Recent Posts
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Sunday
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Saturday
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If only we’d built those offshore wind turbines, eaten more cricket-burgers, we could have stopped the floods, right?
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Friday
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If UK had never tried renewables, each person would be £3,000 richer
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Thursday
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New AI data centers will use the same electricity as 2 million homes
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Wednesday
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No one knows what caused the Blackout but Spain is using more gas and nukes and less solar…
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Half of Australia doesn’t want to pay a single cent on Net Zero targets
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Saturday
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Secret comms devices, radios, hidden in solar inverters from China. Would you like a Blackout with that?
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Friday
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LSE junk study says if men didn’t eat so much red meat we’d have nicer weather
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Thursday
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Now they tell us? Labor says new aggressive Net Zero policy they hid from voters “is popular”
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Wednesday
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British politics in turmoil after Reform’s wins — Greens Deputy even attacks Net Zero from the left
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Children of 2020 face unprecedented exposure to Extreme Climate Nonsense…
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Saturday
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60% are skeptics: Only 13% of UK voters say Net Zero is more important than cost of living
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Friday
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Climate change is causing South Africa to rise and sink at the same time
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Thursday
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Why is the renewables industry allowed to sponsor political advertising in schools and call it “education”?
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Wednesday
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In trying to be a small target, the Liberals accidentally disappeared
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Tuesday
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Monday
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The best thing about the Australian election was that Nigel Farage’s party won 30% in the UK
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Sunday
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Saturday — Election Day Australia
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Vote for freedom…
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Friday
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Bombshell: Sir Tony Blair says climate policies are unworkable, irrational, and everyone is afraid of being called a denier
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Thursday
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Blackout in Spain to cost 2-4 billion Euro, likely due to solar plants — blind and biased ABC says “cause is a mystery”
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Wednesday
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Days after Spain reaches 100% renewable, mass blackouts hit, due to mysterious “rare atmospheric phenomenon”
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Tuesday
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Help needed: Site under DDoS attack from hundreds of thousands of unique IPs this week — especially China and the USA
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Monday: Election Day Canada
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When the Labor Party talk about “The Science” the Opposition can easily outflank and outgun them with bigger, better science
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Saturday
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UK Gov spends £50 m to dim sun to create slightly less beach weather
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Friday
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We have our own unthreaded poem!
Wind-farms and solar thermal plants will prey,
On birds of every size who fly their way.
The public, to pay less per kilowatt hour,
Must vote to drive the zealot Greens from power.
Australia’s constitution has a flaw,
When politicians wish to change the law,
By referendum, have the flaw corrected,
That very flaw will rule their wish rejected.
Bad-tempered glass can have a snap eruption,
Like children’s tantrums cause a quick disruption.
— Ruairi
9.2 out of 10 based on 46 ratings
 This used to be black glass, now it’s a sinkless, shattered crazed basin and bench. Who knew tempered glass could suddenly fracture and in some cases explosively?
We have a bathroom basin and countertop of moulded thick black glass. For about five years it was happy, then late one night this week, for no reason, it shattered — the sink fractured into 100 pieces and fell into the towels below. The countertop crazed from end to end even tossing a few cubes of cracked glass up to two meters away. Luckily no one was in the room. The new white dusty look was created by the crazing pattern, which slowly continued for the next few hours. We could hear the odd crackling noise every now and again as the last of the tempered tension in the glass ebbed away. Even far corners — away from the sink — broke off. It turns out this is a natural, rare phenomenon.
Exploding shower-screens, shelves, sinks, car windows, and patio tables?
Apparently this is probably due to a manufacturing fault that may lie unseen for up to thirty years before triggering. (More below). On one old discontinued site there are some 300 stories of glass spontaneously exploding between 2003-2012 . There is a mainstream news video and story here.
One four year old needed hospital care after a shower screen shattered, though luckily, people rarely get hurt, but it is disconcerting, and it’s easy to imagine how this could end very badly, especially in glass towers far above the ground.
Many people report that it sounds like a gunshot or car backfiring. So some people thought their house was being invaded (rather terrifying, I would think), others feared someone shot at them, or they were victims of a stray bullet. Some hunt for spent bullets, and a quite a few other poor sods got very spooked, wondering if their house was being occupied by angry spirits. Think poltergeists and ghosts. The most common words posted were “I’m so glad I found this thread.”
