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Excellent comedy, if you haven’t already seen this. (Adapted from the Stage Play “Yes Prime Minister”) Yes Prime Minister Global Warming etc Part 1 from Aris Motas on Vimeo. Part II Yes Prime Minister Global Warming etc Part 2 from Aris Motas on Vimeo. Written by Antony Jay and Johnathan Lynn. BBC. h/t Waxing Gibberish and Friends of Science on Facebook. 9.8 out of 10 based on 102 ratings June 23rd, 2017 | Tags: Satire & Parody | Category: Funny stuff, Global Warming |  Print This Post | | The numbers are breathtaking. On the east coast of Australia (which means most households in the nation) they are looking at 15 – 20% increases next month on electricity bills which are already at bleeding point. Get a grip on these numbers: Charis Chang, News.com — POWER prices are set to rocket after three major retailers announced increases of up to 20 per cent and $600 a year for the average customer in some states. Origin, EnergyAustralia and AGL have all announced price increases for electricity and gas starting from July 1. Small businesses may be the hardest hit, especially Origin customers in South Australia, which will see prices rise by a whopping $1453 a year when increases to gas and electricity bills are combined. The biggest increase for residential customers will be for AGL customers in ACT, who will pay an extra $579 a year for a combined electricity and gas rise. In NSW, residential EnergyAustralia customers will see electricity prices increase by up to 19.6 per cent. Origin Energy customers will get a 16.1 per cent rise. The price hikes will take effect […] June 22nd, 2017 | Tags: Electricity Cost | Category: Electricity, Global Warming | Print This Post | | Don’t tell me that cold is nice and the climate was ever ideal A few scientists thought that the climate was stable and well behaved during the Holocene until we invented coal power and the Ford Model T and everything fell apart “unprecedentedly”. But 8200 years ago things apparently got pretty wild. See the GISP graph below where there was a three degree fall in temperatures suddenly (circled in red below). A new study found that at the same time China and California also cooled. Strangely, this cooling effect probably did not produce calm, happy days for the Californians at the time. Instead it looks like they got 150 years of intense winter storms and a lot of wet weather. UPDATE: This graph shows the ice-core data up until 1855. The last 150 years (1705 to 1855) are highlighted in red to show the warming as the Earth began coming out of the LIA. Obviously that red line would continue up further if it was drawn to the present. Looks like real climate change…. The reason for the sudden snap is possibly that a couple of massive glacial lakes in North East America collapsed and suddenly drained out […] June 22nd, 2017 | Tags: California, Cooling & cold snaps, GISP, Greenland, Holocene, Paleoclimate | Category: Global Warming, Holocene | Print This Post | | It’s like an Easter Island moment for an advanced economy: somehow “cheap” energy can’t compete in a free market without government subsidy. A Nation of Serfs have forgotten what a free market is. Will cheap desirable stuff sell itself, or not? The contradictions mount. Electricity and gas prices are hitting escape velocity: The wholesale electricity spot prices was about $35 a megawatt hour during 2011, rose to $58 after the carbon tax was introduced and is now about $130 as gas prices push up energy generator costs. Not surprisingly 70% of Australians want cheaper, more reliable electricity. Only one person in four would rather cut emissions than cut the bill. Yet the agitprop telling people that renewables are “cheap” has been so pervasive that fully 38% of Australians think the government should raise the renewable energy target, and 23% think it should stay the same. It follows that around 4 in 10 Australians apparently hold the bizarre idea that wind and solar are cheap and yet in need of government support, as if there are no investors willing to put money into supplying something that 100% of people want at a price cheaper than what they currently pay. […] UPDATE: It is apparently funded by the Arts Council England. Couldn’t we guess? A new climate forcing, let’s call it Musikiness, will change the upper trough-o-sphere: Climate change data is being transformed into beautiful symphonies What is the sound of a dying planet? Translating hard facts into feeling is the issue of our age – and it is the task Climate Symphony have appointed themselves. A collective of artists and scientists, the London-based team are inspiring action by transforming climate change data into music. Listen at the link. Wait til you see what it can do. This is a pretty powerful tool: “Climate Symphony has developed a side-project – calling out lies in politics.” “We want to create a formal record,” she says, “A method of fact-checking