Jon continues to pull back the curtain of deceit that disguises the most successful prostitutes of atomic, nuclear and particle physics as Nobel-prize winners of physics:
Atomic, nuclear and particle physicists can correct their public image as prostitutes by coming to this site or Jon’s and admitting, denying or debating the simple logical error in public.
I was reading about how there was talk about using the silica in sand as a power source…maybe they are getting ahead to destroy that as a fuel source now, before it can start?
They already put the dibs on fusion, so sand seems the logical next step, if only for consistency?
I seem to recall a Green slacktivist arguing that mankind was wholly unfit to reap the benefit from the purported infinite largesse of nuclear fusion (no mention was made of the sun). He didn’t quite get around to suggesting the expunging humanity from Gaia.
Won’t be long though.
Whatever will we do? I don’t think I can get through the rest of my life knowing we’re making commercial and industrial use of sand. How will we cope? No more sand boxes for the little ones. No more beaches. This is worse than climate change. 🙁
How about arrogance in Canada with the bar set very high by the elected PM Justin Trudeau last week in Parliament avoids answering the same basic question 18 times! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLdEYw3ginA
What an autocratic little manchild, how this guys face has survived unscarred is a mystery.
For some reason the link to the Powerline website always goes into moderation so anyone that likes to read a good collection of political cartoons from around the web every week then search Powerline The Week in Pictures, cheers.
Electricity customers will pay $45B to save $24B and that’s the rose coloured glasses scenario. It gets “progressively” worse when you factor in reality.
“The FAO says if the government has to fund that rebate through debt, the cost to the province could balloon up to $93 billion.” ”
Is this the earliest eevveerrrr Weekend Unthreaded?
Anyway, here is the latest nonsense from the New York Times.
QUOTE
Some scientists fear that parts of Antarctica are on track for an unstoppable collapse. If the resulting rise in sea level turns out to be as rapid as some worst-case projections, it could lead to a catastrophe without parallel in the history of civilization.
Is this the earliest eevveerrrr Weekend Unthreaded?
A believing White Lefty (see above) would take that as ‘proof’ of global warming.
A sceptic would first check to see if it wasn’t the latest one.
Thursday is a public holiday in France, and no one sane shows up at work on a Friday after a Thursday holiday (unless they have to), so it seems quite timely from my perspective!
Whatever happened to the Asmolian Institute? Many years ago I would start my drinking sessions with Weber’s ” Huntsmens Chorus” from “Der Freischütz” . Crowd favourite.
The first time I have seen the incoming data which looks so random with variations far exceeding the curve. My feeling is that a flat straight line would do as well, if you consider the variations as error bars. It is ridiculous to even fit a curve to this data without a very good rationale for the curve.
We all know Charles Dickens famous book “A Christmas Carol” describing a “White Christmas” in London in the 19th century.
But, as I understand it, there was possibly only one such event in London during the author’s lifetime, is it possible that Global Warming flourished in Souther England much earlier than we have been led to believe?
As the world pulled out of the Little Ice Age all the oscillations are still operating normally, Southern England was not exempt.
My argument is that SAM appears to be a mirror image of Northern Hemisphere weather, a miniature bipolar seesaw.
The new CMIP5 model has greater clarity and they have discovered the telltale fingerprint of increased solar forcing between 1980 and 2000 and a decrease ever since, which suggests they have been undervaluing the behaviour of the sun.
Charles J. H. Dickens Born 7 February 1812 Died 9 June 1870
Winters he probably would have been told or read about —
1813-14 (The Thames freezes over and the last frost fair is held),
1814 – January, a great fall of snow everywhere in England.
1816 – This is the year of no summer caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora, Java. Starvation swept Europe and 50000 people died in Ireland from typhus. Some of the worst weather affected most of Europe, with many dying of cold, starvation, and disease.
“On September 2, snow fell in Cambridge and Huntingdon causing much damage to the gardens. Known as the year without summer, snow fell very late on, and the summer never recovered. The winter proceeding it was severe. A volcanic eruption (Tambora: East Indies) disrupted wind patterns and temperatures greatly, affecting the track of depressions, which tracked further South than usual, and making the UK very cold an wet for the summer and beyond. Scotland was drier though, an obvious sign that the depressions changed track. In September the Thames had frozen! Snow drifts remained on hills until late July, 1817!”
Winters Dickens would have known —
1820 – In the first two weeks of January, a cold wave extended to the province of Andalucia (Espana) and Napoli (Italia). The Rhine, Thames, Rhone, Garonne, Saone and the Danish coastal waters froze over; in Haarlem (Holland) -16 C, in Mons (Belgium) -16 C, in Maastricht (Holland) -19C, and in Berlin -24 C. As usual, the thaw caused problems with severe flooding near Kekerdom (Nijmegen, East Holland) large parts of the Dutch river area are like a sea with on the 22nd of January. Dikes broke down. Cattle are lost. In Belgium cities like Brussel, Antwerp, Leuven and Liege are totally or partly under water.
1821 — In England, late May saw snow in London, probably the latest snowfall there until 2nd June 1975.
1822 — Galoengong volcanic eruption in Java; a terrible explosion that kills 4000. Weather patterns again are disrupted. A dry fog (dust?) in England and France (allowing people to gaze on the sun at noonday).
1822-23, a very cold winter in England. Severe winter, ice on the Thames by late December. February 8th (1823) saw a great snowstorm in Northern England. People had to tunnel through the snow.
Other notable weather event apart from storms in Ireland was on June 24, a tornado in Scarborough England, and on December 23, snow fell in Jamaica at Annottobay.
In 1829-30, a very cold winter in England. England had a cold year. Continuous frost throughout January, 1830. The summer was wet, and quite cold. Over an inch of snow fell in early October, although where isn’t certain, most likely to be London. 6 inches fell in London and the South in late November. Northerly and Easterly gales damaged ships, and lost some.
1830 — England, continued cold from last year with ongoing severe winter. Continuous frost from the 23rd to 31st December, 12th to 19th January, and 31st January to 6th February. Ice on the Thames from late December to late January. Some places completely blocked. 25th December 1830 was cold, with -12c recorded in Greenwich.
1836 — On December 24 and several days afterwards, snow fell in England. The snowstorm covered 60000 square miles to a depth of several feet; snow also fell in Germany, Holland, France, and Spain. It also snowed in Paris and northern France. In England, on 25th December 1836, roads impassable, snow depths reached a staggering 5-15 feet in many places, and most astonishingly, drifts of 20-50 feet!
In 1837-38, a very cold winter in England.
1838 — In January, the Thames is completely blocked by ice. Murphy’s Almanac predicts 20 January as coldest day of the year in UK. It is coldest day of the century.
1855 — On January 14-February 24, a severe frost in London with continued cold weather to June 26.
NOTE 1860-80s: Evidence of pronounced glacier withdrawal all over continental Europe; many Alpine glaciers retreated >1 km by beginning of this century. Icelandic glaciers remained in advanced positions, however (Aber).
So yes Dickens probably experienced only 2 white Christmases at the most but all through his early life (until the age of 30) the weather was very, very variable, what these days would be call unprecedentedly extreme!
Like modern times, however, there were exceptions and 1840 was very cold – the record for Christmas Day mentions “trees coated with rime (ice) 3/8 inch thick”!
The following 20 years saw Christmas morning much milder – well over half had maxima of 6C or higher. In 1843, the year Charles Dickens first published A Christmas Carol and the public sent their first Christmas cards, the temperature reached a balmy 10.1C – though dense fog probably made it feel at least a bit more seasonal.
it would be another 11 years before London experienced its first official white Christmas in 1864. Sleet, which fell at the end of a 4-day cold spell,
Five years later London experienced another white Christmas with snow falling in a north-easterly breeze – the start of a four-day cold spell.
The joint-coldest Christmas Day on record followed five years later in 1870 with a mean temperature of -7.2C.
The remainder of Victoria’s reign was marked with far more white Christmases, a period where nearly two-thirds of Decembers were marked with extended cold, snowy spells. Fog and frost were also frequent.
With a new century and new monarch Christmas-time turned milder and London would have to wait until close to the end of Edward VII’s reign in 1909 to see a ‘white Christmas’ – a poor affair with just a bit a sleet mixed in with the rain late morning. Many probably failed to notice it but it still counts as a white Christmas according to modern bookie’s standards.
Four of the 26 Christmas Days of George V’s reign were white but the mean temperatures suggest they were all marginal affairs
Just one Christmas was white during George VI’s reign, a ‘good covering of snow’ was recorded by observers at Greenwich in 1938 – the snow falling at the end of a 7-day cold spell.
he Clean Air Act 1956 ironically saw the return of dull Christmas Days – though 1956 was a white Christmas with a light covering of snow and a maximum of zero Celsius.
White Christmas Days that followed included 1957 (showery sleet), 1964, 1968 (sleet), and 1970.
Christmas Day 1976 was the last time snow actually fell on Christmas Day in this area though, officially, the last white Christmas was 1996 when a few sleety flakes fell in the early morning. ( while there was widespread snow only once between 1971 and 1992, there have been six such occasions between 1993 and 2004. The Guardian). Query also 2009, 2010.
Don’t forget that the definition of a White Christmas was changed to snow on the Air Ministry roof on Christmas Day sometime in the 1920’s so that was not what Dickens meant. Anyway with the Uban Heat effect snow in the middle of London should have become rarer.
I’ll have to get home to check definite dates but I can assure you that either 2009 or 2010 was very snowy on Christmas Day. We had to drive from Gloucestershire to to the north of Cumbria on the day and it was particularly cold (like -13C) around Worcester…we were watching the car temperature gauge all the way. When we reached our destination we found lethal ice where the snow had melted and then refrozen. Happy Christmas!
I remember Christmas Day 1956. It snowed in the evening while I was at a friend’s house near home. I walked home in a thin layer of the white stuff…magical, with the little Christmas trees with their coloured lights in the windows. Things were a lot more modest in those days and somehow more wonderful for that.
Essentially you are saying its a curve fitting exercise, but if you look closely its possible to see the Great Climate Shift of 1976…. and while you’re there consider this….
‘The winter of 1962–1963 (also known as the Big Freeze of 1963) was one of the coldest winters on record in the United Kingdom. Temperatures plummeted and lakes and rivers began to freeze over.
‘This winter remains the coldest since at least 1895 in all meteorological districts of the United Kingdom except Scotland North, where the two winters of 1978–79 and 2009–10 were marginally colder.’
Weekday Unthreaded is fine Jo! I’m relaxing on holiday in England. It was a beautiful day in the Yorkshire Dales too.
However, I am also very angry about what has happened in Manchester this week. This is where all the patronising, glib phrases about ‘Tolerance’ lead you. I’ve just retreated from the BBC News. The mawkish, sentimental wallowing in all the misery gets my goat. When will the ‘powers that be’ actually DO something sensible for a change, like refusing re-entry to the country after sojourns in the ISIS-riddled places. Our ‘leaders’ (our servants, supposedly…ha ha) don’t have the basic commonsense gumption to do what’s needed.
There was talk of a deliberate engineering of “clash of civilizatons” by the powers that be.
Assuming the “other side” has now been sufficiently stirred up to hate the West, now its the West’s turn to be “motivated” by creating widepsread outrage through attacking those who are deemed the most vulnerable in society.
Interestingly, Australians werent motivated to attend the big “party” that was on in Iraq at the time, however the Bali Bomb created sufficient outrage and “motivation” and people couldnt sign up to the fun-fest, fast enough.
Its easy to spot, once you know how it really works….
And the ugly unspoken bit – yes – the powers that be *will* happily sacrifice anyone, young, old, etc to achive thier ends ….. we are just “cattle” to be controlled and used in any way they see fit.
Larry Pickering has a great solution to remove the incentive. Promise to baptise the remains of any suicide bomber. Wicked. This denies them any reward, costs nothing and takes a few seconds. Fight ignorance with absurdity.
For a real perspective of whats going on there search Tommy Robinson who helped start the EDL in Luton, Bedfordshire, he now does reporting for Rebel Media amongst others and is a genuinely good man that simply wants to retain England’s identity, laws and peace.
Thanks Yonnie. I do enjoy being back in my native land, especially in May. The sight of the may blossom, cow parsley, and milkmaids in the hedgerows is one that always amazes me, along with some horsechestnut trees that are in full flower. The grass is wonderfully fresh and green and there are lots of various wild flowers out, not just the ones already mentioned. I even heard a cuckoo today in the Dales; the first I’ve heard for a few years. There are huge numbers of lambs everywhere and lovely dairy cattle too.
In the late 1970s I was visiting relatives in country UK and one, an Australian married to an Englishman, commented on London no longer being for English people.
And that the famous department store Harrods was “Arabs”.
Candlelight vigils are proven deterrents.
Similarly, the leader of a country declaring war on terrorism works wonders – like it did for Fancois Hollande.
He declared war on the terrorists 4 times. Look how effective that was.
Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter, so how is it we can export this commodity for other people to produce cheap electricity with at the same time we are deliberately destroying coal power stations and have some of the world’s most expensive electricity?
As an informational tool, I would like to point something out to you all, and I mentioned this a a week or two back, the difference between ENERGY and ELECTRICITY generation.
Note that when it comes to total Energy production the figure for renewables is much much lower.
From that 2016 Report, look at Table 4.1 on page 23 which details ENERGY production. The number for renewables is only 2.1% and Hydro makes up a good proportion of that.
Now look at Table 4.2 on page 26 which details ELECTRICITY generation, and you’ll see that Renewables make up 13.7%.
Can you see why when it comes to renewables, greenies like to quote Electricity generation because the figure is always so much higher.
Oh, and see how good Geothermal is doing here in Oz, at 0.0%. Doesn’t even make up a tenth of one percent of electricity generation, in fact 0.00046%. That was money well invested, eh!
Also note that for electricity generation, the fossil fuel share of the total, (Coal of both colours Natural Gas and Oil) is 86.3%.
By the way, even though this data says it’s a 2016 report, it is based on data from 2014/15, so even now, it’s almost two years behind.
This may seem to be a useless comment really, but it’s worth conjecturing about.
They have stopped including statistics for Uranium in these Reports, (so our report can line up equally with other reports from around the World) but on page 24 in Box 4.1, they added the statistics as a separate entry.
In 2014/15, Australia exported 6,496 Tonnes of Uranium.
When the uranium ore bearing dirt is dug out of the ground, you get 200 Tonnes of Uranium from 150,000 Tonnes of dirt.
At the end of five processes, that 200 Tonnes of Uranium yields 24 Tonnes of Nuclear Reactor fuel. That 24 Tonnes is what is consumed in one years operation of a nuclear power plant reactor.
So here we have exported 6,496 Tonnes of uranium. At 24 Tonnes of fuel from 200 Tonnes of Uranium, then we exported enough Uranium to power 32 reactors.
Each reactor can drive a 1200MW turbine/generator unit, and with 2 reactors per Nuclear power plant, that’s enough Uranium for 16 Power plants.
Each of those plants (2 Units) will generate 19.5TWH of electrical power, so with 16 plants, that’s 312TWH of generated power.
Australia currently generates 250TWH of power from EVERY source.
We have no nuclear power plants with none even envisaged on the far far far horizon, but at least we are keeping those existing Nukes (somewhere else) running eh!
The smart bloke was Sir Joe B-P.
He built the coal haulage railways. He did not charge any state royalties on coal companies.
Queensland benefited for decades from humungous rail freight costs.
The late Wayne Goss was not so smart and the state of Queensland has suffered financially ever since.
And here we have sleazy, slimy, slippery Jackie Trad rabbiting on about royalties at the start of the Adani project. Even a dumb-at*e like her should realise that it takes a few years for a grass roots resources project to achieve steady-state cash flow.
David, the Netherlands has no coal. They take in coal from various sources and export it from stockpiles. In the 1980’s during the coal miners strikes in UK the Netherlands took in coal from mainly South Africa in large ships upto 120,000 tonne then sent it across the channel to UK in barges. Now some of the coking coal from Australia goes via Rotterdam to steel mills in Germany. The Netherlands do the same with iron ore -taking it in vessels upto 300,000 tonne and shipping it to steel works in Germany, France, Switzerland etc in smaller vessels. The EU is great at fudging figures. When it suits them they can say they do not use or import coal or when it suits they can say they get everything in the common market. [Last two sentences redacted – potentially libelous] Fly
The Federal Government is arguing with the State Government against a Tribunal ruling allowing electricity price to rise again.
I wish the RET was dumped and let so called renewable energy businesses stand or fall on operating profits, if possible to achieve, without taxpayer funded subsidies, penalising power stations and granting price rises regularly.
“There is no question that cleaner coal technologies are the lowest cost option”
ASEAN’s Energy Equation indicates the way forward for Southeast Asia
“ASEAN’s Energy Equation found that investing in low emissions coal plants in Southeast Asia would reduce more emissions than the transition to renewables in Western Europe.”
I am not certain David, but from what I have read nuclear costs more than coal or gas fired power stations.
On the other hand I understand that the Zitskowski (spell?) report to the Howard government recommended a large number of mini-nuclear power plants located around Australia as the future for electricity supply.
David,
Yes, Yes, Yes.
Very high capital cost and lead time from project approval to generating power is at least double that of coal.
Break even on todays dollars is about 18 years on an NPV basis Using today spot prices for thermal coal and U3O8).
