Climate: LNG in B.C. vs Alberta tarsands

[agentaqua]

Report: Solar Energy Subsidies Cost $39 Billion Per Year.”

You almost got this right OBD - or the Koch Tea Party cartoonist did.

Just substitute "Vision for the Future" sign for lemonade on the left - and "Doubt" for the solar panel sign. The money from the Koches - used to generate the doubt is already there.

 

[agentaqua]

http://www.timescolonist.com/news/b...s-full-scale-panic-for-b-c-industry-1.1765167

Increase in shellfish deaths causes 'full-scale panic' for B.C. industry

Glenda Luymes / The Province
February 17, 2015 08:13 AM

B.C.'s shellfish industry is struggling for survival as it deals with rising ocean temperature and acidification. Photograph By Gerry Kahrmann

Despite insatiable demand, many are concerned B.C.’s once-thriving shellfish industry could be sinking.

“I’d say it’s full-scale panic mode (for scallop farmers),” said Rob Saunders, CEO of Qualicum Beach-based Island Scallops.

The company has seen its scallop death rates rise to nearly 95 per cent since 2010, leading to millions of dollars in losses. Ocean acidification — a worldwide problem — is likely to blame.

Saunders said the company’s hatcheries, which produce scallop, oyster, prawn and sea urchin “seeds,” have also had trouble with increased deaths. In order to grow, the B.C. industry must double its seed production.

“Everyone is desperately trying to understand what’s going on and what can be done,” he said.

Other B.C. shellfish growers, like Denman Island oyster farmers Greg Wood and his wife Hollie, have found themselves “going year by year to see if we can make it.”

Wood blames oyster mortality rates on rising ocean temperatures, which cause more parasites and bacteria to grow.

“The problems are extreme,” he said. “We’re being attacked from all angles.”

The possibility of a coal mine a few kilometres from Baynes Sound, where 50 per cent of B.C.’s shellfish are grown, is a major concern.

While each type of shellfish is different in its ability to tolerate changing ocean conditions, they all depend on a clean environment, said Roberta Stevenson, executive director of the B.C. Shellfish Grower’s Association.

“Ocean warming, urban run-off, acidification — it all has an impact,” she said.

Production on B.C.’s coast has dropped 12 per cent since 2003, according to the association.

Red tape has also been a problem for the industry, which is regulated by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, but receives business licensing through the provincial Ministry of Agriculture and land-use licenses through the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations.

“We’d like to see some of the processes streamlined and have one agency that oversees all aquaculture,” said Stevenson.

One thing that is not a problem, however, is demand.

Considered a clean, sustainable industry by many, local shellfish farmers have more customers than they can satisfy.

Hollie Wood Oysters sells its oysters within 160 kilometres, supplying many Vancouver Island chefs, said Wood.

“People know us as a local brand, and we’ve really been able to work with the local food movement.”

Wood described shellfish farming like gardening: “We put the seeds out and then raise them. It’s like an ocean garden.” Shellfish don’t require feed and eat naturally-occurring Phytoplankton. A critical component of a healthy marine environment, they essentially filter the ocean water.

But the industry has met with criticism for its impact on shorelines and beaches.

“We’ve done beach cleanups for about 10 years now, and each time we haul away three to five tonnes of debris, mostly plastics,” said Shelley McKeachie, co-chair of the Association of Denman Island Marine Stewards.

She recounts finding a beach covered in “snow” — tiny white Styrofoam pellets from the shellfish rafts — after a storm.

“The industry is riddled with environmental issues that haven’t been addressed,” said McKeachie, insisting her group’s opposition is not borne out of NIMBY-ism (the “Not in my Backyard” attitude), but rather from a concern for the beaches and water.

Those concerns may become irrelevant if the industry can’t stay afloat.

UBC marine biologist Dr. Curtis Suttle has been studying the “large mortality events” affecting B.C. farmed shellfish.

“We don’t have a great understanding of what is going on,” he said.

Ocean acidity is a likely factor, with intrusions of very acidic water from deep below the surface making it difficult for some species to form adequate shells.

“The problem is probably not just acidity by itself,” said Suttle. “Stressful conditions make the shellfish more susceptible to disease, and different water masses come in with different pathogens.”

Suttle and a fellow scientist from the University of Victoria have applied to the federal government for funding to put together an international team to examine the problem.

“We want to see if there are particular scallops that are more resistant,” he said. “We can’t change ocean circulation, but we hope there’s a way to have a sustainable shellfish industry here.”

For Saunders, it’s all about finding a scallop “survivor.”

“We’re hoping we can identify and breed something that is resistant. Something that could be the foundation for the industry again.”

© Copyright Times Colonist - See more at: http://www.timescolonist.com/news/b...r-b-c-industry-1.1765167#sthash.7EBtW4Uh.dpuf

 

[agentaqua]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150218122947.htm
In a warmer world, ticks that spread disease are arriving earlier, expanding their ranges

Date: February 18, 2015

Source: Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Summary: In the northeastern United States, warmer spring temperatures are leading to shifts in the emergence of the blacklegged ticks that carry Lyme disease and other tick-borne pathogens. At the same time, milder weather is allowing ticks to spread into new geographic regions.

 

[agentaqua]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150219112438.htm

Climate change may dramatically reduce wheat production, study shows

Date: February 19, 2015

Source: Kansas State University

Summary: In the coming decades, at least one-quarter of the world's wheat production will be lost to extreme weather from climate change if no adaptation measures are taken, researchers warn.

