DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) – The world needs an open dialogue about climate change to heal the gap between sceptics and believers since time is running out to cut the emissions that drive global warming, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday.
This may seem important after three decades of skeptics being called deniers, and being shut out of every debate, decision and research grant. But it has all the hallmarks of relevance-deprivation-syndrome. The US people elected a skeptic, and he and Saint Greta have stolen her limelight:
The first two days of the annual Davos gathering were dominated by the back-and-forth between the 73-year-old former businessman Trump and 17-year-old campaigner Greta Thunberg, with corporate leaders caught in the middle, concerned that as well as words, there was a need for concrete decisions.
Statements like this provide cover for the reality which is rampant social ostracism, exclusion, coercion and bullying. But it’s soothing theatre for the Davos crowd who would love to be seen to be diplomatic. They are clapping their own generous image.
She drew applause from the Davos audience when she said opposing sides in polarised debates such as that on climate change had to learn how to talk with each other again.
They won’t be going home and inviting skeptics to dinner.
If Merkel was serious she would be seeking out and holding talks with skeptics — with groups like EIKE in Germany (or any of the many names they could provide from industry and science). We’ll believe she means it when Merkel speaks out against the namecalling and treats any skeptic with respect — other than those who are also leaders of the free world.
Holy Smoke Batman! An astonishing 12,000 fires have started in New South Wales since August. The police have investigated 1700 so far. Of those, fully 42% are described as “deliberately lit” which includes both intentional and accidental and at the moment police refuse to put a number on how many are truly arson, as opposed to people deliberately lighting a campfire which ran amok. Only 156 fires of the total investigated, or 9%, were caused naturally (presumably that means by lightning).
Another 745 fires of the 1700 are not yet determined. There seems plenty of scope to increase the number of man-made fires but I would assume the extent of lightning strikes are already known.
Forty specialist police officers will investigate to zero in on and profile would-be arsonists. “Strike Force Tronto is about profiling. It’s about zeroing in on serial arsonist behaviours that occurs during the bushfire period,” he said.
“That sets the framework for the next fire season so that we do zero in on and target those individuals who we believe may be involved in arsonist behaviour. “This summer we have interacted with 15 individuals that will face court or legal action relative to behaviour around the bushfire period,” he said.
New figures provided by police on Friday showed that legal action has been taken against 55 people for fires that were allegedly deliberately lit since August 1.
Arson and man-made fires threaten the ABC’s reputation and agenda
Long before the police investigated, the ABC announced the “truth” already, using their taxpayer funded crystal balls. Arson obviously doesn’t fit the agenda of the climate change religion. Not only does it show how pointless solar panels and windmills are, but it also shows how the ABC have been misleading the nation to fill their own wallets, or spread their personal religion. The fire issue means millions of Australians may wake up to find out just how politicized their ABC “news” is.
Helpfully, the ABC gives us clues that it is outrageously fibbing. If they say something is “true”, we know it isn’t.
The truth about Australia’s fires — arsonists aren’t responsible for many this season
Only about 1 per cent of the land burnt in NSW this bushfire season can be officially attributed to arson, and it is even less in Victoria, the ABC can reveal.
Given that most fires couldn’t be attributed to anything at that stage, the ABC forgot to mention the “unknown” category, and sliced the data so they could list the smallest possible percentage. In this case, “1%” of the area burnt.
While it is true firebugs remain a legitimate and serious threat, we crunched the numbers provided by police and fire authorities around the country.
The results might surprise you.
Surprised? No. But the self-serving gall of ABC “public servants” never fails to amaze.
Apparently arsonists only light grass fires.
NSW has been the epicentre of Australia’s bushfire crisis, but the facts show arson has little to do with it.
This week, a NSW Police media release revealed 24 people had been charged over deliberately-lit bushfires this season.
However, the majority of suspected arson relates to small grass fires and rubbish bins set alight, which have inflicted negligible damage and burnt a tiny area compared with fires sparked by lightning.
