A declaration of a fake emergency is just like yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre
Photo by Takver.
A couple of days after skeptics were banned by The Conversation, came an article advising how people who do illegal, potentially dangerous things can use the “climate emergency” as a legal defense. Skeptics and scientists might rub their hands with glee, waiting for the climate emergency to be vaporised by any half decent prosecuting lawyer. But that won’t happen — the alleged law breakers don’t have to prove there is a climate emergency, they just have to prove that a reasonable person would think there is. So when East Widgiemooltha declares a “mergency”, that is enough.
So when a local council succumbs to fashion whims or gets heckled into declaring an emergency it’s effectively encouraging vandals, tyrants, and paranoid eco-terrorists.
Nicole Rogers, Senior lecturer, School of Law and Justice, Southern Cross University
The defence permits law-breaking in circumstances of “sudden or extraordinary emergency” if:
an ordinary person possessing ordinary power of self-control could not reasonably be expected to act otherwise.
It’s a version of the common law “necessity defence”, which allows law-breaking to avoid greater harm or irreparable evil. This defence has been argued by climate activists in the US and UK for over a decade.
But unlike the common law defence, the extraordinary emergency defence is only activated by a sudden or extraordinary emergency.
Using climate change as a legal defence worked in the UK in 2008 when Greenpeace protesters painted graffiti on the chimney of a British power station. A jury acquitted them of property damage charges on the basis of necessity.
And earlier this year, another UK jury acquitted Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam and a fellow activist of similar charges. While the judge ruled climate change was irrelevant, the jury was persuaded by the defendants’ argument that their actions were a proportionate response to the climate crisis.
In the US, judges have been largely reluctant to let climate activists use this defence, and no climate activist has yet been acquitted of criminal charges when they do use it.
However, in 2018, a US judge downgraded the charges against pipeline protesters to civil infractions and then found them not responsible on the basis of necessity. And, in 2019, “Valve Turner” protester Ken Ward succeeded in having his conviction overturned, on the basis he should have been allowed to argue necessity as a constitutional right.
But framing the “necessity defence” as an “extraordinary emergency defence” in jurisdictions like Queensland allows Australian climate activists to take advantage of the growing acceptance of climate change as emergency.
What they all need (the ABC, The Conversation, etc) is a calm voice reminding them of the 1001 reasons there’s no emergency. Obviously that won’t happen since they just banned calmness. Speaking of which: on this very important topic there were only 29 comments of which 13 (50%!) were “automatically flagged for inspection by a moderator” and remain trapped there four days later. What’s the bet these comments will appear in 1 week, 1 month, 1 year — or only after Donald Trump is declared King?
The only good question Nicole Rogers asks:
Climate change emergency makes legal norms unworkable
So what is reasonable conduct in the face of the mounting climate crisis? The importance of asking this question cannot be overstated.
The Climate Emergency is a Conversation Emergency. We need to talk about our national conversations.
Attempts to avert this catastrophe through non-violent acts of civil disobedience will come to seem reasonable.
Only in The Monologues thought bubble Nicole.
If you live in a Climate Emergency Zone it’s time to get it rescinded.
The only reason Climate Scare Machine played the Child card was because they’ve given up the adult contest of persuasion.
As a marketing tactic it has a lot going for it. Playing the “girl under seige” card brings out protectors. Holding the “girlie hype” card whips the gullible and emotional into a frenzy. The people who don’t do numbers but rather assess the world via indignation-hope-and-fear can be galvanized into action. They may not be able to add up the megawatts to keep the lights on, but they can leverage emotional barbs to control whole dinner parties. In a gregarious species, that matters.
Strategically, best of all, the kiddie card means most adults will pull their punches, and anyone who tries to reply can be framed as an instant bully. As Laurie Atlas (on 4RO radio) said today, “she’s like a human shield” — the UN put her up there to stop people firing shots back. Just like terrorists hide behind civilians, Eco-terrorists hide behind children.
The UN can fire shots from behind her, and then hold up the Greta-shield to deflect returning missives. “How dare you!”
So the girl too-young-to-own-her-own-home can tell whole nations how to run their economies. She doesn’t have to make sense, teenage girls are known to panic and scream better than anyone, except perhaps three year olds, who presumably are the next step in the devolution of the climate debate. So Greta can say things that no national leader can. She has no responsibility, it won’t matter if she’s wrong, there are no trade-offs and she can write the whole thing off as a folly of youth.
Speaking to Hack ahead of last week’s global climate strike, the 93-year-old threw his support behind young people taking to the streets in protest.
“Young people see things very clearly. And they are speaking very clearly to politicians,” he said.
Sir David said he backed the strategy of non-violent direct action.
“If they just sit on the sidelines, and [debate] in a nice, reasonable way, you know, they’ll say, ‘oh kids’. But if they actually do something in the way that they have been doing in this era, then politicians have to sit up and take notice.”
So, let’s decide national policy according to the number of children glued to crosswalks? May the most obnoxious, persistent trolls win…
Since her parents evidently didn’t teach her humility, Greta is going to find out about it one way or another.
After billions of dollars of “gifts” to the renewables industry, and a doubling of the wholesale electricity price, wind and solar power are still so inefficient and uneconomic that investors can’t make a profit without getting more free money. After the wild bonanza of the last two years the RET scheme has completed the large scale targets that were set so long ago, and that’s it, ppft.
What was 4,300 MW of new projects per quarter is now just 800MW: 83% less
After a record breaking two years of investment in large-scale wind and solar projects, the pace of projects reaching financial close has slowed dramatically over the past two quarters. The Clean Energy Regulator announced this month that the large-scale 2020 Renewable Energy Target (RET) has now been met. What happens next is unclear.
Quarterly investment commitments in new renewable energy projects reached a high of over 4500 MW in late 2018, but has since collapsed to less than 800MW in each of the first two quarters of 2019.
The 2020 large-scale RET was a highly successful policy which drove unprecedented levels of investment in new utility-scale generation over the past two years. Some 15,700 MW of new capacity has been financially committed over the past two years, with that generation either under construction or recently commissioned. This new generation was predominantly in the form of wind and solar, which has been supported more recently by investment in energy storage. With the absence of policy certainty beyond the 2020 RET and a range of regulatory barriers to overcome, investment commitments in new generation have fallen dramatically this year
Financial close is a leading indicator for the level of new generation likely to come online in the future, noting a construction lag of between 6-24 months between financial close and full commissioning. As illustrated in Figure 2 below, the level of new investment committed in the first half of 2019 has fallen to 2016 levels, when then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott attempted to remove the RET and froze the industry during a lengthy review period. And with the rate of new investment now slowing, the forward outlook for wholesale energy prices has started to rise again.
The RET is more a forced payment — money is taken from consumers, secretly snuck out of their electricity bills — and gifted to the renewables industry.
It’s been relentlessly rising for nearly 20 years.
Despite that, the unreliables industry never stopped asking for “certainty”.
The Childrens Rent-a-crowd Crusade didn’t bring in the money
We all know why the climate picnic last Friday was not held on the weekend — hardly anyone would have come. When adults are too bored to go out and save the world, the only option is children. Butter them up, tell them they are heroes and rebels if they do what they want to do anyway and take the day off school. Climate protests have been shrinking for years, so the adults in charge needed to change strategies, and with a compliant media, it worked — it was a grand theatre.
