Perth is set to become the world’s first ‘Ghost City’ according to a long-term weather forecaster and a news anchor. “I’m reading here that unless drastic action is taken, Perth could become the world’s first ghost city – a modern metropolis abandoned by the 1.7 million people there for lack of water,” she said.
As I write, the remnants of a small cyclone are raining down on us in midsummer, which the ABC earlier warned was a “deluge” dropping “three months of rain”. What they don’t mention is that, even before this “downpour” (of 90 mm or 4 inches so far), Perth Dams already have 35% more water than at the same time last year, and an extra 69 gigalitres of the precious wet stuff. We have more water than we’ve had since 2009, and more is on the way.
So far in the last 24 hours we’ve had 90mm, which is unusual for Perth in summer, but hardly a “deluge”. Perhaps that’s why the ABC changed their headline.
The Water Corp says 70 Billion Litres is Nothing to See Here…
You might think this was “good”, but the WA Water Corporation helpfully explains that this extra 70 billion litres is “little”, “slight” and may not even be from rainfall, (though those figures are strangely unavailable):
What does this mean?
Our metro dams are currently holding 35%more water
than this time last year.
Perth’s recent rainfall is welcome but it has made little difference to our dam levels. While it may look like dam levels are increasing slightly at this time of year, this may not be the result of increased streamflow. The water in our dams is no longer just made up of inflows from rain. Groundwater and desalinated water are stored in these dams during periods of low demand so it is available when it is most needed in the hotter months.
And if that extra 70GL is not from rain, somebody tell me why we might be pumping groundwater or adding expensive desalinated water into our dams in a year with average rainfall?
Rivers in the southwest region of WA are struggling to cope with the impact of climate change despite average winter rainfalls returning to the area.
Got more rain than usual? That’s climate change:
Mr Kelly said the February rainfall was another example of climate change where more extreme and unusual weather is predicted.
“River flows are one of the best indicators for measuring the effects of reduced rainfall,” he said.
Because when you get extra rainfall we need to talk about the effects of something that didn’t happen.
“What this year shows is there is no escaping the impact of climate change, which is not only reducing flow to our water supply dams but to our rivers as well.”
Another effect of climate change is that journalists will write self-evident contradictions, internally inconsistent stories, and general click-bait meaningless climate drivel. The well of nonsense is deep and no end is in sight, no matter what the climate does.
And general climate noise can always provide mindless cherry-pickable truthisms:
By Crikey! Birds are deliberately using fire as a tool. Humans are not the only animals on Earth setting things on fire.
Aerial arsonists are on the loose. Sneaky Australian raptors have been spotted picking up burning sticks, or even stealing them from a campfire and then deliberately dropping them on grass so they can feast on rodents fleeing from the fire. Apparently they do this in hunting packs, and will drop the burning stick half a mile away on the far side of waterways or roads. Aboriginal people have been talking about this for years, but no one quite believed it.
This really puts a spanner in the works of the fire management plans. So much for firebreaks.
Someone is going to have to get these birds to apply for permits.
Australian raptors can spread fires. Credit: Bob Gosford
Three species of raptors — predatory birds with sharp beaks and talons, and keen eyesight — are widely known not only for lurking on the fringes of fires but also for snatching up smoldering grasses or branches and using them to kindle fresh flames, to smoke out mammal and insect prey.
Dick Eussen thought he had the fire beat. It was stuck on one side of a highway deep in the Australian outback. But it didn’t look set to jump. And then, suddenly, without warning or obvious cause, it did.
Eussen, a veteran firefighter in the Northern Territory, set off after the new flames. He found them, put them out, then looked up into the sky.
What he saw sounds now like something out of a fairy tale or dark myth. A whistling kite, wings spread, held a burning twig in its talons. It flew about 20 metres ahead of Eussen and dropped the ember into the brittle grass.
And the fire kicked off once again.
All told that day, Eussen put out seven new flare-ups, according to a research paper published recently in the Journal of Ethnobiology. All of them, he claims, were caused by the birds and their burning sticks.
What’s more, the paper argues, the birds might well have been doing it on purpose.
According to the team, firehawk raptors congregate in hundreds along burning fire fronts, where they will fly into active fires to pick up smouldering sticks, transporting them up to a kilometre (0.6 miles) away to regions the flames have not yet scorched.
