A few Australians are just beginning to realize that they are paying for their neighbour’s solar panel. As news spreads, the shine of good-citizen-solar is going to tarnish fast, but it is going to take a concerted campaign to spread the word.
In one corner are 2 million households which have solar PV and thought they paid for it themselves. In the other corner are 7.5 million households which have exorbitant electricity bills. And in every corner and all across the spectrum is mass confusion thanks to the mass media. The fog of advertisements disguised as “news” means if you ask a dumb-enough-question 70% of Australians will say they want the government to set a high RET target to make electricity cheaper. It’s almost like 2 out of 3 people think we need the government to force us to buy cheap stuff, because everyone would buy the “expensive” planet killing volts if we only had the choice. Doh.
That’s $200 per household (and the rest!) added to the electricity bill in 2019
Households will pay nearly $2 billion for rooftop solar installation subsidies this year, costing every home nearly $200 and threatening to derail Scott Morrison’s pledge to cut power bills.
The cost of the federal Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES) and state-based rebates combined is forecast to rise by 45 per cent from $1.2bn last year to $1.74bn this year.
However, analysis of the cost of small-scale technology certificates, which are handed to consumers installing solar panels and then bought back by electricity retailers, shows a soaring cost for all power users.
How’s this for confusion?
Energy companies say the subsidy is 15% of the bill, but the Minister says it is just 3%. We don’t even know what the cost is. Therein lies a free-market disaster. How is anyone supposed to make sensible decisions?
Origin Energy revealed last year that the government’s SRES and state-based solar feed-in tariffs accounted for up to 15 per cent of bill charges.
Mr Taylor, the Energy Minister, said the cost of small-scale technology certificates — created to increase the incentive to install rooftop solar — was just 3 per cent of an average household bill.
Big energy blames big government and big government blames the big energy companies and in a way they’re both right. The big energy companies are playing the market for profits, but big government is screwing the people for power — selling “green electrons” at the election to win seats.
The Liberals are tossing away their best proven election winning advantage. They won’t win votes by aiming for the empty dead centre. The killer comments and lines are left on the cutting room floor.
They can’t show what fools the Labor Green candidates are while they try to be better managed fools themselves.
Just call it quits on the Solar PV subsidy — save householders $200 this year, and even more the year after that.
But read the comments at The Australian. Even at the most informed masthead in the nation many people have no clue.
Sawdust
I pay 28c per kWh for electricity I use from the grid. I get 11c per kWh for electricity my solar panels feed into the grid. Tell me again how I am costing other users money?
The only clever thing about renewable energy is the way the true cost is hidden.
The NASA site used to have a page titled “What are the primary forcings of the Earth system?“. In 2010 this page said that the Sun is the major driver of Earth’s climate, that it controls all the major aspects, and we may be on the cusp of an ice age. Furthermore NASA Science said things like clouds, albedo and aerosol behaviour can have more powerful cooling effects that outdo the warming effect of CO2.
Today that page says Share the science and stay connected, and “Access Denied”.
The Sun is the primary forcing of Earth’s climate system. Sunlight warms our world. Sunlight drives atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns. Sunlight powers the process of photosynthesis that plants need to grow. Sunlight causes convection which carries warmth and water vapor up into the sky where clouds form and bring rain. In short, the Sun drives almost every aspect of our world’s climate system and makes possible life as we know it.
Earth’s orbit around and orientation toward the Sun change over spans of many thousands of years. In turn, these changing “orbital mechanics” force climate to change because they change where and how much sunlight reaches Earth. (Please see for more details.) Thus, changing Earth’s exposure to sunlight forces climate to change. According to scientists’ models of Earth’s orbit and orientation toward the Sun indicate that our world should be just beginning to enter a new period of cooling — perhaps the next ice age.
However, a new force for change has arisen: humans. After the industrial revolution, humans introduced increasing amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and changed the surface of the landscape to an extent great enough to influence climate on local and global scales. By driving up carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (by about 30 percent), humans have increased its capacity to trap warmth near the surface.
Other important forcings of Earth’s climate system include such “variables” as clouds, airborne particulate matter, and surface brightness. Each of these varying features of Earth’s environment has the capacity to exceed the warming influence of greenhouse gases and cause our world to cool. For example, increased cloudiness would give more shade to the surface while reflecting more sunlight back to space. Increased airborne particles (or “aerosols”) would scatter and reflect more sunlight back to space, thereby cooling the surface. Major volcanic eruptions (such as that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1992) can inject so much aerosol into the atmosphere that, as it spreads around the globe, it reduces sunlight and cause Earth to cool. Likewise, increasing the surface area of highly reflective surface types, such as ice sheets, reflects greater amounts of sunlight back to space and causes Earth to cool.
