Sgt Hulka Uncut

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Archive for category Bad Ideas

He has got to be paid a lot to be such an arsehole

Mar 14

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Evil Motherfuckers, Good Ideas, Other Topics, Science | 3 Comments

Andrew Bolt* gave a performance so untruthful and offensive on the weekend Insiders, that I really think he has got to be having this shit fed to him and rehearsed beforehand. No one could honestly hold this many stupid views in one head. His positions on the weekend once again included his greenhouse denial schtick, along with saying that the Coalition actually believes his view on the subject and are just faking it with a token effort to allow for a change of subject. He also used the current lie-attack approach with respect to Ross Garnaut. I hesitate to tell you about it, but will risk spreading its use, as I think it is important to be able to identify it when you see it, as it fits into a wider ploy by cultural conservatives and shills of big business. The lies that Dolt was allowed to share included:

• The lie is that there is zero risk to Australia due to the nuclear accidents in Japan caused by the earthquake, and then tsunami.

• The lie that the Greens will just use this as a beat up so they can stymie the development of nuclear power

• The lie is that Ross Garnaut is not credible to listen to for any reason on the climate change issue, as he is only an economist, and not a climate scientist, and he is paid by the government for his views.

The lies fit into a broader tactic by the cultural conservatives of doing something really shitty, then accusing you of it, falsely and in a pre-emtory manner, to hide their “crime”. They did it to Tim Flannery a couple weeks ago on Q&A, and I’ve heard it from another Coalition climate change denier a week before that.

And Dolt does it here again. Because this time, he used one lie to sell another. While attacking Ross Garnaut’s credibility on one issue, he used Ziggy Switkowski, who has not worked in the nuclear power industry ever to my knowledge, and while very involved with ANSTO as a director, his degree in nuclear physics has got to be 35 years old. After getting his business degree at Harvard, he served in series of company management roles, including Telstra. There is also the fact that he is a big proponent of nuclear power in Australia. Why shouldnt he be, as he was appointed by the Howard Government to look into the nuclear power issue. But hey, not that it is such a bad thing. As I have said before, there is a role for nuclear power in getting us off the magic dirt. Ziggy isn’t a bad guy, and I think he is smart and does have credibility on his issues.

Just like Ross Garnaut does. But Dolt smears Ross as a paid government lackey, and treats a distinguished, professor, diplomat, researcher and company chairman as if he was a one trick pony. And the funny thing about this smear is that it exposes the stupidity of Dolt. Having an economist study climate change and report on its effects is precisely the person to have do it on behalf of the government. You want to have a dispassionate and non-partisan person evaluate the cause and effects that can also apply the scientific method.

But the deniers first act these days is to now say that any scientist on your side of an argument has no credibility, as his field is not exactly climate science. This is a vile and disingenuous strawman of an argument and needs to be exposed. They have no basis upon which to be supported by a consistent theory and evidence in science, so they attack all science itself. Tim Flannery is just a geologist. By that measure, we have no reason to believe Isaac Newton, a farmer who was trained as a mathematician.

But then the bastard went on. Dolt also downplayed the significance of a nuclear incident on the 200,000 evacuated, in the hundreds of those exposed to heightened radiation, some needing treatment, and the potential future risk (at the time on Sunday morning) by saying we should be worrying about the missing. How about we worry about them all, you fucking moron. How about we make a serious effort to address the probable meltdown of two nuclear reactors at about 8 effected by the quakes and tsunami while we also mobilise in the millions people to find the wounded, bury the dead and start to rebuild their lives. Andrew Bolt abused the suffering of one effected people to make his point (a lie, I remind you) about another. He is the worst of humans and should be forced to go work on the recovery and containment effort directly at the site of the nuclear plant where the hydrogen explosion took place on Sunday morning, with his wife and kids (if he has any) living in a nice camp trailer across the street.

So basically, let’s leave this idiot behind, and work into some facts about the reactors in Japan, figure out where we are at, and put together evidence for the future. How about that? Right, well the first thing we want to do is understand what we are dealing with here through some research. Then we will put some facts into context and see where to go from there.

The first thing to understand is that the reactors that have released radioactive caesium and have had to have radioactive steam vented from them (indicators of a probable meltdown) are boiling water reactors (BWR) from the 1970s. Wiki says:

“The family of nuclear reactors known as light water reactors (LWR), cooled and moderated using ordinary water, tend to be simpler and cheaper to build than other types of nuclear reactor; due to these factors, they make up the vast majority of civil nuclear reactors and naval propulsion reactors in service throughout the world as of 2009. LWRs can be subdivided into three categories – pressurized water reactors (PWRs), boiling water reactors (BWRs), and supercritical water reactors (SWRs). Various agencies of the United States Federal Government were responsible for the initial development of the PWR and BWR.”

