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Like the death throes of a religion…
I’d like to see the errors bars on that says Jo
Tim Flannery unhinged. What a rant. Apparently people who deny that Earth has a climate are coming to eat his children or something. It must be awful inside his head:
…the climate crisis has now grown so severe that the actions of the denialists have turned predatory: they are now an immediate threat to our children.
After all his predictions went wrong years ago, now he feels like a failure?
No climate report or warning, no political agreement nor technological innovation has altered the ever-upward trajectory of the pollution. This simple fact forces me to look back on my 20 years of climate activism as a colossal failure.
I say, not at all Tim. You were paid to sell carbon credits and industrial renewables and I’m sure Panasonic are very happy.
Flannery and his institutions may never have been funded by Vestas, GE, HSBC, Deutche Bank, Goldman Sachs, BBVA and Citigroup or Communist China but they’re happy too. I mean they’d like to be happier still, but Flannery did his best. And a lot of feudal bureaucrats […]
Tim Flannery, 2004, The West Australian.
Flannery will be on Q&A tonight (bet you can’t wait, copy your questions and tweets below please!). Let’s check the exact wording of his original 2004 prediction that Perth would become a ghost town. It tells us something, not just about Flannery and a messiah complex (he really does talk of himself as an old testament prophet), but about journalism. Back then journalists interviewed critics too. Flannery was even called “alarmist” in 2004.
The original story had the calm headline: “Perth Will Die, says Top Scientist”. That article has gone beyond the space time continuum, but thankfully, it was preserved by the Wayback Machine.
Perth will become a ghost city within decades as rising global temperatures turn the Wheatbelt into a desert and drive species to the brink of extinction, a leading Australian scientist warns.
–Carmelo Amalfi, The West Australian
Perth in 2018, is wet, cool and productive and 30% larger:
Dams are at their equal highest level at the end of summer since 2002, and Perth has 67 billion litres more than any year of the last seven. The desert seems to be shrinking, arid regions […]
Tim Flannery. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
Dear Tim,
Now that the government funded golden platform is gone, you say you will “not be silenced. ” Bravo, I say.
Perhaps I can help? When I didn’t want to be silenced five years ago, I set up my own blog. I got no government grants. Any financial support comes from readers voluntarily (thanks to Peter, Bill, Bernd, and Malcolm yesterday). I forgo a job to run this blog and get called a “denier” by government funded academics and politicians. Nevertheless, this is the largest skeptical climate science blog in the country, and one of the handful of largest in the world.
To help you until you get your own blog running in full, I extend an open invitation to you for a guest post anytime, unedited, and in full with graphs and images. Links to your own material will help your google rank.
You talked about the importance of scientific discussion, after the Climate Commission was abolished yesterday: “I believe that Australians have a right to know – a right to authoritative, independent and accurate information on climate change.”
Where better to post accurate information on climate change?
Keeping in the […]
TIM FLANNERY, CHIEF CLIMATE COMMISSIONER 7-30 Report ABC: “…everything we’re seeing is consistent with what the climate scientists have been telling us now for decades…”
Leigh Sales, ABC PRESENTER : “… … …(no comment)…”
Steve Hunter Cartoonist:
…
Thanks to Steve Hunter (political cartoons). See also Andys rant. đ
What are the odds?
Tim Flannery makes out that they have used maths to arrive at their conclusion. Let’s be clear, if you have a 499 in 500 chance of winning at poker, that’s not the same as the odds of us being able to predict a normal climate, and be able to spot an “artificial” one. Yet Tim would like you to think that’s the same bet.
7:30 Report excerpts
LEIGH SALES: How do you know that the new climatic conditions are responsible for the extreme whether events? How do you know that it’s just not some combination of meteorological circumstances?
TIM FLANNERY: Sure. Look, the studies suggest it’s a 1/500 chance that this sorta stuff is just normal. This is way outside the range of anything we’ve experienced before. It is really an extraordinary summer….
What studies Tim? Name […]
How is this for a scary thought?
