Over the next 6 weeks, we’ll be travelling up the eastern seaboard of Australia, campaigning hard to get the federal government to acknowledge that renewables can do the job and that the time is up for fossil fuels. So stay tuned – The Energy [R]evolution tour has begun!
Greenpeace Australia Pacific: ‘Greenpeace Esperanza begins Energy [R]evolution tour’
Andrew Bolt: Fueled by the fuel they condemn
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Let’s hope that Greenpeace will be taking better care than in 2005 when it was fined almost $7,000 for damaging a coral reef at a World Heritage site in the Philippines. Their flagship Rainbow Warrior II ran aground at Tubbataha Reef Marine Park. Almost 100 sq m of reef was damaged during this trip to highlight the ENGO’s claims that climate change would damage the reefs!!
A bit about the ship from an early post on this site: The Esperanza was built in Poland in 1984 and was one of 14 vessels commissioned by the Russian government and used by the Russian Navy as a fire-fighting ship in Murmansk.
The engines are: 5.876 BHP, 2*2.938 BHP Sulzer V12.
In 2006 Greenpeace reported 6812.8 metric tons in Direct CO2 emissions for marine transportation including this ship!
One wonders why they didn’t use a wind powered sailing ship.
Last week several hundred Greenpeace protesters travelled to Newcastle to disrupt that ports lawful coal loading operations.
How did they travel ? By electric train! The power that drove the train was generated in our coal fired base load power stations.
Pity someone didn’t pull the switch and let them walk!
Being of a conservationist tendency, I worry about the way environmental groups are nailing their flags to the AGW mast. Let us suppose that the science behind the present panic turns out to be a little less than cast-iron — my personal bet would be a warming rate at .14 deg/decade with CO2 sensitivity at about .6 deg, but that’s just a gut feeling and I have no more hard evidence to back it up than the IPCC has for its 4 deg ish.
The public has been and is being bashed over the head with the message about CO2 until,cowed, they are going along with it. Let there be a hint of error and I would not like to be eg Dr Hansen. The backlash would wipe out environmental organisations as well: forests would go without regret, pesticides would be used with abandon because ‘we don’t have to worry any more’ and the warnings from concerned organisations would be treated as a joke.
I hope Greenpeace has a sister organisation somewhere which is quietly getting on with important things, like re-afforestation, trade bans on endangered woods, preservation of reef systems from over-exploitative fishing. Sure as hell, if AGW proves to be a cry of ‘wolf! wolf!’ then no-one will listen to Greenpeace ever again.
Oh, yes, an obvious way to kill two birds with one stone is to build more nukes: I like the CANDU system.
I’ll excuse Greenpeace from propagandising the last message — with their background it might be too bitter a pill — but, for heavens sake, get an anchor out to windward in case the consensus is wrong.
JF
Yeah good stuff Julian. But I don’t think you realize how vital the general tenor of your argument is. MAKE-BELIEVE concerns drive out the authentic ones. A Greshams law of public policy. You cannot debate about the angels dancing on the head of a pin and figure out how to deal with the besieging Turk at the same time. One man can but the public debate-space cannot make that gig work.
The science fraud of global warming means when I go to tell free enterprise types about overfishing I just get a great big yawn.
So like I tried to say that we needed a 50 year minimum general tax exemption for aquaculture. So that reinvestment would take pressure of feral fishing by expanding farmed fishing more rapidly.
Schemes such as this are just derided because the global warming lie has sucked all the oxygen out of the public debate.
I’ve been pretty proud of relatives who have independently sussed out that the global warming lie is just a racket. But when I then go to tell them that the current energy-deprivation will take decades to overcome they cannot believe it because it sounds to them like more environmentalist lies.
Its what we choose NOT to worry about that can be the more vital determinant of our societal success or failure.
“my personal bet would be a warming rate at .14 deg/decade with CO2 sensitivity at about .6 deg, but that’s just a gut feeling and I have no more hard evidence to back it up than the IPCC has for its 4 deg ish.”
