Friday 29th of March 2024

is there gold in the sewers?...

the skeptic 1994?

As Antarctica  is melting a bit faster due to anthropogenic global warming, one has to revisit a mixed bag of few skewed issues and bad opinions. 
Some scientists like Ian Plimer dispute the concept of anthropogenic global warming. For me, it is a little annoying that someone who has a great humanist scientific mind comes to this wrong conclusion  — wrong as clearly demonstrated by serious examination from many scientists.

Of course most of Plimer's analysis of global warming is underpinned by his own participation in the carbon intensive industries... Ian Plimer has also had a few tiffs with creationists, some of whom have pointed out that Ian Plimer does not know the difference between "melting point and boiling point" (http://creation.com/ian-plimers-bloopers-a-selection) but then I believe these self-CONvinced people don't know the difference between time and time, themselves.... So there.

So why would a non-university-educated Gus take on the might and knowledge of an Ian Plimer — a fellow humanist with degrees and professorial chairs? 
Well, I don't know what I am doing... Though, creationists? I can eat them for breakfast, but I'd rather not — due to the hard solidified indigestible pig-headed fibre...

But when someone like Tony Abbott uses Ian Plimer as a crutch for his understanding of global warming, I get a strong fever going up my spine... I feel like punching someone. 
We are now told that "Abbott" nowadays has quit the Ian Plimer views and "accepts the reality of anthropogenic global warming"... Can you believe this? Bollocks. I knew you did not... If Abbott did subscribe to the anthropogenic views of global warming, he would not pursue his silly stupid "direct action" and would crank up the carbon pricing as any intelligent person would... 

But Abbott, first and foremost, is a lying political beast, is an agent for the carbon polluters and is a shifty policy wind-vane according to where the most votes of the day are, as whispered by the merde-och press, while avoiding the proper path of contrary information. 
In short Abbott is a religious spruiker for snake oil merchandising and is ready to steal your money before the wind does, to prove it... 

Ian Plimer is a geologist — a carbon-intensive-company director and a hater of religion — with views on global climate. Like me, he has no degree in climate science (as of last check). Thus Plimer is a complex character who wrote at length about global warming without expertise — in a book full of unscientific assumption, that has got him to be named as part of the "Denialism Dirty Dozen".
Ian Plimer and Lord Monckton (of breaches and whatever) toured Orstralya to tell us, with the help of Alan Jones —spruiker for the right-wing of the right-wing — that global warming is a fallacy — a disbelief in global warming that has been taken up by Tony Abbott and a zillion of his cabinet colleagues... Thus we are in a pick-a-box kookooland where Abbott still secretly takes Ian Plimer's views on global warming but will reject his views of religion. 

I agree with myself: not everyone's nor everybody's views on the world is unified — not only we contradict within each of us we do it with all of us. We can have doubt about the price of fish, especially godot, and paint ourselves in a corner. I have views that will not be accepted by other people while I have some views shared with other people. Hopefully I make sense to myself, though sometimes I wonder, especially as night falls.

Here on the climate change situation, I feel we need to become more and more ruthless. We need to line the denialists up against a wall and shoot arguments till they convert or die. The future of this planet is at stake, unlike during the inquisition when it was only the ideology of a few religious nuts that was being challenged. Nothing more then.
Much more to lose now.

Serious scientists have debunked all of Plimer erroneous fiction on global warming. As mentioned above even some creationists challenged his views on their beliefs, even with better scientific rigour. But that is not a reference to the facts, as creationists have no idea about reality while they try to fit twisted scientific illusions into their own wonky dodgey art-form.

In attacking the creationists on completely irrelevant but precise points, Plimer let himself open to argument ridicule from the creationists. It is my humble view that one does not try to scientifically nor mathematically dismantle the bible stories — mainly because there are few valid reference points, apart from stupid burning bushes and wine made from water instead of grapes... One should thus dismiss the overall tone of the work, full of paradise lost, moralizationing threats, of glorious wars, of concubined and bigamist sex in a sin-binned godzilliated structure of the universe, which makes no sense at all. 
So for the next few paragraphs, I will dump the creationists views in hell where they belong. I know, don't tell me, hell does not exist. Take it easy... 

