1: Human-polar bear conflicts: Stirling 1974 vs. Amstrup 2013; 2: COP19 – Now The Fifth Successive UNFCCC Failure Is Complete; 3: Three Super Typhoons Hit Philippines In Quick Succession In 1970; 4:Code Blue in the Greenhouse; 5: From sunset to new dawn; 6: Internal Variability May Have Driven Arctic Climate Change; 7: Sea level rise slowed from 2004 – Deceleration, not acceleration as CO2 rises.; 8: Shock News : The Ocean Is Not Getting Acidified; 9: Australia – you beaut.; 10: Fossil fuels now beat wind and solar on environmental as well as economic grounds; Please remember to read the comments, as the information (and the links) contained in them often put the main article into context..
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Human-polar bear conflicts: Stirling 1974 vs. Amstrup 2013
Posted on November 17, 2013 by polar bear science
What a difference a few decades makes to attitudes about human-polar bear conflicts:
Ian Stirling, 1974:
“Dr. Stirling felt that complete cessation of hunting, such as exists in Norway, may increase bear-man conflicts. Dr. Reimers replied that the careful harvesting of polar bears was probably desirable, but the total ban now in effect was largely an emotional and political decision rather than a biological one. Last year four bears were killed in self-defense.”
(1974 PBSG meeting “Norway – progress reported by [Thor] Larsen”; Anonymous 1976:11).
Stephen Amstrup, 2013:
“We have predicted in no uncertain times [sic – terms?] that as bears become hungrier as the sea ice absence period is longer, more and more of these animals are going to be venturing into communities, venturing into villages, raiding food caches, getting into garbage, and even attacking people. So we predict these kinds of events are going to be more frequent and more severe because of climate change.”
(The Guardian, November 4, 2013). – Click here to read the full article
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COP19 – Now The Fifth Successive UNFCCC Failure Is Complete
Posted on November 17, 2013 by Tory Aardvark
That’s 5 UNFCCC COP failures in a row, an unprecedented record of failure, each Conference of the Parties has disintegrated faster than the COP that preceded it, with COP19 holding the current record.
The was never any doubt, from the outset that COP19 was going to be the biggest failure since records began, what has been surprising is the speed of that collapse, COP19 was effectively dead before it had begun.
It has just taken 5 days for COP19 to realize it was dead and hit the floor.
The make or break issue for COP19 was “loss and damage“, wealth redistribution to us regular folks and that great Green Socialist Barack Obama made sure that loss and damage was deader than Osama Bin Laden, before COP19 even started. – Click here to read the full article
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Three Super Typhoons Hit Philippines In Quick Succession In 1970
Posted on November 17, 2013 by Paul Homewood
In October 1970, the Philippines was hit by one of the strongest typhoons on record, Typhoon Sening/Joan, which brought sustained winds of 172 mph. Remarkably, a second super typhoon hit the country within a week, and yet another the following month. These have become known as the famous triplet of super typhoons. – Click here to read the full article
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Code Blue in the Greenhouse
Posted on November 17, 2013 by berniel
In Australia and the USA today the politics of global warming falls fairly predictably across the right/left spectrum. Upon ascending to power in September, Tony Abbott could hardly wait to start abolishing a bunch of climate change qangos. Even before parliament had convened for the first time, the new conservative Australian government had launched their plan for rolling back Labor’s carbon tax and they had also sent a strong message of skepticism into the latest round of UN treaty negotiation. This is all reminiscent of 2001, when George W Bush could not wait to announce that he was rolling back the excesses of Clinton-Gore. – Click here to read the full article
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From sunset to new dawn
Posted on November 16, 2013 by The Economist
Capitalists, not just greens, are now questioning how significant the benefits of shale gas and oil will be for America. The new sceptics are missing the big picture
IN A new book, “The Frackers”, Gregory Zuckerman says of the late George Mitchell, a pioneer of the technique of hydraulic fracturing to tap “unconventional” reserves of oil and gas, that “his impact eventually might even approach that of Henry Ford and Alexander Graham Bell.” Yet of late doubters have been making themselves heard too. In October Peter Voser said that one of his biggest regrets as boss of Shell is the $24 billion his firm has invested in North America’s shale beds. This summer, the firm took a big writedown on this investment and slashed its production targets. Also last month BHP Billiton, which spent around $20 billion in 2011 in a bet on shale, said it would auction half of its oil and gas acreage in Texas and New Mexico.