“The imputed intent of raptors is to spread fire to unburned locations – for example, the far side of a watercourse, road, or artificial break created by firefighters – to flush out prey via flames or smoke,” the researchers write.
Live Science:
Scientists recently collected and evaluated reports from Aboriginal and nonindigenous people of these so-called firehawks — black kites (Milvus migrans), whistling kites (Haliastur sphenurus) and brown falcons (Falco berigora)
The range of the birds’ reported fire stealing spans a significant area measuring approximately 1,490 by 620 miles (2,400 by 1,000 kilometers) across part of northern Australia, the scientists reported.
From their reports, a behavioral pattern emerged: Firehawks (also described as kitehawks, chickenhawks and, on several occasions by non-Aboriginals, s—hawks) purposely swiped burning sticks or grasses from smoldering vegetation — or even from human cooking fires — and then made off with the brands and dropped them into unburned areas…
Mark Bonta, Robert Gosford, Dick Eussen,Nathan Ferguson Erana LovelessMaxwell Witwer (2017) Intentional Fire-Spreading by “Firehawk” Raptors in Northern Australia, Journal of Ethnobiology Dec 2017 : Vol. 37, Issue 4 Special Section: Birds II, pg(s) 700- 718 https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-37.4.700
Now temperatures on Venus reach 250°C with powerful 300mph winds. Hawking says a greenhouse effect burned the planet’s oceans and lands, and that something similar could happen right here on Earth if climate change continues unabated.
“Next time you meet a climate-change denier, tell them to take a trip to Venus; I will pay the fare,” says the physicist in his show.
Sadly, Hawking is an atmosphere-denier. Venus’s atmosphere is ninety times denser than the Earths. The lapse rate* just goes on and on through 60 kilometers of “air” and Venus ends up with a 467 degree surface, just like Earth would if it had an atmosphere this thick. (See these calculations.)
When Hawking yells “Venus”, I yell back “Mars”. Both have atmospheres of 95% CO2, but one is 467 degrees and the other is minus 40. Hawking may say “but the Martian atmosphere is thin”. I would say “Exactly“! It’s not the percentage of CO2 that matters most, it’s the thickness of the atmosphere.
On Earth, to get the same atmospheric pressure you need to get down about a kilometer below sea-level or 50 kilometers down a mine shaft, which is 40 kilometers deeper than anyone has ever dug.
Hawking can save himself the money for my fare to Venus, and get himself a ticket to Mars. He wants to go to there anyway, so I’m doing him a favour.
Compare the outrage: Germany abandons carbon target, but stays in Paris agreement. US abandons Paris, but makes actual “carbon” cuts. One of these nations is a global pariah.
— a potential embarrassment for Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Oh.? Well, it’s only dates and numbers anyway:
Instead, they would aim to hit the 40 percent target in the early 2020s, the sources said, adding that both parties are still sticking to their goal of achieving a 55 percent cut in emissions by 2030.
Which is more important, paper promises you don’t keep, or lower outputs of “planet destroying gas”? Nevermind about CO2.
In the past year alone, more than 2,000 employees in this sector have lost their jobs. Locations like Carbon Rotec in Lemwerder or Powerblades in Bremerhaven have been closed. The Hamburg wind turbine manufacturer Senvion had to go 660 full-time employees. Nordex , the second large wind power company based in the Hanseatic city, wants to cut up to 500 jobs due to eroding profits. And Enercon, the German market leader with more than 20,000 employees worldwide, recently announced “unpopular measures” to cut costs.
Read the article. Try to explain the problem in 25 words or less. As far as I can tell, for some reason, the German government cannot design enough loopholes to allow this revolutionary, cheap, technology to make a decent profit.
Tony Thomas has unearthed a ten year old document that reads like a wet dream for mini-climate dictators. It envisages, by 2028, that the first climate skeptics will be convicted of denying the existence of climate change and exiled to three penal colonies in, wait for it, Kerguelen Island, South Georgia and New Zealand’s South Island. Magically, these are “International convict settlements.” So it’s globalist prisons for the deplorables who say unpermitted things, because they are so bad, we wouldn’t want them mixing with normal criminals back home who believe in climate change but rort the carbon markets.
