Vulture Capitalist Paul Singer funds climate denialism
Bjorn Lomborg Think Tank Funder Revealed As Billionaire Republican ‘Vulture Capitalist’ Paul Singer DESMOGBLOG, GRAHAM READFEARN, 9 FEB 15, A billionaire “vulture capitalist” and major backer of the US Republican Party is a major funder of the think tank of Danish climate science contrarian and fossil fuels advocateBjørn Lomborg, DeSmogBlog has found.
New York-based hedge fund manager Paul Singer’s charitable foundation gave $200,000 to Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Center (CCC) in 2013, latest US tax disclosures reveal.
The grant to Lomborg’s think tank is revealed in the tax form of the Paul E. Singer Foundation covering that foundation’s activities between December 2012 and November 2013.
Singer, described as a “passionate defender of the 1%”, has emerged as a major force in the Republican party in recent years and was a key backer and influencer during Mitt Romney’s failed tilt at the Presidency.
The $200,000 grant represented almost one third of the $621,057 in donations declared by the Copenhagen Consensus Center in 2013……..
Lomborg, a Danish political scientist, is often cited on lists of the world’s most influential people.
He writes extensively on climate change and energy issues with his columns appearing in many of the world’s biggest news outlets.
The CCC think tank produces reports that consistently argue that cutting greenhouse gas emissions and increasing the roll-out of current renewable energy technologies should be low priorities for policy makers.
Most recently, Lomborg wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal arguing climate change was not the urgent problem that many thought.
He wrote that “the narrative that the world’s climate is changing from bad to worse is unhelpful alarmism”.
Lomborg argues the poorest countries need fossil fuels to lift themselves out of poverty – a position that gained support from the world’s richest man, Bill Gates.
At a G20 side event in Brisbane last year, Lomborg appeared at an event sponsored by the world’s largest private coal company, Peabody Energy, where he again argued that the world’s poor needed fossil fuels.
The CCC’s keystone project is the Post 2015 Consensus that is trying to influence the formulation of the next set of global development goals being discussed by the United Nations. Those goals will replace the millennium development goals.
Lomborg’s CCC think tank was registered as a not-for-profit in the US in 2008 and has attracted almost $5 million in donations since then. In 2013, the CCCpaid Lomborg, its founder and president, $200,484 for his work. The previous year Lomborg was paid $775,000……
he discovery of support from Paul Singer comes after a DeSmogBlog investigation last year found that CCC’s early funders included conservative think tanks with links to the network of organisations funded by the Koch brothers, who have pushed millions into organisations denying climate science and blocking action to cut fossil fuel emissions.
In the 2014 US political spending cycle, data presented by OpenSecrets shows Singer spent $9.4 million influencing Republicans – the biggest disclosed individual spender on the conservative side of US politics.
Singer, whose Elliott Management hedge fund manages about $25 billion in assets, has been branded a “vulture capitalist” enterprise due to investment strategies employed by his firm that targets foreign economies in trouble……
As well as the generosity shown to Bjorn Lomborg’s think tank, Singer’s foundation gave $500,000 to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where Singer is chairman of the board of trustees.
The Manhattan Institute is also known for downplaying the impacts of climate change while promoting fossil fuels.
In October 2014, Manhattan senior fellow Robert Bryce wrote a report Not Beyond Coal arguing that the future for the coal industry was bright and the fossil fuel was “essential” for addressing poverty in developing countries — a position identical to that pushed by Lomborg.
Bryce also attacks the wind industry claiming it cannot cut emissions, describing wind turbines as “climate change scarecrows”. In testimony to theUS Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in February 2014, Bryce said wind turbines were “slaughtering wildlife” ………http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/02/09/exclusive-bjorn-lomborg-think-tank-funder-revealed-billionaire-republican-vulture-capitalist-paul-singer
Climate Crocks exposes paid climate denialist “Big Green Radicals’
— Climate Denial Crock of the Week, Climate Crocks, with Peter Sinclair Thanks Dr. Evil! Fossil Fuel Propaganda Misfire Goes Viral
February 12, 2015 Every once in a while we can pull back the curtain and get a good look at the evil elves and Madison Avenue Orcs deployed by the fossil fuel barons. Look hard, climate deniers. This is the man pulling your strings.