Tim Flannery says renewables will run the economy:
“What we can now see is the emerging inevitability that renewables are going to be running the economy…”
And I say: Prepare for economic armageddon. Picture an Australia where we all have jobs — jobs digging holes, mucking out the stables, and chopping those last few remaining trees down. We may lead the world installing chinese-made solar panels, but they won’t help us make anything that anyone else wants to buy. Anton gives us some numbers no one seems to have mentioned to Tim. Like, it takes 1,000 new wind towers to kinda equal one coal plant. – Jo
—————————————
Guest Post: Anton Lang
Get ready — this is how much the 25 most recent, powerful, high-tech wind plants generate. Not the red line — that’s how much electricity we used. Look at the expanse under the blue line — every bit of that (“bit” being the word) is all thanks to those brand spanking new wind turbines.
Courtesy of the National Electricity Market. (NEM)
The red line at the top shows total electricity demand for NSW, Vic, Qld, SA, and Tasmania […]
Tim Flannery is paid to help you understand why Australia is getting a Carbon Tax in eight weeks time. If you can’t fathom why the nation which emits just 1.3% of all man-made CO2 is going to pay three times the current market rate to reduce world temperatures by 0.00 degrees C, I’m sure Prof Tim will be delighted to help. Do book quickly. Sometimes these events sell out (even before they are publicized).
Australiaâs Chief Climate Commissioner, Professor Tim Flannery, is visiting Sydney. The sixth biggest CBD in the country, Parramatta will host the next public forum for the Climate Commission. This is your opportunity to get involved in the conversation about climate change.
The Climate Commission provides independent, authoritative information on climate change to the Australian public.
Event details
Where: Parramatta RSL club , Cnr Macquarie & O’Connell St , Parramatta
When: 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM, Tuesday 15 May 2012. Doors open 6.00pm
Everyone is welcome. Book your place now to avoid disappointment.
Click here to Register for attendance H/t Pat
What would you like to ask Tim in our National Climate Conversation? Perhaps you wonder why he keeps calling us names? Maybe you can’t figure out […]
The conversation Australia needs: should we prevent fires with prescribed burns or solar panels?
The wildfires in NSW so far have burned 2,700,000 ha or, if it were one square area –a box 164km x 164km and destroyed at least 720 houses (that was Dec 11).
The dilemma: will it be managed fires, or unmanaged wildfires to reduce the fuel? Or if you are Tim Flannery who says it’s “immoral not to connect the dots“, the question is “how many solar panels will it take to stop those houses burning down?” Or perhaps “how do we stop lightning”?
This is the rough size of the controlled hazard reduction target area, as carried out for NSW compared to the area of “hazard-reduction” by Mother Nature. The area of official hazard reduction by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) is 135,000 ha, equivalent to a square of dimensions 36km x 36km. There would be some other private fuel reduction. Can anyone find figures for that?
Australian Wildfires Area, 2019, NSW, December. Map.
To protect houses we need a 100m margin (at least) and to burn 20% of the landscape each year.
New South Wales NPWS fire ecologist, […]
Verily. Eclipses do weird things to people.
Justin Gillis, writer for The New York Times used the recent eclipse to sell something I’d call Sciencemagic. Essentially, if some Scientists⢠can calculate orbital mechanics to a fine art, it follows, ipso nonfacto, that all people who use the same job title are also always right.
âShould You Trust Climate Science? Maybe the Eclipse Is a Clueâ
Thanks to the work of scientists, people will know exactly what time to expect the eclipse. In less entertaining but more important ways, we respond to scientific predictions all the time, even though we have no independent capacity to verify the calculations. We tend to trust scientists.
If Scientists⢠say that solar panels will stop malaria, then buy some! Save lives in Ghana. (What are you waiting for?)
The implications stretch far. Clearly, we can chuck out the whole research thing (labs, who needs em?) Why test predictions, if Scientists⢠are 100% accurate? We’ve been wasting money. We don’t need more large hadron colliders, we just need to survey more particle physicists.
