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 New Years Eve 2017 …Wishing everyone here the best of health and happiness for the coming year. Thanks for your help in making this possible! Cheers to every independent soul who stands on their own two feet. And cheers to those who can’t tonight, but would like to. How much don’t we know? Giant pairs of whirlpools travel across the ocean for months in a bizarre pair.These large paired whirlpools, hundreds of kilometers across, travel eastward at something like 10-20cm per second. This is one pair crossing from Tasmania to NewZealand. This was there in our satellite data but “invisible” til recently. As David Evans says “I wonder what else we are observing but not seeing?”  The pair of whirlpools called Modon E travelling eastward from Tasmania to NZ.  The ocean becomes connected at two distant points as the Modon-E whirlpool pair travels from Tasmania to NZ in 2010-2011 In the mini-pool version, these rolling whirlpools are connected in a U shape under water. Wow. PhysicsGirl shows how to make these by pushing a plate through the water, and adding food coloring. Switch on your science nerd, show the kids! (send me your photos :- ))  The two vortexes spin in opposite directions but are connected as a pair underwater. This was created by PhysicsGirl using a plate in a pool and two different food colorings. Twin giant ocean whirlpools travel for months winding their way across oceansPeter Dockrill reports on an interview published in Popular Science For the first time, scientists have recorded a bizarre phenomenon in fluid dynamics, which up until now had only ever been theoretically predicted, but never observed in the wild. “Ocean eddies almost always head to the west, but by pairing up they can move to the east and travel ten times as fast as a normal eddy, so they carry water in unusual directions across the ocean,” explains oceanographer Chris Hughes from the University of Liverpool in the UK. “What we found was a pair of eddies spinning in opposite directions and linked to each other so that they travel together all the way across the Tasman Sea, taking six months to do it.” Since 1993, satellites have recorded nine of these pairs (called Modons). Eight of nine that have been found were around Australia. (Perhaps Australian-NZ oceanography is special, but I suspect other modons just haven’t been identified yet). From the paper: The nine modons we have identified are probably the clearest. There is no sharp cutoff to what could be considered a modon, and there are many other temporary associations of pairs of vortices, particularly to the southwest and south of Australia, and in the region of formation of Agulhas ring eddies. There are hints of acomplex eddy regime in the Pacific off the southern tip of South America, but the relatively small amplitudes and length scales here make interpretation ambiguous. There may also be brief pairings in the Gulf of Alaska and eddies shed from the southern tip of Madagascar certainly interact (de Ruijter et al., 2005, 2004), but clear evidence of modons is not seen. Movies showing modon propagation are given in the supporting information of this paper.
h/t to David E Watch Physics Girl do some extremely cool pool tricks.I’ve seen 99% of the hands-on science tricks out there but this was totally new to me. Oogle away. The twin vortices leave pairs of shadows on the pool floor. They travel right across the pool, but vanish sometimes unpredictably, or are destroyed easily by any interference.
Notice the red ink whirlpool reaches over and envelops the blue one. The colors stay separate. Keep reading → December 30th, 2017 | Tags: Natural Phenomena, Oceans | Category: Global Warming, Science |  Print This Post | | Businesses are closing, customers are cutting back spending, company bosses are all suddenly spot trading experts in the energy market, or planning to become their own electricity supplier. Meanwhile scouts from the US have arrived to poach companies who want cheaper energy (and tax cuts). Happy New Year Australia. These are all headlines and stories in The Australian from yesterday and today. Cut power bills or lose more jobs: ACCC chief’s warning on energy costsGlenda Korporaal writes: Australia’s competition regulator, Rod Sims, who has been tasked with finding ways to cut power bills, has warned that high energy costs will force more plant closures and job losses as prices continue to increase. “Energy affordability is Australia’s largest economic challenge,” the chief executive of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission told The Weekend Australian. “We have already seen jobs lost, investment reduced, plant closures (because of high energy prices). Unfortunately, we are going to see quite a bit more.” Some businesses will be OK – like those that are not involved with fertilizer, paper, glass, steel, bricks, telecommunications or refrigeration: He said the biggest pressure would be on manufacturing companies that used gas, including those involved in making fertiliser, paper, glass, steel and bricks. High energy prices were affecting sectors such as telecommunications companies, services that used refrigeration and farmers using irrigation. They were also affecting retailers, whose customers’ budgets were hit by rising electricity costs. Other businesses that will be OK are those that don’t need customers: The executive director of the Australian Retailers Association, Russell Zimmerman, this week blamed the high cost of energy as a factor in holding consumers back from spending in the post-Christmas sales period. 