An Australian  far-Leftist half-gets it about Pauline Hanson, an anti-immigrant politician



From "New Matilda"

Nelly Thomas (below) recognizes that ordinary people disagree with and resent much of what they are told and commanded by the political elite.  She even recognizes that the pronouncements and ukases of the Green/Left are part of the problem.  And there is no doubt that such resentments do form part of the base of support for Pauline Hanson.

She is wrong,however, in thinking that ONLY the uneducated support Pauline.  I am part of a pro-Pauline family and two of us are highly educated. What she says is largely a regurgitation of what is said about support for Donald Trump, and surveys of Trump supporters in America find he has extensive support at all educational levels.

What she overlooks is that at least half of Australians support Pauline's ideas about Muslims.  That's surely too many to be dismissed as a "Lumpenproletariat".  I suspect that what underlies her thinking and the thinking of other vocal Leftists is the old "all men are equal" myth.  In accord with that, Muslims must be seen as not significantly different from anybody else.  But they ARE different.  Their supremacist religion makes them a breeding ground for terrorism.  How can anybody deny that when we have seen so much mayhem from Jihadis arising out of Muslim communities?

So it is entirely rational and reasonable for anybody to be  rejecting of having Muslims among us. Muslims are a clear public safety concern. 99% of individual Muslims in Western countries have done nobody any harm but the madmen Islamic communities regularly spawn must make them unwelcome immigrants. In legal terms they are accessories before the fact.  Nelly Thomas is completely oblivious of all that.  Her Leftist selectivity towards the facts is running deep and strong

I am always amused at the way Leftists froth at the mouth over any hint of white supremacism but close their eyes to constantly and blatantly preached Muslim supremacism.  Leftism does entail a profound inability to handle reality.  It's a low-level form of schizophrenia


I’ve been wrestling about whether or not to write this piece. So much has been said about Pauline Hanson, so much has been said by her, and so little of it has been productive. But, I’ve decided to weigh in because I come from Hanson country: working class, socially conservative, racist, homophobic, xenophobic Australia.

I went to a public school, I know what it’s like to worry about the electricity bill. The extent of my early cultural experiences were The Sullivans and Albie Mangles. I left my hometown when I was 17, but my roots are there, my family are there and I know this Australia intimately.

For better or worse, unlike most of the people writing, tweeting and talking about Pauline Hanson, she is part of me; part of my story.

A little peek behind the veil.

The last time I went home for Christmas, I went to a family barbecue. I walked in and one of my Uncles turned, saw me, and introduced me to all his friends as, “This is Nelly, she’s my smart-arse radical niece from Prick-toria” (it gets worse), to which – after the laughing had died down – one of the guests said, “I hope she doesn’t protest for those bloody towel-heads,” and everyone cracked up again.

And he’s one of the Uncles who actually likes me. For real.

On the same trip I went to visit a school friend. We were catching up on old times and talking about teachers and who ended up with whom and all that stuff, when her husband joined in and, out of the blue, told me he’d seen a local copper chase a little *&^%$ (a word for “Aboriginal kid” that I refuse to repeat) on a stolen bike in his police car and knock him off it.

The boy was 8. Apparently he was physically uninjured and no charges were laid. We weren’t in Kalgoorlie, but close enough.

On another trip, I rang a cousin to arrange to catch up. His voicemail message was him saying in an Indian accent that he couldn’t answer the phone because he was on the toilet after eating a curry.

Another time, an Aunty – who was sympathetic to my “different” views – tried to find common ground and suggested that “The Aborigines” should be given their land back. I was somewhat heartened until it became clear she meant the “desert” and that she thought they’d “all be happier there”.

I don’t want to think about how she’d get “them” there.

I could go on. I won’t. And this is not meant to be confessional or voyeuristic – my point is that, to be frank, no-one outside the inner-city is surprised by Hansonism. I’m certainly not.

So, what’s up with Hanson? The woman herself – who the hell knows. It kind of doesn’t matter. What is more important, is what’s up with Hansonism. Why is anyone listening to someone so clearly off their rocker, let alone voting for her?

The usual explanation is an undercurrent of persistent racism in Australia. That’s undoubtedly a major factor, but I don’t think it explains her resurrection in full.

The first thing to know about Hanson supporters is that most of them feel stupid. Really. There’s a base insecurity in much of working class Australia about being uneducated which, often times, is conflated with being dumb.

Some of it is paranoia, some of it is real. Educated people do routinely talk down to the uneducated. This is probably true in all cultures, across all time, but I think it is a particular marker of the experience of the English colonisation of Australia: we have a deep-seated suspicion and dislike of The Snob. Being belittled or patronised by The Snob is not a nice feeling.

Fear of the snob takes many forms. I have relatives who panic about filling out even basic paperwork for fear of spelling a word wrong and others who talk differently – literally in a different accent – at the bank, doctors, Centrelink or on the phone with any “officials”.

Many didn’t finish high school, almost none are university educated (certainly none above my generation) and some are functionally illiterate. When they are in the presence of people who sound and look like they’ve been to university, and/or are rich, they’re intimidated.

They will either strike first (their approach with me at the barbecue) or say nothing for fear of being struck (their approach with authoritarian figures).

This is the first clue as to why Hanson resonates: she speaks working class.

Class is complicated in an Australia where a plumber can earn a six figure salary, but suffice to say there is a culture and even an accent and Pauline embodies it, talks it – even when she’s around important people (politicians, journalists, academics)! She’s one of out of the box.

If we had a more diverse political and commentariat class, there’d be others who’d talk working class too, but sadly, we don’t. There’s Jackie Lambie and Chris Bowen, but Australia’s political landscape is dominated by Christopher Pynes and David Marr’s (yes, I love the latter too, but he does sound like a Sydney Grammar Boy on steroids).

In short, Pauline Hanson talks up to the elite. She makes large swathes of working class Australia feel right and powerful. It’s intoxicating.

To complicate matters, every time a commentator, cartoonist, comedian SNOB makes fun of Hanson (and yes, I do it) – especially when she gets a word wrong or mispronounces something – she’s loved even more.

All working class people have at some point experienced that sense of being laughed at. I still wince at the time in first year uni I tried to order an “Alfresco” (thinking it was a coffee) and the time I was asked if I liked Picasso and replied that I didn’t play the piano (I can only assume I thought he was a classical musician). I can joke about these things now, but they sting.

Cultural capital is a powerful thing; and when you don’t have it you know it.

Hanson doesn’t have cultural capital and lampooning her lack of it – please explain – does nothing more than make those of us who already despise Hansonism feel better. And Superior.

Sometimes that’s ok – the choir needs preaching (especially in a comedy club) – but what it does in the media and political sphere is simply reinforce the idea that WE all think we’re better than THEM (The Greens boycotting her second diatribe Parliament thingy did the same. YOU’RE TOO GOOD TO EVEN LISTEN?).

So, first note to self and others: call out bigoted views for sure, but try to leave the easy target bullshit out of it. Her hair, accent, vocabulary and the like are irrelevant. And when you make fun of them, you kind of sound like a dick.

The other thing to understand about Hanson supporters is that, as Kim Carr’s excellent piece on New Matilda recently emphasised, support for Hanson can be tracked geographically and socio-economically.

This is no coincidence.

