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.
The IEA last week published a report titled “Nuclear Power in a Clean Energy System”. I’ll say more about that soon. I used the IEA data to create this graph.
Spot the superpower:
Nuclear power, capacity, country, IEA 2019. (Click to enlarge)
It helps to have a second graph. France looks very impressive above, but nuclear power provides 70% of its electricity. In the USA, that large spike is a mere 20% of total power (see below).
The USA is using every source of energy it can…
Nuclear power, share by generation fuel. (Click to enlarge)
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 calculates that each year about one quarter of a ppm is removed by phytoplankton around Baring Head in NZ. Put into context, the total rise of CO2 each year is around six times that in NZ which makes the effect of plankton seem modest — but the bloom in NZ is but a tiny part of the global rises and falls of phytoplankton all around the world. So the most important question remains unanswered — just how much of the yearly rise and fall of CO2 globally is driven by plankton?
Previously Quirk found a huge 2.5Gt carbon spike in 1990 (which is 9Gt of CO2) — as if three extra China’s were suddenly emitting CO2 that year. The best explanation was that changes in wind patterns and ocean currents meant it was a bad year for phytoplankton. When phytoplankton struggle, they don’t draw down the usual CO2, hence the spike.
Scanning electron microscope image of Syracosphaera azureaplaneta.. | Jeremy Young.
What this means is 1/ that there is a lot we don’t know about the CO2 cycle, and 2/ there are very big players out there that have nothing to do with our airconditioners and cars. It means 3/ that there is another large force that can’t be managed with carbon taxes.
There are still mysteries: Quirk notes that something else was going on around Baring Head in the 70s and 80s when there was an even larger difference between the two stations. Perhaps this was due to ocean currents shifting? Until we understand the global carbon cycle why are we even pretending to control it?
A comparison of atmospheric CO2 measurements at Cape Grim and Baring Head
Guest Post by Tom Quirk
Cape Grim 41 S, 145 E and Baring Head 41 S, 175 E have provided long running measurements of atmospheric CO2 made by the CSIRO[1] and the Scripps Institute for Oceanography[2] (SIO). Cape Grim is on the north-west tip of Tasmania and some 2,500 km from Baring Head on the south-east tip of the North Island of New Zealand.
Seasonal Variations
Seasonal variations are easily extracted from the SIO data as monthly measurements and monthly seasonally adjusted values are provided. The CSIRO data is not as helpful but it is possible by smoothing the monthly measurements to get seasonally adjusted values. The difference on a monthly basis gives the seasonal variations.
The seasonal variations of atmospheric CO2 for Cape Grim agree with the observed seasonal variations at the South Pole 90 S but differ from the seasonal variations at Baring Head by of order one month. This can be seen in Figure 1 where the mid-year rise in CO2 comes at Baring Head before Cape Grim. The westerly winds in the “roaring forties” are 20 to 40 km per hour so CO2 at Cape Grim would arrive at Baring Head some 5 days later but this is not seen in the measurements.
Figure 1: Average seasonal variations for the South Pole, Baring Head and Cape Grim derived from Scripps and CSIRO monthly measurements from 1985 to 2015
There may be an explanation for this as Baring Head is surrounded by oceans that experience chlorophyll-blooms as phytoplankton numbers increase and remove CO2 from the ocean which then rebalances CO2 with the atmosphere through exchange. The phytoplankton bloom is shown in Figure 2 from a fascinating paper by Murphy et al using satellite measurements to detect the ocean surface changes in chlorophyll[3]
Figure 2: Location of Baring Head on a satellite image of chlorophyll-a concentrations around New Zealand (25°-55°S 155°E-170°W) in November 1997. . Extract from Murphy et al SeaWiFS NZ chlorophyll3
The variations in chlorophyll through the year are shown for 9 months in Figure 3 for September 1997 to August 1998. There are seasonal variations and regional variations around the North and South islands of New Zealand.
….
Figure 3: SeaWiFS monthly-composite images of chlorophyll-a concentrations around New Zealand (25°-55°S 155°E-170°W) between September 1997 and August 1998. Extract from Murphy et al SeaWiFS NZ chlorophyll3
The composite average chlorophyll-a concentrations for regions around New Zealand are shown in Figure 4. The regions are the Central Tasman Sea (CTS) and the subtropical water east of North Island (STE) to cover east and west of the North Island while the South Island is covered by Subtropical Front regions east (SFE) and west (SFW).