No David, there was an OECD/IEA report on power generation around the world and the trends. It found that the cheapest power around the world was nuclear in Asia (particularly South Korea, Taiwan and China) in Europe Nuclear power (mainly France and Finland) was cheaper than coal but this was more expensive than power in Asia. Even in USA, nuclear was on par with coal. The most expensive power round the world by a factor of 10 to 20 was solar while wind was was 2 to 5 times (off-shore was at the higher end) as expensive as coal. I think the report was dated around 2012. The IEA has become biased towards renewables so you may not find the report on their web site but it should there in the OECD library of publications. I have down loaded it and it is somewhere in my files.
The Report is called Projected Costs of Generating Electricity 2010 Edition. It is 218 pages. On the cover it has OECD , IEA and NEA. It has a large list of representatives from participating nations (about 55 people) The report is in PDF format but I do not know has to post a copy.
Here is the title page:-
Projected Costs of
Generating Electricity
2010 Edition
INTERNATIONAL ENERGY AGENCY
NUCLEAR ENERGY AGENCY
ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT
Further down it says
Also available in French under the title:
Coûts prévisionnels de production de l’électricité
Édition 2010
Corrigenda to OECD publications may be found on line at: http://www.oecd.org/publishing/corrigenda.
I don’t like the term “cleaner coal” because it implies there is a problem. Emissions from coal have been sorted for decades with various smokestack scrubbing technologies. I assume they are referring to supercritical steam technologies and those should be used simply because the fuel cost is less because they burn coal more efficiently.
Advocating supercritical because it is “cleaner” does nothing to support we climate realists. The only reason we should advocate to use supercritical is the economic argument of lower fuel consumption.
24 May: Daily Caller: Michael Bastasch: UN REPORT: Courts Are An ‘Important Tool’ To Impose Global Warming Laws
“Crucial legal predicate for pushing governments is code for the hook that activist green groups, attorneys general and courts are looking for,” Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), told The Daily Caller News Foundation…
The UNEP report notes that while Paris does not impose legally-binding requirements for countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it “enables litigants to construe governments’ commitments and actions as being adequate or inadequate.”
“The key question, which this cryptically addresses, is the legal risk that results from staying in Paris,” Horner said.
“I understand that has been internally conceded even by the State Department legal advocates,” Horner said, noting that a recent State Department memo did not include these doubts…
Horner pointed to a memo he obtained that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman circulated with fellow Democratic AGs in 2016 to “ensur[e] that the promises made in Paris become reality.”…
2 pages: 23 May: Thomson Reuters Foundation: Climate change court cases on the rise globally, majority in U.S.
The cases range from efforts to push governments for more aggressive national policies to reduce or prevent greenhouse gas emissions to lawsuits over the expansion of airports and coal mines, or concerning the development of renewable energy generation facilities.
Some 884 climate change cases had been filed by March in 24 countries in Africa, Asia, Pacific, Europe and the Americas. The United States had the highest number of cases – 654 – according to the survey carried out by U.N. Environment and the Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law…
“Judicial decisions around the world show that many courts have the authority, and the willingness, to hold governments to account for climate change,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center…
In the future, cases related to the rights of people forced to leave their homes because of climate change are expected to increase, with some predicting the number of “climate refugees” could reach as high as 1 billion people by 2050, the researchers said.
“It’s patently clear we need more concrete action on climate change, including addressing the root causes and helping communities adapt to the consequences,” said Erik Solheim, head of U.N. Environment.
“The science can stand up in a court of law, and governments need to make sure their responses to the problem do too,” he added. http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL8N1IP59D
PDF: 41 pages: UNEP: THE STATUS OF CLIMATE CHANGE LITIGATION: A GLOBAL REVIEW
Copyright: United Nations Environment Programme, May 2017
Acknowledgements
This publication was developed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment) in cooperation with the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University in the City of New York, United States of America. The report was drafted by Michael Burger, Executive Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, and Justin Gundlach, Climate Change Law Fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. The final critical review and consolidation of the draft was undertaken and overseen by Arnold Kreilhuber, Head of the International Environmental Law Unit, Lara Ognibene, Legal Officer, Angela Kariuki, Legal Assistant, and Alvin Gachie, Legal Assistant, with the Law Division of UN Environment…
Disclaimer
The designations employed and the presentation of the material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations or the United Nations Environment Programme concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.
Moreover, the views expressed do not necessarily represent the decision or the stated policy of the Secretariat of the United Nations or the United Nations Environment Programme, nor does citing of trade names or commercial processes constitute endorsement. We regret any errors that may have been inadvertently made.
Produced by: Law Division
UN Environment Programme
P.O. Box 30552 – 00100, Nairobi, Kenya https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/20767/climate-change-litigation.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
While we have no UltraSuperCritical (USC) power plants here in Australia, we do have four SuperCritical (SC) plants, the level of technology immediately below USC.
While they are a pretty big improvement, burning much less coal than the Critical and the even lower tech sub Critical plants we do have, the next level up, USC is almost a quantum level higher even than SC, burning even less coal per unit of power generated.
Those SC plants, and there are only four of them, are all in Queensland, and have all been constructed since 2001.
They are:
Callide C – 920MW
Milmerran – 850MW
Kogan Creek – 750MW
Tarong North – 443MW
That’s a total of just under 3000MW, and the total coal fired power for Queensland comes in at 8300MW.
And with all of them less than 15 years old, that’s why Queensland, as part of its 50% renewables by 2030 (yeah, good luck with that, it won’t happen) it tells you why the Panel came out with one of its major statements than NO coal fired plants will be closed down in that period.
Tell me its not happening. Here we see massive model failure, the subtropical ridge has weakened, leaving the Klimatariat mystified and uncertain but there is no backing down now. Global cooling has begun.
‘…the STR is projected to strengthen and move pole-ward under global warming, contributing to reduced rainfall in the cool season in south- east Australia. This result is largely consistent among 35 models examined, and CMIP5 shows a greater increase in intensity relative to position than CMIP3 did.’
‘CMIP5 included more metadata describing model simulations than previous phases. The METAFOR project created an exhaustive schema describing the scientific, technical, and numerical aspects of CMIP runs which was archived along with the output data.
‘In 2014 a new estimate for solar irradiation added corrections for scattering and diffraction. These corrected a component of the quasi-annual signal and increased the signal to noise ratio, respectively. The corrections decreased the average Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) value without affecting the trending in the ACRIM Composite TSI.
‘The corrections established an increase of +0.037%/decade from 1980 to 2000 and a decrease thereafter. Significant declines can be seen during the peak of solar cycles 21 and 22. Solar forcing of climate change may thus be a significantly larger factor than represented in CMIP5.’
24 May: Reuters: Susanna Twidale: Forecast for EU carbon prices in next decade put Paris target in doubt
Participants in Europe’s carbon market, including utilities, trading houses and banks expect EU carbon prices to be lower than predicted in the next decade, making it less attractive to invest in the technology needed to help hit emissions targets.
Average carbon prices are likely to be almost 9 percent lower than forecast last year, a survey of 135 companies published by the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) on Wednesday showed.
“Once again IETA members have highlighted the yawning gap between current prices and what’s needed to achieve the Paris objectives,” Jonathan Grant, a director at PwC which carried out the survey, said in a statement…
Respondents anticipate an average EU carbon price of 16.28 euros ($18.31) per tonne in the fourth phase of the ETS, which runs from 2021 to 2030…
The expected average price is less than half the 40 euros per tonne that respondents said last year is needed to help incentivise investments to help the bloc meet goals set under the Paris Agreement…
Carbon prices have suffered from an excess supply of carbon permits since the financial crisis, with benchmark carbon contracts now trading around 4.90 euros/tonne…
But two-thirds of respondents to the IETA survey said the rise of populist political movements are a threat to action…
President Donald Trump is expected to decide later this week whether to pull the United States out of the Paris deal …
Trump, who wants to boost the coal industry in the U.S., has said Washington should “cancel” the deal. http://news.trust.org/item/20170524090050-yurt2/
24 May: IETA Press release: Climate action high priority for business, despite rise of populism
BARCELONA, 24 May – Two-thirds of respondents to IETA’s annual GHG Market Sentiment survey (LINK) think that the rise of populist political movements globally are a threat to action on climate change, despite a high level of executive engagement…
Survey respondents are more optimistic about national and sectoral efforts, such as China’s planned national emissions trading system, efforts across Canada, and a new market for aviation…
“When it comes to Brexit, 60% of respondents think that the UK will leave the EU Emissions Trading System. But linking UK climate policy to the EU ETS would be the most cost-effective approach according to some,” says Jonathan Grant, Director, PwC, who performed analysis on the survey…
The survey report will be released at the Pitch Hub at Innovate4Climate in Barcelona on Wednesday 24 May at 11am CET. Hard copies will be available at the launch and it can also be downloaded from the IETA website (LINK)…
Key findings from this year’s survey:
includes: China is seen as an emerging leader on climate action: 83% of respondents expect the Chinese ETS to encourage other countries to adopt a carbon price. The majority of respondents agree that the launch of the Chinese ETS will reduce competitiveness concerns in other countries. http://www.ieta.org/page-18192/4850483
Donald Trump: Pope Francis gives climate change essay to President in Vatican
ABC Online – 15 hours ago
Pope Francis gives Trump his letter on protecting the environment
CBS News – 7 hours ago
Pope Francis presents Trump with a ‘politically loaded gift’: His encyclical on climate change
Washington Post – 11 hours ago
Pope Francis Gave President Trump a Copy of His Encyclical on Climate Change
TIME – 10 hours ago
With Gift and in Conversation, Vatican Presses Trump on Climate Change
New York Times – 1 hour ago
The pope presented the president with a copy of his influential encyclical on preserving the environment…
Pope Francis gives Trump his letter on protecting the environment
CBS News – 7 hours ago
24 May: Twitchy: Greg P: Catholic priest BUSTS liberal narrative over Pope Francis’ gift to Donald Trump
If you’re reading the lefty blogs and the MSM right now, you’ll see they’re pretty psyched about a gift Pope Francis gave to President Donald Trump — a copy of the pope’s 2015 encyclical on climate change.
Some examples…ETC
Except, maybe everyone is reading too much into the gift? From Father Pius Pietrzyk…
FakeNewsMSM want to give impression Pope made CAGW an issue in his meeting with the President but, so far, nothing is known of their talk. Rex Tillerson spoke to the Pope’s secretary of state who brought it up, that’s all:
24 May: ClimateChangeNews: Karl Mathiesen: Pope Francis gives Trump a climate change message
US president promised to read the pope’s encyclical Laudato Si’, which exhorts humanity to care for the environment
According to reports from the presidential press pool, Laudato Si’, the letter on environmental stewardship Francis wrote in 2015, was given to Trump ***ALONG WITH OTHER RELIGIOUS TEXTS THE POPE HAS WRITTEN. The pope also handed Trump a signed copy of his World Day of Peace message about nonviolence, saying: “I signed it personally for you”…
***The agenda for their conversation was reported by CNN (LINK) to include climate change…
A survey published on Tuesday by the Annenberg Public Policy Centre (APPC) at the University of Pennsylvania found that, in the US at least, the pope’s message had failed to make conservative catholics more concerned about climate change. It did however, raise awareness of climate change among liberally-minded catholics. http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/05/24/pope-francis-gives-trump-climate-change-message/
24 May: U.S. News & World Report: Curt Mills: Tillerson: Vatican Urged U.S. to Keep Paris Deal
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the pope’s secretary of state, expressed “their view that they think it’s an important issue,” Tillerson said on board Air Force One en route to Brussels, per the White House pool report. “I think they were encouraging continued participation in the Paris accord.”
“But we had a good exchange [on] the difficulty of balancing addressing climate change… and ensuring that you still have a thriving economy and you can still offer people jobs so they can feed their families,” Tillerson said. “And that’s a difficult balancing act… We look forward to having further talks with them on climate policy.”
But Tillerson emphasized any final decisions on the deal, and other policy matters, would be made later…
24 May: Reuters: Trump has not yet made final decision on Paris climate deal: Tillerson
(Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by Alissa de Carbonnel; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)
“The president indicated that we were still thinking about that, that he hasn’t made a final decision,” Tillerson told reporters, adding that he was unsure whether Trump discussed climate change with Pope Francis earlier in the day but that he had done so with a senior Vatican official…
Those who like to know more of the real truth about our Western history and why socialists and communists alike hated Western democracy over the past then watch The Hidden History of Western Civilization. It also exposes the leftists of today that live among us are effectively continuing the various anti-Western ideologies of the old communists, such as placing a stranglehold on freedom of speech.
I’ve been watching Stefan Molyneux for a few years now, his insights are a constant education in teaching yourself to question and listen to anything while deducing an informed opinion, another good thinker is Professor Jordan Peterson with his non PC accounts of history, Ben Shapiro is also good with an incredible memory for facts during debates.
Indeed. To many he often sounds confused but that’s mostly because he is a very good thinker and tends to over complicates things a lot for those who are not critical thinkers. I like to discuss but this is not the right forum.
23 May: Reuters: Merkel calls for unity in climate talks before G7 as U.S. holds out
Speaking at a meeting of about 30 nations in Berlin before meeting Trump at a Group of Seven leaders summit on May 26-27, Merkel told the Petersberg Dialogue that tackling climate change had to be a global effort…
Merkel cited an Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report showing that bringing together growth and climate agendas could lift economic output by up to 2.8 percent in 2050.
“A low carbon path offers an opportunity to accelerate investment in infrastructure, create a short-term boost to economic growth and development and provide relief from problems like congestion, air pollution and lack of energy access,” the report said.
If the economic benefits of avoiding the effects of climate change, such as flooding or storms, are factored in, the net increase to 2050 gross domestic product would be nearly 5 percent, the OECD added.
(Reporting by Markus Wacket and Alister Doyle in Oslo; Writing by Madeline Chambers, editing by Ed Osmond) http://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-talks-merkel-idUSKBN18J25I?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews
“‘unknown’ climates” for billions! lol.
22 May: CarbonBrief: Robert McSweeney: Half the global population could face ‘unknown’ climates by mid-century
Billions of people across the world could see climates they’ve never experienced before by the middle of the century, a new study says.
Using a measure of climate ‘familiarity,” the researchers show that the tropics in particular are likely to experience conditions that are virtually unheard of for the region in the present climate.
But keeping global temperatures rise below 2C above pre-industrial levels could help keep the climate “familiar” within this century, the researchers say…
This approach can help pinpoint where climates are likely to change beyond what people have to cope with at the moment, says lead author Dr Dave Frame, director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington…
Carbon Brief spoke to another of the study’s authors, Dr Manoj Joshi from the University of East Anglia, about the study at the recent European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna. You can see him explaining the findings in the clip below…
LINKS TO NATURE AT BOTTOM OF ARTICLE https://www.carbonbrief.org/half-global-population-could-face-unknown-climates-by-mid-century
23 May: Reuters: Shell shareholders reject emissions target proposal
By Karolin Schaps, THE HAGUE
Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L) shareholders on Tuesday widely rejected a proposal by an environmental group calling for the oil company to set and publish annual targets to reduce carbon emissions.
The vote is a setback for climate activists…
Around 94 percent of Shell shareholders who cast a vote decided against resolution 21, according to final results reported following the company’s annual general meeting (AGM) in The Hague. Roughly 5 percent of voters abstained…
Mark van Baal, founder of the Follow This activist group which put forward the resolution, said the group would target other oil companies such as BP as soon as funding was available… http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-shell-agm-idUKKBN18J1MN
22 May: UK Telegraph: Jillian Ambrose: BP gives new hope to North Sea oil revival as extraction begins from one of largest projects in recent years
The development follows BP’s $4.4bn (£3.4bn) upgrade to the Schiehallion field in the West of the Shetland islands. The area also holds BP’s major new gas field project at Clair Ridge.
Schiehallion has produced 400 million barrels of oil since it was first developed in 1998, but new drilling technology could now unlock a further 450 million barrels of oil and gas from the licence, known as Quad 4, which would extend the life of the fields for decades…
24 May: America Magazine: Gerard O’Connell: ‘I won’t forget what you said,’ Trump tells pope after meeting at Vatican
According to a summary provided by the Holy See, the pope and president talked, among other things, about “the promotion of peace through negotiation and inter-religious dialogue, with special reference to the Middle East and the protection of Christian communities.”
In their private conversation and in a subsequent one with two of the pope’s top advisors—Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, and Archbishop Paul Gallagher, secretary for relations with states, a Vatican statement said the two leaders discussed their “joint commitment in favor of life, and freedom of worship and conscience” and expressed the hope for “serene collaboration between the State and the Catholic Church in the United States, engaged in service to the people in the fields of healthcare, education and assistance to immigrants.”
***Surprisingly, the summary included no mention about “care for our common home” or climate change, but that does not mean the issue was not addressed in the two conversations that lasted a total of 80 minutes…
The content of their private conversation has not been revealed. This is normal, as Francis explained on the flight back from Cairo at the end of April. When a reporter asked what he had discussed in his private conversation with the Egyptian president, the pope replied, “Generally when I am with a head of state in private dialogue, that remains private, unless, by agreement, we say ‘let’s say on this point, we’ll make it public.’”
The same is true today. Pope Francis will not reveal what has been said, unless he and the president have jointly agreed to make a specific point or points known.
