Australian Met Office Accused Of Man-Made Climate Change
In this newsletter:
1) Bill Gates Slams Unreliable Wind & Solar Energy
Stop These Things, 18 February 2019
2) Australian Met Office Accused Of Man-Made Climate Change
Graham Lloyd, The Australian, 16 February 2019
3) BBC Backtracking On IPPR’s Fake Extreme Weather Claims
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 18 February 2019
4) Andrew Montford: Extinction Rebellion? There Is Little Sign Of A Climate Emergency
Reaction, 18 February 2019
5) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’ Accidentally Exposes Socialists’ Big Lie
Marc Thiessen, Fox News, 16 February 2019
6) The Green New Deal’s Disastrous First Week
Kyle Smith, National Review, 14 February 2019
7) Lord Deben Gave 12 Speeches Benefiting Private ‘Green’ Clients As Lords Sleaze Watchdog Probes £600,000 In Payments
David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 17 February 2019
Full details:
1) Bill Gates Slams Unreliable Wind & Solar Energy
Stop These Things, 18 February 2019
When the world’s richest entrepreneur says wind and solar will never work, it’s probably time to listen.
Bill says it’s time to stop jerking around with wind & solar
Bill Gates made a fortune applying common sense to the untapped market of home computing. The meme has it that IBM’s CEO believed there was only a market for five computers in the entire world. Gates thought otherwise. Building a better system than any of his rivals and shrewdly working the marketplace, resulted in hundreds of millions hooked on PCs, Windows and Office. This is a man that knows a thing or two about systems and a lot about what it takes to satisfy the market.
For almost a century, electricity generation and distribution were treated as a tightly integrated system: it was designed and built as one, and is meant to operate as designed. However, the chaotic delivery of wind and solar have all but trashed the electricity generation and delivery system, as we know it.
Germany and South Australia are only the most obvious examples.
During an interview at Stanford University late last year, Bill Gates attacks the idiots who believe that we’re all just a heartbeat away from an all wind and sun powered future.
Gates on renewables: How would Tokyo survive a 3 day typhoon with unreliable energy?
Jo Nova Blog
14 February 2019
Make no mistake, Bill Gates totally believes the climate change scare story but even he can see that renewables are not the answer, it’s not about the cost, it’s the reliability.
He quotes Vaslav (possibly Vaclav Smil?):
Here’s Toyko, 27 million people, you have three days of a cyclone every year. It’s 23GW of electricity for three days. Tell me what battery solution is going sit there and provide that power.
click on image above to watch the video
As Gates says: Let’s not jerk around. You’re multiple orders of magnitude — … — That’s nothing, that doesn’t solve the reliability problem.
Full post
2) Australian Met Office Accused Of Man-Made Climate Change
Graham Lloyd, The Australian, 16 February 2019
The Bureau of Meteorology has rewritten Australia’s temperature records for the second time in six years, greatly increasing the rate of warming since 1910 in its controversial homogenised data set.
Rather than the nation’s temperature having increased by 1C over the past century, the bureau’s updated homogenised data set, known as ACORN-SAT, now shows mean temperatures have risen by 1.23C.
Bureau data shows the rate of mean warming since 1960 has risen to 0.2C a decade, putting the more ambitious IPCC target of limiting future warming to 1.5C close to being broken.
Homogenisation of temperature records is considered necessary to account for changes in instrumentation, changes in site locations and changes in the time at which temperatures were taken. But the bureau’s treatment of historical data has been controversial. In recent years there have been claims that the organisation was treating temperature records in such a way that left it exposed to accusations that ideological pursuits had trumped good scientific practice.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott unsuccessfully pushed for a forensic investigation into the bureau’s methods.
A number of reviews of the bureau’s network equipment and its temperature data handling have been carried out. A technical panel found the homogenisation methods used were largely sound.
But a key recommendation, to include confidence levels or error margins in the data, remains unfulfilled.
A BoM spokesman said work was under way on a number of scientific papers looking at uncertainty and confidence intervals for temperature data observations, adjustments and national averages.
“This work will be made available to the public following thorough peer review,” the spokesman said.
