Just when power is so important the interconnector went down yesterday between NSW and Victoria effectively cutting the East Coast “National” grid in half. It’s not clear if the transmission lines are damaged which will take weeks to repair or just tripped out. But there were blackouts yesterday in NSW, and coal fired power stations in Victoria that could be supplying customers were disconnected from most of NSW. Large industry was again forced to shut down temporarily. Call it “demand reduction” or call it incompetence. We’re a nation that can’t supply heavy industry with electricity. The people of Sydney have been told to turn off washing machines and dryers, spare appliances. Sure, it’s a national crisis, but what got us through the crisis was coal, and what would have stopped a price spike, and kept the industry online, was more coal.
Meanwhile electricity prices hit $14,700 for two hours in NSW, with a draw of 12,000MW. I estimate that’s theoretically up to $350 million in electricity costs that could have been used to help repair the damage instead. Some of that won’t be realized because of forward hedged prices and long term contracts, but ultimately some of the spike will be paid by consumers in NSW to shareholders of generators. Perhaps Alinta, AGL and Energy Australia will donate two hours of electricity profits to the bushfire crisis?
By definition a decentralized power grid that depends on interconnectors is not as stable in a crisis as individual state grids that are self-sufficient with a few defendable stations which are situated closer to large population centres on shorter transmission lines.
Solar Panels don’t work under a smoke haze, and millions of panels in Melbourne, Sydney and in New Zealand are going to need a good clean or suffer efficiency declines. How many man-hours will that take? Will any injuries or deaths occur from thousands of people climbing on their roof and will anyone even tally up that renewable cost?
The break in the interconnector lines is inside NSW so some power is being supplied by Victoria to “the Wagga area” in southern NSW (just to clear up confusion and thanks to WattClarity and @allanoneilaus).
The NSW grid’s links to Victoria went down late on Saturday afternoon, with Mr Kean issuing a statement urging all residents to preserve power. “The extensive bushfire activity in the Snowy Mountains and other areas of the state have had an impact on our electricity supplies,” Mr Kean said. Just before 7pm, 14,000 people had lost power in Sydney’s north and south-west, and Port Stephens.
A senior official within a government agency, who did not want to be identified, told the Herald the transmission lines from Snowy “had been taken out”, but a spokesperson for Mr Kean could not confirm the reports. Mr Kean asked consumers to make sure power-hungry pool pumps were turned off, raise air conditioner thermostats to 24 or 25 degrees, refrain from using washing machines, dishwashers or dryers, and turn off appliances and lights not in use.
AEMO was also working with large load electricity customers to reduce their electricity consumption where possible.
Two potlines were turned off at the Tomago aluminium smelter – the plant near Newcastle typically accounts for about 10 per cent of NSW demand – to help balance supply and demand. “AEMO estimates we saved 200-300 megawatts of demand” through the public appeals, Mr Kean said. “There was no surplus – every single megawatt counted.” Power supplies have resumed between NSW and Victoria although transmission capacity may not be at full capacity for some time, Mr Kean said.
Engineer Ian Waters sent an open letter to Scott Morrison yesterday afternoon:
Prime Minister you are probably aware of the dramas today with the substations in the snowy mountains – burnt out – and affecting imports of electricity from Victoria? I have attached below what is going on with the grid. Basically we are limited to only 486 Mw of brown coal fired electricity from Victoria – through interconnectors that are supposed to be capable of 1,600Mw. The bushfires have created havoc around the Snowy system and shut down much of the capacity.
You may not be aware Prime Minister – but our local Shoalhaven pumped hydro system is also shut down until further notice because of the massive risk of the Currawan fire to the station. Knowing the condition of the country around there Prime Minister I can understand the fear of every employee and Manager there – even if the Currawan fire didn’t exist you would be bloody nervous!
Prime Minister the Latrobe Valley right now is OK for fires and every Company who runs a Brown Coal fired station down there (except of course AGL with their normal and totally expected bearing failure after commissioning!) are pouring the MW out, Mt Piper is going well, Bayswater and Eraring are performing wonderfully well in challenging conditions and basically Australia is running on coal.
I’ll keep this very simple Scott Morrison – it is a sackable offence for a Prime Minister to continue with the madness of snowy hydro 2.0 knowing the vulnerability of equipment in that region – not to mention the losses, wastage and massive capital cost blow-out.
