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A little update on our favourite green state.
SA tries to fix a Big-Government mess with a Bigger Government:
Man-made regulations created the grid-crisis in South Australia, so the Weatherill government has decided to take what didn’t work and “do more”.
Australian rulers subsidized unstable energy, and lo, created an unstable system. The SA state govt thinks it can solve it by running an opposing scheme simultaneously. The Renewable Energy Target (RET) scheme meets the Energy Security Target (EST). Don’t laugh. The Electricity Price Target (EPT) is probably next. This is magic wish-fairy governance where the guy in charge doesn’t take the effort to understand the cause of a problem and unwind it, he just waves a wand and issues a decree. Perhaps Weathrill thinks the hamstrung-market can squeeze some stable electrons out the ether, but cheap stability only came from coal in SA. His kind of stability-on-command comes out of wallets instead.
The fairy plan looks so bad even the wonder-hero, Elon Musk, is getting nervous that electricity bills will stay painfully high (making his battery power solution not look so attractive to the rest of the world). SA is going to be held up as the global text […]
Historic climate data is being destroyed
The Bureau have a budget of a million dollars a day, but seemingly can’t afford an extra memory stick to save historic scientific data.
In the mid 1990s thermometers changed right across Australia — new electronic sensors were installed nearly everywhere. Known as automatic weather sensors (AWS) these are quite different to the old “liquid in glass” type. The electronic ones can pick up very short bursts of heat — so they can measure extremes of temperatures that the old mercury or liquid thermometers would not pick up, unless the spike of heat lasted for a few minutes. It is difficult (impossible) to believe that across the whole temperature range that these two different instruments would always behave in the exact same way. There could easily be an artificial warming trend generated by this change (see the step change in the graphs). The only way to compare the old and new types of thermometer is to run side by side comparisons in the field and at many sites. Which is exactly what the bureau were doing, but the data has never been put in an archive, or has been destroyed. It’s not easily available […]
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9.7 out of 10 based on 44 ratings
The story changes: first it was quality control, then equipment failure, now a smart card?
Jennifer Marohasy reports that the thermometers are working fine, but a smart card has been added to some to filter out “spurious cold” readings:
In particular, the Minister [Josh Frydenberg] was told that while the Goulburn weather station accurately measured the local temperature as minus 10.4 at 6.30 am on Sunday 2 July, a smart card reader prevented this value from being recorded as the daily minimum on the Daily Weather Observations page.
Apparently, the smart cards don’t filter out the spurious hot readings — on the hot side, all noise is good? I want the BOM to confirm or correct this. Despite knowing of this extraordinary, uncertain, situation, the Minister still has “full confidence” in the Bureau of Meteorology. A month ago, the BOM said the temperature clipping was a deliberate “quality control measure”, but then changed that to “equipment failure”. This week, Bill Kininmonth pointed out that the same equipment worked in Antarctica (where it gets to minus 50C). And I can add that David Stockwell spotted the data sheet for an Automatic Weather Station thermometer installed at Nerriga. It claims […]
The National Center for Public Policy Research released a report that tells us Al Gore’s swimming pool uses the same electricity as six average US homes. In kilowatt hours, his house draws a total annual load equivalent to 21 homes — averages 19,241 kWh per month. He probably lives alone now that Tipper and the kids have moved out. This is after he paid $60,000 to add solar panels which provide about 5% of his domestic electricity (Why doesn’t he just go solar, that’d be only $720k, plus batteries).
He owns two other homes.
I would never use this as an ad hom argument to say that man-made global warming crisis is wildly exaggerated (there are plenty of other reasons to say that). Obviously poor Al needs to use more electricity than most people so he can swim in between flights, because he is constantly being attacked in articles like this one:
How Al Gore Fooled The World Into Paying For His Giant Carbon Footprint
Jeff Dunetz …The real reason Al Gore wants you to read his books and go see his movies and even see his lectures isn’t because he is trying to save the Earth from […]
Today, Graham Lloyd, and Jennifer Marohasy turn up the heat even more on the Bureau of Meteorology’s strange practice of “editing” raw data. The Bureau says it works to the “highest possible standards”. Natch. So an independent audit would clear them, silence the critics, and restore their reputation. Strangely, instead they have been apparently avoiding an independent audit for six years now and counting….
