Sometimes we have laws, and sometimes it’s the wrong time for them
A judgement today in a minor NSW court banned a coal mine in the hope of making storms and floods nicer for our great grandchildren. Curiously, it was not the much hated thermal coal mine, it was a coking coal mine – the stuff we use in making steel. It takes 600 kilograms of coal to make one ton of steel and Australian coking coal is considered some of the world’s best. It follows that either the world uses a bit less steel, or it buys the coal from somewhere else. Does the judge have something against steel? Let’s melt down wind turbines and solar panels instead.
Most likely the world will buy the coal from somewhere else. It will likely be less pure and more polluting with few environmental controls or worker’s rights, but hey-de-ho, Judge Preston is not there to worry about environmental global concerns. It’s not like he’s a judge in the NSW Land and Environment Court. Oh…
Effectively, an Australian court decided to increase global pollution by blocking a clean coal mine*. As usual, there is no scientific or legal consistency; No principle apart from impressing people at dinner parties?
An unprecedented court ruling that links Australia’s coalmines to global climate change may place a $100 billion pipeline of fossil fuel developments in peril.
But who needs money? (Or steel…)
Bear in mind the decision may be appealed. (More money for lawyers).
Tick, tock, time to be legal?
Strangely the judge concludes that moving 0.03% of global coal production from Australia this year to China next year will make the world a better place for the NSW taxpayers who fund his salary.
The developer of the mine, Gloucester Resources — controlled by German mining billionaire Hans Mende — aimed to produce 2.5 million tonnes a year of coal from the open-cut mine 3km south of Gloucester.
Or graphed as the rainfall anomaly rather than as the percentage of the mean:
….
Predicting rainfall in Australia is very difficult. The issue is not that the BoM gets it wrong — it’s that they pretend they can do it that matters. Why bother issuing one month forecasts?
The fancy-pants detailed graphics are entirely misleading — like advertising that sells an ability the experts simply don’t have. We don’t want genius from our BoM, we just want honesty.
Townsville City Council’s spokeswoman said last night the model, which was based on expert modelling of different scenarios, was overwhelmed by an “unprecedented” monsoonal trough …
Local Government Association of Queensland chief executive Greg Hallam said Townsville’s flood maps relied on “exhaustive modelling of every possible scenario”, looking at variables such as rainfall and artificial structures.
“We’re not God. We don’t have supreme knowledge. We only have the best science, the best knowledge we can have,” he said. “We now know with the (dam) gates fully open … what will flood and what won’t, so there will be a new set of flood maps produced out of this event.”
If we had better climate models, perhaps we might have been able to empty the dam before the downpour instead of during it. (Though I’ve yet to see any data on dam levels yet, so perhaps not. Wait and see.).
The Local Government Guru must be flummoxed. He (Hallam) even protests they used the “Monte Carlo” risk analysis “as recommended in 2012 by experts.” What could possibly go wrong?
How about basing a $1.5Trillion dollar global industry, agriculture, energy generation and national wealth on models one hundred times more complex which also use a “Monte Carlo” analysis.”
Another ugly lesson:
Beware, people who followed the expert advice have no legal recourse to get compensation if they’ve just “discovered” it was built on a floodplain instead.
In the global warming parallel universe there won’t be compensation: no climate modeler could even afford to pay back 0.1% of the damage created by those expert predictions.
For those from foreign lands, Brisbane is also in Queensland, but is 1,300km south of Townsville, outside the tropics, yet still prone to droughts and floods too.
Best wishes to those suffering at the hands of monsoons and or models.
———————————————
UPDATE: The Ross River Dam was 65% full before the downpour. This is not the same situation as the Wivenhoe Dam disaster near Brisbane. h/t Jonesy (I note Townsville is currently under Level 2 water restrictions. 🙂 Don’t use your sprinklers on the wrong day!)
Martin Clark: The State Govt forces councils to plan for the UN IPCC RCP 8.5 (worst case “global warming” scenario).
This has been an exceptional event, but it is NOT unprecedented. There is a swale at the rear of my property. I have a marker placed at the level where the 1998 flood reached. The flood water has gone way past this marker four times in the last 6 days.
