I’m travelling this week, so can’t get to this event, but promised I’d give it a free advert. For people interested in the history of Western Civilization and the role of the Classics and Education in the future of The West. These events are always thought provoking. Stephen Hurworth’s knowledge of the to’s and fro’s and strategic cycles of history is par excellence…
How to Destroy a Perfectly Good Electricity Grid in Three Complicated Steps
It takes skill, money and blind faith to trash decades of good engineering.
Find out how to achieve state-wide blackouts, flying squads of diesel generators, and a tripling of wholesale electricity prices in just five years. Admire the virtue signalling ambition of a nation that controls just 1.5% of human emissions yet is trying to change the global weather by sacrificing its largest export earner and main source of electricity.
Australia once had some of the cheapest electricity in the world to one of the most expensive, even though it has more coal and uranium per person than almost any place on Earth. As renewables go in everywhere, businesses are closing. Even in a sunny and windy nation, seductive free “clean” energy turned out to be a poisonous gift because of all the hidden costs. Hospitals are turning off “spare” lights. Retailers are paying customers not to use electricity and national assets that took two generations to build are being blown up.
The quest to stop storms in 2100 leaves a trail of political turmoil — it has already unseated three Prime Ministers and yet there is no solution in sight.
The Times: Lorry drivers joined the protest movement today as ministers struggled to restore order with at least 35 motorways partially or completely blocked, along with at least 18 motorway sliproads. Barricades were erected across dozens of other roads around the country. — h/t to GWPF for the latest
The climate change collectivist overlords were always going to overdo it
Changing the global climate is such a ridiculously ambitious task that there was never any real limit to the imposts that would be demanded. So the zealots and the rent seekers would take what they could get, and then ask for more in escalating cycles, until the people finally rose up in revolt.
Apparently, the French have hit that point. Its spontaneous chaos, violence, and blockades. But the protest is supported by nearly 4 out 5 people:
Saturday: 227 protesters were injured, the majority of which were caused by drivers attempting to force their way through blockades; one 63-year-old woman attending the gilets jaunes protest in Savoie was killed after a driver “panicked” and accelerated into protesters. 117 people were arrested and 73 were later taken into police custody. Police in Paris deployed tear gas to disperse blockades.
A number of French petrol stations joined the gilets jaunes protest, with branches in Brittany, Dordogne and Normandy closing for the day. The SGP Police-FSMI FO police union urged its members not to issue any tickets on Saturday, in solidarity with the protest. Several high profile politicians, including Jean-Luc Melenchon, attended gilets jaunes blockades.
By Saturday evening more than 1,400 blockades were still active, with protesters declaring their intention to stay overnight. The gilets jaunes protest has drawn strong support from the French people, with 78 per cent saying they believed the blockades were justified.
This is also a story about the power of free speech
A woman gets fed up with the hypocrisy of being told to buy diesel cars to help the environment, only to find that now she is punished for the exact same thing after diesel manfucturers got caught cheating on their emissions tests. But it’s about many other ways too, like by a “forest of radars”. That was October 18th. Then Jacline Mouraud’s video went viral and Saturday over a quarter of a million French people walked the streets in protest.
This is world where Youtube gives enormous power to people to say something that rings. The mainstream media gives up on this kind of power every single day. Youtube is now well known for censoring non-PC organizations and groups and demonetizing them. But as long as anyone can post a video, anyone can start a revolution.
As long as we have free speech…
You can switch on subtitles and auto translate (it’s only so good)
This is about renewable energy
It’s a giant leaderless group wearing yellow vests — a symbol of workers against the overlords. The irony is the French government apparently commanded car drivers to carry them, so everyone is “equipped” with protest material:
Alex Ledsom, Forbes
The French have taken to the streets today in a mass protest against the government’s increase in petrol taxes. President Macron has defended the plan as part of a wider movement to shift France towards a transport policy based on renewable energy sources. The question is, who will win?