 

[OldBlackDog]

Dr. Chris Essex: Why Computers Cannot Reproduce The Climate, Never Mind Predicting Its Future

ipcc-models-predict-futureA GWPF talk by Dr Christopher Essex – Chairman, Permanent Monitoring Panel on Climate, World Federation of Scientists, and Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Western Ontario (Canada) in London, 12 February 2015

Has the scientific problem of climate been solved in terms of basic physics and mathematics? No, but you will be forgiven if you thought otherwise. For decades, the most rigorous treatments of climate have been done through climate models. The clever model pioneers understood many of their inherent limitations, but tried to persevere nonetheless. Today, few academics are even aware of what the pioneers understood, let alone what has been learned since about the full depth of modelling difficulties.

Meanwhile popular expressions of the scientific technicalities are largely superficial, defective, comically nonsensical, and virtually uncorrectable. All of the best physics and all of the best computer models cannot put this Humpty Dumpty together, because we face some of the most fundamental problems of modern science in climate, but hardly know it. If you think you want to have a go at those problems, there are at least a couple million dollars in prizes in it, not to mention a Fields Medal or two.

But even if you don’t have some spare afternoons to solve problems that have stymied the best minds in history, this talk will cure computer cachet even for laymen.
Can be found here.http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/...e-things-before-breakfast-and-climate-models/

More from comments.
The uselessness of the GCM’s for forecasting purposes is discussed in Section 1 at

http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html

Here is the conclusion:
“In summary the temperature projections of the IPCC – Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them have no solid foundation in empirical science being derived from inherently useless and specifically structurally flawed models. They provide no basis for the discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money. As a foundation for Governmental climate and energy policy their forecasts are already seen to be grossly in error and are therefore worse than useless. A new forecasting paradigm needs to be adopted.
The modeling community is itself beginning to acknowledge its failures and even Science Magazine
which has generally been a propagandist for the CAGW meme is now allowing reality to creep in. An article in its 6/13/2014 issue says:
“Much of the problem boils down to grid resolution. “The truth is that the level of detail in the models isn’t really determined by scientific constraints,” says Tim Palmer, a physicist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom who advocates stochastic approaches to climate modeling. “It is determined entirely by the size of the computers.” Roughly speaking, an order-of-magnitude increase in computer power is needed to halve the grid size. Typical horizontal grid size has fallen from 500 km in the 1970s to 100 km today and could fall to 10 km in 10 years’ time. But even that won’t be much help in modeling vitally important small-scale phenomena such as cloud formation, Palmer points out. And before they achieve that kind of detail, computers may run up against a physical barrier: power consumption. “Machines that run exaflops [1018 floating point operations per second] are on the horizon,” Palmer says. “The problem is, you’ll need 100 MW to run one.” That’s enough electricity to power a town of 100,000 people.
Faced with such obstacles, Palmer and others advocate a fresh start.”
Climate at a time scale of human interest, is controlled by natural solar cycles especially the 1000 year periodicity which is plainly obvious in the data -see Figs 5-9 in Section 2 at the link above
The earth is just approaching, just at or just past the natural solar millennial peak- see Fig 9. If we look at the neutron count record – Fig 14 which,together with the 10Be data ,is the best proxy for solar activity, it is obvious that solar activity peaked in 1991. There is a 12 year delay between the driver peak and the global RSS temperature peak which occurred in mid 2003 since when the earth has been in a cooling trend -see http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rs....1/to:2003.6/trend/plot/rss/from:2003.6/trend
.The climate models are built without regard to the natural 60 and even more important 1000 year periodicities and lack even average common sense.
It is exactly like taking the temperature trend from say Feb – July and projecting it ahead linearly for 20 years or so. The models are back tuned for less than 100 years when the relevant time scale is millennial. The whole exercise is a joke and a disaster for the reputation of science in general.

 

[OldBlackDog]

The ninety seven percent problem: which consensus?
By Uli Weber
(Translated/edited by P Gosselin)

We constantly hear and read about the claim that 97 percent of all scientific papers (or sometimes all scientists) confirm man-made global warming. The Consensus Project made such a statement in a scientific paper which precisely wants to prove the point. The paper titled: “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature” by Cook et al. in the Environ. Res. Lett. 8 (2013) 024024 (7pp) points to the 97% consensus for anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as follows:

12,465 scientific papers examined for statements on AGW
4014 papers contain own statement on AGW
Of these 4014 papers with statements on AGW, 97% confirm the AGW theory.
The supposed 97 percent AGW consensus is calculated using only a part that is 4014 of the originally surveyed 12,465 scientific papers, and not on the totality of the examined papers. The calculation approach of course is totally absurd and virtually meaningless. If one could even present such a statement on AGW in such a way to begin with, then the so called “consensus“ using the correct method of calculation would yield a result of only 32% of the surveyed scientific papers. Yet at the same time the approximately one third of the 12,465 surveyed papers are supposed to represent the entire spectrum of proponents of the AGW theory as well as the so-called luke-warmers who believe that a human contribution to climate is possible, but reject the catastrophe scenarios for the future climate.