World leaders were asked to come to the UN with concrete plans to cut emissions to net zero.
But on Monday, the presidents and prime ministers of the world’s largest emitting economies stumbled. Signalling just how difficult the work of removing CO2 will be compared to setting targets.
The tougher 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement, backed by UN chief António Guterres and the majority of the world’s nations, requires achieving net zero global emissions by 2050.
The only speaker in the room that “resonated” was the only one in the room who had no responsibility
Greta could say any darn thing at all and none of it would have to be costed, or make sense:
And yet, incrementalism was the main theme at the UN climate action summit, as heads of state took to the podium one after the other. The speeches failed to resonate, except for Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who brought the hall to tears as she called out leaders for their inaction. “Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you,” she said.
Greta Thunberg makes great theater (if you want to scare the world).
Someone has wound up a child into quivering rage and breathless tears. How dare you indeed — exploit the children for political ends.
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Earth Day was a big hit too at the start, but repetition and boredom killed it. Presumably they’ll run some more “climate-strikes” until schools, parents and kids get bored again.
UPDATE: Michael Smith reports that Greta has a IMDB pagewhich lists acting credits and contact details for her agent. She lists climate performances. Just acting then? h/t Another Ian, Dennis.
So unfair that a child be a tool,
Of alarmists, to face ridicule,
Being so underage,
For the fake climate rage,
And would be much better off home at school.
Tony Heller does a fantastic video of the cherry picking done by US propaganda agencies formerly known as “scientific”.
It’s an excellent collection of graphs, mostly US based ones, all showing rising trends but all starting in different years. Somehow the warming effect of CO2 starts at different times in different datasets.
Unskeptical Scientists have an excuse for starting every dataset when they do, but there is no excuse for the pattern of continually picking the low point and hiding the hotter-drier past. Heller is calmly scathing about Arctic Sea Ice data. How many people know the early satellite data shows lower Arctic Sea ice in the 1970s?
It’s the pattern that matters. The US is only a small part of the surface of Earth, but it’s a large part of the propaganda. Formerly great institutions are deceiving the people who pay their salaries. A lie by omission is still a lie…
Before anyone asks: the graphs for Australia don’t necessarily look the same or start at the same date. Though the pattern of behaviour of our “scientists” is — and scary graphs usually start either in 1910 or “the 70s”. The wild heat of the 1890’s and the Federation Drought and the thousands of news stories about that might as well not exist.
Australia is on the opposite side of the Pacific, which means the opposite side of ENSO. Inasmuch as El Ninos and La Ninas drive the climate (which is quite a bit) hot and dry spells swing differently douwnunder, though there are longer underlying cycles which affect the whole globe.
James Cook University is appealing a decision … Federal Court documents reveal JCU has briefed one of Australia’s top barristers, Bret Walker SC, to argue it was legal for the north Queensland university to sack Dr Ridd last year after he publicly criticised its climate change science.
Physics professor Dr Ridd will on Monday launch an online bid for crowd-funding to help pay his legal costs, asking for an extra $1.5m, after supporters already tipped in $260,000 to help fund his unfair dismissal claim. Dr Ridd has spent $200,000 of his own money.
“It’s diabolically expensive because we expect it to go all the way to the High Court,” he said. “In the end, this is a battle for academic freedom. It’s about not allowing universities to stifle free speech.
James Cook Uni will dig deeper into taxpayer funds instead of doing research, in order to protect the reputation of overpaid bureaucrats:
Liberal senator James Paterson tells Alan Jones: “It looks like, so far, James Cook University has spent almost $2 million in order to silence the free speech of one of their own academics. “It’s an outrageous case.” – 2GB Alan Jones and James Paterson.
What’s the aim here? To protect the reef or protect the belief?
Because this is the high court, it’s potentially a bonfire of money about to be burnt. The only winners are lawyers. Taxpayers, skeptics and the environment can only lose if the case goes ahead. Before that happens, let’s run a campaign to ensure free speech at universities and to sack any VC that won’t support that.
Now is the time to outflank them. Let’s get all that money back into research, not yachts for lawyers.
Instant fix: No more Taxpayer funds for any university that won’t protect free speech
Here’s the campaign skeptics, scientists and taxpayers must run:
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This could all be solved so quickly. Since losing the case JCU has changed its employment contracts, not to give their academics the unequivocal right to speak freely, but to make sure they can’t. Enough is enough — all universities need to guarantee free speech in employment contracts or no more government funds.
It’s time Dan Tehan, Minister of Education said to JCU — no more funds for you while you waste it on lawyers defending a case that — even if JCU wins — only shows that it’s not the sort of institution the govt should be funding. Even if the taxpayer wins, it loses. The nonsense must stop. The bonfire of money shows universities, particularly JCU, have lost their way in Australia.
Trump has done this in the US with free speech, and it just took a tweet.
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In March 2019 that tweet became an executive order. Academics tried to claim that it made no difference anyhow, as campuses were already “legally bound to do so by the First Amendment.” But nothing in the first amendment says anything about funding. Australia doesn’t even have a first amendment, so we need this more than the US does.
Vice Chancellor, Sandra Harding AO earnt $975,000 in 2018. Her package must be over a million dollars a year now. The problem with paying her too much evidently is that she thinks she is more important than the scientists and researchers she manages. Giving her an AO (for what — wasting two million dollars and trashing the reputation of JCU?) has apparently cemented her delusion. She must go. If JCU loses funding it will force them to dump the incompetent decision-makers who bear responsibility.
Follow the responsibility for this up the chain. The taxpayer is funding this debacle, so someone in government has to be signing those cheques above JCU admin. The Education Minister (Dan Tehan) is responsible for the kind of universities we have and the student funding. Research grants are likely also coming from The Minister for the Environment (Sussan Ley) and The Minister for Science (Karen Andrews). So there are three points to start asking why taxpayers are funding any university that will not guarantee free speech for staff?
Conservative politicians will go weak at the knees so easily, but we have to stop letting them get away with the easy option of giving in to the namecalling bullies.
Time to head the money off before it reaches the lawyers. Let’s fix the main issue: government funding is strangling science
Universities are so dependent on Big-Gov they have become a wing of it. None of them are independent in Australia. What do taxpayers want? Professors who talk propaganda or ones that tell us what their research shows? Without free speech academics are being turned into advertising agents whose primary role is to get more money from taxpayers. We know now that all academic research at JCU is worthless. Any researcher that finds anything “politically inconvenient” will not say so out of fear, so therefore the only thing we know for sure about JCU research is that any result or expert opinion may be cherry picked, skewed, biased or a lie by omission, and that if it is, no one at JCU will say so.
What does the reef need — solutions dictated by elite business managers or fearless discussion from experts that question every aspect and priority til we get it right?
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UPDATE: The IPA is raising funds for the legal case.
To donate, head to Peter’s GoFundMe page at GoFundMe.
Anyone can say fossil fuels are evil. But let’s count the protestors living without them?
