Weekend Unthreaded

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9 out of 10 based on 23 ratings

What will the carbon tax cost? Bill Shorten says only a lying charlatan would ask.

How much do Australians have to pay to change the global weather?

Snake Oil Salesman, Climate Quack. Bill Shorten.

….

First, Bill Shorten called those who ask “dumb”. Then when that was described as his Hillary “Deplorables” moment he changed the insult from “dumb” to “liar”.

Here’s Bill Shorten in the third leaders debate:

“I accept the cost question is not a dumb question, …it’s a dishonest question.

The idea that you only look at the investment in new energy without looking at the consequences of not acting on climate change is a charlatans argument, it’s a crooked charlatans argument.”

-Bill Shorten, May 8th: iview, 2 mins 30 sec.,

Do you want to discuss the cost benefit ratio of a $500 billion dollar scheme the Labor Party is proposing to stop droughts and hold back the tide? Shorten doesn’t have an answer, instead he claims you shouldn’t even ask the question. You, sir, are a conniving cheat and a liar.

The definition of Charlatan:

A charlatan (also called a swindler or mountebank) is a person practicing quackery or some similar confidence trick or deception in order to obtain money, fame or other advantages via some form of pretense or deception. Synonyms for “charlatan” include “shyster“, “quack”, or “faker”.. – (wikipedia)

Who’s the quack, the faker and the swindler here? The one who is selling a scheme to change the global temperature or the people who want to find out what it will cost?

Welcome to national debate in Australia where the snake-oil salesman weasels out of answering basic questions and the audience and ABC cheers, fooled by the oldest trick in the book. Bill is selling a product “at any cost”. Would you buy health insurance for a million dollars a year? How dare you ask, you stupid liar. You’re not considering the consequences.

It’s all a strawman dodge. Those who ask about the cost have never shied away from discussing the consequences. The cost is one question. The benefit is another. But both get reduced into one meaningless Yes:No “hands-up” moment. Our national debate is nothing more than Quacks selling a cure for the planet.

Are you a good person or a bad one? Bill says: Shut up and give me your vote and your money.

Image:adapted from Library of Congress

9.4 out of 10 based on 113 ratings

More renewables, more record prices

Once again, bad luck for renewables. The AEMO put out their report for the first quarter of 2019. Despite a massive growth in renewables, power prices are still not falling as predicted.

The report highlights that record high spot wholesale electricity prices were set in Victoria and South Australia, and nearly in everywhere else as well:

• Victoria and South Australia’s quarterly average spot wholesale electricity prices of $166/MWh and $163/MWh were their highest on record.

• Victoria and New South Wales recorded their highest underlying energy price on record, while Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania recorded their seconded highest energy prices on record.

These record highs were not just billion dollar price spikes, but the actual underlying energy prices as well.

Looks like a trend here:

Wholesale electricity prices, NEM, Australia, Q1, 2019. AEMO, Graph.

Wholesale electricity prices, NEM, Australia, Q1, 2019 | Click to enlarge.

The news gets reported but somehow coal and heat get the blame?

Record power bills in NSW, Vic

Perry Williams, The Australian

Power prices in NSW and Victoria soared to their highest level on record in the first quarter of 2019, with the jump blamed on high coal and gas tariffs and searing summer temperatures which cut output from hydro-generators.

Significantly, solar partly soothed grid pressures over that period with rooftop units soaking up some of the demand.

Nice theory, but intermittent energy is a burden on the grid that forces up the prices of all the baseload providers. It simply eats into their profits, but doesn’t reduce their costs, so they charge more the rest of the day.

Again, coal gets blamed:

Coal, often cited as the cheapest form of generation in the market, also contributed to the cost hike, with 800MW of supply moved to a price above $100/MWh in the first quarter after being offered below $100/MWh last year.

Firstly, the cheapest form of generation by far is brown coal, which we are cutting back the fastest. Black coal is often twice the price. And if black coal is charging even more (and it appears to be), it’s partly to compensate for the “intermittent burden” on the grid, and partly because it can. Less competition means … less competition.

It was of course, bad luck that the snowy hydro dams are so low. But relying on hydro to get us through very hot summers was never going to be a great idea in Australia.

Gas prices were also high, but then, if we didn’t need so much gas, the gas prices might not be as high. And if we used some of our 300 years supply of coal instead, we wouldn’t care less about the gas price.

Cheaper prices are just around the corner, except when they aren’t

More bad news (for consumers). The traders buying futures contracts don’t see prices coming down.

• Forward wholesale prices also continued their upward climb: the price of calendar year (Cal) 2020 electricity swap contracts traded on the ASX rose between 12-23% over Q1 2019 and have risen by 49% in Victoria since July 2018.

The reason that the salad-days of electricity are gone — not enough Brown coal:

Prices leapt when Hazelwood brown coal power closed. They jumped, and never came back down.

In our auction system, generators bid, say 1GW at $50. The AEMO says “yes please” to all the cheapest bids until the demand is met. That final “highest” accepted winning bid, sets the price that every successful bidder gets paid. A few short years ago, brown coal used to win bids and set low prices like, even, $13/MWh. Now there just isn’t enough brown coal generation to supply all the demand very often. So the winning bids are set by black coal instead, and they are at far higher prices. Remember, all the generators get paid at the highest wining bid price too, even if they offered to do it for less. So if we close even more brown coal plants, it’s happy days for all the other generators. Not so for consumers.

Click to enlarge.

See the graph below to understand bidding better. Loy Yang (bottom left) a brown coal plant in Victoria, put in the cheapest bid on this graph from 2014. Bayswater and Liddell are black coal putting in higher bids. Typically the AEMO will need to accept all the bids in the sweep from the left up to say 25,000MW. As demand rises for MW (the horizontal axis) the AEMO has to accept higher and higher bids.

Keep reading →

9.5 out of 10 based on 66 ratings

Labor plan sends $35b in jobs and goods overseas. Carbon Tax is dumbest deal of The Century.

Cartoon: If $35b is paid for foreign carbon credits, $35b in Australian jobs will follow.

Where money goes, jobs follow.

Unbeknowst to 99% of Australians, we already have an emissions trading scheme.

Thank Malcolm Turnbull and Clive Palmer.

Soon, Australians are likely to be sending real money overseas and getting back paper certificates at prices set by the EU.

The legislation was snuck through just before Christmas 2015, buried under the name “Safeguard Mechanism”. It cost about $7m in the first year. But sits ticking, ready to blow-up into a billion-dollar monster any day. If Labor is elected, it won’t matter whether it has Senate control or not, the minister can just “press a button”, change the caps, and lo, the money will flow to foreigners for certificates based on intentions about atmospheric nullities — for emissions they might have made but didn’t. We’re paying to change the global weather. We could be the stupidest rich nation on Earth. But really, we’re just not paying attention.

The 35 billion dollars we will spend on these useless, fraud–prone certificates is $35 billion we are taking out of the Australian labor market, or not spending on medicine, books or holidays in Bali. Angus Taylor, Minister for Energy, has noticed that this means $10b less tax will be paid too, which means less money for hospitals and schools.

There’s nothing wrong with payments to foreigners for real goods and services. But carbon credits buy us 0.0001C of theoretical cooling we don’t need and won’t be able to measure 100 years from now. It’s the dumbest deal Australia has ever made. Frausters and bankers will love it.

Tony Abbott won 90 seats on a promise to Axe The Carbon Tax in 2013. But, without any election, Australians still got exactly the carbon tax they voted overwhelmingly to stop. It’s one of the biggest lies in politics. It was brought in deceptively and is still being hidden by the Labor-lite unreformed Liberals. Turnbull finally achieved what Rudd and Gillard tried to do for years, but strangely Turnbull didn’t want to brag about it. He knew the voters would hate it.

ALP carbon credits push risks $10bn tax loss

Simon Benson, The Australian

Company tax deductions for international carbon credits purchased to meet Labor’s climate change ambitions could punch a $10 billion hole in the federal budget over the next 10 years due to the potential loss of tax revenue.

Under Labor’s policy, 250 companies that have emission reduction obligations under an expanded safeguard mechanism would be allowed to purchase domestic and international carbon credits to offset those emissions they could not reduce.

The government claims a conservative estimate of a 25 per cent allowance for international credits based on a carbon price of between $70 and $145 by 2030 would require an estimated $35bn in credits to be purchased by Australian companies over the decade.

This would lead to a loss of tax revenue to the government of $10.5bn based on the current 30 per cent company tax rate that applies to the largest companies.

Independent modeling suggests the 45% emissions target of the Labor party will cost at least $264bn and as high as $542bn by 2030. The Liberal Party will “only” waste $50 – $80b.

To be a broken record, there are cheaper carbon credits at home (thanks to Abbott666), and they’re only semi-worthless. At least we might improve our soil and add to our forests.

If the Liberals lose this election it’s because they killed off their own best weapon against the Labor Party. Lord help us if the Labor Party win.

Clive could only get my vote if he tells Australians why this tax exists and apologizes profusely, and grovelling for it.

9.5 out of 10 based on 84 ratings

Midweek Unthreaded

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9.2 out of 10 based on 17 ratings

There’s a new “climate activist non-party party” in Australia

Suddenly there’s a whole lot of independent candidates running in Australia looking to copy the Kerryn Phelps success in taking the blue-ribbon conservative seat of Wentworth. They all say they are independent, but they are all sworn to climate action and GetUp supports most if not all of them. So if and when they say they’ll support a Liberal National Coalition government, ask yourself if GetUp is being fooled, or are Australian voters?

New party is born, Abbott says, as go-it-alone candidates join forces:

Brad Norington and Alice Workman, The Australian

“If they band together to promote their cause, they’ve effectively created a new political party,” Mr Abbott said.

“It’s a climate change party — it’s essentially a small-‘g’ green party. But because in seats like these the Greens would not get elected, they’re pretending to be something else in the hope of removing Coalition members of parliament.”

“It’s absolutely crystal clear in this electorate: vote Steggall, get Shorten. And around the country: vote independent, get Labor,” he said. “All of their protestations to the contrary are bunkum, absolutely bollocks, and the fact that GetUp is supporting nearly all of them, I think, further demonstrates the point.”

Mr Abbott said the group was “plainly targeting Liberal members of parliament” and wanted to see “Labor-Green governments”. Mr Wilkie and Mr Oakeshott had “form” in supporting the Gillard government.

The team who aren’t a party (so they keep saying) are helped by journalist Margo Kingston, who writes at NoFibs.

The 15 independents have banded together with a new advert. (Which you can see at Their ABC. Does our national broadcaster show the other parties ads too I wonder?).

Independents can turn elections. In 2010, Tony Abbott would have won the election instead of Julia Gillard and the Labor party if Rob Oakshott and Tony Windsor had chosen to vote with the predominant political choices of their electorates and the parties they used to represent.

Skeptical MP’s are being targeted. You may have no urge to support any political party, but you can make a difference to the few MPs who’ve been brave enough to stand up to the Renewables Religion. They need all the help they can get.

9.8 out of 10 based on 47 ratings

Adapting to climate change “it’s in our genes” — Another reason to ignore the extinction scare

Two different models predict two totally different futures. On the left, catastrophic extinction. On the right, happy bats. Click to enlarge

Yesterday a UN supercommittee of 145 scientists from 50 countries declared that one million species are set for extinction. The same day, ten other scientists published a paper pointing out that most modelers forget to allow for genetic variation and thus overestimate the extinction rate. (It’s like they’re modelling the World of Clones – take one small study, pretend they’re all the same — extrapolate globally.) Have a look at the big difference in model outcomes in figure 1 (right).

As I keep saying, 500 million years of brutal climate change means almost every species carries around an industrial tool-kit of handy genetic tricks. Matz et al estimated corals already have the genes to survived another 250 years of projected IPCC catastrophe (in the unlikely event that it happens). Liew et al showed corals even have epigenetic tricks as well as genetics ones. Another group showed when corals are heated something like 74 different genes are activated — often genes that we don’t even know what they’re there for.

My favourite all time Global Adaptability Prize goes to the saltwater ocean fish that were landlocked by an earthquake in 1964. Fifty years later, the descendants of those fish are freshwater fish. Nothing gets much more adaptable than that.

Razgour et al looked at 300 bats in Italy which had adapted to either hot and dry or cool and wet conditions. They took gene samples and found so much variation that they calculate that as long as the different bats can do long distance dating across the different forests their kids will cope just fine with a lot of climate change. They looked at habitat loss, but even in over-developed capitalist Europe they estimate the hot-n-dry bats won’t have any trouble meeting cold-n-wet ones.

So much for the extinction disaster:

Genetic adaptation to climate change

Failure to account for genetic variation can result in overestimating extinction risk

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9.9 out of 10 based on 36 ratings

A million species face extinction? Time to burn fossil fuels to save them

A baby-IPCC of biology has just been born

The new 145-expert-committee has just uttered its first words, and the headlines are Hollywood-apocalyptic: A million species face extinction. Daddy-UN is proud.

Nature is in its worst shape in human history, UN report says

Nature is in more trouble now than at any other time in human history, with extinction looming over one million species of plants and animals, scientists said Monday in the UN’s first comprehensive report on biodiversity.

Naturally, these are estimates from unverified models that count species we haven’t even discovered yet. This is truly a scare-based-on-air, except air is real and has weight, and this isn’t that substantial.

Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, explains how vaporous this really is:

“Since species extinction became a broad social concern, coinciding with the extinction of the passenger pigeon, we have done a pretty good job of preventing species extinctions.”

Moore bluntly mocked species extinction claims made by biologist Edward O. Wilson from Harvard University. Wilson estimated that up to 50,000 species go extinct every year based on computer models of the number of potential but as yet undiscovered species in the world. Moore: “There’s no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct. The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson’s computer at Harvard University. They’re actually electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species.”

Consider that the only mammal extinction officially due to “man-made” climate change was a little brown rat colony which had washed up on a sand dune a few hundred meters long in the middle of the ocean. The hapless rats survived for unknown years 50 km off Papua New Guinea. More rats will wash up there again sometime and the cycle will start over. The entirety of mankind’s industrial revolution disaster and that’s it, that’s the only actual mammal anyone can name as “caused by climate change”?

The species scare is bigger than just “climate change”. But in an era when we have more land protected in national parks and more funding to guard and research natural spaces, arguably we’re at a high point in human history. Humans have been wiping out species for 100,000 years, possibly mammoths, mastadons, giant sloths, cave lions, and sabre tooth tigers.

The UN is reviving the old Species Extinction Scare. It’s a handy excuse to get power, increase regulations, demand money, and launch twenty years of nice annual junkets:

Marc Morano – Climate Depot, explains:

The UN has now officially expanded its mission now to include the “climate change” species extinction scare. The UN is once again calling for putting itself in charge of “solving” the newly hyped species “crisis.” “A huge transformation is needed across the economy and society to protect and restore nature, which provides people with food, medicines, and other materials, crop pollination, fresh water, and quality of life,” according to the new UN report. The AP quoted one of the activist scientists claiming “this is really our last chance to address all of that.” Hmmm. This is the same tactic the UN has used on climate for years. See:Every climate summit is hailed as the ‘last chance!’

The solution is cheap energy and spare wealth:

For the first time in human evolution we’ve reached a point where we can finally plan and save and study life on Earth. Three things we know for sure —

1. The worst pollution is in countries with a low income per capita — when people are hungry they raze forests. The most polluted cities are in places like Ghana, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Zambia, Argentina, and Nigeria. The most deforestation occurs in Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, and Mexico. The worst air is in India and China.

2. Only rich nations have the resources to save the environment.

3. Countries that produce more CO2 are richer.

Findings of the Report include a lot of big meaningless numbers

Three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions. On average these trends have been less severe or avoided in areas held or managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.

Trends in indigenous controlled lands are only less now because prehistoric indigenous people wiped out the mega fauna years ago. The trends just reached an equilibrium.

More than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production.

We’ve tied up lots of land, so the last thing we want is to use wilderness for useless solar and wind farms, or palm oil plantations. Why keep coal and uranium underground when we can save forest instead?

The value of agricultural crop production has increased by about 300% since 1970, raw timber harvest has risen by 45% and approximately 60 billion tons of renewable and nonrenewable resources are now extracted globally every year – having nearly doubled since 1980.

And this is bad, how? Better yields means we need less land to feed more people.

Land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of the global land surface, up to US$577 billion in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss and 100-300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of loss of coastal habitats and protection.

And wealthy countries are solving all of these problems faster than poor countries are. The best way to save wilderness is to increase the GDP of those in poverty. Free trade, fair agricultural markets. Less red tape. Less corruption.

In 2015, 33% of marine fish stocks were being harvested at unsustainable levels; 60% were maximally sustainably fished, with just 7% harvested at levels lower than what can be sustainably fished.

Again, in nations where there are healthy economies, fish stocks are being protected and are recovering. Whales too. Even great white sharks.

Urban areas have more than doubled since 1992.

Yet only 1 – 2% of all the area of the United States is urbanized.

Plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, 300-400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes from industrial facilities are dumped annually into the world’s waters, and fertilizers entering coastal ecosystems have produced more than 400 ocean ‘dead zones’, totalling more than 245,000 km2 (591-595) – a combined area greater than that of the United Kingdom.

The oceans cover 510 million square kilometers. So those dead zones cover 1 part in 2,081 parts — or 0.05%. Sure, we should fix it. Let’s do that. Isn’t that problem mostly in South East Asia? Again, rich countries clean up pollution…

Don’t mention the Sixth Great Extinction

The UN team learnt that calling this the “Sixth Great Extinction” was an invitation for skeptics to mock them with reminders of real death and destruction which made their current scare seem pathetically light. To get around that now the blob somehow gets people who were”not part of the report” to mention it, then they can discuss how they are not discussing it. This is the “have cake, eat cake” Psychology 101 rule — if you want people to think of an elephant but have plausible deniability (so you can quash discussion of said-elephant), tell the people not to think of an elephant.

[CBC] “We’re in the middle of the sixth great extinction crisis, but it’s happening in slow motion,” said Conservation International and University of California Santa Barbara ecologist Lee Hannah, who was not part of the report.

Five times in the past, Earth has undergone mass extinctions where much of life on Earth blinked out, like the one that killed the dinosaurs. Watson said the report was careful not to call what’s going on now as a sixth big die-off because current levels don’t come close to the 75 per cent level in past mass extinctions.

h/t to Marc Morano and CFACT

REFERENCE

Media Release: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’

Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services,

9.8 out of 10 based on 77 ratings

Albany robbed of its coldest ever April day, BOM adjusts temp up 15 degrees C?!

Friday April 19^th set more records than anyone realized. Not only was it the earliest recorded snowfall at Bluff Knoll and WA, but it was also the coldest ever April day in Albany and many other towns in south-west Western Australia. It may also be the largest single day temperature mystery I’ve ever seen in the official “raw” data.

Days like the 19^th are extremely unusual in Western Australia — it’s a state that often doesn’t get any snow all year and when it does, the length of the entire snow season is measured in hours. So you might think the million-dollar-a-day Bureau of Meteorology would be paying extra attention. Instead it appears they have lost that day’s data in Albany, despite having two thermometers there to record it. One station is in the city itself and there’s an official “expert” ACORN station at the airport about 10km away.

Luckily Chris Gillham, unpaid volunteer, was watching the live half hour observations roll in at and saw that thermometers at the airport recorded a maximum of only 10.4°C at 11am that day, which he remarks is the lowest April maximum the BOM has ever recorded there. Strangely, the 10.4°C seems to have disappeared. Somehow, the BOM has estimated that April 19th in the city of Albany was 25.1°C on Friday April 19th, which is what is now entered as “raw data” in their Climate Data Online. This is despite temperatures in almost all the surrounding towns being similarly low, and often lowest ever records (for April) as well.

This single day’s omission is so large, it raises the monthly average of Albany Airport by 0.7°C— that’s equivalent to 70 years of “global warming”. Chris reports below that the airport thermometer was also missing four days following Good Friday, which were reasonably cool (according to the City thermometer). He estimates that if the airport thermometer had worked, the official monthly average would have been nearly a whole degree, or 0.9°C cooler than what was officially recorded. (Jo, meanwhile, wonders if any planes took off at Albany Airport over Easter and whether they missed having weather data?)

The big issue here is not a few days of data — it’s the quality control. If the BOM isn’t even checking days that are record extremes, how many other errors like this go unnoticed all around Australia. Volunteers are only picking up the obvious outliers on days of extreme weather. Fortunately we can supply the BoM with the observations they seem to have lost. I’m sure they’ll rush to fix it and thank us. 😉

We know they throw away data all the time, maybe because they can’t afford the memory sticks at Officeworks? (A million dollars a day is not enough.) Perhaps we should run a GoFundMe campaign to buy them a spare hard disc?

The map below shows all the southern WA stations that set record low April daily maxima on the 19th. Chris recorded screen captures of the observations of the day at various stations in the South West. The cold blast was everywhere apparently, except Albany?

SW WA, Map, Temperatures, Bureau of Meteorology

Raw thermometer records show Albany Airport reached 10.4C on the 19th of April. Towns for hundreds of kilometers around recorded similar cool maximums. Instead officially the City of Albany is listed as 25.1C — a temperature recorded the day before at the Airport, and the Airport has no reading at all.

Here is the image (below, left) that Chris Gillham recorded with the half hour observations compared to the now official “raw” daily data for the “top 100” ACORN rated site of Albany Airport and Albany City.

There is a 15°C discrepancy. What on Earth is going on?

Albany temperatures, Easter, 2019, coldest maximum recorded, Bureau of Meteorology.

Clearly the maximum for the day was set at 11am at 10.4°C. Click to see the full screen of observations on April 19th at Albany airport. Those measurements are not available on the BoM site now. The official daily records for the month of April comes from the Bureau of Met here: Albany Airport 9999, and Albany City 9500.

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UPDATE: Lance Pidgeon copied another site’s observations of the day — Timeanddate.com. This is what he recorded on April 23 which matches what Chris copied from the BOM site. The timeanddate site has since been edited and the Easter data has vanished as per BoM official records.

Time and Date data for Albany over Easter shows data that has disappeared since then. (Click to enlarge)

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WA’s south coastal city of Albany appears to have been robbed of its coldest ever April maximum temperature.

Guest post by Chris Gillham, who tracks temperatures in Western Australia at WAClimate.net

On April 19^thwhile Bluff Knoll to the north was experiencing its earliest recorded snowfall, Albany Airport was experiencing its coldest ever April day.As it happened, I was monitoring the current half hourly observations at Albany Airport on the 19^th of April. Fortunately I left my browser tab open and a couple of days later reloaded that page (which is why the full half hourly observations graphic says it was issued by the BoM on 21^stApril).The half hourly observations screenshot shows the airport thermometer struggled to get to a 10.4°C maximum at 11am on the 19^thof April, maybe creeping a few decimal points higher sometime between the 9.0°C at 10.30am and 8.9C at 11.28am.10.4°C was the lowest ever April maximum ever recorded at Albany. The prior records were 12.2°C in 1928 at Albany township dating back to 1907, 15.4°C in 2014 at the current Albany Airport, and 12.9°C in 1970 at the previous airport screen that operated from 1965 to 2014.

However, the Bureau of Meteorology appears to have mislaid this year’s observations and Climate Data Online shows no maximum temperature for Albany Airport on the 19th of April or the following four days.

About 15 kilometres south at Albany itself, CDO lists the maximum temperature on the 19^th of April as 25.1°C. Oddly, 25.1°C was the maximum temperature at the airport the day before, the 18^th of April.

For hundreds of surrounding kilometres, lowest April maximum temperature records were set at currently operating weather stations in Rocky Gully, North Walpole, Shannon, Katanning, Bridgetown, Lake Grace, Collie East and Busselton Aero.

Over the three nights from April 20^th to April 23^rd, new April minimum temperature records were also set at currently operating weather stations in Rocky Gully, Ongerup, Katanning and Newdegate, with North Walpole having its coldest ever night at 6.3°C on April 20^th but then setting a new record at 6.2°C the following night, April 21^st.

Record cold Easter in South West WA

Coldest maximum records, set South West Western Australia, April 2019.

Coldest April maximum and minimum records, South West Western Australia.

Unlike record hot days and nights that confirm global warming, there has been no media mention of these record cold days and nights.

The true maximum temperature in the City of Albany on the 19^th of April is unknown. However, it wasn’t 25.1°C.

Albany Airport is an ACORN weather station that contributes to the bureau’s estimate of national average temperatures. The BoM’s official average maximum temperature at the airport for April 2019, without any listing for 19^th April, is 22.2°C. If the 10.4°C for 19^th April is included, the April monthly average drops to 21.5°C.

It seems Albany Airport’s April monthly average will be up to 0.7°C warmer than it really was and would have been if the bureau hadn’t lost its temperature readings on the coldest ever April day ever recorded there (did the thermometer freeze?).

Through a remarkable coincidence further south in Albany itself, it appears somebody also forgot to take temperatures on what was almost certainly the city’s coldest ever April day, and instead the bureau has inserted 25.1°C – which was either the maximum the previous day (also missing) or it’s been transplanted from the 18^th of April at the airport.

In fact, Albany Airport had no observations from April 20th to April 23rd and if the airport had the same daily maxima as Albany itself on those days (14.5°C, 20.4°C, 24.9°C, 21.1°C), the ACORN station’s April maximum would have been 21.3°C, which is 0.9°C cooler than the official monthly average maximum of 22.2°C.

April minimum daily temperature records weren’t set at either station but a comparison with the coastal city’s observations over the missing five days suggests the airport’s monthly average minimum would also have been a fair bit cooler than the official average of 11.0°C.

Since the airport’s new screen started in 2012, the average April maximum has been 22.3°C and the average April minimum has been 11.9°C.

It’s been over two weeks since the temperatures mysteriously disappeared and/or appeared, and it seems two locations have been robbed of their coldest ever April day – Albany Airport where there is no temperature for the 19^th of April and the City of Albany where it’s been replaced by a fictitious 25.1°C.

Current raw records for Albany
Western Australian observations
Plus other data backed up “in case” Jacup 10905 | Jacup raw | Rocky Gully 9964 |

MAP: NASA Visible Earth WA

9.6 out of 10 based on 92 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

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9.6 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

Global bullies strike again: Economist Dr Fisher’s house egged by climate activist

The Climate Cult wears the Fake Badge of Science, but when people don’t agree with them, they give up persuasion and just throw insults and eggs. Yesterday Dr Brian Fisher’s home was targeted after Simon Holmes a Court (son of one of the wealthiest men in Australia once) published Dr Fisher’s personal details on twitter.

Dr Fisher used to manage ABARE — The Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics. He’s also been an IPCC reviewer, and served under the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments as a chief adviser on climate policy. He released modelling of costs of both Labor and Liberal climate proposals in February, accusing both sides of politics of “engaging in a dishonest debate“.

Climate economist Brian Fisher’s home egged

Rosie Lewis, The Australian

An unnerved Brian Fisher is considering walking away from future independent economic modelling after his analysis of Labor’s climate policy led to his family home being egged when prominent clean energy activist Simon Holmes a Court posted his address online.

The managing director and chairman of BAEconomics, who has worked as a bureaucrat for Labor and Coalition governments, told The Australian yesterday it appeared “extremely difficult” to have rational, economic debate about climate change in today’s political environment and his family felt disturbed by what had happened to their Canberra home yesterday.

The devastating numbers – a third of a million jobs lost:

Labor at war over cost of climate policies

The West Australian

The internal woes for Bill Shorten came after economist Brian Fisher on Wednesday released modelling that showed up to 333,000 jobs could be lost — including 32,000 from WA — and up to $542 billion could be wiped from the economy by 2030 as a result of Labor’s 45 per cent emissions reduction target.

Bill Shorten replies with calm analysis of the productivity benefits of the Labor plan… Wait, no, with the dirtiest empty smear he can think of:

Mr Shorten brushed off the report saying Dr Fisher’s work was akin to a doctor tobacco companies hired in the 1970s to promote the health benefits of smoking.

But the Opposition Leader was still unable to detail the full impact of his climate change policy or reveal if his party would put a cap on international permits if elected.

Labor’s shadow Minister at least argues the assumptions are wrong, but spot the irony:

Mr Butler said Dr Fisher made false assumptions in his modelling.

“His costs of carbon abatement are 2000 per cent higher than the cost Scott Morrison’s Government is paying right now,” he said.

Poor Mark Butler. Looks like he’s referring to Tony Abbott’s direct action plan — which is so much cheaper than anything the Labor Party has to offer? Nothing beats the bargain basement $14/ton price instead of the high cost, obscenely expensive option of their subsidized wind and solar preferred options. Only in February, Butler called the Direct Action plan a failed climate policy that “pays money to polluters”.

These people have no shame.

Holmes a Court has taken the original tweet down but in an unapologetic tweet that effectively explains how to find the address.

Good one @simonahac.

9.6 out of 10 based on 69 ratings

UK declares Climate Chastity Vow (it’s a Groupthink Emergency)

In a win for the Summer Fashionthink Parade, the UK Parliament has declared a Climate Emergency

It’s has all the legal meaning of a Chastity vow, has no scientific definition and was not voted on. It’s purely symbolic — as such its main role is to add social pressure on weak minded M.P’s and be a shot-in-the-arm for green-group fundraising. It’s a PR achievement, a worthy footnote in Marketing 101, but what it isn’t, is democratic, rational or the voice of the people.

This is what you get when you let 16 year olds dictate national policy.

What does it mean? Whatever you want:

What is a climate emergency?

Prof Chris Turney (of the $2.4m Antarctic stuck-ship fame).

While there is no precise definition of what constitutes action to meet such an emergency, the move has been likened to putting the country on a “war footing”, with climate and the environment at the very centre of all government policy, rather than being on the fringe of political decisions.

Nearly half a million Britons died in World War II. So far, man-made climate change has killed no one. The worst storm in British history was three hundred and sixteen years ago. The population is booming. Food is bountiful to the point of being a health hazard. The biggest climate problem Britain faces is the indoor one — whether the poor can afford the kind of safe efficient electric heating that no one had one hundred years ago.

The aim of the Climate Chastity Vow is pure psychology:

The UK Parliament has approved a motion which mandates nothing:

ABC: ” …the declaration on its own does not mandate action on climate“

BBC: “This proposal, which demonstrates the will of the Commons on the issue but does not legally compel the government to act, was approved without a vote.“

The Independent: Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called for the motion to “set off a wave of action from parliaments and governments around the globe”.

The man who tabled it hopes other governments might do the things his own nation isn’t agreeing to. This makes it kind of like a global chain letter, then?

It appears the aim is to fool people into thinking that action is happening and momentum is building at a time when electricity bills are really the issue and the momentum is in electing right wing parties. The real protests are not the ones obedient school children do but the tens of thousands of grown ups who’ve been protesting by the thousands every week for months.

On twitter this is #ClimateEmergency

h/t Serge. Pat, Peter Fitzroy. David.

9.9 out of 10 based on 65 ratings

Bill Shorten sells emissions cost: “like chubby people giving up Big Macs”

Bill Shorten wants us to give up cheap electricity because it’s bad for our health. History will show he’s the guy from the ’70s telling us to give up eggs for thirty years for no good reason at all.

Renewables are the margarine of electricity grids: artificial goods propped up by good intentions. They both fail at high temperatures and were Generally Recognised As Safe — when no one had done any studies. But trans-fats causes heart attacks, and artificial transitions cause poverty.

Eating vegetable oils with no cholesterol sounded good at the time. Just like “free wind” and “free solar” sounds like a free lunch, but turns out to make the whole system chaotically inefficient and horribly expensive. We pay less for fuel but more for capital, wages, infrastructure, stabilizers, and storage.

Free wind and solar are the fake diet foods of the 21st century.

This is Bill trying to explain why we don’t need to mention any numbers.

Saving the planet like giving up Big Macs

Andrew Burrell, The Australian

Having repeatedly dodged questions about the actual cost of Labor’s grand environmental plan, the Opposition Leader yesterday dismissed all the fuss, likening his emissions-reduction policy to stopping “chubby” people eating burgers.

“You know what, mate, you are a great athlete,” he said to the radio show’s morning host.

“But if you had a friend who was perhaps on the large side, the chubby side, and they had 10 Big Macs a day … there’s a cost to not eating the Big Macs. But in the long term it’s an investment isn’t it? ”

I predict he dumps this analogy like a radioactive potato.

This is the next Prime Minister of Australia explaining why he cannot cost his Climate policy

Makes @AOC look like a genius

We could be doomed#auspol @SteveSGoddard @EcoSenseNow @CNN @ABC @BBCNews @XHNews @The_Japan_News @JohnCleese @rickygervais https://t.co/64nWFKUDWc

— Matthew (@matthew25496877) April 30, 2019

Commenters at The Australian:

David

Bills analogy is pretty spot on.
If all Australians give up Big Macs – MacDonalds goes out of business
If all Australians adopt Bills policies – Australia goes out.of business

Keep reading →

9.3 out of 10 based on 85 ratings

Join me in Sydney at the Friedman Conference 2019

Jo Nova, speaking, keynote.

The 2019 Friedman conference is on, bigger than ever from May 23rd – 27th. I had a fabulous time last year. This year there is a big international combination with people from Brexit and the US teaparty as well. See the Speakers list. I’ll be updating the latest How To in Grid Destruction as the world watches The Crash Test Dummy Downunder!

To get a 10% discount off tickets use the code: NOVA2019

Tickets are available just for cocktail parties, gala balls and wine and wildlife tours too.

Thanks to those who do, as I get a commission from those sales. Student scholarship applicants can mention they were referred by me in the “Additional Comments” section, thanks.

Website | Facebook Page | Facebook Event | Twitter Page |

9.7 out of 10 based on 29 ratings

Climate Council pleads “censorship” and calls billions of dollars “a lack of action”

The Climate Council (the rebadged Climate Commission) has launched a 60 page cherry picked list of one-eyed, self serving conspiracies and half-truths subtly called CLIMATE CUTS, COVER-UPS AND CENSORSHIP.

The headlines:

“Federal government accused of ‘false’ climate claims” [Newscorp]

It doesn’t matter how much money Australian’s pour into the climate vat, it’s never enough

When is $5 billion a year a lack of anything?

The council released a new report this morning saying the government’s lack of action on climate change was a defining feature of its 10 years in power as it fights to extend its tenure at the May 18 election.

The Coalition Government hasn’t lacked action, it’s done far too much

Australians are adding more renewables per watt per person than any other nation. We now have targets that are possibly the severest in the world given that we are a small distant population in sparsely populated country with one of the largest per capita immigration intakes in the west. Making it worse, we are one of the only countries on Earth that looks like reaching our target. Our major export earner is coal, our major source of power is coal, and we are an industrial mining quarry far from most markets. The only continent that could justify a higher per capita emissions than Australians are the thousand permanent residents of Antarctica.

If the Climate Council were serious about reducing emissions they’d endorse the Coalition all the way — the Labor Party has grand ambitions, but they pick the most socialist, and thus least effective and most expensive ways to achieve anything. The Gillard Govt managed to spend $5,000 per ton of carbon saved. Tony Abbott’s plan cost just $14 per ton. Which begs the question, are the Climate Council concerned about carbon emissions or are they just an industry lobby group for the $25 billion Australian renewables sector?

Australias carbon emissions per capita are still falling

Australian total emissions are rising, but not as fast as our population is. The Climate Council could campaign to reduce immigration which would be a large simple step to reduce the national emissions.

Check the latest inventory of Australian emissions — per capita.

Australian CO2 emissions, Department of Environment and Energy, Greenhouse office, graph, 2018.

Dept of Environment and Energy, 2018 Report.

Censorship? Seriously?

Millions of dollars have been spent advertising an imaginary climate crisis and yet the Climate Council want us to believe they are censored? Their great “censorship timeline” is full of non-event fillers like the election of prime ministers. As if the election of Abbott and Turnbull somehow censors the climate petals. Things are so banal that bringing a lump of coal to parliament apparently rates as an act of censorship — as if it were some kind of kryptonite that expelled all the little solar and wind voices. They’re so desperate to think up excuses, they list the government offering $4m to fund the Bjorn Lomborg “consensus centre” as act of censorship. Did they forget that all our academic institutions ran like rats at the thought, terrified that some trolls would call them a climate denier? Who exactly is censored when even four million dollars is not enough to overcome that fear? The list is a parody.

The real censors are those who use namecalling and threats to sack, evict, blackball, terminate, punish, vilify and generally be intimidating to people, not to mention blowing up their kids (as a joke) or throwing a RICO investigation at them. If the Climate Council want to talk censorship, bring it on. Peter Ridd was sacked in part for writing the banal “for your amusement” to a colleague. Then he was ordered not to tell the world, or even his wife, how his university was silencing him. Skeptics are even subject to censorship of their censorship.

Wait for it:

The Federal Government has repeatedly released greenhouse gas emissions data when it is unlikely to draw significant attention, for instance, during football finals or at Christmas.

That would make it exactly like the revamped Emissions Trading Scheme that Australians voted against twice that was brought in quietly under the name “Safeguards Mechanism” by Malcolm Turnbull on the last sitting day before Christmas. Did the Climate Council protest that, or is deception fine if it’s “for the sake of the renewables industry?”.

Is that all?

Keep reading →

10 out of 10 based on 52 ratings

Midweek Unthreaded

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10 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Renewables — the $300 billion dollar vested interest that hardly anyone mentions

Imagine there was a $300 billion dollar industry that depended almost entirely on a pagan belief that cars cause storms, and coal caused floods. Imagine this industry produced nothing that consumers would voluntarily buy unless the government banned cheaper options. Now imagine how much money these investors might be willing to donate to lobby groups, Superpacs, and activists in koala suits. Purely hypothetically…

Global clean energy investment[1] totaled $332.1 billion in 2018, down 8% on 2017. Last year was the fifth in a row in which investment exceeded the $300 billion mark, according to authoritative figures from research company BloombergNEF (BNEF).

Global new investment in clean energy, graph BNEF, Bloomberg.

Global investment in renewable energy, 2018 | Bloomberg.

With 100% of their income at risk of evaporating if the voters pick the wrong person, or if public faith in the pagan religion starts to wane, these investors have a reason to create a PR campaign that called anyone who questioned the faith an idiot denier, funded by fossil fuels, out of touch, old, white and unfashionable.

Fossil Fuels, on the other hand, wouldn’t need to worry. They’ve tried the solar and wind research already. They know how uncompetitive they are and how people will be using coal and oil for decades to come.

Imagine if every time someone said “fossil fuel funded”, someone else said, “or a target of a $300 billion investment industry 100% dependent on government rules and a pagan belief?”

Keep reading →

9.2 out of 10 based on 80 ratings

Huge bang and house burns to the ground — just an e-bike battery mishap

World made 0.000001°C cooler, but house made 600°C hotter

Remember The Precautionary Principle: something about “no House-B”?

An Orange Flash and then Melanie’s House Burnt Down

Melanie Sandford was sitting in bed on a rainy Sunday morning listening to a podcast about enlightenment when she heard a “huge bang”.

“A nanosecond later, there was an orange flash that ripped down past the bedroom door,” Ms Sandford said.

All signs point to the lithium ion battery of Ms Sandford’s beloved eZee Sprint e-bike as the culprit.

The firefighters arrived promptly – “I’m told it was four minutes but it felt like three hours” – but it was too late to save her home.

Another hidden battery cost?

GlowWorm Bicycles said eZee has recalled some faulty batteries, but lists these Handy safety tips for all e-bike batteries: Don’t charge them unsupervised, don’t overcharge, undercharge, charge near flammable things or charge overnight, and have a fire safety plan.

B A T T E R Y S A F E T Y

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8.9 out of 10 based on 100 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

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9.1 out of 10 based on 17 ratings

Australia’s $25b renewables bubble set to bust: ABC starts promo to prop it up

Is this the peak of Australia’s renewables bubble?

A Crash Test Dummy Update: Last year our renewables capacity grew 50%. We have more renewables per capita than any other country on Earth. Investors spent $25 billion in just one year, and that doesn’t include the cost of the rampant uptake of home solar PV or presumably, all the subsidies. Our 56 gigawatt grid now includes six gigawatts of unreliables. But Lordy, lo, look what’s coming in the next three years in the table after this graph … potentially another 30GW. How many billion will we burn on this pyre?

In the graph below, note how dependent investors are on government rules and largess. Kevin Rudd started at the end of 2007. Abbott won in mid 2013. Turnbull took over in mid 2016. Investors came and went, not with demand, but with politics.

The headline: “Renewable energy investment looks to be going from boom to bust as prices collapse”

by Stephen Letts, ABC News

Renewables bubble, Australia, 2019, solar, wind, generation, graph.

Figure 1: RHS Renewables investment (the dotted line). LHS Energy generation by Wind and Solar (columns).

Uh-oh. Look at what’s coming:

How big is the oversupply that’s on the way? Check out the ominous table hidden at the bottom of the ABC story.

Extra committed and contracted renewables by 2020-21 across NEM (MWh)

	2018	2020/21	2021 vs 2018
Hydro	16,704	15,000	-1,704
Rooftop solar	8,148	13,419	5,271
Solar farm	2,122	14,486	12,364
Wind farm	14,164	28,869	14,705
Net total extra supply			30,636

Source: Green Energy Markets

But the bust is on the horizon the ABC warns:

Apparently investors have noticed a problem coming.

Long-term power purchasing agreements for large scale renewable generators have fallen 30pc in the past 5 years
AEMO has slashed the prices paid to many more remote renewable generators
A wave of new projects, equivalent to two Hazelwood plants, will start in the next two years leading to a large oversupply imbalance

Would you like propaganda with that?

Now with the first hints that our latest wild bubble might bust, the ABC is not warning us about rushing in too fast, too soon, instead they’re running a soft ad campaign to prop up this pointless industry longer. Author Stephen Letts interviews only Green industry hacks and phrases it all as a “problem” to be solved. It’s almost like he works for the industry?

Having burst out of an investment black hole at warp speed, the renewable energy sector’s massive building boom looks likely to hit an uncompromising wall.

The reckoning is likely to be sooner rather later, as a nasty confluence of factors keeps mounting up.

To ABC staff, this is a “a nasty confluence of factors”. To skeptics it’s a dose of reality.

The AEMO may have cruelly “slashed prices” but it’s just as true to say they’ve been overpaying remote generators for electricity that was being lost in long transmission lines.

As for new projects being “equivalent to two Hazelwoods” — hello DisneyWatts! 4,000MW of random, asynchronous, unreliable generation is not remotely equivalent to 16 centralized turbines honed through decades of engineering efficiency to run at 90% capacity non stop for 50 years. On any given day the unreliables may only be producing 100MW, not 4,000. We need a 98% back up. What do you call the spare car you can only rely on to drive at 2% of the speed limit? Useless.

Holy Cash Cow, this is so unfair!

Coal is still cheap

This might be the only time the ABC have admitted how cheap coal power is — in the middle of a story about why renewables need more help.

Clearly a problem for utility-scale renewable growth at these prices is that old, debt-free coal-fired plants operate profitably at $40/MWh.

What a problem eh? Cheap, debt free, competition that works when we need it!

They [coal plants] also keep churning away when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, a trait retailers are prepared to pay for.

As they say in the industry — “thermal plants burn fossil fuels, renewables burn cash” …

(Poor baby renewables!)

The answer naturally is to shut coal down. So the ABC interviews a Green Industry spokesperson who offers the obvious solution:

“We can have lower power prices, but for them to be sustained we need a policy framework in place that allows us to steadily build replacement capacity in advance of coal plants retiring.”

— Green Energy’s Tristan Edis

Translated: my industry wants guaranteed money from the government and rules that get rid of competition.

Yes, don’t we all?

Notice he dangles the classic sales line “We can have lower power prices”. Sure. We could legislate to make electricity 10c per kilowatt hour. But the money’s got to come from somewhere or the lights go off. Is that through tax? Connection fees? Energy Levy payments to Tesla?

If the ABC served the other half of the nation they’d interview an electrical engineer or two, or maybe a dumb blogger who’d tell them the answer was to let the free market work and get the government out of the way.

The article also somberly discussed fantasy figures like costs of $55 per MW hour. As readers here know, they are not worth analyzing because they are wholly cherry picked delusions based on bids from generators that don’t have to pay for their wildly long transmission lines, their back up, their unreliable product, or the inefficiency burden they dump on the whole system, or the houses they burn down. And in Australia, they get the RET subsidy, and often low cost loans, as well as access to a 1 billion dollar free advertising agency called the ABC too.

The only numbers that count — the number of states with lots of solar and wind and cheap electricity. That’s Zero.

h/t Peter Fitzroy and Dave B.

9.6 out of 10 based on 93 ratings

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REFERENCE

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Is that all? Keep reading →

World made 0.000001°C cooler, but house made 600°C hotter

Another hidden battery cost?

Is this the peak of Australia’s renewables bubble?

Uh-oh. Look at what’s coming:

But the bust is on the horizon the ABC warns:

Would you like propaganda with that?

Holy Cash Cow, this is so unfair!

Coal is still cheap

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Failure to account for genetic variation can result in overestimating extinction risk

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