It doesn’t matter how pointless your action is, the ABC will cover it as long as it gives free advertising to giant multinationals and fellow lobbyists for big government.
Six women take a swim, put it on the news. No hard questions asked.
When South Coast NSW photographer Tamara Dean asks you to be involved in her latest project, be prepared to make a bold environmental statement in your birthday suit.
“Biologists predict that if we continue carrying on the way we are, by the end of this century, 50 per cent of species living today will face extinction,” Ms Dean said.
Canberra environmentalist and economist Tory Bridges said she would do whatever it took to get people thinking about climate change.
That included swimming naked in the open ocean with 20 other women on a rainy weekend. But she was willing to suffer for the art, especially with the future of the environment at stake.
The photo shoot was part of Ms Dean’s ongoing project called Endangered.
She wanted the photo shared, so I’m happy to help. Be convinced all ye doubters.
Sydney-based photographer Tamara Dean was recently invited to Heron Island, near the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern Great Barrier Reef. During the trip, she learned about the effects of climate change from Professor Tim Flannery and world-leading coral experts, while experiencing ‘the beauty and fragility of the reef’.
The reference for the apocalyptic prediction about 50% of all species was from “leading biologists” who were speaking at a conference with Paul Ehrlich, sayth the Guardian. Don’t forget that one (count it) one single mammal has gone extinct anywhere in the world so far and it was a rat stranded on a 3m high sand dune far out to sea. It was surely destined to be wiped out by the next available storm. Just 3,000 species to go til we hit the halfway mark.
How about some taxpayers jumping in with only their wallets on? Do you reckon the ABC would cover their protest about being forced to spend a billion dollars paying for hate-male and naked political advertising?
The Greens policy blueprint suggests Australia would become a “renewable energy superpower”, with coal exports to be replaced by clean hydrogen, and the construction of a $6bn taxpayer-funded energy grid upgrade to develop new renewable energy zones.
— Ben Packham, The Australian
Coming soon, the Greens will ban planes, holidays and jokes…
The Greens will propose 2030 as the cut-off point for thermal coal exports, and the shutdown date for Australia’s fleet of coal-fired power stations, in the party’s new climate and energy policy heading into the federal election.
— Katharine Murphy, The Guardian
Current thermal coal exports bring in $25 billion dollars each year. That’s a lot of money and taxes taken out of our economy. Which hospitals will the Greens close? (Maybe all of them, especially at night time). We could just ban people from getting sick?
Closing our 23GW of coal fired electricity will be a glorious collectivist fashion statement. But China is currently building seven times the entire Australian coal fleet and plans another twelve “Australian coal fleets”. China already has nearly fifty times as much coal power as Australia has. And all that is “part of the Paris agreement”. Geddit? Of course you don’t. None of it makes sense to anyone who can add up numbers bigger than two.
The Coal Council of Australia branded the Greens platform as “economic vandalism” that would threaten up to 150,000 direct and indirect jobs, and hit the governments of NSW and Queensland with the loss of $2.5bn in annual royalties.
— Ben Packham, The Australian
Shame about the 150,000 jobs lost. Still they can all move into tourism to cater for the people who are willing to sail 10,000 kilometers to an island filled with diesel generators and old rental cars.
Backpackers are bound to love the bicycle tours of solar farms and forests filled with windmills.
The party is proposing to phase out thermal coal exports by setting a yearly limit on coal exports from 2020, a set of procedures that would require resources companies to secure permits at auction in order to export product.
The policy also advocates for vehicle emissions standards “that lead up to a complete ban on new internal combustion vehicles by 2030”, and a 17% tax on “luxury fossil fuel cars” to help cover the costs of scrapping registration fees, import tariffs, GST and stamp duty on electric vehicles, “reducing the cost of electric vehicles by around 20%”.
— Katharine Murphy, The Guardian
By 2030 with no coal or nukes running, the price of electricity will be $2 a KW/h (if it’s not $20) and EV’s will cost three times as much as petrol cars to drive and take 72 times as long to fill (assuming we still have electricity).
Does “internal combustion vehicle” mean more than just cars? I’m especially looking forward to battery powered combine harvesters and solar powered semi’s.
Just to make the impossible a little bit harder they won’t allow Kyoto credits:
The Greens have disavowed using Kyoto credits, which is an accounting system that allows countries to count credits from exceeding their targets under the soon-to-be-obsolete Kyoto protocol periods against their Paris emissions reduction commitments for 2030.
All the other parties in Australia must be loving this announcement. What a gift.
Even for the Labor Party, the Greens are there to make their suicidal 45% reduction look less stupid.
The question is though, how could any party preference them anywhere except last?
Lance predicted this could take 3 – 6 months to restart (and scored 67 thumbs up)
This is a teachable moment. Smart people will pause and reflect upon what is happening, lest it happen elsewhere. This is not a game sane people want to play. Societies melt down in a matter of days to weeks without electric power, water, food, transportation, communication, etc.
We’ve yet to see how bad this is going to get. It will get a LOT worse before it gets better.
My guess is it will take 3 to 6 months to restart the grid in Venezuela, even if things go swimmingly. If a few substations and alternators are blown out, it could take 2 years. Longer if some turbines are damaged.
