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Fires this week in South West WA have caused two deaths, burned 72,000 hectares and destroyed 143 homes, wiping out 80% Yarloop. But it’s all happened before, and the fires were bigger, worse, and burned a larger area. The ABC have described the infamous fires of 1961 before, but there doesn’t seem to be any mention of the history of these historic fires in their current news. Surely it’s relevant? No one at the $1 billion dollar agency did the internet search that an unfunded blogger did.
Dwellingup, 1961
Dwellingup, January 1961
In January 1961 the remnants of cyclones meant dry thunderstorms lit fires in the hot dry South West of Western Australia. Ten separate fires began in the same area near Dwellingup. They wiped 60 year old small timber towns off the map, and razed 123 houses. Over the next 41 days, fires continued to burn, destroying 160 buildings and burning through hundreds of thousands of hectares of land (134,000 hectares in the Dwellingup Fire, but 1.5 million hectares burned in SW WA that summer -PDF ). The damage bill would come to $35 million. Somehow, incredibly, no lives were lost.
The fires of 1961 […]
Experts say that climate change is the worst threat we face, except for the worse ones.
Scientists warn over super-volcano threat
Experts at the European Science Foundation said volcanoes – especially super-volcanoes like the one at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, which has a caldera measuring 34 by 45 miles (55 by 72 km) – pose more threat to Earth and the survival of humans than asteroids, earthquakes, nuclear war and global warming.
What could be worse than 1.5 degrees of warming?
[After] … a major eruption, the team said, millions of people would die and earth’s atmosphere would be poisoned with ash and other toxins “beyond the imagination of anything man’s activity and global warming could do over 1,000 years.
We are talking about an “extinction-level event”:
Experts at the European Science Foundation said volcanoes – especially super-volcanoes like the one at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, which has a caldera measuring 34 by 45 miles (55 by 72 km) – pose more threat to Earth and the survival of humans than asteroids, earthquakes, nuclear war and global warming.
But the UN and Obama will save us right?
There are few real contingency […]
If only solar generation was affordable?
In Nevada there is a lot of sunlight and a lot of solar panels, but they generate electricity at a cost of 25 – 30c per kWhr. With subsidies and tax benefits, the cost “falls” to 15c. (In this context, the word “falls” means “is dropped on other people”.) But the retail rate for electricity is 12.5c. So having solar panels doesn’t help you much unless you can sell that excess electricity, which the state of Nevada was buying at 12.5c. That price sounds fine and dandy til we find out that they could have bought the same electricity at wholesale rate of around two cents.
So Nevada has decided that’s what the state will pay… 2c, not 12.5c. The latest decision is to apply normal free market rules. Nevada will now pay wholesale rates for electricity. No more shopping for boutique electrons.
Taking into account all the tax cuts, subsidies and total costs, who would have thought that paying 15 times the wholesale rate for electricity would be economically unsustainable?
Battles Over Net Metering Cloud the Future of Rooftop Solar
One of the fastest-growing markets for residential solar, Nevada is the […]
Life on Earth is proving to be so uncannily adaptive to climate change, you’d almost think that a half a billion years of climate change mattered. Perhaps the precambrian clutter is not just junk, but handy tools from past lives that we may or may not need to use. Last week it was salt-water fish that got cast out of the sea by an Earthquake, and adapted to fresh water.
Stick male guinea pigs into a zone a full ten degrees hotter, and after a couple of months, his future sons and daughters will be better adapted to hot weather. Thank epi-genetics: the genes don’t change, but some get labelled “hot”, some not. Dad’s body sticks methyl groups on choice genes which upregulates them, and the pattern of activation gets passed on in genes. It’s a way of taking his lessons in life and giving his offspring a head start.
In any case, it appears in guinea pigs that there not only can this mammal cope with changes in the climate on a daily and seasonal basis, but the machiney is in place to cope with longer term changes too.
Like father like son: Epigenetics in wild guinea […]
What could possibly go wrong? According to badly done, ambiguous surveys, everyone in Australia “loves” green energy, and believes in climate change. But according to actual payments, hardly anyone wants to cough up any cash for it, (unless the government is waving a big stick). Poor Greenpower appears to have gotten its business advice from the ABC, or the CSIRO.
