Optimism is rising among scientists that parts of the Great Barrier Reef that were severely bleached over the past two years are making a recovery.
Scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science this month surveyed 14 coral reefs between Cairns and Townsville to see how they fared after being bleached.
The institute’s Neil Cantin said they were surprised to find the coral had already started to reproduce.
Who would have thought that after 5,000 years of climate change, sea level change, temperature change and super-storms every 200 years — that the Great Barrier Reef would have something left up its sleeve?
Much of the ABC reporting on the Great Barrier Reef damage uses vague terms. If I was feeling cruel, I might call them “weasel words”:
Nearly two thirds of the Great Barrier Reef was affected by bleaching in 2016 and 2017, killing up to 50 per cent of coral in those parts.
So which parts are “those parts”? Did 50% of the corals die in two-thirds of the reef? Or has two thirds of the reef been affected by a small amount of bleaching while a much smaller number of reefs were hit by the apocalyptic 50% death-rate? There must be a better way to describe the damage. As it is, it is a number mush. (If only the ABC had a dedicated science unit they would be able to make sense of difficult concepts like this.) 😉
“What it means is the corals along the entire Great Barrier Reef, are survivors that are going to reproduce earlier than expected which could help drive quicker recovery if we don’t see another heat stress this summer,” he said.
“This is a positive news story for a change for the Great Barrier Reef. We’re seeing eggs and we hope those eggs will lead to somewhat of a successful spawning season this summer.”
When climate-sameness would be remarkable…
The Barrier Reef survived the Holocene peak for hundreds of years, so we might assume that the reef has ways to deal with hotter conditions and changing temperatures. Sea levels in Queensland were 1 – 2 meters higher 5,000 years ago. (Lewis 2012) Super cyclones have been hitting the coast of Queensland for the last 5,000 years and there is no sign that storms are getting worse. (see Nott 2001 and Hayne 2001.)
Corals have survived warmer periods and worse storms
Globally it was hotter 5,000 years ago, and sea levels were a lot higher in Queensland:
Sea Levels have been falling for 4,000 years in Queensland during the Holocene. Lewis et al 2012.
Nott and Hayne studied a 5000 year history of super-cyclones along a 1500 km stretch of North East Australia and concluded that the big nasty ones hit roughly every 200-300 years in all parts of the coastline from 13° – 24°S.
Fig 6: Progradation plot: normalized distances of each dated Storm Deposit from the oldest ridge crest versus the age difference between each storm deposit and the oldest ridge.
Hayne and Chappell (2001) looked at deposits left from storm surges on Curacoa Island (one of the Palm Islands of far north Queensland). They found that large cyclones have been hitting the coast at a statistically constant rate for 5000 years. This includes the earliest times when the sea surface temperature appear to have been about 1°C warmer (Gagan et al 1998). At Palm Island, sea levels were apparently 70cm higher back in that warm Holocene era (Chappell et al 1983). Somehow the Great Barrier Reef survived.
h/t Dave B. Pat.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef,
At times may get bleached, but its brief,
And for eons survived,
More than bleaching and thrived,
Which must cause alarmists some grief.
The Manns’ electricity costs have more than doubled in five years, from about $200,000 per annum to $500,000.
Due to the high prices, the family will this summer switch to diesel power to run their 116-stand rotary dairy and 14 irrigation centre pivots at Wye in the lower south east of South Australia.
The Manns are among Australia’s top 10 dairy producers, in terms of volume, milking up to 2300 cows and producing 19-21 million litres annually.
If only South Australia had more “cheap” solar and wind power, their electricity might be as low cost as the coal-fired Victorians:
Their move comes as South Australia’s dairy lobby has calculated the state’s dairy farmers paid about 40 per cent more for power than their Victorian neighbours last season.
The Mann’s are definitely going diesel this summer, but may set up a mixed solar-diesel-battery plan in the long run:
“Its embryonic, but information we have is saying we could get a payback within five years of (setting up a system on-farm) not connected to the grid, a combination of solar, diesel and batteries.
Imagine how expensive your electricity has to be for a small diesel generator to be cheaper than mass produced coal power? This could be the first time in 130 years that people connected to coal turbines switch off to use their own small fossil fueled generators because it’s cheaper.
Another world first for South Australia. And possibly a mark of the grid saturation point of intermittent renewables.
File this under Nasty Nature. This is the sort of thing planet Earth throws at life.
The is real “sea level rise” — where most of a continent (called Zealandia) sinks under the waves — and — as far as we know, though I could be wrong — fossil fuel use was minimal circa 50 -80 million years ago. Can Exxon be blamed?
New Zealanders may be feeling a bit cheesed that they carelessly lost something like 80% of their land. (Call that “Old Zealand” which was once as big as India.) Given that it is one kilometer underwater, it looks like it isn’t coming back soon. But think of all the national parks, reefs, etc that were destroyed?
Zealandia. | Credit: IODP
The story is that the Pacific Rim of Fire “buckled” 40-50 million years ago, and Zealandia sunk a lot deeper. There is a suggestion that it was originally submerged about 80 million years ago (or so), when this renegade land split from Australia and Antarctica.
Since 1,000 tide gauges estimate current sea level rise at around 1 mm a year, real climate change puts the current panic about sea levels into perspective. Even the next ice age, with a 125m sea level drop, is not going to uncover all this lost real-estate.
A fairly crappy investment in every sense — even as a “subsidy farmer”:
…renewable energy proponents say individual consumers like Mr Pulford could play an increasingly important role as citizen investors.
