Recent Posts
-
The UN wants to be One World Government and it starts with a carbon tax on ships and planes
-
Thursday
-
What if Global Warming was just because something made the clouds go away…
-
Wednesday
-
Snowy 2.0 is the Trillion dollar Black Hole of Australia — sucking in energy, money, land, industrial relations, the dollar, our lifestyle
-
Tuesday
-
Monday
-
Winter Solstice
-
Saturday
-
We were throwing-renewable-energy away at record levels in 2025
-
Friday
-
Pauline Hanson, the centrist, just wants a free market in electricity, and an end to the renewable energy bribery
-
Thursday
-
Blame the Climate Yeti again for making your life more expensive! (It’s a smokescreen)
-
Wednesday
-
The Sunrise Project funneled $343 million from overseas to push net zero
-
Tuesday
-
Monday
-
Sunday
-
The US government has been secretly funding 120 dangerous biolabs around the world
-
Saturday
-
New report shows renewables are a drag on our national productivity
-
Friday
-
Thursday
-
Well, how convenient. AI data centers have arrived to be the fall guy for the Energy Minister
-
Wednesday
-
Billionaires are leaving the room with excuses — Bezos says “AI will solve climate crisis”
-
Tuesday
-
Monday
-
Sunday
-
The Craziest eco laws against Farmers. Let’s check that science…
-
Saturday
-
China cooks the carbon accounting books by 400 million tons
-
Friday
-
The Wind Power Puzzle (add more wind turbines and get the same output)
-
Thursday
-
To save the world, Cement Australia stops burning coal and burns trees instead
-
Wednesday
-
On Fire! US hunger for gas power so large, wait time for turbines blows out to 5+ years
-
Tuesday
-
Monday
-
Sunday
-
Saturday
-
Perth event Saturday May 30th: Green Greed and the Grid
-
Catastrophic warming already happened in Antarctica 130,000 years ago
-
Friday
-
Suddenly the Paris Agreement grows teeth
-
Thursday
-
Australian renewable investments evaporate in 2025: reaching a ten year low
-
Wednesday
-
The Bubble Pops: Big Miner BHP quietly backs away from decarbonization
-
Tuesday
|
Finally the gloves are off
The critics called him a climate denier anyway, even when he toed the politically correct line, so there was nothing left to call him. For former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, there is no point in pandering. Now after a great speech, the EcoWorriers are left saying he is “loopy”. The new unleashed Abbott is so much stronger, more compelling, and his message is being spread far and wide. Not only will his GWPF speech fire up the footsoldier deplorables, but he is more likely to reach the undecided centre by speaking his mind freely. The ABC was pasting his message in large type all over the TV news and in article after article. That’s great for skeptics. The ABC is so blindly consumed with the dominant paradigm they can’t see how appealingly sensible Abbott looks by speaking about cold being a killer, CO2 being good for agriculture, and a bit of warming being beneficial for humans. His message of irrational electricity pain is so terribly sane. He looks at Manly beach and can see that sea levels haven’t changed much which surely everyone else with open eyes can see too. The ABC frames it […]
The scandals do count. The Australian articles has got Minister Frydenbergs attention. The extensive collection of blog posts and the IPA Climate Change book show there is a deep well of material to fuel more articles. We have barely begun. Congratulations to Jennifer Marohasy. At least we will get a few more answers to questions we shouldn’t even have to ask.
The head of the Bureau of Meteorology, Andrew Johnson, has been asked by Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg to release extensive temperature data from a weather station in Victoria after requests from an independent scientist.
Dr Johnson has also agreed to meet with Jennifer Marohasy, a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, to discuss the integrity of the bureau’s temperature measurements as she pushes ahead with calls for a parliamentary inquiry.
The story of the “one second” records is potent: How many “hottest ever records” have been created thanks to new electronic equipment?
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology appears to have put in place a measurement system guaranteed to provide new record high and low temperatures,” she said in the letter.
Instead of the older-style mercury thermometers in which temperatures […]
Electricity prices jumped in July. Now, retail sales are falling as wallets run out of money. When Greens, Labor, Conservatives said we need insurance, only skeptics pointed out the price.