It is not just the biggest energy companies that have turned sceptical on shale. More than a dozen chief executives of smaller firms specialising in unconventional gas and oil have lost their jobs this year, as the firms’ troubles have made them the targets of activist investors. – Click here to read the full article
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Internal Variability May Have Driven Arctic Climate Change
Posted on October 30, 2013 by reportingclimatescience
Strong evidence from ice core oxygen isotope analysis suggests that significant climate change in the Arctic over the last 1,000 years has been due to internal variability. This may have implications for the suggested causal link between human-driven global warming and recent changes in the Arctic, indicating that a far more complex set of relationships are at work; and that significant regional climate change is a feature of the Arctic. – Click here to read the full article
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Sea level rise slowed from 2004 – Deceleration, not acceleration as CO2 rises.
Posted on November 15th, 2013 by Joanne Nova
A new paper shows that sea levels rose faster in the ten years from 1993-2003 than they have since. Sea levels are still rising but the rate has slowed since 2004. This does not suggest that the missing energy from the atmosphere has snuck into the ocean, but rather that the oceans and the atmosphere were both warming faster in the 1990′s, then as coal power ramped up in China and billions of tons of CO2 was released, both the atmosphere and the ocean did not gain more energy per year, but less. That message again — something else appears to be the main driver the climate, not CO2.
Their highlights include:
- The global mean sea level started decelerated rising since 2004.
- Deceleration is due to slowdown of ocean thermal expansion during last decade.
- Recent ENSO events introduce large uncertainty of long-term trend estimation.
– Click here to read the full article
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Shock News : The Ocean Is Not Getting Acidified
Posted on November 15, 2013 by CACA
The term ‘Ocean Acidification’ is not a scientific term. It is a term used to scare and frighten. The correct scientific term is ‘less alkaline’.
IPCC and alarmist claims that ’ocean acidification’, causing harm to corals due to increased human CO² concentrations in the ocean, are completely unsubstantiated by empirical evidence and peer-reviewed science. – Click here to read the full article
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Australia – you beaut.
Posted on November 15, 2013 by Pointman
We have lived in a globalised society for a lot longer than that relatively recently coined phrase might suggest. Because we’ve greater and easier access to foreign news, and even if we don’t take advantage of that, more foreign news is still reported on by domestic outlets, but usually through the prism of a local worldview.
By and large, this new global information age is a good thing but I think it comes with some downsides. Possibly the most obvious is that in a certain sense, it’s a global disinformation age. The line between reportage and pure opinion is too often blurred and this combined with a supposed short attention span of the internet reader, leads to ridiculously short and simplified articles on complex issues. All too often definitive and authoritive statements are made which have absolutely no provenance, and the sad thing is that it’s rarely noticed.
The worst problem is information overload – there’s simply too much of it and teasing out a useful signal from the background noise can be challenging. I once knew this guy who was a RIO (Radio Intercept Officer) on a MacDonnell Douglas F4 Phantom. He spent a lot of time in the rear seat of one as it made occasional hops into places like Hai Pong harbour with a lot of people trying very hard to kill him while he was visiting. He told me something interesting. – Click here to read the full article
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Fossil fuels now beat wind and solar on environmental as well as economic grounds
Posted on November 14, 2013 by Lawrence Solomon
When governments try to impose large-scale renewable technologies, they lay waste to nature
Non-renewable energy is sustainable; renewable energy is not, not even close, not by any meaningful yardstick, not in our lifetime or in that of our children. Renewables cannot passably meet any of the important needs claimed by their champions, whether economic or environmental. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars governments have spent over the decades in aid of kick-starting a large-scale renewables industry, wind and solar complexes are generally incapable of helping humanity progress today or in the foreseeable future. Fossil fuels, in contrast, have gone from success to success for several centuries now, with no end in sight.
Prior to the industrial revolution of the 1700s, when the world depended almost exclusively on renewable energy, poverty and subsistence was the rule. The rise of mass affluence only came when highly concentrated energy – in the form of fossil fuels — made sustainable progress possible, both material and social. Lifespans improved along with living conditions and eventually the environment did too, as fossil fuels curtailed the denuding of forested lands to obtain charcoal for industry and wood fuel for heating. – Click here to read the full article
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