Today, Judge Vasta asked how it could be that James Cook University – a recipient of so many billions of dollars over the years – could leave no stone unturned in its disciplinary process against Peter Ridd, while doing absolutely nothing to address his complaints about the lack of quality assurance of its research.
Not once in court today, or yesterday, was there any defense by the James Cook University Team of “the science” that Peter Ridd has been so critical of. The university is simply arguing that he doesn’t have a right to speak-out.
Let’s remember how important “quality control” is to JCU: One researcher at JCU was found guilty of fabricating results by Upsalla University. Peter Ridd reported the same researcher has presented photos of 50 fish that contained manipulated, flipped duplicates. These are serious allegations in science. In response JCU took a whole year to even name the people on the investigation panel, let alone start investigating. As I said at the time:
The words, “wild”, “bizarre” and “extreme” come to mind:
“Chris Cocklin, dep Vice Chancellor of JCU, tried to suggest that Professor Ridd was not a “distinguished academic” at the university and therefore was not covered by the academic freedom clause.”
Peter Ridd says he felt he had no choice but to publish information on the GoFundMe page because he was being gagged, had lost all faith in the disciplinary process and needed to raise funds to mount a legal challenge.
He explains why quality assurance is so important:
by Charlie Peel. The Australian
“I [Peter Ridd] was disciplined for saying these institutions were untrustworthy and that was referring to quality assurance in science.”
He argued the studies affected “a lot of people” because it informed public policy on legislation to cut fertiliser use in Great Barrier Reef catchments, shut down dredging and mining operations and was affecting tourism because visitors thought the reef was dying.
“The science needs to be rigorous because it affects a lot of people,” he said.
Also discussing JCU’s search of Peter’s email account.
Judge: ‘Isn’t JCU going through Professor Ridd’s emails itself a breach of confidentiality that is meant to apply in the disciplinary process? This is totally contrary to the spirit of the EBA.’
The first alleged breach of the code occurred in April 2016, when Professor Ridd emailed a journalist to allege that images given to the media by the Australian Institute of Marine Science and Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority were misleading.
Professor Ridd said the images of bleached coral reefs near Stone Island, off the coast of Bowen in north Queensland, were misleading because they showed poorly affected corals, which were selected over nearby healthy coral and used to show “broad scale decline” of reef health.
Field technicians working for Professor Ridd took photos in the same vicinity as the bleaching pictures supplied by the university and GBRMPA which showed “spectacular coral living there”.
Professor Ridd told the journalist in the email that the use of the pictures was “a dramatic example of how scientific organisations are happy to spin a story for their own purposes”.
At one stage Professor Ridd was told he could not even discuss the proceedings with his wife, leading Mr Wood to compare the proceedings to a coercive “star chamber”.
Jennifer Marohasy reminds us this incident was a trigger that set off Ridd’s eventual sacking. Ridd objected to the reef near Stone Island in Queensland being used to tell a story of disaster when the reef around Bowen (nearby) is in blooming health. Peter Ridd took photos in 2015 showing that the same area was doing fine and pointed out that anyone could find both good and bad examples of reef in the area and selectively claim a climate change disaster. In 2016 Nature published a paper “characterising recent loss of coral cover” which AustralianGeographic and others used to sell a story of a reef catastrophe.
When marine scientist Peter Ridd suspected something was wrong with photographs being used to highlight the rapid decline of the Great Barrier Reef, he did what good scientists are supposed to do: he sent a team to check the facts.
After attempting to blow the whistle on what he found — healthy corals — Professor Ridd was censured by James Cook University and threatened with the sack. After a formal investigation, Professor Ridd — a renowned campaigner for quality assurance over coral research from JCU’s Marine Geophysics Laboratory — was found guilty of “failing to act in a collegial way and in the academic spirit of the institution”.
His crime was to encourage questioning of two of the nation’s leading reef institutions, the Centre of Excellence for Coral Studies and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, on whether they knew that photographs they had published and claimed to show long-term collapse of reef health could be misleading and wrong.
This historic photo shows healthy reef above tide circa 1890.
Reef near Stone Island, Queensland, Photo, 1890
This is allegedly the same area in 1994 showing a coral disaster
Reef near Stone Island, Queensland, Photo, 1994
Again in 2012, the area still hadn’t recovered — or so the story goes
Reef near Stone Island, Queensland, Photo, 2012
Peter Ridd photographs the same area in 2015 showing healthy reef
Note the same landscape in the background.
Reef near Stone Island, Queensland, Photo, 2015
The IPA have supported Peter Ridd in his battle for free speech, and are broadcasting updates:
The Jakobshavn is the glacier that dumps more ice in the ocean than any other in the Northern Hemisphere. It made the iceberg that “sank the titanic”. It has been receding for years, and the losses were accelerating, but then it astonished the scientists.
“At first we didn’t believe it,” said glaciologist Ala Khazendar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We had pretty much assumed that Jakobshavn would just keep going on as it had over the last 20 years.”
“That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system,” said Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland ice and climate scientist Jason Box. “The good news is that it’s a reminder that it’s not necessarily going that fast. But it is going.”
Box, who wasn’t part of the study, said Jakobshavn is “arguably the most important Greenland glacier because it discharges the most ice in the northern hemisphere. For all of Greenland, it is king.”