The Australian: BoM faces storm over weather data inaccuracies
It is the biggest public scandal for BoM since furious debate was sparked three years ago over its treatment of historic and contemporary temperature records to compile its new homogenised national temperature data series known as ACORN-SAT.
For an agency that screams from the rooftops every time the mercury nudges to the slightest record high, losing a half a degree Celsius here and there at the lower extremities is a pretty poor look.
In reply, once again, the BOM promises another do-it-yourself review. The Minister (Josh Frydenberg) has insisted on two external independent experts, but if the BOM gets to approve or appoint them, that box won’t be hard to tick (just ask the NZ NIWA team). Apparently the last public scandal […]
It’s a creative South Australian solution to an unstable, expensive grid: close large factories and have less blackouts. If they can close enough, it’s guaranteed to succeed:
Holden closure will help Energy Market Operator manage SA’s blackout risk, report finds
Part of the soon-to-be vacated Holden factory in Adelaide is about to be transformed into a temporary power station to help stave off load-shedding blackouts this summer.
But the car industry’s closure will help the authorities manage the risk of blackouts in another way.
The exit of a once powerful manufacturing sector will see the state using less electricity, particularly during the all-important summer peak.
The information is contained in the latest Electricity Forecasting Insights published by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).
From a story last year:
The closure of Holden’s Elizabeth plant is expected to result in 13,000 job losses across the company and its supply chain.
Energy use in SA is set to fall from 3,116MW to 3,035MW in summer peaks. Even so, they’ll still need more temporary generators (time to cut more jobs?):
Nevertheless, AEMO is forecasting widespread shortfalls of reserve power over […]
Front page scandal today in Australia: BoM opens cold case on temperature data
Jennifer Marohasy, Lance Pidgeon, at the Stevenson screen, Goulburn Airport.
Amazing, the power of the media. Suddenly, the Bureau of Meteorology needs to replace equipment and answer questions and set up an internal inquiry. But they’ve had weeks of warning. Lance Pidgeon and Jennifer Marohasy have been watching the automatic weather stations record very cold temperatures, and then astonished when those same readings either got entered into our national raw database as warmer, or simply disappeared. The BOM apparently has a filter set so that super cold temperatures need to be manually checked. Yet the filter is set so high, in Thredbo’s case, nearly five whole degrees warmer than temperatures already recorded.
Wow. Just wow. What does raw data mean anymore?
The lack of respect for real observations is profoundly unscientific. How much does the BOM even care about understanding our climate if they are so flagrantly uninterested in the data? As I have said, the Bureau of Meteorology behaves more like PR agency than an institute of science. Based on past practice their internal inquiry will find excuses, not answer the questions, and will not […]
Australia is a wonderful living experiment for nations worldwide of how a people with more energy resources per capita than anywhere else in the world can sabotage a perfectly good electricity grid in the hope of appeasing the Weather Gods.
At the request of Senator Malcolm Roberts, Alan Moran slices up our “Chief Scientists” report (known as the Finkel Review) and gives us some home truths. Electricity costs have doubled in Australia, Finkel’s plan would take what isn’t working, and do more of it — in the process pretty much destroying one fifth of our manufacturing base, costing us thousands of jobs, and adding almost $588-$768 per household annually to energy bills. Let’s ask Australian voters if they want cheap coal power or if they’d rather spend $600 a year to make the weather unmeasureably nicer in 2100? Why don’t we have a plebescite on that?
In other basic truths Moran points out that while Finkel seems to think new coal fired plants are uneconomic, everyone else is building them around the world. Old plants don’t have to be blown up on their 50th Birthday either. They can be maintained instead, like lots of other perfectly good 50 year old […]
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9.2 out of 10 based on 45 ratings
Can’t persuade people? Drug ’em.
Tony Thomas finds an academic (Matthew Liao) who suggests that given the climate change risk it might be more ethical to shrink our kids by 6 inches, or drug people with oxytoxin to make them more compliant. Jo Nova thinks it might be more ethical to fund skeptical scientists instead of unskeptical ones and figure out whether a man-made disaster is actually coming before we start shrinking kids.
