with careful editing of films they turned it into a protest of 2-3 thousand students.
It was obviously pre-arranged as nothing happened until the camera crew were there and set up. I was eating lunch and watching along with some others, and wondering why anybody would be protesting to the University Authorities on something that had nothing to do with them (and which they could do nothing about). I made a point of watching theABC News that night.
There wasn’t much action until about 2,000 students left the refectories and headed for the lecture theatres etc. The ABC took general shots of the milling crowd as indicative of support, then a shot of the leader addressing his followers with a loudspeaker, followed by shot from low down showing 6 fists being raised. A final shot of the ABC commentator as the crowd dispersed in the background.
Very informative. Interesting to see them doing the same thing still, except these days I guess the camera wouldn’t linger quite so long on the girl with the big tits. These days the big tits are the ABC commentators.
100
Cell phone and personal gadgets take nice hi quality video these days,it is stunning to contrast the Presstitutes claims against Utube footage from the same event.
I think this is one reason the press doesn’t even try to hide their bias anymore.
70
Graeme back in high school we were shown a video/doco of how this media manipulation can be done, I never looked at news footage the same after that.
Another great video was a mockumentary on how insects will slowly take over the planet, it was so well done that some students were genuinely scared to the point of tears but at the end explained how the theory was flawed and taught us the virtues of skepticism.
60
That reminds me of this paragraph I wrote before the infamous day in December last year when doom was supposed to happen …
“Would you believe me if I made a wild claim that a huge, very deep hole five miles across is going to appear in the South Island of New Zealand on May 30 next year? Would it make any difference to you if I said that the May 30 date is when the ancient Martian calendar ends one cycle and starts another? …. Since I haven’t said how or why that is possible I hope you won’t just assume that I am correct. Most people need some proof, or evidence, that backs up these wild claims. Otherwise, I could say something like: ‘I’ve found a new species of apple tree that has the apples falling upwards!’ and everybody would believe me without question.”
… By the way, I very much doubt that any skeptics would have believed the hype about doom in December, precisely because they *are skeptics. They can definitely reject the crazy claims with scientific knowledge, common sense, and knowing that there is a complete lack of empirical evidence for any of it.
30
Peter at the risk of starting a big Weekend Unthreaded all I’ll say is Russell’s Teapot. 🙂
20
I have correctly applied the Precautionary Principle to this situation and I have determined that, since we cannot guarantee that Russell’s Teapot is completely harmless, and since by definition we do not know the precise location of Russell’s Teapot and cannot target it with a missile, we must save ourselves and our planet from any possible harm from Russell’s Teapot by building an enormous concrete shell 30ft thick around the entire planet.
An appropriate contribution to the UN Earth Stability Fund will be deducted from your bank accounts shortly.
Indeed it may be the first and only time the UN supports a war against “china”.
10
Should be made compulsory viewing by students (and teachers, remember Michael the R).
20
Reminds me of the days when Greenpeace protested against a wolf cull in Northern British Columbia.
For years the BC ministry of the environment has controlled the wolf population by culling. This prevents the alternating cycles of moose and wolves starving.
The CBC rocked into Fort Nelson and produced the illusion that the courageous Greenpeaceers went off into the frozen wilderness, relentlessly chasing the Ministry of Environment cullers.
In fact Paul Watson and his gang of thieves were comfortably bedded down in the Fort Nelson Hotel.
Every wolf pack has a matriarch. Standard practise is to fit this animal with a radio collar. Each wolf pack has a “Judas wolf”. This allows the ministry to locate wolf packs for counting, and also to keep total wolf population, and thereby moose population as well, relatively constant.
30
I keep pushing this type of graph, here shown for Sydney & Melbourne.
Some fire fighters might read it and relax a little.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/Heat%20Waves%20by%204.jpg
30
US was also planning to oppose govt funding, but so far no US reporting on this at all:
17 Nov: Sky News: Australia baulks at climate fund
Australia has joined Canada in rejecting a decision by Commonwealth leaders to make funds available for programs to tackle climate change.
In the final communique of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting released in Colombo on Sunday, the leaders agreed to set up a ‘green capital fund’.
But the statement noted that ‘Australia and Canada … indicated that they could not support a green capital fund at this time’…
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, who agreed to the fund in principle, said Tony Abbott and the Canadian delegate had ‘said they can’t agree to fund their contribution’.
‘There’s quite a long way to go,’ Mr Key said of the final arrangement.
‘They need to be able to demonstrate to us that it’s going to make a difference.’
Mr Key told reporters the Australian prime minister ‘does believe in climate change’.
‘But Australia is going to have to establish as a government how it will approach these international issues,’ Mr Key said.
‘We are taking the middle path, but the right path.’
New Zealand has an emissions trading scheme, but the Abbott government is in the process of repealing the former Labor government’s scheme.
Mauritius agreed to host a Commonwealth Climate Finance Skills Hub, which will be discussed in detail at the next CHOGM in Malta in 2015.
http://www.skynews.com.au/eco/article.aspx?id=925355
14 Nov: IPS: Claudia Ciobanu: U.S. Fights G77 on Most Counts at Climate Meet, Leaked Doc Shows
The U.S. delegation negotiating at the U.N. international climate change conference in Poland is pushing an agenda of minimising the role of “Loss and Damage” in the UNFCCC framework, prioritising private finance in the Green Climate Fund, and delaying the deadline for post-2020 emission reduction commitments, according to a State Department negotiating strategy which IPS has seen.
The document, which has been leaked to a pair of journalists covering the Nov. 11-22 COP in Warsaw, outlines the U.S. strategy for the negotiations to diplomats at their various embassies as well as ‘talking points’ for them to push with their respective countries before the talks began.
The paper makes it clear that, despite President Barack Obama’s progressive stances on climate issues over the past year, the U.S. continues to pose difficulties to closing an international global climate deal by strongly resisting the concept of historical responsibility for emissions and positioning itself in opposition to developing countries on the main issues at stake…
But according to the U.S. State Department position, any work on Loss and Damage should be done under the already existing framework for dealing with adaptation to climate change, not as a third, separate pillar (in addition to the two existing ones, mitigation and adaptation), as the G77+China submission requests.
“A third pillar,” says the U.S. position, “would lead the UNFCCC to focus increasingly on blame and liability which in turn could be counterproductive from the standpoint of public support for the conference.
“We are strongly in favour of creating an institutional arrangement on loss and damage that is under the Convention’s adaptation track, rather than creating a third stream of action that’s separate from mitigation and adaptation,” writes the leaked U.S. document.
The U.S. fears an increased “focus on liability” during the international negotiations on climate because that would de facto translate into an admission of historical responsibility by developed countries for emissions leading to climate change and a subsequent legal obligation to pay a price for this responsibility…
When it comes to the Green Climate Fund, meant to assist developing countries with adaptation and mitigation and on whose set-up and financing progress is expected in Warsaw, the U.S. position writes, “We’re also working to intensify our coordination in the context of the Green Climate Fund board to shape an institution that could leverage private investment more effectively than any other multilateral climate fund.”
