Junket science

Dial up the euphoria and forget the failure of the last junket, er, meeting to agree anything because a major 'climate deal' has been done at Durban. So says the Graun, Age, Aunties Beeb and ABC, and all the rest. But forgive my scepticism when I read things like this:

A new global climate deal has been struck after being brought back from the brink of disaster by three powerful women politicians in a 20-minute "huddle to save the planet".
[...]
... the 16-day talks were effectively over, with a commitment by all countries to accept binding emission cuts by 2020.

Or this:

Every single country in the world has committed to an agreement to take effect from 2020.

Or this:

Talks on a new legal deal covering all countries will begin next year and end by 2015, coming into effect by 2020.

Or this:

Federal Climate Change Minister Greg Combet says it is an "historic breakthrough".
"The idea is that after 2015 countries would start ratifying the new agreement and it would take effect from 2020."

So - and I'm looking at this as I would if I were a true warmista, convinced of the danger of catastrophic warble gloaming - after this dramatic twenty minute huddle, followed by that equally dramatic two hours of tense negotiation, all of which had been preceded by more than a bloody fortnight of presumably equally tense negotiation, everybody agreed to kick the fucking can down the road for another few years. And that's supposed to be a result? Jesus, what do you guys do for an epic failure? No, don't tell me... begins with a C, doesn't it? Cancun? Copenhagen? Email me if I'm getting warm, heheh. Sorry, that was insensitive of me.

Forgive my cynicism but having failed, even by what I'd call pretty low standards, in Cancun and Copenhagen and having just had the embarrassment of Climategate 2.0, which looked a lot like it was timed to damage the Durban circle jerk, there needed to be something positive and preferably scene stealing to feed to the media's headline writers. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if that was the very first thing that was decided, very likely behind the scenes and quite possibly before the conference even officially began. And fucking hell if a unanimous agreement to put off any hard decisions until later and otherwise maintain the status quo isn't good enough if spun right, even if it'd spin the whole world right off its axis if done much harder.

So in practical terms the great success achieved at Durban is that everything stays exactly the same as it was before all those thousands of delegates got on planes and carbon belched their way through the sky to get there, and everyone has agreed to agree on something more meaningful in four or five years to take effect four or five years after that. Well, it might be good news for the campaigners, researchers, climate change departments and ministers, renewable energy companies, greenwashery makers and all the other rent seekers, but otherwise it seems like a resounding 'Meh'.

Frankly I'm tempted to get down on my knees and thank my lucky stars and any deity that has even the faintest possibility of existing that I'm a climate sceptic. Because if I was a catastrophist warble gloaming believer I'd be shitting myself.

Heh

There have been a couple of suggestions made about Climategate 2.0 and what quote will turn out to sum things up. My favourite so far was spotted by the Pedant General over at Devil's Kitchen:

What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably [...]

But "The Cause" comes up a lot too. Granted, it's used without initial caps, but when it appears this many times does it really need them to get the message across? Some people from Minnesota don't think so.



H/T WUWT.

The sky is angry

Or so says Britain's Meteorological Office and The Graun. In fact they're telling us it's almost as angry as it's ever been in the history of everything (since 1850, near the end of a period of unusual cold).

Is it me or do I detect a note of disappointment?

As spring bulbs burst into life in gardens around the UK, and plants break into a late second bloom, this autumn has seen balmy temperatures prevail across the UK and many parts of Europe.
Despite these unusual scenes, however, this year overall is not likely to be a global record-breaker.

Again, that slight sense that the Graun feel let down by this failure of Gaia to punish us more severely for our sins against her.

Figures from the Met Office published on Tuesday show that 2011 stands at 11th place in the list of warmest years ever, in global mean temperature records stretching back to 1850.

Ah, now did I imagine it or was 1998 declared the absolute hottest year it's ever been in the history of everything ever (since 1850, near the end of a period of unusual cold)? Why, thanks to a handy table on the Graun's article I can see that it was no figment of imagination and that the Met Office did say exactly that, and presumably stand by it if it's still going into articles now.

Today's data confirms the overall warming trend, however: of the 10 warmest years on records, nine occurred since 2000.

But looking at that table I can see that it can be put another way: that 13 years after the hottest year ever (since 1850) it's now the 11th hottest year ever (since 1850). There may be a warming trend, though of course arguments still rage over the reliability of measurements, especially when 2010 is listed as almost as big a scorcher as 1998 despite a bitter northern hemisphere winter which the warmists either forgot to mention or didn't see coming (not for the first time), but there's no getting away from the fact that the warmists themselves say that the hottest year was just over a decade and this year is ranked only 11. More interestingly every year of the last decade apart from 2008 was warmer than this year.

Naughty Gaia. People won't be nearly frightened enough by this. My God, er, Gaia, they might even start to think temperatures have peaked. This just won't do. I don't know, you just can't get the Earth Mother figures these days. Look, just move over and leave it to someone who gets paid for this.

Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, said that[...]

Basic problem is that all models are wrong, not got enough middle and low level clouds.

No, Phil, don't tell them that. You're not supposed to let people know of uncertainties. Oh, look, now you'll have to reassure everyone that all the research into warble gloaming is open and honest and transparent and that there's nothing going on.

I wasted a part of a day deleting numerous emails and exchanges with almost all the skeptics. So I have virtually nothing. I even deleted the email that I inadvertently sent.
[...]
I've been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.

Oh dear, this isn't good at all. Even if Gaia carries on as she/it has for the last 4.5 billion years the Graun will be very sad if the whole warble gloaming narrative goes into a decline. Never mind - you can always ask Phil to hide it.

Where's this money coming from?

Click for linky

Of course we know exactly where it's coming from. There are just shy of thirty million individual taxpayers in Britain, and of those about 6 million are public sector employees whose pre-tax salaries are paid out of other people's taxes anyway, leaving 24 million people. This governmental generosity is funded by them to the tune of £42 each - and think how you'd feel if someone just shoved you up against a wall and nicked your wallet with forty quid in - unless they go for the alternative of adding it to the nation's debt to be paid by future taxpayers. This latter choice is increasingly popular because it means the government does not have to shove you up against a wall and take your wallet, thus making you and everyone else much less likely to balk at what it's being spent on, but since the government has no money or income of its own it's a lot like going to an expensive restaurant where you can't possibly afford to eat and then running up a massive tab by shouting for all in the bar and ordering the best stuff on the menu while hoping like hell that you'll be joined by people with money before the coffee and liqueurs come.*

So what are you getting for your money? Well, not a damn thing, obviously, but what are the Africans getting for it?

Among the projects to be funded will be schemes to help African farmers insure their crops against flooding and drought while other projects include installing solar power in rural villages and building slurry pits that can produce gas to power generators.

In themselves these don't seem like terribly bad ideas, not least because they don't seem to be about appeasing the angry sky gods so much as acknowledging the fact that things don't always stay the same and adapting to it. Oh, and the very worthy goal of getting power to people who don't have it, or not much of it, at the moment. But...

The move, however, is expected to attract intense criticism at a time when the UK economy is struggling to recover from recession.

Indeed, and every other thing I blog at the moment seems to be about Britain's government spending money it hasn't got as fast as or faster than even its recklessly profligate predecessor. And I hadn't even got round to Cleggy's latest brain fart about jobs for da yoof paid for by, you guessed it, the taxpayer. Maybe later, or maybe I'll be too despondent to blog it at all, but for now it's enough to state that that's yet another billion pounds. Now back to Huhne-hoon and his bounteous munificence with your money.

One of the countries which will receive money is South Africa, the most economically advanced in the continent. Last year its economy grew by 2.8 per cent, while Britain's economy rose by 1.8%.

A little misrepresentative, this. By just about any metric, GDP nominal or PPP and absolute or per capita, the UK is much wealthier than the RSA. But then the UK has run up far greater debts than the South Africans have, again in both absolute and relative terms, and how much wealthier Britain really is after allowing for the phantom wealth that's come from living beyond its means for so long is tricky to say. On top of all that Britain's likely to go back into recession soon, which makes all these billion here and billion there stories more than a little worrying. So why... ?

The timing of the announcement, however, is being seen as a cynical attempt to "bribe" African nations into signing up to international deals being backed by the British Government at the climate change negotiations in Durban.

Ah, now it's becoming clear. The UK government, like that of many western nations, has caught the religious warble gloaming zeal and is determined to show its faith by righteously fucking its own economy hard in the arse until its well and truly buggered, but hasn't become quite so insane that it thinks its own citizens won't go nuts if they don't see developing nations - the ones that turn out to be causing more of the problem that we don't really know is a problem - making sacrifices too.

Oh well, I suppose the government bribing other people with your money is at least a change from bribing you with it.


* But no cigars of course. The restaurant's long since been forced to go all non-smoking.

Quoted Quote of the Day

More from Climategate II: The Chinny Reckoning. At the Devils's Kitchen the Pedant General has spotted an absolute gem:

The hunt is now on for the snippet that crystallises the whole thing, the "Hide the decline" moment if you will. My favourite so far:

<1682> Wils:
[2007] What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural
fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably [...]

Earlier I repeated Deep Throat's advice to follow the money, but I've mentioned before when talking about Big Eco that there are several reasons to keep it going. Protecting a reputation that's been nailed irrevocably to a particular mast is also a very strong incentive to keep holding that mast up no matter what.

Inconvenient untruth

Anyone who watched Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth will remember the claim that the snowcap on Mount Kilimanjaro is melting due to warble gloaming, though people who've done much reading of sceptical blogs and publications will have long been aware that this was complete nonsense. In fact even people who just watch news even from pro-warmist sources like the BBC should already have been aware that that particular claim was constructed on sand, as the reporting of this court case makes clear:

Mr Gore's assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming - the court heard the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.

