Recent Posts
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Sunday
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Forget “renewable energy” — new AI data centers are building their own gas plants in Texas
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Saturday
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Buy a battery, join a virtual power plant, and let AGL eat 80% of your battery for dinner
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Friday
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Labor Net Zero obsession: Australians don’t know they’re spending $12,000 million dollars a year to fix the weather
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Thursday
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Wednesday
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MPs from Left and Right in France vote to ditch “low emission zones” and bans on old cars
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Billions of dollars spent on wind, solar and batteries and Australian electricity emissions went up last year
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Saturday
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Friday
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Free Speech wins: Trump declares, no US Visas for any foreign official who censors Americans
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Thursday
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New world Energy order: Taiwan closes the last nuclear power plant, then days later, plans a referendum to reopen it
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Wednesday
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Bang! Price bomb sinks Transmission lines: Plan B says let’s pretend cars, home solar and batteries will save “Transition”
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Saturday
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If only we’d built those offshore wind turbines, eaten more cricket-burgers, we could have stopped the floods, right?
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Friday
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If UK had never tried renewables, each person would be £3,000 richer
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Thursday
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New AI data centers will use the same electricity as 2 million homes
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Wednesday
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No one knows what caused the Blackout but Spain is using more gas and nukes and less solar…
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Half of Australia doesn’t want to pay a single cent on Net Zero targets
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Saturday
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Secret comms devices, radios, hidden in solar inverters from China. Would you like a Blackout with that?
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Friday
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LSE junk study says if men didn’t eat so much red meat we’d have nicer weather
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Thursday
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Now they tell us? Labor says new aggressive Net Zero policy they hid from voters “is popular”
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Wednesday
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British politics in turmoil after Reform’s wins — Greens Deputy even attacks Net Zero from the left
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Children of 2020 face unprecedented exposure to Extreme Climate Nonsense…
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Saturday
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60% are skeptics: Only 13% of UK voters say Net Zero is more important than cost of living
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Friday
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Climate change is causing South Africa to rise and sink at the same time
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Thursday
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Several National MP’s have pushed for the Australian Parliament to discuss whether the land with more uranium than anywhere else should use nuclear power. Typical how it takes conservative politicians to raise the question about one of the most successful low-carbon generations there is. On the one hand a million animals might go extinct, seas will swallow up our cities and children won’t know what snow is. On the other hand, one forty year old plant in a modern democracy came unstuck when a 13 m tidal wave hit and at least one person died. The Greens are more afraid of nuclear power than they are of climate change.
If there really was a problem with global warming, we’d want conservatives in charge, because they’d solve the problem, and more cost effectively.
Unbeknown to most Australians there are 451 nuclear plants around the world. The only advanced nations that are truly without it are Australia and New Zealand. Nations like Norway, Ireland, and Poland don’t have nuclear power plants but are connected via a grid to countries which do.
The IEA last week published a report titled “Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System”. I’ll say more about that soon. […]
Scott Morrison in Parliament. Photo, ABC: Nick Haggarty
The Coalition can now form a majority government with no need to do deals with a GetUp candidate. They may win 78 seats. While this is being hailed as a “great” win it’s nothing like Tony Abbott’s 90 seat landslide in 2013. Of the last three elections, the most skeptical PM won hugely, and the biggest believer, Turnbull, almost lost. Morrison-in-the middle, couldn’t fight hard on climate change because his party supports major and expensive action, but at least he didn’t burn off the base like Turnbull did. Luckily for him, the Labor Party had wild ambition and was doomed by overconfidence. (Thank the ABC).
Every time Labor and GetUp reminded Australia that Morrison brought a lump of coal to Parliament, they were helping Morrison.
This was a “climate change” election and Australians voted No
Even ABC commentators admit the central role of climate change and are baffled. (If only they had shown some, any, interest in the opinions of 50% of Australia?). Watch the struggle:
Election 2019: What happened to the climate change vote we heard about?
Matt MacDonald, ABC
It was supposed to be the […]
What was Australia’s Environment Minister thinking?
Melissa Price succumbs to pagan witchcraft:
“There’s no doubt that there’s many people who have suffered over this summer. We talk about the Victorian bushfires; (in) my home state of Western Australia we’ve also got fires there,” [Melissa Price] told Sky News this morning. “There’s no doubt that climate change is having an impact on us. There’s no denying that.”
