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The annual BP Statistical Review of World Energy has been released. Global demand for energy is speeding up again — mainly thanks to China, India and the US. Tellingly, all fuels — coal, oil, gas, nukes and hydro — grew faster than their ten year averages, but not renewables. So the momentum has shifted back to fossil fuels, especially gas which was up a remarkable 5.3%, one of the fastest rates of growth in the last 40 years. Coal grew at 1.4% — twice as fast as the average for the last decade. Coal still supplies 27% of the total energy mix.
Is peak coal yet to come?
Graham Lloyd, The Australian
“As a result, the peak in global coal consumption which many had thought had occurred in 2013 now looks less certain. Another couple of years of increases close to that seen last year would take global consumption (of coal) comfortably above 2013 levels,” the BP report said.
Thank shale gas for saving the world eh?
…without shale gas in America and LNG exports to Asia, notably from Australia, greenhouse gas emissions would be much higher.
Frack for the planet.
The […]
The UK leads the way with more radical rain-dance
h/t James Delingpole, Eric Worrall
If people work only one-day-a-week, they will need to spend the other six days growing food and feeding the chickens in their own back yards.
The head of the so-called conservative government, Theresa May, wants to spend $1,000 billion dollars on fashionable weather, and the leader of the opposition, who may be the next PM, says Brits should work less to save the world. Jeremy Corbyn’s plan last week was to cut working hours to 34 per week, and bring in lots of robots. This week, oh-so-conveniently, a Labour-leaning think tank announces that if a four day week was good, a one day week would be better, and if people worked 10 hours, and got paid 75% less, there will be no more droughts in England and the oceans will fall. Apparently money causes climate change.
Keep your eye on the ball — not on the gambit
The one working day plan is the usual wild gimmick, unmistakably timed to make Corbyn’s plan appear to be in the sensible center. It’s the bread and circuses marketing plan.
Radical scheme to tackle climate change
Rory […]
UPDATE: This beautiful graphic doesn’t show on the home page in some browsers. Click to open the post. Best way to protect the environment? Save the children. Cheap energy and clean water go a long way…
h/t @mattridley
When babies are at high risk of dying prematurely, parents respond by having lots of kids. Once medical conditions improve and infant mortality goes down parents have fewer kids. Overpopulation is solved by improving healthcare. Source: https://t.co/GLzfzzZ8KL pic.twitter.com/oeM4ofXCXe
— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) June 6, 2019
The original creator was Robert Wilson @countcarbon May 14 who went on to split the regions:
This infographic proved popular. So I have split it out to show changes in child mortality and fertility in Europe, Asia and Africa pic.twitter.com/xKq9ovdlGN
— Robert Wilson (@countcarbon) May 18, 2019
The data in the cool graphics come from GapMinder. Love those graphics!
So what will it be? On the one hand some predict the global population will level and start to decline this century. See Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker. They argue the global population is headed for a steep decline—and in many countries, […]
h/t to Charles the moderator at WUWT
In the latest Pew survey of 6,000 Americans 50% see made-up news as a “very big problem” — on a par with violent crime and income inequality. Sadly 46% don’t realize “climate change” is fake news.
Not surprisingly more Republicans than Democrats worry about fake news. In the “starkest” difference — while many people think the fake news comes from politicans — 60% of Republicans blame the journalists themselves, whereas only 20% of Democrats did.
Many Americans Say Made-Up News Is a Critical Problem That Needs To Be Fixed
Pew Research (Google cache link because the proper link wasn’t working).
A solid majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (62%) say made-up news is a very big problem in the country today, compared with fewer than half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (40%). Republicans also register greater exposure to made-up news. About half of Republicans (49%) say they come across it often, 19 percentage points higher than Democrats (30%).
One of the starkest differences, though, is in assigning blame for creating made-up news and information. Republicans are nearly three times as likely as Democrats to say journalists create […]
Media elements in Australia are pushing the myth that aging coal plants are failing and that they can’t handle summer heat as if a plant with an operating temperature of 570°C plus will work at 38°C and fail at 40°C. It’s a hot topic today because AGL has just flagged an extended outage of seven months for one unit at Loy Yang A2. That may linger well into summer — potentially out of action til mid January. Ouch. The outage may wipe $100m off AGL’s profits, though if it pushes up wholesale prices, maybe not. With one more billion-dollar-summer-spike AGL may even come out ahead…
Old coal plants don’t have to die, we can just keep fixing them. The owners of Vales Point coal plant in NSW have a plan to keep it running up to 70 years.