24 May: WaPo: Chris Mooney: Scientists just published an entire study refuting Scott Pruitt on climate change
In a sign of growing tensions between scientists and the Trump administration, researchers published a scientific paper (LINK) Wednesday that was conceived and written as an explicit refutation to an assertion by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt about climate change…
After reviewing temperature trends contained in three satellite data sets going back to 1979, the paper concludes that the data sets show a global warming trend — and that Pruitt was incorrect…
“Satellite temperature measurements do not support the claim of a ‘leveling off of warming’ over the past two decades,” write the authors, led by Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory…
The study finds warming trends for all the 20-year periods, including the “last two decades” referred to by Pruitt, although it acknowledges that the trend is somewhat lower over these later periods. But it attributes this to natural climate variations, including a very strong El Nino event in 1997 and 1998 that caused dramatic warmth around the beginning of the 20-year window that ends in the present…
“Another solid piece of work by Santer et al. that demonstrate multi-decadal satellite-derived global tropospheric temperatures are increasing far more than we would expect from natural causes,” said Thomas Karl…
John Christy, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Huntsville who keeps that data set and whose work has been often cited by climate change “skeptics,” agreed there is a warming trend in the satellite data overall but said that climate models predict that it should be larger. “The datasets are still significantly cooler than the model average,” he said by email.
Christy also argued that the other two data sets, which are warmer than his, are “outliers regarding the magnitude.”
“I wouldn’t get too excited about this study,” Christy said… https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/05/24/scientists-just-published-an-entire-study-refuting-scott-pruitt-on-climate-change/?utm_term=.d238c5220a0a
another piece of madness re “decarbonizing the global energy system”:
23 May: Environmental Research Letters: Will the use of a carbon tax for revenue generation produce an incentive to continue carbon emissions?
Authors: Rong Wang, Juan Moreno-Cruz, and Ken Caldeira
Abstract:
Integrated assessment models are commonly used to generate optimal carbon prices based on an objective function that maximizes social welfare. Such models typically project an initially low carbon price that increases with time. This framework does not reflect the incentives of decision makers who are responsible for generating tax revenue. If a rising carbon price is to result in near-zero emissions, it must ultimately result in near-zero carbon tax revenue. That means that at some point, policy makers will be asked to increase the tax rate on carbon emissions to such an extent that carbon tax revenue will fall. Therefore, there is a risk that the use of a carbon tax to generate revenue could eventually create a perverse incentive to continue carbon emissions in order to provide a continued stream of carbon tax revenue.
Using the Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy (DICE) model, we provide evidence that this risk is not a concern for the immediate future but that a revenue-generating carbon tax could create this perverse incentive as time goes on. This incentive becomes perverse at about year 2085 under the default configuration of DICE, but the timing depends on a range of factors including the cost of climate damages and the cost of decarbonizing the global energy system… http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6e8a/meta;jsessionid=70B1D84769F4F569E67AD06D38781752.c2.iopscience.cld.iop.org
24 May: WaPo: Chris Mooney: Scientists just published an entire study refuting Scott Pruitt on climate change
In a sign of growing tensions between scientists and the Trump administration, researchers published a scientific paper (LINK) Wednesday that was conceived and written as an explicit refutation to an assertion by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt about climate change…
After reviewing temperature trends contained in three satellite data sets going ba/ck to 1979, the paper concludes that the data sets show a global warming trend — and that Pruitt was incorrect…
“Satellite temperature measurements do not support the claim of a ‘leveling off of warming’ over the past two decades,” write the authors, led by Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory…
Nowhere has Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, ever demonstrated that increasing atmospheric CO2 ’causes any increase in surface temperature. He cannot! It is well known\measured that any increase in ocean temperature, by whatever means, must be accompanied by an increase in atmospheric CO2! Natural, never anthropogenic slaver BS.
All the best!-will-
Joanne, I hope your blog absence is (a) temporary, and (b) not the result of any personal problem you might be having. Killing the “AGW Monster” is tough enough with your presence. It would be soooooooo much harder with your absence.
“If Australia can export coal which is used to produce electricity I don’t see why we can’t then import that cheap electricity.”
“High voltage DC could deliver the power to the grid in QLD and then throughout Australia. The longest HVDC cable is 2385km and the distance from Port Moresby in PNG to a grid connection in QLD would be less than that. Could it work?”
Yes it can, with tremendous cost! HVDC has the lowest transmission losses using superconducting niobium, which only works at less than 13 Kelvin! What happens if that infrastructure craps out?
Much better\cheaper to use small, transportable nuke power at every local that needs that power! If more power is needed ship in another one! I just love to keep the greens upset!! 🙂
The cost would be prohibitive but then it didn’t stop Turnbull’s Snowy Hydro 2.0 thought bubble, which is now expected to blow out cost wise to over $4-6 billion (and probably more) and take 5+ years to complete by which time we will most likely be ripe for a takeover by another country as our economy implodes due to every higher electricity costs and other things.
You Aussies seem to be in deeper CClown BS
Than the USA folk. Perhaps that is because you have no Electoral College that limits the effect of money;
on some sort of democracy. In the US, folk vote for ‘representatives” in each state government. The US senate was composed of only state appointed representatives that ‘only’ promoted the financial goals of that state. The US house has only local swarthy members with best bats. In the US congress there is no politeness\courtesy. Only aggression as shown by the floor of the NY stock exchange. Can we do better? Yes; but way over else where\when!
All the best!-will-
David, as I have argued, the best way to export electricity is in solid form. Oil, LNG, coal, aluminium. We are closing our aluminium smelters with electricity costs the highest in the world. The Greens argue making base load cheap for Aluminium is a subsidy, but they are public servants and have no idea of arithmetic or business. Then you can ship the electricity as far as you like and convert it back to energy. It has a comparable heat output per litre to oil, although twice the weight and is totally renewable, but when did Greens actually care about renewables. They just hate carbon.
Funding Summary
(In millions of dollars)
2017 Request 2018 Change from 2017
Green Climate Fund (State)…………998…………………………………………………………….. 0 ……………………..-998
Clean Technology Fund (Treasury)……170……………………………………………………………….0 ………………………..-170
Strategic Climate Fund (Treasury)….. 60……………………………………………………………….0 …………………………-60
Bilateral GCCI (State and USAID)……362……………………………………………………………….0……………………….. -362
Total Base Budget Authority………1,590……………………………………………………… ………0……………………….-1,590
From the last posting:
“24 May: UK Independent: Ian Johnston: Donald Trump’s climate change stance under fire from world leaders as Theresa May keeps ‘pact of silence’”
England has demonstrated to the US be the most staunch ally, with Israel second. The King of Jordan is like attached to P45 in the quest to destroy terrorism, the Saudis maybe! Putin must be handled with a great deal of respect! Why would the Donald give a rat’s a*s of what some so called EU ‘leaders’ might wish? They are trivial\nonsense!! 🙂
“and a copy of his 2015 encyclical letter on the need to protect the environment from the effects of climate change. “Well, I’ll be reading them,” Mr Trump said…”
Did P45 ask Pontiff if his ‘claim of climate change came from GOD or from slavers’?
All the best!-will-
how come they didn’t report that the Vatican’s summary of the meeting between the Pope and the President made no mention of ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’, as Gerard O’Connell did for America Magazine (see comment #30)?
worse, FakeNewsMSM all gave the impression it was the Pope’s only agenda item. disgusting.
‘Will Janoschka -my question would be asked of the FakeNewsMSM.’
“how come they didn’t report that the Vatican’s summary of the meeting between the Pope and the President made no mention of ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’, as Gerard O’Connell did for America Magazine (see comment #30)?”
The Pontiff with vast experience in doing something a we bit incorrect, will never do that again! He uses engine starting fluid on a gasoline engine only once! The whole meeting was to establish trust between two very skilled, but also wary of the intent of the other. TRUST! 🙂
25 May: SMH: Mark Solomons: ‘Pro-coal’ Newman and Palaszczuk regimes blamed for $45 million solar failure
The Newman and Palaszczuk Queensland governments and their “pro-coal” policies are to blame for the failure of the Kogan Creek Solar Boost project, scrapped last year at a cost to taxpayers of at least $45 million, the technology’s inventor says.
State-owned utility CS Energy blamed contractual and technical problems, including rusting pipes and “fast-moving clouds”, for the project’s failure
But Australian scientist David Mills, whose pioneering solar thermal technology was to be used at Kogan Creek, said although former Labor premier Anna Bligh had been supportive in the scheme’s early stages, subsequent governments had failed to get state-owned power companies to buy the electricity produced, dooming the scheme…READ ON http://www.smh.com.au/business/procoal-newman-and-palaszczuk-regimes-blamed-for-45-million-solar-failure-20170525-gwct6k.html
25 May: Adelaide Advertiser: Sheradyn Holderhead: Federal Government promises $110 million to back Port Augusta solar thermal plant
ENERGY Minister Josh Frydenberg has confirmed the Coalition’s commitment to supporting a solar thermal plant at Port Augusta but says investment decisions are independent of the Federal Government…
“This funding is in addition to anything ARENA or the CEFC (Clean Energy Finance Corporation) may provide.”…
The Advertiser revealed yesterday public servants have cast doubt on the level of commitment to a project in Port Augusta, saying ARENA would only support projects which ranked highly on its merit criteria… http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/federal-government-promises-110-million-to-back-port-augusta-solar-thermal-plant/news-story/f9df95b3298a3a4da2cd8c20d1fed5f5
25 May: ABC: Rye Park Wind Farm in southern NSW approved, with 17 turbines cut from plans
ABC ***Central West By Gavin Coote
A major wind farm that has sparked division in a rural community north of Canberra has been approved, but with 17 fewer turbines to allay community concerns.
The Planning Assessment Commission has given the green light to build the Rye Park Wind Farm near Boorowa, on the south-west slopes of New South Wales.
The commission has cut the number of proposed turbines from 109 to 92, despite the NSW Department of Planning and Environment originally recommending it be further reduced to 84 (LINK).
The department received 240 submissions on the project, with many objecting on visual and environmental grounds (LINK)…
Former Boorowa councillor and Rye Park sheep farmer Andrew Southwell supports the project, but said he was disappointed it had been scaled down.
“For the landholders involved, that’s disappointing. For the project itself the concern is whether it’ll put up the cost of electricity and make it sort of unviable at this stage,” Mr Southwell said…
The developer, Tilt Renewables, expressed disappointment the size of the project had been slashed…
Spokesman Rontheo Van Zyl said while cutting 17 turbines from the wind farm could reduce its viability, he was pleased it had been finally approved…
Rye Park resident Rosemary Miller: “I was very relieved. [The turbines] were right in front of the village, and particularly for one resident that was going to be only 1.4 kilometres from a turbine,” Ms Miller said.
“I think the tide is slowly turning, realising wind farms are probably fine out in the desert, well away from where people are living, but not close to towns and villages.”…
I must admit getting a bit addicted to these videos by Juan Browne as they are so well produced with information most wouldn’t know about, in the latest video above look at the size of the spillway compared to the people standing on it, then consider how much water was flowing down it!
I was visiting Morwell in the Latrobe Valley today, the power source for Victoria’s electricity. It was so sad to see the Hazelwood plant standing idle. I wonder how long before Premier Dan visits to promise more jobs (but no idea in what industry) as he detonates the structures and promises greener electricity and ignores the doubling of electricity prices that is driving industry out of the country?
The sooner these leftist socialists are recognised as economy destroyers the better before it’s too late and we all have to look for jobs in other countries. The problem is too many Australians are still asleep so it will have to get a lot worse before they start acting.
PDF: 2 pages: Press release: Carbon Markets Remain Poised to Fill the Pre-2020 Climate Action Gap
More demand needed to stimulate innovative low-carbon project
25 May 2017 | Barcelona, Spain | As of 2016, offsets equivalent to 1.1 billion metric tonnes of carbon
dioxide emissions (BtCO2e) have been transacted voluntarily – through sales to governments, companies,
and individuals as well as intermediary brokers – according to the latest annual State of Voluntary Carbon
Markets (LINK) report from Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace, released today at the Innovate4Climate
conference in Barcelona…
Entitled “Unlocking Potential (LINK),” the new report finds that voluntary buyers in 2016 paid $191.3 million (M) to offset 63.4 million metric tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2e) – about as much greenhouse gases as Massachusetts
emits in a year. Concerned citizens, corporations, and sub-national governments moved ahead with their
battle against climate change by purchasing voluntary carbon offsets from projects that reduce emissions
through forest protection, renewable energy, and other means.
***Still, transaction volumes on the voluntary markets shrank 24% from 2015 to 2016, and demand did not meet supply of these offsets, as 56.2 MtCO2e were left unsold in project developer’s portfolios – some from previous years.
Other key findings include:
Prices for voluntary carbon offsets in 2016 were affordable overall (averaging $3.0/tCO2e) but also highly variable…READ ON http://www.forest-trends.org/documents/files/doc_5593.pdf
You could take a mid-week break, every week.
Start a Hump Day Hilarity post asking for humorous items — sayings, cartoons, with or without a climate related theme.
Anyway, this appears to be comment #43, so folks have a lot on their minds.
Cheers.
25 May: Breitbart: Ben Kew: Republican Senators Urge Trump to Exit Paris Climate Deal
The letter, which is signed by the likes of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, urges Trump to make a “clean break” from the agreement. An excerpt, published (LINK) on Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe’s website, reads etc…. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/25/republican-senators-urge-trump-to-exit-paris-climate-deal/
most of the MSM has this story posted now.
25 May: NYT: AP: Michael Biesecker: 22 GOP Senators Want US to Pull Out of Paris Climate Accord
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and 21 other Republicans on Thursday urged President Donald Trump to follow through on his campaign pledge to pull out of the Paris climate accord…
The letter signers account for fewer than half of Senate Republicans. A similar letter was also sent to Trump this week by attorneys general from 10 Republican-led states, including oil-rich Texas and coal-dependent West Virginia…
***During Trump’s visit to Rome this week, Pope Francis also urged Trump to take climate change seriously. https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/05/25/us/politics/ap-us-united-states-climate-change.html?_r=0
***AP/Biesecker: I don’t recall any such urging from the Pope. where’s your proof?
25 May: Fox News: Poll: Majority of Americans Think Mainstream Media Publishes ‘Fake News’
Nearly two-thirds of Americans think the mainstream press is full of “fake news,” according to the latest Harvard-Harris poll.
65 percent of voters believe there is a significant amount of fake news in the mainstream media, and the sentiment is held by a majority of voters across the ideological spectrum.
80 percent of Republicans, 60 percent of independents and 53 percent of Democrats reflected this distrust of the media…
On “The Fox News Specialists,” Eric Bolling said the media had a particularly bad week last week, with The Washington Post and The New York Times publishing negative stories about President Trump that proved to be “duds.” http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/05/25/harvard-harris-poll-majority-americans-think-mainstream-media-publishes-fake-news
there were plenty of NYT/WaPo”duds” before those two, and there have already been more “duds” since…and so it will go on.
theirABC & other Oz MSM, will generally publish the “duds”, but i can’t recall them ever carrying the “corrections”, or that they have been exposed as “duds”.
24 May: Bloomberg: Eric Roston: There’s Way Less Coal Than We Thought
A young researcher’s discovery about fossil fuels and climate change was so troubling, he wondered, “Oh man, am I really right about this?”
So it turns out global warming isn’t that bad after all.
That’s exactly the conclusion Justin Ritchie doesn’t want the world to draw from the paper he just published.
And for a good reason. It’s wrong…
Looking through “business as usual” and worst-case scenarios for the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, he saw that reliance on coal for energy started ramping up around 2040…
“Why is that?” he remembers asking himself.
The question evolved into his dissertation work—and to the most provocative conclusion of his study, published (LINK) last month ***to little fanfare in the journal Energy Economics. Inflated coal estimates had become at some point “a virtually unlimited backstop supply [that] has misinformed a generation of long-term energy scenarios,” Ritchie and his co-author, UBC professor Hadi Dowlatabadi, write in their paper. The estimates reflected all geologically identified coal, not the fraction it may be possible to dig out…
In other words, Ritchie and Dowlatabadi found, there may not be enough accessible coal to fuel the worst-case scenario of global warming…
“For the past quarter-century, high emission baselines have been the focus of research, explicitly or implicitly shaping national policy benchmarks, such as estimates for the social cost of carbon,” the paper says, referring to the dollars-per-ton measure used by government and business to factor future climate damage into today’s spending…
The surge in global coal production has produced a much more refined understanding of coal deposits around the world. Armed with those refinements, researchers have slashed their estimates of the amount of economically and technologically recoverable coal by two-thirds from ’90s-era forecasts…
“When I first found all this out, in 2015, it was somewhat of an existential crisis in a way,” Ritchie recalled. “I said, ‘Oh man, am I really right about this?'”
“This” could help the scenario developers rethink what they feed to climate modelers…
The discovery that there’s a whole lot less coal to burn would seem a gift to skeptics of climate change and opponents of climate policy. But Ritchie’s paper is a double-edged sword. The same finding that shrinks CO2 emissions may also lower the cost of dealing with global warming, making the Paris Agreement that addresses climate change easier to achieve…
To better understand how carbon-emission projections are made, Ritchie undertook the soul-destroying task of reading all five climate-change assessments published since 1990 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the authoritative but not bestselling scientific body. That cost him about a month. The work was funded, in part, by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions and by National Science Foundation funding awarded through the Carnegie Mellon Climate and Energy Decision Making Center…
***Before Energy Economics published the study, Ritchie said, he had submitted multiple papers to multiple journals. “Despite getting over 30 peer reviews collected from all of these journals, no one has shot it down,” he said, adding that he still has detected a reluctance among some scholars to grapple with his observations.
