Some things just don’t belong at comment #1.
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Coal is a dying industry, but luckily for the Australian economy, the rest of the world is not as smart as The Australian Greens and Labor Party and they are still buying it. Coal is set to regain its spot as the nation’s biggest export earner amid higher prices and surging demand from Asia, sparking fresh calls from the Turnbull government for Labor to end its “war on coal”. The Department of Industry, Innovation and Science figures show total coal exports are forecast to reach $58.1 billion in 2018-19, overtaking iron ore ($57.7bn) for the first time in almost a decade. We’ve only got 300 years of these kind of coal profits to go. The big question, do we open up more coal mines now and rake in the dough, or try to make the weather nicer in one thousand years time? Tricky… Resources Minister Matthew Canavan said new export forecasts strengthened the investment case for Adani’s proposed $16.5 billion Carmichael coalmine and the development of Queensland’s Galilee Basin, which federal Labor has opposed. “Opening up the Galilee would generate 16,000 direct mining jobs and tens of billions in taxes.” What do Australia’s big […] Last Chance to Book for Tony Abbott Lecture: Melbourne, 3 July 2018 … The place to be on Tuesday night. “Climate Change & Restraining Greenhouse Gas Emissions“ Last days to book your tickets for the Bob Carter Commemorative Lecture given by the Hon. Tony Abbott—the former PM and current MHR for Warringah in NSW—on 3 July 2018. Tickets: Book them through Eventbrite. Tickets:$35 for AEF members and $42 for others. Book Tickets here. 9.4 out of 10 based on 34 ratings […] What costs $1,500m, makes no electricity, but “saves money”? South Australia has used federal subsidies to build more wind power than it can use. They’ve spent half a billion already on diesel powered jet engines and a battery that can power the state for “minutes”. For 139 hours last year the state produced so much wind power it supplied 100% of the states electricity needs and then some, and the problem of excess electricity is only getting worse as wind generation keeps increasing and solar PV uptake is rampant. When government rules and regs have created an inefficient, expensive problem, what do we do? More of it. A new report suggests that South Australia needs a direct transmission line to NSW which will cost $1.5b. We could spend that on a reliable generator instead, or get the government out of the way and let the private sector do it for us, but instead we need to pay for another transmission line to connect up different zones-of-subsidy-rent seekers and hope we get $30 off the bill? It’s a savings in the statistic margin of error… South Australia didn’t even have an interconnector til 1990. Now with decentralized and renewable power they […] June 30th, 2018 | Tags: SA (South Australia) | Category: Cost, Global Warming, Grids, Renewable |  Print This Post | | This is serious. The World Cup cometh, and the United Kingdom is running out of beer. The UK emits over one million tons of CO2 each day but bottles of flood-drought-n-coral-killing CO2 are in short supply. Trade journal Gas World, which first revealed there was a problem last week, said it was the “worst supply situation to hit the European carbon dioxide business in decades”. Carbon capture is the way of the future, which is a shame. If it worked now, people wouldn’t be running out of beer, bacon, coke and even crumpets. We spend billions to take pollution out of the sky and stuff it into deep holes. Then we pay people to generate the same pollution and put it in our food. Someone, join the dots. Cut out the middle man and move Heineken next to Drax! 9.6 out of 10 based on 66 ratings […] Don’t camp under an old wind turbine What weighs 100 tons, sits 100 meters above the ground, leaks transmission fluid and may disintegrate into a million sharp fibreglass spikes… …. NoTricksZone As much of Germany’s nearly 30,000 strong fleet of wind turbines approach 20 or more years in age, the list of catastrophic collapses is growing more rapidly. The turbines are now being viewed by technical experts as “ticking time bombs”. According to a commentary by Daniel Wetzel of online German Daily ‘Die Welt’, the aging rickety wind turbines are poorly inspected and maintained and thus are now posing a huge risk. Over the past months alone there’s been a flurry of reports over wind turbines failing catastrophically and collapsing to the ground, e.g. see here, here and here. Industrial systems in Germany need to get technical inspections and safety approvals, but wind turbines don’t… Read the rest at NoTricksZone Vernunftkraft keeps a list of failures. The Greens, of course, are apoplectic (not). _______________________ Photo: this particular turbine crashed in Antarctica. If you own a photo of a failing German one, please let me know. 9.8 out of 10 based on 72 ratings […] Australia is figuring out how to change the global climate and power up the nation. It’s the old “have cake: eat cake: sell cake and build a sea-wall with cake” dilemma. The PM, Malcolm Turnbull, has come up with a plan called the National Energy Guarantee (NEG), which will manage to hurt the environment, jobs and industry at the same time. Who benefits? Gas companies, Renewables Co. Who loses? Everyone else. One of the key ideas is that we should have an average emissions target of 0.4 magical tons of CO2 per MWh, because “storms”. Tom Quirk has laid out our current situation below and how (theoretically) we might meet