“Biggest crisis in a lifetime”, “worse than GFC” hits Australian business — electricity costs

The closures and “heartbreaking” decisions are escalating as electricity contracts for businesses are being renegotiated in the new era of higher wholesale electricity prices. Family run operations that have survived for 40 years are being destroyed. Years of work, investment and training are being erased.

UPDATE: Dated July 2017

Businesses brace for crippling energy bill increases

Frank Chung News.com

“This is the biggest business crisis I’ve seen in my lifetime,” said Peter Strong, chief executive of the Council of Small Business Australia. “The GFC was managed and it affected everybody, but this is only Australia and we cannot see a solution.

“What we’re hearing is terrible. We’re seeing closures have already started, I fully expect there will be more closures and staff put off. When you’re running a small supermarket, where do you find an extra $70,000?”

Businesses are more exposed to the rapidly rising wholesale electricity costs than householders are, and long term contracts are being renegotiated. As they do, rises of 120% are hitting small businesses.

The price hikes hitting businesses of up 120 per cent — dwarfing the 20 per cent increases faced by households — have […]

White elephant solar panels: “force-feeding” high voltage, raising costs, breaking things, shutting themselves down

Some days I wonder if I should spread stories that make us sound like a recidivist third-world backwater struggling to maintain our voltage. But the ABC is already smashing away.

Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be another drawback to solar panels, lo! Solar Panels are pushing up the voltage at midday often as high as 253 Volts when it supposed to be more like 230 to 240V. This means appliances are using more electricity, that makes bills even higher. It may also be breaking appliances (making other bills go higher too). We’re not really sure about that, but when that study is done, it’ll already be 1.8 million panels too late.

Non-solar users are paying for this surge (and the appliances) — for every 1% increase in voltage, the costs go up 0.7%. Then, to ice that gravy-cake, the inverters on solar panels are also shutting off at 253V, meaning that poor home owners who paid thousands are not generating power for the grid. All up, solar is bad for you, bad for them, bad for our light-globes.

The warning comes from groups running the electricity networks in Australia.

Spot the key word missing from the ABC headline […]

Glaciers on the move: Two minutes of extreme climate change on Swiss Alps, Italian beaches

The next ice coming to Europe might look something like the last ice age shown in this simulation. A time when Venice will be top of a long paddock that stretches to Albania.

In school children are taught to hyperventilate about the last 30m retreat of glaciers that never stayed put ever.

Instead, they could be studying this… (click to start)

At the 24,000 year BC point glaciers have wiped out Zurich, Bern, Geneva.

Image the effect on people if this were shown everytime a Swiss Alps disaster story was run?

OK, so it is a model

Advance and retreat of the Alpine glaciers during the last glacial cycle from Julien Seguinot on Vimeo.

About 25000 years ago, Alpine Glaciers filled most of the valleys and even extended onto the plains. Using a computer model that contains knowledge on glacier physics based on modern observations of Greenland and Antarctica and laboratory experiments on ice, help from traces left by glaciers on the landscape, and one of the fastest computers in the world, this animation is an attempt to reconstruct of the evolution of Alpine Glaciers in time from 120000 years ago to today.

Meanwhile, WWF […]

Wind Turbines are new top predator in the ecosystem

Wind turbines either kill or scare away three quarters of buzzards, hawks and kites at three sites in India. That makes them the new “top predator” in the ecosystem according to new research. Perhaps not the niche that Greens were expecting wind farms to occupy.

It’s not all bad news though, fan-throated lizards are pretty happy about not being dinner.

h/t GWPF

Lizards vote for wind.

Wind farms are the ‘new apex predators’: Blades kill off 75% of buzzards, hawks and kites that live nearby, study shows

Harry Pettit for Daily Mail Online

Predatory bird numbers are four times higher in areas away from wind turbines This is having a devastating ‘ripple effect’ across the food chain It means numbers of certain small animals are growing unchecked 9.6 out of 10 based on 69 ratings […]

Climate change causes exploding rat plagues, locusts, cockroaches of the oceans…

Horror Story #241: Rat Plagues coming

How biblical can it get?

If you aren’t scared of a 2 degree rise (really, who is?) then be afraid, plagues of rats shall explode upon your house!

Climate Change Is Scary; ‘Rat Explosion’ Is Scarier

Faye Flam, Bloomberg Opinion

What’s so scary about climate change?