The flood mapping may be partly based on expert engineering analysis, but the provisions are augmented by the lunatic projections of the UN IPCC’s RCP 8.5. This is called up in the State Planning Policy, so it MUST be incorporated in local planning provisions. This has resulted in some ridiculous requirements. I objected to RCP 8.5 being included in the SPP. Much to my surprise, it was removed, but was then put back in by the current regime. It is a distraction that can’t happen, but diverts attention from events that can happen.
There are areas downstream of the Ross Dam that have flooded many times before, and will flood again. In this respect, Townsville is better than many towns and cities on the eastern seaboard, in that it is built at the estuary of rivers that have a limited catchment, not the 1/2 million km2 that applies to many other places. However, stuff that has been approved and constructed under the post-2014 provisions has gone under. Bunnings at Idalia went under by a whole metre.
The ’98 flood was the result of a spent cyclone sitting over the city for about 24 hours. This has been a monsoon trough that has stayed almost stationary for 6 days. “Australian Rainfall and Runoff” does not adequately cover events that don’t move.
Up until quite recently, “monsoonal” weather was regarded as something that only applied to India and SE Asia. As far as we know, monsoon troughs don’t go round for a second go like cyclones sometimes do. We hope.
The only solution is to design for this type of phenomenon and where cost-effective, refit existing development to be recoverable. The money we waste on ruinable energy needs to be spent on real problems. “100 year” events? More like “100 week” events.
After epic flooding in Townsville, witchdoctors are blaming climate change.
Queensland’s recent extreme weather – bushfires, heatwaves, coral bleaching, drought, Cyclone Penny, Townsville’s floods – showed Queensland is clearly experiencing climate change, Professor Ian Lowe said.
Thus spake the Druid of Runes waving a bunch of multifactor complex processes that have been happening forever, can’t be predicted and only have scary trends if you draw short graphs with no error bars. Verily we see doom, doth payth my grant, or whatever it is that keeps Prof Ian Lowe going. He is allegedly in the Queensland Climate Advisory Council (QCAC) — an organization so successful its only existence on the internet appears to be a sidebar on page 15 of a government PDF. But whoever they are, they’re experts, trust us, that the media doesn’t need to ask for an alternate opinion.
Wouldn’t you know it though, floods seem to happen quite a lot in Townsville
This is not to say that the current floods are not serious but just that Townsville is a floody kind of place. It’d be climate change if things stopped flooding in Townsville.
In 1998 Townsville airport recorded half a meter of rain in 24 hours. It sounds recent but back then CO2 levels were 360ppm. Other parts of the city reached up to 1.3m of rain during the week. But Far North Queensland (FNQ) has a history of insane bouts of rain. Few places on Earth do rain like FNQ. The legendary Bellenden Ker Top is 250km north — the wettest place in Australia. Once in 1979, it got nearly 4 meters of rain in just eight days. Fully 1.5 metres of water fell out of the sky in one day. So who has a rain gauge five feet tall? One year it recorded 12m of rain. The whole area should be surrounded by pool safety fences to comply with council bylaws.
In 1946, The upper Ross River got 200mm of rain in just 2 hours. Call that a rain bomb? They would now, but back then CO2 was only 310ppm, and people just called it a downpour.
Images of Townsville in April 12th 1890
1892: Church wrecked, many small houses washed away, half the population cannot reach the city and business was at a standstill.
A couple of weeks back Gillette thought it would pander to the #Metoo women who do the shopping. Uproar resulted. James Delingpole won’t be buying Gillette in a hurry, but “news sells” and a boycott doesn’t always outdo the mindless sales boost. If you’ve had enough of politically correct advertising, spread the word.
It all goes to show that climate change is the most useless phrase in the English language.
It’s able to be used in so many contradictory ambiguous ways, as to mean everything, and therefore, nothing.
It’s useless to anyone who wants to convey information, but pretty handy for those who want to convey fog instead. Anyone want to prey on the good-but-confused?
Widespread poverty and worsening droughts, floods and other climate risks make Africa particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change
Climate change is always 50 shades of evil:
Yaounde — Teenage girls growing up in Lesotho in areas hit by harsh drought and other climate shocks are more likely to drop out of school, start having sex earlier and contract HIV, researchers say.