Luckily their fantasy fiction is even less accurate than climate models. By 2030 they are tipping Africa as an economic powerhouse:
2030 … the global economy today is less dominated by the big three of China, India and the US. Instead, economic blocs such as the African Union, the Latin American Trade Council and the Alliance of Turkic States have emerged as powerful players on the scene.
As Tony Thomas points out they also estimated oil would rise from $150 in 2008 to $400 by 2022. So far it has risen all the way to $60. They also predicted a global depression in 2009-18. Instead we got “Dow Record highs “. I guess they didn’t see Donald Trump coming either.
And by 2020 they predict that not only will there be no snow in the Northern Hemisphere, there will be “No more Winter.” Though I expect Canadians and Americans are disappointed to know that five feet of snow can still fall in a New Year “spring”.
This dream is so wet it should come with flood warnings:
“In most cases this [emissions control] has happened gradually, ratcheting up over time, with citizens surrendering control of their lives piecemeal rather than all at once, as trading regimes, international law, lifestyles and business have responded to the growing environmental crisis.
“Expensive, state-funded information campaigns reinforce the need for changes to lifestyles and aim to keep the mandate for state intervention strong. Inevitably parallels are drawn between this and the authoritarian state propaganda of the twentieth century.
“‘Climate crime’ is a social faux pas everywhere, but in some countries it is a crime to publicly question the existence of anthropogenic climate change or to propose actions that could in some way contribute to climate change.
“It is very rare to come across dissenting voices with any real power, but resistance to overly strong state intervention is occasionally violent. The media in some countries has been permitted to discuss …
The climate futures fantasy would also look like manna for simple sheeple who ache to get off the treadmill, grow kale, and tye-dye hemp shirts, but don’t have the balls to go do it unless everyone is forced to join them.
As loopy as this sounds, look at the list of supporters?
Go to Wikipedia and download the Forum for the Future Report and financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2014.
Take a look at the long line up of virtue signalling, pecksniffian actors ….
Grant funders and major donors
Benindi Fund
C&A Foundation
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Economic Development Board Singapore The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
The European Commission
The Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts The Shell Foundation
Pioneer partners and US founder partners
Bupa
The Crown Estate Ecover Belgium NV Ingersoll Rand Kimberly-Clark Europe Kingfisher
Marks & Spencer
O2
Sky
Target Corporation TUI Travel
Unilever
Network partners: worldwide
3M United Kingdom Aggregate Industries Aimia
Air New Zealand AkzoNobel NV Alliance Boots
Arriva
Associated British Foods
Aviva Investors
Capgemini
Carillion
Cathay Pacific
Certis Europe
The China Navigation Company Colep
Penrith may have recorded 47.3C for at least one-second this week, but Windsor is only 23 km north-east of Penrith, and on January 13th, 1939, it recorded 122F or 50.5C with an old fashioned liquid thermometer, not a modern noisy electronic one.
Apparently, climate change makes our extreme heat less extreme.
Furthermore, this was not measured on a beer crate in someones back-yard, but on the historic Windsor Observatory which was built in 1863 by John Tebbutt F.R.A.S who had discovered The 1861 comet, and published many scientific reports in Astronomical Journals. His meteorological observations are published at Harvard in 1899 (among others). Tebbutt died in 1916, so it’s not clear what instrument the 122 F was recorded on in 1939, but a Stevenson Screen had been installed around 40 years earlier, and the measurement was made by Mr Keith Tebbutt, presumably his son.
In 1939, I doubt either town was considered part of Sydney. But now both are on the metro network. Penrith is 54km from the CBD, Windsor, 56km. Notably, Windsor is a few train stops closer than Richmond, which the BOM acknowledges recorded 47.8C in 1939 on January 14, three days after the high of 122F recorded at Windsor.
Apparently Penrith that particular day, January 11th, was 110F, while Richmond was 115F or 46.1C. Neither Penrith nor Windsor appear to be recognised in BOM climate records.
Extreme heat of long ago — 48.2C (118F) at Windsor in 1896:
So in 1896, as recorded in an old liquid in glass instrument, temperatures were very similar to 2017, as recorded with an electronic sensor. The old thermometer was probably reading a bit high in a Greenwich Screen, but the new thermometer is reading a bit high due to electronic noise.
It follows then if the BOM was interested in our climate history, they could build side-by-side models and figure out how to compare these historic records. That they don’t — when climate is the Biggest Threat To Human Civilization — tells us all we need to know about how interested the BOM is in the climate history of Australia.