2017 was one of the worst years in Australian retail:Eli Greenblatt writes: As 2017 closes it will be remembered as one of the worst years for the $300 billion retail sector, which was hammered by a long line of high-profile collapses — including Topshop, Rhodes & Beckett, David Lawrence and Oroton — driven by the lowest growth in household income for decades, mortgage stress and rising energy bills. “Weak wages, flat house prices and a smaller fall of the household savings rate suggests weak consumption ahead,’’ warns UBS economist George Tharenou. [He] said household cash flow collapsed to a record low in 2017, with discretionary retail spending “taking the hit”. …the country’s biggest department store, Myer, issued a profit warning on the back of worsening sales ahead of Christmas. A funny thing happened to the growth of consumption spending as the RET percentage rose.  … It appears the RET (Renewables Energy Target) takes money from customers and gives it to solar and wind power investors instead. Qenos lay-offs start as energy costs hitJust another company mentioned in the news today: Manufacturing company Qenos is being forced to lay off 15 per cent of its 700-strong workforce as it battles to cope with higher energy prices, chief executive Stephen Bell said yesterday. Mr Bell said Qenos, which has polyethylene plants in Altona in Melbourne and Port Botany in Sydney, had been battling hard to boost productivity following increases of up to $60 million a year in its gas and electricity expenses, but was now being forced to lay off staff. It’s so bad, Australian companies want to spot trade or generate their own electricityYears ago, [Rod] Sims says, most chief executives did not know much about energy. “Now you find when you are talking to company executives, all of a sudden you are talking to energy experts.” Some of them are now buying electricity and gas off the spot market,” he said… “You will be chatting with them and they have half an eye to their phone, looking at what the price is doing.” And we all know how live spot-trading-in-a-volatile-market helps soothe, relax, and hone the focus and creativity of our business leaders. Why didn’t we ask CEOs to do this before? Will Australian companies lead the world or what! And the answer is or what, or maybe watts. The rising prices of electricity and gas have become such a worry for some of Australia’s major companies they are having to take the situation in their own hands. An increasing number, Sims says, are looking at ways to generate some of their own electricity or “self-supply” as he calls it. “I have spoken to at least 50 companies recently on the subject of electricity and I can’t remember one which didn’t talk about self-supply,” he says. “It’s quite extraordinary.” Too bad Australian companies don’t have many choices. They can take the subsidies and go solar, buy a diesel, or build a nuclear plant (as if). But they can’t band together and build a coal station to supply themselves without also paying the RET. US state of Pennsylvania spruiks power to entice Aussie firmsThe state of Pennsylvania has sought to poach Australian companies with a promise of “abundant’’ energy, sparking renewed warnings from Australian business leaders that the nation risks losing jobs to offshore rivals unless it tackles its energy problems. A high-powered delegation from the Pennsylvanian government, headed by Dennis Davin, the state’s Secretary for Community and Economic Development, visited Australia seeking out large and medium Australian businesses and plugging his state’s energy advantages. The week-long trip early this month, with stops in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth,… The Pennsylvanian delegation has fanned fears that Australian firms are considered “ripe for targeting’’ by offshore rivals with offers of low-cost, reliable power. The actual price of electricity in Pennsylvania isn’t cheap. Presumably they are expecting ours to go higher, or theirs lower, or both. The average price of electricity per megawatt ranged from $76 to $123 in 2016-17 in Australia while the average commercial electricity rate in Pennsylvania was advertised at about $121.90 a megawatt ($US94.40). However, I bet gas is a lot cheaper in the US. Still, some companies might prefer to pay high gas prices, and feel good because they live in a state that bans gas exploration. UPDATE: Record breaking snow falling in upstate New York. Pennsylvania.The airport in Erie, Pennsylvania, has had a whopping 65.1 inches of snow from this lake effect event — the highest snowfall total from any event on record in Erie. (Heavy lake effect snow is produced by cold Arctic air moving over relatively mild water temperatures in the Great Lakes.) — World News, ABC (US) News 40,000 people in Cleveland lost power overnight. New York City may have coldest New Year’s Eve since 1960s… — ABC News In freak conditions, Canadians (and many people in the US too) are getting a chance to enjoy record cold for the last time before climate change makes winters unbearably mild. Extreme cold in Toronto smashes 57-year-old temperature recordTemperatures observed at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport bottomed out at -22 C [-7.7F] this morning. The previous record for this date was set in 1960, when it hit -18.9 C. [-2F] Tristan Hopper does some first class bragging about the cold:Mars and the North Pole are warmer than Winnipeg: A guide to how damned cold it isVancouver is as cold as Moscow, Toronto is colder than CFS Alert and a piece of the country roughly the size of Europe was under an extreme cold warning It’s colder in Winnipeg than it has ever been in