WA
Let’s look at her home state. After 67 years of fire management in the giant, hot, dry state of WA, the trend is clear — the more prescribed area we burn, the less wildfire does. In the graph below the prescribed burns declined for forty years and wildfires increased for thirty. After the Dwellingup Fire in 1961 the state ramped up the preventative burns, and reduced wildfires.
As the BushFireFront team say:
“We can’t control the weather but we can control the fuel loads“
Tough call — what do we do, redesign our energy system, pay billions, change our cars, our houses and our light globes in the hope that bush fires will be nicer, or do we just go back to doing what […]
Don’t believe your lying eyes — Australian newspaper archives are full of temperatures recorded higher than 121 in the shade which is 50C. All of these temperatures in the map below are found in historic newspaper archives. Measurements done after 1910 are even done with official Stevenson screens, yet the BOM “throws them away”. It’s true that ones done in the 1800s are often recorded on non-standard equipment, or are just literally “in the shade” under cover. So some of these, perhaps many, are one or two degrees too high. But even if we take two degrees off, how scary is global warming when Australia knew many days of 48C and 49C and some at 50C 120 years ago? The BOM — supposedly so concerned about the State of Our Climate — show little interest in talking about our history or in analyzing it, or even mentioning it.
And modern temperatures are recorded on electronic equipment, sometimes in areas affected by urban heat islands (concrete and cars).
(click to enlarge)
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50C temperatures have occurred all over Australia before
Australians have been recording temperatures of over 50C since 1828, right across the country. In 1896 the […]
Gotta love a long unbroken proxy.
Scientists looked at 44 pines sites across the Scottish Highlands and used their tree rings to create a continuous temperature series for the last 810 years. Showing admirable restraint, they did not paste on adjusted thermometer records to create a hockey stick effect. Instead we can see that Scottish summers were just as warm in the 1300s, the 1280s and around 1500 as well.
The rate of warming is not unprecedented. The temperature is not unusual. But thermometers don’t tell the same story as the tree rings in the last 50 years. They both can’t be right. Either the tree rings are always unreliable thermometers or the thermometers are placed near ice cream trucks and adjusted up-the-kazoo?
Thanks to CO2Science:
Rydval et al. extended “the previously published Scottish dendroclimatic record (Hughes et al., 1984) by nearly 500 years,” in order to create an 810-year-long proxy over the period AD 1200-2010. The reconstruction was derived from a network of 44 Scots pine (Pinus Sylvestris) sites across the Scottish Highlands from both living and subfossil samples that correlated well with summer (July-August) temperatures.
In placing the most recent warming of the instrumental […]
While everyone saw the flying baby Trump balloon, did your local Fake News Media show you footage of the “We Love Trump” rally?
The ABC includes three videos of the anti-Trump events, but only a couple of still shots of the pro-Trump counter protestors which were described as a “small group”.
The ABC description on July 14th
Huge police numbers were on hand to manage the crowds in London, with only small flare-ups occurring when the demonstrators clashed with pro-Trump counter-protesters outside a pub on Whitehall. Wearing Make America Great Again hats, the small group chanted “USA” and also voiced their support for English far-right activist Tommy Robinson.
There’s no mention that the original Welcome Trump rally was banned from gathering at the US embassy and marching on Whitehall even though the large anti-Trump rally was permitted.
But our ABC did feature an interview with a guy wearing a MAGA hat that was there because he “happened across the March”. Obviously the ABC needs more money so it can train staff to use Youtube and teach the Arts grads how to interview leaders of protests instead of anonymous random uninvolved bystanders.
Tommy Robinson seems also to […]
The land of the sunburnt country finds that the rapid uptake of solar is a headache, disrupting the grid, adding variability, making management more complicated. Read right through. The head of the AEMO gives an upbeat talk, but the ominous message is that solar panels are flooding in, there are lots of problems, and not only are baseload generators leaving the market, but there may come a day when things are so ludicrously expensive that big energy customers leave to generate their own too. Is that what the death of a grid looks like?
Audrey Zibelman is the head of the AEMO – Australian Energy Market Operator – which has the responsibility of managing the electricity and gas market and grid stability for all Australians. To hear her, you’d think the future is renewable, the transition is not being artificially forced on the market, and there is no alternative to alternative energy.