How much of the Australian grid is voluntarily green? Would that be 28% (our target for 2030)? Nope. It’s not even five percent. Instead a mere one electron in every 200 is voluntarily “green”. It’s a pathetic half a percent.
All Australians are free to pay an extra 5 or 6 cents per kilowatt to get their energy “green” from GreenPower. But even at the height of the 2008 -Gore-Rudd era only 1% of all the electricity was bought up by green consumers willing to voluntarily pay more for “clean” energy. Since then, though the volunteers have left in droves.
But I’m sure the Greens are happy. They always wanted a free market solution.
Speaking of free markets, I say let’s have more. How about we allow people the choice to buy dirty energy too. I want pure coal fired […]
There’s the truth, then there’s the whole truth.
From a climate expert at NOAA, the study of ocean acidification is so young “they don’t have any data sets that show a direct effect of OA on population health” and they can’t name any place in the world that is definitely affected by it.
Steve Milloy at Junkscience.com FOI’d emails among NOAA scientists discussing a NY times op-ed draft.The editor was serving up an apocalyse:
…and he wanted all the dirt:
Can the authors give us more specific, descriptive images about how acidification has already affected the oceans?
Tony Thomas writes that Dr Shallin Busch, who works for NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program discussed the draft of the article with fellow scientist Ms Applebaum. She warns that they can’t say that OA (Ocean Acidification) was definitely a problem anywhere at the moment:
Unfortunately, I can’t provide this information to you because it doesn’t exist. As I said in my last email, currently there are NO areas of the world that are severely degraded because of OA or even areas that we know are definitely affected by OA right now. If you want to use this type of […]
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8.6 out of 10 based on 20 ratings
Once there were no storms, the climate was perfect and everyone was nice to each other. Then people got air conditioners to make the climate even more perfect, and God was not happy. Along came droughts, floods and plagues and everyone got post traumatic stress disorder.
Humans are just not designed to live in a world where the seas rise 1mm a year. (What,we can’t run fast enough?)
The news on our mental health is dire according to a report from the National Wildlife Foundation (on climate change only the Experts are right, but in other fields, anyone can have a stab, right?).
In America, 200 Million People Will Suffer ‘Psychological Distress’ From Climate Change
So Grok hid in a cave and made it through an ice age, but the modern pajama-boy will have a panic attack if the world warms by one degree.
Hands up who wants a paleolithic health-plan? Their babies died of dysentery. They ate snake soup or they starved, but somehow the tough-nuts who survived evolved into Five Star Pansies.
“The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States,” examines the hitherto undiscussed effects of increasingly prevalent extreme weather, sea level rise, drought […]
Feel free to document your predictions here…
8 out of 10 based on 37 ratings
It’s a bit costly trying to control the weather:
“Germany has been paying over $26 billion per year for electricity that has a wholesale market value of just $5 billion (see here).”
That’s $21 billion that could have been spent on health or education that was used instead to feed the Green Machine.
A few handy facts to memorize. The cost of electricity per kilowatt-hour:
Denmark, 42c; Germany 40c, and the USA, 12.5c. ( — Forbes)
Wind and solar power supplies 28% of electricity in Germany (is it really that high?) This is what Australia is aiming for?
Graph from Forbes (link below)
Europe is a “green energy” basket case. Washington Post
“Germany’s Energy Poverty: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good.” — Der Spiegel
Europe’s Energy and Electricity Policies are a Bad Model, Jude Clement, Forbes
9.1 out of 10 based on 104 ratings […]
Watch the pea. What does it mean to have a non-binding non-treaty, at the same time as a real “commitment”? It’s all semantics, and, as usual, word games are the weapons of big-bureaucrats. Don’t be fooled into thinking Paris was no threat to the free West.
As I keep saying, the climate conference in Paris was not trying to reduce CO2 or change the climate. The real aim is an endless free lunch for freeloaders. The Politicites didn’t get the legally binding agreement they dream of, but what they got may turn out to be almost as good. Marlo Lewis explains it may yet be politically binding on the target rich Western nations, which is all that really matters. It’s the best strategic review I’ve seen of what happened in Paris.
