Recent Posts
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Forget “renewable energy” — new AI data centers are building their own gas plants in Texas
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Saturday
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Buy a battery, join a virtual power plant, and let AGL eat 80% of your battery for dinner
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Friday
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Labor Net Zero obsession: Australians don’t know they’re spending $12,000 million dollars a year to fix the weather
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Thursday
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Wednesday
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MPs from Left and Right in France vote to ditch “low emission zones” and bans on old cars
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Billions of dollars spent on wind, solar and batteries and Australian electricity emissions went up last year
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Saturday
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Friday
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Free Speech wins: Trump declares, no US Visas for any foreign official who censors Americans
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Thursday
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New world Energy order: Taiwan closes the last nuclear power plant, then days later, plans a referendum to reopen it
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Wednesday
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Bang! Price bomb sinks Transmission lines: Plan B says let’s pretend cars, home solar and batteries will save “Transition”
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If only we’d built those offshore wind turbines, eaten more cricket-burgers, we could have stopped the floods, right?
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If UK had never tried renewables, each person would be £3,000 richer
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Thursday
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New AI data centers will use the same electricity as 2 million homes
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Wednesday
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No one knows what caused the Blackout but Spain is using more gas and nukes and less solar…
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Half of Australia doesn’t want to pay a single cent on Net Zero targets
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Saturday
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Secret comms devices, radios, hidden in solar inverters from China. Would you like a Blackout with that?
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Friday
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LSE junk study says if men didn’t eat so much red meat we’d have nicer weather
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Thursday
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Now they tell us? Labor says new aggressive Net Zero policy they hid from voters “is popular”
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Wednesday
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British politics in turmoil after Reform’s wins — Greens Deputy even attacks Net Zero from the left
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Children of 2020 face unprecedented exposure to Extreme Climate Nonsense…
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60% are skeptics: Only 13% of UK voters say Net Zero is more important than cost of living
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Friday
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Climate change is causing South Africa to rise and sink at the same time
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Thursday
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Why is the renewables industry allowed to sponsor political advertising in schools and call it “education”?
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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.
- 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.
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
Friday April 19th 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 19th 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?
 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?

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 19thwhile 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 19th 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 21stApril).The half hourly observations screenshot shows the airport thermometer struggled to get to a 10.4°C maximum at 11am on the 19thof 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 19th of April as 25.1°C. Oddly, 25.1°C was the maximum temperature at the airport the day before, the 18th 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 20th to April 23rd, 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 20th but then setting a new record at 6.2°C the following night, April 21st.
Record cold Easter in South West WA
 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 19th 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 19th April, is 22.2°C. If the 10.4°C for 19th 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 18th 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 19th of April and the City of Albany where it’s been replaced by a fictitious 25.1°C.
MAP: NASA Visible Earth WA
9.6 out of 10 based on 92 ratings
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9.6 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
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“.
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:
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
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
See also: The GWPF Statement On The Proposed Net Zero 2050 Emissions Target
h/t Serge. Pat, Peter Fitzroy. David.
9.9 out of 10 based on 65 ratings
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.
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.
Commenters at The Australian:
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
9.3 out of 10 based on 85 ratings
 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
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.
 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?”.
10 out of 10 based on 52 ratings
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10 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
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 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
World made 0.000001°C cooler, but house made 600°C hotter
Remember The Precautionary Principle: something about “no House-B”?
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
Keep reading →
8.9 out of 10 based on 100 ratings
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9.1 out of 10 based on 17 ratings
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
 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

Behold, the Victorian Govt are proving yet again that Soviet-style electricity management can crush lives, hopes and wallets. The free market is never as cruel and destructive as one run on “good intentions” or the desire to win virtue-signaling fashion parades.
The invisible hand of the market was replaced with Daniel Andrews whimsy. This might work if he was smarter than the collective brains of 5 million people. Apparently Andrews assumes serfs people don’t understand the true value of solar panels and the benefits of creating jobs in China, so he has mandated glorious subsidies in the hope of getting nice weather one day, and the desperate punters took them up in droves. The industry boomed. But now they’ve temporarily halted the free gifts, orders have disappeared as the free market returns to accurately valuing solar installations. So the workers are being sacked. The rebates will come back again in July, so business-owners somehow need to get a different income stream for two months, survive the turmoil, and then the golden gravy will run again.
As per usual ABC policy, no free market voices were harmed, interviewed or asked to provide comment:
An award-winning Victorian solar company has laid off just over half of its staff after the Victorian Government placed a temporary freeze on a solar panel rebate program.
