This weekend it’s snowing within 90 minutes of Melbourne and Sydney. It’s snowing in far south Queensland. In the Alps Thredbo recorded an amazing 117cm of fresh snow in two days, while snow fell in towns that rarely get snow like Gordon near Ballarat, Tumut, Crookwell. The highway through the Blue Mountains was blocked. The airport was closed in Orange.
TA polar blast has whipped across New South Wales, dumping unprecedented levels of snow on parts of the state. From the rugged terrain of the Blue Mountains to streets in Bathurst, whole towns were completed whited out as the freezing weather took hold. @lizzybryan1#9Newspic.twitter.com/elgLlbQiD0
Repeat after me: The Science is Complex. Two “leading” researchers say blah, blah, attribution, models. They argue that unverified, unvalidated models that ignore the solar wind, solar spectral changes, and solar magnetic changes can tell us how much effect CO2 has because there’s a mysterious gap between what their models predict the natural climate would do and what really happened — especially according to thermometers installed over asphalt and next to incinerators. They forget to mention that their models fail on temperature trends, and on the local, regional, and continental scale,the pause, the upper troposphere, the humidity, the fingerprint they said mattered, the medieval warm period, the little ice age, the oceans, down boreholes,and for sea levels, as well as for the temperature of Antarctica, and the Southern Ocean. Lucky we have Seers who can interpret the failures of broken models to explain why CO2 really does cause all the things their models didn’t predict.
Over a million peoplecustomers lost power in the UK yesterday thanks to the sudden outage of a gas and a wind plant. Some of the country’s biggest railway stations were inoperable. Passengers were stuck on trains for up to seven hours. Others stayed in hotels, walked miles or paid “hundreds” for taxis. The outpatient sections of Ipswich Hospital were blacked out for 15 minutes when backup generators failed. “At the height of the Friday rush hour, all trains out of King’s Cross were suspended and remained so for most of the evening.” — BBC. Commuters resorted to using their phones as torches to get out of tunnels in the dark.
According to headlines, at this early stage before the investigation all we know for sure is that wind power is definitely not to blame, but Boris might be. (Seriously, it’s the no-deal Brexit that hasn’t happened).
Officially, people are saying in solemn knowing tones that it is “extremely rare” for two generators to go out at once. But the odd thing about this is how small the loss was. Barfield Gas power is only a 730 MW generator, and Hornsea Wind “Farm” is, at most, 1.2 GW. The whole UK grid is more in the order of 60-80GW. The word on twitter was that this was only a 1.4MW loss. If so — wow. For some reason this small loss meant the grid frequency fell from the usual 50 Hz to a heartache 48.889 Hz (disastrous in grid terms). At that point, pre-programmed emergency “load shedding” kicked in.
“One source at a local energy network said: “I’ve never heard of anything like this in 20 years.”…” – Financial Times
Hmm. This could be a clue – a storm was sweeping through and wind farms were running full tilt just before things fell apart. Half an hour before the crash the National Grid was bragging about a new wind power record:
At 16 minutes past four on Friday a press officer at National Grid put out a tweet which seemed to signal Britain’s progress towards its much-vaunted zero-carbon economy. The proportion of UK electricity generated by wind power, ‘it boasted, had just reached a record high of 47.6 per cent.
–Ross Clark, Spectator.
With such a high proportion of wind power the system inertia would have been very low, which would mean the system was much less able to adapt to any disruption. (And if that is the case then this is a renewables problem. Too many intermittent generators, not enough spinning reserve). Large baseload turbines have spinning weights in the order of 200 – 600 tons, and they turn at 3,000 rpm. Solar and wind power just can’t provide that stability. Wait and see, but there are similarities with the South Australian blackout of 2016.
Ken Stewart rates the Streaky Bay site as one of the worst he has seen This is an influential site because it’s in a remote area, is used to “correct” official ACORN sites, and has been running for a long time. Last October the BOM finally moved it to a completely new (and much better site) — only three decades too late. Strangely, they didn’t give the new site a new station number? Normally the old and new sites would be run concurrently with two different numbers so the data from both could be compared and the differences in temperature between them could be worked out. Is that an accident? Does it hide the terrible quality of the previous site?
The Streaky Bay information (site 018079) tells us it opened in 1865 but the site only has monthly data from 1926 and daily data from an even shorter period. The rest presumably hasn’t been digitized yet. As best as I can tell, the station metadata appear to mark this site as being at the post office from 1865 to 2018, and record the ground cover as becoming asphalt in July 1987. That means for 31 years the Australian Bureau of Meteorology knew the site was sitting on hot bitumen and couldn’t be bothered to move it? The BOM gets more than a million dollars a day, and claims there’s a dire crisis running, and they don’t even care enough to measure climate change properly? They’re not even trying.
According to Stewart, Streaky Bay’s artificially hot data was used to “correct” the Acorn sites at Adelaide, Ceduna, Eucla, Forrest, Kyancutta, and Port Lincoln.
The detailed site information here indicates the site moved on 26 OCT 2018: “STATION Changed to Open farmland, grassland or tundra”. See page 31. But how long was it at the Post Office? On 12/JUN/1980 the metadata records “Changed to Town 1000 to 10,000” which possibly just means a category change as the population grew, not a site change. There is no concurrent longitude or latitude change. Am I right?
