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Third World Science with First World Funding
Is James Cook University a grants machine or a research institute?
James Cook University reviews ex-student’s ‘fishy’ findings, by Graham Lloyd, The Australian
Oona Lönnstedt has been prolific, writing alarming papers on microplastics, acidification, and reef degradation. But her work looks like a trainwreck. One paper has been withdrawn, in another it was “found that Lonnstedt did not have time to undertake the research she claimed.” She’s been found guilty of fabricating data on the microplastics study. Now Peter Ridd has pointed out that the photos of 50 Lionfish appear to contain a lot less than 50 fish. Images have been flipped, spun or “manipulated” so the same fish appears more than once.
James Cook has done what any ambitious, money-hungry grant troughing institute would do, a very slow investigation of allegedly corrupt behaviour and a very quick sacking of the honest researcher who threatens to expose them. Any respectable Science Minister would freeze all grants to James Cook until this situation was resolved and reversed.
Send your thoughts to The Hon Karen Andrews. Contact her here: karen.andrews.mp AT aph.gov.au. There is a crisis in Australian science. Who is going to […]
Everyone “knows” fires are caused by climate change, but how many Australians know that when it comes to the huge Californian fires of October 2017 as many as 750 civil suits have been filed against Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E),the 150 year old utility in California? The fire bill is running at around $30 billion dollars. PG&E are facing financial ruin, calling in a Chapter 11, and going broke.
That’s bad news for people filing the claims, but it is also bad news for renewable energy.PG&E are a major holder of some $35 billion dollars in long term green energy contracts many of which are at above market rates. PG&E may not have to pay out those high prices which means the Green industry will be hurt too.
What goes around comes around. Bad science begets bad business. The Green Industry could have cared enough about the environment to speak out about reducing fire risks through managing fuel loads, and the fires would have been less damaging. Instead they were busy putting up windfarms to stop bushfires instead.
Meanwhile their friends are still doing their best to increase fuel loads in order to reduce CO2 (and stop bushfires).
PG&E Bankruptcy […]
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9.2 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
It’s not well known, but in the same way that climate change causes every hot weekend it also causes snow dumps, avalanches, and freak weather. The scientific link is just as strong and calculated the same way. Take a tendentious cross-correlation on free-range seasonal assumptions, and then pour Vodka in the Cray.
If only the Germans had built more windmills they could have stopped this. Chaos in ski resorts, people trapped, road closed, flights canceled
Three metres of snow fell in the space of 48 hours in some parts of the country and more than a metre is forecast to fall today and tomorrow. — The Times (paywalled)
Heavy snow paralysed much of Europe for yet another day, cutting off mountain villages, sparking avalanches like one that crashed into a Swiss hotel, and killing at least four people.
At least 21 weather-related deaths have been reported in Europe in the last 10 days.
—ABC
With three million dollars to spend today (like every day) the ABC found cute photos of white stuff on cuddly sheep and scooters to fit the deadly theme. Nice.
There is avalanche danger, blocked roads and floods in […]
Millions of dollars will be burning on electricity tomorrow
With normal hot summer days expected tomorrow price spikes are forecast.
It’s not that hot
These are hot, but not unusual days for the capitals — Adelaide is forecast to be 41C, the other capitals are tame: Melbourne 33, Canberra 39 and Sydney 30. Though small inland cities are baking – like Albury at 44C.
South Australia could burn $36 million an hour
For South Australia tomorrow the AEMO is forecasting the state will need 2,800MW for 2.5 hours at $12,000/MWh. That could be $35m per hour. Note that forecasts in electricity often vary quite a lot from actuals. Looking at the truckload of cash being offered (from a generators point of view) will presumably bring in some extra supply and lower that price.
Forecast prices for Jan 15th 2019 | AEMO
For Victoria, things are even worse
The AEMO is forecasting 9,000MW will be needed at $14,500/MWh for 3 hours. That’s $130 million per hour. Hypothetically, it would be an obscene $390 million dollars just to power the state just from 3 – 6pm. Enough to buy an entire gas fired power plant and have it sitting around […]
Look, another climate expert the BBC won’t be interviewing
Anastasios Tsonis is emeritus distinguished professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of more than 130 peer reviewed papers and nine books. He is just retired, and finally able to speak his mind. [Updated] …though he’s been a climate professor and a skeptic for some years, somehow the media didn’t beat a path to his door. He commented below that rather than staying silent til his retirement he has been skeptical for many years and was free to say so at his university (such a rare thing, how many other profs can we say the same about?). His University of Wisconsin site is here, and his statement here.]