Zibelman tosses out pat free-market lines with a straight face, saying at 17:20 that we never really want governments to “pick a technology”, ignoring that this whole transition, all of it, is only happening because governments “picked a technology”.
Listen at 21:30 to get an […]
Australia is so irrelevant. India is cancelling fifty times as many nuclear power plants as Australians ever dreamed of building.
Let’s build another million wind farms.
If we abandoned the country and talked our Kiwi and Canadian friends into moving to Mars with us, we could not make up the carbon credits this decision just vaporized.
Energy Post – thanks to GWPF.
The Financial Express, one of India’s major newspapers, reports that the Narendra Modi government, which had set an ambitious 63,000 MW nuclear power capacity addition target by the year 2031-32, has cut it to 22,480 MW, or by roughly two-thirds.
The drastic reduction in planned construction of new reactors will diminish India’s plans to rely on nuclear energy from 25% of electrical generation to about 8-10%. The balance of new power requirements will likely be met by use of India’s enormous coal deposits.
Please tell us again how coal is a stranded asset?
The country accounts for eight percent of world’s total coal consumption. About two-thirds of India’s electricity generation comes from coal.
India holds the fifth biggest coal reserves in the world. The country’s proved coal reserves are […]
The gold-plated stars of our national grid are the old coal plants we’ve built and paid off.
A US report (thanks Lance) shows how fantastically cheap and bountiful old coal and nuclear plants are. The LCOE or the Levelized Cost of Electricity includes the costs of the concrete, turbines, car parks and coal, plus the maintenance and salaries. It reveals that thirty year old, and even fifty year old coal plants, are the gift from past generations — enormous infrastructure, built and paid for, and ready to churn out bargain electrons. Or in crazy-land, ready to be blown up.
Look how long it takes to pay off the capital cost of building them (the red sector in the graph), and look how wonderfully cheap that electricity is from a 30 year old plant. Watch the pea. All those “investigative news stories” that compare the cost of building new coal to the cost of solar or wind are hiding the most brilliant and essential assets on our grid. Reopen Hazelwood now. (!)
Both sides of politics are choosing to destroy the family jewels in the hope of controlling global weather.
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From the report by Stacy and Taylor, of the […]
From Pierre Gosselin at No Tricks Zone:
Germany needs 80GW of electricity. It has 40GW of installed solar PV.
See the graph: The red line is what the country used, and the orange bumps are the solar contribution.
Clearly, solar power will take over the world.
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In December, Germany got ten hours of sunlight. That’s not a daily figure, that’s the whole month. So in summer on a sunny day, solar PV can make half the electricity the nation needs for lunch. In winter, almost nothing. From fifty percent, to five percent.
Imagine what kind of havoc this kind of energy flux can do. Not one piece of baseload capital equipment can be retired, despite the fact that half of it is randomly unprofitable depending on cloud cover. Solar PV eats away the low cost competitive advantage. Capital sits there unused, spinning on standby, while wages, interest, and other costs keep accruing. So hapless baseload suppliers charge more for the hours that they do run, making electricity more expensive.
They just need batteries with three months supply. It will be fine once Germany turns the state of Thuringia into a redox unit.
Read about it: Dark Days […]
We can’t blame Goldman Sachs. It’s just good business.
Goldman Sachs pours money into lefty causes and politicians of both stripes. The gifts to left-wing flagships like climate change and same-sex marriage buy protection from the anti-bank Occupy crowd. And climate propaganda is doubly useful — Goldman Sachs can invest and profit from government largess. And these are very big biccies – -in 2009 Goldman Sachs announced it would spend $150 billion on green energy by 2020.
The message to non-left causes is that if you want to get multimillion dollar philanthropic funds, mobilize people and march in the street. When Goldman is afraid of what you might do against their bonuses or profits they might get interested in your cause too.
But infamously and so much more importantly, Goldman donates to both sides of politics and their people are appointed to key positions in the Treasury and corridors of power. When Goldman crashes, it gets bailed out — and that has happened four times in the last 20 years. The TARP bailout for Sachs was as much as $10 billion, so a mere $675k in speaking fees for Hillary-nearly-Pres might be viewed as a decent investment at the time […]
Oh the futility. Australia’s entire annual production of carbon from all that mining, construction, industry and everything is replicated in China every 18 days.
If we cut our emissions by an obscene, bleeding 25%, we will spend billions and yet China will undo all our hair-shirt “savings” in just 5 normal days. (And that’s at current rates, it gets worse by 2030).
