Science « JoNova

Trite Science Prize: New science paper tells us air over land “heats more than water”

Is it science or is it a marketing machine?

This press release with psychedelic art tells us land regions will warm by more than the global average, because oceans are slower to heat. No kidding. They use more broken models to breathlessly talk about being locked in to 1.5 °C rise — “more than preindustrial times”. How scared do we need to be about a 1.5C rise — it’s not just locked in, it’s already here. NASA chief climate scientist Gavin Schmidt says so — ” 2016 so far is about 1.5 degrees Celsius ( 2.7 degrees) warmer than pre-industrial times.” Since Gavin is talking “globally” the extra rise over land above and beyond that is not so much programmed in, as pre-baked.

The art might be the most original part of the paper.

Let’s redesign those cities:

The results of the new study have implications for international discussions of what constitutes safe global temperature thresholds, such as 1.5°C or 2°C of warming since pre-industrial times. The expected extra warming over land will influence how we need to design some cities.

Human civilization already lives in towns from -50C to +40C. I reckon we’ll manage a 1.5 […]

Delcons do matter — defiant non-left voters were “most influential group”

Aiming for the passionless imaginary center doesn’t work

Some big surprises from exit polls from the Australian election day, thanks to the Australian Institute of Progress (AIP). Non-Greens third party voters (code for Delcons – or Defiant conservatives) were more interested in “cultural issues like immigration, Islam, gay marriage, refugees, industry protection and political correctness”. Graham Young, Executive Director of the AIP calls these voters the “most influential in Australia, effectively choosing who will form the government.”

The next election will be won by the party that manages to reap more than its fair share of the non-Greens minor party voters. They are up for grabs for Liberal or Labor.

In the end, around 50% of the Delcons are prepared to put Labor above Liberal in preferences (the nuclear option) — showing how wrong Mark Textor’s theory is that the Liberal base “doesn’t matter” and the Liberals should aim for the centre and can afford to mistreat their base. Another theme I see is that parties need passion — when it’s missing from the base, it sure isn’t coming from the centre. As I said before Turnbull took over, “the passionate support base for the Liberal party will […]

Globally 91% of wars have nothing to do with climate change

Climate change causes war (maybe) and meaningless statistics (definitely)

One day when you grow up, children, you too can be a research scientist who writes papers that tells the world something banally obvious — like, say, that natural disasters make conflict more likely.

Who, exactly, thought natural disasters brought peace?

I don’t think the journalist who wrote this next paragraph asked himself what it means (if anything):

Globally, there was a nine per cent coincidence rate between the outbreak of armed conflicts and natural disasters like droughts and heatwaves. But, in countries that were deeply divided along ethnic lines, this rose to about 23 per cent.

I suspect it means not much (define “coincident”), but if it did, it implies that globally, 91% of wars don’t coincide with natural disasters.

If there is a real message here, it appears to be that ethnic divisions cause wars:

Dr Jonathan Donges, who co-wrote the paper about the study, said: “We’ve been surprised by the extent that results for ethnic fractionalised countries stick out, compared to other country features such as conflict history, poverty, or inequality.

9.3 out of 10 based on 48 ratings […]

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8.3 out of 10 based on 22 ratings

John Kerry: Air conditioner, fridge gas, as big a threat as ISIS

Let’s get those priorities right:

Secretary of State John Kerry said in Vienna on Friday that air conditioners and refrigerators are as big of a threat to life as the threat of terrorism posed by groups like the Islamic State.

Depends what you mean by “life” I guess. Some like the world 2 degrees cooler, and some prefer to keep their heads.

“As we were working together on the challenge of [ISIS] and terrorism,” Kerry said. “It’s hard for some people to grasp it, but what we–you–are doing here right now is of equal importance because it has the ability to literally save life on the planet itself.”

It’s good to know the US will be well defended against an invasion of badly gassed fridges.

Since warming is mostly beneficial this threat is at the Defcon-Toothfairy level. And probably not that high. The extra energy trapped by HFC refrigerant gasses most likely just reroutes and escapes to space through water vapor emissions.

9.2 out of 10 based on 65 ratings […]

Backflip: Antarctic peninsula, posterchild of Polar disaster, has been cooling not warming

The “fastest warming place” on Planet Earth wasn’t warming.

A new Antarctic study wipes out 20 years of panic about the West Antarctic Peninsula. All these years while people were crying about penguins, it turns out that the place was cooling rather than warming. Mankind has emitting a third of all its “CO2-pollution” ever from 1998, and there was “no discernible” effect on Antarctica. Indeed, the study quietly finds that even the bigger longer warming that has happened in the last century was not “unprecedented” in the last 2000 years.

