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“We are living in the midst of a veritable energy boom”
Since 2012, the largest producer of oil and gas in the world has been the United States, and its lead is growing.
The balance has shifted in the last ten years. US production now easily outstrips Russia and Saudi Arabia where the output has not increased much for the last decade.
The American Interest: Don’t Doubt the Strength of U.S. Shale. h/t GWPF
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What an innovation nation looks like:
The primary reason for the shift from net importer to net exporter “is we know how to produce natural gas in a very inexpensive way,” [said University of Houston energy economist Ed Hirs]. “And we’re going to be exporting the natural gas out of the U.S. and potentially, we’ll be exporting electricity.”
There’s a little shift in geopolitical freedom — “thanks to shale”.
9.4 out of 10 based on 71 ratings
Get ready. The legislation was done on the last day Parliament sat in December. The Coalition government knew it would be popular with the voters who all want “carbon action” so they… buried the news. No cheering. No speeches.
It apparently starts on July 1, and applies to 150 companies — about half our emissions. It’s a Cap N Trade system with “Caps” that can be screwed gently down as the climate warms to fill government coffers and raise electricity prices. The Direct Action plan auctions can be phased out and the SneakTax phased in. It could end up being the main game. A blank cheque.
It’s called “Safeguard” — it was safe for politicians and guards them against their failure to meet pointless, symbolic international agreements to slow storms. A Safeguard for politicians but a SneakTax for the people.
What does it mean? It’s time Australia got a new central political party.
Alan Kohler in The Australian
From July 1, coincidentally the day before the election, the Coalition’s “safeguard mechanism” within its Direct Action Plan will come into force.
One-hundred and fifty companies, representing about 50 per cent of Australia’s total carbon emissions, will be […]
Who are the national heroes according to the ABC?
Last night we saw two full indulgent minutes on our ABC national news broadcast (from 12:25 mins) on the death of the unfortunate Maria Strydom, as she tried to descend Mt Everest. My issue is not with her, but with the ABC choice of national priorities. The 34 year old climber ticked all the PC boxes, a vegan academic in pursuit of better holidays. The ABC lost one of their tribe. But where are the accolades for the 50 people have died already this year doing their jobs in Australia, like the farmers and miners who die supporting their families?
The effusive coverage did not mention the phrase “unnecessary risk”. It was just a straight out tragedy. (A very first world kind of one).
There was an unbridled virtue message about hallowed university experts:
“…intellectually, reaching a PhD by age 30 — massive achievement”
“…celebrate the life of people like Maria — who actually did what she loved”
ABC narrator James Hancock revealingly sums it up: “…risking their lives in pursuit of the ultimate goal”
Because in ABC-world, “the ultimate goal” is adventure for self-gratification?
The news […]
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8.7 out of 10 based on 20 ratings
Could it be the missing key? The solar wind blasts charged particles, electrons, stuff, towards Earth at 500 km a second — that’s one to two million miles per hour. It speeds up, slows down and shifts in direction as it travels past the Earth and has its own magnetic field. The wind speed varies from 300 km per second up to 800 and the impact on Earth changes with our magnetic field and our seasons. You might think this kind of monster flow might have some effect on our climate. But modern climate models are 95% certain that none of this matters. Only crazy people would think that a electrons flying past at a million miles per hour could “do something” to our stratosphere, or ozone, or cloud cover.
Curiously, a recent study shows that when the solar wind is fastest, the North Atlantic is coldest on the surface. The NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation) appears to correlate. The effect is strongest in the northern winter months. Notably the modern expert climate models fail to predict any of the cycles within our major ocean basins. How immature is our understanding of space weather?
Could changes in the solar wind be […]
Children Win Another Climate Change Legal Case In Mass Supreme Court
[Forbes] This case is one of several similar cases in federal district courts in Oregon and Washington, and in the state courts of North Carolina, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Colorado. All of these legal cases are supported by Our Children’s Trust, that seeks the legal right of our youth to a healthy atmosphere and stable climate in the future.
How about the legal right of our youth to live in a sustainable civilization? What if a stable climate costs more than a stable economy can afford?
Other parents might hope their children have the right to inherit a stable currency, and a government without trillions in debt.