Scientists are using NASA satellites to monitor all of the aforementioned forcings of Earth’s climate system to better understand how they are changing over time, and how any changes in them affect climate.
According to the Wayback Machine the text disappeared in early 2011 under Obama’s reign. Some people say Trump hides climate science, but Trump deletes propaganda, while Obama denies the Sun.
h/t Frank W and Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge. Someone picked this up in tweet, but no one seems to know who. Thanks to them too.
I agree with NASA 2010. So call me a denier.
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UPDATE: I’m happy to say the Tweeter was likely @JWSpry — Jamie Spry — who wrote it up on the Climatism blog last year. Doing phrase searches I also discovered Randall Hoven wrote an article on American Thinker way back in Dec 2010 pointing at the page. A month later the page was gone. NASA reading skeptics?
Once again we find that the oldest thermometers were apparently reading artificially high even though many were newish in 1910 and placed in approved Stevenson screens.) This is also despite the additional urban warming effect of a population that grew 400% since then. What are the odds?!
Fortunately, gifted craftsmen, sorry scientists have uncovered the true readings from the old biased thermometers which they explain carefully in a 67 page impenetrable document.
Chris Gillham has soldiered through the new “ACORN 2” adjustments that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has o-so-quietly released and Australians are just waking up to find that our coldest mornings back in 1910 were even colder than anyone realized at the time. Graham Lloyd is reporting in The Australian how the second rewrite in six years increases the warming by 23% . (Where was the ABC announcement?)
The ACORN series of the Bureau of Meteorology includes 112 stations. Their report lists the warming trends per decade in Table 9. I converted that into the total warming since 1910 and graphed that below.
About one third of the warming of our mean temperature is due to man-made adjustments
Comparing AWAP (semi-raw) to the latest ACORN2, the mean temp is up from 0.08C up to 0.123C per decade. That’s a 50% increase.
To slow Australia’s warming it’d be much cheaper to replace the BOM rather than our electricity grid. Just a thought.
The Australian BOM uses 112 Stations for the ACORN series. These are the full adjustments to the min, mean and max across all stations for the full range of 1910 – 2016.
As Chris points out AWAP is not exactly raw — but it is at least the unhomogenised Australian Water Availability Project dataset.
The biggest changes are in the old minima
The new ACORN version has nearly doubled the rate of warming in the minima of the longest running stations.
About half of the stations in the ACORN list are newer and start recording sometime after 1910. The last station added was in 1975. Chris Gillham reasons that this is not really good practice and so he identified the 57 stations which do have data all the way back. He laboriously calculated the decadal trends, and again I converted them to the total warming and graphed the changes below, and we can see that most of the action comes from the oldest early morning records.
Suddenly, one hundred years later, frosts got far worse during World War I.
It would be very helpful if the Bureau could explain why these particularly were measuring too high.
The historical cooling will presumably stop Australia setting some new “coldest ever records” and make it a bit easier to set “hottest ever” ones.
Records were smashed in all kinds of ways the week ACORN2 was released, but nobody knew…
In the 57 longest running sites the rate of warming nearly doubled in the minima.
No, the homogenisation methods of the BOM have not been found to be “sound”
A number of reviews of the bureau’s network equipment and its temperature data handling have been carried out. A technical panel found the homogenisation methods used were largely sound.
Actually, the The BOM Technical Advisory Forum was never tasked with replicating the homogenization process. Task members were mostly hand picked statisticians. They agreed homogenisation was necessary, “best practice” and they read “the unsolicited complaints”, and concluded that they were not enough to worry about. The only definitive news that came out of that forum was the admission from the BoM that absolutely no one outside of their sacred guild would ever get all the information and training to to recreate their dataset. The BoM method remains a secret black box technique to this day. If it can’t be replicated (because no one can explain the full methodology) it isn’t science.
Three years and $1.3 billion dollars later and still no error bars?
Graham Lloyd reports that progress is slow:
But a key recommendation, to include confidence levels or error margins in the data, remains unfulfilled. A BoM spokesman said work was under way on a number of scientific papers looking at uncertainty and confidence intervals for temperature data observations, adjustments and national averages.
“This work will be made available to the public following thorough peer review,” the spokesman said.
The Australian BOM get one million dollars a day but 1,339 days since the report was released and $1.3 billion dollars of taxpayer funds later, they still can’t do error bars.
