German Greenies turn German water supply brown

Which has been very vexing. When water comes out of your faucet brown, you know something bad has happened.  You expect that only in poor countries like India. I have seen it in India.  The German authorities do in fact manage to bleach the water before it goes out to households but that's expensive. So why are German streams running brown anyway?

It's because of the German government's hostility to industry.  High electricity prices and other policies have chased a lot of German industry to saner countries and the remaining industries are heaviliy regulated in order to reduce pollution of all sorts.

And one effect of that has been a reduction in the industrial emissions of nitrogen compounds into the air.  But such componds do not stay in in the air forever.  They gradfually fall out into the soil.  And in the soil they react with a lot of other stuff, binding it so that it stays put.  So in the absence of all those nitrates  various other compounds are set free and get washed into the rivers.  And among those are brown plant wastes, "dissolved organic carbon".

So where to now?  Nowhere to go.  They just have to spend more money on treating the water before it is reticulated.  Extensive chemical treatment of the water supply before people drink it doesn't seem very Green, though, does it? Maybe brown drinking water is the way ahead for Germans! LOL

The abstract below puts what I have just said into more precise scientific terms

An interesting sidelight. Andreas Musolff  has written a book on Hitler which dodges the fact that Hitler's policies were socialist.  How did he get from history into hydrology?


Unexpected release of phosphate and organic carbon to streams linked to declining nitrogen depositions

Andreas Musolff et al.

Abstract

Reductions in emissions have successfully led to a regional decline in atmospheric nitrogen depositions over the past 20 years. By analyzing long-term data from 110 mountainous streams draining into German drinking water reservoirs, nitrate concentrations indeed declined in the majority of catchments. Furthermore, our meta-analysis indicates that the declining nitrate levels are linked to the release of dissolved iron to streams likely due to a reductive dissolution of iron(III) minerals in riparian wetland soils. This dissolution process mobilized adsorbed compounds, such as phosphate, dissolved organic carbon and arsenic, resulting in concentration increases in the streams and higher inputs to receiving drinking water reservoirs. Reductive mobilization was most significant in catchments with stream nitrate concentrations less than 6 mg L−1. Here, nitrate, as a competing electron acceptor, was too low in concentration to inhibit microbial iron(III) reduction. Consequently, observed trends were strongest in forested catchments, where nitrate concentrations were unaffected by agricultural and urban sources and which were therefore sensitive to reductions of atmospheric nitrogen depositions. We conclude that there is strong evidence that the decline in nitrogen deposition toward pre-industrial conditions lowers the redox buffer in riparian soils, destabilizing formerly fixed problematic compounds, and results in serious implications for water quality.

SOURCE





Coral not dead after all

There have been incessant fake-news proclamations from Greenies about the Northern third of Australia's  Great Barrier Reef being all but dead.  Problem: People who go there find some bleached bits but most of it is fine.  Report below from a very Northerly part of the reef says it is in superb condition



RAINE Island, located about 620 kilometres northwest of Cairns, is the largest green turtle nesting ground on planet Earth.

The 32-hectare coral island is in the far north section of the reef, about 620 kilometres north of Cairns on the way to Cape York.

Cairns local Jemma Craig recently dived at the island for the first time, documenting her experience with a series of incredible pictures.

In October last year, an environmental writer wrote a snarky obituary, declaring the World Heritage Site dead at 25 million years of age.

It was premature, but just one month later a team of scientists wrote an article for news.com.au saying that two-thirds of coral in the northern part of the reef have died in the worst-ever bleaching event.

Raine Island, however, appears to have escaped with its life.

“I grew up on the Great Barrier Reef, I have worked and dived here for many years and have ventured to the far corners of the Coral Sea in a quest to see more, but nothing; nothing I have ever seen compares to my dive on the reef surrounding Raine Island,” Ms Craig said.

The 24-year-old works as a host on board the MV Spoilsport with Mike Ball Dive Expeditions, which operates out of Cairns.

She said she found it hard to comprehend this part of the reef looked so good.

“The reef flat is simply covered in beautiful, colourful hard coral, turtles cruising and marine life from one end to the other. I didn’t know where to look.”

SOURCE





Ontario mother's powerful plea to Justin Trudeau on soaring energy bills

And Pretty Boy just passes the buck

An Ontario mother struggling to pay her hydro bill took Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to task in an impassioned plea that captured the plight of many Ontarians overwhelmed by high electricity rates.

In a question-and-answer session in Peterborough, Ont., Kathy Katula said she works 15-hour days and is a single mother to four and grandmother to three in rural Buckhorn, Ont. Trudeau is in the midst of a cross-country tour.

"Something's wrong now, Mr. Trudeau. My heat and hydro now cost me more than my mortgage," she said. "I now not only work 75 hours a week, I stay and work 15 hours a day just so I don't lose my home."

"I make almost $50,000 a year, Mr. Trudeau, and I'm living in energy poverty. Please tell me how you are going to fix that."

Holding her hydro bill, Katula challenged Trudeau on carbon pricing and said her hydro bill is upwards of $1,000 as people in the crowd shouted "shame."