The ‘gilets jaunes’ — so named after the high-visibility orange vests motorists are required to wear when they break down — parked up their cars in the early hours of this morning on all main arterial routes through major cities. Leaving just one lane open for most of the day, thousands of French people have been hanging out on motorways all day, protesting at what they perceive to be year-on-year hikes hitting the people hardest who use their cars to get to work. Interestingly, the ‘gilets jaunes‘ have no discernible leader, and no political support; it was organised by a series of Facebook groups talking to one another, which has made it difficult for the police to understand where they should have stationed officers this morning.
Monraud’s video
Mouraud’s video went viral, and has been viewed by more than six million people. “I have a thing or two to tell you,” she starts out. The stream of accusations includes the price of fuel, the “hunt” for diesel vehicles, the “forest” of radars, the number of traffic tickets, the possibility tolls may be charged to enter large towns and rumours of mandatory bicycle registration.
“What are you doing with the dough, apart from changing the china at the Élysée and building a swimming pool?” Mouraud asks Macron.
She is a hypotist and spiritual medium, so Macron’s team went for the standard tool, the ad hom attack:
A senior adviser to Macron spoke scathingly of “this Madame Mouraud who generates spirits from under her fingernails”. He expressed consternation that a video “stuffed with lies” has reached such a wide audience, saying: “I have the feeling that our democracy is also at stake.”
It’s a powderkeg:
A poll published by Ifop on November 14th indicates two-thirds of French people expect a “social explosion” in coming months.
According to the IEA, France is sitting on 80% of Europe’s frackable gas – enough to keep the country self-sufficient in energy for centuries. But the Macron government has just banned, not only fracking, but any extraction of any fossil fuels whatsoever on mainland France.
The left in France has been tying itself in knots, supporting the popular movement against rising fuel prices and at the same time calling for a rising tax on carbon. Even the productivist communist party is resolutely green (in anti-capitalist way, of course.) Already the Rassemblement National (ex- Front National) is the most popular party among working class voters.
There’ll be blackouts this summer if nothing is done, AEMO report warns
Stephanie Dalzell, ABC News
Victoria and South Australia are at a high risk of forced blackouts this summer if no action is taken, according to the latest report by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).
Not enough supply? Put another million bucks on the BBQ:
To stop that from occurring, the AEMO has sourced emergency energy reserves, which are typically not available to the market and are only accessed when supply is not keeping up with demand.
Those emergency reserves — otherwise known as Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader (RERT) resources — do not come cheap.
The demand for reserves has been increased this season by the loss of 240 megawatts of thermal generation that its owners have told the market operator will not be available to meet short-term spikes in demand or the loss of generation elsewhere in the National Electricity Market.
The Australian Energy Market Operator is seeking up to 930MW of reserve power to reinforce the NEM during what is expected to be a hotter, drier summer and an earlier bushfire season.
What if 5,000MW of wind or solar capacity was not available tomorrow? That’s not an emergency, it’s business as usual. Every day we pay for back up reserve power lest the wind and solar generators take the day off.
Emergency action includes …”recalling mothballed gas-generation plants in Tasmania, Queensland and SA, diesel generators, and “demand response measures’’ that pay users to switch off their power.”
What do we do when renewables cause instability and price spikes — add more:
But the system operator stated more energy generation and storage capacity would enter the market in time for summer. As much as 2100MW of new energy capacity — mainly from wind and solar generation — will be added to the grid by December.
Another 2GW of renewables coming in the next month. Just what we need!
A new grassroots group is forming to lobby to get Australia out of the Paris Patsy Agreement. The people who are fed up with us being The Crash Test Dummies of Renewables include movers and shakers, professors, farmers, MP’s, executive giants of the mining and medical research industry, engineers, and surgeons. It includes Larry Pickering (cartoonist), Hugh Morgan, Alan Moran, Ian Plimer, Jerry Ellis, John Stone, Peter Farrell (ResMed), Ron Manners, Gina Rheinhart, Geoff Bennett, Colin Boyce, Bob Bryan, Ron Pike, David Archibald, Prof Ivan Kennedy, Prof Peter Ridd, Bill Kininmonth (former head of the National Climate Centre) and so many more. Credit to Viv Forbes of Carbonsense.
