In Germany as 20 years of wind subsidies comes to an end in 2020, half to three quarters of the industry may disappear.
So many parallels with Australia. The Germans have had wind subsidies for 20 years, but even after two decades of support, the industry is still not profitable on a stand-alone basis. In 2016, some 4600MW of new wind plants were installed, but that may drop to one quarter as much by 2019 as subsidies shrink. According to Pierre Gosselin (August 31st, 2017) there are more wind protests, electricity prices are “skyrocketing” and “the grid has become riddled with inefficiencies and has become increasingly prone to grid collapses from unstable power feed in.”
German flagship business daily “Handelsblatt” reported … how Germany’s wind energy market is now “threatening to implode” and as a result “thousands of jobs are at risk“. José Luis Blanco, CEO of German wind energy giant Nordex, blames the market chaos on “policymakers changing the rules“. Subsidies have been getting cut back substantially. The problem, Blanco says, is that worldwide green energy subsidies are being capped and wind parks as a result are no longer looking profitable to investors. The Handelsblatt writes that “things have never been this bad“.
Development of Germany’s 20-year guaranteed support rates for onshore wind power. Source: CLEW.
“It is easy for politicians to make promises to impatient voters and opposition parties. But it is hard to impose high costs on powerful, well-organized groups. No system for international governance can erase these basic political facts. Yet the Paris agreement has unwittingly fanned the flames by letting governments set such vague and unaccountable pledges.”“
Suddenly skeptics are powerful and well-organised groups? Somehow the authors, editors, and reviewers all missed that it costs trillions to change the energy system our civilizations were built on, and millions of voters don’t want to pay. The opposition to this is only organised in the sense that we still hold elections.
In 2015, The Guardian said Paris was where “decades of failure were reversed, and a historic agreement reached.”
Nature, Paris targets, all nations failing, graphic. 2017.
No major advanced industrialized country is on track to meet its pledges to control the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change. Wishful thinking and bravado are eclipsing reality.
No kidding.
Countries in the European Union are struggling to increase energy efficiency and renewable power to the levels that they claimed they would. Japan promised cuts in emissions to match those of its peers, but meeting the goals will cost more than the country is willing to pay. Even without Trump’s attempts to roll back federal climate policy, the United States is shifting its economy to clean energy too slowly.
The Paris deal had voluntary agreements and no enforcement — I can’t think why this didn’t work:
The Paris agreement offered, in theory, to reboot climate diplomacy by giving countries the flexibility to set their own commitments. As of July 2017, 153 countries have ratified the agreement — 147 of which have submitted pledges to reduce emissions, also known as nationally determined contributions. The idea is that as each country implements its own pledge, others can learn what is feasible, and that collaborative global climate protection will emerge. That logic, however, threatens to unravel because national governments are making promises that they are unable to honour.
The only real power to enforce (thankfully) comes from dedicated namecalling. It works on susceptible individuals, but perhaps not so well on whole nations. If only the fear of being called a global pariah could be measured in kilowatt-hours?
… in 2015, the administration of former president Barack Obama pledged to cut emissions in the United States to 26–28% below 2005 levels by the year 2025. Yet the country was probably only ever on track to cut its emissions by 15–19%.
The US promised big, but that’s an impressive “gap” on the graph (right) between hope and change.
Japan pledged to cut 26% (like the magic number of the Paris convention — “26”):
But … the Japanese government is unlikely to meet its aim to supply 20–22% of electricity from carbon-free nuclear power by 2030; our analysis suggests that 15% is more likely. Today, just 5 of the country’s 42 nuclear reactors are producing electricity.
Still infinitely more nuclear power than Australia.
European plans are “extremely ambitious” — did the authors say that before the agreement was made?
European plans to shrink energy use by 27–30% by the year 2030 compared with the business-as-usual scenario are extremely ambitious. Progress is dogged by the weak building regulations of member countries, poor enforcement of minimum standards and double counting of energy savings from overlapping policies.
Even when taxes are levied, emissions don’t change much — see Korea and Mexico:
Mexico and South Korea have introduced schemes that levy charges on those who use energy and emit carbon dioxide, and other policies aimed at increasing energy efficiency and the adoption of cleaner energy. But emissions are not changing much in either country, calling their pledges into question. If South Korea mothballs many of its nuclear power plants, as the current government has suggested, the gap will only grow.
The authors keep mentioning nukes.
There’s a clue here about complexity and transparency:
Most pledges are almost silent on the range of policies being used, making it difficult to discern which are actually effective. The EU, for example, submitted little information about the complex pledge-implementation process that is already under way. The gap between promise and action is especially large for the strategies that governments are using to boost energy efficiency, for which the real costs are often opaque.
David G. Victor, Keigo Akimoto, Yoichi Kaya, Mitsutsune Yamaguchi, Danny Cullenward & Cameron Hepburn (2017) Prove Paris was more than paper promises, Nature 548, 25–27()doi:10.1038/548025a
This is good news but Turnbull still wants to have the Paris cake and power the fridge with the crumbs
Faced with national bill shock, dismal Newspolls, and even leadership rumors, Turnbull is, at last, dropping the deadweight Finkel Clean Energy Target. The biggest poisoned-band-aid will not be plastered on, though mini bandaids will be.
Too much regulation is never enough and the energy market is still being micromanaged.
[ABCnews] A Clean Energy Target recommended by Australia’s chief scientist will not be adopted, with the Federal Government instead proposing a new plan to bring down electricity prices.
The details have not officially been released, but the ABC understands Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will argue his policy will lower electricity bills more than a Clean Energy Target (CET), while meeting Australia’s Paris climate change commitments.
Cabinet is also keen to adopt a generator reliability obligation, which requires three years’ notice of closing a power station, in order to prevent a repeat of the sudden closure of Hazelwood power station in Victoria in March.
The answer to pointless overdone, intrusive and clumsy regulation is apparently to do even more of it:
[The Australian] Energy retailers will be forced to buy a minimum amount of baseload power from coal, gas or hydro for every megawatt of renewable energy under a drastic intervention into the energy market by the Turnbull government to drive energy bills down by $115 a year.
We forced people to buy renewables, and now we force people to buy the antidote too.
The only subsidies we are ending are the ones that haven’t started yet:
Malcolm Turnbull and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg will today announce a “national energy guarantee” as the centrepiece of an energy plan that will end new taxpayer subsidies for renewable energy from 2020 and impose a 0.2 per cent reliability regulation on retailers to inoculate the system from blackouts and give a lifeline to coal power.
The savings (if they happen) are small compared to the increases:
A senior government source confirmed that the policy signed off by cabinet last night and to be taken to the Coalition partyroom today, is estimated to cut retail energy bills of between $100 and $115 a year.