Yet some developing countries are extremely wary of financial assistance promised by developed countries being translated into private investments as opposed to grants and aid…
***“Already in the pre-COP summit organised by Poland, one and a half days out of three were dedicated to companies which were there to present to developing countries technology which they could buy to help with mitigation,” said Rene Orellana, head of the Bolivian delegation, on the first day of the COP. “Linking markets to the financial provisions [under UNFCCC] means a diluted responsibility for developed countries.”…
http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/11/u-s-fights-g77-on-most-counts-at-climate-meet-leaked-doc-shows/
20
Odd. The wildly popular carbon tax didn’t seem to have led to an increase in popularity of Gillard when she backflipped, bowing to the overwhelming will of the AUS people who were converging on Canberra demanding that we move straight to quadruple the EU price.
They were also strangely shy about using this incredibly popular tax in their campaigning with Swan calling reports “hysterical” and “lies.” One also wonders why they wasted 10 s of $billions on “compensation” schemes for doing the population a massive service, or why there weren’t rallies of thanks from the 100,000 people freed from having to work in heavy consuming industries.
60
Jo,
Seeing the water vapour and nitrogen gas interaction really puts a new perspective to science.
20
Watched Bolta this morning. The plain talking from Ridley is what’s needed… from the Liberals. They are still caked in the emissions reduction furphy. If ocean acidification is ever going to be a problem then let’s hear the evidence for that, but at the very least the Libs should stop flogging the warming argument which is now a dead horse.
Afterwards on Meet The Press the Wongbot was still monotonously repeating the same old howlers about climate change.
She made a good point about government transparency, though. They can’t run on a platform of transparency and then give us a limited menu of issues they will be open about. Illegal immigration is not on that menu. Fortnightly summary information could be given without sacrificing individual OPSEC.
Funniest part of Meet The Press had to be the young journo chap they had to comment on political and economic issues. In the closing minute of the show the host asks some vague question about what else might be expected to result from Rudd’s resignation (or some such unprovable question about the future). The young chap suddenly gets all candid and says
“Well politics is a funny old game, there’s no telling what will happen next.”
Host: “Thanks for your insight.”
Yeah thanks, kid, great insight!
71
Well seeing as they had such large “crowds” & you would have to assume being hip & trendy GetUp types, they would have been passing the plate around for “Crowd Funding”.
I can see it now:- Uncle Tim’s benevolent fund had a real kick over the weekend ( after a “small” administrative charge by GetUp )
90
As I understand it, the average rate of ocean evaporation is 1.2 meters per year(http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/512638.html). Taking into account the surface area of the oceans (4.1 x 10^14 square meters), the density of sea water (1030 kilograms per cubic meter), and the heat of vaporization of water (2.23 x 10^6 Joules per kilogram), a back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that the energy rate required to support ocean evaporation is 3.58 x 10^16 Watts, which is a significant fraction of the rate (1.95 x 10^17 Watts) solar energy impinges on the Earth at the top of the Earth atmosphere. The energy required to evaporate the oceans is released when the water vapor condenses. But condensation takes place at altitudes removed from the Earth’s surface where the returned energy can more efficiently be radiated to space. I don’t know about you, but as far as the surface of the Earth is concerned, this process seems somewhat akin to a massive evaporative air conditioner.
100
Exactly right Reed Coray,
Willis Eschenbach has explained process in detail.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/
30
Yes, this is a point I continually make, if you want the feedback to happen, that is an increase in humidity, you have to accept a higher cycling rate for water, first you have to evaporate the extra, then you have to transport it to 3-10 km, those storm clouds in Jo’s picture have Gigajoules of potential and electrostatic energy in them. I saw a paper once that said rainfall would increase 20 percent, which I calculated would consume far more than 3W / m2 implying that the world was cooling. Some of these nutcases writing climate papers, need to learn the law of conservation of energy. I reckoned that the loss of energy due to the kinetic energy of 20% extra rain hitting the earth at terminal velocity alone was of the order 6W/m2 almost double the driving force – another green perpetual motion machine in the making
What a lot of people miss is that this extra energy we are sooooo frightened of is the equivalent of shining a small (3w) torch at the ground to give a 1/2 metre circle at midday, 80 % of which is immediately reradiated to space via the IR transparent region and then worrying that the retained 20 % (0.6 watts shining on that 1/2 m circle) is gonna somehow overheat the surface due to some mystery feedback.. it’s absurd.
Do it, go out and set up your small 3w torch, shine it on a 1/2 m circle at midday on a sunny day and measure the temperature rise as to turn it on.
40
Bobl,
The average speed (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2007/EvanKaplan.shtml) of large raindrops just before they strike the surface of the Earth is 10 meters per second. The average mass-rate of ocean evaporation is 1.6 x 10^10 kilograms per second. If all of the water evaporated from the ocean returned to the Earth’s surface as large rain drops and all of the kinetic energy contained in the falling rain were converted to Earth surface heat, then each second approximately 8 x 10^11 Joules of energy would be returned to the Earth’s surface as heat. This corresponds to 8 x 10^11 Watts. Averaged over the Earth’s surface area (both land and ocean) of 5.7 x 10^14 square meters, this equates to heat entering the surface at a rate of 0.0014 Watts per meter squared. As the nursery rhyme goes:
Where or where has all the heat gone?
Where or where can it be?
I don’t know where all the heat went;
But it’s nowhere that Trenberth can see.
20
Ok, it was from memory … but I didn’t quite do it that way, I presumed that the potential energy of the water at an average of (I think 3 km) was returned to the earth as predominately non heat energy. It has to go somewhere.
Kinetic energy into the earth isn’t returned as only heat of friction, it is also returned as drag on the orbit and lost into the gravitational system, potential energy gained from heat is not returned only as heat.
Lets see what happens when I use your numbers
PE = MGH = 1.6 e10 kg/sec x 9.8 x 3000 m = 4.8 x 10^14 J/ sec of PE or about 1 Watt per m2 of area at the surface.
raindrops using your 10 m/s & e = 1/2 x m x v2
0.5 x 1.6 e10 x 10 ^2 = 2.3 e13 J/s or 0.04 Watts per meter squared
So the loss to kinetic energy lies somewhere between 0.04 watts and 1 watt per meter squared. This explains somewhere between 1/10 th and all of the energy imbalance of 0.6W / m2 at TOA
If this loss is returned as heat then it is thermalised and lost by convection and broadband IR emission anyway, it can’t back radiated. We can essentially say all the PE is lost to the system. As I understand it climate models don’t account for the potentialisations and loss to the thermal system of this energy, it’s upper bound represents all the energy imbalance, you’d think there would be some interest.
