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.
A new incendiary blog by Dr. Duane Thresher and Dr. Claudia Kubatzki unleashes on NASA Goddard Institute (one of the two main motherlodes of climate activism), calling for them to be defunded because they are “ignoble”, with “herds of do-gooders”, and “NASA GISS is a monument to bad science that truly should be torn down. Take the money and buy a rocket.”
They are a husband and wife team, both producing peer-reviewed climate papers. He worked at NASA GISS for seven years. Since they came out as skeptics in California, they’ve had to move house. Thanks to Marc Morano for the tip.
His latest post calls on the new NASA head, appointed by Trump, to just turn off the tap, cut the cash:
Everyone assumes climate scientists are noble. Fighting to save the planet. What nonsense. Not even close.
They write about a wave of new money into climate science and the decay of the field:
Enter opportunists, carpetbaggers, the corrupt, the ignoble.
What to do? Stop paying climate scientists. The good ones are so into their science they will work for food, maybe less, maybe even pay to do it. French President Macron has invited the rest to move to France so they will be fine.
Start with defunding NASA GISS where this whole global warming nonsense started. It was started by James Hansen, formerly head of NASA GISS and considered the father of global warming. It was continued by Gavin Schmidt, current head of NASA GISS, anointed by Hansen, and leading climate change warrior scientist/spokesperson.
Thresher is an MIT graduate in electrical engineering, and went on to study Atmospheric Science (climate modeling), has done Antarctic research, got a PhD from Columbia and worked for James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt at NASA GISS. His wife Kubatzki, is a meteorologist, climate modeler, pollen proxy analyst and a a native German. She’s worked at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany.
Being a whistleblower is always risky:
If you think neo-Nazis are bad, try being a global warming skeptic in the Bay Area of California, where we had to move from for our own safety.
Gavin Schmidt “couldn’t make it” in maths so he became a climate scientist
Thresher is scathing of the quality of the talent that flowed in to the field with the sudden influx of money:
And then there are the not qualified who become climate scientists. When the science bureaucrats (if you can’t do real science be a science bureaucrat) decided global warming was the next big thing, there was a huge influx of money, which meant a huge influx of unqualified into climate science since there just weren’t enough qualified and the money HAD to be used. Enter opportunists, carpetbaggers, the corrupt, the ignoble. Physicists and mathematicians who couldn’t make it in their own fields, like James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt (who actually told me one reason he became a climate scientist was because he couldn’t make it in his degree field of mathematics). People who just wanted instant success as fake heroes or showmen rather than doing years of hard slow obscure real science.
This influx into climate science of unqualified [people] also meant they threw out good scientific practices, like not pretending climate models can actually predict climate when they were just invented to study it by experimentation.
Given the save-the-planet nature of the field, the unqualified included herds of do-gooders, particularly women. (Note: Dr. Claudia Kubatzki agrees with this assessment.) They love committees. Protection by the herd. Power without sticking your neck out.
NASA GISS has got nothing to do with space:
[NASA GISS is] a small group over a restaurant (Tom’s Restaurant from the TV comedy Seinfeld!) in New York City, nowhere near any other major NASA facility. Just the dedicated data link to the nearest NASA facility, GSFC in Maryland, is a big expense. GISS is the Goddard Institute for SPACE Studies. If you don’t need a rocket to get to it, it’s not space.
He could have pointed out the irony that NASA GISS uses land based thermometers and ignores the satellites.
We are the most qualified real climatologists to ever come out as global warming skeptics (including even more than Dr. Richard Lindzen and Dr. Judith Curry, although we acknowledge their revolutionary courage). Unlike most scientists counted in the scientific consensus on global warming we are real climate scientists. Our graduate careers included numerous courses in climate and we have done extensive research in climate, including climate modeling and climate proxies (past climates). Doing both is unusual. Not only have we actually used and run climate models but we have actually programmed them and so fully understand their (huge) weaknesses. Unlike many we don’t just ignorantly use the climate proxy data produced by others but we have taken courses and done research on climate proxies and so fully understand their (huge) weaknesses.
The science of managing the weather with power stations and other modern superstitions.
September 20 @ 6:15 pm – 9:00 pm
The Generous Squire, 397 Murray St, Perth city, Western Australia.
Organized by LibertyWorks: $20 or Free-for-members. Includes a beer or wine. Early bird discount of $15 ends tomorrow at midnight. Food for sale.