Australia is a giant coal and iron quarry built at the far end of the Earth, with a tiny, but rapidly growing population spread across a vast land. Transport distances are eye-watering. We run 94% of everything off fossil fuels and there are no more easy cuts to be made. Gaia gave us more uranium than any other country but we are religiously opposed to nuclear power. (What would it take to change that — a bomb from China?). We’ve got more Sun, hot rocks and empty space than anywhere, so if solar, wind or geothermal were going to work on Planet Earth, it would be here. We are God’s Gift to the renewable industry — yet they all fail. (Today, Flannery’s Geothermal project crashed, last week Windorah’s solar farm shut, and last month, the whole state of […]
With an election likely for July 2nd, the hottest topic in Australian politics right now is how to vote. So put your best case forward here. Hammer this out. Will Turnbull promise anything to win back the Delcons — the angry conservatives? The time to ask is now, and if the Liberal base are not prepared to vote against him, they have nothing to negotiate.
“Better to have a real conservative opposition than a fake conservative government.”
The elephant in 2016 is the ferocious boiling anger among betrayed conservatives and small government libertarians, divided over whether they can bear to vote for Turnbull (a Liberal*) who has been called the best leader the Labor Party never had. Delcons was tossed at the so-called “Delusional” Conservatives. But they took up the badge. Defcons means the Defiant ones.
Right now, and since September, I’m a Delcon, like Tim Blair, Merv Bendle, and James Allan. Convince me otherwise. (We love you Miranda but you are wrong.)
“As long as Turnbull is in charge there will be no real alternative for conservative libertarians.”
The issue: Is it better to vote for the lesser of two evils and hope a Turnbull-led party can be reformed […]
Bask in the hypocrisy — the concern about CO2 is faked
Climate change is The Greatest Threat on Earth but the Merchants of Panic don’t really care if we reduce CO2. Follow what they do, not what they say. This is our last chance to save the planet, but they won’t consider nuclear energy — apparently the planet is just not that important. Nor will they consider Ultra Super Critical hot burning coal, which could reduce emissions by 15% at a stroke. Likewise fracking. Instead, the answer to everything is always inefficient, government-dependent industries and trading schemes. These schemes don’t reduce much CO2, but they reward the patrons of big-government and punish the opponents. They suck money from independent corporations, and churn that cash through the “renewables” cheer-squad, the financial houses, and the groups that profit from keeping the climate scare going. Ponder that the EU had a monster emissions trading scheme, but the USA cut far more emissions — thanks to fracking and no thanks to any fake “free market”. The bottom line is that we may face the Anthropocene Mass Extinction Event, but apparently things are not so bad that the Greens will consider fracking. The big […]
What really happened in 1878?
The raw data at Nobby’s near Newcastle (graphed below) shows monster heat in 1878, 1879, and 1883 — far hotter than modern times. Its unlikely that it was recorded with modern equipment, so it’s hard to compare. Was it really hotter? We don’t know when the Stevenson screen was installed. I went hunting through our wonderful historic Trove archive of old newspaper records. It doesn’t help us make any accurate comparisons, or even tell us about annual averages, but there is a remarkable story of exceptional heat and dryness in January 1877 that few Australians know. Let’s revisit the times of forgotten people who lived when CO2 was perfect and the climate was ideal.
How hot were the 1800s in Australia? My favorite quote is about the miners near Braidwood (in the mountains between Canberra and the coast). It reached 108F but look at the cultural norms:
“Years ago in the valley the miners always ‘knocked off’ if the thermometer registered 112 degrees (44.4C) in the shade, but times and wages are changed now, and the poor men are willing, to work on days like last Friday 18.1.78″ (see the Freeman’s Journal link […]
Get ready for the startling news that Australians have been great corporate “green” citizens — on a per capita basis, all of us are so much more carbon-efficient (sic) than we were 25 years ago. Back then, in those dark days, people frivolously heated and cooled their homes without a thought to how many sinful cyclones they were creating in the Philippines. They drove recklessly in fossil fueled cars, and windmills were used to pump water a mere 10 metres, not to stop floods in Pakistan.
The amazing thing is that Australia’s population has grown by a whopping 38% since 1990. And our emission have grown with that, but the emissions per person has declined by 28% per person. Why aren’t the Greens more excited?
