Inconvenient truth: Sea level rise is decelerating

On Warmist theory, it should be accelerating

A paper published in the Journal of Coastal Research finds that sea level rise around mainland Australia decelerated from 1940 to 2000. According to the latest NOAA sea level budget, global sea levels rose at only 1.1 - 1.3 mm/year from 2005-2012, which is less than half of the rate claimed by the IPCC [3.1 mm/yr] and is equivalent to less than 5 inches per century. Contrary to alarmist claims, sea level rise decelerated over the 20th century, has also decelerated since 2005, and there is no evidence of any human influence on sea levels.

Is There Evidence Yet of Acceleration in Mean Sea Level Rise around Mainland Australia?

P. J. Watson

Abstract

As an island nation with some 85% of the population residing within 50 km of the coast, Australia faces significant threats into the future from sea level rise. Further, with over 710,000 addresses within 3 km of the coast and below 6-m elevation, the implication of a projected global rise in mean sea level of up to 100 cm over the 21st century will have profound economic, social, environmental, and planning consequences. In this context, it is becoming increasingly important to monitor trends emerging from local (regional) records to augment global average measurements and future projections.

The Australasian region has four very long, continuous tide gauge records, at Fremantle (1897), Auckland (1903), Fort Denison (1914), and Newcastle (1925), which are invaluable for considering whether there is evidence that the rise in mean sea level is accelerating over the longer term at these locations in line with various global average sea level time-series reconstructions.

These long records have been converted to relative 20-year moving average water level time series and fitted to second-order polynomial functions to consider trends of acceleration in mean sea level over time. The analysis reveals a consistent trend of weak deceleration at each of these gauge sites throughout Australasia over the period from 1940 to 2000. Short period trends of acceleration in mean sea level after 1990 are evident at each site, although these are not abnormal or higher than other short-term rates measured throughout the historical record.

SOURCE






The New Tin Pot Dictators: Green NGOs

Ben Pile is his usual prolix self on this issue so I present just his opening shots below

It should be clear to everyone by now that environmentalists have no sense of proportion. For instance, on the green view, the claim that ‘climate change is happening’ has been a matter of true or false, rather than a matter of degree. But is this misconception the consequence of green ‘ideology’, or simply a strategy intended to promote it?

A press release from Friends of the Earth on Friday announced:

"Samsung questioned over tin as profits soar:  Commenting on phone manufacture Samsung’s soaring profits revealed today (Friday 25 January 2013), Friends of the Earth’s Head of Campaigns Andrew Pendleton said:

“Samsung’s profits may be soaring, but do they come with a cost? The company has yet to explain whether the tin it uses in its phones is ravaging the tropical forests and coral reefs of Bangka Island, Indonesia.

“Research shows that tin from Banka is almost certainly in Samsung’s products.  “New rules are needed to make all companies disclose their supply chains – starting with a Europe-wide law next year.”

FoE’s research was published last November, in a report called, Mining for smartphones: the true cost of tin [PDF]. On page 20, the report explains FoE’s decision to target Samsung:

Samsung is the top-selling smartphone brand in Europe. It offers a wide range of handsets and as a result has a global reach like no other – in 2011 it sold 95 million smartphones – that’s nearly one in five of all smartphones sold worldwide (19.5 per cent of the global market share). In fact just one model, the Galaxy S, launched in June 2010, and updated Galaxy S2 and S3, has already sold more than 42 million. Samsung Electronics is South Korea’s biggest company and has extended its reach as an Olympic Games 2012 partner and Chelsea football club sponsor.

When Friends of the Earth investigators contacted Samsung Electronics prior to publication to ask if the company sourced tin from Bangka or was aware of the damage tin mining is causing the island’s communities and ecosystems, a Samsung spokesperson neither confirmed nor denied this. In a statement, the company said it took the issue of ethical sourcing of minerals very seriously. “Samsung is committed to upholding the highest standards of corporate responsibility, and we continue to evaluate our sourcing policies to ensure they comply with global standards associated with our industry,” said a spokesperson. “We will monitor the Bangka Island situation to determine if an investigation into whether tin in our supply chain is being sourced from the region is required.”

