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Peter Ridd versus James Cook Uni — Free Speech on trial in two weeks

Peter Ridd

Peter Ridd in Brisbane getting ready for the trial.

Peter Ridd’s court case is set for 26 to 28th March in Brisbane. He invites  you to watch the proceedings (Jennifer Marohasy says she’ll be there, all three days!). Go on…

If James Cook Uni (JCU) wins, they lose. Whatever happens, the taxpayer lost a long time ago.

On a philosophical note, in my opinion JCU will lose the ethical argument even if they manage to win on some narrow legal definition. If they win, it will mean that a judge has decided that a university has set up legally binding contracts that give them the power to effectively take away the right to intellectual freedom of an academic and silence him/her. That would be something of a pyrrhic victory. The university hierarchy may feel vindicated but the general public, especially those in North Queensland who are most affected by the questionable Great Barrier Reef science, will take a different view. But without getting over-confident, I reckon the chances of us winning are considerably above average, so we will see. — Peter Ridd, March 2019

Ridd’s employment contract says he has the right to speak freely, but the universities “Code of Conduct” pretty much says the opposite. He’s allowed to air unpopular opinions even about JCU, but at the same time he must also uphold the integrity of the university and respect the reputation of colleagues. In other words, the university can ignore you or sack you depending on which tribe you are in (Gravy-making, or Gravy-threatening), and then some lawyers can buy a yacht.

JCU already have a dismal record of isolating, blackbanning, and ousting people who disagree with the consensus (vale, Bob Carter!) When Ridd suggested we can’t trust our scientific institutions, JCU censured him, then ordered him not to mention the censure too. Let’s censor the censure! Then they trawled through his private emails as well, hunting for more ammunition … yeah sure, just what any rigorous institute would do. Since then, a JCU former employee has been caught doing Fake science on fake fish. They’re so “concerned” they’ve taken a whole year just to form an investigative panel. Ridd discovered the fake flipped lionfish photos. He is the kind guy that saves a great institute’s reputation. If only JCU was great.  

Trump would sort this out in a tweet — saving millions

Last week Trump told universities – No free speech means no federal grants OK?  No one needs a court case. You either have free speech or you don’t. It’s safe to assume that institutions that don’t allow criticism are harboring incompetent rent seekers. If their staff were capable, they would defend themselves. Good institutions sack incompetent staff. Weak ones sack the good ones who make the weak ones “look bad”.

Where are our taxpayer representatives?

This could have been fixed so quickly. How much longer will most Australian conservative politicians sit by in silence, allowing academics to squander public funds on poor studies and bad researchers, producing irreproducible results and meaningless press releases that advertise Big Government? It was inevitable that Big Gov funded academia would evolve into a grant generating machine. For a while the troughing academics pretended they cared more about the science. But no one at JCU is pretending any more. (Or if they do care, they can hardly say that can they? )

When will conservatives learn?

— Jo

Dr. Peter Ridd’s  GoFundMe Page

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The Spectator

 

Bad Riddance

On the persecution of Peter Ridd and its implications for free speech

by Gideon Rozner, (reprinted with permission) Director of Policy at the Institute of Public Affairs

The Spectator Australia, 9 March 2019

When the Left talks derisively about ‘climate deniers’, they probably imagine someone very different from Dr Peter Ridd. Bearded, bespectacled and softly-spoken, Ridd is a sandal-wearing one-time Green voter and former president of his local chapter of the Wildlife Protection Society. He is also a marine geophysicist who has been studying the Great Barrier Reef for over 35 years. And like many in his field, Ridd is passionate about his subject.

Keep reading  →

9.2 out of 10 based on 103 ratings

The cost of one days electricity on the Australian grid is three times (or 50 times) more than it was in 2012

There were no headlines but $300 million dollars was burned at the stake of renewables

Just another day on the exciting Australian NEM.

Friday week ago we had another price spike hitting the $14,500 mandated price cap. On that day South Australians and Victorians paid a blistering $61 million and $210 million respectively. That’s the cost of a single day’s electricity on what was a hot day (but not a record) for Melbourne (38C) and Adelaide (42C). These are temperatures that those cities often reach in summer. It was about 28C in the other three capital cities. Don’t be fooled — high temperatures are not the reason for the price spikes — as it happens, NSW used 22% more electricity than Victoria that day yet paid 90% less.

Thanks to David Bidstrup for calculating these numbers (MSWord file).

Total cost of wholesale electricity for one day, March 1st, 2019, AEMO. Graph, Australia, NEM.

But even NSW and Queensland are pay millions too much

You might think NSW and Queensland have reasonable prices for electricity, but lest we forget, what they pay today is still three times more expensive than they would have been if they were paying 2012 prices. Long ago in the renewable dark ages the average price of wholesale electricity was $25/MWh — that was the average for the whole month of March 2012.

