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The Basslink cable has gone down again, and is expected to be out of action til mid-October. Luckily for Tasmania, the dams are at 45% full. However in Victoria, which sits on one of the largest brown coal reserves in the world, currently prices are hitting $300/MWh every morning and every evening at peak time. This graph below shows 5 minute prices for the last two days in Victoria. Every dollar Victoria saves at lunchtime from solar generation is lost a few hours later, and then some. Though it’s wrong to use the word “saves” at any time of day. The wholesale price of brown coal power for years was $30/MWh, and this below is a wholesale price graph. Even the lunchtime “low prices” are twice as expensive as brown coal which can supply all day, every day and for hundreds of years to come and doesn’t cause voltage surges, frequency instability, or house fires, and doesn’t need backup batteries, demand management schemes, free movie tickets, or dark hospitals.
The AEMO must be counting their lucky stars that this happened at probably the “best” time of year when demand is lower.
 ….
The effect of the Basslink outage is presumably obvious above the noise of the monthly graph of 30 minute prices in Victoria (see the last three days of thick red spikes). However, the biggest bonfire of money on the Victorian grid is the forced energy transition “every day”. Just look at the prices from 2015 (blue) when Hazelwood coal was still running and compare them with prices this year (red). That’s what the renewables revolution does.
 Victorian prices, AEMO, August 2015, August 2019. At lunchtime even with all those Victorian solar panels working, SA and QLD were keeping the lights on in Victoria.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 67 ratings
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9.5 out of 10 based on 15 ratings
Winning: The ABC news implied the G7 didn’t achieve much and was a bit of a flop with leaders “unable to overcome their differences…” and signing only a one page form. But for the rest of the world, the G7 was a big success — there were no long pledges to lead the world in weather changing voodoo. Climate was sidelined.
Plus the 2019 G7 leaders statement was 54 times smaller than the last G7 leaders statement.
Stuart Varney, Staff, Fox News
“No matter what you read and hear from the media, this G-7 was all about Trump re-aligning the world — reshaping the world economy with America’s interests first and foremost,” said Varney on Fox Nation’s “My Take.”
“Trade was the headline issue … A deal with Japan — they will import a lot more of our agricultural product. Britain gets a major trade deal after Brexit, and there’s dialogue with Germany on car tariffs as well, but the most important — China,” stressed Varney.
After President Trump’s news conference, at the conclusion of the summit on Monday, CNN’s Jim Acosta said, “I think perhaps one of the biggest headlines coming out of this press conference that we just witnessed here in France is that the President would not be pinned down on this question of climate change.”
Good governance means less government:
TWEET: Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent for The New York Times and MSNBC analyst.
With all the differences with Trump, the G7 leaders ended up releasing a largely general one-page statement that added up to 264 words. The last joint statement under Obama in 2016 was 14,263 words
That’s a 98% reduction in word pain.
Speaking of that Trade War
The Z-Man points out that China is much more vulnerable
China is selling cheap labor which is available in so many other places:
China is not selling the world anything the world does not have or cannot make. What China is selling is a safe haven to avoid the labor, tax and environmental laws that exist in the West.
U.S. imports from China totaled $539.5 billion in 2018. U.S. exports were $179.3 billion. … the U.S. market is about 5% of the Chinese economy, assuming the fake Chinese economic numbers are even close to reality, which is surely not the case. The Chinese market is less than one percent of the U.S. economy in 2018.
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9 out of 10 based on 70 ratings
Did you get the memo?
 Which journalists are “just following orders”? All groupthink-minded, obedient journalists have been advised to find a climate crisis to report on in Sept 16th which is the week before the next UN climate summit on Sept 23. How many will obey, conveniently serving the UN, big government activists with “free advertising”?
Kip Hansen on WattsUp spotted the National Narrative for media on Climate Change a couple of months ago.
The best things skeptics can do is expose how artificially crafted and politically timed this “reporting” is. Spread the word that it’s coming to help neutralize the effect.
Let’s ask our favourite ABC/BBC/Guardian/NY Times journalists in advance if they plan to obey this directive. Perhaps we could score each journalist with a Climate Patsy mark as the week unfolds and they hit their prescribed targets? They score extra points for saying “12 years to go”, “all scientists agree” and using the terms “climate crisis”, and “climate emergency”. Triple points go to photos of weather porn: Eg melting asphalt, “rain bombs”, freak clouds, and 20 year old photos of the Amazon burning.
Greetings.
We’re writing from Covering Climate Now, a new project of the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation aimed at dramatically improving journalism’s coverage of climate change. We invite you to join us.
The science is beyond clear: humanity faces an emergency situation. Rising sea levels and record heat waves, wildfires, and floods are unleashing devastation worldwide, and much more is in the pipeline. We have 12 years to radically change course, UN scientists warned last October, or face catastrophe.
As journalists, we have a professional responsibility to report on the urgency of this moment. Despite good coverage by some news outlets, climate silence still reigns in much of the media. For example, only 27 percent of Americans knew in election year 2016 that virtually all scientists agreed that climate change is human-caused, happening now and very dangerous.
The good news is that 63% of the public recognized that the statement “virtually all scientists” agree is a PR and advertising line. No one has surveyed “all scientists”. And the few fields that have been polled show that climate scientists are failing to convince all the professional fields of scientists around them. Surveys show 50% of meteorologists don’t believe the doctrine (Maibach et al 2017), 66% of engineers and geologists are skeptical (Lefsrud et al 2012). Even most certified climate scientists don’t agree with the full 95% certainty that the IPCC claims (Strengers et al 2015).
The Columbia Journalism Review could be sued for false advertising — pretending to be journalists, pretending to be concerned about “facts” and then promoting fake facts.
Previous reasons for underplaying the climate story—fears of alienating audiences, losing money, or appearing partisan—no longer hold. Most people under age 40 care intensely about climate change, irrespective of their political outlook—even Republicans and independents want action, while Democrats call it their number one concern. That may help explain why The Guardian, our first partner at Covering Climate Now, has found that its extensive climate and environment coverage is making, not losing, money.
Instead of most people under 40 “caring intensely” — most people rank climate change as one of their lowest environmental concerns. Here are just a few surveys. Young people universally score higher in belief, but they grow out of it as they grow up.
Just another million dollars of advertising?
We describe our plans for Covering Climate Now in this FAQ, which links to the April 30 conference at the Columbia Journalism School that launched this project and where iconic TV newsman Bill Moyers announced a $1 million pledge from the Schumann Media Center to fund the first year of our work.
