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UPDATE #2: While the imminent threat is lower, the evacuations are still underway and now include 188,000 people.
See what alarmed dam management: (Shots from the 7SanDiego News footage.)
Oroville Dam erosion on the emergency spillway. The road washed away.
Oroville Dam Spillway erosion (the arrow points at the people inspecting one part of the erosion which was headed for the spillway wall.
A close up of the erosion looking down from over the spillway wall. We can see just how much ground disappeared on the weekend.
UPDATE #1: For the moment the dire threat is lessening as water has been successfully released, but the evacuation order remains in place, and around 130,000 people are or have been moved. They are even evacuating some baby fish.
LATEST NEWS: CA – DWR @CA_DWR
Flows over the auxiliary spillway have ceased. 100,000 cfs continue down the main spillway. @ButteSheriff
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A remarkable situation in California is taking place where tens of thousands of people and animals are being shifted away from Oroville Dam as a precaution.
“EVACUATION ORDER. Use of the auxiliary spillway has lead to severe erosion that could lead to a failure of […]
If you thought seas were constant 6,000 years ago…
Microatolls are apparently very accurate proxy for sea levels, giving a higher resolution estimate of sea levels. But the extra data suggests more natural oscillations in seas than the experts used to think. Six thousand years ago, near Indonesia, seas apparently rose and fell twice by as much as 60 centimeters in a 250 year period. A similar pattern happened 2,600km away in SE China. Seas were changing so fast researchers estimate the shift occurred at 13mm per year and comment that these regional changes are “unprecedented in modern times.” (Or unrepeated, perhaps?) At the first peak 6,750 years ago, seas were 1m higher than today. The current rate of sea level change is 1mm a year in hundreds of tide gauges and 3mm in “adjusted” satellite data).
From the paper I gather that sea levels in this region change a lot even now. ENSO and the Indian Ocean dipole slop the oceans back and forward. Meltzner et al don’t know why the seas around asia changed so much in the holocene, nor do they know if this is a global phenomenon. They talk about other studies on the Great […]
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8.4 out of 10 based on 24 ratings
Smell the desperation
Here in Oz, political lives are in turmoil. Suddenly “load shedding” is the topic de jour, and there are hit lists of suburbs in the firing line. It’s a long list. Welcome to your green future.
The language is ramping up. The SA state government is talking of a “dramatic intervention in the electricity market”.
The plans are “advanced” but they apparently don’t know what that intervention is. It could be a script for “Yes Minister”:
Premier Jay Weatherill said the plans were well advanced, and all options remained on the table.
“One option is to completely nationalise the system,” Mr Weatherill said.
“That’s an extraordinary option. It would involve breaking contracts and exposing us to sovereign risk and the South Australian taxpayers to extraordinary sums of money. “It’s not a preferred option but we’re ruling nothing out at this point.”
Even if there were no more blackouts in SA, how much stress is added by not knowing if the electricity will be cut off without warning? How many people are preemptively running air conditioners early or all day?
The situation has changed so much that even Malcolm Turnbull, the […]
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
[…]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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8.2 out of 10 based on 27 ratings
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 […]
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)
9.7 out of 10 based on 63 ratings
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 […]
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 […]
Wait, wait – someone made an assumption that carbon life forms would not like more carbon, and that they might not be able to adjust to a change even after surviving for 100 million years of other changes. But now researchers are surprised that some shells are not only as good in an “acidic environment” but might be even better. Indeed formanifera turned out to micromanage pH levels so that in the right spot, where they need a higher pH, they can create that. The researchers say “such an active biochemical regulation mechanism has never been found before” and wonder “what if” the majority of organisms can do this?
More carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air also acidifies the oceans. It seemed to be the logical conclusion that shellfish and corals will suffer, because chalk formation becomes more difficult in more acidic seawater. But now a group of Dutch and Japanese scientists discovered to their own surprise that some tiny unicellular shellfish make better shells in an acidic environment. This is a completely new insight.
Researchers from the NIOZ (Royal Dutch Institute for Sea Research) and JAMSTEC (Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology) found in […]
More Fake News from the NY Times
Here’s a creative effort to sell the story that the people with billion dollar industries, all the academic positions and a sympathetic media entourage are going underground, forced to disguise their belief about “climate change”.
This is a death-throes type article, clutching for ways to pretend Global Worriers are still relevant, and to feed a fantasy that they might be the underdog.
In America’s Heartland, Discussing Climate Change Without Saying ‘Climate Change’
So while climate change is part of daily conversation, it gets disguised as something else.
“People are all talking about it, without talking about it,” said Miriam Horn, the author of a recent book on conservative Americans and the environment, “Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman.” “It’s become such a charged topic that there’s a navigation people do.”
What really happened is that climate change is overused agitprop and people are tired of being beaten over the head with it. The first most compelling example the NY Times can find is a farmer called Doug Palen who talks about “carbon sequestration” in his soil (and what crop farmer wouldn’t?) Palen is painted as a “believer”:
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8.3 out of 10 based on 38 ratings
No elected representative has done more to speed climate research up:
Donald Trump to sack climate change scientists
Myron Ebell, who led Mr Trump’s transition team at the agency, said that he expects the new President to sack at least half of the staff there. He also hopes that the organisation will have its budget cut significantly, he said.
Trump will save the state based EPA roles, but chop the federal monster which has 15,000 employees:
Ebell suggested it was reasonable to expect the president to seek a cut of about $1 billion from the EPA’s roughly $8 billion annual budget.
About half the EPA’s budget passes through to state and local governments for infrastructure projects and environmental cleanup efforts that Ebell said Trump supports.
We live in hope:
“President Trump said during the campaign that he would like to abolish the EPA, or ‘leave a little bit,”‘ Ebell said.
Not surprisingly, climate scientists are reacting with their usual calm demeanor:
GOVERNMENT SCIENTISTS AT U.S. CLIMATE CONFERENCE TERRIFIED TO SPEAK WITH THE PRESS
The mood was understandably gloomy at the National Conference and Global Forum on Science, […]
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