We are just aiming to wind back a tiny part of the pain.
[The Australian] …It is those untruths Abbott has called out.
And the response from his critics? Personal abuse, distortion… the Prime Minister snidely refers to “it being Mental Health Day”; a minister (Josh Frydenberg) who resorts to the self-demeaning criticism that, as prime minister, Abbott defended the renewable energy target and signed up to the Paris Agreement, both of which he now criticises.
Of course he did, because, despite his long-held view that this new paganism was “absolute crap”, a Turnbull-led majority of his cabinet, to their eternal discredit, had gone along with it and tied his hands. Being at last free to speak the truth, should he be mocked for doing so?
The fact is, as Terry McCrann said (The Daily Telegraph, October 12), Abbott’s speech was “a seminal event”.
The global bullies are trying to tar Abbott by reminding everyone of what he said as a PM and contrasting it with what he says now. But it’s unlikely to do much harm. Millions voted for him when he made a “blood oath” to remove the carbon tax. He didn’t win more over when he spoke with the wooden tones, constrained as PM. Indeed, the critics just give Abbott a chance to talk about why our national conversations are so constrained by the politically correct box…
To pursue the renewable grail,
With Australia’s great coal wealth for sale,
To be burned up abroad,
Is a policy flawed,
And reduce power prices, would fail.
–Ruairi
h/t David B, Scott of the Pacific, Pat.
PS: Headline edited. Was “Christmas already.” (or something like that). Now it’s “Santa’s arrived”.
One in six or, 15% of the Australian population, apparently has experienced “uncertainty” around food in the last 12 months. For some, that’s only one episode in a year but still, in a first world country which is a major food exporter, it’s not a sign of wealth and good times. If the survey is to be believed, fully 9% of Australians are experiencing a food shortage every month or even more often. Surprisingly, half of those experiencing food uncertainty have jobs — working serfs. Foodbank blames it on living costs — like rent and power bills.
A nation in decline: A ten percent increase in people seeking food relief across the nation
One thing is sure “bill shock” is hurting people, and it’s getting worse:
Foodbank provides food for over 652,000 people a month, however, the front-line charities report that demand for food relief has increased by 10% in the last year and they are forced to turn away 65,000 people every month due to lack of food.
How much does renewable energy contribute? Hard to say — all the factors are confounded and feedbacks flow like spaghetti. Adding unreliable energy adds hidden costs in managing wild swings in supply, and lack of spinning inertia. We have to have back up storage that we didn’t need before, so add batteries, battery subsidies, hydro storage, and also the inefficiencies for coal generators — which are cheapest and most efficient at constant supply. Then, add the cost of electricity into the cost of all products, so supermarket bills go up. The intermittent generators make us more dependent on gas, and that extra demand pushes up the price of gas too. Higher costs of living mean higher wage claims. Then the extra prices of everything (electricity, food, salaries) force companies out of business or offshore. Because it’s energy we are messing with, the flow-on implications touch everything.
The 10% increase in people seeking food relief applied across all Australian states. But South Australia started from a higher baseline. The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) data shows that the proportion of residential electricity and gas customers on hardship programs in South Australia is twice as high as other states.
But I spoke to a well connected, influential South Australian last week and he tells me people there love renewables — they think they are cheap. We need to tally up the hidden costs.
This graph shows the total electricity generation capacity in each state and it’s breakdown by generation type. Remember, those grey bars are the capacity of “wind power” but the generation from wind sources is only one third or thereabouts of the total “capacity”.
All the states below are connected to the one NEM electrical grid. SA has more renewables than the other states, but this is electricity-sans-borders to some extent. Pain and problems in one state can flow into the grid. Though according to foodbank, the number seeking help has also gone up by the same amount in WA which is not connected to the NEM. A messy problem. The only thing we know for sure is that when we had hardly any renewables, we had cheaper electricity.
Electricity by generation source, Australian states, AER, 2017. Graph. (I don’t think rooftop solar gets counted at all here). Solar probably means only large solar projects, which make almost nothing — See the dark blue bar in NSW.
For completeness: those unemployment statistics:
…
The end of the mining boom in WA increased the unemployment rate and may also explain the increase in hardship cases and unpaid bills.
In South Australia the Advertiser picked up the issue. Read more from Eric Worrall at WattsUp and Scott of the Pacific.
MORE than 102,000 South Australians seek help from food charity Foodbank every month, as parents skip meals for days on end so children can eat and utility bills can be paid, astonishing figures show.
Foodbank SA chief executive Greg Pattinson said the high number of those needing assistance was staggering, but not surprising, because more and more SA families were being forced to make the heartbreaking decision to either “heat or eat”.
“We’ve heard it from so many people; the power bills come in and they have to decide: ‘Do we feed the kids today or do we not?’” he said.
As as aside — one Foodbank recipient, Steve in Melbourne, wondering why the media is talking about Trump instead of about hungry Australians:
I’ve worked voluntarily for the Uniting Church and The Salvos so I’ve got a lot of food parcels from them and obviously I want to put back in as well. There’s more on our news about Donald Trump and what he’s doing in America than there is about hungry people in Australia. How is that even in the hemisphere of right? That just doesn’t make sense.”
The media are part of the problem. The deplorables are the ones going hungry.
We had a few days away last week in Geographe Bay, SW WA thanks to the kindness of a supporter. Miles of quiet beaches for those who don’t like crowds. 🙂
Yet again, it’s another mindless apple-pie-survey produced to fog the debate
Most Australians don’t want to pay anything more for renewable power.
“Four in five (78%) said Yes: the Australian government should introduce a new Clean Energy Target to encourage the construction of new clean energy sources in Australia.” — The Australia Institute
If we ask people if they’d like free/cheap/clean stuff, they say “yes”. If we ask them how much they want to pay for renewables, 62% say “N.o.t.h.i.n.g”.Which is why the Australia Institute didn’t ask them.
They also didn’t ask whether voters would change their vote on this issue, because we already know, time after time, that voters rate climate change last on their list of priorities. You can bet the Australia Institute would have asked that question if they thought the public would give the right answer, instead they surely know that people vote for jobs, to lower the cost of living and to have a strong economy instead of shipping our manufacturing industry to China in a sacrificial quest to change the weather.
So many other, better, surveys show the lie behind this one
So instead of useful information, we get headlines to pressure Turnbull into thinking that 78% of voters want him to introduce the Clean Energy Target that he is considering backing away from. Will he be fooled? My bet is that he will wipe the words “Clean Energy” out of the title to get his “backbenchers” off his back and to avoid igniting boiling fury among Coalition voters. But Turnbull will find another way to subsidize the Green Blob to keep them from calling him names. That’s how he works. He brought in an emissions trading scheme and carbon tax by stealth — calling it a “safeguard mechanism” buried in fine print. The “environment” is so toxic for voters who are not part of the eco-religious left. A supposedly centre-right leader has to hide the money and power behind innocuous language.
