The Prince of Wales has warned global leaders they have 18 critical months to solve climate change and restore the balance of nature, ensuring the survival of the human race

The Prince has given warnings before that did not work out. When the day of doom arrived, nothing happened, which is what ALWAYS happens with doom prophecies.  He lacks even basic prudence

The Prince, addressing foreign ministers from around the Commonwealth, said they were "uniquely positioned" to lead the world by example, urging them to match ambition with “the practical action that is required”.

Speaking as the future head of the Commonwealth, a position which was confirmed during a convention in London last year, he emphasised that the next 18 months would see "critical meetings that will collectively determine the global agenda for the coming decade".

The leaders of Commonwealth countries will gather next year in Rwanda for a week-long summit, at which they will discuss the "unparalleled challenges caused by rapid climate change and biodiversity loss".

In a speech during a reception at Clarence House, the Prince said: “Ladies and gentlemen, I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival.

“Next year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, therefore, could not be more important and I can only say how much I look forward, I hope, to seeing you and your leaders in Kigali so that we will succeed in raising our level of ambition, while matching it with the practical action that is required.

“I truly believe that the Commonwealth is uniquely positioned to join forces and lead the world by example.

“And your Excellencies, for what it’s worth, I stand ready to support you in these efforts and to seeing the Commonwealth at the forefront of a global solution.”

The Prince has long spoken about his deep concern for the future of the planet, urging leaders to focus on the threat presented by climate change.

Praising the Commonwealth’s shared values, he said: “This unity and strength will be vital in the years ahead for, as you know only too well, we are facing unparalleled challenges caused by rapid climate change and biodiversity loss.

 “I do believe that the Commonwealth, with the extraordinary richness of resources and ideas upon which it can draw, can offer many solutions to the problems that we share.”

Referencing a range of environmental conferences to be held by the United Nations, he added: “The next 18 months will see critical meetings that will collectively determine the global agenda for the coming decade.

“Next year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting stands of course at a pivotal point in the middle of these events and will be an absolutely vital moment to consolidate consensus on the way forward, not least of which, will be the deliberations on how to increase the amount of private sector finance flowing towards supporting sustainable development throughout the Commonwealth.”

Last year, the Prince of Wales was confirmed as the Commonwealth’s next head of government following the Queen’s public recommendation.

As the Queen no longer travels overseas, he will attend the 2020 CHOGM meeting in Rwanda as her representative, effectively taking on the role on the ground.

SOURCE




New study shows that natural factors explain the recent rise in CO2 and that its residence time is only 4 years

Warmists usually claim that CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for a long time -- up to a thousand years

Scrutinizing the carbon cycle and CO2 residence time in the atmosphere

Hermann Harde

Abstract

Climate scientists presume that the carbon cycle has come out of balance due to the increasing anthropogenic emissions from fossil fuel combustion and land use change. This is made responsible for the rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations over recent years, and it is estimated that the removal of the additional emissions from the atmosphere will take a few hundred thousand years. Since this goes along with an increasing greenhouse effect and a further global warming, a better understanding of the carbon cycle is of great importance for all future climate change predictions. We have critically scrutinized this cycle and present an alternative concept, for which the uptake of CO2 by natural sinks scales proportional with the CO2 concentration. In addition, we consider temperature dependent natural emission and absorption rates, by which the paleoclimatic CO2 variations and the actual CO2 growth rate can well be explained. The anthropogenic contribution to the actual CO2 concentration is found to be 4.3%, its fraction to the CO2 increase over the Industrial Era is 15% and the average residence time 4 years.

Global and Planetary Change. Volume 152, May 2017, Pages 19-26





Japanese Climate Scientist with MIT doctorate Slams GW Claims: Based On “Untrustworthy, Falsified Data”…”No Scientific Value”!

In a newly released Kindle book that is set to peeve established climate science, an MIT doctorate climate researcher blasts alarmist claims of a warming planet and illustrates how temperature data are untrustworthy and far too scant to draw sound conclusions.

Dr. Nakamura received a Doctorate of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and for nearly 25 years specialized in abnormal weather and climate change at prestigious institutions that included MIT, Georgia Institute of Technology, NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, JAMSTEC and Duke University.

The book’s title translated into English: “A climate scientist’s profession – Global warming theory is unproven, only a hypothesis“.