Posted by a front group called the “Environmental Policy Alliance”, this corporate forged “viral” video popped up a couple days ago. Had to check and make sure this wasn’t a joke, but it’s real. …..
Big Green Radicals is a front group operated by the PR firm Berman & Co. Berman & Co. operates a network of dozens of front groups, attack-dog web sites, and alleged think tanks that work to counteract minimum wage campaigns, keep wages low for restaurant workers, and to block legislation on food safety, secondhand cigarette smoke, drunk driving, and more.
Big Green Radicals describes itself as “a project of the Environmental Policy Alliance (EPA), which exists to educate the public about the real agenda of well-funded environmental activist groups” according its website. “The EPA receives support from individuals, businesses, and foundations.”
Richard Berman is the type of corporate hit man that Aaron Eckhart played in “Thank You For Smoking” – amoral, vicious, and dishonest. PR guys like him usually don’t make the headlines, preferring to remain the man behind the curtain – but a few months ago he showed up in the New York Times, because recommendations he made in a presentation were so vile and offensive that even members of the oil industry audience were disgusted.
If the oil and gas industry wants to prevent its opponents from slowing its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, a veteran Washington political consultant told a room full of industry executives in a speech that was secretly recorded.
The blunt advice from the consultant, Richard Berman, the founder and chief executive of the Washington-based Berman & Company consulting firm, came as Mr. Berman solicited up to $3 million from oil and gas industry executives to finance an advertising and public relations campaign called Big Green Radicals.
The company executives, Mr. Berman said in his speech, must be willing to exploit emotions like fear, greed and anger and turn them against the environmental groups. And major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.
“Think of this as an endless war,” Mr. Berman told the crowd at the June event in Colorado Springs, sponsored by the Western Energy Alliance, a group whose members include Devon Energy, Halliburton and Anadarko Petroleum, which specialize in extracting oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. “And you have to budget for it.”
What Mr. Berman did not know — and what could now complicate his task of marginalizing environmental groups that want to impose limits on fracking — is that one of the energy industry executives recorded his remarks and was offended by them.
“That you have to play dirty to win,” said the executive, who provided a copy of the recording and the meeting agenda to The New York Times under the condition that his identity not be revealed. “It just left a bad taste in my mouth.”
Pdf of Berman’s presentation here.
Speaking of bad taste, “60 Minutes” profiled Berman as an attack dog for the purveyors of poisonous junk food, and he was proud enough of that to post it on his own Youtube channel,
Berman was paid well by Philip Morris (PM)…. has worked for companies that privatize the profits and socialize the costs. He attacked fine scientists like Steve Schneider (Stanford) and Stan Glantz (UCSF)……….
http://climatecrocks.com/2015/02/12/thanks-dr-evil-fossil-fuel-propaganda-misfire-goes-viral/
Climate change and war: twin threats that exacerbate each other
In the military…. Armed forces have to respond swiftly and cannot wait until the proof is all there, which is why climate is now a risk factor in their planning.
The Pentagon agrees. “Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty and conflict,”
Is climate change fuelling war?, Japan Times, AFP-JIJI FEB 11, 2015 PARIS – For years, scientists and security analysts have warned that global warming looms as a potential source of war and unrest. Storms, droughts, floods and spells of extreme heat or exceptional cold — all can destroy wealth, ravage harvests, force people off land, exacerbate ancient rivalries and unleash a fight for resources, they say. These factors are predicted to become more severe as carbon emissions interfere with Earth’s climate system.
Some argue there is evidence that man-made warming is already a driver in some conflicts. Continue reading
Fossil fuel lobby rattled by the rapid rise of the divestment movement
the long-term prospects for the fossil fuel industry look uncertain at the very least. But don’t take my word for it, thepresident of the World Bank and the governor of the Bank of England have among others warned of the risk posed to fossil fuel assets by climate change action.
The divestment movement does not seek to financially bankrupt the vastly wealthy fossil fuel industry. Instead, the campaign is aiming for moral bankruptcy and is supported by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who testifies to the power of divestment in helping defeat apartheid in South Africa.