On 12/JUN/1980 STATION surface_type Changed to bare ground. On the 08/JUL/1987 the STATION surface_type was “Changed to asphalt.”. On the 16/MAR/2000, the STATION soil_type was changed to “unable to determine”. Why? Because the soil was under bitumen and no one knew what was there?
The Bureau of Meteorology needs an independent audit
There are many questions this site raises. It’s very odd that the site number stays the same — even though the site moved to a dramatically different area. I wonder if that means their “secret algorithm” will treat the old hot data here as if it came from the new grassed site? It’s hard to believe that would be useful for them, since the new readings will be cooler. Usually when a site moves to a cooler location it allow the BOM to post hoc “cool” all the previous readings. Site moves are an excuse to cool data from the original good sites in paddocks which slowly became polluted with urban infill as buildings and roads were added around and under it. The UHI and site effects will have gradually increased temperatures in lots of little steps, but the correction for that rising trend is a backwards single “step” adjustment, which rewrites history, and lowers all the decades before the move down in one flat brutal step. Thus are the original old good sites deemed to be reading falsely hot.
Good news, the Intergovernmental Holy Panel has finally released the new World-Saving IPCC Diet (WSID) which will stop storms, volcanoes and the spread of jellyfish. It also solves all those difficult dietary questions — instead of worrying about your weight, your blood pressure, or your brain, you can sip on a soy latte and know that even if you get dementia from the B12 deficiency or the tofu, you are A Virtuous Signaller. Lucky you.
And even though an atmospheric physicist supposedly can’t advise us on the climate, it’s fine for a climate scientist to tell us what to eat. They already tell us what car to drive and how many kids we should have. Why not?
Humans have been eating meat for 2.6 million years at least, or about 100,000 generations, but it’s time to take the precautionary principle and toss that genetic heritage to the wind.
Meat is a good (as in “the only”) source of Cobalamin, known as vitamin B12, which your body uses to make the myelin sheath on nerves among other things (it’s the insulation on your personal electricity grid). The side effects of not getting enough include:
…demyelinisation of peripheral nerves, the spinal cord, cranial nerves and the brain, resulting in nerve damage and neuropsychiatric abnormalities. Neurological symptoms of vitamin B12 deficiency include numbness and tingling of the hands and feet, decreased sensation, difficulties walking, loss of bowel and bladder control, memory loss, dementia, depression, general weakness and psychosis.3,4 Unless detected and treated early, these symptoms can be irreversible. — Zeuschner et al 2013
Meat is also the best source for creatine, carnitine, methionine, DHA, taurine and iron. Obviously millions of people do fine without meat, but it’s a bit of a bummer for those with defective enzymes or SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) in any of these pathways. Some people just shouldn’t be vegetarians. (I know, I was one).
There looks like some unfortunate trade-offs in trying to reduce global temperatures with our dinner plates. I have barely got started on the health effects, the risks, the costs involved.
If only the ABC / BBC / CBC had well funded specialist science units which could ask those kind of questions. Oh wait…
As it is, dieticians have a torrid time trying to figure out what humans should eat, only a cult fanatic would think climate models would do it better.
In any case the reason cows and sheep are being targeted in the first place were because of methane emissions, and as Tom Quirk found here, global methane levels appear to be mostly due to El Ninos, rainfall and leaky Russian pipes.
How many healthy people do we sacrifice to the weather Gods this time?
Save the forests, burn more coal
If the IPCC are so concerned about forest destruction the best thing they could suggest is to cut back solar and wind power and biofuels which use up to 500 times as much land area as fossil fuels or nuclear power does.
And if people are concerned about food security ponder that the IPCC says that about a third of food is lost or wasted. (Quoting Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project and a researcher at CSIRO). Sounds like we have plenty to spare then, especially if we stop trying to feed good food to cars instead of people .
The heat coming off Charles DeGualle’s Orly Airport’s runways is easily visible from space. (As are all the other ideal locations for putting climate change thermometers.) CORRECTED Charles de Gaulle airport runways are (I think) beyond the top right of the heat map.
h/t To AndyG
The NASA Ecostress map for Paris | Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Hands up who thinks thermometers in 1880 were reading too warm? Anyone…
The shots were taken in the early morning:
They show how the central core of each city is much hotter than the surrounding natural landscape due to the urban heat island effect – a result of urban surfaces storing and re-radiating heat throughout the day.
he fact that surface temperatures were as high as 77-86 degrees Fahrenheit (25-30 degrees Celsius) in the early morning indicates that much of the heat from previous days was stored by surfaces with high heat capacity (such as asphalt, concrete and water bodies) and unable to dissipate before the next day. The trapped heat resulted in even higher midday temperatures, in the high 40s (Celsius) in some places, as the heat wave continued.
So these heat sinks have had all night to lose their extra heat yet here they are still radiating. Even at lunch time the next day.
It’s becoming a joke all around the world — the EVs in Australia powered by dirty diesel. But what’s the difference? Most EV’s in Australia are running on fossil fuel — the generators are just hidden behind longer extension cords. (Ones that carry 240,000V). EV’s on our grid are running on 80% fossil fuels every day.
The sign on the charger above says “Nullarbor” — the vast treeless and grid-free centre of Australia — but this is actually a test site in Perth (the trees were the giveaway).