The problem for Turnbull is that Australians have been systematically misinformed about the costs of the forced renewables transition, so at any point, a ticking time bomb could go off when they find out how much intermittent, unreliable wind and solar panels cost.
We need a survey to ask Australians how many cents per kilowatt hour wind and solar are subsidized? What percentage could say 8 – 9c KWhr? How many would also know what the wholesale price of coal fired electricity is? (It’s 3 – 4c/KWhr). Those surveys would demonstrate how immature, underdone and pathetic our national debate has been on this topic. Those surveys, and the ignorance of the public on such basic questions, would also show the true value of the ABC.
From The Australia Institute:
Respondents were also asked what kind of generation should be supported by a new Clean Energy Target. Respondents could select all that applied.
81% said the CET should build renewables like wind and solar.
Only 27% selected gas fired power and only 16% selected coal fired power.
Respondents selected 1.33 on average.
Amongst voting groups, 79% of LNP voters selected renewables, more than double gas (37%) and triple coal (24%), while 68% of One Nation voters selected renewables, again much higher than gas (24%) and coal (23%).
“We are the people who will be swimming,” he said. “The question will be — will those people on the lifeboats bother to pull us in or push us away because we would be too problematic?”
Kiribati’s highest point is 13m above water, and is sinking at a rate of 1mm a year (see the updated graph below by Eyes On Browne). To rephrase Euan Mearns, at this rate, complete inundation of it will take 13,000 years.
The Titanic’s elevation (waterline to the deck) was 18m, so it was 50% higher, yet it sank in 2 hours 40 minutes. That’s one ninth of a day, or one 3,285th of a year. Conservatively, the comparative speed works out to be 42.7 million times faster. Allowing for the higher elevation (but discounting funnels and/or palms) that would be 59.1 million times faster.
For some reason the ABC was unable to do an internet search on the words “Kiribati, Tide Gauges, Sea Level”. With a billion dollars to spend, apparently they can only afford a one way internet cable. Just enough to upload news stories like this which are essentially a repeat of a press release, unchecked from President Tong:
Kiribati…is already suffering from the effects of climate change.
Rising sea levels are causing land to be engulfed by tidal waters, driving people away from their homes and leaving them displaced.
“What I have seen in my lifetime over the years has been villages, communities, who have had to leave … because it is no longer viable,” he said.
“The sea is there and there is nothing. Everything has been taken away so they have had to relocate.”
No matter how melodramatic the claim, there are no hard questions from journalist Sarah Hancock.
Good luck to Mr Tong. He is just playing the cards he is offered.
Pity the ABC though. I wouldn’t want to be them when Australians realize that they are paying for an internet rerouting service from socialist troughers, freeloading gravy hunters and pagan czars.
To serve the Australian taxpayer he quotes a Professor Vassallo, Chair of Sustainable Energy Development (USyd), and CSIRO Energy Director Dr Glenn Platt. Just in case they weren’t green and biased enough he also interviewed Professor Blakers, director of the ANU Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems. Finally he turns to Dr Mark Diesendorf, who is apparently just some guy at UNSW with a team of modelers. (Kilvert doesn’t give us his title, but a two second search suggests he works at the “Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets“. Perhaps it was an oversight, or maybe Kilvert was feeling guilty that every single person he quoted has a career in sustainable energy). Glenn Platt — by the way, is not just “Energy Director” but is described at The Conversation as leading the Energy Transformed Flagship research centre at CSIRO. So that’s four green academics, no one from the coal industry, no skeptics, no other engineers, and no one involved in managing a grid.
So here’s Dr Platt, struggling with the basics of electricity grids:
“The idea of there being an average or ‘base’ electricity load, doesn’t make sense. Let alone having this sort of big, slow-changing power station to meet that load,” says CSIRO Energy Director Dr Glenn Platt.
And here’s today’s energy production across the national grid, where everyone can see that the minimum demand was 18,000MW (just like it was last time TonyfromOz wrote about it here five years ago. That 18,000MW are all the fridges at Coles, the freezers at Woolies, the air conditioning units in every skyscraper or tall building with windows that don’t open. It’s hospitals, night shift workers, smelters, street lights, home heaters or air con, and water heaters.
Don’t believe your lying eyes.
Source: Aneroid (which gets the data from the AEMO)
Dr Platt is working hard to convince the public that demand is all over the place:
Throughout the day, electricity demand peaks in the morning as people get ready for work, and again in the evening.
But electricity use also changes across the year, maxing out on hot summer days when air-conditioners are at full blast, and bottoming out on mild spring nights.
No mention that the constant unremitting base load is 75% of the peak. Would it change things for the paying public if they knew that?
To craft a story that base load is “old” Prof Anthony Vassallo digs out some historic anedotes:
Coal-fired power stations can take days to fire up from cold to full capacity and when demand slumps during off-peak periods, shutting down isn’t an option.
So when these power plants were being built in Australia, a market solution was created, says Professor Anthony Vassallo, Chair of Sustainable Energy Development at the University of Sydney.
“In the 70s, to stop them from having to turn off overnight, the regulators and the operators offered very, very-low-cost electricity for consumers to run their hot-water systems, which in turn sustained the ‘base load’ on the power station,” he says.
It’s true that people found ways to even out our electricity use by switching on hot water heaters at 11:32pm, but it’s also true that it was cheaper for everyone when they did.
Vassalo frames coal in the worst possible way:
But today, as more and more renewables such as wind are feeding the grid, coal-fired power stations are often forced to pay to keep their turbines running when demand drops.
What he doesn’t say is that coal fired stations are only forced to pay because taxpayers are forced to subsidize renewables. If there was no RET, rooftop or other subsidy, many renewables plants would never have been built. Who would put solar panels on if they had to pay $4,000 more?
Looks like the dinosaur industry supplies the dinosaur base load
Today’s production: 14,000 out of 18,000 MW was supplied by fossil fuels.
…
The ABC is happy to make sure Australians know the limitations of coal in fine, if imaginary detail:
“Technology has moved on from base load, and now you want flexible power.
Spell it out for us, Prof Blakers, why do we “want” flexible power — is that so we can cope with the artificial “flexible” supply, forced onto the system by mini-Gods who think they can change the weather with solar panels and windmills?
…And that’s what demand management, batteries and pumped hydro is,” says Professor Andrew Blakers, director of the ANU Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems.
