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In 1946 fires burned in an “almost unbroken chain from Brisbane to Townsville”. They lit up the sky at night, pushed plumes of smoke 3,000 ft in the sky, that looked like “Bikini Atoll”. And this was July…
Qld 1946: Now that’s what I call Hazard Reduction
Believers of man-made-weather say that warmer drier conditions and longer fire seasons are preventing hazard reduction burns. Aside from the fact that a warmer world is not a drier world, and rainfall trends have gone up not down, this is a snowflakes excuse. Even if it were true, the answer is to get more serious about burning off when conditions are cooler.
Thanks to Siliggy, Lance Pidgeon for the pointer. This is what Queenslanders used to do when they were serious about stopping wildfires. Their view of dry brush was that it was waiting like tinder…
Fortunately yesterday, Armageddon didn’t come to the East Coast. But it might have.
800 Miles Of Fires Along the North Coast
The Courier Mail, Monday July 29th, 1946
Trove, National Library of Australia
By a Staff Correspondent TOWNSVILLE, Sunday. — Fires are burning to-night in an almost unbroken chain from the edge of Brisbane to Townsville, […]
Catastrophic fires are predicted tomorrow across the East Coast of Australia. Around 500 schools will be closed tomorrow. Some 400,000 people have been warned “to be ready. Thousands are evacuated. A state of emergency has been declared. 1,400 interstate fire fighters have gone to NSW to help.
For updates about New South Wales, check the NSW RFS website. For Queensland, see the QLD RFS website.
MyFireWatch has a live map updated regularly with outbreaks.
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How close and thick was that forest?
Shots from the ABC news Monday. To appreciate what happened, see the moving scene as people approach these ruins through tiny lanes surrounded by dense forest. (Full ABC segment below).
Bobin, NSW, Fire damage, ABC News
Look at the trees around this house at Rainbow Flat
The backlash begins
The opportunistic greens are already crying “climate change” while firestorms rage and lives are potentially under threat
Greens playing politics with fire, say Labor and Coalition
Greg Brown, The Australian
Greens leader Richard Di Natale sparked fury from both major parties when he said the nation’s emissions policy had caused the fires that killed three people and injured 100.
Greens policies increasing bushfire […]
Scenes of Armageddon in New South Wales today and people are calling it a climate emergency on twitter. Ban new coal mines! Blame Tony Abbott! (See #nswbushfires). So far there are three deaths, and 150 houses lost (at least). The latest report tonight from @NSW RFS is that at 12:30am, there were 74 bush fires across NSW, 43 still not under control.
@smhussey This was the view over Northern NSW last night.
Passengers flying out of the Gold Coast said they couldn’t get away from the flames. #NSWfires
Details:https://t.co/xiUiZn9Ygh CREDIT Zach Firth on Facebook
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Frightening at any time, especially so this early in the season. It wasn’t that long ago we would have still been undertaking small hazard reduction burns at this time of year. Not any more.#NSWbushfires #QLDbushfirespic.twitter.com/Wchw4NDl8U
— ÆnesidemusOZ ⓒ 抗 (@AenesidemusOZ) November 9, 2019
Wow. That is a lot of forest being converted into cloud in that satellite image.
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Too much fuel causes extreme bush fires, not climate change
67 years of hazard reduction in Western Australia shows exactly how to control wildfires. It’s just chemistry.
We leave all that fuel lying around then get surprised when […]
The Red Brigade uniforms are mass produced and the same all over the world.
Big finds in Mozambique, Saudi trouble, and the anti coal movement are helping African oil and gas:
Why Africa’s Oil & Gas Sector Is Exploding
By Tsvetana Paraskova – Nov 05, 2019, OilPrice
Major oil and gas discoveries and subsequent investments in infrastructure projects are set to help the oil and gas industry in Africa to grow, also helped by improved governance and regulation, PwC said in its newly released Africa oil & gas review 2019.
“One of the most dramatic finds in Africa over the past decade is Mozambique’s natural gas estimated at over 180 tcf, which has already unlocked the first three large-scale LNG projects,” according to PwC.
These projects and additional exploration could make Mozambique the world’s third-largest LNG producer after Qatar and Australia by 2030, PwC says.
So seven XR groupies turn up outside an African oil and gas conference to show just how arrogant they are:
Extinction Rebellion calls Africa Oil Week delegates “climate criminals”
By Madison Yauger, GroundUp
In a media statement, the group said: […]
Eight full grown trees of carbon in every bottle of Eco-vodka
No seriously, yesterday Air Co launched a type of vodka made from air instead of potatoes. One bottle allegedly soaks up “as much CO2 as eight fully grown trees.”
At $65 a bottle, this will be a must have for fashionable snowflakes who have too much money and not enough taste buds.
