Despite all the spin, the non-stop propaganda, a dreadful drought and the two “record” hot years, most Australians still don’t agree with the IPCC. This is exactly the same as it was in 2015 when the CSIRO last did a serious climate poll.
So we sit, a nation of majority skeptics, with no major party to vote for and hardly any TV media, academics or politicians making the case that the IPCC might be wrong and the Paris agreement might be a waste of time. No one is allowed to discuss it and national leaders stay cowed in silence for fear of being called petty names.
There is little to crystallize or focus this sentiment that doubts the experts, yet it exists, even in surveys designed by a team who appear to be doing their best to find and amplify the “believer” vote.
The IPSOS survey suffers from the the usual flaws: loaded questions, ambiguous terms and one sided analysis. Respondents are asked magical pie questions about solving problems as if they only need to wave a fairy wand and it shall be solved. They’re not asked how many dollars they personally want to spend solving it. It’s as if life is not about the costs and benefits or trade-offs. It’s as deep as saying if you could save the world for free, would you?
54% of Australian don’t believe man-made climate change is the dominant driver. | Ipsos, 2019.
What really matters is what would you give up in order to change this?
This new IPSOS climate change poll of 1000 people was conducted in December and finally published, coincidentally, on Sunday before the Labor Party launched its climate policy. IPSOS are telling Australians on the verge of an election that this is some kind of new record momentum. Matt Wade, at The Sydney Morning Herald repeats the IPSOS press release, “this was a record share of Australians that say humans cause climate change”. It’s the usual half-truth — the whole truth is that the CSIRO did multiple surveys involving 17,000 people from 2010 – 2014 and nothing has changed. Isn’t that the kind of research that both IPSOS and investigative reporters might want to mention?
Here are the CSIRO results from 2015. Spot the difference?
The gap between what the experts say and the public believes exists all around the world. In the US the AAAS found that while 87% of experts say climate change mostly “man-made” only 50% of Americans thought the experts were right. (And that was before Trump arrived — it’d be bound to be less now.)
Only 86% of Australians “believe” man-kind has any effect at all
To get a high number IPSOS and the parrot-media bundle together all the people who believe man-made climate change has any possible effect at all. They report that “86% of Australians believe humans contribute to climate change in some way”. That’s a category that would include most die-hard skeptics (like me) — so it’s about as meaningless a statement as anyone can make. The only thing it tells us is that the IPSOS investigators badly want to spin this.
If one third of Australians think the situation is part man – part nature, that’s a lot of people who already think the news is hyped and who won’t want to spend a lot of money.
Where do Australians rank climate change — last
When voters can rank climate change it’s the last thing they care about. Year after year, “the environment” is dead last on pretty much every survey, everywhere.
How many times do people need to tell politicians that being a skeptic isn’t the vote killer that some commentators would like you to believe? Even people who believe in man-made global warming just aren’t as concerned about the environment as they are about jobs, corruption, and the economy.
What’s the biggest issue at the moment: Cost of Living.
Labor’s electric car plan means higher emissions, more pollution, more coal use, and threatens the grid but it’s great for socialists.
Fantasy-land: Labor wants half of all new cars sales to be EV’s by 2030. That’s a radical change in a big country that loves its cars and drives great distances. Last year only 0.2% of new car purchases were EV’s. Our grid is already struggling, and extra charging cars would push it over the edge and may add something like $20b a year in extra network and generation costs.
This makes no sense on so many levels: in Australia EV’s are 80% fossil fuel powered and over their lifetime they cause more pollution than internal combustion engines.
Electric Vehicles produce more carbon emissions if the grid that charges them is powered by fossil fuels.
The results reveal that the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of a battery electric vehicle production range from 92.4 to 94.3 GJ and 15.0 to 15.2 t CO2eq, which are about 50% higher than those of an internal combustion engine vehicle, 63.5 GJ and 10.0 t CO2eq. This substantial change can be mainly attributed to the production of traction batteries, the essential components for battery electric vehicles. (Qiao, 2017)
“… an electric car recharged by a coal-fired plant produces as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered car that gets 29 miles per gallon (12.3 km/L).” (Sivak, 2017)
In a coal fired country, EV’s achieve nothing for carbon emissions, but over their lifecycle, they’re worse for human toxicity, freshwater eco-toxicity, freshwater eutrophication, and mineral resource depletion. (Hawkins, 2012).
EV’s are so useless for the environment you might wonder why Labor and the Greens love them. Take your pick:
Labor Green policitians are honest but stupid.
Labor Green politicans don’t care less about the environment but want a great socialist car.
With our coal fired grid and long distances the only place on Earth less suited to EV’s is Antarctica, where it is too cold for the batteries to work and where people die when they run out of “fuel”. Although at least Antarcticans won’t have to worry about extreme heat setting their batteries on fire.
Unless our grid power goes nuclear the electricity draining into these cars is 60% coal fired, 20% natural gas and diesel powered and 20% “renewable”. The coal percentage would presumably be even higher if they get charged at night, like most electric vehicles surely are. (Figures from Dept of Environment and Energy)
99.8% of Australians don’t want an EV
This is a wild transformation. Currently 499 Australians out of 500 choose anything but an EV:
Behyad Jafari, chief executive of the Electric Vehicle Council which worked with Labor on the plan, said EV sales in Australia totalled 2216 last year, or about one in 500 cars sold. — Peter Hannam, SMH
Electric vehicles in particular are another new “appliance” which is set to place new demands on Australia’s power system. This review has found that each electric vehicle could impose additional network and generation costs from $7500 up to $10,000 per vehicle over the 5 years from 2015 to 2020 in the absence of appropriate pricing signals and efficient charging decisions.