The 3,000 kilometer trip across the Nullarbor from Perth to Adelaide is such an achievement for an EV that it’s practically a news story each time one makes it. Electric Car owners carry a chip about not being able to drive across the country like any real car owner could. So Jon Edwards, a retired engineer from Perth, set up this test site in his backyard. He wanted to know if it could be a realistic stop-gap for our far remote roads.
To me, this looks like a chain of efficiency losses going from diesel to mechanical to electrical to battery to mechanical, but Edwards tested it with ten friend’s cars last December and estimates it works out slightly better on fuel use than just driving a diesel. Readers can check out all his calculations and tables on his page — at a glance it’s a respectable effort. He is an engineer. The charger is a Tritium Veefil 50kW DC (a big fast one) and took 9 hours to charge all 10 cars and used 108L of fuel. Good for fuel. Bad for time. (The 6,600km return trip across the Nullabor took 13 days in case you were wondering, though they were not in a race).
There’s a good reason EV’s are only 0.2% of all new Australian car purchases — with vast distances, a fragile grid, expensive electricity and heavy towing loads. Plus these fast chargers are like adding “20 houses” to our grid, so will cripple the system or require billions of dollars of infrastructure costs. The dumbest thing is that as long as they run off fossil fuels, they’ll probably increase our CO2 emissions, doing the exact opposite of what they’re supposed to be doing, but yet perversely helping plants grow. Their big environmental benefit being mainly achieved by failing to do what they are intended to do.
Good for Jon Edwards for financing his own experiment. but there was one funny moment when he mentioned tax:
…he tells The Driven that driving to Adelaide and back in an electric car, “I felt like a third class citizen.”
“I’m a tax paying citizen and I’m driving an EV, why haven’t we got infrastructure to service us?” he says.
…and the first commenter, Pedro, reminded him that EV owners don’t pay the fuel taxes that maintain the roads the EV’s drive on.
But, hey, he’s in the comments there explaining himself. Give him points, just please don’t give him more of our taxes.
Showing their mastery of business, the Victorian Government is helping the local Solar industry to death. To prop up the failing, uneconomic but “fashionable” industry the Andrews government decreed that they will throw an extra $2,225 at homes earning less than $180,000 that want to install solar. (This is on top of the Federal subsidies). Because free money is always popular, they decided to limit this to 3,333 rebates per month but now it’s a stop-start monthly bloodbath out there.
The applications for this months allocation went online on the first of August and were all gone in 106 minutes. Some people had waited all month but their internet connections were too slow, and according to them “the orange wheel of death” kept spinning, but no magic money appeared. Now they have to wait another month. Who’s going to install solar now, if you might get two thousand dollars off it by waiting a few weeks?
It’s all utterly predictable, but killing small solar installers. For some, not one of their customers scored a rebate. So they’re saying they have no work for the next month now, no more will come in, and no way to pay their staff.
August has smashed last month’s record for the amount of time it took Victoria’s Solar Rebate slots to run out. Three days? How about two hours? Already at a crisis level, the rebate scheme has now entered nightmare territory, with solar installers across the state – already hurting – forced to sit out another month without sales.
What the government created, the government can destroy. There goes the Victorian solar market. If only those businesses were selling something that people wanted to buy without a subsidy?
The up/down artificial cranking of the market will shake out all the small businesses.
Waste, waste and destruction
The rebates paid off people who would have installed the panels anyhow:
The program took residential installation levels from 3,000/month up to 5,000/month for that eight-month period. So, on the up-side, it brought 16,000 new solar installations that wouldn’t have proceeded without the rebate.
But it also funded 16,000 that would have happened anyway. And such was the impact of the scheme, only 1,000 customers/month of the original 3,000/month were ineligible for the rebate.
That makes it problematic even to simply dump the program. In the space of 12 months, the government has conditioned two-thirds of the original market to expect a rebate, and those customers will take a long time to return to the market in the absence of a rebate. Hence the crater
Oops. Spot the bubble. This is the state rebate on top of the Federal version.
Solar Panels are still not worth installing without a subsidy
Watch the fans at Reneweconomy dance around the high cost of solar PV. Here is how to not say that solar is too expensive for homeowners to want to buy it voluntarily:
…past experience with premium feed-in tariff schemes in various states has shown that scrapping the scheme outright would throw the industry into the doldrums, as consumers will feel that they’ve missed out. While the case for purchasing a solar system in Victoria without the current rebate is much more favourable than it was 5-10 years ago, it may take the average Victorian some time to become aware of this fact.
Some time? It may take 20 years for the panels to start being economic. Or 100.
If solar panels saved people money on their extremely high electricity bills they’d figure it out. The real problem is the solar panels are junk tech, solving a crisis that doesn’t exist in the most expensive and stupid way possible.
Joelle Gergis unleashes a message of full gut-wrenching, stomach sinking, terrible truth and brutality. Lordy, 50 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef is dead. Sometimes she cries after her talks. She has a vision, a precognition of awful events, but only she and a few other UN certified seers can see. Climate change is the terrifying eco-disaster that sounds more and more like a Stephen King novel. How does a scientist sell climate change? — with pools of blood. It’s like a brain haemorrhage. Seriously.
Her grief is rapidly being superseded by rage. “Volcanically explosive rage”.
Is she hunting for the truth or looking for fame, status and a captive audience? Once upon a time scientists used to talk in caveats and careful qualifiers. Not any more.
And the irony — after all this hyperbolic unleashed emotion, she twists the knife to call for… wait...”an urgent and pragmatic national conversation.” Where’s the pragmatism in doing science as an unrelated horror movie analogy.