The term is not scary — at last not in a visceral, skin-crawling sense. Scientists have shown that the likely 2 degrees of global warming to come this century will be extremely dangerous, but, you know, “2 degrees” is hardly a phrase from nightmares and horror films.

How about “rat explosion”?

As the climate warms, rats in New York, Philadelphia and Boston are breeding faster — and experts warn of a population explosion.

Climate change only makes bad things live and grow stronger:

The physics of climate change doesn’t have the same fear factor as the biology. … so populations will crash or explode as anthropogenic climate change continues to make wet areas more sodden and dry areas, more parched.

What genius research is this:

… rats have a gestation period of […]

Weekend Unthreaded

9.7 out of 10 based on 20 ratings

Ross Cameron you have been Deleted — how the Delete-People-Tactic destroys discussion

UPDATE: People are still angry over this on Twitter.Sign the petition. Unpermitted words have a Weapons-Grade power over useful words at a rate of a billion to one

Speak a Forbidden Term and your entire career can be neutralized instantly. It doesn’t matter how many other useful ideas or contributions you make. Any breach unleashes a tidal wave of unrighteous indignation. Then the honest players fold like daffodils in a breeze and leap to carry out the judgement of twitter mobs. Why do good people help the Lynch Mob every time?

The permitted word list is defined by the PC mob, it changes at random, and post hoc, and only applies to people who threaten collectivist power. Eminent scientists can be called “deniers” as if they are mental morons, they can be likened to pedophiles, asbestos-pushers and Hitler, and that’s not only OK, those people get lavish taxpayer funded careers and prizes. (Not mentioning any names Stephan Lewandowsky and Robyn Williams.)

Freedom of Speech is under threat — we have to stand up to this

Tuesday, Ross Cameron said the four forbidden words “slanty-eyed, yellow-skinned“. Rude, yes, dynamite, no. They were better left unsaid, and potentially offensive, but not a […]

Just another bunch of old volcanoes we didn’t know about, found off Tasmania

A few weeks ago a CSIRO boat mapped out a string of 3 kilometer high seamounts that no one knew about. They are 400km east of Tasmania and sit in water 5 km deep (so no one is going to run into them, even in a military sub.)

But remember, even though 80% of the ocean floor is unmapped, and we haven’t even logged, named or noticed thousands of volcanoes, we *know* that they are not heating the ocean, changing ocean currents, or affecting our climate. Skillless models tell us so. (Pay us your money).

h/t Thanks to Tallbloke

Huge underwater volcano chain discovered off Tasmania

Denise Chow, Euronews

“We’ve only mapped a tiny fraction of the ocean floor,” said Andrew Fisher, a marine geologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the new discovery. “We have more detailed maps of Mars, Venus and the moon than we do of the seafloor. Other planetary bodies can be mapped in high resolution with satellites, but on Earth, the water layer gets in the way. The only way is to go out with ships.”

More than 80 percent of the ocean […]

Rising seas? Hundreds of Pacific Islands are growing, not shrinking

This should end all the Pacific Island climate claims right here. A new study of over 700 islands for decades shows that even though seas are rising faster than any time in the last million years, somehow no islands with people on are shrinking. This means there are no climate change refugees from any vanishing island. Plus it’s more proof that highly adjusted satellite data is recording sea levels on some other planet.

Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.

Look how closely these researchers are tracking the shores. Below on Tuamoto, French Polynesia, scientists can tell you that islets 12 and 14 (see pic) have disappeared since 1962. So we can track roving blobs of sand about 20 to 30 meters across.

….

 

No habitable island, none, got smaller:

The researchers reckon that 10 hectares is about the smallest island you’d want to plonk […]

Only 16 countries are even aiming to reach their Paris targets

The Paris Agreement was always fake news

Only 16 countries have set domestic targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are clearly at least as ambitious as their pledged contributions to the goals of the Paris Agreement, according to an analysis published today (29 October 2018)…

Who are these environmental stars and global suckers?

The 16 countries with targets in national policies and laws that are compatible with their NDCs are:

Algeria, Canada, Costa Rica, Ethiopia,

Guatemala, Indonesia, Japan, FYR Macedonia,

Malaysia, Montenegro, Norway, Papua New Guinea,

Peru, Samoa, Singapore and Tonga.