How to destroy a perfectly good electricity grid in three easy steps
The World is watching Australia. Despite being handicapped with abundant resources, we’ve turned ourselves into an international spectacle with rampant blackouts, flying squads of diesel generators, and the highest electricity prices in the world.
An achievement like this does not come easily.
The grand experiment unfolds around us, as the nation discovers why “free” energy isn’t free, why storage is deceptively expensive, yet baseload is deceptively cheap.
The key question: How much of the warming trend in Australia is due to the switch in the mid 1990s from older slower thermometers to new electronic zippy ones that could record every waft of hot air? How many records today are just noise?
Here’s an example graph from Maryborough where the daily maximum was 1.5C above every thirty minute reading. Ouch — are we writing outliers and noise into our history books and climate data bases?
Add “sampling method” and averaging to your skeptical vocabulary. There will be a lot more discussion on these.
Let’s consider some basic standards in the meteorology world
The Weather Observer’s Handbook 2012 tells us the new electronic sensors are more sensitive than the old mercury thermometers. The author, Stephen Burt, explains that the new electronic sensors can be too sensitive, and will record “minor random temperature fluctuations“. This means they will simply “generate slightly higher maximums and slightly lower minimums” than the older equipment did. Temperatures from new style thermometers must be averaged over longer periods to make them comparable with the older mercury thermometers, and also to “iron out minor stray electrical noise or sensor logger resolution artefacts.” h/t Chris Gillham.
The WMO, the UK Met office and the US all use longer average samples than Australia
The WMO recommend a one minute mean temperature standard be used, which is what the UK uses. In the US though, get this, meteorologists use a five minute average, and further below, Lin and Hubbard suggest it should be 7 minutes not five.
Further complexifying things — I hear the UK may put electronic sensors outside the Stevenson screens, which would make a big difference. Keep that in mind. UPDATED: Now I’m hearing, not so, it was just one photo.
Records, trends, daily ranges — they can all change with the sampling method
Was that really a record? Here’s a case where longer sampling times meant a record was not set on one day in Dodge city:
Weather Observers Handbook. Click to enlarge.
A good example is accorded by the maximum temperature recorded at Dodge City, Kansas during the heatwave which affected the southern and eastern states of America in summer 2011. Dodge City has one of the longest continuous temperature records in the United States, commencing in 1875. The hottest day on its long record stood at 110F (43.3C). On 26 June 2011 the highest 1 minute temperature observed was 111F (43.9C). However the value logged on an ASOS system was not accepted as a new record because ASOS take the maximum temperature as the highest 5 minute running mean, which was 110F. Thus the official high by the US method was 110F, tying rather than exceeding the previous record: by the WMO recommended method the maximum was 111F which would have set a new record.”
Here in Australia, with one second averaging, based on past behaviour, the new “record” could have been even higher, like 113F (45C) — who knows — which might have been measured for just one whole second. That kind of difference, which appears to be momentarily far above most of the data around it, has been entered into our official climate data online.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) responds with “Fast Facts”
Lets compare the Australian method to the US. In the US, researchers publish long papers on, say, the bias that occurs with two different ways of doing 5-minute averaging (more on that extraordinary detail below). The WMO only recommends a one minute average. Prepare yourself for the Australian BOM’s answer about why they don’t even do that (get ready to be surprised). Engineers everywhere may be crying…
The guide recommends that temperatures be integrated over time to smooth out rapid fluctuations. There is more than one method of achieving this. The WMO guidelines do not prescribe which method to take. In its automatic weather stations the Bureau achieves this by using platinum resistance thermometers. These are comparable to mercury in glass thermometers.
Say what? “Comparable” to mercury in glass? That last sentence goes against everything in the WMO guidelines and the handbook. It blithely writes off peer reviewed papers, not to mention engineering-common-sense. Apparently the BOM are claiming a bucket defacto-averaging kinda-in-the-system. Because their electronic sensors are inside the Stevenson screen, there is a sort of averaging — a lag, or a low pass filter — but probably one that changes minute-by-minute with the wind-speed. They also claim that the response-time of the sensor is as long or longer than the changes in the temperature of the air. (Color me unconvinced, where is that data?)
As Jen Marohasy points out, this is far from a declaration that the electronic sensors are averaging temperatures in the same way that the old slow liquid-in-glass ones do. (Did I mention the data….?)