“I say it is a little bit gold plated,” Mr Pulford says of his $20,000 investment.
‘The new system was installed last month and he is already generating enough power to run all his home energy needs, charge his son’s hybrid SUV and sell excess back to the grid. “It ranges between $2 to about $1.90 a day for energy and that can be with the clothes dryers and bar heaters on.”
Mr Pulford said he expects to pay off the investment within 14 years.
He’s excited that his electricity bill is only $700 a year, after laying out twenty grand. After 14 years his “investment” will start to pay off, assuming the batteries are still running, the solar panels are clean, and the inverter didn’t need replacing. Those battery warranties, at best, are ten years. He might get lucky. Without subsidies, his “pay-back time” would be something like 30% longer.
In the ACT, 250 homes with Reposit technology are generating up to 1.2 megawatts, which is dwarfed by territory-wide consumption.
Reposit power gets a free advertisement from the ABC, but the ABC don’t mention that when it is forecast to be cloudy, the software Reposit uses is designed to charge the battery direct from the grid (and that will be mostly coal-fired). That way “solar users” get electricity at off peak prices and they can sell back the electricity at higher peak rates. This will help the grid deal with the intermittency of solar and wind, a problem the grid didn’t need to have.
The ACT has pledged to be 100% renewable by 2025. I say “bring it on” but they’ll only be 100% renewable when they cut the interconnectors.
Glorious solar subsidies
The ACT Government has released a third round of funding to accelerate solar battery storage and the $4 million includes subsidies for batteries with Reposit control boxes.
Mr Pulford agreed.
“We can’t continue to use fossil fuels for our energy because the future generation will pay the price,” he said.
It’s not the future generation who will pay, it’s people poorer than Mr Pulford who are already paying for the subsidy. He rationalizes his burden on the system with the superstitious belief that having solar panels on the roof will somehow make life nicer for future generations.
I’m sure he is a nice guy, but when it comes to accepting money from taxpayers, half the population is happy not-to-look-too-hard.
Isn’t it time we taught kids where taxpayer money comes from?
Solar subsidies for a 6kW system are round $3,500:
The lowest value STCs have held is $16, while their cap price is $40. Using the median price of $28 as a guide, the “rebate” you would receive for the 6.48 kW system described earlier is approximately 125 x 28 = $3500, which represents 30 to 40% of the price of a good quality system. Real-time STC market prices can be found online.
The subsidies were $1,000 bigger before July 20th 2017.
We are creatures of habit. Look at the spike caused at 11:32pm as something like 27,000 hot water tanks in South Australia suddenly switch on to use cheaper off-peak electricity. This spike is entirely due to pricing plans. It’s entirely avoidable too, but at least it’s predictable. “Scheduled”.
This peak, allegedly, is only a problem if SA is “islanded” — meaning if it can’t rely on the coal generators in Victoria.
Yesterday people were asking why the South Australian demand was peaking at 1am (and why two hours were strangely missing from that graph). “Hot water” is the answer (at least to the first part).
SA Hot water systems add sudden 250MW of demand at 11:30pm. Graph.
This graph comes from the AEMO report in Feb 2016. What follows is their electro-nitty-gritty:
Based on previous experience, and as demonstrated in a separation event on 1 November 2015, maintaining the SA power system in a secure operating state is challenging if there are large changes to the supply-demand balance during a period of islanding.
There is a risk of automatic under frequency load shedding if SA is being operated as an island during the hot water demand peak, which occurs at 11:30 pm daily.
Hot water demand peak
Currently the most concerning of these challenges is the hot water demand peak that occurs at 11:30 pm daily. This is a step change increase in demand of approximately 250 MW, shown in Figure 3. This demand peak is controlled by fixed timers and requires considerable effort to reduce the peak through the adjustment of the time clocks at individual premises. While all new meters installed in SA will have randomised time clocks, all existing meters are set to switch at 11:30 pm.
What other heavily subsidized industry brags about its ability to provide a product for one quarter of the time it’s needed? Vale sunny-day-solar!
Pick a day, an hour, and what are the chances solar will be there for you? A lot less than one in four, because last Monday’s peak in South Australia was an all time record. Every day in the last year was worse.
The price dip at 6am (the black-line bottomless gully), has nothing to do with solar, but was caused by wind power. Far from being useful, essential, or productive, solar and wind power are playing havoc with a normal market, destroying the chance for cheap, reliable energy to find a place. As long as we force the market to accept this non-dispatchable supply, we are actively punishing reliable power. What investor in reliable energy would look at this and head to South Australia?”
South Australia’s level of minimum demand hit a new record low this weekend – barely a week after the previous benchmark was set – with a fall to just 587MW on Sunday afternoon.
We can see what a wild spike this particular lunchtime peak was:
The record eclipsed the previous mark by nearly 200MW – with AEMO data showing minimum demand at 1.30pm of exactly 587.8MW, compared with the previous low mark of 786.42MW posted last Sunday. (See graph above courtesy of Melbourne’s Climate and Energy College).
That is a phenomenal share of 47.8 per cent of the state’s electricity demand being met by rooftop solar (compares with 36 per cent in the previous record last week) and is clearly a record for South Australia, and for that matter in any large grid anywhere in the world.
Parkinson seems to think a slight dip in exorbitantly high prices is a good thing?
The impact of rooftop solar is being felt in prices – look at the black line that shows prices fall as rooftop solar accounts for a sizeable share of demand during the day.
