Dr. Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph presents on the economics of energy and emissions. There has been a lot of positive response to this video during the original broadcast, so I decided to upload it first. Some folks wonder why I haven’t got these all videos uploaded by now. The reason is simple.
Since these were shot in HD and I don’t have a super-hispeed internet connection, this video in HD took ~27 hours to upload. Since there are graphs in these, I try not to compromise the quality by going to a lower resolution. I will continue to add videos as the time permits.
No Big Oil, no Big Broadband.
I wonder what we could’ve done with a fraction of Al’s well-gotten gains.
You’re just a brilliant guy, Anthony. Hope you had a great thanksgiving !!!
Perhaps you could burn them all to DVDs and send them to folks who do have fast connections, and they could upload them. I volunteer if needed. You have my email.
Ditto. The neighbourhood supports 35 mbps, peaks at 50. It can be done securely.
27 hours? Ouch. You might consider if it might be more efficient/easier to distribute that around a bit, Anthony. Yes, there’d a be a couple days delay in sending DVDs off to trusted colleagues to help, but it still might be quicker (and less tie up of your computer for you).
REPLY: Actually, the files are so big they won’t fit on DVD’s The Tricaster records at raw resolution for best quality, no compression apparently – A
I thought this was one of the best presentations.
Great content,
Organized,
Clear and concise,
Delivered in a professional manner by a very good speaker
Content all supported by graphs and data.
Well worth the hour of your time.
Quite a contrast Ross vs Burning dolls. The HD uploads are excellent.
As always Thank You so very much for all of your efforts.
Terry and Hyon
I would suggest getting a bit of help from someone experienced in video compression. Its possible to get significant compression without losing significant quality.
If you want to experiment yourself, try Handbrake if it will read your source, and output to mp4.
Thanks Anthony, this is one of the presentations I missed. Am downloading this as well, to see how big it is – it may fit DVD9?
Well, if DVDs dpn’t work – memory sticks. We could have a whip round to help Anthony purchase some? That way folks like me from the Uk and outside the USA could contribute.
Oh – and Happy Thanksgiving Day to y’all over there. Keep on fighting the good fight!
Wonderful presentation!
Yep, raw, standard format digital video files can run more than 200mB* per minute run time, mp4, about 10mB/min (depending on compression), and flv less than 2mB/min. A dvd-r holds about 4.5 gB of data.
cheers,
gary
* An old Canon DV camera of mine could burn through 19gB per hour of run time.
When these have all been posted, a tab should be set up to access them, for future visitors.
There it all is. The Big Picture.
I wish I’d had professors like Dr. McKittrick when I was in college.
This is a primer on how to make the “dismal science” exciting and meaningful.
Fantastic presentation by Prof McKitrick. Can we find someone on the other side now who can rebut each of the prof’s points – not likely. Can you imagine Gore or Suzuski trying something like that?
Fabulouse. My phone played the video with great sound and picture clarity. The discussion point were top notch.
McKitrick’s first point, about how electrical appliances cut down on housework, should have been fleshed out with half a dozen examples: Stoves, refrigerators, vacuums, irons, microwaves, washing machines, dryers, hot water heaters, etc. The old-time method should be contrasted–kids today don’t know about washboards, coal stoves, etc.
Sorry about spelling and grammar. Typing on my phone.
I just downloaded the video from Youtube using a well known WIN HD converter and it took just 5 minutes converted to MP4 at 5000 kbps and the file is 245 MB. The quality is excellent and all text is clear.
Roger Knights says:
November 23, 2012 at 8:34 am
Regarding time-saving things, many, at their core, rely on advances in physics, chemistry, and technology – related to electricity but not exclusively. Ross McKitrick necessarily would have to prioritize what goes into a timed presentation. Nothing wrong with you, others, and me adding a bit of background.
Remember ironing. In the 1960s, each week I took a batch of shirts to a lady who, for 25¢ each, would iron them. Likely, some folks reading this won’t understand what they have just read.
My mother would run sheets, pillowcases, and a few other cloth items through a mangle. Ours did have an electric motor but must have been pre-WWII, unlike the one in the photo at this link:
http://museumvictoria.com.au/collections/items/256746/mangle-hand-operated-g-h-nicoll-co-1820
I wonder why sheets and such had to be wrinkle free. Today one might ask where did the wrinkles go?