The BOM:
This means that each one second temperature value is not an instantaneous measurement of the air temperature but an average of the previous 40 to 80 seconds. This process is comparable to the observation process of an observer using a “mercury-in-glass” thermometer.
Spot the weasel-word “comparable” (in both paragraphs). Comparable is not equivalent. One and ten are comparable, but they are not equivalent. (Just like one second and sixty seconds, Hmm?) When Ken Stewart looked in detail at the Australian data he found a lot of volatility — in the most extreme case, temperatures fell by almost 3 degrees C in under one minute. In 44 of 100 cases, temperatures changed by more than 0.3C in the following minute. That doesn’t smell like “smoothing” or averaging. Think about what kind of overarching volatility it would take to create a smoothed average that still had that kind of instability.
The bottom line: What we have is 20 years of incomplete raw data that includes random noise recorded from instruments that are nothing like the ones used for about eight of the last ten decades in Australian climate history. Somehow we are supposed to connect that data together?
The Bureau has a budget of $365 million a year, yet it’s looking like they have thrown away the raw detailed data for the last twenty years that might have been useful. What we are left with is — we have to ask — possibly not salvageable?
Where to from here?
The first thing the BOM needs to do is store all the b—– data. Second, it needs to make that public. Then we need to talk about changing the BOM sampling process and getting some averaging done properly. Then we need to set up a search and rescue team to go back through the last twenty years of electronic data and see what they can do. At this point, it would take a group of PhDs years to set up replica stations in many different conditions to gather enough data to be able to kinda “back predict” what the electronic data should have shown had it used a proper averaging method.
A one second wafting hot spike,
Gives a false average temperature hike,
Which for sensors is crude,
And with past records skewed,
Are the methods the B.O.M. like.
–Ruairi
________________
The Nitty Gritty: How temperatures are supposed to be measured
Now we get into some more detail about how different the standards are overseas. We get a better idea of things that muck up the data, so we can all start to appreciate how tricky this is — and perhaps what better management and processes might look like.
Even the US five minute averages are not necessarily good enough
A paper by Lin and Hubbard discusses in extraordinary detail how a systematic bias occur. They have complex graphs showing how different sensors respond to changes in air temperatures at different temperatures, and with different wind speeds. (TX, means maximum temp. TN means minimum.)
Liquid in glass thermometers are fundamentally different from electronic (platinum resistance) thermometers. They are not equivalent:
Although the LIG thermometers in the CRS also is an instantaneous observation for TX and TN the relatively large LIG thermometer’s time constant plays an exclusive role in filtering out high frequency temperatures and exponentially weighted smoothing temperature signals.
The bias (error) can be as large as 0.2°C (and they are talking about 5 min averages):
For the ASOS observations, the ASOS does have a 5- min running average for daily TX and TN, however, the even smaller sensor’s time constant in the ASOS makes its biases systematically significant (0.05–0.2 °C warmer on average TX or cooler on average TN).
Hence they recommend 7-minute averages:
.. “Commonly-used 5 min average was not sufficient for the fast-response thermometers in surface climate networks while the WMO standard thermometer (20 s time constant) should have a 7-min running average for reporting daily maximum and minimum temperatures. The surface temperature sensors with smaller time constant than the standard LIG thermometers must implement a follow-up running average algorithm.”
Calibration alone is not enough to remove this effect:
It should be noted that most of surface temperature calibrations, even highly accurate calibrations, are unable to remove out this type of out-of-phase uncertainties in the TX and TN because the instrument calibrations for climate networks usually are of static calibrations rather than a dynamic calibration process for the electronic surface temperature sensors and the LIG maximum and minimum thermometers…
Is that warm bias bigger than the cool bias?
From the same paper: In the field the maximum temperatures (fig 8) are affected more than the minima (figure 9). Note that they are comparing two different ways to average 5 minute readings, and they still find a difference. They are not looking at the change from one-second to five minutes. That is something entirely different.
Daytime air turbulence intensity usually is stronger than that during nighttime, thus, it is understandable that the TX differences shown in Figure 8 were larger than the TN differences in Figure 9.
Maximum temperature bias from different sampling rates. Lin, Hubbard. Figure 8.
…
Minimum temperature bias from different sampling rates. Lin, Hubbard. Figure 9.