Yes, let’s look at the black-line price “dip” (but don’t compare it with the long term price for electricity when renewables were a smaller part of the grid.)
The South Australians are in deep:
South Australia is the first region where rooftop solar PV has caused a shift in minimum demand from night time to the middle of the day (most states still have electric hot water being switched on at night, when it would make sense to use the “solar sponge” as Queensland has suggested).
We could reprogram all the hot water heaters to automatically switch on in the middle of the day. Bravo. When it’s not so record-breaking-sunny (which is nearly every other day), we’ll a/ pay more for hot water, or b/ have cold showers? We could use the hot water tanks to store solar energy — but isn’t that what we make solar-hot-water-heaters for, and aren’t they more efficient at it? Why not heat the water direct instead of using PV cells to generate electricity, then use the electricity to heat the water? Is this the big advance Parkinson is excited about?
How “good” is a market price of minus $44?
Note, also, the negative price of minus $44/MWh at 6am when there was abundant wind and a constraint on the connector with Victoria.
The sign of a screwed market. Let me build a plant and pay you to take my electricity…. How does that work as a free market, nay, socialist plan — just fine. Would you like nationalized coal with that? The only company that can afford to run the cheapest generator in the market is one with shareholders who are forced to pay and never ask for a dividend.
It also questions the need for old fashioned concepts such as “baseload”, which would struggle to find a niche in a market dominated by wind and solar, where mostly “dispatchable” and flexible generation is needed to fill in the gaps. Wind energy is already producing more than 100 per cent of local demand at certain times.
Baseload is old fashioned in the same sense that cooking dinner at 6-9pm is. Ninety nine percent of Australia is still living the baseload dream.
Excellent news. Obviously we are getting to the BoM.
This week, Jen Marohasy and I were mentioned by Maurice Newman in The Australian.“Smoking Gun demands Grilling for the BoM”. In response, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has unleashed a double dummy-popping effort in The Guardian.
The BoM could have answered the questions in The Australian, of course, but it’s so much easier to whine, bluster, raise the conspiracy flag and avoid the questions that matter at the-ask-no-hard-questions-Guardian.
It really is an extraordinary rant as the former head of the BoM admits skeptics are “debilitating” the BoM with these “attacks”. The Guardian is so starved of real news, it runs the one-sided name-calling excuses and another separate story discusses it as if it was actually news. While The Australian asks the BoM for a reply and would publish it, The Guardian didn’t ask a skeptic. One of these newspapers acts like a newspaper…
How debilitating are we skeptics? Jennifer Marohasy tells me she sent the BoM questions in 2015, but hasn’t heard back yet. It doesn’t take much to debilitate the million-dollar-a-day agency. Ask a few questions and cripple them for years…
Obviously, the BoM have stopped trying to answer Marohasy, but now they also say they won’t answer our national masthead newspaper either. That’s another scandal to add to the list.
Over that time, Vertessy’s agency was under consistent attack from climate science denialists who would claim, often through the news and opinion pages of the Australian, that the weather bureau was deliberately manipulating its climate records to make recent warming seem worse than it really was.
When the Bureau makes mistakes, this is how it thanks the volunteers who want to improve the national data:
Vertessy said these sorts of attacks were dangerous. “From my perspective, people like this, running interference on the national weather agency, are unproductive and it’s actually dangerous,” Vertessy told me. “Every minute a BoM executive spends on this nonsense is a minute lost to managing risk and protecting the community. It is a real problem.”
It’s all a wicked conspiracy:
Now, the agency is under another wave of attack through the pages of the Rupert Murdoch-owned broadsheet, which is publishing claims made by Jennifer Marohasy, of the “free market” conservative thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs.
The recent spate of trouble for the BoM started when Lance Pidgeon and Jen Marohasy caught the BoM artificially clipping the coldest temperatures from Goulburn and Thredbo. The BoM then took weeks to do an internal review and finally answer that it was — through incredible coincidence — only these two stations, and it didn’t matter (even though it had been going on for years). The BoM admitted the hardware was clipping temps at minus 10.4, but still hasn’t explained why that was then altered to minus ten, which made the original “accidental” clipping problem worse. Maurice Newman not only mentioned this issue, but also discussed the far more serious matters of data being deliberately deleted and one-second-noise was being written into our record books. These are radioactive hot potatoes that the BoM won’t even touch:
Science writer and blogger Joanne Nova has raised scandal after scandal concerning the BOM’s record-keeping.
She refers to historic data being destroyed, and the influence of adjustments on Australia’s warming trend. She reports private auditors advising the bureau of almost a “thousand days where minimum temperatures were higher than the maxes”.
When Australia’s bureau transitioned from mercury thermometers to electronic sensors more than 20 years ago, to ensure readings from these devices were comparable with the old thermometers and complied with World Meteorological Organisation guidelines, parallel studies were undertaken at multiple sites….
A key conclusion was that readings from the new electronic sensors needed to be averaged over one to 10 minutes. However, rather than implement practices consistent with their finding, the bureau records one-second extremes (or noise), which can be announced as new record highs
So when a shock jock or a thinktank employee claims the bureau is trying to cook the books, how should the public react?
What needs to be front of mind, Vertessy says, is that there is “virtually complete consensus on the extent to which the planet has warmed and why, since the beginning of the industrial revolution”.
“The facts are just unequivocal because they have been replicated so many times, by so many teams, using multiple independent methods.”
He says if the bureau “was really making a hash of managing its climate data” then it would be documented in scientific “journals and at symposia” but “that’s clearly not happening”.