Every kind of motherhood spirit and mass delusion was at the Global Climate Picnic today. It was all things to all people, a day to absolve guilt about living rich, while simultaneously earning social status miles in the Flying Socialite Program. (Or perhaps that’s the Flying Socialist Program). The Climate Picnic was green and fluffy, nice and sunny, and a walk in the park with the distant promise of free perpetual motion machines. What’s not to like about a day off school feeling like a rebel for conforming with the throng?
It was a chance to complain about corporate greed, and do a cathartic exorcism of smoke and black stuff, which everyone knows must be bad. It was a spiritual event, a social event, and faked up as a science event too. The dumb could feel smart, the rich could feel pious, and everyone could feel so important. They were of course superheroes saving the whole goddam planet.
Fighting Climate Change is morally right, just like the battle against slavery — says someone in The Guardian, as if setting people free is like liberating electrons. Lordy! Those exploited subatomic particles imprisoned in solar panels would feed the world if only we let them!
So nice, but poorly educated kids skipped getting a bit more education while their overly educated parents acted out a pagan ritual drilled into them during the degree in landscape architecture that they didn’t need and never used. And the luckiest generation on Earth found reasons to panic and emote about balmy weather.
With rather meaningless lives in a civilization they’ve been taught is a toxic imperial invader, the gullible, the lost and the resentful were easy pickings to be swept up into a fake movement promising salvation, better weather, nicer insects and less jellyfish. The nonsense runs wild, and placards prophesy a dying Earth in a game of theatre designed to spook weak politicians. This was climate propaganda week after all. These people were part of the advertising.
Let’s see some real climate action
Anyone can wave a banner at a climate picnic. True believers need to prove they care and show us the way. None of this one-day walk-in-the-park stuff. If solar is so cheap — let’s see those leaders go off the grid. No more coal fired electricity. No more gas back up. No more frequency stability for free. Let them put the wind turbines on their own roofs and run their cars on solar powered battery packs.
Years from now PhD students will pore forth over the historic artefacts of The Great Global Warming Delusion and wonder how so many thousands of people got swept into the witchdoctor cult that stops storms with magic PV panels.
Coincidentally this week snow fell in Australia right down to 560m in one area, and it was also starting to fall already in the Northern Hemisphere, in Sweden, China and California. Not that means anything. Just another #climateemergency. They’re everywhere you know.
These people are calling for the end of coal, but they have no idea what that means.
Spot the new religion
Apparently a lot of people want to find a messiah to follow:
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Would you like to feel smug with that?
A lot of people who aren’t very good at science enjoy a chance to feel like they are.
Today, for your amusement, Misha Ketchell, ex-ABC journalist, editor and ED of The Conversation scrambles to justify why banning half the population from speaking is not censorship. It’s almost a form of satire, but it’s not that clever.
He pulls out the old Argument from Authority and Ad Hom fallacies, known since Aristotle. He’s only 2,300 years behind the leading edge of rhetoric. Worse, the journalist doesn’t even understand the basics of journalism — as in, to research, present the best of both sides, and let the readers decide. Instead Ketchell, whose top scientific qualification is watching the ABC for twenty years, has decided that climate sensitivity of CO2 on planet Earth is 3.3C give or take nothing.
The biggest scandal of university research and science is there waiting to be told, but Ketchell-the-journo is 100% obedient to a collection of unaccountable foreign committee members who do unaudited work with unvalidated models.
Real experts just answer the questions, they aren’t scared of the uninformed. Why is it only climate science where we need to protect the public from know-nothing comments? Either the punters are too stupid to spot the expert, or perhaps the fake experts need to be protected from the punters?
This absolutely is about free speech
Just saying it isn’t won’t make it so:
This is not about a denial of free speech. Media outlets have always curated the ways in which they feature audience feedback. Think about the big bags of letters newspaper editors used to sift to pick a dozen or so to publish every day. The skill was always about giving a debate a chance to be aired, to allow all sides to be heard, and then to move on.
But Ketchell isn’t banning misinformation, he’s banning a whole class of people, even “locking their accounts”. That makes it absolutely about “free speech”. Read his words, “deniers are dangerous”. No matter what they say, how well they say it, or how qualified they are, some citizens are the unmentionables who shall have no voice sayth Cardinal Ketchell. It doesn’t get more unfree than a namecalling pogrom with no right of reply.
The Conversation has become the definition of unfree speech. It’s the case study of 2019. The GoTo classic story of censorship for scholars a hundred years from now. The only uncertainty here is if Ketchell has the faintest idea of what free speech is?
Say hello to the false equivalence and strawman meme of your doctor versus your untrained friend:
Imagine you discovered you had a serious illness and went to a doctor who recommended an operation. Then you surveyed 10 of your friends about whether they thought you needed an operation. Then, rather than have the operation, you spend the next 10 years, in deteriorating health, every day hearing from your doctor the operation is needed, while a small subset of your mates comment on how the doctor is a nutjob.
Let’s say their models didn’t predict who got sick, who got well, how many died, and apart from random luck, not much that happened even 10 days in advance?
Misha Ketchell says “don’t ask” just pay the bill, take the drugs — your doctor is practically a God
When we do this to experts of any sort, these uninformed comments undermine their authority. People are less inclined to believe experts when their views are presented alongside hostile opinions. But the two things are not the same; they are entirely different types of information and they don’t deserve equal weight.
The right approach, if you don’t believe your doctor, is to seek a second opinion from another medical expert. And maybe a third or a fourth. And then you make a decision on how to act, based on the evidence.
What if there are other doctors all performing the exact same unnecessary operation, collecting huge fees, being treated like Planet Saving heroes on the ABC and getting nice two week junkets in Bali as well? They are the leading “experts” eh? Who cares that their expertise, status and income is also totally dependent on that type of operation. Complete patsies will ask them, ignore the conflicts of interest, and sign up to have a lung removed to stop their cough.
Which journalist has not done any, as in five minutes of research Misha Ketchell?
He’s out of his depth, like the journo’s who just repeat the sales catalogue of the local real estate agent — the boom is just around the corner! Reality is going to blindside him. He believes in the “thousands” of unnamed expert modelers who don’t even exist. And he believes there is rigor in anonymous unpaid pal review:
In the case of climate science we don’t just have two or three expert opinions, we have thousands. All rigorous and peer reviewed. We also have a range of vested interests who are attempting to discredit that science, following the playbook of big tobacco to profit from casting doubt and delaying action.
Sure, and thousands of commenters on The Conversation get cheques and instructions in the mail from Phillip Morris. Who knew? Or more to the point, who’s got a huge baseless conspiracy theory?
Ketchell talks about “vested interests” but doesn’t realize there are $1.5 trillion in vested interests 100% depending on him (and other un-journalists) to swallow up their prospectus and sell their schemes. Most so-called Big Oil funding goes to alarmists, not skeptics. Big Oil uses the carbon-hate against its main competitor Big Coal, and panders to EPA whimseys out of fear of offending the bureaucrat rulers it depends on. Woodside oil and gas not only doesn’t fund skeptics it won’t even let one speak at a tiny niche Christmas event for petrophysicists. So much for the myth of Big Oil being a merchant of doubt.