Tempered glass and the rare Nickel Sulphide intrusion
The best explanation is that a manufacturing defect leaves tiny traces of nickel-sulfide as an intrusion. The problem has been known about since the 1940s. The flaw can trigger any time without warning, though most events occur in the earlier years. There is an excellent discussion at The Achilles heel of toughened glass by Dr John Barry:
Keep reading →
9.7 out of 10 based on 52 ratings
Al Gore creates more skeptics everyday
Ross Clark, journalist, met Al Gore to interview him about his favourite topic. But Ross broke the rules; he did some research. Clark even talked to a professor about the scenes of Florida being flooded. The prof explained that it’s not so much that the seas were rising fast, but that the land under Miami is sinking — and by an amazing 16-24cm in the last 80 years. (No wonder some residents are seeing water inundate new areas.)
When I put all this to Al Gore and ask him whether his film would be stronger if it acknowledged the complexities of sea level rise — why it is rising in some places and not in others — I am expecting him to bat it away, saying that it doesn’t counter his central point and that there is a limit to what you can put into a film pitched at a mass audience, but his reaction surprises me. As soon as I mention Professor Wdowinski’s name, he counters: ‘Never heard of him — is he a denier?’ Then, as I continue to make the point, he starts to answer before directing it at me: ‘Are you a denier?’ When I say I am sure that climate change is a problem, but how big a one I don’t know, he jumps in: ‘You are a denier.’
That is a strange interpretation of the word ‘deny’, I try to say. But his PR team moves in and declares ‘Time’s up’, and I am left feeling like the guy in Monty Python who paid for a five-minute argument and was allowed only 30 seconds. On the way out, a frosty PR woman says to me: ‘Can I have a word with you?’ I wasn’t supposed to ask difficult questions, she says, because ‘this is a film junket, to promote the film’.
Surely if you are going to make a film claiming climate change to be a grave threat to the world, you ought to be prepared to answer detailed questions about it. — The Spectator
Perhaps he just needs more time? Give him another 20 years and Gore may get the hang of the scientific points.
Exposure to climate-denial, “shocking”
It was the same thing a few weeks ago when Nigel Lawson talked about climate change at the BBC. Gore was practically speechless (certainly he ran out of words):
Al Gore said he was shocked after the BBC “engaged in climate change denial” this morning.
Mr Gore told LBC: “It’s shocking how the BBC is engaged in climate denial, isn’t it?
“I had a personal experience with it this morning. It’s really shocking.”
The way climate denial is referred to — it is almost like the BBC was spreading anthrax or engaged in child abuse. And that’s the message, not that Gore can debate Lawson’s points, just that anyone who asks those questions is such a toxic evil person, so beyond the pale, that even if they were Chancellor of the Exchequer of one of the worlds top economies they don’t deserve to be interviewed. (If only Lawson had come second in a US presidential race.)
Gore is trying to scare listeners who found Lawson interesting. His message is both to BBC journalists (how dare you) and to people listening who might be tempted to go to work or dinners and talk about the Lawson interview. Gore wants to keep “climate denial” in the taboo camp by pouring indignant scorn and outrage at the mere idea of a conversation– but he can’t do this forever.
When people lose their fear of asking what their friends think about Lawson (or any skeptic) the infection will spread rampantly.
H/T William Dwyer, and Joe Bast.
9.6 out of 10 based on 99 ratings
For foreign readers, the Australian Parliament is undergoing the most extraordinary spectacle at the moment. Politicians have resigned after discovering that they were dual citizens of Australia and some other country — such as Britain, Canada, or New Zealand — which is a clear breach of the constitution. But this is going far beyond people who held two passports. The constitutional affliction is spreading, as more and more politicians get caught up in what will now become High Court cases. Some renounced citizenship in writing before the election but their unwanted sovereign-alternate nation didn’t necessarily acknowledge that for months (that was Malcolm Roberts case). Others never knew their mother applied for them to become a dual citizen. Some claim ignorance or inheritance may be no excuse.
Bizarrely, this could theoretically escalate to involve pretty much the entire parliamentary body.
The stakes are pretty high, given that our current government holds power by just one seat. Already the endangered list includes some ministers. People are resigning from the Senate and being replaced. In the House, no one has left yet but their continued stay will depend on the High Court. By-elections may have to be called, and government may change hands to the Labor Party.
Check out the wording of our constitution — spot the problem?
Section 44(i) of the nation’s founding document disqualifies someone from office if that person:
…is under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power…
How to remove every politician in Australia
Last week, David Evans (my other half) pointed out a simple method for a foreign power to get rid of any Australian politician they didn’t like. What if Kim Jong Un, say, granted selected politicians citizenship, or voting rights, or “free health care,” or the rights to some benefits in North Korea? Non-rescindable. Nothing the Australian politicians can do about it. Wouldn’t this disqualify every politician to whom this was granted? The blackmail potential is excellent, obviously.