So as not to confuse anyone, radioactive caesium (Caesium-137) has a half-life of about 30 years, decays by beta emission to barium-137, which is also radioactive (gamma ray emitter) with a half-life of 2.55 minutes. Beta emitters aren’t as big a deal as far as health goes immediately, provided you aren’t too close to a concentrated emission source, but they area chronic health problem generator (cancer) if you consume them. However, gamma radiation is real bad in an acute sense, and this is the radiation that kills people in nuclear blasts and through radiation sickness in months after one. So, once again, the risk posed is an additional cancer causing element that you might be exposed to by ingesting or inhaling radioactive particles from a burning or venting nuclear plant. We have a definite chronic health problem, and a vector by which it is getting into the environment. So, the risk is not zero here in Australia, or anywhere.

Now, how close are we to real real bad in Japan. For that, we have to go back to the engineering of the plants. We now need to know how bad the meltdown is, and whether secondary containment has been broken. I have to get a bit techy again for a moment, so bear with me. In the BWR, the nuclear reaction is used to directly produce steam to run a turbine to make electricity. The nuclear reactor runs on the fission reaction of radioactive uranium, and the control rods used in the reactor control the rate at which the uranium decay reaction occurs. Pull the control rods back – faster. Push them all the way in – very slow. Lose control of the rods, and you lose control of the reaction, and things get as hot as the sun on that little patch of earth. BWR also use a lot of circulating water to control the reaction rate and keep the temperature down while the steam is generated. Lose control of the cooling water, and you can get too hot and lose control of the control rods, and then you go down that bad chain of events again. So, plants like in Japan have double and triple duplicate systems to move cooling water around in a reactor in an emergency. They also have containment systems, with the reactor itself being contained within a 2 metre thick pre-stressed, steel-reinforced, air-tight concrete dome. This is inside a building that also serves as containment. Hydrogen that got broken down from water in the reactor in Japan during this current incident leaked into and then exploded inside the second building that we all saw on tv. You know it is a hydrogen explosion because of the fast shock wave that proceeded the debris of the building being ejected and the lack of fire afterwards.

What we now need to do is find out how the core is. If it’s a melted ball of fuel and rods that doesn’t function at all, then the cleanup may require entombment. If the core was shut down well enough that it still operates as a functioning unit, but was only seriously overheated, the cleanup may be “only” recovering it, cooling it down as far as possible, and salvaging the bits that can be reused. It all depends on the state in which the shutdown got to prior to emergency cooling water loss, how hot the core got, and how much nuclear material melted and where it was finally contained as a solid mass again. We shall see, based on the facts that emerge.

Then, at that time, we will start to debate what the root causes were that led us to this point, whether we knew we might get here before in the evaluation of this plant from 1971 over the years, and the soundness of the logic of having 53 of these facilities in Japan, right on the edge of the ring of fire in seismic terms. Certainly looking at the photos already, we can see that the nuclear plant at Fukushima took the earthquake and tsunami better than the surrounding infrastructure.

Before:
Screen shot 2011-03-14 at 10.22.00 AM

After:
Screen shot 2011-03-14 at 10.22.13 AM
The problem appears to be that while the civil infrastructure held up well, the electrics, piping and backup generation capacities were knocked out by the duel disaster. In most likelihood, the core concrete containment structure was not cracked by the earthquake. But as I said we shall see.

I hear as I upload this that there is another 3 m tsunami headed for NE Japan, and there has been another explosion at Fukushima just now, meaning we now have 2 reactors where this has occurred.

Lets hope those civil engineers got their shit very right, and the cooling water is not lost this time.

But don’t take my word for it, do some research of your own, as I am just a chemical engineer.

* – I am just going to call him Dolt for short now, since it sums him up accurately, and he doesn’t deserve a full human name in my world.

A bit of balance, please

Mar 11

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Climate Change, Good Ideas, Politics, Science | Comments off

A simple search this morning using the words “carbon tax Australia” leads to pretty much all negative positions on this tax. Virtually nothing on the other side (but thank you Wikipedia).

But the real problem is not the tax, or the ETS, or even the alternative direct action approach, but that once again the deniers* have been allowed to sneak back in and present their flawed case along with those who disagree on the proposed way forward on a solution. If you go to the no carbon tax websites that headline a simple search, you will be linked through to the bunko artists, who appear to be a large and reasonable group. But they are not. The reality is that the vast majority of the people who believe in the scientific method, who work in the area of climate science, ocean science, thermodynamics or other related scientific and engineering fields, where the scientific method and the evidence that supports it, believe that anthropogenic climate change is real, and that it will not be positive for humans or the earth. Furthermore, the scientific organisations that they make up, and the peak organisations that represent those organisations, publish peer reviewed findings and recommendations through the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

This is the report that you would have heard all the hyped up controversy about a while back, and that a couple figures and a couple paragraphs in a two 800-page reports were incorrect in. Pity they weren’t perfect, but they state the heavily considered opinion of the 99.99%.

Unfortunately, what you get as “balance” in the news coverage remains what I identified above. Bunko artists given 50% of the time to make their case.

Ross Garnaut today said that he believes that public education is the most important thing that has to happen, and that “If there was a deal to limit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million – required to limit warming to 2 degrees – Australia’s ”fair share” would be a reduction target of 25 per cent.”