Paul McArdle, expert grid generator analyst, who writes at WattClarity, protests at the repeated misinformation and points out that there has been no increase in “sudden trips” as the Australian fleet of coal power stations ages. Nor are these failures more likely in summer. It’s just that we notice them more then. He points out that the failure rate across the whole […]
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How many climate marches does it take to stop a storm?
Photo by Vlad Tchompalov
A new climate model includes “social processes” to predict the climate. They expect the fashionality of hybrid cars or solar PVs will help predict the future climate. So serious researchers are now feeding their models with trends in human behaviour. Though there’s no sign climate models may use the million-mile-an-hour solar wind, nor changes to the solar magnetic field that’s bigger than Earths orbit. They’re also not using solar spectral changes, but who cares about the odd quadrillion joules of ultra violet fritzing or not-fritzing our ozone layer? So much better to track twitter trends on solar panels instead.
The fixation on CO2 is so obsessive compulsive it’s practically a science cult. This kind of work puts the psycho in psychology.
Years from now when everyone agrees it was The Sun, historians are going to fish deep from this well of academic obsession:
New global warming model highlights strong impact of social learning
Human behavior influences a wide range of complex systems, including ecosystems, social networks, and the climate. Moreover, these systems impact human behavior, creating a feedback loop. Human behavior is […]
Just another way cheaper electricity saves lives.
Photo by Photo by noodle kimm on Unsplash
It turns out hotter rooms have higher indoor pollution. Levels of formaldehyde are lower in the morning and rise with the temperature. Air conditioning in hot summers, keeps the temperature down and will reduce the amount of formaldehyde and other pollutants from out-gassing from furniture and gypsum walls. Obviously those who can’t afford to run the air conditioner and who live in warmer rooms in summer will be exposed to more pollution.
Though the worst situation was in 1970s homes with radiant heaters installed on gypsum sheets. In that case, people who can’t afford to heat may avoid some fumes.
Opening windows will clear out the indoor pollution, but houses are increasingly being designed to stop draughts to be more energy efficient.
The message: get rich or open windows when it’s nice outside, move those bar heaters off the walls, and buy peace lilies, bamboo palms, and dracaenas.
Researchers uncover indoor pollution hazards
By Tina Hilding, Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture
PULLMAN, Wash – When most people think about air pollution, they think of summertime haze, traffic or smokestack […]
Hitting the presses today, the vacuous news that lots of companies picked huge numbers out of the air using broken models to guess hyperbolic climate losses coming in the next five years, counter to all the trends for the last hundred years which show declining losses on a GDP basis. The world got warmer but the disasters got less nasty. Less bushfire, less cyclones, less tornadoes, less death per capita. The trends are all good. The only thing that’s up is the number of panic merchants.
World’s biggest firms foresee $1 trillion climate cost hit
LONDON (Reuters) – More than 200 of the world’s largest listed companies forecast that climate change could cost them a combined total of almost $1 trillion, with much of the pain due in the next five years, according to a report published on Tuesday.
So hundreds of companies have offered the climate world a free hit for PR by making a guess. They fall into two kinds of companies –The badgered and harried and the profiteers. See below for examples. Firstly, here’s the only chart that matters.
Global Weather losses are down:
If CO2 causes climate events we need more of it. The […]
Solar subsidies were scrapped in the UK in April, and new solar installations promptly dropped from 79MW a month to 5MW last month, in a 94% fall.
Home solar panel installations fall by 94% as subsidies cut
Jillian Ambrose, The Guardian:
The Labor party accused the government of “actively dismantling” the UK’s solar power industry…
…showing that they don’t understand what “actively” means. If the government was active, solar panel owners would be charged for using the grid as back up, and asked to pay back the subsidy. They could use a feed-in-tariff equal to wholesale coal rates (4c KWh) to pay down their debt. Perhaps one day they’ll compensate other users for voltage surges, damaged equipment, and higher electricity bills too.
It’s not just English, Labor is also struggling to understand “supply and demand”:
Standing in for Jeremy Corbyn, Long-Bailey said solar power had the potential to cut household bills and carbon emissions while creating thousands of jobs.
Studies show every green job created caused two useful jobs to go away, or possibly even four. In Scotland the VERSO study showed for each Green Job created, 3.7 were lost. When electricity costs more, […]
Does anyone think China or India will rush to point out how stupid we are? They laugh at us quietly, as we hobble ourselves with unreliable infrastructure that produces green electrons and vandalizes our cheap baseload power.