He says it “beggars belief” that these commentators “actually profess to know better”.
Obviously, if he hadn’t deleted all the data he wouldn’t need to over-react.
Vertussy continues spinning wild claims and dodging the real questions:
“Time and time again there has been one independent review by experts after another, all telling the same story. The simple, unimpeachable facts are that the BoM is doing an exemplary job at managing the nation’s climate data and multiple independent reviews have confirmed that and we are recognised by our World Meteorological Organisation peers as being amongst the best in the world; that keeps being restated and restated.
“I think the Australian play on very dangerous ground here,” he says, adding that some editors at the newspaper were guilty of “perpetuating nonsense”.
Graham Readfearn launches into full strawman agitprop:
The current non-story centres on two of the bureau’s 695 automatic weather stations (AWS). As temperatures reached -10.4C in Thredbo and Goulburn in July, a hardware card in the AWS stopped working. This event, detected by the bureau, kick-started several internal quality control processes.
The bureau found four other hardware cards in areas where things can get chilly and replaced them. The cards should not have been used, as they could become faulty at low temperatures.
That’s essentially it.
“No. That’s essentially lying by omission” says Jo Nova. The Guardian is hiding all the real problems from their readers.
Here come the conspiracy theories again:
But the Australian and the IPA and the network of climate science denial blogs have once again screamed scandal.
What network? Our secret networks are called “bigpond” and “gmail”.
Vertussy even resorts to vague threats:
“But, as the costs of climate change accumulate in the years ahead, I can see that leaders of this climate change denial movement will really be seen as culpable.”
Culpable indeed. As volunteer amateurs we are only guilty of asking questions the BoM doesn’t want to answer.
Graham Lloyd, and The Australian deserve great praise. If they didn’t ask the hard questions and report both sides of the story, who would?
An advert today describes the real climate change we should afraid of, discusses how past CO2 levels did not cause dangerous global warming, and extra CO2 has a smaller and smaller effect, then connects failed climate models with rising electricity bills.
Spot the political PR paper pretending to be science: the global carbon budget just got a whopping — four — times — bigger, but instructions on how to follow the carbon religion are 100% identical.
It’s become too obvious to everyone that the climate models have been complete failures. Thus, the global leeches were facing a crisis as their credibility and motivation drain. So the new paper in Nature Geoscience is just a retweak of the models to produce a number that isn’t so mock-worthy. There is no scientific reason offered, no new understanding of the climate. No one is even pretending that these modelers can explain the way our climate works any better than they did last year when they were utter failures. It’s all a charade. There is no honesty here — if there was, they’d admit the skeptics are years ahead of them.
The new paper is just about “staying the game”, a desperate injection to keep the dying movement alive. All the political messages remain untouched. It’s got everything to do with PR and nothing to do with science.
The numbers change (and nobody ever cared about them anyway) but PR meme is a carbon copy: We can just barely, possibly save the world. (Give us your money.)
To maintain an artificial money pump and a team of volunteer activists, the messaging has to balance on the fine line between being “too hard” and demoralizing the serfs, and being “too soft” and everyone gets complacent. It also obviously has to avoid the “too ludicrous” line and being the butt of jokes. This paper ticks all those boxes. “How convenient”.
The carbon budget was about to burn out too soon
Time for a paper to keep the scam running another 20 years:
The discrepancy means nations could continue emitting carbon dioxide at the current rate for another 20 years before the target was breached, instead of the three to five predicted by the previous model.
Time to neutralize the dire threat of Trump pulling out of Paris
In 2015 the Paris deal was set to save life on Earth and before Trump won, he was the Anti-Christ and going to destroy the planet. The problem with the hype is that he won and called their bluff — for the troops it’s a crushing dose of “no hope left”. Enter the PR marketeers with a press release titled: “New hope for limiting warming to 1.5°C”. Et Voila. Add to that the new “insight” that Trump and Paris don’t really matter as reported in the Telegraph:
They also condemned the “overreaction” to the US’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, announced by Donald Trump in June, saying it is unlikely to make a significant difference.
The press release doesn’t even try to look like a scientific advance. The evidence is from “complex Earth System Models” which mean it isn’t evidence and comes from the same models that didn’t work. So they have had a few assumptions tweaked to fit the facts. Whatever.
From the Press release:
Significant emission reductions are required if we are to achieve one of the key goals of the Paris Agreement, and limit the increase in global average temperatures to 1.5°C; a new Oxford University partnership warns.
Published today in the journal Nature Geoscience, the paper concludes that limiting the increase in global average temperatures above pre-industrial levels to 1.5°C, the goal of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, is not yet geophysically impossible, but likely requires more ambitious emission reductions than those pledged so far.
Three approaches were used to evaluate the outstanding ‘carbon budget’ (the total amount of CO2 emissions compatible with a given global average warming) for 1.5°C: re-assessing the evidence provided by complex Earth System Models, new experiments with an intermediate-complexity model, and evaluating the implications of current ranges of uncertainty in climate system properties using a simple model. In all cases the level of emissions and warming to date were taken into account.
‘Previous estimates of the remaining 1.5°C carbon budget based on the IPCC 5th Assessment were around four times lower, so this is very good news for the achievability of the Paris targets,’ notes Professor Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter, a co-author on this study and a key expert on carbon budgets for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). ‘The 5th Assessment did not specifically address the implications of the very ambitious 1.5°C goal using multiple lines of evidence as we do here. The ambition of Paris caught much of the science community by surprise.’