And from Son of Climategate we found that certain others were aware of it too.

5315.txt

date: Sat Sep 18 08:48:09 2004
from: Phil Jones subject: Re: kilimanjaro
to: “Jenkins, Geoff”

Geoff,
The data that are used for the grid box should be within the grid box. They will be low
elevation sites though, and this may be part of the reason. It might be worth seeing if
there is anything in the U/A data – but I reckon there won’t be much in that region.
I’ve heard Lonnie Thompson talk about the Kilimanjaro core and he got some local temperatures – that we don’t have access to, and there was little warming in them. The same situation applies for Quelccaya in Peru and also some of his Tibet sites. Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down. They are going though.

Lonnie’s email is “Lonnie G. Thompson”
You could try emailing Ellen as well both might be in the field.
Ellen Mosley-Thompson 
I’m off much of the next 6 weeks at meetings.
I hear you’re retiring soon – hope all goes well ! I’m sure you’ll still be in the field somewhere.
Cheers
Phil
At 10:32 16/09/2004, you wrote:

phil
<>
we have been concerned that people often use the melting glacier on kilimanjaro as an
example of impacts of man-made warming. you may have seen some stories countering this on the sceptics websites.

I got philip brohan to look at temps there (see attached) and there isnt any convincing consistent recent warming in the station data. but your gridded CRUtem2V does show a recent warming. presumably that is because (as philip suggests) the gridded stuff has influences from quite a large radius, and hence may reflect warming at stations a long way from kilimanjaro?

would you agree that there is no convincing evidence for kilimanjaro glacier melt being due to recent warming (let alone man-made warming)?
be grateful for your help
cheers
geoff
Dr Geoff Jenkins
Head, Climate Prediction Programme
Hadley Centre
Met Office
FitzRoy Road, EXETER, EX1 3PB, UK
tel: +44 (0) 1392 xxxxxx
mobile: 0787 966 1136
[1]www.hadleycentre.xxxx.xx

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk
NR4 7TJ
UK

WUWT also points out that it's interesting that Dr Lonnie Thompson's opinion, as reported in emails, on the cause for ice loss on Kilimanjaro seems to have been quite different from that given in more public fora, such as a PR right before a big climate meeting in one of Europe's most beautiful cities.

Big Eco getting caught out again?

And in more ways than one. I've been blogging on other things so I've not mentioned the BBC as brought up by Bishop Hill here. And here, and here, here and here. Do go and have a read, though you might not be terribly surprised at what Auntie's been up to. However, that looks like being overshadowed by what's already being called Climategate II. Yep, more stuff that the R&D department of Big Eco would rather not have had out in the open has emerged and is being gone over by sceptical bloggers everywhere. Very early still, but Bishop Hill's initial take is here, Jo Nova here, Watts Up With That here and here but mostly here, and in the MSM James Delingpole here. I'll leave you with Delingpole's summary and a few of his preferred quotes as I've got popcorn to make. Do go read the rest.

Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the "scientists" at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they'd like it to be.
[...]

<1939> Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary [...]
<3066> Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
[...]
<2884> Wigley:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of
dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]

P.S. a thought's occurred, and I doubt I'm the first one it's occurred to. The last time this happened as around this time last year, shortly before the COP15 climate junket/meeting in Copenhagen (will these fuckers lecturing us all about emissions from travel ever teleconference one of these things?) and here we have it all happening again just a few days before COP17 in Durban. Interesting timing. Does Big Eco's R&D section have it's own Deep Throat, unhappy at something going on there and carefully choosing content and times to leak for maximum effect? I can only speculate, but the advice of the original Deep Throat still applies: follow the money. How many of the people sending, receiving or CC'd in on these emails would be out of a job if man made catastrophic warble gloaming turns out to be nonsense? And that's just the R&D parts of Big Eco - the same applies to those involved in marketing, admin and production. Hell, if my career and future income depended on everyone believing the sky was going to burn I'd be saying it too.

Quote of the Day

Yes, another one, and again it comes from the pen/keyboard of the Carbon Sense Coalition's Viv Forbes and via the Real World Libertarian. My bold:

Since July, temperatures in Australia have soared by over six degrees centigrade. If current trends continue, we can expect another three degrees of warming by Christmas.

This rapid warming has caused massive environmental disruption – alpine snow has melted, birds are migrating, there is an epidemic of weeds and we can expect more storms, cyclones, floods, mosquitoes and solar radiation burns.

This is far more serious than the UN's forecast of a piddling 1-2 degrees of warming over the next hundred years or so.

What caused this dangerous new global warming?

The old people called it "summer".

On taxing the sixth element

Or rather one of its oxides. Via the Real World Libertarian and quoted en bloc, a post by Viv Forbes of the Carbon Sense Coalition.