Most of her supporters are in Western Australia, Queensland and the low socio-economic parts of other states. Yes, there are some entrenched cultural factors of racism and xenophobia at play here, and those should not be underestimated, but there’s also the simple fact that increasing economic inequality in Australia is hitting those areas hardest.

We are a very wealthy country and by-and-large our poorest are better off than the poor world-wide (some Indigenous communities being an exception), but the gap between rich and poor in Australia is growing. This exacerbates feelings of being “left out”.

Just this week the IMF attributed the rise of Trump to this phenomenon, and Hanson is no different. The IMF certainly wouldn’t put it this way, but I would argue the working class know they’ve been royally screwed by deregulation, privatisation, union decimation and globalisation. The rich got richer, the poor paid the price.

I’ll give you a personal example.

My dad left school when he was about 13. He worked a series of shit-kicker jobs (his words) and then landed a low-paid but steady government job in my hometown. When he was in his 50’s, the service he worked for was privatised and he was retrenched with an absolute pittance (no Golden hand-shake, that’s for sure).

He was unemployed for almost two years and eventually got a job at a petrol station earning minimum wage. He was 60 and his boss was 19.

Dad’s story obviously isn’t unique. Hanson and Trump country(ies) are full of stories like his, and none of those workers are consoled by the promises of “trickle down economics” or slogans like “no jobs on a dead planet.” They see the rise, rise and rise again of corporate salaries, white-collar wages, banking scandals and profits and literally they suffer for them.

Economic inequality – including unemployment (which can so easily become entrenched and intergenerational), underemployment and the working poor – are central to understanding Hansonism. When you’re wondering if you can fill your fridge or pay your phone bill, it doesn’t take much for someone to activate your fear centre. Add Border Security and you’ve got a time bomb waiting to happen.

I jest, but seriously: when you’re afraid, you cast around for a reason. Enter Pauline Hanson with The Answer. Sure, The Answer changes from Asian to Aboriginal to Muslim to Refugees to Penny Wong, but fear never required logic.

One of the most galling aspects of all this, is that the targets of Hansonism are, by any rational measurement, suffering the same or more than the working classes (and indeed, the categories aren’t mutually exclusive)! One of my greatest frustrations in life is not understanding why the combined oppressed don’t unite and see the elite is screwing them all. Again, perhaps too busy with Border Security.

Hansonism is about racism.

It’s also about economic insecurity, fear, under-education and historical ignorance. Australia was a powder keg just waiting for Pauline and her box of matches.

One thing I know for sure is that being right about Hanson and Hansonism won’t be enough to defeat her. And making fun of her won’t help either. I have no interest in offering her understanding, but I’m afraid we are going to have to work harder to understand.

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De mortuis nil nisi bonum?

The traditional Latin piece of advice above translates as: "Speak only good of the dead".  But is it not absurd?  Should we speak only good of Hitler? 

Absurd or not, it seems widely regarded as good manners.  So when an Australian Senator made a perfectly factual comment about a dead person which alluded to something unpopular about that person, that was widely condemned.

The person concerned was a popular media personality and she was being very fulsomely praised in something of a media frenzy.  I infer that the Senator was only trying to restore some balance to the commentary about her.  I don't see that he has anything to apologize for.  An alternative point of view is often unpopular but is all the more important for that


A senator has been slammed on social media and faces calls to resign after a 'horrid, dreadful' tweet about sports journalist Rebecca Wilson.

The 54-year-old broadcast and print veteran died at home on Friday after a 'long' battle with breast cancer she had kept very private.

Just hours after the Daily and Sunday Telegraph columnist's death, Liberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjlem tweeted: 'Doubt there'll be many #WSW (Western Sydney Wanderers) fans at Rebecca Wilson's funeral #innocentlivesdamaged.'

He quickly came under attack for the post - a reference to Ms Wilson naming and shaming fans allegedly on Football Federation Australia's banned list, nearly half who were fans of the western Sydney club.

Fairfax investigative journalist Kate McClymont said: 'Shame on you, Senator @DavidLeyonhjelm. 'You mightn't have agreed with Rebecca Wilson but with her death so fresh show some human decency.'

'That's a pretty horrid thing to say so close to her death,' tweeted TV critic Steve Molk.

SOURCE

Having sex before sport CAN boost your performance



Sex the night before a sporting event has long been banned by coaches. But scientists now believe that making love does not harm performance on the running track, on football pitch or boxing ring. Rather than hamper performance, sex before sport - as long as it takes place more than two hours before competition - can actually improve results, according to the study.

The long-standing view has now been challenged by analysis of current scientific evidence, published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology.  The researchers sifted through hundreds of studies with the potential to provide evidence, however big or small, on the impact of sexual activity on sporting performance. One of the nine studies assessed found that the strength of female former athletes didn't differ if they had sex the night before. Another actually observed a beneficial effect on marathon runners' performance.

Source

The bits of Greenland that melted 20,000 years ago are the same bits that are melting today

My rather unsurprising heading above summarizes the findings reported in confusing detail below.  So the effort below to make the findings alarming falls rather flat.  It in fact draws attention to the lively possibility that present changes are as natural as the changes of 20,000 years ago.  

I also append the Abstract of the underlying academic journal article, which is rather fun in its own way. I quote: "We reevaluate the evolution of the GrIS since LGM and obtain a loss of 1.5-m sea-level equivalent from the northwest and southeast"

In other words, they estimate that Greenland melting made sea levels rise by 1.5 meters over the last 20,000 years.  That amounts to less than one ten thousandth of a meter per year.  How worrying is that?  You would need a microscope to see anything that small


The latest observations, reported in the journal Science Advances today, reveal that the entirety of Greenland is rising in response to a combination of Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (that is the rise of land due to ice mass loss over the last ~23 thousands years) and the Earth’s immediate elastic response to present-day ice-mass loss.

Mass loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the world’s second largest ice sheet, has increased dramatically over the last two decades, due to accelerated glacier flow and enhanced surface melting.

Scientists have historically found it hard to provide precise measurements of exactly how much the ice sheet has melted over a millennial time scale, and therefore how much it was contributing to global sea level rise over those time scales.

Earlier studies suggest that the basins of the southeast, east and northwest of the ice sheet have undergone profound change, contributing more than 77 per cent of the total ice loss to the ocean over the last century, specifically between 1900 and 1981.

Using data from the Greenland GPS Network, a team of researchers including scientists from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and the University of Bristol, recently found that these regions actually contributed about 40 per cent to ice mass loss over thousands of years.

Lead author Professor Shfaqat Abbas Khan from DTU, and colleagues, measured the rise of land masses that were once weighed down by ice sheets, known as Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA).  They found large GIA uplift rates of over 12 millimeters per year in southeast Greenland.

The results indicate that these basins alone have contributed to an ice mass loss corresponding to global sea level rise of 1.5 m.

Co-author Professor Jonathan Bamber from the University of Bristol’s School of Geographical Sciences, said: “It’s notoriously difficult to estimate the long term past contribution of Greenland to sea level rise. Our new results provide a unique insight into the millennial timescale contribution of the ice sheet. We find a remarkable similarity between how the ice sheet behaved in the past and what it is doing now, with potential implications for future mass loss trends.”