Even the IPCC doesn’t really pretend in their scientific hearts that we can predict or attribute the causes of drought and flood, yet here it gets bundled in with “climate change” as if everyone knows that droughts are getting worse (they’re not) and are caused by coal plants.
In a study looking at the link between climate change and HIV infection since antiretroviral (ARV) treatment drugs became widely available in Sub-Saharan Africa, researchers found that severe drought threatens to drive new HIV infections.
And here was everyone thinking that droughts would prevent AIDS.
In the urban areas of Lesotho researchers looked at, droughts were linked to an almost five-fold increase in the number of girls selling sex and a three-fold increase in those being forced into sexual relations.
In Lesotho more than half the population lives on less than $1.90 a day according to World Bank, and 55% grow their own food, making them particularly vulnerable to drought.
So poor people will suffer more from bad weather than rich people. We needed a study for this?
UN dilemma: Should we try to reduce AIDS by changing the weather, or helping the poor get richer.
Hands up who wants to stop AIDS with solar panels?
The BBC is reporting that academics from University College London have discovered that the Little Ice Age was not caused by the record low solar activity of the Maunder Minima, instead it was due to the colonization of the Americas. Thanks mostly to measles and small pox the death toll was so enormous that about 9% of the global population died, supposedly leaving empty farmlands. These were swiftly covered in forests causing a deadly fall in CO2 which cooled the world.
This is an Apocryphal story that virtue signals in so many ways. A kind of triple-point scrabble maneuver combining climate, race, war, forests and imperial colonization in the one story.
Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth’s climate.
That’s the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.
The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation.
This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet.
It’s a cooling period often referred to in the history books as the “Little Ice Age”…
The implications of this are pretty staggering. Firstly, we’re only talking of the regrowth of an area the size of France. What if carbon reduction programs overdo things, then, biffo — ice-age, here we come? It was only a reduction of 7 – 10ppm. And think of the paradox, if we reforest the world, it will become so cold we’re looking at snowball Earth, which will kill all the forests.
If a mere 10ppm loss of CO2 caused a mini ice age, it’s a wonder we’ve survived the 120ppm rise since then. All that extra CO2 seems to only have warmed us back to where we were in the Medieval Warm Period. There is a kind of wormhole here in the maths where negative CO2 units are far more powerful than positive ones.
POST NOTE: Commenter Francis Lacan follows this through on “colonizing Africa”.
February 1, 2019 at 5:38 am Some clever scientists at University College London are suggesting that re-colonising Africa would completely offset the effects of global warming. If you follow there maths, suppressing only a few hundred millions inhabitants would allow vegetation to reclaim land, and “pull down enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet”. QED.
These people are truly bonkers: Listen to the co-author talk about the implications.
Co-author Dr Chris Brierley believes there is [a lesson for modern climate policy]. He said the fall-out from the terrible population crash and re-wilding of the Americas illustrated the challenge faced by some global warming solutions.
“There is a lot of talk around ‘negative emissions’ approaches and using tree-planting to take CO₂ out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate change,” he told BBC News.
What matters here, is it the actual temperature “outcome” or the level of a trace gas?
“And what we see from this study is the scale of what’s required, because the Great Dying resulted in an area the size of France being reforested and that gave us only a few ppm. This is useful; it shows us what reforestation can do. But at the same, that kind of reduction is worth perhaps just two years of fossil fuel emissions at the present rate.”
The lesson is always “more”: more reductions, more money, more rules.
What’s more scary — the amount of the Earth we’d have to reforest to get a perfect climate; the amount of people who have to die; or the lax, one sided training of BBC reporter Johnathon Amos?
What about the 50 million killed in the Black Death?
If human population controls the climate what did Earth do for the first 4.5 billion years?
If the Earth were to freeze or to fry,
Alarmists would always deny,
That the sun played a role,
Which beyond their control,
Would all their false dogma belie.
–Ruairi
h/t to George (Aprils fools day indeed@!) and Bill H. Thank you both.
Who knew? The polar vortices are the two strongest and largest “storms” on the planet. These continent scale storms are 600 miles across with winds raging at 300km per hour. Simon Clark is doing (or has done) a PhD in polar vortexes. He describes how each winter they form high over the poles. These are stratospheric, circling far above jet streams and planes. The tight circular pattern keeps the coldest air corralled. But every now again, the neat circle falls apart. In the polar stratosphere sometimes temperatures warm in days by stupid amounts, like 50 degrees C. It’s called a Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW) and one started around Christmas time.