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 are thinking: in this case, that people might vote for a coal mine, but there’s no way they like coal:
Paul Williams is a senior lecturer in politics at Griffith University in Queensland and is one of the country’s foremost experts on elections in that state. He said the Stop Adani Convoy probably cost Labor at least “tens of thousands of votes” in Queensland, if not “hundreds of thousands”.
“That doesn’t mean the Queenslanders are in love with Adani — they’re not,” said Dr Williams.
Sure. Queenslanders couldn’t possibly like money or jobs.
“Adani became totemic — it was a totem for development and for blue-collar job creation.”
Stupid workers just like totems.
No Queenslanders, miners, or workers were interviewed. The ABC is one-billion-dollars of pop-psychology.
The answer is always “go left”
Labor lost because it wasn’t green enough says Greenpeace chief:
Chief of Greenpeace Australia David Ritter said if Labor had strengthened its environmental policies, the environmental movement would have been fully behind the party — a sentiment more-or-less echoed by all the environmental groups the ABC spoke to.
If only Greenpeace had endorsed Labor instead of putting them below One Nation in preferences… oh wait. Nevermind.
Trusting politicians to deliver
But the environmental movement does not accept its actions were a major reason for Labor’s loss.
Most people the ABC spoke to pointed to the money spent by coal miner Clive Palmer, utter distrust of mainstream politics and what they described as scare campaigns run by the Coalition.
If the ABC were the PR wing of the Greens party could they have written a better press release? Hardly. A press release from the Greens would have the Greens logo on it. ABC “News” masquerades as third party endorsement.
If you live in a nation with public broadcasting. Sell. It. Now.
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, like coal or nukes, or explore for more gas. When the new report says “Thermal plants are aging and are highly unlikely to be replaced by new coal plants” they don’t add — but only because government policy prevents this.
Changing markets and scheme “Design” won’t save us — it won’t make low density energy more dense, it won’t make intermittent supply more reliable, or batteries cheaper, or open up vast land near the demand for electricity. All these are structural problems — and every solution involves throwing money.
This report is very useful for identifying problems but not so much for figuring out solutions — to be fair, Paul McArdle and team are not selling their report as such. That’s not their job — that’s Angus Taylor’s.
Australia’s National Electricity Market and power generators are struggling to come up with a coherent plan “to keep the lights on” due to policy and pricing limitations, according to a major independent study of the sector.
No. The problems are due to policy ambitions— do we want 50Hz or fluffy clouds? Holistic thinking starts with checking those boring assumptions that underlie the whole gig: “is there a cause and effect link” or is our energy policy driven by twitter hashtags and namecalling moviestars? Can anyone, anywhere on Earth find observations recorded by actual instruments that shows that the humble Australian 50GW grid will stop the seas rising? There probably isn’t a validated model on Earth that shows that, or even an unvalidated one.
What they show is that the whole system is chaotic, contradictory, has perverse incentives and isn’t achieving much. Say hello to Problems With Centralized Planning v101.
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 in use for 544 years and means essentially the same now as it did then. In 1475, to be a denier meant to reject a religion, and so it is today. If you don’t have faith that solar panels can stop storms you are a denier — a lizard brain robot fool that can’t “see” the light.
The Guardian only swapped “climate denier” for “climate science denier” because they looked so stupid when skeptics said (as I have been saying for years) Which person on Earth denies we have a climate? The phrase was literal rank nonsense with no practical definition in English or science. But who cares? Is language a tool to communicate via accurate shared defined meanings or a self-serving tool to confuse and fool?
As for “global warming” becoming “global heating” — this is just the usual progression of propaganda terms. Once a phrase becomes a joke cliche, it’s time to invent a new phrase. On a cold day the masses now say “we could use some global warming”. No shock value left for agitprop, so bring in “global heating”.
This is mere projection of their Christmas wish list
Who needs evidence, when you can just make up a fantasy:
“There are a lot of words and phrases that are coming into English that are becoming part of the new dialect,” crossword creator and self-confessed word nerd David Astle said.
“It’s looking at the fact this is a changing world, so what are the words we need?”
Let’s talk “facts”. So what exactly are the “lots” of “new words” the ABC is talking about — There’s Cli-fi, a term that almost no normal person uses. Plus solastalgia, both of which are not included in the top 86,800 words in the English language. So about 0.0001% of the population uses these words and they both work at the ABC.