But it’s OK, seriously, we’re all still going to bake in climate hell because all the models that didn’t see this coming are now saying it will be “temporary”. In a rush, climate-scientists hit auto-excuse-mode — saying the things they never say when there’s a bit of warming.
Apparently it is just some natural variation caused by a butterfly or something
It’s such a quirk, a blip: in a spot 1000 km away the atmospheric pressure changed “resulting in either warming or cooling” (I don’t think the laws of physics are too happy about that) and then ocean currents carry that up to Greenland which affects the glacier. Sure. We never hear them work so hard to explain some temporary warming.
The cooling began in the North Atlantic Ocean, 966 kilometres (600 miles) south of the glacier, triggered by a climate pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO): every five to 20 years, atmospheric pressure at sea level fluctuates, ultimately resulting in either warming or cooling, which is then carried northward by the ocean currents up the southwestern coast of Greenland.
So the grand coupled climate models didn’t predict the air pressure, the ocean currents or the glaciers, but apart from that…
But wow. That water is a lot cooler:
In 2016, the water in this current was cooler by 1.5 degrees Celsius, cooling the Atlantic around Greenland by about 1 degree Celsius; this made its way to the mouth of Jakobshavn, allowing the ice to thicken.
Ocean temperatures in the bay’s upper 250 m have cooled to levels not seen since the mid 1980s.
So 30 or 40 years of warming was wiped out just like that?
Get ready — Quote of The Year coming:
“We didn’t think the ocean could be that important,” OMG principal investigator Josh Willis of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory told National Geographic.
I wondered if Josh Willis’s job description was really the Oh My G*d principal investigator, but I see it may mean Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) — except that isn’t happening.
He has to dig deep to explain how they got it completely, utterly, wrong:
“The thinking was once glaciers start retreating, nothing’s stopping them,” explains Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and OMG’s lead scientist. “We’ve found that that’s not true.”
So our top glacier experts are just discovering that glaciers come and go, that oceans are important and that CO2 is not their only driver? This is news to them?
He’s effectively throwing their own knowledge under the bus. It’s that bad.
It’s interesting that they are announcing this growing glacier now, just as they have “found the reason/excuse” but not for the last few years when it was growing but they didn’t have an answer. For free and with no grants, skeptic Tony Heller pointed out it was growing two years ago.
Crystal balls say it’s worse than we thought:
This research demonstrates that glacial recession is not a one-way trend, but it doesn’t show a reversal of climate change. It does indicate that the effects are a little more complex than we thought, but, ultimately, that bird has flown the coop.
“This cooling is going to pass,” Khazendar told National Geographic. “When it does, the glacier is going to retreat even faster than it was before.”
You will not believe, this will cause sea levels to rise:
While this is “good news” on a temporary basis, this is bad news on the long term because it tells scientists that ocean temperature is a bigger player in glacier retreats and advances than previously thought, said NASA climate scientist Josh Willis, a study co-author. Over the decades the water has been and will be warming from man-made climate change, he said, noting that about 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans.
“In the long run we’ll probably have to raise our predictions of sea level rise again,” Willis said.
The fastest-shrinking glacier in Greenland has made an unexpected turn.
Although it’s been melting for 20 years, the Jakobshavn Glacier in West Greenland – famous for producing the iceberg that sank the Titanic – has now started growing again.
We even see the Precognitive-Preemptive-Headline – just in case you think that if shrinking glaciers prove the world is warming then growing glaciers must mean the opposite:
What does this mean? Perhaps not much, but if the world was starting to cool, stuff like this would start to happen more often. No way to know that answer at the moment.
Trump is vindicated. The real substance of Russiagate is what it says about the media
Dragged out for two years of hate, denigration and abuse in the media, in the end the Muller inquiry found no collusion. How many journalists predicted this. How many even wrote as though it was possible? Credit to Matt Taibbi for the scathing WMD comparison.
The summary of the Mueller report issued today by Attorney General William Barr clears the president and his aides of any collusion with Russia and says there is no legal case to support obstruction of justice charges against him. …
It is a devastating defeat for the Democrats and for much of the US media who had hoped, prayed and frankly expected that Mueller would somehow find a silver bullet to end or at least cripple Trump’s presidency.
It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD
Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”
The Special Prosecutor literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with votive candles sold in his image and Saturday Night Live cast members singing “All I Want for Christmas is You” to him featuring the rhymey line: “Mueller please come through, because the only option is a coup.”
Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,” as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.
UPDATE: On the legal process, read Mark Steyn, Read it all. Read it twice.
It started in April 2016, when it became clear that Trump was going to win the Republican nomination. The Hillary campaign and the DNC gave millions of dollars to Marc Elias, a Clinton lawyer, who in turn hired Fusion GPS, who in turn hired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. Why use Mr Elias as a cutout? Because Hillary and the DNC could then itemize the expense as “legal services” rather than list payments to Mr Steele, which would be in breach of federal law…
Steele’s dossier was passed along to the FBI. It seems a reasonable inference, to put it as blandly as possible, that the dossier was used to justify the opening of what the Feds call an “FI” (Full Investigation), which in turn was used to justify a FISA order permitting the FBI to put Trump’s associates under surveillance. Indeed, it seems a reasonable inference that the dossier wascreated and supplied to friendly forces within the bureau in order to provide a pretext for an FI, without which surveillance of the Trump campaign would not be possible.