As Clark describes it, these are easily the most violent weather events on the planet. (They sound fascinating). As with unbalanced centrifuges, when things unravel, as the high speed system unravels, the arctic cold could spin off anywhere — this week it’s the US, but Europe and Russia are often targets too. There is a lag involved — after an SSW it may take two weeks for things to hit the fan on the surface, so to speak. Generally, when an SSW hits it presages a brutal winter with outbreaks of super-cold blobs down for the next month or two.
Naturally, the Eco-worriers are saying it was misplaced Moroccan warm air. Knowledge is ignorance, Pain is bliss, and warm air causes cold air.
Simon Clark | Watch especially from 1:20
But really it’s climate change, trust me, and besides, how can you argue with this:
Some scientists—but by no means most—see a connection between human-caused climate change and difference in atmospheric pressure that causes slower moving waves in the air.
“It’s a complicated story that involves a hefty dose of chaos and an interplay among multiple influences, so extracting a clear signal of the Arctic’s role is challenging,” said Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. Several recent papers have made the case for the connection, she noted.
“This symptom of global warming is counterintuitive for those in the cross-hairs of these extreme cold spells,” Francis said in an email. “But these events provide an excellent opportunity to help the public understand some of the ‘interesting’ ways that climate change will unfold.”
Trust The Guardian to fall for the post hoc genius and ask a question they already knew the answer to in 1990:
Is this weather event linked to climate change?
Studies have pointed to a recent increase in instances where the polar vortex has bulged down into heavily populated areas. Scientists are gaining a better understanding of why this is happening, with many identifying climate change as an influence.
There’s some evidence that the jet stream, a meandering air current that flows over North America and Europe, is slowing and becoming wavier as the planet warms. The jet stream interacts with the polar vortex, helping bring numbing temperatures further south.
And the “evidence” they link too is a Michael Mann et al paper from 2018. Having noticed that polar vortex disturbances are on the increase, they find a way to link it to your SUV:
Examining state-of-the-art [Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5)] climate model projections, we find that QRA events are likely to increase by ~50% this century under business-as-usual carbon emissions, but there is considerable variation among climate models. Some predict a near tripling of QRA events by the end of the century, while others predict a potential decrease.
In parts of the US schools are closed, flights are cancelled, and USPS has even stopped deliveries. Frostbite can occur in ten minutes or less, and police stations have opened their doors to the homeless…
In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!
NOAA Tweeted a link to an article about record snowstorms in reply, or rather, as the BBC says “in what was widely interpreted as a rebuttal to the president.” In other words, if you find this convincing, it was a reply. If you know it’s irrelevant… nevermind.
Oops. Did NOAA just imply that warm water leads to cold air?
This is complete nonsense. The record cold air has an extremely low dew point, meaning it contains very small amounts of moisture. It is sad that government agencies like @NOAA continue to misinform the public.
John Cook tries to attack skeptics for their savage jokes about cold spells. Go for it John, we’ll believe you when you when you stop publishing stories about single hot days and tell PhD’s they shouldn’t harp on about random noise like heat waves:
When a cold spell struck the east coast recently, US President Donald Trump tweeted “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”
The argument he is sarcastically implying and often makes—that global warming isn’t happening because it’s cold outside—possesses an obvious logical flaw. [No kidding]. It’s like arguing that the sun no longer exists when it gets dark at night. Of course, Trump didn’t invent this argument—it’s commonly brought up on denier blogs and social media threads whenever the weather turns cold.
This type of fallacious reasoning is not just common on believer blogs, it’s their bread and butter.
Trump was being sarcastic. Skeptics are making jokes — but what excuse can anyone make for paid PhD’s who are serious?
Let’s swap the hot’s and cold’s of Cooks own words (mine bolded):
The argument PhD’s seriously imply and often make—that global warming is happening because it’s hot, flooding, extreme, drought-striken, rainy, windy, wavy or otherwise not exactly average outside—possesses an obvious logical flaw. It’s like arguing that any weather we get must be caused by our coal plants because we can’t think what else might have caused it.