As usual, the ABC finds people with some official title who agree with their message and interviews them. They either don’t ask all the other experts, or if they do, they “forget” to mention it.
If the ABC and other Reality TV Shows have increased the rate of arson with their breathless 24/7 apocalyptic coverage, they don’t mention that either.
In the largest city in a country with 300 years of coal left, yesterday the government asked a few million people to pull down the blinds on a midsummers day, to turn off the pool pumps, and not run the dishwasher from 4 – 8pm if they could avoid it. It was 42 degrees C.
Remember the good old days when the nation could afford to run the air con? Here in metropolis Australia, some days it’s better to bunker down in a few dark rooms with the air con at survival mode.
Welcome to Renewable World. What’s wrong with all those solar panels? Between dust storms and bushfires and the hail in Canberra, possibly they are covered in dust or soot, or perhaps, holes.
Imagine how much productive brain power is being consumed. The whole nation (almost) is becoming involved in management of the hypercomplex random generation network. As well as all those poles and wires and control rooms, we now need radio and twitter to send messages to the serfs to open and close windows, change their work schedules, or run out and click the pool pump off.
The government is advising people reduce electricity demand for a few hours this afternoon, by:
· closing doors, windows and blinds to keep the heat out;
· switching off non-essential appliances such as pool pumps;
· cooling a minimum number of rooms; and setting air conditioners to 26 degrees.
“The peak period for power use in NSW is expected to be between 4pm and 8pm, according to the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and we are asking consumers to reduce their demand during this period where it is possible and safe to do so.”
While the grid appeared to survive another day, things could easily get worse. The peak heat of summer may (or may not) be over, but here in Oz, summer holidays are winding up, and school and industry will return to full demand in the next two weeks, yet NSW is already struggling. If there is a hot humid day in February, things may not work out so well.
The power market operator has been forced to call on emergency reserves for the third time this summer to prevent potential blackouts in sweltering NSW as the electricity grid strained under the the impact of wild weather, generator outages and high demand.
Who cares about being accurate. The point of being a journalist is to tell people what to do. But after twenty years of propaganda the punters are still not getting the message, so Faye Flam (her real name) thinks it’s time to stop using “climate change” and switch back to “global warming”. Apparently a five year old Yale Study suggests that it’s more scary, and Flam has discovered it just in time to wring a bit more propaganda value out of the Australian fires. “Lucky”. eh?
She seems to think that a George W Bush adviser tricked the world into using “Climate Change” because it was less scary.
Seems “Climate change” is vague and doesn’t convey enough urgency.
As scientific terms go, “climate change” is lame. It sounds like something created by committee. And it’s hard to understand as a crisis when we also hear scientists talking about ice ages and other natural changes to the climate happening throughout earth’s history. “Global warming” is something people have worried about for years, though. It’s essentially another term for the same thing, but conveys a planet-wide danger.
She was inspired by Australian Bushfires, because “Warming” means “Hot” and “Hot” means “Fires”.
There’s good evidence that global warming is exacerbating the wildfires raging in southern Australia, but when we call it “climate change,” non-scientists may well wonder what the connection is and how it could have been averted. Call it “global warming,” though, and it’s intuitively easy to understand that if the world is getting warmer on average, then of course some hot places will get even hotter, and eventually some really hot places, such as southern Australia, will go up in flames.
Apparently Southern Australia has just spontaneously combusted. Either that, or science has.
The caption of the photo of kangaroos jumping in the orange haze says: “When the earth gets hotter, some places catch fire.” Which explains why the Sahara Desert is nine million square kilometers of blazing sand.
It’s always an evil right wing conspiracy, even when left wing journalists run the media:
How, then, did the term “climate change” come to dominate its more descriptive predecessor? Some news organizations have pointed to memo, intended to be secret, from George W. Bush adviser Frank Luntz. In it, Luntz proposed avoiding the term “global warming” because it might scare people.