It is also a sackable offence for a Prime Minister to allow AGL to shut Liddell and – to deliberately run it down as they are now – to guarantee its’ shutdown.
A nation watches the fires. The Australian Navy has rescued around 1,100 people and 250 pets. Thousands of other have fled. Thousands more on the SE corner of Australia have been chopping down trees, cleaning properties, waiting in queues for fuel and food. Today is forecast to be as bad as New Years Eve when 380 houses burnt down. Temperatures will be above 40 C — up to 45C inland in places like Wagga Wagga. (Right now, perhaps there’s a BOM site glitch but temperatures from Nowra south range from 30 -45?) Humidity levels will be very low. But a cooler change is coming late. Things should be much better on Sunday. Best wishes for everyone on the front line.
Suddenly, many people are taking “hazard reduction”. If only it weren’t too late.
Meanwhile the Labor Party still hope to reduce bushfires with an international carbon market. Good luck with that. A carbon market is form of carbon tax that sends money overseas and will make their friends at the UN and Goldman Sachs happy, but probably won’t impress the workers the Labor party used to serve. The only way it will stop fires is if people clearfell old growth forest to plant palm trees or corn for biofuel, to to make way for a solar “farm”. Otherwise, carbon storage = fuel for fires.
South coast residents are seething at the NSW government and councils for failing to take adequate precautions in hazard reduction burning. Numbugga locals Stephen and Janet Lennon said authorities failed to learn the lessons from a bushfire in the forests last August.
“They fly helicopters over there and drop (water) bombs (over state-owned forests) but 90 per cent of the time they don’t even work. And then they cast it as if they have done a burn-off, which doesn’t help,” Mr Lennon said.
“You are not even allowed to cut down trees on your property.”
Scott Morrison has flagged an overhaul of hazard reduction operations in national parks and laws dictating where land can be cleared and houses built, while acknowledging climate change and the drought had extended Australia’s disastrous fire season.
Addressing a press conference for the first time since fires in NSW and Victoria ravaged the coast this week, the Prime Minister again held the line on his government’s climate change policies but said the national security committee of cabinet would meet on Monday to consider a short- and longer-term response.
Policy is not changing: the Labor party says we should fight fires with a carbon market (tax)
Anthony Albanese said the bushfires were a “national emergency” and called for a market-based mechanism to help combat climate change.
Scott Morrison must be delighted. How many Chinese carbon credits would have stopped those arsonists?
Back in August the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC said the areas in red were “above normal fire risk” in what will be remembered as quite some understatement. To be fair, they couldn’t know what rain or temperatures would come.
Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre forecast map Australia
Rejoice Australia. The Star of Mann has crosseth The line of Capricorn. The great Prof has flown 10,000 miles to tell us “Australia is on fire”. Something only thirty million people knew already, including every Australian and the five million New Zealanders who can smell the smoke too.
According to Michael Mann, his plane causes bushfires, and he had to fly all the way to a nation on fire to tell them that.
Australia, your country is burning – dangerous climate change is here with you now
Sadly, everything he knows about the Australian climate comes from a Midnight oil song:
When we mine for coal, like the controversial planned Adani coalmine, which would more than double Australia’s coal-based carbon emissions, we are literally mining away at our blue skies. The Adani coalmine could rightly be renamed the Blue Sky mine.
The songs of Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil I first enjoyed decades ago have taken on a whole new meaning for me now. They seem disturbingly prescient in light of what we are witnessing unfold in Australia.
Some even uttered the words “climate change” without any prompting.
“Without prompting?” Hardly. They’ve had thirty years of prompting — in school, at uni, on the nightly news, in coloring in contests, cereal packets and pop songs. The marvel is that Australians are still capable of doing some science, despite the ABC’s and The Guardian’s best efforts.
Hypothesis lost: Your air conditioner causes bushfires?
This is science with error bars so wide they overlap til there’s no science left in between.
The prophet can see “climate change” with his superhuman eyes:
The brown skies I observed in the Blue Mountains this week are a product of human-caused climate change. Take record heat, combine it with unprecedented drought in already dry regions and you get unprecedented bushfires like the ones engulfing the Blue Mountains and spreading across the continent. It’s not complicated.
