Professor Tim Flannery, chair of the Climate Council, says some of these technologies are unusual. He points to 'carbon negative concrete' as an example

'Negative emissions concrete absorbs CO2 into its structure as it matures,' he says. 'That could be reducing emissions on the gigatonne scale by 2050 if we introduced a carbon price or a cap and trade [emissions trading scheme] into the concrete sector.'

Many negative emissions strategies rely on carbon capture and storage. It's long been thought by many that CCS could save the coal industry, but Flannery says it won't work in that case, though it could with other emissions sources.

'Conventional carbon capture and storage for coal, I think, has now been shown that it doesn't have a future in economic terms,' he says. 'The two [CCS coal] plants that have been built were behind budget, behind time and I don't see anyone lining up now to replicate them. [But] there are other options for CCS that are really interesting.

'One may be associated with seaweed farming, the storage of CO2 in marine sediments down two to three kilometres depth. The thing about those depths is the column of water above tends to pressurise the CO2 and keep it in liquid form and it forms a solid eventually in those sediments.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/climate-change-plan-b-going-negative/6998306

Julie Bishop thinks she has no cause to apologise for recent comments mocking claims that one of the Marshall Islands was already under water because her remarks were based on a “shocking blunder” by her opposite number, Tanya Plibersek.

Asked whether she would be apologising to the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, Tony de Brum, when they encountered one another at the Paris climate conference, Bishop said she wanted to “get some facts straight” – including that she is not Plibersek’s “subeditor”.

“My comments in the parliament were in response to an authorised official transcript put out by the deputy leader of the Labor party. It transpires that it contains a shocking blunder, but I relied on the transcript, an official transcript, approved and authorised by the deputy leader of the opposition,” Bishop said. “If she makes mistakes in her transcripts I am not her subeditor.”

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/dec/08/julie-bishops-marshall-islands-remark-im-not-tanya-pliberseks-subeditor

No Julie you are not anyone subeditor... BUT AS YOU SHOULD KNOW anyone quoting someone else needs to refer to the source documents of information in order to make sure the quote is genuine. There are countless bits of misinformation, spelling error and dumb jokes on the net or in any other papers, including the daily Terrorgraph. It looks your staff did not do the proper checks, Julie. Don't blame the transcripts of a TV interview or such for you BAD JOKE.  Transcripts are done by specialists but the final transcript of what goes to air is usually double-checked by producers and corrected as needed. But THIS IS NOT FOOL-PROOF. The only source to make that bad joke is the TV clip, then it would not be a joke. NOTHING ELSE. In fact, Julie, you should apologise for making a bad joke about global warming, whether your source material was faulty or not. 

Australia has finally won the “fossil of the day” award – bestowed each day by young climate activists at big international climate summits.

Australia traditionally wins the award early and often, but the Paris talks had reached their 10th day before Australia got the gong – accepted, in sorrow and to loud boos, by Greens leader Richard di Natale.

The award, shared with Argentina, recognised a speech by foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop to an Indonesian side event on Tuesday in which she said “coal will remain critical to promoting prosperity, growing economies and alleviating hunger for years to come.”

Bishop also said the world was undergoing a “profound upheaval” as it transitioned to a low carbon economy and that a strong Paris agreement was an important signal for “efficient long term investment”, but the award focused just on the coal remarks.

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/dec/10/australia-wins-fossil-of-the-day-for-julie-bishops-coal-speech-at-paris-climate-talks

Hopefully, the state of the planet won't take long to show the dangerous idiocy of the Australian government, Turnbullish or Abbotish... We shall soon see. 

Australia has belatedly joined a “coalition of ambition” in the Paris climate talks – a loose grouping of more than 100 developed and developing countries including the US, EU, Canada and Brazil – aimed at countering a push by China, India and Saudi Arabia to water down aspects of the climate pact as negotiations run overtime.

Tony de Brum, foreign minister of the tiny Marshall Islands, and a founder of the new alliance, insisted Australia had not yet joined, and Australia was not represented at a press conference to announce new members – which also include Brazil, Switzerland, Iceland, the Philippines, the Seychelles, Luxembourg and Canada.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/australia-belatedly-joins-coalition-of-ambition-at-paris-climate-talks

I have not mentioned 2019 yet... as it could be one of the weirdest year on record...

A climate science denial group with links to President Trump’s administration has been funding work to sow doubt that low-lying islands in the Pacific are at risk from rising sea levels.

The two researchers being funded — one of which is a well-known climate science denier — have targeted little known “open access” journals with dubious quality controls to get their work published, DeSmog has found.

The CO2 Coalition funded the work and in March 2017 sent well-known climate science denier Nils-Axel Mörner to Fiji with Pamela Matlack-Klein, who has described herself as having a degree from the “Oceanographic Center of Nova Southeastern University, Dania, Florida, in 1983” and writes a weekly newspaper column.

Among the CO2 Coalition’s members is Kathleen Hartnett White — an energy and environment fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation who is Trump’s nominee to chair the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House group that helps coordinate environmental policy across the administration.

Trump has renominated Hartnett White, who also rejects any risk of human-caused climate change, after Senate hearings failed to confirm her for the post. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has said she is “wildly unqualified” for the role because she “outright rejects basic science.”

Retired Princeton physics professor William Happer, a director of the CO2 Coalition, was touted as a possible chief science advisor to the Trump White House. Happer also denies that increased levels of CO2 will be a problem for the planet. The CO2 Coalition was caught in a sting by Greenpeace, in which Happer offered to route money from work for a ficticious fossil fuel company through the organization.

Mörner has produced at least six journal articles on the back of the Fiji trip, several co-written with Virginia-based researcher Matlack-Klein, and acknowledged the funding of the CO2 Coalition on several occasions. Matlack-Klein’s affiliation is given as the “Portuguese Sea Level Project, Appomattox, Virginia” but DeSmog could find no public record of the project. Klein did not respond to emails.

Mörner used his research to claim that concerns that Fijians had about rising sea levels were misplaced, and used the then-approaching United Nations climate talks hosted by Fiji (but held in Germany) last fall  to publicize his work, writing an open letter to the country’s Prime Minister, Frank Bainimarama.

DeSmog sent emails to Mörner, Klein, and Happer, who signs the CO2 Coalition’s tax forms, with questions about the research, but received no responses.

One leading Australian scientist, the geophysicist Professor Kurt Lambeck, reviewed several of the papers and said in his view, none would have been accepted to a recognized scientific journal with solid peer-review procedures.

Mörner has been targeting fringe journals with official-sounding names but highly questionable quality controls, in order to publish the papers. 

All the journals are “open access,” which means the scientists pay for their work to be published and the results are available to the public for free.

In October 2017, Mörner presented his findings alongside Matlack-Klein, at a climate meeting in Rome which, as DeSmog revealed, was hijacked by Mörner, who was on the organizing committee, and who listed several climate science deniers as speakers.

Kurt Lambeck, Professor of Geophysics at the Australian National University, said all of the papers had appeared in journals “of little academic standing” and that “none would have passed the reviewing process for more reputable journals.”

He said that two papers which appeared in journals published by a company called “Scientific Research Publishing” were “trivial” and added “no insight into either the evidence for sea-level change nor on coastal erosion processes” beyond what was already well known.

He said: “It is well understood that human influences are one of the most important contributors to changes in coastal erosion and does not need restatement in a scientific paper.”

A third paper was published in a little-known online journal with the title International Journal of Earth & Environmental Sciences. Lambeck said this paper should have been “rejected out of hand” because Mörner had presented no evidence to back up his claim. 

In the paper Mörner argued that ocean levels were being driven by changes in solar winds that changed the rotation of the earth, causing ocean masses to shift towards or away from the poles depending on conditions on the sun. This, Mörner claimed, was the likely explanation for ocean levels around Fiji for 500 years.

Lambeck says he first heard Mörner make this general argument in 1979 during a symposium presentation where it was pointed out to him that the impacts of his proposed mechanisms were “improbable” but, even if they were present, were “orders of magnitude too small” to be effective on sea levels.

Lambeck says that significantly, in order for Mörner to make his arguments about changing sea levels, he had ignored other well-known research in respected journals. In particular, Mörner overlooks the findings that major changes in sea level had historically been driven by melting ice sheets and glaciers and also, in more recent times, by thermal expansion of the oceans.

Read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/01/18/climate-denial-co2-coalition-trump...

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You don’t need to observe politics for too long before realising that hypocrisy is the natural scent of the politics.

It is a stench that pervades much of what is said and policy that is enacted. There are two particular types – the hypocrisy where politicians pretend they care about something and then do nothing, and the one where they pretend to think something and do the opposite.

We have seen it this week with former foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop suddenly discovering climate change.

She told Guardian Australia “that I’ve always been of the view that Australia, as a leading industrialised and developed nation, with one of the best standards of living in the world, needs to be a leader in the international response to climate change”.

The nation as one responded with a resounding, “Seriously, what?”

Name one instance during her time as foreign minister or even just as a member of the Howard or Abbott-Turnbull governments where she ever proffered such a view or supported such a policy position.

Her very last mention of “climate change” in parliament came in 2017 when she lovingly talked up “high efficiency, low emissions” coal plants and decried in loud tones the ALP’s “obsession with a 50% renewable energy target” which she said was “destroying business confidence in South Australia, threatening jobs and threatening industries”.

Gotta love that leadership.

Or perhaps she was leading in 2015 when she told parliament: “I think it is important not to engage in hyperbole when one is talking about climate change. I remember in 2011 when the deputy leader [Tanya Plibersek] tried to scare the senior citizens on the Central Coast by saying that they were going to be subject to the ravages of climate change.”

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2020/feb/16/there-is-al...

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