Climate Change means Perth smashes the coldest ever record for February

Plan for Ghost Town has been delayed

Yesterday Perth had it’s coldest ever February day (since 1910) with temperatures only making it up to 17.4C. This is not just 0.1 or 0.2C below the previous coldest record in February, but a whole 1.7C colder. Perth also got its second wettest February Day (of any season) with a 106mm of rain.

This is peak summer. So much for Tim Flannery’s Ghost Town prophesy.

(To put a fine point on just how far from normal this is, the actual coldest observation in February before this was in 1991 at 19.8C, but that was adjusted down by 0.7C in the All-Wondrous-ACORN data set. So yesterday was a “sigma-lot” below normal). I’ll post soon on how this is not just a one-day thing, but part of a longer curious record for the region.

Another bazillion gigatons of coal emissions since 1991…

POST NOTE: It’s sweltering on the east coast, and still cold and now flooding on the west. The tables below were updated — today was yet another “top ten” coldest ever day in Perth.

How long before the “hot-n- cold” floods-in-summer thing is blamed on air conditioners? – Jo

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South Australian electricity is coming your way

Yesterday 90,000 customers lost power in SA (making it Blackout Round 5 since the big one last September).

This time it was due to load shedding.

SA power woes to spread nation-wide, starting with Victoria, Australian Energy Council warns

The Federal Government needs to take urgent action to improve its energy policies before the rest of Australia falls victim to the type of large-scale blackouts experienced in South Australia, the Australian Energy Council has warned.

It’s not just that renewables muck up the electricity supply (with frequency and instability issues), they also drive a pike through the energy market. These are two separate disruptors. We’ve seen inexplicable spikes in power prices in SA in seasons when it shouldn’t happen, but this might be a new form of volatility. Wind power produced 900MW earlier in the day, but that fell to below 100MW within 6 hours (which is not that usual, see the post yesterday for the graph). The problem, apparently, was that no one thought it was worth turning on their generators?

SA has enough generation (if only it was running), but when the crunch came, the market failed:

It asked for more power generators to […]

Rolling blackouts ordered in SA in 40C heat

South Australia, with 40% renewables, is lucky this has been a mild summer.*

Welcome to your load-shedding future:

Rolling blackouts ordered in Adelaide as city swelters

Widespread power blackouts were imposed across Adelaide and parts of South Australia with heatwave conditions forcing authorities to impose load shedding.

About 40,000 properties were without electricity supplies for about 30 minutes because of what SA Power Networks said was a direction by the Australian Energy Market Regulator. — The Australian

Premier Jay Weatherill blamed the AEMO for not ordering a gas power station to come online.

Electricity prices spiked to $13,440 MWh. Total demand was about 3,000MW. Things are expected to be the same tomorrow.

At 6pm tonight wind power was producing less than 100MW (about 7% of its rated capacity):

Look at the price spike and the forecast for tomorrow:

AEMO, Electricity Prices, Feb 8, 2016

Perhaps with better planning and more money they can reduce the need for planned blackouts — but why bother?I guess they’ll have those gas powered stations running tomorrow.

It has been smack on average at Adelaide Airport at 28.1C for January 2017.

*The Wind power graph was supplied in WA time, so […]

Dear Climate Alarmists, we will never forget…

Got ten years of frustration after being mocked, scorned, and treated like dirt for talking about data?

Adam Pigott unleashes some mockery back at the parody blog XYZ:

Dear Climate Alarmists, We will never forget nor forgive.

“…here’s the thing. Once this all unravels, and it will unravel very quickly as soon as the money stops flowing, those of us on the side that is ludicrously described as being “deniers” are not going to forget. We are not going to let you bastards off the hook.

Woe betide a civilization that can’t learn something from this:

“A decade of you retarded monkeys claiming that plant food is a pollutant. Years of you driving electric cars that only exist due to the biggest taxpayer subsidy in history, while you are seemingly oblivious to the fact that they need to be plugged into an electric power grid. Decades of you opposing nuclear power, which if any of your bogus claims were true would be the immediate answer if mankind truly were in some kind of climate peril. Decades of you pontificating at how the sea levels are going to rise while you buy palatial beach-front homes, […]

Australian chief scientist says Trump is like Stalin, totally missing left’s war on science

Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, is blind to the rampant censorship that’s been going on for 30 years:

Australia’s chief scientist has slammed Donald Trump’s attempt to censor environmental data, saying the US president’s behaviour was comparable to the manipulation of science by the Soviet Union.

Speaking at a scientific roundtable in Canberra on Monday, Alan Finkel warned science was “literally under attack” in the United States and urged his colleagues to keep giving “frank and fearless” advice despite the political opposition.

“The Trump administration has mandated that scientific data published by the United States Environmental Protection Agency from last week going forward has to undergo review by political appointees before that data can be published on the EPA website or elsewhere,” he said.

Governments have been attacking science for decades

The real Soviet style censorship works by cutting funding to inconvenient research, giving awards and grants to namecalling activists, and funding incompetent psychologists who pump out sympathetic press releases that smear researchers who find the “wrong” result. It works by supporting a demonising culture that means honest scientists face exile, insults, threats to be sacked, evicted, blackballed, terminated, punished, vilified and bullied, not […]

Cory Bernardi to quit Liberal Party — What do the Libs stand for?

With no mainstream alternative party standing up for freedom, free speech, small government, and free markets, Cory is about to make a speech to let Parliament know why he is quitting the Liberal Party and will now be an independent senator.