But it gets worse. Apparently New Zealand has already neutralized the Australian Parliament. Now the only people who can run for Parliament are Australian citizens who are not Australian citizens. Figure that…
Robert Angyal SC is a Sydney barrister
Much closer to home, under recent and little-noticed changes to New Zealand law, Australian citizens now don’t need a visa to live, study or work in the Land of the Long White Cloud. That’s right: Any Australian citizen is entitled to live, study and work there.
That means we’re ALL entitled to the rights and privileges of a subject of New Zealand — not a citizen, with the attached rights and privileges such as voting — but to be a subject of that country, living there, subject to New Zealand law, working or studying. And there’s no doubt that New Zealand is a “foreign power” — you only have to watch the All Blacks do the haka to realise that.
What does this mean?
New Zealand law has made every Australian citizen incapable of being elected to, or serving in, the Australian Parliament. It’s not just Barnaby Joyce: It’s everyone!
UPDATE: Seems this is not likely at all. From Tim Andrews (Australian Taxpayers Alliance)
The High Court dealt with this in Sykes v Cleary and in fact in his concurrent judgement Barwick called it “absurd” :
“To take an extreme example, if a foreign power were mischievously to confer its nationality on members of the Parliament so as to disqualify them all, it would be absurd to recognize the foreign law conferring foreign nationality. “
It appears to be a bit of a historical anomaly — one Queen, many countries, that sort of thing.
At the time the constitution was enacted, only Senator Canavan’s Italian citizenship would have triggered the disqualification in section 44(i). Being born in Britain, Canada or New Zealand would have simply made a person a subject of Queen Victoria and therefore not a citizen of a foreign power.
The High Court decided in 1999, however, that at least since 1986, Britain is a foreign power for the purposes of section 44. Canada and New Zealand fall into the same category.
Read more: http://www.afr.com/opinion/columnists/citizenship-ignorance-or-inheritance-may-be-no-escape-from-section-44-20170815-gxwe6b#ixzz4q5RGAJtR
This needs a resolution pronto!
The constitution can only be changed by a referendum, but a referendum can only be initiated by legislation passed by the Australian Parliament. If the New Zealand angle is correct, then all our current politicians are ineligible to be in Parliament and therefore cannot pass the legislation needed to initiate the referendum. No new politicians can be elected without a change to the constitution by a referendum. Checkmate, Australian Government.
9.5 out of 10 based on 85 ratings
It’s not even close: If South Australia seceded it would have the highest electricity price of any nation on Earth.
South Australian households are paying the highest prices in the world at 47.13¢ per kilowatt hour, more than Germany, Denmark and Italy which heavily tax energy, after the huge increases on July 1, Carbon + Energy Markets’ MarkIntell data service says.
When the eastern states’ National Electricity Market was formed in the late 1990s, Australia had the lowest retail prices in the world along with the United States and Canada, CME director Bruce Mountain said.
The Markintell report graph:
 … Hmm — odd coincidence of Price with Wind Energy Penetration:
Wind energy is “free” but countries with the most wind power are also the most likely to get to the top of the Prize Pool for exorbitant electricity. Wind energy penetration is highest in Denmark (1st), Portugul (8th), Ireland (6th), Spain (11th), Germany (3rd). Conversely, renewable energy penetration is low in places at the tail end of the price curve like Luxemburg 6%, Estonia 15%, Hungary 7%, Lithuania 15.5%. In the low mid price range is France with 80% nuclear generation, and Finland which is 47% Nukes and Hydro.
Could be a message there?
If South Australia were on the graph of wind penetration below it would be equal second at 30%.
 …
The end cost of electricity is not just decided by the amount of wind power as a percentage of the grid. Australia as a whole is a stand out – despite having wildly expensive electricity, it only has (as a whole) 5% wind. using 83% fossil fuel sources, it In NSW, Victoria and Queensland, most electricity is generated from fossil fuels. Nor is the cost of electricity due to “renewables” alone, because hydropower is low cost. Countries with a lot of hydropower like Norway have high renewables but low prices. What we can’t find though is a single country with high wind and solar generation that also has cheap electricity.
The Nobel Peace Prize leads to the Nobel Price Price.
Read on to find out (some) of why Australia is such an odd fish.
