One volcano can ruin your climate dogma
Kandahalagalaa is an atoll in the Maldives where drill holes show that sea level rose and fell like a yoyo well before humans started to emit carbon dioxide in the Industrial Revolution. Sea level changes were obviously unrelated to human activities. Drilling showed that the atoll thrived each time sea level rose.
Scientific work nearly 200 years ago showed that as sea level rises, coral atolls grow bigger and the Ellice Islands (now Tuvalu) were used as an example. It was at Funafuti that Professor Sir Edgeworth David’s drill holes in 1896 to 1898 validated the theories of coral atoll growth by Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin.
The work of Lyell, Darwin and Edgeworth David was validated by 1954 to 1958 drilling of the Bikini Atoll and was validated yet again using satellite imagery that showed that most of the 1,100 Indian and Pacific Ocean atolls have increased in size over the last 40 years. Sea level measurements at Tuvalu over the last 30 years show no sea level rise. Drilling, satellite imagery and sea level measurements show that no atoll island nation is being inundated.
Experiments cooking up lava with gases such as water vapour or carbon dioxide at high temperature and pressure show that some common gases lower both the melting and freezing points of lava. The lava type that characterises the Pacific Ring of Fire (andesite) can dissolve a large amount of water vapour and almost no carbon dioxide or other gases. As lava rises, the pressure of the dissolved water increases, steam flashes, expands instantaneously and is suddenly catastrophically released from the lava at a shallow depth. A column of pulverised rock, fine glassy needles of instantly frozen lava (‘ash’) and steam are blasted high into the atmosphere. Such eruptions are common in the Andes, central America, the Rockies, the Japanese island arc (Mt Fuji), Papua New Guinea (Rabaul), Indonesia (Krakatoa) and the Mediterranean (Vesuvius).
At Santorini in Greece, there was a massive eruption in 1,600BC as a result of Africa pushing wet Mediterranean sea-floor sediments deep beneath Europe. The high temperature, high pressure and saturation with water at depth induced melting. Seawater also entered the mass of molten rock beneath Santorini.
The lighter molten rock charged with huge amounts of water in solution started to rise to the surface and rising lava elbowed aside other rocks resulting in earthquakes. Choking sulphurous gas was released. As the lava rose, the weight of overlying rocks became lower. There was a sudden catastrophic expansion and release of steam from the lava resulting in a massive explosive eruption producing an ash cloud that was blasted 25 km into the atmosphere.
Ash particles created internal bleeding of the lungs and people drowned in their own blood, the lungs of people and their animals became lithified, many died from poisoning by sulphurous fumes, tsunamis up to scores of metres high swept across the eastern Mediterranean, crops were covered in a thick layer of volcanic ash and heavy rain triggered by ash particles in the air led to mudflows and flooding.
Some 30 cubic kilometres of Santorini was pulverised into ash which fell as thick layers in and around the Mediterranean and as thin layers on the polar ice caps. The Minoan Empire was destroyed. It was the Santorini eruption that changed the course of Western civilisation leading to the rise of the Mycenæans and Athenians.
After the April 1815 eruption of Tambora (Indonesia), the following year was globally ‘the year without summer’. It was dark, cold and wet. There was a competition between Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley in Geneva to write the scariest horror story commensurate with the appalling weather. In 1816, Mary wrote Frankenstein and Byron wrote Darkness, a poem about depression.
After the Calbuco eruption in Chile on 7 January 1893, Brisbane had a massive rain bomb and the biggest floods ever recorded in February 1893. In 2011, volcanic ash from the Chilean volcano Puyehue-Cordon-Caulle shut Sydney Airport for a week. After another lap of the planet by the ash, the airport was shut again ten days later.
The underwater eruption from the Pacific Ocean volcano in Tonga called Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai occurred on 15 January 2022. Nasa published satellite time-lapse footage showing a column of water rising 50 km to the stratosphere. The volume of water that entered the stratosphere was 10 per cent of all the water in the stratosphere. As a result, Eastern Australia had numerous rain bombs in 2022 and 2023. Elsewhere in the world, there were rain bombs and large snowfalls.
The water and volcanic ash from Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai will remain in the atmosphere for years while it does laps of the planet and eventually falls to Earth. Small sub-aerial eruptions such as Tambora (1815), Krakatoa (1883), Pinatubo (1991), Kasatochi (2008) and Calbuco (2015) cooled the Earth because the ash and water rose to only 25 km in the atmosphere where it reflected light and heat resulting in short-term cooling. By contrast, the massive volume of water from Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai rose to an altitude of 50 km and created a temporary warming effect due to the trapping of heat.
Most andesite volcanoes such as those in the Pacific Ring of Fire pulverise and eject about 30 cubic kilometres of rock. Supervolcanoes eject thousands of cubic kilometres of rock. During the last glaciation, the eruption of Toba (Indonesia) 73,000 years ago blasted 3,000 cubic kilometres of pulverised rock into the atmosphere. There was even more cooling of an icehouse planet, darkness, choking clouds of volcanic ash that took decades to settle, the collapse of plant life (especially in the tropics) and the migration of humans. Around that time three human species became extinct and Homo sapiens was reduced to 4,000 breeding pairs. We very nearly became extinct.