Because all good journalists should time their articles to help the UN political agenda?
Our ask of you is simple: commit to a week of focused climate coverage this September. We are organizing news outlets across the US and abroad—online and print, TV and audio, large and small—to run seven days of climate stories from September 16 through the climate summit UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres hosts in New York September 23. The stories you run are up to you, though we can offer ideas and background information and connect outlets looking for content with content providers looking for outlets.
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9.6 out of 10 based on 87 ratings
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9.5 out of 10 based on 22 ratings
Global Fire Data shows this year is unequivocally a low fire season in the Amazon. But social media tears and outrage is running at 1000% driven by old photos and fake facts of the Amazon producing “20% of our planet’s oxygen”.
And the media experts reported the house was on fire in the lungs of the world, or something to that effect. They didn’t check the data, didn’t ask hard questions.
Based on hyperbolic twitter pics French leader Macron is threatening to cancel a foreign trade deal. The hype serves the purpose of attacking the right wing Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro in the lead up to a G7 summit this week…
Who’s feeding the twitter flames?
@EmmanuelMacron
The photo he used? It’s a stock photo from Loren McIntyre, a photographer who died in 2003. h/t @Desesquerdizada
Funding cuts have created plenty of enemies
Many people have a reason to want Bolsonaro to look bad: In May Bolsonaro withdrew an offer to host a United Nations Latin America and Caribbean climate week. In the same week, the president fired self-confessed “militant environmentalist” Alfredo Sirkis, then-leader of The Brazil Forum for Climate Change. He also declared a 30 percent funding cut to maintenance costs of Brazil’s state-owned universities. Three weeks ago, Brazil’s INPE Space director was sacked. The INPE have been the source of the dire data used in some media stories. But Bolsonaro said the data was “not consistent with reality”, accused the head of the INPE of “lies” and working for an NGO.
On the 13th August Germany announced plans to withdraw some €35 million due to the country’s lack of commitment to curbing deforestation . On August 15, Norway suspended donations too.
Thanks to Robert Walker at Science 2.0 for the statistics via Climate Depot.
The tally of fire counts here is up to data for August 22, 2019. Emissions are preliminary estimates based on fire counts, but the graph shows just how ordinary, normal and boring 2019 is expected to be when the final numbers are done.
 Amazon fires, emissions, graph, record years. (Click to enlarge) | Source: globalfiredata.org The actual fire counts for the whole Amazon Region as listed up to Aug 22nd:
 The monthly fire count total. (Click to enlarge) | Source: globalfiredata.org
Spot the coincidence
The twitter firestorm is amplified just when the UN and big-government fans could use a negotiation weapon.
What is the outside world doing?
The UN secretary general and many world leaders and celebrities have expressed concern. The Amazon will be high on the agenda for G7 leaders at a summit in France this weekend. They are likely to make a strong statement condemning the recent increase in deforestation and urge Brazil to restore the Amazon protections that previously made the country a global environmental leader.
Where was the mainstream media?
Some journalists appear to be running off the twitter feed. But others seem to be carefully crafting their stories to highlight irrelevant, cherry-picked half truths. Notice how many tell us that this year in XXX (sub part of the Amazon) things are “twice as bad as last year” as if history starts in 2018, and as if the low fire statistics from the rest of Amazon don’t matter? Which news outlets are telling the whole truth and nothing but…
International leaders are transparently exploiting the hype:
“France and Ireland say they will not ratify a huge trade deal with South American nations unless Brazil does more to fight fires in the Amazon. French leader Emmanuel Macron said President Jair Bolsonaro had lied to him about his stance on climate change.” — BBC News, 6 hours ago.
Right at the end of one BBC news article the last line hints that the whole event is unwarranted. Why is this just an “add on”?
“US space agency Nasa, meanwhile, has said that overall fire activity across the Amazon basin this year has been close to the average compared to the past 15 years.”
Remember when it comes to climate change, NASA are the definitive last word, but when it comes to Amazon fires, they’re just a casual addendum. “No comment”.
Jonathon Watts at The Guardian carefully words the panic. It’s almost as if he is aware of what is going on but not happy to make it too clear. With headlines like these, anyone would think the readers of The Guardian are 14 year old girls.
Does this happen every year?
Yes, but some areas have suffered far more than usual. In the worst-affected Brazilian state of Amazonas, the peak day this month was 700% higher than the average for the same date over the past 15 years. In other states, the amount of ash and other particulates in August has hit the highest level since 2010.
Is the entire forest ablaze?
No. Satellite monitoring experts say the images of an entire forest ablaze are exaggerated. A great deal of misinformation has been spread by social media, including the use of striking images from previous years’ burning seasons.
The Amazon makes 20% 6% of the worlds oxygen:
The hype is so over the top even Michael Mann is watering it down. This might be the first time Michael Mann is on the same side as skeptics?
Do we need to worry about oxygen?
No. Although some reports have claimed the Amazon produces 20% of the world’s oxygen, it is not clear where this figure originated. The true figure is likely to be no more than 6%, according to climate scientists such as Michael Mann and Jonathan Foley. Even if it were accurate, the crops being planted in the cleared forest areas would also produce oxygen – quite likely at higher levels. So although the burning of the rainforest is worrying for many reasons, there is no need to worry about an oxygen shortage.
As it happens, most of the worlds oxygen comes from phytoplankton.
Right wing leaders might cause fires, left wing leaders go unnamed
Buried in a Guardian story is the admission that there are also huge fires in Bolivia which has a “leftwing populist president.” The Guardian writer uses that to claim this is not a political witchhunt, yet with no one hounding the Bolivian leader, this appears to be exactly what it is.
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9.8 out of 10 based on 96 ratings
Please, sell us your low lying land
Let’s play sea level bingo with the latest advertising from the Merchants of Sea-level Scares.
Hitting the media outlets tonight — the latest “Prepare to Die” news stories claim we must plan now for evacuees, refugees, inundation and homeless koalas. All the usual features of marketing are there — firstly all the images they use are from mocked up futuristic sea level rise. Secondly, it’s not a continuation of current trends, it a sudden acceleration — in this case from 1mm to year to 9mm a year, effectively starting tomorrow.
1 tiny millimeter
 From 1969 – 2013 the seas have not changed the beaches around these Tuamotu atolls — or almost any other atoll you can name. By every method known to man, seas are rising around 1mm a year:
- 1,000 tide gauges,
- hundreds of studies of beaches,
- satellites measuring sea levels, and
- satellites measuring beaches.