And in 2012 when Melbourne was hotter (40C on Jan 2nd), the cost of electricity was a mere $31/MWh.

The market is screwed.

Graph, cost of wholesale electricity, SA, Vic, NSW, Qld, Tas, Australia, March 2019, march 2012

On March 1st a price spike cost millions of dollars, but even without the spike prices are still three times more expensive than in 2012. Click to enlarge

The price table with the costs and demand for March 1st, 2019 in each state of Eastern Australia. The lower two rows are the prices and theoretical cost if the same demand was priced at the same rate that each state was paying on an average March day in 2012.

Table, Electricity cost, Wholesale March 1, 2019, Australia.

Table, Electricity cost, Wholesale March 1, 2019, Australia. (Click to enlarge)

This year, the average wholesale price in NSW (so far for the first 10 days of March) is $86/MWh and QLD is $74/MWh. It’s twice that in SA ($198/MWh) and Victoria ($195/MWh) and it’s $119/MWh in Tasmania.

 Prices are off the scale

Renewables fans (like the ABC) will tell us that high prices are caused by old coal, but old coal plants didn’t cause price spikes in 2012. Demand was greater in 2012 than it is today (everyone is using less electricity than they’d like because of the price) and coal power took on more of the load — with less “help” from renewables.

There are more price spikes today, more wind power, more solar power and less coal power. Most owners of coal plants have little incentive to fund and maintain their coal plants. The more coal plants they can shut, the more their other generation assets will earn. Look at what happened to Hazelwood.

The Australian NEM is a giant success for corporate gentailers or State owned generators and totally wrecked for consumers.

 

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9.4 out of 10 based on 72 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

9.3 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

Ode to the Welfare State

Just when you think it hasn’t all been done before…

Ode to the Welfare State

Nov 4, 1949

 

h/t  Ian B via RedPower

9.8 out of 10 based on 91 ratings

First they came for the coal industry, now for oil and gas: West Australian EPA decides state must meet “Paris” alone

Map, Western Australia

Who’d want to invest here?  Image Catmoz

Suddenly, with five minutes warning, Western Australia may be going it alone to meet Paris on behalf of Australia. Not because an elected government decided that, but because of five people chosen by a state Minister. Who is in charge here? The West Australian EPA is a QUAGO (quasi-autonomous-and-governmental organisation) —  paid by the government, but magically “independent” of it. They are annointed saints charged with protecting “the environment” but as far as I can tell, that does not include the dominant fauna nor the entire plant kingdom.

Billion-dollar WA projects at risk from new EPA emission rules

Paul Garvey, The Australian

 Tens of billions of dollars in new resource projects will be at risk after Western Australia’s Environmental Protection Authority announced tough new measures around carbon dioxide emissions.

WA has only 10% of Australia’s population but generates more than a third of the national exports. Or it did. Watch this space…

The new regulations will affect planned projects such as Woodside Petroleum’s $US11 billion ($15.6bn) Scarborough gas project and its $US20.5bn Browse development, as well as existing projects such as the $US34bn Wheatstone LNG plant and the $US54bn Gorgon LNG plant.

This will also affect Rio Tinto, BHP and Fortescue Metals as well.

Map, Western Australia

The oil and gas industry is up in arms:

“Not only will this proposal put at risk new jobs, investment and domestic gas supplies, it positions WA at a competitive disadvantage in the global LNG marketplace,” Woodside CEO Peter Coleman said in a statement.

Dare I suggest that the oil and gas industry could’ve been helping to explain to Australia how damaging the Paris agreement and pagan weathercraft is. They partly benefit from the anti-CO2 mantra as it hurts coal, and boosts gas. But when we live in a namecalling fantasy land, this attack on them is utterly logical and was inevitable like the rising sun. There is a certain element of reap what you sow. First they came for the coal industry…

Would you like unemployment with that?

Predictably Their Australian ABC promptly interviewed a green activist Piers Verstegen, Conservation Council. He gets free advertising-time to say an “independent study” (that his team paid for) shows it will create 4,000 jobs out of thin air. If the ABC asked me, I’d point out that international studies (that I didn’t pay for) showed that for every new green job at least two jobs were destroyed, and the only time that didn’t happen was when things were even worse. In Spain two jobs were lost, in the UK it was four, and in Italy — five. At best, if 4,000 green jobs are created then the we hope we only lose 8,000 jobs — it could be so much worse.

Verstegen has some plan to plant trees and manage forests to replace our $171b resources industry. Good luck with that.

Did anyone ask the plants? Not the EPA

Not only will money and jobs be at risk, but it’s hard to see how cutting CO2 helps plants that benefit from it– which is all plants on Earth apart from fungus, holoparasites and the Venus Fly Trap. WA is the driest state on the driest continent (apart from Antarctica on a technicality). WA is the definition of An Arid Region and arid regions of the world are 11% greener, mostly thanks to CO2. What’s the EPA protecting plants from — photosynthesis?