So, while we should be discussing the merits of whether the renewable energy targets should be eliminated (no) and whether Australian companies should be able to buy cheaper international permits to meet their obligations (yes), we are still talking about the science as if there is a real debate. Other than this article by Ross in the SMH, and his appearance on ABC2 today, the coverage of the major papers and news has been balanced at least equally to the climate change deniers, and several of the major Newscorp and Fairfax columnists (Piers Ackerman, Miranda Devine, Paul Sheehan and Andrew Bolt) are all active climate change deniers.

Those supported by the scientific method are left to the occasional story by Ross Garnaut or Tim Flannery. Hardly balance where it matters, in swaying public opinion.

Charismatic, reasonable appearing liars get away with it all the time. I lived through Ronald Reagan’s presidency. We all lived through W. The basis of their ideologies have been found to be either wilful misrepresentations, or grossly incorrect. Wealth doesn’t trickle down from the rich, they concentrate it, and war is a lie. But one is viewed as a hero still, and the other isn’t in jail when by all rights he should be. The charismatic people who are playing this lie out again are the same folks who have a vested interest in delay, and who own the media to a large extent.

It is not a fair fight, and as I have said before, the correct argument is falling on deaf ears in a public that has been conditioned by the media that is supporting the lie to have tuned out already. Climate change is so last year’s story. Facts are boring, details are too taxing on the attention span, and the truth requires all of us to modify our behaviour a bit. So fuck that, right?

But in the interest of supporting Ross Garnaut’s call for more education, I will keep on providing my view on the topic. I’d feel guilty otherwise.

* – Unfortunately, when 99.99% of all peer reviewed scientists do not agree with you, you can no longer be called a sceptic, but rather something closer to a person with a mental disease.

How do you reach those who are wilfully ignorant

Mar 8

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Climate Change, Economics, Politics | Comments off

So, it’s been about a week and the Coalition scare mongering campaign over the carbon tax introduction has apparently started to do its expected damage, with the announcement of the Newspoll today that show Labor as being less popular than leaving your kids alone with a Catholic priest at 30% primary support. Nothing much else has happened federally in the last week, so the drop must be mostly due to people who were polled believing the Coalition’s spin, or they believe that if ignored long enough, the climate change issue will go away. In either case, the only way you could believe either of these alternatives to the carbon tax is to be wilfully ignorant.

If you believe that the issue of climate change is going to just go away, then I hope you don’t have any kids. Not because you shouldn’t be allowed to breed, but because I am a nice guy and don’t wish to see the results of your ignorance to be manifested on anyone’s kids.

The other option also requires wilful ignorance, because the detail has been out there for quite a while. You can have a look a the Coalitions direct action policy and my analysis of it from more than a year ago (!), and it clearly shows more than $700 million in spending per year.

This week, Tony Abbott has been out demonising the carbon tax proposal as something that will kill the economy (a lie that I will deal with separately), and putting forward the contention that the direct action policy is (1) better; (2) that no one’s costs will rise; and (3) that it can be implemented with no additional taxes. It’s the life is all ice cream and no pain approach to climate change.

This is where wilful ignorance comes in, because you don’t need to be Paul Krugman to recognise that if a government is going to spend more than $700 million a year in picking winners in the emissions reduction area through paying for the abatement out of the federal budget, and they aren’y going to raise taxes to fund that spending, then clearly budget cuts in other areas are going to have to pay for them. The cuts are likely to come in areas that the Coalition does not approve of, so expect to see funding for things like public schools, public transport, public health care and pretty much anything with a public in it to get a cut in the next Coalition-prepared budget. And if you rely on any of those public things that get cut, your costs to replace them will go up.

Its a pity that honesty doesn’t poll well, because a carbon tax is simple, direct and honest (even if I let people lie and call it a tax). Once again, here is how it works:

• Government makes anyone who is a major emitter of CO2-equivalent (CO2-e) gases pay for each ton of those emissions annually;
• They eat those costs, or pass them on to the buyers of their goods or services (probably the latter);
• The government uses some of the money raised to support long term shifts to alternative energy sources through research, low interest loans and other incentive programs; and
• The government returns any left over money to the taxpayers to offset their rise in cost (if any).

You may not like it, but a carbon tax is at least honest and will do what it says it will.

If I had any control over the situation, I would also apply the tax to all significant imports to the country that have high CO2-e intensity to address issues of major industries here that face significantly rising costs that large polluters elsewhere do not have to pay. That way, I can use local law to also influence behaviours of foreigners who want to sell their stuff in my market. Now that’s what I call effective tax policy.

Climate Change For The Lazy

May 28

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Climate Change, Science | Comments off

So, I once again have found myself pretty busy at work and have not been able to post as much as I like. However, today I have come across something worth sharing. I get in trouble with the censors if I play the man instead of the ball, so I won’t. But I will point out a phenomenally good evisceration of one of the most entertaining of the climate change deniers, Christopher Monkton, Lord Somethingorother.