All anyone needs to know about sea levels is that for the last 50 years sea levels have been rising at 1mm a year as shown by a thousand tide gauges all over the world. There was no acceleration. (Beenstock et al). Some of those gauges were rising, some falling, but when averaged out, it’s almost a wash at 1mm. Nils-Axel Morner took the opposite approach and studied 50 beaches around Scandinavia intensely, figured out which beach was at the centre of the turning crust and calculated that the seas were only rising at 0.9mm a year and for the last 125 years. (Morner, 2014).
Believe it or not, that fits with what the satellites used to say too (Morner 2004). From 1992 – 2000 the satellites recorded a rise of less than 1mm a year, but by 2003 that trend was retrospectively “adjusted” up to 2.3mm/year. As far as Morner can figure out, the satellites were calibrated to one sinking tide gauge in Hong Kong.
It also fits with the 560 odd papers that Nils has written.
Satellites are now tracking every 20m rolling sandspit above the seas — and if seas were rising the beaches would surely be shrinking. Instead of 709 islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans 89% either stayed the same or got bigger. (Duvat, 2018). Not one island large enough to have human inhabitants was getting smaller. Not one.
Most of man made warming is made by adjustments
We don’t need sea walls to stop the rise, just an independent science audit.
Before adjustments:
A lot of the rise here is just the El Nino effect of 1998 in any case.
 Figure 5. Annual mean sea-level changes observed by TOPEX/POSEIDON in 2000, after technical “corrections” were applied (from Menard, 2000). A slow, long-term rising trend of 1.0 mm/year was identified, but this linear trend may have been largely an artefact of the naturally-occurring El Niño Southern Oscillation event in cycles 175-200. After adjustments:
 Figure 7. Sea-level changes after “calibration” in 2003. The satellite altimetry record from the TOPEX/POSEIDON satellites, followed by the JASON satellites. As presented by Aviso (2003), the record suddenly has a new trend representing an inferred sea-level rise of 2.3 ±0.1 mm/year. This means that the original records presented in Figs. 5-6, which showed little or no sea-level rise, must have been tilted to show a rise of as much as 2.3 mm/year. We must now ask: what is the justification for this tilting of the record?
As far as the eye can see, it has nothing to do with CO2. Fully 85% or more of all our human emissions of CO2 have been produced since World War II and nothing changed.
 [Graphed by Jo Nova based on data from Jevrejura et al located at this site PMSML]
There are large natural forces in here that are not well understood — look at the way the rate of change of sea level has rolled in cycles in the last 200 years.
 Source: Jevrejeva 2008 Scream and run soon say the ABC
As usual, Nik Kilvert of the ABC doesn’t do any research or ask any hard questions. He’s just a distant part of the Science propaganda unit. The gloom and doom is based on highly adjusted data being fed into junk models and extrapolated beyond the error bars, but don’t expect Nik to report that. Truly terrible science needs truly terrible journalism to live on long enough to get the next grant.
Nik Kilvert, ABC
From Bangladesh to the Philippines and the low-lying islands of the South Pacific, the impacts of climate change for many people around the world are going to get much worse, very soon.
Some people will become stateless, and will need to find homes in new countries, while others will need to relocate within their own borders.
Researchers writing in Science today argue that it’s time to begin preparing the retreat of people living in regions that will become uninhabitable due to climate change.
Average global sea level will rise by up to 77 centimetres by the end of the century if warming is kept to 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to IPCC predictions.
Extreme weather events, saltwater incursion and bushfires are also expected to displace people in the near future.
etc, etc, etc
Trust the ABC to throw a bushfire scare into a sea level story.
Ruairi
Small changes in sea-level rise,
Should not come as any surprise,
But a reading adjusted,
Can’t really be trusted,
As it’s not what the reading implies.
Sea levels are always changing and past changes were often larger.
- Past changes were larger in the Maldives (Mörner, 2007); In Connecticut (van de Plassche, 2000),; SW Sweden – Kattegatt Sea region (Mörner, 1971, 1980); In the Kattegatt and the Baltic (Åse, 1970; Mörner, 1980, 1999; Ambrosiani, 1984; Hansen et al., 2012). Other sites (e.g. Pirazzoli, 1991). [See the link above for the full references].
- White et al showed seas around Australia were rising at about the same speed during the depression era as they are now.
Other posts on Sea Levels
REFERENCE
Duvat, V. K. E. (2018). A global assessment of atoll island planform changes over the past decades. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, e557. doi:10.1002/wcc.557
Michael Beenstock, Daniel Felsenstein,*Eyal Frank & Yaniv Reingewertz, (2014) Tide gauge location and the measurement of global sea level rise, Environmental and Ecological Statistics, May 2014 [Abstract]
Morner. N.A. (2004) Estimating future sea level changes from past records, Global and Planetary Change 40 49–54 doi:10.1016/S0921-8181(03)00097-3 [PDF]
Nils‐Axel Mörner (2014) Deriving the Eustatic Sea Level Component in the Kattaegatt Sea, Global Perspectives on Geography (GPG). American Society of Science and Engineering, Volume 2, 2014, www.as‐se.org/gpg
Jevrejeva, S., A. Grinsted, J. C. Moore, and S. Holgate (2006), Nonlinear trends and multiyear cycles in sea level records, J. Geophys. Res., 111,
Jevrejeva, S., J. C. Moore, A. Grinsted, and P. L. Woodworth (2008), Recent global sea level acceleration started over 200 years ago?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L08715, doi:10.1029/2008GL033611. [PDF]
9.7 out of 10 based on 72 ratings
Turning up the screws
 Ban cars to get better weather! A UK committee of academics and one of MP’s say cars are not compatible with life as we know it:
Ditch cars to meet climate change targets, say MPs
Roger Harrabin, BBC
The Science and Technology Select Committee says technology alone cannot solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions from transport.
In its report, the committee said: “In the long-term, widespread personal vehicle ownership does not appear to be compatible with significant decarbonisation.”
It echoes a report from an Oxford-based group of academics who warned that even electric cars produce pollution through their tyres and brakes.
Naturally, after suggesting a preposterously large, transformative impossibility — the report then just says the government should spend more on more of the same: buses, trains, bikes and ride shares. See the segue? What starts as a huge mission to change the world morphs into an excuse to boost pet projects. The ridiculous gambit claims pave the way to make another round of “more, more, more” look reasonable.