The Paris Agreement is The Problem

Even if it is non-binding, voluntary and pointless it allows every 2-bit judge and tinpot agency to make grandiose grabs for power on behalf of globalists everywhere. Logically, the quickest fix here is to Get Out of Paris.

No doubt about it, Paris is the excuse:

The authority’s chairman Tom Hatton told reporters in WA the move was necessary because Australia was not on track to meet its Paris targets and the current policies of the federal government “are not going to deliver the outcomes as currently applied that are necessary for Australia to meet its international obligations under the Paris agreement”.

Under the guidelines developers proposing projects with direct emissions of more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per annum would be required to demonstrate they have taken all “reasonable and practicable design measures”, including use of renewable energy, to reduce or avoid emissions. –– The Guardian

Someone doth protest too much:

ABC news — 3mins 45sec: Tom Hatton, “there’s no political motivation from these guidelines, they come strictly from considerations to protect the West Australian environment.”

Given that Western Australian emissions of CO2 will change global temperatures by 0.0 degrees C, saving no plants and stopping no droughts, this has got nothing to do with science or economics. If this is not political it’s witchcraft.

 Where does the buck really stop?

Who is making the decision that counts? The EPA website tells us it advises the government. But the newspapers are reporting this decision as “announced”. The ABC said the guidelines mean projects producing more than 100,000 tons must  show how they will reduce or avoid emissions. Does that mean that the state government can theoretically ignore it, or does it mean that all resource projects have to get EPA approval, so the EPA are de facto Kingmakers?

In the last election campaign, The McGowan government dumped its own plans to set higher emission targets like a hot potato. Obviously they worried that the public wouldn’t want that. Is this a way to get around the democratic process? McGowan takes the advice and just pretends this is out of his hands? Where is the government for the people, by the….

The Guardian:

The EPA, which works independently and makes recommendations to the WA government about whether new developments should be granted environmental approval, said on Thursday it was setting a “higher bar” for how it would assess the impact of major projects on the climate.

If the EPA was funded by Exxon would the Guardian call it “independent”? If it were just an advisory body would it say it was setting a higher bar, or suggesting a higher bar?

On the upside, at least the national imbalance of GST payments will even up. Instead of WA sending money to states that won’t use their own resources, WA will join them on the welfare line. But when every state has their hands out for money, which state will Make Australia Rich Again?

9.9 out of 10 based on 98 ratings

Blame Climate Change for stupid British Voters choosing Brexit says ABC

If only we had built more windmills, and changed more light-globes we could have prevented the British voting to control their own nation. It all makes sense — if you are insane, or a broadcaster paid one billion a year to promote Big Government.

What a disaster — the fifth largest economy choose to trade more with the rest of the world and be less under the thumb of Germany and Brussels. Such madness needs an explanification. So here it is: Our coal plants caused a terrible drought in Syria which made lots of nice people seek refuge in rich countries, I mean “globally”, and that made people talk about a refugee problem in the UK (which wasn’t really a problem, see) and that made scared, selfish and small minded populist voters choose fear and Brexit over the glorious wonder of the EU.

 This is the genius analysis we pay Sabra Lane and the ABC for:

SABRA LANE: Could it be that Brexit, the UK voting to leave the EU, is the result of a cascading series of events due in part to climate change?

ROBERT GLASSER: Yeah, so there was a persistent drought that effected the region, probably the worst drought in something like 900 years and as a result of that drought there were major failures of crops and literally millions of people moved from rural areas into the cities and when they arrived they were exacerbating existing social tensions.

So this wasn’t by any means the cause of the Syrian civil war, but it was certainty a factor and that migration, the increased instability resulted in this cascading, really profound cascading impacts.

You had a refugee crisis in the region that became a refugee crisis in Europe, actually a global refugee crisis.

There was quite a lot of discussion at the time about the refugee problem in the UK and it was a major feature of the discussions around Brexit. And so you had the Brexit, this contributing to Brexit and you had it also contributing at the same time to the rise of right wing populist governments in Europe that further undermined the EU as an institution.

Let’s just isolate the hard-hitting deep questioning and great research by Sabra Lane

Below are all her words in the entire interview where “climate change” is made out to be a political force. Among his ambitious claims, Robert Glasser says the worst-in-900-year drought was “a factor” in the Syrian War, caused crop failures, migration to the cities of the Middle East, increased social tensions, which led to mass emigration, and caused the rise of right wing populist governments in Europe. Furthermore it will cause the collapse of coral reefs, shrink fish supplies 10%, have a huge impact on 130 million people living near Australia. Our defense force needs to strategize. Moreso, the fish will move south  so that will decrease our fish stocks (because Australian boats apparently don’t go south, and we can’t eat the extra tropical fish we’ll get). And onwards brother, climate change will also cause more bush fires and El Ninos, more crop plagues, more hot days where crop-pickers need to rest, and make grains harder to get (despite grain crops rising practically every year in this “peak heat”).