The idea is that people would accept bizarre climate-saving imposts willingly if only we could give them the “love drug” oxytocin. He calls it “Pharmacologically induced altruism”. Oxytocin increases altruism and empathy, but I would guess that only altruistic or empathetic people would willingly take it “for the sake of the planet”. The rest of the population might be a little suspect that they might be more prone to being duped and conned while “under the influence”.
The initial paper Human Engineering and Climate Change, came out five years ago. But in academic circles, Liao wasn’t laughed out of town, and hasn’t apparently issued a more comprehensive update.
Tony Thomas spots a few ethical problems:
Liao insists his human engineering is all voluntary, […]
Alan Jones, interviews Peter Ridd, James Cook university professor of physics about the state of the Great Barrier Reef
The coral reef recovers.
Peter Ridd: Coral Reefs recover — “the scientists make hay when it dies in a spectacular way but they are quiet when it recovers.”
On symbionts — “There is a large variety of symbionts and some allow coral to grow faster but are more sensitive to bleaching.”
All the corals on the Great Barrier Reef live and grow much faster in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Thailand where the water is much hotter than it is on the reef and the corals just juggle these symbionts. 4:20
Corals have a little thermometer built in them, when you take a core of them from many years ago we know what the temperature of the water was back when Captain Cook sailed up the coast, it was actually about the same temperature then. It was colder 100 years ago, but it has recovered from that. The temperatures on the reef are not even significantly warmer than average on a hundred year timescale.
Corals that bleach in one year will […]
Feel the hate. Martin Lukacs in The Guardian blames “corporates” for everything. It’s all a big 40 year neoliberalist plot to trick you, make you feel guilty, and worst of all, to fool you into thinking you are an individual instead of, err… a group. What could be worse?
In the declining stage of the Climate Wars, the excuses are running amok. The Lukacs “analysis” tries to foment an us-n-them class warfare, but will offend quite a lot of believers by tossing their individual actions (their plastic bag penance) under a bus.
He is so busy looking at the world through marxist-colored-glasses he doesn’t seem to have noticed that many of the “big polluters” — the oil and gas giants — all lobby and profit from carbon action. Big Oil and Big Gas want carbon rules and carbon subsidies because it helps them compete with their real rival, Big Coal. Meanwhile Lukacs wants everything back under government ownership, but the worst real polluters on the planet are the wasteful communist regimes and socialist dictators, not the free West and the publicly listed corporations.
The saddest thing is that The Guardian editors thought this was worth publishing as is, and that […]
The Carbon Majors Report came out two weeks ago has been used to stoke Marxist fears that “corporates” are polluting the world.
These 100 Companies Are to Blame For 71% of The World’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions
[ScienceAlert]
Since 1988, a mere 100 companies have been responsible for 71 percent of the entire world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions.
This data comes from an inaugural report published by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an environmental non-profit. Charting the rapid expansion of the fossil fuel industry in the last 28 years, they have now released some truly staggering numbers on the world’s major carbon polluters.
Tess Riley of The Guardian tells us that “A relatively small number of fossil fuel producers and their investors could hold the key to tackling climate change”. She goes on to name the worst corporations: “ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron are identified as among the highest emitting investor-owned companies since 1988″. It’s not til the ninth paragraph we find that: “A fifth of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions are backed by public investment, according to the report.”
Only a fifth?
Look closely — the Worst corporate “polluters” are Big Government, not […]
Apparently human emissions of CO2 have stopped growing in the last few years, but atmospheric levels of CO2 are rising anyway.
IEA data shows CO2 emissions stopped rising:
Global Carbon Emissions, 2017, IEA, Graph.
Pop-Quiz — The correct conclusion from this is:
1/ Human emissions are irrelevant — global CO2 is controlled by ocean currents, phytoplankton, other stuff. Efforts to control global CO2 through windmills and electric cars are a complete waste of money. 2/ Natural sinks have suddenly filled up, the ocean is full, and we are near a tipping point. Panic. Give us your money. 3/ Pretend not to notice, instead, rejoice that Global GDP is still increasing which means that for the first time in 100,000 years, humans have disconnected economic development from burning carbon based stuff. This is proof finally, in your faith that renewables will not cripple economies. (See Scientific American.) 4/ Declare that global emissions are still rising rapidly anyway. (Here is the same award-winning Peter Boyer not researching his claims in 2016. When will he start?)