The bureau had fiercely defended the accuracy of its original ACORN-SAT data. But more recent analysis, including the removal of rounding errors, has effectively increased the rate of warming by 23 per cent, compared with the earlier homogenised ACORN version-one data.
Detailed technical information on the ACORN-SAT update was published late last year, but there has been no public announcement of the revised data, which is now considered the official national average temperature record. A bureau review of the homogenised data said the new version had “increased robustness and greater spatial coherence”.
The updating of the ACORN-SAT data coincided with the release last October of a new version of US weather agency NOAA’s global land temperature data set.
A bureau spokesman said ACORN-SAT version two was the bureau’s “improved official homogeneous temperature data set”. The new data set benefited from “the numerous scientific and technological advances which have occurred over the past six years, as well as the insights and recommendations from an independent ACORN-SAT technical advisory forum”.
“It also contains new data which was not previously available when the bureau developed the first data set,” he said.
The bureau said the updates had been independently peer-reviewed, and the findings were that the methodology was “rigorous and reliable”.
Scientist Jennifer Marohasy said that while version two of the data had used the same set of 112 stations as had been used in version one, the data had been remodelled relative to the raw data and also relative to the remodelled version one.
The bureau said the data in version two was subjected to two rounds of homogenisation, as had been the case with version one. “In total, 22 of the 966 adjustments applied in version two of the ACORN-SAT data set arose from this second-round procedure,” the bureau said.
A technical analysis of ACORN-SAT 2 by the bureau said 1910-2016 trends in Australian temperature were about 0.02C a decade higher than those found in version one.
It said rounding errors in version one accounted for much of the new trend.
Dr Marohasy said the bureau had not explained how it could have generated a 23 per cent increase in the rate of warming, just through updating the official ACORN-SAT record.
The maximum-temperature trend from 1910 to 2016 at the 112 ACORN-SAT weather stations is now an increase of 0.116C a decade. It was 0.09C a decade in the earlier homogenised data.
The minimum-temperature trend is now an increase of 0.13C a decade, compared with 0.109C in ACORN-SAT 1.
The bureau said improved accounting for the widespread relocation of sites out of towns during the 1990s and 2000s, and the incorporation of recent data from new sites, were also substantial contributors.
Dr Marohasy said movement of sites was meant to be part of the adjustments made in the first version of the data.
“The incorporation of data from new sites may account for some of the 23 per cent increase,” Dr Marohasy said, “because the bureau have opened new sites in hotter western NSW, while closing higher-altitude weather stations, including Charlotte Pass in the Snowy Mountains.”
Full post
3) BBC Backtracking On IPPR’s Fake Extreme Weather Claims
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 18 February 2019
The BBC are now trying to backtrack from their report last week of how extreme weather events had rocketed since 2005.
This item was on Radio 4 last night, for the first 5 mins. Click on this link to play.
On Tuesday, Today programme listeners woke up to the news that the think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, had new statistics that showed the scale of the damage we humans are doing to the planet. It said that since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold. However, the IPPR soon corrected that date to 1950, blaming a ‘typo’, but climate change researcher and author of Six Degrees Mark Lynas tells Tim Harford why he thinks the IPPR’s numbers are still wrong.
Even now, Lynas does not give the whole story, that thousands of weather disasters happened in the early decades, but were never properly recorded or registered by EM-DAT.
Full post & comments
4) Andrew Montford: Extinction Rebellion? There Is Little Sign Of A Climate Emergency
Reaction, 18 February 2019
They were entirely sincere in their views. But I was shocked at how little they knew of the climate issues they were campaigning about.
I had a fascinating encounter with two Extinction Rebellion activists in a television studio last week. We were there to film a pilot episode of the new Scottish evening news bulletin, and specifically to discuss the so-called “climate rebellion” and the crowds of schoolchildren who were being encouraged to bunk off school last week, ostensibly out of concern for the planet.
In the event, the studio discussion was rather uneventful – too short to be informative, and pitched at a rather numpty level – but I did enjoy my discussion with my opponents in the green room beforehand.
Extinction Rebellion is noted for its avowed intention to use civil disobedience as the main tool of its campaigning armoury, and I was therefore expecting its representatives to be rather sinister, if not outright thuggish. In the event though, I found two personable young people who were happy to talk and share views.
