Doomed Planet

Can’t Trust ’em with the Lights off…

turbine smashedIt must be the weather. As heatwaves and blackouts produce recriminations on Capitol Hill, the lamentation of climate alarmists becomes ever more shrill. An anxious chorus of atmospheric Jeremiahs and green rent-seekers seems more determined than ever to spin any meteorological “event” as a harbinger of doom. With apocalyptic angst again reaching dangerous levels, expect more cases of “climate fatigue”.

A worrying new syndrome also has emerged: renewable energy trauma (RET). Expect more rhetoric about “energy security” as the bi-partisan renewable energy monster further cannibalises itself; increasing retail prices, penalising “liable entities” (energy retailers), driving coal-fired power generators out of the market and destabilising grids in the process. Yet any roll-back or termination of this flawed policy experiment seems unlikely, especially if a legal liability time-bomb lurks somewhere in this new class of property rights.

Midsummer madness: foolish or reckless behaviour, considered to be at its height at midsummer; acronym: MM. Includes (i) prognosticating wildly about complex natural systems in a state of constant change, such as a planet’s climate, and believing one’s pseudo-predictions; (ii) legally requiring an entity to acquire in the future something that does not exist in the present, such as a specific amount of renewable energy; (iii) using public funds to try to ensure its existence by a specific date, whatever the cost; and (iv) ignoring compelling evidence undermining the legitimacy of the whole exercise. (Summer is the period from 21/22 December to 20/21 March, based on the astronomical calendar.)

To kick off the MM season, Canberra recently hosted a four-day conference: “Australasian weather, climate and oceans: past, present and future“.  The mood was not cheerful. (See Joanne Nova here.) Our “best climate brains” are “fed up, sad and frustrated, as extreme weather becomes the new norm,” reported Weatherzone’s Ridley Stuart.

Arch warmist Dr Andrew Glikson: “There’s definitely what you would call ‘climate fatigue’ on the part of scientists. There’s a fatigue when it comes to arguing in public. It’s definitely a concern. There are people who don’t think in scientific terms and don’t want to accept the basic laws of nature, or have some vested interest. Yet it just hits you what we’re doing to our planet.”

Another attendee with a “heavy heart” was ANU climate scientist, Professor Will Steffen. In the last talk of the conference he stole much thunder by launching the Anthropocene Equation. A brave attempt to quantify the unquantifiable, this intriguing construct was swallowed whole by the media.

At the ABC, The World Today’s Eleanor Hall assured listeners that the “new mathematical formula” showed clearly that humans are driving global warming 170 times faster than natural forces. This news came courtesy of scientists in Australia and Sweden who have assesed “the impact of human activity on the climate, and compare[d] it to events such as volcanic eruptions and changes to the planet’s orbit.”

Tony Thomas: The Climate Cult’s Blackout Brigade

A sevenfold increase in global human biomass in the past two centuries -the more than seven billion people who today occupy the planet — clearly has affected local and regional environments. It seems perversely anthropocentric, however, to put such a precise number on it. Can one quantify nebulous concepts? Here’s how it’s done.

Catastropharian Will Steffen: We have estimates of how temperature has shifted through the Holocene … And climate was shifting very, very slightly to a cooler state at about one hundredth of a degree per century. But since 1970, temperature has been rising at a rate of about 1.7 degrees per century, and when you compare those two, since the 1970s, the climate has been changing at a rate 170 times faster than that long-term background rate.

Walter Stark, a regular contributor to Quadrant Online, has a different perspective.

That this kind of wild speculation dressed up in pseudo-scientific sophistry can be authored by persons widely deemed to be leading experts, be approved by peer review, published in a respected academic journal and broadly accepted as serious science would seem to be surreal nonsense were it not in fact actually happening. Even more bizarre is the fact that while polls indicate that a majority of the public now consider the threat of catastrophic climate change to be untrue or exaggerated, most politicians appear to remain committed to engaging in some kind of hugely expensive measures to “do something about” this phantasmagorical danger. 

Summer Downunder also has attracted two high-profile US climate worriers. Hear the collective sigh of relief from paid-up members of the Canberra Carbon Cargo Cult Club (CCCCC) and folk down at the Clean Energy Regulator and Climate Change Authority. Mr Bob Inglis, a lawyer and former Republican congressman from South Carolina, is one of them. Described as a devout Christian by New Daily’s Quentin Dempster, he “instinctively rejected Al Gore’s prognosis about catastrophic climate change until one of his five children suggested he clean up his act.”

Another climate-epiphany came on a visit to Antarctica with a congressional committee. The “increasingly infectious” carbon dioxide bubbles from the past two centuries” he saw in ice cores were a revelation, but increasing sea ice around the continent left him cold. Mr Inglis now feels all so-called “extreme weather events” are the direct result of escalating concentrations of the gas. As a believer in God, one has a “responsibility to nurture all life on the planet, and not threaten its survival”, he said.