In Simple-Mann-land, heat and drought make fires. Sure, and that’s why the Sahara is the Fireball of Africa, right? Or maybe it’s just a marketing meme designed to scare the kiddies? Fire = hot, therefore “climate change”. In reality, fires need fuel more than hot weather. The worst fires in Australia are not at Oodnadatta where we have lots of heat and permanent drought, they’re in the South-east corner where there is lots of neglected forest. How could a “Prof” forget the most important factor? Looks like he is nearly as bad at science as that legendary guy who could take red noise or bus timetables and discover hockey sticks. The same man who sued someone for calling him a fraud, dragged it on for years, but couldn’t find any evidence to defend himself.
Could anyone calling themselves a prof really make statements so blandly conclusive: no caveats, no margins, missing the main point, and with no direct cause and effect link. Oh yes he can…
The warming of our planet – and the changes in climate associated with it – are due to the fossil fuels we’re burning: oil, whether at midnight or any other hour of the day, natural gas, and the biggest culprit of all, coal. That’s not complicated either.
Not complicated sayth the master guru. Yet none, not one, of the giant models predicts “simple” rainfall or drought?
If it’s so obvious, perhaps Mann can explain the part where a warmer world is a wetter world and the extra rain makes “more droughts”?
But we all know how this circular conversation pans out — Mann says that extra rain is just an average and there will be droughts in some spots and floods in others. I’ll ask him where and when those droughts and floods will happen in the 2020s, and Michael Mann will say “I don’t know, that’s weather, not climate”. And I’ll ask why a bushfire “is climate not weather”, and he’ll ignore the point and talk about extending bushfire seasons, which are not fires, but sound sorta the same. Or he’ll point to probabilities of extremes in models we know are broken, that use data we know is wildly adjusted, and he’ll call it science when it might as well be sorcery.
If there is any tiny link between coal mines and bushfires, it’s through an ocean of chaotic complexity — via changes in droughts and flood patterns thanks to jet-streams shifting, enhanced by ENSO oscillation, the Indian Dipole and the SOI. The skillless modelers can’t predict any of these. The error bars ate my science mum, and there’s nothing left here but a sales scheme of false pretenses built on magic spells, mystery assumptions, total failure, and parasitic self aggrandizement. All designed to prey on the weak-minded and gullible. Quick, someone protect “The Guardian”?
Petrochemical conspiracy — here we come:
Who needs facts when speculative conspiracies will do?
Morrison has shown himself to be beholden to coal interests and his administration is considered to have conspired with a small number of petrostates to sabotage the recent UN climate conference in Madrid (“COP25”), seen as a last ditch effort to keep planetary warming below a level (1.5C) considered by many to constitute “dangerous” planetary warming.
Fifteen years of missing data tells us everything we need to know
Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy are continuing to follow up on the death of the Great Barrier Reef. Strangely, while everyone professes to care, and cry, and Malcolm Turnbull casually tossed half a billion at it, we see the extremely radioactive oddity that no one is worried enough to bother measuring the actual supposed decline of the seventh wonder of the modern world. Fifteen years is a long time to overlook that. Many panicked press releases have gone under the bridge yet apparently AIMS (and all the others) just want to keep quoting the shrinking growth rates, but not keep track of them.
On top of that, Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy have spotted a pretty major flaw in the methodology for that much quoted study that claims growth on the reef has slowed by 15% from 1990 to 2005. If that number is right, the reef will have ground down to a 30% decline by now [in growth rate]. Disaster, disaster. Worthy of a hundred press releases and a thousand grants. So either it just hasn’t occurred to AIMS et al to keep studying the reef they say they love, or else they have quietly looked at those growth rates, found the reef isn’t dying and they shelved the results in the “don’t look now folder”.
Oh the dilemma. Which could it be?
The real test here is not about the Great Barrier Reef, which is probably fine, but about the trustworthiness of our scientific institutions.
Porites corals are typically used to estimate growth rates the Great Barrier Reef. Jen Marohasy photographed the surface of this coral when she visited Bramston Reef with Peter Ridd in August 2019. “It was so soft, like a carpet, but firm from the corallite: the limestone skeleton supporting individual coral polyps.”
Graham Lloyd in The Australian describes the situation:
The yearly [coral growth] rings are roughly 10 millimetres thick so a coral many metres across can be hundreds of years old. In a landmark study, AIMS took cores from more than 300 corals on the GBR and concluded that for the past 300 years coral growth was stable, but in 1990 there was an unprecedented and dramatic collapse of 15 per cent.