Back to the Dark Ages

The passage of the carbon tax bills today is no reason for celebration. It is a step back towards the dark ages.

Just a few generations ago, humans lived in a “green” world. There was no coal, oil or gas providing light, heat, transport and traction power.

In this green utopia, wood provided heat for cooking fires and forests were felled for charcoal for primitive metallurgy; farmers used wooden ploughs and harvested grain with sickles and flails; the nights were lit using candles and whale oil; rich people used wind and water power to grind cereals; horses and bullocks moved coaches, wagons and troops; there was no refrigeration and salt was the only preservative for meat.

Towns were tiny as the whole family was needed to work the farm. For most people, the daylight hours were filled with heavy labour to produce, preserve and transport food. There was no surplus to support opera, bureaucracy or academia.

Humanity was relieved from this life of unrelenting toil by carbon energy – steam engines and electricity, machines, tractors, cars, ships and planes.

Today the pagan green religion celebrates the first step in their long campaign to destroy industrial society and reduce population.

They should be careful what they wish for.

For example, just a few more bitter winters in Britain will see their wind powered lights going out.

A British observer once said of the Whitlam government: “Any fool can bugger up Britain, but it takes real genius to bugger up Australia”.

The Gillard-Green Government is showing the sort of genius needed to dim the lights in the lucky country.

I would say that this should serve as a warning to those outside Australia to do their damnedest to prevent their governments joining this madness, but as I mentioned at the weekend it seems that no other governments are all that keen anyway.

Great work, Jules. Really fucking outstanding.

Big Eco advertising your forthcoming death... again

Via Watts Up With That.



Okay, this is not as bad as the 1010 mob's gleeful explosive execution of anyone expressing ambivalence toward warble gloaming or that aborted video with hundreds and hundreds of airliners zooming towards a New York with smoke curling up from the World Trade Centre, but it's still pretty nasty. "You, you evil sceptics," goes the message, "You'll get it first." Not quite sure how that works - how can the climate tell who believed and us Untermenschen who weren't convinced? Maybe it's the same kind of magic by which the climate can tell difference between the evil CO₂ emitted by a power station or your breath and the benign and harmless CO₂ that's puffed out from the blowholes of whales and dolphins to feed their dear friends, the trees. Or maybe the climate is relying on the warble gloaming believers to muck and help with a set of matches. I've no idea, but somehow or other we're first in line for death despite the usual exhortations to cut down on our selfish energy use because poor people in developing nations are first in line for death. Consistency? Meh.

And so at this point I want to bring up my intermittently maintained list of warble gloaming dates for your diary, because a few weeks ago I noticed an addition spotted by The Filthy Engineer, who notes that in two-thirds of the spirit of reduce, reuse, recycle this has been reused and recycled since 2007.

Runaway Global Warming promises to literally burn-up agricultural areas into dust worldwide by 2012, causing global famine, anarchy, diseases, and war on a global scale as military powers including the U.S., Russia, and China, fight for control of the Earth's remaining resources.
Over 4.5 billion people could die from Global Warming related causes by 2012, as planet Earth accelarates into a greed-driven horrific catastrophe.

"Promises" does it? Then with less than two months 'til the start of 2012 we should see some signs of it already, shouldn't we? And "literally burn-up"? Seriously? Actual fields actually on actual fire? 4.5 billion of the world's 7 billion people dead (which still wouldn't be enough to satisfy the most extreme eco-psychos, such as this fucktroon)? As much as I'm prepared to believe that many warble gloaming catastrophists do actually believe what they claim, when someone comes out with ridiculously over the top scare claims like this I suspect that even they don't believe it. It's the old tactic suggested years ago by the late Dr Stephen Schneider of offering up scary scenarios to get attention even if they're vanishingly unlikely. I've no idea whether to blame overzealous PR of the kind Dr Schneider once suggested or journalistic license, but I suspect there's probably only one thing that's literally going to burn up.

Being generous and giving them 'til the end of next year the updated list now looks like this:

• Probably should have happened by now, or failing that should be possible to observe a very large change in that direction - New York's West Side Highway impassable due to being underwater - Dr. James Hansen (1988/89 interview)
• Probably should have happened around 2005 ± 1 yr - British children will not know snow in their own country - Dr David Viner (Independent, Mar 2000)
• "Imminently" - loss of world's coral reefs - David Attenborough in July 2009 ('world’s tropical reefs face ‘imminent destruction’ unless CO2 levels are slashed')
• By 2010 - 50 million refugees climate refugees (UN Environment Program - currently no link for UNEP site but Watts Up With That has details and evidence of claim)
• Between 2010 and 2015, probably earlier - ice free Arctic - Louis Fortier, director of ArcticNet, speaking to Canada.com in 2007
• 2012 - fields on fire and approximately two thirds of the entire planet's population dead
• Late 2013 - ice free Arctic - Al Gore (North Pole will be ice free in five years')
• 2014 - the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair - WWF.
• Dec 2016 - the whole world and everything all fucked up beyond repair - the Prince of Wails and the 100 months mob
• Dec 2016 - loss of 'the levers of control' for the climate - the Prince of Fails... again.
• Late 2019 - ice free Arctic - Pen Hadow (ten years to Arctic ice loss)
• Late 2019 - the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair - UK Met Office.
• Late 2029 - loss of Great Barrier Reef - marine scientist Charlie Veron ('global warming will destroy the World Heritage site within just 20 years')
• By approximately 2040 - ice free arctic yet again - NSIDC director Mark Serreze