Other words include “Greenwashing”, envirocrime, ecocide, “Green economy” and “closed loop”?
How about some terms the ABC missed:
Like ClimateGate, Green Tape, Green Greed, The Green Blob, junk science, carbonista‘s, EcoWorriers, the Adjustoscene and the Gore Phenomena. How about “children won’t know what science is”.
The Urban Dictionary has a couple of others:
Mannian: “The act of declaring an event or occurrence as unprecedented without having examined the necessary evidence to substantiate the claim.
Or Cli-mate: A combination of the words climate and primate to signify the primitive (primate like) views of the world climate situation. Instead of thinking for themselves, doing research or even investigating both sides of the story, these Cli-mates follow the new religion of environmentalism blindly based on falsified data from Climategate. Sadly, you cannot debate with Cli-mates about the issue despite various climate experts testifying that there is no “global warming”.
What’s evidence? Whatever you want.
Which genius linguists or data sources did the ABC “interview”? Their own pet activists, and data — what’s that?
The ABC quotes “word nerd” David Astle who writes crosswords, and the The Bureau of Linguistical Reality (BLR). Apparently the latter is worthy of a subheader and half a page of descriptors. The BLR is a website set up by two women who got funding from the bizarrely named: “Invoking the Pause” which partners with 350.org, and pretty much the entire Green Blob. BLR is so popular most posts still have zero comments. Hey, but it’s only been running five years. I think some skeptics should pop in and help them get started.
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.
Supernovae bombarded Earth with cosmic energy starting as many as 8 million years ago, with a peak some 2.6 million years ago, initiating an avalanche of electrons in the lower atmosphere…
The authors believe atmospheric ionization probably triggered an enormous upsurge in cloud-to-ground lightning strikes that ignited forest fires around the globe. These infernos could be one reason ancestors of Homo sapiens developed bipedalism — to adapt in savannas that replaced torched forests in northeast Africa.
“It is thought there was already some tendency for hominins to walk on two legs, even before this event,” said lead author Adrian Melott, professor emeritus of physics & astronomy at the University of Kansas. “But they were mainly adapted for climbing around in trees. After this conversion to savanna, they would much more often have to walk from one tree to another across the grassland, and so they become better at walking upright. They could see over the tops of grass and watch for predators. It’s thought this conversion to savanna contributed to bipedalism as it became more and more dominant in human ancestors.”
Based on a “telltale” layer of iron-60 deposits lining the world’s sea beds, astronomers have high confidence supernovae exploded in Earth’s immediate cosmic neighborhood — between 100 and only 50 parsecs (163 light years) away — during the transition from the Pliocene Epoch to the Ice Age.
Like many people her age, Rodriguez believes climate change will have catastrophic effects on our planet. Some 88% of millennials — a higher percentage than any other age group — accept that climate change is happening, and 69% say it will impact them in their lifetimes. Engulfed in a constant barrage of depressing news stories, many young people are skeptical about saving for an uncertain future.
Rodriguez says. “The weather systems are already off, and I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to be a little apocalyptic.”
Being raised on climate propaganda might not be good for your health:
The number of individuals between the ages of 18 and 25 reporting symptoms of major depression increased 52% from 2005 to 2017, while older adults did not experience any increase in psychological stress at this time,
But it could be another catastrophe that really is to blame
“What happened in 2008 was an incredible financial flashpoint for millennials,” he says. “After watching their parents lose a job or a home, millennials are contending with a deep distrust for financial institutions and the stock market. That brings out catastrophic thinking, because they’ve already seen a catastrophe.”
Don’t trust “capitalism” but do trust “government committees”?
Perhaps climate change is partly to blame because it has pushed up energy prices. As people run out of disposable income to pay higher energy prices they may not have any money to save.
Recorded at Comedy Unleashed, the massive Will Franken ‘Climate Change Trans Counselling’ sketch. Inspired by Greta Thunberg and the Climate Crisis Emergency Terror.
After what Peter Ridd went through, and the flagrant waste of one million dollars, someone must be held accountable. Otherwise, no academic would want to risk two years of legal hell for pointing out systematic problems in academia. Who would dare drily write “for your amusement” in an email?