Professor John Abraham from the university of St. Thomas, Minnesota has done a particularly good job of examining every claim made by Chris Monkton, including getting in contact with every one of his named sources to confirm with them if the references used are both technically accurate and also whether they accurately represent the position that the source cited intended to make in context.

“The number of errors Chris Monckton makes is so enormous it would take a thesis to go through every single one of them.” So then he basically does present what would be a thesis paper on the multiple ways in which untruths and misrepresentations can be passed off as “fact” by a good showman.

The presentation is excellent, and I do mean presentation, since he has posted it in Powerpoint form with voice over. If you have 83 minutes, I would give it a listen and then do what I always encourage people to do – look into the issue yourself with the references provided. That is, unless you are so lazy you can’t even listen.

I bet the Vatican runs on coal

Apr 15

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Climate Change, Economics, International | Comments off

The cost of producing power by burning coal is currently the cheapest of any fuel if you look strictly at material cost per heat unit.

But unfortunately, it needs to be examined more holistically, based on recent evidence in combination with my previous research. Currently, coal burners for power production are not required to internalise the costs of things such as:

HSE Performance and possible criminal prosecution
Our Australian coal companies have nothing to do with the recent coal mining disaster in the USA. But keep in mind that our coal producers have to compete with the likes of Massey Energy Company, and we know they all compete on keeping “operating” costs low. In the case of Massey, the deaths of 29 workers in early April were likely the result of the cost containment efforts of Massey in the areas of installing necessary HSE controls and even in paying fines in full and on time. The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration has issued more than $900,000 in fines for the Upper Big Branch mine in the past year, according to federal data compiled by Bloomberg News. Massey is appealing more than $250,000 of the largest fines, among them one in January for ventilation systems that are supposed to prevent the buildup of methane gas and coal dust that can cause explosions, like the one in the current incident. Massey has a history of disputing U.S. findings of safety violations at its mines, including one in Virginia in where 25 people were killed in 1970, records show. Of $1.77 million in safety-related fines that the Mine Safety and Health Administration lodged against the Upper Big Branch mine since 2006, Massey has paid $364,886, or 20 percent, according to agency data.

Note that someone does pay theses cost avoided by Massey at present however, the government and families of those killed.

Great Barrier Reef grounding
This month in Australia, we also have another unintended impact of the coal sales, with the grounding of the coal ship, Shen Neng 1. Whatever the outcome of the court case, the evidence this far is damning. This boat was off course in a no-go zone, and had no responsible pilot on board to guide it on a correct path through a part of one of the great wonders of the world. In the period it was stuck and hung up on the reef, dragging in the current, then anchored and moving in the current on the reef until it could be refloated. It spilled only a few tons of its 900 tons of oil on board, but it also left behind a large amount of its anti-fouling paint on the reef as it went. And anti fouling paint is one of nature’s quiet killers. I won’t go into great detail, but please look into these yourself through your favourite scientific search engine. This paint contains chemicals that can kill instantly, and are also what are called endocrine disruptors when exposed to chronically, so they also leave behind negative mutations.

Financial damages include all emergency response costs, damage protection and clean-up costs, as well as log-term monitoring and repair of environmental damage from the direct impacts of the ship, and the poisons it left behind. Coal traffic out of the Rockhampton loader that this ship departed from are projected to increase 67% this year, all of which should be directed by competent pilots from AMSA, in my opinion.

I wonder if the cost of coal fully incorporates these types of charges, as well as the cost of the court case itself, as I don’t see wind or solar generators ever being in a similar circumstance, product liability-wise.

Health issues in the Hunter Valley
Then, as of Monday, the drumbeat continued, as the ABC’s Four Corners program began an examination of the health effects of the open cut coal mining in the Hunter Valley. The program detailed a number of acute and chronic cases of asthma and related respiratory ailments suffered by residents in and around Singleton, as well as possibly identifying a cancer cluster. But we will know more about that as the government completes a study, that it refused to do until the day after the Four Corners story broke. Up until now, it has been one GP doing a study on his own.

Whether a full study reveals an acute or chronic health problem from the mining activity or not, who pays? The government and communities currently assume all health costs, as far as I can see.

Energy efficiency and greenhouse implications
The very important issues above are possibly reasons alone for discontinuing the burning of the magic dirt from making electricity. But then let’s not forget last week’s “dead” issues, energy efficiency and greenhouse emissions. The public may be tired of hearing about it and want to move on, but the facts remain. Burning coal for fuel is the most inefficient means of making power with respect to waste emissions and thermodynamic power losses.

Just because we can dig it out of the ground for what appears near to free, doesn’t mean it is. If you also agree that the costs of doing the changeover from all or part of our coal burning is not as expensive as predicted by doomsayers, then the arguments for not getting off coal ourselves, and slapping a great big carbon excise tax on any that we do sell overseas, start to make a lot of sense. Just as big rich countries have the right to tie their financial aid to poor countries efforts to adopt climate change goals, so should we cause heavy users of our coal to internalise the full costs of using the product in order to advance their economies.

