Green Electricity in Denmark, Germany, costs three times as much as US

It’s a bit costly trying to control the weather:

“Germany has been paying over $26 billion per year for electricity that has a wholesale market value of just $5 billion (see here).”

That’s $21 billion that could have been spent on health or education that was used instead to feed the Green Machine.

A few handy facts to memorize. The cost of electricity per kilowatt-hour:

Denmark, 42c; Germany 40c, and the USA, 12.5c. ( — Forbes)

Wind and solar power supplies 28% of electricity in Germany (is it really that high?) This is what Australia is aiming for?

 

Graph from Forbes (link below)

Europe is a “green energy” basket case. Washington Post

“Germany’s Energy Poverty: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good.” — Der Spiegel

Europe’s Energy and Electricity Policies are a Bad Model, Jude Clement, Forbes

9.1 out of 10 based on 104 ratings […]

Paris was an enviro-fail, but a PR success, and political win — it’s a non-binding, non-treaty, but real commitment.

Watch the pea. What does it mean to have a non-binding non-treaty, at the same time as a real “commitment”? It’s all semantics, and, as usual, word games are the weapons of big-bureaucrats. Don’t be fooled into thinking Paris was no threat to the free West.

As I keep saying, the climate conference in Paris was not trying to reduce CO2 or change the climate. The real aim is an endless free lunch for freeloaders. The Politicites didn’t get the legally binding agreement they dream of, but what they got may turn out to be almost as good. Marlo Lewis explains it may yet be politically binding on the target rich Western nations, which is all that really matters. It’s the best strategic review I’ve seen of what happened in Paris.

It was no accident that it was “non-binding”. That was part of the plan.

They were never going to get a legal treaty through the US Congress, so the aim became a deal that was “non-binding” and not a “treaty” because things that are overtly legal have to go through Congress. Instead, the bureaucrat class want to go around the voters. By simply declaring that Obama’s promises mean […]

10 reasons that show global warming is not man-made. Physics Prof explains his switch to skepticism.

Bit by bit, smart and influential thinkers are shifting. We’re seeing more and more of this type of exposition from people who are becoming skeptical. How much longer can the big bluff be maintained in the face of this kind of deep, considered and independent analysis?

Mike Van Biezen is a physics, maths and astronomy lecturer in the US. Until seven years ago, he accepted the premise that adding massive amounts of CO2 to the air would cause temperatures to rise. Then he noticed the slip in global temperatures from 1940-1980 and “could not ignore this subtle hint”. He did a lot of investigating over the ensuing years and has condensed that into ten very well written points. Like point 9: “It was so warm 4000 years ago that many of the glaciers around the world didn’t exist.” But things got so cold 150 years ago, people were afraid of glaciers and were asking “local bishops and even the Pope in Rome to come and pray in front of these glaciers in the hope of stopping their unrelenting advance.”

I also found point 7, and 10 particularly worth discussing. Point 10 is the one that he says captures the attention […]

Where is the due diligence on 600 billion dollars invested in “decarbonisation”?

According to Nicholas Stern, the climate industry is set to rival the Industrial Revolution. Graham Lloyd of The Australian asked the obvious question that nobody at the COP 21 Flop thought to ask in Paris: “if [the] $650 billion a year being promised by US banking institutions will ever be expected to make a profit and, if so, will it need public support to do so.”

“US Secretary of State John Kerry sees it as “the most extraordinary market opportunity in the history of humankind”

Michael Kile expands on the little conflict of interest in the UN’s decarbonisation mission

It seems the UN is co-founding groups for money managers to get large funds to “decarbonize”. That’s code for chiseling investments out of coal and forcing them into the pointless, inefficient and uncompetitive “renewables”. But of course, renewables are only worth investing in if governments keep demanding people use them. If the darn voters vote muck it up, by voting for leaders who will stop wasting their money, the renewables industry is a dead dog. So the UN project (which is probably funded by taxpayers) aims to remove the risk for investors by lobbying governments to keep the regulations […]

Merry Christmas

To you, your friends and family, wishing you all the best, wherever you.

The clock is turning, and it’s Christmas in New Zealand… Australia, Japan, China, …

A house around the corner generating some CO2 for Christmas.

Cheers!

— Jo

9.5 out of 10 based on 107 ratings

ABC is not a state broadcaster, it’s “independent” says new boss Ms Guthrie. O’Really?