that target. (Especially if clouds start raining money, thinks Jo, preferably in USD and filling Lake Eyre.) The “good news” is that South Australia can stop already, it’s there. The bad news is that the rest of Australia will need to catch up with South Australia, including the size of the electricity bills (and then some). In 12 years Australia needs to shut nearly every single coal plant thus turning black coal into white elephants. The one last black coal plant or two will operate barely at break-even point, sitting […] Oh the dilemma. When faced with a crocodile do you get out a gun or put up a windmill? It could be that natural cycles change animal habitats as they have for millions of years. It could be that we made crocodiles a protected species and stopped hunting and killing the wild ones in Queensland from 1974, but whatever, it must be climate, climate, climate. Buy an EV and stop the spread of crocodiles! Crikey! Crocs heading south and other changes forecast for Australia’s wildlife ABC “Science” By environment reporter Nick Kilvert The chances of limiting climate change appear to be growing slimmer by the day — and this may have big implications for Australia’s wildlife. Recently a number of crocodiles have been trapped in the Mary River, just 105 kilometres north of Noosa and 250km south of their usual range. Irukandji jellyfish too, appear to be expanding south, with 10 suspected stings near Fraser Island and a child stung at Mooloolaba last year. Numerous tropical fish have been recorded up to 1,000 kilometres south of their traditional range, such as the Great Barrier Reef’s lemon-peel angelfish which turned up […] Solar panels across Australia reduce our emissions by almost nothing. The ABC is whipping Gorgon for not getting carbon sequestration to work, claiming that this is a crisis that will wipe out the entire “gain” from installing two million solar panels across Australia. What the ABC don’t say is that the entire infrastructure of solar panels (on 20% of Australian homes) is only reducing our CO2 emissions by one pointless percent. So the Gorgon delay in achieving the impossible is likewise irrelevant. Australian emissions are rising at 1.5% pa now anyhow. In terms of our national emissions, the real question is if we shut every solar panel in the nation would anyone notice? Despite the $1.1b budget, the ABC could have got this bigger and more useful perspective for free from any number of skeptics, none of whom it tried to interview. With minimal training in arithmetic ABC staff could even have figured it out for themselves. Instead, as per usual, the ABC provides free advertorials for green-industry hacks, with no hard questions and little research. Can someone please explain to ABC investigative journalists the difference between a megaton and a ton? All they had to do was graph […] June 22nd, 2018 | Tags: ABC, Solar Energy (PV), Subsidies | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Thank the ABC. This is the best comedy I’ve seen them do on “climate change” — albeit unwittingly. The ABC has a new comedy show on Wednesday nights called RoadMap to Paradise. This is Big-Government Comedy. You’ll swear this was made by a skeptic. No really. Unconvinced that ‘feel good’ environmentalism is making any real impact @mrcoreywhite sets out to come up with a fresh solution. Could incentivising greed and laziness for a good cause be just what this country needs? #RoadmapToParadise tonight at 9.35pm. pic.twitter.com/JJUqU4lblp — ABC TV Australia (@ABCTV) June 20, 2018 Is he a skeptic infiltrator? Nooo. The same episode includes an interview with a CSIRO scientist, Kathleen McInnes, who drops in to tell us things are “pretty bad”. And one of Corey White’s big ideas is to treat Elon Musk’s business like a tax deductible religion. I don’t think he sees the funny side of that either. What was he thinking? It’s tough being a comedian. I’m guessing Cory White wanted to expose the futility of individual voluntary action to change the planet’s climate, with the bigger aim of convincing the audience that only Big-Government regulation can save us! Sadly for him, Big-government action […] June 22nd, 2018 | Tags: ABC, Satire & Parody | Category: Funny stuff, Global Warming | Print This Post | | Australia’s public broadcaster is under public fire. It’s about time. The rank and file of the Liberal Party voted to sell it off which sparked off a national debate about the value of subsidizing the largest media outlet in the country in an era when the average Australian can broadcast their opinion for free from their own phone. We don’t need a government funded voice, we just need free speech. Fighting back, the ABC head says Australians think the “ABC is priceless”, so I say: Fine — let those people pay for it. I’m Pro-Choice on the ABC. Let the people choose which media outlets they want to contribute to. Since the ABC costs $1.1b that’s about $50 per person per annum or $200 per household of four (assuming everyone pays, which they won’t). I say, launch the IPO, sell the shares, or at least, give us the tick-a-box option on our tax return. Make it voluntary. Stop the forced payments for Big-Government-lovin’ propaganda We could spell out the actual cost on the tax returns, and ask who wants to pay… In a democracy this could be done for lots of items — want to send your tax dollars […] What would China do if it wanted competitors to keep shackling themselves to an industry-crippling religious weather-fetish? mock their economy-killing stupidity openly til they realized it, or nod vigorously and set up