Looking at evaporation ( which is accounted in the models, albeit probably incorrectly)
2257 + 4.18 × 1000 × 85/1000 kj = 2257 + 355 kj / kg at 15 C (2613 kj / kg)
1.6 × 10 ^ 10 × 2613000 = 4.18 e16 equivalent to
4.18e16/5.7e14 or 73 W/m2
gives a total energy requurement of
73 + 1 = 74 W/ m2
to sustain evaporation and rainfall
Now the paper I looked at claimed 20 % increased rainfall due to CO2 doubling implying an energy consumption of 0.2 x 74 or 14.8 Watts per square meter which is greater than the energy supposedly driving the warming.
Since we only have a driving force of 0.6 W per square meter no more than an increase in evaporation/ precipitation of 0.6 / 14.8 × 20 = 0.8 % can be sustained, and that’s if every last bit of the radiative imbalance were converted into rainfall which of course leaves zero energy over to warm the atmosphere and the oceans.
Kinda puts the claims about wild storms and floods into perspective
Now folks, let’s look at the other losses, eg
the loss represented by a 6 percent increase in global photosynthesis for a 20 ppm CO2 increase. Photosythesis is endothermic.
The loss due to kinetic energy of wind, including wind driven waves.
The loss due to increased irreversable chemical endothermic reactions
The energy loss from lighning
The energy loss from irreversable thermal weathering of the surface
How long do you think it would take to make up 0.6W per meter squared…
Excuse typos, composed this on my tablet.
00
Bobl,
I, like you, made many simplifying assumptions. I completely ignored the power required to raise 1.6 x 10^10 kilograms of water every second from 0 altitude to 3000 meters altitude–i.e., I ignored potential energy considerations. Note two things: First, this energy rate (1.6 x 10^10 kilograms per second times 9.8 meters per second^2 times 3000 meters = 4.7 x 10^14 Watts or approximately 0.8 Watts per square meter of Earth surface) is in addition to the energy required to convert water to water vapor. Second, the energy-rate required to raise the evaporated water from 0 to 3000 meters is considerably smaller than the energy rate required to convert the water to water vapor (approximately 63 Watts per square meter of Earth surface). In some sense the energy required to raise the water to 3000 meter altitude will be recovered in some form when the water falls back to the Earth’s surface. If there were no friction, water dropped from an altitude of 3000 meters would be traveling at a speed of approximately 242.5 meters per second when it reached the surface of the Earth. The fact that large rain drops travel at about 10 meters per second at the Earth’s surface implies that most of the potential energy has been converted to heat via friction as the drops pass through the air. But this heat is created as the rain drops fall–hence this heat is transferred to the atmosphere between 0 and 3000 meters altitude. As such, very little of this heat is transferred directly to the Earth’s surface. I took the simple, although incorrect, position that the kinetic energy of the rain immediately above the Earth’s surface would be converted to heat at the Earth’s surface. The resulting power was 0.0014 Watts per square meter. [Note: For this power you have a calculation
0.5 x 1.6 e10 x 10 ^2 = 2.3 e13 J/s or 0.04 Watts per meter squared
that doesn’t seem right to me. I get
0.5 x 1.6 e10 x 10 ^2 = 8 e12 J/s or 0.0014 Watts per meter squared. Am I missing something?]
In any event, I believe we both think AGW proponents are cavalier when it comes to analyzing energy transfer within the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system.
00
Reed,
I’ve tried doing similar calculations on the energy of global evaporation in response to a favourite claim of warmists that CO2 is so strong as a GHG it is the only thing saving us from an iceball earth. Their claim is based on Lacis et al 2010: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Lacis_etal.pdf
They say water vapour is just amplifying the effect of CO2 and CO2 starts the process by evaporating water and without the CO2 the condensing water would not be replaced. It seemed to me the implication of their theory is that almost no water would evaporate from the surface of the earth without the DWLWIR from CO2.
On that basis and using their estimates of CO2 IR, the result I calculated was that the GISS estimate of CO2 back-radiation was around 200 times too small to be responsible for the portion of evaporation they say it does.
If you can find any mistake or unfair assumptions in that calculation, or if you devise your own calculation method and get a very different result, I would like to know more about it.
It’s surprising that such seemingly complex theories on climate change espoused by such prestigious institutions as NASA can be checked by such simple calculations and found to be impossible, but so far that’s been my experience too.
00
Andrew,
On a quick review of your calculation, I have to disagree with you. You claim The global averaged daily rainfall is 990L/m^2 which I interpret to mean 990 liters of rainfall per square meter of Earth surface area each and every day. This seems to me to be too large by a factor of on the order of 500. Specifically, 990 liters is equivalent to 0.99 cubic meters. Thus a rate of 990 liters per square meter per day is the same as 0.99 cubic meters per square meter per day, or approximately one vertical meter of rainfall per day. This seems like an awful lot or rain. One source (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-is-the-Daily-Rainfall-on-Earth-and-More-Questions-From-Our-Readers-169816686.html) claims an average daily rainfall of 2 millimeters per day (0.002 meters per day), which seems a lot more realistic.
BTW, in my opinion the belief that the existence of backradiation to a surface always produces an increased surface temperature is nonsense. I can show that it is possible for backradiation and lower surface temperatures to simultaneously exist. Furthermore, using a common vacuum thermos bottle, I believe I can make a good argument that surrounding matter possessing an internal source of thermal energy with a heat-trapping gas does not guarantee an increase in the temperature of the matter. However, those calculations are too detailed and probably inappropriate for a “comment discussion” on this blog. If you’re interested in those calculations, please e-mail Joanne, show her this comment where I give her approval to send you my e-mail address, and ask Joanne to send you that address.
00
Dammit, I’ve just realised where my mistake was. Where the WP article on Precipitation says “the globally averaged annual precipitation is 990 millimetres” I misinterpreted that as an annually averaged global daily precipitation, since I was doing my calculation on daily radiation dose.
The daily average is therefore 2.7mm which is approximately the Smithsonian answer.
So it’s overstated by 365 times, not 500, but either way it’s just as fatal to the end result.
Thanks for checking, I have to go back and correct the record.
BTW, you’re completely mistaken about the heat-trapping gas, and in the same way as most Slayers are deluded. You completely misunderstand the greenhouse effect, so you’re fighting a strawman. The so-called “backradiation” is just radiation, no different, so you’re actually arguing that no radiation of any kind can lead to a higher surface equilibrium temperature of anything. The Thermos bottle is *not* analogous to the Sun-Earth system because you’re missing a Sun, the water has to be heated by an external source otherwise it is just going to cool off no matter what you do to its surroundings. I’m not saying your desired conclusion is impossible, but if you want to argue there’s no greenhouse effect (ie that H2O and CO2 do not have a net effect of increasing surface temperature) you are going to have to find a different way of arguing it, because pretending radiation does nothing to temperature is insane. For one thing you imply the earth knows the difference between energy absorbed direct from the sun versus the energy re-emitted from GHGs and does not respond thermally to the latter. Because that is so clearly insane I will not be drawn any further into discussion about it.