This solves the hole in the market for all the people wanting low carbon Bloody Mary’s.
The vodka, which costs $65 for a 750 ml bottle, is made from only two ingredients, carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) and water. That’s unlike traditional vodka, which is typically made by fermenting grains such as corn, potato and wheat. Producing a typical bottle of vodka could create around 13 pounds of greenhouse gases, according to Fast Company, while Air Co.’s product is carbon negative, removing a pound of carbon from the air with every bottle produced.
More efficiently than plants?!
The process uses the same principles as photosynthesis in plants but does so more efficiently,” Constantine tells CNBC Make It.
Air Co.’s technology splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, then combines the hydrogen […]
In this world, the deniers are the ones who think humans will survive
There are people more extreme than Extinction Rebellion. Though in a quieter way. They’ve given up. They’re so convinced by the apocalypse — a world careering towards doom — that they only feel at home around others who share their fears. Many have lost relationships, and now often hide their beliefs from their family. Many have dropped out of protests.
Activism means growing opium poppies so they have painkillers to make the end-time easier instead of starving. Kind of like “preppers” but not that optimistic.
James Purtill the ABC journalist, admits he himself was too dark for his girlfriend. “We broke up”.
The doomers get evicted and isolated from mainstream believers because “they sound too much like deniers”. Just as the deniers (he means skeptics) say there is no point cutting emissions, so do the doomers: they figure death is coming, it’s too late, why bother? Indeed.
Unlike the XR-attention-seekers, these are the gullible but they’re introverted, nicer, not forcing their beliefs on anyone. After the fantasy leap to believe in experts and models, there’s a certain kind of logic to it.
More collateral damage of the […]
Image Paulbr75
Beachfront property in skeptical areas is worth 7% more than equivalent homes in “believer” neighborhoods.
Presumably believers think those homes are at risk of being washed away — at least that’s what the researchers think. But it could be that believers suffer an immediate social penalty — imagine turning up to the local dinner party and having to admit to the thought-police that you just bought a beachside mansion?
Then again, the real motivator might be that people will pay more to live next to a skeptic.
This brings the dilemma for skeptics — save 7% on the new house, but live surrounded by snowflakes, or pay more and get on better with neighbors?
Does climate change affect real estate prices? Only if you believe in it
According to a new study from the UBC Sauder School of Business, buyers could end up paying significantly more for a home.
For the large-scale study, researchers combined sea level data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), geographic data about climate change attitudes from the Yale Program on Climate Change, and proprietary data on millions of repeat real estate transactions from Zillow to examine […]
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Who remembers that 15,000 scientists signed some climate declaration in 2017? The same Prof Ripple, and Bioscience probably hope you don’t, because two years later there is the same rehashed, but with only 11,000 signatories. So 4,000 disappeared without a trace. There are however, the same comic indefendable graphs. Call it “extreme graphing” — every line needs to be diagonal. All “pauses” are disappearing. No fallacy remains unbroken.
To stop storms we apparently need to reduce the global population, stop mining “excessive” minerals, eat more veges, and we need to preserve biodiversity, reefs, forests and greenery at whatever it was in 1685 or whenever the sacred preindustrial year of Life On Earth is declared. You know the drill — coal and oil are demon spirits. Exorcise them now! Then rinse, repeat and …hand-wash your undies.
This is panic-science: hold the error bars, hide the adjustments and heap on the hype.
Climate crisis: 11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering’
Damian Carrington, The Guardian
The world’s people face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless there are major transformations to global society, according to a stark warning from more than 11,000 scientists.
“We […]
Georgetown Texas did the Fake Renewables Show and Dance — the one where they “buy” 100% renewables but are connected 24/7 to a grid maintained by the usual non-renewable baseload generators. No doubt they paid for the right number of gigawatt hours of renewables but it’s a mere electrical-accounting trick. They didn’t cut the cord, and they’re not paying for all the hidden costs they would incur if they did.
The real cost of the mythical “100% renewables” does not include a gas fired backup station (which they’re using) — but it does include a huge storage system, transmission lines, and frequency control. They’d need something like 60,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries costing about $2 billion dollars* and maybe a couple of dams too.
ENERGY TRANSITIONS How 100% renewables backfired on a Texas town
Edward Klump, E&E News reporter
Electricity from various sources commingles on the main Texas grid, and the city said it’s not claiming that electrons produced in West Texas are the same ones people consume in central Texas. Georgetown’s customers have been paying for all-renewable energy since April 2017, based on a standard in Texas, it said. Still, […]
First nation out leads the way:
Lisa Friedman, New York Times
Trump serves notice to quit Paris Aggreement
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration formally notified the United Nations on Monday that it would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change, leaving global climate diplomats to plot a way forward without the cooperation of the world’s largest economy.