My thoughts on why we need The Saltbush Club:
“Who speaks for consumers? Our elected reps are supposed to, but few are willing to speak up. There is a $1.5 trillion dollar global industry that wants Australia to accept Paris, but no debate about the vested interests that stand to profit while Australian consumers and businesses pay carbon taxes they have voted against every time they had the chance.”
Skilled and Thinking Australians concerned at the huge costs and unproven benefits of the climate, energy and infrastructure policies on both sides of Federal Parliament.
A new lobby group comprising scientists, farmers, consumers, small business and big business is urging both sides of Australian politics to put aside party interests and global agendas to focus on what’s best for Australian business, workers, consumers and the environment.
The Saltbush Club calls for Australia to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and to cease financing or supporting the international bodies promoting it.
It challenges the whole idea of a consensus on man-made global warming.
Jerry Ellis, retired chairman of BHP, and Founding Chairman of the Saltbush Club says:
“It is clear that Australia’s push to meet the Paris carbon dioxide emission targets is leading to higher electricity prices and unreliable supply. We have lost the balance between working for environmental outcomes and working for economic outcomes. These things need to be balanced, and this balance is missing with the Paris Agreement. The world would be a better place with strong economies generating money to spend on poverty, health, infrastructure and the environment.”
Hugh Morgan, CEO of Western Mining 1990-2003 and a director of the Saltbush Club agrees:
“People think the Paris Accord is just about commitments to lower CO2. It is really about transferring wealth via the UN to the so-called Less Developed Countries. It’s about advancing centralised control of people’s lives on a global scale. This climate alarm movement has got so far because of backing by Western millennials who have been indoctrinated during their education. Enjoying living standards unprecedented in world history, they have embraced alarmism as a new secular religion.”
Ellis and Morgan are supported by a large, skilled and experienced group of other Australians calling themselves “The Saltbush Club”. The group was organised by Viv Forbes (with a few helpers), from a country farm-house in Queensland with no landline, no NBN and less than $3,000 in financial support.
Forbes says:
“The Saltbush Club has over 200 foundation members, plus a bigger group of “silent” members. It will be a voice for those who are rarely heard in the climate and energy debate – those consumers of electricity who are concerned that the war on hydro-carbon energy has increased the costs and reduced the reliability of electricity for industry and private consumers.
“It welcomes anyone with a similar view, regardless of their political affiliations or leanings.
“We must reject the UN Agenda which is crippling western industry with high-cost unreliable electricity in a futile attempt to control global climate.”
“Our top priority is to have Australia withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and to cease financing or supporting the international bodies promoting it.”
Jo Nova (a well-read blogger and Saltbush Media Director) added:
“Who speaks for consumers? Our elected reps are supposed to, but few are willing to speak up. There is a $1.5 trillion dollar global industry that wants Australia to accept Paris, but no debate about the vested interests that stand to profit while Australian consumers and businesses pay carbon taxes they have voted against every time they had the chance.”
Viv Forbes
To join, send an email to Viv Forbes <forbes AT saltbushclub.com>. Obviously replace AT with @.
Miners, scientists, farmers, business people.
The Australian mistakenly announced it as a “mining lobby group” because a few giants of Australian mining have added their names in support. But it is nothing of the sort. Indeed it says something that while former executives of mining companies are often skeptics, most current executives and industry organizations are avowedly not. Former executives have a freedom to speak their minds that current execs do not. Some in the media and in politics openly punish politically-incorrect views. CEO’s fear offending the likely next government and being called a “denier”, or pander to unscientific weather-changing policies because they profit from riding the Green Gravy Train. (Can we talk about the vested interests?) If there was civility about other opinions, and no renewable subsidies to skew the market, current executives might say something quite different.
Hugh Morgan, one of Australia’s most outspoken and influential conservative voices, has joined former BHP chairman Jerry Ellis to lead a new lobby group calling for Australia to leave the Paris Agreement and stop funding global climate-change efforts.
Mr Morgan, a Liberal Party member and former chief executive of Western Mining Corporation, said Western millennials had embraced alarmism over climate change as a new secular religion after being indoctrinated by the education system.
