“Plastics make ideal vessels for colonizing microscopic organisms that could trigger disease if they come into contact with corals,” Lamb said. “Plastic items – commonly made of polypropylene, such as bottle caps and toothbrushes – have been shown to become heavily inhabited by bacteria. This is associated with the globally devastating group of coral diseases known as white syndromes.”
When plastic debris meets coral, the authors say, the likelihood of disease increases from 4 to 89 percent – a 20-fold change. The scientists estimate that about 11.1 billion plastic items are entangled on reefs across the Asia-Pacific region, and that this will likely increase 40 percent over the next seven years.
Complémentairement à l’article de Donna Laframboise, il semblerait que les différents groupes de travail du GIEC n’aient pas la même définition d’un conflit d’intérêt. On peut identifier deux formes principales de conflit d’intérêt : soit l’utilisation d’une étude rédigée par un auteur ou coauteur du GIEC, ce qui revient à publier des études qu’on utilisera ensuite dans une auto-justification, (voir aussi à ce sujet un billet précédent : http://belgotopia.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2013/01/03/methodes-interpellantes-au-sein-du-giec.html ), soit la présence en ses rangs d’un salarié de l’industrie ou d’un membre ou d’un proche d’une ONG militant dans le domaine idéologico-politique.
On se rappelle que des contributeurs du GIEC, salariés de l’industrie chimique, avaient été accusés par diverses sources de conflit d’intérêt en 2016, que dire alors de membres ou proches d’ONG militantes, qui semblent de plus en plus se substituer aux organes démocratiques dans la direction de nos sociétés…
by Douglas Fox, February 16, 2018 in NationalGeographic
Scientists have peered into one of the least-explored swaths of ocean on Earth, a vast region located off the coast of West Antarctica. It is locked beneath a crust of ice larger than Spain and more than 1,000 feet thick, making its waters perpetually dark—and extremely difficult for humans to access. Now, a team of researchers has bored a hole through the ice and sampled the ocean beneath it. Their work could shed light on a poorly understood, but ominous episode in Antarctica’s recent past… (…)
Schellnhuber is often worshipped by the fringe-element climate alarmists as a sort of Climate Pope, whose every uttered word is to be regarded as infallible. Now he may be paying the price for his entrenched, radical positions on climate change.
“We now seriously need a Schellnhuber timeout. […] We do hope the new PIK leadership will correct the extreme direction the institute is currently on and rapidly puts an end to the flow of climate-alarmist press releases.“
A group of prominent scientists are calling for a global network of advanced weather stations that don’t need to go through controversial data adjustments, and it’s vindication for global warming skeptics.
Seventeen climate scientists co-authored a research article published in the International Journal of Climatology calling for a global climate station network modeled after the United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN) to use as a baseline for data quality.
In Africa, food abundance may be driving violent conflict rather than food scarcity, according to a new study. The study refutes the notion that climate change will increase the frequency of civil war in Africa as a result of food scarcity triggered by rising temperatures and drought.
With over 80 percent of forests already degraded by human and industrial activities, today’s findings underscore the immediate need for international policies to secure remaining intact forests — including establishing new protected areas, securing the land rights of indigenous peoples, regulating industry and hunting, and targeting restoration efforts and public finance. Absent specific strategies like these, current global targets addressing climate change, poverty, and biodiversity may fall short, including the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals to sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.
European Union nations are poised to endorse the biggest overhaul of the market they created more than a decade ago to rein in pollution, a move that may lift prices of power generated from fossil fuels.
The measures, due for final approval in Brussels on Tuesday, impose tougher requirements on thousands of companies to reduce greenhouse gases or pay higher costs for their carbon dioxide emissions. They’re part of a plan to clear up a flaw in the market that left the cost of CO2 permits well below the level needed to stir investments in green energy.
A vicious cold blast is about to invade Europe from the Russian Front and shock freeze the continent.
Interestingly some people – meteorologists among them – have been poking fun at the “hype” or even have blasted media outlets and other private meteorologists for “sensationalizing” the forecast Cold Beast from the East.
Sure, a number of locations over Germany for example may not even see temperatures drop below -10°C. What’s the big deal? It’s winter after all, they are saying. Just put on an extra coat. Some of these critics have even called the loud warnings of the Siberian cold “shrill, dumbass, click-baiting headlines“.
by Benny Peiser, February 23, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Ørsted must repair up to 2,000 wind turbine blades because the leading edge of the blades has become worn down after just a few years at sea.
Siemens Gamesa also does not want to comment on the costs, but the company’s Danish subsidiary has just provided 4.5 billion Danish Krone ($750 million) or 16% of its revenue to guarantee its commitments (…)
The bizarre issue of climate catastrophism has been around suf ciently long that it has become possible to trace its history in detail, and, indeed, several excellent re- cent books do this, placing the issue in the context of a variety of environmental, economic and political trends.
by Bjorn Lomborg, February 20, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
The world is mostly run on fossil fuels (81%). Nuclear makes up 5%, with 14% from renewables. Solar panels and wind turbines contribute 0.8%.