26 May: EconomicTimesIndia: Reuters: Mai Nguyen: Vietnam set to approve coal-fired power plants worth $7.5 bln
Although Vietnam wants to boost renewable energy output amid resources scarcity and environmental issues, it has been mostly reliant on coal-fired and hydro power plants to meet its annual electricity demand growth of around 11 percent.
Two of the projects by Japanese, South Korean and Saudi Arabian investors are expected to receive licences ahead of Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc’s visit to Japan next month, investment minister Nguyen Chi Dung told Reuters on Tuesday.
Details provided by the ministry showed South Korea’s Taekwang Power Holdings Co. and Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power would invest $2.07 billion for a 1,200-megawatt thermal power plant.
Each investor would have a 50-percent stake in the plant and commercial operation is expected to start in 2021.
Japan’s Marubeni Corp and Korea Electric Power Corp would invest $2.79 billion in a 1,200-megawatt plant, with operation expected to start in 2021. The investors will also share half of the investment each.
24 May: FirstPost: AP: China will shut down its only undersea coal mine in October
Beijing: China is shutting down its only undersea coal mine, state-run newspapers reported, as the government struggles to rein in rising production that threatens to frustrate a planned shift to cleaner-burning fuels…
Government officials announced plans to shutter 1,000 mines in 2016.
But data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows coal is rebounding this year with production up 9.9 percent in April versus a year earlier…
The closure is part of a government effort to phase out less productive mines, said Li Gongjian, the mine’s manager… http://www.firstpost.com/world/china-will-shut-down-its-only-undersea-coal-mine-in-october-3476278.html
25 May: World Coal: Coal is not dead
The statement from QRC (Queensland Resources Council) Chief Executive Ian Macfarlane is as follows:
As the Mark Twain saying goes: Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. And so have been the green activist reports of the death of coal, and more broadly, the resources sector.
Today, it is pleasing to see the Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Minister for Natural Resources and Mines, Dr Anthony Lynham, have thrown their support behind the resurgence of Queensland’s mighty resources sector. After such a rough few years, there are definitely green shoots across the entire sector, but we also mustn’t forget those who have toughed it out through hard times. In fact, many of those producers have reached record productivity and export levels during the so-called ‘bust’.
The numbers don’t lie, recent employment data shows that there has been a rise in jobs in the coal sector as well as increased exploration expenditure. Existing operations are producing at record levels, projects that have been on the drawing board have received the green light, and we would anticipate a significant amount of jobs once the Byerwen, New Acland and Carmichael mines begin construction. Let’s not forget our world-leading LNG export industry and the announcements of new natural gas projects including Senex’s Western Surat Gas Project, Arrow’s Tipton Project and QGC/Shell’s Ruby Project.
Population growth and urbanisation across SE Asia means the International Energy Agency has forecast that coal used for energy will still make up 23% of the energy mix and the tonnage of coal consumed will continue to rise. Additionally, there is no viable substitute for coking coal in steel making – there is no ‘uber’ in the wings and you can’t use a solar cell to convert iron ore to steel in a blast furnace. Therefore, our coking coal exports, which make up 75% of Queensland’s coal exports, are not in any short-term danger…ETC https://www.worldcoal.com/coal/25052017/coal-is-not-dead/
26 May: Townsville Bulletin: Domanii Cameron: Adani sits out Labor division
ADANI has shrugged off speculation their $16.5 billion project will be deferred until next year amid an ongoing Left faction revolt within the Labor Government.
Adani spokesman Ron Watson said the company was still hopeful that something could soon be resolved.
“We have deferred consideration of a final investment decision until the State Government has made a decision on royalties,” he said.
“This week in Parliament the Government has outlined that it has a strategy being developed.
“We’ll sit and wait.”
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said yesterday the Cabinet would discuss a formal submission for royalties on Monday, with Minister Assisting the Premier on North Queensland Coralee O’Rourke expecting to receive “materials over the weekend”.
Labor ministers met on Wednesday night to discuss the possibility of interest being charged on any mining royalty holidays in a bid to help various projects get off the ground. The option would not only assist Adani but other projects wanting to get under way in the Galilee and Surat basins, and the North West Minerals Province…
However, while the Cabinet attempts to defuse an ongoing “civil war”, the LNP yesterday slammed Ms O’Rourke for being “deathly silent”…
“If they think I’ve been silent on Adani, then they haven’t been listening,” she said. “This week, like every week, I have been speaking in support of Townsville and North Queensland jobs.
“My stance on Adani has always been the same: I support the Adani project and the jobs it will bring for Townsville and North Queensland.
“My support for the project has not and will not change.
“I have spoken to people from North Queensland about the Adani project this week, including the Mayor, Jenny Hill.
“Everyone I have spoken to has expressed the importance of the jobs that this project will create and I am in total agreement with this sentiment.” http://www.townsvillebulletin.com.au/news/adani-sits-out-labor-division/news-story/8c58535d7209b3ddbf95ef69b9380dc9
25 May: NDTV India: PTI: India’s Plans To Ban China’s Power Firms Will Backfire: Chinese Media
Beijing: India’s plans to ban Chinese power firms due to concerns over cyber-attacks could backfire on India even though the move would cause losses to companies from China, a report in a Chinese state-run daily said today.
“India’s reported move to block Chinese companies in the power sector seems to be new evidence of the country’s overly suspicious attitude toward China, but this could backfire given that India is still plagued by electricity shortages and unstable supply,” an article in the Global Times said today.
The article was commenting on the remarks made by Indian Electrical & Electronics Manufacturers’ Association Director General Sunil Misra that ban on Chinese equipment would protect India “from cyber-attacks because the power sector is increasingly software driven with intelligent technology and control systems being used.”
Referring to criticism that China does not allow for overseas investment in its electricity grid, the article said, “the reciprocity argument is unreasonably idealistic and doesn’t make any sense at all. Even if China allowed overseas investment in its power sector, could Indian power companies really make it into the Chinese market given their lack of development?”
For a long time, Indian power companies have been calling for a complete ban on Chinese companies in the domestic power sector, citing the threat to national security, it said.
“Of course, such a prohibition, if it became real, would cause losses for Chinese companies. But it is totally unrealistic and inefficient for a country that relies heavily on foreign technology and equipment due to its own underdeveloped power sector, because it would be hard and costly for India to seek substitutes for Chinese products,” it said.
“At present, Chinese companies are the major suppliers of power generation equipment in India, accounting for about 40 per cent of the traditional power equipment market, according to media reports. As such, India’s boycott of Chinese equipment would be at the cost of its electricity infrastructure development, eventually making its people the biggest losers,” the report added. http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/indias-plans-to-ban-chinas-power-firms-will-backfire-chinese-media-1703931
25 May: Xinhuanet: President of China Coal Energy Co. under probe
The president of China Coal Energy Co., Ltd., Gao Jianjun, is under investigation for suspected serious violations of the Party’s disciplines, China’s anti-graft authority said Thursday.
The news was released on websites of both the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.
The Shanghai-listed company is a subsidiary of China National Coal Group Corporation, a major state coal producer in China. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-05/25/c_136315189.htm
Reuters has picked up the brief announcement:
25 May: President of China Coal Energy Co Gao Jianjun under investigation
BEIJING (Reuters) – The president of China Coal Energy Company Ltd Gao Jianjun, is being investigated by the ruling Communist Party for suspected corruption, the party’s anti-graft watchdog said on Thursday. Gao is suspected of “serious discipline breaches”, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said in a brief statement, using its usual euphemism for graft but providing no other details.
26 May: AFR: Jenny Wiggins: BlackRock says coal is dead as it eyes renewable power splurge
“It’s been amusing sitting back and watching Australia from afar because in effect it’s been denying gravity,” Mr Barry, who is based in Dublin, told the The Australian Financial Review.
“Coal is dead. That’s not to say all the coal plants are going to shut tomorrow. But anyone who’s looking to take beyond a 10-year view on coal is gambling very significantly.”
Mr Barry, who plans to start investing in Australian renewable energy projects, acknowledged it was hard for politicians “not to do something” with resources like coal when they were available, but said he did not think there was “long-term potential” in Indian conglomerate Adani’s proposed $16.5 billion Carmichael coal mine.
He said no board directors in the US would make a 30-year commitment to coal…
“The thing that has changed fundamentally the whole picture is that renewables have gotten so ***cheap,” he said…
US-headquartered BlackRock, which has more than $US5 trillion of assets under management and claims to be the world’s largest investment group, is actively looking for Australian renewable energy investments to add to its new global renewable power fund, which is expected to reach about US$1.7 billion. About 10 per cent of the fund is expected to be allocated to Australia…
BlackRock is considering equity investments in only renewable energy in Australia but will look for opportunities to acquire longer-dated debt of transport infrastructure, including new toll roads like WestConnex
The NSW government has confirmed it will sell at least 51 per cent of the new Sydney motorway, which is under construction.
“A toll road that is up and operating is a very attractive infrastructure asset,” Mr Barry said. “Typically, it has inflation exposure as well in toll rates which a lot of institutions find useful.”… http://www.afr.com/business/mining/coal/blackrock-says-coal-is-dead-as-it-eyes-renewable-power-splurge-20170524-gwbuu6
Can anyone take Global Warming seriously with the heat wave for the bank holiday weekend in the UK?
“Met Office deputy chief Meteorologist, Dan Harris, said: “We’re expecting lots of warm and sunny weather for the start of the bank holiday weekend with a chance temperatures may top 30C in places. If you’re planning a trip then make sure you plan for the hot weather, don’t forget sun cream as UV levels will be high, and plenty of water.”
You would think in 100 years that humans would have evolved to handle the extreme heat. The toll at the surf beaches on the Thames must be horrific, when the homes are not being swept away by higher sea levels by a few mm. It’s a wonder anyone survives.
As for the UV index “The UV index does not exceed 8 in the UK (8 is rare; 7 may occur on exceptional days, mostly in the two weeks towards the end of June).” but in Melbourne in January, the UV index is rarely under 10 and sometimes 13. Again despite having less than 2% of the world’s population under the Tropic of Capricorn, clearly we are also responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. Our CO2 is deadlier too, the worst sort. South Australian CO2. Deadly.
So ‘the Science’ is never wrong despite being utterly illogical. It is all our fault.
“Trump has pivoted back to his base, and the fake news establishment media is butthurt about it.”
Indeed!
and like he did with Kushner and Bannon, there shall be no prema donnas except the Donald!
If you wish to continue to be advisor; in my
presence, you shall respect all other POVs, even to the extent of complementing that other; in my presence!!
This is what every (leader) Monarch! has done throughout history! “I will listen to you, however; do not expect any change in my decision!! Every Monarch knows, I represent those folk with power!; “do not piss off the proletariat”! Else current Monarch is now deceased!
Jon Rappoport has a great new discussion of the great vision and sad reality of technocracy:
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/the-vision-of-technocracy/
71
There is but ONE BEAUTIFUL, BOUNTIFUL, BENEVOLENT REALITY, and it shows the simple elegance of design, by a far superior MIND:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/HIGHER-POWERZ.pdf
to the THOUSANDS OF DAILY DANGERS UN globalists fabricate to hide reality with von Weizsäcker’s SIMPLE, LOGICAL ERROR in 1935:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Nuclear_Energy_Error7.pdf
and Nobel-prize-winning Standard (“97%-Consensus Scientific”) Models of
1. The Sun
2. The Nucleus
3. Earth’s Climate
4. Big Bang Cosmology
41
Jon continues to pull back the curtain of deceit that disguises the most successful prostitutes of atomic, nuclear and particle physics as Nobel-prize winners of physics:
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/05/26/my-first-mega-collection-the-matrix-revealed-logic-and-hypnosis/#comment-227140
Atomic, nuclear and particle physicists can correct their public image as prostitutes by coming to this site or Jon’s and admitting, denying or debating the simple logical error in public.
10
Welcome to “Peak Sand”
” From those “EXPERTS ON EVERYTHING” at The New Yorker magazine
THE WORLD IS RUNNING OUT OF SAND ”
http://www.redpowermagazine.com/forums/topic/107813-something-else-to-worry-about/
130
Of course they really mean tha the world is running out of sand that we haven’t been barred by the Greens from using.
81
“THE WORLD IS RUNNING OUT OF SAND”
That will upset the Sand-witches. But wait … most of the witches are green anyway. Now I am confused.
90
Give the Sandman a call. It comes in handy when these fantasys emerge from somebody’s addled brain.
80
Terry Pratchett’s Sandman doesn’t take the sand out of his sack…
10
I was reading about how there was talk about using the silica in sand as a power source…maybe they are getting ahead to destroy that as a fuel source now, before it can start?
https://phys.org/news/2013-01-scientists-silicon-hydrogen-demand.html
100
They already put the dibs on fusion, so sand seems the logical next step, if only for consistency?
I seem to recall a Green slacktivist arguing that mankind was wholly unfit to reap the benefit from the purported infinite largesse of nuclear fusion (no mention was made of the sun). He didn’t quite get around to suggesting the expunging humanity from Gaia.
Won’t be long though.
60
Whatever will we do? I don’t think I can get through the rest of my life knowing we’re making commercial and industrial use of sand. How will we cope? No more sand boxes for the little ones. No more beaches. This is worse than climate change. 🙁
50
Just because I missed last weekend Powerline The Week in Pictures:OMNIBUS EDITION, enjoyed by everyone but the socially challenged.
50
Adaptable to Australia too IMO
“CBC — routinely fostering ignorance in Canada.
Now there is a bumper sticker if ever there was one.”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2017/05/reader-tips-3844.html#comment-1105884
100
How about arrogance in Canada with the bar set very high by the elected PM Justin Trudeau last week in Parliament avoids answering the same basic question 18 times!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLdEYw3ginA
What an autocratic little manchild, how this guys face has survived unscarred is a mystery.
222
Dont conspiracy theorists talk of NWO flunkies being “lizard people” or some such?
Maybe its the limb re-growing/regeneraton that repairs damage?
I dont know….
70
That is not a very nice thing to say about Mick Jagger’s son.
50
Give that man a cigar…..Cuban of course. 😉
40
For some reason the link to the Powerline website always goes into moderation so anyone that likes to read a good collection of political cartoons from around the web every week then search Powerline The Week in Pictures, cheers.
80
Thanks for the comment!
Good read at¯http[://]www[.]powerlineblog.¯com/ just remove excess []punctuation¯ for address.
30
Ontario’s renewable energy scheme
”
Bill | May 24, 2017 2:44 PM | Reply
Kathleen Wynne’s $21 billion vote buying scheme.
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/toronto/ontario-hydro-1.4128902
Electricity customers will pay $45B to save $24B and that’s the rose coloured glasses scenario. It gets “progressively” worse when you factor in reality.
“The FAO says if the government has to fund that rebate through debt, the cost to the province could balloon up to $93 billion.” ”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2017/05/reader-tips-3844.html#comment-1105913
I guess this might fall into the “don’t mention it as it might give them ideas in Australia” category
210
Is this the earliest eevveerrrr Weekend Unthreaded?
Anyway, here is the latest nonsense from the New York Times.
QUOTE
Some scientists fear that parts of Antarctica are on track for an unstoppable collapse. If the resulting rise in sea level turns out to be as rapid as some worst-case projections, it could lead to a catastrophe without parallel in the history of civilization.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/18/climate/antarctica-ice-melt-climate-change.html?mc=adglobal&mcid=facebook&subid1=au&subid=pay&mccr=engselects&ad-keywords=NYTGAustraliaNews
84
David Maddison:
Is this the earliest eevveerrrr Weekend Unthreaded?
A believing White Lefty (see above) would take that as ‘proof’ of global warming.
A sceptic would first check to see if it wasn’t the latest one.
90
Thursday is a public holiday in France, and no one sane shows up at work on a Friday after a Thursday holiday (unless they have to), so it seems quite timely from my perspective!
30
Did you know that the tune for The Star Spangled Banner comes from an old English drinking song?
The Anacreontic Song
https://youtu.be/3l-n64NWHS4
106
2 red thumbs for that comment? One that has been known for over 100 years. Truly the trolls are stupid.
152
Imbecilism knows no bounds.
60
Everything becomes a drinking song with enough drinks, the other international language.
120
Whatever happened to the Asmolian Institute? Many years ago I would start my drinking sessions with Weber’s ” Huntsmens Chorus” from “Der Freischütz” . Crowd favourite.
70
Tried to search but came up with Ashmolean. Must have dreamt it.
50
Accurate shpelling is often the fust thing that is affected by excessive alkohol.
50
I can’t begin to imagine how (at this point in time) I got 5 red thumbs for that comment…
43
re Arctic Sea Ice
MASIE is showing the SLOWEST melt from maximum in its whole record (starts 2006)
NSIDC is showing the SLOWEST melt from maximum this century.
182
what is the rate of melt compared to the total? If that is also slowest then you have something
61
Time to homogenise the old melt figures (and send the pics to photoshop).
32
I’m putting up this link again because I reckon its a world scoop.
As you know correlation doesn’t prove causation, but at this stage it appears that SAM has caused the hiatus.
https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/styles/node_lightbox_display/public/key_figures/climate_data_set/Marshall-SAM-F2.png?itok=SfM6AroV
61
The first time I have seen the incoming data which looks so random with variations far exceeding the curve. My feeling is that a flat straight line would do as well, if you consider the variations as error bars. It is ridiculous to even fit a curve to this data without a very good rationale for the curve.
