Just to keep you abreast of what is going on in France…
You may have heard of the Yellow Vests, who triggered our president Macron into embarking on a “Grand Debate”, mainly on the internet. It is mostly a closed questionnaire with circular arguments on the most surreptitious ways to shoehorn the energy transition, without offering to question its legitimacy in the first place. However, looking closely at the fine print, contributors like associations can still express an open opinion.
On our side Rémy Prud’homme is an emeritus professor of economics, former consultant to the OECD, occasionally to the World Bank, and visiting professor at the MIT. As such he is our chief economist within the steering committee of the French Climato-Réalistes. He came up with the attached “ENERGY TRANSITION IN FRANCE: USELESS, COSTLY, UNFAIR”, initially in French of course. See: https://saltbushclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/energy-transition-in-france.pdf [PDF, 346 KB]
We thought you may like to know that we Froggies are enduring the same attacks as everywhere in the western world and that we like to voice our concern.
Sympathetically yours,
Pierre Bouteille, on behalf of the French Climato-Réalistes
The Green-ants said “You can’t burn coal” – so we sent our coal to China. Then our factories and our smelters closed and followed the coal to China.
The Green-ants said “You can’t eat beef” – so we sent our beef to China. Then burger chains and canneries closed and followed the beef to China.
The Green-ants said “Protect the trees” – so our grasslands went to weeds. Then China’s wool cheques disappeared and graziers went on welfare.
The Green-ants said “Don’t mention nukes” – so we shipped those fuels to China. Then Chinese power costs fell while ours just kept on soaring.
The Green-ants said “You can’t frack gas” – so we sent our drills to China. Then geologists and engineers were fired and followed the rigs to China.
Then blackouts came and jobs got scarce, so our kids chased jobs in China.
Today we import what we need and our cash is shipped to China.
And now we sit in flickering light, dreaming of times when factories and smelters flourished, work was honoured, explorers and builders were heroes, miners and farmers paid the nation’s bills, electricity was cheap and reliable, and to produce things was no crime.
It’s time we sent all of our Green-ants to China – there should be lots of work for them there.
There has been NO significant sea level rise in the harbour for the past 120 years, and what little there has been is about the height of a matchbox over a century.
Along the northern beaches of Sydney, at Collaroy there has been no suggestion of any sea level rise there for the past 140 years. Casual observations from Bondi Beach 1875 to the present also suggest the same benign situation.
A rush to judgement by local councils and State Governments by legislating harsh laws and building covenants along our coastlines now seems misplaced.
The falsehoods and mendacity of the IPCC and climate alarmists should be rejected out of hand, and efforts be made to ensure that science, not propaganda, defines our school curricula in matters of climate and sea levels
This document aims to contextualise the scientific debate concerning Climate Change (CC) and Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Examining Earth history, it is indisputable that CC has been operating for many hundreds of millions of years, in cycles that span many different time-scales (millennial-plus to decadal), all without human influence. Understanding the causative factors in past CC provides a solid basis for framing the present debate. AGW is a notion which says that human activities, notably the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere, are causing an increase in the global heat budget. That higher-energy state of Earth’s environment it is argued sets the stage for damaging CC effects. Political and economic decisions have been influenced by this claim. Some of those decisions harm efforts to better the health and welfare of the world’s population, including both the poorest and those who are better off. If the CC and AGW arguments are incorrectly based, as we outline here, there is a need to re-consider those decisions.
CC in Earth History
Paleo-temperature (of atmosphere and ocean) is taken as a proxy indicator of climate, since climate is a complex concept that includes precipitation amounts and patterns, wind, etc whose history and future cannot be extracted or classified in a satisfactory way
Earth’s equatorial region has had a consistent temperature during the climate swings over hundreds of millions of years, but the polar areas have varied, thus altering the pole-to-equator gradient of heat energy, which is the principal driver of climate on the planet
Causes of CC (changes in temperature gradients) are dominated by orbital and solar effects, with added signals from volcanoes (both dust and chemicals), tectonics and plate motions, and biological feedbacks
Oceans (which cover ~70% of the planet) are the main heat reservoir, but with patterns of warmer and colder water distributions that reveal decadal and longer cyclicity that is not understood
Global Warming
Earth’s temperature has been generally rising since the end of the last ice age, with an apparent acceleration during the last century, but not since
Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have also been rising more uniformly, now reaching 410ppm or 0.04% of atmosphere
CO2 has been identified as a ‘greenhouse gas’, based on an argument that it traps and reflects heat
The physics of CO2 heat retention are over-stated, as only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (wavelengths of heat energies) can be captured by this molecule
Because CO2 concentration is rising and is implicated in global warming, and because CO2 is a by-product of combustion, energy sources from fossil fuels have been demonised – via social and political suppression of their use, and a push towards 100% renewable energy
There are three key challenges to the idea that CO2 is the primary cause of GW:
Long-term records of CO2 and temperature show good correlation, but the CO2 concentrations lag behind temperature increases by thousands of years. Thus, CO2 increase is the consequence of rising ocean temperature, not the cause
Numerical models of climate systems, which involve simplifying assumptions and methods that are associated with serious artefacts, consistently fail to ‘predict’ the known past temperature patterns. Such models cannot justify the suppression of hydrocarbon fuels.