the things Trump is saying, of finding distortions. It’s revealing. You’re looking at it, and listening to it, and you find that it’s distorted. It’s all distorted.” Musikiness could replace the US GAO. (Who needs auditors). But I worry about what happens if they use the wrong key. Finally, twenty years late, EcoWorriers care about transparency and “hard facts”: “…it isn’t just […] June 20th, 2017 | Tags: Satire & Parody | Category: Funny stuff, Global Warming | Print This Post | | … 9.4 out of 10 based on 49 ratings Peter Brannen argues a real mass extinction doesn’t just wipe out 1% of species, it wipes out 90%. It turns out humans are not quite as bad as a one-kilometer-deep lava layer covering an area as big as the US. Earth is not in the midst of a Sixth Mass Extinction Humans have changed the ecosphere: So things don’t look so good, no matter where we look. Yes, the victims in the animal world include scary apex predators that pose obvious threats to humans, like lions, whose numbers have dropped from 1 million at the time of Jesus to 450,000 in the 1940s to 20,000 today—a decline of 98 percent. But also included have been unexpected victims, like butterflies and moths, which have declined in abundance by 35 percent since the 1970s. Is this a mini extinction? …the only reason we know about mass extinctions in the first place is from the record of this incredibly abundant, durable, and diverse world of marine invertebrates, not the big, charismatic, and rare stuff like dinosaurs.“ So you can ask, ‘Okay, well, how many geographically widespread, abundant, durably skeletonized marine taxa have gone extinct […] Demand enough renewables and you might as well ban coal There’s a lesson Australia needs to learn from South Australia. When intermittent renewables reach a certain percentage of daily average supply they make baseload power unfeasible. The situation develops into an impossible dead end that can only be solved with container-ships of cash. The intermittent supply of wind and solar is the immoveable problem. It eats into the daily chart of the cheapest stable electricity supply — which is coal fired. Coal can’t be ramped in and out in minutes. It is a creature that runs best non-stop, efficiently, smoothly, at a high capacity factor (meaning it works best when it is producing around 90% of it’s design limit continuously). Tom Quirk points out that sometime after these intermittent renewables hit 30% of the average daily supply, as they have in South Australia — locally sourced coal power becomes uneconomic. There are times during the daily cycle when renewables are providing almost all the demand. There is little demand left for the massive coal turbines to supply, so they spin on pointlessly, but costs remain, and profits are zero. In […] June 15th, 2017 | Tags: Australian Politics, Electricity Cost | Category: Electricity, Global Warming | Print This Post | | It’s hard to believe Turnbull could fall for this one twice. Dennis Shannahan warns us: There is a revolt in the Coalition ranks and there are those prepared to say that Finkel is dead or worse. More than 20 Coalition MPs spoke against the Finkel report last night, including Tony Abbott, all concerned that the priority is for cutting emissions and not electricity prices. History repeats? David Crowe on what he’s heard about the same liberal party room meeting: Former prime minister Tony Abbott was a sharp critic of the clean energy target and made interjections throughout the discussions. “He was the most sceptical about it — he said it wasn’t going to cut prices or provide certainty for consumers,” one Liberal said. “He was probably the strongest critic throughout the whole meeting.” One of the senior Liberal figures who took notes on the meeting said last night that about 32 people spoke and about one-third of them were not in favour of the Finkel proposal, while one-third supported the clean energy target and another third asked questions or had suggestions for changes. Victorian Liberal MP Russell Broadbent, […] June 14th, 2017 | Tags: Australian Politics | Category: Electricity, Global Warming | Print This Post | | In one of the most massaged spin-doctor sales messages in Australian history, the Finkel Report is here to “take the politics out” and solve our energy instability and out-of-control prices. But it’s actually an aggressive green-left weather-control program where cost and stability are secondary to the unspoken but main aim which is to slow storms in 2100. If Finkel were really aiming for stability and price control he’d let the free market run, get the government out of our electricity grid and look at the evidence that shows that solar-panels and wind farms don’t, won’t and can’t work as global air-conditioners for us or our grandchildren. Australians, read this line and weep: “Modelling for the Review estimates that by 2030, 42 per cent of electricity demand will be met by renewable generation.” This