70
Maybe, did you know that the UK winter of 1974-75 was the mildest winter since 1868-69 with a CET of 6.4C?
50
We all know Charles Dickens famous book “A Christmas Carol” describing a “White Christmas” in London in the 19th century.
But, as I understand it, there was possibly only one such event in London during the author’s lifetime, is it possible that Global Warming flourished in Souther England much earlier than we have been led to believe?
50
As the world pulled out of the Little Ice Age all the oscillations are still operating normally, Southern England was not exempt.
My argument is that SAM appears to be a mirror image of Northern Hemisphere weather, a miniature bipolar seesaw.
The new CMIP5 model has greater clarity and they have discovered the telltale fingerprint of increased solar forcing between 1980 and 2000 and a decrease ever since, which suggests they have been undervaluing the behaviour of the sun.
70
Charles J. H. Dickens Born 7 February 1812 Died 9 June 1870
Winters he probably would have been told or read about —
1813-14 (The Thames freezes over and the last frost fair is held),
1814 – January, a great fall of snow everywhere in England.
1816 – This is the year of no summer caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora, Java. Starvation swept Europe and 50000 people died in Ireland from typhus. Some of the worst weather affected most of Europe, with many dying of cold, starvation, and disease.
“On September 2, snow fell in Cambridge and Huntingdon causing much damage to the gardens. Known as the year without summer, snow fell very late on, and the summer never recovered. The winter proceeding it was severe. A volcanic eruption (Tambora: East Indies) disrupted wind patterns and temperatures greatly, affecting the track of depressions, which tracked further South than usual, and making the UK very cold an wet for the summer and beyond. Scotland was drier though, an obvious sign that the depressions changed track. In September the Thames had frozen! Snow drifts remained on hills until late July, 1817!”
Winters Dickens would have known —
1820 – In the first two weeks of January, a cold wave extended to the province of Andalucia (Espana) and Napoli (Italia). The Rhine, Thames, Rhone, Garonne, Saone and the Danish coastal waters froze over; in Haarlem (Holland) -16 C, in Mons (Belgium) -16 C, in Maastricht (Holland) -19C, and in Berlin -24 C. As usual, the thaw caused problems with severe flooding near Kekerdom (Nijmegen, East Holland) large parts of the Dutch river area are like a sea with on the 22nd of January. Dikes broke down. Cattle are lost. In Belgium cities like Brussel, Antwerp, Leuven and Liege are totally or partly under water.
1821 — In England, late May saw snow in London, probably the latest snowfall there until 2nd June 1975.
1822 — Galoengong volcanic eruption in Java; a terrible explosion that kills 4000. Weather patterns again are disrupted. A dry fog (dust?) in England and France (allowing people to gaze on the sun at noonday).
1822-23, a very cold winter in England. Severe winter, ice on the Thames by late December. February 8th (1823) saw a great snowstorm in Northern England. People had to tunnel through the snow.
Other notable weather event apart from storms in Ireland was on June 24, a tornado in Scarborough England, and on December 23, snow fell in Jamaica at Annottobay.
In 1829-30, a very cold winter in England. England had a cold year. Continuous frost throughout January, 1830. The summer was wet, and quite cold. Over an inch of snow fell in early October, although where isn’t certain, most likely to be London. 6 inches fell in London and the South in late November. Northerly and Easterly gales damaged ships, and lost some.
1830 — England, continued cold from last year with ongoing severe winter. Continuous frost from the 23rd to 31st December, 12th to 19th January, and 31st January to 6th February. Ice on the Thames from late December to late January. Some places completely blocked. 25th December 1830 was cold, with -12c recorded in Greenwich.
1836 — On December 24 and several days afterwards, snow fell in England. The snowstorm covered 60000 square miles to a depth of several feet; snow also fell in Germany, Holland, France, and Spain. It also snowed in Paris and northern France. In England, on 25th December 1836, roads impassable, snow depths reached a staggering 5-15 feet in many places, and most astonishingly, drifts of 20-50 feet!
In 1837-38, a very cold winter in England.
1838 — In January, the Thames is completely blocked by ice. Murphy’s Almanac predicts 20 January as coldest day of the year in UK. It is coldest day of the century.
1855 — On January 14-February 24, a severe frost in London with continued cold weather to June 26.
NOTE 1860-80s: Evidence of pronounced glacier withdrawal all over continental Europe; many Alpine glaciers retreated >1 km by beginning of this century. Icelandic glaciers remained in advanced positions, however (Aber).
Information from A Chronology of Notable Weather Events by Douglas V. Hoyt.
So yes Dickens probably experienced only 2 white Christmases at the most but all through his early life (until the age of 30) the weather was very, very variable, what these days would be call unprecedentedly extreme!
60
Like modern times, however, there were exceptions and 1840 was very cold – the record for Christmas Day mentions “trees coated with rime (ice) 3/8 inch thick”!
The following 20 years saw Christmas morning much milder – well over half had maxima of 6C or higher. In 1843, the year Charles Dickens first published A Christmas Carol and the public sent their first Christmas cards, the temperature reached a balmy 10.1C – though dense fog probably made it feel at least a bit more seasonal.
it would be another 11 years before London experienced its first official white Christmas in 1864. Sleet, which fell at the end of a 4-day cold spell,
Five years later London experienced another white Christmas with snow falling in a north-easterly breeze – the start of a four-day cold spell.
The joint-coldest Christmas Day on record followed five years later in 1870 with a mean temperature of -7.2C.
The remainder of Victoria’s reign was marked with far more white Christmases, a period where nearly two-thirds of Decembers were marked with extended cold, snowy spells. Fog and frost were also frequent.
With a new century and new monarch Christmas-time turned milder and London would have to wait until close to the end of Edward VII’s reign in 1909 to see a ‘white Christmas’ – a poor affair with just a bit a sleet mixed in with the rain late morning. Many probably failed to notice it but it still counts as a white Christmas according to modern bookie’s standards.
Four of the 26 Christmas Days of George V’s reign were white but the mean temperatures suggest they were all marginal affairs
Just one Christmas was white during George VI’s reign, a ‘good covering of snow’ was recorded by observers at Greenwich in 1938 – the snow falling at the end of a 7-day cold spell.
he Clean Air Act 1956 ironically saw the return of dull Christmas Days – though 1956 was a white Christmas with a light covering of snow and a maximum of zero Celsius.
White Christmas Days that followed included 1957 (showery sleet), 1964, 1968 (sleet), and 1970.
Christmas Day 1976 was the last time snow actually fell on Christmas Day in this area though, officially, the last white Christmas was 1996 when a few sleety flakes fell in the early morning. ( while there was widespread snow only once between 1971 and 1992, there have been six such occasions between 1993 and 2004. The Guardian). Query also 2009, 2010.
Don’t forget that the definition of a White Christmas was changed to snow on the Air Ministry roof on Christmas Day sometime in the 1920’s so that was not what Dickens meant. Anyway with the Uban Heat effect snow in the middle of London should have become rarer.
50
And the Thames hydrology has changed dramatically over the years, so the river is unlikely to freeze at London Bridge any time soon.
20
I’ll have to get home to check definite dates but I can assure you that either 2009 or 2010 was very snowy on Christmas Day. We had to drive from Gloucestershire to to the north of Cumbria on the day and it was particularly cold (like -13C) around Worcester…we were watching the car temperature gauge all the way. When we reached our destination we found lethal ice where the snow had melted and then refrozen. Happy Christmas!
10
I remember Christmas Day 1956. It snowed in the evening while I was at a friend’s house near home. I walked home in a thin layer of the white stuff…magical, with the little Christmas trees with their coloured lights in the windows. Things were a lot more modest in those days and somehow more wonderful for that.
30
Essentially you are saying its a curve fitting exercise, but if you look closely its possible to see the Great Climate Shift of 1976…. and while you’re there consider this….
‘The winter of 1962–1963 (also known as the Big Freeze of 1963) was one of the coldest winters on record in the United Kingdom. Temperatures plummeted and lakes and rivers began to freeze over.
‘This winter remains the coldest since at least 1895 in all meteorological districts of the United Kingdom except Scotland North, where the two winters of 1978–79 and 2009–10 were marginally colder.’
wiki
60
Weekday Unthreaded is fine Jo! I’m relaxing on holiday in England. It was a beautiful day in the Yorkshire Dales too.
However, I am also very angry about what has happened in Manchester this week. This is where all the patronising, glib phrases about ‘Tolerance’ lead you. I’ve just retreated from the BBC News. The mawkish, sentimental wallowing in all the misery gets my goat. When will the ‘powers that be’ actually DO something sensible for a change, like refusing re-entry to the country after sojourns in the ISIS-riddled places. Our ‘leaders’ (our servants, supposedly…ha ha) don’t have the basic commonsense gumption to do what’s needed.
190
“The bombings have only just begun: “Progressive” Western civilization is slaughtering itself by foolishly appeasing those who seek to destroy it”
http://www.trump.news/2017-05-23-western-civilization-is-slaughtering-itself-appeasing-destroy.html
141
There was talk of a deliberate engineering of “clash of civilizatons” by the powers that be.
Assuming the “other side” has now been sufficiently stirred up to hate the West, now its the West’s turn to be “motivated” by creating widepsread outrage through attacking those who are deemed the most vulnerable in society.
Interestingly, Australians werent motivated to attend the big “party” that was on in Iraq at the time, however the Bali Bomb created sufficient outrage and “motivation” and people couldnt sign up to the fun-fest, fast enough.
Its easy to spot, once you know how it really works….
And the ugly unspoken bit – yes – the powers that be *will* happily sacrifice anyone, young, old, etc to achive thier ends ….. we are just “cattle” to be controlled and used in any way they see fit.
Now put the last 48 hours in context….
40
Larry Pickering has a great solution to remove the incentive. Promise to baptise the remains of any suicide bomber. Wicked. This denies them any reward, costs nothing and takes a few seconds. Fight ignorance with absurdity.
70
For a real perspective of whats going on there search Tommy Robinson who helped start the EDL in Luton, Bedfordshire, he now does reporting for Rebel Media amongst others and is a genuinely good man that simply wants to retain England’s identity, laws and peace.
Have a good time Annie and stay safe. 🙂
90
Thanks Yonnie. I do enjoy being back in my native land, especially in May. The sight of the may blossom, cow parsley, and milkmaids in the hedgerows is one that always amazes me, along with some horsechestnut trees that are in full flower. The grass is wonderfully fresh and green and there are lots of various wild flowers out, not just the ones already mentioned. I even heard a cuckoo today in the Dales; the first I’ve heard for a few years. There are huge numbers of lambs everywhere and lovely dairy cattle too.
80
Ah, such delightful memories. And what an education, for a young boy, starting out in the world.
What?
Oh, come on! The milkmaids taught me how to milk a cow by hand. What did you think I meant?
50
Hedge Rose.
‘Once a boy a rosebud spied,
by the way-side grow-ing-‘
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifuwo9iNf7E
20
In the late 1970s I was visiting relatives in country UK and one, an Australian married to an Englishman, commented on London no longer being for English people.
And that the famous department store Harrods was “Arabs”.
60
“peace in our time”…comes to mind….
60
Annie, indeed. The pain.
What we “need” is another candlelit vigil.
101
Candlelight vigils are proven deterrents.
Similarly, the leader of a country declaring war on terrorism works wonders – like it did for Fancois Hollande.
He declared war on the terrorists 4 times. Look how effective that was.
70
Why is Donald not taking this occasion seriously? Doesn’t he realise that the fellow standing next to him is the deity’s man on earth?
http://ll-media.tmz.com/2017/05/24/0524-ivanka-melania-donald-trump-pope-gettty-7.jpg
60
Donald got the joke but his wife, daughter and the Pope didn’t.
81
A memorable photo!
70
What a bizarre photo. It’s like a funeral occasion.
I do like the little space between the Pope and Trump standing apart.
50
The Pope is pissed off and I don’t care.
GeoffW
50
Donald’s security detail is really worried. If someone takes a shot at him they’ll have to say “Donald duck”.
70
It now appears that any hope we had in Donald, to bring about an end to the AGW madness, is now over.
40
Wait.
30
Antarctic model trends do not come near,
To gauge the true extent of ice each year.
India wants a trillion tons of coal,
To formulate a new emissions goal.
The media disregarding skeptics’ views,
Is another way to propagate fake news.
A hundred million on a solar scheme,
Becomes a nightmare from a warmist dream.
90
million tons should read trillion tons
[Fixed it for you Ruairi] Fly
60
Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter, so how is it we can export this commodity for other people to produce cheap electricity with at the same time we are deliberately destroying coal power stations and have some of the world’s most expensive electricity?
http://www.worldstopexports.com/coal-exports-country/
Australia: US$28.3 billion (38% of total coal exports)
Indonesia: $12.9 billion (17.3%)
Russia: $8.9 billion (12%)
United States: $4.4 billion (6%)
Colombia: $4.4 billion (5.9%)
South Africa: $3.9 billion (5.2%)
Canada: $3.4 billion (4.5%)
Netherlands: $2.3 billion (3.2%)
North Korea: $1.2 billion (1.6%)
Mongolia: $994.4 million (1.3%)
China: $697.5 million (0.9%)
Poland: $659.1 million (0.9%)
Philippines: $319.6 million (0.4%)
Kazakhstan: $302.0 million (0.4%)
Czech Republic: $289.9 million (0.4%)
111
A good riddle. I hope the correct answer is conspiracy free.
30
This is a Did you know that comment.
According to the 2016 Australian Energy Update, 90% of all black coal mined in Australia ….. was EXPORTED.
90%.
So, we get to use only 10% of our black coal, reputedly the best in the World.
Someone, somewhere (hint- Governments State and Federal) are making a humungous amount of money from the royalties associated with that.
Tony.
Source – 2016 Australian Energy Statistics (pdf document of 32 pages)
131
Our governments are saving Australia from man-made global warming climate change Tony.
30
As an informational tool, I would like to point something out to you all, and I mentioned this a a week or two back, the difference between ENERGY and ELECTRICITY generation.
Note that when it comes to total Energy production the figure for renewables is much much lower.
From that 2016 Report, look at Table 4.1 on page 23 which details ENERGY production. The number for renewables is only 2.1% and Hydro makes up a good proportion of that.
Now look at Table 4.2 on page 26 which details ELECTRICITY generation, and you’ll see that Renewables make up 13.7%.
Can you see why when it comes to renewables, greenies like to quote Electricity generation because the figure is always so much higher.
Oh, and see how good Geothermal is doing here in Oz, at 0.0%. Doesn’t even make up a tenth of one percent of electricity generation, in fact 0.00046%. That was money well invested, eh!
Also note that for electricity generation, the fossil fuel share of the total, (Coal of both colours Natural Gas and Oil) is 86.3%.
By the way, even though this data says it’s a 2016 report, it is based on data from 2014/15, so even now, it’s almost two years behind.
Tony.
71
This may seem to be a useless comment really, but it’s worth conjecturing about.
They have stopped including statistics for Uranium in these Reports, (so our report can line up equally with other reports from around the World) but on page 24 in Box 4.1, they added the statistics as a separate entry.
In 2014/15, Australia exported 6,496 Tonnes of Uranium.
When the uranium ore bearing dirt is dug out of the ground, you get 200 Tonnes of Uranium from 150,000 Tonnes of dirt.
At the end of five processes, that 200 Tonnes of Uranium yields 24 Tonnes of Nuclear Reactor fuel. That 24 Tonnes is what is consumed in one years operation of a nuclear power plant reactor.
So here we have exported 6,496 Tonnes of uranium. At 24 Tonnes of fuel from 200 Tonnes of Uranium, then we exported enough Uranium to power 32 reactors.
Each reactor can drive a 1200MW turbine/generator unit, and with 2 reactors per Nuclear power plant, that’s enough Uranium for 16 Power plants.
Each of those plants (2 Units) will generate 19.5TWH of electrical power, so with 16 plants, that’s 312TWH of generated power.
Australia currently generates 250TWH of power from EVERY source.
We have no nuclear power plants with none even envisaged on the far far far horizon, but at least we are keeping those existing Nukes (somewhere else) running eh!
Tony.
111
Hmm…if 90% of black coal ( low wate rcontent ) is exported, this means we use brown coal, which the greenies hate even more.
It seems we have been stitched up.
80
The smart bloke was Sir Joe B-P.
He built the coal haulage railways. He did not charge any state royalties on coal companies.
Queensland benefited for decades from humungous rail freight costs.
The late Wayne Goss was not so smart and the state of Queensland has suffered financially ever since.
And here we have sleazy, slimy, slippery Jackie Trad rabbiting on about royalties at the start of the Adani project. Even a dumb-at*e like her should realise that it takes a few years for a grass roots resources project to achieve steady-state cash flow.
30
David, the Netherlands has no coal. They take in coal from various sources and export it from stockpiles. In the 1980’s during the coal miners strikes in UK the Netherlands took in coal from mainly South Africa in large ships upto 120,000 tonne then sent it across the channel to UK in barges. Now some of the coking coal from Australia goes via Rotterdam to steel mills in Germany. The Netherlands do the same with iron ore -taking it in vessels upto 300,000 tonne and shipping it to steel works in Germany, France, Switzerland etc in smaller vessels. The EU is great at fudging figures. When it suits them they can say they do not use or import coal or when it suits they can say they get everything in the common market. [Last two sentences redacted – potentially libelous] Fly
40
Another electricity price hike in NSW.