An update on the graph that is death to climate models
Good people of Earth are spending thousands of billions of dollars to prevent a future predicted by models that we know don’t work. The debate is over, climate spending is an unscientific, pagan, theological quest to change the weather. Just another iteration of what Druids and Witchdoctors have been promising for eons. Don’t expect the vested interests that profit from this Golden Climate Gravy Train to tell you this.
The top 23 global coupled climate models don’t understand the climate and can’t predict it. Our CO2 emissions are accelerating, the effect should be amplifying, but millions of weather balloons and satellites that circle the Earth 24 hours a day show unequivocally that the models are wrong.
TROPICAL MID-TROPOSPHERIC TEMPERATURE VARIATIONS MODELS vs OBSERVATIONS 5-Year Averages, 1979-2016 – Trend line crosses zero at 1979 for all time series
The Climate Study Group have placed this graph in an advert (why do skeptics have to pay to get graphs like this — a public service — printed?)
Acolytes and fellow parasites will say that surface temperatures measured by NASA and Hadley show the models are consistent within the bounds of estimates, and error bars, blah, blah, balony blah.
Grown ups will reply that the Hadley Met Centre uses thermometers near airport tarmacs and air conditioners (when they are lucky enough to even have thermometers). It’s a shonky, degraded dataset with barely any data before 1950, and it starts with freezing tropical islands and boats roaming around on land and then adjusts up the kazoo to make it even worse. The NASA set uses the same bad equipment, holey data, and adjusts by the kazoo squared. The past is constantly changing, the trends are fitted post hoc to the models and the results don’t fit historical records, or satellite data and the weather balloons.
They will protest and say their trends fit the RSS satellite data. They won’t tell you that UAH satellite dataset is better because it agrees with the weather balloons, tosses out inconsistent satellite measurements, uses three channels not one, and uses satellites free of diurnal drift to estimate errors in others. The RSS set is internally inconsistent, starts with model estimates, not observations, leaves in an error that creates artificial warming, then corrects it just in time to stop the exact same error from creating cooling. What do you call a dataset with part-time non-random errors? Junk.
The Christy Graph has all the data we need. It’s as close as we’ll ever get to proof the models are guesswork that failed.
Stop pouring trillions of dollars into a hole.
Thanks to Tom Quirk, John Christy and The Climate Study Group.
Thanks to the Californian conflagration, Global Climate Superstition is here again to tell us that fires in coal plants cause fires in forests. Scientists, on the other hand, find that as emissions got higher there was a fall in wildfires globally, droughts didn’t get worse and winds have slowed.
The witchdoctors play on the Back in the days when people rowed their battleships to war, the megadroughts were really mega. Despite all the mechanization (or probably because of it) global biomass burning was lower in the last century than anytime since Julius Caesar.
If CO2 is the driving force behind fires apparently we need more of it.
When it comes to fire, temperature is not as important as wind speed, fuel load, and the density of arsonists.
Last we heard, winds were slowing globally at a rate of 0.5km/hour. The great Global Stilling can’t be bad for fires (though it can’t be good for wind farms). Perhaps a slightly slower wind is irrelevant. But then if half a kilometer per hour of wind doesn’t matter, why does half a degree of warming? Judging by the actual area burned by fires, not.
As Willis Eschenbach points out California is only warming by 0.02°C per decade, and the rain has only declined “by a totally meaningless five-hundredths of an inch (1.1 mm) per decade.”
The area being burnt around the globe has been … shrinking.
Figure 2. Wildfire occurrence (a) and corresponding area burnt (b) in the European Mediterranean region for the period 1980 – 2010. Source: San-Miguel-Ayanz et al. [37].
As Doerr and Santini say, it’s not just the recent past, but the long term trend too:
Analysis of charcoal records in sediments (Marlon et al) and isotope-ratio records in ice cores (Wang et al) suggest that global biomass burning during the past century has been lower than at any time in the past 2000 years.
Could this be a coincidence? Perhaps fossil fuel powered trucks, bulldozers, helicopters and chainsaws, plus fossil-fuel-launched satellites are better at making firebreaks, identifying spot fires, and stopping fires from spreading?