Global atmospheric CO2 levels at Mauna Loa are still rising:
Global CO2 Levels, Mauna Loa, graph, 2017, NOAA. | Source NY Times
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9 out of 10 based on 46 ratings
Hurry Now and Save Trillions! A 500 trillion, gazillion dollar bill is coming for you unless you buy my solar-panel-techno-wind-battery gizmo NOW! Don’t miss out. You too, can be a world saving star for a bargain price. Free planet with nice weather thrown in. Offer ends at midnight.
Seriously, have you always wanted to stop storms, vermin, disease, plagues, hunger, poverty, droughts, floods, and shrinking fish and chips?
All of this and much more if you just pay up now, pay today, pay tomorrow, and hock your children’s future.
Hands up who wants to be a hero?
Who needs an economist to calculate the biggest bill you’ve ever seen? (It’s a record, the Largest Ever Bill in Four Million Years! )
World’s young face $535 trillion bill for climate
The next generation will have to pay a $535 trillion bill to tackle climate change, relying on unproven and speculative technology.
LONDON, 19 July, 2017 – One of the world’s most famous climate scientists has just calculated the financial burden that tomorrow’s young citizens will face to keep the globe at a habitable temperature and contain global warming and climate change – a $535 trillion bill.
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Poor Bill Nye -he’s thinks somehow most people are as religious about climate change as he is, and will keep their naively unscientific beliefs about our ability to control the climate with power stations, wind mills and light bulbs, into their old age. Instead, the reality is Bill’s biggest nightmare, skeptics are not dying out at all — there is a never ending source of skeptics, as young gullible believers grow up to be old and wise.
Here’s his Christmas fantasy:
LA Times, Pat Morrison Bill Nye on the terrifying ascendancy of American ‘dingbatitude’
It just sounds like people are scared. It just sounds like people are afraid. And the people who are afraid in general — with due respect, and I am now one of them — are older. Climate change deniers, by way of example, are older. It’s generational. So we’re just going to have to wait for those people to “age out,” as they say. “Age out” is a euphemism for “die.” But it’ll happen, I guarantee you — that’ll happen. — Bill Nye
Here’s that data. For starters, we know that Republican voters are older than Democrat voters. So consider what […]
What’s the word for competitive-but-needs-a-subsidy? Broke…
One hundred solar PV companies are forecast to collapse in Japan this year alone.
Up to 100 solar PV firms in Japan could face bankruptcy this year, with more than double the number of firms going bust in the first half of this year than the same period in 2016.
According to corporate credit research company Teikoku Databank, which surveys companies across various industries and has produced its third report on solar PV company bankruptcies, 50 companies in Japan’s solar sector have already gone out of business in the first six months of 2017.
While the market overall has rapidly expanded from the launch of the feed-in tariff (FiT) in July 2012, Teikoku Databank acknowledged that there has been a slowdown in deployment in the past couple of years as the government successively made cuts of 10% or more on an annual basis to the premium prices paid for solar energy fed into the grid.
Bankruptcies have doubled in the industry since last year.
Meanwhile Japan plans to build at least 45 HELE Coal Plants.
Check out the map of “coal in versus coal out” in Japan. For […]
Funny, Al Gore didn’t say anything about 2017 being “less devastating”:
Frankfurt am Main (AFP) – Natural catastrophes worldwide were less devastating in the first half of 2017 than the average over the past 10 years, reinsurer Munich Re said Tuesday, while highlighting the role of climate change in severe US storms.
Some 3,200 people lost their lives to disasters between January and June, the German group found — well short of the 10-year average of 47,000 for the period or the 5,100 deaths in the first half of 2016.
Every year there is a long list of disasters somewhere (aka weather-porn items for Al Gore🙂
April floods and landslides in Colombia that claimed 329 lives were the deadliest single event.
Elsewhere, an April-June heatwave in India killed 264 people, while floods, landslides and avalanches claimed around 200 lives in Sri Lanka, 200 in Afghanistan and 200 Bangladesh.
In terms of costs — that’s 60 billion “saved” this year:
Disasters inflicted a financial cost of around $41 billion in the first six months, Munich Re reported.
That was less than […]
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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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