Its good to see other staff are speaking up. Sandra Harding is vice-chancellor of James Cook University. She could have stopped the witchhunt at any time but pursued it all the way:
Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian
“The bottom line is Sandra Harding should go,” says a former member of the university’s 15-member governing council. “It’s in the interest of everybody that she retires.” Speaking to The Weekend Australian this week, the former council member says if Harding doesn’t retire, she should be sacked.
Still in close contact with JCU staff, including academics, the former council member says staff are upset and “whether or not they agree with Ridd is a separate matter. This court case probably cost the university a million bucks, which is money JCU cannot afford.”
“They know that there will be further redundancies coming.”
Ultimately some staff will lose jobs because JCU tried to silence Ridd.
According to the ex-member, the other reason the governing council should be more involved is that “the sacking of Ridd is being watched around the world. It is damaging JCU’s reputation in an area where JCU leads the world. In marine science, JCU is the top dog. To have that reputation damaged is extraordinarily worrying.”
According to the former member of JCU’s governing council, Ridd has more support on campus than he realises…”
A week is a long time in politics. Ideas that were stupid this time last Friday are suddenly mainstream.
Scratching to pick themselves up, the Labor Party may adopt Tony Abbott’s flagship program, but still cling to the idea that we can do a 45% reduction without major sacrifices. The Liberals must be praying the ALP keeps that target. What a gift for the 2022 election.
Even the Labor Party recognises that the anti-Abbott vote in Warringah doesn’t represent broader Australia:
Labor is considering rejecting Scott Morrison’s mandate to deliver his full $158 billion in personal income tax cuts while flagging a dramatic shift on climate change policy and adopting a Tony Abbott-style “direct action” plan to cut carbon emissions.
Dear Labor Party — it’s not just the “market based mechanism” that stinks:
The warning came as Labor environment spokesman Tony Burke suggested the party needed to rethink its support for market-based mechanisms to cut carbon emissions, after its plan to use of international carbon credits to cut emissions was rejected by voters amid a row over the cost of the policy.
Suddenly the Labor Party is the spokesman for “the environmental movement”? Seriously?
“The Right and the environmental movement have shifted to a direct action model,” Mr Burke told the ABC.
Burke — sticks to double barrel denial: 1/ Denies there is “action” (while adopting the non-existent “inaction” plan as their own?) And 2/ pretends that “it’s less efficient” when Abbots plan cost 300 times less than the their carbon tax. Define “efficient”?
“Every other theory will tell you it is less efficient, and it is less efficient. But we are heading down the path now, once we get to the end of the next term, we will have had inaction for the past 15 years and that is not counting the 12 years the Howard government did nothing.
“We now need to be at the table of working through what are the other ways of reaching targets beyond simply saying we’ll have a market mechanism.”
Labor became bogged down in the election campaign over its “uncosted” plan to lower carbon emissions by 45 per cent by 2030, while Mr Morrison had a $3.5bn direct action plan to cut emissions by 26 per cent.
Mr Burke said Labor should keep its 45 per cent emissions target but achieve it through direct action, which his party had previously ridiculed.
In other backflips: Amazing how fast the black-throated finch could be saved.
Adani mine: work on project could start in just three weeks
by Sarah Elks
Adani could start building its controversial coalmine in just three weeks, after besieged Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk declared she’d had a “gutful” of delays in her own government’s approvals of the project.
Ms Palaszczuk today said there had been a “breakthrough” in the impasse over Adani, declaring in Cairns that the deadline for a decision on Adani’s management plan for the endangered black-throated finch was May 31, while the decision on the company’s groundwater strategy would occur on June 13.
Calling the results “horrifying,” NYU professor Kate Crawford said on Twitter: “We’re on the brink of climate catastrophe. Australia is one of the top carbon emitters per capita in the world. The new leader has no climate change policy, and walked into parliament waving a chunk of coal. Not even kidding.”
Australia has the most aggressive climate action plan per capita on Earth. Just ask the ANU. Blakers et al wrote the report called: Australia: the renewable energy superstar. It showed that, per capita, Australia is installing unreliable generators in a blitzkrieg pace, more than twice as fast as Germany is, and 4-5 times faster per capita than the EU, USA, Japan and China.
Despair out of all proportion:
“A coalition of a small number of bad actors now threaten the survivability of our species,” Michael Mann, atmospheric science professor and director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, told ThinkProgress.