Imagine if Tebbutt’s 40 years of records from the late 1800s showed a cooler climate? Hands up, who thinks studying them would have been a hot topic for Australian PhD students…
Note the Stevenson Screen and Greenwich Screen side by side at Windsor Observatory in 1906. h/t Daily Telegraph.
More extreme heat — 117.1 F was recorded in 1878
Yesterday (Sunday) the shade temperature at this Observatory reached 116.8 degrees, or the same as that attained on the 6th instant. To-day, however, the maximum recorded was 118.8degs, the highest experienced here since 1862. The next highest was recorded in 1878 when the thermometer registered 117.1 degrees. During the 33 years of my experience I have never till today recorded as high as 100 degrees at 9 o’clocka.m. At that hour this morning the reading was 102.8 degrees, and at 6 o’clock this evening the temperature had not sunk below 105 degrees.
From what I have stated it will be seen that the heat of to-day is quite phenomenal.
— JOHN TEBBUTT. The Observatory, Windsor, January 13, 1896.
Old Windsor Observatory — more scientific than the modern BOM?
At Windsor the old Greenwich stand was employed ever since 1862, while at the College the thermometers are enclosed in a Stevenson’s stand. I suggested that a Greenwich stand should be placed beside the Stevenson’s stand and a series of comparisons be made with both modes of exposure in order to get an equation .
Tebbutt made comparisons between Greenwich stand and the Stevenson, and published them, putting him ahead of the current $365 million a year Australian Bureau of Meteorology which has not published side-by-side comparisons of the two main thermometer types currently in use:
In accordance with the suggestion recorded on page 17 of the last Annual Report, I have had constructed a Stevenson’s themo- meter screen exactly similar to that employed at the Hawkesbury Agricultural College. It has been placed beside the old Greenwich stand employed at this Observatory during the past thirty-eight years, and a series of themometer comparisons is now being conducted in order to get an equation between the results derived from the two methods of exposure. I trust to be able to give, in my Report for 1901, a table embodying the results of these comparisons. The readings in the Greenwich stand are, as anticipated, considerably higher than those in the Stevenson’s screen.
It’s hard to tell, but as best as I can make out from an unformatted text page, at very high temperatures — over 100F, the Greenwich screen recorded temperatures about 2-5 F higher. (I’d like to see the original, can anyone help find it?)
The decrepit legacy media is now so low there are competing stories in the same week discussing which form of decay is the worst.
Is it that the media suppresses the good news, or that it amplifies the bad — throwing fake mud that is never cleaned up? It’s two sides of the same corrupt, self serving coin. Pass on these links to friends who think the legacy media still has journalists with , a) a backbone or b) ethics.
Here are headlines you won’t read in almost any major American newspaper, hear on any of the evening news programs, or see in your Yahoo “news” feed:
Dow Hits 87 Record Closes Since Trump Elected
Texas Hero Was NRA Instructor
Dow Reaches Four 1,000 Point Milestones in One Year for the First Time Ever
ISIS on the Run, Almost Completely Destroyed
New Home Sales Highest in a Decade
Texas Hero Uses AR-15 to Save the Day
Dow Hits Two Streaks Lasting More Than Ten Days, First Time Since 1959
Trump Donates One Million Dollars of His Own Money to Hurricane Victims
U.S. Economy Gains Over Six Trillion in New Capital
U.S. Senator Viciously Attacked by Deranged Socialist Neighbor
U.S. Economy Grows at 3% for First Time Since Bush Administration
Unemployment Rate Lowest in 17 Years
h/t David E.
Smear: Toss enough fake mud and make anything dirty
Sharyl Attkinson describes the abject decay of journalistic ethics as opinions become fake facts, and mistakes are rarely corrected. A Prager video. Thanks to MichaelSmith news. “Why no one trusts the mainstream media anymore”
The BOM announced it was the hottest ever day in Sydney today, then realized it had it wrong, but not before headlines spread across the country. For a million dollars a day you’d think the BOM would check their own “high quality” database. A scientific agency would take great care before announcing “historic all time records”for a city of five million people. A shameless PR agency might see that sort of mistake as an advantage.