Thermometers circa 1912
The whole point of averaging is so we can compare modern temperatures with ones recorded a hundred years ago. So check out Thermometric Lag (1912) which looks at the response time in different media including air at different wind speeds. The chart comes from a study published by the American Meteorological Society. Basically, if the wind is very still (slow in cm/sec) it takes a lot longer for a thermometer to respond to a change in temperature outside the screen. A thermometer in air may take over 3 minutes to respond on a still day. When wind speed is very fast, the change is more rapid.
Hurricane Irma is a big bad storm, like other big bad storms. Six awkward facts:
It’s only the 7th most intense at landfall in US history.
It formed over water that was two degrees cooler than normal,
1893, 1933, 1950, 1995, and 2005 had more Accumulated Cyclone Energy by Sept 10.
In 1933 two hurricanes hit the US in just 24 hours
In 1893, 1909, 2004 there were three Cat 3+ landfalls in US (blame climate change).
NOAA itself says there’s no evidence anyone can detect that greenhouse gas emissions have an effect on hurricanes.
Not to be stopped by a lack of any scientific connection, climate druids are out in force finding fingerprints in every storm. Like all the great witchdoctors of history, Big Storms are a chance to pump fear and sell their services.
Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Lawrence said Harvey and Irma were signs of “Mother Nature’s rage and wrath” at the US for electing Trump to the presidency and not believing in man-made climate change.
The Tim Flannery-backed Climate Council declared: “Fingerprints of climate change all over Tropical Storm Harvey.”
Council chief executive Amanda McKenzie issued a statement to claim climate change was driving and influencing extreme weather events around the globe. “Climate change is now supercharging extreme weather events including storms, bushfires, heavy rainfall and floods,” she said. “This is occurring in a more energetic climate system, that’s warmer and loaded up with more moisture than ever before.” McKenzie said Harvey was a “window into our future”.
“Hurricanes get their energy from warm ocean waters, and the oceans are warming because of the human-caused buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, primarily from the burning of coal, oil and gas. The strongest hurricanes have gotten stronger because of global warming. “
Judith Curry: “In a matter of a few hours, Irma became a major hurricane. The surprising thing about this development into a major hurricane was that it developed over relatively cool waters in the Atlantic – 26.5C — the rule of thumb is 28.5C for a major hurricane (and that threshold has been inching higher in recent years).
We can’t blame 26.5 C temperatures in the mid Atlantic on global warming.
The dynamical situation for Irma was unusually favorable. In particular, the wind shear was very weak.”
NOAA: There is no evidence that there is a human influence on hurricanes.
It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity. That said, human activities may have already caused changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observational limitations, or are not yet confidently modeled (e.g., aerosol effects on regional climate).
The NOAA team go on to say that maybe by the end of the 21st century man-made climate change will make cyclones 2 -11% more intense. The odds are “likely” or “greater than 66%” as defined by the IPCC, and calculated by climate models that have exaggerated every effect so far in the last 30 years. So, not a wild increase, not spooky, and odds are only “better than even” (yes, they use that phrase).
UPDATE #4: Now Cat 2, crossed the coast, winds 105 mph (165 km/h) and 942 mb. Slowing down, but hurricane force winds are still covering an area 80 miles from the eye. Hurricane Jose is Cat 3, 120 mph, 956 hPa. Moving at 14 mph.
UPDATE #3: Late Sunday night Australia time (Sunday morning US 11AM) Official advisory updates are here.#46 says 130mph, with lowest pressure 933 hPA . Watch news come in on twitter #IRMA. Blackouts across Miami — over 1 million without power. Storm surges. Streets turning into rivers. Waterspouts off the east coast of Florida.
Katrina is listed as 920 and 902 hPa on different wiki pages. (PS: Judging by the map on this post, Camille and Andrew did not hit Florida. Hmm. Wikipedia?)