This is not a tweet we thought we’d have to make. We’re looking into the eyes of our friends, families and colleagues and seeing them all searching for answers, but only able to ask the same questions: How? Why? Where do we go from here?
Obviously it doesn’t matter what Scott Morrison spends or does — they’ll still be “horrified”. It shows this has nothing to do with the climate, and nothing to do with emissions. It’s only about power. What matters is that Australia didn’t elect a grand socialist. Anything less is a disaster to the acolytes of Big Government.
It’s time sensible people stopped trying to appease innumerateglobal bullies.
Remarkable! A new study by Ashcroft, Karoly and Dowdy pieces together an extraordinary 178 years of rainfall data from Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. This is a rare study that brings in much older data, looking at trends and extremes. This is pretty much the ultimate long term rainfall paper for South East Australia. Henceforth, there shalt be no more headlines about “unprecedented” rainfall or area’s drying out “due to climate change” unless an event rates against this data…
Australia – a land of floods and droughts:
Rainfall goes up and down in long ongoing cycles or change, but no obvious trend that matches the sharp rise of CO2 in the last 30 years. It’s almost like CO2 has no detectable effect…
The worst extremes were for the most part — long ago — particularly in the 1840s (assuming those records are reliable).
Almost nothing in the last 30 years is unusual or unprecedented despite humans putting out 50% of all our CO2 since 1989.
These charts show how misleading it is to use graphs that start in 1970 (or even in 1910) and declare that the recent changes are meaningful, or caused by CO2.
The researchers also use newspaper archives to describe these wild events. Some extracts below and the three key graphs. Normally this would be forgotten history, so it is excellent to see these old records being studied. — Jo
Sydney’s wettest year was 1950, driest year was 1849
Sydney’s wettest year occurred in 1950, while the driest year was recorded in 1849. Two very wet events for Sydney are apparent in the early 1840s — one in April 1841 when 20.12 inches (511 mm) was recorded at Port Jackson, and another in October 1844 when 20.41 inches (518 mm) of rainfall was observed at South Head in one day and night on the 15th– 16th. The Government Gazetteabstract for April 1841 described the deluge as “a most violent storm of rain”, and The Sydney Gazette reported extensive damage to buildings and roads as a result of the downpour (The Sydney Gazette, 1 May 1841, page 2, and 4 May 1841, page 2, available at http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2553198 and http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2553217).
The Simple Daily Intensity Index (SDII): the amount of rainfall received divided by the number of raindays recorded over a month and year.
Melbourne – wettest year and day was 1849
The Millennium Drought stands out as the driest period in the complete record, as noted in other studies of climate change in the region (Hope et al., 2017). The driest year occurred in 1967, at the start of three-year period of dry conditions (Fig. 3b).
Periods of wet conditions, such as the 1950s, are also associated with rainday increases. The wettest year in Melbourne’s history seems to have occurred in 1849, and included the wettest day in the extended record, when 7 inches (177 mm) was recorded on the 27th of November. The Government Gazette table reported rain from the 25th to the 28th of that month, with gales on the 27th. Newspapers at the time wrote that the event caused “Appalling Destruction of Life and Property”, claiming that the Yarra River “attained an unprecedented height” on the 28th (The Courier, 8 December 1849, p 2, available from http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2964223).Flooding killed several residents and thousands of sheep, creating havoc for much of the settlement (The Courier, 8 December 1849).
The wettest Adelaide day occurred on 6 February 1925, when 141.5 mm of rainfall was recorded in 24 h to 9am on 7 February due to a severe thunderstorm. Newspaper accounts at the time reported a “Tropical Downpour in Adelaide: A record fall of over five inches in two and a quarter hours” that had the “streets running like rivers”…
Plastic pollution and climate change may be significantly altering the level of oxygen on our planet. Now, a new study dives into the impact it could have on marine life, including squids, crabs and octopuses – blindness.
The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, highlights how important oxygen is to sight and retinal activity for certain marine larvae. Tiny declines in oxygen levels result in significant vision impairment, including almost total blindness in certain species.
“Using in vivo electroretinogram recordings, we show that there is a decrease in retinal sensitivity to light in marine invertebrates when exposed to reduced oxygen availability,” the study’s abstract reads. “We found a 60-100 [percent] reduction in retinal responses in the larvae of cephalopods and crustaceans…
Or more specifically: Octopuses will go blind if they are suddenly dumped in tanks with reduced oxygen…
To test the theory, the animals were put in reduced oxygen environments for approximately 30 minutes.