It’s careless, piled on rank neglect
Even if the day had been “a record”, the temperatures are often artificially inflated due to site changes, thermometer changes, and the one-second-record effect thanks to the introduction of electronic thermometers, all of which are a product of careless BOM management and analysis. And even over and above that, past temperatures have been adjusted or homogenised downwards — often years after they are recorded — and by secret methods that the BOM will not disclose. I’ll have more information soon on changes at Sydney Observatory, that the BOM don’t make any allowance for.
Looks like another one second record?
The BOM announced the record after Penrith hit 47.1 at 1:55pm, the BOM tweet wrongly claimed it had “broken the all time maximum temperature record for … the Sydney Metropolitan area”. Later, they updated that Penrith was 47.3 at 3:25pm. They did not mention that the observations showed that five minutes after the first “record” at 2pm it was only 46.0, so temperatures fell as much as 1.1C in five minutes. Again, five minutes after the second at 3:30, temperatures fell to 46.5. How long did the 47.3 record last? It might have been just one single second.
The half hourly readings are marked in red. The “one second records” that the BOM uses for historic data and newspaper headlines are marked as stars.
…
From 1859 until 1990, mercury and alcohol thermometers could not possibly produce “one second records”. For 130 years, they missed all this noise. The BOM may be only scientific institute in the world that doesn’t seem to know the difference between electronic buzz and slowly expanding liquids in glass. And they appear to be working to keep it that way — the comparison data that would show the difference between old thermometers is being destroyed as routine practice.
“All time” is deceptive, misleading erasing history
How many Australians now think today was the Hottest Ever Day in Sydney, making the 1939 heatwave a bit more invisible?
The Penrith Lakes station only started recording in 1995, so this “all-time” record was not necessarily a record for anyone in Penrith over the age of 22. The Sydney Morning Herald claimed it went back to 1859, because that’s when records started at Sydney Observatory.
But there was no official BOM station in Penrith in 1939 or 1896, two notoriously hot years, when it might have been hotter. In 1896 in Kiama, south of Sydney on the coast it was 117F (47.2C). In Camden, 45km south of Penrith they recorded 125F. That’s 50.5C! Naturally, these are not recognised by the BOM — like the scores of other records across Australia that recorded 120 plus in the shade. Were they all wrong?
Even a tweet can fit the phrase “since records began in 1995”. Heck, the BOM could probably find the money for a double tweet if it had to. Shouldn’t all records be reported accurately? Normally the media and twitt-o-sphere adds the baseless hype, not the scientific institutions.
Penrith has sweltered to the highest temperature ever recorded in the Greater Sydney region, on a day of baking heat that saw international tennis cancelled and residents flock to the beach in droves.
The Penrith observation station reached 47.1 degrees just before 2pm, with the Bureau of Meteorology confirming it was the highest reading ever recorded at the station.
That makes it the highest temperature ever recorded in the Greater Sydney region, in records stretching back to 1859.
The SMH and ABC both changed the headline and text after the BOM realized they made a mistake.
The original ABC Headline appears to have been and may have stood for three hours (hard to tell):
In a mass syndicated snafu, the news that “Sydney sizzles through its hottest day on record” was shared by the MSN.com site, the SMH Facebook page, The Daily Advertiser, The Herald, The West Australian, The LaTrobe Valley Express, The Port Lincoln Times, the Northern Daily Leader, The Penrith City Gazette, The Bendigo Advertiser, and so on and on to scores more outlets… Many of these publications have back edited or altered the stories post hoc sometimes leaving the headline in contradiction to the first line of the story. None of these news outlets did a google search, or a trove hunt for past hottest headlines. The mass of different mastheads gives the appearance of a free press, but all of them speak as one voice when it comes to the BOM.
h/t to Dave B, Andrew, Pat, Scott and Brett.
The B.O.M. with their temperature ‘fact’,
Care not if it isn’t exact,
So long as it spreads,
Through the media heads,
They can later attempt to retract.
Hidden among the hottest headlines was a quiet mention:
As temperatures soared across the state, thousands of people were left without power, according to electricity provider Ausgrid.
Power outages across the NSW Central Coast affected more than 4000 properties, while almost 3000 properties were left without power throughout Sydney.
An Ausgrid spokeswoman said while additional load on the network from the high temperatures had contributed to some of the outages, there were several other factors at play.