But that’s all you need. The dossier is a remarkable thing. It self-regenerates and corroborates itself as it ricochets back and forth between corrupt bureaucrats, biddable hacks and rubber-stamp judges…
They’ve already been on it for a year, and, if there were any “collusion”, it would have been leaked months ago: If Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, the “Russia investigation” is a nullity wrapped in an absence inside a void, now shimmering in the black hole of the billable hours of fifteen lawyers and the expense accounts of a hundred FBI agents.
But tally-ho! The Great MacNuffin Hunt goes on -..
We have witnessed an extraordinary sustained attempted coup in which senior officials of the “justice” department shoot the breeze about wearing a wire to get the goods on the elected chief executive. If there are no consequences to that, it will happen again.
Moreover, the president and his allies have raised enough questions about the conduct of his investigators to convince many of his supporters that the real scandal is the “deep state” trying to thwart the will of the democratic system by dislodging him from office.
The sheer volume of allegations lodged against Mr. Trump and his circle defies historical parallel, possibly eclipsing, if they were all proved true, even Watergate, the nonpareil scandal of scandals.
Some of the nation’s biggest energy companies have allegedly used the closure of Australia’s dirtiest coal-fired power station to price gouge customers and make an extra $3 billion in wholesale profits, according to a new report.
We already knew that renewables are so poisonous they make other generators more expensive. But this is something “extra”. Either big corporate’s suddenly turned into greedy machines or the government destroyed the free market that worked fine for years:
When the closure of Hazelwood was announced just a few months earlier, AGL increased the price of much of the coal-fired power on offer from the Bayswater and Liddell plants in NSW.
The study found a significant part of the output from the Liddell plant was repriced from $40 to $60 per megawatt hour, to greater than $5,000 per megawatt hour — so expensive it effectively restricted supply.
At the same time, much of the power offered by the Bayswater plant almost doubled in price, from about $40 per megawatt hour, to about $80 per megawatt hour.
AGL’s competitors, Energy Australia and Origin, hiked the prices of their coal-fired power too.
Remember when competition from cheap energy would reduce the bids of competitors?
The free market could solve this, but our government forbids it
Right now in Australia you could not legally set up a coal fired cheap plant and supply consenting adults with cheap electricity through our national grid. The government has decreed that in order to change the weather, all coal plants must charge their customers extra so they can pay off “cheap” wind and solar providers who provide green-nice-weather electrons. The government also says that when these green electrons are available (randomly) the market must buy them and ignore cheaper options. Both Liberal and Labor governments endorse this socialist control. Voters who want cheap electricity need to pick “something else”.
Where is our major free-market party?
Did he just admit wind and solar couldn’t supply cheap energy?
Mark Collette from Energy Australia, has denied price gouging, and says that there was no cheap energy available to replace Hazelwood brown coal.
“I think the market did everything it could to replace that energy as cheaply as possible but there was no source of cheap energy available in the timeframe.”
For some reason, all that new cheap wind and solar are not filling the gap left by the 53 year old Hazelwood coal plant?
Bruce Mountain, the lead researcher and director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre, saidthe price increases flowed through to consumers, and the effects were still being felt.
“[Consumers] are paying roughly $200 more than they should and that’s ongoing,” he said.
“Hazelwood should not have had such a large impact on the market. It was about 5 per cent of the national coal generation market, it was not a big deal. It should have been handled easily.
How could prices not rise when we force out one of the cheapest most reliable providers?
ABC reports on evil capitalists — says nothing about big-bad-government
The ABC is happy to say that AGL is being a big greedy corporate. They won’t admit that it was government rules that caused cheap coal to close and made it possible for companies to legally screw billions out of the market. They won’t admit that if wind and solar were really as cheap and reliable as coal that AGL, Origin and EnergyAustralia couldn’t have done this.
It’s all legal, but couldn’t have happened without the RET (Renewable Energy Target)
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission also examined the price rises, according to its chairman Rod Sims.
“We did not find a breach of the law, because it’s not against the law, it’s not against competition law or consumer law when you’ve got something that’s relatively scarce, to price higher,” Mr Sims said.
“So if I buy an apple for $1 and sell it to you for $10, I’ve ripped you off but that’s not against the law,” he said.
“There’s no law that stops people charging excessively.”
The RET makes sure that coal fired stations are working at a competitive disadvantage. That was the point — to force coal generators out of business, and it’s working.
AGL was given Liddell coal plant for free in 2014. It plans to shut it down in 2022 and despite pleas to sell it or revive it — it turned down offers of a quarter of a billion dollars.
When is an asset is worth more in the trash-can than sold to a willing bidder? — when the market is so screwed the owner makes more profit from destroying an asset than selling it.
Handy questions ABC journalists could’ve asked
If solar and wind are cheaper why did prices rise after Hazelwood closed?
Don’t the comments by Mark Collette demonstrate that renewables can’t yet replace cheap brown coal?
Why did our national electricity market work so well to create low prices and competition for years and then fail recently? Australian electricity wholesale costs were around $30 per MWh for years, now there are almost no settlements at these prices. Surely the big three corporates would have taken the opportunities to profit in the past if they could have?