I believe Ian Plimer is a reasonable thinker. He can construct an argument. But he is choosy about what he is going to use in his construct in regard to global warming. This of course is wrong. Science is not an art form, unlike politics in which pick-and-chose-your-donkey and hope for the best is the arty-farty fuel. Science cannot dismiss or inflate parameters to suit a preferred result or a spruik. And this to some extend make most global warming scientists scared of being wrong as they search for more and more clues about the theory and its implications.

The science of "global warming" is done with as much information as possible by scientists who know what they are doing. There is as much data collection on this subject than the NSA collects on any given day. The diagnosis is basically clear. The method and the formulation is complex but takes care of all parameters, including those Plimer accuses them of ignoring.
The scientists do a good job. An excellent job.

Thus I hate those lying religious "accountants" who devalue the work of scientists, of engineers and of philosophers. This is what the Abbott government is full of: religious "accountant" who lie for political gain to the detriment of the future. They hate scientists, especially those who tell them what they don't want to hear. They hate them like you would not believe. Not only these lying religious "accountants" manipulate your future for the quick gain of a few bucks, they often do it without knowing how to add up (hence the "quote marks"). They use static number systems that will die from lack of oxygen within two weeks. Don't get me wrong, they're not nerds. At least with nerds, you know there is a basic knowledge of stuff, including Lagrangian equations which tell you the earth is warming up, fast. 

These lying religious "accountants" are just plain dorky thieves who still secretly hope the earth is flat and their god sits on a cloud of glory above. They have perfected the arts of fairy dust in dodgey-talk and of pickpocketry.

It is a pity that these dorky thieves are helped along by some people's stupid ideas like Plimer's bad interpretations of a scientific situation...

You could say, I don't have much of a future left and any hope of a better one is in iffy-land...

But this is where my humanistic altruism comes in. I'd want you — especially you the young ones who have no clue as to what life is yet (we've got no idea ourselves but we've had plenty of experience at not knowing much but we keep trying) to have a better future than the one we found under a murderous war, laced with stupid bum fights, while loosing sight of the planet. 

In the end, it does not really matter. 

If you think that being impaled by a stupid budget-prong from lying religious fake "accountants" is necessary and fun, so be it. Enjoy the unnecessary pain.

Meanwhile I'll keep fighting the bastards.

Gus Leonisky
Your local Dorkbuster

Image at top from Gus' collection of useless things...

 

West Antarctic ice sheet has gone into irreversible retreat...

Two scientific papers released on Monday by the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters came to similar conclusions by different means. Both groups of scientists found that West Antarctic glaciers had retreated far enough to set off an inherent instability in the ice sheet, one that experts have feared for decades. NASA called a telephone news conference Monday to highlight the urgency of the findings.

The West Antarctic ice sheet sits in a bowl-shaped depression in the earth, with the base of the ice below sea level. Warm ocean water is causing the ice sitting along the rim of the bowl to thin and retreat. As the front edge of the ice pulls away from the rim and enters deeper water, it can retreat much faster than before.

In one of the new papers, a team led by Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, used satellite and air measurements to document an accelerating retreat over the past several decades of six glaciers draining into the Amundsen Sea region. And with updated mapping of the terrain beneath the ice sheet, the team was able to rule out the presence of any mountains or hills significant enough to slow the retreat.


“Today we present observational evidence that a large sector of the West Antarctic ice sheet has gone into irreversible retreat,” Dr. Rignot said in the NASA news conference. “It has passed the point of no return.”

Those six glaciers alone could cause the ocean to rise four feet as they disappear, Dr. Rignot said, possibly within a couple of centuries. He added that their disappearance will most likely destabilize other sectors of the ice sheet, so the ultimate rise could be triple that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/science/earth/collapse-of-parts-of-west-antarctica-ice-sheet-has-begun-scientists-say.html?hp&_r=0

roads to oblivion faster...

Second, the proceeds of the “pain” are not entirely directed at budget repair. They go to roads funding and the new medical research fund and the new emissions reduction fund.

The improvement in the budget bottom line is relatively slow. And despite the collective efforts being imposed upon us the economic outlook is not rosy – with unemployment remaining high and business confidence low.