Not Dead Yet

Apr 7

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Climate Change, Politics | Comments off

Well, I noticed yesterday how easy it is to miss a month of writing anything for the blog. Yeah, not one rant for a full month. Sure, I did get a bit busy with work and that is one good way to shut me up, but in reality there really wasn’t anything to have a rant about that I had not either covered already, or was significant enough to talk about. Sure, a few minor things have occurred, and yesterday I found out about a couple things which are significant, but probably not in a good way.

The first is that the full report of the review of the scientists of the University of East Anglia is out. And surprise surprise, it shows exactly what I stated in my article on the subject in the week after the issue came to light. But you have to look pretty hard to find the story, and you almost certainly didn’t hear about the death of that conspiracy theory on your evening news.

The second item came last night when I found out that Malcolm Turnbull has decided to quit politics and won’t stand for re-election at the next election. So, climate change is sliding into obscurity and becoming a non-issue in the public forum. Those who stand for science and reason lose support, and lies once exposed go unnoticed, as is true in so much of politics these days.

But I don’t intend to go quiet, and will still write on matters of fact with respect to the issue, although my writing will become more sporadic on the subject of climate change, as apparently it isn’t happening. I will just bide my time and try to come up with better zombie plans and stock up on things to sell people that forgot to develop a good zombie plan so that I can personally do better as things turn to shit. Because apparently, that is what it is all about, right?

Why the yanks are unreliable partners on climate change

Mar 9

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Climate Change, International, Science | Comments off

If you want a good reason why Australia should and must think for ourselves and act for ourselves on climate change, look no further than a current court ruling from America:

“Nine judges of the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals will rehear a climate change nuisance case bought by Hurricane Katrina victims”

Now don’t get me wrong, I have sympathy for the plaintiffs, a large group of Mississippi residents, many of whom are likely lower middle class. They probably lots most of what they physically owned in Katrina, and the preparation and response to that natural disaster could have been far better, I think most reasonable people could agree. But unless the court is actually taking the case in order to set a precedent so that later cases can be won on their merits, I don’t see why they would rehear the arguments on this. This is because the plaintiffs have argued that emissions from the operations of several energy and chemical companies have contributed to global warming, causing a rise in sea levels and adding to Hurricane Katrina’s ferocity.

The merits of the argument, while seemingly logical, do not take into account the chaos generated by the global warming phenomenon, and so tying the emissions of any one company directly to any specific hurricane, or its path or ferocity, is not logical. You cannot make extremely specific predictions (or tie causality) to individual weather events based on general input of CO2. Who is to say who’s CO2 emissions pushed the cycle of hurricane ferocity or frequency to a worse position, or into a positive feedback loop? No one can, at this point. General emissions of CO2 drive average temperature rises in the atmosphere and higher moisture content in the air, and higher ocean levels that in some areas can exacerbate local weather events. But problems (like hurricanes) don’t manifest themselves as averages, they come as extremes, and they come as chaos. No one can reliably predict the occurrence of, or path of a hurricane or tornado, any more than we can predict an earthquake.

Second, the issue of Katrina’s ferocity is of issue. The claim is that the higher sea levels gave support to Katrina’s ferocity leading to the damages sustained, because at the end of the story, that’s where they want to go, right? The money. They (and their litigators) want to make a whole bunch of money out of this disaster, and being able to establish that the severity of damage is worse than otherwise would have been is key to their argument. Katrina was a Category 3 when it made landfall in Louisiana, making it the 6th strongest hurricane in the Atlantic history. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but only in the top 20% of recorded storms. So, making the case that it was particularly ferocious is a bit tough. And while tying the worst of the damage to the storm surge has some validity, one could argue that the particular path had as much to do with the severity of the storm surge as sea level rise.

But all of this is just the detail. The real problem to me seems to be the fact that these people have to attempt to get through expensive tort what they should be getting through reasonable regulation. And virtually any regulation seems to be anathema to the Americans. Unless we in Australia, and the rest of the world, want to become a place where suing someone is the means by which we primarily gain social justice, then we should proceed to get ourselves in order with respect to climate change legislation, so that in addition to the savings on energy efficiency alone, we can also say that we aren’t the major source of the problem, and we won’t be a good target to sue.

Definitions for Stupidity

Feb 20

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Climate Change, Science | Comments off

Weather – the current state of the atmosphere with respect to heat or cold, wetness or dryness, calm or storm, clearness or cloudiness.

Climate – the average course or condition of the weather at a place over a period of years as exhibited by temperature, wind velocity, and precipitation.

I hate to insult your intelligence if you already had a grasp of the two concepts above, but unfortunately too widely in the news at present, I see a lack of basic understanding of these simple words that needs to be addressed.

See, a couple of interesting things are happening in North America this week. First, two snowstorms have hit the east coast of the USA, dumping an all time record amount of snow on places like Washington DC. At the same time, the Winter Olympics in Vancouver is at risk due to a lack of snow there.