Is there any country around the world which has a high penetration of intermittent renewables and cheap electricity? Please name them…
There’s a new Christmas fantasy list for Climate-worriers. It’s a New York Times bestselling book (aren’t they all) and people are gushing …because it lists the same old solutions we’ve heard 100 times before, like using wind, solar, go vegetarian, walk to work, and (wait) educate your girls.
The PR material glows like the Sun. Wear your sunglasses and hazmat suit when reading:
Project Drawdown is the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming.We did not make or devise the plan—the plan exists and is being implemented worldwide. It has been difficult to envision this possibility because the focus is overwhelmingly on the impacts of climate change. We gathered a qualified and diverse group of researchers from around the world to identify, research, and model the 100 most substantive, existing solutions to address climate change. What was uncovered is a path forward that can roll back global greenhouse gas emissions within thirty years. The research revealed that humanity has the means and techniques at hand. Nothing new needs to be invented…
Project Drawdown’s ranked list of 100 climate change solutions has priced the whole planet-fixing kit at a cool $29,609 billion dollars (of other people’s money). Apparently this is cheap as it will save $74 trillion (trust me), and thousands of entreupeneurs have been sitting on their money waiting for a list like this.
All 100 are ranked through a kind of divination of a “Plausible Scenario” in a computer model. That calculates that wind turbines are ranked at 2, while nuclear energy is way down at number 20. Educating girls ranks 6th and family planning at number 7. Number one on the list is refrigerant management (and I’ll just say China, and a $2b HFC fraud). These people are not good with numbers. Who would trust them with a computer?
Educated girls produce fewer human babies which means less humans in 20 years which will make less CO2, which will trap less heat and reduce the size of the tropical hot-spot that doesn’t exist, and that will cause less rain and more rain in all the right places, so we get fewer floods and droughts and bad weather or something like that.
Another great benefit they tell us is that educated girls are “less likely to marry as children or against their will. ” Ponder all those poor unschooled girls who accidentally marry against their own will.Oops, damn, I got married today and I didn’t want to? How is educating girls supposed to make that less likely? Dear Warlord, I learnt my times tables, don’t marry me off?
Yes, sure, we all want girls (and boys) to get an education. We know the world is a better place when they learn to read and write (but not necessarily when they learn to turn atmospheric physics into a social justice campaign).
#63 Transport Teleprescence (is bound to save pigmy squirrels):
This idea implores people to do what conservative writers have been saying for decades and stop flying around the globe for meetings when they could use Skype instead. Telepresencing hasn’t caught on even with the IPCC — an organisation that is more panicked about global warming than any other. If the experts that live off the fear of climate change will not even telepresent their Olympic Annual COP Junket, what hope is there than any other less concerned institute will?
Somehow there are only 80 solutions on the list, not 100. Like everything in climate change, it’s exaggerated and nobody cares about the numbers.
Comment from MapTrap
The list goes from 1 to 80 in order of CO2 saved. Typical of people whose concern is about CO2 saving, with no consideration of money.
If you do what I did and drop the table into a spreadsheet, you can manipulate the data in terms of Saving/Cost per GT of CO2 saved. On that list Fridge Management goes from #1 to #62. Fridge Management is a no cost to implement, and negative $902 billion in savings, for a net loss of $10.06 billion per GT CO2 saved.
France (with nukes) and Germany (with a huge renewables component) used to forge ahead with climate panic in the EU while the Eastern block (like Poland, with more coal and less cash) reliably pushes back against it. But France is pushing everyone to meet the new sacred 1.5C target with the big Carbon-Neutral-By-2050 plan. It’s a target so wildly ambitious even Germany has pulled the pin on yet another fantasy deadline like the last ones it failed to meet. This is despite (or rather, because of) renewables overtaking coal in Germany in January. The more unreliables a nation has the more inefficient their whole grid is, and the more it costs to save each ton of carbon. Every extra wind turbine is more expensive at reducing CO2 than the last.
The EU Council has just released itssummit statement— basically saying yes to all the IPCC favourite pet visions but not putting any dates on it. With no dates, it’s a meaningless wishlist.
But hey, it’s only the planet at stake, it’s not like there is a deadline that matters anyway eh?
March 20: Tomorrow, the 28 leaders of EU countries are set to adopt a new strategy on action to combat climate change. In light of the student protests spreading across Europe and the world, many leaders in the West had wanted to strengthen the strategy. But this has been fiercely resisted by Eastern European countries led by Poland.
Like Trump, and like Brexit, journalists did not see this coming. Centre right parties somehow expect to keep winning by adopting centre left policies. But politics is being transformed by parties brave enough to speak against political correctness.
In the Dutch provincial elections the Forum for Democracy (FDV) Party has rocketed to 12 seats from nothing. They only launched in 2016. The FDV campaigned against “climate change hysteria” and against immigration and for more direct democracy. The Financial Times calls them Eurosceptics.
For centre right parties there are many votes to be gained in being outspokenly skeptical of climate change — Abbott, Trump, Dean, and now “Baudet”.
Thierry Baudet, 36, heads up the FDV. The Dutch PM was and still is Mark Rutte (of the VVD supposedly a centre right party), and he has just lost control of the upper house. There are 75 seats all up, and FDV somehow looks like getting 12, the same number as the ruling VVD Party.
The “centre right” ruling party apparently now has to do deals with the Greens. Which tells us all we need to know about how not-right the centre-right is.