But it probably wouldn’t have sounded quite as snappy if the treasurer had stood up and said “we are cutting health, education, pensions and family payments so we can spend a lot of that money on new roads and medical research.”

He prefers to keep the two concepts separate, and when he does talk about roads he argues that they will improve economic growth and productivity.

Experts say roads can improve productivity, but only if they are carefully selected and assessed and built alongside public transport. For the roads the Coalition is funding, that has in many cases not happened.

We were promised pain with a purpose. The pain is obvious. The purpose less so.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/13/budget-sales-pitch-of-shared-pain-doesnt-really-live-up-to-reality

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I know roads... The more road you build plus the cheaper the cars (less tariffs and no more cars built in this country) the more traffic jams you encourage. The more pollution you create. The CO2 emission supposedly saved by Tony stupid direct action, is already offset in the wrong direction by Tony's promise of road building. In a single swoop, the emission reduction has become an emission plus by at least 3 per cent of budget decision. Eventually all this will have to be killed off. I mean KILLED OFF by 2022. By 2015 global warming is going to make a leap. It could be as soon as the end of 2014... Don't be fooled by the fools of Abbott's government. Global warming is real and incrementally fast. CO2 is the major culprit despite what some pseudo-climate scientist would tell you... Of course the Abbott regime wants to raise tax on fuel, not so much to pay for investments in alternative energies but to create more roads... slower roads, to oblivion faster...

Welcome to madness. 

Scientists know that the climate changes naturally, too...

...

It is one thing to invite a debate about the best policy to address rising global temperatures, a problem no country can tackle on its own. It is another to dismiss the evidence that “these scientists” have compiled — “a handful of decades of research,” Mr. Rubio derisively called it — to show that humans are driving much of that warming.

Just last week, a fresh federal analysis articulated anew many of the reasons the debate should focus on how to respond to the threat of human-induced climate change, not on whether it is happening. The research, a large panel of experts concluded, “tells an unambiguous story: the planet is warming, and over the last half century, this warming has been driven primarily by human activity.”

Scientists rely on “multiple lines of independent evidence” to reach that conclusion. Beyond the basic physics that more greenhouse gases in the air will tend to intensify the greenhouse effect, researchers can’t explain the temperature record of the past 50 years without adding human influence to the picture. Then there are observable climate “fingerprints,” such as where warming is happening, both on the Earth and in the atmosphere, that implicate human-released greenhouse emissions as a major culprit.

Scientists know that the climate changes naturally, too. “Human-induced warming is superimposed on a background of natural variations in climate,” the federal assessment noted. But other possible drivers, such as changes in the sun’s output, can’t fully explain the warming the planet is seeing. Volcanic eruptions and other factors, they reckoned, would have cooled the Earth if not for human activity reversing that course. 

 

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marco-rubios-rhetoric-on-climate-change-casts-questions-about-his-judgment/2014/05/12/94f4e9c2-da19-11e3-b745-87d39690c5c0_story.html

 

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the liberals (CONservatives) hate renewable energy...

Despite election promises of support for renewable energy and action on climate change, this government has not delivered. In fact, John Connor says they've gone backwards.

IF THERE WAS ANY DOUBT that the election of the Abbott Government might slam the brakes on Australia's climate and clean energy progress, it's now over. With the Government's first budget, it's reversing at full speed.

This is the Backwards Budget - a budget that shifts the burden for pollution reduction from polluters to taxpayers. A budget that slashes renewable energy agencies and funding programs that are helping create the jobs and industries of the 21st century. A budget that rips hundreds of millions of dollars away from climate science, international climate finance and clean technology research programs.

We are back to the dark years of the Howard Government where climate and renewable energy are absent from the Treasurer's speech.

Certainty about the future of Coalitions's 'signature' Emissions Reduction Fund isn't helped by the budget overview saying the $2.55 billion thought to be over the first four years is all we get over 10 years. The Minister's office says this is a misprint. But either way this reinforces concerns that any climate action is set to be hostage to the vagaries of the annual budget ritual. How much confidence can we have in the now four-year-old promise that once the ERF is up and running it will spend an average $1.2 billion a year?

What's most tragic is that Australia was just starting to get on track. Our greenhouse gas emissions, which had been growing steadily for decades, have begun to decline. Emissions from electricity, the single most polluting sector, fell an impressive 8.7 per cent since 2012. Solar and wind energy tripled in the last five years, while solar and wind jobs nearly quadrupled.

http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2014/05/14/4004085.htm

rejected because of the greasy salmon..

 

Researcher claims his paper was rejected because it might help climate sceptics advance their case


LAST UPDATED AT 11:02 ON Fri 16 May 2014

SCIENTISTS deliberately suppressed research that cast doubt on the rate of global warming because it might be used by climate sceptics to advance their arguments, it has been claimed.

Lennart Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading, believes his paper was rejected by Environmental Research Letters, one of the world's top academic journals, because of intolerance of dissenting views on climate science.

The paper, co-authored with four other scientists from America and Sweden, was rejected earlier this year after a reviewer privately wrote that publishing it would be "less than helpful".

The unnamed scientist concluded: "Actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of 'errors' and worse from the climate sceptics media side."

Bengtsson's paper challenged findings from the UN's Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the global average temperature would rise by up to 4.5C if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were allowed to double.

The paper suggested that the climate might be much less sensitive to greenhouse gases and recommended more work be carried out "to reduce the underlying uncertainty".

Following the rejection, Bengtsson said: "The problem we now have in the climate community is that some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of a climate activist."

Bengtsson said he was also forced to step down from the advisory board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a climate sceptic think-tank, after he was subjected to "McCarthy" style pressure from other scientists.

The claims are a stark reminder of events at the University of East Anglia in 2009, dubbed 'Climategate', when scientists were accused of suppressing inconvenient data that did not support global warming predictions, says The Times. They were later cleared, but the IPCC was found to have misrepresented part of their research.

A spokesman for IOP Publishing, which publishes Environmental Research Letters, said that two independent peer-reviews had reported that the paper contained "errors" and "did not provide a significant advancement in the field", therefore failing to meet the journal's required acceptance criteria.



Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/health-science/58562/scientists-suppressed-paper-over-climate-sceptic-argument#ixzz323ZaX1yt
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Blah blah... Actually this is not suppressing of "inconvenient" data. Only rejection of an hypothesis which can be right or wrong and not proven yet unless more experiments and observations are made to provide the correlating data. Presently, with the available data, the new theory "with errors" does not stick, while the work of the IPCC still sticks. 
For example, the month of May in Sydney has so far been about 3 degrees C above the average... As we go towards the end of the month, the next seven days could be as high as 4 degrees C above the "new" average.
Previous monthly temperature this year have been at least 1.5 degrees C above the "new" average (note: global warming ONLY rises on average between 0.015 and 0.03 degrees C per year — BUT COULD ACCELERATE). Meanwhile, we should be expecting a noticeable cooling of the Australian continent as West Antarctica is melting fast, but so far we've only had a few cold spells from time to time, inter-spaced with this unusual warm (beautiful) weather.
My natural indicators (flora and fauna) are also telling me that winter will be mild and short. For example, more swallows are still around. I have also noted a third generation of garden-orb spider going towards "winter", considering that in most year, I see there is only one generation of such spiders. Some butterflies are now on their third generation, while most of their eggs would have stayed dormant till the new "warm" season. It is always iffy to make climatic predictions on such small details, but I believe it's most likely the hot beginning of summer will be following a torrid end to spring after a short winter. I could be wrong. 
Who knows. But we know several things, including that climate is overall sensitive to greenhouse gases. Without water vapour nor CO2 in the atmosphere, we could predict that the average temperature of the atmosphere be below a cool minus 30 degree C average. Should the atmosphere be made of CO2 mostly, we know the temperature would be between 250-300 degrees C average, all around the globe (Venus' atmosphere is around 440 degrees C and is about 90 per cent CO2)
But we also know that the mix CO2-water vapour "enhances" warming, adding to the intrinsic warming ability of CO2, even with CO2 concentation as low as 300 ppms. 
I don't know Lennart Bengtsson nor his work, but if some reviewers spotted some errors in his co-produced paper, then errors are enough to stop publishing. Rather than complain, Lennart Bengtsson should organise new experiments from which his "errors" could be rectified or confirmed as proper assumptions. By then, we might also find that the speed of global warming has been understated.