Who pays for the extra generation capacity? Under current market arrangements all consumers would have to pay this extra cost regardless of whether they owned an electric car. Using the AMEX figures, if half our 20 million cars were electric that would add another $20 billion dollars a year to network and generation costs (and that was in 2013 prices).
New “fat” batteries on EV’s draw so much current we need a whole new grid:
New bigger batteries need two days to charge at 7kW which is like adding “three new houses to the grid” and that’s the good option. If consumers want to fast charge (who wouldn’t) the 50kW option is like adding “20 homes”. (Vector, New Zealand Report 2018)
Ten million cars fast-charging at the same time would be like adding 200 million homes to the grid. Psycho.
EV’s are perfect for socialists because no one wants them without subsidies
All around the world consumers need lavish subsidies and rewards to be coerced into buying EV’s. Governments have to offer subsidies in China, India, Japan, Denmark, Norway and practically every country on earth. In South Korea the subsidy is something like US$12,000. In Norway electric vehicles are exempt from purchase taxes (which are extremely high for other cars). They’re also exempt from the annual road tax, all public parking fees, and toll payments. How much icing does that cake need? A lot: Sales of EV’s collapsed from 2000 cars to just 32 cars in Hong Kong when subsidies were withdrawn.
Last year, Australia’s Electric Vehicle Council predicted more than three million electric vehicles could be on Australian roads within 12 years (that’s along way short of ten million). The council wants $7000 tax breaks for buyers of electric vehicles.
The Mitsubishi iMiev arrived in 2010, with a range of just 150km and a hefty price tag of $49,000. The Nissan Leaf was about three times as expensive as a comparable petrol-powered car. The Holden Volt cost $60,000. Only the super-rich could hope to afford the more glamorous Tesla Roadster at more than $200,000. — Sam Clench, News.com
Electric vehicles are the perfect car for socialist governments. It’s another industry destined to be totally dependent on Big Government. EV cars and their owners are born Big Gov lobbyists. They form part of a club to cheer on other big-gov dependents.
The ALP are simply copying the Greens fairytale plans and multiplying by half. But make no mistake, the Labor plans are obscenely ridiculous all on their own. The job of the Greens is to make extreme Labor policies look “moderate” in comparison with something twice as stupid.
In the hundred thousand years since homo sapiens came to be, people have fled bondage, wars, small-pox, dysentery, died from minor scratches, starved to death, been ravaged by lions, stricken by cholera, and survived ninety thousand year stretches of abysmal ice age. We lived in the darkness for 99,900 years.
It’s your chance to show your commitment to fighting the forces of darkness.
Some of those fossil fuels have been waiting for 100 million years to return to the sky. This is a lot of fun to do with kids.
Turn on all the lights you can find (bonus points for incandescents from the stash.)
Put on the party lights, the patio light, the pool light, the mozzie zappers, unpack those Christmas decorations. Get out your torches. Switch the movement detector spotlights to continuous operation. (Involve the kids — they love to help).
Light your backyard with the landcruiser headlights! (Don’t flatten the battery, make sure you keep that engine running.)
Don’t forget those bar radiators — revel in that infra red! (Light the kitchen with the ones in the oven and grill.)
It doesn’t matter how pointless your action is, the ABC will cover it as long as it gives free advertising to giant multinationals and fellow lobbyists for big government.
Six women take a swim, put it on the news. No hard questions asked.
When South Coast NSW photographer Tamara Dean asks you to be involved in her latest project, be prepared to make a bold environmental statement in your birthday suit.
“Biologists predict that if we continue carrying on the way we are, by the end of this century, 50 per cent of species living today will face extinction,” Ms Dean said.
Canberra environmentalist and economist Tory Bridges said she would do whatever it took to get people thinking about climate change.
That included swimming naked in the open ocean with 20 other women on a rainy weekend. But she was willing to suffer for the art, especially with the future of the environment at stake.
The photo shoot was part of Ms Dean’s ongoing project called Endangered.
She wanted the photo shared, so I’m happy to help. Be convinced all ye doubters.
Sydney-based photographer Tamara Dean was recently invited to Heron Island, near the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern Great Barrier Reef. During the trip, she learned about the effects of climate change from Professor Tim Flannery and world-leading coral experts, while experiencing ‘the beauty and fragility of the reef’.
The reference for the apocalyptic prediction about 50% of all species was from “leading biologists” who were speaking at a conference with Paul Ehrlich, sayth the Guardian. Don’t forget that one (count it) one single mammal has gone extinct anywhere in the world so far and it was a rat stranded on a 3m high sand dune far out to sea. It was surely destined to be wiped out by the next available storm. Just 3,000 species to go til we hit the halfway mark.
How about some taxpayers jumping in with only their wallets on? Do you reckon the ABC would cover their protest about being forced to spend a billion dollars paying for hate-male and naked political advertising?
The Greens policy blueprint suggests Australia would become a “renewable energy superpower”, with coal exports to be replaced by clean hydrogen, and the construction of a $6bn taxpayer-funded energy grid upgrade to develop new renewable energy zones.