00
Andrew,
I am not, repeat not, a greenhouse effect slayer. I do not, repeat not, argue that there is no such thing as a greenhouse effect. In fact, I believe, without much conviction but I still believe, CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere will increase the Earth’s surface temperature. What I do argue, and can demonstrate, is that it is possible for backradiation and lower surface temperatures to exist simultaneously. If my argument is correct, it negates the stand-alone argument that “when backradiation is present, the temperature of the surface receiving the backradiation must be higher than the temperature in the absence of the backradiation.” I know this sounds impossible, but what I believe you are forgetting is the fact that the presence of material that radiates energy back to an active object (an active object is an object with an internal source of thermal energy), may also permit heat transfer away from the active object via conduction/convection. If the material that provides backradiation to the active object also provides heat transfer via conduction/convection away from the active object, then the issue of whether the temperature of the active object increases or decreases in the presence of the backradiating material boils down to which energy rate is greater (a) backradiation to the active object or (b) thermal conduction/convection away from the object.
Radiation is not, repeat not, the only way for heat to leave the Earth’s surface. It may be the only (or at least the overwhelmingly dominant) way for heat (energy) to leave the Earth/Earth atmosphere system, but I’m talking about the stand-alone claim that backradiation to the Earth’s surface warms the Earth’s surface, not backradiation to the Earth’s atmosphere warms the Earth’s atmosphere.
Furthermore, I disagree with you when you say: “so you’re actually arguing that no radiation of any kind can lead to a higher surface equilibrium temperature of anything.” I’m arguing no such thing. I’m arguing that to determine the temperature of an object, all forms of heat transfer (conduction, radiation, convection coupled with evaporation) must be considered. It is possible that inert material can be added to a system such that the rate energy is being backradiated from that inert material to the surface of an object in the system is less than the rate energy is being conducted away from the object’s surface to the inert material. When that happens, the temperature of the object will be lowered relative to its temperature in the absence of the added material.
I am not as you claim: “pretending radiation does nothing to temperature”. It does. What I’m claiming is that radiation is not the only thing that affects temperature. What is insane is to take the position that the temperature of an object can be determined solely by analyzing the radiation entering the object and that if more radiation enters the object the temperature of the object must increase.
I don’t as you say: “imply the earth knows the difference between energy absorbed direct from the sun versus the energy re-emitted from GHGs and does not respond thermally to the latter.” As you point out, that is insane. Energy is energy. But if the addition of material to a system (a) induces backradiation to an object in that system where none existed before and (b) simultaneously permits conduction/convection of energy away from that object where none existed before, then when considering the net effect of that material on the temperature of the object, all forms of energy transfer (not just radiation) must be considered.
Finally you argue that the thermos bottle example is not analogous to the sun/Earth system because I’m missing a sun. I agree I’m missing a sun; and in the sense that the sun is the source of energy, I am missing an energy source. However, what if in place of the sun I insert a heat source in the material inside the thermos bottle. It’s true that this heat source is inside the thermos where the sun is external to the Earth/Earth-atmosphere system; but at least now the contents of the thermos bottle have a heat source and hence will not “cool off” to room temperature. I strongly believe that to maintain coffee at some fixed temperature above room temperature, the rate heat will have to be injected into a CO2 thermos will be higher than the rate heat will have to be injected into a vacuum thermos bottle. If true, then the rate heat leaves the coffee in the vacuum thermos is less than the rate heat leaves the coffee in the CO2 thermos–i.e., CO2 acts to enhance the release of heat.
I close with the following contention (which is documented in a word file that I would be happy to send you): Assume we have a solid spherical object with an internal source of energy spread uniformly over the surface of the object, and the object exists in the vacuum of cold space. The object surface will eventually come to a temperature at which energy-rate-equilibrium (ERE) is established–i.e., the rate energy enters the object or any and all subportions of the object will equal the rate energy leaves the object or the subportions. The shape of the sphere is such that in isolation no radiation of any kind (back or direct) impinges on the surface of the sphere. Now surround the solid sphere with a non-touching, thin, inert (i.e., no internal source of thermal energy), concentric spherical shell. When ERE is established, the shell’s temperature will be non-zero and hence both its inner and outer surfaces will radiate energy. Some of the energy radiated from the shell’s inner surface will be directed towards and absorbed by the solid sphere. Thus, when the shell is present, backradiation to the solid sphere exists. For this case (solid sphere and shell, but no heat transfer via conduction and/or convection), the temperature of the solid sphere in the presence of the shell will be higher than the temperature of the solid sphere in the absence of the shell. Now insert a few (not many) thin highly thermally conducting rods that connect the solid sphere to the shell. Depending on the size (length, area) and thermal conduction properties of the conducting rods, the ERE temperature of the solid sphere can be made to be less than the ERE temperature of the solid sphere in isolation. This will be possible if the conduction heat current from the solid sphere to the shell via the connecting rods is sufficiently high. Note that even in the presence of the connecting rods, the shell’s temperature will be non-zero (in fact, the shell’s ERE temperature with conducting rods will be the same as the shell’s ERE temperature without conducting rods–i.e., the rate of backradiation energy to the solid sphere will at most only be slightly changed by the addition of the connecting rods) and thus the shell’s inner and outer surfaces will radiate energy. Some of the energy radiated by the inner surface of the shell will be directed towards and absorbed by the solid sphere. Thus, when the rods are present, we have backradiation to the solid sphere and possibly lower solid sphere surface temperature. Bottom line, I contend that a situation can be created where backradiation and lower solid sphere surface temperatures exist simultaneously.
00
Stephan Lewandowsky seems to have reached new depths of unsubstantiated claims. At the Conversation he wrote:-
Steve McIntyre tracked down the original data. Out of 137 respondents to a questionnaire precisely 0 believed both. The reason for a correlation was explained in a subsequent posting:-
This posting – “Another Absurd Lewandowsky Correlation” – investigated the correlation in the “hoax” paper between those who rejected the strongly-supported hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS and those who believed “US Government created AIDS”. This time there were two who agreed with both – the same two “fake” responses that agreed with every conspiracy theory, firmly rejected climatology along with rejecting other scientific hypotheses that have strong evidence. There appears to be no genuine responses out of 1145 that support the AIDS questions.
It gets worse.
The title of the hoax paper began “NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax“.
There were 3 out of 1145 responses that supported both. In fact they supported all 13 conspiracy theories. This 3 included the fake responses above. With 13 responses there are 312 possible combinations of inferring if A is true then B is also true. There were no questioning of respondents, so even 3 out of 1145 respondents were genuine, there is no basis for making this claim. This I lay out in more detail here.
Stephan Lewandowsky and Klaus Oberauer, in defending their “hoax” paper called the use of Excel for statistical analysis “drilling into noise”. They further said that “number-crunching ability that’s unaccompanied by informed judgment can often do more harm than good.” I had earlier used Excel pivot tables to show the very things that Steve McIntyre is now demonstrating.