Peter Ridd explains AIMS didn’t measure the rings correctly and used young and small corals, not the original large old corals of 1990:
With Thomas Stieglitz and Eduardo da Silva, I reanalysed the AIMS data and, in our opinion, AIMS made two significant mistakes.
The first was incorrect measurement of the near-surface coral growth rings on most of the corals that were giving data from 1990 to 2005. After years of argument AIMS has begrudgingly agreed that it made this mistake. The other problem is that it used much smaller and younger corals for the 1990-2005 data compared with the mostly very large and old corals of the pre-1990 data — it changed its methodology and this is what caused the apparent drop at 1990. When we corrected this problem, the fall in growth rate disappeared.
This is the first in a series of blog posts planned on what Peter is calling ‘The Coral Challenge’. Graham Lloyd has a companion piece, also in today’s The Australian.
Great Barrier Reef Truth May Be Inconvenient, But It Is Out There By Dr Peter Ridd
We have no data of Great Barrier Reef coral growth rates for the last 15 years. Has growth collapsed as the Australian Institute of Marine Science claims?
Is the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) being affected by climate change, the acidification of the ocean, and the pesticides, sediment and fertiliser from farms? One way to tell is to measure the coral growth rates. Our science institutions claim that coral growth rates collapsed between 1990 and 2005 due to stress from human pollution. Remarkably, despite having data of coral growth rates for the last few centuries, there is no data for the last 15 years. We don’t know how the GBR has fared since 2005.
Peter Ridd is predicating that when the data is finally analysed it will show little change in growth rates, perhaps some improvement. The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), in contrast, is predicting a significant fall in coral calcification rates. Science is a method. The best test of competing theories, hypotheses and claims is with the data.
If I had time, I’d do a similar graph of the AIMS reputation, which might be the only thing matching the AIMS graph prediction right now.
But a second and almost equally valuable outcome of measuring the missing data is that it will be an acid test of the trustworthiness of our major science institutions. AIMS have dug in their heels and denied they made a major methodological mistake. Let’s do the experiment and see if they are right, or untrustworthy. Same for me. If this measurement is done, and done properly, and it shows there has been a major reduction in coral growth rates, I will be the first to accept I was wrong and that there is a disaster happening on the reef.
The coral challenge is a measurement that will have to be done sooner or later. The longer it is neglected the worse it will look to the public. Farmers who are accused of killing the reef are especially interested.
We need to make sure these new measurements are done properly and without any questions about reliability. They must be supervised by a group of scientists that are acceptable to both sides of the agricultural debate on the reef to ensure methodology and execution is impeccable.
Golly and gee…. the missing data rather says an awful lot. One of those rare times when the lack of data is more conclusive than any error bars ever could be.
89 houses were lost in Lake Conjola township but a few saved their cars in the lake. (Image pieced together from the video pan)
Meanwhile, apparently the ABC is cleaning Facebook posts up where two locals of Nowa Nowa (East Gippsland) protested a few months ago and stopped a prescribed burn. One said she was “more worried about climate change”.
Could be a clue here about how the nation got its priorities so screwed?
Back in September ABC Gippsland put a story on Facebook about how locals were protesting the spring prescribed burns which were “killing baby birds alive”. The East Gippsland locals managed to stop the hazard reduction burns. We note also that the Forest Fire Management Victoria local manager said that the burns were planned “after extensive community consultation”. Which tells us just how impossibly hard it is to get even a small (tiny) cool burn done. We’re only talking about 370 ha.
Sharp eyed Michael Ayling noticed that the ABC deleted this Facebook post below. Most of it is still captured on Google Cache, though for some reason, if you wait on the google cache page even that will disappear soon too. Luckily skeptics with no budget are here to help the ABC and Google Cache keep historic records that may help explain the mystery of how a first world nation created such a catastrophe.
It’s probably not the protesters’s fault that she thought climate change posed more threat than bushfires. She probably watches Their ABC.
*UPDATE: This is not about the protestors (or about a tiny 370 ha, which wouldn’t have changed anything yesterday). Accountability lies with decision-makers. Everyone has the right to protest and after twenty years of one sided and well funded propaganda it’s no wonder people are confused. The ABC cheered for “climate change”, and asked no hard questions. They mentioned fuel loads but didn’t put those experts on high rotation. They did repeated interviews with people who know nothing about climate change like Greg Mullins. He was free to repeat the mantra. The ABC decide what message goes out.
