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Last December British Fish and Chips was going to become Squid and Chips thanks to Climate Change. This year, cod will become anchovies. Battered anchovie anyone? British Fish and chips have been dying for a decade. Now, apparently, fish are shrinking, thanks to falling oxygen levels in the seas: By 2050, the size of fish could shrink by 10 – 20 per cent, Dr William Cheung, a marine ecologist at the University of British Columbia, Canada, forecast. Dr Cheung, who gave a keynote address at the 50th Anniversary Symposium of the Fisheries Society of the British Isles at Exeter University this week, said some fish in the North Sea, including haddock, were already getting smaller. Some might say the shrinking Haddock might have more to do with over-fishing. He predicted the trend would continue with common species such as cod shrinking by up to a fifth within our lifetime. Get ready for “child’s portions” of fish and chips. No really, that’s the headline, not the punchline. Climate change will extinguish Life on Earth but if that doesn’t scare you, let me tell you about your shrinking food. Kiddie meals are coming! July 9th, 2017 | Category: Global Warming | Something very “seismic” has happened to our electricity prices. Paul McArdle of WattClarity goes through each state looking at quarterly trends and prices, and remarks that things are going “off the chart”. We had some electricity crises in Australia in the last 12 months, and 2016 was a significantly more expensive than all previous years bar the major drought year of 2007. But ominously, prices haven’t come down in what should be a “normal” quarter. In Tasmania there was a crisis last year when dams ran dry, and the undersea Bass cable broke. But this quarter, prices are only $3.20/MWh lower than the crisis levels of Q2 2016 despite water in dams and a working cable to Victoria. Something has gone seriously wrong with our electrical grid and market. In both Victoria and South Australia prices are higher on average than any previous April-June quarter in the 19 year history of the National Electricity Market. In Queensland and New South Wales, prices are at the “second highest”. McArdle goes to some length to explain that this is not “one factor”, which seems obvious and fair — Its the combination of the closure of Hazelwood and Port Augusta coal generators; the […] July 7th, 2017 | Tags: Electricity Cost, Electricity Grids | Category: Electricity, Energy, Global Warming, Renewable |  Print This Post | | The BOM got caught this week auto-adjusting cold extremes to be less cold. Lance Pidgeon of the unofficial BOM audit team noticed that the thermometer at Goulburn airport recorded – 10.4°C at 6.17am on Sunday morning, but the official BOM climate records said it was -10.0°C. (What’s the point of that decimal place?) Either way this was a new record for Goulburn in July. (The previous coldest ever July morning was -9.1°C. The oldest day in Goulburn was in August 1994 when it reached -10.9°C). Apparently this was an automated event where the thermometer recorded something beyond a set limit, and the value put into the official database was the artificial limit. Since colder temperatures have already been recorded in Goulburn, who thought it was a good idea to trim all future minus-ten-point-somethings as if they were automatically “spurious”? Yesterday, the BOM have acknowledged the error and at first deleted the -10.0 figure, replacing it with a blank space. Then today, after Jennifer Marohasy’s post, they’ve corrected it. You might think a half degree between friends is not that significant, but this opens a whole can of worms in so many ways — what are these “limits”, do they apply […] July 5th, 2017 | Tags: Adjustments to data, Australian temperatures, BOM | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | The wind fizzled out over the South East slab of Australia during June. Predictably, that meant the wind industry lost millions, and wholesale electricity prices went up. When the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) was asked where the wind had gone, Darren Ray, expert climatologist, said it was due to a high pressure system over the bight, which, he explained, was linked to “climate change”. Thus, as the world warms, wind farms will be progressively more useless in South Australia. Perhaps the BOM should have mentioned that before SA became dependent on wind farms? I don’t think he had thought this one through. Perhaps the BOM is hoping that the masochistic sacrifice of South Australia will stop global warming before global warming stops the wind farms? You might think that if the global climate models could see this coming they would have suggested that wind farms weren’t a good idea. Or maybe, since climate models predict every equal and opposite outcome in unison, the models are always right post hoc, but not so useful in projections? Climate models predict climate change causes faster and slower winds over Australia In 2017, Darren Ray, BOM expert, said the decrease in winds was due […] July 5th, 2017 | Tags: Predictions (that went wrong), Renewable Energy, SA (South Australia), Wind Power | Category: Energy, Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | “End-Coal” Global Coal Tracker does a magnificent job of showing how essential coal is around the world, and which countries are pathetically backwards in developing new coal plants. It’s probably not what the “CoalSwarm” team was hoping to achieve, but this map is a real asset to those of us who want to show how tiny Australia’s coal fired assets are compared to the rest of the world. The site itself is a fancy-pants high gloss major database and website that also shows how much money is in the “anti-coal” movement. Oh, that skeptics should have even 2% of these funds. Heffa Schücking, the director of Urgewald, which created the maps, calls it a “cycle of coal dependency”. Normal people call it “freedom and wealth”. Chinese companies build coal plants — NY Times These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin. Many of the plants are in China, but by capacity, roughly a fifth of these new coal power stations are […] Tricky maths in Australia. Should we save $800 million dollars and get stable cheap modern electric power or give that money to renewables giants to help them compete with our fifty year old coal fleet and get us 0.0001% better weather in 2100*? Hmm. What to do?! A new HELE Coal plant (also known as an Ultra Super Critical — USC– coal generator) would cost $2.2 billion. We currently pay $3b a year in renewables subsidies. A modern coal plant would make 1,000MW of electricity 24 hours a day (and stabilize the grid for free). Renewables subsidies get us free electricity at random moments which we may or may not need, they need expensive gas back up, and add enormous costs to stabilize the grid. If we get one modern hot coal plant we might catch up to countries like Indonesia, and Malaysia, though we’ll still be far behind India and Japan, which is building 45 USC plants. As of May 2017, China has at least 90 USC plants. The USA has one. What does an “advanced economy mean”?