The overblown and misleading issue of global warming
Washington Times
Anastasios Tsonis
The fact that scientists who show results not aligned with the mainstream are labeled deniers is the backward mentality. We don’t live in the medieval times, when Galileo had to admit to something that he knew was wrong to save his life.
Lives are not at risk, but careers sure seem to be. Not medieval times but perhaps modi-eval?
So how […]
When cheap solar is expensive Badly installed solar PV makes Australia’s grid fragile
On August 25 last year there was nearly a system blackout when, improbably, three states of Australia were islanded by one lightning strike. Within seconds, trips were switching, two smelters were load shed to save the grid from collapse, and across the Eastern Seaboard of Australia frequency and voltages surged or fell everywhere. In Sydney 45,000 homes lost power for a couple of hours. Shops had to close. Trains were stopped. Passengers were stranded. Traffic signals were not working on major roads. There was chaos. Industrial users shut down in a mass of 725MW of load shedding.
The AEMO final report on that day has just come out and shows us just how fragile our grid is. This was not so much a freak accident, as an accident waiting to happen.
It turns out that another cost of cheap rushed solar panels is that many drop out with voltage spikes, suddenly going offline and leaving another hole to fill. The numbers are amazing — of panels installed in the last 2 years as many as one-third in South Australia dropped out when we needed them and […]
Australia Wins The Global Patsy Award 2019
The Brookings Institute released a report that claims everyone is better off economically by sticking to Paris, but check out the devastating graphs. Economically, everyone is a loser, but the three biggest losers are Australia, Russia and OPEC.
Australia is doing more, paying more, suffering more and yet will make almost no difference to the global emissions tally in anything other than a purely symbolic impress-your-dinner–guests kind of way.
If Australia left the Paris Agreement, even the left leaning Brookings Institute can’t find much difference in total global man-made emissions. Australia is forcing the renewables transformation faster than anywhere else, it will lose GDP, wages, jobs, investment, and the dollar will fall. All that, and no one could even tell the difference between Paris with Australia, and Paris without.
Clearly Australian negotiators at the UN are incompetent on a whole new scale. If they had Australian’s interests at heart, even a little bit, they would have done this study themselves, and gone to Paris with some realistic comparative data to argue that we are cutting too fast and paying too much. Finalists for most useless Global Negotiator of the Decade are Kevin Rudd, […]
Go on. Prove how much you love the planet, or maybe just outdo the Jones’s and get yourself a $2,000 automatic designer cat door that is draft free, radio controlled and evens opens the door for the cat in case your cat is intellectually challenged.
How many storms will this cat door prevent?
Couple pay $2000 for a cat door to help fight climate change
Petwalk image
This story was first reported on CBC by Greg Rasmussen. What else are public broadcasters for?
Sometimes being energy conscious can mean geeking out on gigawatts, or studying the latest heat exchanger technology. But in this case, it involved splurging on a $2,000 cat door.
The super-insulated, radio-frequency-controlled designer cat passageway is one of many energy saving features in a super energy efficient house being built in West Vancouver.
I thought climate warriors weren’t supposed to have a cat?
Just three million dollars to build a passive “net zero” house:
Costing about $3 million to build, it’s not far out of line in pricey West Vancouver. James said he kept close watch on the extras and said it only cost about 4 per cent more than […]
Tony Abbott won a 90 seat landslide based on a blood oath to Axe The Carbon Tax. In 2014 he was thwarted in the Senate from instigating his plans to clean out the green-machine burden, largely by Clive Palmer and cohort, a coal explorer and senator who was a skeptic til Al Gore visited the week before key legislation was voted on. The people who voted for Clive sure didn’t vote to bankroll the Renewables Industry but that’s what they got, and thanks to the Australia Institute we can see just how much the turncoat cost — about $1,000 per person.