Championed by Professor Mary Christina Wood in the Law School at the University of Oregon under the idea of Atmospheric Trust Litigation, these lawsuits claim that a government elected by the people and for the people has a duty to protect the natural systems required for the people’s survival.
So if the government is elected by the people to make these kinds of decisions, why is a court deciding public policy? The children of Massachusetts are free to […]
Does “climate change” cause more polar bears to chat up the grizzly girls producing Grolar Bear babies? Maybe…
The Headline: “Grolar bears: Climate change could be behind grizzly-polar bear hybrid, scientists say”
The evidence:
Chris Servheen, a bear biologist and Adjunct Associate Research Professor at the University of Montana, said sightings of this hybrid bear species have been very rare in the past.
“But they seem to be more common now,” he said.
Mr Servheen said not very much was known about the grolar and pizzly bears, as little contact had yet to be made between them and humans.
The recent photo of what many suspect to be one of the hybrid bears was posted on Facebook…
That’ll be one data point confirmed then?
Mr Servheen said it was hard to know how many of the bears existed.
In 2006 a bear shot by hunters in the Arctic was tested and confirmed as a polar-grizzly hybrid.
So if a scientist reported that thermometers “seem” to be more near airport tarmacs than they were in 1910, with a photo of an unconfirmed one on facebook, would that be worth […]
Don’t look now. Might be another negative feedback the modelers forgot. When the cold arctic warms up, there are more plants and less tough old moss. The real, err, surprise — was what happened to the bacteria and fungi. The micro-critters that normally decompose organic matter are pretty happy about the switch from tough moss to tasty tundra shrubs (or in this case, to cake, I’ll explain in a minute). They adapt in a jiffy to chewing through the freshly dead bits of gourmet plants with more nitrogen. So instead of decomposing more in warmer weather, the soils got richer with carbon and decomposed less.
After reading the press release, I watched the video and was a bit surprised to find them seeding the ground with sugar, rather than gourmet arctic plants. I’m a bit underwhelmed by the study design. Though the end result sounds believable because life on Earth spent 500 million years figuring out ways to suck that CO2 out of the sky.
The researchers even suggest this might slow global warming. If it does, it will be a symbolic, unmeasureable semi-hundredth of a degree. But perhaps the nicest thing about this is that at Lund University […]
UPDATE: A new ABC version of this story asks if it is a sackable offence for an energy company chairman to send an email praising The Skeptics Handbook years in the past before he was appointed? NSW Labor thinks so.
Click to download the PDF
The NSW Labor spokesman for Energy, Adam Searle, has described Mr Massy-Greene’s stance as “disturbing” and is calling for him to clarify his views or resign.
“If he is a climate change skeptic then his position as chair of publicly owned electricity businesses is untenable”, says Mr Searle.
“If Mr Massy-Green won’t resign, the Baird Government, which appointed him, needs to sack him.”
Amazing. Just to have ever sent an email praising the skeptics handbook years before he was appointed.
Are you now, or have you ever been a skeptic?
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Streisand Effect coming
Nearly 7 years ago Roger Massy-Greene sent an email around to around 200 VIP’s with a link to the Skeptics Handbook saying “the best piece I have seen on global warming, and helps to explain what has so far been a very confusing debate.” Mr Massy-Greene later became chairman of […]
It’s another meaningless Reachtel climate poll. Fergus Hunter at the Sydney Morning Herald has been fooled like Turnbull and Shorten, and Rudd and Gillard before them.
It’s the same old Polling Trap. Junk questions produce junk answers.
ReachTel asks motherhood questions about whether people would like to change the weather for free, and get free clean energy too. Who could say no? Without asking “what are you willing to pay?” the question is giving away coffee and cake at the side of road. Better survey’s show 80% of Australians don’t donate to environmental causes or vote for it. How committed are they? Answer, not even ten bucks a year. On flights, not even two bucks a trip. Survey after survey shows that when people rank issues, climate concerns are flat at the bottom of the barrel. Only 3% of US people think climate is most important issue.
Let’s translate that apathy to votes. Tony Abbott ran the 2013 election on the costs of making the weather nice and the people said No. No thanks, and No Way. He won in a landslide. What do people want? Cheaper electricity.