Is this, or is this not the “Best Ever” dataset?
I mentioned a few days ago that the new rewrite created a new all time hottest Australian temperature record — a day that reached 51 degrees C. The question is whether the BOM will recognize this officially, or whether, like the last ACORN record in Albany, they simply pretend it doesn’t exist. ACORN 2 is now considered the official national average temperature record, but is the Carnarvon record from 1953 real, or just an anomaly accidentally created by sweeping changes?
Do the BoM team believe in ACORN? With no press release it doesn’t appear so.
Chris Gillham (and others) has done a mountain of work and there is much more yet to discuss. More soon…
A bunch of children are being hailed as heroes for skipping a day of school in order to get better weather for their 120th birthday party. Imagine the thrill of importance for any 17 year old “said” to be wielding this power. This is rock-star stuff.
[by Tara John, CNN] A thick smudge of gold glitter on her right cheek belied the fact that [Anna] Taylor, 17, has taken a leading role in organizing a protest that is expected to see hundreds of students walk out of class across the UK on Friday.
“Hundreds” eh? Keep that figure in mind.
Meanwhile adults in yellow vests go to expense, effort and take risks to mass protest week after week and the TV ignores them
This phenomenon is entirely unprecedented but apparently not that newsworthy. It’s not like the media have spent twenty years telling us that everyone wants “climate action” and that was totally wrong.
Instead of wanting to stop storms, these adult protestors “want to live in dignity”. They “want to be heard”. Must be nutso.
The media reporting (such as google finds it) seems to be keen to report any violence, damage or injury as if this were a football match brawl or simply declaring that the movement is shrinking. Our ABC still adds a box to coverage: “What is the yellow vest movement“. The caption says it’s just “fuel taxes”, not a political phenomenon protesting elitist rulers, high taxes. The linked page tells us Everything We Need To Know is stuff like “violence“, “hoods“, “masks“, and “graffitti“. The phrase “largely peaceful” sneaks in to paragraph 4 to be immediately neutralized by telling us that “some” unnamed persons who may be people at the local coffee shop, are calling the protests the worst in over a decade and even anticipate the unrest leading to civil war. That’s a lot of negative words in “everything we need to know”, some of which have not even happened.
Tweeters tell a different story. See#YellowVests. Who needs the ABC when there are a thousand reporters on the spot?
Reuters tells us that the French people are saying Enough! and want the protests to stop. But ignore their headline and read their fine print:
While a majority of people support the movement, two in every three believe those still protesting each weekend in Paris and other cities are not representative of its early ambitions.
Lo, someone did a survey and someone else can interpret at least one question to say what they want to say. If the French media is like ours, French people probably are sick to death of hearing of fires and violence (which Craig Rucker told us were radical lefty infiltrators). Imagine if there were interviews with normal looking people in the crowd instead.
Make no mistake, Bill Gates totally believes the climate change scare story but even he can see that renewables are not the answer, it’s not about the cost, it’s the reliability.
He quotes Vaslav (possibly Vaclav Smil?):
Here’s Toyko, 27 million people, you have three days of a cyclone every year. It’s 23GW of electricity for three days. Tell me what battery solution is going sit there and provide that power.
As Gates says: Let’s not jerk around. You’re multiple orders of magnitude — … — That’s nothing, that doesn’t solve the reliability problem.
Bill Gates on renewables (part 1). I’ve never seen him so animated. His Tokyo in a cyclone scenario is interesting. pic.twitter.com/N2nhl2u9Ut
Who knew? With intrepid dedication the Australian BoM has uncovered our hottest ever day, buried under erroneous calculations, hidden from view in High Quality expert data sets that were World Class til they weren’t. Strangely the BOM hasn’t issued a press release, even though their supercomputer-marketing team put out a Hottest Ever January media release within hours of January ending. It appears the BOM hasn’t even issued a press release to tell the world they’ve finished the third complete reanalysis of Australian temperature history.
Luckily for the BOM, which may have run out of bytes or letters of the alphabet, volunteers like Chris Gillham of the unofficial BoM audit team noticed that the BoM ACORN dataset has become ACORN2. So we’d like to tell the world. Once again, the genius at the BOM is able to retrospectively compensate for all the flawed sites and thermometers that kept reading too high. Incredibly, no one noticed for a hundred years.
As we launch ACORN2 let’s remember how proud the BOM were of ACORN1. This is from them back in 2017:
The Bureau of Meteorology holds the integrity of our weather observations and climate data to the highest possible standards. The Bureau rejects allegations aired in some media outlets that it has sought to tamper with temperature data.