Wind turbines pose a threat not just to bats, birds and bedtime, but also Buicks, buildings and babies.
By some miracle luck, no one was killed. This wind turbine was installed two weeks ago…
Coming soon: insurance premiums to rise in car parks under turbines, and real estate values to fall. Children’s car seats to be reinforced with 6ft thick titanium shells.
Presumably Al Gore and the member for Warringah will dismiss the risk and plan to build one in their own backyards.
Repeat after me: Wind energy is free and there are no hidden costs from installing gigatons of infrastructure across the country to catch low-density random unreliable energy.
Peacetime maximums on Boxing Day are just not what they used to be
The ABC is afraid that Boxing day cricket may “go extinct” due to the heat. Chris Gillham at WAClimate.net graphed the December 26 test temperatures in Melbourne all the way back to 1855. Obviously, using ABC-ScienceTM (absurdio-extrapolatory et al) what we are really looking at is ominous cooling. To help the ABC, let’s adjust headlines accordingly.
“Injuries are forecast to rise as maximum temperatures fall in Melbourne on Boxing Day.”
The trend is clear in a supercomputer somewhere. If this decline continues the second polynomial will hit zero in 440 years. Cricketers won’t know what heat is.
Two things to keep in mind, apart from designing a team beanie, is that many of the temperatures in the 1800s weren’t from Stevenson screens and so are debatable. On the other hand, the urban heat island effect is strong and site maintenance is weak, so modern temperatures are debatable too. Sometime in World War I Australian sites hit a peak of being both reliable, modern, and not surrounded by hot concrete. The BOM obviously adjusts those days down.
As Chris says: The current Olympic Park weather station is less than a kilometre from the MCG, and it’s worth noting that Melbourne is an urban location not included in national temperature averages because the BoM acknowledges that city infrastructure has caused artificial UHI warming of one or two degrees.
Obviously the urban heat island effect (UHI) will be concealing the true cooling trend. If it weren’t for all those skyscrapers and super highways, the cricket pitch would be considerably cooler. Prof Panicbunny from Melbourne Uni fears that if the Australian economy continues to collapse under weight of high energy prices, the growth in UHI will stall, potentially putting cricket players at risk of needing scarfs in summer.
Clearly, since CO2 emissions appear to be ineffective at raising temperatures, only more concrete can save cricketers.
A ray of hope — while Boxing Day is cooling, Dec 27-30 is not:
Cricketers may only need ski jackets for the first day.
This is obviously due to climate change. Climate change causes climates to stay the same.
…
No doubt this data will need some adjustment post hoc, and post hoc hoc.
Sometime in 2200AD we look forward to finding out what the temperature was in 2019.
POST NOTE: Jokes aside. All conclusions and inferences here are subject to mockery, but the graphs above are real and based on BOM data. If only ABC journalism was too.
There is no lake, no dam large enough to put out the firestorms we have created
Like some kind of cargo cult, modern inhabitants pray to the sky for enough water bombers to keep things they love safe. They fret that the season for safe burning is too short, while they leave the litter to burn at the most dangerous time possible. The quest for perfect forests, perfect air, and perfect centralized planning is the perfect recipe for a catastrophe. Utopia burns again.
This is a great article by Viv Forbes describing how radically different fire “management” was in ancient times. Management being almost like non stop arson. The main rule, apparently, was to light often and always, and never extinguish. — Jo
_______________________________________ Fighting Fires with Fire
by Viv Forbes
Firestick farming Joseph Lycett. Circa 1817. Australian National Library.
The Power of the Torch
“There can be few if any races who for so long were able to practice the delights of incendiarism.” Geoffrey Blainey “Triumph of the Nomads – A History of Ancient Australia.” Macmillan 1975.
The Fire-lighter was the most powerful tool that early humans brought to Australia.
Fires lit by aborigi
nal men and women created the landscape of Australia. They used fire to create and fertilise fresh new grass for the grazing animals that they hunted, to trap and roast grass dwelling reptiles and rodents, to fight enemies, to send smoke signals, to fell dead trees for camp fires, to ward off frosts and biting insects, and for religious and cultural ceremonies. Their fires created and maintained grasslands and open forests and extinguished all flora and fauna unable to cope with frequent burn-offs.