So, by golly, why didn’t we use them before — maybe because they are inefficient, or inconvenient, or waste energy or cost more?
“If you have an increase in demand, a coal power station will take hours [to meet it], a gas turbine 20 to 30 minutes, batteries about a second, demand management about a second, and pumped hydro will take anywhere between 20 seconds and two minutes.”
It’s true coal can’t shift up quickly and gas can (and I hear, within a mere minute or two, not “20 – 30”). But gas also costs twice as much as coal (or even more). Does an academic care? Do taxpayers pay him to give them the whole truth or just the bit that suits him?
“Compete Nonsense” because thousands of computer simulations show that it’s theoretically possible
Theoretically, if you have unlimited funds, we could go “renewable”:
“All this talk about ‘you’ve got to have baseload power stations’ is complete nonsense,” says Dr Mark Diesendorf.
His team at the University of New South Wales ran “thousands of computer simulations” correlating hourly power-consumption data from the National Electricity Market (NEM) in 2010, with the potential power generation of renewables, based on recorded weather data for the same year.
He claims that a combination of existing technologies, including hydro and biofuelled gas turbines, were able to supply the simulated NEM even during “peak demand” — on winter evenings following overcast days.
Kilvert didn’t ask what it would cost. The academics just say “it won’t be cheap”.
Known as ‘stilling’, it has only been discovered in the last decade. And while it may sound deceptively calm, it could be a vital, missing piece of the climate change puzzle and a serious threat to our societies.
While 0.5 kilometre per hour might barely seem enough to ruffle any feathers, he warns that prolonged stilling will have serious impacts.
‘There are serious implications of wind changes in areas like agriculture and hydrology, basically because of the influence of wind on evaporation,’ said Dr Azorin-Molina. ‘A declining trend in wind speed can impact long-term power generation, and weaker winds can also mean less dispersion of pollutants in big cities, exacerbating air quality problems and therefore impacting human health.’
Here’s a rare concept in science these days: Dr Azorin-Molina isn’t sure if this is natural or man-made. No doubt, climate modelers will coming up with the answer they didn’t predict, post hoc, any day now…
In idyll speculation, researchers wondered if perhaps humans built too many obstacles (which seems hard to believe — for every skyscraper that blocks the flow we must have flattened a million trees to pave the way for easier breezing). But we have built 340,000 wind towers. Wickedly, commenter barrashee jokes that we could run nukes to power the turbines in reverse and restore the wind. 😉
Take it all with a bucket of salt– in 2011 National Geographic ran a headline The World is Getting Mysterious Winder.That same year at the meeting of the UK Parliamentary science committee they wrote a report “Warmer, Wetter, Windier, Will the UK’s Infrastructure Cope.“But despite “windier” being in the headline the sole reference to wind strength was to say that the models will get better at predicting it one day, and to note the alliterative possibility that there were unknown effects of Wetter, Warmer, Windier on the World Wide Web.
Maybe it’s clouds? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe no one has any idea:
We know that one of the best forecasts in Europe, that of the ECMWF, predicts winds close to the earth’s surface which are slightly different than those observed,’ said Dr Nuijens. ‘The question is, “What causes that?” One idea is that it is related to convective mixing coming from these cumulus clouds.’
I’d be amazed if global average wind speed was identical now to what it was in 1960.
What a fantastic line-up of speakers at the One Nation, Cost of Living Summit on Friday 13th October, 9.30-4pm.
Go see Malcolm Roberts, Mark Latham, Ross Cameron, Graham Young, Tim Andrews, Dr Alan Moran, Prof Tony Makin, and Dr Dan Mitchell (USA) and others speak on Friday at the Queensland Parliament House, LC (red chamber): Just $20.
Australians are facing severe cost-of-living pressures and decreasing living standards caused by Federal and State governments who no longer represent everyday Australians. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party are bringing together experts in tax, regulation, money, banking, housing, farming and energy who will highlight the key issues driving our high cost-of-living in Australia.
Our Cost-of-Living Summit will demonstrate how excessive government interventions have created a mess in the energy market resulting in our unaffordable power prices, and how we can remove these drivers of high costs to create a fairer and more affordable future. One Nation wants to set our nation free, harness human ingenuity and resourcefulness to create a better Australia for all Australians.
The critics called him a climate denier anyway, even when he toed the politically correct line, so there was nothing left to call him. For former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, there is no point in pandering. Now after a great speech, the EcoWorriers are left saying he is “loopy”. The new unleashed Abbott is so much stronger, more compelling, and his message is being spread far and wide. Not only will his GWPF speech fire up the footsoldier deplorables, but he is more likely to reach the undecided centre by speaking his mind freely. The ABC was pasting his message in large type all over the TV news and in article after article. That’s great for skeptics. The ABC is so blindly consumed with the dominant paradigm they can’t see how appealingly sensible Abbott looks by speaking about cold being a killer, CO2 being good for agriculture, and a bit of warming being beneficial for humans. His message of irrational electricity pain is so terribly sane. He looks at Manly beach and can see that sea levels haven’t changed much which surely everyone else with open eyes can see too. The ABC frames it as “Abbott has examined a century of photos, and he detects no rise” implying he is an amateur out of his depth (pardon the pun). But it won’t do Abbott any harm, thousands of people know Manly beach.
“Primitive people once killed goats to appease the volcano gods. We’re more sophisticated now but are still sacrificing our industries and our living standards to the climate gods to little more effect.” — Tony Abbott
In most countries, far more people die in cold snaps than in heat waves, so a gradual lift in global temperatures, especially if it’s accompanied by more prosperity and more capacity to adapt to change, might even be beneficial. — Tony Abbott
The reply: “Tony Abbott has gone from just destructive to quite loopy”. — Tanya Plibersec, Deputy Opposition Leader.
The ABC narrator, Andrew Probyn, tosses out any pretense of being impartial, just blows that facade away:
Tony Abbott – already the most destructive politician of his generation — now intends waging war on what he calls environmental theology, …
What exactly did Abbott destroy?
As Hold my beer says at #12.1: “He’s currently threatening their authority-protected, grant-dependent, welfare-sapping livelihoods.”
This is the man who led Australia to the most definitive election victory so far this century, who saved lives by stopping the boats, and who didn’t cause deaths with inept programs like rushed “pink batts” schemes. Other politicians promised to not do a major economic transformation which they then went on to exactly and specifically do. That’s a whole new league of political lie. How’s that for destroying democracy?
Probyn goes on to say that “…if [Abbotts position] tells us anything, it’s that Malcolm Turnbull can’t do anything to appease Tony Abbott on climate action which may embolden cabinet to pursue and deliver the energy policy it wants.“
Instead, the truth is that no one can do anything to appease the Climate-Masters — full obeisance, with bowing, is still not enough.