And while it’s fair to say we didn’t agree on anything very much, I think we learned a lot from each other.
I can report that they were both entirely sincere in their views. But I was shocked at how little they knew of the issues they were campaigning about. Their position was that the world was going to hell in a hand-basket and that they were going to do something about it.
So, when I suggested that the world wasn’t in fact on the brink of disaster, I got blank, uncomprehending looks. By way of example, I brought up the weather extremes that are said to afflict us in this age of global warming, and I pointed out that there was now little evidence to support such a view. In fact, this is hardly even the stuff of controversy any longer: The official position of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their latest report is that there are no significant trends, although they note that many studies have found that hurricanes have become less numerous and less intense in recent decades. Similarly, they find little evidence that droughts or floods are becoming worse on a global scale either. Heatwaves seem to be slightly hotter, as you would expect in a slightly warmer world, but evidence of problems is hard to come by.
At this news, my opponents looked suspicious – perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the mainstream media never report inconvenient facts like this. Instead, they moved the conversation on to agricultural yields, which they said would start to plummet in five years’ time. This again seemed to fly in the face of the evidence: farm output continues to rise across the world and yield records are broken anew every year or so. Indeed, our agricultural output is so vast that one researcher has already suggested that we have reached “peak farmland”, a possibility that could lead to a vast transfer of land back to nature.
Unfortunately, the IPCC’s renewed enthusiasm for biofuels seems to have killed off this opportunity. They imagine vast areas of agricultural land being converted to biofuels: in essence, whatever crop might sequestrate carbon dioxide the fastest. In this country, that probably means mile upon mile of deathly Sitka spruce plantations.
What was worse, neither of my two environmental activist friends had heard about what happened the last time the world tried to introduce biofuels on a large scale, again in a bid to “save the planet”. This is understandable because they would have been no more than children in 2007, but readers of a certain age may recall that people in Africa started to go hungry as grain prices rocketed. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Hunger said at the time that biofuels were a “crime against humanity”.
The decades of global warming have coincided with the most extraordinary flourishing of humankind. The extraction of hundreds of millions of people from absolute poverty in countries like China and India has been a triumph of the human imagination, and it has been powered almost entirely by fossil fuels. Life expectancy is rising, health outcomes are improving, human happiness is growing. Meanwhile, there is abundant good news from the natural world too.
Manmade carbon dioxide emissions have brought about an extraordinary greening of the Sahel – the arid fringes of the Sahara – a development that is unarguably wonderful news both for nature and for the people who live there.
Full post
5) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’ Accidentally Exposes Socialists’ Big Lie
Marc Thiessen, Fox News, 16 February 2019
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s now infamous talking points on the Green New Deal are the most unintentionally honest explanation of the neo-socialism now gripping the Democratic Party.
Too honest, apparently. After her office sent the “FAQ” to NPR, The Washington Post and other news organizations, and posted a similar version on her congressional website, they were met with withering criticism — prompting Ocasio-Cortez to furiously backtrack, seeking to disown and discredit documents her office had produced, posted and distributed. Sorry, you don’t get to do that. Ocasio-Cortez told us what is really behind her Green New Deal. Now she, and the Democrats who endorsed her plan, have to live with it.
Ocasio-Cortez has been pilloried for her plan to “get rid of farting cows and airplanes,” upgrade or replace “every building in America,” replace “every combustible-engine vehicle” and provide “economic security” for people “unwilling to work” — and rightly so. The old five-year plans of the former Soviet Union are modest, by comparison, in their pursuit of full socialism.
Yet the big untold story is her admission that all of this cannot be paid for simply by taxing the rich. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is campaigning for president on a wealth tax, while Ocasio-Cortez has proposed 70 percent marginal tax rates on wealthy Americans. The message is clear: We’ll soak the millionaires and billionaires and mega-rich corporations so we can give you free stuff.
But her talking points (even the watered-down version that was posted on her website) admit that won’t come close to covering the full costs of her Green New Deal. “The level of investment required is massive,” the talking points declare. “Even if every billionaire and company came together and were willing to pour all the resources at their disposal into this investment, the aggregate value of the investments they could make would not be sufficient.” Her document says that funding the Green New Deal requires World War II levels of government spending of between 40 and 50 percent of gross domestic product.