When wowsers banned alcohol in the US, the price of beer rose sevenfold. Nick Cater points at rising coal share prices and ponders that the Green divestment plan to reduce coal use works just as well as prohibition did. Divestment shrinks capital inflow to coal mines, so there are fewer new mines, and less coal available. But people still want just as much coal as they ever did, so the price of coal goes up instead of down. Good news for coal investors. Too bad about those on the poverty line. Put some more dung in the barbie…..
Once again Green economics amounts to Wish Fairy Declarations. The first Law of Free Markets is Supply and Demand. The Greens might have changed the “supply” slightly (temporarily, and only in some countries) but demand hasn’t changed, so supply will rebound.
To help the poor afford coal the only ethical thing to do is invest in coal mining:
Nick Cater, The Australian
History is unlikely to be kind to them. Coercive attempts to stop the use of fossil fuels are delivering the same perverse economic consequences as the attempts to close down American saloon bars in the 1920s. The consumers pay more for a substance they choose not to live without, while the producers count the profits.
A report released last week by international financial analysts Redburn predicts a similar result from the activist-driven campaign against fossil fuel companies.
The attempt to starve coal producers of capital has impeded their attempts to build new coal mines but it hasn’t got in the way of profits. The price of coal has risen to a six-year high, which is good news for the coal business but bad news if you’re living in, say, India’s Bihar state, where three out of four households don’t have electricity.
“Energy prices will need rise to the level at which the marginal consumer of fossil fuels is incentivised not to be a consumer,” Redburn reports. “In other words, the 1 to 2 billion people on the planet with zero or unreliable access to modern energy would remain priced out of the market.”
Guide to being ethical — do NOT what the Greens do:
Redburn’s analysts turn the tables on so-called ethical investors by forcing them to confront the consequences of fossil fuel divestment, a phenomenon that has swept university campuses, shareholder meetings and boardrooms, much as anti-alcohol mania did a century ago.
“Given the pernicious consequences of energy undersupply, we would go so far as to argue that the socially responsible investor has a duty to ensure capital is available to the fossil fuel industry, for as long as it is needed,” they write.
One pities those who may have taken their financial advice from Choice, which in 2014 seized on a dismal report from the Australia Institute to predict that fossil fuel shares were heading south.
The closures and “heartbreaking” decisions are escalating as electricity contracts for businesses are being renegotiated in the new era of higher wholesale electricity prices. Family run operations that have survived for 40 years are being destroyed. Years of work, investment and training are being erased.
“This is the biggest business crisis I’ve seen in my lifetime,” said Peter Strong, chief executive of the Council of Small Business Australia. “The GFC was managed and it affected everybody, but this is only Australia and we cannot see a solution.
“What we’re hearing is terrible. We’re seeing closures have already started, I fully expect there will be more closures and staff put off. When you’re running a small supermarket, where do you find an extra $70,000?”
Businesses are more exposed to the rapidly rising wholesale electricity costs than householders are, and long term contracts are being renegotiated. As they do, rises of 120% are hitting small businesses.
The price hikes hitting businesses of up 120 per cent — dwarfing the 20 per cent increases faced by households — have been partly blamed on the closure of cheap coal-fired power stations, including Hazelwood in Victoria and Playford in South Australia.
Another key driver has been the high price of gas, partially due to a shortage of east coast domestic supply.
Managing director [of Plastic Granulating Services] Stephen Scherer said his monthly electricity bill had increased from about $80,000 to $180,000 over the past year-and-a-half,…
Blame Tony Abbott, what else?
Sadly Peter Strong thinks the problem is a mythical creature called a “policy deadlock”. The only deadlock in Australia is the poison grip of rampant renewables subsidies which have relentlessly increased year after year without missing a day:
The small business lobby group says urgent action is needed to resolve the decade-long national deadlock on energy policy in the face of what’s being described as a bigger crisis than the GFC.
Mr Strong hit out at the Liberal backbench for being too focused on “ideology”. “The dissenters in the Libs need to shut up and go away,” he said.
“Tony Abbott in particular is the reason nothing has been done. The Finkel Report is a good report and it needs to be actioned. To promise power prices would go down [through scrapping the carbon tax] and to have them go up 110 per cent is one of the biggest policy failures we’ve ever seen.”
Abbott couldn’t have solved the electricity rises unless he axed the RET. Axing the carbon tax helped, but was not enough.