— Ben Packham, The Australian
Coming soon, the Greens will ban planes, holidays and jokes…
The Greens will propose 2030 as the cut-off point for thermal coal exports, and the shutdown date for Australia’s fleet of coal-fired power stations, in the party’s new climate and energy policy heading into the federal election.
— Katharine Murphy, The Guardian
Current thermal coal exports bring in $25 billion dollars each year. That’s a lot of money and taxes taken out of our economy. Which hospitals will the Greens close? (Maybe all of them, especially at night time). We could just ban people from getting sick?
Closing our 23GW of coal fired electricity will be a glorious collectivist fashion statement. But China is currently building seven times the entire Australian coal fleet and plans another twelve “Australian coal fleets”. China already has nearly fifty times as much coal power as Australia has. And all that is “part of the Paris agreement”. Geddit? Of course you don’t. None of it makes sense to anyone who can add up numbers bigger than two.
The Coal Council of Australia branded the Greens platform as “economic vandalism” that would threaten up to 150,000 direct and indirect jobs, and hit the governments of NSW and Queensland with the loss of $2.5bn in annual royalties.
— Ben Packham, The Australian
Shame about the 150,000 jobs lost. Still they can all move into tourism to cater for the people who are willing to sail 10,000 kilometers to an island filled with diesel generators and old rental cars.
Backpackers are bound to love the bicycle tours of solar farms and forests filled with windmills.
The party is proposing to phase out thermal coal exports by setting a yearly limit on coal exports from 2020, a set of procedures that would require resources companies to secure permits at auction in order to export product.
The policy also advocates for vehicle emissions standards “that lead up to a complete ban on new internal combustion vehicles by 2030”, and a 17% tax on “luxury fossil fuel cars” to help cover the costs of scrapping registration fees, import tariffs, GST and stamp duty on electric vehicles, “reducing the cost of electric vehicles by around 20%”.
— Katharine Murphy, The Guardian
By 2030 with no coal or nukes running, the price of electricity will be $2 a KW/h (if it’s not $20) and EV’s will cost three times as much as petrol cars to drive and take 72 times as long to fill (assuming we still have electricity).
Does “internal combustion vehicle” mean more than just cars? I’m especially looking forward to battery powered combine harvesters and solar powered semi’s.
Just to make the impossible a little bit harder they won’t allow Kyoto credits:
The Greens have disavowed using Kyoto credits, which is an accounting system that allows countries to count credits from exceeding their targets under the soon-to-be-obsolete Kyoto protocol periods against their Paris emissions reduction commitments for 2030.
All the other parties in Australia must be loving this announcement. What a gift.
Even for the Labor Party, the Greens are there to make their suicidal 45% reduction look less stupid.
The question is though, how could any party preference them anywhere except last?
Lance predicted this could take 3 – 6 months to restart (and scored 67 thumbs up)
This is a teachable moment. Smart people will pause and reflect upon what is happening, lest it happen elsewhere. This is not a game sane people want to play. Societies melt down in a matter of days to weeks without electric power, water, food, transportation, communication, etc.
We’ve yet to see how bad this is going to get. It will get a LOT worse before it gets better.
My guess is it will take 3 to 6 months to restart the grid in Venezuela, even if things go swimmingly. If a few substations and alternators are blown out, it could take 2 years. Longer if some turbines are damaged.
Today, Judge Vasta asked how it could be that James Cook University – a recipient of so many billions of dollars over the years – could leave no stone unturned in its disciplinary process against Peter Ridd, while doing absolutely nothing to address his complaints about the lack of quality assurance of its research.
Not once in court today, or yesterday, was there any defense by the James Cook University Team of “the science” that Peter Ridd has been so critical of. The university is simply arguing that he doesn’t have a right to speak-out.
Let’s remember how important “quality control” is to JCU: One researcher at JCU was found guilty of fabricating results by Upsalla University. Peter Ridd reported the same researcher has presented photos of 50 fish that contained manipulated, flipped duplicates. These are serious allegations in science. In response JCU took a whole year to even name the people on the investigation panel, let alone start investigating. As I said at the time:
The words, “wild”, “bizarre” and “extreme” come to mind:
“Chris Cocklin, dep Vice Chancellor of JCU, tried to suggest that Professor Ridd was not a “distinguished academic” at the university and therefore was not covered by the academic freedom clause.”
Peter Ridd says he felt he had no choice but to publish information on the GoFundMe page because he was being gagged, had lost all faith in the disciplinary process and needed to raise funds to mount a legal challenge.
He explains why quality assurance is so important:
by Charlie Peel. The Australian
“I [Peter Ridd] was disciplined for saying these institutions were untrustworthy and that was referring to quality assurance in science.”
He argued the studies affected “a lot of people” because it informed public policy on legislation to cut fertiliser use in Great Barrier Reef catchments, shut down dredging and mining operations and was affecting tourism because visitors thought the reef was dying.
“The science needs to be rigorous because it affects a lot of people,” he said.
Also discussing JCU’s search of Peter’s email account.
Judge: ‘Isn’t JCU going through Professor Ridd’s emails itself a breach of confidentiality that is meant to apply in the disciplinary process? This is totally contrary to the spirit of the EBA.’
The first alleged breach of the code occurred in April 2016, when Professor Ridd emailed a journalist to allege that images given to the media by the Australian Institute of Marine Science and Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority were misleading.