Hence Mr Inglis has established republicEn.org to promote a cumulative carbon [dioxide] tax in the US, starting at US$40 a tonne. Several veteran Republicans from the Climate Leadership Council reportedly have joined up, including James Baker, Henry Paulson, George Shultz, Marty Feldstein and Greg Mankiw.

Mr Inglis will address the National Press club on February 22. Perhaps there will be a question on recent public comments by US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who defended carbon dioxide in a recent keynote speech honouring Sir Winston Churchill (here). How could an invisible trace gas we exhale be a “pollutant”? But this is the national press we’re talking about, so don’t count on any queries that might run counter to the media’s catastropharian narrative.

The other visitor was Michael  “I’m not a charlatan, seriously” Mann, the professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University whose so-called hockey stick graph landed him in hot water a few years ago. From Tina Perinotto’s breathless account (“…the Barrier Reef is almost gone”) for website The Fifth Estate to Fairfax Media’s reliably hysterical climate diddler Peter Hannam, such was the ecstasy of his admirers that one might almost hve thought the Messiah was gracing our shores our shores. Predictably, none mentioned Mark Steyn’s what-an-ignoble-piece-of-work-is-Mann, A Disgrace to the Profession, nor did they mentioned the defamation case slowly making its way through US courtroom.

Mann fan Tina Perinotto: Mann himself was stunning. Humble, quietly spoken, reserved, like the really superior minds among us are, and also mindful not to venture publicly into too many political no-fly zones, lest he provides more targets for those who lie in wait to down even more respect for science with their ballistic missiles.

If Mr Inglis has God on his side, Professor Mann had the weather on his during the workshop, organised by Professor Christopher Wright, University of Sydney Business School, and the Sydney Environment Institute.

Tina Perinotto (again): One of the world’s most respected climate scientists who has rankled the denialist industry more than most – and we know that because he’s received death threats –Mann was the star attraction. The tour came in the two weeks since Donald Trump took power and promised to destroy American leadership in climate action. Poignantly, as if to underscore what’s at stake, it was also amidst the increasingly vile weather punishing the country.

It was, alas, mostly bad news. Yet there emerged “a kind of solace and strength” in solidarity. Fortunately, academic Lesley Head was there to deal with the emotional side of climate change. “We don’t always have to be optimistic,” she said. “There is value in acknowledging grief, for it has its own work to do.”

“Lesley has a point,” gushed Perinotto. “The death spiral of the planet has started and no one yet knows how to bring it back. In addition, we have amongst us the enemy who are trying to actively stop us taking action.” But one person professes to have the answer. In his book, The Madhouse Effect, Professor Mann offers a solution that might save both the day and planet – a “giant sucking machine” (Chapter 7, page 126).

Michael Mann: If, however, after doing everything possible to reduce our carbon emissions, we still find ourselves in need of a stop-gap scheme to avert catastrophic climate change, carbon-sucking artificial trees may be the safest and most efficacious of all the available geoengineering schemes out there.

Wonders never cease in the climate space! The determination of climate modellers to get reality to dance to their tune knows no bounds. Consider, for example, this recent report in Nature:

At least 58 NZ glaciers advanced between 1983 and 2008, with the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers advancing nearly continuously during this period. While “unusual” on a global scale, the [report’s] authors claimed it was “consistent with a climate system being modified by humans.

So global warming is making the world’s glaciers shrink — except when climate change makes things colder and they don’t. Intriguingly, the paper’s authors noted that alarmists’ chatter about vanishing ice rivers owed much to a preference for “using data interpolated from global measurements rather than from local observations.” (emphasis added)

While their reassessment “may seem to be a surprising result in light of the protracted [glacier] advances, it nevertheless “confirms that New Zealand glacier mass balance was affected by anthropogenic forcing since 1980.”

Astonishing stuff — or, rather, it would if academic warmists had not embraced inconsistency and error as their stock in trade. Nowwhere told that cooling is “consistent with” warming? Good Lord, they are a shameless bunch.

Meanwhile, while glaciers grow and warmists sling their sophistries, the legislated bi-partisan magic-number target of 23% renewable energy  remains on the books — that figure attainment requiring a 50% increase in the output of solar systems and wind farms in just three short years. Should they fail to make their mandated nut, energy retailers will be required by law to pay a shortfall charge of $65 per megawatt hour, thereby forcing up consumer prices yet again. Indeed, some are already paying the penalty because they are unable or unwilling to source more RE.

As Andrew Bolt explained last week, “any talk now of scrapping the target will just make that green investment shrivel even more. So the government is too scared to even speak the truth about the sheer uselessness and vandalism of its own renewable energy target.” If your business is obfuscation, this is a small price to pay for the chimera of “climate stability”, at least in the short-term.

Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg is now mooting a change to changing existing regulations to permit the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to fund construction of new “re-badged” high-efficiency, low-emission coal-fired power plants – presumably instead of more windmills. He said

We’re going to look at all our options because of the challenges that we face, namely to ensure energy security [and] energy affordability, as we transition to a low-emissions future. We’re looking at all our options because we’re intent on stabilising the system. Right now we need more baseload power. Our focus is on stabilising the system and not allowing a repeat of what happened in South Australia [with blackouts] to happen anywhere else in the country.”