Early white explorers and settlers recorded the smoke and the blackened tree trunks. They admired the extensive grasslands, either treeless or with well-spaced trees, and no tangled undergrowth of dead grass, brambles, branches and weeds.
Making fire without tinder boxes or matches is laborious. So, most aboriginals tried to keep their fires alive at all times. When on the move (a common situation), selected members of the tribe were charged with carrying a fire stick and keeping it alight. In really cold weather several members may have each carried a fire stick for warmth. When the stick was in danger of going out, the carrier would usually light a tussock of dry grass or leaves and use that flame to rejuvenate the fire stick (or light a new one). As they moved on, they left a line of small fires spreading behind them. They have been observed trying to control the movement of fires but never tried to extinguish them.
Early explorers who ventured inland were amazed to find extensive grasslands and open woodland. Their reports attracted settlers to these grassy open forests and treeless plains with mobs of cattle and sheep.
Despite modern folk-lore tales about aboriginal fire management skills, anyone reading diaries from early explorers such as Abel Tasman (1642) and Captain Cook (1770) soon learned that aboriginals lit fires at any time, for many reasons, and NEVER tried to put them out. If threatened by fires lit by enemies, the most frequent response was to light their own protective fires (now called back-burning). Fire lighting was deliberate, and sometimes governed by rules, but there was no central plan. There were no fire-fighters, no 4WD tankers, no water bombers, no dozers, and no attempt to put fires out. But aboriginal fire “management” worked brilliantly. Because of the high frequency of small fires, fire intensity was low and fires could be lit safely even in hot dry summers. Any fire lit would soon run into country burnt one or two years earlier and then would run out of fuel and self-extinguish.
The futility of water bombing a million hectares
The early squatters quickly learned about the dangers and benefits of fires, and like the aboriginals, they learned to manage fire to protect their assets, grasslands and grazing animals. The settlers had more to lose than the nomads. Graziers need to protect their herds and flocks, homesteads, hay stacks, yards, fences and neighbours, as well as maintaining their grasslands by killing woody weeds and encouraging new grass. So their fire management was more refined. They soon learned to pick the right season, day, time of day, place, wind and weather before lighting a fire. And if threatened by a neighbour’s escaping fire or a lightning-strike fire, back-burning from roads and tracks was the preferred way to protect themselves.
Today we have replaced decentralised fire management by aboriginals and settlers with government-nurtured fire-storms.
First governments created fire hazards called National Parks, where fire sticks, matches, graziers and foresters were locked out and access roads were abandoned or padlocked. And Green-loving urbanites built houses right beside them, and planted trees in their yards. The open forests and grasslands were invaded by eucalypt regrowth, woody weeds, tangled undergrowth, dry grass, logs, dead leaves, twigs, bark and litter – all perfect fuel for a wild-fire holocaust.
These tinder-boxes of forest fuel became magnets for arsonists, and occasionally even disgruntled neighbours, or were lit by wind-blown embers or dry lightning. With high winds, high temperatures and heavy fuel loads some fires will race through the tree tops of oil-rich eucalypt forests.
Just another ordinary worker trying to warn us about climate werewolves:
What?
Someone someday is going to do a very interesting study on the power of suggestion on gregarious hominids. Could industrial marxists convince university educated young men and women to strip naked in public and paint their bodies while forecasting the end of the world if people don’t buy their products? Isn’t education supposed to protect them from that? We got the kids out of the mines and factories and they grew up to be advertising banners for big government instead.
Don’t stop now XR. All you need is someone like this on every street corner.
Seriously, just watch the expressions of South Australians as they walk past the XR Christmas Choir. That’s a nation not freaking out.
… anything is possible in a land where we sit on 400-year supplies of high-quality coal that will guarantee supply at a reasonable price and a vocal crowd is dumb enough to say we should leave it in the ground.
The worst part of this selfishness is the attempt by some to prevent India from importing our coal to fuel its endeavours to increase living standards. It was only in recent decades that some people there still starved to death.
For some reason (what could it be?) a few months ago the Goldman Sachs investment bank was gripped with a sudden urge to repackage the IPCC report. Perhaps they were afraid their clients didn’t watch CNN, the BBC, or, pick-any-channel, maybe they couldn’t afford a television?
A Goldman Sachs report on the impact of climate change on cities across the world makes for grim reading.
The bank warned that “consequences of a warming world may well play out over several decades to come, even if efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions are successful today.”