Worse, it’s like saying that every bushfire, bleached reef and reckless fish is evidence that your car is changing the climate.
Believers are, after all, the true stars in this world of turning random noise and spurious correlation into pretend evidence. It’s not just something they do anymore, it’s their main strategy. After telling us for years that weather is not climate all the half baked evidence they had fell apart. The ice core result came out backwards. The hot spot went missing. The temperature trends slowed. The seas didn’t accelerate and Antarctica ignored them. All they have left now is relentless Pavlovian hammering of the “hottest X years of the last ten years”. That, and the agitprop linking every change in local beach sand, migrating crocodiles and jellyfish plagues to fossil fuel emissions.
Perhaps Cook is worried that skeptics might get serious about doing what alarmists do, and beat them at their own game.
Greens et al want to add €12 or $20 AUD to the cost of filling a car in order to stop jellyfish plagues, sharks and droughts in Ireland in 2100. Hello, Yellow Vests….
TDs and senators are split over plans for a fourfold increase in carbon tax …
Fine Gael and Green Party members of the Oireachtas climate action committee want a report next month to recommend a carbon tax of at least €80 a ton over the next decade, which would add €12 to the cost of filling a car with diesel or petrol and €7.20 to a bag of coal.
Sinn Fein is opposing increases in carbon tax until there is better public transport, grant aid for retrofitting houses, and lower costs for electric vehicles. Fianna Fail is also against recommending a carbon tax rise in the climate action report.
The Greens want the tax to be doubled to €40 next year, with annual increases of €5 over the next decade until it reaches €90.
As usual, the theft is disguised as a gift. Will the people fall for the “free lunch” yet again?
Eamon Ryan, the Green Party leader, said the money raised should be paid back to households as a carbon dividend.
The rebate would begin at about €200 per household — based on the Greens’ proposed €20 carbon tax increase in next year’s budget — rising to €600 by 2030 if the tax reaches at least €80 per ton.
Someone needs to tell the poor that “the money” doesn’t come back when someone adds a stupid burden to the economy. The only people who benefit are the bureaucrats, lawyers and accountants (and bank shareholders) who manage the pointless merry-go-round of money.
The cost of electricity on Thursday in two states of Australia reached a tally of $932 million dollars for a single day of electricity. Thanks to David Bidstrup on Catallaxy for calculating it.
As Bruce of Newcastle says ““Three days and you could buy a HELE plant with the money wasted.” That’s a power plant that could last 70 years, and provide electricity at under $50/MW. (Forget all the high charges for 30 years to pay of the capital (in red below), we could just buy the damn thing outright, paid off in full from day one.)
Cost of old coal plants in the USA. From the report by Stacy and Taylor, of the Institute for Energy Research (IER)
Burned at the stake: $500 per family
In Victoria, per capita, that means it cost $110 for one day’s electricity. For South Australians, Thursday’s electricity bill was $140 per person. (So each household of four just effectively lost $565.) In both these states those charges will presumably be paid in future price rises, shared unevenly between subsidized solar users and suffering non-solar hostages. The costs will be buried such that duped householders will not be aware of what happened. Coles and Woolworths will have to add a few cents to everything to cover their bills, and the government will have to cut services or increase taxes. No one will know how many jobs are not offered or opportunities lost. This is the road to Venezuela.
If Hazelwood had still been open, the whole bidstack would have changed, quite probably saving electricity consumers in those two states hundreds of dollars. Eight million Australians could have had a weekend away, gone to a ball, or bought brand new fishing gear. And this is just one single day of electricity. If Liddell closes, things will get worse, no matter how much unreliable not-there-when-you-need-it capacity we add to the system. Indeed, the more fairy capacity we add, the worse it gets. NSW will soon join the SA-Vic club.
This is what happens when an electricity grid is run by kindergarten arts graduates who struggle with numbers bigger than two.
This is utterly and completely a renewables fail
The socialist Labor-Greens are already trying to blame it on coal, but we ran coal plants for decades without these disasters. Right now, no one is investing in coal because of bipartisan stupidity. What company would pay the maintenance fees on infrastructure so hated by the political class? The coal plants are being run into the ground. Maintenance is even being delayed to keep the plants running through peaks like this.