@Crispin in Waterloo — you have upload speeds of 35-50 mbps? Wow. Who is your ISP?
@Anthony As others have said, you should (in the future, probably not for this) look into video compression. This video (compressed to H.264 by Youtube) is 58:48 and 583 MBytes at 720p. Assuming the other 23 hours compress similarly, you’d be looking at about 14 GB of data, easily fitting on a 16 GB stick, or 1 blu-ray disc, or 3 DVD’s.
I also suspect it would upload a lot faster — given 27 hours to upload this, if it had been uploaded in H.264 HD, it would imply you have an ancient mid-1990’s analog modem AOL connection running at 46 kbits/s! Clearly you don’t.
A 1 Mb/s upstream connection (reasonably standard in my parochial neck of the woods) would take about 1.3 hours (to upload) per hour of similarly compressed video, assuming a decent ISP, router, and computer.
If at some point you would like to provide access to a relatively small sample of your raw footage (perhaps 5 min or so?) in that exact format (e.g. via dropbox.com or google drive) I’d be happy to test out some compression tools that cost little or nothing and suggest a workflow. (Though sorry, if you’re mac based, I can’t help; only Windows or Linux, but I’m sure there are plenty of mac people here who could similarly test out compression tools for you).
Very informative and enlightening. Hope your Thanksgiving was good as well.
jeez – Anthony- guess what youtube is going to do with your file- convert it to .mkv.
So do that yourself with the divX converter.
the converter is free.
it will reduce your file size to @ 10% of the original with loss of fidelity that you can hardly detect when viewed on youtube.
What an excellent presentation. So clear and well put that everything was just obvious.
Thanks Dr. McKittrick for the lecture and well done Anthony for having both the wit and the pull to get him onto your Channel.
An excellent presentation that was enlightening. Well done!
The words in the last 20% broke up badly. Probably a problem with my system.
Anthony, I feel your pain. I have to produce these type of videos on a regular basis. I re-viewed this one while waiting for my laptop to load a 30+ minute recording. My videos are a mix of talking heads, slides, video, and screen captures (which need high fidelity playback).
Some suggestions on how to maintain playback quality where needed. I noticed that the live-action video was perfectly good at 480p but even at 720p playback the slides were suspect. If you can get the original slide presentations you can generate a png image per slide and then using a video editor replace the captured video of the slide with the image (keeping the audio). You can then render the edited video at 720p or possibly 480p. This will significantly reduce the production file size (and thus upload times) and thanks to YouTubes encoding process the slide will be played back at pretty close to source quality regardless of the viewers chosen video quality.
I can help you with this if we can work out a way to get me the raw video and slides e.g snail mail a USB drive.
I have an issue with the graph comparing coal, oil, and gas. It’s not very useful to index their prices to 1949, and compare how they’ve evolved from there. It would be a lot more useful to compare the three on a $ (real) /BTU basis. When you do that, oil comes out on top, gas on the bottom, and coal in the middle. What that mix looked like in 1949 isn’t relevant to much of anything, except possibly extrapolating trends.
Anthony– As a few others have noted, looking around for some transcoding (formats that is) software might be worthwhile. But I’d have to say “might be” –the transcode time on files that big might not be much of a net savings vs the upload time! Depends somewhat on how hefty your desktop PC is.
All this discussion appears to confirm geekhood is a common trait among skeptics
Some of us will have download problems too. Sounds like you will have plenty of offers of help with compression, reformatting etc which may make it feasible to produce a set of DVD’s covering the main presentations. Many people including me would be happy to prepay to purchase these.
Clear and concise – congratulations to you both and thanks
Having some experience of video file conversion, I have to concur that you should seek help from someone local to help you.
You should be achieving about 350Mb per hours worth of mp4 file format in 720p using H264.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X264
Hth.
converting to mkv, which is exactly what youtube does, takes a fraction of the time that viewing it takes. 1/2 hour of raw vid @ 720p converts from @ 6G to @ 330M .mkv @ 720p in about 7 minutes on my dualcore 3.2GHz.
the entire 24 hours can be converted in a few hours and uploaded in a few hours more.
http://www.divx.com/
Roger Knights-
Doubt it was your system unless it was mine also. So irritating I wanted to quit, but the content was valuable enough to tolerate the audio. Still, I suspect it seriously degrades the broad appeal.
Frank K: if you downloaded it from YouTube it was already compressed, no?