The world has 150 years of coal, and China and India are going to use it (unless they get cheap nukes, in which case, coal really will be worthless). Meanwhile the West puts white-elephants on every roof…
China And India Will Watch The West Destroy Itself
By Todd Royal, Eurasia Review
Without energy you have nothing. China and India understand this better than the west since their citizenry and leaders view energy through the lens of what will help over two-billion-combined-citizens; join the prosperous, western, consumer-driven world…
Naïve-thinking, bordering on western suicide, believes China and India will stop using fossil fuels, led by coal. Each country understands coal is plentiful (“estimated 1.1 trillion tonnes of proven coal reserves worldwide that at current rates of production will last 150 years”), and it is scalable, reliable, cost-effective to the end user, and has the best energy density of all fossil fuels or renewables available.
China is currently […]
Biblical doom coming says prophesy
Limbourg Bros, Folio 108: Hell. circa 1416.
A new report by a “Breakthrough” think tank has arrived to leave no stone, or cliche, unturned in scaring the kiddies. Whole thesauruses have been ransacked: the threat is existential, lethal, and not survivable. The End Days include choas, collapsing ecosystems, with devastating wildfires. “Nuclear War is possible”. (Yes, just like it was in 1962 when CO2 was 317 perfect ppm.). Will zero emissions bring World Peace? Why not. It can solve everything else.
The Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration is run by two men from Melbourne who apparently long for the little ice age. To get back there they take the climate models that don’t work and amplify their worst guesses into an apocalypse. They pluck the most ominous quotes they can find to create a sense that the IPCC are just another bunch of bureaucrats hiding the awful truth. As if Big-government is on the side of skeptics.
It’s not about observational evidence so much as quote-mining. If a professor once said something ominous, suggestive of oppression or of censorship, that’s grist for the carbon-mill. Naturally, they focus on Arctic Sea Ice since it’s […]
Al Gore is here in Australia to train 1,0o0 useful idiots on Unscience, neolithic reasoning and witchcraft. The man with no climate science expertise, and a huge vested interest is being paid by taxpayers to train people to chant “consensus” and pretend that wind and solar can stop storms and hold back the tide. These obedient fools help to destroy any conversation about science by reciting anti-science bumperstickers like “the science is settled”, “gravity is real” and “tobacco, tobacco, tobacco”. Because, hey, the tobacco industry funded merchants of doubt, and they were wrong, so therefore Ergo Prompter Upchuck, all government scientists are right on Everything, All Of The Time, and you are an idiot denier.
Repeat after me: There were no storms in 1703. Droughts didn’t exist. It wasnt hotter, colder, deadlier and more extreme for most of human history and 20 times as many people didn’t die of cold.
Global Bullies Unite and ask Anna Palaszczuk for money. Suffer the Queensland taxpayer. The Labor Party in Queensland should pay this money back, it’s an advertising expense.
Fittingly, The Gore effect strikes again. Snow fell in Queensland. (The last time it fell was 2015.)
Alan Jones asks why the Queensland […]
Several National MP’s have pushed for the Australian Parliament to discuss whether the land with more uranium than anywhere else should use nuclear power. Typical how it takes conservative politicians to raise the question about one of the most successful low-carbon generations there is. On the one hand a million animals might go extinct, seas will swallow up our cities and children won’t know what snow is. On the other hand, one forty year old plant in a modern democracy came unstuck when a 13 m tidal wave hit and at least one person died. The Greens are more afraid of nuclear power than they are of climate change.
If there really was a problem with global warming, we’d want conservatives in charge, because they’d solve the problem, and more cost effectively.
Unbeknown to most Australians there are 451 nuclear plants around the world. The only advanced nations that are truly without it are Australia and New Zealand. Nations like Norway, Ireland, and Poland don’t have nuclear power plants but are connected via a grid to countries which do.
The IEA last week published a report titled “Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System”. I’ll say more about that soon. […]
Mysterious CO2 activity in New Zealand shows Phytoplankton at work
Tom Quirk both finds a mystery and solves it.
Emiliania huxleyi coccolithophore | Alison Taylor.
Carbon dioxide is a “well mixed gas” yet CO2 levels over New Zealand start rising there each year in March — a whole month before we see it CO2 start to rise over Tasmania. Air over Cape Grim in Tasmania will be blown by the prevailing wind over to New Zealand about five days later. So these two stations should be showing similar numbers throughout the year. Instead some process in NZ is pushing up CO2 early. Levels also peak earlier in New Zealand, and by September, in early spring, some process around NZ is pulling the CO2 out of the sky. Both NZ and Tasmania share large forested areas, so that wouldn’t explain the difference.