With their opponents now taking the threat of divestment seriously, the campaigners will be hoping to they are another step closer to the final stage of Ghandi’s analysis: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Fossil fuel lobby goes on the attack against divestment movement Guardian, Damian Carrington 12 Feb 15 The speed at which the fossil fuel divestment campaign is growing seems to have rattled its opponents in the coal and oil lobbies “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you,” said Mahatma Gandhi. The climate change campaign to divest from fossil fuels seems to be moving through those stages at express speed, with a sudden barrage of attacks from the coal and oil lobbies ahead of its global divestment day on Valentine’s day.The speed is appropriate given that the campaign, which argues the fossil fuel industry is a danger to both the climate and investors’ capital, is the fastest growing divestment campaign yet seen, moving quicker than those against tobacco and apartheid. It’s moving fast in the financial world too, with one finance executive calling it “one of the fastest-moving debates I think I’ve seen in my 30 years in markets”. Continue reading
Refuting the climate denialists’ conspiracy theories on global warming
Fiddling with global warming conspiracy theories while Rome burns The latest global warming conspiracy theory of ‘fiddling with the data’ is nonsense. Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli, 12 Feb 15 It shouldn’t need to be said, but the Earth really is warming. Air and oceantemperatures are rising fast, ice is melting across the planet, ecosystems are shifting, sea levels are rising, and so on.The latest zombie climate myth to rise from the dead involves the oldest form of global warming denial. It’s a conspiracy theory that the Earth isn’t really warming; rather, fraudulent climate scientists are “fiddling” with the data to introduce a false warming trend…..
In reality climate scientists process the raw temperature data for very good reasons. Sometimes temperature monitoring station locations move. Sometimes the time of day at which they’re read changes. Sometimes changes are made to the instruments themselves. In each case, if adjustments aren’t made, then biases will be included in the data that don’t reflect actual changes in temperatures.
Richard Muller at UC Berkeley was skeptical that climate scientists were doing all these adjustments correctly, so he assembled the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) team to check the data for themselves. The biggest initial financial contribution to the project came from the Koch brothers.
As Muller discusses in the video below [see original article] , his team confirmed that the Earth’s surface temperatures are warming. In fact, BEST finds that NASA, NOAA, and the UK Met Office have slightly underestimated the warming over the past 15 years…..
This particular conspiracy theory is an old one, but it’s easy to understand its origins. Certain groups have an ideological opposition to the government policies that would solve the global warming problem. If the problem doesn’t exist because scientists are fudging the data, then voilà, those distasteful policies aren’t necessary.
Global warming denial can usually be traced back to this sort of ideological bias. That’s why contrarian attempts at scientific arguments like Booker’s are so poor,contradictory, and transparently wrong. These myths are just a means to an end; that end being the opposition to climate policies. Any argument that seems to justify that climate opposition will suffice, no matter how flimsy.
Unfortunately, the problem we face is a real one. Scientists only make adjustments to the data where they’re scientifically justified. The accuracy of those adjustments has been confirmed over and over and over again. And the adjustments slightly reduce the long-term global warming trend. Moreover, even if you distrust it, “fiddling” with data doesn’t make ice melt or sea levels rise. Nature’s thermometers register global warming too…….
As a society we’ve usually been smart enough to acknowledge the dangers we face and take action to mitigate them, even with environmental threats. When people resort to conspiracy theories and slip into denial, it’s time to stop listening to them and instead look for serious voices who are trying to find palatable solutions to the problem. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/feb/11/fiddling-with-global-warming-conspiracies-while-rome-burns
Climate change is the one massive and unrelentlingly growing threat to life on this planet. However the threat from nuclear war and nuclear accidents is an equal threat, and could even bring rapid climate change.
Some new converts to the idea of climate change are the proponents of the nuclear industry, who claim, (quite incorrectly) to have the cure for climate change. In fact, to go down the “nuclear power cure” route, is to give the fossil fuel industries more time, while we all wait for this spurious cure
Jet stream affected by global warming? Danger for aircraft (esp transporting nuclear wastes)
Global warming may be affecting jet stream, SMH, 13 Feb 15 A winter of strange weather and turbulent transatlantic flights in the northern hemisphere has scientists asking: Has a predicted climate imbalance of the jet stream begun?