Ask yourself: were left wing journalists really such obedient patsies for a sole Republican memo or is this theory just so much junk?
Then figure out how a term too vague to be used in the media is “useful” for scientists:
But the term “climate change” also caught on among scientists, who have argued that it’s more encompassing, including all the side effects of the carbon dioxide buildup — not only warming, but also changes in rainfall patterns, sea level rise, more dangerous storms, floods and droughts. Seen that way, “climate change” should be the scarier term, but ironically, the Yale/George Mason survey found non-scientists had the opposite reaction — global warming carried a much stronger suggestion of potential catastrophe.
“Climate change” is far too useful for the scaremongers to give up, and next week when the blizzards strike, or the floods come, Global Warming will be quietly packed away again.
Go on — wear the T-Shirt — Global Warming causes Cold Snaps. See what I mean?
Yesterday hail the size of golf balls fell on Canberra:
Windows, cars, gardens smashed. Already there have between 15,000 insurance claims made and it’s been declared a catastrophe. (Tough few weeks for insurers in Australia).
Canberra aims to be 100% renewables (but they aren’t cutting the line to the coal power). Will we ever find out how much the bill for the solar panel damage was?
One hundred and thirty three years ago:
h/t John in Oz.
… (Click to enlarge)
Queanbeyan is Canberra’s twin city, 15 minutes from Parliament House but in the next state. Long before Canberra was even founded, there were shocking hail storms. At a glance, terrible hail storms appear more common in summer.
January 7, 1871: Queanbeyan Hail of “large jagged shapes”, “bigger than pigeon’s eggs” shattered “hundreds of glass windows”, “cut ripe paddocks of wheat to pieces”, was “ruinous on fruit” crops, vine and trees. Many buildings were damaged. Hail lay in “deep drifts on the ground”.
Dec 29th, 1877: Extraordinary Hailstorm in Queanbeyan — large as “oranges” and “cricket balls”, cut through corrugated tin, killed “40 lambs”, knocked down foals, felled a horse. Left a trail of “terrible” destruction.
Dec 2nd, 1919: Destructive hailstorm: “on roofs with the noise of musketry, while others came with such force upon the ground as to bury themselves deep in loose soil, or to rebound from harder lodgements, especially the roads and streets, like tennis balls, two or three feet high…”
Feb 16th, 1956: Hailstorm Canberra’s Longest: …lasted 29 minutes. Some of the largest hail ever seen… “4.8 inches” fell on Yarralumla in 12 minutes. The hail caused “up to 100% losses in stone fruit”… “the most disastrous storm for many years”. 182 points of rain fell on the suburb of Griffith.
Big Government strangles our ecosystems just like it strangles scientific research. Australia has had 57 bushfire inquiries since 1939. We knew what was coming and we knew how to stop it, and we’ve known for eighty years (and indigenous people for thousands). Instead we paid a garrison of gravy trainers to not-read-those-reports and to create the exact conditions we knew would turn into a pyroconvective catastrophe. State Premiers missed a major threat to their people, their industry, our environment. On top of the death and destruction toll, just one industry, tourism, is looking at a $4.5b loss. Heads must roll. If they were misled, then name the names.
Our institutions failed us: The CSIRO didn’t save us, the ABC didn’t. What’s the point of them? Academics and CRC’s could’ve warned the nation, but instead most experts and the “reporters” said renewable energy would prevent these fires, even though climate change has made no difference to rainfall or droughts, which are driven by ocean currents, and solar cycles, not carbon dioxide. Let’s promote those who got it right, and turn off the tap to those that didn’t. Who pays damages? Who gets sacked?
Just do it: less fuel, less rules, more roads, more dams.Read Viv Forbes.
Cartoon thanks to Steve Hunter and the Saltbushclub
Government by Enquiry by Viv Forbes
Politicians hide behind enquiries – their magic answer to all problems, especially bushfires.