The Federal Government is arguing with the State Government against a Tribunal ruling allowing electricity price to rise again.
I wish the RET was dumped and let so called renewable energy businesses stand or fall on operating profits, if possible to achieve, without taxpayer funded subsidies, penalising power stations and granting price rises regularly.
70
They keep telling us how cheap renewables are so remove the subsidies and the world’s biggest carbon tax and let them operate in a free market.
81
“There is no question that cleaner coal technologies are the lowest cost option”
ASEAN’s Energy Equation indicates the way forward for Southeast Asia
“ASEAN’s Energy Equation found that investing in low emissions coal plants in Southeast Asia would reduce more emissions than the transition to renewables in Western Europe.”
https://www.worldcoal.org/asean’s-energy-equation-indicates-way-forward-southeast-asia
30
Or, if deemed to be necessary, nuclear power stations with zero emissions, at a much higher cost but a far superior option to wind and solar.
50
Are nuclear power stations really more expensive than coal, taking into account all costs?
41
I am not certain David, but from what I have read nuclear costs more than coal or gas fired power stations.
On the other hand I understand that the Zitskowski (spell?) report to the Howard government recommended a large number of mini-nuclear power plants located around Australia as the future for electricity supply.
50
http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Browse_by_Topic/ClimateChangeold/responses/mitigation/emissions/nuclear
20
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AURELawJl/2007/54.pdf
20
Mini nuclear power plants-are we talking ‘thorium’?
GeoffW
40
David,
Yes, Yes, Yes.
Very high capital cost and lead time from project approval to generating power is at least double that of coal.
Break even on todays dollars is about 18 years on an NPV basis Using today spot prices for thermal coal and U3O8).
10
No David, there was an OECD/IEA report on power generation around the world and the trends. It found that the cheapest power around the world was nuclear in Asia (particularly South Korea, Taiwan and China) in Europe Nuclear power (mainly France and Finland) was cheaper than coal but this was more expensive than power in Asia. Even in USA, nuclear was on par with coal. The most expensive power round the world by a factor of 10 to 20 was solar while wind was was 2 to 5 times (off-shore was at the higher end) as expensive as coal. I think the report was dated around 2012. The IEA has become biased towards renewables so you may not find the report on their web site but it should there in the OECD library of publications. I have down loaded it and it is somewhere in my files.
50
Would this be the document. You have to sign-up to receive it (via email)
http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/energy/energy-statistics-of-oecd-countries_19962827-en
10
The Report is called Projected Costs of Generating Electricity 2010 Edition. It is 218 pages. On the cover it has OECD , IEA and NEA. It has a large list of representatives from participating nations (about 55 people) The report is in PDF format but I do not know has to post a copy.
Here is the title page:-
Projected Costs of
Generating Electricity
2010 Edition
INTERNATIONAL ENERGY AGENCY
NUCLEAR ENERGY AGENCY
ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT
Further down it says
Also available in French under the title:
Coûts prévisionnels de production de l’électricité
Édition 2010
Corrigenda to OECD publications may be found on line at: http://www.oecd.org/publishing/corrigenda.
00
I don’t like the term “cleaner coal” because it implies there is a problem. Emissions from coal have been sorted for decades with various smokestack scrubbing technologies. I assume they are referring to supercritical steam technologies and those should be used simply because the fuel cost is less because they burn coal more efficiently.
Advocating supercritical because it is “cleaner” does nothing to support we climate realists. The only reason we should advocate to use supercritical is the economic argument of lower fuel consumption.
83
http://balance10.blogspot.com/2017/05/let-all-who-are-athirst-come.html
20
Its not well known that the foundation of the North Korean legal system is Confucianist, this communist aberration is an accident of history.
I have lost all faith in your god.
10
http://balance10.blogspot.com/2017/05/double-mindedness-cannot-magnetize.html
00
24 May: Daily Caller: Michael Bastasch: UN REPORT: Courts Are An ‘Important Tool’ To Impose Global Warming Laws
“Crucial legal predicate for pushing governments is code for the hook that activist green groups, attorneys general and courts are looking for,” Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), told The Daily Caller News Foundation…
The UNEP report notes that while Paris does not impose legally-binding requirements for countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it “enables litigants to construe governments’ commitments and actions as being adequate or inadequate.”
“The key question, which this cryptically addresses, is the legal risk that results from staying in Paris,” Horner said.
“I understand that has been internally conceded even by the State Department legal advocates,” Horner said, noting that a recent State Department memo did not include these doubts…
Horner pointed to a memo he obtained that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman circulated with fellow Democratic AGs in 2016 to “ensur[e] that the promises made in Paris become reality.”…
The UNEP report notes the Paris Agreement “does expressly call on national governments to make their mitigation commitments incrementally more stringent and never less so.”…
http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/24/un-report-courts-are-an-important-tool-to-impose-global-warming-laws/
2 pages: 23 May: Thomson Reuters Foundation: Climate change court cases on the rise globally, majority in U.S.
The cases range from efforts to push governments for more aggressive national policies to reduce or prevent greenhouse gas emissions to lawsuits over the expansion of airports and coal mines, or concerning the development of renewable energy generation facilities.
Some 884 climate change cases had been filed by March in 24 countries in Africa, Asia, Pacific, Europe and the Americas. The United States had the highest number of cases – 654 – according to the survey carried out by U.N. Environment and the Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law…
“Judicial decisions around the world show that many courts have the authority, and the willingness, to hold governments to account for climate change,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center…
In the future, cases related to the rights of people forced to leave their homes because of climate change are expected to increase, with some predicting the number of “climate refugees” could reach as high as 1 billion people by 2050, the researchers said.
“It’s patently clear we need more concrete action on climate change, including addressing the root causes and helping communities adapt to the consequences,” said Erik Solheim, head of U.N. Environment.
“The science can stand up in a court of law, and governments need to make sure their responses to the problem do too,” he added.
http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL8N1IP59D
30
If anybody tells you they know because science says so, or they say that whatever is scientifically proved; or when with bloated hubris it is announced the ‘science is settled’ — watch these two short videos in this order —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2kiAF1GL9M
then watch —
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXwj4jMnWZg
If you/they are still intrigued then Amazon has the book and the 13 hours box set for sale.
50
PDF: 41 pages: UNEP: THE STATUS OF CLIMATE CHANGE LITIGATION: A GLOBAL REVIEW
Copyright: United Nations Environment Programme, May 2017
Acknowledgements
This publication was developed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment) in cooperation with the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University in the City of New York, United States of America. The report was drafted by Michael Burger, Executive Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, and Justin Gundlach, Climate Change Law Fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. The final critical review and consolidation of the draft was undertaken and overseen by Arnold Kreilhuber, Head of the International Environmental Law Unit, Lara Ognibene, Legal Officer, Angela Kariuki, Legal Assistant, and Alvin Gachie, Legal Assistant, with the Law Division of UN Environment…
Disclaimer
The designations employed and the presentation of the material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations or the United Nations Environment Programme concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.
Moreover, the views expressed do not necessarily represent the decision or the stated policy of the Secretariat of the United Nations or the United Nations Environment Programme, nor does citing of trade names or commercial processes constitute endorsement. We regret any errors that may have been inadvertently made.
Produced by: Law Division
UN Environment Programme
P.O. Box 30552 – 00100, Nairobi, Kenya
https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/20767/climate-change-litigation.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
40
While we have no UltraSuperCritical (USC) power plants here in Australia, we do have four SuperCritical (SC) plants, the level of technology immediately below USC.
While they are a pretty big improvement, burning much less coal than the Critical and the even lower tech sub Critical plants we do have, the next level up, USC is almost a quantum level higher even than SC, burning even less coal per unit of power generated.
Those SC plants, and there are only four of them, are all in Queensland, and have all been constructed since 2001.
They are:
Callide C – 920MW
Milmerran – 850MW
Kogan Creek – 750MW
Tarong North – 443MW
That’s a total of just under 3000MW, and the total coal fired power for Queensland comes in at 8300MW.
And with all of them less than 15 years old, that’s why Queensland, as part of its 50% renewables by 2030 (yeah, good luck with that, it won’t happen) it tells you why the Panel came out with one of its major statements than NO coal fired plants will be closed down in that period.
Tony.
81
Tell me its not happening. Here we see massive model failure, the subtropical ridge has weakened, leaving the Klimatariat mystified and uncertain but there is no backing down now. Global cooling has begun.
‘…the STR is projected to strengthen and move pole-ward under global warming, contributing to reduced rainfall in the cool season in south- east Australia. This result is largely consistent among 35 models examined, and CMIP5 shows a greater increase in intensity relative to position than CMIP3 did.’
Grose et al 2015
61
The CMIP5 is supposedly superior, this from wiki.
‘CMIP5 included more metadata describing model simulations than previous phases. The METAFOR project created an exhaustive schema describing the scientific, technical, and numerical aspects of CMIP runs which was archived along with the output data.
‘In 2014 a new estimate for solar irradiation added corrections for scattering and diffraction. These corrected a component of the quasi-annual signal and increased the signal to noise ratio, respectively. The corrections decreased the average Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) value without affecting the trending in the ACRIM Composite TSI.
‘The corrections established an increase of +0.037%/decade from 1980 to 2000 and a decrease thereafter. Significant declines can be seen during the peak of solar cycles 21 and 22. Solar forcing of climate change may thus be a significantly larger factor than represented in CMIP5.’
10
24 May: Reuters: Susanna Twidale: Forecast for EU carbon prices in next decade put Paris target in doubt
Participants in Europe’s carbon market, including utilities, trading houses and banks expect EU carbon prices to be lower than predicted in the next decade, making it less attractive to invest in the technology needed to help hit emissions targets.
Average carbon prices are likely to be almost 9 percent lower than forecast last year, a survey of 135 companies published by the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) on Wednesday showed.
“Once again IETA members have highlighted the yawning gap between current prices and what’s needed to achieve the Paris objectives,” Jonathan Grant, a director at PwC which carried out the survey, said in a statement…
Respondents anticipate an average EU carbon price of 16.28 euros ($18.31) per tonne in the fourth phase of the ETS, which runs from 2021 to 2030…
The expected average price is less than half the 40 euros per tonne that respondents said last year is needed to help incentivise investments to help the bloc meet goals set under the Paris Agreement…
Carbon prices have suffered from an excess supply of carbon permits since the financial crisis, with benchmark carbon contracts now trading around 4.90 euros/tonne…
But two-thirds of respondents to the IETA survey said the rise of populist political movements are a threat to action…
President Donald Trump is expected to decide later this week whether to pull the United States out of the Paris deal …
Trump, who wants to boost the coal industry in the U.S., has said Washington should “cancel” the deal.
http://news.trust.org/item/20170524090050-yurt2/
24 May: IETA Press release: Climate action high priority for business, despite rise of populism
BARCELONA, 24 May – Two-thirds of respondents to IETA’s annual GHG Market Sentiment survey (LINK) think that the rise of populist political movements globally are a threat to action on climate change, despite a high level of executive engagement…
Survey respondents are more optimistic about national and sectoral efforts, such as China’s planned national emissions trading system, efforts across Canada, and a new market for aviation…
“When it comes to Brexit, 60% of respondents think that the UK will leave the EU Emissions Trading System. But linking UK climate policy to the EU ETS would be the most cost-effective approach according to some,” says Jonathan Grant, Director, PwC, who performed analysis on the survey…
The survey report will be released at the Pitch Hub at Innovate4Climate in Barcelona on Wednesday 24 May at 11am CET. Hard copies will be available at the launch and it can also be downloaded from the IETA website (LINK)…
Key findings from this year’s survey:
includes: China is seen as an emerging leader on climate action: 83% of respondents expect the Chinese ETS to encourage other countries to adopt a carbon price. The majority of respondents agree that the launch of the Chinese ETS will reduce competitiveness concerns in other countries.
http://www.ieta.org/page-18192/4850483
40
FakeNewsMSM:
Donald Trump: Pope Francis gives climate change essay to President in Vatican
ABC Online – 15 hours ago
Pope Francis gives Trump his letter on protecting the environment
CBS News – 7 hours ago
Pope Francis presents Trump with a ‘politically loaded gift’: His encyclical on climate change
Washington Post – 11 hours ago
Pope Francis Gave President Trump a Copy of His Encyclical on Climate Change
TIME – 10 hours ago
With Gift and in Conversation, Vatican Presses Trump on Climate Change
New York Times – 1 hour ago
The pope presented the president with a copy of his influential encyclical on preserving the environment…
Pope Francis gives Trump his letter on protecting the environment
CBS News – 7 hours ago
24 May: Twitchy: Greg P: Catholic priest BUSTS liberal narrative over Pope Francis’ gift to Donald Trump
If you’re reading the lefty blogs and the MSM right now, you’ll see they’re pretty psyched about a gift Pope Francis gave to President Donald Trump — a copy of the pope’s 2015 encyclical on climate change.
Some examples…ETC
Except, maybe everyone is reading too much into the gift? From Father Pius Pietrzyk…
Tweet: Fr. Pius Pietrzyk OP:
Replying to @jeremyrumbolt @BBCWorld:
It’s been the custom of Popes to give copies of ***all their major writing. BBC makes it look like Pope had especially chosen this encyclical…
http://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2017/05/24/catholic-priest-busts-liberal-narrative-over-pope-francis-gift-to-donald-trump/
FakeNewsMSM want to give impression Pope made CAGW an issue in his meeting with the President but, so far, nothing is known of their talk. Rex Tillerson spoke to the Pope’s secretary of state who brought it up, that’s all:
24 May: ClimateChangeNews: Karl Mathiesen: Pope Francis gives Trump a climate change message
US president promised to read the pope’s encyclical Laudato Si’, which exhorts humanity to care for the environment
According to reports from the presidential press pool, Laudato Si’, the letter on environmental stewardship Francis wrote in 2015, was given to Trump ***ALONG WITH OTHER RELIGIOUS TEXTS THE POPE HAS WRITTEN. The pope also handed Trump a signed copy of his World Day of Peace message about nonviolence, saying: “I signed it personally for you”…
***The agenda for their conversation was reported by CNN (LINK) to include climate change…
A survey published on Tuesday by the Annenberg Public Policy Centre (APPC) at the University of Pennsylvania found that, in the US at least, the pope’s message had failed to make conservative catholics more concerned about climate change. It did however, raise awareness of climate change among liberally-minded catholics.
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/05/24/pope-francis-gives-trump-climate-change-message/
24 May: U.S. News & World Report: Curt Mills: Tillerson: Vatican Urged U.S. to Keep Paris Deal
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the pope’s secretary of state, expressed “their view that they think it’s an important issue,” Tillerson said on board Air Force One en route to Brussels, per the White House pool report. “I think they were encouraging continued participation in the Paris accord.”
“But we had a good exchange [on] the difficulty of balancing addressing climate change… and ensuring that you still have a thriving economy and you can still offer people jobs so they can feed their families,” Tillerson said. “And that’s a difficult balancing act… We look forward to having further talks with them on climate policy.”
But Tillerson emphasized any final decisions on the deal, and other policy matters, would be made later…
24 May: Reuters: Trump has not yet made final decision on Paris climate deal: Tillerson
(Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by Alissa de Carbonnel; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)
“The president indicated that we were still thinking about that, that he hasn’t made a final decision,” Tillerson told reporters, adding that he was unsure whether Trump discussed climate change with Pope Francis earlier in the day but that he had done so with a senior Vatican official…
30
Those who like to know more of the real truth about our Western history and why socialists and communists alike hated Western democracy over the past then watch The Hidden History of Western Civilization. It also exposes the leftists of today that live among us are effectively continuing the various anti-Western ideologies of the old communists, such as placing a stranglehold on freedom of speech.
40
I’ve been watching Stefan Molyneux for a few years now, his insights are a constant education in teaching yourself to question and listen to anything while deducing an informed opinion, another good thinker is Professor Jordan Peterson with his non PC accounts of history, Ben Shapiro is also good with an incredible memory for facts during debates.
40
Indeed. To many he often sounds confused but that’s mostly because he is a very good thinker and tends to over complicates things a lot for those who are not critical thinkers. I like to discuss but this is not the right forum.
40
bottom line for Germany/Merkel:
23 May: Reuters: Merkel calls for unity in climate talks before G7 as U.S. holds out
Speaking at a meeting of about 30 nations in Berlin before meeting Trump at a Group of Seven leaders summit on May 26-27, Merkel told the Petersberg Dialogue that tackling climate change had to be a global effort…
Merkel cited an Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report showing that bringing together growth and climate agendas could lift economic output by up to 2.8 percent in 2050.
“A low carbon path offers an opportunity to accelerate investment in infrastructure, create a short-term boost to economic growth and development and provide relief from problems like congestion, air pollution and lack of energy access,” the report said.
If the economic benefits of avoiding the effects of climate change, such as flooding or storms, are factored in, the net increase to 2050 gross domestic product would be nearly 5 percent, the OECD added.
(Reporting by Markus Wacket and Alister Doyle in Oslo; Writing by Madeline Chambers, editing by Ed Osmond)
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-talks-merkel-idUSKBN18J25I?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews
“‘unknown’ climates” for billions! lol.