She said at one point in the summer, she went without electricity for five days, despite paying a $680 bill.  "I called and I begged our hydro company. They wouldn't do nothing. Five days, I lived in that heat."

She continued to press Trudeau in the emotional exchange.

"How do you justify to a mother of four children, three grandchildren, physical disabilities and working up to 15 hours a day; how is it justified for you to ask me to pay a carbon tax when I only have a $65 left of my paycheque every two weeks to feed my family?"

"I am asking you to fix our hydro system. I am asking you to fix Canada."

Trudeau said he acknowledged her concern while defending his government's policy on climate change and clarifying that hydro bills fall under provincial jurisdiction.

"We're facing a challenge where we have to change behaviours. It is important that those changes happen in a way that doesn't penalize our most vulnerable; that doesn't make it more difficult for families who are already stretched thin to succeed."

The prime minister noted that carbon pricing revenues would stay with provincial governments to be used at their discretion, adding that the national carbon pricing requirement does not take effect until 2019.

"We are a country, in which anyone with a quarter of your strength, of your drive, should be thriving and focused on how are you going to spoil your grandchildren with all your energy as opposed to how are you going to get through the week or the day," Trudeau told Katula.

SOURCE




Reality-based climate forecasting

Continuing to focus on carbon dioxide as the driving force will just bring more bogus predictions

By Paul Driessen

After diving recently among Key West’s fabled ship-destroying barrier reefs, I immersed myself in exhibits from the Nuestra Senora de Atocha, the fabled Spanish galleon that foundered during a ferocious hurricane in 1622. The Mel Fisher Maritime Museum now houses many of the gold, silver, emeralds, and artifacts that Mel and Deo Fisher’s archeological team recovered after finding the wreck in 1985.

Also featured prominently in the museum is the wreck of a British slave ship, the Henrietta Marie. It sank in a hurricane off Key West in 1700, after leaving 190 Africans in Jamaica, to be sold as slaves.

As Fisher divers excavated the Henrietta wreck, at 40 feet below the sea surface they found – not just leg shackles and other grim artifacts from that horrific era – but charred tree branches, pine cones and other remnants from a forest fire 8,400 years ago! The still resinous smelling fragments demonstrate that this area (like all other coastal regions worldwide) was well above sea level, before the last ice age ended and melting glaciers slowly raised oceans to their current level: 400 feet higher than during the frigid Pleistocene, when an enormous portion of Earth’s seawater was locked up in glaciers.

Climate change has clearly been “real” throughout earth and human history. The question is, exactly how and how much do today’s human activities affect local, regional, or global climate and weather?

Unfortunately, politicized climate change researchers continue to advance claims that complex, powerful, interconnected natural forces have been replaced by manmade fossil fuel emissions, especially carbon dioxide; that any future changes will be catastrophic; and that humanity can control climate and weather by controlling its appetite for oil, gas, coal, and modern living standards.

If you like your climate, you can keep it, they suggest. If you don’t, we can make you a better one.

Not surprisingly, climate chaos scientists who’ve relied on the multi-billion-dollar government gravy train are distraught over the prospect that President Donald Trump will slash their budgets or terminate their CO2-centric research. Desperate to survive, they are replacing the term “climate change” with “global change” or “weather” in grant proposals, and going on offense with op-ed articles and media interviews.

“This is what the coming attack on science could look like,” Penn  State modeler and hockey stick creator Michael Mann lamented in a Washington Post column. “I fear what may happen under Trump. The fate of the planet hangs in the balance.” (Actually, it’s his million-dollar grants that hang in the balance.)

A “skeptic” scientist has warmed to the idea that a major Greenland ice shelf may be shrinking because of climate change, a front-page piece in the Post claimed. Perhaps so. But is it manmade warming? Does it portend planetary cataclysm, even as Greenland’s interior and Antarctica show record ice growth? Or are warm ocean currents weakening an ice shelf that is fragile because it rests on ocean water, not land?

The fundamental problem remains. If it was substandard science and modeling under Obama era terminology, it will be substandard under survivalist jargon. The notion that manmade carbon dioxide now drives climate and weather – and we can predict climate and weather by looking only at plant-fertilizing CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” – is just as absurd now as before.

Their predictions will be as invalid and unscientific as divining future Super Bowl winners by modeling who plays left guard for each team – or World Cup victors by looking at center backs.

As climate realists take the reins at the EPA and other federal and state agencies, the Trump Administration should ensure that tax dollars are not squandered on more alarmist science that is employed to justify locking up more fossil fuels, expanding renewable energy and “carbon capture” schemes, reducing U.S. living standards, and telling poor countries what living standards they will be “permitted” to have.

Reliable forecasts, as far in advance as possible, would clearly benefit humanity. For that to happen, however, research must examine all natural and manmade factors, and not merely toe the pretend-consensus line that carbon dioxide now governs climate change.

That means government grants must not go preferentially to researchers who seek to further CO2-centrism, but rather to those who are committed to a broader scope of solid, dispassionate research that examines both natural and manmade factors. Grant recipients must also agree to engage in robust discussion and debate, to post, explain and defend their data, methodologies, analyses, and conclusions.