This latest presentation came through OK in Sydney. It was sometimes a bit jerky but nothing fatal. This was a notably excellent presentation, clear, logical and easy to follow. It was good to see great content so well organized and so to-the-point. The graphs contained a lot of surprising and relevant information on pollution. Some of the graphs and data was a little hard to read but it was well supported by good clear speaking. I am looking forward to future releases that I missed at the time.
This is a very good prensentation, high quality, high relevance. Thanks.
John F. Hultquist says:
November 23, 2012 at 9:09 am
My mother would run sheets, pillowcases, and a few other cloth items through a mangle. Ours did have an electric motor but must have been pre-WWII, unlike the one in the photo at this link:
When I was a child in the 1950s in the UK, I remember my mother doing the washing in a cast iron gas heated washing tub, with a hand operated mangle. Even now I recall the physical effort she needed to operate that mangle, and it would take her most of the day to do the week’s laundry.
Then she had to dry the clothes outside. In the winter of 1963, I remember she would hang the clothes out in the morning and they would immediately freeze solid and stay that way all day. She brought them in the evening, and then have to put them out the next morning. And so on, day after day.
“Some folks wonder why I haven’t got these all videos uploaded by now.”
Take your time !!
We all know that you have a real day job !!!
Of the 6-8 hours of your broadcast that I watched, Ross McKitrick was the best !!
Great job !!
Yes well done. A few bits of sound drop-out but otherwise excellent info. I’ve posted it twice to the Delingpole thread on the Daily Telegraph, as the real economics surrounding this nonsense is rarely discussed.
97% (where did I get that number from?) of the comments generally bang on about CO2, the Artic and references to the poor performance of wind farms relative to the subsidies received.
This was an eye opener for me and I actually understood the points made. My thanks to you both.
Sounds like a good opportunity for a crowd sourced project. As jeremyp99 had suggested, people could purchase USB sticks and have then sent to you. 16GB flash drives can be purchased on amazon.com for about $10 each. I’d be willing to purchase 5 and have them sent to an address of your choosing. I am sure others would be willing to step up and supply as many as you require. You could then send these out to people willing to convert them to a more compact video format as gnomish had suggested. The converted files could be uploaded to a ftp site. You could then download, the much smaller files, from there. I’d be happy to do some of the converting for you as well. Let me know if I can help.
Trouble is the wasted time and endless trillions $ won’t make a scrap of difference to co2 emissions until 2035.
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/emissions.cfm
Also a guaranteed zero change to the climate and temp, SLR, or Glaciers, or Greenland,or Antarctica, cyclones, or bushfires,or droughts etc, etc. We may as well flush those trillions $ straight down the toilet because it won’t make a scrap of difference.
If people are so concerned about co2 emissions they should take their protests to China, India and the non OECD because that’s where the big emissions growth ( 73%) will come from.
Of course the OECD co2 growth is hardly more than flatlining until 2035.( 6%)
Joffa says;
My thoughts on the matter. One major aspect has been excluded from the excellent economic analysis – but it is a fatal flaw no less. Namely, no mention of the benefits provided by Carbon dioxide. C02 is part of the great natural carbon cycle. C02 is an essential nutrient for vegetation. to ensure GROWTH. Photosynthesis enables the storage of energy. The process converts C02 into carbohydrates, and in turn improves the nutritional status of the soil, increases soil moisture levels and aids the health of micro bacteria, fungi, algae, etc. This process increases vegetative growth, which also means increased crop yields, which also means more food and also is the basis to economic growth.
Because, following this cycle on round – CO2 ensured (in the past) the presence of fossil fuels and in the present, biomass and biofuels More fuel energy, as this video declares, is essential to drive economic growth. Similar benefits occur in the oceans with the growth of phytoplankton and algae, to ensure a major source of nutrients for fish, the production of oxygen, etc.
Given the failure of cost/price to reduce C02 emissions and the inability to capture C02 and shove it down some hole underground. THEN, all the efforts to reduce/control, put costs on C02 etc, are actually a violent crime against nature and totally unnecessary – a complete waste of time, financial and other resources and energy.
Surely it is best, instead. to ensure that all vegetation has unlimited ACCESS to C02 gas. And thus ENABLE maximum ongoing health for this great natural cycle. Less C02, less LIFE. Less overall GROWTH.
In a phrase: “It’s Carbon Dioxide that is so essential …. STUPID”.