So what does Lane say when faced with abject nonsense?

“All right”.

If Sabra Lane was a hired Informercial talk-face for Big-Government advertising, she would sound… just like this:

SABRA LANE: Could it be that Brexit, the UK voting to leave the EU, is the result of a cascading series of events due in part to climate change?

Robert Glasser, a visiting fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, thinks a case can be argued that it might well have had an impact, and that it could be an example of the disruptive side-effects of a warming planet.

He’s warning in a new report out this morning, that Australia needs to be better prepared to deal with an ‘era of disasters’, which will have a profound effect on our economy and way of life.

Dr Glasser previously served as the special representative to the UN Secretary-General on risk reduction and he joins us now.

Good morning and welcome.

Let’s get to that Brexit argument first….

SABRA LANE: Can you concisely explain your thinking on how climate change played a role there?

SABRA LANE: All right, and you think cascading effects around drought, food security and people movement are risks that Australia and our neighbours should be prepared for – how big a risk is it?

SABRA LANE: So Dr Glasser, sorry you argue that senior military and security leaders need to be aware of this and preparing for this – how?

SABRA LANE: All right, Dr Glasser from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, thanks for joining AM this morning.

I nominate this one for Big Gov Ad-Queen of 2019

Has there been a more patronizing, condescending, less informed interview on their ABC?

Buried between the lines is the message that right wing voters are fooled by weather events and couldn’t possibly have any rational reason to vote for Brexit or oppose mass immigration. (This study shows the opposite). Obvious in every word Sabra says is that she has done no research, and read no opposing views, possibly because she knows she is smarter than the 17 million people that live in the UK and voted for Brexit. Oh the burden of being so gifted!

Hello Sabra: Cold kills and warming will save lives. Crops love CO2 and warm weather.The worst droughts were 1,000 years ago and had nothing to do with CO2, and the models are hopelessly broken, unverified and failing, which suggests the latest droughts were entirely natural. There is no respectable evidence that “climate change”, whatever that distorted abused term means, has anything to do with El Ninos, which no expert in the world can predict a year in advance (or sometimes even 3 months out). Likewise bushfires have always happened, and coral bleaching too. For the last hundred thousand years humans have over-populated areas, suffered famine and war and emigrated in waves to better places.

What is really remarkable is that for the last hundred years, finally, there are a few civilized nations where almost no one starves, and war-lords don’t rape, pillage, murder and enslave people. In these, the most precious islands of peace and prosperity, we are so wealthy, beyond the imaginings of billions of people, that we can afford to pay *possibly as much as* a quarter of a million dollars a year to lazy, self serving, incompetent people like Sabra Lane.

To all the people who are fed up with that and help support me to say so, Thank You.

More info that Sabra could have found for free:

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9.5 out of 10 based on 84 ratings

Too much fuel causes extreme bush fires, not climate change

What was Australia’s Environment Minister thinking?

Melissa Price succumbs to pagan witchcraft:

“There’s no doubt that there’s many people who have suffered over this summer. We talk about the Victorian bushfires; (in) my home state of Western Australia we’ve also got fires there,” [Melissa Price] told Sky News this morning. “There’s no doubt that climate change is having an impact on us. There’s no denying that.”

Western Australia, State Map.

WA

Let’s look at her home state. After 67 years of fire management in the giant, hot, dry state of WA, the trend is clear — the more prescribed area we burn, the less wildfire does.  In the graph below the prescribed burns declined for forty years and wildfires increased for thirty. After the Dwellingup Fire in 1961 the state ramped up the preventative burns, and reduced wildfires.

As the BushFireFront team say:

“We can’t control the weather but we can control the fuel loads

Tough call — what do we do, redesign our energy system, pay billions, change our cars, our houses and our light globes in the hope that bush fires will be nicer, or do we just go back to doing what we used to do that worked?

Prescribed fire reduction, South West WA.

As prescribed fire reduction declined, Wildfires increased in South West Australia.

Thanks to Roger Underwood and the BFF team who told us how to prevent megafires in April 2009, fully ten years ago.

Avoiding Megafires in Australia

 Large wildfires can only occur when there is a combination, at the same time, of three things:

  • an ignition source,
  • severe fire weather and,
  • a large contiguous accumulation of fuel.

Remove any of these three and you cannot have a large wildfire (= megafire).

We obviously can’t control the weather, nor can we hope to eliminate all possible avenues of ignition. The only factor we can control is the large contiguous accumulations of fuel. Therefore, broadscale fuel reduction burning is the only defence we have against large wildfires. This will not prevent fires occurring, but it will ensure fires are less intense, are easier and safer to control and will do less damage.