They must devote far more attention to improving our understanding of all the forces that drive climate fluctuations, the roles they play, and the complex interactions among them. Important factors include cyclical variations in the sun’s energy and cosmic ray output, winds high in Earth’s atmosphere, and decadal and century-scale circulation changes in the deep oceans, which are very difficult to measure and are not yet well enough understood to predict or be realistically included in climate models.

Another is the anomalous warm water areas that develop from time to time in the Pacific Ocean and then are driven by winds and currents northward into the Arctic, affecting U.S., Canadian, European, and Asian temperatures and precipitation. The process of cloud formation is also important, because clouds help retain planetary warmth, reflect the sun’s heat, and provide cooling precipitation.

Many scientists have tried to inject these factors into climate discussions. However, the highly politicized nature of U.S., IPCC, and global climate change funding, research, regulatory, and treaty-making activities has caused CO2-focused factions to discount, dismiss, or ignore the roles these natural forces play.

The political situation has also meant that most research and models have focused on carbon dioxide and other assumed human contributions to climate change. Politics, insufficient data and inadequate knowledge also cause models to reflect unrealistic physics theories, use overly simplified and inadequate numerical techniques, and fail to account adequately for deep-ocean circulation cycles and the enormity and complexity of natural forces and their constant, intricate interplay in driving climate fluctuations.

Speedier, more powerful computers simply make any “garbage in-garbage out” calculations, analyses, and predictions occur much more quickly – facilitating faster faulty forecasts … and policy recommendations.

The desire to secure research funding from Obama grantor agencies also perpetuated a tendency to use El Niño warming spikes, and cherry-pick the end of cooling cycles as the starting point for trend lines that allegedly “prove” fossil fuels are causing “unprecedented” temperature spikes and planetary calamity.

Finally, the tens of billions of dollars given annually in recent years to “keep it in the ground” anti-fossil fuel campaigners, national and international regulators, and renewable energy companies have given these vested interests enormous incentives to support IPCC/EPA pseudo-science – and vilify and silence climate realists who do not accept “catastrophic manmade climate change” precepts.

The Trump Administration and 115th Congress have a unique opportunity to change these dynamics, and ensure that future research generates useful information, improved understanding of Earth’s complex climate system, and forecasts that are increasingly accurate. In addition to the above, they should:

* Reexamine and reduce (or even eliminate) the role that climate model “projections” (predictions) play in influencing federal policies, laws and regulations – until modeling capabilities are vastly and demonstrably improved, in line with the preceding observations.

* Revise the Clean Air Act to remove the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide – or compel the EPA to reexamine its “endangerment” finding, to reflect the previous bullet, information, and commentary.

* Significantly reduce funding for climate research, the IPCC and the EPA, and science in general. Funding should be more broadly based, not monopolistic, especially when the monopoly is inevitably politicized.

This is not an “attack on science.” It is a reaffirmation of what real science is supposed to be and do.

Via email





It’s the facts the BBC leaves out about climate change that are important

Christopher Booker

Last November, when news that the “climate denier” Donald Trump had been elected president reached the thousands of climate zealots gathered in sunny Marrakech for the UN’s annual dronefest on how to save the planet from global warming, they were reportedly plunged into an almost clinical depression, many bursting into tears.

Last Tuesday, the BBC’s Roger Harrabin picked up on this harrowing scene in a much-trailed Radio 4 documentary, Climate Change: The Trump Card, which was like the BBC’s first major fightback against the horror that was looming up.

The essence of Harrabin’s message was that whatever the dreadful Mr Trump does to reverse President Obama’s world-leading role in keeping global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees, at least we can look for hope to India and China, both now firmly committed to clean, green, “renewable” energy.

His programme began with him enjoying a solar-heated shower in a “backpackers’ camp” on an island off southern India, seguing into India’s prime minister Narendra Modi promising the UN’s mammoth 2015 Paris climate conference “a huge expansion in the power of the sun”.

We heard an interview in Potsdam with one of the high priests of climate alarmism, Hans Schellnhuber, predicting that by 2100 global temperatures could have risen by five or six degrees, with assurances that, whatever Trump does, this will not knock Germany or the EU “off their low carbon course”.

If the US under Trump leaves a “vacuum”, already poised to fill it is China, now the world-leader in producing wind turbines and solar panels. And Harrabin ended back in India, gazing down on “the world’s biggest solar farm”, as “a spectacular monument to India’s energy policy”.

No mention of the fact that, before that Paris conference, China and India formally notified the UN that, to keep their economies growing, they intend between them to build more than 800 new coal-fired power stations; and that by 2030 – as already the world’s first and third largest emitters of CO2 – they plan to double and treble those emissions. Even by the BBC’s standards, as one expert observer put it, this farrago of “deluded groupthink was stunning”.

As always, what was striking was not just what it did say, but how much more it was careful to leave out. How this squares with the BBC’s statutory obligation to report with “accuracy and impartiality” has long been one of the puzzles of the age.  But back in the real world, that dreaded “Trump card” is now fast approaching.

SOURCE

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