Professor Khan added: “It seems likely, therefore, that further destabilization of these ice sheet regions will continue to be the source of Greenland’s contribution to sea-level rise in the future.”

SOURCE  

Geodetic measurements reveal similarities between post–Last Glacial Maximum and present-day mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet

Shfaqat A. Khan

Abstract

Accurate quantification of the millennial-scale mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet (GrIS) and its contribution to global sea-level rise remain challenging because of sparse in situ observations in key regions. Glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) is the ongoing response of the solid Earth to ice and ocean load changes occurring since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; ~21 thousand years ago) and may be used to constrain the GrIS deglaciation history. We use data from the Greenland Global Positioning System network to directly measure GIA and estimate basin-wide mass changes since the LGM. Unpredicted, large GIA uplift rates of +12 mm/year are found in southeast Greenland. These rates are due to low upper mantle viscosity in the region, from when Greenland passed over the Iceland hot spot about 40 million years ago. This region of concentrated soft rheology has a profound influence on reconstructing the deglaciation history of Greenland. We reevaluate the evolution of the GrIS since LGM and obtain a loss of 1.5-m sea-level equivalent from the northwest and southeast. These same sectors are dominating modern mass loss. We suggest that the present destabilization of these marine-based sectors may increase sea level for centuries to come. Our new deglaciation history and GIA uplift estimates suggest that studies that use the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission to infer present-day changes in the GrIS may have erroneously corrected for GIA and underestimated the mass loss by about 20 gigatons/year.

Science Advances  21 Sep 2016: Vol. 2, no. 9, e1600931. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600931

An insight into the intellectual quality of Warmist believers

Marc Morano received the following barely literate email:

Although it is my belief that you and your children should be burned in public. Not be cause you are " a skeptic", I honestly believe that you know the science is true, but because you are to cowardly to engage in a real dialog. Since I already know your a coward, I expect this to be declined. I challenge you to debate me on climate change an average citizen with no connection to anyone. The last time I dealt with a door to door salesman, which is really all you'll ever be, I sent away with his tale between his legs. If you don't want to debate then let's meet man to man and I'll rip that stupid smile off your face. Again I know your cowardice runs deep, I am sure it runs in your family, so I know you won't accept.

DT

A question that I know you can answer. Ho long is Limbaugh's cock since you have had it your mouth so many times ?

The sender appears to be Douglas Trolian [dtrolian@me.com].  He appears to live at  Oakhurst, New Jersey.  The email is clearly threatening so is probably a crime under both State and Federal law.  Morano has been advised to report the threat to the police -- JR

How can we call something a thousand-year storm if we don’t have a thousand years of climate observations?

The article below gives the official NOAA answer to that question.  It is a bit heavy with statistics but it makes a fair point given its assumptions.  And the main assumptions is that the recent record is representative of the longer record.

And that assumption is wrong.  We know that the longer climate record had much more extreme events than the recent record has.  There were warm periods, little ice ages etc.  The recent record CANNOT be used as an estimate of the longer record because it is not representative of the longer record.

What they say is not guesswork. They are not just making things up. It is conventional extrapolation but the conditions for accurate extrapolation are not met.

I give the text minus graphs below just to give readers an idea of the argument.  It is a well set-out and respectable argument but it relies on a false premise.  And, sadly, they must know it is a false premise.  The writer is capable of good academic work but has prostituted his work to prove a falsehood.  We CANNOT accurately know things about the climate of the past for which we have no historic data


The summer of 2016 overflowed with extreme rain events. Here at Climate.gov, we’ve written about two of them: the June floods in southern West Virginia and the mid-August floods in Louisiana.

After the historic flooding in West Virginia in June, the National Weather Service said that in parts of West Virginia, 24-hour rainfall amount—more than 10 inches in some places—were a thousand-year event. We often do not have observations that go back 100 years, let alone 1,000. So how do scientists figure that out?  The answer lies in statistics.

Precipitation, rain, West Virginia, flooding
An "early glimpse" of 24-hour rainfall totals from storms over West Virginia on June 23, 2016, based on PRISM data from Oregon State University. "Early glimpse" data may not include data from all stations in the reporting network, and totals should be considered preliminary. Even the preliminary totals are enormous, however, with up to 8 inches of rain in many areas of southeastern West Virginia. Map by NOAA Climate.gov.

Dinosaurs and data

Estimating the size of a thousand-year event using a much shorter history of observations is like how paleontologists can take an incomplete collection of fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex bones and turn them into a picture of what T-rex  probably looked like when alive. The climate “bones” are all the observations we have. Since we have an admittedly incomplete set of weather observations, we have to use what we’ve got to create an image of the actual climate “dinosaur.”

Let’s work through it with a real-life example. I have compiled over 80 years’ worth of daily rainfall observations from the Beckley VA Hospital in West Virginia, near where June rains were so extraordinary. First, I eliminated any year with more than 10 day of missing data. Next, I pulled the highest daily rainfall amount that occurred in each year (1). Some years clearly have larger daily rainfall maximums than others.

Annual maximum precipitation, rain, bar graph
Annual maximum daily precipitation totals from 1909 to 2015 at a weather station located at Beckley VA Hospital in West Virginia. Years where more than 10 days of precipitation data were missing are excluded. NOAA Climate.gov based on data from the National Centers for Environmental Information.

To figure out how rare a particular rainfall event was, we need to understand the range of the data. We’ll start by putting the values in order from smallest to largest.

Annual maximum precipitation totals (inches) sorted from smallest to largest for 82 years at Beckley VA hospital in Beckley, West Virginia. The annual maximum precipitation total exceeded 4 inches in only two of the 82 years. NOAA Climate.gov map based on station data from the National Centers for Environmental Information.

Ordering the data from lowest to highest allows us to see the spread in totals but doesn’t help us figure out what is the most common daily rainfall maximum. For that, we need to sort the values into bins defined by rainfall amount (a bin for 0 inches, 0-0.25, 0.25-0.5 inches etc), like sorting clothes into piles based on size. It is at this step, that we can begin to see if there is a pattern.

histogram, precipitation frequency, heavy rain, extreme, West Virginia

A histogram of annual daily maximum precipitation totals for Beckley, West Virginia. There are 82 years in total. Precipitation totals are sorted into 0.25-inch bins. The most common bin, with 18 events, represented daily precipitation totals between 2 and 2.25 inches. 80 of the 82 years had precipitation amounts less than 4 inches. NOAA Climate.gov figure based on data from the National Centers for Environmental Information.

Certain piles have more items of clothing in them than others: we have more mediums than extra-larges so to speak. It is clear that some yearly 24-hour rainfall maximums occur more often than others. In 18 of 80 years, the highest 24-hour rainfall was between 2 and 2.25 inches. In 15 years, the highest daily rainfall total was between 1.75 and 2.0 inches. Only one time in 80 years was there a daily record above 5 inches.

However, the other thing that is clear is that the spread is incomplete. In this example, there are no years in which the highest daily rainfall total was between 4 and 4.5 inches, but there are some cases between 4.75-5 inches and 5.25-5.5 inches. It’s not physically plausible that the atmosphere would just never produce those rain amounts. It’s more logical to assume that if we had enough data going far enough back or forward in time, that there would eventually be a daily event filling in the gaps.