Far-right populist newcomer Forum for Democracy stunned the Dutch political establishment after winning the most votes in provincial elections, according to a preliminary count early Thursday.
In order to achieve a working majority in the Senate, Rutte’s coalition will have to rely on the support of one or more opposition parties.
It’s unlikely that Baudet’s party will work with the government. It rejects, for example, the need for climate change policies, a major issue for the Dutch government. Last week, Baudet suddenly wavered on his long-standing support for the Netherlands leaving the EU.
Two weeks ago snow mass in the Northern Hemisphere hit “exceptional”. This graph below is from the Finnish Meteorological Institute and unlike other datasets includes both snow and ice. They don’t say if this is an all-time record (since 1982).
Look at that chart: Total Snow Mass for the Northern Hemisphere (excluding mountains)
[Science Daily] In the Northern Hemisphere the maximum seasonal snow cover occurs in March. “This year has been a year with an exceptionally large amount of snow, when examining the entire Northern Hemisphere. The variation from one year to another has been somewhat great, and especially in the most recent years the differences between winters have been very great,” says Kari Luojus, Senior Research Scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
Credit: Image courtesy of Finnish Meteorological Institute
There are the usual we-still-believe weasel word caveats:
The weather fluctuates from one year to another and individual cold snaps in the Arctic area are not, as such, proof of the progression of climate change.
And lets not forget…individual hot snaps in the Arctic area are not, as such, proof of the progression of climate change either. Wouldn’t it be good if scientists reminded everyone?
97% of scientists are more certain than ever, but look out! We are about to be hit by the Climate Uncertainty Monster
“However, they [cold snaps] are a reminder of how climate uncertainty has increased and that we’ll have to get use (sic) to variations in the weather as the climate change proceeds,” Laaksonen observes.
And thus the scientists resort to Voodoo and post hoc excuse-making. Climate Uncertainty is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for modelers. It legitimizes every departure from average as “proof” of their success.
What would it take to disprove them — Ten average years? Not even an ice age?
Unlike “hottest ever” press releases the researchers felt compelled to cherry pick some contrary indicators and remind us snow cover has been declining. This snowy year could absolutely *not* be part of a changing cycle.
Total amount of snow declines and snow starts to melt earlier
Lengthy series of observation times show that the total amount of snow in the Northern Hemisphere has declined in the spring period and that the melting of the snow has started earlier in the same period. Examination over a longer period (1980-2017) shows that the total amount of snow in all winter periods has decreased on average.
Also, the ice cover on the Arctic Ocean has grown thinner and the amount and expanse of perennial ice has decreased. …
“The dream of skiing on Alpine snow is going to go away,” says Zorzanello. The loss of the beauty that once was the Alps is a just price for the damage wrought by humans—and might serve as a sufficient spur for us to begin to avoid doing more. — Jeffrey Kluger, undated, 2017 or later.
Scientists ran 300,000 years worth of climate change models at U.S. ski resorts
In just 70 years, the ski season will be markedly shorter, no matter what happens in the near future.
Subsequently, revenue from ticket sales alone will drop in the coming decades by hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. – June 20, 2017, Julie Brown
This is now:
American ski resorts to stay open until July following snowiest winter on record
It has officially been the wettest winter on record in the USA, meaning many of the country’s ski resorts have experienced the snowiest ski season in history.
A new book from Susan Crockford and published by GWPF looks interesting. It’s called The Polar Bear Catastophe That Never Happened but maybe it could have been called “How to hide 30,000 Polar Bears” which the Green-Scare Machine has apparently done under a mountain of smear and indignation. This is a story of the concealment and the backlash — the failure of science.
“Polar bear numbers could easily exceed 40,000, up from a low point of 10,000 or fewer in the 1960s.”
At least they weren’t invaded by 52 polar bears like the Russian town Belushaya Guba was. Those fat healthy bears stayed for two months or so and even wandered into buildings.
Since a full grown male can weight 700kg and is the largest carnivorous mammal on land, that sounds like a Bruce Willis movie plot. Though polar bears in Russia are protected “because they are endangered” (though from what, I can’t tell you). If Bruce shot one he’d be breaking the law.
The invasion of bears was of course, also blamed on “climate change”.
Last night, sixteen days before Britain supposedly leaves the European Union in accord with the people’s vote of three years ago, their elected representatives voted by 312 to 308 to rule out a “no-deal” Brexit – i.e. a straightforward walkaway – ever.
So the EU now has no incentive ever to reach a deal with Britain. The appalling “deal” Theresa May “negotiated” was for a wretched and humiliating vassal status with Brussels. Because for the Eurocrats, what matters is to teach the lesson the ingrate voters that you can check “Out” any time you like but you can never leave. Mrs May’s deal was meant to be a message to antsy Continentals that the citizenry’s impertinence must never happen again.
So last night the elites rose up and overthrew the masses….
Is May working for the EU or the UK?
Am I crazy? I’m hardly a foreign trade wizz, but I would have thought if you represent the fifth largest economy in the world, whose Monarch technically still heads the most widespread empire, culture and language on Earth* you arrive at the negotiating table saying “We’re out”. Offer us something worthwhile and we’ll consider it. “Two weeks to go.”
From afar downunder there haven’t been any signs Theresa May was serious about Brexit. Surely she would have already negotiated trade deals with the likes of the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand? The new arrangements would start the day after Brexit. The EU would be coming to her.