The Australia Institute is suddenly raving about the value of crossbench Senators — especially the ones who did the opposite of what their voters expected — “yay”, democracy. Then they’ve paired it with the release of a nothingburger survey that asked the wrong people no relevant or specific questions so the Institute could pretend Australians approved of the sell-out Senators who wasted $23 billion dollars on a pagan weather-changing plan. Do you like the Senate, then you love Renewables? Cheers Jiminy!
Is the Australia Institute a research group or a PR Agency for Renewables?
Saved By The Bench
MIT researchers think they have solved a bit of a mystery regarding Sahara dust, but if they’re right it means the Sahara Desert has already come and gone 3 – 5 times since humans walked the Earth. The Sahara is the largest desert on Earth, and this would be the largest and longest drought “ever” on the planet (as far as we know).
UPDATED: Commenter Javier points out these drying cycles were known years ago. (See below)
This would rather redefine the whole idea of “climate change” — 3.5 million square miles of Green Sahara turns into Dust-bowl Sahara — and it’s all thanks to sunlight. The drought doesn’t just last 7 years, but more like 7,000. And it’s happening over 9 million square kilometers, an area larger than Australia. The major climate models leaned towards the monsoonal cycle, rather than the longer ice age one. So this theory may have resolved one of the 495 contradictions in climate models. Or not. But the bigger message here is that the sun causes climate change and on a massive scale.
h/t to Roger Tallbloke.
The Sahara is the largest dust bowl in the world, dumping 10 million trucks of dust across […]
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9.7 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
It’s summer, so the BoM and ABC can’t help themselves.
Albany, Hottest Town in Australia
Last week Marble Bar “hit an all time record”. This week, it’s Alice Springs. But the Australian BOM still haven’t used their own fabulous World Class ACORN Temperature data to find the hottest day ever in Australia. They’re still telling people it was in Oodnadatta, on Jan 2nd in 1960, but even dumb deniers know that according to ACORN temperatures hit 51.2C in Albany in far south WA in 1933.
[Marble Bar Dec 28th, 2018] The high temperature occurred at 12:39 pm local time. At that stage, it appeared Marble Bar could crack 50 for the first time — and perhaps even threaten the all-time Australian record of 50.7 in Oodnadatta, South Australia.
Chris Gillham pointed this out the strange anomaly of the cool coastal town that was hotter than a million square kilometers of desert, but four years later the BOM still haven’t resolved the situation. The 51.2C temperature is still there in the data, but the Top Ten Highest Temperature Records remain exactly the same. Is Albany, or is it not, the true record holder? Or is it that the […]
South Australians have so much wind power, too much, that in Quarter 3 last year the AEMO had to intervene to cut off excess wind and solar generation. Ever since the Great Blackout of 2016 new rules mean that there must be enough back up power running to cope with the fickle vagaries of intermittent energy. (Obviously, this wasting of sacred green electrons wouldn’t need to happen if people weren’t so persnickety about blackouts!)
This graph is from the Quarter 3 AEMO report for 2018. It is technically about both wind and solar, but it appears to be mostly wind. Solar is not a star player in Q3 because it’s winter.
Would we put up with any other industrial output that had such a dismal performance. Imagine this was your car….
AEMO Quarter 3 report page 7
Synchronous generation is the kind that comes from machines that spin at 50 Hz (like coal, gas, hydro, nukes). These keep the system stable. Happy happy hertz.
But ten percent of all the wind and solar power had to be thrown away in SA because there wasn’t enough reliable back up power to guarantee the stability of the system.
During […]
Best wishes to everyone for 2019.
Back at the desk soon!
9.9 out of 10 based on 53 ratings
It’s serious folks: If you use models that don’t work, extrapolate, exaggerate, and spin the runes properly, at worst, man-made climate change caused “100 billion dollars of damage” in 2018. It’s another BIN moment (a Big Irrelevant Number).
To put that in perspective, the GWP (Gross World Product) is around $100 Trillion dollars. So, all that inflated climate damage rained upon us and 99.9% of the global economy wouldn’t even notice.
Climate change-induced disasters cost nations at least $100 billion in 2018, says watchdog
News, AFP, AAP, BBC, maybe ABC, CBC, CNN, CBC, everyone with a channel.
As reported by the same people who say “If you want heart surgery, ask a doctor.”
The bill for climate-linked disasters in 2018 is estimated to be more than $100 billion according to a leading UK relief organisation.
A Relief Charity added up these numbers. They couldn’t possibly have anything to gain by inflating them, could they?