Today, federal spending amounts to 21 percent of GDP, or $4.4 trillion annually. Increasing it to between 40 and 50 percent of GDP would require doubling government expenditures to between $84 and $105 trillion over 10 years (and that’s without factoring in rising GDP). But Warren’s wealth tax would raise just $2.75 trillion over 10 years. And according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, Ocasio-Cortez’s 70 percent marginal rate might raise at best $189 billion over 10 years, and could actually cost the federal government $63.5 billion in lost revenue by stifling economic growth and encouraging capital flight.
Taxing the rich won’t come close to covering the costs of the Green New Deal, which includes a bunch of socialist policies that have nothing to do with climate change. Manhattan Institute budget expert Brian Riedl has calculated the 10-year costs using liberal and nonpartisan sources. The results are stunning: $32 trillion for a single-payer health care plan; $6.8 trillion for a government jobs guarantee; $2 trillion for education, medical leave, job training and retirement security; and between $5 trillion and $40 trillion to fund universal basic income to support those who are “unwilling” to work. (The final price depends on how “universal” it is.) Grand total? Between $46 and $81 trillion.
The only way to raise the revenue for even the low end of that estimate, he calculates, would require establishing a European-style value-added tax of 87 percent on everything we buy, or a new 37 percent payroll tax for every American (on top of the current 15.3 percent payroll tax and all existing federal, state and local taxes.)
And that covers the price tag only before we even get to the energy and environmental policies in the Green New Deal.
Full post
6) The Green New Deal’s Disastrous First Week
Kyle Smith, National Review, 14 February 2019
Somehow the Democrats managed to create a shiny, magical rainbow-colored unicorn and immediately impale themselves on it.
How bad is the debut of the Green New Deal looking a week later? “Dead on arrival” makes it sound better than it is. It’s more like Zima meets Green Lantern times Bill Simmons’s HBO show. It’s such a disaster that Democrats and their media allies are calling Mitch McConnell a nefarious schemer for proposing to allow them to vote on their own idea.
A party whose loudest voice avers that we’re 144 months from the end of the world if we don’t “address climate change” (and that was almost a month ago!) is saying, “Hey, let’s not slam the pedal to the metal and rush this thing all the way to the voting-on-a-nonbinding-resolution phase this year.”
The GND got pummeled, pureed, and pantsed from left, right, and center. Bloomberg’s Noah Smith: “The Green New Deal Would Spend the U.S. Into Oblivion.” Jonathan Chait of New York: “The Green New Deal Is a Bad Idea, Not Just a Botched Rollout.” USA Today’s deputy editorial-page editor catalogued “Green New Deal’s 55 promises that have little to do with climate change: The full list.” “A deeply unserious proposal to tackle climate change,” ruled The Economist.
Jonathan Swan of Axios: “We’ve been talking to Trump’s political advisors, it’s like Christmas and Hanukkah and every other holiday has arrived. I’ve never seen them so joyful and full of glee. They’re gonna elevate this and talk about it til the cows come home.” Under the headline, “Democrats, Debt and Double Standards,” Paul Krugman advised the Left on February 11, “Don’t let the deficit scolds scare you into thinking small,” but upon further reflection one day later said of progressives, “Their agenda still needs to be tax-and-spend, not just spend” and deficit-scolded them:
“Progressives should be thinking about how to pay for their policies. So it’s a source of mild concern that I keep hearing that heterodox economics — specifically Modern Monetary Theory — says that we don’t have to worry about where the money will come from.”
Somehow the Democrats managed to create a shiny, magical rainbow-colored unicorn and immediately impale themselves on it. Such a nightmare is the GND that the Democratic-party shills at the Associated Press wrote, “McConnell Wields Green New Deal as Bludgeon against Dems.” Who is wielding that weapon, though? It’s like watching Edward Norton beat himself up in Fight Club. The Green New Deal proposal is such a merde burrito that it seems likely to kill any Democratic-led climate-change action for the rest of this congressional term.
