A bike used to transport coal for domestic use in China.
The death tally: Real pollution kills 5 million people annually, CO2 saves 500 million with extra crops.
The problem: The poor lack cheap clean electricity.
The groupthink solution: Restrict coal consumption, reduce “emissions” (and make electricity more more expensive).
What do countries with low air pollution do? They burn coal. (75% of Australian electricity comes from coal.)
What do people who care about the poor do: A) Copy success, or B) Start a carbon market?
Some people are conflating issues here.
New research shows that more than 5.5 million people die prematurely every year due to household and outdoor air pollution. More than half of deaths occur in two of the world’s fastest growing economies, China and India.
Power plants, industrial manufacturing, vehicle exhaust and burning coal and wood all release small particles into the air that are dangerous to a person’s health. New research, presented today at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), found that despite efforts to limit future emissions, the number of premature deaths linked to air pollution will climb over the next two decades unless more aggressive targets are set.
“Air pollution is the fourth highest risk factor for death globally and by far the leading environmental risk factor for disease,” said Michael Brauer, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health in Vancouver, Canada. “Reducing air pollution is an incredibly efficient way to improve the health of a population.”
In India wood and dung fires are the problem
In India, a major contributor to poor air quality is the practice of burning wood, dung and similar sources of biomass for cooking and heating. Millions of families, among the poorest in India, are regularly exposed to high levels of particulate matter in their own homes.
So we should stop that with what — is that less industrial coal power?
“India needs a three-pronged mitigation approach to address industrial coal burning, open burning for agriculture, and household air pollution sources,” said Chandra Venkataraman, professor of Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, in Mumbai, India.
In China the problem is coal (no matter what’s wrong, the answer is always “less coal”):
In China, burning coal is the biggest contributor to poor air quality. Qiao Ma, a PhD student at the School of Environment, Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, found that outdoor air pollution from coal alone caused an estimated 366,000 deaths in China in 2013.
Does the vague phrase “burning coal” mean power stations, or home combustion:
Ma also calculated the expected number of premature deaths in China in the future if the country meets its current targets to restrict coal combustion and emissions through a combination of energy policies and pollution controls. She found that air pollution will cause anywhere from 990,000 to 1.3 million premature deaths in 2030 unless even more ambitious targets are introduced.
“Our study highlights the urgent need for even more aggressive strategies to reduce emissions from coal and from other sectors,” said Ma.
Apparently in rural China people commonly use coal raw in unvented stoves. The pic at the top is a bike used to transport coal.
Vague phrasing and the anti-coal campaign stop researchers from seeing that while the problem is coal, the answer is also coal. Ultra super critical industrial coal burns hot and can be clean.
What’s more important — their pride or millions of the poor…
Image: Wikimedia — Brian Kelley
As the late George Carlin pointed out, the Metrosexual Latte-sippers, who push carbon trading, windmills, and solar panels, dont care about people dying in other places, because of severe air polution.
They only care about their own little private habitat, and they don’t want to be inconvenienced by people talking about poor foreigners dying at an early age because they don’t have a reliable power supply.
I will see if I can find the clip.
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It’s pretty clear that, as with the global warming industry, all the charities professing to help the poor are doing nothing more than prolonging poverty to the maximum extent, so that they can keep running charities. Every day I will read of another ‘noble’ creation to help the poor with water quality, sewerage, lighting etc, but all of these devices are things that would be spurned by modern civilisation. Everything is designed to maintain the status quo.
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Socialists always pass laws and introduce practices based on theory only – not facts. This ‘social engineering’ replaces common sense with political double talk.
Common sense is evolutionary, sustains life, and takes thousands, even millions, of years to evolve through natural selection.
‘Social engineering’ destroys life and living standards in a few short years……….. until further evolution replaces it and takes over again.
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These are all very highly educated people – of course they are not going to introduce anything which would work them out their cushy little jobs!
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Were you looking for this one Rereke?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4
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Gold
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Thanks Bulldust,
I have spent most of the day, not being able to find it, outside of a compendium of monologues.
00
These days, highly educated people are debt slaves who owe a million on a house mortgage, student loans, a car loan, the list goes on.
After meeting repayments, they can barely have enough disposable income to turn on a heater in their homes, or afford to refuel their cars and go out to dinner at a fast food restaurant.
This kind of structure in society is the proven method to stop people emitting CO2. Once they become fully fledged debt slaves, they are very careful about lighting or turning on the slightest electrical appliance and so or risk not meeting their endless repayments which might end up with them losing their home and so on…
Like those in the third world, they are owned like debt slaves by private bankers and global central banks.
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Bruce J you say “These are all very highly educated people – of course they are not going to introduce anything which would work them out their cushy little jobs!”
That is not correct…. These highly educated debt slaves are not going to anything that is going to endanger their credit rating from Moody’s or StaNdard and PoOrs etc…
These days the sophisticated debt slave is only interested in maintaining their credit rating. 🙂
31
in another aspect……the tantalising psychology of the modern debt slave is that when petrol cannot be afforded for the SUV, so that an entire collage of finely quilted debt repayments, student loans etc can be met, a special ‘step 2’ is mobilised amongst many in the same category of ‘step 2’..
Steo 2. In order to hide the fact that petrol for the SUV or electricity to heat/cool the home cannot be afforded due to the said repayments, a flash racing bike is purchased on a credit card and everyone is suitably informed that the reason for the racing bike is to save the planet by riding the bike to work to a cushy job, and so on… 🙂
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I use debt or someone some else’s savings to my own advantage. Banks are my friends not enemies.
Sorry but very difficult to read what you said, may I say even more forcefully a complete hogwash dribble.
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Yes well don’t come to me complaining about sulfur dioxide then. I am off for a ride on my racing bike now. Some of us have to keep up appearances..
00
You mean CO2?
I cycle on regular basis and have still many complains about sulphur dioxide
10
So spot on.
I actually blew a relationship having this discussion. A guy at a party my ex was holding wanted to talk AGW and despite her forbidding me to engage, I did. Like many of us I just couldn’t listen to the garbage any longer.
So I put it to him that when all is said and done his opposition to the normal development of the “third world” was mostly about his little sprogs being able to be assured of their first world lifestyle. To my amazement he happily admitted that was the case. I of course called him a racist $#@%^ …. as you do…
And that was the end of that relationship *sigh*…. but what I have learned since is that his position which surprised me at the time, was the unabashed position of almost everyone I subsequently discussed it with… truly amazing and pretty sickening.
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Yes,
I once had a discussion with a devoted warmist greenie couple, I said, “wouldn’t it be better if all that money wasted on anti-human cAGW mitigation was instead spent on pro-human activities like preventing malaria or curing cancer”. They said literally, “All the cancer sufferers should be left to die, because the world is overpopulated”. The MOTHER OF ONE OF THOSE GREENIES WAS A CANCER SURVIVOR !
This greenie would have sacrificed his own mother to the altar of cAGW. I was not impressed – This is totally the truth, this actually happened!
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And the same reasoning can be made for abortion on demand. “The Bell Curve” postulates that people with low mental abilities live in poverty and the inner cities. The SJW’s say let them have all the abortions they want! Dumb people, no matter what their race, do not contribute to society, they just drag it down.
Colorado is the only state that has handled the teen pregnancy problem. A very rich person provided $25M to enable sexually active teens to have Long Term IUDs installed. What an idea!
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I think you will find that CAGW/Extreme Greenie mindset seems to be happy to embrace eugenics….
61
And the circle of death is closed. Greenies want 90% population reduction. My money is on that the vast majority of this blog contributors are included in the 90% except of course the likes of Silly Filly other trolls.
Despite their silly credentials they will be accepted into the greenie ark for being obedient and faithful to this Neo nazi cause.
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You’re quite right. There’s a rock-solid chain between the eugenics folks and the greens. Robert Zubrin’s Merchants of Despair Is very good on that. Some of it, such as when he discusses China’s one baby rule, is absolutely heart-breaking.
Jonah Goldberg has some interesting points on the eugenicists in Liberal Fascism.
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OK, I’m going to plead ignorance here but I thought power stations had electrostatic scrubbers to remove a lot of the particulate matter from the smoke stacks…..
With pollution in places like China, is the pollution mostly due to particulate or gas emissions?