This is where statistics come in. Scientists apply what they call a “distribution” (the dark line in the figure below), a relationship of the magnitude of the rainfall to how often that rainfall amounts occurs (2). The distribution line is like the final picture of the dinosaur. It uses the observations (bones) as the input for a reconstruction of the whole climate picture.

The observations from Beckley, WV, of the frequency of rain events of different sizes (dots inside bars) can be used to estimate the full range of likely events and their frequency (dark line). This statistical estimate is called the probability density function, and it's like the process of using the bones from an incomplete dinosaur skeleton to describe what the complete creature probably looked like. Graph by NOAA Climate.gov, based on data from NCEI.

And now, researchers can see how often an event of any rainfall amount is likely to occur. In fact, if we consider the total area under the curve (dark line) and recognize that it must equal 1.0 (100%), then the probability of a single event of a given size occurring at some point is simply the area under that portion of curve (dark line). The probability of a yearly daily maximum rainfall event greater than 4 inches, for example, is just the area from 4 on the x-axis to the right, bounded by the distribution line.

In this type of graph, the curved line marks a hypothetical list of all possible extreme rainfall events, with the caveat that the total area under the curved line must equal 1.0 or 100%. The percent chance of any single rain event being more than a specific amount is the percent of the total area to the right of that rainfall amount. The percent chance of a rain event less than or equal to that threshold can be found by subtracting the area to the right of the threshold from 100. Graph by NOAA Climate.gov.

Since we can figure out the probability for a given rainfall amount, we can also figure out what rainfall amounts correspond to specific probabilities like 0.1%, or said another way, a 1-in-1,000 year event (1/1000).

SOURCE  

Wisdom from people in the news

Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?

Answer: "I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever," --Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss USA contest.

"Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff." --Mariah Carey

"Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life," -- Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for federal anti-smoking campaign

"I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body,"
--Winston Bennett, University of Kentucky basketball forward.

"Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country," --Mayor Marion Barry, Washington , DC .

"That lowdown scoundrel deserves to be kicked to death by a jackass, and I'm just the one to do it," -- A congressional candidate in Texas .

"Half this game is ninety percent mental." --Philadelphia Phillies manager, Danny Ozark

"It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.." -- Al Gore, Vice President

"I love California . I practically grew up in Phoenix ." -- Dan Quayle

"We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?" --Lee Iacocca

"The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein." --Joe Theisman, NFL football quarterback & sports analyst.

"We don't necessarily discriminate. We simply exclude certain types of people." -- Colonel Gerald Wellman, ROTC Instructor.

"Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992, because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances." --Department of Social Services, Greenville , South Carolina

"Traditionally, most of Australia's imports come from overseas."  -- Keppel Enderbery, Government minister

"If somebody has a bad heart, they can plug this jack in at night as they go to bed, and it will monitor their heart throughout the night. And the next morning, when they wake up dead, there'll be a record." --Mark S. Fowler, FCC Chairman

Reservoirs play substantial role in global warming because of methane release (?)

This is a totally dishonest piece of work.  In the laboratory, methane (CH4) does indeed absorb a lot of  wavelengths.  But in the atmosphere, water vapour absorbs the same solar wavelengths.  And water vapour is many time more frequent than CH4.  So there is little or nothing left for CH4 to absorb after water vapour has done its work.  In real life its presence or absence in the air has virtually no effect at all


Washington State University researchers say the world's reservoirs are an underappreciated source of greenhouse gases, producing the equivalent of roughly 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide a year, or 1.3 percent of all greenhouse gases produced by humans.

That's more greenhouse gas production than all of Canada.

Writing in next week's journal BioScience, the WSU researchers say reservoirs are a particularly important source of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the course of a century. Reservoir methane production is comparable to rice paddies or biomass burning, both of which are included in emission estimates of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading international authority on the subject.

John Harrison, co-author and associate professor in the WSU Vancouver School of the Environment, last month attended a meeting in Minsk, Belarus, to discuss including reservoir emissions in a planned 2019 IPCC update of how countries report their greenhouse gas inventories.

Methane accounts for 80 percent

"We had a sense that methane might be pretty important but we were surprised that it was as important as it was," said Bridget Deemer, WSU research associate and lead author. "It's contributing right around 80 percent of the total global warming impact of all those gases from reservoirs. It's a pretty important piece of the budget."

The BioScience analysis, which drew on scores of other studies, is the largest and most comprehensive look to date at the link between reservoirs and greenhouse gases, Harrison said.

"Not only does it incorporate the largest number of studies," he said. "It also looks at more types of greenhouse gases than past studies."

Acre per acre, reservoirs emit 25 percent more methane than previously thought, he said.

The researchers acknowledge that reservoirs provide important services like electrical power, flood control, navigation and water. But reservoirs have also altered the dynamics of river ecosystems, impacting fish and other life forms. Only lately have researchers started to look at reservoirs' impact on greenhouse gases.

"While reservoirs are often thought of as 'green' or carbon neutral sources of energy, a growing body of work has documented their role as greenhouse gas sources," Deemer, Harrison and their colleagues write.

Gases from decomposing organic matter

Unlike natural water bodies, reservoirs tend to have flooded large amounts of organic matter that produce carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide as they decompose. Reservoirs also receive a lot of organic matter and "nutrients" like nitrogen and phosphorous from upstream rivers, which can further stimulate greenhouse gas production

In 2000, BioScience published one of the first papers to assert that reservoir greenhouse gases contribute substantially to global warming. Since then, there has been a nine-fold increase in studies of reservoirs and greenhouse gases. Where earlier studies tended to be confined to reservoirs behind power stations, the newer studies also looked at reservoirs used for flood control, water storage, navigation and irrigation.

The WSU researchers are the first to consider methane bubbling in models of reservoir greenhouse gas emissions. Also, while previous papers have found that young, tropical reservoirs emit more methane than older, more northern systems, this study finds that the total global warming effect of a reservoir is best predicted by how biologically productive it is, with more algae and nutrient rich systems producing more methane.

The authors also report higher per-area rates of methane emission from reservoirs than have been reported previously. This means that acre-for-acre the net effect of new reservoirs on atmospheric greenhouse gases will be greater than previously thought. Reservoir construction around the globe is expected to proceed rapidly in coming decades.

SOURCE  

'I am a model. FULL STOP': Model hits out at fashion houses who insist on calling her 'plus size'



Australian model who made headlines for asking fashion houses to stop labelling models 'plus size' continues to find herself fighting against being labelled by her size. Stefania Ferrario, from Melbourne, found herself taking a stance last year when she posted an image of herself with the statement 'I am a model.' written across her abdomen.

The 23-year-old who is the front woman of #DropThePlus movement says those who claim certain models are 'plus size' imply they are 'bigger than normal,' reported Broadly.

The young model also noted that although some people in her industry might find the word empowering she believes it's the meaning expressed to the public that needs to be changed.  'I think certain labels do have a negative impact and it's easier to completely get rid of a word than to try to change its connotational meaning,' Ferrario said.

Source

Greenie study comes to some awkward conclusions

Some amusing stuff here.  Ozone depletion is doing something new and nasty?  What about the 1989 Montreal Protocol and the ozone hole?  Hasn't the ozone hole mostly healed up by now?  Instead of depleting, shouldn't the ozone be increasing?  Is this report undermining the ozone hole story? It would appear that it is.