The first item above has been picked up pretty quickly by those who deny climate change to try to show that climate change is all a hoax due to the fact that a single weather event has occurred. The problem the deniers have is apparently a lack of understanding of the terms weather and climate, accompanied by a failure to understand the science of thermodynamics. I can possibly excuse the latter, provided they don’t attempt to attack it simply due to a failure to understand it, but I cannot excuse not level of stupidity that is required to treat the terms weather and climate as interchangeable.

The current weather outside is an example of nothing unless it is joined over a long period of time by similar weather events that form a trend which may then demonstrate something in relation to the climate at a location. To suggest otherwise is analogous to seeing a single bird flying through the air and declaring it as proof that gravity no longer exists.

Furthermore, the increased incidence of big freak snowstorms are exactly the kind of evidence that supports climate change theory. A discussion of climate change and how it will almost certainly manifest itself (thank you again, J Willard) is covered in some detail here (starting in paragraph 7). If you don’t want to read it all, I will summarise for you: heating of the atmosphere due to anthropogenic climate change will manifest itself as greater weather chaos, not as similar changes in weather all over the world.

The example we see at present in North America is an example of greater chaos in weather. Note, however, that nether I or any of the other climate change believers that I know about have made the claim that the lack of snow for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver proves our case for anthropogenic climate change. We haven’t done this because it would not be supported by a reasoned scientific evaluation of the facts. Vancouver is actually a pretty warm and wet area as far as places that receive regular winter snow are concerned. This year’s lack of snow at this time, while regrettable, is not particularly uncommon. Until climate change really kicks in, organisers should probably stick to the continental divide if they want guaranteed dry fluffy snow for their tv events.

So, despite its high profile as an event where we could whip up lots of frenzy and possibly recruit people to our side of the argument, we on the side of science haven’t done so. But you decide for yourself who the fanatics are.

It can’t be any good . . .

Feb 4

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Climate Change, Politics | 2 Comments

. . . if the coal industry likes it.

Honestly, look at the facts. There is no realistic plan for addressing climate change that involves verifiable CO2 reductions that will benefit the coal industry. NONE. We must reduce the use of the magic dirt significantly to meet any targets set, and all the other direct action proposed by Tony Abbot is window dressing compared to moving to large-scale electricity production that doesn’t use coal as the fuel.

That’s the short summary of what I think of the Coalition policy that took a year to develop, after they had had a very good look at the proposed CPRS, negotiated in good faith to complete it, then reneged on that agreement.

Here is the link to the Coalition Policy I read.

And here is my more detailed analysis for the not faint of heart:

1. It’s too small, but they are only shooting for the 5% the government will. They say it will do 140 million tons of emissions reduction, and I call the amount required 143 in my previous analysis, but let’s not quibble.

2. The main focus of the policy is a thing called the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF), which comprises 80% of the $3.2 billion to be spent over 4 years. Companies (with restrictions in the Policy steering finance to the largest projects at the largest companies) will bid for money out of the ERF for their abatement or emissions reduction projects to be funded. It will focus a significant amount of money on the least efficient old power plants, which smacks to me of rewarding these companies for holding out with the crappiest old technology the longest. Hardly my idea of incentivising the positive. The ERF will allow companies to trade in reductions of their emissions voluntarily, so it still has an ETS built into it, and is based on the already functioning NGERS compliance program. So, the claims of less bureaucracy and no ETS are complete distortions of reality.

3. The coalition has earmarked 61% of the emissions reduction under the ERF to abatement projects in the soil carbon area. Remember, this is the bio-char technology that they were hyping early on for sequestration of lots of carbon. It is an untested technology with uncertain success and unknown other consequences. So, for the folks who want to question the science of climate change in the first place, it seems a bit too much blind faith for my taste, but what the hell, lets put some research money into ramping it up I say.

4. It has some fantastic populist stuff in it that no one can be against, but that will have little effect or shows no stretch-target goal setting. Plant 20 million tees in the cities – who could disagree. A million homes with solar panels – great idea, but why so few? Clean energy hubs – wow, now that sounds futuristic, it’s got to be a great idea. Research on algal fuels – since I mentioned that two days ago (item 7), you know you have my vote!

5. it is entirely funded with federal tax revenue. No sources of new funding are proposed, and no elimination of current projects to free up funding are identified. So, it is an entirely unfunded program that will require drawing on federal support, and we know where they get their cash, don’t we?

6. It saves the Greenhouse Friendly™ (GF) Program that was to be killed off by Labor! This is a fantastic bit of grandstanding that is a complete distortion of fact. The fact is the GF program has already been included in the National Carbon Offset Standard (NCOS) that will be administered by the Australian Carbon Trust, a private company set up to do just that, and the details of the NCOS are pretty much exactly the same as the GF program, and the government has made transition from GF to NCOS hassle free and low cost. Hold on, I thought the Coalition were the folks who were supposed to be into privatising government programs? Are they planning on abandoning this work that has already been done?