Let’s join the dots that they won’t. How many storms exactly will 1,000 extra buses prevent?
Next, how not to do journalism by Roger Harrabin:
The MP’s go on to say that the big problem is that the punters keep buying big polluting cars because “financial incentives to buy cleaner cars are insufficient.” Which is another way of saying people want big cars and if we don’t punish them enough with punitive taxes they won’t settle for something less. Being a paid PR agent for the government, Harrabin knows which way of phrasing things sounds better for the rulers and he chooses that.
This next line says so much — mostly by what it doesn’t say:
Ministers have held down fuel duty increases in recent years following lobbying from motoring groups.
Obviously, if it weren’t for motoring groups the whole nation would be asking for a higher fuel tax. To a BBC journalist, “the people” might as well not exist.
But the MPs say they should ensure that the annual increase in fuel duty is never lower than the average increase in rail or bus fares.
Give Harrabin a point for mentioning there was a conflict of interest:
The MPs backed many of the recommendations of the government’s official advisory body, the Committee on Climate Change.
But they complained that its chair, Lord Deben, should have declared the interest of his consultancy firm in Drax power station, the largest recipient of renewable energy subsidies in the country, and Johnson Matthey, which is about to make a huge investment in electric vehicles.
Give Harrabin no points for describing this comically absurd conflict of interest as merely “a complaint”. Here’s the Logo of Debens committee:
 … The Committee on Climate Change (the CCC) is an independent, statutory body established under the Climate Change Act 2008.
See especially, Strategic policy 3: “Conduct independent analysis into climate change science, economics and policy.”
Thus it’s essentially an industry lobby group. Other industries have to set up their own and don’t get to call themselves “independent”. The big mystery to me is that Lord Deben’s conflicts have been known for years (thanks to David Rose and Christopher Booker), yet Deben’s still in charge?
Could anyone imagine the CCC employing one skeptical scientist?
UPDATE: Official link to the UK Parliament Select Committee statement, thanks to Eric Worrall.
Car image adapted Andriy Makukha.
9.8 out of 10 based on 66 ratings
New rooftop BBQ known as TeslaKebab
 Photo from the legal paper. Also known as a “money printer” according to Elon. Walmart installed Tesla solar panels on 240 stores across the US. There have been 7 incidences of fire which Walmart claim has cost them $8.2m and were caused by negligence on Tesla’s behalf. After a spate of fires in 2018 Walmart de-energized all the panels. Then one more caught fire. Now it not only wants damages paid, it wants Tesla to remove all of the panels.
It’s not that there is something wrong with solar power, just that it’s complex, unnecessary, unaffordable and the companies that install panels can’t afford to train staff or pay guys who know what they are doing:
Elecktrek @FredericLambert
One of them in 2012, one in 2016, another in 2017, and then three of the fires happened in the first half of 2018 and it eventually led Tesla to de-energize all 240 solar power systems at Walmart stores:
“Fearing for the safety of its customers, its employees, and the general public, and wishing to avoid further damages and store closures, Walmart demanded on May 31, 2018 that Tesla “de-energize” (i.e., disconnect) all of the solar panel systems that Tesla had installed at Walmart sites. Tesla complied, conceding that de-energization of all the sites was “prudent” and recognizing that it could provide no assurances that the deficiencies causing its systems to catch fire were confined to particular sites or particular components.”
However, Walmart says that there was one more fire even after Tesla de-energized the systems.
Elecktrek have a full copy of the lawsuit at their site.
Reuters claim Walmart gave Tesla 30 days to fix the situation in July. By August 15th, nothing had happened, except for Musk relaunching his solar business and saying ““It’s like having a money printer on your roof.”
The lawsuit accuses Tesla of having untrained workers putting up shoddy installations and showing “utter incompetence or callousness, or both,” court papers said.
The lawsuit is the latest blow to Tesla’s struggling solar business, which it acquired through its $2.6 billion purchase of SolarCity in 2016. Quarterly installations have plummeted more than 85 percent since the deal, as Tesla has cut its solar panel sales force and ended a distribution deal with Home Depot Inc .
Remember, solar is the future.
Walmart is such a large emitter of greenhouse gases that in 2013 it was emitting almost as much CO2 as Chevron:
Nilima Choudhury
“If Walmart were included in the Greenhouse 100 Polluters Index,” the report said, “a list that is limited to heavy industrial firms, such as oil companies and power plants, the retailer would take the 33rd spot, just a hair behind Chevron, America’s second largest oil company.”
In related news, in 2014 there was this story:
How Walmart Became A Green Energy Giant, Using Other People’s Money
Christopher Helman, Forbes
Last year President Barack Obama stopped by here to give a speech about his energy plan. Standing before shelves filled with discount lightbulbs, Obama held up Wal-Mart as an exemplar of corporate responsibility.
…And it’s great p.r. for a company that has been lambasted for a range of corporate sins, …
[But] … the retailer has off-loaded the capital investment–and all the risk–onto partners, like SolarCity, that minimize their exposure by taking full advantage of the federal government’s generous subsidies for investing in alternative energy.
Wal-Mart has installed 105 megawatts of solar panels–enough to power about 20,000 houses–on the roofs of 327 stores and distribution centers (about 6% of all their locations). That’s enough to make Wal-Mart the single biggest commercial solar generator in the country. And it intends to double its number of arrays by 2020.
Walmart’s goal is now 50% renewable energy by 2025.
Solar panels are expensive PR.
h/t Andrew V, Pat.
9.9 out of 10 based on 75 ratings
Add another billion to the cost of the Renewable Energy Target?
 In the last few days Bluescope Steel (formerly BHP) has confirmed it will spend US$700m (AU$1b) to expand it’s North Star steel mill in Ohio. So there are multiple headlines. But back in February CEO Mark Vassella explained exactly why they were thinking of it, and his first reason was “energy prices”. Last week, high energy prices were even “a tragedy” for Australian manufacturing. This week however, he’s clarified his position by muddying it up. Now there other reasons and the solution is to fix our gas prices. He’s backpedaling and tossing quotes that happen to help the renewables industry.
Perhaps he’s been heavied by his PR and strategy team? Now he’s saying that energy costs matter, but labor costs do too and “we weren’t ever going to put another steel mill in Australia”. He’s even saying energy costs “did not play a role” — the complete opposite. These will become the quotes the renewable energy fans rely on. Apparently, now what he really wants is cheaper gas — which requires a socialist government-driven solution to fix gas prices, and it’s safe for anyone to mention anything that requires bigger government. It’s not so safe for him to say “get the government out of our electricity market”, “axe the RET”, or “Australia has too much red tape, and too many regulations.” And he doesn’t say that.