Commonwealth Bank economist, Gareth Aird, calls the fall a “shocker”.
Shoppers stay away as power costs bite
–Adam Creighton, The Australian
In a sign sluggish wages and higher power prices are starting to bite, the new financial year has seen the biggest fall in retail sales since 2009…
The Australian dollar fell back towards US78c yesterday after the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed retail sales had fallen 0.6 per cent between July and August, defying economists’ expectations they would rise modestly.
“Households are facing several headwinds, including record low wage growth, record levels of debt, slowing house price growth, and, importantly, sharply higher energy bills,” said ANZ economist Jo Masters. The drop in retail sales by a cumulative 0.8 percentage points over the two months to August, the biggest two-month decline since 2009, comes as consumers receive their first round of power bills after prices went up more than 20 per cent since July.”
Who would have thought? The country is forced […]
The Greens are now asking for another $2.2billion to pay for the battery bandaid to fix a problem they and the leeching renewables industry created.
Adam Bandt is out today with the big new plan, apparently confused about what “load” means:
We don’t have a baseload problem, we have a peak load problem,” Mr Bandt said.
No matter how you look at this, it’s not a “load” problem. It’s an issue of supply.
We can count on the Greens to pour confusion on any problem:
“We need flexible generation and energy storage to manage the transition, not more coal.”
Four mistakes in one sentence. We have flexible generation – more than enough to cope with the current load curve. What we need is affordable electricity, which we used to have, and which coal supplies. What we don’t need is energy storage to manage an irrelevant transition that we never had to have in the first place. Let me say it again, electricity generators are for generating electricity, not for magical attempts to control the climate.
What Adam Bandt was trying to say:
“We The freeloading renewables industry needs flexible generation and energy storage to […]
Matt Ridley is about as gentlemanly, polite and sane a man as you’ve ever likely to meet — which is exactly why the mob are so afraid of letting him speak. Ridley even agrees that humans have caused most of the warming in the last fifty years (I shall have to talk to him about that). But this middle position is a potent threat. He’s walking the very ground that threatens the Green Blob — there are no subsidy trains in middle land. There’s no urgency, no gravy, and yet it’s so temptingly sensible, which is why the minions work hard to silence him. He can’t be ignored as “fringe”:
The National Review — Julie Kelly
“I’ve written about many controversial issues during my career,” Ridley said. “Never, have I ever experienced anything like what happens when you write about climate, which is a systematic and organized attempt to blacken your name rather than your arguments, and to try to pressure any outlet that publishes me into not publishing me any more.” A group of activists and scientists is urging the Times (U.K.) to stop publishing a regular column authored by Ridley because his views […]
With only a million dollars a day it’s hard for the BoM to keep up with their own stations. Luckily Bill Johnston has arrived to help out for free. The BoM announced that it was Canberra’s hottest ever day last week, but forgot to check whether the heat was due to the site moving three times, changes in thermometers and a wind profiler they installed themselves in 2010.
Normally the BoM would detect and correct for these sorts of things by using Homogenisation Magic (HM). That’s where they spot these effects by comparing a station with surrounding stations. However in this case HM missed all three site moves and the wind profiler. It looks like those might add up to 2.2°C of artificial warming. Nothing to worry about, but the hottest ever record will have to be shredded, and naturally, the BoM will need to issue a correction with at least as much fuss and coverage as the mistaken headlines. It’s only fair…
After the effect of rainfall is removed there are at least three site moves, a screen change, equipment change, and alterations to the surrounding area that may influence the site. These step changes align with documented […]
Managing the global climate is a tough thing. Sacrifices are required.
The last 100 years has been a success story of cleaner air in London. But air pollution is on the rise again. The fear of carbon is partly responsible for over a million people returning to burning “renewable wood” instead of clean gas and turning around a century long trend. Welcome to the “progressive” 21st century. Too bad about about the dusty lungs and razed trees.
As much as a third of small particle pollution is due to wood fires.
Wood-burning stoves are increasingly popular in middle-class homes and hotels, with 1.5 million across Britain and 200,000 sold annually. Old fireplaces have also been opened up in many houses and can cause greater pollution than stoves. Wood burning is most popular in the southeast, where it is done in 16 per cent of households compared with less than 5 per cent in northern England and Scotland.