7. The paper complains heavily (honestly, over half of the 30 pages is just a write up of the opposition to the CPRS we have already heard) about how an emissions trading system (ETS) results in unnecessary “churn” of money that is bad. But how exactly Tony, as I thought all the capitalists were onboard with growing GDP? As I see it, isn’t that what an economic instrument to cause emissions reductions is all about? I trade emissions reductions at my clean operating plant to you operating your dirty plant so that neither of us has to shut down tomorrow, we get an emissions reduction overall, and we delay the capital cost of implementation of other newer technology? Who gives a rats whether the GDP goes up with a bunch of these trades? Maybe Glenn Stevens, but then I reckon Glenn is a pretty cluey bloke who will probably factor in the introduction of a mew commodity market into his thinking when setting fiscal policy for the country in the year that it is introduced. He will probably let inflation go to 3.4% that year instead of the regular 2.5% before he starts ratcheting up interest rates to address the “inflation” caused by the trading of carbon credits on the countries GDP.

8. It’s a policy that allows business as usual, then trade if you decide to sign up and get free money to fix your old plant. Then if your efficiency goes down later after you got the free money, you will get penalised. But the penalties will be negotiated out with business later, and new entrants to the market will have to meet “best practice” which is not defined.

The analogy I draw is pirates in Somalia. Who here thinks the best approach is to go to the pirates and say, “Hey fellas, all this pirating you are doing is really harshing my buzz. So how about I pay you to learn a new trade and if you do that you don’t have to pay me back, and if you do go back to pirating, we will negotiate a financial penalty together. Plus, any new kids of yours that want to get a job when they grow up can’t get into piracy, but they can go into drug running or something else that meets a definition of best practice employment that we will also work out later.” Anyone?

Therefore, from the observations above, I do not think this proposal from the Coalition contains sufficient quantity of the simple kind of direct action that I think that governments alone exist to do.

I can propose an alternative approach that exceeds the test of simplicity proposed by the Coalition, is honest, and contains direct action to begin addressing energy efficiency, energy efficiency, energy efficiency, and then climate change.

How about instead of bribing people to do the right thing, we do a straight carbon input tax, and we take $3.2 billion dollars of the money raised to go the old crappy coal power plants and convert as many of them as possible to natural gas. The companies can either pay us in stock for our capital injection, which we can sell on the open market later when our investment of public dollars proves to be good business, or they can take the money as a loan on favourable terms (say 50 basis points lower than the average of the rate the 4 major banks would charge a small business).

Then, we spend an equivalent amount on upgrade of the power distribution systems throughout Australia on a priority basis.

Then we pass some simple regulations to be overseen by the consumer watchdog (ACCC) that prevents any consumer product that uses electricity which doesn’t meet a basic energy efficiency test from being sold in Australia.

Then, lets do all the ice cream and puppies direct action in the Coalition plan, but lets have good stretch targets, like a solar hot water, solar electric or a fuel cell system on half of Australia’s 8 million homes by 2015. We can use some of the money from the carbon input tax to subsidies this, before we send the rest of the money back to families to pay their higher power bills.

If we do the above, we will significantly exceed the 5% target in truly simple (not even a whiff of an ETS in my plan) and honest way. All of what I want to do costs some money up front, but pays off significantly over time in a compound manner.

Equal Time For This?

Feb 2

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Climate Change, Politics, Science | Comments off

It annoys me greatly when I see things like I have witnessed today. When unsupportable fairly tales get equal time with established science. Today, we got the double blow of Lord Throckmorton (or whatever) with his climate change road show. And if that bit of snake oil salesman wasn’t enough, we then also get the corporate shill Paul Sheehan providing a supporting argument on the SMH today. Well, I don’t have time today to sort these two out separately, so I shall address them jointly.

Gentlemen, you are either phenomenally ignorant of the scientific method, or purposely promoting disinformation voluntarily or under corporate compulsion. Your motives are your own, and I will not comment on them, but I will take specific issue to Sheehan’s written words, since they adopt several of the Lord Christopher Monckton’s arguments.

If you want to read the short version, just stop with Paul’s beginning:

“[all of these facts] . . . are either true or backed by scientific opinion. All can also be hotly contested.”

No Paul, they can’t. That’s what makes them facts, you moron. As the saying goes, we are all allowed our own arguments, but there are only one set of facts.

However, I will continue and move onto the detailed specifics for those who have some time, and give a shit. I know there are very few of you, and probably fewer every day as we are inflicted with more and more drivel on this subject that should have been (and was) decided at least ten years ago to the bright, and to the rest of the world’s scientists in the intervening period. What we are left with is significantly less than 1% of the scientists who could withstand any peer review whatsoever who deny the anthropogenic climate change we have begun. And they use poor journalists and mainstream opinion spewers to provide winners like these 10 “facts conveniently brushed over by the global warming fanatics”:

1. The pin-up species of global warming, the polar bear, is increasing in number, not decreasing.

Hmmmn, now while I so wish this was true, I think I am going to have to see at least some shred of evidence to back this one up. None? No? Well sorry, then I think I will go with what the people at Polar Bears International, since they pretty much spend their whole time studying them and have answered this exact question, and unfortunately they don’t think so.