Claims by Lewandowsky (for he is the clear ringleader)that those who question the climate hegemony should be viewed as nutters, is an attempt block any delving into either a CAGW hypothesis for which there is no evidence and policy that is not only useless, but positively harmful. He does this on the basis of zero or near-zero evidence. He then questions the competence and judgement of who expose this fact.
Any complex data set may, to some extent or other, confirm any number of incompatible theories, or none. A number of different statistical methods are needed to draw out if a particular interpretation clearly stands out. Given that all of us like to defend our own interpretation, getting the best results that requires pluralism.
80
Oh, what a lovely view.
And those clouds, the conveyors of heat energy around the globe. And an essential for human life too, and with the human population getting on for 10 billion, and each of us is about 55% water, that’s an awful lot of stuff we have in those many bodies.
Of course humans also burn many types of fuels and all of these release yet more water into the atmosphere. I wonder if any of these things have an effect on the biosphere we inhabit?
I’m sure lots of research must have been done on it by someone somewhere…
30
Err…..The estimated world population as of 16 Nov was 7.2 Billion, so you’re out by 40%. http://www.geohive.com/earth/population_now.aspx
50
You are correct.
But in mitigation the last time I looked (IIRC a few of years ago) estimations were of 9 billion for 2013 and still rising. The wiki entry on it looks almost comforting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-Population-1800-2100.svg
30
Let’s hope the Greens don’t see this. They might want to push for a water vapour tax.
40
They are already vapourous enough thank you.
30
Reed Coray @ 28,
Yep, even Kevin Trenberth gave it as the greatest heat loss from the surface at 46% in the 4AR (and radiation not escaping directly to space due GHG as rather small). I’ve not checked the draft 5AR.
Seems to me that a small percentage increase in evapotranspiration would result in a substantial negative feedback but no one seems to be interested.
70
“…a small percentage increase in evapotranspiration would result in a substantial negative feedback but no one seems to be interested.”
Is exactly what I’ve wondered for a while.
60
It is.
Plus the much higher albedo of low level clouds , the reflective properties of low level clouds which reflects a lot more solar visible and infra red [ heat ] spectrum radiation back into space.
It only needs about a 2% to 3 % change in low level global cloud cover to make the difference between a warming planet and a cooling planet. And the evidence is that the relative humidity in the troposphere has increased over the last couple of decades and the relative humidity of the Stratosphere has fallen slightly.
An excellent description in layman’s language on clouds and the effect of different cloud types on the global temperatures along with a very comprehensive range of other climate data and graphs can be found on [ Norwegian ?] Prof Ole Humlum’s Climate4you site.
The links on this site also provide some very interesting reading on various exploration and historical episodes from the past as well.
The third graph down on the Climate and clouds [ LH menu ] section of the site shows the changes in the atmospheric water vapour content at different levels and the way in which that WV content has changed since 1948.
Following the end of WW2, peace time weather research, [ we only had a “climate” in those days which explained why it got hot and cold and rained and dried out, how, when and where you lived ] started using balloon based atmospheric sounding technology to start to measure the various attributes including WV of the upper levels of the atmosphere.
I remember reading about some of this early work in the National Geographic back in the 1950’s
CO2 effects are miniscule compared to the impact of changes in atmospheric WV content and those change’s effects on the trends of the global climate.
50
18 Nov: Economic Times, India: Urmi A Goswami: Impasse in Warsaw climate talks as developing nations stay united
A deal at Warsaw will, therefore, require the developed countries to come up with meaningful measures to deal with climate change in the period up to 2020.
Several industrialised countries including Japan and Australia have, however, gone back on their commitments to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases for the pre-2020 period.
***Funding for developing countries to tackle climate change is virtually not available…
Two years on, there has been little progress on the issues raised by the vulnerable countries. “The pre-2020 period is about implementation and greater efforts to reduce emissions, but there is no action or talk about this. Instead, industrialised countries only want to talk about what to do in post-2020 agreement,” a senior G-77 negotiator said…
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/et-cetera/impasse-in-warsaw-climate-talks-as-developing-nations-stay-united/articleshow/25963220.cms
20
Sounds like it’s going too well so far. Can we not persuade more countries to ‘reschedule’ their commitments?
20
17 Nov: UK Guardian: Climate change pledges: rich nations face fury over moves to renege
Typhoon Haiyan raises fear over global warming threat as Philippines leads attack on eve of key talks
Developing nations have launched an impassioned attack on the failure of the world’s richest countries to live up to their climate change pledges in the wake of the disaster in the Philippines…
The diplomat, on the sixth day of a hunger strike in solidarity for those affected by Haiyan, including his own family, told the Observer: “We are very concerned. Public announcements from some countries about lowering targets are not conducive to building trust. We must acknowledge the new climate reality and put forward a new system to help us manage the risks and deal with the losses to which we cannot adjust.”
Munjurul Hannan Khan, representing the world’s 47 least affluent countries, said: “They are behaving irrationally and unacceptably. The way they are talking to the most vulnerable countries is not acceptable. Today the poor are suffering from climate change. But tomorrow the rich countries will be. It starts with us but it goes to them.”
Recent decisions by the governments of Australia, Japan and Canada to downgrade their efforts over climate change have caused panic among those states most affected by global warming, who fear others will follow as they rearrange their priorities during the downturn…
When the highest-level talks start at the summit on Monday, due to be attended by representatives from 195 countries, including energy secretary Ed Davey, the developing world will seek confirmation from states such as Britain that they will not follow the path of Japan and others. David Cameron’s comments this weekend in which he backed carbon emission cuts and suggested that there was growing evidence of a link between manmade climate change and disasters such as Typhoon Haiyan, will inevitably be used to pressure others to offer similar assurances.
The developing world also wants the rich western nations to commit to establishing a compensation scheme for future extreme weather events, as the impact of global warming is increasingly felt. And they want firm signals that rich countries intend to find at least $100bn a year by 2020 to help them to adapt their countries to severe climate extremes…
China and 132 nations that are part of the G77 block of developing countries have expressed dismay that rich countries had refused to discuss a proposal for scientists to calculate emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Ambassador Jose Antonio Marcondes de Carvalho of Brazil, who initially proposed the talks, said: “We were shocked, very much surprised by their rejection and dismissal. It is puzzling. We need to understand why they have rejected it.
“Developing countries are doing vastly more to reduce their emissions than Annexe 1 [rich] countries.”…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/16/climate-change-pledges-rich-nations
developing nations should simply walk out. suckered into this CAGW scam by the promise of $$$, they were willing to go along with the scam, wasting millions on attending these endless talkfests, while they could have been taking care of business at home.
30
“Developing countries are doing vastly more to reduce their emissions than Annexe 1 [rich] countries.”…
Oh dear, maybe the champagne socialist and limousined lefties of the Grauniad readership should help out by donating all their money.