Thats about where Patrick Michaels was at with it and it became my default model when I first started looking at this problem since it seemed reasonable from an inductive point of view.
It isn’t reasonable at all. Because the entire watts-per-square-metre paradigm is wrong. It doesn’t matter that its bipartisan. Its wrong anyway.
We can be very sure that we are headed into serious cooling. If not by the late teens, then certainly by the 2030’s at the very latest.
It looks like we will just keep oscillating downwards clear to mid-century.
Basic assumptions would have our next cold period being colder than the little ice age prior to us getting any relief.
I say this all without doing any quantitative work but the severity of what is likely in store is not going to be something that turns on a few numbers here or there.
Well Julian Flood, so there might be a silver lining after all. Having lunatic Greens with far less political power sounds like a a good thing to me. Meanwhile real science based conservation can get on with the job.
Paul
A wind powered sailing ship ?????? 🙂
Don’t knock wind power for container transport. I heard the Germans had this system which reduced the fuel costs 30%.
We have to think about energy-efficiency and energy sources with the same 24 hour concern that some of the fat chicks in the office think about choclate. Not because of the global warming racket. But simply because we are in real trouble for decades before we can lift ourselves back into a cheap energy era.
Wind power is emerging as a really important source. Where are the windiest places in Australia?
Graeme,
Ahm, a sailing ship is wind powered by definition.
As for cheap energy, that is easy – reduce the government take, but as long as we keep electing social democratic governments, everything will be expensive since it is nigh well impossible to stop the redistributive bug from spreading.
Kevin – oh sensitive Kevin – where are you – how about a view on “fat chicks in the office ” … Kevin ? Kevin ? must have stepped out….
“Where are the windiest places in Australia” – you seriously don’t want to ask that sort of question here?
More Muppetish from Luke I see.
If you travel to the numerous small natural harbours around Eastern Denmark and near Stockholm especially you will see a lot of beautiful white small ships and large pleasure cruisers with computer-controlled rigid aerofoil sails and lots of solar panels. These vessels have been built by environmentally conscious wealthy Swedes and Danes. I saw a TV interview with the gracious (and intelligent) owner of one such vessel who claimed he was able to amortise the cost of the vessel more rapidly than if he had built a conventional fuel oil or diesel-powered craft. He also noted there were several larger ocean cargo ships being constructed in Germany. This was 9 years ago. Maybe they weren’t economic at the time? I’m sure they would be now.
For Greenpeace to travel around the coast of Australia in a diesel-powered vessel promoting repudiation of fossil fuels, they may as well have had the ship towed by a team of trained whales so breath-taking is the hypocrisy.
I’m waiting for the radical green lobby/AGW alarmists to get themselves into a full meltdown over emerging trends on the fossil fuel industry which centre around in situ syn-gasification of coal or oil shale and direct combustion in gas turbine engines near the well head (40% efficiency improvement over conventional PF plant) or Fischer-Tropsch type liquefaction to diesel. Even the Queensland Govt. is getting in on the act – google Black Leaf Project.
It is quite likely that direct mining of coal will in future only be required for coking coals as gaseous reduction of iron ore is not economic for non-magnetite ores.
Does Julian Flood seriously think AGW is the only concentration of gross bull$hit masquerading as environmental concern? Which planet have you been on, fella?
The Greens and NSW Government said there was 150,000 hectares of native forest being cleared each year but the satellite scans revealed only 8,000 to 12,000ha a year. And most of that was regrowth.
The greens refused to even recognise that vegetation thickening was taking place, even after it was revealed that there was 14 million hectares of it in NSW alone.