is where South Australia is currently at, but it has a lifeline to coal power in Victoria whenever it needs it. What happens when the whole National Grid needs a lifeline? Pull out your wallet… How much does an undersea cable to New Zealand cost? It’s only 2,000km. For the same price we might be able to afford a new ultra-supercritical coal plant and catch […] June 13th, 2017 | Tags: Electricity Cost, Renewable Energy | Category: Cost, Electricity, Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | … 9 out of 10 based on 51 ratings Tomorrow Chief Scientist Alan Finkel is delivering a report that could potentially split the Liberal Party. Turnbull was tossed out by the party in 2009 because he supported the bank-friendly emissions trading scheme. Now the debate is back again in a different guise — called a LET scheme (low emissions target), or a CET scheme (Clean Energy Target). Details are scant at the moment. On the plus side, it appears it’s not necessarily a trading scheme (code for banker driver fiat currency) and it’s aimed at “emissions” directly instead of “renewables” (which makes it slightly more direct and gives the market a tiny bit more freedom, except of course, the market can’t choose “Nukes”.). On the downside, it’s still a pointless waste of billions of dollars in a futile attempt to slow storms for our grandchildren. If it succeeds in reducing emissions, it will reduce airborne plant fertilizer. Split coming in the Liberal Party again? Tony Abbott has warned the federal government it would be making a big mistake if it adopted a low emissions target that made it hard to build new, more efficient coal-fired power stations. The former prime minister expressed his “anxiety” around reports […] Apparently, what electric cars need is not better performance but better subsidies: Australia’s electric car market was unlikely to take off beyond its current tiny niche unless the federal government introduced subsidies to encourage consumers, says Nissan’s global chairman Carlos Ghosn. It’s a micro-mini-market for electric cars in Australia: Despite record sales of new cars, just 219 of the 1.2 million new vehicles sold in Australia in 2016 were electric, even that was a 90 per cent drop from the previous year. Battery powered cars represented only 0.0018 per cent of the total market. People buy cars to get places. Governments “buy” cars to change the weather. One of the justifications for subsidies was that sales of electric cars were not driven by consumer demand, but by governments’ desire to reduce emissions. How rich is the State of California? In California, sales of Nissan’s Leaf Electric vehicle, which retails at US$30,680, attracts a US$2,500 clean vehicle rebate, a $7,500 federal tax credit and gets some preferential treatment on high occupancy vehicle lanes. You know a car is bad when it is allowed to go in “bus” lanes. h/t Dave B 9.8 out of 10 based on 131 ratings The cult brain can spot a link anywhere In the new Analytical Tool of Weaponized Outrage, anyone who talks about a group “laughing” at them is, ergo, ipso fantastico, channelling Hitler. Sasha Abramsky does word analysis and finds both Hitler and Trump used the word “laughing” therefore Trump is a neoNazi, white nationalist, fascist (who is, by implication, probably planning to do mass-gassings.) Trump Echoed Hitler in His Speech Withdrawing From the Paris Climate Accord Seriously—it’s not a direct quote from the Führer, but it’s perilously close. By Sasha Abramsky Define “perilous”? It used to mean, you know “danger”. Who is in peril here — Only the socialist parasites who need a symbolic supranational committee to suck funds from the free west in an effort to change the weather and provide two-week 5-star conference junkets for cult believers. On September 30, 1942, shortly after the death camps began gassing Jews, Hitler declared, “In Germany too the Jews once laughed at my prophecies. I don’t know whether they are still laughing, or whether they have already lost the inclination to laugh, but I can assure you that everywhere they will stop laughing. With […] … 9.3 out of 10 based on 49 ratings The best way to kill off the Climate Debate is to do what Team-Alarm has done for years — stop talking about whether it’s real, and just project forwards, detailing the collapse. For twenty years others have been saying “the debate is over”. Now the tables are turning. The debate really is over, skeptics won, and what’s left is to watch it continue to unravel. Clive James argues that it won’t collapse like a house of cards… (an extract from the new IPA book Climate Change: The Facts 2017.) To take a conspicuous if ludicrous case, Australian climate star Tim Flannery will probably not, of his own free will, shrink back to the position conferred by his original metier, as an expert on the extinction of the giant wombat. He is far more likely to go on being, and wishing to be, one of the mass media’s mobile