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.
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 @ur momisugly 720p converts from @ur momisugly 6G to @ur momisugly 330M .mkv @ur momisugly 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.