Warble gloaming - I refuse to use the term climate change when climate has always been changing since the planet's ancient beginnings - warble gloaming might not need you to believe in it, but warble gloaming catastrophists very much do need you and everyone else to believe. Because they're all out of a job otherwise.

By a man's deeds shall you know him

And probably the same can be said of governments. If, naming no names, a hypothetical government was elected having promised to deal with a spiralling deficit and an eye-watering level of debt left it by its predecessors, and then it carried on largely as before you'd know that it wasn't really all that serious about what it had said. It would have been talking the talk rather than walking the walk. Similarly if a government tries something and is universally praised by other governments, but those governments don;t show any interest in following suit, you have to wonder how much of that praise is meant honestly and how much is nothing but empty diplomacy. Our dear Madam Prime Minister, Gingery Dullard, ought to be asking herself that question about now (possible paywall).

JULIA Gillard's introduction of a carbon tax has been praised at the latest economic summit for showing the way on climate change but Australia is being isolated within the G20 on carbon pricing as members retreat due to changing priorities and economic pressure.
[...]
While Australia is pursuing the most comprehensive carbon tax in the world to combat the effects of climate change, other G20 members are retreating from emissions trading schemes to cut greenhouse gas emissions, such as Canada, while others are giving greater emphasis to dealing with the immediate effects of climate change.
[...]
Senior fellow at the Canadian-based G20 watchdog, the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Daniel Schwanen, told The Weekend Australian the praise for carbon tax "would not play well at home".

I should bloody coco. Even making the generous assumption that the warble gloaming catastrophists are actually right the whole idea that other nations will follow Australia's lead, which was the only possible answer its supporters could offer when asked how it could possibly change anything given Australia's meagre emissions, was part of the efforts to sell the carbon tax to us. If the response from the rest of the industrialised world is words to the effect of "Good on Australia for doing this, but don't think for a moment that we're going to do it too" then you have to wonder if the case for it was really that solid. If it was wouldn't they be falling over themselves to join in?

Which should really have Jules wondering now whether it's such a good idea after all. I don't really think she's daft and I'm sure she's been wondering that for a while now, but being left by other countries to go it alone speaks far louder than the praise she's had for doing it.

Occupational therapy

From Watts Up With That.

Chuckle. Do go read the rest.

Tilting at windmills

Click for linky

... soon after being installed [at the Gorran School in Cornwall] the wind turbine became faulty and after a few months seized up - showering the school's playing field with debris.
Since then the school has been locked in a battle with suppliers Proven Energy which has now gone into administration leaving the school with little hope of any money being returned - and a pile of scrap in their field.

Having seen this earlier I was going to blog it later on today, but I see Watts Up With That have already done a thorough job on it, including the fact that the debris with which it showered the playground included two fucking turbine blades lessons have not been learned as well as the local community's apparent inability to treat this as a learning experience - they're now spunking away half a million pounds on two 'community turbines'. Nip over to WUWT and have a read of the whole thing when you can. I can't add anything other than the cynical observation that someone, or several someones, in Big Eco is probably getting wealthy off places like Gorran. Which would be fine if what was provided in return actually worked.

The most expensive electricity in the world - UPDATED

It's tricky to determine what's the most expensive form of electricity generation and you can probably come up with different figures depending on whether you include capital and decommissioning costs, not to mention the thorny and not always transparent issue of subsidies. However, if you want to use a very simple measure of income generated divided by electricity generated then the most expensive electricity in the world is wind, which can come in at a cost which is literally infinite, which is what my calculator says £1.2 million for producing absolutely nothing works out to be.

A wind farm has been paid £1.2 million not to produce electricity for eight-and-a-half hours.
The amount is ten times greater than the wind farm's owners would have received had they actually generated any electricity.
The disclosure exposes the bizarre workings of Britain's electricity supply, prompting calls last night for an official investigation into the payments system.

Well, if governments are prepared to pay farms not to grow things then it's not that much of a leap to pay wind farms not to produce electricity, but this seems to be all to do with grid management.

Australia's Carbon Taxed National Anthem

SING!



Australians all let us revolt,

For we are carbon free;

We’ve iron ore and coal and more,

But live in poverty.
Our land abounds in Nature’s gifts,

To use we do not dare;

In history’s page, we’re now stone age

What chance Australia fair?

In worried strains then let us ask,

What chance Australia fair?


