Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Dr Ridd said: “The public are constantly told that reefs are being irreparably damaged by global warming, but bleaching events, about which there is so much doom-mongering, are simply corals’ natural response to changes in the environment. They are an extraordinarily adaptable lifeform, and bleaching events are almost always followed by rapid recovery.”
By Paul Homewood
h/t Patsy Lacey
HERE WE GO AGAIN!!!!
Hundreds of sites across most of the Great Barrier Reef are turning white from heat stress in the fifth mass coral bleaching event in eight years.
Aerial surveys over two-thirds of the reef have confirmed ‘widespread’ bleaching, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said on Friday.
Climate change is the biggest threat to tropical reefs worldwide, and coral bleaching is caused by heat stress.
It’s not always fatal but corals are likely to die if temperatures remain higher than normal for too long.
Reef Authority chief scientist Roger Beeden said bleaching had been recorded at 300 sites from Cape Melville north of Cooktown to just north of Bundaberg.
‘The results are consistent with what we have seen with above average sea surface temperatures across the marine park for an extended period of time,’ Dr Beeden said.
It was only a year ago that Australia’s leading reef expert, Dr Peter Ridd, reported that coral cover was at record highs:
London, 8 February – A new paper published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation refutes alarmist claims about the state of the world’s coral reefs.
According to the author, eminent reef scientist Peter Ridd, the official data show no signs of any long-term trends in reef health. Indeed, the best records – for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – suggest that coral cover is at record highs.
Dr Ridd said:
“The public are constantly told that reefs are being irreparably damaged by global warming, but bleaching events, about which there is so much doom-mongering, are simply corals’ natural response to changes in the environment. They are an extraordinarily adaptable lifeform, and bleaching events are almost always followed by rapid recovery.”
Dr Ridd suggests that rather than being seen as under threat from climate change, corals should actually be recognised as one of the organisms least likely to suffer harm in a warming world.
“Corals get energy from a symbiotic relationship with various species of algae. When environmental conditions change, they can rapidly switch to a different species that is better suited to the new conditions. This shapeshifting means that most setbacks they suffer will be short-lived.”
Dr Ridd says that the real risks to reefs come from overfishing and pollution.
The GWPF invited responses to this paper from authors likely to dissent from its conclusions. None of the authors who were contacted accepted this invitation.
As Peter Ridd’s report noted, it only in the last two or three decades that the GBR has really been systematically surveyed. Yet there is plenty of evidence that similar bleaching events have frequently occurred in the past, particularly during El Nino events. They were just never observed.
Whereas it was natural to assume that coral reefs would die off after bleaching, Ridd shows that they actually recover very quickly. Bleaching, far from being fatal, is actually a remarkable adaptive response to changing temperature, because having expelled the microscopic algae, which gives it its colour as well as energy, it reabsorbs another strain of algae which thrives in warmer water. The opposite happens when the seas cool.
Ridd concluded:
The Mail report includes this comment, which exposes the thing as a scam:
Australia’s emissions of CO2 are just 1% of the world’s, so calling on the Federal Government to reduce emissions will make no difference whatsoever to the reef. Instead they are using the reef as an excuse to force through their left wing political agenda.
Around 400 million years ago during the Devonian, carbon dioxide concentrations were over 2000 ppm, 5 times higher than today’s level. However, by the end of the Devonian, the increase in photosynthesizing plants had greatly reduced CO2 concentrations to near dangerous levels.
Around 400 million years ago during the Devonian, carbon dioxide concentrations were over 2000 ppm, 5 times higher than today’s level (graphic A). That allowed evolving land plants to rapidly spread across the land. Plant species diversified and increased so rapidly it was called the Devonian Explosion. Marine species likewise multiplied enabling greater fish speciation, so the Devonian was also called the Age of Fishes. However, by the end of the Devonian, the increase in photosynthesizing plants had greatly reduced CO2 concentrations to near dangerous levels.
During the following geologic period known as the Carboniferous, great forests of primitive Lycopod trees now covered the earth’s wetlands. Trees buried in the swamps were slow to decompose, creating some of the earth’s greatest coal deposits (graphic G). That further sequestered CO2. Some research suggests CO2 levels fell as low as 150 ppm, plant starvation levels. That led to the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse around 305 million years ago (graphic B).
Low CO2 levels also correlated with a die-off of ocean algae known as the “Phytoplankton Blackout” (graphic D). This dramatic collapse in primary production on land and in the sea, disrupted the earth’s Permian food web and set in motion a series of long-drawn-out extinctions known as “Dead Clades Walking”.
The vigorous photosynthesis of the Carboniferous also generated the earth’s greatest levels of oxygen (graphic C). Compared to our atmospheric oxygen of 21%, oxygen levels reached 30 to 35%. High levels of oxygen allowed giant arthropods to evolve (graphic E). It also enabled amphibian ancestors, that breathed by absorbing oxygen through their skin, to better colonize the land. However, as forest species and phytoplankton went extinct, oxygen levels plummeted (graphic C). As a result, the giant arthropods, as well as primitive amphibians like Euryops, (graphic F) adapted to more abundant oxygen, were the first to go extinct by the early Permian around 295 million years ago. Falling oxygen concentrations also reduced land animals’ ability to use high altitude ecosystems.
Starting with the Olson Extinction land plants experienced >60% extinction rates, rates lasting into the middle Triassic period. Plant eating reptile-like species, such as Diadactesand Edaphosaurus (graphic F), went extinct by 272 million years ago, along with the Dimetrodon predators, further restructuring ecosystems. Mid-Permian extinctions continued, culminating in another mass extinction event known as Capitanian or Late Guadalupian extinctions between 262 and 259 million years ago with some regions indicating extinction of 74-80% of the vertebrate genera. Driven by the phytoplankton blackout, 35-45% of marine invertebrate species went extinct, all causing a cascade of biological disruptions.
The subsequent Great Dying or end Permian Extinction 252 million years ago was simply the culmination of “dead clades walking” that began with CO2 starvation, the rain forest collapse, and phytoplankton blackout. The end Permian saw 81% of the remaining marine species and 70% of remaining terrestrial vertebrate species go extinct. The loss of forests and their ecosystem continued throughout the entire Permian as reflected by the absence of coal deposits (graphic G).