In the last decade as this cooling trend was happening in the real world — in the media, the same spot was being described as “one of the fastest warming places on Earth”:

The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest-warming places on Earth, NBC, 2013

West Antarctic Ice Sheet warming twice earlier estimate, BBC, 2012

And this sort of news has been going on for years. This was “big deal” once-in-2000 year type stuff:

UK scientists say parts of Antarctica have recently been warming much faster than most of the rest of the Earth. They believe the warming is probably without parallel […]

Clexit-coming? President of Philippines says Paris climate deal is stupid nonsense. Wants to kick someone.

Let’s not mince words. The new President of the Philippines, Jose Duterte, says he won’t sign or honor the “stupid” Paris deal and he wanted to kick the ambassador who asked.

Here’s a memorable moment in international diplomacy:

“You are trying to stifle us,” Duterte said on Monday in widely reported comments. “That’s stupid, I will not honour that. You signed … That was not my signature.”

Duterte said: “I’m mad at this ambassador. I want to kick him,” adding that limits on carbon emissions for the Philippines were “nonsense”.

“You who have reached your peak and along with it spewed a lot of contaminants, emissions … Good for you. We are here, we have not reached the age of industrialisation. We are on our way to it.”

This is a bit of a bummer for the big-government collective. The Philippines has 100 million people and is the 12th biggest country on Earth population-wise.

Brexit, India and the Philippines smell like “Clexit”

The Trump factor looms too. Sensing a tidal wave, the UN promptly issued a call for everyone to hurry up.

The United Nations has issued a plea for nations to […]

Cure cancer with weaponized bacteria that do mass “suicide bombing” at the right site?

Bacteria multiply

In the West we could try to cure cancer faster with research like this, or we could pour billions into making expensive electricity to try to cool the world by 0.01°C for our grandchildren. Hmm. What to do? Which activity is more likely to make citizens richer, happier and more productive?

In this approach (below) bacteria are engineered to find cancer cells, make lots of baby bacteria until they reach a large enough colony size then do a mass self-destructo at the cancer site — releasing a tumor killing drug. A few bacteria survive the micro-apocalypse and they start another round. So far, the researchers haven’t cured any cancers, but they can shrink cancers in mice and extend mousy lives by 50%. One day this might mean cancers can be “lived with”, if not actually destroyed completely.

A critical mass is reached and the colony “bombs”.

So the bacteria can be engineered into neat little machines to manage cancer. But they are still living creatures, so are messy machines. One problem is that evolution tends to make all living machines chuck out bits of DNA that don’t improve survival, so the “survivors” will gradually take over, […]

Wind power sucks money and electricity in South Australia

On a good day South Australia has more than 40% renewable energy. On a bad day, it’s -2 or something. Wind towers suck in so many ways. They can even draw more power out than they bring in and best of all — their peak electron sucking power comes just when the state needs electricity the most.

Business blows up as turbines suck more power than they generate

The sapping of power by the turbines during calm weather on July 7 at the height of the crisis, which has caused a price surge, shows just how unreliable and intermittent wind power is for a state with a renewable energy mix of more than 40 per cent.

South Australia has more “renewable” wind power than anywhere else in Australia. They also have the highest electricity bills, the highest unemployment, the largest number of “failures to pay” and disconnections. Coincidence?

The emergency measures are needed to ease punishing costs for South Australian industry as National Electricity Market (NEM) prices in the state have frequently surged above $1000 a megawatt hour this month and at one point on Tuesday hit the $14,000MWh maximum price.

Complaints from business […]

Bloomberg tells business leaders to say climate change is real or risk “survival”

The 6th richest guy in the US and the head of a major media corporation made it clear last December:

“No CEO could survive if they tried to say climate change isn’t real,” Bloomberg said, offering a suggestion for why Fox News rarely features business leaders to tout climate sceptic positions. | BusinessGreen Dec 4th 2015

What about business leaders who just have a few doubts? He’s got that covered too:

“You don’t sit there and say ‘I’m not sure it’s a real risk’. “ Bloomberg said.

Apparently the Big Fear of Michael Bloomberg and Mark Carney (head of the Bank of England) is that a few business leaders will start asking questions or speaking their minds, and we can’t have that.

Successful entrepreneurs could be quite a scary force if many of them started speaking out. They have clout. They are not the gullible types and if they paid attention to this debate or even asked good questions, the whole House of Carbon would come undone so easily. That’s why it’s a big No No for leaders to ask questions, the believers know they don’t have the answers.

These kinds of warnings need to […]

Greenpeace slam Australia’s new Environment Minister (so Frydenberg can’t be all bad)

The one thing Malcolm Turnbull has got right in the last year? Out with Greg Hunt, and in with Josh Frydenberg.

