Dealing with deniers

Graham Readfearn (see link to the right) has done a brilliant piece on how journalists like Fairfax's Ben Cubby deal with the utterly inane drivel being pushed out by deniers like the Galileo Movement's Malcolm Roberts. It's a lead everyone should follow.

The whole thing can be summed up in one beautifully succinct sentence: “how does one critically analyse a pile of horse shit?”

For those who haven't heard of the gloriously mis-named Galileo Movement you haven't missed much. Here's a small sample:

Roberts wraps this whole global conspiracy theory neatly into a heading for one section: “The objective is global control through global socialist governance by international bankers hiding control behind environmentalism”.

“The core problem is massive over-government through international bankers seeking to control,” writes Roberts. “We now know WHY they push climate fraud. They’re pushing global control.”

At one point, Roberts claims that “it’s likely that during John Howard’s prime ministership socialist bureaucrats pulled the strings” which leaves you wondering why these evil socialist puppet masters failed to get Howard to sign the United Nations’ Kyoto protocol?

Oh how Galileo would spin in his grave if he knew these clowns had taken his name to promote their "scientific" denier agenda.

Even Andrew Bolt thinks GM are too crazy for him.

Funnily enough though, Gina Reinhardt and Alan Jones are still supporters of GM. No surprises there.

More blizzards, less snow overall - Climate changes northern winter?

And the problem is...?

The Keystone XL Tar Sands Climate Threat

Obama is undoubtedly a great orator - certainly one of the greatest in the modern era.

But when he recently said that action had to be taken to deal with global warming, did he actually mean it? The first great test he has to pass is to stop this monstrosity. No ifs, no buts; it has to be stopped.

Minding Nemo: Dr. Jeff Masters on Snowstorms and Climate Change

Links Between Powerful Storms and Ocean Temperatures

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It takes a special kind of stupid to be in the Queensland government

A NEWMAN Government MP says he would rather spend the rest of his life taking a banned performance-enhancing substance than drink fluoridated water.

Nudgee MP Jason Woodforth made the statement after The Courier-Mail raised the fact his bodybuilding supplement store sold a protein powder with an ingredient that is banned by sports anti-doping authorities and linked to heart, lung and liver damage.

Good news! Renewable energy is now cheaper in Australia than coal or gas!

A new analysis from research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance has concluded that electricity from unsubsidised renewable energy is already cheaper than electricity from new-build coal and gas-fired power stations in Australia.

The modeling from the BNEF team in Sydney found that new wind farms could supply electricity at a cost of $80/MWh –compared with $143/MWh for new build coal, and $116/MWh for new build gas-fired generation.

A plethora of reasons why Australian governments can not be trusted to deal with the fossil fuel lobby

The past week has seen a virtual avalanche of stories about how the fossil fuel lobby has bought (in some cases quite literally) both Labor and LNP governments across Australia. Believing that either of the two major parties can deal with global warming alone is like believing fairies at the bottom of the garden will deal with global warming.

First up, some very dishonourable mentions for the federal Minister for (Destroying) the Environment, Tony Bourke. Not letting a little thing like outright lies concerning environmental offsets get in his way, the Minister for Destruction has approved the Maules Creek and Boggabri coal mines:

"These decisions represent a disgraceful failure of government policy on mining and gas development,” Nature Conservation Council of NSW Chief Executive Officer Pepe Clarke said.

"These mines will carve the heart out of Leard Forest, destroying almost 3,500 hectares of woodland in the Brigalow Belt South Bioregion, a nationally-listed biodiversity hotspot.

"This decision sounds the death knell for this extraordinary area, and will leave a permanent scar on the landscape.

“These decisions seriously damage Minister Burke's credibility as an effective environmental regulator.

"These are simply the latest in a series of destructive mining and gas proposals waved through by the Minister in recent months.

"It is especially troubling that the Maules Creek mine appears to have been approved without detailed offset requirements, despite serious concerns about the adequacy and accuracy of the company's offsets proposal."

“It is unconscionable that a Federal Environment Minister has permitted these important public lands to be destroyed for short-term profit.

“Our state forests should be managed in perpetuity for the benefit of the people of New South Wales.”