Thus for the forecast of global future climate catastrophe scenarios, what is really left is only a consensus of considerably under one third of the papers surveyed and not more. And when one looks more critically at the information, one indeed does find there is a stated restriction to the described partial amount of papers in the Consensus Project. Here it is written in fine print behind the huge “97%” (emphasis added),



… of published climate papers with a position on human-caused global warming agree: GLOBAL WARMING IS HAPPENING – AND WE ARE THE CAUSE”,

However, in a thorough consideration of all the scientific climate publications surveyed by Cook et al., the result looks entirely different:

A two thirds majority of the examined scientific climate papers take no socio-political stand on AGW.
Judging from socio-political views, only about 1% of climate realists are said to be opposed to AGW.
The AGW protagonists on the other hand, with about one third of all the surveyed publications, are far less reserved when it comes to their statements on scientific publications.
Result:

The ominous and often cited 97% consensus for the acceptance of the AGW theory in climate science does not exist. Thus the scientifically hostile demand for “an end to the climate discussion” is morally and computationally way offsides. In the Cook et al. study it is clearly shown that the protagonists of the climate catastrophe bring their social-political positions in scientific papers. Finally, in the given study a comparison is made between diametrically opposed socio-political positions using a subjectively selected sampling amount as a yardstick for a supposed consensus in the entire climate sciences.

The one positive result the study yields is that it allows us to determine that in climate science there is still a “silent” two thirds majority who choose to refrain from the socio-political discussion in their scientific publications. In the end, however, in the public depiction of climate science, the socio-political opinion of a one third minority is being sold as scientific 97% majority consensus.

So with the backdrop of the proven “one-third truth“ for man-made climate change, it is indeed very peculiar that the so-called “climate deniers” are getting lumped together with deniers of every type by the climate catastrophe followers again and again. Moreover in an open scientific discussion on the fundamentals of the dreaded climate change, it is completely incomprehensible that a climate of hatred is being applied to an equal extent against both the “climate deniers” and “luke-warmers” (Kalte-Sonne article of 3 February 2015). And that is not only the case in Great Britain and in USA, but elsewhere as well. For example in a 2013 brochure issued by the German Ministry of Environment (to which a link no longer exists), climate change critics were universally declared as being clueless. German daily WELT even carried an article titled: “A government authority declares the climate debate over“.

 

[GLG]

And back in the real world, something that OBD is not aware of......

[h=3]Pettit: My solar year Watt's Happening[/h]http://www.alaskahighwaynews.ca/opinion/columnists/pettit-my-solar-year-1.1751508

A five-kilowatt grid-tied solar array has been operating on my roof in Dawson Creek for just over a year now, and the numbers for the year are in: instead of my electricity costing me money, I actually made a profit last year!
Many interested folk have asked to “see the numbers” so in this column I will write them out and then discuss what we can learn from my experience. If numbers and calculations cause your brain to go numb, then you can stop reading right now. Just remember my overall conclusion: grid-tie solar power works extremely well in northeast BC.
And the rest of the world too! It’s hard to imagine, but last year Japan installed one million solar roofs like mine, and is busily installing another million this year. That’s about the equivalent power of 3 or 4 Site C dams every year, but with almost no physical footprint because the solar is covering existing roofs, and no new transmission infrastructure because the power is used right where it’s generated. And the fuel is free! Cool.

NUMBERS
Now for the numbers copied from my BC Hydro bills. “Inflow” is how much power my building used FROM the grid, and “Outflow” is how much solar power I fed INTO the grid. These numbers are tracked automatically by the Smart Meter and appear on every power bill in kilowatt hours (kwh), a standard measure of electricity flow over time.
DATE (2014)INFLOW OUTFLOW
Jan+Feb. 618 kwh 67 kwh
Mar+Apr. 305 895
May+June 145 1537
July+Aug 128 1366
Sept+Oct. 298 452
Nov+Dec. 660 11
Year Total: 2154 kwh 4328 kwh
The gadget (the inverter) that fed my solar power into the grid tracked the total solar power that passed through it, some into the grid and some used up by the building. At the end of the year it read 5479 kwh.
Now we can figure out how much power the building used: subtract the total Outflow (4328 kwh) from the Inverter output (5479 kwh) and we find the building used 1151 kwh of solar plus the Inflow from the grid (2154 kwh) equals 3305 kwh.
We can also calculate how much “excess” power I fed into the grid: subtract the total Inflow (2154 kwh) from the total Outflow (4328 kwh) and you get 2174 kwh. This is roughly the amount I was paid for under the BC Hydro grid-tie agreement, which pays 10 cents per kwh for power fed into the grid (a bit better than the 7.5 cents per kwh most of us are now paying Hydro for electricity).
Last week I was thrilled to receive a “Generation Settlement” statement from BC Hydro showing a $275 credit to my account. Sweet. (I’m not complaining, but in Ontario that credit would be a lot sweeter: not hundreds but thousands of dollars.)

WHAT THE NUMBERS TELL US
Over the year, my rooftop solar generated almost twice as much electricity (5479 kwh) as I used (3305 kwh). This wiped out my electrical bills for the year plus gave me a cash credit.
This is in part because I run a low-demand very efficient building that used just 3305 kwh over the year. A standard north American home will use anywhere from 5000 kwh (very efficient) to 13,000 kwh per year (very inefficient) with an average home using about 8000 kwh per year. Therefore a somewhat larger array than mine and/or a better solar exposure (I get quite a bit of shading from a nearby building) would be needed to completely eliminate the electrical bills for an “average” home.
Low winter output does not matter. In northeast BC we generate so much power in the spring, summer and fall (up to ten times more than needed each month) that this extra power will more than cover power needed through the winter. That’s why grid-tie, where you stash your extra power in the grid for use later on, works so well here.
Rooftop solar works very well throughout BC, including the Peace Country, and BC Hydro is to be congratulated for streamlining the grid-tie process. Next, we need to be paid a higher rate for the solar power we produce, and even a tiny bit of encouragement from the feds would go a long way. The people are ready. It’s time for the governments to catch up.