Someone needs to write to Peter Strong. Ask him what kind of electricity and policy kept small businesses running for 40 years.
Unreliable renewables are destroying businesses, the last thing we need is more of them.
Some days I wonder if I should spread stories that make us sound like a recidivist third-world backwater struggling to maintain our voltage. But the ABC is already smashing away.
Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be another drawback to solar panels, lo! Solar Panels are pushing up the voltage at midday often as high as 253 Volts when it supposed to be more like 230 to 240V. This means appliances are using more electricity, that makes bills even higher. It may also be breaking appliances (making other bills go higher too). We’re not really sure about that, but when that study is done, it’ll already be 1.8 million panels too late.
Non-solar users are paying for this surge (and the appliances) — for every 1% increase in voltage, the costs go up 0.7%. Then, to ice that gravy-cake, the inverters on solar panels are also shutting off at 253V, meaning that poor home owners who paid thousands are not generating power for the grid. All up, solar is bad for you, bad for them, bad for our light-globes.
The warning comes from groups running the electricity networks in Australia.
Spot the key word missing from the ABC headline — starts with ‘s’, ends in ‘lar’:
Travel 40% of the way through the article to find the key point:
Andrew Dillon, spokesman for Energy Networks Australia, the peak body for Australia’s poles and wires companies] said the rapid uptake of rooftop solar systems was a particular issue for the networks, because solar systems are supplying extra electricity to the grid, and boosting voltages.
But to be fair, the ABC did highlight “solar” in the three key points at the top — wait for it: “Voltage” can be a problem, but solar panels can only be victims. No sacred cows are sacrificed in this story.
Key points
Higher voltage on power supply to homes is a major concern, researchers say
Impact on home appliances and potential ‘burnout’ needs more research
Could be causing a significant amount of solar energy to be wasted
Solution: give us more money, try another experiment
“There are technologies we could adopt today, to be able to manage the voltage challenges we have from solar better than we are now,” he said.
“The problem we have is we are not willing to pay billions of dollars further on the network … [we’re] after a smart, cost-effective transition.”
Some poles and wires companies are trialling voltage reduction on a large scale, and there is evidence that this could cut electricity consumption.
Don’t mention the third way: Stop subsidizing weather-changing-white-solar- elephants, and ask solar owners to cover the costs to stabilize the system as is. We could make a case that solar owners should be subsidizing bill payers who have been carrying the cost.
Higher voltage means higher bills
The results of a recent trial, by the Victorian network United Energy, showed that when voltage was reduced at 20 substations in and around Melbourne, every 1 per cent reduction in voltage saw, on average, an estimated 0.69 per cent reduction in demand for electricity.
But there is also research by the Queensland network Energex showing the scale of the problem the networks are facing.
When Energex reviewed almost 34,000 of the electrical transformers on its network in 2014, it found 76 per cent of the transformers were set too high, and were sending too much voltage through to households.
“Lucky”, a quarter of transformers in Queensland might be working properly. Err, “congrats”.
High voltages turn solar PV in white elephants
Above 253V solar panel inverters themselves shut off, making the panels into white elephants just at the point when they are generating the most electricity.
High volts could mean wasted solar
There is one area where high voltage is definitely causing headaches, and that is for people who have installed rooftop solar systems.
Pensioner Paul Ryan installed solar panels on his house in the Victorian town of Warragul more than a year ago, but for much of that time they have not been working. The system often has to shut off to protect itself from high voltages coming in from the grid.
“It turned out to be a bit of a white elephant in a sense,” Mr Ryan told 7.30.
Rooftop solar systems are designed to operate at a few volts higher than the grid, so they can feed electricity back into the local network.
But with network voltage supplied to households already running at the high end, solar energy feeding into the grid can boost the volts even higher, and over the 253-volt limit — causing solar inverters to shut off.
The whole point of solar panels is to stop storms and hold back the tide which makes them a white elephant from the moment they are installed. The high voltage cut-off makes white elephants into double elephants.
Not something you want on the roof.
With 1.8 million solar systems installed in Australian homes and businesses, a significant amount of renewable energy may simply be wasted.