Does it work? Yes it does, as has been shown many times, over many years, by the experience of Western Australian forest managers. The “proof of the pudding” is the incidence of large wildfires in Western Australian forests over the last 50 years.

Or we could put up some windmills and solar panels to “stop the flames”.

 

h/t George and Pat

9.7 out of 10 based on 98 ratings

Can you spare a few dollars to help with site maintenance?

UPDATED: Good news. Today’s comments issue has been resolved. Apologies for those who tried and couldn’t. Thanks especially to Andrew B for his brilliant IT help!  The site needs more work to be future-proofed so we can avoid these glitches. Any dollar support you can help out with will go toward that.  Thank you to those who have already chipped in today. : -) Much appreciated. — Jo

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There’s an issue with comments this morning. Apologies! Thanks to everyone emailing in to let me know. I’m working on it. I will keep posting and hope to restore new comments as soon as possible.

Paypal buttons below, and other methods — bank deposits, cheques here 

In paypal, due to strange Australian rules, people are only permitted to “Buy” me as many $1 units of emergency chocolate support as they would like. All help big or small, gratefully received.

Click on the currency button, and write in the quantity.



Apologies, the GBP button seems to only do AUD. :- (  Sigh.









A big thank you to all the people who make this site possible.

You can email me at joanne AT joannenova.com.au if you have questions or suggestions.

9.2 out of 10 based on 24 ratings

Trump tells Universities – No free speech means no federal grants OK?

Trump tells Universities – No free speech means no federal grants OK?

Universities depend on Big Government, so it’s practically a law of physics that they will evolve into Big-Gov promoters unless some force stops them.

What is surprising is that most conservative governments let it happen.

Trump does the obvious but unheard of:

The Hill: Trump says he’ll sign executive order for free speech on college campuses
by Tal Axelrod

“We reject oppressive speech codes, censorship, political correctness and every other attempt by the hard left to stop people from challenging ridiculous and dangerous ideas. These ideas are dangerous,” Trump said. “Instead we believe in free speech, including online and including on campus.”

“Today I’m proud to announce that I will be very soon signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research grants.”

This came to a head because a conservative activist was viciously punched at Berkley. (See the full appalling attack on youtube). “Higher” education has become Hater education.

Keep reading  →

9.6 out of 10 based on 84 ratings

Huge week in Perth: Plimer, Archibald, Abbott, Nova — Libertyfest is on!

Hope to see as many sharp minds and good souls as possible.

This week in Perth day by day:

Tuesday 5th March, David ArchibaldStop The Climate Stupidity, The Irish Club, 61 Townshend St Subiaco

Brazil’s New foreign minister has said that climate change is a Marxist plot and he is right. Hear the whole story of Global Warming Hysteria including its dark Nazi origins. Australia is destroying itself for no good reason. Increased CO2 is wholly good.

_______________________________

LibertyFest in the West: in Perth for the first time

NWFRIENDSP19 gives readers here 30% off!

Prices start at just $99 (before the discount)

Libertyworks speakers, Perth 2019

 

Weds 6th, March, Ian Plimer, UWA Club
Thurs 7th March, Student Pitchfest Competition, CIS and Mannkal, Natalie Elliot, The Hon Aaron Stonehouse, Tom Switzer, The Vic Hotel, Subiaco.
Friday 8th March, Parliament House Tour, Steve Baxter, Shark Tank Celebrity, 6:30pm Live Q&A with Tony Abbott MP, Nick Cater, Tom Switzer. The Duxton Ballroom.
Sat 9th March, The Big Day — Bettina Arndt, Chris Berg, Jo Nova, MLA’c, MLC’s, and stacks more, see the page.
Millenial Socialists, Wicked Witches, Who Owns Your Body?, Free Market Environmentalism, Drug Law Reform, Toxic Masculinity, Banking Culture, The Great White Protection Racket, Liberalism, and Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.
I’ll be doing the latest Top Ten Ways to Destroy A Perfectly Good Grid!
Find out what it takes to achieve state-wide blackouts, flying squads of diesel generators, and a tripling of wholesale electricity prices in just five years.
________________________

The LibertyWorks registration page: don’t forget the code for the 30% discount — NWFRIENDSP19

Hope to see you there. This is a rare opportunity to meet like minded people, stretch bounds, ask questions, share the gasps and laughs. And it’s a bargain. Don’t miss it!

9.5 out of 10 based on 47 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

….

8.6 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

States with low cost solar and wind paying 1300% more at the moment

Any more free electricity and SA and Victoria will go broke.

In other news a few days ago, the retail price of electricity rose 16% in Victoria and the number of disconnections rose 21%.