Preparing for this talk I experienced something gut-wrenching. It was the realisation that there is now nowhere to hide from the terrible truth.
“We are witnessing catastrophic ecosystem collapse of the largest living organism on the planet.”
Being willing to acknowledge the arrival of the point of no return is an act of bravery.
Holy Horrors: This woman is so special — Look at me, so brave, so visionary!
She’s a messiah in the making. Joelle Gergis is one of the chosen ones:
As one of the dozen or so Australian lead authors on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sixth assessment report, currently underway, I have a deep appreciation of the speed and severity of climate change unfolding across the planet. Last year I was also appointed as one of the scientific advisers to the Climate Council, Australia’s leading independent body providing expert advice to the public on climate science and policy. In short, I am in the confronting position of being one of the few Australians who sees the terrifying reality of the climate crisis.
She’s so smart almost no one else sees what she sees.
Because climate change is like a brain hemorrhage. Explain to me how this has any scientific link at all — it’s mere theatre — the two topics connected by personal “shock”. She’s shamelessly milking family grief for propaganda mileage.
Preparing for this talk I experienced something gut-wrenching. It was the realisation that there is now nowhere to hide from the terrible truth.
The last time this happened to me, [finding there was “no where to hide”] I was visiting my father in hospital following emergency surgery for a massive brain haemorrhage. As he lay unconscious in intensive care, I examined his CT scan with one of the attending surgeons who gently explained that the dark patch covering nearly a quarter of the image of his brain was a pool of blood. Although they had done their best to drain the area and stem the bleeding, the catastrophic nature of the damage was undeniable. The brutality of the evidence was clear – the full weight of it sent my stomach into freefall.
Which part is emotionally frozen?
Increasingly after my speaking events, I catch myself unexpectedly weeping in my hotel room or on flights home. Every now and then, the reality of what the science is saying manages to thaw the emotionally frozen part of myself I need to maintain to do my job. In those moments, what surfaces is pure grief. It’s the only feeling that comes close to the pain I felt processing the severity of my dad’s brain injury. Being willing to acknowledge the arrival of the point of no return is an act of bravery.
Sure. Blood n’ guts one minute, analytical the next:
As a climate scientist at this fraught point in our history, the most helpful thing I can offer is the same professionalism that the doctor displayed late that night in Dad’s intensive-care ward. A clear-eyed and compassionate look at the facts.
Dear Joelle, any time you want to start the clear eyed commentary, go right ahead.
Thanks to Ken Stewart, the tour through the Great sites of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology continues.
Once again, the experts have carefully graphed, diagrammed, checked and ignored all the things that shouldn’t be within 30 meters of a thermometer. See Maitland Site Info. That fence is described as “Galvanised iron”. The ground is bitumen. The incinerator is labeled “incinerator”. And there are two tanks just out of view to the right, not to mention the tin sheds, trees, buildings and wind breaks.
In 1967 the site only had two tin sheds within a 30 meter radius, which was still not compliant, but vastly cooler than present. The incinerator is about 6 or 7 meters from the Stevenson Screen, and only appears on the maps in 2014.
As Ken says “the site is a heat sink”. It’s not an official “ACORN” star site, but records here get mentions in the media. Worse, Maitland is one of the sites used to adjust official ACORN data in Adelaide, Cape Borda, Ceduna, Kyancutta, Port Lincoln, and Snowtown.
Ken has also looked at Eudunda, Meningie, and Warooka this week. Anyone happening to be driving past Warooka post office? Please send us a shot to admire from out the back. The screen’s not visible from the street.
______________________
If people want to send in more site photos, start at theBoM page for Climate Data Online. Type in the town, and “Find” the nearest site. On that site’s page look to the top right for a button marked “Details” to find out the lat and long. You can enter them in Google Maps as: 34.3745S, 137.6733E (for example). If you visit a site, please respect the privacy of any homeowners, don’t share street addresses or car number-plates publicly. Email me: joanne AT this site domain.
“All else being equal, larger animals can tolerate cold conditions better than smaller animals, so one could expect that a warming climate is relatively more advantageous for smaller animals,” said Professor Altwegg.
To investigate this idea and whether it could be true, the research team looked at a group of wagtails living along the Palmiet River.
It’s “a” group — just the one — and a temperature change of less than one fifth of a degree over 23 years:
Based on data from a local weather station near the Palmiet River, the researchers knew that temperatures in the area had increased by 0.18 °C. But they didn’t know how this had affected the birds’ size.
What they found supports the idea that climate change can shrink Earth’s animals.
“Supports” the idea? The study’s big achievement was only that it didn’t extinguish the idea at the “back of envelope” stage…
Their results showed that as temperature increased along the Palmiet River, the mountain wagtails living there had become lighter. Specifically, they found lighter individuals were replacing heavier ones in the population and that they survived better under high temperatures. This indicated that an evolutionary pressure was acting on the birds to become lighter.
Or maybe food, predators, fertility, rainfall, and disease were more important than 0.18 degrees C which may or may not be larger than the error bars of South African meteorology. Who knows. Australian meteorology has larger “adjustment bars” than this.
But this is definitely evolution. Look closely and we can see evidence that smaller minded researchers are outcompeting larger ones.
This appears to occur in every soft left environment there is, no matter what the climate.