22 May: CarbonBrief: Robert McSweeney: Half the global population could face ‘unknown’ climates by mid-century
Billions of people across the world could see climates they’ve never experienced before by the middle of the century, a new study says.
Using a measure of climate ‘familiarity,” the researchers show that the tropics in particular are likely to experience conditions that are virtually unheard of for the region in the present climate.
But keeping global temperatures rise below 2C above pre-industrial levels could help keep the climate “familiar” within this century, the researchers say…
This approach can help pinpoint where climates are likely to change beyond what people have to cope with at the moment, says lead author Dr Dave Frame, director of the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington…
Carbon Brief spoke to another of the study’s authors, Dr Manoj Joshi from the University of East Anglia, about the study at the recent European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna. You can see him explaining the findings in the clip below…
LINKS TO NATURE AT BOTTOM OF ARTICLE
https://www.carbonbrief.org/half-global-population-could-face-unknown-climates-by-mid-century
20
I initially read that as the New Zealot Climate Change Research Institute.
20
23 May: Reuters: Shell shareholders reject emissions target proposal
By Karolin Schaps, THE HAGUE
Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L) shareholders on Tuesday widely rejected a proposal by an environmental group calling for the oil company to set and publish annual targets to reduce carbon emissions.
The vote is a setback for climate activists…
Around 94 percent of Shell shareholders who cast a vote decided against resolution 21, according to final results reported following the company’s annual general meeting (AGM) in The Hague. Roughly 5 percent of voters abstained…
Mark van Baal, founder of the Follow This activist group which put forward the resolution, said the group would target other oil companies such as BP as soon as funding was available…
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-shell-agm-idUKKBN18J1MN
22 May: UK Telegraph: Jillian Ambrose: BP gives new hope to North Sea oil revival as extraction begins from one of largest projects in recent years
The development follows BP’s $4.4bn (£3.4bn) upgrade to the Schiehallion field in the West of the Shetland islands. The area also holds BP’s major new gas field project at Clair Ridge.
Schiehallion has produced 400 million barrels of oil since it was first developed in 1998, but new drilling technology could now unlock a further 450 million barrels of oil and gas from the licence, known as Quad 4, which would extend the life of the fields for decades…
The group is planning to double its UK North Sea production to 200,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day by the end of the decade and has promised to hold a material business in the region for several decades…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/05/22/bp-gives-new-hope-north-sea-oil-revival-extraction-begins-one/
30
The action of Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L) shareholders will help plant life thrive and grow, so future generations will have more fossil fuels to burn!
30
Congratulations to Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L) shareholders!
30
24 May: America Magazine: Gerard O’Connell: ‘I won’t forget what you said,’ Trump tells pope after meeting at Vatican
According to a summary provided by the Holy See, the pope and president talked, among other things, about “the promotion of peace through negotiation and inter-religious dialogue, with special reference to the Middle East and the protection of Christian communities.”
In their private conversation and in a subsequent one with two of the pope’s top advisors—Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, and Archbishop Paul Gallagher, secretary for relations with states, a Vatican statement said the two leaders discussed their “joint commitment in favor of life, and freedom of worship and conscience” and expressed the hope for “serene collaboration between the State and the Catholic Church in the United States, engaged in service to the people in the fields of healthcare, education and assistance to immigrants.”
***Surprisingly, the summary included no mention about “care for our common home” or climate change, but that does not mean the issue was not addressed in the two conversations that lasted a total of 80 minutes…
The content of their private conversation has not been revealed. This is normal, as Francis explained on the flight back from Cairo at the end of April. When a reporter asked what he had discussed in his private conversation with the Egyptian president, the pope replied, “Generally when I am with a head of state in private dialogue, that remains private, unless, by agreement, we say ‘let’s say on this point, we’ll make it public.’”
The same is true today. Pope Francis will not reveal what has been said, unless he and the president have jointly agreed to make a specific point or points known.
Climate change activists projected the words “Planet Earth First” on the massive dome of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican Tuesday night and protests are expected Wednesday in Rome and later in the week when Mr. Trump travels to Brussels for a NATO meeting and Sicily for a G7 gathering.
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/05/24/i-wont-forget-what-you-said-trump-tells-pope-after-meeting-vatican
20
all the big guns!
24 May: WaPo: Chris Mooney: Scientists just published an entire study refuting Scott Pruitt on climate change
In a sign of growing tensions between scientists and the Trump administration, researchers published a scientific paper (LINK) Wednesday that was conceived and written as an explicit refutation to an assertion by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt about climate change…
After reviewing temperature trends contained in three satellite data sets going back to 1979, the paper concludes that the data sets show a global warming trend — and that Pruitt was incorrect…
“Satellite temperature measurements do not support the claim of a ‘leveling off of warming’ over the past two decades,” write the authors, led by Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory…
The study finds warming trends for all the 20-year periods, including the “last two decades” referred to by Pruitt, although it acknowledges that the trend is somewhat lower over these later periods. But it attributes this to natural climate variations, including a very strong El Nino event in 1997 and 1998 that caused dramatic warmth around the beginning of the 20-year window that ends in the present…
“Another solid piece of work by Santer et al. that demonstrate multi-decadal satellite-derived global tropospheric temperatures are increasing far more than we would expect from natural causes,” said Thomas Karl…
John Christy, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Huntsville who keeps that data set and whose work has been often cited by climate change “skeptics,” agreed there is a warming trend in the satellite data overall but said that climate models predict that it should be larger. “The datasets are still significantly cooler than the model average,” he said by email.
Christy also argued that the other two data sets, which are warmer than his, are “outliers regarding the magnitude.”
“I wouldn’t get too excited about this study,” Christy said…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/05/24/scientists-just-published-an-entire-study-refuting-scott-pruitt-on-climate-change/?utm_term=.d238c5220a0a
another piece of madness re “decarbonizing the global energy system”:
23 May: Environmental Research Letters: Will the use of a carbon tax for revenue generation produce an incentive to continue carbon emissions?
Authors: Rong Wang, Juan Moreno-Cruz, and Ken Caldeira
Abstract:
Integrated assessment models are commonly used to generate optimal carbon prices based on an objective function that maximizes social welfare. Such models typically project an initially low carbon price that increases with time. This framework does not reflect the incentives of decision makers who are responsible for generating tax revenue. If a rising carbon price is to result in near-zero emissions, it must ultimately result in near-zero carbon tax revenue. That means that at some point, policy makers will be asked to increase the tax rate on carbon emissions to such an extent that carbon tax revenue will fall. Therefore, there is a risk that the use of a carbon tax to generate revenue could eventually create a perverse incentive to continue carbon emissions in order to provide a continued stream of carbon tax revenue.
Using the Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy (DICE) model, we provide evidence that this risk is not a concern for the immediate future but that a revenue-generating carbon tax could create this perverse incentive as time goes on. This incentive becomes perverse at about year 2085 under the default configuration of DICE, but the timing depends on a range of factors including the cost of climate damages and the cost of decarbonizing the global energy system…
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6e8a/meta;jsessionid=70B1D84769F4F569E67AD06D38781752.c2.iopscience.cld.iop.org
30
pat May 25, 2017 at 2:46 pm
“all the big guns!”
41
Roy Spencer’s post is about this:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/05/santer-takes-on-pruitt-the-global-warming-pause-and-the-devolution-of-climate-science/
30
Joanne, I hope your blog absence is (a) temporary, and (b) not the result of any personal problem you might be having. Killing the “AGW Monster” is tough enough with your presence. It would be soooooooo much harder with your absence.
120
If Australia can export coal which is used to produce electricity I don’t see why we can’t then import that cheap electricity.
Entrepreneurs could build a large power station in PNG, say 2000MW or bigger, it could burn Aussie coal and then we could import cheap electricity.
High voltage DC could deliver the power to the grid in QLD and then throughout Australia.
The longest HVDC cable is 2385km and the distance from Port Moresby in PNG to a grid connection in QLD would be less than that.
Could it work?
51
David Maddison May 25, 2017 at 3:38 pm
“If Australia can export coal which is used to produce electricity I don’t see why we can’t then import that cheap electricity.”
“High voltage DC could deliver the power to the grid in QLD and then throughout Australia. The longest HVDC cable is 2385km and the distance from Port Moresby in PNG to a grid connection in QLD would be less than that. Could it work?”
Yes it can, with tremendous cost! HVDC has the lowest transmission losses using superconducting niobium, which only works at less than 13 Kelvin! What happens if that infrastructure craps out?
Much better\cheaper to use small, transportable nuke power at every local that needs that power! If more power is needed ship in another one! I just love to keep the greens upset!! 🙂
71
The cost would be prohibitive but then it didn’t stop Turnbull’s Snowy Hydro 2.0 thought bubble, which is now expected to blow out cost wise to over $4-6 billion (and probably more) and take 5+ years to complete by which time we will most likely be ripe for a takeover by another country as our economy implodes due to every higher electricity costs and other things.
60
You Aussies seem to be in deeper CClown BS
Than the USA folk. Perhaps that is because you have no Electoral College that limits the effect of money;
on some sort of democracy. In the US, folk vote for ‘representatives” in each state government. The US senate was composed of only state appointed representatives that ‘only’ promoted the financial goals of that state. The US house has only local swarthy members with best bats. In the US congress there is no politeness\courtesy. Only aggression as shown by the floor of the NY stock exchange. Can we do better? Yes; but way over else where\when!
All the best!-will-
31
‘…..takeover by another country as our economy implodes …..’
New Zealand?
30
I am not sure that New Zealand would want it.
Papua New Guinea might be interested, if the liquidation write-offs were reasonable.
30
We have a large quarry and a lot of intellectual property, that must be worth something.
10
David, as I have argued, the best way to export electricity is in solid form. Oil, LNG, coal, aluminium. We are closing our aluminium smelters with electricity costs the highest in the world. The Greens argue making base load cheap for Aluminium is a subsidy, but they are public servants and have no idea of arithmetic or business. Then you can ship the electricity as far as you like and convert it back to energy. It has a comparable heat output per litre to oil, although twice the weight and is totally renewable, but when did Greens actually care about renewables. They just hate carbon.
40
From the President’s 2018 Budget, released today:
Funding Summary
(In millions of dollars)
2017 Request 2018 Change from 2017
Green Climate Fund (State)…………998…………………………………………………………….. 0 ……………………..-998
Clean Technology Fund (Treasury)……170……………………………………………………………….0 ………………………..-170
Strategic Climate Fund (Treasury)….. 60……………………………………………………………….0 …………………………-60
Bilateral GCCI (State and USAID)……362……………………………………………………………….0……………………….. -362
Total Base Budget Authority………1,590……………………………………………………… ………0……………………….-1,590
20
From the last posting:
“24 May: UK Independent: Ian Johnston: Donald Trump’s climate change stance under fire from world leaders as Theresa May keeps ‘pact of silence’”
England has demonstrated to the US be the most staunch ally, with Israel second. The King of Jordan is like attached to P45 in the quest to destroy terrorism, the Saudis maybe! Putin must be handled with a great deal of respect! Why would the Donald give a rat’s a*s of what some so called EU ‘leaders’ might wish? They are trivial\nonsense!! 🙂
“and a copy of his 2015 encyclical letter on the need to protect the environment from the effects of climate change. “Well, I’ll be reading them,” Mr Trump said…”
Did P45 ask Pontiff if his ‘claim of climate change came from GOD or from slavers’?
All the best!-will-
41
Will Janoschka –
my question would be asked of the FakeNewsMSM.
how come they didn’t report that the Vatican’s summary of the meeting between the Pope and the President made no mention of ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’, as Gerard O’Connell did for America Magazine (see comment #30)?
worse, FakeNewsMSM all gave the impression it was the Pope’s only agenda item. disgusting.
40
pat May 25, 2017 at 4:57 pm
‘Will Janoschka -my question would be asked of the FakeNewsMSM.’
“how come they didn’t report that the Vatican’s summary of the meeting between the Pope and the President made no mention of ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’, as Gerard O’Connell did for America Magazine (see comment #30)?”
The Pontiff with vast experience in doing something a we bit incorrect, will never do that again! He uses engine starting fluid on a gasoline engine only once! The whole meeting was to establish trust between two very skilled, but also wary of the intent of the other. TRUST! 🙂
21
25 May: SMH: Mark Solomons: ‘Pro-coal’ Newman and Palaszczuk regimes blamed for $45 million solar failure
The Newman and Palaszczuk Queensland governments and their “pro-coal” policies are to blame for the failure of the Kogan Creek Solar Boost project, scrapped last year at a cost to taxpayers of at least $45 million, the technology’s inventor says.
State-owned utility CS Energy blamed contractual and technical problems, including rusting pipes and “fast-moving clouds”, for the project’s failure
But Australian scientist David Mills, whose pioneering solar thermal technology was to be used at Kogan Creek, said although former Labor premier Anna Bligh had been supportive in the scheme’s early stages, subsequent governments had failed to get state-owned power companies to buy the electricity produced, dooming the scheme…READ ON
http://www.smh.com.au/business/procoal-newman-and-palaszczuk-regimes-blamed-for-45-million-solar-failure-20170525-gwct6k.html
25 May: Adelaide Advertiser: Sheradyn Holderhead: Federal Government promises $110 million to back Port Augusta solar thermal plant
ENERGY Minister Josh Frydenberg has confirmed the Coalition’s commitment to supporting a solar thermal plant at Port Augusta but says investment decisions are independent of the Federal Government…
“This funding is in addition to anything ARENA or the CEFC (Clean Energy Finance Corporation) may provide.”…
The Advertiser revealed yesterday public servants have cast doubt on the level of commitment to a project in Port Augusta, saying ARENA would only support projects which ranked highly on its merit criteria…
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/federal-government-promises-110-million-to-back-port-augusta-solar-thermal-plant/news-story/f9df95b3298a3a4da2cd8c20d1fed5f5
10
***ABC, do you plan to air this nationally?
25 May: ABC: Rye Park Wind Farm in southern NSW approved, with 17 turbines cut from plans
ABC ***Central West By Gavin Coote
A major wind farm that has sparked division in a rural community north of Canberra has been approved, but with 17 fewer turbines to allay community concerns.
The Planning Assessment Commission has given the green light to build the Rye Park Wind Farm near Boorowa, on the south-west slopes of New South Wales.
The commission has cut the number of proposed turbines from 109 to 92, despite the NSW Department of Planning and Environment originally recommending it be further reduced to 84 (LINK).
The department received 240 submissions on the project, with many objecting on visual and environmental grounds (LINK)…
Former Boorowa councillor and Rye Park sheep farmer Andrew Southwell supports the project, but said he was disappointed it had been scaled down.
“For the landholders involved, that’s disappointing. For the project itself the concern is whether it’ll put up the cost of electricity and make it sort of unviable at this stage,” Mr Southwell said…
The developer, Tilt Renewables, expressed disappointment the size of the project had been slashed…
Spokesman Rontheo Van Zyl said while cutting 17 turbines from the wind farm could reduce its viability, he was pleased it had been finally approved…
Rye Park resident Rosemary Miller: “I was very relieved. [The turbines] were right in front of the village, and particularly for one resident that was going to be only 1.4 kilometres from a turbine,” Ms Miller said.
“I think the tide is slowly turning, realising wind farms are probably fine out in the desert, well away from where people are living, but not close to towns and villages.”…
The Planning Assessment Commission said removing 17 turbines and imposing strict conditions would ensure any negative impacts were outweighed by the broader public benefit…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-25/rye-park-wind-farm-in-southern-nsw-approved/8557470
20
Got another update on the Oroville Dam with works starting on the spillway, Oroville Update 23 May Demolition Begins!
I must admit getting a bit addicted to these videos by Juan Browne as they are so well produced with information most wouldn’t know about, in the latest video above look at the size of the spillway compared to the people standing on it, then consider how much water was flowing down it!
30
Amazing how much damage water can do.
30
I was visiting Morwell in the Latrobe Valley today, the power source for Victoria’s electricity. It was so sad to see the Hazelwood plant standing idle. I wonder how long before Premier Dan visits to promise more jobs (but no idea in what industry) as he detonates the structures and promises greener electricity and ignores the doubling of electricity prices that is driving industry out of the country?
80
The sooner these leftist socialists are recognised as economy destroyers the better before it’s too late and we all have to look for jobs in other countries. The problem is too many Australians are still asleep so it will have to get a lot worse before they start acting.
70
I took some video of Hazelwood just before it closed.
https://youtu.be/4X0-wiQ9fDA
https://youtu.be/GZGo18mRByA
https://youtu.be/8k6eCM_ftws
00
PDF: 2 pages: Press release: Carbon Markets Remain Poised to Fill the Pre-2020 Climate Action Gap
More demand needed to stimulate innovative low-carbon project
25 May 2017 | Barcelona, Spain | As of 2016, offsets equivalent to 1.1 billion metric tonnes of carbon
dioxide emissions (BtCO2e) have been transacted voluntarily – through sales to governments, companies,
and individuals as well as intermediary brokers – according to the latest annual State of Voluntary Carbon
Markets (LINK) report from Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace, released today at the Innovate4Climate
conference in Barcelona…
Entitled “Unlocking Potential (LINK),” the new report finds that voluntary buyers in 2016 paid $191.3 million (M) to offset 63.4 million metric tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2e) – about as much greenhouse gases as Massachusetts
emits in a year. Concerned citizens, corporations, and sub-national governments moved ahead with their
battle against climate change by purchasing voluntary carbon offsets from projects that reduce emissions
through forest protection, renewable energy, and other means.