It’s not just renewables in Australia, the National Electricity Market is a bureaucratic nightmare
Something very seismic has happened to our electricity prices. Despite 76% of our total mix coming from inexpensive coal generation, and only 10% or less coming from intermittent renewables, our prices have doubled. As Judith Sloan says, our NEM “is complete madness”: (The Australian)
The NEM operates one of the world’s longest interconnected power system. It covers a total distance of about 5000km from Port Douglas in Queensland to Port Lincoln in South Australia, with 40,000km of transmission lines.
But herein lies one of the NEM’s weaknesses: it is a very long, weakly connected system which does not provide the ideal underlying conditions for the efficient and transparent operation of the market for electricity. The penetration of renewables, as well as their preferential access to the NEM, has made this weakness even more apparent.
The NEM is not a free market, it’s so over-regulated with state and federal layers and counter committees to undo or outdo each other that any normal price signal is lost.
If we look at the operation of the NEM, one standout feature is the proliferation of regulatory agencies. There is the Australian Energy Market Commission, the Australian Energy Regulator, the Australian Energy Market Operator and the Clean Energy Regulator. And just because we don’t have an enough empire building in the electricity space, the government will add yet another agency: the Energy Security Board, one of the many unfounded recommendations of the Finkel review of the security of the electricity system.
The market used to have a reliable supply with intermittent demand, now both sides of that equation are volatile. The forced uptake of intermittent renewables must surely make the whole system a much more complex beast, and the generators are gaming that volatility. In this case, even the Queensland government is in on the act:
The Queensland government is also attempting to destroy the NEM by instructing one of its generators, but not the other, to bid low at peak times. Mind you, that government has been more than happy to reap the excessive dividends produced by the gaming of the system by these generators.
The customers get screwed by everyone in this:
Some of the bigger [private] players are behaving in duplicitous and self-serving ways, the most egregious example being AGL. All that marketing tosh about being committed to renewables while coal and gas make up 93 per cent of its output of electricity.
The other problem is complexity and customers being unwilling to shift
The big corporates are offering big discounts to get customers to switch then quietly raising the charges a couple of years later. (AFR)
“…big retailers are content to let customers slip off the deep discounts they attracted them with after a year or two, and onto a costly standing offer or a much smaller discount.
Punish loyal customers
AGL Energy chief executive Andy Vesey admitted last year that big power companies were guilty of punishing their most loyal customers in this way, but said subsequently AGL was abandoning the practice.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said last week he wanted to help consumers find better offers and lower barriers to new entrants to curtail the market power of AGL, Origin Energy, EnergyAustralia and Queensland’s state owned power duopoly.”
Mr Mountain said power bills are constructed in such a complex way that ordinary customers without sophisticated spreadsheet and analytical skills have little hope of analysing competing offers to work out which offers them the best deal.
Private comparison websites do not include all market offers and charge retailers for switching customers, while the websites offered by the Australian Energy Regulator and the Victorian government do not provide the tools customers need to discriminate among offers.
There is no free market for electricity in Australia. If a group just built a coal fired plant and lined up free and consenting customers willing to pay for 100% fossil fuel based electrons, it would be breaking the law. If customers can buy “clean energy” why can’t they choose “fertilizing energy”?
BACKGROUND: As a whole the EU uses about 50% thermal, 25% nuclear, 12% hydro, 10% wind, and 4% “others”. The breakdown by generation source is graphed (awkwardly) here.
h/t Bob FJ, StopTheseThings. Markintell Research, 2017.
9.6 out of 10 based on 81 ratings
 Crescent Dunes, Solar Thermal Plant, USA. | Wikimedia Author, Amble. A company called SolarReserve is planning to build the new Aurora 150MW solar thermal plant at Port Augusta, which is apparently a copy of their Crescent Dunes plant in the US. But that project has been offline for most of the time since last October. The whole SA government is meant to be running 24/7 off “solar power”, which allegedly only has about 8 hours of energy stored up (as heat in the molten salt block). So an 8 month break will be a bit of problem for the SA government (except of course, we all know that the real baseload backup here at 4 or 5am everyday, and most of the day in winter, is ultimately the very fossilized gas and coal.) Since the project only began working in Sept 2015 it managed to operate for all of one year and one month before it went offline for 8 months due to a leak. The SA State Energy Minister is not concerned saying it was a construction issue and SolarReserve “have learnt from that”.