And in one way, that's reasonable.  The ozone hole waxes and wanes as it always has and its greatest extent was in fact in September last year.  So the Montreal convention of which Greenies are so proud has in fact achieved exactly nothing. But by the same token ANY systematic change in the ozone levels is a fiction, including ozone depletion.  So the claims below are  rubbish.

I could go on but I like a sentence from the Abstract too much to quarrel further with it:  "climate model simulations that include anthropogenic forcing are not compatible with the observed trends"

Translating that into plain English:  "The global warming theory is wrong.  It does not predict reality".  How's that for today?

Journal abstract follows the summary below


Rising greenhouse gases and ozone depletion over the Antarctic are increasingly pushing rain-bearing storm fronts away from Australia's west and south, according to a new international study.

The research, which involved the Australian National University and 16 other institutions from around the world, has just been published in the Nature Climate Change journal.

It found Southern Ocean westerly winds and associated storms were shifting south, down towards Antarctica, and robbing southern parts of Australia of rain.

ANU Associate Professor Nerilie Abram, the lead Australian researcher, said this had contributed to a decline of more than 20 per cent in winter rainfall in southwestern Australia since the 1970s.

"That band of rainfall that comes in those westerly winds is shifting further south, so closer towards Antarctica," Dr Abram, from the ANU's Research School of Earth Sciences and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, said.

The study attributed this shift directly to human-induced climate change, primarily from rising greenhouse gases and ozone depletion.

Dr Abram said the loss of rain combined with "2016 being on track to smash the hottest-year record was ominous for communities and the environment".

"Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are remote but this region influences Australia's heatwaves, affects whether our crops get the winter rainfall they need and determines how quickly our ocean levels rise," she said.

The international research team examined how recent Antarctic climate trends compared to past climate fluctuations using natural archives such as ice cores drilled into the Antarctic ice sheet.

They found the bigger picture of the region's climate trends remained unclear because of Antarctica and the Southern ocean's "extreme fluctuations in climate year to year".

Dr Abram explained the climate measurements were not yet long enough "for the signal of anthropogenic climate change to be clearly separated from this large natural variability".

Lead author Dr Julie Jones, from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, said there was still an enormous amount to learn about the Antarctic climate.

"At face value, many of the climate trends in Antarctica seem counter-intuitive for a warming world," Dr Jones said.

"Scientists have good theories for why, but these ideas are still difficult to prove with the short records we are working with."

SOURCE

Assessing recent trends in high-latitude Southern Hemisphere surface climate

Julie M. Jones et al.

Abstract

Understanding the causes of recent climatic trends and variability in the high-latitude Southern Hemisphere is hampered by a short instrumental record. Here, we analyse recent atmosphere, surface ocean and sea-ice observations in this region and assess their trends in the context of palaeoclimate records and climate model simulations. Over the 36-year satellite era, significant linear trends in annual mean sea-ice extent, surface temperature and sea-level pressure are superimposed on large interannual to decadal variability. Most observed trends, however, are not unusual when compared with Antarctic palaeoclimate records of the past two centuries. With the exception of the positive trend in the Southern Annular Mode, climate model simulations that include anthropogenic forcing are not compatible with the observed trends. This suggests that natural variability overwhelms the forced response in the observations, but the models may not fully represent this natural variability or may overestimate the magnitude of the forced response.

Nature Climate Change 6, 917–926 (2016) doi:10.1038/nclimate3103

Earth CO2 levels: Have we crossed a point of no return?

The article below is singularly brainless.  It can be summed up in one sentence:  "CO2 levels have been rising steadily so will probably continue to rise".  To which the obvious rejoinder is "So what?"  The only obvious effect of the rise so far is bigger crop yields and the greening of some desert areas -- hardly something to worry about.  CO2 has certainly had no effect on global temperature.  CO2 levels rose steadily throughout this century but temperatures remained flat until 2015.  They bobbed up and down but only by hundredths of one degree, which is insignificant by any criterion


Usually, September marks a low in the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. This concentration sets the bar over which levels of the greenhouse gas will fluctuate throughout the next year. But this September, CO2 levels are staying high, at around 400 parts per million, and many scientists think that we will not see levels of the greenhouse gas drop below that threshold within our lifetimes.

Earth has been steadily building up CO2 in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, but the 400 ppm landmark is creating a new normal that hasn't been seen on this planet for millions of years.

"The last time our planet saw 400 ppm carbon dioxide in our atmosphere was about 3.5 million years ago, and global climate was distinctly different than today," David Black, associate professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University in New York, tells The Christian Science Monitor in an email.

"In particular, the Arctic (north of 60°) was substantially warmer than present, and global sea level was anywhere between 15 and 90 feet higher than today," Professor Black says.

"It took millions of years for the atmosphere to reach 400 ppm CO2 back then, and it took millions of years for the atmospheric CO2 to drop to 280 ppm right before the industrial revolution. One of the things that really concerns climate scientists is we as humans have taken only a few centuries to do what nature took millions of years, and most of that change was just in the last 50-60 years."

While global concentrations have spiked above the 400 ppm level for several years, the summer growing season has always absorbed enough atmospheric CO2 through photosynthesis to keep concentrations below that mark for the bulk of the year.

As human activities – mainly the burning of fossil fuels – have flooded more CO2 into the atmosphere, however, the annual low point has inched closer and closer to that 400 ppm mark. This year, scientists fear that the planet may have reached a point of no return.

"Is it possible that October 2016 will yield a lower monthly value than September and dip below 400 ppm? Almost impossible," wrote Ralph Keeling, director of the program at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in a blog post last week.

While CO2 levels have dipped below the previous September's benchmark in the past, such an occurrence is rare. Even if the world stopped producing carbon dioxide completely tomorrow, the gas would likely linger above the 400 ppm mark for years, scientists say.

"At best (in that scenario), one might expect a balance in the near term and so CO2 levels probably wouldn't change much — but would start to fall off in a decade or so," Gavin Schmidt, NASA’s chief climate scientist, told Climate Central. "In my opinion, we won’t ever see a month below 400 ppm."

While the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is cause for concern, it should be noted that the 400 ppm mark itself is more of a waypoint, rather than a hard line spelling doom for the global climate.

"It's a round number that people recognize," says Damon Matthews, environment professor at Concordia University in Montreal. "Also symbolic is that, in parallel with this increase in CO2, global temperatures have exceeded one degree above pre-industrial temperatures."

While these milestones are largely symbolic, they represent tangible illustrations of the trajectory the Earth's climate is following.

SOURCE  

Two women 'had sex with a 15-year-old boy at a pizza party after asking him if he's ever had a threesome'





Two Pennsylvania women have been charged with having sex with a 15-year-old boy during a pizza party where alcohol was served.

Tonia Simms, 37, and Melissa Weaver, 26, were arraigned Tuesday on multiple counts of statutory sexual assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, corruption of minors and indecent assault.

According to a probable cause affidavit, the sexual encounter between Simms, Weaver and the teenage boy took place on July 8 at the older woman's apartment at the Holiday Acres housing complex in Derry Township.

The document, obtained by TribLive.com, states that the 15-year-old and Melissa Weaver arrived at Simms' residence for dinner, which featured pizza and some alcoholic beverages.