REFERENCE. Seriously?
Jorinde Prokosch et al. Are animals shrinking due to climate change? Temperature-mediated selection on body mass in mountain wagtails, Oecologia (2019). DOI: 10.1007/s00442-019-04368-2
(What are the odds this is pure spoof? I mean, a bunch of wagtails…. fergoodnesssake– Jo)
Dr Rex Fleming has a PhD in Meteorology and spent years at NOAA, as he said involved with climate research from the beginning, and responsible for funding scientists who “pushed” the theory of man-made global warming. He’s written a book called The Rise and Fall of the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change (2019) and has just done a podcast with James Delingpole.
When David Evans first spoke out as a skeptic we were contacted by someone inside NOAA who said there were many skeptics there, but none of them could speak. We know there are others out there, still silent.
My rough notes: Dr Fleming did a PhD in uncertainty in climate and was involved in something called “The weather experiment in 1979.”. He talks about “people who fiddled with the data — ocean data, atmospheric data..”, and about how they “won’t admit they put their temperature sensors too close to cities.”
James Delingpole asks what motivates these researchers and Fleming replies along the lines of soft corruption, how people just want to keep the funds coming in. That people are just not willing to fight it. He repeats that Under Obama they would get sacked. So people don’t speak up until the retire. (@ 7 minutes)
It’s so much fun saving the planet 114 private jets at a time
The glitterati are descending on a ritzy Sicilian seaside resort this weekend to discuss how to save the world. As usual, a bit of wrecking-the-world on the way is fine if it’s “for a good cause” — meaning fame, status, and hot three day summer camps in an Italian resort.
It’s known as Google Camp — the place where famous VIP’s get some training and incentives not to stray off the Google Groupthink-Ranch:
The three-day event will focus on fighting climate change — though it’s unknown how much time the attendees will spend discussing their own effect on the environment, such as the scores of private jets they arrived in and the mega yachts many have been staying on.
It’s only going to cost Google $20 million or so. It’s a small investment in their pet team of lobbyists for Big Government.
Small governments, after all, like to break up monopolies, encourage competition and cut subsidies…
What starling would want to announce they were a climate denier and get crossed off this invitation list?
Thanks to Bill in Oz sending in the shot of Mt Barker, Ken Stewart started auditing other sites in South Australia and discovered this masterpiece of expert siting. And thanks to Ken, you can see The Wacky World of Weather Stations: No. 2- Murray Bridge.
The screen is in a houseyard near concrete paths, vegetable gardens and shrubs, close to a picket fence, within 5 metres of sheds, sheltered from the south by a 1.6 metre high fence, with buildings to the east, north, and west, and less than 10 metres from the bitumen road.
Like Mt Barker, this is another site which is not an ACORN “top ranked” site that the Bureau of Meteorology use, but results from here are used to adjust ACORN sites like Mount Gambier, so it is de facto a part of that network. Sites like this are also used to create propaganda, sorry, press releases about “hottest ever records”.
The BoM know exactly how bad this site is, and in carefully measured detail.
Somewhere a paid bureaucrat has dedicatedly measured and mapped all the things that shouldn’t be there within a 30 meter radius.
Ponder the awesome attention to detail for a site that should never have been selected. In that single PDF link, there is not just one map like this but 14 separate maps of this same site dated roughly once a year since 2004. Would private industry spend so much money documenting failure or would they just … move the dang site?! And then there are more maps from before that of the site when it was located near the railway station (see below for that photo).
More meaningless expert data
Would any private company spend money analyzing the exact time of day shadows fall on this thermometer each month of the year, or would they just find a 30 by 30 meter square plot of clear land in the most empty inhabited continent on Earth? Does anyone think a supercomputer could calculate what the thermometer should have recorded, and if so, why bother having a thermometer at all?
Murray Bridge, skyline, Bureau of Meteorology, climate data.
As Ken says, don’t blame the householder, blame the BoM. As Jo says, send a message to your elected representative.
If life on Earth depends on climate science why don’t the Bureau of Meteorology care about the data? We give them over a million dollars a day, yet they use sites like this to tell us that Australia has “unprecedented” warming.
Modern junk used, old quality forgotten
The thermometers scientists installed in 1896 which recorded extreme heat then may be more accurate than the modern “expert” network, yet the BoM ignore those and use junk like this.
Here’s the expanded view of the site that was chosen in 2004 (white arrow marks the spot). At a glance, there are other sites you might think were better, like the sort under the red dots. Just a thought?
Count the ways this site breaches the Bureau of Meteorology own rules:
Ken Stewart finds the relevant BoM guidelines. Clearly this site is on a slope, too close to buildings, too close to tall foliage, too close to heat sinks, it should not be artificially watered, or near asphalt. It should have a 30 meter buffer zone, and not be shielded from the sun, rain or wind. BillinOz points out that it is totally screened from the southerly cold winds, and the cold air will be drained from the spot down the slope.
How much do the Bureau of Meteorology care about climate change? — About 1m out of 30m or 3% of their advertised “care” factor. That’s a a 97% Junk-Science rate. The future of life on Earth is supposedly at stake and the “experts” can’t even be bothered accurately measuring the climate change they tell us we need to pay billions of dollars to solve.
Obviously every record claimed at this site is scientifically meaningless. This sort of error can’t be homogenized or adjusted away, but taxpaying Australians might think that installing a proper site would be possible when we pay them over a million dollars a day.