In a highly critical report to be released on Tuesday, the Essential Services Commission accused energy retailers of running ineffectual hardship programs that saw customers cut off anyway in most cases.  The commission reported power prices leapt 16 per cent last financial year, feeding a 21 per cent jump in the number of disconnections as 60,732 customers had their power cut off. The ESC said the number of disconnections in the last quarter of the financial year was one of the highest on record. — Sydney Morning Herald

Enjoy all the fun of watching our Australian Electricity Market in operation live as tens of millions of dollars get converted into income for AGL, Energy Australia, ENGIE, Origin and Snowy Hydro. No wonder they love renewables.

States with the most cheap wind and solar pay the most for electricity. Graph. AEMO.

States with the most cheap wind and solar pay the most for electricity. Graph. AEMO.

Why do we allow a few companies to own so many different and competing generators across the entire market?

h/t David B

9.8 out of 10 based on 77 ratings

EU hides their Toaster and Kettle bans so they don’t “galvanize” Brexit

Toaster, photo

The last thing the EU want is for the British to be reminded of the EU’s intrusive, pointless plans to control them from afar:

Dave Keating, Euractiv.com

EU’s ban on inefficient toasters delayed to avoid pro-Brexit press attack

The EU has put plans to regulate inefficient kettles and toasters into cold storage amid fears in Brussels that they could galvanise support for the leave campaign in the UK’s 23 June referendum

 Freudian slip?

Are the laws made for the people, or for the M.P’s?

But in fact, these efficiency improvements have had a complicated relationship with public opinion in the past decade. Public backlash has been one of the biggest impediments to passing these EU laws.

Dang voters are an impediment to bureaucrats.

Efficiency improvements for things like toilets and lightbulbs, passed by the Commission of Jose Manuel Barroso which ended in 2014, prompted negative press, particularly in the United Kingdom.

So the British press has more spine than the French and German propaganda sheets?

Newspapers accused the European Union of meddling in the most minute details of daily life and demanded the freedom for consumers to use too much electricity and too much water if they so choose.

Joy. At least they stopped regulating toilet flushing (only just):

Juncker: This Commission no longer regulates the flushing of toilets

Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Thursday (23 February) that he “fought like a lion” against “ill-inspired Commissioners” who thought the EU should regulate the flushing of toilets. He also indicated that he will push for a multi-speed Europe in proposals to be unveiled next month.

Junker the lion. Sure.

The article is about the EU passing efficiency laws that the public are “unconvinced” about. The toaster line is buried. In the opening paragraph, there is a strange admission that the EU has plans to make your whitegoods “independent”:

European legislation has made appliances like washing machines and dishwashers even more water and energy efficient than washing clothes and dishes by hand. The next step is to connect these appliances to the web and allow them to act independently.

Because we all long for our fridges to grow up and tell us what we are permitted to eat, right?

Photo by Stocksnap.

9.7 out of 10 based on 66 ratings

Midweek Unthreaded

Oops. Forgot yesterday…

9.1 out of 10 based on 20 ratings

Quick! Tell the PM: Pumped Hydro is not a “generator”. It’s a $2 – $4b energy chewing “renewables” bandaid.

No more excuses for sloppy, inaccurate language. How can you run a country with falsehoods?

Hydropower is a generator. Pumped Hydro is giant appliance that sucks electricity and gives you back some later. In a system with reliable baseload generators it is superfluous, redundant, and entirely unnecessary. It is an expense we don’t have to have, didn’t need, and don’t want to pay for. It can only make things more expensive than the system we used to have. Not only do we have to pay for the giant infrastructure, every day it operates we also throw away 20 – 30% of the electrons (so to speak) that go through it.

Scott Morrison says it’s only $1.4 b from the taxpayer, but the total cost may be $4 billion, and as Judith Sloan says, someone’s got to pay — if not through taxes, it will be added to electricity prices. The Snowy Corp may “self fund” it (a deceptively nice way to put it), but they won’t be donating the money.

And the Snowy Corp couldn’t “self-fund” it from electricity bills if they weren’t already so ridiculously high.  If we had enough coal power to keep electricity as inexpensive as it was a few years ago no one would buy this non-competitive supply.

Let’s be clear about the economics of this project: it rests on very high and variable wholesale electricity prices. Water can be pumped up the hill when prices are low and released when prices are high. That might be a good deal for the corporation, but it’s not a good deal for consumers.    — Judith Sloan

Let’s be absolutely clear, this is entirely a Renewables Expense

The cost of any storage should be henceforth added to the cost of Wind and Solar Power. No one should say Wind power is cheaper than coal — unless they’ve added in the cost to make it reliable (like coal power is) — add on the costs of the batteries, the interconnectors, the pumped hydro.  Let’s compare apples to apples.

Lets remind ourselves why we are spending up to $4,000 million dollars — we’re trying to stop bad weather

This is pure superstition money — we think that buying expensive electricity will stop droughts and floods and if we only pay enough penance to the Climate Gods the weather will get nicer. Follow the money trail, there is a chain of profit-makers living off our pagan fear. If our conservative major party sells out the voters out to the likes of Vestas, GE, Siemens, the EU and the UN and a bunch of B-grade bullies and grant troughing scientists, no wonder their polls are so dismal.