The $1.3 billion solar homes package started last August and has been so popular that the rebates for this financial year have been fully subscribed.
Since the freeze on new applications came into effect, the work for solar installation companies like Sky Energy Systems of Melbourne has dried up.
The business’s directors, Sam Kent and Ross Howard, said they had no choice but to cut staff when customers started cancelling their orders.
Twenty-five people have been told to finish up work on Friday and another 15 staff could go in two weeks’ time.
Live by government handouts, die by government handouts. Oh the pain:
“Having no sales is like having no oxygen. You can’t breathe. There’s no business so it’s devastating,” Mr Kent said.
What’s a company that “follows a rebate” — another labor voter
As long as businesses are allowed to earn a living entirely dependent on government largess they are a form of “public servant”, a wing of big government with all the entitlement that doesn’t deserve and none of the obligations:
No sales, no business
A petition has been launched on the change.org website calling on the Victorian Government to reconsider the temporary rebate halt.
“Because consumers know that the rebate will return on July 1, they will be holding off making a purchase,” the petition said.
“For these small businesses to survive 15 weeks without sales is unlikely.”
Mr Kent said many other solar companies are based interstate, and use subcontractors in Victoria.
“They’ll disappear interstate until the rebates comeback. They are companies that are basically rebate-based so they follow the rebates,” Mr Kent said.
Making money in Australia increasingly means being a better lobbyist for government masters, not being a better producer of things Australians need or want.
h/t Dave B
9.8 out of 10 based on 90 ratings
A major new “nail in coffin” study shows the more renewables we force onto the market the more expensive electricity gets.

Everyday someone tells us renewables are cheap, but these estimates come from flawed “LCOE” method (at best) supposedly the lifetime cost, but without many indirect costs. Granted, it’s hard to figure out what the bill for renewable energy is. But what really matters to every man and his dog, is the cost effect on the whole system, not a cherry-slice comparison of a few sunny-windy hours a day which doesn’t take into account the effect that renewable energy has on the rest of the 24/7 electricity grid.
Greenstone, McDowell and Nath have analysed all 29 states in the US where there are laws demanding a certain percentage of energy be renewable. On average a 4% increase in renewables led to a price rise of 17% and the impost was wildly high compared to any remotely sensible cost-benefit analysis. Renewables are the car insurance bill that costs 3 times as much as your car. Any serious environmentalist would hate renewables.
Michael Shellenberger, Forbes
The cost to consumers has been staggeringly high: “All in all, seven years after passage, consumers in the 29 states had paid $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have in the absence of the policy,” they write.
Greenstone et al analyze the RPS (Renewable Portfolio Standards) in the US. This is like the RET in Australia and the Renewables Obligation in the UK. Like any market destroying rule, it ensures the system finds a more expensive way to supply electricity.
The low estimates ignore the cost of building and running a gas station that just sits around a a spare wheel, randomly earning no money some of the time. They ignore the vast land area wasted and the long transmission lines. One study by Edison Electric in 2011 estimated that 65% of all planned transmission lines in the US were primarily going to be built for renewables. In the US that’s another $26 billion cost tossed on the invisible renewables BBQ.*
Greenstone et al look at retail prices state by state in the US as these RPS requirements came into action and followed them for the next 7 years.
They found three things: A 4% increase in renewables led to a price rise of 17% and the impost was wildly high compared to any remotely sensible cost-benefit analysis
1. Electricity prices rise after the RPS rules come in. After 7 years the prices are 11% higher, and after 12 years they are 17% higher.
2. The addition of renewables does reduce the “carbon intensity” of the system. But the cost is exorbitant. Across the 29 states and after 7 years it costs somewhere from $130 – $460 per ton of CO2 “saved”. In Obama’s reign the social cost of carbon was wildly overestimated at around $50 per ton, so the intermittent energy generators are orders of magnitude more expensive than doing nothing. Compare that to the Australian Dutch auction process called Direct Action (by Tony Abbott) which reduced carbon for under $14 a ton. The relentless push to use wind and solar to save the world looks like a late-night infomercial for the renewables industry. Even if the IPCC were right, and if there was a global carbon market to reduce CO2, no one would want to use renewable energy to do it. It’s too expensive.
3. That many of the states already had renewables (I’m guessing hydro) so the targets were already partly met. So the net increases in renewables were smaller than the gross target suggests. These targets were very small, averaging around 2% extra renewables after 7 years and 4% by 12 years.
Clearly, it doesn’t take many intermittent renewables to wreck the grid.
 Renewable total and net requirements per state, USA. Plus the Australian RET target (red). | Click to enlarge.