20
17 Nov: WUWT: Climate and Human Civilization over the last 18,000 years
Guest essay by Andy May
You might just be able to see that the middle graph (Carbon Dioxide concentration) slight lags the temperature by about 800 years on average. This suggests that the changes in temperature might cause the Carbon Dioxide changes rather than the other way around…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/17/climate-and-human-civilization-over-the-last-18000-years/#comment-1477930
i posted the following at WUWT & suggested someone send the graph to Carnahan; maybe the thread itself should be sent to the developing nations G77 reps in Warsaw. if lord monckton is there, perhaps he could spread it about!
15 Nov: Bloomberg: Alex Morales: U.S., EU, Reject Brazilian Call for Climate Equity Metric
“Temperature is a lagging indicator and does not show up until well after emissions have occurred,” U.S. envoy Kim Carnahan told delegates on Nov. 11…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-15/u-s-eu-reject-brazilian-call-for-climate-equity-metric.html
10
CO2 is more soluble in colder water than warmer water (simple empirical lab results)
This means that as the temps rise slightly, the oceans exhale CO2 (since some of it won’t remain in solution in warmer water)
This process takes ~800-1000 years on an oceanic scale
10
How do you know this?
00
Sunrise through the appropriate greenhouse gas is always beautiful, whether it’s Australia or America.
Well, actually condensed greenhouse gas! But we won’t quibble over the small details. 😉
Things like that are one of natures little gifts that say, “Have a great day!”
20
heard the last call-in part of this, which is not on the audio at the link.
99% of scientists (not even climate scientists) agree it’s real, says a guest. Cleary doesn’t dispute the claim. after a single caller – from what i heard – complains they’ve talked all nite about this subject, Cleary & guest spend inordinate time bemoaning how people don’t believe the scientists etc; Cleary bemoans time is gone when people believed the priest & the teacher:
AUDIO: ABC Sunday Night Religion with John Cleary: The Issue: Faith and Climate Change
Around Australia today thousands of people have gathered to call for increased action in the cause of climate change. It marks the end of a week where from the tragedy of Typhoon Hiayan in the Philippines, through to the global politics of the UN Warsaw Conference, climate has been at the forefront of the news.
Just a week ago Australia’s former Prime Minister, John Howard speaking in London suggested that for some Climate Change was something akin to a religion.
This remark was not meant to be complimentary. Religion was used here as illustrative of blind faith triumphing over evidence and rationality. It is fuelled by observations that for some, Environmentalism, does have elements of nature worship and animist paganism, running counter to Christianity.
Paradoxically this kind of ‘religion’ argument is also deployed by supporters of climate change against the climate change deniers. They argue that for many years, fundamentalist Christians have been associated with the idea that since God gave us charge of the planet, we were free to exploit, until God decided otherwise; and that would probably herald the End Times, anyway, so there was no need for us to take action…
In this week’s Issue, we take a look at faith and climate Change. Are religions part of the problem or the solution?
GUESTS
Matthew Sleeth, founder of Blessed Earth
Steve Bradbury, director of the Micah Centre, set up across churches to keep the government on track with the Millenium Goals
Miriam Pepper, founding member of the Uniting Church’s ecology network, Uniting Earthweb
http://www.abc.net.au/sundaynights/stories/s3892730.htm
30
re ABC religion comment:
for years, the CAGW meme has mocked creationist evangelicals/fundamentalists as CAGW deniers in much the same way they mocked Big Oil; wrongfully – in both cases – as it turned out when you did the research:
13 Nov: PlainView Daily Herald: Jonathan Petty: Lowe challenges listeners on climate change issues
Wayland Baptist University students, faculty and staff were challenged by guest speaker Ben Lowe during the university’s fourth annual Creation Care Week. Lowe, founder of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, was on campus to speak about taking care of God’s creation.
The author of “Green Revolution: Coming Together to Care for Creation,” Lowe was on campus Tuesday and Wednesday interacting with students and visiting classes to discuss climate change…
Lowe majored in environmental studies at Wheaton College where he helped organize the school’s first national Climate Change Summit…
http://www.myplainview.com/news/article_c2b69cc2-4ccd-11e3-b8e6-0019bb2963f4.html
Young Evangelicals for Climate Action: Who we are
Senior Advisor:
Rev. Dr. Jim Ball is Executive Vice-President for Policy and Climate Change at the Evangelical Environmental Network, the author of Global Warming and the Risen LORD, the architect of the “What Would Jesus Drive” educational campaign, and the key organizer and national spokesperson for the Evangelical Climate Initiative. Jim has testified before Congress and appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America, Fox, CNN, and NPR. He has been featured in the New York Times, and honored by Rolling Stone magazine as one of their environmental “Warriors and Heroes,” and by Time magazine as one of its climate change “innovators.”
ALLIES
The Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) is the organizational sponsor of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action and is a ministry dedicated to equipping, inspiring, discipling, and mobilizing God’s people in their efforts to care for God’s creation. EEN publishes Creation Care Magazine and also sponsored the Evangelical Climate Initiative in 2006, which included over 300 senior evangelical leaders across the United States. CreationCare.org…
***350.org is building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. Their campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions are led from the bottom up by thousands of volunteer organizers in over 188 countries…
http://www.yecaction.org/about/who-we-are/
8 Nov: Huffington Post: Jim Wallis: A Problem with the Climate in Texas
(Christian leader for social change; Author, ‘On God’s Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn’t Learned About Serving the Common Good’)
In Texas, the State Board of Education will recommend new textbooks for all its students–and because it has such a large population, what they decide could determine what students in other states learn about science. There are several ideologues submitting textbook critiques to the board and their reviews will factor into each book’s overall score and likelihood of being approved by the school board. These ideologues could block the use of textbooks that teach the reality of climate change for the whole country’s public school students.
Climate science is being attacked by deniers who want to sow seeds of doubt as we try to educate our children about how our way of life — including our fossil fuel habit — is affecting God’s earth through climate change. Children, the ones who will most be affected by climate change, are the ones who most need to how to combat it…
One such leader is Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and professor at Texas Tech University. Hayhoe is also an evangelical and married to a pastor. She has been a leading voice in both the scientific community and the church, calling for action on climate change. For Hayhoe, action comes not from guilt over past behavior, but out of love for God and God’s people. Hayhoe writes in her book, A Climate for Change, “Using our God-given wisdom to comprehend the climate change issue and making decisions that we believe will help the poor and disadvantaged certainly fall within the attitude of Christ in us, Christ through us, and Christ toward others. And we believe that making these choices is a loving thing to do.”
And many evangelicals — particularly young adults — would agree. In a recently commissioned survey by Sojourners, we found that 60 percent of evangelicals acknowledge the reality of climate change. Climate deniers are a minority, not the majority that they often claim to be…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-wallis/a-problem-with-the-climat_b_4239973.html
Wallis is so obnoxious. “Climate deniers are a minority” – what the hell does that mean, Wallis?
30
Look at all that pollution! We should do something about it.