The Minerals Council has a new report out with some Fun Facts and numbers screaming for attention:
So having some solar waste panels lying around is not exactly like having a second-hand nuclear fuel rod in the basement, but there will be Gigatons-to-Go, the volume is spectacular, and we can’t eat cadmium for breakfast. There will literally be a mountain of toxic garbage — and only Europe, apparently, has a rule about solar manufacturers having to collect and figure out what to do with the solar waste. (And with a 25 year lifespan, how much, exactly, is even that worth? Just say “Solyndra“.) A new study from a group called Environmental Progress shows that solar panels make 300 times more volume of toxic waste per megajoule as nukes do. All estimates like these are based on assumptions and guesses, so perhaps it’s not that bad. The study might be exaggerated, and maybe solar panels are only 100 times larger in volume than nukes eh? Where’s the Green outcry. … Study: Solar panels a looming toxic ‘crisis’ Discarded solar panels, piling up around the world, are detrimental to the environment, according to a new study by Environmental Progress. And carcinogenic. And teratogenic. While environmentalist have warned for decades of […] …. 9.7 out of 10 based on 53 ratings I’d like to thank South Australia for so selflessly showing the world how well renewables work. (And thank we West Australians for paying for it). To get ready for the shortfalls next summer, the SA government is said to be ordering in 220MW of diesel generation at an expected cost of $114m. The government has contracted privately owned South Australian electricity distribution company SA Power Networks to obtain and install 200 megawatts of back-up generation across the state before summer. But despite promising a “detailed costing” would be provided in last week’s state budget, Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis did not offer any such details. The opposition said the budget had allocated $114m for operational costs in 2017-18 from the $550m energy plan, “indicating the diesel generators are going to be very expensive”. This $106m sacrifice is expected to reduce global temperature by 0.000C, but will save the premier from being called a climate denier at dinner parties: “Eighteen months ago the Tasmanian government spent $64m in leasing, site establishment and operational costs for 220MW of diesel generation for three months when a combination of drought and repairs to the Basslink left it short of electricity,” […] June 30th, 2017 | Tags: Renewable Energy, SA (South Australia) | Category: Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | South Australia has the largest uranium deposit in the world, which it digs up to sell to other countries to make electricity. It also has lots of sun and wind and empty space. If any state can make solar and wind power work, surely it’s there. And renewables are working for SA, working to put it in top place for Global Electricity Bills. South Australia power prices to rise to highest in the world on Saturday, energy expert warns South Australia will overtake Denmark as having the world’s most expensive electricity when the country’s major energy retailers jack up their prices this Saturday. AGL, EnergyAustralia and Origin Energy will all increase their electricity prices from July 1, adding hundreds of dollars to annual household bills. Residential customers will see an average rise of 18 per cent under AGL, 19.9 per cent from EnergyAustralia, 16.1 per cent with Origin Energy. Bruce Mountain, the head of a private energy consultancy firm, said the increases would see South Australia take the lead on world power prices — but for all the wrong reasons. “After taxes, the [typical] household in South Australia will be paying slightly more than […] June 29th, 2017 | Tags: Electricity Cost, SA (South Australia) | Category: Electricity, Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | How often do you clean your solar panels? Spare a thought for the poor sods in the Middle East, India and China, where migratory dust coats solar panels and hangs around in the air, blocking incoming sunlight. Researchers in India who cleaned their panels every few weeks and discovered that they got a 50% jump in efficiency each time. If the cleanings happened every two months, the total losses were 25 to 35 percent. The article very much blames human pollution for half the capacity loss, but in the detail, the press release admits that 92% of the dust on each panel was natural. Apparently human made particles are smaller and stickier which makes the 8% human-emitted-dust equivalent to the 92% of other dust. Either way, real pollution and natural dust will slow the clean-green-energy future in India and China until we get auto-cleaning panels or roof slaves. Unfortunately, cleaning panels also risks damaging them, so the price of solar power really needs to include the cost of windscreen-wipers/slaves, electricity losses, damage to panels, and damage to the panel cleaners too. But solar panels will definitely power all the other parts of the world that are near enough to the […] June 28th, 2017 | Tags: China, India, Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | A business processing 15% of Australia’s low grade plastics survived for 37 years with coal fired power in SA, and for one year without: South Australia’s sky-high electricity prices have forced an Adelaide plastics recycling business to shut its doors, costing 35 workers their jobs, its managing director says. Plastics Granulating Services (PGS), based in Kilburn in Adelaide’s inner-north, said it had seen its monthly power bills increase from $80,000 to $180,000 over the past 18 months. Managing director Stephen Scherer said the high cost of power had crippled his business of 38 years and plans for expansion, and had led to his company being placed in liquidation. “I hate to think of how many hours I’ve wasted on the AEMO website with tools to monitor spot pricing, to assess the implications of power, the trends of power and the future costs of power. The SA Government is still in denial: SA Environment Minister Ian Hunter said it was disappointing the facility was shutting down, but he said the pain of high electricity prices was being felt across the country. Mr Hunter said help was available through the State Government’s energy efficiency programs.