Having announced such a cackhanded crackdown, Ketchall is feeling the heat and complaining that he’s being bullied, but who’s the bully here? The one that uses his power arbitrarily to say shut up to tens of thousands of people who partly fund his own job, or the one earning money from voluntary payments who is working to persuade others to stop funding an incompetent publisher?
A few loud media voices have claimed our approach is totalitarian. In an interview with Senator Eric Abetz on Sky News Chris Kenny did what bullies often do – he tried to intimidate and cause maximum damage by asking the Senator to ensure The Conversation never again receives government funding.
Yes, let’s talk intimidation — and start with “deniers” and “denialists” and let Ketchall define them in scientific terms. What empirical evidence is being denied? Or are these just pure insults, declaring that anyone who doesn’t agree has the brain of a lizard and is not worth listening to?
As I’d explain to the children in the room, obviously the only point of these hostile demeaning terms is to stop people questioning the religion.
Ketchell is still in denial that half the population just don’t buy the foreign committee report he considers gospel:
The truth is that how to handle the views of the small group who are hostile to climate science is a complex media ethics question…
Remember the “climate election”? Survey’s, polls and millions of votes show the citizens of Australia are not convinced the world is going to hell — the journalists job is to persuade them, the totalitarians job is to shut them up.
Hypocrisy knows no bounds
Misha Ketchell says:
And this means less emotive argument that distorts the evidence.
Jo Nova says: Sure, and calling critics “predators of our children“, or zombies is all calmness and light yeah? Not to mention “great science”. Go “the Con”.
A climate-change ideologue,
Fearing comments and free dialogue,
From the skeptical few,
Who challenged his view,
Had them shut down and barred from his blog.
–Ruairi
PS: Readers, send in your ideas for the logo. The Conversion needs a new byline.
What kind of conversation only has one side? Paid propaganda.
The Conversation is a site established** by your taxpayer dollars, in countries where 50 – 60% of the entire population don’t agree with the IPCC’s dominant mantra. Yet no matter how qualified you are, no matter how good your argument, your evidence and your data, you, we, half the population, is now banned. The editor Misha Ketchell has officially blocked unbelievers, and thus effectively admitted that they can’t reply to skeptics, and that skeptics are posing too many questions they can’t answer. They’ve been deleting skeptical comments for years, so it’s good that they finally have the honesty to admit it.
The irony of a site called “The Conversation” which won’t allow a conversation is perfect Owellian Newspeak. Let’s just call it The Conversion from now on (thanks Travis) — the mission is to help converts keep the faith. Yesterday they published hatemail from Tim Flannery calling scientists who disagreed, deniers who are “predatory threats” to his own children. Today they’re banning half the population.
If only they had evidence they wouldn’t need to ban people:
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The poor snowflake believers of the Windmills-change-the-weather religion can’t cope with hearing arguments that threaten their faith. Thou shalt have no other God but mine:
Climate change deniers, and those shamelessly peddling pseudoscience and misinformation, are perpetuating ideas that will ultimately destroy the planet. As a publisher, giving them a voice on our site contributes to a stalled public discourse.
Terrified! Lord save my eyes from blasphemy:
That’s why we’re implementing a zero-tolerance approach to moderating climate change deniers, and sceptics. Not only will we be removing their comments, we’ll be locking their accounts.
Looks like 56% of Australians can’t comment on The Conversation
So a “stalled public discourse” will be able to move forward by gagging half the population? What’s your definition of “stalled”? No wonder people like Ketchell can’t understand why our electrical grid is being destroyed by subsidizing random generators with no spinning reserve in distant locations — Ketchell doesn’t even understand the basics of discussion — to unstall an argument you let both sides debate, and may “the best man win”. The reason the debate is stalled is because the only outcome Ketchell will accept is belief in fairy weather control. Since it’s a joke, maintained by namecalling “denier” and indignant fautrage, manipulated data and unvalidated models known to fail, this debate will only unstall when the debate is hammered out through … conversation, which obviously isn’t going to happen at The Conversation.
But it can happen here. All believers and escapees from The Conversation are welcome to comment at joannenova.com.au. The only limits are legal, and basic manners.*
One half of the population are wrong on this topic, and one half are running chicken from debate. Join the dots.
Conversation snowflakes need protection
Here comes the fake sciencey motherhood statements. Every hypocrite, pocket-dictator and cult-ruler uses some version of “it’s better for you if I protect you from hearing things I deem unworthy”:
We believe conversations are integral to sharing knowledge, but those who are fixated on dodgy ideas in the face of decades of peer-reviewed science are nothing but dangerous.
It is counter productive to present the evidence and then immediately undermine it by giving space to trolls. The hopeless debates between those with evidence and those who fabricate simply stalls action.
As a reader, author or commenter, we need your help. If you see something that is misinformation, please don’t engage, simply report it. Do this by clicking the report button below a comment.
So who’s a troll then? Roy Spencer? Ph.D. in meteorology, NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, supported by NASA, NOAA, and DOE?
Half the population of Australia, the UK, USA, NZ and Canada are trolls according to surveys and most national elections. As I’ve said before, the polls are in:
Obviously he doesn’t have Misha’s scientific qualifications which apparently amount to watching twenty years of The ABC:
Misha Ketchell
Editor & Executive Director
Misha has been a journalist for more than 20 years. In previous roles he was a reporter at The Age, founding editor of The Big Issue Australia and editor of Crikey, The Reader and The Melbourne Weekly. He also spent several years at the ABC where he was a TV producer on Media Watch and The 7:30 Report and an editor on The Drum.
History won’t be kind to those journalists who fell for the belief that solar panels can stop storms which tens of thousands of qualified engineers, atmospheric physicists, geologists, doctors, and scientists tried to warn about. Nobel prize winners of physics and men who walked on the moon. Freeman Dyson. Shame none of them are as smart as Ketchell.
The Conversation’s conflicts of interest hidden in plain view
As for funding: The Conversation in Australia (the original source that spawned the other national sites) was funded with $6m in government funds, and is now maintained by second-hand government funds washed through “university admin accounts”. They have a record of putting up deceptive and inane Disclosure Statements which say the authors does not work for, consult to, or own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. Virtually all authors on The Conversation earn their income from Big-Government handouts, and virtually all of them put forward arguments that big-government should get bigger — research should get more funding, universities should get more money, welfare should be larger, the government should be managing the weather, the conversation, your light globes and what you read.
Try to find thinkers who argue for free markets, free speech, small government, fewer laws, greater efficiency and to stop meddling do-gooders from interfering in every aspect of your life. Good luck with that.
* Message to believers: Please, bring out your best, invite your friends! I promise to publish any comment that disagrees with skeptics and doesn’t breach copyright or defamation laws, is relevant to the topic, not a repeat, and is posted by someone with a working email. We ask only civilized manners. Those with a pattern of dominating threads (>10%), hijacking threads, not answering questions, repetition, and who post ad hom fallacies will be asked to change their behaviour.