Don Pettit, a resident of Dawson Creek, is a founding member of the Peace Energy Cooperative. He can be reached at dpettit@pris.ca​

​

​

- See more at: http://www.alaskahighwaynews.ca/opi...-my-solar-year-1.1751508#sthash.DdVCRRsp.dpuf

 

[GLG]

The ninety seven percent problem: which consensus?
By Uli Weber
(Translated/edited by P Gosselin)

We constantly hear and read about the claim that 97 percent of all scientific papers (or sometimes all scientists) confirm man-made global warming. The Consensus Project made such a statement in a scientific paper which precisely wants to prove the point. The paper titled: “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature” by Cook et al. in the Environ. Res. Lett. 8 (2013) 024024 (7pp) points to the 97% consensus for anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as follows:

12,465 scientific papers examined for statements on AGW
4014 papers contain own statement on AGW
Of these 4014 papers with statements on AGW, 97% confirm the AGW theory.
The supposed 97 percent AGW consensus is calculated using only a part that is 4014 of the originally surveyed 12,465 scientific papers, and not on the totality of the examined papers. The calculation approach of course is totally absurd and virtually meaningless. If one could even present such a statement on AGW in such a way to begin with, then the so called “consensus“ using the correct method of calculation would yield a result of only 32% of the surveyed scientific papers. Yet at the same time the approximately one third of the 12,465 surveyed papers are supposed to represent the entire spectrum of proponents of the AGW theory as well as the so-called luke-warmers who believe that a human contribution to climate is possible, but reject the catastrophe scenarios for the future climate.

Give it up OBD you lost that argument in stunning fashion with the Tol paper.
Your side came up with, if memory serves me, a 94% consensus.
Except for the part that Tol had problems with his math.....
The end result was, if memory serves me, 98%
Only a fool would try that one again....

 

[agentaqua]

http://thetyee.ca/News/2015/02/20/F...ce=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=200215

Fossil Fuel Divestment's True Aim? To Remake Capitalism

Surging millennial campus movement rejects the belief that money and morals are separate.

By Geoff Dembicki, Today, TheTyee.ca

University of Toronto divestment march

The rapid growth of petro-divestment owes much to young people's unease about climate change. University of Toronto divestment march. Photo by Milan Ilnyckyj, Toronto350.org.

When Mike Soron was about seven or eight years old, he visited an education centre known as the "Energeum" in his hometown of Calgary. It had a section at the front where you could put on gloves, play with bitumen from the oilsands, and learn how the tarry substance was going to make Alberta rich. But at the rear, a screening of The Lorax seemed to warn of dire ecological consequences. Soron didn't know what to think. "Looking back," he said, "I was trying to wrestle with the contradiction."

Soron kept wrestling with it. In his twenties he studied political science at the University of Calgary, and in 2009 he moved to Vancouver to earn a master's in urban studies from Simon Fraser University. As friends and family back home pursued lucrative careers in oil and gas, he became executive director of the non-profit Sustainable SFU and made fighting climate change his top priority. Then, in summer 2012, he read a Rolling Stone essay by the climate activist Bill McKibben that affected him deeply.

In it, McKibben described "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math," and urged university students like Soron to lead an international movement to divest their schools' endowments from companies like Shell and Exxon Mobil. To Soron, the essay was "very exciting." Several months later, after stumbling across a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report by Marc Lee that put McKibben's math into a more local context, he decided to help set up a divestment campaign at SFU.

Over 400 campuses now have such campaigns, 27 of them in Canada. Last week, University of British Columbia faculty voted in support of the youth-led movement. Its rapid growth owes much to young people's unease about climate change. Yet Soron is among those who think it also represents a generational shift in values. "There's this false idea that where you put your money doesn't have anything to do with your morals," he said. "That's something young people have a problem with."

Generation gap

The absurdity of separating money and morals became clear to Soron in June 2013, when floodwaters surged into Canada's oil and gas heartland. Via text message, Facebook and Twitter, Soron watched helplessly as friends and family in Calgary and across southern Alberta coped with a disaster that displaced over 100,000 people. "Seeing my hometown so damaged by extreme weather and poor planning," he later wrote, "I realized I needed to step up and work for safer communities."

One lesson Soron took away was that a community's financial decisions should not work against the well-being of the people who live there. Which is why he spoke before Vancouver council in Oct. 2013. The world's "Greenest City" was debating whether it should divest from its municipal pension fund nearly $400 million invested in fossil fuels. To Soron, it was a no-brainer. "Young people are determined to protect their future," he argued. "They demand that same determination of their leaders."

Across the world, young people were making similar demands. A 2013 report from the University of Oxford concluded that fossil fuel divestment was growing quicker than any earlier divestment movement, while one executive described it as "one of the fastest-moving debates I think I've seen in my 30 years in markets." Yet many university leaders were skeptical. Harvard president Drew Faust argued the school's $36-billion endowment "is a resource, not an instrument to impel social or political change."

Such words were evidence to Soron of a growing generation gap. "The idea that you can be neutral while wrecking the planet is totally bizarre," he said. "Younger people have an easier time thinking about the impact of their actions." Some fossil fuel firms are taking notice of that gap. David Crane, CEO of the utility NRG, has said he doesn't "relish the idea that year after year we're going to be graduating a couple million kids from college... with a distaste or disdain for companies like mine."