The Arctic is warming faster than other parts of the world, and scientists believe that is having a dramatic impact on the jet stream, which may be responsible for the unusual weather and stronger upper atmospheric winds of late.
n January 8, thousands of Britons were left without electricity in the aftermath of the most violent storms to hit the isles in more than a century. British Airways Flight 114 carried by strong winds journeyed from New York to London in a record five hours and 16 minutes.
Several jetliners flying from Europe to North America in recent weeks faced powerful headwinds, which forced them to make unscheduled mid-flight stops to refuel.
The jet stream – a narrow, variable band of westerly air currents miles above the Earth – is strongest in winter, when boundaries between hot tropical and cold polar air masses are most pronounced.
Currents can be even more turbulent at high altitudes flown in by jetliners some 10 kilometres above the Earth, where winds can reach 300 kilometres per hour.
Since 2012, researcher Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University in New Jersey has been trying to develop new scientific tools to study these “very messy” changes in the jet stream.
“Last winter and this winter the jet stream has been unusually strong,” she told the Royal Society of Britain last year, adding that scientists expect more of the same in coming years…..http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/global-warming-may-be-affecting-jet-stream-20150212-13dhtm.html
Foolish risks in trying geoengineering to solve climate change
Geoengineering and the folly of playing God with the planet WP, By Jason Samenow February 10 There’s this wild, grandiose idea – mostly discussed in academic circles – that we could offset and reverse the effects of global warming by intentionally spraying reflective particles high into the atmosphere.
“[It] would mimic the effects of a volcanic eruption,” writes the Post’s Joel Achenbach. “The thin haze would reflect sunlight, cooling Earth’s surface. Our planet would literally be shinier when seen from space.”
The idea is taken seriously enough that the National of Academy of Sciences released a report today evaluating its merits. The report prudently concludes such geoengineering schemes “pose considerable risks and should not be deployed at this time.”
But I’d go a step further and say it’s an idea that almost certainly will never be practical and could be more dangerous than the problem it’s trying to solve
We do not understand the climate system well enough to predict the disruptive impacts injecting particles would likely have. Although we know with certainty they would result in a net cooling of the climate — just as adding greenhouse gases would ensure net warming — how the effects would play out at the local and regional scale is a huge wild card. It might cause drought in some areas, and bring floods to others.
Our climate models cannot, with reliability, predict the manifestation of regional precipitation changes induced by altering the composition of the atmosphere.
Applying this type of geoengineering plan would require the global community to effectively sign-up for unpredictable climate changes that could benefit some areas at the expense of others. It’s akin to seeking global agreement on the mechanics of playing God with the planet – establishing a world government to set and control a thermostat for Earth, and amicably living with whatever consequences.
Not to mention injecting particles into the atmosphere would not remove the carbon pollution that can persist in the air for decades to centuries with consequences beyond warming, including the acidification of the oceans……..
The best way to confront climate change is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the root cause of the problem, and better understand and cope with the climate changes we are dealt. We need not introduce new ways to alter our climate and further tinker with our one and only livable planet.
If we can’t reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to sufficiently slow climate change, we may even have another way out. The National Academy of Sciences also issued a companion report that discusses “climate interventions” that would directly remove carbon from the atmosphere. To me, those are much more promising than other particle-injecting geoengineering schemes……..http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/02/10/geoengineering-and-the-folly-of-playing-god-with-the-planet/
Nuclear power is simply NOT “low carbon”
Greenhouse gases are emitted in all stages of the lifecycle of a nuclear reactor: construction, operation, fuel production, dismantling and waste disposal. Leaving out any of these five stages will bias estimates towards lower values.
The last two contributions, dismantling and waste disposal are particularly difficult to estimate. Not many commercial reactors have been fully decommissioned. Also there is still no scientific or political consensus on the approach to be used for the long-term storage of waste.
The fuel preparation contribution is also problematic. Considerable amounts of carbon are released in the mining, milling and separation of the uranium from the ore. Also the carbon emitted is very dependent on the concentration of uranium in the ore.