Scotland (ever) The coldest ever in Scotland was apparently only – 27C. (-16.6F). And for southerners, “CFS Alert” is the worlds most northern inhabited place, deep into the Arctic, and beyond even where Inuits would live. Today, by the way, in midsummer the South Pole warmed up to -18C. A swath of Canada the size of Europe was under an extreme cold warning Alberta’s warmest place was almost as cold as Mars This means that, for a few minutes, all of Alberta was about as cold as Mars’ Gale Crater, the home of the Curiosity rover. Mars is subject to pretty violent temperatures shifts, and Curiosity regularly encounters temperatures below -80 C….this week, the highest temperature experienced by the rover were -23 C. A Calgary Boxing Day shopper, therefore, might have found themselves getting into a car that was literally colder than a Martian spacecraft. People in Whitby are presumably making the most of the cold at the moment: Hydro blackout hits 11,000 Whitby customers in extreme coldThe outage arrives on a morning when it feels like -31 C with the wind chill. Best wishes to our Canadian and US friends. I’m sure they will be devastated if spring hits early. h/t Pat, Scott, Clipe. ________________ *NOAA Satellites @NOAASatellites 24h24 hours ago Check out these “cloud streets” over the December 29th, 2017 | Tags: Canada, Cooling & cold snaps, Snow | Category: Global Warming, Meteorology | Print This Post | | To cut smog and PM 2.5 pollution the Chinese government banned coal fired heating in 28 cities in Northern China and ordered them to convert to gas. But things aren’t going too well: Public anger boiled over after China Youth Daily published video images of children at a primary school in Hebei province’s Quyang county who were forced to sit outside in the winter sun because their classrooms were too cold. The Ministry of Education demanded “immediate” action to provide heating after students at another primary school showed signs of frostbite, the official English-language China Daily said. It seemed like such a good idea at the time: A joint government and municipal action plan for the 28 cities was released as far back as last March, calling for Beijing, Tianjin, Langfang and Baoding to ban small coal- fired furnaces by the end of October, among a host of other measures for the region. “Areas in these cities will be declared completely ‘coal free,'” the official Xinhua news agency reported on March 31. Communism fails for the 300th time: Despite efforts to shift the blame, responsibility for the poor policy coordination seemed to fall squarely on the NDRC and the central government. Coal futures at record highs: The impact on gas supplies has already driven coal prices to new highs. On Dec. 11, coal futures hit a record of 689.8 yuan (U.S. $104.86) per metric ton, Reuters said. Small coal burners are inefficient, so a gas transition could be a good thing, but sometimes when bureaucrats click fingers, kids lose them. h/t GWPF Holiday chatter.. Cypto currencies are killing the world and saving it at the same timeIt’s the battle of the cryptos. Bitcoin is set to destroy the global climate due to exponential electricity consumption. Mining for bitcoins consumes the same electricity as 159 countries (probably more now), and by 2020, the world. I suspect we’ll be saved by reality — transactions now take hours and cost $20, $40, $50 (depends on the day) — making bitcoin not useful for buying a beer. But Michael Kile has found a competing cypto which will save the world — bound to relieve climate believers of their normal cash while offering them gold-hopey-hyper-cubits which may evaporate at a moments notice. Don’t mock it, in people with the right brain, these may briefly increase oxytocin and reduce cortisol. So say hello to the saviour ClimateCoin. It wants to be an “exponential environmental organisation…” (because linear ones are achieving so much, and the square of zero could do so much more right?) They are not even pretending to produce anything real. Their mission is to “create a symbol for the common man to be able to participate in the struggle against climate change…” No uncommon people need apply. No weather need be changed. This record breaking video below has more hot-net-keywords than you have ever seen in one 6 minute 19 second youtube video since the dawn of civilization. Buy now, hurry, invest, send them your money. Or not. There’s another interview here with CryptoCurrently which may win the prize for the longest uninterrupted hype without describing any real object or outcome. Or maybe they did, and I just missed it. You too can “merge blockchain and climate change“, though when I do I get a blockchange, or a chain of climates and I’m not sure what to do with them. Futures in bitcoins make a short selling crash possible (maybe quite appealling to some)Ten days ago I asked maths brain (and other half) Dr David Evans what he thought of BitCoin. He said: A futures exchange in New York will start to trade Bitcoin starting Monday [on Dec 19]. For the first time, people will be able to bet on Bitcoin, both up and down (long and short), using US dollars. That is, you can bet on the price of Bitcoin to go up, or to go down, without ever having to own any. This is important because the introduction of futures markets has previously coincided with the end of upward movement in several commodities, such as uranium in 2007. Now suppose you were part of a bunch of profit-seeking money men looking to make a serious killing. Perhaps you are at an influential global player like Goldman-Sachs. Along comes Bitcoin, a few years ago. Would the following scheme appeal?