Co-author Professor Michael Grubb of University College London, concludes: ‘This paper shows that the Paris goals are within reach, but clarifies what the commitment to ‘pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C’ really implies.
Pretends to be a science paper but openly dictates energy policy:
‘Starting with the global review due next year, countries have to get out of coal and strengthen their existing targets so as to keep open the window to the Paris goals.
Grubb is claiming that the facts have changed. Which they haven’t. Climate skeptics have been saying for years that the IPCC climate models have been running “too hot.” Indeed, the Global Warming Policy Foundation produced a paper stating this three years ago. Naturally it was ignored by alarmists who have always sought to marginalize the GWPF as a denialist institution which they claim – erroneously – is in the pay of sinister fossil fuel interests.
Allen’s “so it’s not that surprising” is indeed true if you’re on the skeptical side of the argument. But not if, like Allen, you’re one of those scientists who’ve spent the last 20 years scorning, mocking and vilifying all those skeptics who for years have been arguing the very point which Allen himself is now admitting is correct.
… that word you were looking for to describe the current state of global warming science is: “Sorry.”
ABSTRACT
(Political phrases bolded by moi)
The Paris Agreement has opened debate on whether limiting warming to 1.5 °C is compatible with current emission pledges and warming of about 0.9 °C from the mid-nineteenth century to the present decade. We show that limiting cumulative post-2015 CO2 emissions to about 200 GtC would limit post-2015 warming to less than 0.6 °C in 66% of Earth system model members of the CMIP5 ensemble with no mitigation of other climate drivers, increasing to 240 GtC with ambitious non-CO2 mitigation. We combine a simple climate–carbon-cycle model with estimated ranges for key climate system properties from the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Assuming emissions peak and decline to below current levels by 2030, and continue thereafter on a much steeper decline, which would be historically unprecedented but consistent with a standard ambitious mitigation scenario (RCP2.6), results in a likely range of peak warming of 1.2–2.0 °C above the mid-nineteenth century. If CO2 emissions are continuously adjusted over time to limit 2100 warming to 1.5 °C, with ambitious non-CO2 mitigation, net future cumulative CO2 emissions are unlikely to prove less than 250 GtC and unlikely greater than 540 GtC. Hence, limiting warming to 1.5 °C is not yet a geophysical impossibility, but is likely to require delivery on strengthened pledges for 2030 followed by challengingly deep and rapid mitigation. Strengthening near-term emissions reductions would hedge against a high climate response or subsequent reduction rates proving economically, technically or politically unfeasible.
Years from now this paper will be cited as another example of the way Nature sold out and became a mindless political tool.
In his first interview with his former chief of staff Peta Credlin on Sky News’ Jones & Co on Tuesday night, Mr Abbott described climate change as “very much a third order issue”.
He suggested Liberal MPs had “extremely serious reservations” about the government’s clean energy target, and said last year’s power blackouts in South Australia had influenced the attitude of Liberal MPs to renewable energy.
“I think there is no chance that our party room will support any significant increase in the amount of renewables in our system.”
Asked whether he would support an attempt by Mr Turnbull to legislate for a clean-energy target, Mr Abbott replied: “It would be unconscionable, I underline that word unconscionable, for a government that was originally elected promising to abolish the carbon tax and end Labor’s climate change obsessions to go further down the renewables path,” he said.
The Turnbull government has a one-seat majority in Parliament, underscoring the potential of Mr Abbott’s threat to do real damage to the government.
Limit the damage ASAP:
Asked by Ms Credlin if he would scrap subsidies for renewable forms of energy, Mr Abbott said: “We have to respect people who have made investments in the existing system. We don’t want additional sovereign risk factors bedevilling our economy.”
But he said there should be no further subsidies: “There should be no subsidies for further solar and wind because this is inherently unreliable.”
At this point our market is so screwed the government may have to build a coal plant, because the subsidies and weather-alchemy-rules have made it impossible for the private sector to do what they have done for most of the last century.
Mr Abbott also suggested governments should build coal-fired power stations.
“Power generation is an essential service and if the market won’t build coal-fired power stations, if the market won’t build base load power, the government has got to,” he said.
The unspoken problem here is how to unscrew the market so the government can get out of the generation business.
Let’s let people tick “green energy” or “coal” on their personal power bills and adjust their electricity prices accordingly. Then we’d find out how many Australians really want a renewable energy target. That’s true democracy where people vote with their wallet.
You have to hand it to The Australian – they will publish both sides. Take this (please, take it): “Our energy policy still stuck in coal country”. This is Alan Kohler, bless him, who doesn’t get it and dreams of a nation of motor-heads “going electric”. But, wow, ouch, watch how he reasons it out… not with numbers and graphs (he’s the numbers man on the nightly finance report) but with pop psychology?
The idea of an Australian government banning petrol and diesel cars to promote public health seems especially remote right now: we can’t keep the lights on as it is, having closed a few fossil fuel power stations.
But you can bet that the Coalition government and its media supporters will argue that the electrification of transport makes it even more necessary for there to be more “baseload power” from coal-fired power stations — how could we possibly charge millions of cars, and run millions of airconditioners and fridges if we let Liddell close in 2022?
And you can fix that Mr Kohler, how?
Wait for it…
This is the underlying reality of Australia’s energy debate: a majority of the government does not actually believe the science of climate change. Not really.
Politicians are generally in it for the public good. If they all believed in global warming, there would be a bipartisan energy policy.