Nor does he point out that if we burned more coal, we wouldn’t need to use much expensive gas to make electricity, we’d have cheaper electricity and we could sell more profit-making gas overseas. (But Jo does and you can quote me.)
Which world does Australia get richer in: Burn more coal or fix gas prices?
h/t to Eric Worrall at WUWT, RicDre, and Lance
Feb 25 2019, Simon Evans, Australian Financial Review
The chief executive of Australia’s largest steelmaker, BlueScope, says much cheaper energy in the United States is a major driver of the company’s preparedness to invest in a $1 billion expansion of its star performer, the North Star steel mill in Ohio.
North America was providing far more growth opportunities than Australia, Mr Vassella said.
He said energy prices in the US were only a third of those in Australia and New Zealand, and that was a big plus, along with North Star’s proximity to customers and the strong market for steel products, which has benefited from trade sanctions that favour US steelmakers in supplying automotive companies and building products.
“It’s part of the package of a competitive business model,” he said. “We’re still paying too much for energy in Australia.”
Last week the CEO was still saying that energy prices were a tragedy”
Aug 16 2019, Simon Evans, Australian Financial Review
BlueScope chief executive Mr Vassella said the $1 billion expansion of the North Star mill, to be fully up and running by 2023, was the largest capital investment the steelmaker would likely ever make…
Mr Vassella lamented the state of Australian manufacturing as the sector battled high energy prices and said one of the main drivers of the North Star expansion, which will increase capacity by 40 per cent, was that energy costs in the United States were substantially lower.
“That’s a tragedy quite frankly for Australian manufacturing,” Mr Vassella said.
BlueScope also operates the Port Kembla steelworks in New South Wales, which underwent major cost-cutting and restructuring in 2015. Mr Vassella said he worried a lot about manufacturers in Australia who were BlueScope’s customers and were facing ”demand destruction” because their energy costs were too high.
As Trump would say …”Winning!”
As ScoMo won’t say: “Losing!”
See his latest muddy quotes below where he contradicts himself:
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9.2 out of 10 based on 58 ratings
Guess which state, big business will be headed to next?
Brilliant! Let’s talk about a Quexit of the NEM. Nationals MP, Keith Pitt is suggesting that Queenslanders could cut their power bills if Queensland stands alone and disconnects from the rest of the Australian National Grid. There are concerns from experts within the energy sector that this could result in blackouts in other states… (is there an “e” in electricity?).
Keith Pitt says these are Queensland assets paid by the Queensland people, owned by the Queensland people, but we can’t continue to prop up states that make silly decisions. He’s driven by one motivator, and that’s price for consumers.
Check out the AEMO data dashboard. On any given minute Queensland is probably sending electricity to most of the NEM.
simon holmes à court
@simonahac
The Nationals haven’t decided if they will back this at the next state election. Send them a message.
Just asking the question changes the game
In the long run, it would be silly for Queensland to own large assets that could turn a profit but say “no thanks” and just blow off the excess. But if they seriously threatened to leave, suddenly contracts would be up for negotiation. Perhaps more importantly, an excess wouldn’t last for long if big business from NSW and Victoria moved to Qld to use that excess power. It could work out well for a lot of people.
For decades each state managed its own grid just fine. As I say in my speeches, to truly wreck a grid, it needs to be nationalized. Only a big groupthinky grid can be mismanaged by one sole mismanager. Not mentioning any names, Audrey Zibelman.
But let’s not forget, Queenslanders still need to cut off the RET next.
The NEM formed in 1998. For most of the first 15 years of the NEM, prices stayed around $30/MWh.
9.8 out of 10 based on 70 ratings
 Random power generators. Photo JoNova Wind and solar power are the intermittent freeloaders on the electricity grid. They are treated as if they’re generators, adding power to the grid, but instead they provide something the grid doesn’t need — power that can’t be guaranteed.
Random gigawatts has the illusion of looking useful, but it’s the gift of a spare holiday house you don’t know if you can use til the day before. It’s the spare fridge in the garage that overheats in hot weather, the extra turkey for thanksgiving that might not arrive til the day after. The bills, the storage, the clutter, the chaos.
As I keep saying in RenewablesWorld fuel bills go down, but the land-maintenance-staff-insurance-FCAS-storage-and-capital costs all go up.
RenewablesWorld is a place where a lot more people and machines sit around and watch cat videos on youtube.
Here’s a great plan by Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann, The Australian, Business Review
If you wish to sell power into the grid, the NEM or National Energy Market, you will have to guarantee a minimum level of supply and guarantee that minimum level of supply 24/7.
And critically, that minimum level can be no lower than 80 per cent of the maximum amount of energy you will be permitted to sell into the grid.
He gives the example of the 1,000MW wind farm that either has to promise 800MW or more like 200MW. If it’s 800 — which means the team has to buy a gas plant out the back (or a fixed deal with a group that owns one), and if you own that gas plant, you’d just run it, who needs the wind turbines? If it’s 200MW, then you the owner can only profit on sales up to 250MW max.
In the simplest example, you would have to build an (at least) 800MW gas power station next to your wind farm, which you would only use intermittently, on the whim of the weather. Suddenly, wind would not look so cheap; it would be exposed as certainly not being “free”.
Critically, you would not be allowed to sell up to that 1800MW into the grid, using both the gas and the wind turbines when the wind did blow.
And if they did generate 1800MW, the same group would need to blow away the 800MW, or pay for the battery or dam to store it.
Which leads to the obvious question:
Why would I build two so-called power stations, the real gas one and the fake wind one? Why wouldn’t I just build the one, the gas one?
Ur, yes. But in a really rational world you’d just build the one coal-fired station…
But the problem with what McCrann is suggesting is that it only works in that old anachronistic thing called a free market. The RET’s got to go. No renewable energy target to force the transition we don’t need to transit to.
The good thing about McCrann’s idea is that we could finally find out what wind and solar cost.
9.5 out of 10 based on 118 ratings
 Solar Road, Normandy, France | Credit: KumKum Would you like to drive slower, add to noise pollution and waste money? Then solar roads are for you:
Ruqayyah Moynihan and Lidia Montes, Business Insider
- Two years after the world’s first solar road — the Normandy road in France — was set up, it’s turned out to be a colossal failure, according to a report by Le Monde.