Since he said that the price has gone from up to $19k, down to $15k. Not that that is unusual in cryptoworld. Bitcoin has crashed over 30% in every quarter since it began. So this fall is not out of the ordinary. Michael Kile wished everyone a Merry Crypto Climatecoin Christmas and warned of crypto-crazy times: The UK Financial Conduct Authority, incidentally, has warned that an initial coin offering (ICO) is high risk and offers little, if any, investor protection. For details of what can go wrong, visit cryptocurrency. So, should you be concerned that your funds could be caught in a carbon portal, become bogged in a blockchain, or otherwise impeded or delayed, have a chat with your financial advisor, climate consultant and any person or deity you know who can look into the seeds of time and tell you which cryptocurrency will grow and which will not, including Lord Bull and Bear. Welcome to a clean green Australia where we gave up coal to move to diesel. Back to the future. Diesel’s prototype engine circa 1892. Channel Ten news tonight discusses the sudden surge in demand for diesel generators Homes and businesses are so afraid of blackouts in Australia that some retailers are selling four times as many generators as normal. Mygenerator.com.au reports a 425% increase year on year. The strongest growth has been in South Australia, Victoria and western Sydney. According to Channel Ten, Energy companies across Australia have sent letters to their customers to warn customers to be prepared in case there is a blackout. But one company says it’s just a precaution they are required to do every year. (Does anyone ever remember getting a letter like that?) Once, the renewables industry just wanted “certainty” for business (as in certainty of taxpayer funded subsidies). Now “certainty” means a diesel generator. h/t Dave B
December 24th, 2017 | Tags: Australia's Energy Statistics, Diesel, SA (South Australia), Victoria | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | … This is what winning looks like.The NY Times reports on Droves of Scientists Leaving EPA WASHINGTON — More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration. This is 700 of 15,000 employees. The cuts started under Obama (“blame” Republicans) and is just the start: The cuts deepen a downward trend at the agency that began under the Obama administration in response to Republican-led budget constraints that left the agency with about 15,000 employees at the end of his term. …the administration is well on its way to achieving its goal of cutting 3,200 positions from the E.P.A., about 20 percent of the agency’s work force. After skeptical scientists have been sacked, exiled and subject to RICO threats, NOW they worry about “silencing” scientists? Many also said they saw the departures as part of a more worrisome trend of muting government scientists, cutting research budgets and making it more difficult for academic scientists to serve on advisory boards. Let’s talk about real silencing. Out of thousands of workers, how many vocal skeptical scientists do the EPA employ? Anyone? This is a deep-state agency, which was being used to bypass American voters and Congress. James Delingpole says “Christmas is here”.As Dennis Ambler argued at the time in this Science and Public Policy paper:
No tears lost: The junk science of the Endangerment Finding was in turn responsible for Obama’s monumentally destructive Clean Power Plan, which drove up energy prices, hit U.S. economic competitiveness and killed jobs. Anyone who thinks it’s sad that 700 EPA officials have lost their jobs should maybe consider the 50,000 workers in the U.S. coal industry alone who lost their jobs as a result the EPA-enforced Clean Power Plan.