Probyn has some Christmas fantasy that this will embolden cabinet, that an outspoken Abbott is somehow less of a threat. Good luck with that theory. Are the voters likely to run from an open skeptic? Ask Donald.
Only yesterday Turnbulls team hinted they may have to drop the Renewable Energy Target. Pundits blamed “backbenchers” — which means Abbott and supporters. Abbott on the fringe, or is he ahead of the pack?
Federal Labor’s treasury spokesman Chris Bowen said the speech was spectacular evidence that Mr Abbott thinks “we can put our head in the sand” and pretend climate change is not happening.
“It is 2017 and we have got a former PM overseas denying the science of climate change and … he is calling the shots on the policy of Australia,” he said.
Now freed from any belief he will be prime minister again, [so Probyn hopes] Mr Abbott claims virtue in saying it as he sees it. Even if it is from the fringe.
This is ruinous to Malcolm Turnbull’s ambition to end the climate wars, which is what he had originally hoped for the review conducted by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel.
The prospect of a bipartisan peace on climate policy with Labor, however unlikely, is now impossible. Mr Abbott will not be satisfied even by orthodox expressions of environmentalism.
Andrew Street starts with “Heatwaves are better than cold snaps…”, but has to admit that “That first claim appears to be true”. The best Street can come up with is the threat that things will be worse 30 years from now because the WHO says so, and malaria might spread (he probably doesn’t know it was more of a threat in northern Europe in the cold 1800s), and besides, Himalayan Glaciers will melt. Whatever. Street — probably watches the ABC — so he doesn’t realize the WHO projections are based on models that might as well be magic spells. As for floods, 1,000 years of paleohistory shows that, if anything, floods and droughts were longer and worse. Climate change is bringing us… nicer weather. Tough eh?
“We can tell ocean levels aren’t rising by looking at Manly Beach”
Poor Street again has to admit this is a lot like what we were taught in primary school (because it’s true, eh?) But he repeats the old Nature study that claims the extra food will be less nutritious. Supposedly if rice has 3% less zinc or 5% less iron, people will die, or then again, if you think about it, no sane person eats rice for its zinc or iron content, and as I calculated, people just need to eat one extra chickpea for every 100g of rice and their nutrition problem is solved. People in abject poverty may not be able to afford that pea, but the answer is to help them get cheap reliable energy so they can get out of poverty, not to panic about small declines in minerals. Bulk carbohydrate crops grow faster in a CO2 rich world. That dilutes the other stuff. It’s just chemistry.
“People prefer clear policy to endless uncertainty”
You can’t push ..it uphill forever. We’ll have uncertainty as long as policies are levitating on a namecalling campaign instead of being based on hard data. If we want certainty we need to drop the pagan belief that our power stations can be used to control the climate.
It would be wrong to underestimate the strengths of the contemporary West. By objective standards, people have never had better lives. Yet our phenomenal wealth and our scientific and technological achievements rest on values and principles that have rarely been more widely challenged.
To a greater or lesser extent, in most Western countries, we can’t keep our borders secure; we can’t keep our industries intact; and we can’t preserve a moral order once taken for granted. Eventually, something will crystalize out of this age of disruption but in the meantime we could be entering a period of national and even civilizational decline.
In Australia, we’ve had ten years of disappointing government. It’s not just the churn of prime ministers that now rivals Italy’s, the internal divisions and the policy confusion that followed a quarter century of strong government under Bob Hawke and John Howard. It’s the institutional malaise. We have the world’s most powerful upper house: a Senate where good government can almost never secure a majority. Our businesses campaign for same sex marriage but not for economic reform. Our biggest company, BHP, the world’s premier miner, lives off the coal industry that it now wants to disown. And our oldest university, Sydney, now boasts that its mission is “unlearning”.
Of course, to be an Australian is still to have won the lottery of life, and there’s yet no better place to live and work. But there’s a nagging sense that we’re letting ourselves down and failing to reach anything like our full potential.
We are not alone in this. The Trump ascendancy, however it works out, was a popular revolt against politics-as-usual. Brexit was a rejection of the British as well as of the European establishments. Yes, the centrist, Macron, won in France but only by sidelining the parties that had ruled from the start of the Fifth Republic. And while the German chancellor was re-elected, seemingly it’s at the head of an unstable coalition after losing a quarter of her vote.
Minister Josh Frydenberg has just implied Australia might drop ongoing endless renewables subsidies (and thus dump the Finkel chief-“scientist” plan). He didn’t say that in so many words, but hinted at it, and will now wait to see how the idea goes down.
Soak in this reasoning — renewables are becoming so cost competitive they don’t need subsidies. He’s calling their bluff. It’s like the announcement to sack climate scientists because “the science is settled”. Let’s take them at their word and follow that propaganda to its logical end:
The key message from Josh Frydenberg is that subsidies for renewable energy are coming to an end.
There is no Clean Energy Target in sight in Frydenberg’s plan for a new policy by the end of this year. The phrase does not get a single mention in his new speech on the way ahead.
In a key argument, the Energy Minister argues that the cost of building wind and solar power has more than halved in recent years.
He does not rule out more subsidies explicitly, but the clear suggestion is that renewable energy generators are now at a point where they can stand on their own two feet. This is exactly the message from Coalition backbenchers who are sceptical about the Renewable Energy Target and any CET to continue the subsidies after 2020.
The energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, says Australia’s electricity sector is looking for stability, “not necessarily” for handouts, in a signal the Turnbull government is poised to abandon the clean energy target.
I don’t think they’re going to want this sort of stability. What they really want is “subsidy”.
This is not over yet:
When Turnbull was asked if the government had abandoned the Finkel hot favourite list, he played it both ways, ambiguously waffling about meeting Paris agreements while delivering reliable affordable energy which says exactly nothing. Write to your elected rep. Write to your newspaper editor. Write, ring, holler, don’t stop now. The renewables industry will be doing it like their next ski trip to the Swiss Alps depends on it.
Bluff meet reality:
We can measure the truth of the “competitiveness” by the outcry from the renewables industry lobbyists. How loud will be the squeal? At Reneweconomy.com, David Leitch, principal of ITK (whatever that is), puts in his best effort to scare the Coalition today declaring it is Frydenberg’s election losing speech. “In our dreams”, say skeptics, this next election will be about energy policy like it was in 2013. Bring it on. We might see a 90 seat landslide again. Labor are running with their 50% renewables plan, death to Australian manufacturing.
