Friday, March 18, 2022


Eco-grief a burden for some

These credulous people deserve little sympathy. Instead of wailing about a theoretical future they would a do lot more good agitating for measures that might make a real environmental difference -- such as agitating for more preventive measures against forest fires -- such as regular off-season back- burning

And I am always delighted to hear that the fears and grief of such people deter them from having children. It helps to improve the gene pool as far as I can see


The planet has heated by 1.1 degrees and Australia’s land mass has warmed by an average of 1.4 degrees since 1910, according to the CSIRO.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on climate change last year issued a “code red for humanity”. The group’s most recent report on March 1 said climate change will cost Australia’s economy hundreds of billions of dollars in coming decades.

Various terms have been coined to describe the psychological distress which accompanies climate change. There’s climate anxiety and eco-anxiety, as well as solastalgia (from the Latin “solacium” for comfort and the Greek root “-algia” for pain, coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to describe a “homesickness you have when you are still at home”).

Although its use dates back to the 1940s, perhaps the most apt term for the modern state of affairs is “eco-grief”.

“That’s the grief that people are feeling as we watch our planet die around us,” explains Dr Kate Wylie, chair of the Royal Australian College of GPs’ climate and environmental medicine group.

Wylie says GPs are seeing an increase in people of all ages presenting with psychological distress they attribute to concern for the climate.

“One of the interesting things about it is not really an anxiety disorder: it’s an extremely rational response. It makes sense to be sad,” Wylie says.

In its position statement on climate change, the Australian Psychological Society says it believes the phenomenon “involves serious and irreversible harm to the environment and to human health and psychological wellbeing”.

Concern for the climate becomes climate anxiety when it interrupts a person’s life.

The climate crisis has led some young people to reconsider what their futures should look like, including whether they should bring children into the world, Professor Cavenett says.

A 2019 survey of about 1600 young people aged 14 to 23 found 82 per cent believed climate change would “diminish their quality of life” and 80 per cent reported being “somewhat or very anxious” about climate change.

Macheon Smeaton, a 24-year-old university student from Sydney’s inner west, says he “struggles to imagine” what the world will look like when he is 50.

“I have two nieces and I’m already thinking about their future and how difficult parts of their future will be because of what’s already set in motion,” he says.

Asked what form the mental stress he experiences from climate change takes, Smeaton says it is more sadness for himself but anxiety for his nieces.

“I guess getting involved in activism, whether or not we are actually making a huge difference, does help,” he says.

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Weapon of self-destruction: Beware the folly of net zero

Putin’s criminal aggression demonstrates that all net zero emissions can ever achieve is to advance the interests of the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran Axis.

The war has exposed the foolishness of American, EU and British politicians in making their countries dependent on Russia for fossil-based energy. The mainstream media should now admit Donald Trump’s wisdom in making America energy independent and in blocking the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. They should also concede that they were at best naive and at worst complicit in giving such ridiculous credence to the Democrats’ and Mrs Clinton’s fabrication about Trump’s alleged collusion with Putin.

Politicians and big-business executives by now must surely realise that the net zero emissions exercise is not only pointless, it requires the West to commit suicide.

Along with many others, Communist China will never significantly reduce her emissions. And with Boris Johnson now being realistic and talking about a ‘climate change pass’, it is surprising that more politicians are not expressing reservations about net zero.

So far, politicians are acting as if nothing relevant has happened in the Ukraine.

They are still resorting to their favourite device to stop discussion, whether it be about the Wuhan virus or global warming. This is to precede some totally unacceptable conclusion with the phrase ‘the modelling says…’. With that, press and people are expected to react as Ancient Greeks did to the Oracle of Delphi.

Such modelling involves computer programs that purport to produce mathematical simulations of whatever is being discussed such as the climate system. This is impossible. As Professor George Box, ‘one of the great statistical minds of the 20th century’ and ‘the Grand Old Man of Anglo-American statistics’ famously said of models, all of them are wrong, but some are useful.

And not only are IPCC models wrong. Professor Steven E. Koonin, who in 1985 wrote one of the first textbooks on computer modelling, reveals in his recent book, Unsettled, that IPCC modelling does not involve, as you might hope, the careful selection of the model which on past performance has been shown to be most correct.

Rather, IPCC modelling is no more than the average of models which, he says, ‘disagree wildly with each other’. The simulated global surface temperature among these models varies by about three degrees celsius, three times greater than the observed value of twentieth century warming they claim to describe and explain. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that this is only to avoid damaging public debates among modellers.

In the meantime, adherents of net zero emissions have a convenient distraction from the war in the latest of our ‘droughts and flooding rains’, each one of which is now officially described as an ‘extreme weather event’. This is to suggest that this is not what it is, a normal occurrence. This also hides the fact that the task of the politicians was once accepted to be not one of elimination, which is impossible. Their task was mitigation associated with water harvesting which was being achieved in Australia until a disaster in public administration which occurred forty years ago. Mitigation and harvesting have been well achieved elswhere, for example, in the Netherlands, Singapore, Israel and surprisingly Libya.

The term ‘extreme weather event’ is yet another example of the introduction of Newspeak, predicted by George Orwell in his novel, 1984. Newspeak is a language with a restricted vocabulary introduced to narrow the range of thought.

Another example is when politicians and business executives talk of the form of electricity they are eliminating as ‘dispatchable’ electricity. This is cheap and reliable electricity available 24/7. It is not difficult to see why they want to disguise this as dispatchable. The surprising thing is that the mainstream media go along with this fraud.