***Still, transaction volumes on the voluntary markets shrank 24% from 2015 to 2016, and demand did not meet supply of these offsets, as 56.2 MtCO2e were left unsold in project developer’s portfolios – some from previous years.
Other key findings include:
Prices for voluntary carbon offsets in 2016 were affordable overall (averaging $3.0/tCO2e) but also highly variable…READ ON
http://www.forest-trends.org/documents/files/doc_5593.pdf
20
You could take a mid-week break, every week.
Start a Hump Day Hilarity post asking for humorous items — sayings, cartoons, with or without a climate related theme.
Anyway, this appears to be comment #43, so folks have a lot on their minds.
Cheers.
20
25 May: CFACT: Senators call on Trump to “make a clean break” from the UN Paris Agreement
Twenty-two Republican Senators sent a letter to President Trump today calling on him to withdraw from the UN Paris climate agreement.
Read the full letter (LINK)
http://www.cfact.org/2017/05/25/senators-call-on-trump-to-make-a-clean-break-from-the-un-paris-agreement/
25 May: Breitbart: Ben Kew: Republican Senators Urge Trump to Exit Paris Climate Deal
The letter, which is signed by the likes of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, urges Trump to make a “clean break” from the agreement. An excerpt, published (LINK) on Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe’s website, reads etc….
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/25/republican-senators-urge-trump-to-exit-paris-climate-deal/
most of the MSM has this story posted now.
25 May: NYT: AP: Michael Biesecker: 22 GOP Senators Want US to Pull Out of Paris Climate Accord
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and 21 other Republicans on Thursday urged President Donald Trump to follow through on his campaign pledge to pull out of the Paris climate accord…
The letter signers account for fewer than half of Senate Republicans. A similar letter was also sent to Trump this week by attorneys general from 10 Republican-led states, including oil-rich Texas and coal-dependent West Virginia…
***During Trump’s visit to Rome this week, Pope Francis also urged Trump to take climate change seriously.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/05/25/us/politics/ap-us-united-states-climate-change.html?_r=0
***AP/Biesecker: I don’t recall any such urging from the Pope. where’s your proof?
00
25 May: Fox News: Poll: Majority of Americans Think Mainstream Media Publishes ‘Fake News’
Nearly two-thirds of Americans think the mainstream press is full of “fake news,” according to the latest Harvard-Harris poll.
65 percent of voters believe there is a significant amount of fake news in the mainstream media, and the sentiment is held by a majority of voters across the ideological spectrum.
80 percent of Republicans, 60 percent of independents and 53 percent of Democrats reflected this distrust of the media…
On “The Fox News Specialists,” Eric Bolling said the media had a particularly bad week last week, with The Washington Post and The New York Times publishing negative stories about President Trump that proved to be “duds.”
http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/05/25/harvard-harris-poll-majority-americans-think-mainstream-media-publishes-fake-news
there were plenty of NYT/WaPo”duds” before those two, and there have already been more “duds” since…and so it will go on.
theirABC & other Oz MSM, will generally publish the “duds”, but i can’t recall them ever carrying the “corrections”, or that they have been exposed as “duds”.
10
hmmm!
24 May: Bloomberg: Eric Roston: There’s Way Less Coal Than We Thought
A young researcher’s discovery about fossil fuels and climate change was so troubling, he wondered, “Oh man, am I really right about this?”
So it turns out global warming isn’t that bad after all.
That’s exactly the conclusion Justin Ritchie doesn’t want the world to draw from the paper he just published.
And for a good reason. It’s wrong…
Looking through “business as usual” and worst-case scenarios for the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, he saw that reliance on coal for energy started ramping up around 2040…
“Why is that?” he remembers asking himself.
The question evolved into his dissertation work—and to the most provocative conclusion of his study, published (LINK) last month ***to little fanfare in the journal Energy Economics. Inflated coal estimates had become at some point “a virtually unlimited backstop supply [that] has misinformed a generation of long-term energy scenarios,” Ritchie and his co-author, UBC professor Hadi Dowlatabadi, write in their paper. The estimates reflected all geologically identified coal, not the fraction it may be possible to dig out…
In other words, Ritchie and Dowlatabadi found, there may not be enough accessible coal to fuel the worst-case scenario of global warming…
“For the past quarter-century, high emission baselines have been the focus of research, explicitly or implicitly shaping national policy benchmarks, such as estimates for the social cost of carbon,” the paper says, referring to the dollars-per-ton measure used by government and business to factor future climate damage into today’s spending…
The surge in global coal production has produced a much more refined understanding of coal deposits around the world. Armed with those refinements, researchers have slashed their estimates of the amount of economically and technologically recoverable coal by two-thirds from ’90s-era forecasts…
“When I first found all this out, in 2015, it was somewhat of an existential crisis in a way,” Ritchie recalled. “I said, ‘Oh man, am I really right about this?'”
“This” could help the scenario developers rethink what they feed to climate modelers…
The discovery that there’s a whole lot less coal to burn would seem a gift to skeptics of climate change and opponents of climate policy. But Ritchie’s paper is a double-edged sword. The same finding that shrinks CO2 emissions may also lower the cost of dealing with global warming, making the Paris Agreement that addresses climate change easier to achieve…
To better understand how carbon-emission projections are made, Ritchie undertook the soul-destroying task of reading all five climate-change assessments published since 1990 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the authoritative but not bestselling scientific body. That cost him about a month. The work was funded, in part, by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions and by National Science Foundation funding awarded through the Carnegie Mellon Climate and Energy Decision Making Center…
***Before Energy Economics published the study, Ritchie said, he had submitted multiple papers to multiple journals. “Despite getting over 30 peer reviews collected from all of these journals, no one has shot it down,” he said, adding that he still has detected a reluctance among some scholars to grapple with his observations.
“Maybe I’m completely wrong about all of this, and here I’ve written all these papers and there’s some critical flaws in them. That’s great—tell me about it,” Ritchie said. “Please! Someone just read it!”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-24/misleading-coal-estimates-may-have-skewed-climate-projections
June 2017: Science Direct: Energy Economics: The 1000 GtC coal question: Are cases of vastly expanded future coal combustion still plausible?
Authors: Justin Ritchie, Hadi Dowlatabadi
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988317301226
00
26 May: EconomicTimesIndia: Reuters: Mai Nguyen: Vietnam set to approve coal-fired power plants worth $7.5 bln
Although Vietnam wants to boost renewable energy output amid resources scarcity and environmental issues, it has been mostly reliant on coal-fired and hydro power plants to meet its annual electricity demand growth of around 11 percent.
Two of the projects by Japanese, South Korean and Saudi Arabian investors are expected to receive licences ahead of Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc’s visit to Japan next month, investment minister Nguyen Chi Dung told Reuters on Tuesday.
Details provided by the ministry showed South Korea’s Taekwang Power Holdings Co. and Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power would invest $2.07 billion for a 1,200-megawatt thermal power plant.
Each investor would have a 50-percent stake in the plant and commercial operation is expected to start in 2021.
Japan’s Marubeni Corp and Korea Electric Power Corp would invest $2.79 billion in a 1,200-megawatt plant, with operation expected to start in 2021. The investors will also share half of the investment each.
Japan’s Sumitomo Corp would invest about $2.64 billion into a 1,320-megawatt plant, with an expected starting date of 2022, the ministry said. This project was expected to get its licence later this year, the ministry said.
http://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/coal/vietnam-set-to-approve-coal-fired-power-plants-worth-7-5-bln/58850785
24 May: FirstPost: AP: China will shut down its only undersea coal mine in October
Beijing: China is shutting down its only undersea coal mine, state-run newspapers reported, as the government struggles to rein in rising production that threatens to frustrate a planned shift to cleaner-burning fuels…
Government officials announced plans to shutter 1,000 mines in 2016.
But data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows coal is rebounding this year with production up 9.9 percent in April versus a year earlier…
The closure is part of a government effort to phase out less productive mines, said Li Gongjian, the mine’s manager…
http://www.firstpost.com/world/china-will-shut-down-its-only-undersea-coal-mine-in-october-3476278.html
00
25 May: World Coal: Coal is not dead
The statement from QRC (Queensland Resources Council) Chief Executive Ian Macfarlane is as follows:
As the Mark Twain saying goes: Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. And so have been the green activist reports of the death of coal, and more broadly, the resources sector.
Today, it is pleasing to see the Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Minister for Natural Resources and Mines, Dr Anthony Lynham, have thrown their support behind the resurgence of Queensland’s mighty resources sector. After such a rough few years, there are definitely green shoots across the entire sector, but we also mustn’t forget those who have toughed it out through hard times. In fact, many of those producers have reached record productivity and export levels during the so-called ‘bust’.
The numbers don’t lie, recent employment data shows that there has been a rise in jobs in the coal sector as well as increased exploration expenditure. Existing operations are producing at record levels, projects that have been on the drawing board have received the green light, and we would anticipate a significant amount of jobs once the Byerwen, New Acland and Carmichael mines begin construction. Let’s not forget our world-leading LNG export industry and the announcements of new natural gas projects including Senex’s Western Surat Gas Project, Arrow’s Tipton Project and QGC/Shell’s Ruby Project.
Population growth and urbanisation across SE Asia means the International Energy Agency has forecast that coal used for energy will still make up 23% of the energy mix and the tonnage of coal consumed will continue to rise. Additionally, there is no viable substitute for coking coal in steel making – there is no ‘uber’ in the wings and you can’t use a solar cell to convert iron ore to steel in a blast furnace. Therefore, our coking coal exports, which make up 75% of Queensland’s coal exports, are not in any short-term danger…ETC
https://www.worldcoal.com/coal/25052017/coal-is-not-dead/
26 May: Townsville Bulletin: Domanii Cameron: Adani sits out Labor division
ADANI has shrugged off speculation their $16.5 billion project will be deferred until next year amid an ongoing Left faction revolt within the Labor Government.
Adani spokesman Ron Watson said the company was still hopeful that something could soon be resolved.
“We have deferred consideration of a final investment decision until the State Government has made a decision on royalties,” he said.
“This week in Parliament the Government has outlined that it has a strategy being developed.
“We’ll sit and wait.”
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said yesterday the Cabinet would discuss a formal submission for royalties on Monday, with Minister Assisting the Premier on North Queensland Coralee O’Rourke expecting to receive “materials over the weekend”.
Labor ministers met on Wednesday night to discuss the possibility of interest being charged on any mining royalty holidays in a bid to help various projects get off the ground. The option would not only assist Adani but other projects wanting to get under way in the Galilee and Surat basins, and the North West Minerals Province…
However, while the Cabinet attempts to defuse an ongoing “civil war”, the LNP yesterday slammed Ms O’Rourke for being “deathly silent”…
“If they think I’ve been silent on Adani, then they haven’t been listening,” she said. “This week, like every week, I have been speaking in support of Townsville and North Queensland jobs.
“My stance on Adani has always been the same: I support the Adani project and the jobs it will bring for Townsville and North Queensland.
“My support for the project has not and will not change.
“I have spoken to people from North Queensland about the Adani project this week, including the Mayor, Jenny Hill.
“Everyone I have spoken to has expressed the importance of the jobs that this project will create and I am in total agreement with this sentiment.”
http://www.townsvillebulletin.com.au/news/adani-sits-out-labor-division/news-story/8c58535d7209b3ddbf95ef69b9380dc9
00
25 May: NDTV India: PTI: India’s Plans To Ban China’s Power Firms Will Backfire: Chinese Media
Beijing: India’s plans to ban Chinese power firms due to concerns over cyber-attacks could backfire on India even though the move would cause losses to companies from China, a report in a Chinese state-run daily said today.
“India’s reported move to block Chinese companies in the power sector seems to be new evidence of the country’s overly suspicious attitude toward China, but this could backfire given that India is still plagued by electricity shortages and unstable supply,” an article in the Global Times said today.
The article was commenting on the remarks made by Indian Electrical & Electronics Manufacturers’ Association Director General Sunil Misra that ban on Chinese equipment would protect India “from cyber-attacks because the power sector is increasingly software driven with intelligent technology and control systems being used.”
Referring to criticism that China does not allow for overseas investment in its electricity grid, the article said, “the reciprocity argument is unreasonably idealistic and doesn’t make any sense at all. Even if China allowed overseas investment in its power sector, could Indian power companies really make it into the Chinese market given their lack of development?”
For a long time, Indian power companies have been calling for a complete ban on Chinese companies in the domestic power sector, citing the threat to national security, it said.
“Of course, such a prohibition, if it became real, would cause losses for Chinese companies. But it is totally unrealistic and inefficient for a country that relies heavily on foreign technology and equipment due to its own underdeveloped power sector, because it would be hard and costly for India to seek substitutes for Chinese products,” it said.
“At present, Chinese companies are the major suppliers of power generation equipment in India, accounting for about 40 per cent of the traditional power equipment market, according to media reports. As such, India’s boycott of Chinese equipment would be at the cost of its electricity infrastructure development, eventually making its people the biggest losers,” the report added.
http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/indias-plans-to-ban-chinas-power-firms-will-backfire-chinese-media-1703931
25 May: Xinhuanet: President of China Coal Energy Co. under probe
The president of China Coal Energy Co., Ltd., Gao Jianjun, is under investigation for suspected serious violations of the Party’s disciplines, China’s anti-graft authority said Thursday.
The news was released on websites of both the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.
The Shanghai-listed company is a subsidiary of China National Coal Group Corporation, a major state coal producer in China.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-05/25/c_136315189.htm
Reuters has picked up the brief announcement:
25 May: President of China Coal Energy Co Gao Jianjun under investigation
BEIJING (Reuters) – The president of China Coal Energy Company Ltd Gao Jianjun, is being investigated by the ruling Communist Party for suspected corruption, the party’s anti-graft watchdog said on Thursday. Gao is suspected of “serious discipline breaches”, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said in a brief statement, using its usual euphemism for graft but providing no other details.
00
time will tell, Mr. Barry:
26 May: AFR: Jenny Wiggins: BlackRock says coal is dead as it eyes renewable power splurge
“It’s been amusing sitting back and watching Australia from afar because in effect it’s been denying gravity,” Mr Barry, who is based in Dublin, told the The Australian Financial Review.
“Coal is dead. That’s not to say all the coal plants are going to shut tomorrow. But anyone who’s looking to take beyond a 10-year view on coal is gambling very significantly.”
Mr Barry, who plans to start investing in Australian renewable energy projects, acknowledged it was hard for politicians “not to do something” with resources like coal when they were available, but said he did not think there was “long-term potential” in Indian conglomerate Adani’s proposed $16.5 billion Carmichael coal mine.
He said no board directors in the US would make a 30-year commitment to coal…
“The thing that has changed fundamentally the whole picture is that renewables have gotten so ***cheap,” he said…
US-headquartered BlackRock, which has more than $US5 trillion of assets under management and claims to be the world’s largest investment group, is actively looking for Australian renewable energy investments to add to its new global renewable power fund, which is expected to reach about US$1.7 billion. About 10 per cent of the fund is expected to be allocated to Australia…
BlackRock is considering equity investments in only renewable energy in Australia but will look for opportunities to acquire longer-dated debt of transport infrastructure, including new toll roads like WestConnex
The NSW government has confirmed it will sell at least 51 per cent of the new Sydney motorway, which is under construction.
“A toll road that is up and operating is a very attractive infrastructure asset,” Mr Barry said. “Typically, it has inflation exposure as well in toll rates which a lot of institutions find useful.”…
http://www.afr.com/business/mining/coal/blackrock-says-coal-is-dead-as-it-eyes-renewable-power-splurge-20170524-gwbuu6
***cheap and useless, for the most part.
00
Can anyone take Global Warming seriously with the heat wave for the bank holiday weekend in the UK?
“Met Office deputy chief Meteorologist, Dan Harris, said: “We’re expecting lots of warm and sunny weather for the start of the bank holiday weekend with a chance temperatures may top 30C in places. If you’re planning a trip then make sure you plan for the hot weather, don’t forget sun cream as UV levels will be high, and plenty of water.”
That extra 1C must be unbeararable.
10
You would think in 100 years that humans would have evolved to handle the extreme heat. The toll at the surf beaches on the Thames must be horrific, when the homes are not being swept away by higher sea levels by a few mm. It’s a wonder anyone survives.
10
As for the UV index “The UV index does not exceed 8 in the UK (8 is rare; 7 may occur on exceptional days, mostly in the two weeks towards the end of June).” but in Melbourne in January, the UV index is rarely under 10 and sometimes 13. Again despite having less than 2% of the world’s population under the Tropic of Capricorn, clearly we are also responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. Our CO2 is deadlier too, the worst sort. South Australian CO2. Deadly.
So ‘the Science’ is never wrong despite being utterly illogical. It is all our fault.
20
“Trump has pivoted back to his base, and the fake news establishment media is butthurt about it.”
Indeed!
and like he did with Kushner and Bannon, there shall be no prema donnas except the Donald!
If you wish to continue to be advisor; in my
presence, you shall respect all other POVs, even to the extent of complementing that other; in my presence!!
This is what every (leader) Monarch! has done throughout history! “I will listen to you, however; do not expect any change in my decision!! Every Monarch knows, I represent those folk with power!; “do not piss off the proletariat”! Else current Monarch is now deceased!
00