And then there was QLD, where half the reported 500,000 ha of annual clearing was woody weeds and recent regrowth while most of the other half was mapped as ‘remnant’ but was nothing more than mulga regrowth that had been pulled over (not cleared) every 20 years for drought feed since the 1890s. Most of the remainder was not even forest, it was tussocky and tufted grasses, mapped as remnant vegetation. And the greens refused to recognise that there was 60 million hectares of vegetation thickening despite the detailed, uncontestable science of Bill Burrows.
And then there was all that salinity. More than half of which was actually mapped as remnant (pre-settlement) saline ecosystem but that didn’t stop Premier Beattie from announcing that he would have “zero tollerance of denial” of his own bull$hit position.
And the list goes on, and on, and on, and on. People don’t believe anything a green scumbag says because lying is what spivocrats and shonkademics do best.
So please excuse me. It is Friday and I am off down to the farm again, and be assured, there is a particular endangered plant that will be departing this world, roots and all, just for you.
PS that plant species is so “endangered” that it routinely outcompetes our most virulent and invasive weed infestation, f@#$& Lantana, for pity sake!!
Might take the gun down too to work off some bimbophobia.
A new study examines the basis for the belief that greenhouse gases can only result in atmospheric warming and concludes that that assumption is incorrect.
This new paper might throw a few spanners in the works, just from the title alone, but it’s behind a green wall. Anyone got any access to it?
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a788582859&fulltext=713240928
This isn’t the only arrogance Greenpeace has committed regarding “care for the environment”.
See “Greenpeace slips up with lack of permit; Ship must settle oil discharge issues”, Waste News, August 2, 2004, http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offices/8269060-1.html
“The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation accuses Greenpeace, ship’s Capt. Arne J. Sorensen, and ship’s agent Willem Jan Beekman of operating the ship in state waters without an oil discharge prevention and contingency plan and for failing to file proof of financial responsibility for oil discharge damages.”
It appears that crimes against the environment are excusable if you’re ‘protecting’ the environment.
Sort of like crimes against humanity. Good cause, and all that, don’tcha know.
Luke. What are you on about? You are just being an idiot. You are not a scientist Luke. Quit this delusion that you are a scientist. A scientist only cares about evidence. Doesn’t matter how long you work at the RMIT you can never be a scientist.
I wrote back at my blog :
“Greenpeace has often been criticised for its fuel guzzling ships sailing on the Oceans , as now by Paul Biggs , back on Jennifer Marohasy’s blog.
To avoid criticism and hypocrasy , GP should install kites on its ships. During the previous month some oil companies have succesfully used big kites on its tankers to decrease fuel consumption. The tests have been very succesful and should be something for the future.
I have heard numbers that the ships have decreased their fuel consumtion with about 20% when using giant kites.
http://www.kiteship.com/news.php?nid=11“
http://annimal.bloggsida.se/
There’s several reasons why Greenpeace won’t use “renewable” wind power to run its ships.
1. The wind doesn’t blow when you want it to, doesn’t always blow in the direction you want it to, and often blows at an inconvenient speed.
2. It’s a whole lot more expedient to power electrical equipment, like computers, satellite uplinks, GPS transponders, etc. by burning “the devil’s liquid.”
3. As all Al Gore worshipers and gang-greens agree (it’s an international consensus, you know), all harms inflicted on the environment, which are inflicted on the behalf of the environment, are actually virtues, and instantly forgiven. This explains why “do as I say, don’t do as I do” enjoys its international consensus among green jet-setting playboys, playgirls, politicians, rock stars, glitterati, paparazzi, and their camp-followers.
Neo-Stalinists, now generally known as ‘watermelons’, understand all of this quite well. It’s the prerogative of the autocratic elite.
I can say that on a two month survey I did on the Rainbow Warrior the ship relied on wind approx 70% of the trip. On two other shorter trips on this vessel there was a heavy reliance on sailing.
Norwegian paper Aftenposten states that Greenpeace have funded / donated 12 million NOK , an impressive sun to a German aquarium.
The Norwegians state the aquarium is impressive , but anti whaling ….