To put this in perspective, the RET target in Australia in 2020 will be 23.5% of Australia’s electricity generation.
That would be the gross figure, not the net gain.
 …
9.5 out of 10 based on 65 ratings
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8.6 out of 10 based on 23 ratings
More fake news: Miners are only switching to solar because they can’t get access to cheap coal fired power.
A better headline would be: Renewable targets make electricity so expensive miners are forced to switch to renewables.
The money quote:
Emily Alford is a principal consultant at Oakley Greenwood … [she] told The Weekend Australian that solar generation cost about $200 a megawatt hour five years ago, and had dropped to about $70-$80 now.
Compare that to 53 year old Hazelwood coal power which was selling electricity for $30/MWh in it’s last month of operation. When brown coal stations set the price in Victoria they were winning bids at prices like $13/MWh.The cheapest electricity in the world comes from 30 year old brown coal plants.
The $70-$80 estimate is artificially low. Unreliable power makes the other baseload generators more expensive, adding $30/MWh to gas generators for example. Because the back up generators have to be there, not earning money while solar feeds in, they have to charge more to recoup those costs in a shorter working period. Doh. So add that cost to solar, not the gas.
Compare the real costs and weep:
I’ll repost those graphs from a year ago from the AER report on the closure of Hazelwood:. These are the price setting winning bids by different fuel types. It’s a better way to understand the real cost differences.
The following graphs show the percentage of time power stations located in various regions of the NEM were involved in setting the 5 minute dispatch price in Victoria (vertical bars) and the average price of the offered capacity which was involved in setting that price. –– Appendix C, AER, 2018
Brown coal:
Bayswater coal plant used to be able to win bids at $40/MWh (or it used to have to bid that low to win). Thanks to the RET (Renewable Energy Target) destroying some of the cheapest power, that’s not happening any more. Costs are up and competition is down.
One gas plant. Not cheap to start. Not cheap to finish.
As I keep saying: Solar power reduces fuel costs, but makes capital, staff, maintenance, and land costs more expensive.
Solar looks “cheap” when compared to expensive alternatives. Nobody mention coal:
Ms Alford says an initial push to justify installation of renewable energy generation on the grounds of pure carbon abatement, as part of the miner’s social licence to operate, has been overtaken by the cost benefits of adding solar or wind generation to the mix.
“We’ve got to a stage now with renewables where the commercial benefit outweighs any social licence consideration. Renewable generation is becoming a commercial no-brainer from a cost and economic point of view,” Ms Alford said. “If you’re burning diesel you’re burning cash, and on the east coast if you’re burning gas you’re burning cash.”
Solar power is only a “no brainer” economic choice because the electricity market has been brainlessly wrecked by the Renewable Energy Target and a host of other subsidies.
All journalists need to be reminded of the invisible elephant in the room. As long as they are not comparing a generator to brown coal, they aren’t looking at all the options.
9.6 out of 10 based on 66 ratings
Is this the tipping point for David Attenborough’s reputation?
Will anyone see David Attenborough the same way again after the Netflix debacle that is “Climate Change: The Facts”?
The Attenborough subspecies may present itself as an impartial scientist but under scrutiny this is revealed to be a chameleon-like illusion that hides the real intent, which appears to be to garner prizes, funds, fame and better dinner invitations. Evolutionarily, Attenborough may be seeking to increase his own status (and resources for kin) at the expense of taxpayers, donors and hapless walruses.
 David Attenborough, homo propagandis, wears the guise of environmental scientist while spruiking pagan fears, cherry picked evidence and lying by omission.
The facts turn out to be half-truths that fit the pattern of exploiting primal fears to create deep psychological spin. He says “we don’t know” but then shows the opposite — associating every kind of bad weather, fire, and storm with man-made emissions even though data shows that these were worse in the past or are caused by other factors. In probably his lowest career point, rumours are spreading that not only did thriving polar bears cause the falling walrus episode rather than coal power stations, but his crew may have killed walruses unwittingly by being there. Paul Homewood argues the team itself scared the walruses by flying drones near the herd and spooking them, or blocking their exit path. Attenborough’s team deny this, but the “trust me” answer doesn’t sit well with past behavior. They didn’t mention the presence of polar bears in the documentary, nor past walrus-on-the-rocks deaths, they blamed it all (improbably) on a lack of sea ice — as if walruses climb high cliffs to escape the open sea, and they won’t say when and where it was filmed. In short, there’s no trust left in the Attenborough-trust-bucket.
Let’s pause for one minute’s silence to mark the death of a once great reputation.