Not to mention the significant billions used to install equipment that was never going to achieve anything bar making expensive green electrons that we didn’t need in the first place.
The next ice coming to Europe might look something like the last ice age shown in this simulation. A time when Venice will be top of a long paddock that stretches to Albania.
In school children are taught to hyperventilate about the last 30m retreat of glaciers that never stayed put ever.
Instead, they could be studying this… (click to start)
At the 24,000 year BC point glaciers have wiped out Zurich, Bern, Geneva.
Image the effect on people if this were shown everytime a Swiss Alps disaster story was run?
About 25000 years ago, Alpine Glaciers filled most of the valleys and even extended onto the plains. Using a computer model that contains knowledge on glacier physics based on modern observations of Greenland and Antarctica and laboratory experiments on ice, help from traces left by glaciers on the landscape, and one of the fastest computers in the world, this animation is an attempt to reconstruct of the evolution of Alpine Glaciers in time from 120000 years ago to today.
Glacier recession has led to an upward migration of Alpine plants at a rate of 0.5 – 4 m per decade. In the long run, lowland plants will displace Alpine species to ever-higher altitudes until they simply have nowhere to go at all, effectively forcing them into extinction.
But one day, sometime, they will come back. Then what?
The Rhone Glacier, Glacier hotel and Furka Road, Valais, Switzerland. Circa 1890 – 1900.
REFERENCE
J. Seguinot, S. Ivy-Ochs, G. Jouvet, M. Huss, M. Funk, and F. Preusser. Modelling last glacial cycle ice dynamics in the Alps, *The Cryosphere*, 12, 3265-3285, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-3265-2018, 2018.
Wind turbines either kill or scare away three quarters of buzzards, hawks and kites at three sites in India. That makes them the new “top predator” in the ecosystem according to new research. Perhaps not the niche that Greens were expecting wind farms to occupy.
It’s not all bad news though, fan-throated lizards are pretty happy about not being dinner.
The term is not scary — at last not in a visceral, skin-crawling sense. Scientists have shown that the likely 2 degrees of global warming to come this century will be extremely dangerous, but, you know, “2 degrees” is hardly a phrase from nightmares and horror films.
How about “rat explosion”?
As the climate warms, rats in New York, Philadelphia and Boston are breeding faster — and experts warn of a population explosion.
Climate change only makes bad things live and grow stronger:
The physics of climate change doesn’t have the same fear factor as the biology. … so populations will crash or explode as anthropogenic climate change continues to make wet areas more sodden and dry areas, more parched.
What genius research is this:
… rats have a gestation period of 14 days. The babies can start reproducing after a month. That means that in one year, one pregnant rat can result in 15,000 to 18,000 new rats.
Holy Rodent! Someone has discovered exponential growth and applied no limits. And E.Coli shall take over the world in the next 48 hours, except they never do.
It’s the Mathusian Growth Model, without even Malthus’ limits.
But it’s not just rats, think locusts and marauding urchins!
Rats are just the beginning. Biologists have calculated that with the expected warming this century of 2 degrees Celsius, populations of dangerous crop-eating insects are likely to explode as temperate areas warm, reducing crop yields by 25 to 50 percent. Similar horrors lurk offshore, where biologists have found that a population explosion of purple sea urchins — “cockroaches of the ocean” — is choking out other denizens of Pacific kelp forests.
Forget rodents, we are being over by pop-psychologists:
The worst thing about ignorant, uninformed waffle is that the people doing it are Professors of Psych:
In recent years, psychologists have accused conservatives of being more innately fearful than liberals, but that never quite squared with the fact that conservatives express less fear over environmental problems.
There’s a difference between fear of real things, and fear of fake ones. Anyone who studies conservatives knows that they are afraid of losing jobs, quality of life, and the building blocks of a fragile, brilliant civilization. Anyone who studies the modern incarnation of “progressives” knows they worry about forests that are greening, crops that are increasing, and whether we have got the labels right on toilet doors.
Naturally, we all can’t wait to go back to a time when CO2 levels were perfect and rat plagues never happened.