- The road has deteriorated to a terrible state, it isn’t producing anywhere near the amount of energy it had previously pledged to, and the traffic it has brought with it is causing noise problems.
The original aim was to produce 790 kWh each day, a quantity that could illuminate a population of between 3,000 and 5,000 inhabitants. But the rate produced stands at only about 50% of the original predicted estimates.
Even rotting leaves and thunderstorms appear to pose a risk in terms of damage to the surface of the road. What’s more, the road is very noisy, which is why the traffic limit had to be lowered to 70 kmh.
Despite costing up to roughly $6.1 million, the solar road became operational in 2016.
The 1km road is in Tourouvre-au-Perch, Normandy, France made by Colas.
Leaves fall on the road, then cars grind the leaves on the beautiful polymer surface. The road isn’t angled towards the sun, gets brutally hot, and both reduce efficiency. If the top polymer layer were thicker and tougher, less solar energy would get through. Planting trees beside the road would cool it, but the shade…
Who likes trees anyhow? Not the Greens.
9.7 out of 10 based on 90 ratings
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9.7 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
Skeptics get banned, rejected, blocked and sacked from the mainstream media yet somehow Nature has a paper on Skeptics getting too much media. Believers don’t have to be an expert to control the news agenda, just a Greenpeace activist, or a teenage girl. Skeptics on the other hand, can be Nobel Prize winners, but the BBC won’t even phone them.
Nature, the former science giant, just launched the tenets of science over the event horizon. This paper is Argument from Authority rolled into false equivalence, and powered with cherry-picked errors in both category and in categorization. Nonsense on a rocket. It’s not what science is, and it’s not what journalism should be either. And Nature is supposed to be both. Judith Curry calls it The latest travesty in ‘consensus enforcement’ and the worst paper she has ever seen in a reputable journal.
 …. Both David Evans and I get a mention on what is effectively Nature‘s blacklist. What an honour! No really — there are 386 great names. Even more of an honour is a mention on Judith Curry’s site “blogs she’s learnt something from”. (By some freak, my name comes right after Freeman Dyson and Ivar Giaver, Nobel Prize winner. Career-high I tell you!) But seriously, Marc Morano tops the Nature blacklist, and no man deserves it more. Congratulations Marc!
Methodoggogy
The contrived “study” compares bloggers, commentators and journalists with largely academic scientists, as if the two groups ought have comparable scientific citations or media mentions. Somehow paid scientists get more science citations and professional media personalities get more media. Who would have guessed? Or rather, who couldn’t?
The ratio of “scientific authority” to “media visibility” is pretty much guaranteed by picking scientists-with-funding and comparing them to the rag tag bunch of sacked scientists and independent opinion makers who make their own media channels in order to even get media.
There’s no pretense at symmetry in the way the two groups were picked: the big citation-free media-kings on the believer side don’t even get a mention. As Curry points out — no Al Gore. There are also no teenage girls getting on boats. No Leonardo de Caprio either. Did David Suzuki make it? Bill Nye? Hard to say. Apparently the supplemental information became detrimental information within 48 hours and has been vanished already.
So having constructed a meaningless study they get meaningless results, which appears to be the aim, because it’s an excuse to write headlines complaining that skeptics get too much media.
The press release is what it’s all about
The key point:
“It’s time to stop giving these people visibility, which can be easily spun into false authority,” Professor Alex Petersen said.
– Uni California Merced
Conveniently, they blur new and old media under the one label. The new “research” shows skeptical scientists are all over the new media, while unskeptical scientists get “the same” amount of mentions on the mainstream media. (Sorry about your coffee). Thus with loaded categories, contrived rules, and no principles, they can finally pretend that “media outlets” are interviewing skeptics out of some outdated sense of duty. Skeptics domination of blogs translates into skeptics get too much “media”.
It plays well for their victimhood status — another excuse for why climate scientists can’t seem to convince the world.
Purge the media
If only they could beat skeptics in public debates they wouldn’t need so many media rules:
The proper counterpoint to a climate scientist would be another legitimate scientist who could show competing data from the same experiments or show where the first climate scientist has made mistakes in his or her work. Having a non-expert oil lobbyist or politician respond to a peer-reviewed study or assessment by saying “climate change doesn’t exist” is not a credible argument or a means of balancing, Petersen said.
Since skeptics are sacked, defunded, and exiled, or even stranded at airports, if debate has to be from only certified approved, and paid gravy-trainers, that will pretty much end all debate, eh? Suits con artists and climate scientists.
Propagate your favourite ad hom conspiracy:
Author LeRoy Westerling lets rip with pure speculation
“It’s well known now that a well-financed propaganda campaign on behalf of conservative fossil fuel interests led mainstream media to frame reporting on climate change science as political reporting rather than science reporting,” he said. “Political reporting focuses its narrative around conflict and looks to highlight competing voices, rather than telling the story of the science.”
This, he said, has led to the false balance between scientists and a handful of climate deniers who have become regular commenters.
I think Nature should own this all the way. By publishing such a dismal paper, they gave all the authors the platform to get media interviews to put forward these baseless claims which he has zero evidence to support. Where was their rigor? Well…
This is their fancy-pants way of saying skeptics win in blogs and social media:
By simultaneously accounting for each individual’s scientific authority, our quantitative analysis contributes to the CC [Climate change] communication literature by revealing the degree to which prominent contrarian voices benefit from the scalability of new media, in particular the large number of second-tier news sources and blogs that do not implement rigorous information quality assessment standards.
…and that blogs are not as rigorous as Nature thinks it is. Except of course, this blog here would never accept a paper as pathetic as this one — except to mock it.
Rigor means 100% complete obedience
The “study” calls Roger Pielke Jnr a “contrarian” and Bjorn Lomborg, even though both accept all the IPCC scientific reasoning, they just don’t buy the disaster or the solution. So any step outside the church and pfft — you’re gone.
Roger Pielke has already pointed that out. Fabius Maximus wonders if that’s why the Supplementary information has disappeared in the last two days, deleted while they get legal advice or think up a better excuse. The data will be available on January 1 next year, long after the media headlines have been and gone.
So @nature has published a paper that includes me on a list of “contrarians” who reject climate science.
I’ve contributed to and defended the IPCC for 25+ years.
Yet such smears pass peer review.
What’s the remedy here?
Letter?
Lawsuit?
Other?