30
TO YESTERDAY’S RIGHTEOUS PROTESTORS, PLUS THE RIGHTEOUS JOHN CLEARY AT ABC, HIS GUESTS & ALL THE RELIGIOUS GROUPS STILL PUSHING THE CAGW SCAM:
17 Nov: ThisIsMoneyUK: Adam Uren: Energy bills have risen at EIGHT times the rate of earnings in the last three years
The charity has found that the ‘Big Six’ suppliers have increased their gas and electricity prices by on average 36 per cent since October 2010, during which time earnings have risen by a measly 4.4 per cent.
Prices have also easily outstripped the (FAKE) rate of inflation as well, almost four times the 10.2 per cent increase in the last three years…
Energy firms have shown no sign of putting a stopper on rises either, with recent announcements seeing rises of up to 10.4 per cent set to come in this winter, and Citizens Advice fears that people are racking up serious debts to pay for their winter energy bills…
Chief executive Gillian Guy said: ‘Enormous escalations in energy prices are creating a desperate situation in many households.
‘People find they do not have enough money coming in to pay for everyday essentials as increases in daily costs are outstripping low rises in earnings.
‘As we head into winter, and the latest price rises begin to kick in, more and more people are likely to reach crisis point as they struggle to heat their homes and feed their families.
‘People should not have to get into debt in order to have a warm home. Energy companies and the Government need to look at how they can reduce the pressure energy bills are putting on people’s finances.’…
***Ms Guy thinks green levies on energy companies should instead be raised via taxation to make it fairer on those struggling to stay afloat.
She said: ‘It’s absolutely essential that families on low incomes and pensioners get the necessary help to stay warm so I urge the Government not to cut the support that is currently available.
‘Levies are adding an unfair financial burden to poorer households. Paying for these costs through taxation would be a much fairer approach and would avoid low income households funding.’
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-2508782/Energy-bills-risen-EIGHT-times-rate-average-earnings.html
10
I have heard an argument articulated in NZ (where else) that individuals should pay their power bill in the form of an income related consumption levy. If this particular bridge is crossed then I imagine there’s no reason why the same redistributive reasoning couldn’t be applied to food and fuel.
As Lisa Minelli once was reported to say upon leaving NZ: ‘will the last person to leave turn out the lights’
30
You could get this next.
The electricity bill comes with a comparison of your bill to your neighbors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/science/earth/31compete.html?_r=0
10
***As much as two-thirds of the Department for Energy and Climate Change’s budget is gobbled up by decommissioning nuclear waste. TO THE CAGW RIGHTEOUS: ISN’T IT IRONIC???
15 Nov: ThisIsMoneyUK: Rachel Rickard Straus: Taxpayers’ money scattered ‘like confetti’: How two-thirds of the government’s energy budget is guzzled by nuclear waste projects
Nuclear waste projects are years behind schedule and hundreds of millions of pounds over budget
Budget has jumped to £1.9billion in the last year alone
MPs warn of an ‘appalling waste of public money’
***As much as two-thirds of the Department for Energy and Climate Change’s budget is gobbled up by decommissioning nuclear waste – a staggering £1.9billion in the last year alone.
But at a time when every penny spent on energy and climate change costs is being counted, projects to decommission nuclear waste are years behind schedule and going hundreds of millions of pounds over budget, a report seen by This is Money reveals…
Britain has an expensive legacy of nuclear waste, left over from a post-war era in which little thought was given to how nuclear weapons would be decommissioned.
Successive governments have failed to deal with the waste, the vast majority of which is at Sellafield in Cumbria, leaving current taxpayers facing a bill that has reached £67billion and is rising…
The job of decontaminating the Sellafield facility has been entrusted to a private company for the past five years – Nuclear Management Partners.
But a new report by KPMG exposes a litany of rising costs, missed deadlines and poor management…
One project – Separation Area Ventilation – which was initially estimated to cost £120million and be completed by June is now expected to cost £229million and not be completed for another three years. This alone marks an extra cost of £109million and a 92.3 per cent increase in scheduled deadline.
The report also warns that Sellafield projects are being managed in the interests of shareholders – not taxpayers. It is ‘driven by the pursuit of value for its shareholders,’ the report states. ‘This is not aligned with Nuclear Decommissioning Authority objectives under current incentive structures.’…
***The panel of MPs expressed surprise that the damning KPMG report had not been shared with them until the day of the evidence session, nor was it shared with the National Audit Office. Indeed the MPs only got hold of the report as a result of a Freedom of Information request…
???But Stephen Lovegrove argued that renewing the contract was still the best option. ‘We felt that, despite the poor performance on a number of the projects on the Sellafield site, there is a lot of other good work going on in Sellafield,’ he said. ‘Looking at the alternative courses that we could have taken in discussion with the NDA, we felt that the best likelihood of achieving our outcomes and value for money was to renew the contract.’…
Chief executive of the NDA John Clarke explained the organisation’s decision to renew the contract…
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2507159/Nuclear-decommissioning-budget-scattered-like-confetti-warn-MPs.html
10
I am currently listening to the debate in Federal Parliament about introducing the removal of the “Carbon Tax” and “carbon pollution”. Where is Nick Minchin when we need him? Why can’t we find one intelligent politician who has the intestinal fortitude to answer all the stock talking points being parroted by the Labor member now speaking?
Yes I understand the “tactical” thrust of the Abbott Govt. in not confronting the issue directly.
Anyone who has followed your blog and Anthony Watts blog for some time must understand the flaw in this strategy. It will only lead to accusations of not being truthful to the Australian people when the whole proposal of CO2 being a pollutant is eventually seen by the majority to be demonstrably false. Can we not educate someone like Malcolm Turnbull and convince him of the foolishness of trying to control climate by reducing carbon dioxide emissions? (I have written to him about this but I don’t think my arguments were compelling – if in fact he actually read what I wrote – you might have a better chance :-).
Please keep up the good work!
40
Bolt has a thread mocking the “stop climate change” placard being held by one of the pro-carbon-tax “protestors”. the re-branding of CAGW as “climate change” should not have been allowed to stand, because it has led to such idiocy. who pushes such a ridiculous meme:
“stop climate change” is Greenpeace’s top campaign story:
Greenpeace Campaigns: Stop climate change
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/
European Free Alliance/Greens in the European Parliament:
StopClimateChange.net
http://www.stopclimatechange.net/
April 2011: David Suzuki Foundation: 10 ways you can help stop climate change
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/publications/resources/2011/10-ways-you-can-help-stop-climate-change/
Aug 2013: ABC: The Drum: Can social change stop climate change?
By Kearnes and Kuch
(Matthew Kearnes is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales where he lectures on the ‘Politics of Climate Change’… Declan Kuch is a Research Fellow in the School of Law at the University of New South Wales.)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-21/kearneskuch—climate/4902334
30 Oct: Time Mag: Obama to Hecklers: “That’s the Wrong Rally!”
“Mr. President! (Inaudible)! Stop climate change! For our generation! Stop the pipeline!” the group shouted in unison.