After they ate and drank, Simms went upstairs to put her children to bed, while Weaver and the boy stayed downstairs.

Having tucked her kids in for the night, Simms then allegedly invited her guests to her bedroom, where according to the affidavit, the trio got undressed.

'After they were all naked, the child victim said that Melissa looked at him and said, "What, you've never had a threesome before?”' State Trooper John Zalich wrote in the affidavit.

The document states that the two women then proceeded to have sexual intercourse with the boy and with one another.

Confession: Simms reportedly told police she and the teen had sex on more than one occasion. she called what happened between them a 'big mistake'

When the teen went to police about the incident, he reportedly showed a text message exchange between himself and Simms in which the two allegedly discussed his age.

When interviewed by police, Zalich wrote that both Simms and Weaver admitted to the sexual encounter with the minor.

‘Tonia said that it started out as innocent flirting and turned into a big mistake because they all had a moment of weakness,’ Zalich said in the affidavit.

Simms also revealed that she and the 15-year-old had sex on more than one occasion.

PennLive.com reported that Weaver was released Wednesday on $10,000 unsecured bail, while Simms remains jailed in Westmoreland County Prison on $20,000 cash bail. Both suspects are due back in court for plea hearings on November 16.

According to information available on social media sites, Simms is a stay-at-home mom to her two sons, one of whom is a special-needs boy who was born with a congenital heart defect and is in need of a kidney transplant.

SOURCE  

Tradesman gets bitten on his penis by a spider for the second time

A 21-YEAR-OLD tradie has been branded “the unluckiest man in the world” after he was bitten on the penis by a spider for a second time.  The apprentice, known only as Jordan, was bitten on his old fella by a redback spider on a worksite in Sydney’s south back in April.  

Yesterday, almost five months later exactly, his tackle was bitten again in a portaloo on a worksite. “This is the first time I’ve used one [portaloo] since then,” Jordan revealed to Kyle and Jackie O on KIIS FM this morning.  

The tradie claims he did try to check the toilet seat before he sat down to use it but didn’t notice the spider. Jordan said the spider bit him in “pretty much the same spot” as last time, although he’s not sure what type of spider it was on this occasion. 

“This is one is a bit sorer,” Jordan said, “it seems like it got a better shot at it this time”.  The tradie was released from hospital last night and will return to work tomorrow once the swelling has gone down.

Source

Boston Latin needs more diversity?

Boston Latin High School is prestigious because of only one thing.  The quality of its students. It no longer requires the study of Latin but it does filter out applicants by ability.  You have to be smart to be admitted.  But, as the certainties of black educational achievement will tell you, that means that the school should almost all be white.  There are very few top educational achievers among blacks.

But Leftists hate that "unequal" reality and will always strive to destroy anything selective.  And they have already undermined Boston Latin.  They have subverted the admission procedures to the point where blacks are an absurd 20% of the student body.  Many of those blacks should not be there -- mixing with elite whites.

Nobody likes dummies so it is a considerable tribute to the white students that for 99% of the time they do or say nothing adverse to the dummies amongst them.  Schoolchildren are however hard on one another generally.  The elite cliques that form among the "cool" students are well-known.  And those excluded by such cliques are mostly white.  So superior attitudes towards blacks can be expected not because of race but because of "coolness", however coolness is defined in that time and place.  But in the perfervidly race-conscious environment of Left-dominated American education today, normal adolescent aloofness will be characterized as racism.

There is NO racism at Boston Latin.  Blacks just don't like the way whites look past them.  Even the author below admits that the complaints are nebulous.  They are more than nebulous.  They are mistaken.  The smart white kids of Boston Latin know what terrors would descend upon them if they did or said anything racist.  So they don't do it.

So the prescription below is exactly the reverse of what is needed.  Bending the rules to let more blacks in would only sharpen racial divisions.  What is needed is strict enforcement of the rules so that the whites and blacks who are admitted are intellectually equal.  THAT is how the black students would get respect.  Respect cannot be forced.  It has to be earned.


US ATTORNEY Carmen M. Ortiz announced the findings of a civil rights investigation into Boston Latin School on Monday, but they were shockingly unrevealing. Ortiz found that there was a climate of racial discrimination and harassment at the school, and that BLS staff failed to adequately handle student complaints.

But we already knew that, primarily from Boston Public Schools’ own investigation into the incidents. What’s new is that, in one instance, Ortiz found the school in violation of the federal Civil Rights Act. As a result, the district agreed to a three-year period of oversight under the Department of Justice. During that time, BPS will be monitored to make sure the school carries out mandatory training for students, faculty, and staff on racial harassment policies; designs a restorative justice system; hires a diversity officer; and conducts an annual survey of the school’s racial climate. In fact, some of those measures had already been implemented at the school, such as the hiring of Albert Holland, in March, as special assistant to the superintendent, to help with racial tensions. He’s now been appointed as the diversity officer at Boston Latin.

Hopefully, such remedies will result in a better school environment. But Ortiz ignored the elephant in the room. The racial harassment that resulted in the civil rights violation probably wouldn’t have happened if the school were more diverse in the first place. “We know the harm racial isolation causes,” says Matt Cregor, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice. “When you’re made to be the only person in the room of a certain color of skin or national origin, that’s a tremendous burden.”

Indeed, the racial demographics at Boston Latin School diverge sharply from the district’s. Black and Latino students constitute 74 percent of the city’s school population yet account for only 20 percent of Boston Latin’s student body. To be fair, the district is boosting efforts to diversify the pool of candidates seeking admission to the city’s three exam schools, including Boston Latin. But in looking for long-term strategies to tackle racial tensions at the school — approaches that go beyond a survey or a training session here and there — the admissions policy must be on the table.

School officials had been already doing that. But they got off on the wrong foot when it was reported, in early July, that there was an under-the-radar advisory group examining entry requirements at Boston Latin and the city’s two other exam schools. Alumni and parents understandably cried foul, concerned about stealth efforts to change policy. It’s incumbent on Boston Public Schools to reexamine a process that shortchanges the majority of the city’s student body. But such conversations need to be conducted publicly.

Students are currently admitted to BLS based just on grade averages and test scores. A quota system once reserved 35 percent of seats for black and Latino students, but that system ended after a 1995 lawsuit in which a white student claimed reverse discrimination. Since then, minority representation has lagged.

Boston Latin is an exclusive school by nature. But application criteria have changed over time, and could change again; maintaining academic excellence is perfectly compatible with the goal of reducing racial isolation.

The use of test scores and grades as admission criteria carries an inherent disadvantage. It favors the families who can afford to pay hundreds of dollars for a test preparation course. The old quota system may have been an unacceptably blunt tool to diversify the student body, but there are legal race-conscious approaches that the district could consider, such as assigning more weight to applications from kids living in certain zip codes.

This summer’s US Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action signals that higher-education institutions have some discretion factoring race in the admissions process. That message should ring loud and clear in elementary and secondary school systems as well. To address the root of tensions Ortiz and others have identified, the district needs to look hard at the way students are admitted to BLS, the district’s “crown jewel.”

SOURCE

Greenie bank tottering

Germans are the original environmentalists.  They have been walking around naked in their forests -- and feeling good about it -- for over 100 years.  Even Hitler adopted Greenie ultimate goals of primitive bliss.  So modern environmentalism could well be said to be a German invention.