From floods to extreme heat, 10 of the worst climate-linked disasters in 2018 caused at least $A120.8 billion worth of damage, says a study released by the charity Christian Aid.
I don’t think they meant to tell us that […]
Channel Seven News.
Unintended consequences: When your insurance to stop the planet burning burns down your house instead.
Storing all that energy in a small box at home. What could possibly go wrong?
Fire crews are warning that solar powered batteries may cause fires that move fast and burn with “ferocity”.
Solar home battery warning after Brisbane house fire
Brisbane Times, Toby Crockford
The homeowner told reporters they had solar panels connected to lithium-ion batteries and suspected the fire started nearby, a view shared by firefighter Malcolm Muscat.
“[There were] approximately three battery banks so lithium-ion, lead-acid batteries, they burn with a ferocity that moves through the house quickly,” Mr Muscat said.
Remember: When the future of the planet is at stake, there’s no such thing as too much insurance.
We just hope the owners had plenty.
Friends and family can be consoled that the house has been sacrificed for a good fashionable cause.
Note this is the “suspected” cause in this fire, but solar panels have been linked to many other house fires.
Does your home need a “fire bunker”? ‘Years to understand’ fire risk of solar power systems
From […]
One big government agency quietly admits renewables make electricity more expensive, and another big gov media agency hides it.
The new AMEC report tells us renewables will make electricity prices go down a tiny 2% in the short run but make electricity more expensive in the long run due to forcing out cheap baseload players. What matters most to Australians — that we can expect our electricity costs to be 2% less than “obscene” for the next couple of years, or that the artificial transition we are forcing on the grid will indirectly make electricity more expensive?
Which message does the ABC headline? Say hello to Trivia!
Renewables set to drive down power prices, new AEMC analysis shows The ABC is essentially a taxpayer funded advertising machine for the renewables industry.
A flood of new renewable energy projects is likely to drive down household electricity bills, according to new analysis by government policy adviser the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC).
On a national basis, household bills are set to fall by 2.1 per cent — but price falls in the eastern states and South Australia are offset by increases in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and […]
Here’s a problem coal fired plants don’t need to worry about.
Sydney’s ‘catastrophic’ hailstorm happened on Thursday, the damage bill said to top $125 million. How much of that damage is to rooftop Solar PV? The last massive hail storm in Sydney was in 1999 — but there were hardly any solar panels then.
From SBS News
There are wild scenes and images everywhere.
Worst Sydney hailstorm in 20 years declared catastrophic
Jessica Cortis and Sascha O’Sullivan, The Australian
At least 50,000 homes remain without power in northern Sydney and more than 1000 calls for help are waiting to be responded to by State Emergency Services after Sydney and the NSW central coast were yesterday rocked by the worst hailstorms in almost 20 years.
Before anyone yells “Climate Change”, Reader, Pat, found stories about hail the size of Eggs in Sydney in November 1929. Hail the size of Tennis Balls fell on Reids Creek near Brisbane in 1934 and hail the size of Tea Cups fell on Brookville in 1902. Paddington had “ice inches deep” on Nov 1, 1931. There are scores more Hail-the-size-of… Maybe building 2 million solar panels on a continent with […]
Opportunity costs are the most invisible costs in the world.
Purely hypothetically, if you wanted to nobble a competing country, you could pay 350.org…
“We know what it takes to stop this industry,” said 350.org’s May Boeve. “It is not a mystery, it is not magical.
Valerie Richardson, The Washington Times
Climate protests cost $91 billion in lost economic activity, chamber study finds
Climate activists fighting to derail pipelines and other energy projects have blocked $91.9 billion in U.S. economic activity and hundreds of thousands of jobs, according to a new report.
See more at: https://www.globalenergyinstitute.org/infrastructure-lost
There is no Economy B. Once we have wrecked this one….
The report analyzed 15 targeted projects, including the hotly contested Keystone XL pipeline, Constitution Pipeline, and Oregon LNG terminal, as well as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s 2014 fracking ban.
In addition to $91.9 billion in lost economic activity, the protests cost nearly 730,000 job opportunities and $20 billion in tax revenue to federal, state and local governments.
…the U.S. surpassed Russia this year to become the world’s largest crude oil producer and has led the world in […]
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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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