However, biased by the rapid extinction event 66 million years ago when a meteor struck earth, many researchers looked for a similarly rapid extinction event, like a volcanic eruption. Despite the life-promoting benefits enabled from high CO2 that increased biodiversity during the Devonian, researchers have been biased by recent narratives suggesting rapidly rising CO2 is a deadly killer.
So, several researchers blamed end Permian extinctions on a series of volcanic eruptions, the Siberian Traps, narrowly centered around 252 million years ago for the release of copious amounts of CO2. If history teaches us anything, that release helped raise CO2 concentrations back to over 2000 ppm, which more likely enabled the new expansion of life on earth, like it did in the Devonian (graphic A), with the rapid spread of flowering plants, the Age of Dinosaurs, and the further evolution of birds and mammals.
And again, if history teaches us anything, we must ensure that attempts to reduce CO2 concentrations do not result in devastating CO2 starvation ever again.
For more details watch “How CO2 Starvation & Plate Tectonics Caused the Greatest Mass Extinction, the Permian Great Dying.”
I see that the usual gloomy hype about arctic sea ice continues unabated. This has been going on for a while. Here’s the dean of failed serial doomcasting, James Hansen, pontificating on the subject back in 2008.
I see that the usual gloomy hype about arctic sea ice continues unabated. This has been going on for a while. Here’s the dean of failed serial doomcasting, James Hansen, pontificating on the subject back in 2008.
Figure 1. James Hansen’s 2008 crashed and burned prediction of an arctic ice-free summer by 2018.
The latest entry in the prediction sweepstakes is described in the climate alarmists’ favorite newspaper, the Guardian, with the obligatory tear-jerking polar bear photo:
Ice-free summers in Arctic possible within next decade, scientists say
Home of polar bears, seals and walruses could be mostly water for months as early as 2035 due to fossil fuel emissions
Now, you’ve got to be careful to watch the pea under the walnut shell. Well down in the scientific study they say:
The definition of an ‘ice-free Arctic’ has varied over time. Early on, it referred to the nearly complete disappearance of all sea ice, or zero SIE [sea ice extent]. However, as thick sea ice remains north of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago more than a decade after the rest of the Arctic Ocean becomes ice free in September a SIE threshold of 1 million km2 [386,000 square miles] became commonplace.
So we’re not really talking about zero sea ice extent. We’re talking about getting down to a million square kilometers of ice, more than a third of a million square miles. That’s a very different question.
Next, they say:
Statistical methods have also been used to provide predictions of an ice-free Arctic. Most of these predictions are based on observed linear relationships between global or Arctic temperature and sea ice cover.
I saw that claim of a linear relationship between temperature and Arctic sea ice extent and said “Hmmm” … let’s start with what’s actually happened to sea ice since the start of the satellite era in 1979. First, the changes up until 2012.
Now, this is curious. Minimum Arctic sea ice extent decreased slowly from the start of the satellite record up to the year 2000. From there it started dropping faster and faster, up to 2012.
And that’s why the scientific cognoscenti were so sure it was going to crash. I mean, in 2012, any sane person could see the inevitable. After dropping from 6 million to 4 million square kilometers since the turn of the century, 1 million square kilometers (AKA “ice free”) was obviously just around the corner. That’s why even back in 2008 James Hansen was so sure of an ice-free Arctic in the near future.
However, a funny thing happened on the way to Thermageddon™. Here’s the rest of the Arctic ice extent record.
Arctic sea ice extent went flat in 2012 and has stayed relatively stable since. I’m sure this made Jim Hansen tear his hair out. And it’s an excellent example of the limitations of climate models.
As far as I know, not one climate model and not one climate scientist predicted that around 2012, the strong downward trend of Arctic ice extent would go flat, and stay that way for a decade. It’s a problem with iterative climate models of chaotic systems. It’s also a problem with humans. Both humans and models tend to calculate that a trend will continue. Neither humans nor models are very good at predicting U-turns or regime shifts in chaotic systems.
So which way will it go from here? Unknown. For example, one of the oddities is that a warmer world is a wetter world, and a wetter world means more snow. Snow on top of ice insulates the ice, making it last longer. It’s a fine example of what I modestly call Willis’s First Law of Climate, which says:
In the chaotic giant heat engine we call the climate, everything is connected to everything else, which in turn is connected to everything else … … … except when it isn’t.
It’s true. The climate has six main subsystems—atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, and electrosphere. Each of these subsystems is constantly exchanging matter and/or energy with all the other subsystems. Each subsystem contains relevant phenomena at all time scales from nanoseconds to millions of years, and at all spatial scales from nanometers to planetwide.
In addition, each of these subsystems has its own chaotic internal resonances, cycles, and regime shifts, which in turn affect all of the other subsystems. Climate is a system of almost unimaginable complexity that we’re only beginning to understand. As a result, claiming that we can model it with current computers is … well … let me call it hubris of the highest order.
But I digress. I started to test one of their central claims, that Arctic ice extent has a “linear relationship” with temperature. So I took the Arctic ice extent data shown in Figure 4 and compared it to a variety of temperature records. To show things clearly, I used just the smoothed versions of each dataset, and set them all to the same range from maximum to minimum.
Figure 4. A view of what the paper erroneously describes as “observed linear relationships between global or Arctic temperature and sea ice cover”. Temperature datasets are inverted because greater temperatures should yield less Arctic ice.
Not only is there no “linear relationship” between Arctic ice extent and temperature, there is very little relationship at all. Yes, in very general terms, warmer temperatures are correlated with less Arctic sea ice extent.
But none of the temperature datasets show the recent leveling out of the Arctic sea ice extent. The closest, as you might expect, is the Reynolds OI sea surface temperature north of the Arctic Circle … but even that one diverges wildly in the early part of the record and matches poorly in the recent part.
So I’m gonna say that their claim of “observed linear relationships between global or Arctic temperature and sea ice cover” is simply not true.