During Friends of the Earth’s research Samsung was identified as a buyer or user of Indonesian tin via the supply chain of PT Timah.

The problem, according to FoE is the environmental destruction caused by tin mining operations in Indonesia. As this FoE film shows, it’s certainly not a pretty process, and the lot of the workers involved in the production of tin have a pretty lousy time.

Tin is used in the production of mobile phones, chiefly as an ingredient in solder, a substance used to hold electronic components to circuit boards. But to what extent is Samsung responsible for the situation in Indonesia?

Let’s start with the facts. FoE claim that Samsung sold 95 million smartphones last year. That’s a lot of phones. So how much tin is that? Curiously, for it’s emphasis on smartphones, FoE’s report is vague about how much tin is in a smartphone.

A tablet contains between 1 and 3 grammes of ‘tin rich solder’. So let’s assume that a smartphone, which is about half the size and complexity of a tablet, contains a gramme of tin rich solder. So Samsung used 95 million grammes of tin in smartphones in 2011. There are a million grammes in a tonne (1,000 grammes in a kilogramme; 1,000 kg in a tonne). So that’s 95 tonnes of tin, for Samsung’s global smartphone market.

Is that a lot?  No.  According to the US Geological Survey, in 2010, the world produced 277,000 tonnes of tin. On the FoE’s own gallery of images of tin mining in Indonesia, it shows a picture of an operation that produces 50,000 tonnes a year:

More HERE  (See the original for links, graphics etc.)



Is Climate Change Like Gravity?

If climate change is as straightforward a scientific concept as gravity, why does the IPCC continue to produce multi-thousand-page reports?

A few days ago Martin O’Malley, the Governor of Maryland, delivered a speech – the complete text of which was published by The Washington Post.

O’Malley is a lawyer by training. His official biography says he has been involved in Democratic Party politics since he was 23 years old. Near the end of his speech O’Malley said the following:
Climate change is not an ideological issue any more than gravity is. It is physics, pure and simple.

O’Malley isn’t the first person to use the gravity analogy. Last November, the Associated Press reported that physicist Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, an official with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made similar remarks:

[Van Ypersele] said the scientific backing for man-made climate change is now so strong that it can be compared to the consensus behind the principles of gravity.

“It’s a very, very broad consensus. There are a few individuals who don’t believe it, but we are talking about science and not beliefs,” Van Ypersele told AP.

But here’s the problem. Van Ypersele isn’t a dispassionate scientist who can be counted on to tell us the facts and only the facts. At the same time that he’s serving as one of the IPCC’s three vice-chairs (one step down from chairman Rajendra Pachauri on the org chart), Van Ypersele is also an honourary member of that granddaddy of alarmist environmental organizations, the Club of Rome.

The front page of the Club of Rome’s website is currently promoting its latest report, Bankrupting Nature: Denying Our Planetary Boundaries. A headline on that same front page declares: “Enough is Enough. It’s time for a new kind of economy.”

I’ve written previously about affluent, well-connected do-gooders who believe that their purpose in life is to shepherd the rest of us toward a utopian tomorrow. The Club of Rome fits that description.

It insists that the future is “gloomy” because of our “outmoded ideas, values and institutions.” Its members, therefore, have nothing less than a wholesale redesign of human society in mind.

In my view, the Club of Rome is dangerous because the people involved appear to have learned nothing from other, profoundly tragic, attempts to establish new economic and social orders (see the former Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, and Cambodia). They appear entirely unfazed by all the misery and murder that has historically accompanied these sorts of experiments.

But to get back to the gravity analogy. If climate change was no more than “physics, pure and simple” there’d be no need, would there, for a UN body such as the IPCC?