**Edit: the word “funded” by taxpayer dollars, replaced with “established“. As I explained later in the post the funding is now maintained mostly from universities — so a lot of the funding is still public funds “washed” through grants to universities and student enrollments. Can someone tell me what percentage of university funding ends up coming from the government? Judging from this page — of $11b total in funding for research, it’s all government bar business ($500m) Donations ($250m), Overseas ($372m) and Other Australian ($0.3m) = $1.1b. So university research is 90% government funded? But universities get students too. The bottom line of all funding from higher ed financial accounts suggests the total uni sector gets $32b of which students pay $9.1b, investment $1.2b, consultancies $1.3b, other $1.8b and the rest appears to be govt. So the govt pays $18.5b which means 57% is government funded?So I get a figure of nearly 60% government funded. I’m not sure that’s right because accounting is not my thing. Do students repay all that debt or does the govt end up footing more of their bill?
The Conversation partners include many unis, plus a couple of foundations, and include CSIRO (are they still funding it?), the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES), and CSIROs data61. But without actual numbers, who knows?
I think 60% indirectly government funded is a fair claim. And given that The Conversation is about research mostly, not students, then in some ways it leans closer to 90% government funded.
Tim Flannery unhinged. What a rant. Apparently people who deny that Earth has a climate are coming to eat his children or something. It must be awful inside his head:
After all his predictions went wrong years ago, now he feels like a failure?
No climate report or warning, no political agreement nor technological innovation has altered the ever-upward trajectory of the pollution. This simple fact forces me to look back on my 20 years of climate activism as a colossal failure.
I say, not at all Tim. You were paid to sell carbon credits and industrial renewables and I’m sure Panasonic are very happy.
Flannery and his institutions may never have been funded by Vestas, GE, HSBC, Deutche Bank, Goldman Sachs, BBVA and Citigroup or Communist China but they’re happy too. I mean they’d like to be happier still, but Flannery did his best. And a lot of feudal bureaucrats and desalination-plant-owners are also glad Flannery came to forecast the end of rain and scare the heck out of all the little kiddies and state premiers.
But Flannery still thinks that his side’s aim was to reduce carbon dioxide, rather than just get rich or fill a spiritual vacuum. No wonder he’s hysterical. It’s kind of touching how he doesn’t realize his backers, patrons and fans were never serious about carbon reduction — they just wanted a job, the dough, or an invite to dinner parties in the right circles. If any of them cared about the climate, they would have demanded nukes.
How could he forget the endless droughts and hordes of locusts? (Perhaps Prof Andy Pitman finally explained that droughts were never part of the deal anyhow?).
Tim-Not-an-Economist-Flannery thinks coal need subsidies:
Prime Minister Scott Morrison continues to sing the praises of coal, while members of the government call for subsidies for coal-fired power plants.
When what coal power really needs is for us to get rid of renewables subsidies.
Time for fury, anger and rebellion?
Here’s comes the means-to-an-ends excuses:
How should Australia’s parents deal with those who labour so joyously to create a world in which a large portion of humanity will perish? As I have become ever more furious at the polluters and denialists, I have come to understand they are threatening my children’s well-being as much as anyone who might seek to harm a child.
In the past, many of us have tolerated such pronouncements as the utterings of idiots — in the true, original Greek meaning of the word as one interested only in their own business.
Words have not cut through. Is rebellion the only option?
So he quotes the Extinction Rebellion Declaration of something which says essentially: Democracy is dead and “We hereby declare the bonds of the social contract to be null and void.”
Yes, indeed, voided perhaps when Flannery has paid back the Australian taxpayer for his past salary plus damages (anyone want to buy a desal plant?)
A large Yougov Climate Change survey has questioned about 1,000 people in 30 different countries. Despite being loaded and biased towards the IPCC religious position, and despite 30 years of non-stop propaganda, most of the population in major western countries are not obedient believers in the IPCC message.
Who do this half of the population vote for? Which mainstream major party even says humans are only partly responsible?
If political parties represented the voters, one of the two major parties in every country would be willing to say “the IPCC exaggerates the problem”. Only the USA (at the moment) has a leader that doesn’t repeat the IPCC line, even though many Republicans still do. In most western nations both sides of politics are competing for the 40 – 50% of the population that thinks humans are mainly responsible. As Donald Trump, Tony Abbott, Doug Ford and Jason Kenny show, most voters are easily inspired to vote against the climate dogma.
These numbers are typical of bigger and better studies over the years. Though the UK figure shows more believers than an ITV Newrs poll in 2014 showed. (Fully 62% of the UK were skeptical then and may still be if they were asked in a decent survey.)
Yougov, climate change survey, 2019,graph, USA.
I’ve included “don’t knows” as skeptical simply because saying “don’t know” in a loaded survey, and after all these years of repetition of the politically correct line is very much a skeptical position. Who could claim they hadn’t heard the IPCC position when it’s now taught in schools? So the “don’t knows” are people who could’ve said they believed the IPCC but chose not too. Because anyone who doubts climate change is called ugly names — where’s the tolerance for diversity — we can also be sure that a percentage of people saying they agree with the IPCC are feeling badgered into it.
Which of the following comes closest to your view?
It’s already too late to avoid the worst effects?
We are still able to avoid the worst…
We will be able to avoid the worst if we broadly carry on with the steps being taken.
Don’t know?
Or how about the options they didn’t ask, and don’t want to hear?
Action to change the climate is mostly a waste of time and money
Action to change the climate is a deadly burden on good people that costs lives and livelihoods?
So when critics turn up to ask why the “don’t knows” are included as skeptics, my answer is that the survey was loaded and biased and largely maximized the number of believers. Does anyone really think that the respondents would answer the same way if they’d also been offered realistic choices?
“Climate Change” is still a useless ambiguous phrase to design a survey around
Anyone who was really interested in knowing what people think would not use the term “climate change” because it intrinsically means natural change as well as man-made change, and they don’t specify.
…
So take it all with a grain of salt, but I am heartened to see our Scandinavian friends have a lot of skeptical brains and are often the least likely to “believe”.
The Greens religious beliefs are so fragile that they have to defend their science by stamping out any discussion at all. You either believe in their God or you are a despicable child killer denying that the Earth is round. How many senators will fall for this naked bullying? The Greens realize that their fantasy belief that windmills and solar panels control storms and hold back the tide, will fall apart under the most gentle of questioning. So they have to stop every question.
Reverend Adam Bandt thinks climate sensitivity is a yes no question, and that if man landed on the moon therefore upper tropospheric water-vapor feedbacks are positive and dangerous even though 28 million radiosondes say otherwise.
This is a dummy-spit of kindergarden proportions. Which of our elected leaders will call them out, or are they all so underconfident in their scientific knowledge that they are too afraid to admit moon landings and cloud microphysics are actually different topics, and that “yes” and “no” are not numbers?
The Australian Greens will urge the Senate to put the denial that burning coal has an impact on climate change, on par with some of the world’s wackiest conspiracy theories.
Party leader Richard Di Natale will move a motion on Monday noting that the upper house accepts humans first landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, and that the earth is round.
The motion also calls for the upper house to accept that burning thermal coal is the single biggest contributor to climate change, in a move designed to compare denial with conspiracy thinking.
Bandt wants legislation that ensures any Green-religionist can take a day off work to worship windmills in mass gatherings called “strikes”.
The “Conspiracy” insult is inane. It’s just the Greens destroying our language once again. Some conspiracies are real, and climate science has nothing to do with it either way. It’s as if the Greens are suggesting that no two humans ever conspire to rip people off, and the word must now be removed from English.