For the record: Fires were worse, are falling, are caused by fuel loads, not temperatures, biofuels kill people and destroy forests. Storms have been ghastly forever, and don’t correlate with CO2. The Great Barrier Reef survived thousands of years of warmer weather, reseeds itself, have genes to cope with CO2 and warmth. Most of the reef wasn’t bleached, and it recovers fast, is adaptable, and fish cope with daily pH swings that are larger than anything humans might cause.
h/t the GWPF who have been so important in revealing this sociological phenomena. And The Australian.
[World Tribune] There was an incident in Russia in 2017 where polar bears were reported to have spooked a herd of walruses, causing them to fall off a cliff to their deaths. Crockford believes this is the event that was filmed by the documentary crew.
“The film crew have steadfastly refused to reveal precisely where and when they filmed the walrus deaths shown in this film in relation to the walrus deaths initiated by polar bears reported by The Siberian Times in the fall of 2017,” Crockford said.
David Rose, The Daily Mail, UK
The film’s message was so bleak it could have been made by Extinction Rebellion, the eco-anarchist protest group which has brought Central London to a standstill.
Watching it did fill me with horror, but not at the threat from global warming. It was at the way Sir David and the BBC presented a picture of the near future which was so much more frightening than is justified.
…it is a grotesque travesty of the truth to claim that ‘nothing’ has been done: for example, since 1990, UK emissions have fallen by 43 per cent, according to the Government’s Committee on Climate Change. Not only that, Government statistics say 56 per cent of our electricity came from low carbon sources in 2018, our last coal-fired power station will close in six years and the Government has pledged to ‘decarbonise’ electricity by 2030.
Above all, the Climate Change Act requires Britain to reduce its 1990 carbon emissions by no less than 80 per cent by the year 2050…
Rose explains how (among other propaganda) the documentary claims that Orangutans were being evicted from forests by land clearing to make soap and biscuits. Attenborough somehow forgets to mention that Borneo’s forests are also being razed to make palm oil as a biofuel for cars. What’s killing orangutans is not climate change but the climate change industry.
Ross Clark, The Spectator
What I won’t let go is this growing practice … of trying to link every adverse weather event to climate change. In this, Attenborough’s documentary was a masterclass.
If you are going to present a film called Climate Change: the Facts the very least you should be doing is, well, presenting the facts. Well here they are, in two of the areas which made up such a hefty part of the film: wildfires and hurricanes. Are wildfires increasing?
Michael Mann says wildfires are tripling. Clark points out the US EPA data says “not”:
…the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) [data] shows no upwards trend in the number of wildfires in the US over the past 30 years. Take another way of measuring wildfires – the acreage burned, in figure two of this data – and there is an upwards trend since the 1980s.
It is little wonder that terrified kids are skipping school to protest against climate change. Never mind climate change denial, a worse problem is the constant exaggeration of the subject.
Read more at both The Daily Mail and The Spectator.
Image MikeDixson
9.6 out of 10 based on 127 ratings
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8.7 out of 10 based on 26 ratings
Remember when climate modelers told us fossil fuels cause longer snow seasons?
No neither do I.
 Albany, snowboarding, earliest snow, WA, 2019. | ABC Facebook
It is the earliest recorded snow event in a calendar year in the state’s history. Statistically, we can tell how anomalous this is by the behaviour of the local wildlife – seen snowboarding in shorts on the driveway in Albany. (Even going across the road). It’s possible this is the longest snowboard ride in the state’s history too. Though technically it is hail-boarding.
See snowboarding in Albany Western Australia
For foreign readers, WA (Western Aust) doesn’t have a snow season. Last regular snow was probably circa 20,000BC.
The ABC reports:
BOM forecaster Matt Boterhoven said snow was an extremely rare occurrence in April.
“It’s exceptional. We’ve only recorded once, in the last 100 years, snow as early as this on top of the Stirling Ranges,” he said.
“It’s related to a very strong cold air mass moving over the south-west of the state, so when conditions get below freezing and there’s precipitation, snow can form on top of Stirling Ranges.”
Mr Boterhoven predicted further snow flurries were possible into Saturday morning — something which came to pass overnight.
ABC on facebook
We all know this is weather not climate. We also know that if this was the earliest heatwave of the season it would be “proof of climate change” on the ABC.
Bluff Knoll, where the snow is, is a five hour drive from Perth. In WA snow is so rare we have “snow chasers”. Reportedly “dozens” of people are headed there to see the snow. Dozens!
9.4 out of 10 based on 85 ratings
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