Quirk wondered if it had something do with phytoplankton, so he searched for satellite data that measures chlorophyll in the ocean and shows, voila, that there is major activity right around the Baring Head station at the same time as CO2 levels are falling. Indeed, the station is smack in the middle of a mass phytoplankton bloom.
He […]
Two weeks later, and the excuses are still flowing.
The left lost because: a/ their policies were stupidly ambitious and unfundable, or 2/ Tasmanian greens went too far north.
The ABC says “2”.
If only Bob Brown had got some Queenslanders to do the Adani protest instead, Bill Shorten would be PM:
Environment leaders reflect on their role in the ‘climate election’
Michael Slezak, ABC Enviroment and Science Ad Writer:
Like many Australians, green groups were surprised by the federal election result.
Underlying much of their campaigning was the belief that the majority of voters wanted stronger climate action.
But the results did not seem to bear that out.
Did environmental groups fail to read public sentiment? And did they, in fact, help the Coalition to victory?
It’s all so easy in hindsight:
One of Australia’s leading social researchers, Rebecca Huntley, said the Stop Adani Convoy strategy was bound to fail.
“People from outside the area coming in — that just pisses people off,” said Dr Huntley, who heads up Vox Populi Research.
ABC Staff can always find someone to say what the journalists […]
A big new study by electricity grid nerds (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) shows that after all the money and pain of 20 years of forced transition Australia’s electricity has shifted from 85% coal powered to 75% coal powered, which cost billions and as a bonus, made electricity more expensive and unstable. We drove out some brown coal, but swapped it for black coal. Instead of ousting coal power, the extra solar and wind power replaced some gas and hydro.
The authors are genuine independent experts, and the report is incredibly detailed — so this is rare — but still suffers from serious drawbacks:
The team doesn’t question the need for an artificial expensive transition. Almost all the problems they describe are caused by government policies that task our grid with changing the climate as well as producing cheap and reliable electricity. In a grid being ruined by inept policy, the implied solutions almost all involve more regulation and government policy. If our gas prices are too high we could ban sales overseas, but then we lose the export income. The left hand steals from the right. The free market solution is to use another fuel, […]
Could the ABC be more incompetent? Not only do they deny linguistic history, fail to do basic research, have no data, nor cogent argument, they don’t come up with any new words in common use, and they resort to kindergarten name-calling as if it was “scientific”.
Here’s a group of paid propaganda workers who have destroyed basic English — now pretending that the distortion of the language was somehow a natural grassroots progression instead of their own sloppy tool to silence debate.
Climate change has started to influence our language. Here’s how
by someone called “ABC News Breakfast”
Climate change isn’t just affecting our planet, it’s also shifting the language we use, as idioms take on new meaning and words are created to express the unique phenomenon.
Some words have been popularised by musicians and filmmakers, while the rather grandly named Bureau of Linguistic Reality has started crowdsourcing new terms and definitions.
The Guardian media outlet also announced this month it was updating its style guide on climate, suggesting “climate sceptic” be swapped for “climate science denier”, and “global warming” for “global heating”.
Let’s be real, the term “denier” has been […]
Back in the unpoliticized Pliocene it’s possible that cosmic rays bombarded Earth and triggered lightning which started fires all around the Earth. This may (warning: speculation) have pushed human ancestors to stand on two legs. In the politicized Holocene, however cosmic rays are “irrelevant”. Ancient cosmic rays can set the Earth on fire apparently, change dominant species, and leave a charcoal layer around the Earth. But changes in cosmic rays lately can *not* cause any changes in modern lightning and cloud cover.
Color me skeptical that there is a cause and effect link between fires and homo-four-legs becoming homo-two-legs. It’s possible, and interesting, but a little bit “just so”. There are many advantages in standing upright — seeing further, reaching higher, standing in water, and carrying booty or babies. Some dinosaurs also evolved to be bipedal.
The study reminds us that for most of human history Space Weather was important. It’s only modern climate models that decree astronomical-stuff = zero.
Another previous study showed that lightning strikes occur in time with the spinning Sun in 150 year old Japanese farm records.
Did ancient supernovae prompt human ancestors to walk upright?
Supernovae bombarded Earth with cosmic energy […]
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