Unpermitted words have a Weapons-Grade power over useful words at a rate of a billion to one
Speak a Forbidden Term and your entire career can be neutralized instantly. It doesn’t matter how many other useful ideas or contributions you make. Any breach unleashes a tidal wave of unrighteous indignation. Then the honest players fold like daffodils in a breeze and leap to carry out the judgement of twitter mobs. Why do good people help the Lynch Mob every time?
The permitted word list is defined by the PC mob, it changes at random, and post hoc, and only applies to people who threaten collectivist power. Eminent scientists can be called “deniers” as if they are mental morons, they can be likened to pedophiles, asbestos-pushers and Hitler, and that’s not only OK, those people get lavish taxpayer funded careers and prizes. (Not mentioning any names Stephan Lewandowsky and Robyn Williams.)
Freedom of Speech is under threat — we have to stand up to this
Tuesday, Ross Cameron said the four forbidden words “slanty-eyed, yellow-skinned“. Rude, yes, dynamite, no. They were better left unsaid, and potentially offensive, but not a sackable offence.
Suddenly the experienced former MP and long time commentator was a Proven Racist, which, like a dose of social Ebola, means he had to be excised lest his condition infect the rest of the show, or even the entire channel. Lordy, deranged Twitter Mobs might call Sky The-Channel-of-Racists! But here’s the thing, they already do that anyway.
As Andrew Bolt points out Ross was defending China. Co-host Rowan Dean told him off for sounding like an advert.
Ross Cameron has made decades of contributions to the national dialogue, with millions of useful words, but none of that counts if we reduce a whole person to a binary dot. In a one-nil national debate you are either a person or a racist! Thus everything he ever says on any topic can now be met with the inane “rascist” namecalling. That is, as long as we let namecallers control the conversation.
Think about the incredible power of these four words. Who died? Which trade deal was axed? The over-reaction (by non-Chinese people) is a patronizing put-down, as if the Chinese are such weak petals they can’t handle a colorful description or an old demeaning cliche.
Kevin Rudd thinks it’s all so important he declared Rupert Murdoch practically employed Ross Cameron to say this. “They knew exactly what they were doing”. Apparently defending China for 6.9 out of 7 minutes is an “extreme right wing view”. Shows what KRudd knows about politics.
Instead of sacking him, Outsiders could have invited some actual Chinese people on the show to reply. Ross could’ve explained himself face to face (if they wanted that, but they probably have more important things to discuss). Let him face that music. Why not find out whether Chinese people preferred Ross’s commentary to Rowan’s. That’s what a national conversation looks like. Not like a witchhunt.
Ross Cameron on Outsiders
A seven minute long monologue from Ross about the importance and achievements of China. Forbidden words at 5:20.
The Punishment Does Not Fit “the Crime”
Sacking him feeds the DeletePeople Movement, giving them a power they don’t deserve and destroying any chance of a sophisticated national debate.
A few weeks ago a CSIRO boat mapped out a string of 3 kilometer high seamounts that no one knew about. They are 400km east of Tasmania and sit in water 5 km deep (so no one is going to run into them, even in a military sub.)
But remember, even though 80% of the ocean floor is unmapped, and we haven’t even logged, named or noticed thousands of volcanoes, we *know* that they are not heating the ocean, changing ocean currents, or affecting our climate. Skillless models tell us so. (Pay us your money).
“We’ve only mapped a tiny fraction of the ocean floor,” said Andrew Fisher, a marine geologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the new discovery. “We have more detailed maps of Mars, Venus and the moon than we do of the seafloor. Other planetary bodies can be mapped in high resolution with satellites, but on Earth, the water layer gets in the way. The only way is to go out with ships.”
More than 80 percent of the ocean remains unmapped and unexplored, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That’s because it’s difficult and time consuming to create detailed seafloor maps. Sonar-equipped research vessels like the Investigator must make a series of passes over an area in a process Fisher likened to mowing a lawn.
The lost world was uncovered during detailed seafloor mapping by CSIRO research vessel Investigator while on a 25-day research voyage led by scientists from the Australian National University (ANU).
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Some days I wonder if I should spread stories that make us sound like a recidivist third-world backwater struggling to maintain our voltage. But the ABC is already smashing away.
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