H/T to the Real World Libertarian.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

It's a funny one, the Law of Unintended Consequences. It's one of those laws that is beyond any possibility of repeal, but it's one that most governments, if they ever stop their furious production of arse gravy for long enough to think about things for a few minutes, must wish they could do away with quietly because they keep falling foul of it. These days the poor, stupid things seem to be particularly prone to unintended consequences when trying to give themselves a veneer of greenishness, and so it is with the latest example from this part of the world.

A couple of years ago, in a move reminiscent of the current drive for Australia to lead the world by introducing mandatory plain tobacco packaging to make it easier for counterfeiters and chop-chop dealers to compete with the legal tobacco industry, South Australia led the nation in banning plastic carrier bags. This would, it was claimed, reduce waste sent to landfill - though quite why that's a problem in a state of more than a million square kilometres and only 1.6 million people, three-quarters of whom live in Adelaide, I'm not quite sure. Nobody likes to see plastic bags littering the place, but SA is not short of room to bury shit is what I'm saying here. Now I know that you can probably emit some carbon dioxide down any street of any city in the developed world and be sure of warming at least half a dozen green zealots by a fraction of a degree, all of whom will tell you that plastic bags in landfill won't decompose for about eleventy squillion years, and hyperbole aside they're probably right. So far better to ban the nasty things and force everyone to buy those reusable ones, right?

Wrong, as any member of any household that used to reuse their carrier bags could have told them. We do use the reusable bags but we tend to make sure we get a few carriers on shopping trips for use in small pedal bins and for clearing up after pets, and since many SA pet stores will surely sell bags for that it's not like the bags are completely banned in SA. It's just that the supermarkets aren't allowed to give them out, or even sell them, for you to take your groceries home in. And since South Australians also used them for more than that the ban has had an effect that you probably needed to be in government to have been unable to foresee.

BIN liner sales in SA have doubled since free plastic shopping bags were banned more than two years ago.
And most bin bags are made of thicker plastic than traditional bags, which means they take longer to break down in the environment.

But... but... surely there must be some mistake because, as the article mentions, none other than the head of Zero Waste SA (a state government quango by the looks of it) said at the time that there wouldn't be a significant increase in bin bag sales. Exactly what he thought South Australians would be lining their bins with I don't know, but clearly it wasn't expected to be bin liners. So this must be coming as a bit of a shock.

Woolworths (one of Australia's big two supermarket chains - AE) says SA sales of plastic kitchen-tidy bags of a similar size, capacity and shape to single-use plastic shopping bags, are now double the national average.
At Coles (the other big supermarket chain - AE), sales of kitchen tidy bags increased 40 per cent in the year following the ban in May 2009.
Bin bag manufacturer Glad reported a 52.5 per cent jump in kitchen-tidy bag sales in the first year of the ban, compared with a 5.5 per cent increase nationally.
In SA, 48 million Glad bin bags were bought in 2008, rising to more than 73 million in 2009 and 84 million last year.
The figures have raised concerns about whether the plastic bag ban has been effective in reducing waste sent to landfill.

And it gets worse, since both paper and reusable bags are heavier, meaning emissions if you believe in warble gloaming, and costs if you don't, are higher per bag you transport since you'll get far fewer of them on the lorry. This is going to be at least partly cancelled out if a lot if people do reuse them but it turns out that there's more bad news on that score - they have to be reused a hell of a lot before they make up for the extra energy used in their production.*

HDPE bags are, for each use, almost 200 times less damaging to the climate than cotton hold-alls favoured by environmentalists, and have less than one third of the Co2 emissions than paper bags which are given out by retailers such as Primark.
The findings suggest that, in order to balance out the tiny impact of each lightweight plastic bag, consumers would have to use the same cotton bag every working day for a year, or use paper bags at least thrice rather than sticking them in the bin or recycling.
Most paper bags are used only once and one study assumed cotton bags were used only 51 times before being discarded, making them – according to this new report – worse than single-use plastic bags.

And ironically this means that I, as a warble gloaming sceptic, can use the allegedly eco-friendly bags with a clear conscience, while the eco-sustainability types should be marching on the South Australian parliament house to demand the evil polythene ones back. Clearly then, the policy makes no sense at all, and it's really a bit of luck that the South Australians have found out about these unintended, though not unforeseeable, consequences in time for other states and territories to avoid the same trap.

The Northern Territory and ACT are now introducing their own bans.

/facepalm


* Tip of the Akubra to Cracked.com.

We're all going to die, yet again

I was going to write something about the latest example of greenie toad licking / pushing the warble gloaming bandwagon along to keep those grant cheques coming, this NASA paper paper co-authored by a NASA affiliate about how Earth might be destroyed by aliens as a punishment for our warble gloaming sins (blogged at WUWT and the Real World Libertarian) and enthusiastically printed by The Grauniad. But aside from having little to say that's not already been said, in particular the point brought up by WUWT that this was a "fun paper by a few friends" that nonetheless ended up passing peer review to be published in the journal of the fucking IAA, I think The Daily Mash have done it far better than I could have.