So the highest possible standards just got higher. Luckily they have arrived in time to find extra warming trends before the next Australian election.
From Chris Gillham:ACORN 2 influence on Australian temperature trends
An example of the haywire homogenisation that’s rewritten Australia’s temperature history is that Carnarvon can now claim to have had Australia’s hottest ever day, with ACORN 2 listing the town at 51.0C on 23 January, 1953. The bureau names Oodnadatta Airport at 50.7C on 2 January 1960 as Australia’s hottest ever day.
In the ACORN 1 dataset, 23 January 1953 at Carnarvon was 48.5C, and in RAW it was 47.7C. ACORN 1 lists Albany at 51.2C on 8 February 1933 but ACORN 2 cools this day to 49.5C (RAW 44.8C).
So the original Carnarvon record just got 3.3C hotter. The Albany record which got 7 degrees warmer in the last round has dropped back 2.7C. Lordy, look at the size of those centigrade wrestling matches!
The original ACORN may have been a bit rushed as it arrived just in the nick of time to save the BOM HQ dataset from being audited by the Australian National Audit Office. (Something Cory Bernardi requested with our help). The old HQ stood for High Quality. So much for that.
Cooling the past once again?
Thermometers in 1910 -1940 were reading far too high despite them being in Stevenson Screens at some of our best sites:
….
What bad luck. All this time the raw data was conspiring to hide Australia’s true cooler history.
It was even more true of Minima:
….
It’s a big news day when a town is even forecast to maybe possibly beat the old Oodnadatta record, so I expect (not) that the media will go crazy about this new discovery, or they would if the hottest ever day was not 60 years ago.
There’s a lot more we will say about ACORN2. Questions we are all waiting to find out — does it still have nearly a thousand days where the minima are higher than the maxima? Are they still creating monthly square wave patterns in the data as temperatures whip-saw up and down with adjustments going a degree either way on each side of New Years Eve? Just how much has this cooled the past and warmed the trend and where are these changes most apparent? Will the BOM call these adjustments “neutral” like the last time. How do they compensate for the Urban Heat Island effect, for the introduction of electronic super sensitive thermometers and all the site moves?
The Australian people pay a million dollars a day for this inept and biased operation.So far the only thing new about this version is that the BoM don’t seem so keen to tell the world about yet another revision of history.
Thanks to all the dedicated BOM Audit team who don’t get paid, thanks to Jen Marohasy, Senator Cory Bernardi, Graham Lloyd and The Australian. All of whom have played an important role in keeping the pressure on.
Now comes a paper: Australia: the renewable energy superstar showing that, per capita, Australia is installing unreliable generators in a blitzkrieg pace, more than twice as fast as Germany is, and 4-5 times faster per capita than the EU, USA, Japan and China. No other dummies are even in the race. The largest coal exporter in the world is working harder than anyone to destroy its largest export earner — which would be noble if only there was more to it than being a magical spell to ward off storms.
This is a legendary paper and very helpful. Save the link, copy the reference, send it to your MP, your friends, your newspaper! Why not head to the launch at ANU at 5:30pm, 14th Feb?
Never again can anyone get away with national flagellation for “not doing enough”. Henceforth Green and Labor M.P.’s will stop calling us a national joke, a pariah, and a disgrace. (Though, actually, all those things are true, for the opposite reason. China is laughing at us, and we are a disgrace to our children for blowing up national assets, squandering resources and teaching them witchcraft.)
Per capita, Australia (all shades of red) is installing renewables
Australia is installing renewables so fast it’s even faster than the second top country which is also, Australia.
Apparently the net cost of adding renewables is zero according to the experts at the ANU. In a consistent world this one document would also immediately end all subsidies. No more RET, SRES, LRET, low interest loans, tax breaks, forced market rules or golden interconnectors.
Except, of course, they’re totally wrong on the cost. Australians have the most expensive electricity in the world for a reason. Somehow Chinese hackers or a renewables marketing team must have snuck into the ANU to write most of the report. Of the six summary conclusions, the first two are obvious and the last four are fantasy. They are only “straight-forward” or “sustainable” if you have $10 trillion dollars to spare and you can’t think of anything better to do with it.
Australia is installing renewable energy (solar photovoltaics and wind) far faster per capita than other countries.
The Australian deployment rate is 4-5 times faster per capita than the EU, USA, Japan and China.
Stabilising the electricity grid when it has 50-100% renewable energy is straightforward using off-the-shelf techniques that are already widely used in Australia.