They even show film and photographs of steam emitted from coal-fired power stations knowing that this will be seen by some as CO2 emissions which are, of course, invisible. Whenever you hear the other term used, ‘renewable’ electricity, know that this means electricity which is unreliable, must be heavily subsidised and where the means for making this have been cornered by the Chinese communists who are laughing all the way to the bank while they use our coal for their electricity. And whenever you hear any of these terms, know one thing. You are being deceived for the purpose of supporting a policy which will only benefit the dictators and especially Xi Jinping and the CCP.

Unsurprisingly, the recent floods in New South Wales and Queensland have been blamed on climate change. Politicians have chosen this to disguise the fact that they have abandoned their duty to their constituents to mitigate the effect of floods. This occurred after that duty was suppressed by the Hawke government working with activist judges who completely emasculated the constitutional protection of farmers’ access to water. This is discussed in detail by Alan Jones in the 2018 Neville Bonner Oration ‘Drought-Proofing the Nation’.

Predictably, we are told that we are living through a ‘one-in-a-100 (or 500 or 1,000) year flood’. But as hydro-climatologist and former professor of environmental engineering, Professor Stewart Franks, explained to Luke Grant on 2GB, to get an accurate estimate of the significance of such an event, you would need many samples, not just one. And as Dr Jennifer Marohasy points out, Australia’s climate records have been subjected to industrial-scale remodelling by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

The people will have an opportunity to make a judgement on all this in coming elections. Common sense surely is not to elect those who support net zero emissions, or if there is no choice, support those less attached to that doctrine.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/03/weapon-of-self-destruction/ ?

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The green fairy-tale is over

Even the green cheer squad in the bureaucracy and the media can sense the change. The sudden end was signalled by rolling columns of Russian tanks, quickly followed by surging prices for oil, gas, coal, wheat, and barley.

For decades, one-worlders and greedy industrialists have sung the green songs – lauding wind/solar energy, worshipping hydrogen, and condemning coal, oil, gas, and nuclear. Their doomsday chorus was taken up by tweeting teenagers and trendy adults in the green leafy suburbs – most of them supported in soft-chair jobs in media, bureaucracy and big woke corporations.

John Kerry (a rich climate-obsessed American aristocrat) worries that the Ukraine war ‘could have a profound negative impact on the climate’. He is more concerned about beneficial emissions of life-supporting CO2 than about lethal bullets, missiles, and starvation.

Russia, China, and India have focussed on developing and using their best energy resources, but Australia (following the Pied Pipers of Europe) has a bi-partisan policy to keep spreading the climate virus and subsidising more expensive green toys imported from China.

But, at long last, sanity is surfacing – Nigel Farage (the UK Brexiteer) has rung the full-time bell on climate alarmism with his new slogan against Net Zero madness – ‘Vote Power not Poverty’.

Just one late snowstorm in Berlin, a food riot in Cairo, or a blackout in New York will start the green rout.

The world is becoming a cold, hungry, and dangerous place. Food is not produced in green forests, electricity is not generated in big batteries, green hydrogen is a net consumer of energy, and we will not fight the next war with battery-powered tanks, wind-powered frigates, or an air force burning bio-fuels.

Just two years ago, Biden promised: ‘We are going to get rid of fossil fuels.’

It’s time to drag green dreamers and climate alarmists into the real world where food, fuels, metals, electricity, and defensive weapons are produced. This must start by cleaning the green horse manure from the ‘Net Zero’ stables.

Putin’s tanks and missiles have started this process. Europeans now face the truth that coal, oil, nuclear, and gas provide most of the power for their homes, factories, industry, transportation, and agriculture. Without them, big cities die.

We need more Hydrocarbon Power, more Nuclear Power, and less Un-reliables.

The world has changed. We can no longer afford ‘Net Negative Energy’ or ‘Building Back Worse’.

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Energy reliability is everything

A recent Wall Street Journal article, The Power Struggle, raised the importance of grid reliability, but claimed that electric grid failures were caused by climate change.

The claim that climate risk is undermining grid reliability is an illusion. The WSJ article correctly diagnosed the danger of blackouts, but incorrectly determined that the cause was climate change.

It is their proposed cure, i.e.,more wind, solar and batteries for storage, that is causing the problem.

As usual, some of their assumptions are wrong.

For example, the WSJ article said:

“Wind and solar technologies have become increasingly cost-competitive and now rival coal, nuclear and, in some places, gas-fired plants.”
And:

“Unlike electric systems in Europe, distribution and transmission lines in the U.S. were typically built overhead instead of buried underground, which makes them more vulnerable to weather.”
And:

”Wind and solar farms, whose output depends on weather and time of day, have become some of the most substantial sources of power in the U.S., second only to natural gas.”
Here are some facts:

Wind and solar are not less costly than existing natural gas combined cycle (NGCC), coal-fired or nuclear power plants.

They are also not less costly than new NGCC power plants. And they are, without question, far more costly when the cost of batteries, needed to backup up wind and solar, are included in the cost of generating and distributing electricity.

Transmission lines in Europe are above ground except for a few DC transmission lines, mostly used to span waterways, just as in the US. The US has many more suburbs which resulted in distribution lines being built above ground, but distribution lines in new developments, since the 1960s, have largely been built underground.

I place the time as the 1960s because I was a manager at the plant making distribution transformers when we began making pad-mounted transformers used for underground distribution. Subsequently, in the 1990s, while living in Reston, I happened across one of the compact pad-mounted transformers we had shipped to the Reston developer, Bob Simon, in 1963.

Wind and solar are not a substantial “source of power" generated by all power plants serving the grid. Together, wind and solar only provided 10.6% of the electricity in 2020.
Rather than solving problems, wind and solar are creating problems and increasing costs.

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

” Now let’s see how long it takes Joe Biden to recognize that the Ukraine war has reset energy politics and that his climate agenda risks dooming his party this fall.”

If it’s Obama running the White House, it all makes sense. Only a community organizer could screw everything up so efficiently,