He is one of the many anti-establishment representatives out there. Australia has no Trump, but the vacuum left by the Liberal Party’s slide to the far left will pull something together. Perhaps Bernardi and the 50,000 people on his Australian Conservatives membership list will help achieve that.

Daily Telegraph has live coverage.

The current Liberal party doesn’t want Australians to speak their minds in case they cause offense. It forces us all to pay big dollars for fantasies that we might change the weather for our great grandchildren by a hundredth of a degree. It won’t allow us to buy the cheapest safe energy. Won’t allow us to discuss real problems. Won’t audit foreign committees that tell us what to do. The Australian Liberal Party is an alt-left option that stands for nothing.

Pyne serves up a dose:

Christopher Pyne ‏@cpyne 5h5 hours ago The Liberal Party’s values are not limited to conservatism. We are Liberals because we are […]

NOAA whistleblower tells how they used bad data to rub out “pause” for Paris

The abominable Karl et al paper came out in the nick of time to pretend that the “pause” didn’t happen. We knew the paper was junk thanks to hard sleuthing, especially from Ross McKitrick, now Dr John Bates, a pal of Judith Curry is speaking up from the inside to confirm that the paper used bad and unapproved datasets which were so flawed they have already been revised. The data wasn’t archived either, which is a mandatory requirement. Bates retired from NOAA and was given a medal for setting up the “binding” standards which were ignored for the sake of generating headlines in time for Paris.

David Rose at the DailyMail:

Exposed — How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data:

In an exclusive interview, Dr Bates accused the lead author of the paper, Thomas Karl, who was until last year director of the NOAA section that produces climate data – the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) – of ‘insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence […]

Weekend Unthreaded

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Japan building 45 HELE coal plants, Australia 1 (maybe)

Japan will use Australian coal to build 45 modern coal fired plants:

Japan is the largest overseas market for Australian coal producers, taking more than a third of all exports.

Why coal? It’s cheaper than gas:

Tom O’Sullivan, a Tokyo based energy consultant with Mathyos Global Advisory, said in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Japan started importing more liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Australia.

But he said the move to more coal fired power was because coal was cheaper than LNG, and the energy security was priority for the government.

The new ultra super critical coal plants burn hotter and are more efficient (hence, high energy, low emissions = HELE).

Finally, after blackouts and scandalously high electricity bills, Malcolm Turnbull is just starting to float the idea of building, maybe, one. China has them, even Indonesia will get one before us.

Japan needs to import 95% of its energy. Australia is the largest exporter of coal in the world, and has the largest known uranium resources in the world, but we voluntarily wear a hair shirt to appease GAIA. We sacrifice our cheap energy advantage for fear that loud ill-mannered […]

Molten lava ball called Earth springs leak — incandescent rock “waterfall” on Hawaii

It is easy to forget we stand on a molten lava ball. Worth a minute of your time. Wow.

It’s being called the Lava fire hose — 70 feet of flowing liquid rock. Pure Geo-voyerism. How close is that boat… camera trick?

I gather Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano has been erupting pretty much all the time since 1983 so this is not “evacuation time”. But I’m guessing this waterfall variety is pretty unusual. If it keeps up, it’s one helluva tourist attraction.

All the forces of nature are pretty much just showing off here — wrap your mind around this steam:

“The steam plume created by the lava reaching the water is also a concern.

“It’s super-heated steam laced with hydrochloric acid from the interaction with the seawater and has shards of volcanic glass,” Ms Babb said.

“It’s something to be avoided.”

The story: Massive lava stream exploding into ocean in Hawaii (ABC)

 

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Trump moves hands on Doomsday clock for the EPA and the Paris Climate Agreement

James Delingpole dropped in at the GWPF press conference where Myron Ebell says Trump will pull the US out of the Paris agreement and says “I’ve just watched the London liberal media’s heads exploding like ripe watermelons.”.

They hated it. (Especially the bit where Ebell told them that Trump would definitely be pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate treaty) They couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They curled their lips. They laced their questions with the bitterest scorn. But they didn’t really tune into Ebell’s measured, silken, soft-spoken answers because, hell, they knew what he was saying just had to be wrong and they didn’t really understand what he meant anyway.

The reporter who set the tone – and if nothing else, you’ve got to admire his honesty – was the one from Channel 4 News who told Ebell: “It will occur to you that this room is full of people like myself who consider that nothing you say has any basis in fact. So what you’ve been telling us is essentially meaningless.”

Ebell replied with some painful home truths. “Elections are surprising things…” he began and went on to explain to […]

World is going to hell but we’re finding new coral reefs everywhere…

Click to enlarge map.

2016 was a good year for coral surprizes. Until recently no one even knew that corals could grow just out from the river-mouth of the Amazon. Then 9,300 square kilometers of reef was found living in a region no one thought corals could grow.

Volunteers found very nice reefs in Morton Bay, not far from the ferry route, but entirely “unexpected” and “better than tourist sites”. Researchers also found another 4.000 square kilometers of reef off Queensland, hidden under 20m of water.

In every media article the corals were immediately called into action against mining, farming, stuff like that. Journalists talk to scientists and head straight over to Greenpeace. The poor corals are politicized before they’d even been put on a tourist map.

Somehow scientists that are wrong are always described as surprised, excited or astonished. Other professions dream that their errors would be recounted this way. (Think –tax accountants, pilots, politicians…) . In terms of hard questions from the media, the only group that gets it easier than Hillary Clinton are scientists. Not that I’m saying they should have known, but the same profession that talks about 97% certainty can’t also get a free […]