It’s important to appreciate that these three problematic contributions, fuel production, dismantling and waste disposal are either non-existent or small contributions in the case of electricity generation by renewable technologies. Estimates of the carbon footprint of renewably generated electricity therefore should be much more reliable than those for nuclear.
But what is the carbon footprint of nuclear power? I have trawled the literature and found that there is no scientific consensus on the lifetime carbon emissions of nuclear electricity.
Remarkably, half of the most rigorous published analyses have a carbon footprint for nuclear power above the limit recommended by the UK government’s official climate change advisor, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC).
According to the CCC, if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change, by 2030 all electricity should be generated with less than 50 grams of carbon dioxide emitted for each kilowatt-hour (50 gCO2/kWh).
Since all new generators have lifetimes well over 20 years, I believe this limit should be imposed on all new electricity supply systems here and now – and all the more so for those with lifetimes spanning many decades.
Note that thanks to long construction times for the EPR design and a forthcoming legal challenge, it’s entirely possible that the planned Hinkley C reactor will not be completed until 2030 or beyond. It will then be subsidised for the first 35 years of its projected 60 year lifetime – taking us through until 2090.
What is the carbon footprint of renewable electricity? Continue reading
The true carbon footprint of nuclear power – the ‘Third Generation’ reactor at Hinkley Point C?
As we have seen, the EPR’s very high cost suggests considerably higher emissions in the construction stage. So too does the fact that, over its projected 60-year lifetime, it will be using uranium from very low quality ores.
The likely delay due to the Austrian appeal against the European Commission’s decision on the EPR subsidy offers an opportunity for a full, independent and peer reviewed assessment of the environmental impact of this complex and expensive new technology.
“………..Using 0.005% ore, nuclear has higher carbon emissions than gas
Nuclear fuel preparation begins with the mining of uranium containing ores, followed by the crushing of the ore then extraction of the uranium from the powdered ore chemically. All three stages take a lot of energy, most of which comes from fossil fuels. The inescapable fact is that the lower the concentration of uranium in the ore, the higher the fossil fuel energy required to extract uranium.
Table 12 in the Berteen paper confirms the van Leeuwen result that for ore with uranium concentration around 0.01% the carbon footprint of nuclear electricity could be as high as that of electricity generation from natural gas.
This remarkable observation has been further confirmed in a report from the Austrian Institute of Ecology by Andrea Wallner and co-workers. They also point out that using ore with uranium concentration around 0.01% could result in more energy being input to prepare the fuel, build the reactor and so on, than will be generated by the reactor in its lifetime.
According to figures van Leeuwen has compiled from the WISE Uranium Project around 37% of the identified uranium reserves have an ore grade below 0.05%.
A conservative estimate for the future LCA of nuclear power for power stations intended to continue operating into the 2090s and beyond would assume the lowest uranium concentration currently in proven sources, which is 0.005%.
On the basis that the high concentration ores are the easiest to find and exploit, this low concentration is likely to be more typical of yet to be discovered deposits.
Using 0.005% concentration uranium ores, the van Leeuwen, Berteen and Wallner analyses agree a nuclear reactor will have a carbon footprint larger than a natural gas electricity generator. Also, it is unlikely to produce any net electricity over its lifecycle.
What is the carbon footprint of the ‘Third Generation’ reactor at Hinkley Point C? Continue reading
Fossil fuel company executives just do not care about the planet’s future
Fossil fuel companies are the greatest threat to life’s party – not greens People who argue it’s a good idea to respect nature’s thresholds get labelled spoilsports, but the real party-poopers are those who recognise no limits at all Guardian, Andrew Simms, 5 Feb 15 22 months and counting“Will we go ahead?” asked Shell CEO, Ben van Beurden, rhetorically, about the oil company’s plans to drill in the Arctic. “Yes if we can. I’d be so disappointed if we wouldn’t.” Van Beurden had the grace to concede that his plans “divide society,” but he seemed unable to comprehend that they might condemn it.