a big inflatable strawman idol in the streets of Shanghai? It protects no fields but looks convincing to Greenpeace and good enough for Goldman Sachs… Notice the size of the carbon markets: The EU’s trading scheme is the largest in the world and “covers” 1.8 gigatons of carbon emissions. China’s power sector (just power) produces 3 gigatons of emissions. The plan is to carefully strap a very mild carbon market on the Chinese power sector starting in 2020 and expand it later to other industries which would then include some 5 gigatons of emissions. Sounds like a marvelous advert for people trying to sell carbon trading schemes: Clean-energy advocates trumpeted the creation of the planet’s largest carbon market, which will be nearly twice the size of the European Union’s. The headline in TechnologyReview, James Temple: China is creating a huge carbon market—but not a particularly aggressive one Not aggressive is the phrase — join these dots: … the government’s goal for now is to reduce the […] Despite 20 years of non-stop propaganda and belligerent namecalling, strangely, expert green policies have achieved exactly nothing of what they said they aimed for. Coal provided 38% of our power in 1998 and it is still the same 38% in 2017. The non-fossil fuel sector has actually declined slightly as nukes decrease. We spent billions doing exactly what was asked. Perhaps following the advice of people who think the debate is over and “denier” is a scientific term might not be the best national energy policy? Fuel shares in global power generation for the last 20 years | BP Energy Review, 2018. Long-term dominance of fossil fuels unchallenged Graham Lloyd, The Australian Global demand for coal and gas to generate electricity was back on the rise last year … Most striking had been the failure of renewable energy to make an impact on the fossil fuels share of power generation, BP group chief economist Spencer Dale said. “Despite the extraordinary (global) growth in renewables in recent years, and the huge policy efforts to encourage a shift away from coal into cleaner, lower carbon fuels, there has been almost no improvement in […] June 17th, 2018 | Tags: Coal, Greens | Category: AGW socio-political, Electricity, Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | Academic Freedom in Australia: Academics are free to use hotmail at work For the first time in months the ABC suddenly finds time to mention Professor Peter Ridd — but not because he got sacked for an email with the illegal line “for your amusement”. That new development in academic freedom was not newsworthy on the billion dollar ABC site. Nor did the-blob’s-ABC feel Australians needed to know that the international outcry over his sacking was so strong that Ridd raised $160,000 in donations in a mere couple of days. However now things are apparently “serious”: other academics at JCU have given up using the official email network, hiding their thoughts on hotmail and gmail instead. Finally, 27 days after he was sacked, the ABC have arrived… Management of JCU insists Ridd’s sacking was not about academic freedom. But everyone at JCU acts otherwise. Staff at JCU now know exactly how free they are — if they say something the management doesn’t like, they too could be victims of a personalized email trawl. Anyone could lose their job at any time for falling foul of a selectively enforced and unknowable “code of conduct”. James Cook University staff avoid using emails […] June 15th, 2018 | Tags: Ridd (Peter) | Category: Academia, Free Speech, Global Warming | Print This Post | | Quick — tax the magma It’s another round of Antarctic Doom about next to nothing. In April Antarctica’s ice was melting five times faster than usual. Now it’s losing ice three times faster in the last five years than the 15 before that! What you won’t hear is how the Antarctic ice cap has 29 million cubic kilometers of ice and has been there for 30 million, mostly warmer, years. You also won’t hear how Antarctica was warmer in Roman Times, or that the Antarctic Peninsula has cooled by almost 1 degree. You also won’t hear a word about any volcanoes The new paper has zero mentions of the word. But other scientists have published plenty of papers describing how the West Antarctic zone is being warmed from below by 1200 degrees of magma. According to scientist Dustin Schroeder and co, it is as if the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctic is sitting on a “stovetop burner”.[1] His words. Thwaites Glacier,, smack in the middle of the warming is being melted from below by geothermal heat. Then there is the large blob of superheated rock 60 miles below West Antarctica. The researchers use the phrase “like a blow-torch”…. Capping it […] Solar Wind, Earths magnetosphere. Image: NASA The Solar Wind is a torrent of space weather cruising past at 500 — 800 kilometers per second which is around 1.5 million miles per hour or, if you prefer, Mach 2,000.