No country on Earth with lots of unreliable renewables has cheap electricity. How many times do I have to repeat it? This is my mantra for 2019.
In Australia when we had mainly coal and no renewables our electricity was cheap and reliable. Now we are still mainly coal, but all it takes is a poisonous small infiltration of subsidized unreliable renewables to destroy the former economic incentives, the whole market, the system: our lifestyle.
The Liberal Party needs to grow a spine
This is surely a crisis. As long as the Liberals are a Tweedledum version of the Labor party, they can’t solve this and deserve to lose. New renewables installations must be stopped immediately — put on hold indefinitely — until they no longer need forced subsidies, until the RET is gone, the carbon taxes, the hidden emissions trading scheme and we have a proper free market. Then new renewables can be permitted to compete with all generation alternatives, though all new generators will also have to be responsible for paying for extra transmission lines, back up batteries, and any other frequency stabilization required. On net a generator must be able to guarantee that when the people call on it, it can provide, lets say, 80% of total nameplate capacity. When that day comes (thirty, fifty, years from now or maybe never) I will be happy to support renewables. Until then, we are global patsies handing over glorious profits to energy giants, renewables companies, Chinese manufacturers, and large financial institutions.
Lets have a plebescite: How many Australians would rather have a weekend away with their family or make the world 0.00 degrees cooler in 100 years in a symbolic display to assuage the Gods of Storms?
Happy Australia Day!
h/t to Ian B
*Added the word unreliable post hoc. It’s more accurate. We are talking about Wind and Solar, not Hydro. h/t Claude.
***UPDATED: Melbourne has been 42C or more around 50 times since 1855. That’s one in three years. Thanks to Bob Fernley-Jones for the correction.
They were only 250 million watts short:
Loy Yang, powering Victoria, and soon probably “taking the blame” too.
Rachel Baxendale, The Australian
h/t Des Moore
More than 200,000 Victorian households had their power cut off yesterday in a bid to protect the state’s energy system from shutting down, as the Andrews government was forced to admit there was not enough power to keep up with soaring demand in sweltering summer heat.
Homes were blacked out, traffic lights across Melbourne were switched off and businesses were forced to close for up to two hours after the Australian Energy Market Operator enforced rolling power outages to make up a 250 megawatt shortfall in supply.
The State Energy Minister (Lily D’Ambrosio) said there would “absolutely” be no blackouts this morning and the rolling blackouts started 90 minutes later. Welcome to the USSAustralia where we hope to make your 150th Birthday Party 0.001 degrees cooler but we can’t predict our electricity grid for the next hour and a half.
Dark ages — get used to it:
Greens leader Richard Di Natale blamed an over-reliance on coal for the heatwave and backed Ms D’Ambrosio’s calls for people to stop using their dishwashers and washing machines and to turn up the temperature on their air-conditioners.
Senator Di Natale said Australians experiencing power outages were being unreasonable if they complained about not being able to use home appliances…
That’s right, the man who thinks solar panels will protect your children from storms wants you to “be reasonable”.
We were told renewables would be cheap, would save the world, and power the nation. Now we’re told the lights will go out, we shouldn’t expect to run the dishwasher or air-conditioner at 7pm every day, and burning hundreds of millions of dollars for an afternoons electricity is just “part of the price”.
I have seen your future and your future is load shedding:
Once we were going to lead the world, now we are happy to be failing like everyone else.
Ms Zibelman said load shedding was common practice around the world. “All countries that I’m aware of, and again, I have been in the business for 30 years, and over periods of time you run into these systems like you have, where you have generators that go off and you have to do load shedding,” she said. “We can’t afford … 100 per cent reliability over all hours and all circumstances, but we do like to plan that for what we see these extreme weather events that we have enough reserves available. That’s really what we’re working towards.”
Victoria used to be able to “afford” reliable energy, until they got lots of cheap wind and solar power.
Now business can’t afford to set up in Victoria.
Australia used to be able to maintain coal plants too:
AEMO blamed the failure of two generators at the Yallourn coal-fired power station and another at Loy Yang A, all in the Latrobe Valley, for reducing supply by 1800MW.