Announcing enquiries give the impression of decisive action, they generate fees for armies of barristers, lawyers and bureaucrats, and provide momentary excitement for the media.
The proposed 2020 Australian Bushfires corrobboree will provide a grandstand for the Climate Rebellion Mob who will get starring roles on ABC/Fairfax. Big business will probably propose a carbon tax to fight bushfires while foresters and land owners will hardly be heard.
When the final report is ultimately delivered, the media will be off trumpeting some new climate “emergency” to scare the public. The expensive new report will be quietly filed with all the others.
We’ve had at least 57 bushfire enquiries since 1939 – about one every two years. Anyone who bothers to read them will soon deduce what should be done. Nothing much has changed except there are more people living in fire prone zones with no protection, and more forest and private land was locked up with heavy fuel loads.
The current bushfire tragedy has occurred after 30 years of unprecedented government control of environmental policy at all levels of government. Many of these destructive policies have been imported under so called “international agreements”. As a result, ordinary Australians have been dragged into court for constructing firebreaks or removing dangerous trees on their own land. Governments and green advisers have assumed total stewardship of the environment and they own the results – massive destruction of lives, homes, property, animals and vegetation – over five million hectares and 2,000 homes burnt.
Here is a five point plan which should come from Bushfire Enquiry number 58.
Firstly, reduce the fuel load especially in national parks and forests by cool season burning, grazing, timber harvesting, slashing/mulching and collecting dead fire-wood. Appoint trained and experienced foresters to maintain safe and healthy public forests. Private landowners should also be enabled and obliged to become fire safe. Green-tinged politicians and bureaucrats have prevented or hampered all of these reforms.
Secondly, create and maintain wide clear trafficable roads, tracks and firebreaks through the forests and around towns and private properties. In fire seasons, these patrolled fire-barriers will help to confine any fire to one sector and provide a prepared line from which to back burn if there is an approaching fire.
Thirdly, build more dams and weirs to provide water for fire-fighting and to provide fire havens for humans, animals and vegetation. Increase penalties for arson in times of high fire danger.
Fourthly, abolish all restrictions on responsible management of “protected” vegetation reserves on private land – especially the private land sterilised to fulfil foolish government Kyoto Protocol promises or under government-enforced vegetation protection orders. Governments have created these fire hazards by trying to wrap vast areas of vegetation in cotton wool and green tape (both of which are flammable). Government “protection” of flora and fauna has proved to be the fiery kiss of death.
Fifthly, decentralise fuel and forest management out of the cities and into the regions.
City based politicians and bureaucrats have done enormous harm by locking up land and opposing fuel load reduction.
Decisions on vegetation risk management should be handed to property owners, park rangers, forest managers and rural fire wardens.
There is no useful role for the Commonwealth unless asked by States or regions for logistic support or to help fund bushfire training and fuels management. Otherwise it is better if Canberra politicians keep out of the way – send them all for a holiday in Hawaii. Viv Forbes
To download this article with all images click: Saltbushclub PDF
Viv Forbes has been an explorer, pastoralist and weather-watcher in Queensland and NT for most of his long life. He has lit fires (accidentally and deliberately), and he and his wife have fought fires and had their camps, fences and pastures wiped out by fires. They were both members of a local bush fire brigade for over 25 years. (Judy even had formal training).
Whose fault was it and will they get away with it (like all the other times)?
Twenty seven people died, a billion animals, 2,000 homes, tourism wrecked and a plume of smoke stretched from here to South America. Unless heads roll, this cycle repeats every 10 – 20 years. Imagine if the media was demanding to know how State Premiers had allowed this catastrophe, or if the opposition was accusing the government of listening to the Ivory Tower instead of the firies? The problem is, they’re all complicit. Both sides of politics are guilty, and the media didn’t see this coming either.