For the incoming ABC boss, the first priority is to keep up the pretense that the public broadcaster is “independent”.

Independent of what, you may ask? It’s independent of public accountability. We can’t vote for programs or presenters; we can’t choose not to pay for it. We can’t choose to sell it, or even to send our tax funds to a different broadcaster.

The organization that depends on big-government for funds wants you to believe it’s in-dependent of big-gov.

When BP sponsors art, it’s an outrageous reputational risk (stage a sit in!). In that case the offensive BP donations to Tate were a mere one fortieth of the membership income. When Big-Gov provides almost all the income for the national broadcaster we’re supposed to laud it’s independence?

SMH: ABC boss defends independence of public broadcaster

Ms Guthrie was officially announced on Monday morning as the replacement for outgoing managing director Mr Scott. She will begin the role in May after a month-long handover period with Mr Scott.

In an interview with ABC 24 she said the essence of the ABC as an institution was its independence.

Watch Guthrie turn truth upside down:

“The important […]

No Yackandandah, wind farms will not stop bush fires

In less than 24 hours The Guardian can turn personal disasters into political advertising:

Climate change and the Victorian bushfires: this is not a coincidence

Cambell Klose

Klose tells us climate change is too complicated for stupid people:

“The issue of bushfires can’t be divorced from climate change. For too many people climate change remains an esoteric concept – something that may happen to someone else in the hazy, far-off future.”

Luckily gifted people, like Cambell Klose (political adviser) can “feel” the causes of climate change.

“Clearly this isn’t the case. The effects of climate change are being felt right now and it is having real impacts on Australians and people all across the world.”

Who needs computer models? (Or for that matter, thermometers?)

What not to do when faced with infernos:

“Yackandandah is trying to do something about this. The community has committed to powering themselves entirely by renewable energy by 2022.”

Some people reduce fuel-loads, others fight off the flames with a solar panel.

Wind farms may reduce bush fires if we have to chop down large tracts of forest to install them. Otherwise they make expensive fire-breaks.

What warming? […]

It’s “The Fright before Christmas”. Can we scare the kiddies?

What could make climate change more real for the kiddies than to get rid of Santa and drown the deer. No more presents, little ones!

Inspiration from Tim Blair. who writes: If you enjoy making small children cry – and who doesn’t? – then Fairfax has the perfect Christmas gift idea.

An Australian scientist has written a new children’s book, just in time for Christmas, that weaves the impacts of climate change into a story about Santa Claus, his reindeers and an evil billionaire.

Because billionaires are always evil. It’s important to teach kids that only nasty people get rich.

Author Dr Ian Irvine, who has been a scientist for over three decades, first came up with the idea of marrying Christmas and climate change together for his eBook The Last Christmas, The North Pole is melting! two years ago.

Dr Ian Irvine is a specialist in the management of sediments, which may explain why he doesn’t seem up to date with sea ice trends.

“The ice at the North Pole isn’t very thick and over the last 30 years or so it has been getting a lot thinner, it is […]

Weekend Unthreaded

7.7 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

The IPCC doesn’t believe its own models. The 1.5C ambitious target = 400ppm. We’re already there!

Apparently we want to set Earth’s climate control knob at 1.5C above the Little Ice Age. If the IPCC is right, we can use cars, hairdryers and air-conditioners to do it. All we need to know is equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and then we can work out the right atmospheric level of CO2 to aim at. Easy, right?

Now I don’t believe the IPCC claims, but the IPCC believes the IPCC, and therefore they’ve done this calculation. It’s what the whole Paris convention was for, eh? But something doesn’t add up. If the climate modelers are right, and equilibrium climate sensitivity is 3C, the CO2 concentration we need to aim for is … wait… 400 ppm. How many years have we got to change the whole “human emissions” equilibrium and discover 100% clean energy? Answer: No years.

If CO2 is the dominant climate driver, we are already at the “max” set point that 40,000 people in Paris just decided was the holy grail new ambitious target. Turn off the lights, stop the planes, get on your bike. The warming is in the can already.

Bear in mind that it is “equilibrium” climate sensitivity, so the warming is not all here […]

Anthony Watts at AGU2015 shows that hot air rises off concrete (it does affect thermometers)

Who would have thought that temperature stations near concrete are warming faster than those over grass?