Rising temperatures would lead to changing disease patterns, more intense and longer-lasting heatwaves, more destructive weather events, and pressure on the availability and quality of water for drinking and agriculture.
“Despite the uncertainty around the timing and scale of the impact, it may be prudent for some cities to start investing in adaptation now,” Goldman says. “Urban adaptation could drive one of the largest infrastructure build-outs in history. Given the scale of the task, urban adaptation will likely need to draw on innovative sources of financing.”
In his abject terror, journalist Yusef Kahn forgot to ask if Goldman Sachs would profit from this.
The very day the UN Galactic Junket COP25 ended in near complete failure, Goldman Sachs was ready to step in with good news.
Goldman Sachs said it’s planning to spend $750 billion on sustainable finance-related projects over the next decade.
The firm also said that it will restrict financing to all new oil production and exploration projects in the Arctic, and that it would impose stricter lending requirements for coal companies.
“There is not only an urgent need to act, but also a powerful business and investing case to do so,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon wrote in an opinion piece published Sunday in the Financial Time
“To give us the best chance of combating climate change, governments must put a price on the cost of carbon” says Goldman Sachs, CEO David Solomon.
And what wonderful investment opportunities there are if governments can be hectored into demanding forced payments from citizens for better weather. But the profits in this are not so much in the suckers buying windfarms as is the banks doing the brokerage. The windfarm owners will be completely dependent on government rules in order to make any profit (and the fickle wind). Their market could evaporate and they may be left with a bunch of factories making intermittent random and sleep destroying volts that no one wants.
Goldman CEO David Solomon announced the plans in an editorial in the Financial Times, where he wrote that there is “a powerful business and investing case” for the bank to take steps to address climate change and the growing worldwide opportunity gap. Very powerful: having failed to make almost any money from the bank’s last foray into carbon tax and cap-and-trade, Goldman is now seeking to directly appeal to fellow fake virtue signalers, who in turn will hope to extract capital from naive investors pursuing the oh so noble goal of only investing in green, renewable, and “clean” (whatever that means) projects. Goldman’s bottom line, assuming a blended 3% commission on the $750BN in financial services it sells to gullible clients, works out to about $22.5 billion – a “powerful business case” indeed.
…earlier this year Goldman worked with Italian electricity company Enel to raise $1.5 billion through a bond offering that linked the investments to Enel’s commitment to increase its renewable energy base by 25% before 2022.
Translation: Goldman made about $15 million selling a bunch of bonds to a bunch of “green” liberals managing other liberals’ money. Because when central banks have taken over the market and Goldman’s own trading desk is shrinking quarter after quarter, and when the coming negative rates will make Goldman’s recent investment into retail banking a disaster, one can always make money betting on liberal guilt,…
If Goldman Sachs can earn twenty-two-thousand-million dollars for shaking a few green hands, why wouldn’t they hire a squad of science hacks to write reports and issue press releases? Indeed, they’d be crazy if they weren’t donating a few million here and there to Greenpeace types too. Who knows — there might even be a business case for hiring teams of astroturfing trolls? It’s only an idea. But $22 billion in profits makes all kinds of things possible.
It’s a taxpayer funded bonfire: The billion dollar ABC does cut-n-paste “journalism” from the largely taxpayer funded Monash Uni, which wrote a one-sided, badly researched piece as advertising for The Australian Conservation Foundation. Not only have Australians played cricket in 42 degree heat a thousand times before, but on days when the sun was obscured by smoke from bushfires. It’s all easy to find history from 150 years ago recorded on official sites and searchable for anyone with “the internet”.
No hard questions asked — the only question that matters is “how does this help Big Government?”
By Richard Willingham and Joseph Dunstan, ABC, News
The Boxing Day Test may need to be moved to November or March in the future to avoid extreme heat, which is a danger to players and cricket fans, a new report has suggested.
Cricket Australia must also work to help grassroots clubs deal with extreme heat, the report from Monash University’s Climate Change Communication Research Hub has found.
The study, commissioned by the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), urges Cricket Australia to use its prominence to push for greater climate action and do more to look after player and spectator welfare.