From new research showing that recent sea level rise is “far worse than previously thought”, to updated confirmation of how far we are transgressing our planetary environmental boundaries, an almost daily accumulation of evidence seems unable still to connect van Beurden’s words to their full implication.
What if, instead, he had said to the press conference gathered to hear Shell’s quarterly financial results a few days ago: “We wish to inform you that our business plan is to destabilise permanently the climate on which you, your families and society depend.”
Harsh? Perhaps, but their strategy will end the party for the rest of us, so that their corporate party might continue. In fact, it seems that extreme weather in the form of drought is already breaking hearts in Brazil by forcing cities to cancel carnival, the greatest party of all.
It’s ironic. Those who argue it’s a good idea to respect nature’s various thresholds (like not making farming so toxic that you poison the bees who kindly pollinate our food crops) traditionally get labelled as fun-free spoilsports. But it seems it’s those who recognise no limits at all who represent the greatest threat to life’s party.
While the global industrial exploitation of nature drives a mass extinction event on land and sea, it becomes ever clearer that our own well-being is dependent on the general condition of the environment. Our health, both physiological and psychological, is deeply connected to and relies on the diversity of life.
Now, a new global calculator developed by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, suggests a course of action to prevent irreversible warming that could be as good for the web of life as it is for our quality of life. Radical changes to farming, transport, food and fuel will be needed, but it envisages a world of spreading forest canopies, clean, quiet electric transport and healthy, increasingly vegetarian diets. With such a potential win-win, why would anyone choose bad times with business as usual? The status quo is tenacious.
If you look at the UK’s biggest lobbying groups at the centre of European power in Brussels, their scale seems to be in direct proportion to the damage they do and how likely they are to resist progressive change. Oil, finance and aviation are all in the top five. And, even as the economics of fracking and remote oil exploration, such as in the Arctic, have fallen apart, their lobbies remain persistent and audacious. How else could a Conservative party, which extols the notion of an English person’s home being their castle, be persuaded to promote changes in the trespass law to allow fracking firms to drill beneath homes without the owners’ permission?
Logic, consistency and science become inconvenient to indefensible positions. When the US Senate last month voted on whether climate change was real and caused by human activities it was creating future folklore. Accepting the first, but not the second proposition, the Senate put its debate on a par with the famous, and now seen as absurd, 1925 Scopes ‘Monkey’ case in theUS, which effectively put the theory of evolution on trial………http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2015/feb/04/fossil-fuel-companies-are-the-greatest-threat-to-lifes-party-not-greens
A pro nuclear expert bemoans the fact that their “climate” propaganda is not working!
Is climate change the worst argument for nuclear? Nuclear Engineering International 21 January 2015 Jumping on the environmental bandwagon may not be the best choice for the nuclear industry….. By Steve KiddMy articles over the past three months have covered the failure of nuclear advocates to make much progress with gaining public acceptance over the past few years, with the prime need now to undertake a serious effort to gain better public understanding…
…….There remains one piece in the jigsaw and that is to abandon climate change as a prime argument for supporting a much higher use of nuclear power to satisfy rapidly-rising world power needs…….
We have seen no nuclear renaissance (instead, a notable number of reactor closures in some countries, combined with strong growth in China) the story has not changed very much. The 2014 edition of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook shows nuclear playing a small but indispensable part in those scenarios maintaining greenhouse gas emissions at much lower and environmentally safer levels to 2030 and beyond. ……….
The International Atomic Energy Agency has also just released the 2014 edition of its publication Climate Change and Nuclear Power which addresses the perceived need for a lot more nuclear power for this reason, together with the range of issues which inevitably surround this transition.
The problem is that the hoped-for process is not working. Countries such as Germany and Switzerland that claim environmental credentials are moving strongly away from nuclear. Even with rapid nuclear growth in China, nuclear’s share in world electricity is declining. The industry is doing little more than hoping that politicians and financiers eventually see sense and back huge nuclear building programmes. On current trends, this is looking more and more unlikely. The high and rising nuclear share in climate-friendly scenarios is false hope, with little in the real outlook giving them any substance.
