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Midsummer madness

By Michael Kile - posted Thursday, 23 February 2017


It must be the weather. As heatwaves and blackouts produce a perfect storm on Capitol Hill, the lamentation of climate alarmists becomes ever shriller. An anxious chorus of atmospheric Jeremiahs and renewable energy (RE) capitalists are more determined than ever to spin every meteorological "event" as a harbinger of doom. With apocalyptic angst again reaching dangerous levels, medical experts expect more cases of "climate-fatigue".

Expect more rhetoric about "energy security" too, as the bi-partisan RE public policy experiment continues to cannibalise itself; increasing retail prices, penalising "liable entities" (energy retailers), driving coal-fired power generators out of the market and destabilising grids in the process. Yet any roll-back or termination seems unlikely, especially if a legal liability time-bomb is lurking somewhere in the RE architecture.

Midsummer madness:foolish or reckless behaviour, considered to be at its height at midsummer; acronym: MM. Includes (i) prognosticating wildly about complex natural systems in a state of constant change, such as a planet's climate, and believing one's pseudo-predictions; (ii) legally requiring an entity to acquire in the future something that does not exist in the present, such as a specific amount of renewable energy; (iii) using public funds to try to ensure its existence by a specific date, whatever the cost; and (iv) ignoring compelling evidence undermining the legitimacy of the whole exercise. (Summer is the period from 21/22 December to 20/21 March, based on the astronomical calendar.)

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To kick off the MM season, Canberra recently hosted a four-day conference: "Australasian weather, climate and oceans: past, present and future". The mood was not cheerful. (See Joanne Nova here.)

Our "best climate brains" are "fed up, sad and frustrated, as extreme weather becomes the new norm," reported weatherzone's Ridley Stuart.

Dr Andrew Glikson: "There's definitely what you would call 'climate fatigue' on the part of scientists. There's a fatigue when it comes to arguing in public. It's definitely a concern. There are people who don't think in scientific terms and don't want to accept the basic laws of nature, or have some vested interest. Yet it just hits you what we're doing to our planet."

Another attendee with a "heavy heart" was ANU climate scientist, Professor Will Steffen. In the last talk of the conference he stole much thunder by launching the Anthropocene Equation. A brave attempt to quantify the unquantifiable, this intriguing construct was soon swallowed whole by the media.

The World Today's Eleanor Hall assured listeners the "new mathematical formula" showed humans are driving global warming 170 times faster than natural forces. Derived by scientists in Australia and Sweden, the AE apparently "assesses the impact of human activity on the climate, and compares it to events such as volcanic eruptions and changes to the planet's orbit."

A seven-fold increase in global human biomass in the past two centuries - to over seven billion people today – clearly has affected local and regional environments. It seems perversely anthropocentric, however, to put such a precise number on it. Can one quantify nebulous concepts? Here's how it's done.

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Will Steffen: We have estimates of how temperature has shifted through the Holocene….And climate was shifting very, very slightly to a cooler state at about one hundredth of a degree per century. But since 1970, temperature has been rising at a rate of about 1.7 degrees per century, and when you compare those two, since the 1970s, the climate has been changing at a rate 170 times faster than that long-term background rate.

Dr Walter Starck, a distinguished marine scientist and frequent contributor to Quadrant, has a different perspective.

That this kind of wild speculation dressed up in pseudo-scientific sophistry can be authored by persons widely deemed to be leading experts, be approved by peer review, published in a respected academic journal and broadly accepted as serious science would seem to be surreal nonsense were it not in fact actually happening. Even more bizarre is the fact that while polls indicate that a majority of the public now consider the threat of catastrophic climate change to be untrue or exaggerated, most politicians appear to remain committed to engaging in some kind of hugely expensive measures to "do something about" this phantasmagorical danger.

Summer Down Under also has attracted two high-profile US climate worriers. Hear the collective sigh of relief from paid-up members of the Canberra Carbon Cargo Cult Club (CCCCC) and folk down at the Clean Energy Regulator and Climate Change Authority.

Mr Bob Inglis, a lawyer and former Republican congressman from South Carolina, is one of them. Described as a devout Christian by The New Daily's Quentin Dempster (here), he "instinctively rejected Al Gore's prognosis about catastrophic climate change until one of his five children suggested he clean up his act."

Another epiphany came on visiting Antarctica with a congressional committee. The "increasingly infectious carbon dioxide bubbles from the past two centuries" he saw in ice cores were a revelation, but increasing sea ice around the continent left him cold.

Mr Inglis now feels all so-called "extreme weather events" are a consequence of escalating concentrations of the gas. As a believer in God, one has a "responsibility to nurture all life on the planet, and not threaten its survival."

Hence Mr Inglis has established republicen.org to promote a cumulative carbon [dioxide] tax in the USA, starting at US$40 a tonne. Several veteran Republicans from the Climate Leadership Council reportedly have joined up, including James Baker, Henry Paulson, George Shultz, Marty Feldstein and Greg Mankiw.