The Bushfire season started in August in 1951 in Queensland
In 1946 in August “Mt Archer, in the Kilcoy district, was a 1500 ft torch tonight”. The 1951 fires did £2m of damage, and within three years the people of Queensland responded by creating six times as many fire teams and more firebreaks. One farmer put in 500 miles of firebreaks on his own property.
Since then humans have put out 85% of all the CO2 emissions we have ever put out, showing that cutting our emissions by 85% (in reality, even going wildly negative to get back to 311ppm) won’t stop fires in August in Queensland.
We don’t have a climate emergency, we have a history emergency. It’s like hundreds of years and the effort of thousands of people just doesn’t exist.
The outbreaks hare been the worst for years. The fire risk is being maintained by westerly winds and the tinder-dry nature of the land.
Flames are laping 60 ft high and whirlwinds carrying blazing foliage and grass often 200 ft. high, are spreading the fire…
After the savage fires of 1951, Queenslanders formed hundreds of volunteer bushfire groups, cleared firebreaks, and it was simply understood that fires were coming, and could occur anytime after August.
“The bushfires of 1951 were the board’s worst on record, with losses totalling more than £2,000,000. Mr. Healy said an outbreak of bushfires this year was so certain that it was just a question of when. There had been two recently in the Monto district, but they had soon been brought under control. Most risky time would be after August, with October possibly the worst month.?” –— Warwick Daily News, Tuesday 15th June 1954
In 1951, there were only 50 volunteer bushfire brigades, but by 1954 in Queensland there were 300.
“One grazier in the Barcaldine district had made 500 miles of fire lines on the one property.”
…
Out in Longreach, fires were so common, the fire season ran all year, but was reduced in winter.
12 May 1953: Trove: Winter lessens Bushfire Risk – May 12 1953
With the beginning of winter, the bushfire risk had lessened and no serious outbreaks were expected until August-September, Mr T. Pyae, manager Of Dalgety’s…
The city and suburbs were again overcast with a pall of smoke from bush fires continuing to burn on he ranges surrounding Brisbane. — 6 Aug 1935: Trove: Courier Mail Brisbane
…
Thanks to Graham Dunton and Pat for finding these stories.
FIRES INVADE FARMS ON NORTH COAST
Several bush fires on the North Coast have threatened farms, and in some cases caused damage… – August 6, 1935
15,000 ACRES BURNED OUT
A bush fire which started on Noora homestead after a goods train passed through burned out between 15,000 and 20,000 acres in the district… — Aug 6, 1935
LOSS AT MULGOWIE
Bush fires in the Mulgowie district during the week-end did much damage, and it is estimated that more than 1000 acres of grass was destroyed. … — Aug 6, 1935
Meanwhile this week in 2019 the ABC and Queensland fire and emergency services are telling us that the fire seasons are starting earlier.
28 Aug: ABC: Queensland bushfire season expected to last longer, authorities warn
Queensland Fire and Emergency Services (QFES) Deputy Commissioner Mark Roche said Queensland had already started its fire season, with several fires coming close to homes and killing wildlife in the south-east last week.
“The bushfire season has started early and we expect it will go later as well,” he said…
9 Sept: MyPoliceQld: Fire investigation, Lakes Creek Following investigations into a fire in the Mount Archer area, police commenced proceedings by way of a Notice to Appear against a 63-year-old Lakes Creek man for the offence of Light Unauthorised Fire under the provisions of the Fire and Emergency Services Act 1990. Around 1.45pm yesterday a member of the public called Triple Zero after seeing a man acting suspiciously in the area. It will be alleged that the man was conducting his own backburning operations without a permit – and the fire subsequently spread from Lakes Creek to Mount Archer… The man is scheduled to appear at the Rockhampton Magistrates Court on 8 October 2019.
Once upon a time, scientists had colleagues that brought them back to earth. Then sensible scientists were sacked and the only people left in the department were the hyperbolic dramatists. Is it any wonder that what’s left of university departments thinks they need therapy? Every time one of them hits the panic button they all panic together.
Barnes, who is still analysing her results, was surprised that many of the scientists whom she interviewed felt intense grief and sadness about the reef’s deterioration. Nature has also spoken to several coral-reef scientists not involved in Barnes’s study who echo those sentiments.
“I now feel much more hopeless, and there’s a deeper anxiety breaking through,” says John Pandolfi, a marine ecologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.
David Suggett, a coral physiologist at the University of Technology Sydney. “Nothing can prepare you for seeing it play out in real time,” he says.
Nothing can prepare you — unless of course a wiser older colleague reminds you when it all happened before. “No biggie.”
Suggett says that he finds it difficult to set his emotions aside about the reef’s condition when talking to the public. He worries that if he shows his feelings, then people will accuse him of being biased. “It’s very challenging for researchers to maintain the appearance of being objective while showing that they care about the ecosystems they’re working on,” Suggett says. He thinks a lack of support networks for scientists struggling with the emotional effects of their work could also lead to feelings of isolation.
Dear Dr Suggett — why maintain the appearance of objectivity when you could maintain objectivity instead? We can show we care about the ecosystems by studying them better — by listening to opponents, debating it freely and tossing out cherished assumptions.
Scientists don’t need a therapy group — they need a debate.
Temperatures in the green circle marked in the centre were 11C, instead of minus 40 to minus 60C. As we mentioned before, this is extremely rare, and the likely implications are that sometime in the next few weeks a cold beast will hit somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, but no one really knows where. The Australian BOM are rather bravely predicting a warmer less rainy spring for NSW and QLD. (See below).
If only we really understood the major drivers of our climate we might have predicted this more than a few weeks in advance. Perhaps it is caused by some of those solar factors that the big GCM’s completely ignore?
Two years ago, same time, we see a single large polar jetstream at 10hPA and temperatures of around minus 40C in the warmest part and minus 60 elsewhere in the jetstream. These normal winds flow in a westerly direction at around 200km an hour especially in spring.
More normal stratospheric pattern over Antarctica in 2017
There are hardly any news reports on this in Australia, indeed it’s even hard to find twitter discussion: #SSW
Impacts from this stratospheric warming are likely to reach Earth’s surface in the next month and possibly extend through to January.
Apart from warming the Antarctic region, the most notable effect will be a shift of the Southern Ocean westerly winds towards the Equator.
For regions directly in the path of the strongest westerlies, which includes western Tasmania, New Zealand’s South Island, and Patagonia in South America, this generally results in more storminess and rainfall, and colder temperatures.
Past stratospheric warming events and associated wind changes have had their strongest effects in NSW and southern Queensland, where springtime temperatures increased, rainfall decreased and heatwaves and fire risk rose.
The influence of the stratospheric warming has been captured by the Bureau’s climate outlooks, along with the influence of other major climate drivers such as the current positive Indian Ocean Dipole, leading to a hot and dry outlook for spring.
The peak was expected a couple of weeks ago, but apparently the peak moved and was repredicted to be yesterday at 17C.