Far more likely is the situation posited in the World Nuclear Industry Status Report covered in September’s article (September 2014, ‘The world nuclear industry – is it in terminal decline?’). Although this report is produced by anti-nuclear activists, its picture of the current reactors gradually shutting down with numbers of new reactors failing to replace them has more than an element of truth given the recent trends………
….The nuclear industry giving credence to climate change from fossil fuels has simply led to a stronger renewables industry. Nuclear seems to be “too difficult” and gets sidelined – as it has within the entire process since the original Kyoto accords. And now renewables, often thought of as useful complements to nuclear, begin to threaten it in power markets when there is abundant power from renewables when the wind blows and the sun shines.
Climate change is also an issue now seemingly irretrievably linked to some combination of higher taxes and prices, bigger and more intrusive government intervention, lower economic growth, and less disposable income. The nuclear sector doesn’t want to be associated with any of this. ……Nuclear should not be cosying up to anything that costs money. It should promote itself as inherently cheap energy, vital for economic growth…..http://www.neimagazine.com/opinion/opinionis-climate-change-the-worst-argument-for-nuclear-4493537/
Pro nuclear expert rubbishes the advertising movie “Pandora’s Promise”
Is climate change the worst argument for nuclear? Nuclear Engineering International 21 January 2015 Jumping on the environmental bandwagon may not be the best choice for the nuclear industry….. By Steve Kidd
……..Fair-weather friends?
While it is true that some previously anti-nuclear activists and advocates have moved over to the nuclear side on account of their new conviction that nuclear is essential to curb climate change, these are very uncomfortable bedfellows.
They are likely to do as much damage to the nuclear case as good. The industry has hailed the recent “Pandora’s Promise” movie, but the five new nuclear disciples look rather like enemy turncoats in a war-time propaganda movie, trying to urge their former colleagues also to “see the light”. Why, after so many years of being “wrong”, should anyone have faith in the new (and apparently deeply-held) convictions of these people? Will they not change their minds again once the wind changes?
Why on earth would one cosy up to the very people who killed your market in the first place because their foolish advocacy led to much higher costs? Their general lack of soundness is invariably amplified by attaching themselves to next generation reactor technologies, thorium or whatever. …….
The other issue with those who belatedly come to endorse nuclear is that it becomes a “last resort” technology. Once everything else has been tried and found lacking, we simply have to use nuclear, or the world will risk coming to an end. Even though they still believe that nuclear has the same host of problems, they also now believe we need it badly. But this won’t work for one minute. As soon as anything goes wrong, the support of these people will melt away. Nuclear needs a strong positive endorsement from supporters who recognise that the arguments marshalled against it were always phony…..http://www.neimagazine.com/opinion/opinionis-climate-change-the-worst-argument-for-nuclear-4493537/
World’s excess heat going largely into the Southern Oceans
Southern oceans play major role in absorbing world’s excess heat, study finds February 3, Peter Hannam Environment Editor, The Sydney Morning Herald The world’s oceans are heating at the rate of two trillion 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously, providing a clear signal of global warming, according to new study assessing data from a global fleet of drifting floats.
The research, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Climate Change, used data collected from the array of about 3500 Argo buoys from 2006-13 to show temperatures were warming at about 0.005 degrees a year down to a depth of 500 metres and 0.002 degrees between 500-2000 metres.
Oceans south of the 20-degree latitude accounted for two-thirds to 98 per cent of the heat gain during the period studied, with three giant gyres in the southern Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans largely responsible for drawing down the extra warmth.
“The global ocean heat content right now is the most reliable metric of that radiation imbalance” between the energy received from the sun and what is radiated back to space, said Susan Wijffels, an oceans expert at the CSIRO and one of the report’s authors………..
“The ocean is just vertically transferring the heat away from the surface to the depth,” Dr Wijffels said. “The ‘hiatus’ is not meaningful.”
Even with the relative slowdown in surface temperature increases, 14 of the world’s 15 warmest years on record have been in the 21st century, the World Meteorological Organisation said on Monday.
The United Nations body also confirmed that 2014 was the hottest year, edging out 2010 and 2005. The readings were based in part on United States agencies, including NASA which last month also declared 2014 as its warmest year.