How did this Hindenburg-crashes-into-the-Titanic-and-unleashes-Chernobyl situation happen? A couple of reasons are apparent. The first is the Dems’ obvious and growing Ocasio-Cortez problem. I stress that it is not I who want her to be reined in. I want her on every front page, every podcast, every news program. I want her to host the Grammys. I want her to be the newest Avenger. The more she talks, the better for conservatives, because, six weeks into the 60-year service of “First Citizen AOC” (Ross Douthat), it is obvious that the effective leader of the Democratic party is a moron. But that’s being too kind.
The effective leader of the Democratic party is a heedless, arrogant, spotlight-chasing, wrath-threatening ignoramus maximus who is too dumb to have any inkling of how much she doesn’t know. Three years after convincing themselves that the ideal presidential candidate was a woman with the personality of an ulcerous Gila monster, the Democrats have once again fallen in line behind “star power,” meaning someone who seems like a star only inside the hermetically sealed Village Cinema of Potemkin, a safe space for true believers only.
Which brings me to the second unanticipated problem with the Green New Deal. The progressives didn’t understand how their Year Zero fantasy would be received because they have hermetically sealed themselves off from the Right, and even from moderates. They actually leaked a document to their woke friends at NPR without anyone realizing how badly a pledge of support for everyone “unable or unwilling to work” would play outside the bubble, or how inane it seems to grownups when you propose eliminating every combustion engine in the United States in ten years or declare war on cows.
Republicans who watch Fox News are often derided for living in an echo chamber. Maybe they’d like to be, but it’s almost impossible to accomplish. It’s simply not possible to wall oneself off from opposing opinion if you’re right of center, because the Left owns the media, the culture, and, increasingly, corporate America. Moreover, conservatives live in areas that are more ideologically diverse than liberals do. Liberals huddle in and around silos. […]
Within Progtown, extremism in the defense of climate-change hysteria is no vice. AOC and Co. probably thought they were moderating their tone by not charging the rich with being malefactors of great wealth and suggesting mandatory sensitivity camp for straight white males. “Trump says whatever he feels, why can’t we?” the progressives think. If their aim is to be much less popular than he is, they should keep talking.
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7) Lord Deben Gave 12 Speeches Benefiting Private ‘Green’ Clients As Lords Sleaze Watchdog Probes £600,000 In Payments
David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 17 February 2019
Tory peer John Selwyn Gummer spoke in support of measures that would benefit green businesses that paid his private company more than £600,000 during a dozen House of Lords debates, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The former Minister, who has been chairman of the independent Committee on Climate Change (CCC) since 2012, is being investigated by Standards Commissioner Lucy Scott-Moncrieff over claims that he breached the Lords’ Code of Conduct by failing to declare his interest in Sancroft International – his family consultancy – and its green technology clients.
The probe was triggered in part by allegations from five MPs that he had backed measures that could benefit Sancroft’s clients in three Lords debates – but our investigation suggests he did so on a further nine occasions.
They include three contributions to a debate on an Energy Bill going through Parliament in July 2013.
During the debate, the former Environment Secretary, who became Lord Deben in 2010, told peers that carbon-free electricity was the ‘key to the future’ and that it was important not to restrict the activities of companies which made power from biological sources such as food waste and wood.
Such firms include Saria, a biofuel producer, which has paid more than £183,000 to Sancroft. In June 2015, Lord Deben used another Lords debate to call on the Government to ‘give security’ to companies investing in low-carbon generation.
By then, Sancroft’s clients included Temporis Capital, venture capitalists with interests in wind farms and solar energy projects, which paid £50,000 to the consultancy.
That would include the EU Renewables Directive, which says 20 per cent of the country’s energy needs must come from renewable sources by 2020.
Sancroft has been paid £15,500 by Drax, a green energy producer that receives £700 million a year in Government subsidies.
The Mail on Sunday has also learned that in his capacity as CCC chairman, Lord Deben wrote to Business Secretary Greg Clark and Transport Secretary Chris Grayling to urge the Government to provide more ‘financial support’ to the electric vehicle industry, and to bring forward the date when all new cars would have to be electric.
But he failed to mention in the letter – dated October 11, 2018 – either his involvement with Sancroft or that the firm had received almost £300,000 from Johnson Matthey, a firm investing more than £200 million in electric vehicle batteries, since 2012.
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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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