We can recognise those avoiding responsibility by the way they fob off hard questions:
1. Let’s blame “climate change” (because these fires are “normal” now, get used to it. Plus luckily no one ever says — “you mean it’s China’s fault?”)
2. Let’s say “now’s not the time to play the blame game” and,
3. Coming soon: “let’s wait for the Royal Commission, or Almighty Investigation, or 28th Fire Report” — or whichever comes last. (Who wants to preempt a report even if we already know what it will say. )
But we already know three State governments have not followed the advice from most past reports. They’ve ignored the fire and forestry scientists who warned them a disaster was coming and fuel loads were too high. They’ve ignored history. Bushfires in Australia are one of the most obvious dangers to live and health and yet few state leaders have bothered to understand them.
Roger Underwood AOM spent years in bushfire management, and was General Manager of CALM in WA (Conservation and Land Management). He is often asked “who’s to blame” and he points at the State Premiers, Minister and Public Servants who listened to university fools and not the bushfire scientists who said “a disaster was imminent” and who told them to clear the fuel.
At the top of the list are the premiers and ministers responsible for land management, such as it is, and bushfire policy, and the public servants in their departments with jurisdiction over forests and national parks. State governments in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria have palpably failed to do the most important job they were elected to do: protect the lives and livelihoods of their citizens and the health of their environment. And their public servants have failed to do the job they are being paid to do: serve the public.
All Big-Government roads lead to death and destruction:
Yet despite the science, the evidence presented by bushmen, the dramatic history of this contininent’s relationship with fire, and the findings of numerous inquiries, successive governments in Qld, NSW and Victoria over the last 25 years have consistently failed to prepare potential firegrounds in the expectation of the inevitable. Not only this, they seem to have actually go out of their way to make things worse: the cut-backs to fuel reduction burning, the closure of access roads and trails in national parks, the decimation of professional forestry and fire management expertise, the turning of the blind eye to the creation of residential subdivisions incapable of being defended, the funding of “research” in the universities that is aimed at making the job of the firefighter more difficult, and the erection of a complex bureaucratic edifices that hinder sensible bushfire preparedness and make fuel-reduction burning almost impossible.
Local Councils are also responsible, but ultimately the State Government is responsible for allowing council nonsense. And State Governments are responsible for Crown land.
By destroying the forestry profession they dumped the job on volunteers:
One of the consequences of the deliberate destruction of the forestry profession and forestry district structures and crews has been that governments now have to fall back on volunteers to fight forest fires.
And, of course, we could have sold all those trees instead of having one big New Years Eve bonfire.
Underwood also describes something that sounds like a Water Bomber Cargo cult. He says it is a futile fantasy with fires this big, a profligate waste of money. During fires ten years ago, government spent $10 million dollars on using a DC10 brought over from the USA. The plane was so big it could only take off and land at Avalon airport in Melbourne. It needed a smaller lead plane to follow, and couldn’t land with the full $45,000 load of fire suppressant, so once it was off the ground it had to dump that stuff somewhere, on fields, or forests or failing that — on whales. If an academic isn’t already asking for a grant to study the effects of fire retardant on wildlife, they will be soon.
*Postscript: NC in comments points out most of the planes used are smaller, which is true, but they’re also impotent against a pyroconvective infero. Plus in a drought especially, Australia just doesn’t have handy Hoover Dams of disposable fresh water to drop on a million hectares of fire. But in true big government style — the DC10’s are so ineffective, we’re getting more of them, due to arrive on Jan 11 and Jan 18, which means, just in time for the rain.
Underwood doesn’t spare the Federal government either. They were warned too, but they choose to fund knee-jerk “suppression” and “recovery” projects rather than funding prevention and mitigation. I suspect there is a federal government role in carbon accounting which encourages wildfires against prescribed burns. But again, it’s state laws that stop people clearing native vegetation. What Royal Commission would untangle those knotted incentives?
This is an idea surrounded by layers of dumb. Like an onion, but not that smart.