June 27th, 2017 | Tags: Recycling, SA (South Australia) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Don’t miss this if you can get there :- ) (And don’t forget to sign that Petition to get Australia out of the Paris Agreement too). … U.S.-based CFACT, along with its Australian partners, is hosting a showing of its new groundbreaking documentary, Climate Hustle, and you’re invited! Following each event, join film director CFACT Executive Director, Craig Rucker and film host and publisher of ClimateDepot.com Marc Morano, for a question and answer session. Get the behind the scenes scoop on both the film and the US’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. This could be the antidote to the Al Gore effect. As Tim Blair says “Get out of Melbourne while you still can — the notorious serial chiller is coming. Let’s see if Al can break Melbourne’s 2015 July chill record.” We are pleased to be working with the following organizations: Australian Institute for Progress | Galileo Movement | Australian Environment Foundation | Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance July 12- Melbourne, Australia Village Roadshow Theatrette- State Library of Victoria Doors open at 5:30 PM, film to start at 6:00 PM Reception and Q/A session to follow Get Melbourne TICKETS here June 27th, 2017 | Tags: Social Events for Skeptics | Category: Global Warming | It’s the end of the world, and kittens will probably die too. Here’s another round of Global Panic. Horror part I: you will get stuck at airport-world Earlier this week, nearly 50 flights out of Phoenix were cancelled. At 120 degrees, the temperature forecast exceeded the airline’s 118 degrees maximum operating temperature. It’s difficult not to connect the delays to climate change…. It’s difficult not to blame climate change, after a generation of brainwashing. So Phoenix got to 48.9C which made it nearly as hot as Marble Bar, Australia, last year (when it was 49C). After 80 years of deadly global warming both towns were nearly as hot as Marble Bar was in 1922. As the world continues to warm, such plane delays will become more common, says Camilo Mora, an associate geography professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And that’s just the beginning. And imagine what associate professors of geology might forecast on flight patterns circa 2080? You’ll never know if you read Fortune, where anyone can forecast climate bad-news, but prize-winning atmospheric scientists remain invisible if they stick to things they know, like […] June 27th, 2017 | Tags: Satire & Parody, Science (funding of) | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post | | … 9.1 out of 10 based on 60 ratings Al Gore’s new move is to wrap the global warming religion in with a bucket-list of “moral movements”, evidently targeting the naive souls who seek an Instant Life’s Mission, and / or approval from sorority girls: Al Gore: battle against climate change is like fight against slavery The fight against global warming is one of humanity’s great moral movements, alongside the abolition of slavery, the defeat of apartheid, votes for women and gay rights, according to the former US vice-president and climate campaigner, Al Gore. He forgets to add the defeat of Hitler and eradication of small pox. Though he gets points for finding a way to quote Martin Luther King Jnr: “No lie can live forever”. Gore piles on the “industrial revolution” — apparently confusing actual working steam engines that move twenty thousand tons with solar cars whose weight is measured in kilograms and whose load bearing capacity is not even mentioned: The battle to halt climate change can be won, he said, because the green revolution delivering clean energy is both bigger than the industrial revolution and happening faster than the digital revolution. But he mixes up the exponential theoretical prospects of renewables with […] Let’s get Australia out of the pointless Paris Agreement which will cost trillions, hurt the poor, send Australian manufacturing overseas, kill birds, bats, whales, raise electricity prices, and not change global temperatures by any measurable amount. This is a very well reasoned petition written by someone very familiar with the details of IPCC proceedings. It is an official petition, and alas, needs to be limited to Australian signatories. Jo _______________________________________________________________ An electronic petition for the House of Representatives requesting Australia pull out of the Paris Agreement. Petition Number EN0264 Petition Address To the Hon. Speaker of the House of Representatives and Members of the House of Representatives Petition Of Certain citizens of Australia Petition Reason (a) The damage and impairment to the Australian economy and the financial pain inflicted on our citizens and residents caused by inflated energy costs will be very significant and are very likely to be increased in future. (b) Australian greenhouse gas emissions are insignificant and have no measurable influence on global average temperature, meaning that Australia’s involvement is merely a political gesture. (c) The ratification of the Agreement seems to have ignored the following statements of IPCC’s Fifth Climate Assessment Report (5AR) of 2013: (i) […] 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 | | |
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