The electricity sector is on track to deliver Australia’s entire Paris emissions reduction targets five years early, in 2025. This is one of the world’s fastest sustainable rates of emissions reduction.
Remarkably, the net cost is zero because expensive fossil fuels are being replaced by cheaper renewables.
Australia is on track for deep and rapid greenhouse emissions reductions through deep renewable electrification. Much of the world can readily follow the Australian path. Renewable energy offers real hope for a future liveable planet.
The net cost is zero?
The net cost is only zero if you ignore the glorious subsidies, the extra transmission lines, the rising FCAS bill, the blackouts, the emergency demand management, the damage from surging voltages, the wasted capital expenditure, the squads of flying diesels, synchronous condensors, and the burden that unreliable energy dumps on the whole grid. In the US windpower makes gas power $30/MWh more expensive. Blakers et al might think this is a part of the gas bill but obviously it’s a hidden renewable cost. We can argue the toss with cherry-plucked analysis of wholesale price bidding games, but the end result is a retail price and on that, history is devastating. Coal gave us 30 years of falling prices, and renewables wiped all those gains out.
Renewable energy saves on fuel, but wastes infrastructure, land, labor and resources. How can that be cheap?
Like an infection, unreliable power damages the efficiency and economics of every other generator. And even though solar energy is semi-reliable, it still wrecks havoc on the grid: see the Duck curve, the 1000MW generator that goes AWOL and the warnings. For most of the year solar energy is the extra energy that arrives when we know we don’t need it.
Plus the rise of subsidized unreliables pushes out the unsubsidized sector leaving the market ripe for bid squeezes that cost nearly a billion dollars a day.
One of the world’s fastest sustainablerates of emissions reduction?
What’s sustainable? Not the price, our industries, or our 50Hz supply. Not our lifestyle.
We can have sustainable rates of carbon reduction but we can’t have a sustainable civilization at the same time.
The world can readily follow the Australian path?
Sure if they happen to be a first-world nation with vast empty space that’s 15 degrees from the equator, in the roaring 40s, and with $100 billion to throw away. Sure.
Welcome to the DroneAge, where people act like robots and share dumb ideas at light speed!
Episode #601: Climate change makes you lonely and fat.
Feeling friendless, floppy and like a loser? It’s not your fault. Blame a coal plant. Blame Exxon. Blame anyone but yourself. It’s your bad luck to be born into the most bountiful, benevolent era in human history. Damn!
Nicole Hasham, Sydney Morning Herald, uses new unorthodox indicators of “climate change”. Wait for it… test cricket attendance? It’s a smorgasbord of nonsense:
Are we kidding? Thirty-eight degrees is just a summer’s day in Perth. It’s something that happens 19 years out of 20. As for coal generators shutting down: we’ve spent 20 years trying to drive them out of business to stop climate change, and now, if they don’t work, that proves climate change is real? The reasoning is so circular it could give people whiplash.
Let’s not forget coal plants run at 550 degrees plus (unless they run at 1000C). They don’t shut down when it gets two degrees hotter outside, they are some of the last generators running. They outlast even the nuclear plants. (Not that we have any of those).
And Lordy, a modern university professor was trapped in his airconditioned car in Adelaide and discovered sunlight goes “through glass”:
It was not what the Griffith University professor had planned. But as a monster heatwave baked a crust onto southern Australia, “it was not possible to be outside at all”, he says. “I couldn’t do anything, I was basically just in the car all the time. Even then I got fried because the sunshine was so hot, it went through the glass,” Stantic recalls.
Sure. Hot sunshine goes through glass. Cold sunshine, of course, bounces right off. The nonsense never ends.
So he cut his holiday short.
Once, long ago, my parents drove 4,000km right across Australia in January, including 700km of dirt road over the Nullabor in an un-air-conditioned EJ Holden. They couldn’t put the windows down or the car would fill up with dust. At times the car was over 50C inside. Somehow they survived, and even had fun. In the 1800’s people did it on horseback (if they were lucky). If they weren’t lucky, they walked from Perth to Kalgoorlie with wheelbarrows. No fans, no fridges, no phones. What a bunch of fat unfit sissies we are.
Dead fish, dead birds, and even a dead baby. The mercury hit 120F in Collarenebri. (That’s 50C, again, just another one among our long list of 50C temps).
You know it must be climate change when things are almost as hot and deadly 87 years later.
Mass fish and bird deaths in 1932 prove climate change was something that happened all the time.