The new ministry has been announced, as predicted, without magnanimity, wisdom or grace. There is no role for Tony Abbott; Turnbull is still too afraid of him. But Greg Hunt has finally been moved out of the Environment portfolio which can only be a good thing. He has been a key proponent of passionate and pointless action on the weather, and was central to stopping a BOM audit and bringing in a carbon tax. Almost any other minister might actually try to get better science (see here and here), and solve real environmental problems instead of fake ones. Perhaps finally an environment minister may recognise that we need temperature data that can be independently replicated if we are ever going to understand the Australian climate?

The Dept of Environment has been merged with Energy which makes sense for carbon traders and the renewables industry, but perhaps not for the environment.

The new environment minister looks good

The Sydney Morning Herald has put together the praise for Josh Frydenberg:

Former Greens leader Bob Brown said Mr Frydenberg would […]

Climate change is potentially a $7 Trillion dollar money making venture (for bankers)

The tide of money, the vested interests flows

H/t to Eric Worrall at WattsUp.

The current “green” industry is already around $1.5 Trillion a year. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England said he expects this to grow to $5-7 trillion.

Financial Post: Climate change a $7 trillion funding opportunity

He said that given the enormous funding needs for clean infrastructure — he estimates at somewhere between $5 trillion and $7 trillion a year — investment opportunities will rebound.

If clean green energy was efficient, cheap and reliable there would be no “funding need” as the market would leap to exploit that opportunity. Instead most leading investors act like they are skeptics. The fact that central bankers are selling it so aggressively says a lot. Perhaps central bankers want to help the poor and save the world, or could it be that the entire financial industry will profit from a fake, forced market and another fiat currency? What are the brokerage fees on a $7T market…

Again we get this “free market” myth:

[Carbon pricing is the cleanest way for markets to judge the tangible exposure to climate change,” said Carney

[…]

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8.7 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

This is not a tribute

On Candlelit vigils for the people in Nice

What Tim Blair says: Ditto

After so many repetitions, these events are now actually insults. They are not about the victims. They are about the mourners. They are indulgent displays of emotion that serve only to generate soothing feelings of moral comfort and to mask what should be a united and righteous fury.

Tonight’s attendees should consider this. While you see every lit candle as a poignant reminder of life’s tragic fragility, Islamic State sees them as post-game bonus points.

I know people want to talk about the atrocity in France. I wish. But thanks to Section 18C you will have to talk in other nations where offending someone is not an offence. Or perhaps if you are lucky you might be able to discuss this somewhere in Oz where they have paid staff to moderate and lawyerate. See also Andrew Bolt’s: We cannot keep living in this fear.

Heartfelt thoughts to the victims and their families on a dark day.

9.4 out of 10 based on 92 ratings

The rise of the skeptics — Brexit shifts the ground: Boris promoted, DECC gone

Don’t underestimate the Brexit effect. The landscape is shifting.

The Paris agreement just became less likely. The UK Dept of the environment will submerge, and Boris Johnson, the outspoken skeptic and Brexit figurehead, has been promoted to foreign minister.

James Delingpole says: Britain’s New Prime Minister Drives A Stake Through The Heart Of The Green Vampire

Britain no longer has“the greenest government ever.” This is good news. Very good news. The agonised screeching of all the usual suspects in the Environmental movement will be enough to sustain many of us in lols for weeks and months to come.

Five years ago, could we imagine an “infamous climate denier” like Boris rewarded in any Western Government? There were closet skeptics in the cabinet, but that’s not the same. In Australia, Tony Abbott once said climate change was “crap” and somehow still managed to become PM, but once he was, his official line was the permitted global warming story. ( He pandered, but in the most sensible possible way. And because he did not flagrantly add to the climate slush fund they still called him a “denier” but he rarely said anything openly skeptical.).

To have Boris in such an […]

At the zoo: Interpreting academics trying to interpret Christians and conservatives

Geniuses at Rice made a breakthrough and discovered that Christianity reduces the “negative” effect of being a conservative. Conservatives, see, are less likely to buy things that are “pro-environment”. The academic mindset assumes this is a personality flaw. Instead it’s an attribute. The environmental movement has a record of hurting the poor, razing forests, and destroying family businesses. There is a reason “environmentalist” has come to be a dirty word.

Supersize that condescension:

Obviously the true evil people are the people who watch Fox.

“Put more colorfully, Americans who are watching Fox News instead of attending church on Sunday morning appear to be particularly uninterested in buying with the environment in mind,” said Ecklund, who is also director of Rice’s Religion and Public Life Program. “It would stand to reason that those who participate in their houses of worship and who tend to be more engaged in civic life may have less time to be exposed to such media and therefore be less likely to follow the politicized conservative ‘line’ with respect to the environment.”