Finally, to return to the topic of the study, the “projections” of the year when we’ll see the first ice-free Arctic are pretty hilarious. They are so broad that if ice-free Arctic conditions were to occur at any time between now and 2150, someone’s model could claim credit for it. Below I show the nine different models and model averages reported in the study.
The first thing to notice is that contrary to the claims of an imminent ice-free summer, in fact we’re already past the claimed earliest ice-free date of five of the nine models.
Figure 5. Earliest and latest ice-free dates of the nine models and model groups. Horizontal lines connect the names of each model with the boxes whose left and right edges show the earliest and latest ice-free dates according to that model.
The dark blue region around 2035 to 2045 shows what the models say is the most likely time when we’ll see an ice-free Arctic. However, given their accuracy to date, that should be taken, not with a grain of sale, but with a kilo of salt …
Finally, the authors have used only the most extreme climate scenarios. The current general agreement among mainstream climate scientists is that these extreme scenarios (SSP5-8.5, RCP8.5, and A1B) are all highly improbable, and are not recommended for use because they lead to very unlikely projections. Despite that, the authors have selected them, presumable because it jacks up the fear and anxiety in the public … which of course will guarantee that these authors continue to receive funding in the future.
CONCLUSIONS
• There is no simple linear relationship between either global or Arctic temperature and Arctic sea ice extent.
• Models are just a reification of the understandings and misunderstandings of the programmers.
• They are supposed to be “physics based”, but if they truly were, there wouldn’t be such huge disagreements between models.
• The use of the most extreme scenarios is clear evidence of the alarmist views of the authors of this study.
And a final thought. The world of climate science would be well served to declare a moratorium on these endless failed serial doomcasts, and study the climate of the past instead. The models are a joke in that regard. Consider that the models give climate sensitivities that range from about 1.5° C to 6.5° C per doubling of CO2. Despite that, they all do a reasonable job of emulating the historical temperature record … and if they are “physics-based” as the modelers claim, that’s physically not possible. I discuss this in my post Dr. Kiehl’s Paradox That is clear evidence that they are merely tuned to match the past, and thus they have no credibility in predicting the future.
Here, it’s nighttime. I walk outside, and the redwood forest surrounding our house is perfectly silent, not a breath of wind. The constellation Orion burns low in the western sky, and Leo is right overhead. The crisp night air is redolent of springtime, of life bursting forth on all sides.
Ah, dear friends, what a wonderfully mysterious universe, with far more questions than we will ever have answers.
A coalition of red states announced Wednesday that they are challenging the Biden administration over its fresh corporate emissions and climate disclosure rule, just hours after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) greenlit the measure.
A coalition of red states announced Wednesday that they are challenging the Biden administration over its fresh corporate emissions and climate disclosure rule, just hours after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) greenlit the measure.
The SEC moved Wednesday to finalize new rules legally requiring certain public companies to report climate-related risks to their businesses and disclose data on the greenhouse gas emissions that their business operations directly generate. A group of ten Republican state attorneys general are suing the Biden administration over the rule, arguing that it is an unconstitutional attempt to impose climate regulation through the back door using an agency that does not have much to do with climate-related rulemaking. (RELATED: Green Firm That Advised SEC On Proposed Emissions Rule Sold Carbon Credits From Chinese Region Known For Slave Labor)
The challenge was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, and is being co-led by Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr and West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrissey. The attorneys general for Alabama, Alaska, Indiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Wyoming and Virginia are also involved in the suit.
The WV AG briefed the media today on a development involving the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The AG is co-leading a coalition of 10 states in filing a petition for review in the U.S. Court Of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.
— WV Attorney General (@WestVirginiaAG) March 6, 2024
“While the administration and the SEC have made some changes to the proposed rule, what they have released today is still wildly in defect and illegal and unconstitutional, and that’s why we are taking the action that we are taking today,” Morrissey said during remarks announcing the suit. “We believe that we are going to proceed in court and prevail. Today, the Biden administration has once again gone on the attack against America’s energy industry. It actually may be one of their most egregious attempts yet, but this time, they’re not using the [Environmental Protection Agency] as their tool of choice.”
The final rule approved Wednesday is a weakened version of the SEC’s March 2022 proposal. Nevertheless, manyopponents contend that it is still illegal or needlessly onerous, or both, while some critics from the left have criticized the SEC for dropping some of the most aggressive provisions included in the proposal.
The final rule mandates medium-sized and large companies to report emissions attributable to the electricity they use to power their business operations starting in fiscal years 2026 and 2028, respectively. The regulation will also require all public corporations to disclose climate-related risks to their business, just as they are required to disclose other material risks.
The rule also requires relevant companies to report their organizational climate goals, such as plans to ditch fossil fuels. The agency opted to make these requirements legally binding, meaning that corporations could be exposed to legal liability if they misreport their emissions.
The agency dropped a provision in the initial proposal that would have required certain public corporations to disclose the indirect emissions caused by their businesses, including those generated along supply chains and by the use of final products.
“The Commission undertakes rulemaking consistent with its authorities and laws governing the administrative process and will vigorously defend the final climate risk disclosure rules in court,” a spokesperson for the SEC told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include comment from the SEC.
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Innovation Zero 2024, set for April 30-May 1, is the largest net zero conference in the United Kingdom, a nation that has opted to keep nuclear energy in its “green” portfolio. The government-sponsored event “provides a meeting place for announcements, partnerships, deal-making, and collaborations for those who develop, produce, deploy, and fund low-carbon solutions.”
Innovation Zero 2024, set for April 30-May 1, is the largest net zero conference in the United Kingdom, a nation that has opted to keep nuclear energy in its “green” portfolio. The government-sponsored event “provides a meeting place for announcements, partnerships, deal-making, and collaborations for those who develop, produce, deploy, and fund low-carbon solutions.”
Just two of the 40 speakers at the Innovation Zero 2024 Energy Forum will represent the nuclear energy industry – Michael Hewitt, CEO of Allied Nuclear Partners, and James Walker, CEO of NANO Nuclear Technology, which is also a cosponsor. Both the UK and the U.S. are bullish on nuclear energy as part of their decarbonization programs.