When you hear 14% renewables, you will likely think ‘wow, things are going pretty well with the switch to renewables’. But these renewables are not the ones you hear about. The biggest contributor is humanity’s oldest fuel: wood (…)
by Dr S. Crockford, February 12, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
It acknowledges that polar bear numbers have not declined in recent years even though summer sea ice dropped dramatically but goes on to perpetuate a number of myths that might not have happened if the author had done his homework or quizzed his other experts as thoroughly as he did me.
This article describes a simple but effective procedure for regional average temperature reconstruction, a procedure that you, yes you dear reader, can fully understand and, if you have some elementary programming skills, can implement.
To aid readability, and to avoid the risk of getting it wrong, no attempt is made in the article to give proper attribution to previous work of others, but a link is provided at the end to where a list of references can be found.
After several decades of extremely dry weather, residents in southern regions of Morocco finally woke up this morning to an unusual snowfall that currently impacted Ouarzazate, Taroudant and even Zagora, which has not experienced snowfall for fifty years.
Several photos and videos have been posted on social media depicting the cities covered with a huge layer of snow. Despite the freezing cold temperatures, many residents went outside to enjoy the unexpected snowfall.
Que sont les métaux rares ? Des ressources peu connues mais essentielles au fonctionnement de l’espace mondialisé. Insérées au cœur de tout appareil électronique, sans elles aucune de nos technologies numériques n’existerait. Composant également la plupart de nos technologies vertes (éoliennes, panneaux solaires ou voitures électriques), leurs modes de production laissent toutefois perplexe sur leur capacité à s’établir comme alternatives durables aux énergies fossiles. La pollution ne serait pas réduite mais simplement délocalisée… essentiellement en Chine où 95% des terres rares sont produites. Un chiffre qui par ailleurs devrait nous alarmer sur la situation de dépendance à la Chine dans laquelle le reste du monde -dont l’Europe- se trouve depuis les années 1980. Guillaume Pitron nous présente une enquête de six ans, dont les résultats sont à retrouver dans son livre La guerre des métaux rares.
According to Business Insider, renowned marketing expert Seth Godin suggested in an interview that “atmosphere cancer” would be a far more engaging term to promote climate action, than “global warming” or “climate change”.
Plastics make ideal vessels for colonizing microscopic organisms that could trigger disease if they come into contact with corals,” Lamb said. “Plastic items — commonly made of polypropylene, such as bottle caps and toothbrushes — have been shown to become heavily inhabited by bacteria
by E. Garnier, septembre 2012, in Risques, les Cahiers de l’Assurance
Ce travail tente de prouver l’intérêt pour l’assureur d’une approche historique consacrée aux tempêtes et aux cyclones entre 1500 et nos jours. Les exemples de la France, de l’Europe et de l’océan Indien montrent que ces événements extrêmes sont en réalité des facteurs de permanence historique et que les archives peuvent être très utiles pour estimer leur sévérité. Dans cette perspective, une simulation du coût actuel de la tempête atlantique de mars 1937 est réalisée. Elle révèle que les sociétés littorales de cette époque étaient nettement plus résilientes. Enfin, l’étude prouve que, depuis la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la vulnérabilité a augmenté plus rapidement que l’aléa tempête, notamment depuis les années 1990 avec l’urbanisation croissante des littoraux.
(…) I like the TAO buoy data because we can be sure that it is free of urban heat islands, changes in location, instrumentation changes, and many of the other problems that plague land-based stations. It is also measured very frequently, typically every ten minutes. This lets us explore the daily cycles of air and sea temperature, solar radiation, longwave radiation, humidity, and the like.
It has long been dawning on most people that the costs of Germany’s Energiewende (transition to green energies) have been spectacularly underestimated. As Germany rushes into its foray with renewable energies, principally wind and sun, we are finding out that many of the costs involved were never taken into account.
The short answer to the question posed in the title to this article is virtually and practically nothing. They definitely do not tell us what is claimed, that is, accurate representation of the state of the atmosphere including temperature in individual years. This is why one of the world’s experts on atmospheric chemistry and ice cores Zbigniew Jaworowski M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., wrote,
“It was never experimentally demonstrated that ice core records reliably represent the original atmospheric composition.”
According to Webster’s, science is: “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws.”
The way I see it, science is a method of discovering truths. For the idea to make any sense at all, though, we need first to agree that scientific truth is objective. Now, a particular truth or fact may of course be unknown, or poorly understood, or wrongly apprehended, at a particular time. But in science, one man’s truth must be the same as another’s. (…)
Germany’s utopian dream of transforming itself into the world’s green powerhouse is collapsing as its political and media establishment is mugged by reality. The country’s climate obsession has turned into one of the country’s biggest political and economic handicaps, making Germany almost ungovernable.