Tellingly, Leitch’s first graph is about the cost of nasty storms in the US, because subsidies for windmills will stop droughts, floods and tornadoes. Yeah, baby. (Please keep reminding people. Please.) He then talks share prices, gas prices, trading volumes and baseload futures. What he doesn’t graph are the countries which have lots of renewables and their electricity costs. I wonder why?
His reading of the implications of Frydenberg’s speech as the same as everyone else:
Mainstream media, specifically “The Australian Financial Review” and “The Australian” have taken the Federal Minister for “The Enviroment and Energy” speech to a conference today to state that the Government is “set to dump clean energy target”.
Frydenberg reasons that the public won’t support climate change action if they have to pay too much for their bills:
Should reliability and affordability be compromised, public support for tackling climate change will quickly diminish and previous gains will be lost
How does Finkel justify more subsidies in a cost competitive industry?
Because “management”:
Finkel told the gathering a clean energy target was a framework allowing an orderly transition away from carbon-intensive power sources to low-emissions power sources.
“It remains a useful tool even if there is an extreme rate of reduction in the price of the new technologies,” Finkel said. “You need a managed transition.”
So Finkel the chief scientist hath spoken on economic matters of energy policy and the answer is to manage the transition, which shows what a pointless position “Chief Scientist” is. He didn’t assess the scientific reasoning at all, and fails on economic basics. If renewables were competitive, the transition would manage itself. Who wouldn’t want solar panels and batteries if it really did cut the electricity bill in half? But solar still has subsidies, the payback time is long, uncertain, and there are horrid aftereffects making the whole grid unstable, driving out the cheapest baseload providers, and ultimately intermittent “cheap” electricity drives up the cost of electricity overall.
The scandals do count. The Australian articles has got Minister Frydenbergs attention. The extensive collection of blog posts and the IPA Climate Change book show there is a deep well of material to fuel more articles. We have barely begun. Congratulations to Jennifer Marohasy. At least we will get a few more answers to questions we shouldn’t even have to ask.
Dr Johnson has also agreed to meet with Jennifer Marohasy, a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, to discuss the integrity of the bureau’s temperature measurements as she pushes ahead with calls for a parliamentary inquiry.
The story of the “one second” records is potent: How many “hottest ever records” have been created thanks to new electronic equipment?
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology appears to have put in place a measurement system guaranteed to provide new record high and low temperatures,” she said in the letter.
Instead of the older-style mercury thermometers in which temperatures changed more slowly, the bureau has since the late 1980s installed electronic probes sensitive to rapid variations. “Just last Saturday (September 22), the Bureau of Meteorology announced a September record for Mildura, in northwestern Victoria, of 37.7C.
What we need is the absolute raw data. No editing, filtering or adjusting. We need to know what the equipment recorded, and every part of the trail that leads from the instrument to the reported number in the headline.
Banks, businesses, taxpayers get audited. Time for the BOM.
Electricity prices jumped in July. Now, retail sales are falling as wallets run out of money. When Greens, Labor, Conservatives said we need insurance, only skeptics pointed out the price.
Commonwealth Bank economist, Gareth Aird, calls the fall a “shocker”.
In a sign sluggish wages and higher power prices are starting to bite, the new financial year has seen the biggest fall in retail sales since 2009…
The Australian dollar fell back towards US78c yesterday after the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed retail sales had fallen 0.6 per cent between July and August, defying economists’ expectations they would rise modestly.
“Households are facing several headwinds, including record low wage growth, record levels of debt, slowing house price growth, and, importantly, sharply higher energy bills,” said ANZ economist Jo Masters. The drop in retail sales by a cumulative 0.8 percentage points over the two months to August, the biggest two-month decline since 2009, comes as consumers receive their first round of power bills after prices went up more than 20 per cent since July.”
Who would have thought? The country is forced to spend more on green electrons to change the global weather, and that means people have less to spend elsewhere.
Cafe and restaurant owners were hit particularly hard. Survey’s show people “believe” in climate change, but don’t want to spend more money on it. But no surveys ask the questions that matter — How many restaurant meals will you give up in order to cool the world by 0.0001C? Will you give up your sales job to make hurricanes slower (maybe) in ninety years?
Adam Bandt is out today with the big new plan, apparently confused about what “load” means:
We don’t have a baseload problem, we have a peak load problem,” Mr Bandt said.
No matter how you look at this, it’s not a “load” problem. It’s an issue of supply.
We can count on the Greens to pour confusion on any problem:
“We need flexible generation and energy storage to manage the transition, not more coal.”
Four mistakes in one sentence. We have flexible generation – more than enough to cope with the current load curve. What we need is affordable electricity, which we used to have, and which coal supplies. What we don’t need is energy storage to manage an irrelevant transition that we never had to have in the first place. Let me say it again, electricity generators are for generating electricity, not for magical attempts to control the climate.
What Adam Bandt was trying to say:
“We The freeloading renewables industry needs flexible generation and energy storage to make up for its unreliable supply, to managekeep the frivolous and expensive transition to renewablesfrom collapsing, not more coal.
Baseload scares the renewables industry and their lobbyists
It’s the great weakness of intermittent renewables. Solar and wind are in dire need of government funded batteries to stop their inefficient, unreliable, subsidy-dependent industry from evaporating. It’s only by paying more billions to “shift the load curve” that the normal load can be adapted to fit the new intermittent supply.
How much?
Such a system could deliver between 400 and 450-gigawatt hours of storage, which has the potential to power more than 100,000 homes for eight hours.
Or we could save $2b, get the government out of the electricity market, and let someone else spend $2b of their own money building an efficient coal plant that would supply more homes for fifty years at rates much cheaper.
Matt Ridley is about as gentlemanly, polite and sane a man as you’ve ever likely to meet — which is exactly why the mob are so afraid of letting him speak. Ridley even agrees that humans have caused most of the warming in the last fifty years (I shall have to talk to him about that). But this middle position is a potent threat. He’s walking the very ground that threatens the Green Blob — there are no subsidy trains in middle land. There’s no urgency, no gravy, and yet it’s so temptingly sensible, which is why the minions work hard to silence him. He can’t be ignored as “fringe”:
“I’ve written about many controversial issues during my career,” Ridley said. “Never, have I ever experienced anything like what happens when you write about climate, which is a systematic and organized attempt to blacken your name rather than your arguments, and to try to pressure any outlet that publishes me into not publishing me any more.” A group of activists and scientists is urging the Times (U.K.) to stop publishing a regular column authored by Ridley because his views often challenge the climate tribe’s reigning dogma. Fortunately, none of this seems to have dampened Ridley’s good humor or self-effacing manner.