In a very positive review of the nuclear industry, National Public Radio quoted Tennessee Valley Authority President and CEO Jeff Lyash, “You can’t significantly reduce carbon emissions without nuclear power.”
Likewise, Columbia Climate School dean Jason Bordoff questioned California’s plans to abandon nuclear energy. In his view, “We have to incorporate nuclear energy in a way that acknowledges it’s not risk-free” while admitting that “the risks of falling short of our climate goals exceed the risks of including nuclear energy.”
Today, there are no small or even micro nuclear reactors in operation in the U.S. or Europe even though these two technologies are the supposed “wave of the future.”
Walker admits that public sentiment for nuclear energy is the highest in decades. People should know, he said, that “nuclear” combines zero carbon emissions with 24/7/365 reliability. Nuclear leads all energy sources in fewest deaths per trillion kilowatt-hours of generation. Moreover, nuclear is the only large-scale energy-producing technology required to take full responsibility for all its waste and that fully includes waste management in its costs of operation.
A year ago, Casey Crownheart posed the question, “We were promised smaller nuclear reactors; where are they?” Crownheart said small modular reactors (SMRs), both cheaper and safer than full-sized reactors, could solve some major challenges of traditional nuclear power. NuScale in early 2023 was the first to receive final federal approval for its SMR design, but operational SMRs are still years from deployment.
In the UK, Rolls Royce is developing large-sized SMRs to supply the national grid, cities, towns, and possibly massive industrial processing facilities (chemical plants, for example) that require huge amounts of power. Microreactors are designed to serve a largely different clientele, such that SMRs are a complementary, rather than a competing, technology.
Even more than SMRs, microreactors are fast becoming the rage among those seeking to decarbonize energy generation. Microreactor designs allow them to operate as part of the electric grid, independently of the grid, or as part of a microgrid to generate up to 20 megawatts of thermal energy for both electricity generation and heat for industrial applications.
Walker was effusive about the “huge potential” for microreactors, starting with the “tens of thousands of mining operations running on diesel fuel.” Microreactors are 100 to 1,000 times smaller than conventional nuclear reactors and considerably smaller than SMRs. Most are designed to be portable, and many can be hauled from site to site in a semi-tractor trailer.
This combination of reliability and operational flexibility makes microreactors an attractive choice at many, especially remote, locations that today rely on diesel generators. Pursuant to a contract awarded in 2022, BWX Technologies, Inc., is scheduled to deliver the first advanced, transportable, nuclear microreactor prototype in the U.S. later this year for testing at the Idaho National Laboratory.
The potential customer base for these tiny reactors includes deployable mobile reactors, remote industrial and manufacturing projects, current and previously uneconomic mining sites, oil and gas projects, military bases, remote towns and communities, and small islands. Another valuable application is supplying emergency power following catastrophic events (tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes).
Walker noted that returning uneconomic mines to viability using inexpensive, clean energy creates the potential to free up huge deposits of mineral wealth. This is especially true for African nations whose huge mineral wealth is concentrated at locations inaccessible to existing electricity grids. Moreover, microreactors do not need daily supplies of diesel fuel.
Market research, said Walker, has identified over 100 remote settlements in Canada that today run exclusively on diesel fuel. Similarly, many countries – the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand, among others – have numerous small islands that rely on diesel fuel. Microreactors can also service electric vehicle charging stations.
Another major area for potential growth is the shipping industry. The U.S. Navy has for decades powered aircraft carriers and submarines with nuclear fuel without incident and without carbon emissions. Yet oil tankers, shipping container vessels, and other large ships all use high-polluting bunker fuel. If the Navy can rely on nuclear energy, so can these ships.
The resurgence of interest in nuclear energy has prompted funding opportunities from both the federal government and private industry, but there are disconnects. The Department of Energy, says Walker, has allocated over a billion dollars this year toward rebuilding the U.S. nuclear infrastructure, with a primary strategy favoring supply-chain continuity.
The recent DOE enrichment RFP required bidders to have established relationships stretching from mining (or sourcing) of the uranium ore through conversion to enrichment, but this requirement alone excludes most nuclear energy system developers.
On the industry side, mining companies, tech companies, and large industrial processing companies are all examining and investing in nuclear solutions to power their operations with nuclear energy – but none are investing in early-stage prospective technologies. Instead, significant existing development supported by an established company with a strong technical workforce is a precondition for prospective partnerships.
On the positive side, said Walker, cryptocurrency miners have begun looking at nuclear energy to generate the massive power for mining economic quantities of cryptocurrencies. AI and data center companies are also looking at nuclear energy to power their operations, especially at remote locations. No prominent nuclear energy company has funded its development with cryptocurrencies, but this may soon change.
Walker says that NANO’s microreactors are expected to begin demonstration and physical test work this year. The hope is that working prototypes will be ready by 2027, with full licensing process by 2030. Manufacturing facilities would be constructed during the licensing phase to enable prompt deployment upon approval.
The best scenario would be that the regulators issue a general permit for the reactor design so that multiple reactors could be deployed, moved to new locations, and piggybacked as needed without additional regulatory delays.
The best business model, says Walker, keeps the manufacturer as owner and operator of the reactors, selling power to customers. Dozens of microreactors can be operated from a central control room, employing only a few onsite personnel. This keeps operating and power costs low and ensures that the manufacturer retains responsibility for operation and maintenance, decommissioning, and liability insurance.
In sum, as development of microreactors continues, the primary hurdle may not be on the manufacturing end. Adapting the nuclear regulatory framework to accommodate microreactors, perhaps with a general permit structure, could be the key to revolutionizing electricity generation for industry, remote communities, and other applications without straining the electric grid or building massive new transmission infrastructure.
And that, said Walker, is what makes microreactors ideal for a green future.
Tesla’s Australian representative has just exited the board of the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI), one of the most vocal critics of the government’s preferred model, and will quit official membership on June 30.
That’s after FCAI chief executive Tony Weber’s loud warnings that the strictness of a 60 per cent-plus reduction in emissions over five years will add thousands of dollars to the cost of Australia’s most popular vehicles.
