Japan: Building coal plants is “climate finance”

Watts Up With That?

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

The Minerals Council of Australia has pushed back at coal divestment campaigns, by pointing out that Japan has joined the Asian infrastructure rush, by offering “climate finance” loans to aid the construction of up to 1000 new high tech coal power plants throughout Asia.

According to The Australian;

More than 1000 “high-efficiency” coal-fired electricity generation plants are planned or under construction in key Asian nations, according to new research that provides a fillip for Australia’s thermal coal exporters hit by the fossil fuel divestment push.

The research, produced by the UK’s IEA Clean Coal Centre and obtained by The Australian, is significant as the hi-tech plants typically emit 20 to 25 per cent less carbon dioxide than existing power stations.

Commissioned by the Minerals Council of Australia, it finds that an extra 1066 “high-efficiency, low-emission” coal plants are planned or under construction in 10 Asian…

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On the “march of the thermometers”

Watts Up With That?

I’ve been away from WUWT this weekend for recovery from a cold plus family time as we have visitors, so I’m just now getting back to regular posting.  Recently on the web there has been a lot of activity and discussions around the issue of the dropping of climatic weather stations aka “the march of the thermometers” as Joe D’Aleo and I reported in this compendium report on issues with surface temperature records.

Most of the station dropout issue covered in that report is based on the hard work of E. M. Smith, aka “chiefio“, who has been aggressively working through the data bias issues that develop when thermometers have been dropped from the Global Historical Climate Network. My contribution to the study of the dropout issue was essentially zero, as I focused on contributing what I’ve been studying for the past three years, the USHCN. USHCN…

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Of Missing Temperatures and Filled-in Data (Part 1)

Digging in the Clay

One of the most shocking things about examining the GHCN data that goes into global climate models has been the inconsistency of the data.  Not only is there loss of stations, but within each set of station data, there may be considerable loss of monthly data. This post asks – how bad is this? (answer – much worse than I thought – see the last graph).

Figure 1. Station data for Mactan, Philippines 2000-2009 (GISS unadjusted/combined data).  Missing months are highlighted in yellow; seasonal averages and annual means derived (by GISS) with the inclusion of in-filled data due to missing months are coloured red. Only the Annual Mean from 2006 (27.87 degC) is derived from a full 12 monthly observations (Dec-Nov). 

GISS stated methods and QC
The methods used by NASA GISS for the calculation of the global average temperature using the GIStemp programme can be found here

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