Mt Barker’s temperatures are published at their Latest Weather Observations page. As Stewart points out this flawed site is used to adjust temperatures at official superstar ACORN-SAT sites at Adelaide, Cape Borda, Nuriootpa, Robe, and Snowtown. And thus does bad data pollute Australia’s temperature records and the press releases that are used to scare the public into paying more money to fix a climate problem no one can be bothered to even measure properly.
The bottom line? Ask our M.P.’s to audit the Bureau of Met. If the environment matters, there must be an independent audit. Skeptics have asked, and the Bureau threw out the whole dataset to avoid the audit. They admit they won’t describe their methods. If the Greens or Australian Conservation Foundation cared about the environment, they would demand an audit like we do.
In 2015 this site was on the other side of the block next to the driveway and car. “Lucky” the BoM realized, and … moved it to another inadequate spot.
Skeptics are now the brain-eating undead from Haitian Cult Voodoo. Just more namecalling in lieu of science. The ABC has become the US Weekly, TVWeek, or OK! of national policy, filled with inane clickbait animations, fictional stories and fantasy myths.
Looks like it’s projection again
Here’s a guy who believes that we control storms, floods and droughts with solar panels and wind turbines. The only climate zombie that needs hosing down is all his. He’s the one saying that the type of milk you drink, or your funeral service are to blame for random stuff like spotted quoll fertility, shark attacks, or tornadoes. Go vegan to save the planet!
Poor Nick Kilvert is so badly trained he can’t figure out why ideas like “CO2 feeds plants” just won’t die. The mystery of how the truth keeps coming back (despite their best efforts). So this weekend he put out a handy condescending guide of strawmen and mythical myths for beleaguered believers who are lost for answers to skeptical scientists. The man’s cult-like belief is so obvious, the real question we need to ask our elected MP’s is why are we funding an journalistic organization which has staff who are so incompetent, and who clearly work as ideological partisan activists? After writing an article like this, could anyone argue that Kilvert is capable of dispassionate investigative research on this topic? Kilvert, with a Bachelor of Applied Science and Honours in Ecology, apparently thinks Nobel Laureates, NASA Astronauts, Professors of Atmospheric physics are brain sucking zombie deniers, involved in a big fossil funded conspiracy.
This is the same guy who wrote climate fiction: Life at 0.5 degrees hotter: imagining an apocalypse by 2040 where 2,000 km of Barrier Reef dies and jellyfish rule the world, and where gardens are dead, err, because our rainfall increased, yeah?
They might pop up in your social media feed, or manifest in comments under climate change news online. They might even appear at your Christmas lunch. And they’re rife in some media outlets — they often come out after dark.
They’re the cases against climate science that were buried years ago, yet somehow, refuse to die. “It’s the Milankovitch cycles”, “CO2 is good for plants anyway”, “What have the scientists ever done for us?”
You might have even been infected yourself. It’s no surprise really, a multi-billion dollar campaign funded by the likes of Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund, Koch-affiliated foundations, and parts of the fossil fuel industry has been animating these damned corpses since the ’80s.
So consider this your own handy guide for killing the undead. Or at least a shield for deflecting their relentless pursuit of brains.
Good luck out there.
#1 CO2 doesn’t cause warming
Strawman. None of the serious skeptical scientists or main commentators say this. Kilvert couldn’t quote skeptics here because there’s no one to quote.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it absorbs infrared. The question is whether the clouds, humidity and jet streams amplify this warming or neutralize it. Believers assume these feedbacks are positive, put that in their models then, lo, their models tell them the feedbacks are positive. The miracle! Skeptics look at all the data (before it’s adjusted) and find that feedbacks are negative. The hot spot is the key fingerprint of feedback and it’s missing. The warming has happened before and the runaway greenhouse didn’t happen. Skeptics point out that the CO2 effect is saturated already, and water is a far more important as a greenhouse gas –– and even the IPCC agrees.
Kilvert either hasn’t done any research or is working to mislead ABC readers. Which is it? Lazy or dishonest?
#2 It’s Milankovitch cycles
Another strawman. The skeptics he debunks are imaginary creatures he has invented. The largest skeptical site in Australia (this one) has over 3 million words on it and “Milankovich” gets barely three times, none of them by me. Clearly it’s an important plank … not.
#3 There’s been a 5? 10? 20? year pause in warming
In 2008 NOAA said that pauses of 15 years or more didn’t fit with climate simulations (so if it went longer, the models would be wrong). Likewise James Hansen was caught in ClimateGate saying that ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’When the pause got a bit longer still, Ben Santer said in a paper it really was 17 years we needed to see. That was 2011.
The IPCC says: there is low confidence in quantifying the role of forcing trend in causing the surface-warming hiatus…. {WG1 8.5; WG1 Box 9.2}
Kilvert says: “This little doozy has gone a bit quiet in the past few years, though it ate quite a few brains in the early 2000s and again in 2012/13.”
He thinks 1998 is in tenth place, but that’s only in hyper-adjusted data changed with secret adjustments. The best satellite system in the world reports that year as number 2, and shows the obvious, unarguable pause. All the major datasets once showed a pause, til they were adjusted. At the same time as the pause, sea levels slowed, hurricanes paused, deny deny deny, eh?
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. The pause is still a problem, even though it stopped. The models were wrong, and no wonder. They are missing key forcings like solar magnetic, solar spectral changes and the solar wind.