The action, which came on the first day possible under the accord’s complex rules on withdrawal, begins a yearlong countdown to the United States exit…
A true leader, Trump didn’t wait for herd approval, just made his own path.
But why does it take so many years to get out? It’s a non-binding, non-treaty with no legal teeth except ones countries domestically screw on themselves. The wording is “should” not “shall”. Most nations aren’t even aiming to meet their own targets, and their commitment is essentially to turn up and renegotiate their commitment, and get told off for not fawning enough, whether or not their actual target reductions in carbon emissions are met or not. Is there any reason why this can’t be extinguished overnight except that the deep state bureaucrats knew the […]
The panicked closure of nuclear power in Japan pushed electricity prices up. The UN agrees that no people died from radiation in the Fukushima event, but the frenzied over-evacuation killed up to 2,000 people. After that, higher electricity prices led to at least 1280 extra deaths in the 21 largest cities. That translates into 4,500 deaths if the mortality rate was similar across the rest of the country.
Japan nuclear shutdown did ‘more harm than good’, study finds
World Nuclear News
Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident, by Matthew Neidell, Shinsuke Uchida and Marcella Veronesi. A discussion paper by the Germany-based IZA Institute of Labor Economics.
“Our estimated increase in mortality from higher electricity prices significantly outweighs the mortality from the accident itself, suggesting the decision to cease nuclear production caused more harm than good.”
The authors calculated that these higher electricity prices resulted in at least an additional 1280 deaths during 2011-2014. This is higher than a previously documented estimate of 1232 deaths which occurred as a result of the evacuation after the accident, they say.
“Since our data [on mortality […]
Image profvideos
Just 4 sets of four-minute-long bursts of intense exercise was all it took for sedentary people aged 60 -88 to get an improvement in memory scores of up to 30%.
They worked out three times a week for 3 months, and the short sharp sets were better than 50 minutes of moderate exercise. Five hundred million years of evolution will do that — hone organisms to adapt to common stressors. And even if don’t need to outrun lions very often now, we still carry the genes that did.
This won’t surprise people who’ve been reading medical research papers. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) appears to be good for fat loss, anxiety, depression, improves blood vessel function, may slow Parkinsons, and colon cancer, is quicker, can restore glucose uptake in diabetic muscles in just two weeks.
Obviously the 30% memory boost mostly happens to people who start out sedentary. There may not be such spectacular gains for people who are already semi fit. But it only took 12 weeks.
Researchers at McMaster University who examine the impact of exercise on the brain have found that high-intensity workouts improve memory in older adults.
Researchers […]
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We need more free speech, not less
Is National Australia Bank scared of this? @ExtinctionR
The witchdoctor activists have been demanding bankers and insurance firms boycott new coal mines. One by one these corporate giants have jumped to obey, like towers of saluting jelly. Australia’s PM, Scott Morrison, has “threatened a radical crackdown” as if there is some way, and some worth, in forcing free people to choose a sensible option. But this is not the way. What the nation needs is not more laws to stifle speech but someone with the balls to speak freely. Persuade the nation instead! Half the country quivers in fear of being called a climate denier by a teenage girl. Tell them to grow up and get over it.
The activists are just namecalling bullies — too chicken to engage in polite conversation because their case falls apart like a crystal mousetrap — looks good, but destroys itself on deployment. If they had overwhelming evidence they just need to explain it — not beat people over the head with it. Australians are good people, right?
They’re only a threat if we take them seriously
Whatever we do, don’t take them seriously. Instead […]
That’s it: It was 4% cloudier in 1985, then roughly the same after 2000 — that’s the Pause and the Cause
A new paper in Russian, by OM Pokrovsky, shows that global cloud cover decreased markedly from 1986 to 2000. This is a very large decline in terms of the planetary atmosphere. Pokrovsky uses ISCCP satellite data (the “International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project” — a US program). It’s the best cloud data there is. The effects of clouds are so strong that most of the differences between IPCC-favoured-models comes from the assumptions the models make about clouds. Cloud feedbacks are the “largest source of uncertainty”. [IPCC, 2007]
Clouds cover two-thirds of the Earths surface, reflecting around 30% of the total energy from the Sun back to space. A small change in cloud cover can easily warm or cool the planet, like a giant pop-up shade-sail.
This, on its own, explains all the warming that occurred from 1986 – 2000. It explains the pause. We don’t know why clouds decreased, but we know it wasn’t due to CO2, which kept rising relentlessly year after year, and even faster after the turn of the century.
Something else is driving cloud formation, or […]
Battery back-up is so expensive and uneconomic that South Australian householders are ignoring the SA governments offer of a $6000 gift to entice them to buy them.