Professor Ridd said the images of bleached coral reefs near Stone Island, off the coast of Bowen in north Queensland, were misleading because they showed poorly affected corals, which were selected over nearby healthy coral and used to show “broad scale decline” of reef health.
Field technicians working for Professor Ridd took photos in the same vicinity as the bleaching pictures supplied by the university and GBRMPA which showed “spectacular coral living there”.
Professor Ridd told the journalist in the email that the use of the pictures was “a dramatic example of how scientific organisations are happy to spin a story for their own purposes”.
At one stage Professor Ridd was told he could not even discuss the proceedings with his wife, leading Mr Wood to compare the proceedings to a coercive “star chamber”.
Jennifer Marohasy reminds us this incident was a trigger that set off Ridd’s eventual sacking. Ridd objected to the reef near Stone Island in Queensland being used to tell a story of disaster when the reef around Bowen (nearby) is in blooming health. Peter Ridd took photos in 2015 showing that the same area was doing fine and pointed out that anyone could find both good and bad examples of reef in the area and selectively claim a climate change disaster. In 2016 Nature published a paper “characterising recent loss of coral cover” which AustralianGeographic and others used to sell a story of a reef catastrophe.
When marine scientist Peter Ridd suspected something was wrong with photographs being used to highlight the rapid decline of the Great Barrier Reef, he did what good scientists are supposed to do: he sent a team to check the facts.
After attempting to blow the whistle on what he found — healthy corals — Professor Ridd was censured by James Cook University and threatened with the sack. After a formal investigation, Professor Ridd — a renowned campaigner for quality assurance over coral research from JCU’s Marine Geophysics Laboratory — was found guilty of “failing to act in a collegial way and in the academic spirit of the institution”.
His crime was to encourage questioning of two of the nation’s leading reef institutions, the Centre of Excellence for Coral Studies and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, on whether they knew that photographs they had published and claimed to show long-term collapse of reef health could be misleading and wrong.
This historic photo shows healthy reef above tide circa 1890.
Reef near Stone Island, Queensland, Photo, 1890
This is allegedly the same area in 1994 showing a coral disaster
Reef near Stone Island, Queensland, Photo, 1994
Again in 2012, the area still hadn’t recovered — or so the story goes
Reef near Stone Island, Queensland, Photo, 2012
Peter Ridd photographs the same area in 2015 showing healthy reef
Note the same landscape in the background.
Reef near Stone Island, Queensland, Photo, 2015
The IPA have supported Peter Ridd in his battle for free speech, and are broadcasting updates:
The Jakobshavn is the glacier that dumps more ice in the ocean than any other in the Northern Hemisphere. It made the iceberg that “sank the titanic”. It has been receding for years, and the losses were accelerating, but then it astonished the scientists.
“At first we didn’t believe it,” said glaciologist Ala Khazendar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We had pretty much assumed that Jakobshavn would just keep going on as it had over the last 20 years.”
“That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system,” said Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland ice and climate scientist Jason Box. “The good news is that it’s a reminder that it’s not necessarily going that fast. But it is going.”
Box, who wasn’t part of the study, said Jakobshavn is “arguably the most important Greenland glacier because it discharges the most ice in the northern hemisphere. For all of Greenland, it is king.”
But it’s OK, seriously, we’re all still going to bake in climate hell because all the models that didn’t see this coming are now saying it will be “temporary”. In a rush, climate-scientists hit auto-excuse-mode — saying the things they never say when there’s a bit of warming.
Apparently it is just some natural variation caused by a butterfly or something
It’s such a quirk, a blip: in a spot 1000 km away the atmospheric pressure changed “resulting in either warming or cooling” (I don’t think the laws of physics are too happy about that) and then ocean currents carry that up to Greenland which affects the glacier. Sure. We never hear them work so hard to explain some temporary warming.
The cooling began in the North Atlantic Ocean, 966 kilometres (600 miles) south of the glacier, triggered by a climate pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO): every five to 20 years, atmospheric pressure at sea level fluctuates, ultimately resulting in either warming or cooling, which is then carried northward by the ocean currents up the southwestern coast of Greenland.
So the grand coupled climate models didn’t predict the air pressure, the ocean currents or the glaciers, but apart from that…
But wow. That water is a lot cooler:
In 2016, the water in this current was cooler by 1.5 degrees Celsius, cooling the Atlantic around Greenland by about 1 degree Celsius; this made its way to the mouth of Jakobshavn, allowing the ice to thicken.
Ocean temperatures in the bay’s upper 250 m have cooled to levels not seen since the mid 1980s.
So 30 or 40 years of warming was wiped out just like that?
Get ready — Quote of The Year coming:
“We didn’t think the ocean could be that important,” OMG principal investigator Josh Willis of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory told National Geographic.
I wondered if Josh Willis’s job description was really the Oh My G*d principal investigator, but I see it may mean Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) — except that isn’t happening.
He has to dig deep to explain how they got it completely, utterly, wrong:
“The thinking was once glaciers start retreating, nothing’s stopping them,” explains Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and OMG’s lead scientist. “We’ve found that that’s not true.”
So our top glacier experts are just discovering that glaciers come and go, that oceans are important and that CO2 is not their only driver? This is news to them?
He’s effectively throwing their own knowledge under the bus. It’s that bad.