Between a quarter and a third of all fine particle pollution in London comes from domestic wood burning. During a period of very high air pollution in January, it contributed half the toxic emissions in some areas of the […]
Coral which has produced eggs near Fitzroy Island. Photo AIMS, Neal Cantin.
The ABC reports today that the Great Barrier Reef is recovering “surprisingly” fast.
Optimism is rising among scientists that parts of the Great Barrier Reef that were severely bleached over the past two years are making a recovery.
Scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science this month surveyed 14 coral reefs between Cairns and Townsville to see how they fared after being bleached.
The institute’s Neil Cantin said they were surprised to find the coral had already started to reproduce.
Who would have thought that after 5,000 years of climate change, sea level change, temperature change and super-storms every 200 years — that the Great Barrier Reef would have something left up its sleeve?
Much of the ABC reporting on the Great Barrier Reef damage uses vague terms. If I was feeling cruel, I might call them “weasel words”:
Nearly two thirds of the Great Barrier Reef was affected by bleaching in 2016 and 2017, killing up to 50 per cent of coral in those parts.
So which parts are “those parts”? Did 50% of the corals die […]
Maybe they’ll get one like this one? 😉 Circa 1934.*
Green management of the South Australian grid scores another big success for the environment:
SURGING power prices are pushing South Australian dairy farmers such as James and Robyn Mann to go off-grid.
The Manns’ electricity costs have more than doubled in five years, from about $200,000 per annum to $500,000.
Due to the high prices, the family will this summer switch to diesel power to run their 116-stand rotary dairy and 14 irrigation centre pivots at Wye in the lower south east of South Australia.
The Manns are among Australia’s top 10 dairy producers, in terms of volume, milking up to 2300 cows and producing 19-21 million litres annually.
If only South Australia had more “cheap” solar and wind power, their electricity might be as low cost as the coal-fired Victorians:
Their move comes as South Australia’s dairy lobby has calculated the state’s dairy farmers paid about 40 per cent more for power than their Victorian neighbours last season.
The Mann’s are definitely going diesel this summer, but may set up a mixed solar-diesel-battery plan in the long run:
[…]
File this under Nasty Nature. This is the sort of thing planet Earth throws at life.
The is real “sea level rise” — where most of a continent (called Zealandia) sinks under the waves — and — as far as we know, though I could be wrong — fossil fuel use was minimal circa 50 -80 million years ago. Can Exxon be blamed?
New Zealanders may be feeling a bit cheesed that they carelessly lost something like 80% of their land. (Call that “Old Zealand” which was once as big as India.) Given that it is one kilometer underwater, it looks like it isn’t coming back soon. But think of all the national parks, reefs, etc that were destroyed?
Zealandia. | Credit: IODP
The story is that the Pacific Rim of Fire “buckled” 40-50 million years ago, and Zealandia sunk a lot deeper. There is a suggestion that it was originally submerged about 80 million years ago (or so), when this renegade land split from Australia and Antarctica.
Since 1,000 tide gauges estimate current sea level rise at around 1 mm a year, real climate change puts the current panic about sea levels into perspective. Even the next ice […]
We are creatures of habit. Look at the spike caused at 11:32pm as something like 27,000 hot water tanks in South Australia suddenly switch on to use cheaper off-peak electricity. This spike is entirely due to pricing plans. It’s entirely avoidable too, but at least it’s predictable. “Scheduled”.
This peak, allegedly, is only a problem if SA is “islanded” — meaning if it can’t rely on the coal generators in Victoria.
Yesterday people were asking why the South Australian demand was peaking at 1am (and why two hours were strangely missing from that graph). “Hot water” is the answer (at least to the first part).
SA Hot water systems add sudden 250MW of demand at 11:30pm. Graph.
This graph comes from the AEMO report in Feb 2016. What follows is their electro-nitty-gritty:
Based on previous experience, and as demonstrated in a separation event on 1 November 2015, maintaining the SA power system in a secure operating state is challenging if there are large changes to the supply-demand balance during a period of islanding.
