Jo Nova, speaking, keynote.
The 2019 Friedman conference is on, bigger than ever from May 23rd – 27th. I had a fabulous time last year. This year there is a big international combination with people from Brexit and the US teaparty as well. See the Speakers list. I’ll be updating the latest How To in Grid Destruction as the world watches The Crash Test Dummy Downunder!
To get a 10% discount off tickets use the code: NOVA2019
Tickets are available just for cocktail parties, gala balls and wine and wildlife tours too.
Thanks to those who do, as I get a commission from those sales. Student scholarship applicants can mention they were referred by me in the “Additional Comments” section, thanks.
Website | Facebook Page | Facebook Event | Twitter Page |
O-oh, I would so-o luv ter go,
Jo Nova, the Harbour! But…
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Apropos the Harbour, one of the seven great harbours of the world. )
Sydney Harbour on a Summer’s Day.
Light glancing off the water below
the bridge, overhead a sky of endless
blue – what is it about blue that merges
mind and eye in a hazy journey into
infinity? Here’s sublime without fierceness
of storms, the peaceful heavenliness of
Sydney Harbour on a summer’s day.
Sublime combines with the familiar,
a colourful ferry with revellers churns
its way towards the north shore, white
wake furrowing irreverently the sea’s blue
opacity, yachts skittering like gulls, houses
crowding the harbour, eager for a glimpse of
heaven – Sydney Harbour on a summer’s day.
A serf.
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Lovely free verse.
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In his book “Unreliable Memoirs” Clive James when in London, writes indelibly of Sydney Harbour:
“The sun shone straight through him. It shone straight through all of us. It shone straight through everything, and I suppose it still does. As I begin this last paragraph, outside my window a misty afternoon drizzle gently but inexorably soaks the City of London. Down there in the street I can see umbrellas commiserating with each other. In Sydney Harbour, twelve thousand miles away and ten hours from now, the yachts will be racing on the crushed diamond water under a sky the texture of powdered sapphires. It would be churlish not to concede that the same abundance of natural blessings which gave us the energy to leave has every right to call us back. Pulsing like a beacon through the days and nights, the birthplace of the fortunate sends out its invisible waves of recollection. It always has and it always will, until even the last of us come home.”
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Went last year, it was great.
You going again Peter?
KK
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Regretfully KK, I am hoping to be away at the time.
I agree I had a great time and I loved meeting a fellow from the blog.
Jo was great and will be again.
I do commend the conference. It was encouraging to meet like minded people.
WE ARE NOT ALONE! even if our numbers are small at present. So few people are WOKE!
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A meeting of like minds… I wish, a conference re freedom as the right way to live, and that bridge, built by the endeavours of many individuals. https://beththeserf.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/676/
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History of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (The Coat Hangar)
By Beth (noted historian herself and studied under Geoffrey Blainey)
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Thx Peter, too generous… no historian, jest a teacher and writer of blog posts.
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Check Out the Speakers List!
Some very “Hot” Numbers there!
(not being sexist, or gender specific)
http://www.alsfc.com.au/speakers
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am sure it will be wonderful. will let friends in Sydney know.
30 Apr: BBC: British Steel gets £100m government loan to pay carbon bill
The money means the private equity-owned firm will avoid a steep EU fine.
The firm said earlier this month it needed the funds to settle its 2018 pollution bill due at the end of April.
Sky News (LINK) said the government money was used to pay for the company’s carbon credits – and that British Steel would repay the money on commercial terms.
The firm has been hit by a European Union decision to suspend UK firms’ access to free carbon permits until a Brexit withdrawal deal is ratified.
The EU’s emissions trading system’s rules allow industrial polluters to use carbon credits to pay for the previous year’s emissions, or trade them to raise money.
Each free permit gives a firm the right to emit a ton (1,000kg) of carbon dioxide (CO2)…
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) declined to comment on British Steel specifically, but said it was in “regular conversation with a wide range of companies”.
Beis is expected to make a formal announcement on Wednesday…
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48113303
France to delay cutbacks to nuclear power by a decade
Financial Times – 30 Apr 2019
France will delay by 10 years the shutdown of part of its nuclear power industry in order to fulfil President Emmanuel Macron’s aim of making the country carbon-neutral by 2050, the government said on Tuesday…
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29 Apr: Carbon Brief: The Carbon Brief Interview: Prof Joanna Haigh
by Robert McSweeney
Prof Joanna Haigh is a professor of atmospheric physics and co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London. Her research into solar influences on climate has seen her awarded the Chree Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics in 2004 and the Adrian Gill Prize of the Royal Meteorological Society in 2010. She was president of the Royal Meteorological Society from 2012 to 2014. In 2013, she was awarded a CBE for services to physics. Haigh will retire in May this year.
CB: A popular [climate] sceptic argument is that the sun is ultimately responsible for our changing climate. How do we know that’s not the case?
JH: Right [laughs]. So what happened was I had been working on all these other things, and then there was a paper published in Science [in 1991] which showed this apparently extraordinary correlation between galactic cosmic rays and the temperature in the northern hemisphere. So that – let me get it the right way around – when there was more cosmic rays it was cooler. And the authors of that paper were saying that, “Look. All that recent global temperature change is due to the sun, because the sun influences the cosmic rays.” I thought, “That’s an interesting science question. I must have a look at that.” That’s how I got started, and again it was really from the aspect of solar radiation and its effects on the atmosphere, and whether or not that could be responsible for the global temperature change that was being reported.