The 150MW myth: most of the time it will be less, a lot less
Here’s an ominous number: Crescent Dunes has worked at an average capacity factor of only 16%. That would mean an average generation of just 24MW of power from the 150MW plant. Theoretically, they are aiming for a capacity factor of 51.9%. (Yes, according to Wikipedia, it is not 51.8%, or 52%, but 51.9%. Very specific spin then?) — Thanks to Graeme No 3 and AndrewWA in comments for their help. And from TonyfromOz who says: “Everything about this SouthAus plant is the hyped to the max best case scenario that NO plant on Planet Earth has achieved yet…”
Should they close their Solar-Parliament each winter?
The South Australian government might want to switch their summer holidays to winter, because Crescent Dunes production in summer was three times as high as their best winter month. (30GWh in Sept 2016 compared to 9GWh in February 2016). SA may well be better off if Parliament has to shut down for winter, but how do you run hospitals and schools on one-third of the power?
Not low-cost:
State Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis is not a man you want negotiating your deals:
“This deal is an incredible outcome for South Australians. It locks in low-cost power for our schools, hospitals and trams while also boosting supply to the broader market in order to reduce power bills for households and businesses.”
In pure NewsSpeak — a $70-plus-per-MWhr-deal is “low cost” now compared to what — the shockingly high prices of the National Electricity Market which have just doubled? For most of the last 15 years the average wholesale price of electricity in SA was around $30/MWhr (See fig 1).
This genius deal is so good, Premier Jay Weatherill is going to waste $2.6 million to sell it to South Australians.
Premier Jay Weatherill has defended allocating $2.6 million to an advertising budget to spruik the plan.
He argued the advertising was necessary to “ensure” investors understood that SA has “a secure energy future” and to protect the state’s reputation against people “seeking to essentially characterise South Australia as having an insecure and unstable energy system”.
Here’s Weatherill offering a slight cut to astronomical electricity bills too:
Given the likely capacity factor, and the governments use, how many megawatts exactly will be left to spare?
Jay Weatherill has promised a $50 cut to the average household power bill when a $650 million solar thermal power plant is running, even as experts warn that the technology is in its infancy and largely untested anywhere.
The South Australian Premier yesterday visited the proposed site of the world’s largest solar thermal project, 30km north of Port Augusta, hailing the new 150-megawatt plant as a “game-changer … (that) signals the death knell for coal-fired power stations in this nation”.
Coal is dead sayth Mr Weatherill
Being anti-coal is a religious badge of honor. Here’s a line history will not be kind to:
Mr Weatherill said no form of coal-fired electricity generation, which includes new high-efficiency, low-emission options, were considered during the tender process.
“There’s going to be no more coal-fired generation,” he said. “Coal is dead”
The solar thermal plant, to be built by US company SolarReserve in the state’s mid-north, was “by far the lowest-cost option of the shortlisted bids”, he said.
“The government will pay no more than $78MWh for our power. By way of comparison, you can’t build a coal-fired power station for less than $100MWh,” Mr Weatherill said, hailing the technology as “the future for the world”.
Weatherill knows coal is more expensive even though he didn’t consider it. All the other world leaders building 1600 coal plants in 62 countries must be kicking themselves.
As for $100MWh coal power — Weatherill could have paid $30m to keep the 520MW coal plant going.
Possibly people can come watch birds fry in the sky:
 Birds combust in mid-air at Ivanpah, Solar Thermal Plant, USA. | (Click to watch the video – how much fun can you have?). h/t David Maddison for the youtube link.
Not the largest solar thermal project
Being the biggest in a new immature and rarely used field is not that exciting, but Aurora is not the biggest bar perhaps in a minor technical sense. Everything about this is hyped — spot the weasel words “of its kind”:
The planned 150MW South Australian solar thermal plant will be the largest of its kind in the world, using 12,000 mirrors to direct heat at a 227m tower.
There are at least seven larger solar thermal plants — including the infamous Ivanpah which is more than double the size at 392MW. Possibly Aurora has the largest solar thermal tower at 227m, as the tower at Crescent Dunes is about 200m. How exciting is that?
Keep reading →
9.3 out of 10 based on 111 ratings
It’s possibly the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world, some as high as 4km and we didn’t even know these existed til recently. Despite that overwhelming ignorance, we’re 97.00% certain that all the warming in Antarctica is due to your car and airconditioner. Robin McKie, The Guardian writer, talks about the recent discovery of so many volcanoes under the ice. Not surprisingly, we have no data on how active these volcanoes are. However because we *know* climate change is definitely wrecking Antarctica, it follows that your car, air conditioner and pet dog could melt more ice, take the pressure off the tectonic plate and set one off. Then things will really get out of hand.