UPDATE#2: Sunday morning Australia time. Irma now aCat 3, up to a Cat 4 again, savaging Cuba and weakening as it loses moisture being half over land. It is already affecting Florida, with gusts of 50-60 miles per hour, and set to go north right along the western edge of the peninsula (which has caught people off guard, as the eastern edge have boarded up windows in anticipation, but many on the western side did not). In the 12 full hours over the ocean north of Cuba it may well recover a lot of wind speed quickly. Will hit the Keys in 12 hours. Watch the windy.com radar here, or the Ventuski radar and the TropicalTidbits updates here. Weatherbell forecaster Joe Bastardi has a public update with the eye track running along the west edge of Florida. He is expecting it to speed up and hit near Port Charlotte as close to a Cat 5 with 150 mile per hour winds. He predicts it to deepen from 935hPa to 896hPa. Hurricane Jose is following in the wake of Irma and could be a big problem. Watch his public video (top right at his site). He points out the high pressures in the North Atlantic are also helping to drive a bad hurricane season.
UPDATE #1: At least 4 dead in British Virgin Islands. BBC footage shows devastation.This video is by Levi Cohen (TropicalTidbits). h/t to RAH, Tomomason, RobertW and others (great comments, thank you).
Best wishes to the people of Florida, Cuba, the Caribbean.
The tracker here is automatically updating.
Hurrican Irma Forecast
Ryan Maue :No longer any spread or uncertainty about landfall of Hurricane #Irma … this is happening for sure, unfortunately.
Thoughts also to those in Mexico with the Magnitude 8.1 Earthquake hitting the southern coast, and at least 61 dead.
The BOM’s bad luck never seems to end. Of all the 695 stations in Australia, 693 worked perfectly, but Jen Marohasy and Lance Pidgeon happened to live near, or have a personal random connection to the only two stations that didn’t — Thredbo and Goulburn. Apparently these stations had been flawed (not fit for purpose) for 10 years and 14 years, but the BOM world-class experts hadn’t noticed. I expect they were just about to discover the flaws when (how inconsiderately) Lance and Jen announced the errors to the world and the BOM were forced to do this pointless 77 page report to stop people asking questions they couldn’t answer.
The nub of this fracas is that something called an MSI1 hardware card was installed in cold locations even though it would never report a temperature below minus 10.4C. Awkwardly this doesn’t explain why the 10.4C appeared in the live feed, then was automatically changed to -10C in the long term data sets which are used for climate analysis. Does the BOM think the dumb public don’t know the difference between -10 and -10.4? Implicitly — the BOM installed the wrong type of card, and also accidentally had an error flagging system on top of that, that compounded the error by ruling out even the already-flawed -10.4, which may have been even colder. A double flaw, and both non-randomly warming the minima. What are the odds?
And John Frydenberg, Minister of Critters, Plants and Green-stuff believes this? Seriously?
The BOM wants to stop this sort of error being discovered
For me the absolute red-flag, radioactive recommendation is this one where the Panel recommends changing their website in a way that would hide the exact inconsistencies that make this public error detection possible. They want a less complicated BOM reporting system — saying that currently it is possible for different temperatures for the same site/time to be on the Internet in public:
“The Review Panel found that: … the current data flow architecture creates situations where data can be delivered to, and displayed on, the Bureau’s website via multiple pathways and this can be potentially inconsistent and confusing for end users;
Recommendation 6: Future investment in supporting IT systems should, as part of their design and system architecture, streamline and improve efficiency and consistency in data flows.” — page 12 of the PDF.
The review panel didn’t thank the citizen scientists who helped them find an error the experts had missed for years by noticing the inconsistencies in the live and long term data streams. Instead the BOM’s priority is to not get caught again, by rejigging the system to get “consistency”. What matters more: accuracy, error detection, or “consistency”? It depends on whether you are a scientific unit or a PR unit.
The BOM review tries to palm off the citizen scientists who were right, and more careful than them, as “confused”. In this in-house review the million-dollars-a-day BOM proves beyond a doubt that their highest priority is to protect their own jobs, not to collect accurate information about the Australian climate.
Thredbo
Thanks to Bob Fernley-Jones for graphing the data from Thredbo. The maxima in red are at the top. The minima in blue below. In green the data recorded on the new electronic thermometer which was faulty for seven years (which is not even the same faults we are discussing in the review.) Between 1997-2004 the electronic thermometers were rounding temperatures to whole degrees. So much for the 0.2C accuracy. On the minima side, it is obvious to the eye that since electronic thermometers were installed there have been no temperatures below minus 11 (I thought we weren’t supposed to even get below minus 10.4?).
Perhaps this was a climate shift that occurred around the same time the electronic equipment was brought in? Perhaps it wasn’t. Where is the raw side-by-side data of the two year overlap between old and new equipment? There have been a lot of -10.4Cs since the flawed MS1 hardware card was installed in 2007.