There is a risk of automatic under frequency load shedding if SA is being operated as an island during the hot water demand peak, […]
Excellent news. Obviously we are getting to the BoM.
This week, Jen Marohasy and I were mentioned by Maurice Newman in The Australian.“Smoking Gun demands Grilling for the BoM”. In response, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has unleashed a double dummy-popping effort in The Guardian.
The BoM could have answered the questions in The Australian, of course, but it’s so much easier to whine, bluster, raise the conspiracy flag and avoid the questions that matter at the-ask-no-hard-questions-Guardian.
Bureau of Meteorology attacks pushed by ‘fever swamp’ of climate denial
Graham Readfearn
Former weather bureau chief says agency debilitated by climate deniers’ attacks
Michael Slezak
It really is an extraordinary rant as the former head of the BoM admits skeptics are “debilitating” the BoM with these “attacks”. The Guardian is so starved of real news, it runs the one-sided name-calling excuses and another separate story discusses it as if it was actually news. While The Australian asks the BoM for a reply and would publish it, The Guardian didn’t ask a skeptic. One of these newspapers acts like a newspaper…
How debilitating are we skeptics? Jennifer Marohasy tells me she sent the BoM questions in 2015, but hasn’t […]
An advert today describes the real climate change we should afraid of, discusses how past CO2 levels did not cause dangerous global warming, and extra CO2 has a smaller and smaller effect, then connects failed climate models with rising electricity bills.
Click to enlarge.
The text….
9.3 out of 10 based on 155 ratings […]
Spot the political PR paper pretending to be science: the global carbon budget just got a whopping — four — times — bigger, but instructions on how to follow the carbon religion are 100% identical.
It’s become too obvious to everyone that the climate models have been complete failures. Thus, the global leeches were facing a crisis as their credibility and motivation drain. So the new paper in Nature Geoscience is just a retweak of the models to produce a number that isn’t so mock-worthy. There is no scientific reason offered, no new understanding of the climate. No one is even pretending that these modelers can explain the way our climate works any better than they did last year when they were utter failures. It’s all a charade. There is no honesty here — if there was, they’d admit the skeptics are years ahead of them.
The new paper is just about “staying the game”, a desperate injection to keep the dying movement alive. All the political messages remain untouched. It’s got everything to do with PR and nothing to do with science.
The numbers change (and nobody ever cared about them anyway) but PR meme is a carbon copy: […]
You have to hand it to The Australian – they will publish both sides. Take this (please, take it): “Our energy policy still stuck in coal country”. This is Alan Kohler, bless him, who doesn’t get it and dreams of a nation of motor-heads “going electric”. But, wow, ouch, watch how he reasons it out… not with numbers and graphs (he’s the numbers man on the nightly finance report) but with pop psychology?
The idea of an Australian government banning petrol and diesel cars to promote public health seems especially remote right now: we can’t keep the lights on as it is, having closed a few fossil fuel power stations.
But you can bet that the Coalition government and its media supporters will argue that the electrification of transport makes it even more necessary for there to be more “baseload power” from coal-fired power stations — how could we possibly charge millions of cars, and run millions of airconditioners and fridges if we let Liddell close in 2022?
And you can fix that Mr Kohler, how?
Wait for it…
This is the underlying reality of Australia’s energy debate: a majority of the government does […]
It will only take 50 plants like this, and $15 billion spare dollars, to replace the Liddell coal station (8,000GWh), now slated for closure in 2022.
$300m handout to Saudi tycoon for solar farm
Australians are set to pay $300 million in subsidies to an outback solar farm owned by a Saudi Arabian billionaire in a new test of the federal government’s looming energy reforms, escalating a dispute over whether to cut the handouts to keep coal-fired power stations alive.
AGL’s controversial Liddell coal power station in the NSW Hunter Valley generates 50 times as much electricity as the Moree solar farm in the state’s north, which stands to gain big subsidies from households from higher electricity bills until 2030…
But we need more chinese-built glass panels that make green weather-controlling electrons.