The closest supervolcanoes to Australia are in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and in New Zealand. If the Wallabies are ever to win the Bledisloe Cup again, then a resurgence of a supervolcano in the Taupo Volcanic Zone might do the job. New Zealand will be all black.
Every slight variation in natural events is now blamed on ‘climate change’. All settled, no argument. If the science of climate change is settled, then there is no reason for taxpayers to fund climate research any longer.
Normal geological processes in the oceans that were documented nearly 200 years ago are now evidence for a climate crisis. Monstrous volcanic eruptions that produce climate and weather changes have been well documented since Adam was a boy. Heavy rain with the resultant flooding and snow we are told is evidence of a human-induced climate catastrophe and the possibility of a natural phenomenon is not even considered by the hysterical green-tinged media. Massive wildfires are obviously due to sinful Westerners emitting plant food while arsonists, sparking machines and fallen power lines don’t enter the equation.
If you have sneezing fits or stutter, don’t try to say Kandahalagalaa or Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/09/one-volcano-can-ruin-your-climate-dogma/
****************************************************Stop Blaming the 'Climate Crisis' for Democrat Mismanagement
“I don't think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore,” said President Joe Biden while touring the damage caused by Hurricane Idalia in Florida last weekend. “Just look around,” he urged. “Historic floods. I mean, historic floods. More intense droughts, extreme heat, significant wildfires have caused significant damage,” Biden continued in his attempt to blame natural disasters on the “climate crisis.” Biden's claims might be a politically expedient excuse, but it's just that: an excuse to cover for what is often mismanagement by Democrat leaders.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, rightfully so, rebutted Biden’s claims. “The notion that somehow hurricanes are something new, that’s just false,” he pointed out. “We’ve got to stop politicizing the weather and stop politicizing natural disasters,” he urged of those on the other side of the aisle who use natural disasters to underscore their climate alarmism which naturally turns into attacks on Republican leaders who refuse to enact restrictions on reliable and affordable energy and know it’s a fool’s errand to try spending their way out of the path of severe weather. “We know from history there’s been times when it’s very busy in Florida, late ‘40s, early ‘50s, you had a lot of hits of significant hurricanes,” DeSantis reminded.
But beyond using the “climate crisis” as a bludgeon with which to attack Republicans, Democrats’ use of such buzzwords is also an attempt to cover for Democrat mismanagement of natural resources, utilities, and tools at their disposal.
As we learned in the aftermath of the devastating Maui fires, there were years of warnings about wildfire danger that went ignored or unaddressed. The Wall Street Journal reported that Hawaiian Electric knew since 2019 that it “needed to do far more to prevent its power lines from emitting sparks,” yet that threat was not properly mitigated because, “politically, the focus was on electricity generation.” As summarized by Michael Shellenberger, “what caused the fires was Hawaiian Electric’s failure to clear flammable grasses from around electric wires because its focus, and ratepayer money, was going to renewables.”
That is, it wasn’t a fire caused by a radically changing climate, it was mismanagement caused, at least in part, due to prioritizing the demands of climate alarmists that saw resources used in pursuit of renewable energy instead of safeguarding power transmission infrastructure. In the end, hundreds of people died and even more, many of them children, are still “missing.”
The tragic events in Maui are hardly the first instance of Democrats attempting to use a “climate crisis” to paper over their own failures to manage natural resources.
In California, Governor Gavin Newsom took office in 2019 declaring “everybody has had enough” with wildfires in the Golden State, citing climate change as the culprit but pledging to “fundamentally” change the way California responded to such infernos.
But, just more than two years after taking office, an investigation conducted by the Sacramento National Public Radio affiliate CapRadio found that Newsom had botched the whole plan and failed to deliver on his promises — even going so far as to lie about how much work California had undertaken while cutting wildfire prevention spending.
According to CapRadio’s report on its investigation, “the governor has misrepresented his accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention” and “overstated, by an astounding 690%, the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities. Newsom has claimed that 35 ‘priority projects’ carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres,” CapRadio recounted. “But the state’s own data show the actual number is 11,399.”
Meanwhile, after Newsom promised to do better managing California’s natural resources but failed to do so, cut prevention efforts, and lied about how much he was doing, “4.3 million acres burned” in 2020, “the most in California’s recorded history,” according to CapRadio. “That was more than double the previous record, set in 2018, when the Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise, killing 85 people.”
So after Newsom took office in January 2019 and pledged to better manage forests and focus on wildfire prevention, he proceeded to mismanage the state’s wild lands so dramatically that by 2020 the Golden State saw the most acres burned — ever.
That statistic, of course, was and has been used to show how the “climate crisis” is making conditions worse and triggering record-setting blazes. But why is it blamed on something supposedly out of control while there’s no serious discussion about how Newsom mismanaged — and tried to cover up — the vital work of managing California’s forests and wild lands?
Since then, Newsom has continued to chalk wildfires up to climate change, even though he’s been found to have been negligent in keeping his promise to adequately manage California’s natural resources.
Newsom’s use of climate alarmism is just another ploy to skirt blame or accountability for his failures, and people shouldn’t take Democrat demands for radical climate policies seriously until they’ve proven some ability to do the immediate and tangible things that can prevent fires and slow their spread.
Just as Democrat climate alarmists often foolishly reject expanding nuclear power generation in their demands to “decarbonise” the energy sector, refusing to take logical actions such as active land management render their hooting and hollering unserious at best.
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The US is facing a blackout ‘crisis’ – thanks to green energy
Power grids in the US are currently providing a case study of the risks of a mis-managed energy transition. Prematurely closing coal, gas and nuclear power stations risks blackouts. Who knew?
Well, apparently lots of people.
Back in April, lawmakers wrote to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) saying that “blackouts, brownouts, and energy rationing have become far too common in the past few years. The primary cause of the electricity shortages Americans have experienced in recent history is a lack of generation capacity ... These shortages often happen in the cold of winter or the heat of summer. This is due, in no small part, to the premature retirement of dispatchable generation resources, like coal, nuclear, and natural gas, and the rapid expansion of intermittent resources, like wind and solar, onto the bulk power system.”
The FERC agrees. Appearing before the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee earlier this summer, FERC Commissioner Mark Christie said “the United States is heading for a reliability crisis. I do not use the term ‘crisis’ for melodrama, but because it is an accurate description of what we are facing.”
Christie said that too many coal, natural gas and nuclear power stations are being mothballed too quickly, threatening security of supply. Jim Robb, CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), an agency which enforces grid reliability standards, told the same committee that operating the electric grid “ever closer to the edge” by relying on weather-dependent renewables will likely lead to “more frequent and more serious disruptions.”
In June, the NERC warned that two-thirds of North America was at risk of energy shortfalls in high heat, in its summer reliability report. It found that all 20 assessment areas have adequate power resources to meet normal peak summer demand, but some areas are at elevated risk of supply shortages in the event of “more extreme summer conditions”. Evening solar drop off and a reliance on wind were a common theme across these areas.
“Low wind and high demand periods could result in energy emergencies,” said the report. Similar risks were identified last year and the year before.
Despite these warnings, the US Environmental Protection Agency has issued new power-plant emissions standards that will effectively dismantle baseload coal and gas capacity by 2030, much to the discomfort of grid operators across the country, while utilities have announced plans to retire more than 40 percent of the remaining US coal fleet by 2030. Meanwhile millions of Americans are facing blackout risks right now.
Texas has been hit particularly hard, but states from California to the Canadian border are facing potential power outages as an extended heatwave boosts demand for air-conditioning at a time when wind output is low. Despite large amounts of solar generation in some states, fossil fuels are being relied on to meet demand, but a combination of outages and premature closures means there’s a lot less of that available than in the past.
This should not be a surprise. The US is experiencing a high pressure weather system, characterised by sunny but still weather. In Britain these weather systems in winter pose a problem as they bring cold temperatures and low wind conditions – in the summer they bring heat and low wind conditions. The common theme is: electricity demand peaking at the same time that wind output is low, and the problems this creates are being repeated in the US year after year.
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Hotel giant declares war on plastics in green push
A lot of this makes sense. The little plastic bottles of various things that often come with a hotel room will not be much missed. People would mostly have their own versions of such things
When Accor Pacific boss Sarah Derry hosted a lunch for her top executives in Brisbane this week there was nary a single use plastic item in sight.
The nosh up at the Pullman & Mercure King George Square was to celebrate the hotel and three other Accor properties - Sofitel Brisbane Central, ibis Styles Brisbane Elizabeth
Street and Novotel Brisbane South Bank - receiving coveted sustainable tourism certification from Ecotourism Australia.
The former Townsville girl earlier this year declared war on plastic in a new sustainability push for the group, which included a drastic reduction in plastic use across its properties in Australia including the Softel, Novotel, Ibis and Mercure brands.
Derry says that includes getting rid of the little plastic bottles of shampoo and body lotion offered in hotel rooms, plastic water bottles and numerous other single use plastic items. “We have removed some 43 single use plastic items such as individual toiletries from guest facing areas in over 80 per cent of our hotels,” says Derry.
She says the Ecotourism Australia certification is a rigorous process that evaluates a hotel’s environmental performance, community engagement, and contribution to conservation.
Derry says “sustainability is redefining our business model” with the company enrolling a further 150 hotels in the Pacific into the certification program.
Attending the lunch at the Pullman’s Goldfinch restaurant was Ecotourism Australia chief Elissa Keenan, who says Accor Pacific is leading the industry across Australia and New Zealand with its commitment to sustainability.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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