“We found only six countries that have set economy-wide targets beyond 2030 in their NDCs – Iraq, Cameroon, Brunei, Armenia, Bhutan and Palestine. Only 16 countries plus the EU currently look beyond 2030 in their national laws, policies and directives…”

The committee writing the report seems to have a thing about “economy wide” targets probably because they are the most expensive, profligately wasteful and pointless schemes, like the Australian carbon tax which cost $5310 per ton of carbon reduced. Economy wide schemes […]

80% of Australian don’t want the government to put renewables ahead of costs, health, housing, jobs etc

With boring regularity, when voters are asked to rank their choices, “clean” energy is not a top priority. Only 7% of Australians want the government to promote renewables ahead of other major issues. It’s the same old, same old for years, yet the media and both parties are locked in a death spiral trying to turn it into an election issue. Real people put living Standards above Virtue Signalling, says Alan Moran.

Essential Report Oct 2018: Rocketing into top place is the cost of living. Stuck in the dull middle is renewables.

Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address. Click to enlarge.

Split voters into left and right, and remarkably they all want the same things. (So we’re all still human, though it says something about the type of questions asked.)

Conservative / liberal voters want to be able to afford stuff, stay alive, have a home:

Liberal voters put renewables at number 10 out of 13.

Essential poll 2018. What Australian want the government to address. Click to enlarge.

Labor voters want to be able to afford stuff too:

Even Labor voters are only putting renewables at number 6.

Essential poll 2018. What […]

Don’t miss Dan Hannan in Australia – Perth, Melbourne, Sydney

He’s in Perth Tuesday night. I’ve seen him speak before and he was excellent. I’ll be there. Tickets to Perth here.

“British Conservative Member of the European Parliament Dan Hannan explains why London will soon be closer to Perth than Brussels, and outlines historic opportunities ahead for West Australian entrepreneurs.” With introduction by Andrew Hastie MP.

Dan Hannan In Australia: Melbourne on Wednesday 31 October in conversation with John Roskam and Nick Cater. Sydney, the 2018 Annual John Bonython Lecture with the CIS on 1 November.

 

10 out of 10 based on 27 ratings

Interview with David Evans — breaking the impasse in the climate change debate, and why he became a skeptic

David Evans speaks to Emmett at Resolving Reality radio on why he shifted to being a skeptic (4:15 mins), and on the current state of the climate debate and where climate modelers get their “implacable confidence” from (5:20). David discusses the impasse — the standoff. It’s possible that climate modelers can have the physics right but the model paths wrong.

Quite a bit of the interview is aimed at people new to this debate. Regular readers might enjoy more on the Sun’s role (22 minutes). And some of the history, like the rich pickings of working for the Gravy Train (32:15 minutes).

At 33:00 David discusses the audacious threat to national sovereignty and the near miss of 2009. Useful history to remind us of what is at stake. David goes on to discuss the systematic demonization of non-PC views — he argues that climate change was the test case for the newer more aggressive model of stamping out discussion in so many areas.

David’s research work continues, he prefers to keep a low profile and stay out of the “blood sport” online. I’m not going to put a date on it, original discovery doesn’t work to a timetable, but […]

Weekend Unthreaded

9.5 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

Scientist seals himself in plastic tent for 3 days for “climate change” — aborts in 15 hours, foiled by clouds

A 28 year old guy in British Columbia thought it had some message about climate change if he sealed himself in a primitive biodome with 200 plants. But the sun didn’t shine, the plants didn’t photosynthesize enough, and he “felt sluggish”. CO2 levels were a bit high so he had to abandon the experiment just 15 hours later — calling it “a huge success”. As you would, if you had no connection to actual hardship, or actual success.

The BBC thought this badly planned, unscientific stunt failure was newsworthy and lauded him his 15 seconds of fame and advertising for the cause. Proving that any kind of measurable achievement is irrelevant. If it promotes the religion, anything will do.

I challenge anyone to find a lamer stunt in the history of climate panic

Kurtis Baute: Scientist leaves airtight dome after 15 hours

A self-styled “whimsical scientist” who locked himself in an airtight dome with 200 plants to raise awareness of climate change has ended his experiment.

He thanked fans and described the experience as a “huge success”.

While still inside the dome, he explained his mission in a Twitter thread, writing: “#ClimateChange […]

ABC-Watch: Beyond fake headlines — 61% of company directors do not care about Climate Change

Fake News Lesson: How to turn the views of a minority into National Headlines

Yesterday’s ABC headline tells the world that Australian company directors have started to “care” about climate change. What the ABC don’t mention is that only 17% of them actually ticked the box saying they think the Government should make “climate change” the top long term priority. While more directors were concerned about climate change than any other single issue, most directors thought other things were more important.