Firstly, rejoice, nice big rain is falling, and Australians are Pretty Happy About That. But, oh no. Who knew, all along — the drought we thought was so bad was actually helping cool Australia. Golly, droughts cripple our agriculture industry and therefore reduce our agricultural emissions. It follows then (if you are crazy) that when the rain comes back that will raise our emissions.
Today is the first day I’ve seen the term “Drought-breaking” entertained…
But wait, there’s more. This rain is falling on Conservatives:
Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are likely to rise if there is a break in the intense drought in eastern Australia, sinking the Morrison government’s goal of lowering emissions in the short term.
Yes, and in a world not obsessed with political power games, when rain falls, green stuff grows, sucking down the CO2. Nevermind.
The agriculture sector did most of the heavy lifting in emissions reduction in the year ending May 2019, falling by 4.2 million tonnes to 67.4 million tonnes. It reduced the sector’s greenhouse contribution by 5.87 per cent, compared to the electricity sector’s 1.15 per cent reduction.
“That big drop in agriculture was twice the emissions reduction that came from the record rollout of renewables. But it’s all built on the suffering of Australia’s farmers under drought,” Climate Council senior researcher Tim Baxter said.
And the emissions reduction from electricity was built on the suffering of electricity consumers.
Oh the dilemma, should we kill off our agriculture sector or our electricity supply?
“A break in the drought could push our emissions so they are again trending upwards,” Australian National University Climate Change Institute Professor Mark Howden said.
Professor Howden said while Australia’s emissions were “almost flatlining”, when the drought finally broke livestock emissions would likely rise by 4 million tonnes a year.
And therein lies the hard truth. All options are bad. All reductions are difficult.
And if the Sun controls our climate, all options are also a total waste of time.
Since CO2 affects the weather every day now, obviously, this is climate change rain.
” The Government tells Climate Change Deniers to stop arguing and accept The Science.”
ABC Prime Time News in Australia this week stooped to abject petty namecalling — claiming those despised climate change deniers are robbing Australia again. In reality, the people robbing Australia work for the ABC. If they only had evidence they wouldn’t need to stomp all over debate.
In other non-news — the Australian Science Minister obediently repeated a twenty year old robot meme that Al Gore invented. Unlike what the ABC headline and wording suggests, it doesn’t appear Karen Andrews mentioned “deniers”. That profoundly unscientific and inflammatory activist term seems to be all the ABC’s. And they call themselves “reporters”?
Those who are still debating whether climate change is real are wasting time.
The people wasting out time are the ones using vague, ill defined, unscientific terms to discuss the end of a debate that never began. What’s “climate change” mean to the listeners? Anything they like. What’s a denier, who knows, but it has the brain of a lizard.
It’s pure namecalling. It’s a science debate yet no one can define a “climate change denier” scientifically — what observations does a climate change denier deny? The original meaning of “denier” in 1475 was to deny God. Five hundred years later and nothing much has changed except to replace denial of one church with denial of other (or any sub part or sub-clause of the 10,000 page IPCC commandments.)
So the evidence is overwhelming, and has been settled for 100 years, but somehow Australians needed to hear this lite-tripe in their 7pm news?
Let’s accept that the climate has changed, the climate is changing.
Lordy I believe in ice ages…!
Between them, not one meaningful new concept was raised, no policy point was moved forwards. No one learnt anything except what they are allowed to say in polite company. It’s just a fashion update.
Andrews is naively hoping that capitulation will get the attack dogs off her back, but all it does is give them more to work with. Now the ABC and Labor Party (co-dependents in politics) can manufacture headlines saying how there is division in the Liberal Party, that even conservative MP’s “accept climate change is real”. They can isolate the real threats like Craig Kelly who they paint as marginalized, even though he’s the most popular conservative MP on Facebook, possibly even more popular than Scott Morrison, and definitely more popular than the opposition leader:
Sydney Morning Herald: Mr Kelly – who denies the link between human activity and climate change, … – uses his Facebook page to question climate science and spruik the coal industry on a daily basis.