In a normal scientific debate, there would be a normal distribution of opinions — with most minds walking the middle ground where Matt is. It’s only tribal politics and rampant bullying that can keep opinions split in a U-shape distribution with most “players” either completely for or completely against an idea. And this is what Ridley is experiencing.
One of those groups must be wrong. Perhaps both. But the U-shape polarized opinion state takes a lot of effort to maintain. There is high-speed-spin, and buckets of money required to centrifuge the minds out of the middle.
Skeptics are not the ones fighting to silence voices.
With only a million dollars a day it’s hard for the BoM to keep up with their own stations. Luckily Bill Johnston has arrived to help out for free. The BoM announced that it was Canberra’s hottest ever day last week, but forgot to check whether the heat was due to the site moving three times, changes in thermometers and a wind profiler they installed themselves in 2010.
Normally the BoM would detect and correct for these sorts of things by using Homogenisation Magic (HM). That’s where they spot these effects by comparing a station with surrounding stations. However in this case HM missed all three site moves and the wind profiler. It looks like those might add up to 2.2°C of artificial warming. Nothing to worry about, but the hottest ever record will have to be shredded, and naturally, the BoM will need to issue a correction with at least as much fuss and coverage as the mistaken headlines. It’s only fair…
After the effect of rainfall is removed there are at least three site moves, a screen change, equipment change, and alterations to the surrounding area that may influence the site. These step changes align with documented moves and account for most of the warming.
Instead of using Homogenisation Magic, Johnston did things like getting site photos from national archives, and from google as well as using the BoM’s own data. He found out that most things have changed about the Canberra site since 1995. In 1995, not only did the thermometer shift to a new spot, the old liquid-in-glass style was converted to an electronic sensor (and we know they can be more sensitive and responsive to temperature changes). On top of that the screen around the thermometer shrank to about a quarter of its original volume (from 0.23m3 to 0.06m3). In the last ten years, large gravel or concrete pads were built near the sensor as well as a thingummygig called a wind profiler (which is a vertical radar array for detecting atmospheric turbulence).
Johnston uses a change in the relationship between temperature and rainfall to spot the site changes (then confirms them with documentation). If a site moves to a warmer or cooler spot the temperatures will shift up or down but the rainfall won’t. The relationship between rain and temperature will be broken — an effect that shows up during the following years of data. These changes in pattern often occur at the same time as a site change, and Johnston uses the shifting ratio’s to estimate how much effect the site change has.
Johnston has looked at a lot of sites around Australia, and estimates that many modern records wouldn’t be records at all if the BOM bothered to dig out historic photos, maps, and data and took more care to estimate the effect of site changes. The techno magical homogenization tool sounds fancy but allows site problems to be turned into misleading headlines.
Canberra’s record “hottest ever September day” is a great headline but not remotely real. The BoM forgot to mention thermometers were moved at least three times, each time to a warmer site.
Homogenisation is a complete failure. Canberra temperature appears to follow model projections because homogenisation ignores site changes in 1973, 1997, 2004 and 2010.
Introduction
It’s not fair to expect meteorologists who don’t observe the weather to know much about their data.
However, its reasonable for people in Canberra gouged by ACTEW-AGL’s energy prices to expect Ashleigh Lange from the Bureau of Meteorology to have researched the BoM site at Canberra Airport so she knows what she is talking about when claiming “Canberra records its hottest ever September day” (Canberra Times, 23 September 2017).
It was cold as a toad three days before the record was allegedly “smashed”; people and businesses were forced to turn on the heat, which sent ACTEW-AGL laughing all the way to the bank. Which bank? The ones that won’t support low-cost coal-fired electricity generation of course.
Why is site history important?
Moving a Stevenson screen often results in a permanent change in background heat sources and sinks. For example buildings may shield prevailing winds; a site near a runway is likely warmed by tarmac not the weather. So for places like Canberra airport, where the site moved at least three times (See those details below) its important to know if temperature changes are due to site effects or the climate.
Canberra Airport
Figure 1. The original 1939 Canberra airport Aeradio site was near the hanger (S1) where the office was located. The site moved to S2, probably in 1973; then to an AWS south of the meteorological office at S3 (December 1995); then S4 in December 2008.
Rainfall can be used to help analyze the effect of changes in the site and equipment
Evaporation cools the environment and there is a simple relationship between average Canberra maximum temperature (Tmax) and annual rainfall. Dry years are warm years, and the drier it is, the hotter it gets [Figure 2 (a)]). [It’s not the same for minimums where things are more complicated. A wet year can have slightly warmer nights. Clouds and humidity reduce heat loss by radiation so temperature is warmer in the early morning. (Exposure of the Stevenson screen to down-slope drainage of cool air is also important.) As foggy and cloudy winter days often don’t bring rain in Canberra, relationships between Tmin and rainfall are less clear-cut.]
The variation in Tmax can be split into the portion attributable to rainfall (the component described by the linear regression line [Figure 2 (a)]) and the residual variation, which is the portion not explained by rainfall. The relationship is robust if it is statistically significant and more than 50% of Tmax variation is accounted-for (R2adj, the coefficient of determination, is greater than 0.50). Although random in the rainfall-domain, Tmax-rainfall residuals may embed a hidden time-signal. As rainfall effects are removed the trajectory of residuals (rescaled by adding grand-mean Tmax) is unaffected by persistent weather effects and is analysed for step-changes using an independent statistical test [Figure 2 (b)].
Residual step-changes show that either the S1-site changed in 1973 (due to works nearby, for example) and it moved to S2 later (about 1975); or the move in the ACORN-SAT catalogue is miss-specified. Many things changed in 1995 [the site moved to S3, an AWS replaced thermometers, and it is likely that a small Stevenson screen (0.06m3) replaced a previous large one (0.23m3)]. In 2005, a vertical radar array for detecting atmospheric turbulence (wind profiler) was installed on a 350 m2 gravel or concrete pad 30 m north of the screen and a bitumen car-park replaced a former playing field 25 m east (Figure 3). However, the site didn’t move to S4 until December 2008, afterwards, in 2010, the wind-profiler relocated 40 m north of the S4 screen.
Figure 2. Tmax depends on rainfall (a); however, due to embedded site changes, variation explained (R2adj) is only 0.36 or 36%. As the naïve regression (Tmax = 21.91 – 0.34oC/100 mm) accounts for rainfall; rescaled residual variation (b) is due to non-rainfall factors including site and observer inconsistencies data in-filling etc.; and site changes and relocations. (Out-of-range outliers (o/r; red squares) are excluded from analysis.) Segments defined by step-changes are analysed separately in (c). Except for 2005 to 2016, relationships are significant. Differences in R2adj reflect both the number of cases and closeness of data to respective regression lines and are not comparable. Dotted lines indicate median rainfall (vertical) and overall average Tmax (horizontal), which provides a visual reference. (A P value of 0.10 is not statistically significant.)