Let a real conservative party take their place or hope the Liberals can be reborn.

h/t Ian

9.9 out of 10 based on 101 ratings

Europe’s popular right on the rise — replacing fake conservatives — threaten Climate Gravy-train

Europe was always the leader and main driver of the climate-scare-machine.

The salad days are over.

Bloomberg calls non-left parties “populist” which is code for popular-but-we-don’t-like-them (and-nor-should-you).

They say this trend is the rise of “right wing” but as the jellyfish conservatives became the center left, the voters looked for politicians with a spine instead. And the push back against climate change is very much a core target of many of these parties. In the previous term, 86% of the EU parliament voted for climate policies, the next term it was 75%. The term coming it is predicted it will shrink again to 71%.  h/t GWPF

Popular right,"populist", rise of politics, graph.

Almost all these parties think Climate Change is an elitist tax grab (or something like that). Adelphi 2019

As so democracy threatens “the consensus” and the Bloomberg team see no irony…

 Europe’s Populist Right Threatens to Erode Climate Consensus

 William Wilkes, Bloomberg,

 Europe’s consensus in favor of curbing greenhouse gas emissions is weakening due to rising support for right-wing populists, many of whom cast doubt over whether people bear the responsibility for climate change.

When voters elect the wrong people to do what they want and the politicians do it, thats “pandering”:

The researchers wrote that the populist wave poses “the danger that centrist parties will pander to climate-skeptic priorities or nationalist rhetoric, and shift from progressive to reactionary positions.”

There are already signs that the right-wing wave has blunted attempts to introduce environmentally-friendly policies, with Germany’s coal commission delaying the country’s exit from burning the dirtiest fossil fuel. That’s in part due to concerns about job losses in the Lausitz region of Saxony, where the AfD is catching up to more established parties ahead of September elections.

Support for right-wing populists looks set to surge in May’s European elections…

And in Week 15 of the Yellow Vest protest, another 46,600 people took the streets, again.

Tell me again how everyone wants climate action.

10 out of 10 based on 68 ratings

At the turn of last century people didn’t know what a radio was

Predicting 2100?

Doug McKelway  — Fox News

Novelist Michael Crichton, in the Caltech Michelin lecture in 1993, offered what some might see as a calming reassurance about the future of the earths’ climate. He looked back to the turn of the last century when people, “didn’t know what radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD,  or what IBM was…”

Crichton went on, presenting a long list of the scientific inventions of the 20th century that changed human life for the better. Toward the end of the lecture he asked, “Now, you tell me you can predict the world of 2100?”

Green New Deal rollout rattles both sides of climate change debate

x-35 Jet.

 

In 1993, when Crichton spoke, many thought it was impossible to clone a mammal from an adult cell.

Feb 23 1997: SCIENTIST REPORTS FIRST CLONING EVER OF ADULT MAMMAL

In a feat that may be the one bit of genetic engineering that has been anticipated and dreaded more than any other, researchers in Britain are reporting that they have cloned an adult mammal for the first time.

The group, led by Dr. Ian Wilmut, a 52-year-old embryologist at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, created a lamb using DNA from an adult sheep. The achievement shocked leading researchers who had said it could not be done. The researchers had assumed that the DNA of adult cells would not act like the DNA formed when a sperm’s genes first mingle with those of an egg.

The paper was published on Feb 27th 1997.

Another consensus, busted.

h/t ClimateDepot

9.8 out of 10 based on 64 ratings

Millennials haven’t forgotten Mao, Stalin or Lenin. They never knew them.

Millenials are aged 25 – 39. In Australia four out of five are not even “familiar” with Mao. Half have never heard of him, even though he caused the deaths of twice as many people as Adolf Hitler.

Political ideologues control our education system. We teach kids identity politics, and how to control the weather with light globes, but not the most important political lesson of the 20th Century.

We won the cold war, then lost the peace.

Why Millenials are embracing Socialism

Tom Switzer, Sydney Morning Herald

The survey evidence is clear. In a YouGov poll commissioned by the Centre for Independent Studies last year, 58 per cent of Australian millennials have a favourable view of socialism, with only 18 per cent having an unfavourable one. These findings reflect Millennial attitudes in Britain and the US.

What’s going on?

Part of the problem is plain ignorance. Most Millennials were hardly alive when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire”.

According to the CIS poll, only 26 per cent of Millennials are familiar with Vladimir Lenin and 34 per cent with Joseph Stalin. Only 21 per cent of those questioned said they knew well who Mao was. Never mind that these men were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and the impoverishment of hundreds of millions.