'Powerfully different'

Divestment isn't a new idea. In the 1980s, universities used their endowments to protest tobacco and apartheid. But the latest iteration came in 2004, when five U.S. student activists formed the Responsible Endowments Coalition to compel colleges to consider the social and environmental impacts of their investments. "We helped broaden young people's understanding of how they could engage... with major things happening in the world," REC co-founder Morgan Simon told The Tyee.

With the coalition's support, young people at Swarthmore College launched a campaign in Oct. 2011 to divest their school from fossil fuels. Likeminded efforts went national after McKibben calculated "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math" in his Rolling Stone essay and toured the U.S. urging students to take action. But by then Simon had left REC to engage with the other side of the divestment equation: how can financial markets be used to create a more just and sustainable world?

Divest SFU's Mike Soron

Divest SFU's Mike Soron: 'Younger people have an easier time thinking about the impact of their actions.'

As founder of such "impact investing" networks as Toniic and Transform Finance, Simon said she's strived to create "effective commerce without exploitation." Many other young investors share her goals. "Millennials consider social responsibility to be a major factor in evaluating investments," a 2013 report from ImpactAssets reads, "which is powerfully different from the bifurcated approach of previous generations who perceived doing well and doing good as separate activities."

Wall Street is well aware of this shift. As The Tyee reported from New York last year, Morgan Stanley will oversee $10 billion over five years in assets addressing such global issues as climate change and poverty. Simon is wary of the greenwashing and exploitation that can occur when major financial institutions attempt to become more socially conscious. Yet she's also excited about the prospect of morals and finance becoming so aligned "that at some point you could just call it 'investing.'"

Remaking capitalism

That's a radical proposition to most mainstream investors. But not to people like UBC climate activist Alex Hemingway. In fall 2013 he helped gather the signatures needed to get divestment onto the student elections ballot, and then spoke to anywhere between 1,500 and 2,000 students, he estimated, about the tension between UBC's green commitments and the $100 million of its endowment supporting oil firms like Suncor. "We can't live up to those principles of sustainability," Hemingway said, "if we don't address the school's investments."

It proved to be a powerful message. In Jan. 2014, 77 per cent of students voted to divest UBC from fossil fuels. And last week, 62 per cent of the school's faculty cast ballots to support them. "It's time for UBC to take some action," said forestry professor George Hoberg. How the school's Board of Governors choose to react to those votes is uncertain. But the Vancouver Sun's Pete McMartin argued that "it will be students, not the board members, who will live with the consequences of their decision."

In deciding whether to divest, UBC's leadership has many factors to consider. The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions estimated that if the school fully divested from fossil fuels while reinvesting in clean energy, "it would reduce [UBC's] overall exposure to GHG emissions by around three per cent." Former Quebec premier Jean Charest has added his voice to those elders who think "decisions for university endowments must be based on one thing: which investments will bring the best financial returns."

For young climate activists like Soron and Hemingway, such analyses overlook the divestment movement's broader aim: which is to remake the value structure of capitalism. No less than the Swiss financial giant UBS thinks such efforts should not be ignored. "Many of those engaged in [divestment] are the consumers, voters and leaders of the next several decades," it argued last September. "Time, youthful energy and stamina are on the side of the fossil fuel divestment campaign." [Tyee]

Read more: Energy, Rights + Justice, Environment

Geoff Dembicki reports on energy and climate change for The Tyee. Find his previous stories here.

Funding for this article was partially provided by the Climate Justice Project of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, with support from the Fossil Fuel Development Mitigation Fund of Tides Canada Foundation.

 

[ClayoquotKid]

Dr. Chris Essex: Why Computers Cannot Reproduce The Climate, Never Mind Predicting Its Future

ipcc-models-predict-futureA GWPF talk by Dr Christopher Essex – Chairman, Permanent Monitoring Panel on Climate, World Federation of Scientists, and Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Western Ontario (Canada) in London, 12 February 2015

Has the scientific problem of climate been solved in terms of basic physics and mathematics? No, but you will be forgiven if you thought otherwise. For decades, the most rigorous treatments of climate have been done through climate models. The clever model pioneers understood many of their inherent limitations, but tried to persevere nonetheless. Today, few academics are even aware of what the pioneers understood, let alone what has been learned since about the full depth of modelling difficulties.

Meanwhile popular expressions of the scientific technicalities are largely superficial, defective, comically nonsensical, and virtually uncorrectable. All of the best physics and all of the best computer models cannot put this Humpty Dumpty together, because we face some of the most fundamental problems of modern science in climate, but hardly know it. If you think you want to have a go at those problems, there are at least a couple million dollars in prizes in it, not to mention a Fields Medal or two.

But even if you don’t have some spare afternoons to solve problems that have stymied the best minds in history, this talk will cure computer cachet even for laymen.
Can be found here.http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/...e-things-before-breakfast-and-climate-models/