“Okay, we’re talking about healthcare today, but we will,” Obama said. The group was met with boos as it continued to chant…
http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/30/obama-to-hecklers-that-is-the-wrong-rally/
unbelievable!
20
this is a tawdry little CAGW saga. i posted about this bank at one time because it needed a “bail-in”:
Wikipedia: The Co-operative Bank
In March 2013 the bank reported losses of £600m. In May Moody’s downgraded its credit rating by six notches to junk and the chief executive Barry Tootell resigned.
Over the weekend of 15–16 June 2013 negotiations between the Co-operative Group and its regulator the Prudential Regulation Authority culminated in reports that the Bank had a shortfall in its capital of about £1.5 billion, and that this would be filled by a procedure known as a “bail-in” scheme…
Ethical Policy
***The Co-operative Bank operates an Ethical Policy which excludes the provision of any banking services to businesses which take part in certain business activities or sectors. These include a commitment not to finance “the manufacture or transfer of armaments to oppressive regimes” or “any business whose core activity contributes to global climate change, via the extraction or production of fossil fuels”. The bank estimates that it has declined finance totalling in excess of £1bn since the policy was introduced in 1992…
The Policy only applies to the balance sheet of The Co-operative Bank…
In June 2005, the bank closed the account of a Christian evangelical group (Christian Voice) because of its standpoint on homosexuality, specifically the group’s “discriminatory pronouncements on grounds of sexual orientation”. They said the group was “incompatible with the position of the Co-operative Bank, which publicly supports diversity and dignity”. Christian Voice said the bank was discriminating against it on religious grounds. Gay Times subsequently selected the Co-operative Bank for its Ethical Corporate Stance Award…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Co-operative_Bank
well…
17 Nov: UK Mirror: Former Co-op Bank boss in drugs confession: Job pressure drove me to ketamine, cocaine and crystal meth
The Rev Paul Flowers, who is also a Methodist minister, last night said the pressure of his job and a family tragedy drove him to buy crack cocaine, crystal meth and ketamine…
The former Co-op Bank chairman who oversaw the organisation’s near collapse has been caught using hard drugs…
Text messages also prove that Flowers was buying and taking drugs in the days surrounding his testimony to the Treasury Committee on November 6…
After his grilling by MPs on how his bank had managed to lose £700 million in six months Flowers, who is gay, headed back to Manchester to “get wasted” with friends.
He boasts in another text how his plans for a party were “turning into a two-day, drug -fuelled gay orgy”…
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/rev-paul-flowers-drugs-confession-2801064
18 Nov: UK Mirror: Co-op bank ex-boss Paul Flowers framed and shamed as a secret drug-taker
The 63-year-old minister was in hiding last night, possibly abroad, as he faced a police quiz over his use of crystal meth, crack cocaine and ketamine
It was filmed earlier this month – just days after he was grilled in Parliament about disastrous £700million losses at the Co-op bank, which prides itself on its “ETHICAL” policies…
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/co-op-bank-ex-boss-paul-flowers-2803420
Co-Operative Group: Sustainability Report 2012
pdf. Climate Change 1.0MB
Context
Climate change is widely regarded as humanity’s greatest challenge.
If left unchecked, global atmospheric temperature is forecast to rise between 1°C and 6.4°C by the end of this century, severely disrupting the economic and ecological systems on which we rely. We recognised the need to act on climate change long before most businesses. For example, since 1998, The Co-operative Bank has declined finance for the extraction or production of fossil fuels…
Our overall strategy for addressing climate change includes energy efficiency, renewable energy, carbon offsetting, the provision of sustainable finance and lobbying to influence public policy.
Climate change is a major focus of our Ethical Plan (page 101)…
http://www.co-operative.coop/corporate/ethics-and-sustainability/sustainability-report/ecological-sustainability/
u have to laugh!
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18 Nov: Australian: AAP: Nick Perry: Govt could be stuck with climate building
The headquarters of the former climate change department has come under fire again in parliament, after it was revealed it would cost as much to ditch the building as it would to hold onto it.
The fancy digs in Canberra’s hip New Acton region have been a magnet for criticisms by coalition MPs, who have painted it as a symbol of Labor waste on climate change bureaucracy.
The former Labor government has been blasted for spending $20,000 on coffee machines and leaving dozens of work terminals vacant in the modern complex…
When asked by Liberal Senator Anne Ruston on Monday what the penalty would be for terminating the $150 million lease on the building, the environment department had a sobering response.
“I understand it’s in the order of $150 million,” chief operating officer Dianne Carlos told a senate estimates hearing on Monday.
Senator Ruston said taxpayers had been lumped with a “green lemon”, and criticised Labor for locking in a 15-year lease at above average rental prices.
“Labor effectively left taxpayers a $150 million bill for a lease taxpayers do not need,” she said in a statement…
The former department is saving money in some regards.
(LOL)The bulk of envelopes, business cards and other stationery branded with the Climate Change Department logo are still being used, despite the department being scrapped by the Abbott government…
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-news/govt-could-be-stuck-with-climate-building/story-fn3dxiwe-1226762616685
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” spending $20,000 on coffee machines”. Soya decaff latte machines don’t come cheap, you know.
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I’m deeply shocked!
I find it absolutely disgusting and despicable that Julie Bishop, the current Foreign Minister in this Abbott Government, barely in office for less than 3 Months now, found a way to go back in time more than 3 years to spy on a valued and trusted friend that the Government of that time was so friendly with. This is utterly reprehensible that the Rudd Government of the day could be slimed because of this time travel that the current Government has seemingly perfected.
I expect the Kevin Rudd and his foreign minister at that time, Stephen Smith, should both come out and condemn not only the current foreign minister, but Tony Abbott as Prime Minister, who quite obviously approved this act of time travel!
The ABC is totally justified in dropping this at the feet of the Abbott Government. How dare they do this so soon after assuming Office!
Tony.
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Tony I am shocked too, the last government were the time travelers, their thoughts and policies, their words and behaviour were 1930 ties Marxist nonsense. The idiots thought that lying, bullying and media control would see them firmly ensconced in control of Australia.
Academia the so called elite, the plethora of left wing bleeding heart journos and the stacking of the judiciary would see to their protection as icons and protected species.
Strange how invention can get in the way of decades long planning of the revolution, simple little things like computers and the internet, bypassing the feeding of the chooks. They did try hard to control information, I think the NBN may have been a try at control of the internet.
Sadly for them their business sense was about as clever as a box of hammers, ensuring the internet remains free of tampering will ensure freedom of thought and speech. Regards
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My son linked to a news story about the Hornsby cyclone today, one of his friends left the following comment.
Getting sick of people who claim these things have never happened before, I posted the following:
The first two quotes come from wiki,the info for 1904 I found on Trove. People that make statements about weather over time without checking the facts first are really starting to s!*t me.
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