Factored on step-changes, simultaneous analysis[3] shows regressions [individually free-fit in Figure 2 (c)] are parallel; rainfall reduces Tmax 0.33°C/100 mm and 78.8% of Tmax variation is explained (vs. 36% for rainfall alone). Moving the site beside the runways in 1972; then to the AWS and small screen in the vicinity of the new met-office in 1995; then installation of the 2005 wind-profiler array; sealing the car-park; then in December 2008 moving 400 m south along the eastern airport boundary, where a wind-profiler array was installed in 2010 caused data to warm 1.75°C[4] (0.43°C + 0.76°C + 0.56°C [Figure 2 (b)]). With those changes and rainfall accounted-for no Tmax trend remains that is indicative of changes in the climate.
The history of Canberra airport’s moving weather station
Temperature measurements started at Canberra airport in 1939 when Aeradio was set-up to monitor aircraft and advise pilots of inclement weather. In those days planes flew through turbulence not above it like jets do and Aerado ensued aviation safety. Plans at the National Archives of Australia show the Aerado and meteorological offices were in the northwest corner of the original hanger, still standing at RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force) Fairbairn. In June 1940 weather observers and radio operators were conscripted to the RAAF and after WWII, in July 1946, air traffic control merged with the Department of Civil Aviation and Weather Bureau staff transferred to Department of the Interior. As technology changed and demand for services increased facilities across Australia were up-graded in the 1950s. Radar was introduced to monitor aerosonde balloons; the busy met-office in the hanger at Canberra airport was provided with forced ventilation in 1954.
The National Library of Australia holds aerial photographs from 1956 and 1960 that show a meteorological enclosure between the north-south runway and the hanger (at about Latitude ‑35.3049, Longitude 149.2014) (S1 in Figure 1). The 2012 ACORN-SAT[2] catalogue states vaguely that the “original site (070014) was on the eastern side of the airport”; and “there are indications … of a possible move in about 1975”. The Canberra Aero Comparison (70228) (December 1995 to 1997) site summary locates the second site (S2) in the centre of the airport near intersection of the N-S and E-W runways (Lat. -35.3083, Lon. 149.1936). The site moved 800 m northeast to an automatic weather station (AWS) in December 1995 (S3); then 400 m south in December 2008 (S4). Canberra Airport Comparison (70014) metadata doesn’t mention either of the two earlier sites so perhaps the Bureau doesn’t really know what happened.
Discussion and conclusions
Daily temperature fluctuates around average site temperature. For September, average S1 Tmax from 1939 to 1972 is 15.8°C; from 1973 to 1996 (S2) it is 16.0°C; from 1997 to 2004 (S3), 17.3°C and at the current S4 site it is 18.0°C. Due to site changes and moves which have nothing to do with the climate, average September Tmax has shifted-up by 2.2°C!
World’s worst-practice compounds multiple site and instrument changes. Although the 1973 S2 site operated in parallel with S3 until December 1997; reply to an FOI request confirmed that data for thermometers observed in parallel with the AWS until March 2010 at S3 (which would enable the change to the AWS/small screen to be cross-referenced using the same instrument) are not available. Internal Bureau policy directed that manually observed data were discarded without being databased and that paper records were destroyed. In the absence of comparative data statistical inference and interpretation of site factors (Figure 3) is the only evidence that the heat signature of the MO-site (S3) is different to the runway (S2) site.
…
Canberra
Figure 3. Google Earth satellite images of the Stevenson screen (sc) and meteorological office (mo) at S3 beside a sports oval on 11 March 2004 (left); and with the wind profiler array (wp) and sealed car-park on 31 March 2008 (the site did not relocate until December 2008).
Homogenisation makes no Tmax adjustment despite the weather station moving three times to situations whose background heat signatures are different; and changes such as to the AWS and small Stevenson screen in 1995, which is documented; and installation of wind profiler arrays in the vicinity in 2005. Bureau meteorologist Ashleigh Lange who claimed 30.2°C on Saturday 23 September “smashed a 52-year record” and was the “hottest ever September day” may not have visited the site, analysed any data and may not know that Tmax is affected by background warming independent of the climate. Even if it’s an above-average anomaly, inflated by site factors it is not a valid 52-year record.
Homogenisation provably does not improve site records. Choosing not to adjust for site and instrument changes in 1973, 1997, 2004 and 2010 causes Canberra data to warm like the models claim it should. Although Canberra airport data are not used directly to calculate Australia’s warming, Bureau meteorologists use the site to stir alarm about the climate.
Furthermore, airport data spread their faults far and wide: to ACORN-SAT sites at Bathurst Agricultural Research Station (63005), Dubbo airport AWS (65070), Moruya Pilot Station (69018) and Nowra RAN (68072). Data for those, adjust others, including Sydney Observatory, whose numerous faults find their way to Alice Springs (via. Tibooburra). Homogenisation of faulty ACORN-SAT site data using other data that are faulty is flawed. Instead of being recycled into yet another version, ACORN-SAT should simply be abandoned.
Bureau marketing of record-heat that doesn’t exist is the reason for the RET; the rivers-of-cash ACTEW-AGL takes from the Canberra community and the ACT Labor-Greens government’s hard left-turn to consumer-subsidised unreliable “renewables”.
Trends don’t exist; the cost is too high; people are hurting and losing their jobs. An open public inquiry into the Bureau of Meteorology and its dodgy homogenisation methods is long-overdue. In the meantime, the Bureau should cease making claims about record temperatures, which like at Canberra are provably false.
Managing the global climate is a tough thing. Sacrifices are required.
The last 100 years has been a success story of cleaner air in London. But air pollution is on the rise again. The fear of carbon is partly responsible for over a million people returning to burning “renewable wood” instead of clean gas and turning around a century long trend. Welcome to the “progressive” 21st century. Too bad about about the dusty lungs and razed trees.
As much as a third of small particle pollution is due to wood fires.
Wood-burning stoves are increasingly popular in middle-class homes and hotels, with 1.5 million across Britain and 200,000 sold annually. Old fireplaces have also been opened up in many houses and can cause greater pollution than stoves. Wood burning is most popular in the southeast, where it is done in 16 per cent of households compared with less than 5 per cent in northern England and Scotland.
Between a quarter and a third of all fine particle pollution in London comes from domestic wood burning. During a period of very high air pollution in January, it contributed half the toxic emissions in some areas of the city, King’s College London found.
It is alleged that air pollution causes “9,500 early deaths a year in London and 40,000 across Britain”.
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