More from comments.
The uselessness of the GCM’s for forecasting purposes is discussed in Section 1 at

http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html

Here is the conclusion:
“In summary the temperature projections of the IPCC – Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them have no solid foundation in empirical science being derived from inherently useless and specifically structurally flawed models. They provide no basis for the discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money. As a foundation for Governmental climate and energy policy their forecasts are already seen to be grossly in error and are therefore worse than useless. A new forecasting paradigm needs to be adopted.
The modeling community is itself beginning to acknowledge its failures and even Science Magazine
which has generally been a propagandist for the CAGW meme is now allowing reality to creep in. An article in its 6/13/2014 issue says:
“Much of the problem boils down to grid resolution. “The truth is that the level of detail in the models isn’t really determined by scientific constraints,” says Tim Palmer, a physicist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom who advocates stochastic approaches to climate modeling. “It is determined entirely by the size of the computers.” Roughly speaking, an order-of-magnitude increase in computer power is needed to halve the grid size. Typical horizontal grid size has fallen from 500 km in the 1970s to 100 km today and could fall to 10 km in 10 years’ time. But even that won’t be much help in modeling vitally important small-scale phenomena such as cloud formation, Palmer points out. And before they achieve that kind of detail, computers may run up against a physical barrier: power consumption. “Machines that run exaflops [1018 floating point operations per second] are on the horizon,” Palmer says. “The problem is, you’ll need 100 MW to run one.” That’s enough electricity to power a town of 100,000 people.
Faced with such obstacles, Palmer and others advocate a fresh start.”
Climate at a time scale of human interest, is controlled by natural solar cycles especially the 1000 year periodicity which is plainly obvious in the data -see Figs 5-9 in Section 2 at the link above
The earth is just approaching, just at or just past the natural solar millennial peak- see Fig 9. If we look at the neutron count record – Fig 14 which,together with the 10Be data ,is the best proxy for solar activity, it is obvious that solar activity peaked in 1991. There is a 12 year delay between the driver peak and the global RSS temperature peak which occurred in mid 2003 since when the earth has been in a cooling trend -see http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rs....1/to:2003.6/trend/plot/rss/from:2003.6/trend
.The climate models are built without regard to the natural 60 and even more important 1000 year periodicities and lack even average common sense.
It is exactly like taking the temperature trend from say Feb – July and projecting it ahead linearly for 20 years or so. The models are back tuned for less than 100 years when the relevant time scale is millennial. The whole exercise is a joke and a disaster for the reputation of science in general.

That was really an enlightening video.

I always know clouds were too complex, and things like thunderstorms popping up moving massive amounts of heat around could not be accounted for - but now knowing the limitations of the models, it all makes sense.

 

[OldBlackDog]

Shock News: Government Agencies Are Tampering With Temperature Data

Daily Caller reports that Congress will be investigating US data tampering by NCDC and NASA

Are government climate agencies tampering with climate data to show warming? Some Republicans think so. That’s what California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher says to expect at congressional hearings on climate data tampering.

For years, those skeptical of man-made global warming have argued that government agencies are altering raw temperature data to create a warming trend. Allegations of tampering have increased as satellite temperature readings show much less warming than land and ocean-based weather stations show.

Science blogger Steven Goddard (a pseudonym) has been a major critic of NASA’s and NOAA’s temperature measurements. Goddard points out that NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center makes the present look warmer by artificially cooling past temperatures to show a warming trend.

“NCDC pulls every trick in the book to turn the US cooling trend into warming. The raw data shows cooling since the 1920s,” Goddard told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview last month.

“NCDC does a hockey stick of adjustments to reverse the trend,” Goddard said. “This includes cooling the past for ‘time of observation bias’ infilling missing rural data with urban temperatures, and doing almost nothing to compensate for urban heat island effects.”

NOAA does make temperature adjustments, but it argues such adjustments are necessary to remove “artificial biases” in surface temperature data. The biggest adjustment made by NCDC scientists is cooling past data to take into account the fact that there was a big shift from taking temperature readings in the afternoon to the morning.

TOBS is actually only a small portion of the Final minus Raw adjustments, and is not due to the time when they “take the temperature.” That is misdirection by NCDC intended to confuse people. It is based on the time when the thermometer is reset. Min/max thermometers record the highest and lowest temperatures since the last time they were reset.

“We get a lot of people questioning our data adjustments,” Thomas Peterson, NCDC’s principal scientist, told TheDCNF. There was an “artificial cool bias in the data,” Peterson said.

UHI makes an artificial cool bias? These people should be stand up comedians.

Republicans To Investigate Climate Data Tampering By NASA | The Daily Caller

If the Republicans understand and focus on the low hanging fruit, this is a slam dunk. There is overwhelming evidence that the US temperature adjustments are completely bogus. They need to stay away from the global temperature data and avoid discussions of individual stations. Those mistakes would take them down a rat hole which Tom Karl has buried them in the past.

 

[GLG]

[FONT=freight-text-pro, serif]So you think your smarter the everyone else there CK an OBD
[/FONT][FONT=freight-text-pro, serif]
[/FONT]
The US navy would like you to read this........

[FONT=freight-text-pro, serif]The Pentagon & Climate Change: How Deniers Put National Security at Risk
[/FONT]
‪‎ClimateChange‬ is not only a threat to the ‪‎environment‬ but a threat to our national security. Coastal military bases and U.S. Navy missions on seas are at risk. ‪‎Military‬ readiness could be compromised by these ‎environmental‬ changes. Read about the challenges the Pentagon faces posed by a changing‪ ‎climate‬.

https://www.facebook.com/NavalEnergy


[FONT=freight-text-pro, serif]Or you could follow this link to an op-ed on Rolling Stone
[/FONT]
http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...eniers-put-national-security-at-risk-20150212

[FONT=freight-text-pro, serif]It's odd that in Canada if you object the rising increase of CO2 by the fossil fuel industry you are going to be target by the new bill C-51 as some kind of terrorist. But in the US you would be seen as protecting national security. You would think that the US Tea Party ran the show up here...... perhaps they do. [/FONT]

 

[GLG]

Shock News: Government Agencies Are Tampering With Temperature Data

Daily Caller reports that Congress will be investigating US data tampering by NCDC and NASA

Here I'll fix this for you....