The peak of the strat. warming is expected tomorrow: +17 °C (290 K) in the stratosphere (10 hPa) above the Antarctic. However the average polar temperatures will increase in the next few days according to the ENS forecast. #SSW#polarvortex
Images via https://t.co/JO5aXhSB59pic.twitter.com/sgCbbsBi91
During the SSW the ozone hole shrinks and repairs itself even faster than usual. Normally the ozone hole grows and peaks in October. But right now it is already vanishing as the winds up high turn back on themselves. At least half the Stratospheric jet stream — especially over the Australian side appears to be flowing from the East instead of the West. Twitter #Ozonehole
Sudden warming in the high stratosphere,
In winter, in the Northern Hemisphere,
Is a forcing, it seems,
On its lower jet streams,
And a sign that a cold blast is near.
How to make electricity more expensive: build 1,000MW of random generation which needs expensive back up and an undersea cable too.
Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly noticed that the team selling the new “largest wind farm in the Southern Hemisphere” on Robbins Island are claiming it will help stabilize the supply of intermittent power in Australia. Instead it’s likely to do the opposite. This is the same 1GW wind farm that even Bob Brown, former Greens leader, doesn’t want. An eagle-chopping eyesore.
UPC Renewables are claiming the correlation between the Tasmanian Robbins Island output is “very low” compared to the wind farms in Victoria. It would be nice if only it were true. Instead they apparently got their r mixed up with their r2 — and incorrectly claim the correlation is low when actually its dangerously high. I say “dangerous” because it’s a danger to the NEM — the national grid. The last thing we need is 1,000MW of useless extra energy that arrives when all the other useless energy arrives — exacerbating the ups and downs — driving the efficient baseload providers out of business even faster, and leaving the nation with an expensive headache and sitting on a knife edge of frequency hell.
And there’s no point (or any profit) without a second undersea interconnector, so who’s paying that bill? It’s being sold to the taxpayer as a necessary bit of infrastructure for the forced transition (that we didn’t need in the first place). All so UPC investors can make money.
Jo
____________________________________________
Tasmania – Australia’s offshore wind farm?
Guest post by Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly
Is it possible that Tasmania could become Australia’s offshore wind farm? A proposal by UPC Renewables[1] [1] an international developer of wind farms, suggests that a 1000 MW wind farm could play on important role in moderating the intermittent supply of electricity from renewable resources.
UPC wants to construct what would be one of the largest wind farms in the world on Robbins Island, near Cape Grim in northwest Tasmania. There are two wind farms in the north of Tasmania that are part of the Australian Energy Market (AEM). These are Woolnorth to the west and Musselroe to the east. These and the proposed site on Robbins Island are shown in Figure 1 with the Victorian wind farm at Bald Hills, the closest mainland wind farm to Tasmania and along with the Basslink connection that joins the Tasmania grid to the grid in Victoria.
Figure 1: Layout of operating and proposed wind farms in Tasmania, along with Basslink and Bald Hills in Victoria.
At present Tasmania with hydropower, wind farms and the Basslink connection has enough energy available for its own needs and is also able to supply surplus energy to Victoria as Basslink has a capacity of 400 MW, and for short periods of up to 4 hours, 630 MW. However adding 1000 MW potential of the new wind farm will require not only a transmission line from Robbins Island to the Basslink terminal near Launceston but also an additional 500 MW link to Victoria.
The key question is what will these connectors cost for the consumers and taxpayers?
However before discussing this, an independent assessment of the benefits, and also, any potential risks, of the proposed new wind farm, needs to be made.
In their submission, UPC Renewables provides an analysis that states:
“UPC has done its own analysis of 5 minute NEM data for 2017 which demonstrates that the correlation between operating Victorian and Tasmanian wind farms is very low (i.e. R- Squares below 0.2 in most cases — refer Table 3 appended See Figure 2 below). This points to the value of development in geographical diverse locations to minimize coincidently high or low output and hence avoid the issues that coincident generation or lack thereof brings.”
The key point in the above quote is the use of the term “correlation”. A correlation coefficient ranges from +1 to -1 or 100% to -100%. The UPC quote above and their table quoted there refers tothe correlation coefficient as “R-Squares”, or “r2“. How or where does this r-squared term arise? The question arises because “R-Squares” is not a term in normal usage as a correlation coefficient[2].
A second point about looking at correlations among the outputs of these wind farms is that the energy generated as a function of time needs to be examined in detail as there may well be low correlations but nonetheless swings in energy output of any of the wind farms, even large swings, may occur, being not necessarily made apparent by the correlation analysis alone.
Figure 2: Extract from Table 3 appended to the UFC document. The table shows correlation values for the wind farms shown in Figure 1.and the average values for the 35 wind farms examined.
Given that there are ambiguities arising from the form of the UPC renewables statement as per the quote above, the rule in any such potential for confusion is: look at the data.
Correlations among selected Wind Farm outputs
The5 minute NEM data for 2017 has been obtained from the AEMO website and Figure 3 shows the 5 minute variations for the month of July 2017 for Woolnorth and Bald Hills. Figure 4 shows Woolnorth and Musselroe. These wind farms are about 250 km apart from each other.
Figure 3: 5 minute variations for the month of July 2017 for Woolnorth and Bald Hills.
…
Figure 4: 5 minute variations for the month of July 2017 for Woolnorth and Musselroe.
The correlation coefficient for Woolnorth against Bald Hills is 57 +/- 1 % and the value for Woolnorth against Musselroe is 54 +/- 1%. The error is so small as there are between 8,000 and 9,000 5 minute values for each wind farm.
But if you square these July correlation coefficients you get 32% for Woolnorth against Bald Hills and 29% for Woolnorth against Musselroe !
The full analysis of the 5 minute data is given in Table 1. The UPC quoted values are the squares of the correlation coefficients.
Table 1 Comparison of correlations coefficients
Month 2017
Woolnorth Bald Hills 2017
Woolnorth Musselroe
2017
Bald Hills Musselroe
2017
January
61%
25%
10%
February
47%
38%
25%
March
14%
14%
21%
April
54%
40%
29%
May
71%
52%
46%
June
81%
74%
61%
July
57%
54%
56%
August
65%
68%
56%
September
77%
65%
69%
October
65%
21%
36%
November
32%
24%
2%
December
43%
35%
25%
Year 2017
56%
45%
40%
UPC r2 value
32%
20%
16%
UPC r value
57%
45%
40%
Should this usage be in fact what UPC Renewables has chosen to offer in their presentation of the apparent correlations in wind farm output? It does pose one potential disadvantage for the case that they are presenting. The squaring of the correlation coefficient, remembering that the real, non-squared, value is across a range [-1, +1]), has the apparent advantage that, indeed, it results in a smaller numerical value An example from the table above gives the real value of the correlation coefficient (the bottom row of the table) is 57% or 0.57. Squaring this yields the value of 0.325, apparently a low value for the “correlation”. However, a possible value of -0.57, would have been much more supportive of the argument that UPC Renewables is trying to advance, then squaring this latter value to get +0.325.
However, the actual data show no negative correlations for the full year of 2017 (Figure 5).
Figure 5: Full year correlations of Woolnorth against all other wind farms for 2017
In the event, the fact remains that the correlation is positive, and is significantly higher overall than the UPC Renewables paper would seem to suggest.
So what performance might be expected from this new wind farm?