Fergoodnesssake, If politicians all believed in being skeptics there would be bipartisan energy policy too.
If half of Parliament are skeptical, it is exactly as it should be in a representative democracy. Fifty percent of Australians are skeptical, but too scared to say so on TV for fear the ABC will call them a denier.
If belief were baseload we could run our cars on polls instead of petrol.
Australians are set to pay $300 million in subsidies to an outback solar farm owned by a Saudi Arabian billionaire in a new test of the federal government’s looming energy reforms, escalating a dispute over whether to cut the handouts to keep coal-fired power stations alive.
AGL’s controversial Liddell coal power station in the NSW Hunter Valley generates 50 times as much electricity as the Moree solar farm in the state’s north, which stands to gain big subsidies from households from higher electricity bills until 2030…
But we need more chinese-built glass panels that make green weather-controlling electrons.
Lucky solar power is so competitive. Look at the money roll…
The Moree solar farm generates 150,000 megawatt hours of electricity a year, about 0.08 per cent of the 200 terawatt hours produced on the national electricity market every year. The project is forecast to collect about $50m in payments over the next four years and $90m in the following decade under the existing RET.
Subsidies piled on subsidies? Does one gravy train know where the others are going?
These subsidies, funded by electricity customers, will add to taxpayer aid including a $101.7m direct grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and a $60m concessional loan from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
AGL is getting even more:
The Australian yesterday reported that AGL stood to receive $589m from the grants and subsidies for two solar projects over the period to 2030,…
Solar is the future, my foot.
REFERENCE
Crowe, David (2017) Saudi solar tycoon’s $300m handout, The Australian, Sept 19, 2017.
Dr Duane Thresher who worked seven years at NASA GISS describes a culture of self serving rent-seekers, mismanagement and incompetence. These are the top experts in the climate science field that we are supposed to accept without questioning. Those who say they are working to “save the planet” care more about their junckets than they do about the data or their “best” model.
NASA GISS’s most advanced climate model is run from the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Thresher recounts a story from someone on the inside:
“NASA GISS’s climate model — named Model E, an intentional play on the word “muddle” — is called the “jungle” because it is so badly coded.” I know this to be true from my own extensive experience programming it (I tried to fix as much as I could…).
Thresher writes about how the team was happy to take taxpayer funds and spend it on unnecessary conferences which were “loads of fun” while they scrimped and saved on things like data security and incompetent tech staff. Secretaries and mail boys were hired for jobs they were not qualified for. At one point data was lost when exposed plumbing leaked in the computer room.
One of the guys hired/promoted to provide tech support was the NASA GISS mail boy. He was a good kid so why not give him a high-paying tech job?
Similarly, a NASA GISS secretary was hired/promoted to provide tech support. She was very nice but c’mon.
Another of the guys hired was so incompetent a bunch of the climate scientists finally got together and demanded Jim Hansen, head of NASA GISS then, fire him, WITHOUT REPLACEMENT. Tech support got BETTER after that.
While I was nearing completion of my dissertation at NASA GISS, an exposed water pipe to the bathroom overhead broke in the computer room, destroying thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment and data, including mine; the “data recovery” by incompetent NASA GISS tech support destroyed even more. To start, you should be shaking your head and saying, “why are there exposed bathroom water pipes going through a computer room?”
Even though flights are a large contributor to carbon emissions, climate scientists were keen to fly for fun:
Even though nowadays conferences could easily and more efficiently be done as teleconferences, climate scientists love to travel to FUN places for conferences, paid for by the taxpayer. We were no different, as we said in AGU’s “Climate Change: Believe It Or Else” Prize…
At some climate conferences, climate scientists can even donate some of their conference travel money to offset the carbon emissions from the travel. The tiny number of participants would make Scrooge blush.
He wanted to be a whistleblower but the media weren’t interested
I wanted to be like FBI agent Mark Felt, who was the Watergate informant Deep Throat, or Edward Snowden, the NSA informant. Secretly supplying inside information to bring down a government agency gone bad. (Due to lawmakers actually hating whistleblowers, Snowden isn’t covered by whistleblower laws, but I might be.) I even tried that at first (did you know that you can’t simply email information to WikiLeaks but have to use Tor, which can be a bit of a hassle?).
Journalists weren’t interested. This shouldn’t have surprised me. Read Glenn Greenwald’s No Place To Hide, which is about Edward Snowden and the NSA. Snowden practically begged Greenwald for months to take his information but Greenwald was too lazy. The Washington Post (which also stalled Snowden), The New York Times (“Pravda On The Hudson”), and the rest are worthless at this point so we became our own newspaper. Recognize our masthead font?
Thresher is pressing a case against Gavin Schmidt, current head of NASA GISS, for violations of the Hatch Act. (Quote: “…the Hatch Act, …forbids government officials from spending government time and money on political activities.”)
What usually happens is that money for specific projects is pooled to pay the grad students, although usually there is one big money project paying the lion’s share. That means that many grad students are paid off grants for specific projects but are not working on those projects. I remember once at NASA GISS having to write up a progress report for a project I didn’t really work on but was paid off of. That is the definition of “misspent”.
We’ve seen this all three times before. As soon as skeptics expose enough scandals in The Australian the BOM has to run and hide behind a “major revision”, a panel, or a review. It’s their pass-out-of-class to not answer questions. It’s too late, I have no expectation that this will achieve anything other than being the excuse de jour for the BOM to keep operating as a PR machine rather than a scientific agency.