Thredbo, maxima, minima, 1966 – 2017. Click to enlarge. | Graph: Bob Fernley-Jones.
I’m not suggesting that a few truncated minima, if that’s all it was, necessarily affect our long term trends. (Though it may affect press releases about cold records). Nor am I suggesting it was deliberate. The bigger issue for me, the reason this matters, is yet again we see what kind of scientific standards and attitude are behind the work the BOM do. Accidents happen, but lack of interest in error detection and correction and the cover-up’s are not unwitting. Do the details of the Australian climate matter to the BOM?
Here’s a few choice picks of BOM fails — the highest temperature ever recorded in their Hallowed ACORN data set occurred in Albany far south WA, but only after adjustments. This basic error quality control error is a flag for who knows how many other unexplained changes, but even this radioactive “hottest day ever recorded in Australia” hasn’t been corrected. (Three years and still counting.) Who cares about good data when it’s only the planet at stake?
The BOM homogenize stations a thousand kilometers apart, they use city stations, bad stations, to adjust the good ones by a mysterious unpublishable process. Their methods generated a thousand days where mimima were absurdly higher than maxima. They adjust temperatures up-down-up on a calendar month with major corrections whipping up and down 2 degrees overnight that defies any kind of meteorological explanation. They introduced a new electronic thermometer system right across Australia in the 1990s which coincides with a jump up in temperatures. They say they carefully calibrate the two systems, but they’ve deleted all the side by side raw data, so who knows? Who will ever know?
The Australian climate data set is possibly beyond recovery — damaged beyond repair. We’re at the point where if Frydenberg and Turnbull won’t do something to serve Australian citizens and the Australian environment we need to set up our own independent stations. Someone needs to collect data that the Australian people can trust. We need thermometers outside the control of the BOM.
The current review is full of “confidence-building” but totally unjustified language:
This includes taking a highly precautionary approach and ensuring any location that has recorded below -5 degrees Celsius in the past has equipment capable of recording down to -25 degrees Celsius.
The previous approach was sloppy, lazy, inept and for years, and would not have been discovered without volunteers. Now they discover the highly precautionary approach?
What kind of “rigorous” control includes not publishing the full methods or data?
Page 12 “The controls around ACORN-SAT are particularly rigorous, requiring a minimum two-year overlap between sites or systems when observing equipment is changed or relocated, or techniques are changed. System changes, and any other events that might have an impact on data records, are documented in the Bureau’s station metadata repository SitesDB, in accordance with WMO requirements.”
Question 1: Is the SITESDB open to the public?
Question 2: Does it contain raw data from the overlap period?
There is so much more to say about this, and the many PR terms in what is supposed to be a scientific reply, but for the moment, why trust the BOM?
Christopher Kremmer, Senior Lecturer in Literary & Narrative Journalism, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW, wants to help you shield yourself from worldviews that you don’t like, so he provides a detailed “how to” list of ways to make sure you filter out, specifically, news.com.
This man lectures in journalism. Instead of teaching journalism students on how to logically outplay and counter arguments and spot the flaws, he’s teaching them to cleanse their feeds lest they be exposed to inconvenient worldviews.
The team that has no evidence and no answers has to find a way to compensate for their intellectual vacuum.
… before I had even typed in my search terms, it was apparent that my options had been narrowed. The news list that the aggregator threw up was dominated by websites whose idea of what constitutes news is very different to my own.
It takes a lot of effort to build an information silo:
One by one, I began blocking offending mastheads, then refreshing the browser to check the progress of my censorship. It takes a while because news websites use multiple addresses to maximise reader access. So with News Corporation, for example, I had to eliminate all their Australian regional mastheads, which provide backdoor access to stories that are often hidden behind the pay walls of their larger publications.
I would love to report that ten minutes of effort produced a remarkable change in the news of my world. But it takes more than that to curate news feeds until they perfectly match your worldview.
“News cleansing” made no difference to the top three stories that day which appeared in exactly the same order as before I tweaked my feeds.
Some of us choose who are we, others “get shaped” accidentally by the news they read:
News doesn’t just report on our world. It shapes it, and it shapes us. So the media choices we make matter. Instagram over Twitter, or The Conversation over The Daily Mail – all determine the horizon and characteristics of the known. Like it or not, we need to take control over who gets to send us news.