Robbins Island is some 25 km from and immediately to the east of the Woolnorth wind farm so its performance should be similar. As an example, in South Australia, two wind farms, whose latitude and longitude data are separately published, North Brown Hill and Hallett 2, are 35 km apart and their correlation coefficient for the year 2017 is 85%. That is, their respective outputs are seen to track each other fairly closely. Therefore, given that the proposed Robbins Island wind farm would be even closer to Woolnorth than the 35 km that separates these two South Australian wind farms, it can be expected that, if anything, the output of the proposed Robbins Island wind farm would track that of Woolnorth even more closely.
So it is possible to model the Robbins Island contribution to Victorian wind farm supply by scaling both Woolnorth and Musselroe to 1000 MW as the behaviour of the Robbins Island wind farm. Table 2 show the contributions increase the intermittency. Figure 6 is an example of potential Victorian wind farms correlation to Robbins Island from Woolnorth scaled to 1000 MW.
Table 2: Victorian wind farm performance with added supply from Robbins Island
Wind farms
Correlation with Victoria
Capacity including “Robbins Island”
Annual average MW
Capacity factor
Mean 5 minute changes MW
% of changes over 100 MW
Maximum change MW
Victoria
1408
403
29%
10
0.13%
252
Woolnorth
47%
2408
802
33%
26
3.09%
941
Musselroe
24%
2408
774
32%
19
1.06%
964
Figure 6: 5 minute variations for the month of July 2017 for Victorian wind farms and Robbins Island scaling the performance of the Woolnorth wind farm to 1000 MW
Extent of the swings in total wind farm output
What has become a clear issue in the deployment of so much in the way of the ever-increasing proportion of the total installed capacity of both wind farms and solar PV installations is both the inherent intermittency of these forms of generation, and their virtually complete lack of a contribution to that all-important component of generation, system inertia, that is so important to the grid’s ability to deal with the stress of unexpected transients, such as that due to lightning strikes, loss of generation and bushfires passing under major transmission lines.[3]
One of the tasks required of the professional engineer in developing any proposal is the requirement to properly examine any and all likely worst-case scenarios.
The determination of a correlation index as performed by UPC Renewables does not address the matter of volatility in any way whatsoever. That volatility in the output of wind farms is clearly a concern can be seen by an examination of the total wind farm output on the Eastern Australian grid for virtually any month of the year. That for June 2019 is reproduced as Figure 7 below as a typical example.
Figure 7 Total Wind Farm output of all AEMO-registered wind farms on the Eastern Australian grid for the month of June 2019[4]
The figure shows numerous occasions where deep minima in the output occur. Remember, this is the output of the total wind farm fleet. This also raises doubts about the UPC correlation analysis as recorded wind output varies by a factor of 10.
Clearly, if this supply were the only source of generation, then multiple grid-wide blackouts would have occurred during this month of June 2019 alone.
We need to keep very firmly in mind that supply and demand on the grid must be maintained in second-by-second balance. If the balance is not maintained 24/7, grid collapse, (the technical term for widespread blackouts), very quickly follows.
Now, let’s talk about the acceptability or otherwise of grid-wide blackouts. Remembering that a grid-wide blackout that lasts even a few hours can have catastrophic and even tragic consequences, and also remembering that the required “black start” after a grid-wide collapse may take several days to enable restoration of power, clearly a grid-wide failure occurring at any time is totally unacceptable. That this is so was a message brought home loudly and clearly to the British authorities after the occurrence of a widespread, very disruptive blackout on Friday, 10 August last. See, for example, the coverage in the Daily Mail.[5]
We may safely conclude then, that a grid-wide blackout, at a frequency of even just one in every ten years, is totally unacceptable.
So, what does the possibility of grid-wide blackouts have to do with the choice of whether or not to build a great, big, new wind farm, in northern Tasmania, the largest so far to be installed in Australia?
The clue can be found in an examination of either or both of the outputs of the Woolnorth and Musselroe wind farms shown in Figure 4. Each exhibits swings in output across the full range of its capacity, Woolnorth’s for example varying from zero to near its full installed capacity of 140 MW and back, and similarly Musselroe varying over its full capacity from zero to 168 MW. Furthermore, figure 4 shows that both wind farms vary in their output over their full range very frequently, if seemingly chaotically and frequently the swings over their full range occur quite rapidly. What is interesting is that the higher capacity factors demonstrated in the Tasmanian wind farms simply results in power excursions over the full installed capacity rather more frequently than might occur in lower capacity factor wind farms of mainland Australia. Maintaining control over the grid is a challenge where such uncontrolled variations are occurring, particularly where multiple generators are involved.
We can be quite certain then that should the Robbins Island facility be built then the grid operator will have to deal with an additional wildly swinging input varying from zero to 1000 MW and back, virtually fully correlated with the wild swings of the Woolnorth (and Bald Hills) wind farm. Without the building of a new 1000 MW gas-fired power station purpose built to back up this new wind farm, continued control of the Eastern Australian grid would be hugely challenging, if not impossible, to achieve.
Conclusion
Our analysis of the correlations among the various wind farms shows that the proposed wind farm at Robbins Island would add a very large additional highly variable, intermittent, supply that is positively correlated with the existing wind farm supply. As a result, any wind farm built at the Robbins Island location will merely add a large chunk of additional instability to what is an already increasingly unstable Eastern Australian grid. This instability is due to the inherent intermittency in the output of all wind farms and solar PV installations. As with all these other intermittent sources of generation, any such wind farm will also fail to provide the very necessary synchronous inertia provided by conventional dispatchable plant, inertia that protects the grid from the sudden shocks induced by such events as already mentioned. This second shortcoming is of concern if the Robbins Island wind farm is considered to be some sort of replacement for any coal-fired power station, to which UPC Renewables allude in their submission.
The sheer scale of the installed capacity of this proposal then should give cause for grave concerns for the continued operational stability of the Eastern Australian grid should it proceed.
Furthermore, our analysis shows that any suggestion that the building of wind farms at other sites in Tasmania would contribute the desirable output negatively correlated with that from wind farms in mainland Australia would require rigorous analysis before any confidence could be given to any such claim.
The development of the Robbins Island wind farm comes in two parts. The first stage of the farm would be a 500 MW installation. A transmission line would be needed to deliver the electricity to the Basslink station near Launceston. The second stage would add a further 500 MW and would require a second Basslink cable.
The impact would be experienced in Victoria as the wind farm output under the RET scheme has entry at zero bid price so receives the price set from the bid stack along with REC payment. Victoria already has some 4,000 MW of proposed or approved wind farms that will come into operation over the next five years. A further 1,000 MW will simply add to an already overloaded renewable intermittent energy supply.
This development by a supplier outside Victoria where there are limited interconnectors to other states shows that there is no effective planning for the development of electricity supply on a national scale.
REFERENCES
[1^] The UPS Renewables submission may be found at:
[2^]Correlations That a term such as “R-Squares” is not commonly used as a correlation coefficient can quickly be ascertained by reference to any standard text on statistics. A website such as: https://www.statisticssolutions.com/correlation-pearson-kendall-spearman/ that discusses statistics in a very general fashion allows the reader to quickly determine what are the standard formulae and standard procedures.
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