For the past 25 years the IPCC has recruited thousands of scientists to write reports thousands of pages long about what is going on with the climate.

The fact that no similar reports are necessary where gravity is concerned exposes the flawed – and foolish – nature of this analogy.

SOURCE  




Japan to drop warmist pledge

Japan will drop its pledge to the global community to cut greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2020 because of the country’s reduced future reliance on nuclear power, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a government panel Friday.

During a meeting of the panel, which is discussing economic revival measures, Abe stated that he will revise the energy strategy compiled by the previous administration of the Democratic Party of Japan, which aimed to completely phase out atomic energy by the 2030s.

He instructed Environment Minister Nobuteru Ishihara and other members of his Liberal Democratic Party-led Cabinet to alter the DPJ’s target of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other gasses blamed for greenhouse warming by 25 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels.

Domestic utilities have become increasingly reliant on fuel oil and gas for thermal power generation since almost all of the nation’s nuclear reactors remain offline for safety reasons following the March 2011 meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 plant.

Yukio Hatoyama, the DPJ’s first prime minister after the party swept the 2009 general election, announced the 25 percent reduction goal the same year in a speech at the U.N., drawing praise from many countries.

Abe said his government aims to establish the country’s new emission goal prior to a U.N. conference on climate change to be held this November in Poland. However, any lowering of the target could weaken Japan’s influence at the gathering, officials in Tokyo said.

At the panel meeting, Abe also instructed his ministers to address 10 major issues, including the revision of the DPJ-set energy strategy, work to enable stable low-cost energy supply, the promotion of free-trade agreements with other countries and support for Japanese farm exports.

The panel is also examining policies to boost domestic employment, encourage deregulation in growth sectors such as medical and welfare, and promote Japan-made infrastructure abroad.

The new policies will be incorporated into Japan’s new growth strategy slated to be compiled by June. “I hope you will be freed from conventional ideas and will pursue policies in different spheres,” Abe told the gathering.

However, he fell short of making clear Tokyo’s position on whether to join negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a Pacific Rim free-trade initiative fiercely opposed by LDP supporters in the agricultural sector.

SOURCE  




Greenies getting into bed with a fossil fuel industry?

Top solar rep endorses long-term marriage to natural gas

It’s no secret that environmentalists are going through a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to natural gas. Celebrities including Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon, and Yoko Ono have aligned themselves with green groups like the Sierra Club to come out steadfastly against gas because of fracking, the drilling technique that harvests most of it, citing concerns about water and air contamination. Meanwhile others, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Environmental Defense Fund, have boosted fracking as a “bridge” to wean the US off of coal, and usher in more renewables, a process that is already underway.

But a report released this morning makes it clear that the renewables industry sees itself in the latter camp, forming an unexpected alliance with the natural gas industry, since both groups are intent on giving coal the boot. The informal partnership should be a PR boon to the embattled gas industry, which has spent the last several years trying to allay concerns from the public and policymakers by shouting over the anti-fracking fracas.

“Natural gas and renewables complement each other very nicely,” Rhone Resch, CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said this morning at a press conference for the release of Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s 2013 Factbook, an exhaustive analysis of the state of clean energy in America (it’s chock full of interesting charts; we pulled out a couple key ones here). The report, based on a blend of original and existing government research, is unequivocal in placing natural gas in the same “clean energy” boat as renewables, a new arrangement Resch and Dave McCurdy, head of the American Gas Association, agreed they were happy to see.

“I think it can happen: In the next 30 years we’re going to have 50 percent renewables and 50 percent natural gas,” Resch said, referring to the breakdown of US energy generation. Natural gas can fill the gap when renewables go intermittant, he said, ramping up when the wind stops or the sun goes down; meanwhile, renewables, which are growing even faster than natural gas, can pick up the slack left by a waning coal industry.