It’s interesting that they are announcing this growing glacier now, just as they have “found the reason/excuse” but not for the last few years when it was growing but they didn’t have an answer. For free and with no grants, skeptic Tony Heller pointed out it was growing two years ago.
Crystal balls say it’s worse than we thought:
This research demonstrates that glacial recession is not a one-way trend, but it doesn’t show a reversal of climate change. It does indicate that the effects are a little more complex than we thought, but, ultimately, that bird has flown the coop.
“This cooling is going to pass,” Khazendar told National Geographic. “When it does, the glacier is going to retreat even faster than it was before.”
You will not believe, this will cause sea levels to rise:
While this is “good news” on a temporary basis, this is bad news on the long term because it tells scientists that ocean temperature is a bigger player in glacier retreats and advances than previously thought, said NASA climate scientist Josh Willis, a study co-author. Over the decades the water has been and will be warming from man-made climate change, he said, noting that about 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans.
“In the long run we’ll probably have to raise our predictions of sea level rise again,” Willis said.
The fastest-shrinking glacier in Greenland has made an unexpected turn.
Although it’s been melting for 20 years, the Jakobshavn Glacier in West Greenland – famous for producing the iceberg that sank the Titanic – has now started growing again.
We even see the Precognitive-Preemptive-Headline – just in case you think that if shrinking glaciers prove the world is warming then growing glaciers must mean the opposite:
What does this mean? Perhaps not much, but if the world was starting to cool, stuff like this would start to happen more often. No way to know that answer at the moment.
Trump is vindicated. The real substance of Russiagate is what it says about the media
Dragged out for two years of hate, denigration and abuse in the media, in the end the Muller inquiry found no collusion. How many journalists predicted this. How many even wrote as though it was possible? Credit to Matt Taibbi for the scathing WMD comparison.
The summary of the Mueller report issued today by Attorney General William Barr clears the president and his aides of any collusion with Russia and says there is no legal case to support obstruction of justice charges against him. …
It is a devastating defeat for the Democrats and for much of the US media who had hoped, prayed and frankly expected that Mueller would somehow find a silver bullet to end or at least cripple Trump’s presidency.
It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD
Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”
The Special Prosecutor literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with votive candles sold in his image and Saturday Night Live cast members singing “All I Want for Christmas is You” to him featuring the rhymey line: “Mueller please come through, because the only option is a coup.”
Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,” as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.
UPDATE: On the legal process, read Mark Steyn, Read it all. Read it twice.
It started in April 2016, when it became clear that Trump was going to win the Republican nomination. The Hillary campaign and the DNC gave millions of dollars to Marc Elias, a Clinton lawyer, who in turn hired Fusion GPS, who in turn hired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. Why use Mr Elias as a cutout? Because Hillary and the DNC could then itemize the expense as “legal services” rather than list payments to Mr Steele, which would be in breach of federal law…
Steele’s dossier was passed along to the FBI. It seems a reasonable inference, to put it as blandly as possible, that the dossier was used to justify the opening of what the Feds call an “FI” (Full Investigation), which in turn was used to justify a FISA order permitting the FBI to put Trump’s associates under surveillance. Indeed, it seems a reasonable inference that the dossier wascreated and supplied to friendly forces within the bureau in order to provide a pretext for an FI, without which surveillance of the Trump campaign would not be possible.
But that’s all you need. The dossier is a remarkable thing. It self-regenerates and corroborates itself as it ricochets back and forth between corrupt bureaucrats, biddable hacks and rubber-stamp judges…
They’ve already been on it for a year, and, if there were any “collusion”, it would have been leaked months ago: If Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, the “Russia investigation” is a nullity wrapped in an absence inside a void, now shimmering in the black hole of the billable hours of fifteen lawyers and the expense accounts of a hundred FBI agents.
But tally-ho! The Great MacNuffin Hunt goes on -..
We have witnessed an extraordinary sustained attempted coup in which senior officials of the “justice” department shoot the breeze about wearing a wire to get the goods on the elected chief executive. If there are no consequences to that, it will happen again.
Moreover, the president and his allies have raised enough questions about the conduct of his investigators to convince many of his supporters that the real scandal is the “deep state” trying to thwart the will of the democratic system by dislodging him from office.
The sheer volume of allegations lodged against Mr. Trump and his circle defies historical parallel, possibly eclipsing, if they were all proved true, even Watergate, the nonpareil scandal of scandals.
Some of the nation’s biggest energy companies have allegedly used the closure of Australia’s dirtiest coal-fired power station to price gouge customers and make an extra $3 billion in wholesale profits, according to a new report.
We already knew that renewables are so poisonous they make other generators more expensive. But this is something “extra”. Either big corporate’s suddenly turned into greedy machines or the government destroyed the free market that worked fine for years:
When the closure of Hazelwood was announced just a few months earlier, AGL increased the price of much of the coal-fired power on offer from the Bayswater and Liddell plants in NSW.
The study found a significant part of the output from the Liddell plant was repriced from $40 to $60 per megawatt hour, to greater than $5,000 per megawatt hour — so expensive it effectively restricted supply.
At the same time, much of the power offered by the Bayswater plant almost doubled in price, from about $40 per megawatt hour, to about $80 per megawatt hour.
AGL’s competitors, Energy Australia and Origin, hiked the prices of their coal-fired power too.
Remember when competition from cheap energy would reduce the bids of competitors?