* It’s so powerful it erodes rocks on Mars, ejects particles up high and creates a kind of atmosphere of tiny rock particles which we can study. Then it blows that Martian atmosphere away. In this new research people realized it was not just the rain of tiny high-speed protons fritzing Mars at 800 km per second that were carving up the rocks — the main role was from the heavy and highly charged He2+. (Now there’s a molecule you don’t see too often). You might think that a variable torrent of charged particles that are constantly changing speed and direction might have an impact on our atmosphere, but you’d be wrong (or at least, politically incorrect). On Earth the solar wind “just causes the northern lights”. How do we know? We’ve got climate models. In all known GCMs the total global forcing for solar wind is “zero”. Must be true. Thus and verily the IPCC can conclude that a flow […] June 14th, 2018 | Tags: Solar Wind, Space-weather | Category: Astronomy, Global Warming | Print This Post | | … After half a billion million years of climate change, I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, that life on Earth (and specifically corals) have so many ways to cope with the climate changing. After all, it’s natural (if you are trained by Greenpeace) to assume that corals can only survive in a world with one constant stable temperature just like they never had. One more tool in the coral-reef-workshop Corals don’t just have a tool-box, they have a Home Depot Warehouse. h/t to GWPF We already knew corals chuck out the symbionts that don’t work so well and pick up better partners. Plus, evolution left a stack of genes lying around that were honed in a world that was warmer, and natural selection has a way of amplifying better combinations as conditions shift. Then there is the way corals can be reseeded from safe sites, far away. Now we find out that corals can use epigenetics too. Epigenetics is that kind of spooky effect where people can inherit the exact same DNA code yet it works or doesn’t work depending on whether it was Dad’s copy, or Mum’s, or whether parents were starved, fearful or stressed. It’s weird, see […] June 12th, 2018 | Tags: Corals, Extinction, Genetics, Great Barrier Reef, Reefs | Category: Biology, Genetics, Global Warming | Print This Post | | It’s not even summer. NSW has been hit by clouds and a lack of reliable coal power. Prices are soaring. In NSW the Tomago Aluminium Smelter consumes about 10% of the state’s electricity. It has been forced to switch off three times in the last week because there was not enough reserve power on the grid. The boss of Tomago, Mr Howell, said Australia is “at a crisis point with our energy system”. “This is not summer with extreme demand. This is the likely future of our energy grid as once reliable baseload generators exit the [NEM] and are mostly replaced with intermittent wind and solar projects with no practical storage to speak of,” Mr Howell said. “Our energy debate should not advocate either renewables or conventional thermal,” he said. — SMH, Peter Hannam, Aluminum pot lines can only sit idle for a few hours before they cool too far and the damage becomes permanent and wildly expensive as the aluminum becomes solid. Renewables-fans blame the emergency on the unreliability of coal See @TheAustraliaInstitute. Suddenly Australia is the only western nation on Earth with coal resources that can’t […] June 9th, 2018 | Tags: Coal, Electricity Cost, NSW (New South Wales), Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Cost, Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | Ladies and Gentlemen, Australia is now romping in as Star-Crash-Test-Dummy in the renewables stake. Proportionally, we have more uncontrolled solar roof top generators than any other nation. We’re in uncharted territory: about 20% of houses in Hawaii and California have Solar PV, but in Western Australia, it’s 25%. In Queensland it’s 30% and throughout Australia we are adding 100MW a month and it’s like a whole new coal fired station every year (except it doesn’t work most of the time). Strap yourself in! This is more useless infrastructure than anywhere else on planet Earth. The only time solar PV panels provide something we might need is at afternoon tea time in summer when airconditioners are on. So for three quarters of the year they provide electricity when we don’t need it, and for three quarters of every day they don’t even work. The rest of the time they burn capital, increase the blackout and fire risk and sit there collecting dust and hail stones. Electricity at the wrong time is not just wasted, it’s a burden Too much electricity bumps up the grid frequency and voltage, potentially damaging equipment and risking blackouts. Obviously we have to “manage” this flood of […] June 8th, 2018 | Tags: California, Duck Curve, Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | Solar is so competitive that the Queensland government has to pour in money to keep solar developers from running away. How much money? Who knows. Whatever it is, it’s so big, the government has to keep it a secret. Queensland taxpayers kept in dark as they prop up solar firms MARK SCHLIEBS, The Australian The Queensland government is concealing its financial support for large-scale renewable energy projects, guaranteeing subsidies to solar companies that do not appear on balance sheets. With an expert panel previously finding the government would need to spend between $500 million and $900m in subsidies to meet its 50 per cent renewable energy target by 2030, there are now calls for spending to be made public. The government has struck four deals with major solar-farm developers, under “contracts for difference”, with floor prices nominated for the sale of their energy in order to attract finance. When the market price falls below that threshold, the government has to make up the difference. Luckily for Queensland taxpayers — who don’t know how to spot a good investment or the energy source of the future — the Government can spend their money for […] June 8th, 2018 | Tags: Queensland (QLD), Solar Energy (PV), Subsidies | Category: Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | |
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