Although the backbench MP has only 38,000 “fans” on the social media platform, compared to 231,000 for Mr Morrison and 124,000 for Mr Albanese, he regularly outperforms both men on engagement – particularly the number of people sharing his content.
Since July 1, there have been 1.33 million interactions involving Mr Kelly’s page, compared to 1.26 million for Mr Morrison and 720,000 for Mr Albanese. Mr Kelly regularly outperforms the Prime Minister, and there have only been three weeks since July 1 when the Opposition Leader had more interactions than Mr Kelly.
The term “climate change” is deliberately vague. Everyone agrees with the literal meaning of the words climate and change which means some kind of religious belief that humans have a convenient dial to control storms, clouds, rain, heatwaves and the sea, that they know what exact temperature “earth” should be, and that we can also measure that accurately, and that all countries agree on that particular level of storms and heat and sea level.
The ABC is afraid of debate. The Science Minister is afraid the ABC will mock her, but they already are, and this only feeds the bun-fest.
Hence both are happy with an interview where no one says anything except 20 year old propaganda lines.
Hook, line, stinker.
In the Iview WA News edition UK readers will be amused to hear that ” in the United Kingdom action on Climate Change is largely bipartisan. Boris Johnson took an ambitious climate target to an election and won. (2:45). Since Australians have added more renewables per capita than anywhere in the world, including the UK, and that’s been done by a conservative government here, “what’s the difference”.
Presumably the BBC says the same about Australians.
LATE ADDITION: Karen Andrews should know better, being a former Mechanical Engineering from QUT. (These Queensland universities have a lot to answer for.)
What the Science Minister said (blah blah, strawman, blah.)
Australia is wasting time debating the merits of climate change and should instead focus its attention on responding to the impacts it is having on the country, a senior Liberal minister has warned.
Science Minister Karen Andrews said it was time to move on from ideological battles, which she said had robbed the nation of the time and energy needed to respond to climate change.
“Every second that we spend talking about whether or not the climate is changing is a second that we are not spending on looking at adaptation [and] mitigation strategies,” she said.
“It really is time for everyone to move on and look at what we’re going to do.”
Ms Andrews, a former engineer, said the science on climate change was settled.
Proving that actual carbon reduction is totally irrelevant…
It doesn’t matter what any nation does. The CO2 blame-game is a fashion contest and success is not measured in megatons, but with megaphones.
Over the last 30 years, the Australian population has grown faster than nearly any other western nation on Earth. At the same time the Australian GDP more than doubled. Despite that and against all the odds of being a large, remote, thinly spread population which makes a living from industrial mining and agriculture and is further on Earth from anywhere, each Australian has reduced their carbon dioxide emissions by 40% each.
Emissions per capita and per dollar of real GDP, year to June 1990 to 2019
Australian per capita emissions reductions, Australian Greenhouse Office
Our national leaders need to start getting better at negotiating. They undersell our target and our achievements. Isn’t it time to talk “per capita”?
Details:
Over the period from 1989-90 to June 2019, Australia’s population grew strongly 49% ( from 17.0 million to around 25.4 million).
Australia’s real GDP (chain volume measures) grew 137% expanding from $0.8 trillion in 1989-90 to around $1.9 trillion in the year to June 2019.
Emissions from the electricity sector are experiencing a long term decline, down 15.0 per cent from the peak recorded in the year to June 2009. Emissions in the NEM for the September quarter 2019 decreased by 1.5 per cent on a seasonally adjusted and weather normalised basis compared with the previous quarter.[3] For the September 2019 quarter, generation from renewables increased 20.3 per cent primarily due to increases in wind generation (21.4 per cent) and solar generation (33.5 per cent).