Australia may be the worlds largest exporter of coal, sending out 388 million tons in 2015, but China’s production of coal the same year was 3,747 million tons — nearly ten times as much, and nearly half of global coal production. But the Chinese coal boom is turning. David Archibald describes the geopolitical ramifications. For me, the next question is what stops China doing nukes? — Jo
PS: There is a rumor that Australia has only 4-5 days of fuel stocks today, and is especially low on aviation fuel. Anyone with info, please comment or email joanne AT this site.
One of the reasons that China produces the world’s cheapest solar panels, for example, is because it has some of the world’s cheapest coal-fired power
There is no doubt that China wants to subjugate Asia, echoing Japan’s role during World War II. For those who think China’s economy might overtake the United States economy, and thus make China a more formidable adversary, this article aims to provide detail on China’s main constraint in that ambition: that its domestic coal production is near its peak and will then go into long-term decline.
Even if China can keep its energy supply constant with an accelerated expansion of its nuclear power sector, the cost of producing coal from deeper mines will mean that the costs of industrial production will rise due to higher feedstock costs. One of the reasons that China produces the world’s cheapest solar panels, for example, is because it has some of the world’s cheapest coal-fired power. German solar panel-producers are hobbled by that country’s energiewende, which, translated from the German, means the miracle required to replace coal and nuclear power with sunbeams and breezes and still have a functioning economy.
Figure 1: The United States and China: Primary Energy Consumption by fuel in 2016.
To put China’s situation in perspective, Figure 1 shows the contributions to total energy supply in China and the United States in 2016 expressed in millions of tonnes of oil equivalent (data from the 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy). [Editor’s note: One tonne, or metric ton, is equal to about 1.102 U.S. tons.] Coal absolutely dominates China’s energy supply. This would be good for China if its coal were going to last a long time. But China is depleting is coal endowment rapidly.
Figure 2: World Coal Production, 1830-2014.
One of the reasons why the U.K. dominated the Industrial Revolution is because it was the major coal-producer on the planet at the time. China now dominates world coal production with half the total.
…
Figure 3: UK Coal and Oil Production, 1853-2016.
What goes up in fossil fuel production must eventually come down. A classic case of that is the U.K., which provides two fossil fuel production peaks. That country’s coal production peaked in 1913 and, over the subsequent century, fell to a little over one hundredth of the peak production rate.
Strangely, the more free, clean, green energy we get the more household incomes fail to keep up with inflation. Who would have thought that using inefficient energy in an artificial government-picks-the-winner market could possibly reduce our living standards?
Of course, this is not all due to electricity efficiency and pricing. Bill Shock only affects things that need to heat, cool or move.
Australians have endured their longest period of falling living standards in more than a quarter of a century as growth in costs outstripped earnings for the fifth consecutive quarter, leaving households worse off than they were six years ago.
After allowing for inflation, taxes and interest costs, average household incomes dropped 1.6 per cent in the year to September, capping a sustained fall in living standards that has not been seen since the 1990-91 recession.
Economists say more than half the cost increases for households are being driven by electricity, rent, health, new housing and tobacco, while modest wage rises are being partially absorbed by workers being pushed into higher tax brackets.
Energy prices feed into every other cost. Even the value of a house depends on the capacity people have to pay off their mortgage. Higher electricity bills means more expensive food, smaller profit margins, reduced consumer spending, and fewer jobs.
The energy transition we-didn’t need-to-have has a hidden price.
PS: Can anyone find or create a graph of employment in the renewables energy industry in Australia that is up to date?
*The Kyoto Agreement date is just a marker, and indicator of a new government that put “climate change” as a much higher priority. All subsequent governments largely shared that priority. The RET has become increasingly important as the percentage of renewables required to meet the target has risen every year. Rudd was elected in Nov 2007. March 2008 was the point when electricity prices started rising faster than inflation.
” The Bomb Cyclone isn’t a winter hurricane — just a bad storm with good branding” — Vox
A “Bombcyclone” off the East Coast of the USA is verging on, or has broken a record for the fastest drops in pressure. It’s now at 965mb. It’s not a bomb, nor a cyclone, just a common winter storm. Though this one is a bad one which has already dumped snow on Florida– “most snow in three decades”. The hastag #BombCyclone is exploding.
Also known as a Blizzard, the National Weather Service forecasting winds as high as 70 miles per hour (113 km per hour), and more than 3,300 flights have been cancelled. — Reuters
BombCyclone, NE USA, Jan 4th.