Strong climate change policy is a vote-changing matter for […]
The liquid iron flowing in the Earth’s core maybe what drives a magnetic field some 40,000 km to 370,000 km out beyond the Earth. The solar field envelopes that. At the layer where these fields interact sometimes the Sun and Earth’s magnetic field lines do something called “reconnecting” — suddenly converting magnetic energy into plasma energy in an explosive way. We’ve finally just measured one event properly for the first time. So a 12,000km ball of lava with a thin crust of rocks and 15 km of damp air, floats in a sea of magnetically charged fields. You might think that our slithery-thin layer of humid air and clouds could be affected by the stirring of “yo-yo” like lava flows and magnetic fields that are also twisted by solar dynamos, but you would just be a silly denier. These magnetic explosions and solar winds can’t possibly affect our climate — there’s a 97% consensus that says so.
Luckily we have climate models that are 95% certain we don’t even need to include these factors — especially lucky, since we barely understand them.
This is after-all, just space weather, and it’s not like the Earth is in space, eh?
Supposedly geomagnetic […]
The Sydney Morning Herald lauds the Queensland Academic who won an award and busted four myths. The fake expert tosses out non-sequitur red herrings and strawmen, ignores some of the largest forces of nature in the solar system, trashes the scientific method. Give him a Nobel eh? John Cook still doesn’t appear to know about the most relevant surveys in his chosen field.
This week, the American National Center for Science Education gave Mr Cook its annual Friend of the Planet award, for outstanding work to advance the centre’s goals.
Evidently the centre’s goals include teaching kids that science is a form of opinion polling. Nah — who am I kidding, the primary goal is training kids to pay their science tax, to salute officials in lab coats, and prostrate themselves before Big-Gov, which after all, controls the weather. Whatever else happens at schools, children must never ever question Big-Government Science. (That might lead them to question big-government grants!).
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Lets unpack the mythical myth-busting
John Cook starts with a myth that isn’t a myth, and which isn’t science either:
MYTH BUSTED: There’s no scientific consensus on climate change
Despite getting a full time salary at UQ, Cook-the-consensus […]
A study done on… golly, Antarctic Ice, allegedly shows that in the catchment area for Newcastle in NSW, Australia, the last 100 years have been pretty darn nice, compared to the past when droughts and big-wet periods used to last a lot longer.
Set aside, for a moment, that the ice cores are thousands of kilometers away and in a totally different climate, if they are right, if, then natural climate change is much worse than our short climate records are telling us. And if our current records are so inadequate and don’t represent the “old-Normal”, then we have a flying pigs of predicting the “New Normal”. Has the climate changed at all, or is the new one just like the old old one?
Hydroclimatologist and lead author, Dr Carly Tozer from the ACE CRC said the research showed exposure to drought and flood risk was higher than previously estimated.
“The study showed that modern climate records, which are available for the past one hundred years at best, do not capture the full range of rainfall variability that has occurred,” Dr Tozer said.
“The wet and dry periods experienced since 1900 have been relatively […]
Is Force X two different forces? The Sun could influence Earths climate through magnetic fields, solar particle flows, or spectral changes. | Image: ESA
There are two key clues, almost contradicting each other, which we must solve to figure out what Force X is. How do we explain that mysterious pattern — the little spike of extra sunlight each sunspot cycle doesn’t warm the Earth as it arrives — and it should. Instead, the warming appears greatly amplified 11 years later (or one sunspot cycle later). What’s going on? Logically the sunlight itself is not the direct cause, but only a signal, a leading indicator of something else going on — perhaps the solar wind, the magnetic fluxes, or the changes in the UV-Infra Red spectrum. Any one of these (or all of them) or maddeningly, even something else, could be influencing cloud cover on Earth — and some action on clouds is by far the most likely mechanism to amplify the solar effect. They blanket 60% of Earth, and small changes make large differences. We live on a Water-Planet. So having looked at the reasons for Force X, we now split it into two different forces (N and […]
Christopher Monckton reminds us of just how badly the “experts” have failed in the last 15 years, even including the recent hottest ever El Nino months. China bombed the atmosphere with record carbon “pollution” — worse than we thought. The world though, warms sedately at a mere half a degree per century. This is what 95% certainty looks like. — Jo
Introducing the global warming speedometer
A single devastating graph shows climate panic was unfounded
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
A single devastating graph – the new global warming speedometer – shows just how badly the model-based predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have failed.