As Joe Bastardi explained, there is an extreme Madden-Julian Oscillation going on north of Australia. We’ve launched into “Phase 5” with a rocket, and “wow” — things are far out on the phase diagram. Looking at past MJO patterns the wiggles can loop, dive to the centre, swing wildly out, though I didn’t see any with such an extreme phase 5. They can resemble the flight path of a bee. Predicting what any MJO does next looks difficult, and next week it may have retracted to low normal “six”. Who can say?
When will our BoM and Climate Experts correct the Fake Science and misinformation?
Climate change leads to a hotter-wetter world. This is a central canon of the theory of man-made global warming. Despite that, none of our paid experts are correcting the myths and misinformation of our public debate. Every man and his monkey (including M.P’s) are saying that Climate Change causes a hotter drier world which leads to fires, and the BOM, CSIRO and millions of scientists apparently agree. So if Australians are misinformed, who’s fault is it? — Not looking at you Andy Pitman, David Karoly, Tim Flannery, ABC Science Unit, Gergis, Sherwood, Trewin, Steffan and all the rest.
Blame the ocean currents for our bush fires
The biggest cause of bush-fires in Australia is the drought. A lack of rain allows the nation to get scorching hot days and dries out the fuel. Yet our long term records show that obscene megatons of CO2 from China has no detectable effect on our long term rainfall. Not in the fire zones, and not across the whole country either. The main driver of droughts and fires therefore is the El Nino oscillation, the IOD, and the SOI. Tax the ocean! Stop the currents! Hold back the tide and pray to Karl Marx!
Climate change made zero difference to rain trends in Australian fire zone
A half hour search finds six long records of rainfall in the latest bushfire zone but no sign of a CO2 signal. But, hey, it’s not like we pay the BOM a million dollars a day to correct misinformation, or the ABC three million dollars a day to ask them hard questions.
Long term rainfall in all these places is just like it used to be.
This is what a graph looks like when CO2 has no detectable impact on rainfall. 50% of all human emissions since the days of Neanderthals has been produced since 1992. But the rainfall is just like it was in the 1920s. 89 houses were lost in Cobargo, but they were lost because of land management and a natural drought.
While the rainfall in Dalgety appeared to increase slightly, the rainfall in Ensay appears to fall slightly. Since modelers have no skill in predicting regional rainfall trends anyone claiming either shift is caused by coal plants might as well be a fortune teller.
Climate scientists can’t explain why the rainfall was lower from 1920 – 1940 here so they have no idea if it’s just a natural cycle driving twenty year trends. There are natural cycles linked to solar cycles that are a complete mystery to climate modelers.
The longest records we have show cycles come and go. Since we can’t predict the cycles more than five months in advance (and often not even then), clearly we don’t know what drives these cycles. When will Australia’s climate scientists correct the politicians and celebrities who benefit from making false claims?
It’s not drier than the 1880s. Not drier than WWI. If there is any pattern it’s that there might be a long term natural cycle where there was less rain in the early 1900s, more rain after WWII and less rain again after the 1980s.
Looking at the 1900 – 2020 Australian rainfall trend map (which ignores the decades of data before that)much of Victoria has a 10mm lower rainfall per decade. But NSW, where most of the fires have burned so far ,, has exactly the opposite trend. Which one is climate change?
In Australia you can claim any trend you want in rainfall, just by cherry picking the start date.
Droughts are the same as they ever were
In the 178 year record, across the whole nation — there is no trend. All that CO2 has made no difference at all to the incidence of Australian droughts. Climate scientists have shown droughts have not increased in Australia. The graph here shows Sydney rain, but click the link to see Melbourne and Adelaide. Same thing. All the data we have, looked at in all the ways we can think of shows CO2 is not controlling our rain.
Rainfall trends, cycles, Australia, Sydney, Graph, 2019, 1840 – 2020. All the data we have, looked at in all the ways we can think of shows CO2 is not controlling our rain.
Follow Jo's Tweets
Recent Comments