Record breaking?
Rarely do you get to see such perfection w/ the structure of a winter storm. Running out of adjectives for this one. Our blizzard has dropped 54 mb’s in 24 hours, making it not only a “meteorological bomb,” but one of the fastest stengthening winter storms in modern history. — @WeatherOptics
Roy Spencer explains the Bomb term:
The term “bomb” was coined by meteorologist Fred Sanders in 1980 to refer to a non-tropical low pressure area that intensifies at least 24 millibars in 24 hours. They happen every year, and are usually centered offshore in the winter where cold continental air masses meet warm oceanic air masses, providing maximum energy to the intensification process.
Bombcyclones are more common than real cyclones, @RyanMaue:
Germany needs 80GW of electricity. It has 40GW of installed solar PV.
See the graph: The red line is what the country used, and the orange bumps are the solar contribution.
Clearly, solar power will take over the world.
…
In December, Germany got ten hours of sunlight. That’s not a daily figure, that’s the whole month. So in summer on a sunny day, solar PV can make half the electricity the nation needs for lunch. In winter, almost nothing. From fifty percent, to five percent.
Imagine what kind of havoc this kind of energy flux can do. Not one piece of baseload capital equipment can be retired, despite the fact that half of it is randomly unprofitable depending on cloud cover. Solar PV eats away the low cost competitive advantage. Capital sits there unused, spinning on standby, while wages, interest, and other costs keep accruing. So hapless baseload suppliers charge more for the hours that they do run, making electricity more expensive.
It’s a shame Australia’s billion-dollar-ABC apparently can’t afford a Wall St Journal subscription. In long coverage of the Iranian unrest ABC prime time news tonight said the protesters “wanted the government to create jobs”. (Sounds like an Australian election) But The Wall St Journal, puts it differently. Farnaz Fassihi describes the slogans being chanted:
“We don’t want an Islamic Republic, we don’t want it, we don’t want it.”
“They are using Islam as an excuse to drive people crazy.
Despite the threats of physical violence, women in the Islamic republic have used the opportunity to call out for more personal freedom and a relaxation of strict Islamic rule and sharia law:
I’m just letting people know there is another side. Best wishes for the brave people seeking freedom.
There is an epic battle going on, with lives of workers and families at stake, and the only subheader the ABC can find is” ‘Trump should focus on America’.
Absolutely best possible reduction in global temperature because of the latest announcement of a Australian carbon mitigation surplus.
Other countries are failing to meet their targets, but we’re not only achieving them, we’re overdoing it. And this is despite our obvious handicaps: like that we have rapid population growth, are further from everywhere and anywhere* except for Antarctica, and we’re the largest coal exporter in the world.
Emissions are now the lowest on a per capita and GDP basis in 28 years, having fallen 34 per cent and 58 per cent respectively since 1990. Just as Australia beat its first Kyoto target by 128 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, we are on track to easily surpass our 2020 target.
The latest data indicates we will overachieve by 294 million tonnes, a 30 per cent improvement on the year prior. When one considers one million tonnes of carbon abatement is equivalent to taking 300,000 cars off the road for a year, this is substantial.
Substantial?- Don’t undersell this — that’s like taking 88 million cars off the road! Holy hat! That’s 7% of the global fleet.
In the war of Big Numbers, let’s fight back with Very Small Ones.
Two hundred and ninety-four million tonnes sounds so impressive. But read the fine-print (so fine it isn’t usually printed) and it’s spread over eight years, not one, so it’s really a 37 million tonne a year “saving”. Even if the IPCC were right, and CO2 mattered, even if we wanted things to get colder, and we ignore that half of what we emit goes straight to Davy Jones Locker, even then that’s all of two ten-thousandths of a degree.
See the calculations by Dr David Evans below. If miracles happen, we just made the world 0.0002C cooler. Which is zero degrees C if we round that number to the nearest thousandth of a degree.
Was that $8 billion dollars good value?
Minister Frydenburg is still bragging about how much he’s spent. Hasn’t he learnt?
The Turnbull Government is also supporting innovation which is driving down technology costs. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has made more than $4 billion in investment commitments, around $3.5 billion under the Coalition, and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency has made more than $1 billion of grants, around half under the Coalition. There is much work to be done, but it is clear policy measures are working.