It is therefore no surprise that a major German bank, Deutsche Bank,  has been active in promoting environmentalism. They frequently proclaim the truth of Warmism, for instance.  And their investments must be "ecologically responsible", of course.  No building of dams to benefit poor people in India and Africa. Below is an excerpt from the front page blurb on their site:

Environmental and climate protection are among the most pressing global challenges of our time. We take these concerns into account in all aspects of our business, including minimising our own ecological footprint. Using our expertise in the areas of energy and climate change, we support the development of a more sustainable world economy

Pretty clear.  But it is an an old adage that if your theories are wrong, you won't get the results you expect.  And that seems to have happened to this group of cabbage-heads. We read:

"Deutsche Bank shares have finally climbed today after falling to a historic low amid mounting fears for the future of Germany's top bank.

Companies in the FTSE 100 index saw £23billion wiped off their value yesterday as investors dumped financial stocks.

The sell-off was triggered by reports that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had ruled out a government rescue of troubled lender Deutsche Bank.

The bank has lost more than half its value in the past year as it struggles to cope with low interest rates and sluggish growth.

Deutsche Bank shares fell another 7.5 per cent to a record low yesterday, dragging other finance stocks down with it.

This morning they fell to €10.25 amid warnings that a dip below €10 per share would take the bank into the realm of a risky investment. However, by this afternoon, shares had risen to €10.63 before the market closed at €10.51 - down 0.4%.

The FTSE 100 Index was down 10.37 points to 6,807.67, as London-listed lenders were dragged lower by the negative sentiment surrounding the German bank"

Instead of lending money to foster "Green" projects, they should have lent to the most promising commercial projects.  And instead of worrying about the environment, they should have been worrying about cyclic downturns in the economy.  But they did not do that so they got results they did not expect.  Their theories about what was important were wrong.

Deutsche could have learned from Australian banks. Australian banks are the world's soundest banks.  In 2008 when banks worldwide were falling over and being rescued by their governments, Australian banks just kept on making profits as usual.  I know.  I had and have shares in most of them.

So how did the Oz banks do it?  By sticking to their knitting.  They just concentrated on lending to people who were most likely to pay it back.  No political lending. No Greenie activism.  Pretty simple!

Hillary insults white people

American whites have been kicked in the teeth so often by the Left that there has been little reaction to this so far.  Hillary  thinks she can persuade white people not to be racist, thus assuming that they are.  She is blaming a shooting of a black man by a panicky female cop (who happens to be white.  Black cops also shoot and kill troublesome black men) on white people generally.  It's an extraordinary generalization of exactly the sort that the Left are always warning us against. For instance, no matter what individual Muslims do, you can't say anything about Muslims generally. She is an utter racist. Race, race, race.  That's all the Left talk about. It's the Left who are the ultimate racists

On Tuesday's episode of "The Steve Harvey Morning Show,"  Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stated:

"This horrible shooting again. How many times do we have to see this in our country?...And maybe I can, by speaking directly to white people, say, ‘Look, this is not who we are’…We have got to do everything possible to improve policing, to go right at implicit bias"

She was referring to the police shooting of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Ok.—a recent killing of a black man by the hands of police that has caused widespread outrage.

Clinton, who recently criticized Donald Trump for jumping to conclusions regarding the NYC bombing, saying, “I think it’s also wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions, because we are just in the beginning stages of trying to determine what happened,” seems to have chosen a different method when discussing the possibility of police officers making fatal mistakes.

This is not the first time Clinton has deemed white people responsible for the deaths of black men by police. In an interview with CNN back in July, Clinton discussed the Dallas shooting of five police officers saying, “I’m going to be talking to white people, we’re the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries coming from our African-American fellow citizens.”

At the 107th NAACP convention this year, she stated, “We white Americans need to do a better job of listening when African-Americans talk about the seen and unseen barriers you face every day. We need to recognize our privilege and practice humility, rather than assume our experiences are everyone’s experiences.”

SOURCE

Girlfriend gets revenge on 'cheating boyfriend' by tasering him in the crotch



A girlfriend got revenge on her 'cheating boyfriend' - by tasering him in the crotch. Mandie Pistol, from Las Vegas, was filmed walking in on her boyfriend with another woman before using the taser gun on him.

A video, which has been viewed over two million times, shows her claiming that she knows her boyfriend has been cheating on her for 'quite some time'.  'What he doesn't seem to remember is that he got me this taser for Christmas. F*** him.'

After seeing her boyfriend on the sofa with another woman, she shouts: 'Who the f*** is she?' Her boyfriend replies: 'That's not my girl. That's not my girl!' Ignoring her boyfriend's protestations, Mandie tasers him in the groin"

Source

Why correlations of CO2 and Temperature over ice age cycles don’t define climate sensitivity

This paper from a great headquarters of Warmism is something of a mess.  Its conclusion -- that there are so many unknowns in the paleoclimate record that it should not be used as a basis for generalizations -- most skeptics would wildly applaud.  The authors  limit themselves to talking about only one type of generalization but the same considerations surely throw all paleoclimate generalizations into doubt.

The other thing of interest is their comment on the long-term correlation beteween CO2 levels and temperature.  Skeptics have never questioned that.  Instead they point to the time lag involved:  Temperature rises PRECEDED CO2 rises -- exactly the opposite of what Warmist theory prescribes but fully understandable as warming oceans outgassing CO2 -- a normal physical effect


We’ve all seen how well temperature proxies and CO2 concentrations are correlated in the Antarctic ice cores – this has been known since the early 1990’s and has featured in many high-profile discussions of climate change.

For obvious reasons, we are interested in how the climate system will respond to an increase in CO2 and that depends on time-scale and what feedbacks we consider:

The “Charney” sensitivity is generally thought of as the medium-term response of the system, including all the fast feedbacks and some of the longer term ones (like the ocean). This is usually what is meant by climate sensitivity in normal conversation. On longer (multi-millennial) timescales we expect changes in vegetation and ice-sheets to occur and alter the response and that sensitivity is often described as the Earth System Sensitivity (ESS).

But let’s go back to the correlation from EPICA Dome C:

Using local temperatures, the straight line regression is ~3.9 ºC/(W/m2). Assuming that global temperature changes on these timescales are roughly half as large, that implies ~2 ºC/(W/m2) at the global scale, and given that 2xCO2 forcing is about 4 W/m2, that means a ‘sensitivity’ of ~8ºC for a doubling of CO2. This is very much larger than any of the standard numbers that are usually discussed. So what is going on?

The first point to recognize is that the ice age/interglacial variations are being driven by Milankovitch forcings (“orbital wobbles”). These have an almost zero effect in the global mean radiative forcing but make huge differences to the seasonal and regional solar fluxes. This makes these drivers almost uniquely effective at impacting ice sheets, hence temperature, the circulation, the biosphere, and therefore the carbon cycle. Notably, these drivers don’t fit neatly into a global forcing/global response paradigm.

Second, the relationship we are seeing in the ice cores is made up of two independent factors: the sensitivity of the CO2 to temperature over the ice age cycle – roughly ~100 ppmv/4ºC or ~25 ppmv/ºC – and the sensitivity of the climate to CO2, which we’d like to know.