Mr. Watts, 1TB external USB drives are under $100; 2TB USB & esata drives are about $150. Someone could purchase one, and your raw video could be farmed out to trusted people to convert the videos by sending it back and forth FedEx. Afterward it could be used for a full system backup for whoever bought it or originally had it.
@gnomish says:
“converting to mkv, which is exactly what youtube does”
The native Youtube format is flv.
Mkv is just a container for most other formats for grouping video, audio and subs.
Excellent choice for #1, Anthony. I lauded the McKittrick presentation on The Day, and I happily re-laud it now.
you’re right, Jabba. sorry i got that detail wrong.
it’s divX that now puts out .mkv files instead of the former .divx extension.
the important point was that youtube serves only highly compressed data. it converts anything raw while it’s being uploaded.
therefore it makes no sense to upload raw vid.
I’ve only done this a few hundred times using multifarious codecs.
well, ok- maybe more- but fewer than 1000 times, i think.
divX is what I prefer on account of the results.
Really superb!
Many thanks.
Ross McKitrick is a wonderful teacher as well as a very smart economist.
The wilful blindness of advisers who pretend that substantial CO2 reductions can occur without sending us all broke needs to be exposed at every opportunity. The stupidity of indirect policy measures, ditto. I would love to see one of the well-known economic apologists (Lord Stern comes to mind) address the points made in this presentation. But, as with so many other aspects of the CAGW scare campaign, direct engagement on the economic issues is probably a forlorn hope.
omnologos says:
November 23, 2012 at 10:46 am
All this discussion appears to confirm geekhood is a common trait among skeptics
============
Yes, skeptics do appear to include an above average number of folks that understand technology. As compared to alarmists that don’t understand technology, believe in solutions that do not work, to problems that do not exist.
One can imagine the first humans to use fire. There would have been a much larger group raising alarm over the threat this poised to future generations. Had the prehistoric Hansen’s and Gore’s of the time got their way we would never have domesticated fire and would still be living in trees. Or quite possibly extinct.
I don’t know the limits of WordPress. I’d suggested previously that the links to the videos be put on the sidebar. Perhaps they should be put under “Resources” or “Reference Pages” with a reminder on the sidebar?
So many people have stepped up to counter this deception and corruption. Some of the names of those involved are given a backseat to those more reconized and or well known. Mann, Hansen and Gore are the names most reconized of those trying to drive us back to the stone age. Often things that others have done are connected with those names. And those names ofren get the blame.
On the flip side, I’m happy to see that Dr. McKitrick is getting credit here for what he has done that may, at times, be lumped under another’s name.
Thank you, Dr. McKitrick.
(Sigh) People might think I much smarter than I really am if I didn’t have to type what I want to say. (Sigh)
epanadiplosis
It still baffles me why CO2 is looked upon as a pollutant. It is the natural, efficient resultant of a chemical reaction burning hydrocarbon. You should be focused like a laser to output CO2 over all other outputs.
Alvin;
It’s so very useful to do so. As a significant demonstration example of this, it enables/requires the EPA in the US to monitor and minimize every source of over 250 tons/annum. That’s pretty much the entire economy.
(The EPA itself objected to this Hurculean task. It would have to increase its bureaucratic staffing by something like 140X. Palpably impossible.)
Very good observation by Dr. McKitrick about the inefficiency of regulating each and every aspect.
Of course, the warmists , warmist governments and their cronies know this full well but simply use the arguments they had themselves manufactured by the political tools at the IPCC exactly to have a pretense to inflict damage on their economies whereever they can – as one man’s damage is another man’s profit, at least in the short term – in the long term we’ll all suffer because the growth of the entire wealth will be exterminated – but until then they will have made off with their billions.
Dr. McKitrick,
That was very informative and you kept my attention. Thanks for passing on your knowledge and common sense. It seems very clear to me what governments must do as far as energy production regulations are concerned. It isn’t clear at all why the environmental advocates do such mental gymnastics to get around the simple facts that you have supplied. Anthony, thanks for putting that up and for all that you do at this blog.
Loved it!
This was one of the presentations I missed during the live show.
As an Economist, I was right at home 😉
Economics is something that loads of folks like to think they understand, especially Lawyers, and typically don’t. Especially things like the indirect regulation failures… Sigh…
I wish we could require that every law maker and regulator watch this presentation once a month until they ‘get it’…