As the chart below shows, energy from coal and natural gas is still much cheaper than that from renewables (the purple bar is a range; the blue triangle the average cost). Still, this chart doesn’t account for subsidies, which make solar and wind even more competitive. And solar in particular has already made huge strides toward cheapness, the report found, dropping in price by more than half since 2009. Steps toward cost parity put renewables in a stronger position to exert pressure on coal.

But Jenny Chang, a spokesperson for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Natural Gas campaign, says the partnership between renewables and natural gas is more unholy than happy: It distracts, she says, from the basic fact that, as a fossil fuel, natural gas can never be truly “clean.”

“It’s incredibly frustrating and incredibly manipulative” for the gas industry to align itself with renewables, Chang said. “Clean energy and natural gas are not on the same spectrum.”

Natural gas-burning power plants produce half the carbon emissions of coal-burning ones, but some researchers fear that leakage of methane—a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide—from natural gas extraction sites could offset any potential emissions benefits. At this stage, however, given the low price of natural gas, rampant fracking across the country, Obama-era emissions rules, and other factors, natural gas is on the rise and seems on track to stay that way for the forseeable future. As for its potential to form a “bridge” from coal to renewables, recent research suggests that, to hit ambitious carbon goals, the bridge would have to be quite short.

Still, Resch said he wants to encourage policymakers and activists, as renewables gain increasingly solid footing in the US enegy market, to see natural gas as a natural ally.

“I think it’s important to recognize that these industries, although we do compete,” Resch said, “are working together to address some of the most pressing energy needs in the country.”

SOURCE  (See the original for links and graphics)





"Sustainability" is a grab for  for control and power

Comment from Tennessee

Our elected leaders are either complicit, or willfully ignorant of the ongoing assault on your private property rights, your liberty and your children. Our elected servants are drunk with power and some that have been re-elected are now emboldened to continue the march toward seizing every opportunity to take your land and wealth through taxation and annexation, in the name of sustainability.

Have you noticed the words "sustainability" or "sustainable development" popping up in the local media, at your grocery store, at government meetings and even by family members in your own home? If you are paying attention, it is coming home with your children as part of their education. Oh it sounds great! The planner's plan, the city council approves beautiful projects, the so-called leaders of the community are going to create jobs and save the city from a slow death and save the county from over population through grand development schemes. Utopia is here!

These leaders wrap their ideas in nice little packages and use phrases like, "Public/Private partnerships" (which is code for government control of property and business, Communism.) "We are working on drainage improvement projects, and adding more greenways, bike, and pedestrian paths to improve livability in our community" (all of which are forced on us by our government), or "we want to enhance the quality of life for farmers, ranchers, forest mangers, workers and society as a whole," or, "we are working to sustain the economic viability of agriculture in our beautiful rural communities."  Some of them just come right out and admit their intentions, like mayor Jo Ann Graves of Gallatin TN, "We need to get you folks out of your cars and into walk-able communities." From this statement I can surmise she believes we humans are killing the planet and we are bad, bad folks who need to be taught how wrong we are for driving our earth killers.

Really pretty statements, non-threatening, notice the key words in these phrases; livability, quality of life, viability, sustained, sustainable and walk-able.

There is nothing wrong with any of this, if private individuals through private investment are doing it. If these private investors want to build walkable communities and take the risk, then so be it. If it fails, they lose their investment and move on; if it succeeds, then they build more at their own expense and we as citizens can make a choice of free will to live in these communities or not. But, what we have here is a public private partnership in which we are all footing the bill and, once we allow it to happen, the government will just continue to throw money at it, as it fails over and over again, and we will be stuck with the bill.

Sustainable development is nothing more than the re-naming of a failed theory that just won't die in the hearts of progressives. No matter how you look at sustainability, the trail always inevitably leads to one source, global warming.

Even though the radical group of scientists who helped push global warming, then climate change, and now sustainability, have been exposed as frauds, with Al Gore being the most notable face of their deceitful agenda, global warming wacko's just can't accept the facts.