Anthony Watts carefully analyzed all 1,218 surface stations in the USA and managed to find 410 good ones in the last 35 years (1979 onwards) — which is an achievement in itself. But the real point of his paper is to see if the best stations show less warming than the rest. (The good ones are the ones that are not near artificial heat sources, and haven’t been moved around). Watts finds (again) that the NOAA homogenisation practice appears to be adjusting the good stations up to the bad ones.

About a third of the US recorded warming trend in the last 35 years may have just disappeared…

Watts presents it today at the AGU 2015 conference.

Congratulations to Anthony Watts for what must have been a mammoth amount of work. The irony is that the conclusion — that hot air radiates or rises off concrete, asphalt, and from bricks affects thermometers is banal, yet so few can demonstrate it across such a big network. We have to wonder why no one else was looking… Maybe the Earth’s climate doesn’t matter that much to […]

The carbon tax and ETS is right back on the agenda in Australia — thank Gore and Palmer

The political bomb is ticking again. Despite being slayed twice at Australian elections the ETS monster – the emissions trading scheme – has popped back out of the box. This time around, Turnbull and co will not paint it as a big deal grand scheme, nor give it a proper name. It will be eased in under the radar as much as possible (as I predicted) being forced on only the worst “polluters” as a cheaper way to offset carbon emissions.

There’s a strange rush on in Australian politics to force Australian companies (and consumers) to send money to struggling bankers in Europe.

It’s only a few credits… Greg Hunt says overseas emissions credits will ‘probably’ be allowed

The environment minister talks flexibility in emissions targets as Coalition backbenchers mock international deal reached at Paris climate conference.

The Turnbull government will “probably” allow emission reduction permits to be bought from overseas, giving Australia flexibility to increase the targets it pledged at the Paris climate conference, Greg Hunt has predicted.

Right now, to avoid lighting the same fires that got Turnbull ousted in 2009, Turnbull and Hunt are pretending an ETS was a part of the Abbott […]

Life adapts — fish evolved from salt to fresh water in just fifty years

In 1964 an earthquake made some parts of the Pacific into ponds on a few islands. Fifty years later and the fish in those ponds are now freshwater fish. Apparently the genes for dealing with that sort of wild extreme change are held by some of the fish in the crowd and natural selection can work its wonders in a decade.

In terms of ocean acidification, this is as catastrophic as it gets, not only did the ocean become “more acidic” but it stopped being an ocean.

It can’t get much worse than this for a fish, and yet somehow life on Earth had the answer.

What’s the pH of those ponds — The ocean pH is 8.1, rain is 5.5. Those ponds will be somewhere in between.

And some people think a man-made “ocean acidication” that’s smaller than this and slower, will devastate the ocean.

 

Science Daily

Evolution is usually thought of as occurring over long time periods, but it also can happen quickly. Consider a tiny fish whose transformation after the 1964 Alaskan earthquake was uncovered by University of Oregon scientists and their University of Alaska collaborators.

The fish, […]

Australian Academy of Science trains school children to be lobbyists and teachers don’t mind

Wow. Just wow. Tony Thomas has uncovered the material the AAS provides to thousands of Australian teachers and students under the guise of science education resources.

As far as climate science goes, they might as well have hired Greenpeace. Mining is a questionable activity, Bob Brown is a hero, students should be lobbyists, and climate activists are champions. Forget the calculator, just whip out the placards. Science is not about evidence or thinking, but about following “reputable web sites” (which is code for “give me your brain and I’ll tell you what to think”). Coal is not so much a combustible mineral, as the number one “climate killer”. Not quite the dispassionate, logical path we used to think an Academy of Science might pursue.

“Ask students if they have ever taken action or advocated for a cause.” — AAS advice to teachers.

Or how about this:

Lesson outcomes: At the end of this activity students will … appreciate the need to lobby at all levels of government to ignite and lead change – even if it is unpopular with the voters.”

Because 15 year olds obviously know more than the voters, right?

But the young ones […]

Weekend Unthreaded

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8.4 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

Paris Text out — a quick discussion — More bureaucrats, more money, but there is an exit.

The December 12th Draft on UN web site.

h/t Andrew McRae and Pat in comments

Here are some rough preliminary thoughts on the latest version of the COP21 document.

The Australian ABC news made it sound like Moses was just about to come back from the Mount. “There were tears!”.

James Hansen, though called Paris talks ‘a fraud’

“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”

It’s a rare moment when I am on the same side as he is.