For every director who said the government should put climate change at number one, there were more than three who didn’t want that.

The Australian Institute of Directors surveys its 43,000 members every six months on lots of questions. In this round 1,252 members took part and answered something like 40 questions. Only 39% put “climate change” in the top five “long term” issues. So 61% of respondents didn’t think climate change even ranked in the top five issues facing the nation in the long run. Are they all skeptics?

The ABC also forgot to mention that in the short term, company directors wanted the government to fix Energy Policy.

This is what non-stop agitprop looks like

First: […]

ABC-watch: Economist talks unresearched conspiracy science to pretend journalist

Welcome to another $3 million-a-day quality moment on Their ABC

Here’s a Nobel Prize winning economist reviewing scientific evidence — something Nobel Prize winners in physics don’t get to do on the ABC. His interviewer is the star economist Emma Alberici.

The guest opens with near apocalyptic predictions:

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: If more and more of Australia are not liveable because of climate change, you’re not going to be better off.

You know, the future of the world, let alone the future of Australia really is at stake when we are talking about climate change.

These days, wild claims are just introductory wallpaper. Meh.

Who knew, the key scientific evidence was reviewed by economists.

The evidence is overwhelming and I was on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that reviewed the evidence back 1995, …

Which tells you everything you need to know about how rigorous the IPCC science reviews are.

But it would be OK if only he knew something about climate science, the IPCC or its predictions:

…and I’ve kept looking at the evidence and you know, the one mistake we made in 1995 was that we didn’t anticipate how […]

Evil Nature caused Swiss Glaciers to melt faster in 1870 (See solar and volcanic effects)

A study on Swiss Glaciers shows that the fastest melting was in the 1860s and 1870s, long before the first coal fired power. (See that steep decline from 1850-70 in Part a in the graph below.) In Part b see the glaciers have been going back and forward in cycles that somehow have no correlation with human emissions.

Climate models can’t predict any of these turning points, don’t understand any of these cycles, but “doom is coming”.

Pay up your money to make glaciers grow again.

From the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI)

Figure 8. (a) Cumulative glacier length changes for the four glaciers Bossons, Mer de Glace, Oberer (O-) Grindelwald and Unterer (U-) Grindelwald …); (b) glacier length change rate …(c )glacier length changes compared to surface air temperature anomalies for the summer … Panel (d) air temps and stratospheric aerosol optical depth (SAOD) (Click to enlarge and read the proper full caption).

In Part c (above) — glacier lengths correlate with temperatures. In part d the brown spikes are the Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Depth [SAOD] — meaning volcanic dust, black carbon, soot. These were bad years to head to the beach.

In terms of speed, note the lack […]

The largest poll in Australia on Climate Change was the 2013 Abbott landslide election

The flipping of Wentworth just marks a the morphing of the two major parties which started long ago.

The Labor Party now represents the rich and the welfare dependent. The Liberals represent the Deplorable worker and what’s left of the Middle Class and there aren’t many of those in the seat of Wentworth. Turnbull was the perfect fit for the seat as it transited from being a safe Conservative Seat to a safe Collectivist-Virtue-Signalling Seat. He was the Labor-guy badged as a Liberal. Kerryn Phelps is the “ideal” replacement — the Labor-Green candidate badged as an Independent. This made it easier for doctors-wives, lawyers and journalists to vote for an option which was essentially Labor-Green, but had the appearance of being “smarter” and above all the riff raff.

Kerryn Phelps essentially stands for a Get UP approved Labor Green Christmas Wish List: More renewable parasites, death to coal, pandering to collectivist UN committees, a ban on fossil fuel donations (but no ban for government cronies who take big-government funds and donate it to big-government parties.). She wants to restore funding to The ABC because $3m a day is not enough. Heck, they lost 5% a while back.

The vote […]

Unthreaded Party

Majority gone. The Liberals are not paying for the last leadership change, so much as the one before.

Picking a Labor guy to run the Party was never going to end well.

Thank Turnbull (and MP’s that voted for him) for turning a 24 seat majority into one seat rule that he then threw away…

Note to Libs: if the ABC approves, you are doing something wrong.

Latest Count

 

9.5 out of 10 based on 75 ratings