You have to feel sorry for those with jellyfish for brains.
If you can’t think for yourself, you’d better filter:
For digital natives, with their proclivity for tailoring their social media news feeds, this is a no-brainer. When I asked my students recently to find stories on a range of topics, most of their sources were stories on Yahoo7 and News Corporation mastheads delivered via Facebook. This stuck me as odd. Why would 18-year old undergrads with strong views on the need for action against climate change be reading The Australian? (sic)
Just let your ideology hang right out there… why would an 18 year old want to read our national masthead?
The answer is that as far as they are concerned they’re not reading The Australian. They’re reading Facebook. Yet much of their “news” reflects the attitudes of an aged generation that likes coal mines. Go figure.
Coal mines are bad, because Christopher Kremmer, polymath, genius is not just a lecturer in journalism, but a climate and energy expert, and he knows the best energy generation mix for Australia. Why don’t we just make him Prime Minister? Heck, King?
That Kremmer-Cleanser trusts Google to micromanage his sources tells you all you need to know.
Please — send your polite thoughts on this to Uni NSW, and add them as comments to The Conversation. Copy your comments (and screencap) and write them here too. We want a record of the censorship of the Guide to Censorship.
Who knew it would cost a lot to change the climate?
It’s crisis time in Australia. Electricity bills have doubled, and the fallout is just starting to feed through to consumers. Not only does electricity cost more, but so will nearly everything else. Large businesses, economists, and miners are warning that Australians will be paying so much more it will push our inflation figures up.
Major packaging and brick makers, supermarkets, soft-drink bottlers and poultry producers said yesterday the bill shock would chip away further at profit margins and could push up consumer prices…
Economists, including National Australia Bank chief economist Alan Oster, warned the power bill shock was expected to show up in national inflation figures as early as next month.
He predicted headline inflation would increase 0.6 per cent for the July-to-September quarter, purely from energy price rises.
Paul McArdle from WattClarity makes the point that for most of the last 16 years our electricity prices didn’t even rise with inflation. In this graph, since the start of the NEM (National Electricity Market) in 1998 the spot price of electricity was about $30 per MWh, barring major drought, carbon tax and the last two years. Currently, prices are $100/MWh.
Why have things “gone seismic” in the last two years? It looks like we’ve reached the tipping point — the tolerance limits of the system. Renewable penetration has been increasing since 2006 or so. The RET (Renewable Energy Target) started in 2001, but has been rising ever since. In the last two years we’ve had the closure of Hazelwood and Port Augusta coal, broken interconnectors in South Australia and Tasmania, had major blackouts, got stung by rising gas prices and the sudden awareness of ‘uncertainty’. The system has lost its buffer — previously if gas prices rose, we had cheap coal to rely on. But with so much intermittent wind and solar power and with the closing of coal power plants we are now unable to escape high gas prices (and that demand is feeding the gas price rise too). It’s positive feedback of the ugly spiral kind. Coal can’t ramp up and down with the coming and going of wind power, only gas or hydro can.
The record electricity prices aren’t just about the percentage of renewables, but the correlation is inescapable. There are no nations with high wind and solar penetration and cheap electricity. Australia is also one of the few advanced nations with no nuclear power generators. The EU interconnected nations get access to a mix which is about 25% nuclear.
The NEM was designed at a time when supply of electricity was reliable, but demand varied. Now both supply and demand are volatile, and traders have more opportunity to game the system.
How much should we pay to slow storms in 2100?
The only point of wind and solar is to change the climate. In Australia, where we are the worlds second largest exporter of coal, so it’s not about “energy independence”. It’s not about pollution either. Our coal generators meet strict standards. It’s not about us being “world leaders” in exporting solar panels or wind turbines, we are buying these from China. The sole reason we destroyed our cheap power base is because we hope the weather will be nicer next century. We are doing this for our unborn great grandchildren, the same people who will be laughing at our primitive climate-alchemy, our bizarre superstition and delusional fixation that we can hold back the tide, stop floods and droughts and windy days.
It’s like a hidden carbon tax on every item that needs to be heated, cooled or moved in Australia.
BlueScope Steel chief executive Paul O’Malley warned the nation was facing an “energy catastrophe”. “If it hits the point where people can’t make money then the industry will start to shut down,” he said.
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