The free market could solve this, but our government forbids it
Right now in Australia you could not legally set up a coal fired cheap plant and supply consenting adults with cheap electricity through our national grid. The government has decreed that in order to change the weather, all coal plants must charge their customers extra so they can pay off “cheap” wind and solar providers who provide green-nice-weather electrons. The government also says that when these green electrons are available (randomly) the market must buy them and ignore cheaper options. Both Liberal and Labor governments endorse this socialist control. Voters who want cheap electricity need to pick “something else”.
Where is our major free-market party?
Did he just admit wind and solar couldn’t supply cheap energy?
Mark Collette from Energy Australia, has denied price gouging, and says that there was no cheap energy available to replace Hazelwood brown coal.
“I think the market did everything it could to replace that energy as cheaply as possible but there was no source of cheap energy available in the timeframe.”
For some reason, all that new cheap wind and solar are not filling the gap left by the 53 year old Hazelwood coal plant?
Bruce Mountain, the lead researcher and director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre, saidthe price increases flowed through to consumers, and the effects were still being felt.
“[Consumers] are paying roughly $200 more than they should and that’s ongoing,” he said.
“Hazelwood should not have had such a large impact on the market. It was about 5 per cent of the national coal generation market, it was not a big deal. It should have been handled easily.
How could prices not rise when we force out one of the cheapest most reliable providers?
ABC reports on evil capitalists — says nothing about big-bad-government
The ABC is happy to say that AGL is being a big greedy corporate. They won’t admit that it was government rules that caused cheap coal to close and made it possible for companies to legally screw billions out of the market. They won’t admit that if wind and solar were really as cheap and reliable as coal that AGL, Origin and EnergyAustralia couldn’t have done this.
It’s all legal, but couldn’t have happened without the RET (Renewable Energy Target)
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission also examined the price rises, according to its chairman Rod Sims.
“We did not find a breach of the law, because it’s not against the law, it’s not against competition law or consumer law when you’ve got something that’s relatively scarce, to price higher,” Mr Sims said.
“So if I buy an apple for $1 and sell it to you for $10, I’ve ripped you off but that’s not against the law,” he said.
“There’s no law that stops people charging excessively.”
The RET makes sure that coal fired stations are working at a competitive disadvantage. That was the point — to force coal generators out of business, and it’s working.
AGL was given Liddell coal plant for free in 2014. It plans to shut it down in 2022 and despite pleas to sell it or revive it — it turned down offers of a quarter of a billion dollars.
When is an asset is worth more in the trash-can than sold to a willing bidder? — when the market is so screwed the owner makes more profit from destroying an asset than selling it.
Handy questions ABC journalists could’ve asked
If solar and wind are cheaper why did prices rise after Hazelwood closed?
Don’t the comments by Mark Collette demonstrate that renewables can’t yet replace cheap brown coal?
Why did our national electricity market work so well to create low prices and competition for years and then fail recently? Australian electricity wholesale costs were around $30 per MWh for years, now there are almost no settlements at these prices. Surely the big three corporates would have taken the opportunities to profit in the past if they could have?
Is there any country around the world which has a high penetration of intermittent renewables and cheap electricity? Please name them…
There’s a new Christmas fantasy list for Climate-worriers. It’s a New York Times bestselling book (aren’t they all) and people are gushing …because it lists the same old solutions we’ve heard 100 times before, like using wind, solar, go vegetarian, walk to work, and (wait) educate your girls.
The PR material glows like the Sun. Wear your sunglasses and hazmat suit when reading:
Project Drawdown is the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming.We did not make or devise the plan—the plan exists and is being implemented worldwide. It has been difficult to envision this possibility because the focus is overwhelmingly on the impacts of climate change. We gathered a qualified and diverse group of researchers from around the world to identify, research, and model the 100 most substantive, existing solutions to address climate change. What was uncovered is a path forward that can roll back global greenhouse gas emissions within thirty years. The research revealed that humanity has the means and techniques at hand. Nothing new needs to be invented…
Project Drawdown’s ranked list of 100 climate change solutions has priced the whole planet-fixing kit at a cool $29,609 billion dollars (of other people’s money). Apparently this is cheap as it will save $74 trillion (trust me), and thousands of entreupeneurs have been sitting on their money waiting for a list like this.
All 100 are ranked through a kind of divination of a “Plausible Scenario” in a computer model. That calculates that wind turbines are ranked at 2, while nuclear energy is way down at number 20. Educating girls ranks 6th and family planning at number 7. Number one on the list is refrigerant management (and I’ll just say China, and a $2b HFC fraud). These people are not good with numbers. Who would trust them with a computer?
Educated girls produce fewer human babies which means less humans in 20 years which will make less CO2, which will trap less heat and reduce the size of the tropical hot-spot that doesn’t exist, and that will cause less rain and more rain in all the right places, so we get fewer floods and droughts and bad weather or something like that.
Another great benefit they tell us is that educated girls are “less likely to marry as children or against their will. ” Ponder all those poor unschooled girls who accidentally marry against their own will.Oops, damn, I got married today and I didn’t want to? How is educating girls supposed to make that less likely? Dear Warlord, I learnt my times tables, don’t marry me off?
Yes, sure, we all want girls (and boys) to get an education. We know the world is a better place when they learn to read and write (but not necessarily when they learn to turn atmospheric physics into a social justice campaign).