Now, it subsequently transpired that that paper was very poor in the sense that it had extrapolated data and made assumptions that really weren’t valid, and in terms of showing a cause of global warming it was really not worth the paper it was written on, hardly. It was an interesting idea. But, in the meantime, I’d got interested in this whole issue about the sun’s effect on climate. I was really looking at it very much from a physics perspective, what the sun can and can’t do. I wasn’t setting out to prove that it was causing climate change, or indeed that it wasn’t. I was looking at the science, or trying to.
But, as you suggest, what happens is that people think that because you’re working on the sun’s effect on climate, you are therefore a climate change denier because you want it to be the sun that’s causing climate change and not greenhouse gases. So for a while I was on various sceptic’s circulations, and I was getting all the information from this rubbish climate stuff, which was really an insight into how that sector works, which is quite – a lot of is quite unpleasant. But, in the meantime, I think I did some quite interesting work on the sun and the climate, and I carried on doing that for quite a while.
My angle – which was different perhaps to what other people had done before – was looking at changes in solar ultraviolet radiation. When you think about climate change you generally think of the energy coming in and the energy going out, and that’s the total energy coming from the sun right the way across the whole of the spectrum. If you look at how much that varies – and we have measurements now – they show that it varies by quite a small amount, about a 10th of 1% over an 11-year cycle, or over longer multi-decadal timescales. So that’s really not going to be responsible for much more than a 10th or something of a degree of warming or cooling – indeed, in both directions.
But, actually, as the sun’s radiation varies by a 10th of a percent, it’s not the same across all of the spectrum. So that’s what it’s like in the middle of the visible spectrum – because that’s where most of the energy is – but actually in the ultraviolet it varies a lot more. So by the time you get out to a hundred nanometers, which is quite well into the ultraviolet, it’s doubling between solar max and solar min. If you’re looking at the sort of wavelengths that influence ozone – you see where I’m going now – it varies by a few percent over a solar cycle. So a few percent is not huge, but it’s a lot more than a 10th of a percent.
So I thought, “This is interesting. Let’s have a look at this,” and started looking at how changes in solar radiation – the ultraviolet radiation – affected stratospheric ozone, and then what that did to radiative forcing of climate change. And so, that’s what really got me involved in the whole climate thing. And then, I started looking at other things that were doing radiative forcing of climate and how they compare, and all the rest of it…
CB: In a Nature article last year, you spoke about how to cope with online harassment from climate sceptics. How have you seen this issue emerge?
JH: For me personally, or in general?
CB: Both
JH: I’ve had it for many years. I think it got to a worst point after I did a Radio 4 programme called The Life Scientific. It has quite a wide audience and I got loads and loads of emails of which a few were nice, and many were really nasty and that set the scene. I stupidly said in that interview, “I always answer people when they email me.” So I thought I ought to live up to my claim – pompous twit that I am. I try and – unless it’s actually completely vile insults – I always reply once trying to explain why what they’re saying about the science of something is not quite correct and perhaps you should think about this. I generally don’t follow up an engagement – although I am at the moment, I’ve got somebody who’s going on and on and on, I’m very carefully explaining to them. It’s such a waste of time [laughs]…
CB: The last topic I just wanted to ask you about was, as we speak there are protests on climate change going on in London by Extinction Rebellion, and there have been a series of school strikes across the world led by Greta Thunberg. What do you think of their tactics, the two different approaches, and would you be happy to join them?
JH: Absolutely. Yes. I think they’re doing a great job, and I know they’re disrupting people’s lives and it’s a bit irritating if you want to get somewhere and you can’t, but they’re making a point. And it’s on the front of the newspapers and it’s on the first item on the BBC. Good on you, kids…READ ON
https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-carbon-brief-interview-prof-joanna-haigh
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A weird interview.
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Shes in the ‘pay’ of the British Gov. So prof. Haigh how do you explain that CO2 has nothing to do with global temperatures with out breaking thermodynamics?
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what next?
30 Apr: CarbonBrief: Climate change could ‘raise stress levels’ of endangered mountain gorillas
Global warming could cause stress to endangered Virunga mountain gorillas, potentially raising the risk of health problems and early death, a new study suggests.
by Daisy Dunne
The new study, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution (LINK), gives an idea of how current threats might be compounded by future climate change…
https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-change-could-raise-stress-levels-endangered-mountain-gorillas
1 May: Guardian: London tubes, schools and homes ‘face climate change chaos’
Heatwave of 2018 will become the capital’s new normal, claims Green party in report
by Matthew Taylor
Hundreds of schools, hospitals and tube stations in London are at risk of flooding or overheating as the climate crisis accelerates and global temperatures continue to rise, according to a study.
The report, commissioned by the Green party on the London Assembly, paints a bleak picture of life in the capital as global temperatures increase by 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – a conservative estimate based on current projections.
The study is one of the first to chart (LINK) the likely impacts of the crisis and comes amid growing pressure on politicians to take radical action.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/30/london-tubes-schools-and-homes-face-climate-change-chaos
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Its interesting that Sir Roger Douglas is speaking at the conference. Allot of Kiwis, trades people mostly, jumped ship 2200 km to the ‘West Island’ in the late 80s due to his policies.
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Probably they will migrate back now, thanks to the success of Rogernomics.
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Nothing to do with rogering the economics Flashman style then…
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Probably not. It was a genuine comment.
I assume you picked up on Roger.
Ps; I liked the Flashman novels.
🙂
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