oracles about climate. While that possibility continues, it will go on being dangerous to stand between him and a television camera. If the giant wombat could have moved at that speed, it would still be with us. The mere fact that few of Flannery’s predictions have ever come […] Bubble popped. :- ) The Leader of the free world leads the way out of the hollow bureaucratic pointless puffery of an agreement that was never going to change the weather. The people of the free world never voted to join the Paris agreement. Trump has just said the obvious — he’ll look after US citizens first, and renegotiate a deal that helps the environment and doesn’t punish the leading polluters. The members of the climate cult reacted the way cult members do. A Greens MP in Australia called the President of our greatest military ally a “climate criminal“. Al Gore said it’s reckless, and indefensible, and apparently the “planet has suffered” sayth the spokesperson for the Third Rock from the Sun, Leonardo Di Caprio. Tom Steyer says Trump is “committing a traitorous act of war against the American people.” MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch… said the president “is a sociopath.“
Excerpt from the transcript As the Wall Street Journal wrote this morning: “The reality is that withdrawing is in America’s economic interest and won’t matter much to the climate.” One by one, we are keeping the promises I made to the American people during my […] Two days ago unidentified confidants suggested he would really pull out. Now more unnamed sources have more details about the announcement that is apparently imminent. Headlines are telling us that Trump Withdraws from Paris Climate Change, but Trump hasn’t (yet). Are you excited? Scoop: Trump is pulling U.S. out of Paris climate deal President Trump has made his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the decision. Details on how the withdrawal will be executed are being worked out by a small team including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. They’re deciding on whether to initiate a full, formal withdrawal — which could take 3 years — or exit the underlying United Nations climate change treaty, which would be faster but more extreme. Thanks to ClimateDepot, The Hill tells us: CBS News also reported that Trump is telling allies about his decision. The move marks a dramatic departure from the Obama administration, which was instrumental in crafting the deal. It also makes the U.S. an outlier among the world’s nations, nearly all of whom support the climate change accord. But Trump’s decision fulfills an original campaign promise he made just […] Oh the irony. What if “fossil fuels” were driving the climate debate, but on the Warmie side? Fossil fuels is a misnomer, there is no collective fossil industry, just a bunch of massive multi-conglomerates competing. And the biggest competition for oil and gas comes from coal. Gas wins two ways: not only do “carbon schemes” help gas and oil compete, but the more windmills there are, the more gas we need to cope with the intermittency. William Kay joins some interesting dots. Rex Tillerson, he argues, is a dark knight, painted as the enemy of climate deals yet pushing Exxon belatedly into the BP and Shell mould as another giant gas company that lobbies for carbon credits. The war waged on skeptics for their “fossil fuel” funding was a red herring to distract from the real direction of the lobbying. REX TILLERSON: DARK KNIGHT OF THE OIL & GAS LOBBY Let’s cut to the chase. The coal lobby and the natural gas lobby are dueling over the captain’s share of the U.S. electricity-generating market. As The Donald would say, “The stakes are yuge.” Americans spend almost $400 billion a year on electricity. Recent figures have natural […] The EU Ministry for The Management of Nice Weather says that the artificial price of carbon credits must rise a magnitude or two if they are going to have any chance of meeting their “climate” target. In some senses they are right — the price of carbon would have to be very high to get people to shift energy sources, because the ones that produce carbon dioxide are so blissfully cheap. On the other hand, this assumes that the IPCC models are right and that economies would survivc this brutal management. They don’t seem to mention what this will do to electricity prices. Global carbon prices must soar to meet Paris climate target: report By Susanna Twidale | LONDON Reuters The cost of emitting carbon dioxide must rise to $50-$100 per tonne by 2030, much higher than the current price in Europe of less than $6, if countries are to meet climate pledges made under the Paris Agreement, economists said on Monday. Under the Paris deal, more than 190 countries pledged to keep planet-warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) to stave off the worst effects of climate change. The Commission […] |
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