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Particulate, there is a set of stages a developing economy goes through, it’s only when a country gets to a certain point of development that it can afford to migrate from particulate producing biomass and unscrubbed hydrocarbon (like small (0-10kW) diesel/petrol generators) to scrubbed centrally produced electricity. China is making that transition now, but they still have a lot of uncontrolled biomass and oil burning going on and will do for another 20 years, to change too quickly deprives a large amount of the population of the “free” energy they need, so you can’t just switch unless you give the electricity away. People need the capacity to pay FIRST.
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@Rereko first post, Well freaking exactly. This was never an exercise in humanitarianism which is what so many of the true humanitarians here are so riled about. If you look at the way these people operate the definition is state sanctioned quangos with prerequisite state sponsored squealing, braindead luvvies calling the shots, (of either sex, I don’t discriminate, a tool is a tool).
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Substitute “air pollution” with “CO2” and then you’d hear the moral outrage of the MSM, the ambulance chasing stories surrounding this trace gas has become a macabre obsession for news content as the CAGW dogma must be maintained at all cost, stuff the real reasons for suffering this is saving humanity for the next 4 billion years!
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Precisely Yonniestone.
Prof. Michael Brauer, School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia has been peddling his green vision for sometime. It is not free of CO2, climate change or even electric cars. For example:
or here:
Here at the very least, the ‘adjustment’ of a very substantial range of confounding variables would be required to be identified. The point is that epidemiologists can torture the data ad infinitum, can claim to adjust for ALL potential confounding variables because they’re ALL known after all,
the sciencetheir view of the World is settled).Study design is key here. Prospective, retrospective, random, blind, longitudinal, cross-sectional etc.
The presentation appears to have been made by Prof. Bauer at the annual 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference. The key publication it relies upon is here and refers to Bauer et al. 2016 publication “Ambient Air Pollution Exposure Estimation for the Global Burden of Disease 2013.”
I quote from the abstract – the article is pay walled:
This is absolutely typical epidemiologist language. Some might suggest that it is policy driven institutional risk mongering. Whichever, it is a World of estimates, models and simulations, one in which the policy is settled and the data seemingly identifed, created and fitted a priori.
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This hyper-alarmist conference poster presentation by Prof. Bauer et al. at the annual 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference clarifies the eco-hysteria. The key publication here, cited on the conference poster in small text, bottom right hand side, refers to Bauer et al. 2016 publication “Ambient Air Pollution Exposure Estimation for the Global Burden of Disease 2013.”
I quote from the abstract – the article is pay walled:
Usual epidemiological language? Some might suggest that it is policy driven institutional risk mongering. Whichever, it is a World of estimates, models and simulations, one in which the policy is settled and the data seemingly identifed, created and fitted a priori.
For information, the other cited paper is: Lancet. 2015 Dec 5;386(10010):2287-323. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(15)00128-2. Epub 2015 Sep 11. Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks in 188 countries, 1990-2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013.
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Manfred,
A version of the Bauer et al. paper is freely available at http://sci-hub.io/
Just search for —
Ambient Air Pollution Exposure Estimation for the Global Burden of Disease 2013 Bauer et al.
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hmmmmm……..the increasingly dire economic crisis.
Some people are living in a information vacuum.
“the urgent need for even more aggressive strategies to reduce emissions from coal and from other sectors,”
“Downturn Now Hitting The Refining Sector”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-17/downturn-now-hitting-refining-sector
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“ Depression-Level Collapse In Demand: In Historic First, Glencore Shuts Coal Mines For 3 Weeks
is, earlier today the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Australia’s biggest coal exporter … company and world’s biggest commodity trader, will suspend its Australian coal business for three weeks ” ……
“ Second Largest Coal Miner East Of The Mississippi Files For Bankruptcy: 4000 Patriot Coal Jobs In Peril
At last check Patriot Coal had around 4000 employees. Those soon to be former employees will soon … second largest coal miner east of the Mississippi and the second largest producer of thermal coal in the … ”
” “High-Skilled Hillbillies” Become Computer Programmers As Coal Dies Slow Death
And then there’s Appalachia. The death of coal as had a dramatic impact on the region, where …
etc etc…… Finding another 1000 links to articles indicating something like, ‘people cannot even afford to buy petrol so they can emit Molotov cocktails’ would not be difficult at all.
We are in a economic death spiral. It is dire and the effects are showing up everywhere in all industry,.
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……another tiny batch of links amongst untold thousands..
“An Interactive Look At China’s Massive Coal Bubble
the green light to more than 150 coal power plants so far this year despite falling coal consumption,” …
“The “Hard-Landing” Has Arrived: Chinese Coal Company Fires 100,000
Heilongjiang Longmay Mining Holding Group , or Longmay Group, the biggest met coal miner in northeast China … coal prices, the group saw its loss over January-August surged more than 1.1 billion yuan ($17.2 million) from the year before. In the first half of 2015, the group closed eight coking coal mines most of” …
” Obamanomics – Union Pacific Cuts 100s Of Jobs On Coal Shipments Collapse
Plan, as NBCNews reports , Union Pacific will cut hundreds of management jobs as the amount of coal shipped by railroads continues to plunge . Coal carloads down YoY 25 weeks in a row… … last month that coal volume dropped 26 percent in its most recent quarter and said it believed that …
Closer to where i live:
“Greens push for new authority to help Latrobe Valley ...
http://www.theage.com.au/…/greens-push-for-new-authority-to-help-latrobe-valle...
Oct 11, 2015 – The body overseeing the Latrobe Valley’s move from the brown coal industry would comprise … said it was clear the coal industry was dying globally and there was an urgent need to cut greenhouse gas emissions. .
Hello……..if the coal industry is dying, then CO2 emissions caused by coal are also dying….
Thanks
Mike.
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Odd isn’t it.
“The new joint policy to be launched by the federal and state Greens, who are campaigning for the closure of the Hazelwood mine and power plant, says it is time to prepare the region for the inevitable closure of coal plants.”
No idea of how to replace the power. Don’t care really. No solutions, just close everything, stop everything, buy everything we need from overseas. H.G.Well’s eloi in a world of total ignorance of reality and even of their own needs. God will provide. He did.
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Yeah and when industry starts to collapse, there wont be enough light poles and “rope” to go around….figuratively speaking of course……
I think one service skeptics can do is ensure the greenies and Left are porperly identified as the casue of this milignant cancer of ideas, so they can take personal responsibility for what follows…..
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I have been looking at the King Is. website (KIREIP) a couple of times a day to see how the windmills are faring. A few minutes ago the wind had dropped to 5m/s and they were using 15 Kw from the system which was being powered by 100% diesel. For the next few days as the high pressure system prevails it will be the same for the coastal S. A. and Vic. windfarms as well. Seem to need a wind speed of 15m/s before the the diesels stop.
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Looking at the wind energy site, aneroid, most of the wind farms are green (0-30% production), and 5-6 are brown (30-60% production). There will not be much production for a day or two.
10
Sorry yellow, not brown.
00
Post-Fukushima Japan prepares to turn back to coal.
Last year, the Environment Ministry refused to endorse the planned construction of five new coal-fired power plants in Yamaguchi, Aichi, Chiba and Akita prefectures …
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small potatoes 🙂
If we look at the huge empty ghost cities in China, it comes as no surprise many of the coal power plants in China will also be doing something similar.
From: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-12/interactive-look-chinas-massive-coal-bubble
“An Interactive Look At China’s Massive Coal Bubble”
“With thermal power generation this year is equal to what it was in 2011, China has essentially spent four years building 300 large coal power plants it doesn’t use.”
30
I find this sort of thing confusing. One minute leftists are screaming there are too many people in the world, we need to reduce the worlds population down to under 1 billion. The next minute they are screaming that pollution is reducing the worlds population, we need to stop pulluting the air.
Then we have folks like Michael Oppenheimer, who said “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
These people are lunatics.
I don’t know how leftists get along each day, I really don’t.
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“If you are not a socialist in your 20s you don’t have a heart, if you are a socialist in your 40s you don’t have a brain” – Sir Winston Churchill.
I think there is truth to this.
10
Jo
O/T but wrt David’s modelling
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/nitrogen-active-in-the-ir-a-ghg/
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You know that the madness is out of control when the only fix to the problem that is openly discussed is more of the same. It didn’t work then, it doesn’t work now, and it won’t work in the future. When it fails again the cry will be more of the same: again and again and again. The end will come when there is nothing left to steal and no more sacrificial victims are willing to be sacrificed for the good of the unspecified “greater good”.
The truth is that sacrifice means trading something of greater value for something of lessor value. Such a trade is less than a zero sum game. In the long run, no one wins and everyone looses. It is destructive of everything that makes life possible and worth living. The many thousands of years of poverty, despair, death, and destruction is a blood soaked testament of the only things it can achieve.
Clearly, it is way past time for the nobleness of sacrifice to be questioned. Yet the endless cry is “more of the same”.
Check your premises. When you achieve nothing but failure, one or more of them is wrong.
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As I understand it, modern coal fired power plants do not contribute much to particulate pollution (as a percentage of total particulate pollution). The problem comes from homeowners and small businesses, (especially common in China) burning coal for heat in low-temperature woodstoves, for example.
In Canada, my family used to shovel coal into a wood furnace until 1960. In France I saw the same thing in 1982. You cannot hope to have acceptable particulate emissions until burning coal means combustion of powdered coal in a large, computer-controlled boiler at high temperatures, with exhaust scrubbers attached.
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By using decades old proven technologies China could improve its air quality – they stand condemned by their failure to do so.
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Jo says
The regulars who come to this site know the difference between a dickensian coal fire and a modern
power station with scrubbing. Someone just passing through, not reading all of the comments, may read the post and say “well coal is the problem, let’s stop using it it”.
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I know a consultant who was involved in the building of coal powered stations. He was leading a group of Chinese who were visiting our power stations. One of the Chinese asked the question how come the power station they were visiting was not running. The consultant asked what makes you think it’s not running? The Chinese visitor said it’s because there’s no smoke. The consultant called the power station to check if it was running and yes of course it was. He explained to the Chinese that we use very efficient scrubbers. The Chinese were astonished.
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Not so now
As older stations are replaced, state-of-the-art scrubbers are used. And please do not confuse water vapour off the cooling towers with particulate emissions from the actual boilers; the leftoid meeja love to use that little trickie
With 1.3bn people in a geographic area only about 10% larger than the Oz continent, replacing all the older stations is a slow and capital-intensive process … but it is being done
China has still a long road ahead and it has many difficult aspects, but it is making progress. This is particularly lumpy and leavened by the inevitable periodic purges (yes, Oz has these too) – a Chinese version of Pilgrim’s Progress, perhaps
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Well, H2O has more of an effect on the environment than CO2.
But yes, calling either pollution is madness.
170
Maybe the radical leftists/greens should try to live without fossil fuel or anything it produces or powers including their iphones, cars, vacation trips by air, sea, or land. Then thy could try to live without anything that CO2 produces: food, the oxygen we breathe,all wildlife, plants, and their carbonated beverages. Have them try it a minute, but not longer or they might die from lack of O2.
It is the simple truths they cannot understand.
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Maybe there might be a bit of a problem with birth control as well.
00
Not trial and error evolution
But mystic crystal revelation,
When the moon is in the seventh house,
Aquarius, Aquarius…
50
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planet
20
Eh?
10
Annie,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjxSCAalsBE
10
Ian, I was just thinking about your comment about water vapour emisions. Given that H2O vapour is a greenhouse gas and emitted by industry, by the alarmists own definition this makes water vapour a pollutant. For the love of gaia we must save the planet!!! The time to ban water vapour is now!! We must act before it’s too late!!! Think of the children!!!
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Yes, the irony burns for them … the water cycle is just overwhelming, and oh so dangerous 🙂
There is a smallish power station in the region I live and previously worked that actually erected signs on the near highway stating that the visible “emissions” were just water vapour. These signs were removed after “Letters to the [local] Editor” demanded that this be proved. The power station management recognised an unwinnable battle when they saw it
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Yes, telling the truth now is a revolutionary act.
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Just add “EPA Monitored” to fix the ignorance?
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Yes Rollo, very much so. For those who do not bother to read the context these statements can be easily mistaken. That is why I rail against sarcasm.
14
[… I rail against sarcasm.]
Surely not?
20
Fair point Rollo. I’ve added a bit more to the post:
In China the problem is coal (no matter what’s wrong, the answer is always “less coal”)
Does the vague phrase “burning coal” mean power stations, or home combustion:
Apparently in rural China people commonly use coal raw in unvented stoves. The pic at the top is a bike used to transport coal.
And I found a photo of a coal bike… Thanks.
Ted, I’m sorry, sometimes satire is the only thing that keeps me going. But it is a fine art.
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Jo, one hardly needs to resort to satire when one sees the two “scientific” sources (see post 2.1.1) of Bauer’s baying ‘5.5M’ alarmism, his poster presentation to the annual conference of the AAAS with its two source citations on which his ‘new research’ was presented (see 2.1.1 for pdf of conference poster).
The first from his own et al ‘estimates’ work:
and the second, Forouzanfar et al. (2015), dependent on complex regression analysis.
This material lies precisely in the same domain of settled climate science known and loved so well by all here. /sarc
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Amazing stuff now posing as science. No need to measure things, just meta_ analyse the literature and you don,t even need to leave your computer.rob
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That second quote is total gobbledegook. I suppose they think it makes them sound clever!
As for the first one: ‘Estimates’ and ‘simulations’! What codswallop they expect us to swallow as ‘scientific data’.
30
Jo, I know from my family history how everyone in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s used coal ranges. I had an uncle who started a business delivering coal on his bicycle by the bag to households when he was a teenager. He died a multimillionaire (not really relevant I know, but think of all the wonderful roasts cooked). I guess we can say the modern Chinese miracle is a bit two speed. It was never completely an exercise in capitalism and I wonder if the downturn that is having such a marked effect on your own economy is a direct result of this. I suspect you can’t cure the Chinese off coal, and frankly given their bitter winters, why should we?. Since nobody has ever shown conclusively that burning coal is an international emergency to be addressed we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be swayed by the luvvies. Aus exports coal, it pays bills and fills the coffers. Given what I have said what kind of looney would have a problem with that?
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A lefty greeny loony…
30
That’s possibly the definition of a loony.
10
I was lucky enough to visit Beijing in 1990, 1 year after Tiananmen Square, interesting in itself for a young traveller. Through the perpetual smog over the city, I saw as I rode/walked around (very few cars)numerous boilers and household stove units with fuel piles outside their doors. I come from the Hunter Valley and I know coal very well. This stuff was a dusty, dirty, crumbly dark grey almost brown material. I went up to it and touched it because it looked liked dirt not coal. But yes, it was coal – low grade and unwashed. They were burning it in unregulated, inefficient boilers, stoves and fireplaces with short exhaust stacks and sometimes unflued in high density urban areas. No wonder it produced pollution! Multi-story housing unit blocks were crammed in around these coal burners. The smoke would have gone straight into their windows. Beijing is cleaned up now but the regions would still be like this.
And now, the Chinese are rapidly modernizing their country and building some of the most efficient, low emitting coal-fired power stations on the planet. But some people, with a green heart, just want them stop burning coal altogether! WTF?
20
Haven’t the London smogs disappeared due to the replacement of open coal fires with modern coal fired electricity?
In Launceston during the winter one often used to see a blanket of woodsmoke covering the city held in by an inversion layer and there was a concerted effort to change to heat pumps and use dry wood in the slow combustion heaters.
170
Was there last October and while it wasn’t a blanket it was still evident when viewed from surrounding hills. Nice place though.
70
I grew up in London. And at that time, all of the Government and public buildings were a dark grey colour. I thought nothing of it, at the time.
I went back a few years ago, and found that all of those grey buildings had been cleaned in my absence, and were actually made of a beautiful golden sandstone. I would never have thought!
As you point out, open coal fires have been phased out, and replaced by more efficent heating sources. London is the better for it.
90
So true Rereke, but what if that’s your only option to keep your family warm, in a city other than London?
30
Is anyone else noticing an increase in “climate scare stories” from ABC, BBC, Fairfax, CNN, National Geographic, etc?
171
Yes,
the Left are getting hysterical. There are those who think that with a bit more pushing they will win control and be able to stifle any opposition, and those who realise their policies (uncontrolled immigration, soaring debt, workers and middle class suffering) are fuelling a backlash and are trying to clamp down before it overwhelms them.
Hence, in Australia, their delight in ‘their’ Mal Turnbull being P.M. (not that most of them will vote for him but they assume that everyone else will).
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Graeme, I suggest you examine more closely Malcolm Turnbull’s timeline. When he was pushing for an ETS The Pause was in its infancy. The announcements since he became Prime Minister bring no new support for the AGW push, just continuation of policies which he is unable to change anyway with the senate blockade, with the old polls trick of presenting old spending as new spending applied.
Some of the changes which people have been fearing here he would not be able to get past Barnaby Joyce. If you look at the photo of Barnaby at Bunnings that would be a very big task.
And he has already broached the subject of a double dissolution. This time realistically.
51
The people would rather he serve out the full term even if it means he’s a lame duck.
The Morrison Budget will set the tone and we can probably expect lots of infrastructure goodies in the run up to the election.
Greg Hunt won the award for best minister in the world, its enough for Julie and Malcolm to bask in his light and leave climate change in the shade.
10
Toorightmate says..
Yes the entire science/technical section in the newsagents seems to be devoted to alarmism. National Geographic leads the charge. They reached peak alarmism in the march 2015 issue, where they equate climate sceptics to creationists, anti vaxxers, those who object to GMO foods and those who think the moon landing was faked.
PS. Silicon Chip, an electronics mag, seems to be the only one which allows open discussion on climate related issues.
71
Yes I’ve noticed it too. I’ve also noticed a similar increase in hypothetical events about earth being invaded by aliens with advanced technologies and calling it science documentaries. It appears science today is moving over to the realms of religious superstition and make-believe. I suppose next they will be teaching this sort of nonsense in schools soon as part of the science curriculum, next to the existing untruths they teach about man-made climate change and why mankind should be punished for not doing something about it. There should be a law that prevents this crap being passed on as science in our schools.
60
Yairs. When I many years ago was a lad at Catholic schools, they taught us that Karl Marx said: “Religion is the opiate of the people”! But they didn’t tell us what an opiate was, and I didn’t trouble myself to find out for a long time.
By the time I did find out, I finally understood that what he was saying was that religion makes “the people” dopey and too tolerant of injustice. Which led me to the observation that Marx failed to notice that a lot of people need their opiate.
Did he fail to notice? Or did he factor it in? An attempt to read Das Kapital ran into a wall of Original Sin much higher than Pope Francis’s. So much as to make me put it aside.
30
All forms of religions can make people dopey, including atheism. Eventually though some people do wake up and think for themselves rather than keep listening to the propaganda and lies.
40
Atheism caused hundreds of millions of death.
After many years of being scared of God I liberated myself and became an atheist. That does not mean that I immediately follow some other dogma or propaganda. My liberation was about individualism, taking responsibility for my own life and pledging non-violence unless someone wants to kill me, my family, my country or judeo-Christian values or human values without the need to invoke God.
50
The lingua franca of the weather reports has been completely re-engineered to convey maximum alarmism at all time, climatism on steroids, pure propaganda.
It struck me today that with patience and some funding, one could retrospectively take a series of seasonally matched days or weeks separated by a decade or so with comparable weather conditions and then trawl through the weather reports during each period to compare the narrative.
The null hypothesis: The Fourth Estate does not use consistent and representative language to describe prevailing weather conditions across time.
The null hypothesis would likely not be disproved.
‘In flagrante delicto’ springs to mind.
30
There was an unexpected and gratifying turn of events on Insight on SBS last Monday night where the causes of the increasing severity of bushfires were discussed.
All three of the technical participants identified ‘green tape’ and the lack of hazard reduction burning as the causes of fire severity. They were from the CSIRO, Victorian CFA, and an aboriginal fellow who specialises in contract burning using traditional techniques for various agencies.
Jenny Brockie didn’t even attempt to interrupt or correct their ‘wrong’ thinking Tony Jones style. I was taken aback.
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Sounds like a tendril of common-sense couldn’t be extinguished? It’s surprising she didn’t sue them for micro-aggression. Or could it be that Green extremism has outlived its usefulness to The Brokers?
10
Naturally Richard di Natale was on the news tonight spruiking you-know-what as the cause of the Tassie fires while he did a grand tour of burnt-out areas with the requisite ABC camera crew tagging along at his heels.
Apparently the Greenpeas beat him to it and were there a week ago shooting scenes of burnt forest for some upcoming global warming propaganda flick of theirs.
Of course all of the Tassie fires were labelled “unprecedented” and the trees had “never known fire before”. There’s a surprise for you.
Not a word about the Greens policy of locking up forests to make them ready to burn catastrophically at the first spark.
50
The article clearly shows the hypocrisy of the green movement and how anti human it really is. As I see it, environmentalism is a hobby of wealthy nations, poor people are to preoccupied with surviving to give a hoot about green philosophy. It seems to me that modern greens simply don’t want the poor nations to share in the worlds wealth. They also fail to see the relationship with poverty and the necessity to have many children in the hope that some may survive to adulthood so as to help out on the farm (or whatever is their means of income/ sustenance). It’s quite simple really, the worlds wealthy nations can afford to have environmental policies that keep the air and water clean, the worlds poor cant.
If the greens are fair dinkum they would support massive investment in modern, clean coal and gas fired electricity, water catchment (yes, this means dams!) and basic hygiene infrastructure (toilets) in developing countries. This would open up opportunities for industry and employment and give the people longer and healthier lives and lead to a natural stabilisation of their population growth.
Hang on a minute, what was I thinking. Far easier and cheaper to hand out birth control and abortions and just let them die out.
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The Greens don’t work,they just go to “centrelink”like most of the “Country Shoppers”we have know.
71
We in the West should build 500 hi-tech coal burning plants in the
fifty African nations….and extend the grid to everywhere.
10
Another lesson on how not to measure their so called CAGW, with photos. What a joke.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/17/how-not-to-measure-temperature-or-climate-change-96/
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Hang on a minute Neville. The first couple of photos show a brick wall between the station and the heat exchangers. Obviously the readings will have to be adjusted upwards!
41
Worse than that. If they moved away all the contributing factors that make the sensors read higher temperatures they probably will adjust them upwards to compensate and call it homogenization. Alternatively they would move the sensors to another place with similar if not higher artificer hot spots, such as at the start of a runway at an airport. Oh I just remembered; they are already doing that.
21
artificer -> artificial
00
Nasty, brutish and short…but green.
61
17 Feb: Guardian: Arthur Neslen: Donald Trump warned against scrapping Paris climate deal
US climate envoy says threats by Republican presidential candidates to withdraw from the global agreement would be ‘diplomatic black eye’
Speaking to journalists in Brussels, Todd Stern also said that a recent supreme court decision to block Barack Obama’s clean power plan would not affect US climate pledges, or plans to formally sign up to the Paris agreement later this year…
“Paris as an agreement has such broad acceptance and support around the world from countries of every stripe and region and Paris itself was seen as such a landmark – hard-fought, hard-won – deal that for the US to turn around and say ‘we are withdrawing from Paris’ would inevitably give the country a diplomatic black eye,” he said…
“There’s a sense that if the US did not join [Paris] it might discourage other major economies like China and possibly India and Brazil from joining,” the source said…
Stern pointed out though that the death of the supreme court justice Antonin Scalia earlier this week created the possibility of a “more than slight change to procedural posture” in the supreme court…
“It is hard to tell how this is going to play out, but the supreme court is in a different place right now,” Stern said…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/16/todd-stern-warns-republicans-against-scrapping-paris-climate-deal
16 Feb: NYT: Eduardo Porter: Next Supreme Court Justice Will Be Crucial to Climate Change
The United States sure knows how to throw cold water on international harmony.
Just two months have passed since the world’s top diplomats cobbled together the best plan we’ve ever had to start curbing emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Yet already the Supreme Court of the United States said no, delaying much of the Obama administration’s strategy to deliver America’s contribution to the collective effort…
And yet the Supreme Court’s temporary stay of the administration’s Clean Power Plan — the last decision of global consequence of the right-leaning court on which Justice Antonin Scalia had sat since the Reagan administration — underscores just how far the United States remains from its climate goals…
If the Senate were to confirm whomever President Obama nominates to succeed Justice Scalia, one of the most conservative justices on the bench, the Supreme Court would probably become more sensitive to the imperative to combat climate change. That’s not just good news for the Clean Power Plan. It could open the door to more aggressive policies…
Last week, this kind of thinking would have been unlikely to survive a spin through the Supreme Court. But perhaps it could survive a different one — maybe one that placed more weight on international harmony.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/17/business/economy/next-supreme-court-justice-will-be-crucial-to-climate-change.html?_r=0
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17 Feb: ReutersCarbonPulse: Ed King: Coalition of 17 US states signals support for wind, solar
New ‘Accord’ published on Tuesday avoids direct mention of climate change, but makes economic case for renewables and warns of future extreme weather events
“Extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, wildfires and sea level rise can negatively impact electric reliability and the economy,” they say in a statement (LINK) released late Tuesday…
Michigan’s Republican governor Rick Snyder is among the signatories, despite his state being one of 27 to take legal action against President Barack Obama’s flagship carbon cutting policy…
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2016/02/17/coalition-of-17-us-states-signals-support-for-wind-solar/
17 Feb: ReutersCarbonPulse: Stian Reklev: China mobilises financial industry to help clean up economy, meet emission targets
China has called for financial institutions to ease access to funding for high-tech industries that will help the world’s biggest-emitting nation rely less on energy-intensive, high-polluting manufacturers.
Eight ministry-level government institutions, including the central bank and the National Development and Reform Commission, on Tuesday issued a statement urging the financial industry to help restructure the Chinese economy…
The statement called on local administrators overseeing banks to ensure that lenders prioritise industrial borrowers that contribute to the “Made in China 2025” plan, an industry strategy released last year.
The plan seeks to get China’s industry in good shape and shed dead weight, but it also has a number of environmental targets…
Tuesday’s statement also said clean, high-tech industrials would be given the flexibility to use more sophisticated financial tools to secure funding, such as bonds, private and public funding sources, insurance, and loans backed by receivables, such as energy saving revenues and carbon permits.
Meanwhile, it reiterated the government’s previous pledge to withdraw or deny lending to manufacturers that fail to meet environmental and safety standards, indicating that companies failing to comply with the national emissions trading scheme that begins next year might lose access to funding…
http://carbon-pulse.com/15710/
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17 Feb: ReutersCarbonPulse: Stian Reklev: Diverse Paris climate targets create accounting headache for carbon markets -report
But the pledges varied in nature: some were absolute GHG emission reductions, some were intensity-based (CO2 per unit of GDP), and some were not directly related to emissions, for example goals for renewable
energy, energy efficiency and so on.
For the 100 or so nations that have expressed interest in making use of international carbon markets, which according to the Paris Agreement are to be based on Internationally Transferred mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs), these variations increase the risk of double-counting unless sound accounting standards are developed, according to the Wuppertal report dated Jan. 2016…READ ON
http://carbon-pulse.com/15730/
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On this note I was incensed when before Paris the ABC was showing some report on record Beijing pollution with people running around in surgical masks then linking it to the Paris Gab-Fest which of course had nothing to do with reducing particulate emission. Ironically SOX in smog like Beijing actually causes global COOLING, so by inference the greenies clearly want more particulate pollution which can actually CAN kill people, unlike 400 or even 800PPM of CO2.
That’s real pollution, CO2 is an essential trace gas that is the basis of all life on earth.
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One of the earliest greenie excuses for the “pause” was that particulate emissions from Chinese power stations were responsible for reflecting a large proportion of energy from the sun before it reached the planet’s surface
That is, high particulate pollution was fortuitously helping cool the planet … this was obviously a good thing
21
I want you to read the article at the following link. Read the article first, and then I’ll draw your attention to something.
Welcome to Baoding, China’s most polluted city
You’ll get right to the bottom of the article before the puzzled journalist mentions why it is so polluted.
Not from what is happening in this large city with a population of around one million people, but from what is happening in the surrounding countryside. In the surrounding area containing up to 100 provincial villages, the only access they have to heat is from coal fired boilers, and these are extremely polluting. These villages are not connected to the main grid, as that’s only in the city, as it has not got out that far yet. So, they burn coal in furnaces for steam to use as heating.
It would seem that the only way to reduce this pollution is to connect the electricity grid to all these villages, and the same applies across all of China, where the grid is still only connected in city areas, and even then, basically only for Industry, as the Residential sector in China only gets around 12/15% of the total electricity, and in the Developed World the Residential sector consumes between 25 and 40% of all electricity, so very few homes in China outside of cities are connected to the grid, and coal boilers are all they have for heating and cooking.
So now, having read the article, scroll back to the top and note the image they use to show the extent of the pollution. Note in the distance the cooling towers of the coal fired power plant, and to the left of them, the smoke stack, belching its smoke, an image taken in Winter as you can see from the Steam out of the cooling towers, not particularly visible during warmer Months.
The inference is that coal is causing the pollution, so they show a coal fired power plant. Note the date of the image, 2013, and the date of the article mid 2015.
That coal fired power plant shown in the image has been closed for almost three years now, an old time expired plant, and the city is now supplied by a grid which has new tech cleaner burning more efficient less emitting plants connected to it.
It’s an irony that this same city is now the hub for China’s renewable construction industries.
True, coal is the source of the pollution, but in truth, coal is the answer. High tech power plants to supply power for heating which is currently using polluting and old coal fired boilers.
Tony.
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Good story 🙂
30
Absolutely spot on.
They need energy to survive and function there.
Currently, they use coal, in myriad old, inefficient and polluting stoves and furnaces.
The new (16% more efficient than Australia’s old plants)coal fired generators and grids are the answer to the efficiency and the pollution problems.
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Maybe off topic but I think this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3451664/The-heat-goes-Earth-sets-9th-straight-monthly-record.html from UK Daily Mail might need to be shot down.
30
‘Temperatures in January are rising at the rate of about 0.75 degrees per century, the agency added.’
A piffling amount and well within the bounds of natural variability.
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“well within the bounds of natural variability”
Also, well within the bounds of measurement error.
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This author is on the renewable bandwagon in India, nevertheless its a good insight into what is happening on the ground.
http://thediplomat.com/2014/10/indias-renewable-energy-opportunity/
20
The greens, the left and other social engineers are always banging on about over population, that we are running out of room, and how the poor are expendable.
Humans, as an organism, don’t take up much room, our activities do, housing, transport and the like, but the biomass of the human population doesn’t.
Those who travel know that there is an awful lot of empty space in the world
All the people in the world could fit into cube the has 1 kilometre sides, with room left over.
That is about the CBD of any major city, the calculations are not hard so if you find this unbelievable, get your pencil out.
As an aside, a variation on an old joke,
“How can you tell if a Friend of the Earth is telling porkies?
Their lips move”
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I worked in a garage years ago. We repaired asbestos lined brake systems.
We ran smoking oily engines indoors during tuneups.
Do you think I’m worried about some stray carbon?
Oh, Last I knew, life was a terminal disease.
I only wish we could inoculate against politicians and save the world do-gooders.
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Mark D
“Oh, Last I knew, life was a terminal disease.”
Sexually transmitted too.
70
Shhhh! This is a family blog! 😉
10
Mark,
I tend to agree with you. There’s a certain threshold above which you work on the problem and below that threshold you don’t. When air pollution is as bad as it once was in and around Los Angeles you were literally choking all day long when there was an inversion layer. And that certainly demanded action. But the situation is much better now, yet the EPA is still insisting on spending uncountable amounts of money to cure that last little bit of air pollution. We have to settle on a point where the last little bit of a problem that remains isn’t worth the cost of remediation. There are better uses for the money, like solving other problems.
And yes, life is a terminal disease. But I would enjoy what life I have left a lot more if some of the other problems we have could be solved, CO2 not being one of them.
30
I might add that my father smoked like a chimney. Smoke used to hang in a cloud at about midway between the floor a ceiling in the living room. According to the EPA’s claim that passive smoking is as dangerous as active smoking I should have had lung cancer by now and probably be dead.
I’m still here and without a sign of lung disease, even in spite of those early years exposed to some of the worst smog on the planet. So there are experts who know what they’re doing and experts who “know what they’re doing” if you know what I mean. The EPA is not on the peoples side.
10
That may be true. However on a recent trip to India I visited New Dehli. New Delhi was described as having the worst air pollution in the world! The smog was indeed very thick.
The main source of all the smog, as far as I could see was cars, tricks, motor bikes and tuck tuks ( small three wheeled taxi cabs). Most of the transport uses either diesel engines or two stroke petrol engines. The diesels were mostly belching black smoke and the two strokes were also making lots of visible smoke.
Combined with an atmospheric inversion all this smog has no where to go so it sits around, getting worse day after day until it rains.
New Delhi is on place where electric vehicles might make sense. However,there is no infrastructure in India to charge all the vehicles and the electricity supply is marginal .
Improving the electricity supply seems to be a national priority.
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‘Improving the electricity supply seems to be a national priority.’
I’m not surprised, India is a democracy in the 21st century and 300 million people don’t have electricity.
10
Yeh, China isn’t a democracy and how many don’t have electricity?……….
20
In north-west China electricity is unreliable, but some recent figures suggest only about 3 million are still without, that means roughly 97% of the population have it.
Indian politicians risk losing their seats if they fail to act.
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/bihar-village-dharnai-nitish-kumar-clamours-for-real-electricity/1/375733.html
It would be worth following up to see if the village got their real electricity.
20
El Gordo;
You said
Is this correct?
10
From my reading it appears to be the case, they definitely aren’t on this list of most deprived.
http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/06/where-billion-people-still-live-without-electricity/5807/
00
The renewable experiment failed miserably.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-trumps-solar-in-india/
20
In many parts of India they are still using high sulphur petrol and diesel. This combined with older technology engines and two strokes ensures high levels of particulates and sulphur dioxide.
Modern petrol engines running low sulphur fuels would help solve these problems. Sadly it will be a long time before Indian cities have infrastructure to run electric vehicles, let alone update clapped out two strokes and diesels.
Time for the western world to help India build some modern USC power stations perhaps?
10
Yes there are a lot of clapped,out or poorly maintained diesel and two stroke transport engines in India, which should be upgraded and replaced but it will not happen soon.
With respect to electric power I think they may bypass coal power and go straight to nuclear. They already have a number of nuclear power stations amd nuclear weapons. They signed a uranium supply agreement with the Howard government. They are said to be progressing with research on the Thorium nuclear cycle.
In the mean time the nuclear issue is still too hard for us to even even contemplate here in Australia.
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Who cares about sulfur dioxide.…
Australia is doing its part to reduce CO2 emissions. As you know, if people have jobs, they can buy petrol for largish vehicles. Now we are on track to achieve CO2 emission cuts and be recognised by the IPCC as cutting jobs is a very straightforward way of cutting CO2 emissions…
full-time jobs plunged by 40,600
“Australia Stops “Cooking” Its Jobs Report And The Result Is A Disaster: Full-Time Jobs Plunge Most Since 2013″
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-17/australia-stops-cooking-its-jobs-report-and-result-disaster-full-time-jobs-plunge-mo
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There is actually a double whammy to this. Tanzania is a classic example. They have a poor electricity system meaning that even in Dar es Salaam a city of about 5 million the electricity supply is probably only good enough to run a few lights and a fridge if your lucky. Ordinary folk use charcoal to cook on. Where do you get your charcoal? Well they cut down their forest to generate charcoal and every car you pass driving to Dar will have numerous bags of charcoal on the roof or anywhere you can fit it. Quite a sight
I like to occasionally play at this website to show the importance of energy to society
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Perhaps before we start pontificating about the western world “helping” India et al to build clean, modern power stations, we should maybe stop a few volcanos from erupting, for example…put a plug in Hawaii’s Kilauea or Mexico’s Popocatépetl. Makes about as much sense as putting it on the western world to solve the problems of the rest.
20
at least UK Mirror has reported this:
17 Feb: UK Mirror: Andrew Penman: Firms selling worthless carbon credits shut down for “one giant scam”
The 19 companies were put into compulsory liquidation by the High Court after victims were fleeced by ‘boiler room’ cold callers
The cold callers employed by these firms were expected to ring 300 members of the public every day.
Another company shut down, PureCarbon, claimed it sold the carbon credits at “genuinely market-leading prices.” The reality was that it bought them for £1.90 and sold them to investors for as much as £7…
The two companies that supplied the carbon credits to the boiler rooms were among the 19 shut down.
Another 10 companies face being wound up, and Chris Mayhew of the Insolvency Service hinted at criminal proceedings when he said: “This is not the end of the matter”.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/firms-selling-worthless-carbon-credits-7389240
DM’s Hetherington has been the lone voice exposing this scam:
14 Feb: UK Daily Mail: Tony Hetherington: (SCROLL DOWN TO) WE’RE WATCHING YOU
A huge network of corrupt investment firms has been closed down by the High Court following an investigation by the Insolvency Service.
Nineteen companies have been ordered into liquidation after evidence was given that they had raked in more than £36 million from the public in return for ‘near worthless’ carbon credits. At its peak, nearly 90 sales companies were involved in the swindle.
Chris Mayhew, who headed the investigation, described the network as ‘one giant scam’.
Hinting that arrests and prosecutions may follow, he added: ‘This is not the end of the matter.’ Many of the companies and their bosses have already been the subject of warnings by The Mail on Sunday. I warned against Charles Stratton Limited and its boss Ansar Ali. Then there was CNI (UK) Limited, and Paul Seakens, pictured right, director of Enviro Associates.
There was Global Carbon Exchange and its boss Stephen May, as well as John Oakes, who headed two rip-off businesses, Anglo-Capital Partners and Oswald Bradshaw Limited. And as long ago as 2012, I sounded the alarm over Pure Carbon Limited and boss Stephen Sulley.
In court, the judge, Mr Registrar Briggs, said: ‘Credits were sold at up to 28 times greater than the cost of those credits. False information was given and the public misled.’ He condemned the 19 companies as ‘immoral’…ETC
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/experts/article-3445592/TONY-HETHERINGTON-no-one-rely-Halifax-banker-s-draft.html
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18 Feb: AFP: French environment minister to head UN climate forum
French Environment Minister Segolene Royal said Wednesday she would head the UN’s COP21 climate forum after a long-time political rival, former foreign minister Laurent Fabius, stepped down from that role…
A spokesman for Hollande’s office confirmed the appointment but said a date had not been set…
He (Fabius) was pressured to relinquish the job on Monday after he stepped down as foreign minister and was named to head France’s constitutional court.
Critics argued that he could not simultaneously be on the court, which is supposed to be above the political fray, and also in charge of the COP, where politics and powerful interests collide.
Royal, Hollande’s former companion and the mother of their four children, was among the first to raise objections, calling for “the rules to be clarified” on double postings…
***Among her priorities, she said, are putting a price on carbon and climate action in Africa.
“Africa can be a laboratory for transitioning away from fossil fuels using solar, geothermal, hydroelectricity,” she said…
https://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/30851221/french-environment-minister-to-head-un-climate-forum/
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17 Feb: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Alisha Graves: Family planning: The quick carbon payoff
In so many realms of national policy, the interests of the entire population must be balanced against the rights of individuals. And so it would seem to be with climate mitigation and family planning—how can nations reduce their carbon dioxide emissions if nothing prevents individuals from having as many babies as they want?…
Wang has written about the key role that governance plays in encouraging the use of clean energy. Where delivery of family planning services is concerned, good governance is nice—it makes things easier and cheaper—but it is not a necessary condition. To be sure, the countries with the highest fertility also tend to be among the least developed countries, the most corrupt, and the worst governed. But that is no excuse for delaying family planning until good governance emerges—to the contrary, appalling rates of maternal and infant mortality in the least developed countries demand that family planning be delivered now…
When public health programs provide women that ability, they not only empower women to exercise their right to determine the size of their families—they also make a meaningful contribution toward lowering emissions in the near future.
What do I mean by “the near future?” Well, if contraception prevents an unintended pregnancy today, the world will have one fewer carbon emitter in just 40 weeks’ time—about the length of a full-term pregnancy.
http://thebulletin.org/debating-link-between-emissions-and-population/family-planning-quick-carbon-payoff
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click on writer at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Alisha Graves is cofounder and executive director of the OASIS Initiative (Organizing to Advance Solutions in the Sahel). She is also vice president of population programs for Venture Strategies for Health and Development. Graves lectures internationally on population and food security in the Sahel and is a research fellow for Project Drawdown. Previously, she worked to improve access to the life-saving drug misoprostol. Graves holds a master’s degree in public health from the University of California, Berkeley…
10
17 Feb: Washington Times Editorial: Global-warming Ice Capades
He who lives by the crystal ball must expect occasional bits of ground glass in his pudding, and the false prophets of global warming and their cheerleaders in the media are learning that lesson the hard way. After years of predicting that man-made global warming would melt the planet’s glaciers and drown coastal towns beneath rising oceans, the threat itself is melting like ice in April. That’s cause for both celebration and a little humility in the face of the many mysteries of nature still to be unraveled.