In the first round back in February 2011, we worked with Cory Bernardi to request a formal audit of the BOM. They had lauded their “High Quality” or HQ dataset, but suddenly it was not good enough and needed revising. In March 2012 the BOM released an entirely new version called ACORN. The formal audit request was thus “neutralized”, but the new set was as bad as the old set. By July 2012, for free, skeptics analyzed and advised the bureau of a string of pathetic flaws, including that the bureau had “created” nearly a thousand days where minimum temperatures were higher than the maxes, the “hottest day ever recorded in Australia” in their hallowed ACORN dataset now occurred in cold Albany after a seven degree shift. The trend in average summer maximums was been tripled by adjustments that the BOM imply are neutral. The adjustments follow an inexplicable monthly whip-saw square wave pattern that defies any reasoning. The independent audit team found gaps and errors, like days where 36.8C was changed to 26.8C (and so many more). The same pattern of mysterious adjustments took data recorded in modern Stevenson screens eighty years ago and “discovered” they needed to be cooled, changing trends by as much as two degrees, thus turning some raw cooling trends to warming trends and non-randomly increasing the total “averaged” warming rate.
The whole national warming trend from 1910 is supposedly about one degree. But up to two-thirds of Australia’s warming may be due to “adjustments”, not “CO2”. The most cost effective way to stop Australia warming is to dump the BOM and set up a scientific agency instead. It’s a lot cheaper than crippling our electricity grid and punishing our manufacturing base.
Five years after the Wonderbar ACORN dataset was released, none of these errors have been fixed. The BOM never said “thanks for helping”, showed no interest in doing a better job, won’t release either methods or comparison data. Now, lo, in a fourth round, a few articles in The Australian (and total silence from Fairfax and the ABC) and wouldn’t-you-know but the bureau has suddenly discovered that majorly-revised “best quality” isn’t good enough and they need to aim for doubly-revised ultra-super-HQ. Sure.
We’re beyond excuses now. Read what I said in 2012. The HQ errors could be called unwitting then, but the ACORN revision could not:
For me, this version is so much worse than the previous one. In the HQ data set the errors could have been inadvertent, but now we’ve pointed out the flaws, there can be no excuses for getting it wrong. Instead of fixing the flaws (and thanking the volunteers), it’s almost as if they’ve gone out of their way to not solve them. Instead it’s been complexified, rushed, has many typo’s and gaps, and the point (see below) about the “adjustments having no impact” — when they obviously do — begs to be audited by the Auditor General, the ACCC, Four Corners (ha ha) and 60 Minutes.
The Australian people pay a million dollars a day for this inept and biased operation. A fourth round of “internal” revisions is a waste of money. There is no sign the BOM is any more competent or even willing to act in a scientific manner. Give skeptics just 2% of the BOM budget and the nation would get a real revision and a totally transparent database.
I predict Minister Josh Frydenberg will be fooled and will accept the BOM excuses, thus utterly failing to stand up for the Australian people and the Australian environment. Shame.
Behind the scenes here we’re seriously discussing ways to set up better quality temperature recording stations. If you’d like to offer help, money, advice or space on your farm, please get in touch, leave a comment or send an email. Thank you.
A lot of this information and so much more was discussed in my chapter “Mysterious Revisions to Australia’s Long Hot History” in the new book Climate Change: The Facts 2017.Co-authors include Clive James, Matt Ridley, Willie Soon, Roy Spencer, and Anthony Watts. Order your copy now, the first edition has sold out. Also available as Ebook and paperback on Amazon.
Chris Kenny in The Weekend Australian puts almost all the pieces together. This is self-sacrificial, pointless, and the RET is the problem because the subsidies allow renewables to drive out true baseload generation. The so-called hunt for “certainty” is a hunt for high prices because no one will speak the obvious “Dump the Renewable Energy Target”.
We are an energy-rich nation. Last year we exported 388 million tonnes of coal (valued at $35 billion) to supply affordable and reliable energy to countries such as Japan, China, South Korea and India. Our liquefied natural gas exports are doubling from 30 million tonnes a couple of years ago to almost 80 million tonnes (valued at $42bn) by 2019.
Australia also remains one of the largest exporters of uranium…
While we happily export our energy advantage, we have deliberately sacrificed it at home.
Turnbull — doing exactly the wrong thing after Trump won:
Astonishingly, less than a day after Donald Trump won the US election promising to abandon Paris, Malcolm Turnbull announced Australia’s ratification. The Prime Minister thumbed his nose at the obvious opportunity to hold out, see if the US withdrew (as it has) and perhaps forestall our own commitment.
The accord is dramatically weakened without the world’s largest economy, especially given other powerhouses such as China and India will continue to increase their emissions. (Ironically, perhaps no country is making a greater contribution to emissions reductions than the US through its innovation in areas such as fracking and battery technology.)
Thanks to Malcolm Roberts for contacting me tonight with more information. CLARIFICATION: It’s not a complete ban on two-strokes, but a change to increase standards on motors. (It appears it will reduce real pollution, and the legislation also claims it will reduce CO2, though no CO2 limits are mandated as far as I can tell. It will stop the sales of most conventional two-stroke outboards and mowers, but not “direct injection” outboards. Gory details below)*
Please note that Soichiro Honda himself banned his company from making 2-stroke outboard motors in the 1970’s after he visited Lake Tahoe and was shocked to see oil film on its waters. That pollution was produced by 2-stroke outboard motors.
He had the courage to do the right thing so despite the inherently higher weight and lower power of 4-stroke motors at the time. He put the real environment ahead of profits and as a result the new path led Honda to designing and building superior motors.