2. US President Barack Obama supports building nuclear power plants.

Whoopdeedoo! And so do I, Paul. What is your point? Are you saying it is a wholly and totally bad thing to consider every alternative in a risk-based approach when addressing climate change? I don’t even know why this inconvenient fact is in your list, because there are a number of climate change scientists that would be happy to pay it any amount of attention you want anytime. Maybe you just threw this in because you needed to make up the numbers.

3. The Copenhagen climate conference descended into farce. The low point of the gridlock and posturing at Copenhagen came with the appearance by the socialist dictator of Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez . . .

No, I would say the low point came when everyone realised on the first day that the organisers didn’t even plan the amount of tickets they issued based on the space they were using, and risked everything from a minor safety to a major security incident. After that, I wasn’t really expecting much, and I can say the same for the greenies I know. But here again, I don’t think I could call this in any way overlooked, as I remember seeing it on the news multiple times.

4. The reputation of the chief United Nations scientist on global warming is in disrepair.

Once again, no facts supplied. Just unsupported assertions with no references provided. My five minute research on this online through typically reliable sources provides me with no evidence to support the slander put forth by Sheehan. Talk about playing the man and not the ball.

5. The supposed scientific consensus of the IPCC has been challenged by numerous distinguished scientists.

The body of scientific work has been around for something like 30 years when people I know of decided that this might be an issue, following not long after the theory that was around when I was a boy suggested that the world might be going into a new ice age. The science moved on and even I published my first paper on the issue in ’99. The body of evidence upon which the science is based has been around forever. It is based on planetary physics, thermodynamics, chemistry and the application of industry through economics. It is not simple, and it is subject to some criticism (as that is the nature of science), but it remains solid and supported by the vast overwhelming number of credible scientists.

6. The politicisation of science leads to a heavy price being paid in poor countries. After Western environmentalists succeeded in banning or suppressing the use of the pesticide DDT, the rate of death by malaria rose into the millions. Some scholars estimate the death toll at 20 million or more, most of them children.

This one is so bad, I had to repeat it in full. “Some scholars”? Honestly, that’s what passes for a credible citation these days? For the record, those pesky kids who determined that the banning of DDT was causing a number of the bird species to go extinct, and demonstrating the basis of disruption of the reproductive cycle of animals through concentration of poisons through the food chain was a seminal piece of work (Silent Spring), that has withstood scientific scrutiny since its publication in 1962, despite a highly paid and aggressive disinformation campaign by the chemical industry for 10 years before DDT was banned. Humans have since, if you haven’t noticed, not gone extinct to malaria in any of the locations where it exists, and the birds were demonstrably going that way. Malaria also becomes resistant to drugs and poisons, so it would surely be as bad with or without DDT use.

7. The biofuels industry has exacerbated world hunger.

Aha, we finally have the start of something that is a bad idea and has not had nearly enough light shined on it, mainly because people still waste so much time debating if there is a climate change issue. But the idea of plant-based biofuels was attempted for the right reasons, even though it does end up driving food prices up and is not going to be a major long-term solution. But you can’t blame people for trying. Unless, of course, you have better examples of what you have tried. The thought that we might grow our own fuel is not dead either, but should be more focused on things like bacteria, and not food crops turned into ethanol.

8. The Kyoto Protocol has proved meaningless.

It may seem meaningless to those who don’t agree with the motives, good science, or common sense. But that does not make it overlooked, particularly since Paul and the sceptics still want to discuss it, and its being meaningless is not an established fact by a long shot. That global emissions have gone up since its 1990 is not in dispute, but the argument that emissions would of gone up more, and at a greater rate could easily be made, if one wanted to speculate. But why bother? Their argument is meaningless and doesn’t require any other response.

9. The United Nations global carbon emissions reduction target is a massively costly mirage.

I don’t even know what this one means, to be honest, but man it sure sounds good as an emotive statement without anything to support it at all. It is just hanging there in the article, as if dropping it so casually by itself lends itself to its credibility.

Unfortunately Paul, its also completely bullshit. To suggest emissions reductions are a mirage that cannot be reached shows no faith in the engineers of the world (forget the pure scientists), and the costs have been debated by me amongst others as not being as bad as you think. But of course we publish our math, data and assumptions, and that doesn’t really play as sexy as a one liner by a know-nothing on the subject like Sheehan.

10. Kevin Rudd’s political bluff on emissions trading has been exposed.

Here again, we have this presented as an undisputable fact hot off the pen of Paul Sheehan. But where is your evidence Paul? If Kevin Rudd wanted to pull off a bluff of doing something on emissions trading, imagine the conspiracy he would have had to create. Virtually all of Labor and a large portion of the Liberals, as well as the Greens and the non-bonkers independents are on the side of believing the science and doing something. The bulk of the emissions trading process as it exists comes from the Howard government. So let’s not characterise those of us on the reasonable side of the argument as fanatics. That’s called projecting.