It was no accident that it was “non-binding”. That was part of the plan.
They were never going to get a legal treaty through the US Congress, so the aim became a deal that was “non-binding” and not a “treaty” because things that are overtly legal have to go through Congress. Instead, the bureaucrat class want to go around the voters. By simply declaring that Obama’s promises mean […]
Bit by bit, smart and influential thinkers are shifting. We’re seeing more and more of this type of exposition from people who are becoming skeptical. How much longer can the big bluff be maintained in the face of this kind of deep, considered and independent analysis?
Mike Van Biezen is a physics, maths and astronomy lecturer in the US. Until seven years ago, he accepted the premise that adding massive amounts of CO2 to the air would cause temperatures to rise. Then he noticed the slip in global temperatures from 1940-1980 and “could not ignore this subtle hint”. He did a lot of investigating over the ensuing years and has condensed that into ten very well written points. Like point 9: “It was so warm 4000 years ago that many of the glaciers around the world didn’t exist.” But things got so cold 150 years ago, people were afraid of glaciers and were asking “local bishops and even the Pope in Rome to come and pray in front of these glaciers in the hope of stopping their unrelenting advance.”
I also found point 7, and 10 particularly worth discussing. Point 10 is the one that he says captures the attention […]
According to Nicholas Stern, the climate industry is set to rival the Industrial Revolution. Graham Lloyd of The Australian asked the obvious question that nobody at the COP 21 Flop thought to ask in Paris: “if [the] $650 billion a year being promised by US banking institutions will ever be expected to make a profit and, if so, will it need public support to do so.”
“US Secretary of State John Kerry sees it as “the most extraordinary market opportunity in the history of humankind”
Michael Kile expands on the little conflict of interest in the UN’s decarbonisation mission
It seems the UN is co-founding groups for money managers to get large funds to “decarbonize”. That’s code for chiseling investments out of coal and forcing them into the pointless, inefficient and uncompetitive “renewables”. But of course, renewables are only worth investing in if governments keep demanding people use them. If the darn voters vote muck it up, by voting for leaders who will stop wasting their money, the renewables industry is a dead dog. So the UN project (which is probably funded by taxpayers) aims to remove the risk for investors by lobbying governments to keep the regulations […]
For the incoming ABC boss, the first priority is to keep up the pretense that the public broadcaster is “independent”.
Independent of what, you may ask? It’s independent of public accountability. We can’t vote for programs or presenters; we can’t choose not to pay for it. We can’t choose to sell it, or even to send our tax funds to a different broadcaster.
The organization that depends on big-government for funds wants you to believe it’s in-dependent of big-gov.
When BP sponsors art, it’s an outrageous reputational risk (stage a sit in!). In that case the offensive BP donations to Tate were a mere one fortieth of the membership income. When Big-Gov provides almost all the income for the national broadcaster we’re supposed to laud it’s independence?
SMH: ABC boss defends independence of public broadcaster
Ms Guthrie was officially announced on Monday morning as the replacement for outgoing managing director Mr Scott. She will begin the role in May after a month-long handover period with Mr Scott.
In an interview with ABC 24 she said the essence of the ABC as an institution was its independence.
Watch Guthrie turn truth upside down:
“The important […]
In less than 24 hours The Guardian can turn personal disasters into political advertising:
Climate change and the Victorian bushfires: this is not a coincidence
Cambell Klose
Klose tells us climate change is too complicated for stupid people:
“The issue of bushfires can’t be divorced from climate change. For too many people climate change remains an esoteric concept – something that may happen to someone else in the hazy, far-off future.”
Luckily gifted people, like Cambell Klose (political adviser) can “feel” the causes of climate change.
“Clearly this isn’t the case. The effects of climate change are being felt right now and it is having real impacts on Australians and people all across the world.”
Who needs computer models? (Or for that matter, thermometers?)
What not to do when faced with infernos:
“Yackandandah is trying to do something about this. The community has committed to powering themselves entirely by renewable energy by 2022.”