She’d have been delivering speeches about restoring the power and influence of the Commonwealth — surely a bargaining chip worthy of cashing in. Dare I say “India”?
May has had two years to prepare, yet here we are with days to go, andnow she’s talking about Tariff details in a No Deal Brexit — the option the house voted down a few days ago?
Tonight the Express is reporting that a couple of economists are asking why she didn’t negotiate with the major EU nations instead of trying to negotiate with the man who had the most to gain from wrecking any deal.
According to 2018 book, “Clean Brexit: Why Leaving the EU still makes sense” by authors and economists Liam Halligan and Gerard Lyons, Britain should have negotiated in the first place with big EU nations, chiefly Germany, and not Mr Juncker. If you represent the fifth largest economy in the world you arrive at the negotiating table saying “We’re out”. Offer us something worthwhile and we’ll consider it. Two weeks to go.
Mr Halligan and Mr Lyons claimed that as Britain heads for the exit, “the Commission is deeply concerned about losing the UK’s annual contribution – some £13.1 billion in 2016, or £8.6 billion in net terms.”
They wrote: “So Juncker wanted to do everything he could to frustrate, delay and even help prevent that exit.”
And in the end, the irony, for all the argy bargy on the floor of Parliament, the MP that stops the delay may be the PM of Italy
Mr Brok, a close ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, insisted there were “very different views” across the EU over Theresa May’s request to extend the bloc’s Article 50 exit clause. Any Brexit delay will require a unanimous decision by all leaders at the European Council summit on Thursday afternoon. Mr Brok has begged for a short delay until May 23 to avoid new British MEPs having to be elected to the European Parliament.
There are growing concerns in Brussels of swathes of Eurosceptics being elected through British polls as Theresa May fails to deliver Brexit on time.
British Brexiteers have been working hard to lobby European governments to see if they would veto a British extension of Article 50 to ensure Britain leaves the bloc without a deal.
Brexit has friends here in Australia too. Here’s hoping the 17 million voters get what they were promised.
*OK. Call it “symbolic” but there’s 800 years of goodwill, culture and odd legal phrases connecting the Anglosphere. It might be soft power, but it’s still power. The UK has been called the second most powerful country on Earth in by Researchers at European Geostrategy. Though the nation appears to be working hard to change that…
h/t to Barry Woods from a throw away line in the GWPF office.
As Australia push-pumps “renewables” into remote locations some of their incomes are suddenly being cut because the losses (as they transmit across long lines) are higher than they expected. On March 8th the AEMO rerated many generators and this year it’s being called a bloodbath for wind and solar. Some of them, like AGL’s Silverton wind farm face losses of 20%.
It all revolves around something called Marginal Loss Factors, a value that is set by the AEMO each year for each generator. The rating is reduced by transmission losses over distance and also by “congestion” from other renewables which are popping up in the same remote locations far from the cities and industries that need the electricity they make. This sudden loss of expected income threatens new wind and solar projects (as it should — hello market signal!) Sometimes the loss factors are hard to predict years in advance which makes it difficult to also predict whether a project will return a profit (even despite the guaranteed subsidies).
Another renewable inefficiency strikes — “marginal loss factors”
Generators are paid according to the electricity that arrives rather than what they produce at the plant. (Seems fair). This is called the Marginal Loss Factor (MLF). Ideally they’d get paid for an MLF of 1.0 or higher (which means paid for every MWh or potentially even more if they are based in an area where there is a lot of demand and not many generators). Loss factors range from 0.8 up to 1.2, though most of them are close to 1.000. But this year there are losses across the board and only a few gains. An MLF below 1.0 is bad news for generators. In the extreme case of Silverton, the marginal loss factor fell from 1.0 to 0.79 which means they only get paid for 79% of what they produce. One fifth of the energy generated is not getting to where it is needed and won’t get paid for. Karadoc Solar Farm dropped from 0.94 to 0.78. These are some of the biggest falls.
It’s affected base load providers too, to a lesser extent. Snowy Hydro, and some gas plants are down about 5%. If dumping too much capacity on the grid causes the MLF’s to sink, surely that is another “renewable cost”? Add it their bills…
The big inescapable problem for unreliable generators is that they need acres of land which makes it expensive to build them near the demand.
There were some big falls last year (as in North Queensland for 2018 which was particularly bad). This gives us some idea of how the trend is “breaking new ground”. Alas I don’t think there are graphs for the 2019 projections yet.
1996 – 2018: Last year the falls in marginal loss factors showed up in some places like here in Far North Queensland. In 1997 – 2006 before the growth of renewables, most projects in North Queensland had MLFs over 1.0. (2018 Presentation AEMO)
Hard to believe but as our grid capacity grows and load stays largely the same, the marginal loss factors are increasing. Really.
“physics of the power system beats financial models every day of the week”
Dyson has this spectacular quote showing how confused the developers are:
A recent conversation around MLF’s, where a developer told me ‘… the degradation in MLF was not in our business-model; who do we need to talk to get the MLF changed by AEMO?…
The draft Marginal Loss Factors report was released on March 8. The final one comes out on April 1. The AEMO says that the year-on-year changes to the MLF are high and they are considering proposals to change the way they are calculated, and other ways to make the system “more manageable” for generators. But these rules have been rules for years — smart planners should have allowed for the possibility that rampant subsidies and religious fervour would mean too many new renewables in the one spot, and when the wind stops on one, it stops on the neighbours too.