Such BS
What’s troubling is not enemies list,they’ve been around for a long time. What’s troubling is that they are now laundered by academic journals & used by scientists & journos to silence or otherwise cause professional harm to their peers. It is really amazing. And it works.
This paper is cheese food science, the kind Nature increasingly specializes in. Just like cheese food isn’t real food, which tastes good going down but which starts to come back up in a mean way twenty minutes later, this paper has a sciency name but which nauseates minds.
It doesn’t say a damned thing about whether anything any contrarian said was right or wrong, or even whether any expert scientist ever gets anything right or wrong. It only says, over and again, with slick graphics and thunk-tank prose, that contrarians aren’t to be respected solely because they aren’t in the The Club. It’s an article designed to make its cheese food authors, and their cheesy readers, feel well about themselves.
Commiserations to Marcel Croc, John McLean, and the fabulous BOM Audit team here who deserve to be on The Blacklist. Many other great skeptics may also have missed out on the US media focus or the 2016 cut off date. (Nothing after Trump won was included, because Trump distorts gravity fields or something.).
If only Unskeptical scientists had evidence, they wouldn’t need to work so hard to keep skeptical views out of the media
Other blog “Media” posts on the topic: Judith Curry | WattsUp | Fabius Maximus | William Briggs
Posts on Media Bias
- Media bias — ABC, CBS exclude skeptical scientists for 1300 days
- News media networks report global warming 92 times, versus global pause, zero times
- BBC secret exposed: Greenpeace, activists, BP decide what “science” brits see — Hello TwentyEightGate
- Third icebreaker abandons rescue of climate scientists boat in Antarctica, media fog, obscure, don’t say “climate”
- Richard Black — the fastest apologist for misbehaving scientists
- ClimateGate II: Handy Guide to spot whitewash journalism – The top 10 excuses for scientists behaving badly
- The Guardian-the-gullible: blind to whistleblowers, ignoring scandals, defender of feel-good teenage thinking
Keep reading →
9.9 out of 10 based on 108 ratings
It’s self congratulation disguised as “science”. The insults are passed off as universal human failings but the unmistakable message is that those who do believe in “climate change” are exempt. (Only the unbelievers have smaller minds and more selfish cortexes. )
You’d have to be pretty stupid not to get this message:
…We know—at least those of us not in the grips of outright climate denial—how bad it is. But we can’t seem to act to save the future.
The Time readers who haven’t cancelled their subscriptions already may like to read this and give themselves a free shot of mojo, knowing that they can process climate change. Possibly they buy Time because it tells them they’re the gifted, superior beings they hope they might be. This is manna for those with low self esteem and meaningless lives.
This is not just some random author either, Bryan Walsh, who wrote this, was TIME’s International Editor, its energy and environmental correspondent and was the Tokyo bureau chief in 2006 and 2007.
As usual, it’s projection all the way down:
There are many reasons why [we fail to act], ranging from political polarization to the disinformation campaigns of major energy companies to the sheer technical difficulty of replacing carbon-based fossil fuels. But the biggest reason is found within our own minds.
The real victims of disinformation campaigns are those who think storms and floods are “new”, and every kind of weather is a magical omen foretelling doom. And the worst kind of political polarization is the sort which makes a scientific discussion into a tribal war — it’s not 1.2 or 1.5 degrees, it’s good man : bad man, expert and “denier”?
Would you like pity with that?
Bryan Walsh even manages an air of fake compassion and understanding while he soaks in first-class condescension. I mean, those poor normals, their brains really can’t process the risks. Mere deplorables have mental flaws visible in fMRI’s:
When you think about yourself while inside the narrow metal tube of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a certain part of your brain, called the medial prefrontal cortex, or MPFC, will light up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. If you think about a family member, the MPFC will still light up, though less robustly. And if you think about other people whom you feel no connection to—like, say, the inhabitants of the South Asian island nation of the Maldives, which will likely one day be erased by climate-change-driven sea level rise—the MPFC will light up even less.
You don’t need a $3 million MRI machine to know that human beings are self-centered creatures.
You don’t need a $2 MRI machine to know that this article is buttering up the needy with baseless speculation based on imaginary brain scans. Who needs data when you can just fake it up?
Let’s take the easy risk-free conformist path but pretend we are above it all, smarter than the riff raff.
Adapted from END TIMES: A Brief Guide to the End of the World by Bryan Walsh.
Image: Cerebral Hemisphere: wikimedia, Polygon data were generated by Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS)
9.5 out of 10 based on 107 ratings
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9.4 out of 10 based on 20 ratings
An idea so dumb big government just might do it.
John Naish, Daily Mail
 This initial $3 million test, known as Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) would use a high-altitude scientific balloon (pictured) to raise around 2kg of calcium carbonate dust — the size of a bag of flour — into the atmosphere 12 miles above the desert of New Mexico Spraying 2 kilo of dust costs how much?
This initial $3 million test, known as Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) would use a high-altitude scientific balloon (pictured) to raise around 2kg of calcium carbonate dust — the size of a bag of flour — into the atmosphere 12 miles above the desert of New Mexico
Indeed, the plans are so well advanced that the initial ‘sky-clouding’ experiments were meant to have begun months ago. … (to) seed a tube-shaped area of sky half a mile long and 100 yards in diameter.
Here comes the precautionary principle on steriods:
SCoPEx is, however, on hold, amid fears that it could trigger a disastrous series of chain reactions, creating climate havoc in the form of serious droughts and hurricanes, and bring death to millions of people around the world.
So 2kg of dust could kill millions of people and we still let planes fly? Surely they are talking about the “big” version of this, not the 2kg test? And the big version needs to be gargantuan, with 800 planes working to lift “millions of tons” of chalk dust to 18 kilometers or 12 miles up. How much money can someone waste?
Why not just spend the budget for just one plane to “audit the science”. That’d be a first.
But follow the reasoning:
There is no way of predicting how the world’s long-term weather may respond to having a gigantic chemical sunshade plonked on top of it. Climatologists are also concerned that such tinkering could unintentionally disrupt the circulation of ocean currents that regulate our weather.
This itself could unleash a global outbreak of extreme climatic events that might devastate farmland, wipe out entire species and foster disease epidemics.
The technology may even spark terrible wars. For tinkering with our climate could send sky-high the potential for international suspicion and armed conflict.
They are professional climate spooks and they’ve totally spooked themselves.