As with all these statistics, watch the pea for the real story. Most of that decline is not due to solar panels, pink batts, bird blending wind towers, energy efficiency, or even economic trends — it is predominantly due to cutting down fewer trees. The “improvements” are in the “land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF)” sector, of which the “LUCF” basically means deforestation, afforestation and reforestation. The decline is mostly thanks to farmers like […]
This week the Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, called people who oppose green energy subsidies “liars”.
Mr. Schmidt said: “And the people who oppose it (climate change) are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And so we should not be aligned with such people—they’re just, they’re just literally lying.”
Meanwhile, Google uses mostly non-renewable fuel to power its operations, but has “pledged $1.5billion” to fund renewables. It has invested millions into solar panel plants that are “bird-fryers” — literally roasting birds in the sky. These investments mostly occur in states with renewable-mandates, would not survive without taxpayer funding, qualify for tax credits, and require infrastructure (like transmission lines) that electricity consumers or governments have to fund.
Wall St Journal
Google Kills Birds The mercenary motives behind Eric Schmidt’s appeal to green virtue.
“The real charlatans are businesses like Google that use climate change as a pretext for corporate welfare.”
… nearly all of Google’s solar and wind farms are located in states with renewable-energy mandates, which create opportunities for politically mediated profit-making. For instance, California requires that renewables make up a third of electricity by […]
The year 1851 and CO2 is 287ppm in Law Dome Antarctica. The climate is perfect, but Australians are dealing with the worst fires in recorded history, scorching heat, drought, searing wind and by the sounds of it, an arabian dust storm. There are no skycranes, no mobile phones, and no helitankers. Temperatures in the shade hit 117F in Melbourne (that’s 47C), 115 in Warnambool, 114 in Geelong. But those are not BOM official records (the BOM didn’t exist until some 50 years later). The conditions were unprecedented in living memory even though, at the time, many people said fires and droughts were commonplace. Businesses stopped, and it was described as “wanton martyrdom” to go out in the streets. People fighting the fires realized they had to flee instead and took en masse onto galloping horses to head for bare hilltops or watercourses. One writer two weeks later suggests the fire consumed 150,000 pounds of life and property, “to the utter ruin of many families.” The population was around 80,000. Despite the devastation, no one suggests a carbon tax.
‘When the smoke turned day into night’ Painted by William Strutt | Library Of Victoria
Apparently the pall of smoke was […]
Is this a 2013 Streisand-Effect finalist?
The UK has decided to build its first new nuclear power plant in 20 years. The UK Department of Energy & Climate Change posted this graphic below in a News Story probably to help justify why it really did make sense to go nuclear rather than renewable. The Renewable Energy Association called it “unhelpful”, and lo, it disappeared from gov.uk.
Credit goes to Emily Gosden’s Tweet, and Will Heaven‘s Blog. Hat tip to Colin.
(Click to enlarge to see the fine print)
The fine print (edited out in the small copy here) says that Hickley Point C “is estimated to be equal to around 7% of UK electricity consumption in 2025 and enough to power nearly 6 million homes.” About onshore wind, the fine print reads: “The footprint will depend on the location and turbine technology deployed. DECC estimates the footprint could be between 160,000 and 490,000 acres“. That’s quite some error margin.
How many National Parks does one nuclear plant save then?
It’s a good representation of just how much of the Earths surface we have to give up if we want to live off renewables at the moment. So who […]
You could almost be forgiven for wondering if the Bureau of Meteorology is a science unit or a PR agency. They seem professionally adept at getting headlines, but not so hot at predicting the weather.
On Jan 7th the BOM models forecast 50 spanking hot degrees across hundreds of square kilometers in central Australia. But it was a whole week ahead, the prediction itself cooled with a day or two, and in the area under the “purple searing spot” the result on Jan 14th ended up being around 40C instead. That’s fine in itself — predictions are difficult. What’s not fine is the PR storm that ensued, which is still being used, as if somehow the very fact that our faulty climate models predicted a record temperature (but failed) is evidence of man-made global warming. How many thousands of people all around the world now think that Australia had a 50C plus day this January? Did anywhere hit the fifty mark? No report of one so far. Watch the loop of Australia’s January temperatures here. The highest brown bar on that graph is 45 – 48C, and those hot spots are a thousand kilometers from the purple patch.
That said, […]
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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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