This idea that job titles have a kind of truth-telling power is not much different to astrology where truth […]
To paraphrase: People who disagree with my economic predictions should not get funds.
UPDATE: What an extraordinary moment. UWA has announced that due to the unexpected “passion” of the staff and students they have to cancel the Lomborg Consensus Centre (May 8th 2015). Does UWA do science-by-passion?
The Australian Government is spending $2.5 billion on Direct Action to reduce atmospheric carbon. They offer to spend a tiny $4m extra setting up a centre for an economist who studies the effectiveness of action to change the climate.
Tim Flannery’s reaction to the Consensus Centre:
“…it’s an insult to Australiaâs scientific community.”
It’s an insult I tell you! Imagine taking Australia’s climate scientists seriously, and setting up an economics centre to solve the crisis they say is occurring. How could any scientist stand that.
Lomborg-the-economist agrees completely with the IPCC and Flannery on the climate science. But he disagrees on the economic and policy positions. Obviously it’s a disaster if the Flannery-IPCC economic predictions are subject to analysis.
Flannery, self-satirical, on the appointment of Lomberg:
âMr Lomborgâs views have no credibility in the scientific community. His message hasnât varied at all in the last […]
Flannery and the Climate Council are at it again — trying to scare money out of people with their prophecies of bushfires. They are milking the fear factor from the October fires in the Blue Mountains, telling us disaster planning means we have to get “the facts straight”.
Let’s get the facts straight on exactly how human emissions of CO2 have affected the temperature and rainfall in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. How much hotter and drier is the climate? Ninety percent of human emissions have been produced since WWII. Katoomba has the longest running temperature series I could find in the BOM records -see below. But where is that rising trend? The string of hot years in the late 1930s appears to be just as hot as the last decade. The 1920s and 30s look a lot like the 1980 and 90s.
The facts about Katoomba annual temperatures
Source: Katoomba annual mean temperature
see also Katoomba October mean temperatures
But wait, the Climate Council tells us “Hot, dry conditions create conditions favourable for bushfires. Australia has just experienced its hottest 12 months ever recorded.” Any sane person would assume the Blue […]
Tim Flannery
No wonder Flannery and co. are playing double or nothing. While headlines have shouted for years that vested interests of the fossil fuel players dominate this debate, few journalists point out that the renewables industry, carbon trading markets, and the climate-scary-science-campaign have an all-or-nothing interest in propagating alarm.
As I keep saying, those in private business who provide real goods to real voluntary customers will suffer from a carbon tax, but they still have a market. For them it’s a “dent” in profits. We’ll still be buying coal, oil and gas for decades to come. In contrast, those who make a living from government funds could lose everything in an instant. Their wealth and status depends on a forced payment and a decision from one Minister. It is far more ephemeral and subject to whim. The state-dependents are far more desperate. The stakes are higher.
Gillard calls the “climate commission” an independent body, which is only true in the same sense that any parasite can be described as “independent” of the host while being completely dependent on it.
This shows just how independent and apolitical the Climate Commission reality is:
The Australian “Abbott says Tim […]
The ABC will declare that “most Australians don’t think the ABC is biased” but while half the nation thinks it’s balanced, 30% don’t know, and of the 20% who are sure there is bias, there are three times as many who think it’s pro-Labor as those who think it’s pro-Coalition. Bear in mind ABC1 only has about 10% of the Australian audience, so 90% of the nation prefers to watch something else. Did the survey ask respondents if they watch the ABC? We might find that of the 20% of the population who are familiar with ABC coverage, most think it’s biased to the left. With some probing questions, we might also find that people of different political persuasions define bias very differently. Could it be that those more likely to vote for the Coalition tend to value free speech even if they don’t agree with the views?
On the other hand those more likely to vote Labor or Green seem to think balance means skeptics shouldn’t speak at all. Is their idea of bias just “if the ABC allows skeptics to comment”. The Centre for Independent Journalism had a whole forum devoted to asking whether “balance” meant they still […]
What does it take to be a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science? Apparently, making wildly exaggerated predictions that are already known to be wrong, calling people names, and having a thin grip on the scientific method is just the stuff the Academy is looking for. Who knew? Science used to be about seeking the truth.