This comes in the wake of the Minister ignoring the Australian Heritage Council's recommendation to protect Tasmania's Tarkine wilderness and protecting it from strip mining. Even the former senior Labor figure Carmen Lawrence said 'she deeply regretted Environment Minister Tony Burke's decision to rule out natural heritage listing for Tasmania's Tarkine wilderness': 

Dr Lawrence, a former ALP federal president and chairman of the Australian Heritage Council, said Mr Burke showed a fundamental misunderstanding about an already weak heritage act. 

'To read [it] as prohibiting development is simply wrong,'' Dr Lawrence said on Friday. ''I'm very disappointed, and I'm sure I speak for other members of the council.'' 

Mr Burke overruled the AHC's recommendation to add to the National Heritage List about 447,000 hectares of rainforest, moorland and remote coastal hinterland in the island's north-west on natural heritage grounds...

Instead, only the Tarkine's two-kilometre coastline will be protected in recognition of an ancient Aboriginal presence in rock carvings and middens.

Remember, this is the same Minister who has no problem with the planned doubling of coal exports from Australia, including establishing a whole series of new or expanded coal ports along the length of the great Barrier Reef. Dredging of Gladstone harbour has literally destroyed the entire commercial fishing industry run out of Gladstone because of mysterious red lesions on caught seafood.

Thankfully, the Queensland Department of Environment (under both the previous Labor government and current conservative LNP government) confirms that stirring up heavy metals etc by dredging is not the cause of this unprecedented disaster. Phew, that's a relief!

Remember, these are the same Labor and LNP governments who both approve of doubling coal exports and open slather coal seam gas extraction. 

Speaking of CSG tracking, the previous Labor government pressured its own public servants to ram through approvals of major Queensland CSG projects:

Public servants at the two departments tasked with giving the official go-ahead to Queensland's new coal seam gas industry were blindsided by Bligh government demands that two of the gigantic projects be approved within weeks of each other.

Documents obtained through a Courier-Mail investigation reveal that as the $18 billion Santos GLNG project was nearing its approval in May 2010, public servants were hit with the demands from the government to also tackle the $16 billion QGC project - and then the Origin-led APLNG proposal, approved in November of the same year. 

And just days before the QGC approval was granted, public servants were warning the directors of the government's assessment team that they still had not been given any detailed information on pipelines and the location of wells.

But wait, it gets worse!

The Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in New South Wales is in the process of uncovering almost endless allegations of how the huge sums of money involved in coal mining corrupted the former Labor NSW government via the Obeid saga:

Former NSW minister Ian Macdonald has told a corruption inquiry that it was simply "by chance" that a mining exploration licence was granted over land owned by the family of Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid.

The Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) is probing whether Mr Macdonald, 63, rorted a coal mining tender process in the NSW Upper Hunter's Bylong Valley in 2008, and how Mr Obeid and his family may have profited from it.

The ICAC alleges Mr Macdonald gave the Obeids inside knowledge that allowed the family to profit, potentially by $100 million.

Let's face it, unless people like you drive the change to renewables, governments across Australia will happily drive us to environmental destruction regardless of which 'side' of politics is in power.

As Greens Senator Christine Milne neatly summed it up today "A vote for Labor or the Coalition is a vote for Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer, the mining lobby and accelerated global warming."

And the new world record goes to...

Arctic ice cracking up when winter still hasn't finished - update 1

Clearer shot of the ice cracking

What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay there

Like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in South America causing a cyclone here, the heat build up in the Arctic causes chaos far away. Peter Sinclair's Climate Denial Crock of the Week video on superstorm Sandy looks at how Sandy was pushed westwards into the coast by a high probably resulting from last year's record ice melt.

At the same time, an Arctic cyclone formed, weakened and reformed again because of the higher than average water temperatures in the Arctic, pushing a waves of freezing air down into Europe and another into the US.

Arctic ice cracking up when winter still hasn't finished

The photo below is a bit confusing at first but take a close look...the dot in the upper centre is the north pole, Greenland is outlined to the lower right, northern Canadian islands to the bottom stretching out to Alaska on the far left.

See that gigantic crack extending out from Alaska? That's a crack that's widening by the hour right now, just off Barron, Alaska.