MORK from Ork will blast your face off unless you reduce your average fuel consumption to 62 miles per gallon, scientists have warned.

Experts said intelligent extra-terrestrials will detect increases in the Earth's CO2 emissions and wipe us out because studies into 14 different species of intelligent extra-terrestrials have all confirmed that is exactly how they behave.

[...]

Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: "We now need to have a debate about whether angry alien genocide research is more terrifying than one of those book covers that has huge waves crashing against the middle of Big Ben.

"And it has surely got to be more effective than some fucking documentary called 'The Last Gnu' or 'Cry Me a Desert'."

He added: "My initial research confirms it is now imperative that we pinpoint a likely planet from whence our murderers will emanate and then publish painstakingly accurate drawings of what their flying saucers will definitely look like.

"We should also give them a name. I suggest 'the Monbions'."

The Monbions! Priceless. I imagine their flying saucers will somehow look like an archaeologist in nuclear explosion propelled fridge jumping over a shark. While you're trying to work out how anything could possibly look like that why not go and read the rest?

Welcome to The Asylum

In So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, the late Douglas Adams introduced us to a minor character by the name of John Watson or, as he preferred to be called, Wonko the Sane. Those who've read it will probably recall Wonko's unusual house and the reason for it being that way, but for those who don't know the story this is how the book put it.

His house was certainly peculiar, and since this was the first thing that Fenchurch and Arthur had encountered it would help to know what it was like. It was like this:

It was inside out.

Actually inside out, to the extent that they had had to park on the carpet.

All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which was decorated in a tasteful interior-deisgned pink, were bookshelves, also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semicircular tops which stand in such a way as to suggest that someone just dropped the wall straight through them, and pictures which were clearly designed to soothe.

Where it got really odd was the roof.

It folded back on itself like something that M. C. Escher, had he been given to hard nights on the town, which it is no part of this narrative's purpose to suggest was the case, though it is sometimes hard, looking at his pictures, particularly the one with all the awkward steps, not to wonder, might have dreamed up after having been on one, for the little chandeliers which should have been hanging inside were on the outside pointing up.

[...]

The sign above the front door read "Come Outside," and so, nervously, they had.

Inside, of course, was where the Outside was. Rough brickwork, nicely done pointing, gutters in good repair, a garden path, a couple of small trees, some rooms leading off.

And the inner walls stretched down, folded curiously, and opened at the end as if, by and optical illusion which would have had M. C. Escher frowning and wondering how it was done, to enclose the Pacific Ocean itself.

[...]

"Your wife," said Arthur, looking around, "mentioned some toothpicks." He said it with a hunted look, as if he was worried that she might suddenly leap out from behind a door and mention them again.

Wonko the Sane laughed. It was a light easy laugh, and sounded like one he had used a lot before and was happy with.

"Ah yes," he said, "that's to do with the day I finally realized that the world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put it in, poor thing, and hoped it would get better."

This was the point at which Arthur began to feel a little nervous again.

"Here," said Wonko the Sane, "we are outside the Asylum." He pointed again at the rough brickwork, the pointing, and the gutters. "Go through that door" -- he pointed at the first door through which they had originally entered -- "and you go into the Asylum. I've tried to decorate it nicely to keep the inmates happy, but there's very little one can do. I never go in there myself. If I ever am tempted, which these days I rarely am, I simply look at the sign written over the door and I shy away."

"That one?" said Fenchurch, pointing, rather puzzled, at a blue plaque with some instructions written on it.

"Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do."

The sign read:

"Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion."

"It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane."

And it's Wonko the Sane and his house that immediately spring to mind when I read, via Watts Up With That, that fat people are the latest cause of warble gloaming ...

Researchers at the Robert Gordon University have completed a study that addresses the link between climate change and obesity.
The academics suggest that global weight loss would result in a drop in the production of the major greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO(2)).
The study was carried out by a trio of researchers within the university's Centre for Obesity Research and Epidemiology (CORE). It suggests that if every obese and overweight person in the world lost 10 kilograms (or 1.58 stone), the resulting drop in greenhouse emissions would be the equivalent of 0.2% of the CO(2) emitted globally in 2007 (49.560Mt).

... and via this PR that watching TV is as bad for you as smoking.

Every hour spent watching television shortens your life by a little over 20 minutes – on a par with smoking a cigarette, Australian researchers claim.
And the worst couch potatoes – watching more than six hours of TV a day – can expect to die almost five years earlier than people who watch no TV at all, researchers calculated.
Writing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (online), the Brisbane-led group say Australia’s love of TV poses a significant threat to the health of the population.