Data from two NASA satellites, employed in the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment between 2002 and 2014, enabled researchers to analyze the effects of glacier loss. They found to their surprise that trillions of tons of water wound up not in the sea but spread across the planet’s land mass. In fact, 3.2 trillion tons of water, equal to the volume of Lake Huron, soaked into thirsty soil or were collected in lakes and underground aquifers…
Not all seaside dwellers are feeling the love. Some residents say they have been harmed more by bogus climate change predictions than by changes in the weather. In Wales, the village of Fairbourne is determined to sue the government over its fear-mongering Shoreline Management Plan 2…
Not all seaside dwellers are feeling the love. Some residents say they have been harmed more by bogus climate change predictions than by changes in the weather. In Wales, the village of Fairbourne is determined to sue the government over its fear-mongering Shoreline Management Plan 2.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/feb/17/editorial-global-warming-ice-capades/
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read all:
15 Feb: Morning Jack Fitzpatrick: Obama’s Energy Legacy: Republican Coal Country
Since the 2010 elections, coal country turned against Democratic congressional candidates and never looked back.
Republicans now control 45 of the 51 congressional districts where there were active coal mines as of 2008, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. That’s a sharp decline from Obama’s first election in 2008, in which Republican won 29 districts in those locations and Democrats won 28…
Meanwhile, coal country keeps electing Republicans. The GOP’s dominance of coal country is most pronounced in federal politics, but it’s also trending in the same direction on the state level. Republicans control 81 of 108 state Senate districts and 130 of 196 state House districts where mines were active as of 2008.
In the 15 states where at least 1,000 people were employed at coal mines as of 2013, 10 of 15 governors are Republican, 18 of 30 U.S. senators are Republican. Republicans control 25 of 30 state legislative chambers (state Senate and/or state House)…
Where there are coal mines, there is a steep drop-off in Democratic victories in districts that had once been considered competitive. Republicans control 88 percent of coal country’s U.S. House seats, 75 percent of state Senate seats, and 66 percent of state House seats…
COAL DEMS SAY OBAMA IS ‘TOXIC’
Kentucky may best illustrate coal country’s shift away from the national Democratic Party. It has morphed from a swing state to a deep red state in presidential elections…
http://morningconsult.com/2016/02/obamas-energy-legacy-republican-coal-country/
20
18 Feb: Herald Sun: Terry McCrann: Let’s talk about the real Australian of the Year
COULD we “persuade” the latest “Australian of the Year”, David Morrison, to take early retirement — like, immediately; and replace him with the person who has made the greatest, boldest and, dare I say it, most “innovative” contribution to Australia so far this year?…
The real Aussie of the Year is Larry Marshall, the relatively new CEO of what should be our premier 21st century research organisation, the CSIRO, but which has been in sad decline for most of this century as it institutionally gulped the Global Warming True Believers Kool-Aid by the gallon while wasting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars…
Yet in doing so, he unleashed roars of outrage, for what he was also doing was making the first direct assault, infinitesimally tiny as it was in the global scheme of things, on the great climate-change gravy train…
“All” Marshall has done — and I put the word in quotation marks, because in its way it’s as big a step as that taken by Neil Armstrong on the Moon — is to say: can’t some tiny, tiny, bit of that money be better spent?
Instead of spending the money to continually proving over and over again the supposedly (long since) “settled science”, redirect some of it to research on mitigating or adapting to what that “settled science” is going to deliver?…READ ON
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/terry-mccrann/the-real-australian-of-the-year/news-story/17c4963aaa6e7936f22beb23ae895199
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Darfur – revisited
This year (2016),will see the camps in Darfur dismantled by the President of that country. After 300,000 deaths and 2.5 million displaced and living in those camps , one has to ask has the U.N. got its priorities right ?
With this report by Jo plus Darfur and then add to that so many homeless in Europe ! the focus on saving the planet whilst people are suffering and dying seems both dillusional and callous.
i think people expect too much from our politicians and they inturn believe that they can achieve the impossible, which is why perhaps we should only give them small jobs to do. Like running the postal service.
when 5 million die each year from smoke pollution that is 50 million in ten years, which about the same as the number of fatalities from WWII.
Politicians have a lot to answer for..
50
Running the postal service?
That isn’t a recommendation here imo.
Unless you add “down”
30
17 Feb: Globe & Mail: Ted Talks: Al Gore ‘extremely optimistic’ climate crisis can be turned around
by Marsha Lederman
Al Gore says climate-related disasters are on the rise with record-breaking temperatures, warmer oceans, rising sea levels, unusual storms and longer, more pervasive droughts. “It’s a climate crisis,” he warned during a TED Talk in Vancouver…
Ten years after bringing mainstream attention to the issue of climate change, an impassioned Mr. Gore was back at the TED conference Wednesday with a fiery update. He offered sobering – even terrifying – statistics.
“The heart of the problem is that we still rely on dirty carbon-based fuels for 85 per cent of all the energy that our world burns every year,” said the former U.S. Vice President and presidential candidate-turned climate change activist.
“The accumulated amount of man-made global warming pollution that is up in the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours, 365 days a year,” he said – adding that the figures were fact-checked multiple times and were even conservative…
He said with remarkable growth in renewable energy, things are turning around. He showed solar panels on grass huts in Bangladesh, and reported an explosion of investment in the private sector.
***“This is the biggest new business opportunity in the history of the world.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/al-gore-extremely-optimistic-climate-crisis-can-be-turned-around/article28792991/
17 Feb: CBC: Al Gore says ‘we will prevail’ in fight against climate change
10 years after An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore delivers a positive message at TED in Vancouver
LINK: Highlights from TED Talks in Vancouver
As the momentum built in his 22-minute talk, Gore began to sound more like a Tennessee preacher than the Nobel Peace Prize-winning elder statesman of U.S. politics…
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/al-gore-ted-talk-vancouver-1.3444986
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read all:
2 pages: 17 Feb: Forbes: Michael Krancer: Scalia’s Last Stand? He Helped Crush Obama’s Big Paris Climate Change Deal
Will Justice Antonin Scalia’s last judicial act be remembered as helping undo the White House’s embrace of the most sweeping climate change accord in history?…
On Feb. 9, the court issued a stay on CPP, undermining Obama’s signature environmental policy. This stay was unprecedented—the first time the U.S. Supreme Court halted a regulation before the lower court even ruled on the validity of the regulation. Now, it’s becoming clear that the ruling could end up gutting the United Nations-backed Paris Agreement, too…
It’s hard to know how things develop. Much depends on who wins the White House and Congress in November…
(Michael L. Krancer is Partner & Energy, Petrochemical and Natural Resources Practice Group Leader at Blank Rome LLP and former Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. His blog, Energy Trends Watch, follows developments in energy, petrochemical and natural resources.)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkrancer/2016/02/17/scalias-last-stand-he-helped-crush-obamas-big-paris-climate-change-deal/#6da91ffe609b
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Does anyone here think that a dying, leukaemia afflicted green would allow the genetically modified human material mined from their OWN bodies be used to cure them?. After all, they put their stakes in the sand on this issue. There should be a philosopher somewhere who states that ‘if you put your stake in the sand, be prepared to forgo your own bum on the line should you be mistaken”. Not a coal issue I apologise but I had to say it.
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Jo
Winds changing?
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2016/2/18/ditching-precaution-in-favour-of-innovation.html#comments
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Britain also lacks cheap electricity of course. (A situation that’s likely to get worse) The on-going CMA investigation into energy prices identifies in it’s interim report that the main driver of this is Green levies and networking costs. Is this likey to improve?…. Is anything likely to improve?…Is Great Britain facing a crises?
….Fen Beagle investigates our ‘current’ position…
https://fenbeagleblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/18/global-warning/
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Jo,
Along with a prize for the most creative use of 97% you need to award Fenbeagle a prize for his cartooning. He’s got a better handle on global warming than even Al Gore. He’s grabbed it by the funny bone and hasn’t let go for several years now.
🙂
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Roy, this link ain’t about warming. It’s about warning.
There may be more than the old tune “Fires in Calais”
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT0-IWejhUc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Calais_%281940%29
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Global WarNing!
Yes I missed that.
Thanks Mark D. Well done Fenbeagle
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Whatever it is, Mark, Fenbeagle is the best comic relief from all this nonsense I’ve ever seen. So I’ll vote him the prize any day. 🙂
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“More than half of deaths occur in two of the world’s fastest growing economies, China and India”
In the polluted city – China’s Health Miracle – World Life Expectancy
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/china-health-miracle
Life expectancy in Beijing and Shanghai has reached 80 years
Average life span in clean Green Germany- 80.89 years
average life span in the US- 78.74 years
average life span in the clean countryside in China- 74 years.