Gigantic ice crack off Barrow, Alaska

Since the middle of December, the ice has been breaking up much as it did last year in March. Last year's breaking up in March was a couple of months early. Last year also saw a record low sea ice volume for the Arctic by a long way.

Freezing temperature may cause this to re-freeze, but if these cracks and leads persist until the end of the winter (if the ice remains thin and weak), then the ice is going to vanish really fast, once the sun gets to work in summer.

Watch an animated gif of this here.

As always, superb work from Arctic Sea Ice blog (see links upper right).

US carbon emissions fall to lowest levels since 1994 - we hope

The Guardian is reporting that Carbon dioxide emissions fell by 13% in the past five years, because of new energy-saving technologies and a doubling in the take-up of renewable energy, the report compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) for the Business Council for Sustainable Energy (BCSE) said.

As described by Bloomberg, the US is in the throes of a major shift in energy production. Coal fell to just 18.1% of America's energy mix last year, down from 22.5% in 2007. Oil use also declined.

The explosion of natural gas production, thanks to fracking, filled much of the gap. America got 31% of its electricity from gas-fired power plants last year.

But the report found steadily expanding installation of wind, solar, hydro and geothermal energy. Renewables represented the largest single source of new growth last year, reaching $44bn in 2012, the report said, the report said.

At least, that's what we hope.

Unfortunately you can justify any argument using the right statistics. So how useful are the stats used here?

Certainly increased investment in renewables and efficiency are having a beneficial impact. But it's a stretch to say this alone is responsible for the 13% drop in CO2 emissions.

A quick look at Net Generation by Energy Source figures shows that electricity generation in the US fell from 4,156.745 GW in 2007 to 4,100.656GW in 2011; a 1.3% decrease caused by economic recession. (Something similar is happening in Australia, too.)

The same recession has caused total distillate usage in the US to plummet to 2009 levels:

A reduction in emissions is a good thing, but we simply can't rely on the destructive impacts of economic decline to produce the majority of the cuts required.

Finally, much of the "decrease" is attributed to CO2 reductions from 'fracking' gas rather than using coal. However, as recent research from Queensland gas fields shows, the fugitive emissions from these fields may be so drastically underestimated that the conversion to gas may well be as bad as (or even worse) than coal.

Ultimately all this underlines the simple point: only renewable energy sources cut emissions; and gas is just another fossil fuel.

Fitzroy catchment miners release 'diluted' cocktail of toxic wastewater into flooded river

This story from Queensland shows again why no government in Australia can be trusted to deal with the coal industry.

The recent floods have been used as a convenient way to dump 250GL of water contaminated with high levels of salt and toxic heavy metals.

The only way to change this is for the public to move towards 100% renewable energy. That's what RCP is here for.

Greenland

Two starkly contrasting views of what Greenland might do in a warming world.

First, a new paper in Nature, Eemian interglacial reconstructed from a Greenland folded ice core(NEEM Community Members, (2013)) carries the big news is that this group has managed to obtain and use the information in ice from the Eemian — the peak of the last interglacial period, about 125,000 years ago — in Greenland. Getting usable Eemian ice from Greenland has been a Holy Grail of ice core research for the better part of two decades.

The good news: the implications from this data for the Greenland ice sheet seem to indicate that it is less sensitive to climate warming than some of the higher-end estimates suggest. The NEEM ice core record suggests both that temperatures may have been warmer than once thought, and and that the ice sheet mass loss was unlikely to have been >2 m of sea level. In essence, the new data show that Greenland, while evidently contributing significantly to Eemian sea level, cannot have contributed more than half the total — despite the strong forcing.

The bad news: This once again points to Antarctica as the major source of Eemian sea level rise. There are only about 3 m of sea level rise available from West Antarctica, and it remains unclear whether all of West Antarctica may have collapsed.

Read more here: The Greenland melt

And here: Greenland defied ancient warming

Now the contrary view.

Humans have already set in motion 69 feet of sea-level rise

Jason Box is one of the premier experts on the Greenland ice sheet, having spent, in total, more than year camping on the ice over the course of  the last 2 decades. He states that we’ve already pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide 40 percent beyond Eemian levels. What’s more, levels of atmospheric methane are a dramatic 240 percent higher — both with no signs of stopping. “There is no analogue for that in the ice record,” said Box.