In its resignation letter, Tesla says such claims are “demonstrably false” and are likely to deceive or mislead consumers, accusing the association of “cherry-picking the most polluting variants”. It wants the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to investigate.
…
From January 1, manufacturers will have to compensate for their higher-emitting vehicles by importing more fully electric cars, hybrids or other lower-emissions vehicles to meet a target that will reduce every year.
The alternative is to buy credits from manufacturers that easily meet the target – such as Tesla and other EV makers.
Federal climate minister Chris Bowen makes regular comedy appearances on WUWT. Bowen is the technological illiterate who told us in 2022 that we can store electricity like water.
Chris Bowen isn't having any of Uhlmann's 'wind doesn't always blow' rhetoric.
"the rain doesn't always fall either, but we manage to store the water – we can store the renewable energy if we have the investment"#auspolpic.twitter.com/LjJkEr3zJy
Bowen’s latest brainstorm is as absurd as his previous efforts. Australia is not remotely EV ready.
The biggest problem, even if everything else lined up, our electric grids couldn’t cope with lots of EVs being charged. The following is a WUWT article discussing a report by the AEMO, Australia’s official electricity industry body, showing all of Australia’s East Coast electric grids except Tasmania are on track for serious systemic shortages. Bowen’s punitive regulatory attacks on fossil fuel dispatchable electricity, his blind faith in fantasy solutions such as grid scale battery backup, and Bowen’s ban on dispatchable zero carbon nuclear energy are not helping this situation.
Bowen’s latest brainstorm is as absurd as his previous efforts. Australia is not remotely EV ready.
Another big problem is the state of our roads. Drive even slightly outside the big cities or major highways, and even roads marked on maps as major connecting roads are pothole pitted disasters. If you ever plan a road trip around Australia and intend to visit the outback, make sure you purchase the comprehensive insurance plan.
Endurance is a big problem. Tradies, people who rely on their vehicle for work, frequent spend a significant part of their day driving between jobs. An EV would be hopeless for such a task, especially in adverse weather conditions. Hertz recently announced the selloff of 20,000 rental EVs due to lack of demand. People who rent vehicles generally like to be able to use them, and a vehicle which dies after a few hours driving, and needs hours of charging to recover, is of limited use to people who rent automobiles.
And there is availability of chargers.
Most towns in the Aussie outback we encountered were friendly, tidy, welcoming places, but there were exceptions. An exception was a town in Western New South Wales. We stopped for 5 minutes for a quick toilet break, after being on the road for hours.
During the stop I talked to a serviceman repairing a nearby public EV charger. He told me that charger needs frequent service, because of the local gangs.
While waiting for my wife and child to use the toilet, two drunk teenagers did a very obvious walk by of my vehicle, checking out our stuff. The EV repairman kept the back of his van locked while he was working, even though he was standing next to it.
It is difficult to imagine a worse place to stop and wait for hours for your vehicle to recharge, but if you are insane enough to take an EV into outback New South Wales, on the edge of the Australian desert, you don’t have a lot of options. In such a sparsely populated place, distances between towns are enormous, and you would have to take what you can get. Even fuel stops are few and far between in such places.
Personally I’m glad I was driving a heavy 4WD SUV with a bull bar, and not just for the endurance and rugged road handling. We hit multiple animals on that trip, including one terrifying encounter with a feral pig which dashed straight under my wheels at highway speed, and bumped the left side of my vehicle 20 degrees above level. Much higher and my vehicle might have tipped over. I shudder to think of what would have happened I had hit the pig while driving a Tesla, the armor plate on the bottom of my vehicle took a beating when I hit the pig, though thankfully it survived without needing repair.
How will Aussies react to this political attempt to crush the gasoline and diesel vehicle market? Personally I’m hoping Aussies will kick the bums out of office in next year’s election, but the mainstream green “conservative” opposition is so hopeless there is a chance they will cling to power.
How will the USA react to having Australia tax US automakers, then pay the collected cash to China? Australia is such an insignificant auto market US automakers might not care. But supporting US automakers has been a high profile issue in the USA lately, so an ally like Australia discriminating against US automakers in favour of Chinese manufacturers might attract some attention.
If the US government does decide to push back, they have a lot of levers to pull, from threatening retaliatory sanctions against Australian products, right up to re-opening discussions about Australia’s high profile deal to purchase US nuclear submarines.
On episode 101 of The Climate Realism Show, we examine the folly of electrification of EVERYTHING that are chasing NetZero goals. It seems that not only is there a plethora of electric cars that fail regularly, but there are also battery powered trains and airplanes which also seem doomed to failure.
Climate Change Roundtable is now The Climate Realism Show. The same great climate news and analysis from The Heartland Institute’s world-class climate and energy experts, but a snazzy new name that gets right to the heart of what it is about.
On episode 101 of The Climate Realism Show, we examine the folly of electrification of EVERYTHING that are chasing NetZero goals. It seems that not only is there a plethora of electric cars that fail regularly, but there are also battery powered trains and airplanes which also seem doomed to failure.
The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, and the always sharp Linnea Lueken, provide expert commentary on ELECTRIC Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
Plus, we will also have our regular weekly feature, Crazy Climate News – where we look at some of the most absurd climate alarmism stories of the week. Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET (12 p.m. CT) to get the latest news and join the chat to ask questions of your own.
There has been no significant warming in one of the most climate-sensitive parts of the planet, analysis of Greenland ice core data shows, casting further doubt on the alarmist climate narrative.
There has been no significant warming in one of the most climate-sensitive parts of the planet, analysis of Greenland ice core data shows, casting further doubt on the alarmist climate narrative.
We are all familiar with the climate change scare narrative. Red coloured maps of the globe, polar bears stranded on ever diminishing ice floes, extreme weather events etc. When you read a climate change related article or scientific paper it nearly always opens with a statement underlining the severity of the situation facing mankind. What is usually lacking is perspective.
I am not interested in ‘expert’ opinion unless it is supported by empirical data and perspective. Selected sources must be reliable and have ample past data to encompass solar cycle variation. Ideally these data need to come from a region of the planet that is sensitive to global warming. What data from the world of paleoclimatology fit that criteria?