Evidence = one guy who didn’t drink enough water on a 42 degree day which has happened in summer for 150 years in Australia (and probably the last ten thousand years):
Then there was the time players had to abandon cricket due to heat, when it was 45C in Albury in 1939 and the town ran out of ice. Forget the hype, “conditions were not the best, and the “players generally stood manfully up to the heat” — unlike modern snowflakes at Monash Uni and millenials at the ABC.
Usual lies-by-omission pretending that Mildura did not exist before 1970:
Both Monash Uni and the ABC are either incompetent or deliberately erasing history:
ABC 2019:
Mildura batting away heatwaves and dust storms already
Over the past 40 years, the north-west Victorian city of Mildura’s average daytime January temperature has increased by 2.7C. Recently it endured three days over 40C, with last Saturday’s round of games cancelled.
Here’s the anti-witchdoctor kit for bushfires and “climate change”
Hi to all the new readers. Keep these graphs handy…
To Recap: In order to make really Bad Fires we need the big three: Fuel, oxygen, spark.Obviously getting rid of air and lightning is beyond the budget. The only one we can control is fuel. No fuel = no fire. Big fuel = Fireball apocalypse that we can;t stop even with help from Canada, California, and New Zealand.
The most important weather factor is rain, not an extra 1 degree of warmth. To turn the nation into a proper fireball, we “need” a good drought. A lack of rain is a triple whammy — it dries out the ground and the fuel — and it makes the weather hotter too. Dry years are hot years in Australia, wet years are cool years. It’s just evaporative cooling for the whole country. The sun has to dry out the soil before it can heat up the air above it. Simple yes? El Nino’s mean less rain (in Australia), that’s why they also mean “hot weather”.
So ask a climate scientist the right questions and you’ll find out what the ABC won’t say: That global warming means more rain, not less. Droughts haven’t got worse, and climate models are really, terribly, awfully pathetically bad at predicting rain.
Four reasons carbon emissions are irrelevant
1. Droughts are the same as they ever were.
In the 178 year record, 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. Click the link to see Melbourne and Adelaide. Same thing.
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.
There are a hundred ways to measure a heatwave or a hot day. This is one from our 60 best and longest stations. The BOM could easily slice, dice and change the parameters and create a scary graph. The only antidote to being bamboozled is to read the old newspapers. Go Trove.
3. Rainfall trends across Australia have gone up not down
Despite the Cracked-Earth propaganda there is not, on average, across the nation — a trend towards dryness. Some regions are drier, and since climate models can’t predict where or when that’s just something that happens.
Here are comparisons of 5 different models over Australia. Is CSIRO Mk 3.6 the “right” model, and who predicted that in advance?
One of them might get it right, accidents do happen, especially if you predict nearly every possible outcome.
Figure 2.1.1: Leading mode of annual rainfall variability over Australia, from observations (Bureau of Meteorology), the CSIRO Mk3.6 and Mk3.5 climate models, and three leading international models: HadGEM1 (United Kingdom), GFDL CM2.1 (USA) and MIROC 3.2, medium resolution (Japan).
Read some of that misery at the link. CO2 was perfect and five million hectares went up in flames.
Last word: The is one risk that extra CO2 incurs and that is that burnt areas will regrow faster. Thanks to CO2 the biomass of greenery has increased all around the world. So preparing for climate-change means we need to do even more hazard reduction than we did fifty years ago.
The conversation Australia needs: should we prevent fires with prescribed burns or solar panels?
The wildfires in NSW so far have burned 2,700,000 ha or, if it were one square area –a box 164km x 164km and destroyed at least 720 houses (that was Dec 11).
The dilemma: will it be managed fires, or unmanaged wildfires to reduce the fuel? Or if you are Tim Flannery who says it’s “immoral not to connect the dots“, the question is “how many solar panels will it take to stop those houses burning down?” Or perhaps “how do we stop lightning”?
This is the rough size of the controlled hazard reduction target area, as carried out for NSW compared to the area of “hazard-reduction” by Mother Nature. The area of official hazard reduction by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) is 135,000 ha, equivalent to a square of dimensions 36km x 36km. There would be some other private fuel reduction. Can anyone find figures for that?
Australian Wildfires Area, 2019, NSW, December. Map.
To protect houses we need a 100m margin (at least) and to burn 20% of the landscape each year.
New South Wales NPWS fire ecologist, Ross Bradstock, said that to protect Sydney housing:
We have worked out you have to burn 20 per cent of the landscape per annum to significantly reduce the size of wildfires, fires under severe weather.(50)
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