#4 It’s a natural cycle, man
Apparently it’s not natural because 250 million years ago CO2 rose fast and caused the Permian Extinction. Kilvert argues that all past changes were slower than this one. Since we know warmer temperatures cause CO2 to rise about 800 years later, it takes some magical thinking to assert that any scientist can show CO2 rose before temperatures 250,000,000 years ago. Show us your error bars.
Riddle me this: we’ve got 800,000 years of ice cores, and modern satellites circling the Earth 24 hours a day, but the only proof that CO2 causes rapid warming comes from a quarter of a billion years ago?
Any nutritional deficiencies are so minor they can be solved by adding two chickpeas to each cup of rice.
#6 It was warmer during the Medieval Warm Period
Skeptics can name hundreds of peer reviewed studies from every continent showing it was as warm or warmer. Believers say that these are just localities, but can’t name continents that were colder at the same time. They “know” it was cooler 1,000 years ago because their models say so, and because junk science graphs look like Hockeysticks — but only if they use tree rings for 2,000 years then throw them away and use thermometers near airports instead. The Hockeystick graph has all the skill of a random number generator but fake scientists are still defending it. Fake journalists are letting them get away with it.
#7 But the world’s been colder before when CO2 levels were higher
Another mythical myth. I’ll just quote Kilvert: “Actually CO2 has been at higher levels than today, when temperatures were much cooler.” Kilvert debunks himself.
#8 Climate science is a conspiracy of the ‘elites’
#9 CO2 has historically followed, not caused warming
Another myth that’s hard to break because it’s true. Skeptics cite the Vostok Ice Cores, Kilvert cites Al Gore.
He goes on to quote a couple of scientists who just declare the positive feedbacks to be real. Kilvert doesn’t ask them to name actual examples of where they demonstrate this mythical amplification in the ice cores. Where are those papers? If there is amplification, if CO2 is the defining “force”, why is it so hard to find examples of it?
#10 Climate scientists are only in it for the money
Kilvert appears to be saying that climate sensitivity is 3.3C because mining engineers are paid more than climate scientists.
This is no accident. With climate scientists inept modeling skills, which mining company would employ them?
The mining engineers and geologists are mostly skeptics. Why? They can add up. Their jobs depend on getting it right. Climate Scientists jobs depend on getting the “right” answer. If engineers and geologists don’t find the oil, gold or gas, they get sacked. If climate scientists don’t find a “climate crisis” they lose their job. They’re just mining for different things…
The truth is that B Grade graduates of ecological degrees can’t get better paid work than “in climate science”. They get rock star status, two week round-the-world UN junkets every year, no journalist asks them hard questions, and besides, if they don’t toe the line, they get sacked.
Cowardice everywhere
The ABC can take the punters money but it can’t allow taxpayers to comment, lest inept, unresearched activism like Kilvert’s gets torn to pieces on their own site.
Likewise Kilvert can’t risk naming large skeptical websites either. Despite skeptics being stupid tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists, apparently Kilvert is too scared his readers might find out that he doesn’t know what skeptics say, doesn’t have any real answers, and is debunking strawmen and mythical myths.
And why has the ABC sunk to posting nauseating repeat animations, as if their website is run by teenage boys? Even tabloid news is above that. This is inane mocking, not a scientific argument. And that’s exactly the point. This ABC article is not there to educate, to discuss science, or explain national policy. It appears to be there to tell readers what opinions they are permitted to have — to warn them how they’ll be treated if they ask the wrong question. The flicker-repeats are the type of images used by teenage clickbait-minds looking for easy things to go trolling on to score points to boost their low self-esteem.
Apparently, the ABC aren’t writing for national policy makers any more, they’re feeding the trolls. Well, send ’em on over…
h/t David B, Pat, George, Todd H, Travis T. Jones, BillinOz, bemused.
After nearly two weeks the ABC carrier pigeons finally brought the news that Bob Brown, former Greens leader, is campaigning against this gigantic wind farm — the $1.6b one in NW Tasmania that wants to be the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. Could it be the ABC doesn’t want to admit they were wrong too, pushing wind power non stop for years?
Look how erratic that wind is — 90% one day, zero the next
Tom Quirk looked at the nearest wind farm to Robbins Island, and it’s a fitful machine (see that graph below). Worse, it fails in synchrony with most wind farms in Australia. Thus exacerbating the unstable, fickle supply of wind energy.
Tom Quirk predicts the demise of another coal plant
A wind farm on Robbins Island will simply extend the variations in power supplied to the mainland while making no difference to the correlations of wind through the states in the wholesale market. Thus more backup would be required from gas and hydro sources. Loy Yang B with 1,000 MW would clearly become uneconomic to operate since more wind farms are also planned for Victoria…
Woolworth Wind Farm, Tasmania, Output, June 2019, Data source anero.id/energy
The proposed 400 to 1,000 MW Robbins Island wind farm is at the North West of Tasmania close to the 140 MW Woolnorth wind farm. The capacity factor for Woolnorth is shown below. The behaviour of the Robbins Island wind farm should be the same with a capacity factor varying from 0 to 90%.
If it’s built, it will make good money for the American owners on the days it works, but make electricity more expensive for Australians. The awkward truth is that, barring freak accidents, its power arrives exactly when Australians don’t need it — when they have an excess from every other wind farm and a steady reliable baseload supply working just fine that must sit around, waiting for the wind to ebb, while it has bills to pay.