When snow falls, it contains a mix of oxygen isotopes. During warm periods, more heavy oxygen isotopes are found in the snow, while cold periods have more light oxygen isotopes. By analysing these ratios in ice cores, scientists can learn about past temperatures and climate conditions. The ice is laid down in annual layers which can be dated accurately. Consequently, we can construct an accurate temperature record where sufficient ice accumulation exists, such as in polar regions.
If anthropogenic climate change is a real threat, due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels, then we are expecting to see a clear rise in temperature above and beyond the normal variation. This was attempted and published by Michael Mann et al. and is widely known as the hockey stick graph. The main problem with this graph is that it was constructed using 12 sets of proxy measurements which included three sets of ice core data. The ice core data went back only 500 years and the remaining extrapolation relied on tree ring data. There was considerable uncertainty of measurement which was highlighted in his original paper (Figure 1), and a period of 1,000 years provides us with limited perspective in relation to the impact of solar cycles.
Note the light grey area is an estimate of the uncertainty of measurement and extrapolation.
There seems to be a dearth of records that provide temperature proxies for recent times that are relevant to the sudden rise in carbon dioxide levels (1860 to current). However, I did locate data from two overlapping periods from Renland peninsula in Eastern Greenland. The two studies that reported the results from these ice core measurements had quite different themes. The first, which covered the period from 1960 to 10,000 BC, commented on the high temperatures in the Holocene period and the impact on the ice sheet. The second covering 1801 to 2014 examined local site variability. The creation of these datasets was a gargantuan effort. It remains a mystery why these papers did not comment on the temperature trends or indeed try and link the two datasets. Below is a graph combining these two isotope ratio data sets (Figure 2). The black line (far right) is the key as it is a 20 year rolling average of the more recent dataset (brown dots). The first dataset (blue dots) has data points every 20 years, so this rolling average enables a more valid comparison.
These data tell us we’re in one of the coldest spells in the approximately last 9,000 years. Was the only way up? Virtually all global records indicate a steady warming in recent times. I have added green lines to help visualise the ‘normal’ variation in the last 9,000 years. Clearly recent warming is within this normal variation.
I have added another graph (Figure 3) with linear trend lines to each of the datasets to demonstrate how important perspective is in assessing climate change. If we take the trend from 1801 to 2014 (purple dashed) and compare it with that from the last 10,000 years (green line) it seems alarming. But from the longer trend the reader can see that variation in both sets of data is quite normal.
There is also a serious lack of agreement between the Mann hockey stick graph (Figure 1) and these data. It should be borne in mind when making this comparison that the Mann graph attempted to reconstruct temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere whereas the data I have cited here are from a specific area of Eastern Greenland.
The next graph (Figure 4), focusing on the overlap period (1800 to 2014), provides the degree of validity of aligning these two datasets. There appears to be excellent correlation when comparing the black and red lines, implying the data are good proxies for temperature.
In summary, these data indicate there is no significant global warming signal coming from one of the most sensitive parts of the planet. Any warming may be latent, but this seems to be a bit of a stretch.
This absence of a signal could be explained by the fact that the relationship of carbon dioxide to global temperature is logarithmic and above a certain concentration there is minimal direct impact relative to solar cycles.
There are many climate scientists who have devoted their lives to saving mankind but unless these data are invalid, they need to return from the chill winds of the polar regions. Is it game over for the climate change scare narrative?
It’s certainly not true and actually the history of the relationship between population growth and abundance of Natural Resources is much more complex than people realize. It’s very interesting to see how extreme environmentalism maps onto Christian theology.
“Climate Activism is a Religion” – Marian Tupy. H/T Raymond. Excerpted transcript below in italics with my bolds and added images.
“The planet is infected with us we’re all gonna die. Isn’t that all true and and correct?
It’s certainly not true and actually the history of the relationship between population growth and abundance of Natural Resources is much more complex than people realize. It’s very interesting to see how extreme environmentalism maps onto Christian theology. On the one hand you’ve got your Garden of Eden: that’s the world before industrialization. You have your Devils: fossil fuel CEOs and people like that. You have your Saints, Greta Thunberg. Your Priesthood is the IPCC scientists. And of course you even have indulgences like back in the days before Reformation. Where you are allowed to fly around the world on a private jet, so long as you give a few thousand pounds or dollars to a green cause. All those sins are simply washed away. And one of the fundamental features of any religion is apocalypse, the end of days.
What we are saying is that if the world is going to end. it will certainly not end because we will run out of Natural Resources. The British energy problems are not an outcome of physical limits on fossil fuels or energy that can be produced in the world. They are an outcome of stupid decisions made by your politicians for the last 20 years.
Context
Our guest today is the editor of humanprogress.org, a senior fellow at the center for Global liberty and prosperity, whose latest book is called super abundance the story of population growth Innovation and human flourishing on an infinitely Bountiful Planet. Marian Tupy, welcome to triggeronometry. Please tell everybody who you are and what brings you to be sitting here talking to us
It starts with my birth in Czechoslovakia socialist republic. When I was a child my parents moved to South Africa. Later I went to Great Britain and studied at Saint Andrews University. I’ve been in Washington DC at the Cato Institute which is a Libertarian think tank for the last 20 years. And as you mentioned I run a website called viewingprogress.org which is basically just a website trying to document and promote the notion that the world is improving along many different dimensions of human well-being. That led me to writing a book about population and Innovation and natural resources.
Well speaking of all of that Marian, the the self-evident truth that everyone’s been completely persuaded about for the last God knows how many years is the planets overpopulated, humans are the virus infecting the planet. We’re all gonna die, and as we die we’re gonna make everything terrible. Marion why is it that so many people think that overpopulation is a real danger for our planet and the future of the human race?
I think it’s because the notion of finitude of atoms which is absolutely true. It is common sense and intuitive to say: If you have the finite quantity of atoms but you are increasing the people using those atoms then at some point you must run out. But this ignores a very fundamental difference between human beings and other animals. We are animals who are capable of planning forward and we are animals capable of innovating out of our problems through human knowledge. So American Economist Thomas Sowell has a famous quote:
An example is iPhone, a great way of dematerializing our the world. In other words we are saving a lot of atoms that we don’t have to put into television sets, into cameras, into Maps, into campuses, into calculators and all those other things. Instead we put it on this device. I hope it goes some way into explaining why the number of atoms in the world is actually not a limiting factor for how much of value we can create.