Tim Flannery
The Australian Academy of Science thinks that it can give the besieged Tim Flannery more credibility. Instead, they pour their own credibility down the sink. If making predictions that are wrong and exaggerated, and following fashions of scientific groupthink is “good science”, who next will make the hallowed list of “Fellows” — Cate Blanchett? Clive Hamilton? Charles Manson?
Hailing people who achieve in Science Communication might be fine, but it is not communicating science when their predictions don’t fit the real world and they won’t change the theory. The prophesies of Tim are a religion. (See “Help! How you can tell a scientist from a non-scientist”.)
Now every time Flannery makes a statement like these below, it can carry the AAS logo:
For the first time, this global super-organism, this global intelligence will be able to send […]
The struggles for believers of the theory-with-no-observations are getting worse. Once upon a time they used to just ignore skeptics. Now they’re coming to terms with their fall from hallowed “untouchable” status.
The Climate Spectator posted an article Wish I wasn’t a warmenist last week discussing the new urban terminology:
Hereâs how the online Urban Dictionary defines a warmenist: âGullible, scientificially (sic) illiterate, unthinking acolyte and zombie-fired propagandist of the Religion of Anthropogenic Global Warming.â
One in the eye, one supposes, for all those academies of science which have declared they accept the science of global warming and manâs role in it. But the definition goes on: âOne who takes direct orders from High Priest King of Idiocy, Albert J. Gore. One who puts the “mental” in environmentalism. Historical inheritors of those who believed that King Canute could hold back the tides and that the wolf would eat the moon unless their first-born daughter’s virginity was sacrificed to the local shaman.â
They are even thinking of tossing out Tim Flannery (as gently as possible): “Given the level of national debate, maybe Tim Flannery wasn’t the ideal choice to champion the need to do something about climate change.” As usual when […]
Tim Blair broke the story of Tim Flannery claiming to be working for Panasonic. (But wait, I hear you say, how could that be, we thought he was working for the Australian people?!)
If you are a foreign multinational and you want to influence national Australian policies, you don’t need to spend much. Prime time advertising in Australia is as cheap as chips, but it only works on politically correct topics where our national broadcaster (the ABC) will give you a free pass. When it comes to climate change, ABC adverts don’t interrupt the program, they are the program.
Flannery has been on ABC’s Q&A five times, ABC’s Lateline three times [1,2,3,], the ABC’s 7.30 report, ABC breakfast, ABC Latenight live, something on the ABC called Conversations, and too many radio spots to mention. When people question whether Tim Flannery ought be proud of promoting an electronics giant at the same time as he is paid for government funded work … the ABC comes out defending him, and their no-hard-questions approach to promoting what he promotes.
It’s not that someone of his notoriety shouldn’t be getting ABC airtime, it’s that he gets away with failed predictions, half truths, and is […]
The new hole in the ground in the Snowy 2.0 scheme.
By Jo Nova
Complexity has a price, and a renewables grid is a bit like a 240 volt moving Rubiks cube. Here we see an unnecessary project hit by a random factor that in turn will affect all the others, blowing out other costs and schedules.
Australia’s breakneck energy transition, driven like a crash test dummy by government subsidies, depends on finishing the massive pumped hydro scheme called Snowy 2.0. However it has hit another delay no one apparently saw coming.
“Australia’s biggest renewable energy project” is the $6 – 10 billion plan to pump water uphill so it can run back down again to generate electricity every time the windmills and solar panels suffer a catastrophic failure, which is nearly every day. The entire project is superfluous in a grid with coal power — as we know from the last fifty years when we didn’t need it.