The record-smashing temperatures of recent weeks have made it very clear: climate change has arrived. Depictions of a world almost too hot for humans are no longer an abstraction. Summer has changed, and so must we.
Hasham writes like a Hollywood marketing groupie. Where are the hard questions? The counter-points? Any semblance of critique?
Today people “on low incomes” we’re told, are lying on the floor because they can’t afford air conditioning. “They would literally lie on the floor in the coolest part of the house and not move for hours,” [Dr Louise] Crabtree says.
They are trapped in their homes “because they don’t have transport options that are affordable and cool.” It’s like a Soviet Gulag I tell you!
We’ve spent 30 years telling people to live in high density apartments and catch buses so they can stop heat waves. But now they are imprisoned at home in heatwaves that keep coming, and what they really need is a car, cheap petrol and a garage at home to park it.
“We heard from people who, on a hot day, can’t get out of the house because they don’t have transport options that are affordable and cool.”
Blast-furnace ambient temperatures also turn people off physical exercise.
“If it’s just too hot and a walk to the bus stop is too far and the bus stop has no shade, people will stop walking. It’s very much impacting how much people are walking or bicycling,” Crabtree says.
Is the real problem the heat waves that Australia has always had, or is it that people can’t afford fuel and energy since the government decided we should try to change the weather instead?
Sometimes we have laws, and sometimes it’s the wrong time for them
A judgement today in a minor NSW court banned a coal mine in the hope of making storms and floods nicer for our great grandchildren. Curiously, it was not the much hated thermal coal mine, it was a coking coal mine – the stuff we use in making steel. It takes 600 kilograms of coal to make one ton of steel and Australian coking coal is considered some of the world’s best. It follows that either the world uses a bit less steel, or it buys the coal from somewhere else. Does the judge have something against steel? Let’s melt down wind turbines and solar panels instead.
Most likely the world will buy the coal from somewhere else. It will likely be less pure and more polluting with few environmental controls or worker’s rights, but hey-de-ho, Judge Preston is not there to worry about environmental global concerns. It’s not like he’s a judge in the NSW Land and Environment Court. Oh…
Effectively, an Australian court decided to increase global pollution by blocking a clean coal mine*. As usual, there is no scientific or legal consistency; No principle apart from impressing people at dinner parties?
An unprecedented court ruling that links Australia’s coalmines to global climate change may place a $100 billion pipeline of fossil fuel developments in peril.
But who needs money? (Or steel…)
Bear in mind the decision may be appealed. (More money for lawyers).
Tick, tock, time to be legal?
Strangely the judge concludes that moving 0.03% of global coal production from Australia this year to China next year will make the world a better place for the NSW taxpayers who fund his salary.
The developer of the mine, Gloucester Resources — controlled by German mining billionaire Hans Mende — aimed to produce 2.5 million tonnes a year of coal from the open-cut mine 3km south of Gloucester.
Or graphed as the rainfall anomaly rather than as the percentage of the mean:
….
Predicting rainfall in Australia is very difficult. The issue is not that the BoM gets it wrong — it’s that they pretend they can do it that matters. Why bother issuing one month forecasts?
The fancy-pants detailed graphics are entirely misleading — like advertising that sells an ability the experts simply don’t have. We don’t want genius from our BoM, we just want honesty.
Townsville City Council’s spokeswoman said last night the model, which was based on expert modelling of different scenarios, was overwhelmed by an “unprecedented” monsoonal trough …
Local Government Association of Queensland chief executive Greg Hallam said Townsville’s flood maps relied on “exhaustive modelling of every possible scenario”, looking at variables such as rainfall and artificial structures.
“We’re not God. We don’t have supreme knowledge. We only have the best science, the best knowledge we can have,” he said. “We now know with the (dam) gates fully open … what will flood and what won’t, so there will be a new set of flood maps produced out of this event.”
If we had better climate models, perhaps we might have been able to empty the dam before the downpour instead of during it. (Though I’ve yet to see any data on dam levels yet, so perhaps not. Wait and see.).
The Local Government Guru must be flummoxed. He (Hallam) even protests they used the “Monte Carlo” risk analysis “as recommended in 2012 by experts.” What could possibly go wrong?
How about basing a $1.5Trillion dollar global industry, agriculture, energy generation and national wealth on models one hundred times more complex which also use a “Monte Carlo” analysis.”
Another ugly lesson:
Beware, people who followed the expert advice have no legal recourse to get compensation if they’ve just “discovered” it was built on a floodplain instead.
In the global warming parallel universe there won’t be compensation: no climate modeler could even afford to pay back 0.1% of the damage created by those expert predictions.