The MLFs are having a greater impact on wind and solar farms because many are being built away from load centres, and the “open access” regime means the local grid struggles to transport the new capacity and some project developers might not know – at the time of construction – what else might be built nearby.
“As more generation is connected to electrically weak areas of the network that are remote from the regional reference node, then the MLFs in these areas will continue to decline,” AEMO says in its MLF draft documentation.
Last year, falls in marginal loss factors of 20 per cent or more were imposed on some projects as a result of grid congestion, or changes to load. That has the potential to dramatically alter the economics of a project, affecting equity owners and lenders alike.
The worst-affected regions this year and last year are north Queensland, south-western and western NSW and north-west Victoria, known now as the “rhombus of regret” – so named because of the shape of the grid and because of the sheer number of projects built and proposed for the area, and the grid limitations.
In NSW, these include three projects owned by Neoen – the new 150MW Colleambally solar farm (down from 1.01 to 0.88), the Griffith solar farm (1.06 to 0.92), and the Parkes solar farm (1.06 to 0.92) – and AGL’s Silverton wind farm (1.0 to 0.79) and Broken Hill solar farm (0.97 to 0.72).
Not good news for renewables investors
But remember this is another inefficiency hitting non-renewables to some extent too. No joy for anyone with a stupid system and a broken market.
The MLF is a key calculation because it can make or break a power project. It reflects how much of a power plant’s output at source arrives at destination (load) and is credited for payment.
Many solar and wind farm operators contacted by RenewEconomy say the latest downgrades – of up to 20 per cent in some instances, and more than 5 per cent in many cases – will have a major impact on the industry.
Developers say that some existing projects may face equity calls or refinancing demands from lenders because of the anticipated fall in revenue. Other projects that are not yet developed, or yet to get finance, may find themselves stalled at the gate.
“Some projects won’t go ahead,” said the head of one international developer.
Some [developers] have been completely blindsided, in certain instances by poor modelling done internally or by consultants, and in other cases because they were simply unaware of the scale of impact, or the number of other projects competing for space in the same part of the grid.
The data is all in the AEMO latest draft. If anyone feels like graphing the fall in the MLF per state or region it might be interesting. However the latest report only has last years data and the projections. Other years are at the AEMO link. It would be quite a bit of work.
The AEMO explains why there are losses this year and explains that it could get worse
Changes between the 2018-19 MLFs and the 2019-20 MLFs are mainly due to changes in projected power flow over the transmission network. The key driver for these changes is a large increase in generation connections to the NEM, particularly in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. The modelling for the 2019-20 MLFs includes 47 new connections providing approx. 5,600 MW of new capacity. As more generation is connected to electrically weak areas of the network that are remote from the regional reference node, then the MLFs in these areas will continue to decline.
When will politicians stop the subsidies? The growth is becoming carnivorous.
__________________________________________
Mosomoso #2:
What do they do? They mainstream a bunch of antique technologies guaranteed to be high cost, high impact, resource-greedy, import-dependent, unreliable, diffuse, intermittent and feeble. To improve the image they call these relics “renewables” and group them with an old technology, hydro, that has some mainstream use. For laughs, they incinerate anything that grows, is discarded or is exuded by a ferment and call all that “renewable” too.
Then they express surprise when distances prove a problem on a continent about which “The Tyranny of Distance” was written.
I say they knew it was all a turkey from the get-go. Renewables were too-failed-to-fail from their very inception. It was like clobbering the Titanic with an iceberg before it was launched.
Jo replies: But you are too kind. Most of the renewables-fans can’t add it all up and still don’t see what’s coming. Free is *!Free!* and dollars are only numbers!
Donald Trump quoted Patrick Moore this week — the skeptic with an ecology PhD who was once a Founder of Greenpeace. So Greenpeace leapt to do some damage control on their brandname and created more damage instead. They promptly tweeted that he was never a founder and is a paid lobbyist. (And what is Greenpeace anyway if not paid lobbyists?)
If they’ll lie about their own history, what won’t they lie about?
For 40 years of Greenpeace history Patrick Moore was called one of the five founders of Greenpeace. He traveled on the first Greenpeace boat trip. Thanks to the Wayback Machine we know that sometime in March 2007 he fell off the Founders list.
Good people could use classes to stand up to absurdly hypocritical accusations
It doesn’t matter what narcissistic hypocrites say, good team-player-type folk seem to apologize so fast, it’s like a reflex.
Australia needs a Fox. When SkyNews was tested with Ross Cameron’s four word breach of “permitted” lines, they failed. How big would their ratings be if they stood for something that matters, like free speech, instead of being afraid of breaching rules set by people with no principles.
To paraphrase:
The whole conversation is an absurdity…
People who laud Bill Clinton accuse others of supporting sexism.
People who want race based rules accuse those who don’t of racism.
The lefts main goal is controlling what you think. They ban unapproved thoughts.
The left demand total conformity.
…never bow to the mob.
The group-thinking Left mob today,
Would control what we think, do and say,
Deny us debate,
Call opposing views ‘hate’,
Taking all hard won freedoms away.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Ok
Recent Comments