I think that if we are looking at the source of discomfort and a sense of dejection about the future, it may come from the fact that in Britain you cannot build that many houses. Or rather you refuse to build that many houses because of governmental policy. I’m not bashing Britain I’ve spent five years in your beautiful country and I love it and we have the same problem in the United States. it’s not that all of these people living in the cities are concerned about overpopulation, just that they’ve decided that you’re not going to build in my backyard.
It’s policy driven rather than driven by some sort of fundamental physical lack of space.
People still need a search for the transcendental; they still need to commit their lives to a meaning, to some sort of a heroic vision of themselves. What is it that they are trying to accomplish with their lives aside from going to work? And I think that many people especially in secular societies have embraced Extreme Environmentalism as a substitute for religion. um it’s very interesting to see how extreme environmentalism maps onto Christian theology. So I think that there are religious overtones to environmentalism. And the number of apocalyptic movies has been growing every decade since the 1950s, even though the world has improved along very many different dimensions: we live longer, we live healthier lives, we are much richer, poverty is collapsing around the world.
But with every decade the number of apocalyptic movies is actually increasing with one exception and it was 1990s because of the peaceful resolution of the Cold War.
Whatever your view on fossil fuels, whether or not you believe that emitting ever more CO2 in the atmosphere is a problem, clearly the timeline and the plan that our politicians have invented is completely unrealistic. We are not paying a price for there being too little oil or gas or uranium in the world. We are paying a penalty for politicians forcing us into energy consumption patterns which were completely unrealistic. The book tells you that there is plenty to be used for hundreds of thousands of years. We are never going to run out of these energy sources or natural resources, but yes as a society we could certainly decide not to use them and simply to shut off the lights and close the door on Western Civilization. That choice is not going to be forced on us by physical limits of the planet.
I think there is a reasonable chance that we have seen Peak apocalyptic environmentalism, for two reasons.One is that half of the world, the underdeveloped or developing world is never going to buy into our nonsense. We just have to stop thinking that and don’t even pretend that people in India and China and Bangladesh and Africa, which are still very poor are simply going to start using windmills. It’s just not going to happen for decades, if ever. They would have to be at a completely different level of Economic Development to start playing around with wind farms and whatever. So they’re going to be reliant on oil and natural gas for a long long way to come. And even that is better than using biofuels in order to power their own societies.
So that’s one half of the population; the second half are the advanced economies like yours and our economies, which are by and large democratic. And I do not believe that with any level of brainwashing coming from Whitehall or from Greta or people who glued themselves to roads or whatever. I don’t think any level of that kind of propaganda and brainwashing will make the good people in the United Kingdom to decide that this is the future they’re going have. In other words democracy is going to win. And if it’s not going to be the Tory party which changes the green policies and the green New Deal or Net Zero, or it’s going to be somebody else. And the sooner the British political establishment awakes to the fact that the British people are suffering and their living standards are collapsing, the less likely it is that you will have a really nasty party emerging that will do it for them.
I have a concern about the democracies we still have here in the West. If our center right and center left simply refuses to acknowledge that by government design lives of our people are getting worse, somebody else is going to fill that void, and that is something I want to avoid.
The reason why the public in this country and in yours holds the politicians in utter contempt is precisely because they see the level of hypocrisy that is going on in in both societies. You see them constantly raising taxes on air travel but they themselves fly around on private jets or first class which is much more carbon intensive. You see them telling you to drive you know little EVs while they enjoy being driven around in SUVs as big as a house. You see them telling you that the world is going to be swallowed up by by the oceans while at the same time they’re buying beachfront properties.
They basically think that we are so stupid and they think that can they can basically freak us out to an extent where where any kind of policy can be can be implemented. And to that extent I was actually impressed with some of the work done in the UK by the former head of your Supreme Court Jonathan Sumption, who was deeply concerned about the kind of public reaction to covid; you know, you end up with a Chinese virus but also with a Chinese Society. If people can be freaked out enough that the world is going to implode, they would be willing to part with their civil liberties and their basic freedoms.
On the other hand all of these apocalyptic predictions have been wrong in the past. And if you again put a date on it, you say that we only have five or ten years left on the planet left, when that time expires we will be wondering why we should be believing these people. What sort of credibility do they have? Do they also realize just how extraordinarily damaging it it to our institutions? How are we supposed to believe the leadership in our societies when they get these calls wrong time and time again.
They complain about populism when they are the causes of populism because they keep on saying things which are obviously not true.
In this book we looked at 18 different data sets with some of them going back to 1850, and we looked at hundreds of Commodities: Goods, finished goods, Services, food, fuel etc. We found that for every one percent increase in population we had one percent decrease in the price of all of these Goods, services and commodities. That tells us that human beings on average are more producers than they are consumers; that we are really able to produce more wealth than we consume, otherwise you would see the opposite: With every one percent increase in population you would see an increase in prices with greater scarcity. But that is not the fact.
We are very divided in Western countries and so while remaining optimistic: How do we manage some of the trade-offs of these technological developments? Because it seems to me in social communication, cultural programs and entertainment and particularly social media are areas where everyone knows there’s a big problem but no one quite knows what to do about it.
Any technology developed by the human brain can be can be used for good and evil. A baseball bat can be used to hit a baseball and it can be used to to bash you to death, not to mention guns and um anything else, knives and on. So what you do with your Technologies also matters. I think that any new technology from gramophones to bicycles was first met with a wall of negativism. Once it was thought writing of novels was supposed to lead to mental collapse throughout the Western World. Television, radio, all of these things were considered to be potentially world-ending events, but that didn’t happen
When it comes to social media, I don’t like them and I don’t partake. I left Facebook in 2012 when I realized that it was making me unhappy. Because what I was putting up on Facebook was a curated picture of my life, and what I was consuming was a curated picture of my life. So basically I was posting lies in consuming lies, and once I realized that I left Facebook. That was a choice, a choice which can be made independently by any number of all 8 billion people
I think that what we are going through right now is a period of adjustment to a new technology but that period of adjustment will resolve itself. You know it took us 50 years to figure out that drinking and driving was not a good idea. Now it’s sort of been internalized into us that cars are much better operated when you are sober, but it took time to to to to to square the human brain with this new technology. That will probably happen with social media as well or at least I hope that people are going to realize that much of it is simply unreal, what is making them unhappy, and they could be spending their time doing better things than than being on social media. We’ll probably figure it out in the way that we have figured it out with novels and bicycles and radio and television.