On the other hand, The Wall St Journal writes that it is watered down but will “transform” the economy:

If approved and implemented, the agreement would force businesses and citizens to sharply reduce their use of fossil fuels like oil, gas or coal and could fundamentally transform the global economy.

Both James Hansen and the […]

Why China, India and Russia want to be bought off for the Paris Climate PR Spectacle

COP21 won’t get a meaningful agreement, but they will get “breakthrough success”

Don’t think China, India and Russia can save us. They won’t give up fossil fuels in a meaningful way, but they all have a price and buying them off is a lot cheaper than you might think. That’s because the goal is not for them to reduce CO2, but only for them to give the appearance of doing so.

It’s not about CO2, but about PR

Paris is a theatre– a grand show, and China’s Vice Foreign Minister Liu Jianmin said as much. He “laughed when the ‘High Ambition Coalition’ was mentioned. “It is a kind of performance,” he said, “It makes no difference.”

The 1.5C “high ambition” target is a perfect PR win. The Green Machine will be able to claim a major success getting X number of countries to sign up for a breakthrough pledge to do something “more ambitious”, something that “far exceeded our hopes” but that is really decades away and likely to happen even if nobody did anything at all. It’s the do nothing, unaccountable promise that politicians love to make.

All three nations have publicly poured cold water on the Paris solutions, […]

66% of pledges have nothing to do with the climate. Billions in claims “inflated”

Everything about Climate Fear is just PR

You will never guess. Not only does no one care if carbon credits don’t cut carbon emissions, but hardly anyone cares if so called climate money is even spent on the climate. As many as 66% of climate projects funded by the developed world have nothing to do with “climate vulnerability”.

It’s the bragging game — politicians want to make out they are doing a lot for the climate, but there’s barely any accountability to check whether they get value for money — by how many thousandths of a degree did that policy cool the world? So they inflate their spending promises by claiming random other projects are “climate projects” or they use accounting trickery.

University of Zurich’s Axel Michaelowa, who studies climate aid grants, found “there was a huge misrepresentation. Governments were actually really not able to report properly” on aid that was supposed to help countries reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

His study, conducted on specific climate grants four years ago, showed a list of “projects without any conceivable climate change connotation,” such as Belgium funding for a “love movie festival” in the early 2000s in Africa, a […]

Climate Deniers Anthem — Slick expensive parody only has one old joke

Bravo for the full gloss, hi def, professional production, top editing, audio and camera work. It probably cost a motza, paid for by Climate Truth (formerly Forecast the Facts). So the side with lots of vested interests pumps the myth that the unfunded volunteer grassroots opponents are all funded by fossil fuels. (Projection anyone?) It’s the one and only cannon in their arsenal.

They use all the best intellectual weapons of the leftie toolkit: namecalling, bad manners and swearing.

If only it had a joke?

Like other attempts to be funny — the big-gov-pandering-fans-of-authority just can’t do political satire. (It’s by definition, really.) The video works as pap entertainment to keep believers from straying — it’ll help keep the Gullible Smug feeling smug. But on the rest of the population it will help skeptics more than hurt them. It takes a special kind of brainwashing to “know” droughts are worse and summers have never hit “ninety” degrees before. (Lordy!) But without any real surprises or ironic insights there are no gags for the mainstream audience. How funny is the line “fossil fuels are useful”? Laugh your socks off.

You can rate it “Funny” or “Die” at bottom of the video.

[…]

“Find the climate deniers near you” — Ted Cruz, Mark Steyn, Will Happer, Judith Curry in Congress

The full 2 hour 40 minute testimony of Ted Cruz and his invited guests.

Don’t underestimate the importance of what is going on in this testimony to Congress. It captures why the USA is the best hope for defeating the religious climate meme. Which other western democracy comes close to this? As Mark Steyn says, the most important form of competition is the competition of ideas. Paris will not get a binding agreement mostly because the USA congress stands in the way. (Though that doesn’t mean they won’t get billions; more on that in the next post.)

The landscape of the US presidential campaign has undergone a phase change. Watch this and think back to the bland weakness of Mitt Romney in 2012. In 2015 the top Republican candidates are competing to be the most skeptical, and to demonstrate how they don’t pander to political correctness. And Ted Cruz surely is the best informed on the climate topics.

Judith Curry ” I can no longer get government grants….”

Please copy your favorite quotes below so those who can’t watch the lot can pick up the gems.

UPDATE: Best short parts are around 2:14 – 2:20 with Steyn and Curry. […]