Full speed ahead, then, to the promised land and a “low emissions future” – or bust.

5 thoughts on “Can’t Trust ’em with the Lights off…

  • bemartin39@bigpond.com says:

    May I offer my simplistic yet utterly satisfying take on the matter of CO2 and climate:

    Ice core samples prove beyond doubt that over the millennia warming occurred first and an increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere followed some 800 years later.

    To the best of my knowledge, nobody, no scientist nor layman, contests this – although climate alarmists have concocted some “explanation” why it does not contradict their theories based entirely on CO2 driven CAGW – it makes me unreservedly satisfied that human induced CO2 emission has precious little, if anything, to do with the climate.

    • Rob Brighton says:

      I do not have sufficient knowledge Bill to be so sanguine about AGW reality or not. I am of course perfectly capable of spotting the noses in the trough which is at the very least an excellent argument for how poorly we are dealing with the proposal.

      That said and holding ones nose I would direct you to a SMH article that outlines what happens when virtue signallers and state Premiers are one and the same….the exodus begins.

      http://www.smh.com.au/business/cocacola-amatil-to-close-south-australia-plant-cut-180-jobs-20170221-guia3a.html

      By the way, I could not help but notice the SMH has claimed in its online masthead that they are “The News site of the Year”, I would love to know if this gong was bestowed or self inflicted, either way to say it is erroneous is quite the understatement.

    • ianl says:

      > “To the best of my knowledge, nobody, no scientist nor layman, contests this …”

      The Vostok ice core data consistently show a time break of about 800 years between (1st) an increasing temperature and (2nd) an increasing atmospheric CO2 level. This *fact* so bedevils the CAGW activists that a non peer-reviewed paper was published about 12 months ago claiming that ultra-high resolution of these data showed the two peaks were really reversed. As this paper did not actually show any data (High Res or otherwise) or demonstrate its’ thesis with other than assertion, it plopped onto the ground with a large hissing sound as its’ heated puffery escaped. That’s the only attempt to discredit Vostok interpretations I’ve seen in about 20 years. And I have looked … although perhaps there are real ones out there, Scully.

      The time break actually makes physical sense as well as data sense as when oceans slowly warm, they degass dissolved CO2 because that gas is less soluble in warm than cold water. This effect is not completely overwhelming – CO2 is a minor GHG and of itself will cause almost trivial warming. The GHG “biggie” is water vapour of course, both in its’ ability to absorb defined wavelengths temporarily of energy reflected off the earth’s surfaces and also in its’ sheer overwhelming volume. So far no one has demonised the water cycle – but there’s still time, methinks.

      Finally, in an attempt to move the goalposts CAGW activists have claimed that the climate is changing just so much faster than the Vostok data record. In Michael Kyle’s article above, he notes that 170x faster is noisily claimed, although the statistics used there are circular. However, there are many geological data showing rapid climatic changes during the past. The geological literature is replete with hundreds of reviewed papers on these phenomena. For example,the Younger Dryas (a cold period) had many very sudden shifts, none of which correlate even roughly with proxies for atmospheric CO2 levels. All of this is not controversial any more, just not reported or published by the MSM.

      Does all of this matter anyway ? Not in my view. Most of the public are scientifically illiterate and mathematically innumerate, are easily scared and think that anyone who isn’t “saving the planet” is morally criminal. And they do *not* believe that the power will stay off very long. The propaganda has worked to the extent that public outrage requires a considerable number of people to die before it is kindled. One can see that Aus has indeed been just the “lucky” country.

  • Geoffrey Luck says:

    Forget the science – follow the money!

  • en passant says:

    My Dark Green cousin in England is a true believer and has told me that more snow is a predicted sign that the planet is warming. More heat is sucking up a lot more water and depositing it as snow. It is this heating that has caused the huge increase in the Antarctic ice cover and the Snowmageddon that covered the UK a few years ago. He referred me to the homogenised, tortured and extrapolated results that show that each of the three past years broke all records as the warmist [sic] years evaaaaaaaaaa! You see, they cannot allow natural variation, or facts to affect the ever upward temperature graph. Even a pause would cast doubt. Still, at 0.054C increase a year they can string this out for some time yet.

    Incidentally, when my cousin schooled me in warmist logic 101, he then puffed out his chest and boasted that he had not created any ‘carbon pollution’ by heating his home during the big freeze … MacD would be proud of him, but as for me; I want a DNA check …

    Despite all the substantial evidence that the Climate-Con is a scam, I note that I have been invited to three upcoming Defence Conferences all targeting the ‘Climate’. The first one (I am considering disrupting) is on “The Strategic Implications of Climate Change”. Oh, good, no need to get involved in the nasty business of killing and maiming bad people, or dealing with the irritation of ISIS and the hundreds of thousands they have killed, maimed and enslaved, when you can fight the climate and save the whole planet. How good is that?

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