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From my personal observation:
As a general rule, you can only get someone to care about your plight if that someone is in the same boat you’re in. If they’re in some other boat they will only care about whether that boat is taking on water and not about what’s happening to your boat. There are exceptions but not nearly enough of them.
You can get one country to send lots of money to solve another country’s problems. We foolishly call that “foreign aid”. But that seldom works out to solve the problem because the money ends up in the hands of people in the wrong boat. It should be called what it really is, money wasting.
The way to make it work is simple. You make the people who can solve the problem live with those who’re suffering; live on the same streets and in the same houses; eat the same food; drink the same water; in short, have a real incentive to improve things. It’s the equivalent of making the slum lord live in his own rundown, ill repaired, unsafe buildings. Then just watch the improvement. So, for example, make the government of India live and work where the conditions are worst and not in their air conditioned condos and office buildings.
Now how do we do that?
If I knew I could bottle it, sell it cheaply and still die a rich man.
And if you think I’m wrong you should rethink. That old saying about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions came about just because I’m right, as have been many an observer before me.
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Ah yes. The good old “I don’t know how to solve the problem so I propose to use brute force to compel those whom I think can solve the problem to live inside a problem they did not create.” The flaw in that thinking is that to solve a problem you have to be free to identify the problem, its cause, and its mitigation. You have to use your mind, make a choice, and act accordingly. Yet, that is exactly what you have prohibited by forcing them into the situation.
In essence, what you propose is to apply more brute force to solve a problem that was caused by excessive use of brute force to begin with. That, my friend, is a contradiction. You cannot have you cake and eat it too. Pretending that you can by taking someone else’s cake after you ate yours is just that: a pretense.
I suggest that, if you do implement your proposal, you had better watch your back. If my some miracle you force some people who are really good at solving problems, you will be their prime target.
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Lionell,
Since we (you and I) already know that compelling others to do what they don’t want to do using bruit force doesn’t work, why would you read what I said as proposing bruit force?
That’s the whole problem. We have all these problems because compelling people to do what they don’t want to do doesn’t work. Remember when smog devices on cars didn’t work? I do. When was the last time you subverted your smog device to get your car to run better or to run at all? Don’t incriminate yourself by answering. But I remember the last time I did it. Thankfully antipollution devices are much better than they used to be. And as an interesting sidebar — manufacturers were compelled to create them by force of law. Ironic, is it not? Have Diamond lanes worked? No! The freeways are jammed with one person per vehicle vehicles and the diamond lanes are empty. That good old self interest will always prevail absent a workable compulsion.
I asked rhetorically if someone, anyone knows how to do that. But I know that no one knows how to make it work. However, if I did know how to do it I’m certain I could bottle it, sell it and die a rich man. The world needs solutions to many problems. But as you point out, human nature works against solutions.
The only way I can see to get to where we need to be is to provide incentives for people with the power to change things to act differently, to make it in their interest to do what’s in the general interest as well as their own. And I don’t know how to do that.
Perhaps you can suggest something?
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Brute force is what MAKE someone do something means. That is why I said what I said. If you meant “persuade”, using the word “make” was an unfortunate choice. Unfortunately, “persuade” has been contaminated by being used as a euphemism for “make”. The target of “make” and “persuade” is not to have the freedom to deny the “request” (which is itself a euphemism for “command”.
Again, in today’s semantic climate, “provide incentives” has the same usage contamination. Rules, regulations, taxes, penalties and the like are thought of as “incentives” to make you do what you would not otherwise do.
The only real fix to the problem is to get away from the idea that there is a common or greater good that must be serviced. Only individuals exist. Collectives don’t. In any event, a group of individuals have no more rights than a single individual. We need to recognized that each individual is sovereign over his own life and the results of his productive efforts. The only obligations one has for another is to keep your word and to remember and abide by the understanding that all interactions between sovereigns must be absolutely voluntary. When either of those obligations are broken, it is a criminal act and should rightly be prosecuted by a legitimate government by force if necessary or by necessary acts of self defense. Otherwise force must be exclude from the social arena.
A truly free people will be productive, cooperative, and respectful of others rights. There is much to be gained from the division of labor and trading value for value. And it would be seen as such except for a few predatory individuals who falsely want to live off the works of others.
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I’ve known for a long time that you’re a fan of the Ayn Rand view of how things should be, Lionell. But in the end, it hasn’t ever been that way. So I ask myself, why isn’t it that way? And the answer is very simple, humans have banded together in groups with rues of behavior and responsibilities expected of everyone for a very long time because there is a benefit to everyone — just for one example, a larger group can more easily defend itself. I expect you know this to be true, even in spite of your individualistic point of view.
So what does that leave us with? For better or for worse, when you’re part of a group there will be rules to follow, some rather trivial and some rather important. When it come it those we put in place to govern us the rules are really quite serous and failure to follow them has bad consequences for everyone. Leaders must lead. They must solve real problems. There is no escaping it. Do we want the pollution or not? I think not. And the solution is to provide real incentives for those in positions of responsibility to work on and solve those problems. Nothing works any better than putting those in responsibility into the conditions others suffer.
And I would do exactly that if I knew a way to do it. It’s very simple, the needs of the group are important, we would not form groups, societies and nations if there were not things only the group can do better than the individual. Nothing is more important than to have leaders vested with authority to compel compliance with certain things. And you know this as well as I do.
If the requirements of the group limit certain freedoms an individual might otherwise have, remember, with rights also comes responsibility, not just to yourself but to others. And history shows us very plainly that not everyone will carry out responsibilities to others. If this were not so, we wouldn’t need laws and law enforcement. I get evidence of this almost every day because I’m constantly picking up trash from in front of my house or in the yard — other people’s trash. QED.
It’s a giant juggling act to keep the individual rights in balance with responsibility without undue harm to either one. And we humans don’t do that very well.
I rest my case.
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Your rights do not place an obligation on me except to not violate them. I have no positive duty of action or transfer value put upon me as a consequence. The same for you with respect to me.
However, you failed to notice that I did point out the substantial value of division of labor and voluntary exchange of value for value. THAT is sufficient to sustain cooperation and proper behavior among rational individuals. It is an everyone wins and no one loses situation.
When irrationality creeps in, government is necessary to restrain and contain said irrational action. Barring that, the right of self defense is sufficient to deal with it.
To say that the group has a right to demand my service and wealth for whatever it decides is a primary irrationality and a fundamental violation of rights. The group/gang/government might have the power, ability, and will to make and enforce such demands but that does not make it right. They thereby all become criminals. That it has not been otherwise for all of man’s existence does not make it right either. It is simply some men, by using force, making slaves of others. Which, in the long run, will make things worse for all, including the predators. It is nothing but a position of anti mind, anti man, and anti production of value.
You started out being willing to force others to make things better. You agreed that force really won’t work. Now you assert once again that force will be necessary to make things work.
Apparently we will have to agree to disagree on these points. As has been said, you have a right to your opinion but facts simply exist and are owned by no one.
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Narcitopia – everything is OK in my world (at least it should be, because you owe me), and that’s all that counts.
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That word “voluntary” is where all the trouble comes in, isn’t it? I don’t like forcing anyone to do anything and would much prefer it if society could provide more gentle incentives for people to get it right when they don’t do it voluntarily. But as I pointed out, society needs certain responsibilities taken seriously, yet they aren’t always even considered at all. If voluntary would work we wouldn’t need laws and law enforcement as I’ve already pointed out.
So yes, we disagree about how to get things done. But at least we can do it like gentlemen, no pistols at dawn or anything like that.
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Hey Bemused is this your way to excuse yourself from helping out?
There are 1,000’s of small direct to recipient charities where 100+% of $$/items get placed directly in the hands of those that are in need.
How do I know this you may ask??
Because I help start on and participate in another.
Every time I visit the developing world I see so much potential for all of us to help in so many “small” (to us) ways.
http://giveashirt.ca/
For the 1st world to tell these people they can’t burn coal for electricity is very much “Do as I Say NOT as I Do/Did”
and then pretty much insures the deforestation of their countries.
[snip].
[Your comment has a lot more impact without what I snipped than with it left in place. The strength of an argument doesn’t depend on an ad hom attack on someone. It only distracts attention from the message.] AZ
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