For those from foreign lands, Brisbane is also in Queensland, but is 1,300km south of Townsville, outside the tropics, yet still prone to droughts and floods too.
Best wishes to those suffering at the hands of monsoons and or models.
———————————————
UPDATE: The Ross River Dam was 65% full before the downpour. This is not the same situation as the Wivenhoe Dam disaster near Brisbane. h/t Jonesy (I note Townsville is currently under Level 2 water restrictions. 🙂 Don’t use your sprinklers on the wrong day!)
Martin Clark: The State Govt forces councils to plan for the UN IPCC RCP 8.5 (worst case “global warming” scenario).
This has been an exceptional event, but it is NOT unprecedented. There is a swale at the rear of my property. I have a marker placed at the level where the 1998 flood reached. The flood water has gone way past this marker four times in the last 6 days.
The flood mapping may be partly based on expert engineering analysis, but the provisions are augmented by the lunatic projections of the UN IPCC’s RCP 8.5. This is called up in the State Planning Policy, so it MUST be incorporated in local planning provisions. This has resulted in some ridiculous requirements. I objected to RCP 8.5 being included in the SPP. Much to my surprise, it was removed, but was then put back in by the current regime. It is a distraction that can’t happen, but diverts attention from events that can happen.
There are areas downstream of the Ross Dam that have flooded many times before, and will flood again. In this respect, Townsville is better than many towns and cities on the eastern seaboard, in that it is built at the estuary of rivers that have a limited catchment, not the 1/2 million km2 that applies to many other places. However, stuff that has been approved and constructed under the post-2014 provisions has gone under. Bunnings at Idalia went under by a whole metre.
The ’98 flood was the result of a spent cyclone sitting over the city for about 24 hours. This has been a monsoon trough that has stayed almost stationary for 6 days. “Australian Rainfall and Runoff” does not adequately cover events that don’t move.
Up until quite recently, “monsoonal” weather was regarded as something that only applied to India and SE Asia. As far as we know, monsoon troughs don’t go round for a second go like cyclones sometimes do. We hope.
The only solution is to design for this type of phenomenon and where cost-effective, refit existing development to be recoverable. The money we waste on ruinable energy needs to be spent on real problems. “100 year” events? More like “100 week” events.
After epic flooding in Townsville, witchdoctors are blaming climate change.
Queensland’s recent extreme weather – bushfires, heatwaves, coral bleaching, drought, Cyclone Penny, Townsville’s floods – showed Queensland is clearly experiencing climate change, Professor Ian Lowe said.
Thus spake the Druid of Runes waving a bunch of multifactor complex processes that have been happening forever, can’t be predicted and only have scary trends if you draw short graphs with no error bars. Verily we see doom, doth payth my grant, or whatever it is that keeps Prof Ian Lowe going. He is allegedly in the Queensland Climate Advisory Council (QCAC) — an organization so successful its only existence on the internet appears to be a sidebar on page 15 of a government PDF. But whoever they are, they’re experts, trust us, that the media doesn’t need to ask for an alternate opinion.
Wouldn’t you know it though, floods seem to happen quite a lot in Townsville
This is not to say that the current floods are not serious but just that Townsville is a floody kind of place. It’d be climate change if things stopped flooding in Townsville.
In 1998 Townsville airport recorded half a meter of rain in 24 hours. It sounds recent but back then CO2 levels were 360ppm. Other parts of the city reached up to 1.3m of rain during the week. But Far North Queensland (FNQ) has a history of insane bouts of rain. Few places on Earth do rain like FNQ. The legendary Bellenden Ker Top is 250km north — the wettest place in Australia. Once in 1979, it got nearly 4 meters of rain in just eight days. Fully 1.5 metres of water fell out of the sky in one day. So who has a rain gauge five feet tall? One year it recorded 12m of rain. The whole area should be surrounded by pool safety fences to comply with council bylaws.
In 1946, The upper Ross River got 200mm of rain in just 2 hours. Call that a rain bomb? They would now, but back then CO2 was only 310ppm, and people just called it a downpour.
Images of Townsville in April 12th 1890
1892: Church wrecked, many small houses washed away, half the population cannot reach the city and business was at a standstill.
A couple of weeks back Gillette thought it would pander to the #Metoo women who do the shopping. Uproar resulted. James Delingpole won’t be buying Gillette in a hurry, but “news sells” and a boycott doesn’t always outdo the mindless sales boost. If you’ve had enough of politically correct advertising, spread the word.
It all goes to show that climate change is the most useless phrase in the English language.