And that’s not all. The present mass-scale human burning of trees and vegetation for clearing land and building fires, plus our pumping of aerosols into the atmosphere from human pollution, weren’t happening during the Eemian. These human activities are darkening Greenland’s icy surface, and weakening its ability to bounce incoming sunlight back away from the planet. Instead, more light is absorbed, leading to more melting, in a classic feedback process that is hard to slow down.

“These giants are awake,” said Box of Greenland’s rumbling glaciers, “and they seem to have a bit of a hangover.”

Dr. Box is the creator of the Dark Snow Project, an ambitious attempt to Crowd-fund an arctic expedition this summer.  Over the last decade, Jason’s measurements indicate that the surface of Greenland has become darker, more absorptive of the sun’s light and heat.  There are a number of processes that could be causing it – some natural, some manmade. DarkSnowProject is designed to sample snow at various points on the ice sheet, and determine if  soot from increasing numbers of large wild fires could be one of the significant reasons for darker snow.

The ultimate irony - George Bush slashes worldwide carbon emissions

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8681&page=0

As referred to below in Welcome, my article from four years ago. A few highlights:

If you’re concerned about global warming, you’ve probably already changed to energy-efficient light bulbs, you take your own reusable bags to the shops, compost your scraps and turn your TV off standby. That will solve the problem. After all, that’s what the government and environment groups tell us to do, right? Except of course this type of demand-reduction behaviour, while slowing the rate of increase in greenhouse gas emissions, will never solve the problem....

Simple actions capture people's attention and provide an entry-level activity. Present people with the daunting big-ticket solutions and they turn away. Give them something easy and you have them moving in the right direction and, in theory, ready to make the step up to the next level.
That is the theory, but, as plentiful social research confirms, it doesn't work...  

While George wasn’t the slightest bit interested in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, eight years of his presidency have resulted in the credit crisis which looks set to decimate worldwide productivity and perhaps result in the first reduction in atmospheric CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution... 

In his article The decline of the American superpower, Roubini set out the main reasons for the credit crisis, which have the fingerprints of Bush all over them:
But since 2001 the further worsening of the US current account deficit was driven instead by growing fiscal deficits - especially in the 2001-2004 period - caused by unsustainable tax cuts and by the buildup of spending on foreign wars and on domestic security and since 2002 by the collapse of household savings and boom in investment in unproductive stock of housing capital that the housing bubble induced ... By now the US is the biggest net borrower in the world - running current account deficits still in the 700 billion dollars range - and the biggest net debtor in the world with its foreign liabilities now over 2.5 trillion dollars.

See how it all falls together by following the link above.

Welcome!

When it comes to the environment, everything matters!

The environment obviously cares nothing for national borders. Whether emmissions come from this country or that, it makes no difference in the end. Same as an improvement here means an an improvement for all. But what about things that we don't readily identify as being 'environmental' issues - do general economic, political, and social events similarly ignore how we categorize them and become environmental issues regardless?

That's what this blog will explore.

Four years ago I wrote a provocative piece titled 'The ultimate irony - George Bush slashes worldwide carbon emissions'. It looked at how the only decrease in world-wide emissions had come because of Bush's extraordinarily incompetent economic policies, rather than via the good intentions of environmentalists. So when it comes to global warming, economics matters.

What happens politically or militarily in the Middle East may be one of the biggest short-term influences on the environment imaginable. A significant disruption to the supply of oil would affect the entire world economy, which in turn affects emission levels. As well as our choice of energy supply in future years. If someone was insane enough to use nuclear weapons in the Mid East, or attack Iran's nuclear facilities, the fallout (both literally and figuratively) would have immense social, economic and environmental impacts.

The same goes for many things we don't readily label 'environmental issues'. There are no set boundaries.

When it comes to the environment, everything matters.

Like the Facebook page Renewable Community Power http://www.facebook.com/renewcommpower this blog will report on the science of global warming and advances in the field of renewable energy supply. But it will also take a wider view and explore other issues which, one way or another, tie in to the environment.

After all, everything matters.