One man installed the batteries and still spent $18,000. Obviously batteries are a “tempting” offer for renters and the poor (if they win lotto).
Home battery scheme off to sluggish start in SA, despite $6,000 subsidy
Richard Davies, ABC
For the past 12 months, the SA Government has offered households $6,000 towards a battery, as well as access to low-cost loans to install solar panels. But so far only about 3,700 have applied, with only 2,000 batteries installed — significantly less than the target of connecting 40,000 households over four years.
Energy analyst Tristan Edis said …
“At best, you’d be getting a payback at around eight years…” and “another reason was that feed-in tariffs to export solar energy back to the grid were still relatively generous — about 15 cents per kilowatt hour.
South Australia is the economic space where one distorted market signal meets another.
The opposition could have pointed out how this hurts the poor, but instead complain that the conservative govt […]
The next annual giant UN climate junket was due to be held in Santiago, Chile on Dec 2 – 15. But protests have driven the country into a state of emergency, 20 people have died, and 3 of the countries six train lines are not functional. It’s so bad, it may take six months to restore the train lines. The protests are reminiscent of the Yellow Vests in France — they started over a minor hike in prices (to train tickets) but escalated rapidly, are largely leaderless, but are obviously very angry.
Chile’s president has just, tonight, pulled out of hosting both the UNFCCC conference, and APEC as well.
A few days ago both sides of politics were claiming the protesters as their own. But with this extraordinary news it’s going to be hard for Saint Greta’s team to say that the protesters want carbon taxes and climate action which is why they destroyed the trains.
Greta is on the way overland.
Chile cancels climate and Apec summits amid mass protests
BBC News,
Chile has pulled out of hosting two major international summits, including a UN climate change conference, as anti-government protests continue.
October 31st, 2019 | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
Just another renewables subsidy
The Prime Ministers office has announced $1 Billion boost for power reliability which translates as a billion dollars spent on emergency measures we wouldn’t need if we hadn’t spent billions recklessly and artificially on a transition we didn’t need to have.
Ten years ago Australia didn’t have to spend a single dollar, on any batteries, pumped storage, or “grid stabilizers”. And it didn’t need extra interconnectors. For decades the FCAS was largely free, thanks to giant turbines from coal plants. If we wanted grid unreliability back then, we’d probably have had to pay for it.
The Liberal National Government will establish a $1 billion Grid Reliability Fund to support Government investment in new energy generation, storage and transmission infrastructure, including eligible projects shortlisted under the Underwriting New Generation Investments (UNGI) program.
This is a government fund to support governments “investing” in energy generation?
The new $1 billion fund will be administered by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), drawing on the energy and financial markets expertise that has seen the CEFC invest more than $7 billion in clean energy since its establishment in 2012. The Fund represents the first new capital provided […]
California’s devastating Kincaid Fire located in Sonoma County has grown to over 66,000 acres and NASA’s Terra satellite captured this dramatic image of the smoke plume cascading down the coast. OCt 27, 2019. | NASA image.
In Western Australia (WA) we have incendiary gum trees, regular droughts, and humidity so low that sometimes the clothes dry in the washing machine. Far be it for me to tell Californians how to manage their forests, but thought it worth a mention that Western Australian State govt do managed burns on 8% of the forest each year, and our top experts say it should be twice as much.
Compare that to California, where the rate of prescribed burning is now around 0.2% of the forest or so. Not the same type of fire-loving trees, but still the flammable kind…
BushfireFront: WA burns about 8% annually
A regime of green burning also produces a healthier and more vigorous forest and is better for biodiversity. This approach was applied rigorously in WA forests for nearly 30 years, with tremendous success. Unfortunately since about the 1980s green burning has been under constant attack from environmentalists and academics. As a result, in […]
The Australian BOM has lost its way
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is paid more than a million dollars a day, and the planet is under seige, yet the paint is peeling off some Australian thermometer screens, the grass is long, and wasps are nesting in them. What once were large 230 litre wooden boxes have shrunk to 60 litres and are now even turning to plastic. The old glass thermometers are being replaced with electronic gear that can record a burst of hot air — yet somehow those freak high spikes are supposed to be comparable to temperatures recorded 100 years ago by slow glass thermometers.
Old larger boxes protected thermometers from sudden changes in air temperature.
Left: Len Walker with a 230L screen in 1940. Right: Blair Trewin with a modern 60L Stevenson screen.
Possibly the hardest thing to explain is that even though the BOM collected comparison data on the different types of thermometers, which might help to assess new versus old, they routinely throw the data away. Compounding that, the metadata on sites is incomplete, missing, lacking in documentation. Giant six lane highways are built next to equipment sites but not recorded. There is a huge […]
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