So, both Christians and conservatives are dump people who are fooled by Fox. But Christians are a bit more useful, not because they […]

Gergis Australian hockeystick is back: How one typo took four years to fix

UPDATED: See below for Stephen McIntyre’s response, with details of emails showing that Joelle Gergis did not independently discover the problem but learnt of it from Climate Audit.

The Gergis hockeystick was heralded in the media for a week in 2012 before it was cut apart online and months later, quietly withdrawn. Headlines raved that Australia was having the “hottest years in the millennium”. As I said at the time, it was all silly beyond belief — the whole study relied on two bunches of trees in Tasmania and New Zealand to tell us that the greater continental area was 0.09°C warmer now than it was in 1000AD. If trees in yonder Tassie can tell the whole continental temperature to a tenth of a degree, who needs thermometers (especially the kind which need 2 degree corrections)? Why does the BOM bother today?

Part II of this sorry paper has arrived under this auspicious headline at The Conversation:

“How a single word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking and blog backlash”

Still hurts eh?

Look out. The Scientific Saints have arrived!

According to Joelle Gergis, skeptics found just “one typo”, and in Gergis’ own […]

85% clinical medical research is false, or not useful, not worth the money – government funded waste

John Ioannidis paints a picture of a vast hive of researchers all pushed to publish short papers that are mostly a waste of time. The design is bad, the results useless (even when meta-collated with other badly designed studies). Basically, humankind is pouring blood, sweat and tears into spinning wheels in medicine — just paper churn. Most papers will never help a patient.

Ioannidis wants rigor – full registration before the study, full transparency afterwards, fewer studies over all, but with better design. Astonishingly, fully 85% of what is spent on clinical trials is wasted. It’s really a pretty big scandal, given that lives are on the line. I can’t see the media or pollies joining the dots. Imagine how many quality life-years are being burnt at the stake of the self-feeding Science-PR-Industry.

And this is clinical medical research, where standards are higher than in many other scientific areas and where there are easily defined terms of success unlike “blue sky” studies. Ioannidis doesn’t say it directly, but his description of the effect current funding has (which is almost all government based) almost guarantees that researchers will be wasting time in the paper churn — fast, short papers of little […]

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7.7 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

Some renewable-energy subsidies are stupidly, insanely expensive, says emissions trader

The price of carbon permits makes them useless. Governments have issued too many permits, and also put in competing programs to reduce CO2 emissions. The collective Green Gravy train is fracturing and now even frustrated carbon traders are pointing out that parts of the save-the-world-program make no sense.

Tough to Keep the World From Warming When Carbon Is This Cheap

“Some of the renewable-energy subsidies are stupidly, insanely expensive per ton of carbon dioxide saved,” said Louis Redshaw, who has his own emissions-trading company, Redshaw Advisors Ltd. in London, and was previously head of carbon at Barclays Plc. “Politicians are not only failing to deliver a comprehensive carbon price for the economy, they are busy undermining them where they exist.”

The price of carbon is destined to achieve its true value — nothing. The only reason it hasn’t done that already is thanks to governments changing the rules to keep it alive.

Carbon trading is still a big merry-go-round even if it’s going nowhere:

Today, there are 38 countries, cities, states and provinces using pricing systems in an attempt to put a lid on greenhouse gases, according to the World Bank.

JoNova

Recent Posts

Trite Science Prize: New science paper tells us air over land “heats more than water”

Delcons do matter — defiant non-left voters were “most influential group”

Globally 91% of wars have nothing to do with climate change

Weekend Unthreaded

John Kerry: Air conditioner, fridge gas, as big a threat as ISIS

Backflip: Antarctic peninsula, posterchild of Polar disaster, has been cooling not warming

Clexit-coming? President of Philippines says Paris climate deal is stupid nonsense. Wants to kick someone.

Cure cancer with weaponized bacteria that do mass “suicide bombing” at the right site?

Wind power sucks money and electricity in South Australia

Bloomberg tells business leaders to say climate change is real or risk “survival”

Greenpeace slam Australia’s new Environment Minister (so Frydenberg can’t be all bad)

Climate change is potentially a $7 Trillion dollar money making venture (for bankers)

Weekend Unthreaded

This is not a tribute

The rise of the skeptics — Brexit shifts the ground: Boris promoted, DECC gone

At the zoo: Interpreting academics trying to interpret Christians and conservatives

Gergis Australian hockeystick is back: How one typo took four years to fix

85% clinical medical research is false, or not useful, not worth the money – government funded waste

Weekend Unthreaded

Some renewable-energy subsidies are stupidly, insanely expensive, says emissions trader

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