Average temperatures are no longer increasing despite the inexorable rise of CO2
Human activities are not the driver of global warming (or cooling). Earth’s systems are governed by processes that operate over a wide range of time- and length-scales, many of which far exceed the usual scope of human perceptions. The demonization of carbon is scientifically unjustified.
“We think that, by 2020, the cost of electricity will be threefold what it is today, given the current policy of large amounts of renewables being forced into the system, un-costed charges for those renewables given the current policy settings and a substantial increase in transmission and distribution costs.”
Here is a time lapse video showing the effect of increased carbon dioxide on plant growth.
The current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 386 ppm. In this experiment, one plant-growing chamber had 450 ppm carbon dioxide, the level at which we are told will cause the world to tip into runaway global warming. The other chamber had carbon dioxide at 1270 ppm, a level most nurseries would prefer to have, and the level at which much life on earth evolved it.
See for yourself the dramatic increase in plant growth we could expect from a carbon-rich atmosphere. The well fed plant weighed 44% more than the starved one, with greater height, more leaves and far more roots. This plant not only grew faster and better, its better root system would make it more drought and heat tolerant.
Yet Penny Wong and the alarmists want us to believe carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and more of it would be a disaster!
Why are CSIRO and our many Departments of Agriculture so silent on this fundamental issue?
Are they all cowed, or are their well paid jobs more important than revealing the truth?
Personally I look at the stupid notion of Blackout Night, in honour of the planet.
We left our caves, our sod houses of the past to enjoy modern homes. I enjoy the thought that if I’m sick and require an operation the hospital has electricity 24 hours per day, seven days per week so that the surgeon and his team can fix me or my loved ones. I enjoy the thought that at 7pm at night I can turn on a television and watch it, in the comfort of my single family dwelling home. I enjoy the thought that if I want a beverage I can go to my frost free fridge and grab a beer. I enjoy the thought that my employer has electricity and indoor plumbing so that I can defecate in the safety of my closed off cubicle.
These modern fools of Mother Earth and modern Environmentalism want to return to the yesteryears of cave dwelling pre-human existence. All I’ve ever read about pre-modern living, and that’s not all too long ago, just 100 years ago. Most men died before the age of 50 years. Children died by the thousands because of infections, and poor health quality. You were considered old when you were over 40!
Turning out the Lights glorifies stupidity, and glamorizes the progressive liberal mentality about the so called “global village”. You know what, its one village I don’t want to belong too. I’ll take living in a single dwelling home, with electricity, and my beer fridge powered by coal fired plants with modern precipitators and scrubbers installed in the gas path cleaning up the grime.
Today’s environmentalist aren’t cleaning up the stacks – they’re socialists who can’t get elected at the ballot box but are hell bent to destroy our western society so that we fit into their social activist world of stupidity and failure.
“As things now stand, the advocates representing the establishment climate science story broadcast (usually with color diagrams) the predictions of climate models as if they were the results of experiments – actual evidence. Alongside these multi-colored multi-century model-simulated time series come stories, anecdotes, and photos – such as the iconic stranded polar bear – dramatically illustrating climate change today. On this rhetorical strategy, the models are to be taken on faith, and the stories and photos as evidence of the models’ truth. Policy carrying potential costs in the trillions of dollars ought not to be based on stories and photos confirming faith in models, but rather on precise and replicable testing of the models’ predictions against solid observational data.”
Jason Scott Johnson of the University of Pennsylvania Law School for the Institute for Law and Economics, a Joint Research Center of the Law School with the Wharton School of Economics. Report: http://www.probeinternational.org/UPennCross.pdf [PDF, 399KB]
Here is an animated video produced by FirstEnergy available from Mining Connection (http://www.miningconnection.com/). It shows how we make electricity from coal. It also shows that the cooling towers so loved by TV to illustrate power plant pollution in fact emit only warm air and moisture – not even the demonised but harmless carbon dioxide. The invisible carbon dioxide exits via the less photogenic chimneys. So what TV usually shows to illustrate “carbon pollution” is no more polluting than what comes out of the spout of your kettle. So much for truth on TV.
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