Lucky solar power is so competitive. Look at the money roll…
The Moree solar farm generates 150,000 megawatt hours of electricity a year, about 0.08 per cent of the 200 terawatt hours produced on the national electricity market every year. The project is forecast to collect about $50m in payments over the next four years and $90m in the following decade under the existing […]
Dr Duane Thresher who worked seven years at NASA GISS describes a culture of self serving rent-seekers, mismanagement and incompetence. These are the top experts in the climate science field that we are supposed to accept without questioning. Those who say they are working to “save the planet” care more about their junckets than they do about the data or their “best” model.
NASA GISS’s most advanced climate model is run from the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Thresher recounts a story from someone on the inside:
“NASA GISS’s climate model — named Model E, an intentional play on the word “muddle” — is called the “jungle” because it is so badly coded.” I know this to be true from my own extensive experience programming it (I tried to fix as much as I could…).
Thresher writes about how the team was happy to take taxpayer funds and spend it on unnecessary conferences which were “loads of fun” while they scrimped and saved on things like data security and incompetent tech staff. Secretaries and mail boys were hired for jobs they were not qualified for. At one point data was lost when exposed plumbing leaked in the computer […]
Breaking news: Bureau of Meteorology to revamp temperature records, Graham Lloyd reports in The Australian.
We’ve seen this all three times before. As soon as skeptics expose enough scandals in The Australian the BOM has to run and hide behind a “major revision”, a panel, or a review. It’s their pass-out-of-class to not answer questions. It’s too late, I have no expectation that this will achieve anything other than being the excuse de jour for the BOM to keep operating as a PR machine rather than a scientific agency.
In the first round back in February 2011, we worked with Cory Bernardi to request a formal audit of the BOM. They had lauded their “High Quality” or HQ dataset, but suddenly it was not good enough and needed revising. In March 2012 the BOM released an entirely new version called ACORN. The formal audit request was thus “neutralized”, but the new set was as bad as the old set. By July 2012, for free, skeptics analyzed and advised the bureau of a string of pathetic flaws, including that the bureau had “created” nearly a thousand days where minimum temperatures were higher than the maxes, the “hottest day ever recorded in […]
Let’s get “certainty” — dump the RET.
Chris Kenny in The Weekend Australian puts almost all the pieces together. This is self-sacrificial, pointless, and the RET is the problem because the subsidies allow renewables to drive out true baseload generation. The so-called hunt for “certainty” is a hunt for high prices because no one will speak the obvious “Dump the Renewable Energy Target”.
Dumping green folly will secure energy future, reboot economy
We are an energy-rich nation. Last year we exported 388 million tonnes of coal (valued at $35 billion) to supply affordable and reliable energy to countries such as Japan, China, South Korea and India. Our liquefied natural gas exports are doubling from 30 million tonnes a couple of years ago to almost 80 million tonnes (valued at $42bn) by 2019.
Australia also remains one of the largest exporters of uranium…
While we happily export our energy advantage, we have deliberately sacrificed it at home.
Turnbull — doing exactly the wrong thing after Trump won:
Astonishingly, less than a day after Donald Trump won the US election promising to abandon Paris, Malcolm Turnbull announced Australia’s ratification. The Prime Minister thumbed his […]
Thanks to Malcolm Roberts for contacting me tonight with more information. CLARIFICATION: It’s not a complete ban on two-strokes, but a change to increase standards on motors. (It appears it will reduce real pollution, and the legislation also claims it will reduce CO2, though no CO2 limits are mandated as far as I can tell. It will stop the sales of most conventional two-stroke outboards and mowers, but not “direct injection” outboards. Gory details below)*
From Malcolm Roberts:
Re: Genius Plan to ban two-stroke motors
Please note that Soichiro Honda himself banned his company from making 2-stroke outboard motors in the 1970’s after he visited Lake Tahoe and was shocked to see oil film on its waters. That pollution was produced by 2-stroke outboard motors.
He had the courage to do the right thing so despite the inherently higher weight and lower power of 4-stroke motors at the time. He put the real environment ahead of profits and as a result the new path led Honda to designing and building superior motors.
9.5 out of 10 based on 55 ratings […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).

Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!


Follow Jo's Tweets
To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments