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David Attenborough thinks fossil fuels cause scores of walruses to careen off cliffs. The ABC is crying as it advertises the latest Netflix tear-jerker and WWF fundraiser. In behind-the-scenes footage posted to YouTube by Netflix, producer and director Sophie Lanfear explained the events with tears in her eyes. “It’s the sad reality of climate change,” she said. “They’d be on the ice if they could be, but there’s no option but to come to land. Actually though, it’s the sad reality of predatory polar bears … Canadian zoologist Dr Susan Crockford is all over it calling it Walrus Tragedy Porn. Apparently, the Attenborough footage is from 19 October 2017 in Ryrkaypiy, Siberia which was overrun with polar bears that terrorised the walruses. Five thousand walruses were herded to a cliff. Hundreds were driven over the edge to their deaths, and afterwards the polar bears feasted off McWalrus on the rocks.
Apparently, it’s happened before and has nothing to do with sea ice:
“We have records of walrus haulouts that are nearly a century old, including some from this part of the Arctic. The idea that walruses are being driven on shore by sea-ice decline is entirely incorrect. They have always done so. In fact there are reports of walruses falling over cliffs from long before the age of global warming too. Sir David’s story about climate change appears to be just that – a fable.”
Buying a Tesla probably won’t save a single walrus.
The ABC doesn’t mention this, nor find an zoologist expert to interview. They don’t even google it. Instead, they give us the-world-according-to-WWF:
“Earlier on, when there was ice, the walruses did not need this place,” he said in a short clip posted on the Our Planet website. “They are meant to live on the ice. Now they have lost this ice platform essential for their everyday life in the Chukchi sea. “Many scientists blame this on global warming. Then for the 4,400th time, ABC breaks their own rule about only interviewing real experts: “I am not a climate specialist, but the fact is, over the last 34 years the ice has just disappeared before my very eyes and the animals, their natural habitat has changed, that fact is undeniable.” Of course, if they’d interviewed an actual expert, or even a blogger, they’d know that ice comes and goes, and so apparently, do marauding mean poley bears. Should we save more polar bears? Let’s ask a walrus… Keep reading → April 10th, 2019 | Tags: Arctic, Polar Bears, Walrus | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
We can see how much research and planning goes into Labor Party policy. “How long does it take to charge it up?” Jackie O asked the alternative prime minister in an interview on the Kyle and Jackie O radio show this morning. “Oh, it can take, umm … it depends on what your original charge is, but it can take, err, 8 to 10 minutes depend on your charge, it can take longer … ” Mr Shorten replied unconvincingly. “Is that all?” Jackie O pressed. “Well it depends how flat your battery is,” Mr Shorten said. Shorten also says that if we do this we can start to say goodbye to “angry” summers and natural disasters …. Audio here. UPDATE: The myth that Shorten was rightSeeing the tragedy unfolding, assistants leapt to Shorten’s defense to say that there is a theoretical planned, possible battery charger that can charge in 10 minutes. But read Shorten’s words again — he is strictly all waffly present tense, and the only qualifier is “how flat the battery is”. This is not a man thinking of kW or amps. Jackie O presses him to expand, but he can’t. In the world there is one show-pony super fast charger of 350kW — but there are no cars that can use that speed. Most home chargers are 3 kW and up to 7kW. It’s all very well for some EV fans to rave about how far new batteries go, but those new big batteries need two whole days even at 7kW to get fully charged. (see that Vector report) PLUS we’re going to need a whole new gridThere’s the problem that each fast charger is like adding 20 extra houses. The Vector, New Zealand Report 2018 claimed that new big batteries are like adding “three new houses to the grid” (if they are charging at 7kW). If consumers want to fast charge at 50kW it is like adding “20 homes”. (Though at the moment the cost of a 50kW charger is NZ $50,000 which would rather limit the rush to buy them.) Australians buy around 1 million new cars a year, so that would be 500,000 new EV’s each year by 2030 according to the Labor Party plan. If I read it correctly, according to the Vector NZ report that would be like adding another ten million homes to the Australian grid each year in terms of network capacity — and we only have 10 million homes in the country. Could it really be that nuts? h/t Pat A Dutchman took the worlds slowest car trip in hope of stopping storms A Dutchman completed an epic 95,000 kilometre (59,000 mile) journey by electric car in Sydney Sunday in a bid to prove the viability of such vehicles in tackling climate change. The average speed here is 3.6 kmph (2.2 mph). The world would probably cool if he took, say, 1,000 years. Wiebe Wakker drove his retrofitted station wagon nicknamed “The Blue Bandit” across 33 countries in what he said was the world’s longest-ever journey by electric car. The trip from the Netherlands to Australia took just over three years and was funded by public donations from around the world, including electricity to charge the Bandit, food and a place to sleep. Proving EV holidays are viable if you can create a global fan-base by riding on a multinational industrial scare campaign, and have 36 spare months to do what fossil fuels can achieve in 20 hours. Should catch on with two, three people. h/t Pat and Tim Blair who says “Non Flying Dutchman wastes 3 years”
UPDATE: If they tried to show how impractical electric cars could they have done a better job?Given it takes 12 hours to recharge the car from a domestic power point and three hours from a commercial point, he’s learned to live in the moment. The journey appeared to go really pear-shaped in Surabaya, Indonesia when floodwaters deluged his battery pack, rendering it completely unable to hold a charge. When Coober Pedy was his next goal 260km away, he waited 12 hours for a tailwind and then trundled along at a power-saving 60km/h, with giant road-trains thundering by at irregular intervals. Despite the conservative approach he still fell 15kms short of the mining town and had to be towed the rest of the way… — Canberra Times h/t to Pat, and Stonyground in comments. Next time someone tells you how extreme the climate is today remind them that five million people died in a drought in 1896 in India. That was the same year a brutally hot summer in Australia caused 400 deaths and people fled the inland heat on emergency trains. Somewhere between 1 and 5 million people died a few years later in the next drought — the same time as Australia’s “Federation drought”. Spot the effect of CO2 in 150 years of rainfall of India: Average rainfall anomalies in India from 1850 – 2016 from IMD (black) and GISS (red). | Click to read the official caption. Famine deaths have largely been eliminated in India, mostly thanks to better transport and organisation, higher yields (thanks to fertilizer and CO2) and irrigation. Droughts still happen but in a population that has grown from 250 million in 1880 to a billion in 2000 the extraordinary thing is that more people starved of famine when the population was only a quarter of the size and CO2 levels were “perfecto”. Weakened people died of cholera and malaria, and bubonic plague too. Death rates to these diseases often doubled or tripled.  Famine, India, 1896. Thanks to fossil fuels and atmospheric CO2 countless lives have been saved. History keeps being forgotten:Drought and famine in India, 1870-2016 Vimal Mishra et al., Geophysical Research Letters, January 2019 Keep reading → April 8th, 2019 | Tags: Drought, Evidence, India, Rain | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | … Despite the obstacles, the free market just saved South Australian’s $110 million dollars The Aurora plant was to be a bigger copy of Crescent Dunes, Solar Thermal Plant, California. The Aurora Solar Thermal plant was going to be the biggest one in the world, but they couldn’t find enough private investors so it’s just been scrapped. That is despite the SA government being willing to give $110 million dollars, and the state being one of the sunniest, richest places in the world and with people already paying obscenely high prices for electricity. If Big-Solar could make it anywhere, surely there is no easier place on Planet Earth than in coal-less South Australia where competition from cheap reliable power has been completely extinguished? A $650 million solar thermal power plant planned for Port Augusta will not go ahead after the company behind it failed to secure commercial finance for the project. Despite all those fixed, unfair advantages, the market didn’t want to pay up for a 150MW bird frying power plant that would cost $650 million and probably only produce 30MW effectively. (The company’s prototype was Crescent Dunes which had a capacity factor of only 16%). Possibly investors also weren’t enthused about the dismal operation record of that smaller sister plant in California which was beset with maintenance issues and failed for one third of the time in its first two years. That 110MW plant cost $1.3b in 2015 and produced electricity at $178/MWh, nearly 6 times as pricey as the 53 year old Hazelwood coal plant managed in its last month of operation. It was such a bad deal the government did everything it could to help: Mr van Holst Pellekaan said the Government had done “everything it possibly can to support this project”, including extending deadlines, agreeing to changes to the project to add photovoltaic solar panels and introducing SolarReserve to potential financiers. Earlier in 2017, the Federal Government confirmed it would grant $110 million in a concessional equity loan to support the project The opposition (the same party that proposed the plant in 2017) blame its demise on the proposed $1.5b interconnector to NSW: Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas blamed the scrapping of the solar thermal power plant on the State Government’s plan for an interconnector to New South Wales. He said the interconnector project, due to be completed by 2022, prioritised another state’s “dirty coal power over South Australian renewable power”. “That was a bad decision and the people that are going to pay the price are the Port Augusta community, but also South Australian power consumers,” he said. The unfree market can’t save us from stupid big governmentThat interconnector is a $1.5 billion project that will allow South Australia’s erratic electricity to help destroy baseload power in New South Wales just like it did in Victoria. Electricity prices are predicted to fall, but SA already has one interconnector to Victoria and prices have only gone up everywhere within 1,000km of that. It takes big national planning to make big problems. Indeed, without the Heywood interconnector SA couldn’t have managed a state-wide blackout in 2016. In the real economy, $1,500 million dollars buys a lot of electricity, or 6 gas fired plants, or most of one large advanced coal plant that could produce 2000MW of cheap electricity for 50 years (or indefinitely, as long we keep the maintenance going). Kids are running the country. h/t to Steve Hyland, Bill in Oz, Original Steve. Plus thanks to Graeme No 3 and AndrewWA in past comments for their help. And from TonyfromOz who says: “Everything about this SouthAus plant is the hyped to the max best case scenario that NO plant on Planet Earth has achieved yet…” April 6th, 2019 | Tags: SA (South Australia), Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Global Warming, Renewable, Solar Power | Print This Post | | The message that CO2 causes fires, floods, storms, reef damage and refugees is wearing offWhat a problem for the vested interests — it’s their main propaganda message. It’s witchcraft:When the witchdoctors ran out of long term trends and supporting evidence they started blaming every storm on CO2. It was a sign of desperation. In more respectable days they would say these were “weather” not climate trends. Storms, floods, droughts and fires are caused by many variables, none of which the climate modelers can predict even ten days in advance. Furthermore, huge 1 in 100 year events need a thousand years of data (at least) before we could pretend to have even a hint of statistical significance that they are not just natural events which have always happened and always will. About 10% more Australians have woken upNew polling shows that about 1 in ten Australians that used to find this witchcraft convincing are smelling a rat and don’t believe it anymore. Back in 2015 when IPSOS asked the exact same climate change question 62% of Australians thought that climate change was already causing more droughts. Now after a vast drought, it’s only 52%. In 2015, 61% of Australians thought CO2 made bushfires worse, now it’s only 48%. Then, 57% thought climate change impacted on sea level rise, now it’s only 44%. Where 62% thought climate change made storms worse, now it’s only 48%. These are big changes in just 4 years. It was a loaded question anyway: In how many years, if at all, do you think climate change will cause the following? In 2019, most Australians don’t think climate change is already causing more extreme fires, storms, floods, reef damage, sea level rise, extinction or more heat deaths. On pretty much every factor below, except droughts, less than half of respondents believe climate change is already causing it. So Australians are increasingly over it, weary of ridiculous claims Question: In how many years, if at all, do you think climate change will cause the following in Australia? Belief is a fragile thingRemember, every night on the ABC and every day in the SMH and The Age Australians are told that floods, fires, fish, crocodiles and everything else can be attributed to climate change. Imagine if they heard an alternate view — how fast would the faith crash? These numbers would plummet. Belief in 2015:Notice that IPSOS published more information back then. Now they don’t say how many people think it “won’t cause” or “don’t know”. Hiding something? IPSOS are supposed to be impartial, instead it looks like they will sell their reputation to the highest bidder.  … Revive that forgotten history!The message for skeptics here is that pointing to past storms, floods, fires and droughts is working. Dig out those stories of extreme weather from Trove and historic archives. Keep reminding people that in Australia, 50 degree super hot days happened many times in the 1800s, the worst fires were in 1851, the worst heatwave was in 1896, terrible storms happened in 1967, 1945 and 1925 and 1974. The worst superstorms have happened every 200 years for last 5000. The worst storm in all history was probably in the UK in 1703. Storms trends are not worse. The worst droughts were 1000 years ago. Can people from other countries compile a short list with links of your worst floods, fires, droughts, storms and heatwaves? That’s a resource every nation or region needs. I want to set up a reference list. Keep reading → A nation struggling to get the lights on still:
‘New York Times’ Journalist Describes An ‘Almost Unimaginable’ Crisis In VenezuelaNew York Times journalist Nicholas Casey was in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in March when the country was hit by a six-day blackout… “By the fourth day of the power outage, that was when you started to hear shots getting fired in the street,” Casey says. “People were beginning to loot, and the store owners were coming out to defend their stores.” The U.N. estimates that it’s upwards of 3 million people who have left. Now remember, this is a country of 30 million people. So we’re talking about 10 percent of the population that has gone. A few weeks with intermittent power and the country is becoming uninhabitable. When a government tries to print its way out of trouble by giving away “free” money it seems cheap but costs the whole economy:
Rich one year, down with polio the next. Nature comes back fast: …this crisis that’s getting worse and worse, because of lack of medicine mainly, people are coming into these countries with diseases that should be controlled in Venezuela — diseases like diphtheria, malaria, tuberculosis have made a huge comeback in Venezuela.
The ultimate Mediscare campaign:President Maduro forced visiting Cuban doctors to use access to medicine as a way to gain votes for Maduro right before an election They would start by going house to house to people. … The way that it was being described to me was that essentially you would start by handing people medications that they needed, especially seeing if they had chronic illnesses that they really needed medication for on a regular basis. And then after you start to get their trust, you would start to bring up Maduro. You’d start to bring up politics. You’d ask them, “Are you registered to vote?” And then actually start to make a much harder pitch, like “You need to vote for Maduro. This is where this medicine is coming from,” and ultimately at the end of this there would be a threat, which is that “If you don’t vote for Maduro, there is a possibility that you will lose your medication. Oxygen tanks and medicines were being withheld from opposition supporters.
The curse of galloping inflation, — Ruairi April 5th, 2019 | Tags: Venezuela | Category: Electricity, Global Warming, Grids | Print This Post | | Who’s afraid of a cascading blackout?Last year investment in unreliable and asynchronous generators doubled in Australia thanks to government decree. For some reason, adding another few gigawatts of iffy capricious infrastructure to a 50GW finely-tuned-system appears to put the whole national grid in a near constant state of emergency. The AEMO (our market operator) had to intervene in the South Australian market eight times in 2016/17, but last year they had to do it 101 times. This warning comes from the Australian Energy Market Commission (AMEC) which makes the rules for the national grid. Why are they baring the dirty renewables laundry? Because the answer to the crisis is always bigger government and this is a reason to call for it. Renewables stress the gridPerry Williams, The Australian Australia’s electricity grid is relying on emergency safety nets to keep the lights on, … The deterioration of the strength of the electricity network — most pronounced in South Australia — is also spreading to southwest NSW, northwest Victoria and north Queensland, adding to wholesale costs incurred by users. SA’s electricity system is increasingly operating under the direct intervention of the grid operator, with last-ditch interventions reserved for emergencies becoming a default way of managing the network,… “Systems with lots of non-synchronous generation like wind and solar are weaker and harder to control — raising the risk of cascading blackouts. Unprecedented in their breadth and scope, these trends put extraordinary pressure on the security and reliability of our power grid.” Investment in large-scale renewable energy doubled in 2018 to $20 billion, with one in five Australians now owning rooftop solar and electricity generated by clean energy accounting for 21 per cent of the overall power mix, Clean Energy Council data will show today. That trend is also pressuring wholesale market prices, with the cost of keeping the system stable soaring to $270 million as of September 2018, while the cost of maintaining frequency control surged nearly tenfold to $220m in 2018 from $25m in 2012. Spot the trend in Frequency Control payments. The weekly bills used to be $400,000. Now it’s $5 million.  Frequency control has gone up ten-fold in cost since 2012. Data AER. Lo and verily, the solution to a problem the government created is to add more government… Stop-gap measures propping up power gridAngela Macdonald-Smith, AFR Australia’s power grid is only coping with the rapid influx of intermittent wind and solar power with the help of costly daily intervention by the energy market operator to keep the lights on, an assessment of the electricity system has found, ramping up pressure for a long-term federal framework that integrates climate and energy policy. AMEC could have pointed out the costs of trying to turn our national grid into a weather-changing-machine. Instead they are changing the rules and adding synchronous condensers, giant spinning discs to create some artificial stability. “After AEMO declared a problem in South Australia that state’s network provider organized to install synchronous condensers which are due to be commissioned in 2020,” Mrs Pearson said. When that happens the need for very frequent directions to maintain system strength in South Australia will hopefully come to an end. It is a timing and technology issue. First AEMO declares a shortfall, then networks decide the best local solutions for them and start putting them in place.” — AMEC press release Just let the free market back and renewables wouldn’t be a problem… Keep reading → April 4th, 2019 | Tags: Electricity Grids, Renewable Energy | Category: Global Warming, Grids, Renewable | Print This Post | | … Despite all the spin, the non-stop propaganda, a dreadful drought and the two “record” hot years, most Australians still don’t agree with the IPCC. This is exactly the same as it was in 2015 when the CSIRO last did a serious climate poll. The IPSOS Climate Change Report So we sit, a nation of majority skeptics, with no major party to vote for and hardly any TV media, academics or politicians making the case that the IPCC might be wrong and the Paris agreement might be a waste of time. No one is allowed to discuss it and national leaders stay cowed in silence for fear of being called petty names. There is little to crystallize or focus this sentiment that doubts the experts, yet it exists, even in surveys designed by a team who appear to be doing their best to find and amplify the “believer” vote. The IPSOS survey suffers from the the usual flaws: loaded questions, ambiguous terms and one sided analysis. Respondents are asked magical pie questions about solving problems as if they only need to wave a fairy wand and it shall be solved. They’re not asked how many dollars they personally want to spend solving it. It’s as if life is not about the costs and benefits or trade-offs. It’s as deep as saying if you could save the world for free, would you?  54% of Australian don’t believe man-made climate change is the dominant driver. | Ipsos, 2019. What really matters is what would you give up in order to change this? This new IPSOS climate change poll of 1000 people was conducted in December and finally published, coincidentally, on Sunday before the Labor Party launched its climate policy. IPSOS are telling Australians on the verge of an election that this is some kind of new record momentum. Matt Wade, at The Sydney Morning Herald repeats the IPSOS press release, “this was a record share of Australians that say humans cause climate change”. It’s the usual half-truth — the whole truth is that the CSIRO did multiple surveys involving 17,000 people from 2010 – 2014 and nothing has changed. Isn’t that the kind of research that both IPSOS and investigative reporters might want to mention? Here are the CSIRO results from 2015. Spot the difference?
The gap between what the experts say and the public believes exists all around the world. In the US the AAAS found that while 87% of experts say climate change mostly “man-made” only 50% of Americans thought the experts were right. (And that was before Trump arrived — it’d be bound to be less now.) Only 86% of Australians “believe” man-kind has any effect at allTo get a high number IPSOS and the parrot-media bundle together all the people who believe man-made climate change has any possible effect at all. They report that “86% of Australians believe humans contribute to climate change in some way”. That’s a category that would include most die-hard skeptics (like me) — so it’s about as meaningless a statement as anyone can make. The only thing it tells us is that the IPSOS investigators badly want to spin this. If one third of Australians think the situation is part man – part nature, that’s a lot of people who already think the news is hyped and who won’t want to spend a lot of money. Where do Australians rank climate change — lastWhen voters can rank climate change it’s the last thing they care about. Year after year, “the environment” is dead last on pretty much every survey, everywhere. How many times do people need to tell politicians that being a skeptic isn’t the vote killer that some commentators would like you to believe? Even people who believe in man-made global warming just aren’t as concerned about the environment as they are about jobs, corruption, and the economy. What’s the biggest issue at the moment: Cost of Living. Note that this graph was done in colors that were so indecipherably similar it was almost like IPSOS didn’t want us to see the data (see that original). So I changed the colors.
 IPSOS report page 4. IPSOS’s headline about that bottom green line is “Environment returns as an important issue”. Well, No. It doesn’t.I’ll have more to say about this survey… h/t Dave B.
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I know commenters discussed this on the weekend, but lest anyone missed it. The man who wants 
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