John Church, another of the paper’s authors and also from the CSIRO, said the temperatures in the atmosphere – which accounts for just 1 per cent of the planet’s heat uptake – would rise sharply if oceans absorbed less of the heat……..
As it is, warming oceans are swelling in volume, lifting sea levels, and also affecting ecosystems, he said.
“If we want to avoid the worst impacts of climate change then we need to start taking some mitigation action,” Dr Church said. This included cutting carbon emissions and lifting renewable energy targets at home and overseas.
Future Argo missions will extend coverage to higher latitudes, including sea-ice zones, and reach depths of 6000 metres.
However, Dr Wijffels said Australia’s contribution is in doubt with about half of its Argo budget tied up with the Abbott government’s stalled higher education reform bills. Those funds run out “in a few months”, she said.
The Nature study was led by Dean Roemmich of the California-based Scripps Institution of Oceanography. http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/southern-oceans-play-major-role-in-absorbing-worlds-excess-heat-study-finds-20150202-133j2p.html
Majority of US Republicans support action on Climate Change
Most Republicans Say They Back Climate Action, Poll Finds, NYT By CORAL DAVENPORT and MARJORIE CONNELLY JAN. 30, 2015WASHINGTON — An overwhelming majority of the American public, including half of Republicans, support government action to curb global warming, according to a poll conducted by The New York Times, Stanford University and the nonpartisan environmental research group Resources for the Future.
67 percent of respondents, including 48 percent of Republicans and 72 percent of independents, said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who said that human-caused climate change is a hoax.
The results came as climate change was emerging as a source of debate in the coming presidential campaign.
In 2012, all the Republican presidential candidates but one — Jon M. Huntsman Jr. — questioned or denied the science that determined that humans caused global warming, and opposed policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But over the past year, President Obama has proposed aseries of Environmental Protection Agency regulations intended to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, which Republicans in Congress have attacked as a “war on coal.”……..
And while the poll found that 74 percent of Americans said that the federal government should be doing a substantial amount to combat climate change, the support was greatest among Democrats and independents. Ninety-one percent of Democrats, 78 percent of independents and 51 percent of Republicans said the government should be fighting climate change…….
among those who support the Tea Party, 49 percent said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who said “I’m not a scientist” or a variant……..http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/31/us/politics/most-americans-support-government-action-on-climate-change-poll-finds.html?ref=us&_r=1
Poor likelihood that nuclear power can ever be effective against climate change
Nuclear power additions ‘need to quadruple’ to hit climate goals, IEA says, The Carbon Brief 31 Jan 2015, 14:50 Simon Evans “………Governments can choose whether to support new nuclear or not, the IEA says. They could finance guarantees, as well as reviewing electricity market arrangements. The UK has done both, through its electricity market reforms and fixed-price contracts for nuclear power.
The nuclear industry needs to show it can deliver projects on time and within budget so that these financing costs can be reduced, the IEA says. It says new nuclear plants should cost around £3.8 billion per gigawatt in Europe. The UK’s Hinkley C plant is expected to cost almost that, partly because of the costs of borrowing money to finance the scheme.
Existing nuclear plants will also need to stay open for longer as part of the 2050 roadmap, which depends on further research and investment. The IEA sees plants operating for up to 60 years or more. Nuclear operator EDF recently announced a ten-year life extension at one of its Dungeness B plants, and it hopes to agree similar extensions at its other UK plants.
Small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) could play a “niche” role in future, the IEA says. It points out that just three prototype modular reactors are under construction, that none are yet operating and that the economics of SMRs “have yet to be proven”. Former environment secretary Owen Paterson gave SMRs a starring role in his vision for the UK’s energy future in a speech last year…….”
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25 June- THE PUKE ON NUKES
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From NRC & DOE Deregulation to Techno-Fascist Billionaires Going Nuclear, Plus a Few Songs from Atomic Cabaret REGISTER
26 June – Radiation Trainwreck at the NRC / Join the Protect Better Campaign – https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/4ZlZ5_qLSHGiLSCg8FF6Bg#/registration
Cuba Is Not a Failed State – It Is a Besieged State
PETITION: “Global Appeal to Endorse Palestinian Right of Return of Refugees”
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