Some people reduce fuel-loads, others fight off the flames with a solar panel.
Wind farms may reduce bush fires if we have to chop down large tracts of forest to install them. Otherwise they make expensive fire-breaks.
What warming? […]
What could make climate change more real for the kiddies than to get rid of Santa and drown the deer. No more presents, little ones!
Inspiration from Tim Blair. who writes: If you enjoy making small children cry – and who doesn’t? – then Fairfax has the perfect Christmas gift idea.
An Australian scientist has written a new children’s book, just in time for Christmas, that weaves the impacts of climate change into a story about Santa Claus, his reindeers and an evil billionaire.
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Because billionaires are always evil. It’s important to teach kids that only nasty people get rich.
Author Dr Ian Irvine, who has been a scientist for over three decades, first came up with the idea of marrying Christmas and climate change together for his eBook The Last Christmas, The North Pole is melting! two years ago.
Dr Ian Irvine is a specialist in the management of sediments, which may explain why he doesn’t seem up to date with sea ice trends.
“The ice at the North Pole isn’t very thick and over the last 30 years or so it has been getting a lot thinner, it is […]
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7.7 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
Apparently we want to set Earth’s climate control knob at 1.5C above the Little Ice Age. If the IPCC is right, we can use cars, hairdryers and air-conditioners to do it. All we need to know is equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and then we can work out the right atmospheric level of CO2 to aim at. Easy, right?
Now I don’t believe the IPCC claims, but the IPCC believes the IPCC, and therefore they’ve done this calculation. It’s what the whole Paris convention was for, eh? But something doesn’t add up. If the climate modelers are right, and equilibrium climate sensitivity is 3C, the CO2 concentration we need to aim for is … wait… 400 ppm. How many years have we got to change the whole “human emissions” equilibrium and discover 100% clean energy? Answer: No years.
If CO2 is the dominant climate driver, we are already at the “max” set point that 40,000 people in Paris just decided was the holy grail new ambitious target. Turn off the lights, stop the planes, get on your bike. The warming is in the can already.
Bear in mind that it is “equilibrium” climate sensitivity, so the warming is not all here […]
Who would have thought that temperature stations near concrete are warming faster than those over grass?
Anthony Watts carefully analyzed all 1,218 surface stations in the USA and managed to find 410 good ones in the last 35 years (1979 onwards) — which is an achievement in itself. But the real point of his paper is to see if the best stations show less warming than the rest. (The good ones are the ones that are not near artificial heat sources, and haven’t been moved around). Watts finds (again) that the NOAA homogenisation practice appears to be adjusting the good stations up to the bad ones.
About a third of the US recorded warming trend in the last 35 years may have just disappeared…
Watts presents it today at the AGU 2015 conference.
Congratulations to Anthony Watts for what must have been a mammoth amount of work. The irony is that the conclusion — that hot air radiates or rises off concrete, asphalt, and from bricks affects thermometers is banal, yet so few can demonstrate it across such a big network. We have to wonder why no one else was looking… Maybe the Earth’s climate doesn’t matter that much to […]
The political bomb is ticking again. Despite being slayed twice at Australian elections the ETS monster – the emissions trading scheme – has popped back out of the box. This time around, Turnbull and co will not paint it as a big deal grand scheme, nor give it a proper name. It will be eased in under the radar as much as possible (as I predicted) being forced on only the worst “polluters” as a cheaper way to offset carbon emissions.
There’s a strange rush on in Australian politics to force Australian companies (and consumers) to send money to struggling bankers in Europe.
It’s only a few credits… Greg Hunt says overseas emissions credits will ‘probably’ be allowed
The environment minister talks flexibility in emissions targets as Coalition backbenchers mock international deal reached at Paris climate conference.
The Turnbull government will “probably” allow emission reduction permits to be bought from overseas, giving Australia flexibility to increase the targets it pledged at the Paris climate conference, Greg Hunt has predicted.
Right now, to avoid lighting the same fires that got Turnbull ousted in 2009, Turnbull and Hunt are pretending an ETS was a part of the Abbott […]
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