Click for linky, and also to increase your risk of developing a need for lithium carbonate

We've known for some time that Niemöller's warning is as relevant today as it ever was, that as victories are won over the smokers and drinkers the rest of us would come in for our turn, and that the salad dodgers would be among the first. And now I think the next couple of phases are becoming clear. Your weight isn't just your problem anymore and it's not just for your own good that the swivel-eyed are exhorting you to lose weight. No, it's also essential to help stop warble gloaming. Yes, folks, we have identified passive obesity, and since we're also going to be told that TV is as bad as smoking - no qualification, no consideration to the obvious differences between, say, an hour's telly time after a hard afternoon's slob and an hour's telly time after a daily 10km cycle followed by a warm down and a shower - we can expect passive TV watching to be only around the corner. Christ's sake! I'd intended to sit down with Mrs Exile this evening and watch Sons of Anarchy together over some delicious take-away food from Urban Burger* just up the road in Balaclava.** Actually I still do intend to, but I'm wondering how much longer we'll be allowed to get away with it if we're going to be told it's bad for us and accused of raping polar bears to death with our wanton secondary televisioning.

Wonko the Sane was very nearly correct: the world, or at least quite a lot of people who have a disproportionate say in its running, is completely mad. Where Wonko was wrong is the nature of the insanity. It's not the harmless*** and almost genteel lunacy of Adams' H²G² universe, but a vicious psychosis that increasingly seems determined to stamp out anything it does not approve of - freedom, mostly - and isn't at all reticent in coming up with all kinds of reasons why having your liberty reduced and removed is A Good Thing. Why you must be nudged into it if you don't want to and punished if you refuse is rarely far behind.

And so I find Wonko the Sane's take on house design increasingly appealing. So appealing, in fact, that I might have applied for planning permission if it wasn't for the problem that there isn't the faintest hope of the inmates of The Asylum granting it. But I've also spotted a critical flaw in the design. Remember that door that Wonko pointed out to Arthur and Fenchurch, the door they had just opened and walked through minutes before to come in from The Asylum?

I reckon it needs a big fucking lock on it.


* Which incidentally serves delicious burgers and chips, and preempts the possibility of food packaging legislation in the future by putting them in plain brown paper bags. I'm absolutely not making that up, and even if it is just coincidental I wouldn't bet against it one day coming in handy for them.

** Yes, I'm still in Melbourne, not the Crimea, and no, I have no idea why a landlocked local suburb is called Balaclava. After the battle, I think, but why exactly and why that battle I can't imagine.

*** Okay, mostly harmless.

When you want to know what to do just ask a celebrity

Number Six's mum?

Why ask people who do it for a living when slebs always seem to have all the answers.

[Olivia Newton-John] - in a comment piece in The Sunday Age - has called for a moratorium on fracking until all health, social and environmental risks have been examined.

I have to say she's looking very good for her age. Suspiciously good in fact. Hmmmmm... Apparently not ageing, blonde but with slightly dead eyes, and possessed of a calculated misanthropy while being keen on hybrids. And she's against fracking too, which with everything else we're not allowed to do anymore is almost the only pleasure left. There are very likely lots more just like her too.

Scary thought. If she gets upset when someone mentions toasters then we may be in a lot of trouble.

Olivia? Do us a favour.

By a man's works shall you know him

Years ago I had a good chuckle when I read that Al Gore, the Al Gore who was talking about a 6 metre sea level rise because of warble gloaming, bought a condo only a few hundred metres from San Francisco bay. There, I said to myself, goes a man who has either forgotten the doom he's predicted, has a lot of confidence (arguably misplaced) in it being averted, or didn't really believe what he was saying in the first place. Which of those depends on whether you think he's mad, stupid or over-egging the warble gloaming pudding in an effort to getting everyone on board and taking the action I'm sure he sincerely believes is necessary. Catastrophists would no doubt disagree, perhaps pointing out that the Goreacle's condo is on ground more than 6m above sea level, but it doesn't change the fact that that kind of rise will cause a lot of disruption nearby and buying property there wouldn't be a smart move if you really think it's going to happen.

However, if Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun is correct then Gore has been outdone in a big way by Australia's Professor Tim Flannery.

Flannery in 2006 warned we could be on the brink of causing the seas to rise by 25m if we did not slash our emissions.
"Picture an eight-storey building by a beach, then imagine waves lapping its roof," he said dramatically.
"So anyone with a coastal view from their bedroom window or kitchen window is likely to lose their house as a result of that change."
So how terrifying it must be for Flannery as he gets his breakfast each morning to look up and see the estuarine waters of the Hawkesbury, just 5m from his waterfront home on Coba Point.
Why hasn't he sold up and moved to higher ground? Is it because even he doesn't believe his absurd scare?

Good question, though again Coba Point isn't all in the danger zone and rises to over 100m according to Google Earth. Unfortunately all of the visible houses, and presumably Tim Flannery's is one of them, are practically on the beach, and beaches tend to be rather close to sea level.

Perhaps Tim's planning on pulling it uphill when the waters get too close.