But ponder: here’s a group of people who think climate models can predict exactly what happens when we add two parts per million of a trace gas to the sky, but the same models have “no way of predicting” what happens when we add an aerosol even though we know the exact composition and placement of said dust?
I’m with them this time, it’s bound to end badly. If it cools the world it’s bad, and if it doesn’t it’s a “waste of money”. It’s just odd to hear them admit their models are useless.
In the end, even though the UN has Global Dumbness boxed and packed, this’ll never be rolled out. All the two-bit worrier nations want the money, not the cooling. And every government, surely, has one scientist that knows that cooling the planet will kill crops and people. Besides the Chinese and Russians will surely hate it.
The whole project looks like just another excuse for more Global Panic PR. Cheap advertising for the cause.
h/t Marvin, Greg in NZ, Pat, Original Steve.
9.5 out of 10 based on 68 ratings
It’s being hailed as a “soaring investment” but it’s just the fake fiat carbon scheme that has been fiddled back to life. The EU ETS market had too many credits and crashed down to 5 Euro or less by 2013. On deaths door, the EU decided to cull a quarter of the credits for the EU ETS every year starting in 2019 and the price predictably went back up. The big success of this unnecessary unfree market is that it has added a tariff to cheap coal to make it just as expensive as gas, and pushed up electricity prices in the EU.
Any illusion of generating economic wealth, or energy efficiency is purely coincidental. There’s no supply and no demand, no extra products or productivity — and without government force, no market at all for imaginary carbon penances. It draws money from every consumer and hands it to gas, and renewables giants, as well as bankers, crooks and VAT Tax cheats. And if this market goes global it’s potentially a $7 Trillion dollar money-making racket for bankers. No wonder HSBC, Deutche Bank, Goldman Sachs, BBVA and Citigroup want to “save the world”.
Back to 2008:
 Government decisions largely set the EU ETS Prices, 2008 – 2019 Carbon credits are not an investment. They are a speculative bet on what the worlds governments will do. If the public turns against carbon reduction, and the mood changes, the market is a dead-man walking. There’s a lot of money here that has an interest in keeping skeptical views out of the public light. Just saying…
We can tell this is not a real market. Real free markets make things cheaper. Communist markets just make things worse.
By DAVID HODARI, Wall Street Journal (The Australian)
Carbon-emission credits, long shunned by traders, are now one of the world’s best-performing investments.
The big players are still financial houses and speculators not generators:
Back in 2013 Banks and trading houses bought two-thirds of carbon permits. Now not much has changed:
The recovery has drawn back investors who largely abandoned the market when prices collapsed last decade.
“It’s attracting hedge-fund speculators,” said Norbert Rücker, head of economics at Swiss private bank Julius Baer. “With this move, carbon has really come back to life this year and it’s attracted a lot of interest — we have clients reaching out to us asking about it.”
Orwellian Translation: “free market” = fake market, and industrial “polluters” = global free fertilizers:
The higher prices mean that it now costs industrial polluters almost as much to use coal as it does to use cleaner natural gas. Putting the two markets on an equal footing means carbon prices are driven by factors similar to the ones that affect gas prices, such as high summer temperatures.
They’re taxing one fuel more than the other so “Equal footing” means “unequal footing.”
Fake markets attract frauds. When you’re selling a product no one needs, no one even cares if it’s fake.
Posts from long ago about the EU ETS
9.7 out of 10 based on 52 ratings
Drought Panic Over
h/t to Jim Sternhill, Frank Brus, via Jim Simpson.
 Professor Andy Pitman, UNSW In June Professor Andy Pitman quietly dropped a bomb:
“…as far as the climate scientists know there is no link between climate change and drought.”
“…there is no reason a priori why climate change should made the landscape more arid.“
He’s admitting there’s never been a scientific basis for the endless climate drought scares? He went on to say that in Australia, droughts are not increasing, and there’s no drying trend in one hundred years of data. He’s also admitting the models can’t predict extremes in rain either. Where are the press releases?
It’s great to hear him speaking like a skeptical scientist, with candor and care, but 52% of Australians (including many of our politicians) think “climate change” is already causing more frequent droughts. So half the country is not only convinced droughts are increasing, but they think climate change is causing an effect that isn’t happening. And the world is spending $330b a year on windmills and solar panels in the hope of stopping droughts, among other things.
 There’s no link? Has Andy Pitman told the Climate Council? Pitman follows this with: “this may not be what you read in newspapers…” No, Sir. And the 64 billion dollar question (which isn’t asked) is — why not? And what are you doing about that?
Does Andy Pitman keep trying to tell journalists the full and accurate story and they won’t print it? (Well, we know what that’s like.) Given his roles as Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, and as a Lead Author for the IPCC, does it bother him when he sees his specialty misreported over and over again? Since the taxpayer funds him, isn’t there an obligation to correct the record?; to flick an email to the ABC journalists who keep saying climate change is linked to drought, or drop a five minute phone call to Peter Hannam of the Sydney Morning Herald who is still getting it wrong? He may even want to call his own researcher at the centre where he is a director. Andrew King advised Hannam on that last link which is filled with “human fingerprints” of “drought” and emerging “greenhouse signals”. The article even says — completely incorrectly —“Australia is among the regions of the world where the drying trend is clearest”.
Wednesday 19 June, 2019, Sydney Environment Institute (SEI), University of Sydney.
At 1:11:20
Professor Andy Pitman:
“…this may not be what you expect to hear. but as far as the climate scientists know there is no link between climate change and drought.
That may not be what you read in the newspapers and sometimes hear commented, but there is no reason a priori why climate change should made the landscape more arid.
If you look at the Bureau of Meteorology data over the whole of the last one hundred years there’s no trend in data. There is no drying trend. There’s been a trend in the last twenty years, but there’s been no trend in the last hundred years, and that’s an expression on how variable Australian rainfall climate is.
There are in some regions but not in other regions.
So the fundamental problem we have is that we don’t understand what causes droughts.
Much more interesting, We don’t know what stops a drought. We know it’s rain, but we don’t know what lines up to create drought breaking rains.”
Bookmark this page. I’ll be referring back to these quotes.
Just trying to help Prof Andy Pitman get his message out — the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
As I’ve been saying, the Federation drought was worse than anything modern. The worst droughts in Australia were 1,000 to 2,000 years ago and there’s no trend in Australian droughts. And who could forget the recent study by Ashcroft showing that 178 years of Australian rain has nothing to do with CO2?
Keep reading →
9.3 out of 10 based on 122 ratings
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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