As a curious aside, actual emissions from Australia are the same in 2000 as in 2020. There are some allowances for bits n pieces in there which means that 551 mt in 2020 is a “reduction” from 551 in the year 2000. See this table in the Fin Review:
There is a deep asymmetry in science. Don’t take it from me, take it from the former President of American Meteorological Society (AMS) and a current Director of the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Atmospheric Sciences Program. Marshall Sheppard would know, he has written over “80 peer reviewed papers” which gives him secret weather knowledge. It’s a kind of smarts that people who analyze MRI scans, design aerofoils or find minerals 3,000m underground can only aspire to.
He’s worried that people are mocking climate change, just because snap-frozen sharks are washing up on the beach, and it’s hitting minus 50C in Canada. In the last twenty years mankind has put out more than a third of all the CO2 homo sapiens has ever made since Homo Erectus lit their last fire. Despite that whole extra blanket on the planet, the last time it was this cold was, like 1917.
The neat-o graph covers a whole 24 hour period. Don’t look now, but according to Sheppard that’s meaningless weather. See Step Two, or not.
The global pause, on the other hand, lasted for years. It wasn’t supposed to be possible. Sheppard doesn’t seem to want to discuss that kind of climate right now. Next time there is a heatwave, lets send a graph of anomalies to Sheppard so he can tell the world why heatwaves don’t matter.
Step Two: Weather is not climate
This, we can all agree with (in a sort of vague “statisticky” way over an undefined period):
Weekly or daily weather patterns tell you nothing about longer-term climate change (and that goes for the warm days too). Climate is defined as the statistical properties of the atmosphere: averages, extremes, frequency of occurrence, deviations from normal, and so forth.
What we are seeing right now in the United States is just,………well……wait for it……”winter”…..
And name one occasion Marshall Sheppard, when you said:
What we are seeing right now in the United States is just,………well……wait for it……”SUMMER“…..
How many journalists and scientists have you corrected?
Likewise, if this is true:
The other thing to point out is that because one part of the world is cold (in that valley), there is likely another part of the world experiencing abnormally warm conditions (in the hill part of the wave pattern).
Tell us which heat wave you claimed the mirror converse for. Swap the warm for cold. Which heatwaves did you warn people were being used to distract us with “pesky climate communication” when the warm peaks were only the random bumps?
A distracting narrative is emerging. There have certainly been some misinformed tweets, posts, and innuendo about the cold weather and the global warming narrative. One thing that I have observed is a narrative in certain circles that some people are being hypocrites by pointing out that cold weather doesn’t refute climate change but not making a similar point during the warm season.
Don’t cringe now, but these are not equal and symmetrical. Saying that a hot spell “may contain climate change DNA” is not the same as saying “cold spells are weather”. If a hot spell could contain DNA, (we molecular biologists don’t think so) then so can a cold one. If hot DNA can spell “manmade global warming”, then cold DNA can spell “the models are wrong”.
Sheppard creates a diversion: Don’t look here!
The question he can’t answer is apparently the wrong question to ask.
Sheppard says:
I pointed out this cliche dance that often plays out in social media,
Person X: “This event is clearly caused by climate change…..blah blah blah”…..Person Y: “See they say every extreme event is caused by climate change, but the climate changes naturally and there were always extreme events…..blah blah blah”
is important to discuss events from the proper perspective. “Was that event caused by climate change?” is an ill-posed question because natural variability almost always plays some role. However, this does not mean that an anthropogenic signal is not sitting on top of the natural variability.
An anthropogenic signal can be “sitting on top of natural variability”. And natural variability could equally be sitting on top of the anthropogenic signal and crushing it flat.
The question ” “Was that event caused by climate change?”” is not ill-posed, it is mindless, undefined agitprop with an ambiguous vocabulary, loaded meanings and no role in a scientific conversation.
Step Three: Pretend Models are Reality
Marshall goes on to claim that peer reviewed studies calculate the percentage of attribution:
So consistency “has to be applied” everywhere except for in situations where scientists can draw four-color graphs claiming otherwise.
Sheppards inconsistent use of cold and warm imply that cold is not just a lack of heat, it’s something fundamentally different. Heat, after all, can prove human attribution, but cold cannot prove the opposite.
South West WA and Perth have been the Australian posterchild for Water-Panic for years.
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