According to the Daily Caller.... (what ever the hell that is)
Some old fool has asked another old fool to check to see if a new ice age is coming. In fact the old fool thinks it is all ready here. Here is the quote. "I woke up this morning and it was cold outside therefore a thought came into my head.... Climate change can't be true it's cold outside. Better call my congressman for the fossil fuel industry and let him know. I'm sure he is thinking the same thing."

 

[OldBlackDog]

Because you cannot read.

Here I'll fix this for you....

According to the Daily Caller.... (what ever the hell that is)
Some old fool has asked another old fool to check to see if a new ice age is coming. In fact the old fool thinks it is all ready here. Here is the quote. "I woke up this morning and it was cold outside therefore a thought came into my head.... Climate change can't be true it's cold outside. Better call my congressman for the fossil fuel industry and let him know. I'm sure he is thinking the same thing."

 

[OldBlackDog]

The Real Threat Of Climate Change Alarmism

cartoon al gore making money
For nearly four decades, we’ve increasingly been bombarded with global warming alarmism. What actually should alarm us is the corruption of science and, consequently, the undermining of knowledge-based authority.

“Global warming” began being called “climate change” about the time warming so obviously had tapered off that annual differences were essentially immeasurable, and well within the margin of error.

But warmists profit by scaring people to justify heavy-handed schemes for wealth transfer and control. To salvage their schemes, they substituted an unremarkable, meaningless expression – climate change – and claimed it had an innate, identical urgency.

In the immortal – or should we say, immoral – words of Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

We long ago took a twilight-zone detour to where reality no longer is bound by facts, a “journey into a wondrous land of imagination,” as Rod Serling might have put it.

But, once enough scientists are revealed to be mere propagandists, all science comes into question. Once “facts” are shown simply to be concocted hoopla, moral groundings sink in quagmires of doubt.

After liars are finally exposed, when can we again believe anything they say? “This time we’re not lying!” doesn’t inspire much confidence.

This is the real dilemma posed by global warming alarmism, aka climate change, which for decades screamed that human-caused atmospheric heat threatens the planet – despite overwhelming contrary evidence.

Loss of credibility undermines public confidence, in turn, undermining legitimate authority. We are quickly approaching the point when cynicism replaces skepticism. The consequences will make global warming seem like the mild excuse for panic that it is. We already are living in an age of absurdity in which the History Channel airs documentaries on extraterrestrial visitation.

If we no longer can trust, where can we turn for truth? That constitutes cause for real panic.

Yours truly has written for years that global warming’s war on reality never was about the globe getting warmer. It always has been about control and money. Their control and your money.

As with all wars, the first victim was truth. The latest exposed canard shows warmists behind what some people call “one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.” Climate data from South America have been “adjusted” since the 1950s to give the impression that the Earth’s temperature is rising more than original data showed.

That revelation is hardly new. This columnist years ago noted the routine “adjustment” of raw data then asked why the formulas for adjusting couldn’t be shared with the public. Moreover, why were scores of earthbound temperature measuring stations around the world – a disproportionate number of them in cold climes – no longer being used?

Global warming data manipulation, half-truths, fallacious reasoning and flat-out distortions are corrupting science and public policy. They are agendas driven by lust for control and money.

For 15 years, the Environmental Protection Agency resisted releasing data from two key studies, while using those studies to justify some of the most costly regulations in history. The public and Congress were denied access to the data, which supposedly showed deadly dangers posed by fine particulate matter, which became the basis for Draconian regulations. Whistle-blowers finally leaked the information.

Now we know that there is no real-world evidence to suggest that not meeting EPA’s contrived parts-per-million emission standard causes sudden, or long-term, death, as the EPA insisted. “The claim that [it] kills people is at the heart and soul of how the EPA is selling these regulations,” said Steve Milloy, former editor of JunkScience.com. “But it’s a claim that’s not supported by the facts or evidence. The EPA has rigged the whole process.”

Not only is the science fraudulent, it remained secret until surreptitiously leaked.

Nevertheless, EPA press secretary Liz Purchia has insisted the resulting air quality standards are supported by “sound science and legal standards.” Or, as the Wizard of Oz put it, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

When, by government or by scientific edict, “Yes” becomes “No,” and “Fact” is replaced by “Fiction,” we live out George Orwell’s “1984,” where, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Exploitation of fearful people suppresses their knowledge of reality.

“[A]fter all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works?” Orwell wrote. “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it,” observed the book’s protagonist. “It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: The logic of their position demanded it.”

Dubious temperatures, the supposed effects of human-caused CO2 emissions, particulates per million – are all doubtful claims and standards that mean just what those who stand to gain choose them to mean, “neither more nor less.” All the better to pick your pocket and control your lives.

Source

 

[triplenickel]

You almost got this right OBD - or the Koch Tea Party cartoonist did.

Just substitute "Vision for the Future" sign for lemonade on the left - and "Doubt" for the solar panel sign. The money from the Koches - used to generate the doubt is already there.

So are the subsidies claims he posted correct or not?

 

[agentaqua]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150220094805.htm

Greenland is melting: The past might tell what the future holds

Date: February 20, 2015

Source: Faculty of Science - University of Copenhagen

Summary: Scientists have managed to quantify how the Greenland Ice Sheet reacted to a warm period 8,000-5,000 years ago. Back then temperatures were 2-4 degrees C warmer than they are in the present. Their results are important as we are rapidly closing in on similar temperatures.

Nicolaj Larsen and Anders Bjørk working on a drilling platform bv the Helheim glacier in Southeast Greenland.