In his book, Dr. Nakamura explains why the data foundation underpinning global warming science is “untrustworthy” and cannot be relied on.

“Not backed by demonstrable data”

He writes that although many people, including a lot of climate researchers, believe it is a confirmed fact that global surface mean temperatures have been rising since Industrial Revolution, it is however “not backed by demonstrable data”. He points out:

Global mean temperatures before 1980 are based on untrustworthy data. Before full planet surface observation by satellite began in 1980, only a small part of the Earth had been observed for temperatures with only a certain amount of accuracy and frequency. Across the globe, only North America and Western Europe have trustworthy temperature data dating back to the 19th century.”

Nakamura’s book demolishes “the lie of critical global warming due to increasing carbon dioxide”, exposes the great uncertainty of “global warming in the past 100 years” and points out the glaring failure of climate models.

According to Dr. Nakamura, the temperature data are woefully lacking and do not allow in any way the drawing of any useful conclusions.

Presently the book is available in Japanese only. What follows are translated/paraphrased excerpts.

For example, Dr. Nakamura illustrates how scant the global temperature data really are, and writes that over the last 100 years “only 5 percent of the Earth’s area is able show the mean surface temperature with any certain degree of confidence.”

Ocean data extremely scant…

Then there’s the desolate amount of data from the massive oceans. Later Dr. Nakamura describes how the precision of the observed mean temperature from the ocean surface, which accounts for roughly 75％ of the Earth’s surface, are questionable to an extreme.

He writes, “The pre-1980 temperature data from the sea and water are very scant” and that the methodology used for recording them totally lacks adequacy.

To top it off: “The climate datasets used for the sea surface water temperature data have added various adjustments to the raw data.”

Dr. Nakamura also describes how the number of surface stations used globally cannot provide any real accurate temperature picture. He writes: “Experts cannot just decide that 10,000 sq km per station is representative of temperature.”

Later he explains: “If you accept the Earth surface mean temperature’s warming since the Industrial Revolution as the truth, it means you agree with the idea that the Earth surface mean temperature rise can be determined by a biased tiny region on the globe. It is nonsense. Looking at the regions with long term temperature data, you can see that some regions warmed, and some other regions cooled.

Finally, Nakamura blasts the ongoing data adjustments:

"Furthermore, more recently, experts have added new adjustments which have the helpful effect of making the Earth seem to continue warming”. The talented Japanese scientist deems this “data falsification”.

He concludes:

Therefore, the global surface mean temperature change data no longer have any scientific value and are nothing except a propaganda tool to the public.

SOURCE





Why the global fossil-fuel phase-out is a fantasy akin to time travel

To produce the power needed to offset fossil fuels, Canada would have to build two and a half $13-billion hydro dams every year

Judging from the headlines, Canada and the world are on track to ratchet up renewable energy and begin the rapid scale-down and ultimate phase-out of fossil fuels. Most energy analysts consider the fossil-fuel phase-out to be a scientific, economic and political fantasy, akin to levitation and time travel, but the movement keeps making news.

Governments everywhere — from Canada to the United Kingdom to states in Australia — are declaring climate emergencies and committing to variations on zero emissions. The international organization promoting emergency declarations claims “a fast transition to zero emissions is possible.”

Canada’s Green Party, said to be gaining ground, has a new platform plan, headlined “Mission: Possible,” to eliminate fossil fuels by 2050. A proposed Green New Deal in America aims to eliminate fossil fuels from the U.S. power grid by 2030 and phase gasoline out of the transportation sector.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh says Canada’s oil industry is on its way out: “It’s the direction the world is headed.” The newly announced Liberal and Conservative programs are leaning in the zero-carbon direction, although less explicitly.

So what are the carbon zeroists talking about? Aside from massive amounts of government intervention — almost a total takeover of the economy — the practicality of it all looks a bit impossible, to put it mildly. As the graph below suggests, the required technological and economic change could be a little overwhelming.



The general scale of the operation is hinted at by Climate Mobilization, an organization promoting climate emergency declarations: “Only WWII-scale Climate Mobilization can protect humanity and the natural world.”

In keeping with the analogy, here are some indicators of the magnitude of the coming Green World War III.

In Canada, for example, Vancouver energy consultant Aldyen Donnelly calculated that to achieve the “deep decarbonization” Canada is aiming for will require massive expansions of non-fossil fuel sources of energy.