Like other windfarms it will help drive the cheap baseload off the grid, and leave Australians footing the bill for high cost peaking replacements.
With turbines moving at 300 km an hour it’ll be the apex predator — death to avians too.
Whats the difference between and ABC reporter and a PR writer? PR writers are more honest.
Carrington Clarke of the ABC gives free advertising to an industry, interviews no critics and does no research. Watch the pea, the word “average” is used to bury the bad-news variability. This sounds like it could be from a prospectus for UPC:
“We have an absolutely stellar, solid, low turbulence, high average wind speed around the 36 kilometres an hour average, which in my experience is some of the best in the world,” UPC chief operating officer David Pollington said.
“Best” in this case being “best for the owners”, bad for Australians. For about a quarter of the entire month of June the output was between ten percent of capacity and “zero”.
The average buries the bad news on prices too:
Mr Pollington argues projects like Robbins Island are good news for consumers in Tasmania and on the mainland. “We’re confident that we can produce energy at a lower rate than is currently the average price in the market,” Mr Pollington said. “So we should be helping depress the price of electricity for consumers.”
It’s hardly an achievement if wind turbines can make electricity cheaper than the “average” record high prices we pay now. In any case, it’s the effect on the whole system that matters, not the cherry-picked five-minute bids for wholesalers on windy days. The average retail price paid by consumers is what matters and the more wind we get, the higher it is. If wind farms “depressed” the price (rather than the consumer) there might be a country on Earth which has cheaper electricity since it built wind farms. There isn’t.
Tom Quirk looks at the erratic synchronicity of wind power of the national grid:
Wind power supplied is an example of state by state wind correlations that reflect the reach of the weather systems in the Australian eastern region.
Total wind power contribution to the wholesale electricity market
Total wind farm output Australia, June 2019 | Data source anero.id/energy
The capacity factor is the energy produced as a percentage of the maximum output of a wind farm. The total capacity factor is the weighted average of all wind farms. The capacity factor is a useful way of showing the correlations in wind energy supply from the state regions.
The figures below show strong correlations for Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia with lesser correlation for New South Wales and Queensland.
Wind farms, Australia, combined output, June 2019. Data source anero.id/energy .
There are 55 wind farms on the National Electricity Market in the Eastern States: 2 wind farms in Tasmania and Queensland, 22 in South Australia, 17 in Victoria, and 12 in NSW. Those graphs for June 2019 for each state up close:
Here’s one of the great whitewash lines of PR by the ABC:
UPC’s Mr Pollington says the company has been working with experts to ensure the wind farm is designed to minimise the impact on birds.
What does minimize even mean? They’ll make choices that kill less birds as long as it doesn’t cost much. The way to minimize the impact is to not build it in the first place.
…AGL’s Macarthur wind farm in Victoria is a good example of how expert reports can be wrong and conditions difficult to enforce.
Local farmer and bird lover Hamish Cumming has been raising the alarm for almost a decade. In September 2014, he wrote to all federal MPs: “The AGL Macarthur wind farm is slaughtering raptors at an alarming rate and no one seems to care, especially the Greens.” He asked Brown for help: “Dear Bob, I think the Greens in Victoria (and nationally) have forgotten what they are supposed to be protecting,” he wrote. “They refuse to help me make AGL adhere to their permit conditions just because they are a wind farm.” Cumming says he got no reply.
When the Macarthur wind farm was approved, AGL estimated it would kill two birds per turbine a year. However, post construction monitoring showed the project was killing 13.4 birds per turbine a year, more than six times the pre-construction estimate. The AGL permit application claimed a raptor kill of three a year across the wind farm, yet a post-construction report estimates a kill of 430 raptors a year, 30 per cent of bird deaths at the wind farm.
The experience in northern California is an 80 per cent decline in golden eagles numbers with none nesting near the Altamont facility, although it is a prime habitat.
The best solution to this conflict is to use different types of Wind Turbines that would not kill birds. There are at least 4 types of smaller wind turbines on the internet that will not kill any birds. That they are smaller would mean that they would be easier to transport to Robbins island. One of the birds I research, the White-throated Needletail is the main species being killed at a wind farm near Robbins island, in spite of it being one of the fastest birds in the world. Because it flies all day it is going to pass many wind farms and risk being killed. Two weeks ago the Australian Government accepted my application and declared this species as Vulnerable.
Also near Robbins island, Short-tailed Shearwaters or Muttonbirds are also being killed by wind farms of the same type that are used across Australia. Which politician has shares in this company. Lets solve the problem by using the types that will generate cheap electricity and do not kill birds.
Prof Mike Tarburton.
Likely this is Prof. Mike Tarburton, “retired” from Dean of School of Science & Technology, Pacific Adventist University, Papua New Guinea. His website is Swifts of the World.
Turbines are going to get bigger, so Prof Tarburton, bird specialist, is effectively telling us that things for birds are going to get much worse. Sadly, the awful bird toll will get more awful.
Smaller turbines might save the birds, which is a good thing, but they still make grid-wrecking, job-destroying electricity that makes the entire network more inefficient and more expensive. And presumably small turbines must be more expensive per Watt than large turbines or the profit making corporations wouldn’t be building the biggest ones they can get approval for.
Lets save birds and jobs and keep the heating and lights on.
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