Unfortunately a 2,400 ton Tunnel Boring Machine called Florence is quite stuck under a cave-in. According to the ABC she started ten months ago, and is supposed to be digging her way through 15 kilometres (10 miles) of mountain. […]
The Murray River was far higher in the 1970 floods and worse still in 1956 when CO2 was just 314ppm. Obviously, if all current floods are “caused by CO2”, we need more of it.*
A photo of flood markers on a tree in South Australia has sparked a debate on Facebook. The only things we know for sure — floods were worse when CO2 was perfect, and censorship of banal truths is the only way to stop the climate change rort unravelling.
Picture of tree at centre of furious flood debate
News.com.au
A picture of a tree in regional South Australia has sparked a wild climate change debate.As floodwaters from the River Murray crept up the Loxtonâs Tree of Knowledge, one local thought it was a good time to take a picture to put things into perspective.
The updated flood markings of The Tree of Knowledge, SA, Nov 30th, 2022. Click to enlarge
UPDATED: Dec 2, 2022. Previous photo Nov 28th. See future updates on flood levels (weekly) here. Thanks to Craig Thomas.
The depth of the scientific response:
âUsing one tree as evidence to suit your agenda shows what level of […]
The Conversation accidentally provides a great case study in confirmation bias
It’s how the fake consensus in science was created in the first place. Just sack the skeptics, poll the survivors, and pretend you’ve “discovered” something scientific!
The Conversion gets excited in 2022 A staggering 10,000 people took part in our #SetTheAgenda poll, and voters’ number one issue was climate change.
“Climate change was overwhelmingly the number-one issue on our readersâ agenda. In fact, more than 60% of you picked it…”
We wonder what they will do with the other 40%?
People were asked to pick three topics from a set list, so the 60% is inflated too.
Flashback to 2019:
âThe Conversationâ bans all skeptical scientists from commenting What kind of conversation only has one side? Paid propaganda.
by Jo Nova
The Conversation is a site established** by your taxpayer dollars, in countries where 50 â 60% of the entire population donât agree with the IPCCâs dominant mantra. Yet no matter how qualified you are, no matter how good your argument, your evidence and your data, you, we, half the population, is now banned. The editor Misha Ketchell has officially blocked unbelievers, […]
We’re in a Culture War, and there has been no name to label the group who are driving this war. The old Left-Right canard isn’t working. The DINO-RINO’s are one and same Swamp-creatures. The left-leaning Bernie fans got screwed by the Upper Class as much as the Trump fans did.
It’s not about the rich versus the poor either: Donald Trump is a billionaire but he isn’t upper class. Green hippies in XR Superhero-Monk costumes needn’t be wealthy, but they aspire to be in the popular upper class. It’s about status and the pecking order. The same is true of the high school students who lecture grown ups on climate change. They might be poor but they’re aiming to climb class rungs.
Words matter. People can unite behind an idea that has no name, but the movement is fragile, prone to fragmenting. But here, in a rather scathing blast from someone who isn’t Republican and doesn’t even like them is a suggestion that’s got a lot going for it. Bring back a new version of the class war, against the Upper Class, and a war on classism. It is something that can unite the Deplorables, the workers, the minorities, and […]
The Snowy 2.0 Scheme is a $10 billion bandaid to make up for Wind and Solar’s unreliability. Hydro storage is an anti-generator that destroys 20-30% of the electricity fed into it. It turns out it also destroys three quarters of the money fed into it, and some of the environment as well. What’s not to like?
by Steve Hunter. h/t StopTheseThings
Today a Who’s Who of Australian engineering are scathing about Snowy 2.0 in The Australian
The mammoth pumped Hydro scheme is a $10 billion dollar disaster that will never pay for itself, is already being superceded by battery technology, and will scar the land, infect pristine alpine lakes, risk critically endangered species, damage fishing grounds, and breach the Biosecurity Act in a National park. (Where are the environmentalists, Tim Flannery? Does anyone care?)
Pumped Hydro doesn’t even work on a small scale. Projects like it are being junked around the country before they get built and there has been only one other pumped hydro project “committed” in the last 20 years.
On the revenue side, the output of Snowy 2.0 from 2025 to 2042 is now forecast to be less than half the business case estimate, […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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