Time to legislate against free range low-oxygen tanks.
Every day, octopuses survive swimming up and down through different oxygen levels of water, but a slow change over 200 years will blind them. Really.
The research highlights that it is likely there is a change in oxygen in the daily environment of these animals due to swimming at different depths, but it underscores the concern that a permanent decline could be destructive.
You can’t make this stuff up, but you can buy it with enough government grants.
Scott Morrison in Parliament. Photo, ABC: Nick Haggarty
The Coalition can now form a majority government with no need to do deals with a GetUp candidate. They may win 78 seats. While this is being hailed as a “great” win it’s nothing like Tony Abbott’s 90 seat landslide in 2013. Of the last three elections, the most skeptical PM won hugely, and the biggest believer, Turnbull, almost lost. Morrison-in-the middle, couldn’t fight hard on climate change because his party supports major and expensive action, but at least he didn’t burn off the base like Turnbull did. Luckily for him, the Labor Party had wild ambition and was doomed by overconfidence. (Thank the ABC).
Every time Labor and GetUp reminded Australia that Morrison brought a lump of coal to Parliament, they were helping Morrison.
This was a “climate change” election and Australians voted No
Even ABC commentators admit the central role of climate change and are baffled. (If only they had shown some, any, interest in the opinions of 50% of Australia?). Watch the struggle:
It was supposed to be the big issue of the 2019 Australian federal election: climate change.
A range of polls and surveys had left many analysts, myself included, with the sense that this would be a crucial issue at the ballot box. … ABC’s Vote Compass survey those identifying climate change as the most important issue had risen from 9 per cent in 2016 to 29 per cent in 2019.
Advocacy groups and even media outlets also encouraged the view that 2019 was, and should be, Australia’s climate election.
Voters feared climate policy more than climate change
Andrew Probyn, the ABC’s favourite political “analyst” — who completely missed what was developing — puts personalities, not policies at the top of his list. As if Australians primarily just vote for the guy they like the look of.
Instead, this was unmistakeably a vote for a coal mine:
“I never expected numbers like this,” admitted central Queensland MP Michelle Landry. [Lib-Nat Party]
“Thank you Bob Brown is all I can say. He came up here trying to tell Queenslanders what we should and shouldn’t be doing, and it actually drew together the agriculture and mining sectors — I’ve never seen anything like it.”
In Adani country, Michelle Landry, George Christensen and Ken O’Dowd recorded swings of up to 15 per cent to transform their ultra-marginal electorates into comfortably safe seats.
It’s likely only five of Queensland’s 30 electorates will be held by Labor when the pencil dust has settled.
This was a coal election in Queensland:
There’s little doubt among regional Queensland MPs that coal killed Labor’s chances.
“People up here in central Queensland aren’t stupid, they can work out that [Bill Shorten’s] unsure what’s going to happen in the coal mining industry,” said returned LNP member for Flynn, Ken O’Dowd.
Kerryn Phelps put “climate change at the top of her agenda” says the ABC. And after only 7 months she’s out. Her primary vote was just 33%. Mr Sharma (Liberal) gained 48% of the vote. That’s not much of a honeymoon. Though the end result was extremely close on two-party preferred votes, which is a mark of the great political re-alignment as wealthy formerly Liberal blue-ribbon seats shift to the “inner city” Labor Party while the workers become Liberal conservative voters.
One Nation votes are unmistakeably votes against climate propaganda, and the swings were large. More fool the Liberals, who were so afraid of namecalling attacks by the ABC that they preferenced the Greens ahead of One Nation.
The LNP’s George Christensen kept his seat with a swing towards him of 11 percentage points. Labor lost votes to the One Nation candidate who polled 13 per cent. Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon in the coal mining area of the Hunter Valley may survive the big swing against him, but one Nation candidate Stuart Bonds polled 22 per cent of first-preference votes and clearly took votes from Labor. In Rockhampton the One Nation candidate won 17 per cent of the vote. That meant the swing away from Labor on two-party preferred was more than 10 percentage points.
The left lost because: a/ their policies were stupidly ambitious and unfundable, or 2/ Tasmanian greens went too far north.
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.
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