Whatever excuse explains Millennials’ ignorance of communism, they should at least know about Venezuela where the socialist regime of the past two decades has led to repression, an economy in free fall, widespread disease and starvation and mass emigration.

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies and presenter at the ABC’s Radio National.

Here’s what failure looks like:

Politics, Historical figures, CIS, Graph, education, millenials, familiarity with dictators.

Only one in five people aged 25-39 in Australia are familiar with Mao, Stalin and Lenin.

Time to say “No”.

Here’s a radical idea, no child should get a high school certificate if they can’t answer the question “which political party caused the most deaths in the last 100 years”? The answer starts with C, and if you say Capitalism you have to repeat a year, and so do your teachers.

h/t David B.

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7.1 out of 10 based on 146 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

9.8 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

Adjusted! Another degree shaved off Darwins history — (it’s cooling so fast, in 50 years Darwin won’t even be tropical)

Graham Lloyd and Jen Marohasy scorch through the BoMs latest revision of Darwin.

On the 1st of January 1910 the maximum temperature recorded at the Darwin post office was 34.2 degrees C, then it became 33.8 C, and now it was, is, 32.8 C. (What’s the past tense of something that is now, but wasn’t then? We don’t even have grammar for this.)

Extrapolate that adjustment trend: One degree of cooling in 6 years (since the last adjustment) becomes 16 degrees cooler in a century. Darwin won’t know what hot days were!

Look what they’ve done to history Mum

The Bureau of Meteorology has no interest in the hot pre-1910 era which just gets chopped.  And even if they did include it, after they’ve adjusted it — it wouldn’t be hot anymore anyway. Remember the Federation Drought? No one else does either.

Temperature is whatever you want to make it.

Darwin, temperatures history, graph, Bureau of Meteorology

Mean maximum annual temperatures as measured at the Darwin Post Office and airport shown with the new remodeled ACORN-SAT Version 2, which is the new official record for Australia.

“What the Bureau has done to the historical temperature record for Darwin is indefensible. ” –Marohasy

 

As Marohasy explains, the record at Darwin matters because the site had some of the best and earliest data for the vast northern reaches of Australia:

Graham Lloyd, The Weekend Australian –

“Scientist Jennifer Marohasy said Darwin’s temperature record was important because the city was the only location in central northern Australia where temp­era­tures had been measured since 1895 from within an instrument shelter. The Darwin record include­s temperatures taken at Darwin post office from 1882 until 1941 and from Darwin airport from 1942 to the present.”

The Bureau of Meteorology have plenty of vague excuses:

“For the case of Darwin, a downward adjustment to older records is applied to account for differences between the older sites and the current site, and differences between older thermometers and the current automated sensor.

“In other words, the adjustments estimate what historical temperatures would look like if they were recorded with today’s equipment at the current site.”

But the World War I site that was hasn’t changed in the last six years. Why were the 2012 corrections in need of re-correcting again? According to Marohasy the Bureau says the site was shaded by trees after 1937 and “other factors” changed too.

No dissent allowed

Jen Marohasy almost got a paper published on Darwin’s adjustments but after being accepted it was pulled at the last minute. Marohasy argues that the cooling wasn’t caused by shading but by a cyclone that wiped out the plants that were stopping the sea breeze getting in to the post office.

Dr Marohasy said many would claim the raw record for Darwin must be wrong because it showed a general trend of cooling to about 1950, and then warming.

As readers here know scientists in 1952 were discussing how Australia had cooled since the turn of the century. It was well known at the time — the cooling stretched all the way from Alice Springs to Narrabi and Hay, across the Eastern States. Marohasy provides a graph comparing Darwin to Richmond:

Darwin, Richmond, historical temperatures, Australia, Graph.

Darwin, Richmond, historical temperatures, Australia, Graph.

I often satirize the changes by mocking how old thermometers were always measuring “too high”. The Bureau protests:

 The bureau said the adjustment of historical temperatures in its ACORN-SAT dataset did not suggest records at any point in time were too high or too low. “Both upwards and downwards adjustments have been made at many ACORN-SAT sites to ensur­e past observations are consistent with modern conditions,” the bureau spokesman said.

Lo and verily, we all know the aim is supposedly to compare the past with today — but all the extra concrete, airports, and air conditioners means thermometers in bare paddocks in the horse and carriage era need to be adjusted up, not down.  And what about the all new one-second-records from electronic equipment? The old glass thermometers couldn’t measure a one second blast of hot air from a 747 that wasn’t there in 1898 either. (Even if it was there, they couldn’t measure it.) The slow acting mercury thermometers need to be adjusted up, not down, to compete with super sensitive electronic gizmos.

We know the Bureau have made adjustments “up and down”, but go on, tell the obvious bleeding truth — historic adjustments go down far more often than they go up and none of it makes sense unless the BoM is under the spell of a religion or is an advertising agency for the Big Gov that funds them.

9.8 out of 10 based on 100 ratings