It’s able to be used in so many contradictory ambiguous ways, as to mean everything, and therefore, nothing.
It’s useless to anyone who wants to convey information, but pretty handy for those who want to convey fog instead. Anyone want to prey on the good-but-confused?
Widespread poverty and worsening droughts, floods and other climate risks make Africa particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change
Climate change is always 50 shades of evil:
Yaounde — Teenage girls growing up in Lesotho in areas hit by harsh drought and other climate shocks are more likely to drop out of school, start having sex earlier and contract HIV, researchers say.
Even the IPCC doesn’t really pretend in their scientific hearts that we can predict or attribute the causes of drought and flood, yet here it gets bundled in with “climate change” as if everyone knows that droughts are getting worse (they’re not) and are caused by coal plants.
In a study looking at the link between climate change and HIV infection since antiretroviral (ARV) treatment drugs became widely available in Sub-Saharan Africa, researchers found that severe drought threatens to drive new HIV infections.
And here was everyone thinking that droughts would prevent AIDS.
In the urban areas of Lesotho researchers looked at, droughts were linked to an almost five-fold increase in the number of girls selling sex and a three-fold increase in those being forced into sexual relations.
In Lesotho more than half the population lives on less than $1.90 a day according to World Bank, and 55% grow their own food, making them particularly vulnerable to drought.
So poor people will suffer more from bad weather than rich people. We needed a study for this?
UN dilemma: Should we try to reduce AIDS by changing the weather, or helping the poor get richer.
Hands up who wants to stop AIDS with solar panels?
The BBC is reporting that academics from University College London have discovered that the Little Ice Age was not caused by the record low solar activity of the Maunder Minima, instead it was due to the colonization of the Americas. Thanks mostly to measles and small pox the death toll was so enormous that about 9% of the global population died, supposedly leaving empty farmlands. These were swiftly covered in forests causing a deadly fall in CO2 which cooled the world.
This is an Apocryphal story that virtue signals in so many ways. A kind of triple-point scrabble maneuver combining climate, race, war, forests and imperial colonization in the one story.
Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth’s climate.
That’s the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.
The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation.
This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet.
It’s a cooling period often referred to in the history books as the “Little Ice Age”…
The implications of this are pretty staggering. Firstly, we’re only talking of the regrowth of an area the size of France. What if carbon reduction programs overdo things, then, biffo — ice-age, here we come? It was only a reduction of 7 – 10ppm. And think of the paradox, if we reforest the world, it will become so cold we’re looking at snowball Earth, which will kill all the forests.
If a mere 10ppm loss of CO2 caused a mini ice age, it’s a wonder we’ve survived the 120ppm rise since then. All that extra CO2 seems to only have warmed us back to where we were in the Medieval Warm Period. There is a kind of wormhole here in the maths where negative CO2 units are far more powerful than positive ones.
POST NOTE: Commenter Francis Lacan follows this through on “colonizing Africa”.
February 1, 2019 at 5:38 am Some clever scientists at University College London are suggesting that re-colonising Africa would completely offset the effects of global warming. If you follow there maths, suppressing only a few hundred millions inhabitants would allow vegetation to reclaim land, and “pull down enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet”. QED.
These people are truly bonkers: Listen to the co-author talk about the implications.
Co-author Dr Chris Brierley believes there is [a lesson for modern climate policy]. He said the fall-out from the terrible population crash and re-wilding of the Americas illustrated the challenge faced by some global warming solutions.
“There is a lot of talk around ‘negative emissions’ approaches and using tree-planting to take CO₂ out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate change,” he told BBC News.
What matters here, is it the actual temperature “outcome” or the level of a trace gas?
“And what we see from this study is the scale of what’s required, because the Great Dying resulted in an area the size of France being reforested and that gave us only a few ppm. This is useful; it shows us what reforestation can do. But at the same, that kind of reduction is worth perhaps just two years of fossil fuel emissions at the present rate.”
The lesson is always “more”: more reductions, more money, more rules.
What’s more scary — the amount of the Earth we’d have to reforest to get a perfect climate; the amount of people who have to die; or the lax, one sided training of BBC reporter Johnathon Amos?
What about the 50 million killed in the Black Death?
If human population controls the climate what did Earth do for the first 4.5 billion years?
If the Earth were to freeze or to fry,
Alarmists would always deny,
That the sun played a role,
Which beyond their control,
Would all their false dogma belie.
–Ruairi
h/t to George (Aprils fools day indeed@!) and Bill H. Thank you both.
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