The problem is perhaps made clearer with two thought experiments. Imagine a world where the sensitivity of the climate system to carbon dioxide was zero (note this is not Planet Earth!). Then the records discussed above would show a reduced amplitude cycle, but a strong correlation between CO2 radiative forcing and temperature. This relationship would be exactly the T to CO2 function. To take another extreme case, assume that that carbon cycle was insensitive to climate, but climate still responded to CO22, then we’d see no CO2 change and zero regression. In neither case would the raw T/CO2 regression tell you what the sensitivity to CO2 alone was.

Instead, to constrain the Charney sensitivity from the ice age cycle you need to specifically extract out those long term changes (in ice sheets, vegetation, sea level etc.) and then estimate the total radiative forcing including these changes as forcing, not responses. In most assessments of this, you end up with 2.5ºC to 3ºC in response to 2xCO2. To estimate the ESS from these cycles you’d need to know what the separate impacts the CO2 and the orbital forcing had on the ice sheets, and that is not possible just from these data. Constraints on ESS have thus come from the Pliocene (3 million years ago) or even longer Cenezoic time scales – giving a range roughly 4.5ºC to 6ºC. Lunt et al (2010) and Hansen et al (2008) have good discussions of this and we discussed it here too.

The bottom line is that you can’t estimate Earth System Sensitivity solely from correlations over ice age cycles, no matter how well put together the temperature data set is.

SOURCE (See the original for links and graphics)

The pill and Massey Ferguson

The great moral questioning of the '60s is normally attributed to the contraceptive pill, which became generally available at that time.  The pill did what conventional morality had long done: remove the risk of ex-nuptial births.  So conventional morality lost its authority among the young.  Whether any sexual restraint of any kind was warranted became questionable.  So sexual promiscuity probably reached its peak at that time.  I was there and was a cautious participant in the mood of the times.

And ALL morality, not only sexual morality, came into question at that time.  There was a collapse of values and standards across the board at that time.  If sexual restraint had become irrelevant, might not all forms of restraint be old-fashioned and irrelevant?  So practices that had evolved over millennia for the guidance of society lost their authority and there was nothing to replace them.  People were cast adrift from all guidance and had to figure out entirely from new how to live the good life.  Nobody knew any longer what was wise.

Fortunately, however, Christians in particular kept the old moral thinking alive and showed by results that it gave a better balanced life.  I was myself a fundamentalist Protestant throughout my teens (late '50's to early '60s) and that gave me a great set of rules to live by.  I did not have to invent my own rules. I had the wisdom of the ages on my side.

So I got though my teens with no trauma at all and much happiness.  I took no mind altering substances so was not damaged by them.  I did not drink alcohol so avoided all the risks associated with that.  I had friends who drank who died while drunk driving but I did not.  I was celibate so avoided some nasty diseases. I kept clear of crime.  So I arrived undamaged at adulthood and mental maturity.

And at around age 20 (1963) I became an atheist.  But my teen-aged experience of a very puritanical lifestyle gave me strong habits of restraint so I participated in the sexual revolution from that time on only as part of affectionate relationships. A lot of my old Christian values stay with me to this day and even in the '60s casual sex had no attractions for me.

So I saw it all in the '60s and was sober enough to remember what I saw.  Many of the people who glorify the life they had in the '60s can't actually remember much detail of what they did. They can't remember what they saw through a blur of drugs and alcohol.

So what I have given so far is a conventional explanation of the great break of the '60s.  But the pill is in fact only half the story.  It's not the whole explanation for that break.  The other half is the Massey Ferguson tractor!  How's that for a strange proposition?  To understand that proposition we have to go back to what was behind the conventional morality of the pre-1960 era.

Conventional morality was heavily influenced by a shortage of food.  In our present era of cheap and abundant food, we find it hard to comprehend that for most of human history, it was a struggle for most families to put enough bread on the table for their children.  Most people were poor and the money often did not stretch far enough to buy all the food that the family wanted.  They often had to make do with the cheapest possible food in order to eat at all.  Oaten porridge was a lifesaver.

So in those circumstances men wanted to be absolutely certain that the children they were feeding were their own. "Cuckoos" were regarded as robbing the man's natural children of what was rightfully theirs.  But the problem was how to tell who was the father of the various children.  Women mostly had a pretty good idea of it but the men did not.  And there is no doubt that both men and women sometimes "stray".  In a moment of passion a woman might easily sleep with someone other than her husband and produce a child from that union.

So there was only one way a man could ensure that his scarce resources were spent on his own children:  He had to convince his wife to sleep only with him.  And all the persuasive resources of society were brought to bear on that need.  Sexual restraint became the highest morality, with everything from ostracism to hellfire deployed to produce it.

And the pill did little to reduce that need.  Sex became less perilous but the man still needed to know which children were his.  So how come a highly functional morality broke down?  Why did not the pill simply drive promiscuity underground?

And that's where we come to Massey Ferguson.  The Massey Ferguson tractor was only one part of a broader phenonenon but it was a very visible one.  The Massey Ferguson was a small, cheap tractor  that was a remarkably tough machine.  I remember seeing lots of them in Australia and I gather that they were equally popular in Britain.  Massey Ferguson have made tractors of all shapes and sizes over the years but those small post-war models had a big impact.



With a Massey Ferguson farmers could pull bigger implements than a horse team could, could pull them for longer and could pull them more cheaply.  A horse team was not cheap to maintain.  You had farrier's bills, veterinary bills and feed bills.  And a  team of big working horses can go though a phenomenal amount of feed every day. For his Massey Ferguson the farmer just had to keep a drum of fuel handy.

So a farmer's productivity was at least doubled when he bought a Massey Ferguson. And what does a farmer's productivity add up to?  Food.  Along with other agricultural advances of the postwar era, the Massey Ferguson steadily drove down the price of food.  In t
he USA it was probably John Deere who provided most of the tractors but the result was the same.

So by the time the '60s hit, feeding your family was a difficulty only for the very unfortunate.  So it was no longer a tragedy if a man fed a child who was not his own.  His other children were not deprived thereby.  So the great need for the sexual control of women largely fell away.  Conventional morality had lost its main function.

So the Massey Ferguson is at least as important as the pill as an explanation of the '60s moral revolution -- JR

Men and women should wear the same sort of clothes (?)



FANS are up in arms over the first pictures to emerge from the new Jumanji reboot, starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Jack Black, Karen Gillan and Kevin Hart, with many branding the movie “sexist”.

Hart took to Instagram to rave about how great the chemistry is between the stars in the remake of Robin Williams’ 1995 original movie, but ended up attracting major backlash over the difference between the men’s outfits and Gillan’s.

In the on-set picture, the males are seen in commando-style outdoor wear, while Gillan is wearing wildly impractical short-shorts, a crop top, and knee-high boots — hardly sensible for running through the jungle.

Johnson quickly jumped into the commentary underneath Hart’s picture, explaining that it’s not how it looks. “Her jungle wardrobe will make sense when you know the plot,” he wrote. “Trust me.”

But fans were still up in arms, with some even threatening to boycott the movie.

“All the guys are dressed for the jungle,” one person commented. “Except the girl who’s dressed like she’s in the beginning of an adult film. If the girl’s going to dress like that, pass. I have two young girls.”

SOURCE

Note that the black guy is also wearing shorts.  Doesn't he count?