#63 Transport Teleprescence (is bound to save pigmy squirrels):
This idea implores people to do what conservative writers have been saying for decades and stop flying around the globe for meetings when they could use Skype instead. Telepresencing hasn’t caught on even with the IPCC — an organisation that is more panicked about global warming than any other. If the experts that live off the fear of climate change will not even telepresent their Olympic Annual COP Junket, what hope is there than any other less concerned institute will?
Somehow there are only 80 solutions on the list, not 100. Like everything in climate change, it’s exaggerated and nobody cares about the numbers.
Comment from MapTrap
The list goes from 1 to 80 in order of CO2 saved. Typical of people whose concern is about CO2 saving, with no consideration of money.
If you do what I did and drop the table into a spreadsheet, you can manipulate the data in terms of Saving/Cost per GT of CO2 saved. On that list Fridge Management goes from #1 to #62. Fridge Management is a no cost to implement, and negative $902 billion in savings, for a net loss of $10.06 billion per GT CO2 saved.
France (with nukes) and Germany (with a huge renewables component) used to forge ahead with climate panic in the EU while the Eastern block (like Poland, with more coal and less cash) reliably pushes back against it. But France is pushing everyone to meet the new sacred 1.5C target with the big Carbon-Neutral-By-2050 plan. It’s a target so wildly ambitious even Germany has pulled the pin on yet another fantasy deadline like the last ones it failed to meet. This is despite (or rather, because of) renewables overtaking coal in Germany in January. The more unreliables a nation has the more inefficient their whole grid is, and the more it costs to save each ton of carbon. Every extra wind turbine is more expensive at reducing CO2 than the last.
The EU Council has just released itssummit statement— basically saying yes to all the IPCC favourite pet visions but not putting any dates on it. With no dates, it’s a meaningless wishlist.
But hey, it’s only the planet at stake, it’s not like there is a deadline that matters anyway eh?
March 20: Tomorrow, the 28 leaders of EU countries are set to adopt a new strategy on action to combat climate change. In light of the student protests spreading across Europe and the world, many leaders in the West had wanted to strengthen the strategy. But this has been fiercely resisted by Eastern European countries led by Poland.
Like Trump, and like Brexit, journalists did not see this coming. Centre right parties somehow expect to keep winning by adopting centre left policies. But politics is being transformed by parties brave enough to speak against political correctness.
In the Dutch provincial elections the Forum for Democracy (FDV) Party has rocketed to 12 seats from nothing. They only launched in 2016. The FDV campaigned against “climate change hysteria” and against immigration and for more direct democracy. The Financial Times calls them Eurosceptics.
For centre right parties there are many votes to be gained in being outspokenly skeptical of climate change — Abbott, Trump, Dean, and now “Baudet”.
Thierry Baudet, 36, heads up the FDV. The Dutch PM was and still is Mark Rutte (of the VVD supposedly a centre right party), and he has just lost control of the upper house. There are 75 seats all up, and FDV somehow looks like getting 12, the same number as the ruling VVD Party.
The “centre right” ruling party apparently now has to do deals with the Greens. Which tells us all we need to know about how not-right the centre-right is.
Far-right populist newcomer Forum for Democracy stunned the Dutch political establishment after winning the most votes in provincial elections, according to a preliminary count early Thursday.
In order to achieve a working majority in the Senate, Rutte’s coalition will have to rely on the support of one or more opposition parties.
It’s unlikely that Baudet’s party will work with the government. It rejects, for example, the need for climate change policies, a major issue for the Dutch government. Last week, Baudet suddenly wavered on his long-standing support for the Netherlands leaving the EU.
Two weeks ago snow mass in the Northern Hemisphere hit “exceptional”. This graph below is from the Finnish Meteorological Institute and unlike other datasets includes both snow and ice. They don’t say if this is an all-time record (since 1982).
Look at that chart: Total Snow Mass for the Northern Hemisphere (excluding mountains)
[Science Daily] In the Northern Hemisphere the maximum seasonal snow cover occurs in March. “This year has been a year with an exceptionally large amount of snow, when examining the entire Northern Hemisphere. The variation from one year to another has been somewhat great, and especially in the most recent years the differences between winters have been very great,” says Kari Luojus, Senior Research Scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
Credit: Image courtesy of Finnish Meteorological Institute
There are the usual we-still-believe weasel word caveats:
The weather fluctuates from one year to another and individual cold snaps in the Arctic area are not, as such, proof of the progression of climate change.
And lets not forget…individual hot snaps in the Arctic area are not, as such, proof of the progression of climate change either. Wouldn’t it be good if scientists reminded everyone?
97% of scientists are more certain than ever, but look out! We are about to be hit by the Climate Uncertainty Monster
“However, they [cold snaps] are a reminder of how climate uncertainty has increased and that we’ll have to get use (sic) to variations in the weather as the climate change proceeds,” Laaksonen observes.
And thus the scientists resort to Voodoo and post hoc excuse-making. Climate Uncertainty is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for modelers. It legitimizes every departure from average as “proof” of their success.
What would it take to disprove them — Ten average years? Not even an ice age?
Unlike “hottest ever” press releases the researchers felt compelled to cherry pick some contrary indicators and remind us snow cover has been declining. This snowy year could absolutely *not* be part of a changing cycle.
Total amount of snow declines and snow starts to melt earlier
Lengthy series of observation times show that the total amount of snow in the Northern Hemisphere has declined in the spring period and that the melting of the snow has started earlier in the same period. Examination over a longer period (1980-2017) shows that the total amount of snow in all winter periods has decreased on average.