Even the Godfather of Global warming had to admit, before his death, that he was wrong. James Lovelock, the master to apprentice Al Gore and the man who created the "Gaia theory" {in which the earth operates as a single, living organism}, who's work had a profound impact on the development of the now debunked global warming theory, and after observing that global temperatures since the turn of the millennium, have not gone up in the way computer-based climate models predicted, acknowledged, "the problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago." He goes on to say in his interview on MSNBC, "so-called 'sustainable development' -- is meaningless drivel -- we rushed into renewable energy without any thought. Our schemes are largely, hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can't stand windmills at any price." These are his final words, about Global religionists claiming, "The science is settled" on global warming: "One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don't know it."

So, now we have the truth of the fraud perpetuated on us by science, from the man who invented global warming, we can move on right? Nope. For decades the environmental tree hugger wackos have lost battle after battle, trying to convince us that the ice caps will be gone in 5 years and New York will be under ten feet of ocean by the end of the decade every decade. Polar bears will be extinct, but oops! The ice caps still freeze on both ends and polar bears are thriving. Dr. Drikus Gissing, Director of Wildlife Management in Nunavut, Canada says, "the bear population is not in crisis as people believed," He goes on to say, " the media in southern Canada has led people to believe polar bears are endangered. They are not." He went on to add that; "there are about 15,000 polar bears across Canada's Arctic. That's likely the highest population level there has ever been."

The scientific community continues to tell us CO2 is causing the earth to warm when actual evidence is to the contrary. By the way, if you didn't learn this in 5th grade science, when you breathe out, that's CO2. Also trees and plants just love the stuff and use it to create oxygen, which I am sure you know already, it is the stuff we breathe.

Why am I telling you all of this you say? Well, because sustainable development is just the newest evolution of global warming hysteria, and your local governments, right now in your back yard, are carrying it out. Of course, it's not being called global warming or Agenda 21. Because of the recent exposure of this U.N. plan, numbers of local governments have backed out of the groups pushing these utopian projects, but our local, county, and state governments have not stopped implementing the plan.

NGO's (Non-governmental organizations) like Cumberland Region Tomorrow and Power of TN are just two of the groups you must pay attention to. These organizations are made up of your mayors, city councils, county commissioners, city planners, Chambers of Commerce and regional planners, all the way up to the Governor's office and, from there, all the way to the Whitehouse. These organizations are operating as a shadow government, where elected officials and bureaucrats who do not live in your county or city are being given a say in how your county or city is run and developed.  

Sustainable development has nothing to do with preserving the environment; it has everything to do with power and governmental control. Whoever controls land and water resources controls all the wealth and who is wealthy. In America, we hold private property rights up as one of the symbols of why our nation is the greatest power on earth, because the people, not the government, own the majority of property. This is a huge problem for progressives, and they have figured out that if they can convince Americans that we are world citizens, not individual Americans, and individually we are weak, but together as a collective we are strong, we will buy into their communistic philosophy under the guise of environmental, financial, collective patriotism.

In a lot of ways government ownership of all land has been in place for decades. We all say we own our land, but do we? Try not paying your property tax and see what happens. No, they already have us. By us allowing our local and county governments to tax our property in the name of the "children", we are doing nothing more than leasing what we call our property from the government. Like an over bearing landlord, we receive our bill every year and, if not paid, we will be evicted like some squatter.

You will continue to hear the cries of fairness and equality from progressive socialists. You will be called hateful, and it will be said that you just don't understand what we are trying to do for you. You will hear your politicians say, we must come together to accomplish our goals and move our city forward. Watch for the words progress, progressive, and forward.

Do your own research. Look up sustainable development, research www.cumberlandregiontomorrow.org and follow the trail of links that lead right to Federal control of your cities, towns, and counties and, ultimately, global control through the U.N.Council. This plan may not be complete in our lifetime, but we must fight it now in the beginning stages so our children will not have to.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

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