Oops, please. The bank balance is trending to zero, and I must pay attention. Can you can spare the equivalent of a beer, a steak, or a month of bandwidth ($100) for 2018? I, we, will be ever so grateful. We can do this thanks to philanthropists like you. It’s a testament to the fantastic readers here that nine years, 2,863 posts and 450,000 comments later, this blog is still going and somehow a family of five just gets by. Long live the internet! Details on how to help below: Keep reading → The fear is palpableHow much fun can you have living in a global experiment? In Australia, peak summer is about to hit in a post-Hazelwood-electricity-grid. There’s a suite of committee reports as summer ramps up. Everyday there’s another Grid story in the press, and a major effort going on to avoid a meltdown. Minister Josh Frydenberg announced today that “we’ve done everything possible to prevent mass blackouts”. Or as he calls it, a repeat of the South Australian Horror Show. Politicians are so afraid of another SA-style-system-black that they are throwing money: The “Snowy Hydro Battery” will be another $2 billion. Whatever. It’s other people’s money. This is what they are afraid of:The red bars mean “Reserve Shortfall”. The dark blue matter is “Generation”. The graph covers two years (sorry about the quality) so the two red bursts are summer 2018 and summer 2019.  SA Medium Term Forecast, Outlook, AEMO, Nov 16th 2017, South Australia. Oddly we are headed for a critical time, but this’s the most recent graph I can find — thanks to Wattclarity — from November 16th, 2017. (Here’s an earlier version from March 2017. and from Dec 2016). Perhaps there is a newer kinder forecast, but curiously the AEMO Medium Term Outloook page isn’t working “til early 2018”. Hmm? Odd time to take it down. The words in that top box (rewritten below*) indicate they do a new outlook every two weeks, but I can’t find one on the Wayback Machine, or Google Cache. Perhaps you can? Please let me know. Australian electricity prices forecast to rise and fall at the same timeThe ABC tells us prices look set to fall: The Australian Energy Market Commission (AMEC) said the price drop will happen as variable wind and solar generation comes online, which is paid for by the Government’s Renewable Energy Target. Notice how in the government funded ABC, “the Government” appears to pay for many things, almost like it generates income? More accurately, the Government’s Renewable Energy Target forces customers to pay more for electricity from coal and gas producers, which in turn, give that to the intermittent generators. Nationally, prices rose almost 11 per cent this year, but with the extra supply from wind and solar, the commission predicts that will be offset by a 12 per cent fall over the following two years. Eleven percent? Twelve percent? Praise the error bars! Always, always, the cheap electricity is coming. Soon. The world is full of paradoxes. Everyone is paying more for electricity yet the cheapest generators are going out of businessWholesale electricity prices in Australia are higher than ever and headed for the sun, averaging in the $100/MWh range. Yet the AMEC report somehow found “that over time, low wholesale prices contributed to the closure of coal-fired plants”. Could it be that the gap between the reality of the wholesale prices the retailers pay and the wholesale prices the coal plants receive has something to do with the LRET (Renewable Energy Target) which is currently around $85MW/h? While government groups are forecasting cheaper prices, the people betting on future prices and markets are forecasting more profits ahead and higher prices. Who to believe? Seems the more free energy we get from the wind and sun, the higher the prices rise.Ten days ago a Goldman Sachs report warned that people are underestimating the future price rises coming in Australia. NSW and Victorian wholesale power prices are set to rise as much as 50 per cent in coming years, boosting profits at energy giants AGL and Origin, as peaking power that requires high prices to start is increasingly required to back up renewables. This is the view of analysts at investment bank Goldman Sachs, who say a recent softening in electricity futures prices is underestimating a coming price shock by 20-30 per cent, even if the National Energy Guarantee is put in place. “We forecast wholesale electricity prices will rebound towards a new peak of between $120 and $130 per megawatt hour,” Goldman Sachs analyst Baden Moore said in a note to clients. In South Australia, prices are forecast to average $150, while in Queensland, which has state-owned coal generators, prices are forecast to fall to about $50. — Matt Chambers, The Australian, December 12th, 2017 GoldMan upgraded the profit forecast for AGL and Origin.  Forecast prices on the Australian National Grid StopTheseThings argues that Australia’s Energy Transition is leaving 42,000 families in Abject Energy Poverty. (Despite that suffering, it must be reassuring to know that thanks to the energy “transition”, storms will be slower in 2100. ) Sydneysiders are being warned of chaos, unprepared for a blackout
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