Also, the ice cover on the Arctic Ocean has grown thinner and the amount and expanse of perennial ice has decreased. …
“The dream of skiing on Alpine snow is going to go away,” says Zorzanello. The loss of the beauty that once was the Alps is a just price for the damage wrought by humans—and might serve as a sufficient spur for us to begin to avoid doing more. — Jeffrey Kluger, undated, 2017 or later.
Scientists ran 300,000 years worth of climate change models at U.S. ski resorts
In just 70 years, the ski season will be markedly shorter, no matter what happens in the near future.
Subsequently, revenue from ticket sales alone will drop in the coming decades by hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. – June 20, 2017, Julie Brown
This is now:
American ski resorts to stay open until July following snowiest winter on record
It has officially been the wettest winter on record in the USA, meaning many of the country’s ski resorts have experienced the snowiest ski season in history.
A new book from Susan Crockford and published by GWPF looks interesting. It’s called The Polar Bear Catastophe That Never Happened but maybe it could have been called “How to hide 30,000 Polar Bears” which the Green-Scare Machine has apparently done under a mountain of smear and indignation. This is a story of the concealment and the backlash — the failure of science.
“Polar bear numbers could easily exceed 40,000, up from a low point of 10,000 or fewer in the 1960s.”
At least they weren’t invaded by 52 polar bears like the Russian town Belushaya Guba was. Those fat healthy bears stayed for two months or so and even wandered into buildings.
Since a full grown male can weight 700kg and is the largest carnivorous mammal on land, that sounds like a Bruce Willis movie plot. Though polar bears in Russia are protected “because they are endangered” (though from what, I can’t tell you). If Bruce shot one he’d be breaking the law.
The invasion of bears was of course, also blamed on “climate change”.
Last night, sixteen days before Britain supposedly leaves the European Union in accord with the people’s vote of three years ago, their elected representatives voted by 312 to 308 to rule out a “no-deal” Brexit – i.e. a straightforward walkaway – ever.
So the EU now has no incentive ever to reach a deal with Britain. The appalling “deal” Theresa May “negotiated” was for a wretched and humiliating vassal status with Brussels. Because for the Eurocrats, what matters is to teach the lesson the ingrate voters that you can check “Out” any time you like but you can never leave. Mrs May’s deal was meant to be a message to antsy Continentals that the citizenry’s impertinence must never happen again.
So last night the elites rose up and overthrew the masses….
Is May working for the EU or the UK?
Am I crazy? I’m hardly a foreign trade wizz, but I would have thought if you represent the fifth largest economy in the world, whose Monarch technically still heads the most widespread empire, culture and language on Earth* you arrive at the negotiating table saying “We’re out”. Offer us something worthwhile and we’ll consider it. “Two weeks to go.”
From afar downunder there haven’t been any signs Theresa May was serious about Brexit. Surely she would have already negotiated trade deals with the likes of the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand? The new arrangements would start the day after Brexit. The EU would be coming to her.
She’d have been delivering speeches about restoring the power and influence of the Commonwealth — surely a bargaining chip worthy of cashing in. Dare I say “India”?
May has had two years to prepare, yet here we are with days to go, andnow she’s talking about Tariff details in a No Deal Brexit — the option the house voted down a few days ago?
Tonight the Express is reporting that a couple of economists are asking why she didn’t negotiate with the major EU nations instead of trying to negotiate with the man who had the most to gain from wrecking any deal.
According to 2018 book, “Clean Brexit: Why Leaving the EU still makes sense” by authors and economists Liam Halligan and Gerard Lyons, Britain should have negotiated in the first place with big EU nations, chiefly Germany, and not Mr Juncker. If you represent the fifth largest economy in the world you arrive at the negotiating table saying “We’re out”. Offer us something worthwhile and we’ll consider it. Two weeks to go.
Mr Halligan and Mr Lyons claimed that as Britain heads for the exit, “the Commission is deeply concerned about losing the UK’s annual contribution – some £13.1 billion in 2016, or £8.6 billion in net terms.”
They wrote: “So Juncker wanted to do everything he could to frustrate, delay and even help prevent that exit.”
And in the end, the irony, for all the argy bargy on the floor of Parliament, the MP that stops the delay may be the PM of Italy
Mr Brok, a close ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, insisted there were “very different views” across the EU over Theresa May’s request to extend the bloc’s Article 50 exit clause. Any Brexit delay will require a unanimous decision by all leaders at the European Council summit on Thursday afternoon. Mr Brok has begged for a short delay until May 23 to avoid new British MEPs having to be elected to the European Parliament.
There are growing concerns in Brussels of swathes of Eurosceptics being elected through British polls as Theresa May fails to deliver Brexit on time.
British Brexiteers have been working hard to lobby European governments to see if they would veto a British extension of Article 50 to ensure Britain leaves the bloc without a deal.
Brexit has friends here in Australia too. Here’s hoping the 17 million voters get what they were promised.
*OK. Call it “symbolic” but there’s 800 years of goodwill, culture and odd legal phrases connecting the Anglosphere. It might be soft power, but it’s still power. The UK has been called the second most powerful country on Earth in by Researchers at European Geostrategy. Though the nation appears to be working hard to change that…
h/t to Barry Woods from a throw away line in the GWPF office.
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