To produce the electric power needed to offset the lost fossil fuel energy, Canada would have to build 2.5 hydro power dams the size of British Columbia’s $13-billion Site C project somewhere in the country “every year for the foreseeable future” leading up to the proposed 2050 carbon reduction targets. The geographic and cost obstacles send that prospect into the realm of the impossible.

On a global basis, the magnitude of the implied decarbonization effort illustrated in the graph takes us beyond the possible and into the world of junk science fiction. In 2018, world consumption of fossil fuels rose to 11,865 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe). To get that down to near zero by 2050 as proposed by the zeroists would require a lot of alternative energy sources.

University of Colorado scientist Roger Pielke Jr. did some of the rough numbers. “There are 11,161 days until 2050. Getting to net zero by 2050 requires replacing one mtoe of fossil fuel consumption every day starting now.” On a global basis, such a transition would require building the equivalent of one new 1.5-gigawatt nuclear plant every day for the next 30 years.

If not nuclear, then maybe solar? According to a U.S. government site, it takes about three million solar panels to produce one gigawatt of energy, which means that by 2050 the world will need 3,000,000 X 11,865 solar panels to offset fossil fuels. The wind alternative would require about 430 new wind turbines each of the 11,865 days leading to 2050.

So far, other tested technologies do not exist to offset the fossil fuel energy that would be lost under the green zero targets. Maybe this is a world war that should be stopped before it gets out of control.

SOURCE 





Plastic bag ban: Critics warn it isn’t helping Australia reduce waste

Coles and Woolworths say the bag ban diverted about 4.7 billion single-use plastic bags from landfill in 12 months, but a research study says the policy may be doing more harm than good.

University of Sydney economist Rebecca Taylor studied a similar policy in California to analyse the behaviour of consumers when it comes to bags and recycling.

She said the stores gave out less bags, but the shopper still needed something to put rubbish in at home or pick up dog poo with. “What I found was that sales of garbage bags actually skyrocketed after plastic grocery bags were banned,” Dr Taylor told the NPR podcast Planet Money.

According to her study, the purchase of small plastic bags jumped by 120 per cent.

Dr Taylor said consumers typically used the reusable bags for rubbish, which was problematic because they’re thicker than the single-use bags and take longer to break down in landfill.

“So about 30 per cent of the plastic that was eliminated by the ban comes back in the form of thicker garbage bags,” she told the podcast.

Speaking on Channel 7’s Sunrise, the economist cast doubt on the success of the environmental policy.

“If we don’t consider the thickness and the types of bags people substitute to, we could be substantially over-estimating the benefits of the policy,” Dr Taylor said.

Hazardous materials management expert Dr Trevor Thornton echoed the economist’s concerns. “Garbags are only used once,” he told Sunrise. “They generally have more plastic, they’re heavier, they’re often coloured so there’s chemicals and are often perfumed so there’s chemicals in them.

“Sometimes the cotton bags or the reusable bags are the ones that are causing more environmental concerns than the plastic ones. “We don’t get that sort of data from the supermarkets or the retailers to say what is actually happening.”

Aldi says its policy of never offering single-use bags has kept 40,000 tonnes of plastic from entering the environment, while nearly 5000 tonnes of plastic have been kept out of circulation from Woolworths alone since the supermarket plastic bag ban was introduced 12 months ago — equal to more than 780 African elephants.

Despite some controversial backflips and modifications to the environmental policy along the way, both major supermarkets have revealed its massive impact.

Woolworths has issued about three billion fewer plastic bags from its stores over the last year.

It says shoppers have embraced the new habit, with one in six transactions now including the purchase of a plastic bag, and that number is decreasing month-on-month.

Coles says the sustainable strategy has diverted 1.7 billion single-use bags from landfill, with data claiming seven in 10 of its consumers now remember to bring a reusable bag when they shop and a further two in 10 bringing them on more occasions than not.

Single-use plastic bags have been banned in South Australia, Queensland, the ACT and Western Australia, while Victoria is expected to follow in November.

Woolworths chief executive Brad Banducci said consumers were quick to embrace the change despite vocal criticism from portions of the country. “We recognise change is never easy, particularly when it comes to something as habitual as grocery shopping,” he said. “Yet one year after we phased out single-use plastic bags, it’s clear Australians have formed new habits and embraced a vastly more sustainable way of shopping with reusable bags.”

SOURCE 

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