Melbourne has been this hot or hotter about 30 50 times since 1855
It’s being billed as wildly extreme, but Melbourne officially peaked at 42.8C. Bob Fernley-Jones looked back at the long Melbourne Regional Office data going back to 1855, and found around 30 corrected “50” examples of a day of 42C or more. Days like this are one-in-3-year-event. This is summer in Melbourne. It’s not rare and any half-competent planner would plan accordingly.
As Bob points out the highest spikes in Jan ’39 and Feb 2009 are arguably outliers “resulting from freakish hot northerlies (and the most terrible Victorian bushfires). If they are waived as outliers, then for the rest of the record from 1855 it’s all pretty dam flat?”
Temperatures recorded above 42C in Melbourne from 1855 to 2015. (Regional Office) Thanks to Bob Fernley-Jones.
Seriously, officer, these two thermometers are exactly the same. Trust me.
An example of different thermometers side-by-side in a Stevenson Screen.. Photo: Bill Johnston.
How much did it all cost?
Who will add up the electricity bill, the RERT (emergency scheme), the FCAS charges and the compensation payments?
This [RERT scheme] means paying smelters, factories and other heavy power users to rapidly curtail their energy use to rein in demand, when the system is under strain.
Who will add up the lost wages, the lost opportunities, and the jobs that never came to Victoria?
Three amazing things in this story. One that solar cycles might influence the oceans to such an extent that jellyfish plagues are cycling in tune with the sun. Second is that the sun might control food for jellyfish on Earth somehow but have no effect on clouds, temperature or our climate (join the dots that expert climate models don’t). Third is that (briefly) there was actual scientific debate published on the ABC (even if only a few Australians were exposed to it). No one called anyone names, and both sides got to speak (albeit on different channels). Put it in your diary.
A couple of weeks ago on the ABC jellyfish were booming and it was because of climate change:
This week a researcher said the data was weak and there was much better evidence that jellyfish populations surge in 22 year cycles that match the solar pattern instead:
Marine science professor Kylie Pitt from Griffith University is seeking to publish a research paper connecting jellyfish numbers to the 22-year cycle of solar sunspot activity and subsequent changes in magnetic fields.
Pulling together worldwide datasets of jellyfish that go back decades, she said her team found the creatures would increase in abundance for 10 years, then decrease, then start again in what was found to be a 22-year cycle.
Solar cycles are really 22 years (or so) because each 11 year alternate cycle alternates with the North pole “on top” then the South pole.
“There’s been a lot of emotive commentary about jellyfish for a long time, even in the scientific community, with people making claims that jellies under anthropogenic stress are going to take over the oceans and all that sort of stuff,” Professor Pitt said.
But her team believed jellyfish numbers increased because solar cycles could affect wind changes, which “turned over nutrients and stimulated the growth of phytoplankton” and subsequently ocean food productivity.
Try to imagine how the sun could increase phtyoplankton and jellyfish and yet have *definitely* no effect on clouds, or temperature…
Complexifying things, there are scientists who think phytoplankton changes CO2 levels (more on that soon), and others who think microbial sea life can affect cloud seeding.
Fourth amazing thing is a marine researcher willing to say they need data to support their models and that the man-made signal was not statistically significant.
“We need to wait and see if that data starts rolling in and our predictions are supported.”
Professor Pitt’s study found a “really small signal” that there was an overall increase in jellyfish numbers irrespective of the 22-year cycle but not one that was “statistically significant”.
“It’s absolutely not a given that warmer water causes more jellyfish and there’s nowhere near enough data to say that,” she said.
“Some of my colleagues are quite sure that it’s happening but the data for it isn’t very strong.”
Bravo to Kylie Pitt from Griffith University. And well done Malcolm Sutton, ABC, Adelaide.
Prices are “off the chart” in Vic and SA right now and likely for the next few hours. Factories will be closing. Diesel generators will be running, but only in South Australia and Victoria. At these kinds of prices tens of millions of dollars could be going up in smoke every hour. By the end of today the bill could come to more than a hundred million dollars.
In QLD and NSW where there are old or evil coal fired plants the wholesale electricity costs are only $105/MWh.
UPDATE: LOR3 (highest level warning) issued in Victoria but resolved at 8pm. In SA the diesel jet engines have been switched on for the first time as emergency reserve. We didn’t used to need to buy expensive machinery so it could sit around for 18 months before it was needed.
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