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9 out of 10 based on 132 ratings […]
While Turnbull and the Liberals are attacking Labor for wanting a “massive new carbon tax on electricity,” it turns out that the Climate Change Authority is going to recommend the Liberals do exactly that but not ’til after the election. Allegedly Greg Hunt’s office are “very happy” that the report will be delayed. It would muddy up that scare campaign about Labor’s carbon tax if the punters knew the Libs planned to bring one in too. Labor and the Greens are crying foul, saying the report should be released now.
We are bizarrely reliving 2009. The public don’t want carbon trading. They have voted against it at every opportunity. They don’t want to spend even $2 to neutralize flights, yet both major political parties are now demanding we have one. If the report is suppressed in any way it shows Turnbull and Hunt know the public don’t want a carbon tax, but they’re going to give them one despite that.
The Climate Change Authority was rescued from the Abbott sabre by Al Gore and Clive Palmer. Turnbull and Hunt pointed at it on Sept 22 last year, barely two weeks after the coup, and announced carbon trading and a “cap” […]
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7.8 out of 10 based on 17 ratings
Tony Abbott’s plan is one of the most efficient and effective programs anywhere in the world. But the Green hero is really enemy number one. Apparently giving the eco-cartel what they say they want is a disaster. Don’t look now, but green underpants are showing. Who cares about carbon reduction or trees? Givem’ power and money!
Gillard’s carbon tax cost $5310 per ton. Abbott’s plan at $10/ton this round is 531 times greener. The Direct Action plan uses a reverse auction to buy the cheapest carbon reduction in Australia. In the third round another half billion dollars has bought 47m tons of carbon reduction at an even cheaper price than the first two rounds. Most it achieved by planting or restoring greenery and trees.
The real problem with the Direct Action plan is manifold — a/ it doesn’t specifically punish the “big polluders” (those big independent companies that don’t need the government to survive). b/ it doesn’t reward the right patrons — there’s no money for the parasitic windmills and solar industries. And c/ It is more like the real free market solution the eco-fans say they want — showing that the fake free market idea of imposing an […]
I’ve said before that the man-made climate-faith is a luxury of the stupidly wealthy. Only people with time to stress about the carbon footprint of their oranges can wallow in the indulgence of owning the idea that windmills in Alabama could reduce tidal surges in Peru. It follows then that if (or as) the economy falls apart so will the Green religion.
A new research paper backs this up, but possibly shows more about researcher’s confirmation bias than it does about the public. (I suspect the most useful part of this research was that a couple of hundred people got to see a video with Richard Lindzen in.)
That the global-eco-faith needs lots of wealth is a horrible conundrum for the Greens. The best thing they can do to encourage “climate belief” is to get out of the way and let the economy prosper, which of course is the last thing the Greens can do since “Growth” = “Pollution” in the GreenWorldView. So the more the Greens do to slow or wreck the economy, the more skeptical the population will get. It’s a “positive” feedback loop that may protect Western Civilization a little bit. Joy.
Is that motivated recall or […]
Don’t turn on the air conditioner. You might make someone a racist:
Climate change is spawning injustice, racism, intolerance and wars, according to author and political activist Naomi Klein.
Got moral decay? High Priestess Naomi Klein, expert psychoanalyst, says blame the weather. John Vidal, writer for The Guardian, believes her:
“It is not about things getting hotter and wetter but things getting meaner and uglier, unless we change the corrosive values that are pitting people against each other,”…
See, some people think mums and dads are supposed to teach values, but really it’s a humidity thing.
(Obviously, the way to fight racism is with biogas.
…and maybe ethanol.)
Naomi’s thesis reminds us that when the weather was ideal — like in 1915, there were no wars and everyone liked everyone.
She urged people to make the links between climate change and conflict. “Anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change. And climate change people rarely talk about war. Overcoming these disconnections is the most pressing task for anyone occupied with social justice.
Yes, stop ISIS now — send in the windmills!
“There is no clean, safe way to run an […]
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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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