Credit: Kurt Kjær
[Click to enlarge image]

A team of scientists lead by Danish geologist Nicolaj Krog Larsen have managed to quantify how the Greenland Ice Sheet reacted to a warm period 8,000-5,000 years ago. Back then temperatures were 2-4 degrees C warmer than they are in the present. Their results have just been published in the scientific journal Geology, and are important as we are rapidly closing in on similar temperatures.

While the world is preparing for a rising global sea-level, a group of scientists led by Dr. Nicolaj Krog Larsen, Aarhus University in Denmark and Professor Kurt Kjær, Natural History Museum of Denmark ventured off to Greenland to investigate how fast the Greenland Ice Sheet reacted to past warming.

With hard work and high spirits the scientists spent six summers coring lakes in the ice free land surrounding the ice sheet. The lakes act as a valuable archive as they store glacial meltwater sediments in periods where the ice is advanced. That way is possible to study and precisely date periods in time when the ice was smaller than present.

"It has been hard work getting all these lake cores home, but is has definitely been worth the effort. Finally we are able to describe the ice sheet's response to earlier warm periods," says Dr. Nicolaj Krog Larsen of Aarhus University, Denmark.

Evidence has disappeared

The size of the Greenland Ice Sheet has varied since the Ice Age ended 11,500 years ago, and scientists have long sought to investigate the response to the warmest period 8,000-5,000 years ago where the temperatures were 2-4 °C warmer than they are in the present.

"The glaciers always leave evidence about their presence in the landscape. So far the problem has just been that the evidence is removed by new glacial advances. That is why it is unique that we are now able to quantify the mass loss during past warming by combining the lake sediment records with state-of-the-art modelling," says Professor Kurt Kjær, Natural History Museum of Denmark.

16 cm of global sea-level rise from Greenland

Their results show that the ice had its smallest extent exactly during the warming 8,000-5,000 years ago -- with that knowledge in hand they were able to review all available ice sheet models and choose the ones that best reproduced the reality of the past warming.

The best models show that during this period the ice sheet was losing mass at a rate of 100 Gigaton pr. year for several thousand years, and delivered the equivalent of 16 cm of global sea-level rise when temperatures were 2-4 °C warmer. For comparison, the mass loss in the last 25 years has varied between 0-400 Gigaton pr. year, and it is expected that the Arctic will warm 2-7 °C by the year 2100.

Story Source: The above story is based on materials provided by Faculty of Science - University of Copenhagen. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference: 1.N. K. Larsen, K. H. Kjaer, B. Lecavalier, A. A. Bjork, S. Colding, P. Huybrechts, K. E. Jakobsen, K. K. Kjeldsen, K.-L. Knudsen, B. V. Odgaard, J. Olsen. The response of the southern Greenland ice sheet to the Holocene thermal maximum. Geology, 2015; DOI: 10.1130/G36476.1 http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/G36476.1

 

[GLG]

Because you cannot read.

Because you cannot subtract.


Using a quote from 2001 seems a bit odd coming from you OBD, but then again you are in denial.
Why don't you look through the latest report and find something else.
http://ipcc.ch/report/ar5/
Oh wait that would require effort and that's not team denials strong suit is it.

 

[GLG]

The Real Threat Of Climate Change Alarmism

“Global warming” began being called “climate change” about the time warming so obviously had tapered off that annual differences were essentially immeasurable, and well within the margin of error.

Following your logic then LBJ must have been in on the Hoax......

Warning from 1965 about "Climate Change"
http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldei... Restoring the Quality of Our Environment.pdf

 

[GLG]

New subsides for fossil fuel industry...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/lng-tax-breaks-will-help-but-is-it-too-little-too-late-1.2965444

Tonight's first order of business: Federal support, by way of tax credits, for a fledgling industry in Canada, liquefied natural gas, is a long way from reality in this country, but it seems our government wants to make it as attractive as possible for investors.
With gas prices at rock bottom levels here, and higher overseas, the benefit seems clear. And yet, investors aren't breaking ground. If they won't do it without a form of corporate welfare, we have to question whether they are investments that will happen at all.
— Amanda Lang


​The federal government is hoping to kickstart a multibillion-dollar industry that, according to one analyst, is currently suffering an anxiety attack. Speaking in B.C., Prime Minister Stephen Harper unveiled new tax breaks for investment in liquefied natural gas.
The new measures mean companies will now get a capital cost allowance of 30 per cent for LNG equipment. And 10 per cent for buildings at LNG facilities. The government projects the tax break will save the industry about $50 million over the first five years.
Another estimate says it will allow companies to write off 90 per cent of their investments in seven years, instead of 27.
[h=2]Race to market[/h]The hope is to give Canada a competitive edge against the U.S. and Australia in the race to tap Asian markets. But also, to convince reluctant investors to join the race in the first place. Right now, there are 19 LNG proposals. They're all collecting dust on the shelf. Not a single owner has committed to moving forward, spooked by global uncertainty and a plunge in oil prices.
The B.C. government is still optimistic. It expects to have three LNG projects in operation by 2020. Lately, that may be a little too glass-half-full.
The Pacific Northwest LNG facility was, until recently, the most likely project to get off the ground. But in December, Petronas delayed its final investment decision, citing those low oil prices that don't appear to be recovering. That followed BG Group postponing its decision on the Prince Rupert LNG project until 2017.
And most recently, Chevron said it was cutting spending on LNG worldwide by 20 per cent this year. That doesn't bode well for its Kitimat LNG facility, for which a decision date hasn't even been set.