I’m basically a follower of the Enlightenment. I aspire to the ideals of the Enlightenment and one of the main features of the Enlightenment was freedom of speech. We are not putting enough emphasis on the way that freedom of speech is being destroyed by our governments, by the media, by cancel culture. Freedom of speech is not only necessary in order to produce new inventions and Innovations but also to produce new ideas. In this country we need a lot of reforms because the country is not functioning very well. Things won’t improve if ideas that I propose are canceled just because they seem too outrageous. In the same way in the United Kingdom, you need to undertake a lot of reforms and what if somebody tells you that your proposal for, let’s say, NHS reform is somehow unspeakable.
We need to preserve freedom of speech, it’s absolutely fundamental and we should be talking more about people getting canceled for joking uh for expressing wrong ideas and also for having peculiar forms of behavior. and that’s important because as we discuss in our book a lot of people on whom we rely for some of the most important Innovations and inventions in the world are also very peculiar people.
I’m rationally optimistic about the future just just to just to clarify that. So long as we don’t have a massive war caused by politicians, so long as we’re able to innovate without a precautionary principle, so long as we are able to freely speak and publish and research. And so long as we have the free markets which can tell us which inventions and Innovations are valuable and which inventions and Innovations are not valuable.
The windmills are spinning golden subsidies in the central German ‘fairy tale’ forest of Reinhardswald, but the payment is the partial destruction of the 1,000 year-old ancient wood itself. Work has started on the clearing of up to 120,000 trees in the forest, the setting for many of the Brothers Grimm mythical stories, to provide access for an initial 18 giant wind turbines around the Sababurg ‘Sleeping Beauty’ castle.
The windmills are spinning golden subsidies in the central German ‘fairy tale’ forest of Reinhardswald, but the payment is the partial destruction of the 1,000 year-old ancient wood itself. Work has started on the clearing of up to 120,000 trees in the forest, the setting for many of the Brothers Grimm mythical stories, to provide access for an initial 18 giant wind turbines around the Sababurg ‘Sleeping Beauty’ castle. Who is opposing this massive destruction of the ancient forest teeming with wildlife with trees over 200 years old? Certainly not the Green party, now in power at national and local level. In fact the project is being led by local Hesse Green Minister Priska Hinz who is reported to have said: “Wind energy makes a decisive contribution to the energy transition and the preservation of nature. It is the only way to preserve forests and important ecosystems.”
There is some local press interest in Germany about the destruction of part of the forest that covers a 200 square kilometre area. Nevertheless, the mainstream media generally keep well away from covering environmental destruction when the Greens are doing it in the claimed cause of saving the planet. The BBC did cover the story under the headline ‘Battle over wind turbines in the land of Sleeping Beauty‘, but that was in 2013 when plans for the industrial development were first announced. It seems that the state-reliant broadcaster is less interested now that the Big Bad Wolf has finally made a meal of Little Red Riding Hood.
Pierre Gosselin, who runs the German-based science site No Tricks Zone, has been covering the outrage felt in a number of German quarters at the plans to destroy some of the Reinhardswald forest in the interest of inferior green technology. He feels the affair shows what an inefficient and costly scam green energy is. “It’s not cost-free, it’s full of corrupt and unresponsive politicians who no longer care about democracy, and it certainly doesn’t make the environment better. It’s a nasty juggernaut of waste, fraud, corruption and ecological degradation – with dead birds, turbine vibration sickness, strobe dizziness and landscape pollution,” he adds.
The Guardian has been curiously silent over the clearing of woodland to build wind turbines in Hesse. In 2020 it was less reticent about reporting on the construction of a 3 km highway in another Hessian forest at Dannenroder. Thousands of climate activists gathered on the site north of Frankfurt, it reported. Dannenroder tree-felling would be a catastrophe, environmental campaigners are reported to have said. “Some parts of this forest are 250 years old,” noted Nicola Uhde of the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (Bund), “and there is simply not much of this kind of woodland around anymore.” At the time, the Guardian noted the fate of Dannenroder was a “litmus test for the Green party” which governed the state as part of a coalition. It seems to have been remiss in not suggesting such a test with the Reinhardswald deforestation. But then it seems none of the usual climate activists have been protesting about the loss of trees and wildlife habitat on this occasion.
The Daily Sceptic has reported on numerous recent examples where the lack of interest in ecological damage is a feature of green industrial development. Last month, we noted that one of India’s iconic large birds, the great Indian bustard, was on the verge of extinction due to the growth of electric power lines in its home area of the Thar desert. To reach global Net Zero, it has been estimated that new power lines equivalent to circling the globe 2,000 times will need to be built in the next few years.
Last October, we reported that wind farms in Tasmania had reduced the population of the endangered local wedge-tailed eagle to around 1,000 individuals. Across the world, millions of bats are being chewed by giant wind blades. Any animal that relies on wind currents for flight such as a large raptor is at risk of being sucked into the whirling machines. In California, the Democrat-controlled state Government recently relaxed controls on wildlife protections to allow permits to kill previously fully protected species for renewable infrastructure projects. Despite an increased risk to America’s national bird, the bald eagle, barely a peep of protest was recorded. Off America’s eastern coast, massive industrial parks are being constructed for wind turbines. It might be a coincidence that hundreds of whales have beached along the shore in recent years, but a more likely explanation is the deafening sonar noise, constant pile driving, extensive ocean building works and heavy shipping movements.
None of the above are likely to feature when the magic mirror is asked: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the greenest one of all?”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor.
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