Mr Inglis addressed the National Press club on 22 February. Perhaps there was a question on recent public comments by US Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito. He defended carbon dioxide in a recentkeynote speech honouring Sir Winston Churchill (here). How could an invisible trace gas we exhale be a "pollutant"?

The other visitor was Michael Mann, the professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University whoseso-called hockey stick graph landed him in hot water a few years ago.

From Tina Perinotto's breathless account for The Fifth Estate (here, also see here) on 9 February, "Finding hope in a time of madness," one could be forgiven for thinking the Messiah himself had graced our shores, rather than the inspiration of Mark Steyn's compilation, A Disgrace to the Profession.

Tina Perinotto: Mann himself was stunning. Humble, quietly spoken, reserved, like the really superior minds among us are, and also mindful not to venture publicly into too many political no-fly zones, lest he provides more targets for those who lie in wait to down even more respect for science with their ballistic missiles.

If Mr Inglis has God on his side, Professor Mann had the weather on his during the workshop, organised by Professor Christopher Wright, University of Sydney Business School, and the Sydney Environment Institute.

Tina Perinotto: One of the world's most respected climate scientists who, Mann was the star attraction. The tour came in the two weeks since Donald Trump took power and promised to destroy American leadership in climate action. Poignantly, as if to underscore what's at stake, it was also amidst the increasingly vile weather punishing the country.

It was mostly bad news. But there is "a kind of solace and strength" in solidarity. Lesley Head was there to deal with the emotional fallout. "We don't always have to be optimistic," she said. "There is value in acknowledging grief, for it has its own work to do."

"Lesley has a point," confided Perinotto. "The death spiral of the planet has started and no one yet knows how to bring it back. In addition, we have amongst us the enemy who are trying to actively stop us taking action."

But one person might have the answer. In his book, The Madhouse Effect, Professor Mann offers a solution that might save the day and planet - a "giant sucking machine" (Chapter 7, page 126).

Michael Mann: If, however, after doing everything possible to reduce our carbon emissions, we still find ourselves in need of a stop-gap scheme to avert catastrophic climate change, carbon-sucking artificial trees may be the safest and most efficacious of all the available geoengineering schemes out there.

Wonders never cease in the climate space. The determination of climate modellers to get reality to dance to their tune knows no bounds. Consider, for example, a paperpublished in Nature this month: "Regional cooling caused recent New Zealand glacier advances in a period of global warming."

At least 58 NZ glaciers advanced between 1983 and 2008. While "unusual" on a global scale, the authors claim it is "consistent with a climate system being modified by humans."

While their reassessment "may seem to be a surprising result in light of the protracted [glacier] advances", it nevertheless "confirms that New Zealand glacier mass balance was affected by anthropogenic forcing since 1980."

How can one ever falsify a theory when the orthodoxy seems determined to describe examples of (regional) cooling as "consistent with" (global) warming? As one blogger commented:

NZ glaciers, South Island, are gaining ice mass during the "hottest evaah period since records began. The MSM/activist hyperbole is utterly boundless and completely shameless. Hypocrisy is so deeply embedded that I'm of the view that the swamp cannot be drained. (ianl, February 16, 2017 at 1:52 pm)

One person who got it right this summer was not in the nation's capital, or tuning a clunky climate model somewhere, but in the Home of the Big Rocket.

"There's nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about Mother Nature," the Mayor of Moree Plains, Katrina Humphries, cheerfully informed ABC Radio's Thomas Oriti (here), as her shire struggled through a 40+C heatwave. "She rules the world."

Meanwhile, Father Time is turning the nation's RE dream into a nightmare. To meet the legislated bi-partisan magic-number target of 23 per cent, the amount of available RE must be increased by 50 per cent in three years.

If not, energy retailers will be required by law to pay a shortfall charge of $65 per megawatt hour for not fulfilling their obligations, thereby forcing up consumer prices. Indeed, some are already paying the penalty because they are unable or unwilling to source more RE.

Hence the scramble to ensure sufficient RE is available "to ensure energy stability". Do companies forced to pay the shortfall charge mentioned above solely due to lack of supply have any legal recourse to the Commonwealth, given it has created this new class of RE property rights?

The Federal Energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg, mentioned last weekend (here) changing existing regulations to permit the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to fund construction of new - rebadged RE - high-efficiency, low-emission coal-fired power plants – presumably instead of more windmills.

We're going to look at all our options because of the challenges that we face, namely to ensure energy security [and] energy affordability, as we transition to a low-emissions future. We're looking at all our options because we're intent on stabilising the system. Right now we need more baseload power.

Full speed ahead, then, to the promised land of "climate stability" – or bust.

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About the Author

Michael Kile is author of No Room at Nature's Mighty Feast: Reflections on the Growth of Humankind. He has an MSc degree from Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London and a Diploma from the College. He also has a BSc (Hons) degree in geology and geophysics from the University of Tasmania and a BA from the University of Western Australia. He is co-author of a recent paper on ancient Mesoamerica, Re-interpreting Codex Cihuacoatl: New Evidence for Climate Change Mitigation by Human Sacrifice, and author of The Aztec solution to climate change.

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