Cory Bernardi outlines legislation that has just passed banning *old-style* 2-stroke motors from 2019 — meaning lawn mowers, leaf blowers, chainsaws, weed whackers, and outboard boat motors. In Australia mowers and fishing tinnies are heritage material. It’s a new carbon tax by stealth, pretending to be about health.
h/t to Tim Blair who adds a movie of Australians dancing with lawn mowers for the Sydney Olympic opening ceremony (just to give you foreigners some appreciation of how attached Australians are to them).
Stock up now. You may not be able to buy them (legally) after 2019. I predict a high black market value decent prices for “Vintage models on ebay”.
Bernardi argues that theoretically this ruling could be extended to farm machinery, quad bikes, and off road dirt bikes.
Things are heating up to stop other things blacking out
Last week the AEMO (which controls our electricity grid) said we needed 1,000MW of spare power to keep the lights on in SA and Victoria this summer. Didn’t that light a fuse? Then AGL (a major energy player in Australia with coal, gas and wind assets) dug in and repeated that it was going to be hero and definitely close another coal plant (called Liddell) in 2022. At this point, the Prime Minister, no less, had to suddenly enter into talks to convince AGL to sell Liddell or keep it running a bit longer — anything but a shut down. (Figure how screwed up a market has to be for the owner of an asset to need to be talked into perhaps, maybe selling it for money instead of throwing it away? Isn’t any money better than none? Well, maybe not in a river of subsidies… more on the games going on in AGL soon.)
Desperate, Turnbull even offered to buy a stake in Liddell (with tax dollars). So the government may have to buy up exactly the kind of project the government has been working to close with RET schemes and clean energy targets. It’s emergency nationalization to repair the damage from the unnecessary, mindboggling government schemes to control weather with power stations. The bandaid on a leech.
Amongst this mess, finally, this week the National Party got the mojo to vote to axe all subsidies for renewable energy. And not a moment too soon. (For foreign readers, the “Nats” are a part of the coalition goverment with the Liberals. )
The Nationals have voted to remove all subsidies for renewable energy providers over a five-year period and to freeze them at their current level for the next year.
There is a big pie for people to fight over:
Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are set to receive subsidies of up to $2.8 billion a year up to 2030, according to research by economic consultancy BAEeconomics commissioned by the Minerals Council of Australia.
The former prime minister [Tony Abbott] told 2GB on Thursday he welcomed signs from Malcolm Turnbull that the government was moving away from the clean energy target recommended by the chief scientist to what he is characterising as a “100% reliable energy target.”
“I welcome these signs that we are moving away from a clean energy target to a reliable energy target, and, frankly, nothing less than a 100% reliable energy target will do because we’ve got to keep the lights on all the time … if we are to be a first-world country,” Abbott said.
Abbott declared the government should end all subsidies for renewable energy, and that would mean there was no need to subsidise coal. … “I don’t want to see subsidies, I want to see a market”.
Turnbull has been PM for two years after the coup to oust Abbott, but faces the whiff of a revolt. Carbon emission schemes were his undoing in 2009, and the pain of pushing a myth continues. MP’s in the Liberals are getting fed up with renewables too (paywalled):
“…between five and 10 Coalition MPs thinking about crossing the floor and voting against any new or remodelled renewable energy scheme.
It should be 50 MP’s.
As debate about the future of energy policy rages, former prime minister Tony Abbott has been doing the rounds of his colleagues in a bid to get support for dumping all government funding for renewables. h/t GWPF
Abbott now argues we are not obliged to abide by the commitments made in the international accord.
Abbott said there was no need to walk away from the Paris agreement, because the emissions reductions commitments contained within it were not binding on Australia.
MPs concerned about the power bill impact of the policy proposed in a report by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel have been emboldened by last week’s Nationals conference passing a motion opposed to a clean energy target and former prime minister Tony Abbott’s push to wind back renewable energy subsidies.
Mr Abbott will double down on his position in delivering a speech, entitled Daring to Doubt, to the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation on October 9.
It is understood the prime minister and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg are seeking to finalise the design of a new policy by the end of November.
But at the moment, whatever the solution is, it’s likely to be a mash of competing demands still swamped by the ridiculous notion that we need to reduce a healthy beneficial gas produced by every plant, fungus, microbe, animal and ocean on the planet in order to change the weather for our great grandchildren. Get over it guys.
Forecast wind generation a day ahead?
The AEMO’s chief has an idea that wind farm operators surely won’t like:
Earlier in the day, the head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, Audrey Zibelman, told a parliamentary committee she favoured the creation of a day-ahead market – a system where the market operator identifies the energy demand for the next day, hour-by-hour, then generators bid in to supply the market.
She said a day-ahead market would create more certainty and stability in the system, and also allow tools like demand management to be deployed in the event there was insufficient dispatchability in the system.
To make the grid more stable, an official somewhere decided it would help to have at least one day’s warning of how much electricity will flow from those towers.
A directive took effect this week ordering wind farms with a capacity of 10 megawatts or more to forecast their generation in 15-minute blocks for the following day. Missing estimates by more than 30 percent will incur penalties. “Forecasting at 15-minute intervals is very challenging,” and could cost a 100-megawatt farm an estimated 250 million rupees ($4.2 million) a year, Tata Power said in an e-mailed response to questions. “Developers will see this as a further handicap” and penalties will “jeopardize” the industry’s growth, the nation’s second-biggest developer said.
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