 

losing ice... twice as much...

 

Antarctica is shedding 160 billion tonnes a year of ice into the ocean, twice the amount of a few years ago, according to new satellite observations. The ice loss is adding to the rising sea levels driven by climate change and even east Antarctica is now losing ice.

The new revelations follows the announcement last week that thecollapse of the western Antarctica ice sheet has already begun and is unstoppable, although it may take many centuries to complete.

Global warming is pushing up sea level by melting the world’s major ice caps and by warming and expanding oceans waters. The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet would eventually cause up to 4 metres (13ft) of sea-level rise, devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world.

The new data, published in journal Geophysical Research Letters, comes from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite, which was launched in 2010.

It shows that the western Antarctica ice sheet is where 87% of the lost ice is being shed, with the east Antarctic and the Antarctic peninsula shedding the rest. The data collected from 2010-2013 was compared to that from 2005-2010.

 

The satellite measures changes in the height of the ice and covers virtually the whole of the frozen continent, far more of than previous altimeter missions.

CryoSat-2 collected five times more data than before in the crucial coastal regions where ice losses are concentrated and found key glaciers were losing many metres in height every year. The Pine Island, Thwaites and Smith Glaciers in west Antarctica were losing between 4m and 8m annually.

“The increased thinning we have detected in west Antarctica is a worrying development,” said Professor Andrew Shepherd, at the University of Leeds and who led the study. “It adds concrete evidence that dramatic changes are underway in this part of our planet.”

Professor David Vaughan, at the British Antarctic Survey and not involved in this research, said: “The increasing contribution of Antarctica to sea-level rise is a global issue, and we need to use every technique available to understand where and how much ice is being lost. Through some very clever technical improvements, [Shepherd’s team] have produced the best maps of Antarctic ice-loss we have ever had. Prediction of the rate of future global sea-level rise must be begin with a thorough understanding of current changes in the ice sheets – this study puts us exactly where we need to be.”

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/19/doubling-of-antarctic-ice-loss-revealed-by-european-satellite

 

See also: 

thin ice in our whisky...

(nearly) all in the family...

of engineering, carbonising, fracking and politics...

climate change...

newscrap in unlimited supply...

warming up...

global warming is real...



 

 

tell your friends and enemies...

 

Sydney’s run of warmth continues with 22 degrees expected on Friday, its 27th consecutive day of at least 20 degrees. The previous record in May was 19 such days, set in 1947, the bureau said.

That stretch, though, may end on Sunday with rain and cooler conditions setting in, said Rob Sharpe, a meteorologist with Weatherzone. Parts of the coast may get as much as 50 millimetres of rain, although the wettest areas may be in the Illawarra to Sydney’s south.

“We’ll see the low 20s for Sydney [for the coming week]," Mr Sharpe said. “But that’s still 3-4 degrees above average for this time of year."


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/australia-basks-in-record-warmth-with-cold-blast-weeks-away-20140530-zrsp4.html#ixzz33BKwQskT

Global warming is real, anthropogenic and fast. in all these measurements, one has to consider the minimum and the shoulders...

 

it's troubling when the dead come back to "let you know"

 

Rising sea levels have washed the remains of at least 26 Japanese second world war soldiers from their graves on a low-lying Pacific archipelago, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands has said.

"There are coffins and dead people being washed away from graves. It's that serious," Tony de Brum told reporters on the sidelines of United Nations climate change talks in Germany.

Putting the blame on climate change, which threatens the existence of the islands, which are only 2 metres (6ft) above sea level at their highest, De Brum said: "Even the dead are affected".

Twenty-six skeletons had been found on Santo Island after high tides battered the archipelago from February to April, he said, adding that more may be found.

"We think they are Japanese soldiers. We had the exhumed skeletons sampled by the US Navy in Pearl Harbour [in Hawaii] and they helped identify where they are from, to assist in the repatriation efforts."

Unexploded bombs and other military equipment had also washed up in recent months.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/06/rising-seas-wash-japanese-war-dead-marshall-islands-graves