Anyhow, it’s just a coincidence that all the warming in Antarctica is where the volcanoes are.
 Warming in Antarctica | New volcano discoveries Spread the hagtag #allvolcanosmatter.
Scientists have uncovered the largest volcanic region on Earth – two kilometres below the surface of the vast ice sheet that covers west Antarctica.
The project, by Edinburgh University researchers, has revealed almost 100 volcanoes – with the highest as tall as the Eiger, which stands at almost 4,000 metres in Switzerland.
Geologists say this huge region is likely to dwarf that of east Africa’s volcanic ridge, currently rated the densest concentration of volcanoes in the world.
These newly discovered volcanoes range in height from 100 to 3,850 metres. All are covered in ice, which sometimes lies in layers that are more than 4km thick in the region. These active peaks are concentrated in a region known as the west Antarctic rift system, which stretches 3,500km from Antarctica’s Ross ice shelf to the Antarctic peninsula.
Who’s responsible for lava?
(Regulate now!)
h/t Christopher T 🙂
9.7 out of 10 based on 128 ratings
UPDATE: More details are coming in: The SA govt is effectively covering all its own electricity use with this one plant, which is about 5% of the whole state’s demand. The plant will have 8 hours of battery storage (theoretically). The word I hear is that this is not an outright purchase of $650m, but an offtake agreement for around 70-78/MWh — which means the government will buy nearly all the production available (125Mw of 150MW) each year, but won’t own the plant. [Text edited and substantial additions below.]
Not long back, Port Augusta had a thirty-one year old coal plant generating 520MW. The Premier could have spent $30 million to keep it going through this anti-coal political era. Instead he blew it up and is spending millions to buy electricity at twice the price, under contract for 20 years. The $650 million Aurora Solar Plant
Solar power is supposed to be competitive with coal, but no private company seems to keen to do this. In this case, the company is getting a signed up buyer for around 80% of its product, and for 20 years. Of the 150MW of sacred solar electrons, 125MW will go to the government itself and just 25MW will be left over for non-government customers. If South Australians wanted to vote for cheaper electricity, this is another 5% that out-of-reach.
To put this in perspective $650 million dollars is around $400 per man, woman and child in SA, over the next ten or twenty years, to appease the climate Gods. The exact cost is hard to calculate at this stage. But the government of SA will be the one sole major customer, effectively paying off the solar farm, but won’t own it in the end.
The original Northern Coal Power station employed 250 people. The new solar one will give 700 people a pointless but paid position for three years, after which, only 50 people will have a job at the solar plant, and countless others will be out of work as more businesses close down in South Australia due to the price of electricity.
Praise flows in:
The Australian Services Union hailed Mr Weatherill as “the unequivocal international leader for clean energy generation”.
Independent SA senator Nick Xenophon and Pt. Augusta Mayor Sam Johnson said the deal will be “transformational”.
It will be “transformational” like a dose of Dengue Fever.
Will South Australia ever recover?
The project is underpinned with a $110m concessional equity loan that Senator Xenophon negotiated earlier this year as part of the talks over the federal government’s company tax cuts legislation.
Time for WA to secede and cut the financial lifeline that makes these kinds of decisions possible.
Put it in your diary, Malcolm Turnbull gets something right:
The announcement comes after Malcolm Turnbull told the South Australian Liberal Party annual meeting on Saturday that the state’s strong focus on renewable energy was equal parts “ideology and idiocy”.
The Prime Minister said Mr Weatherill’s energy policies were an “experiment’ that should have been conducted in private, not inflicted on an entire state”.
TonyfromOz in Comments: This is not nor has it ever been baseload power
Nick Xenophon said this: (my bolding here)
“This will make a difference in the South Australia energy market. It will secure the grid and mean more baseload power than intermittent power,” he said.
The Base Load for South Australia is at around 4AM every morning, every morning, and averages around 1100MW. The total amount of power that will be generated and delivered by this Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant at 4AM on ANY morning, even at the height of Summer will be …..
ZERO MEGAWATTS
There is not one plant of 150MW Nameplate on Planet Earth which has EVER generated 24 hour power, and this plant will not be the first to do it. If you want some facts on CSP, you only need to see how poorly it works in Spain, and I have some information on just that at the link below. This is just another joke from a Government that has no idea at all.
Solar Thermal Power (Concentrating Solar) Fail – Just Look At Spain
South Australia won’t need too much cable,
With less power, very dear and unstable,
And must learn to cast lots,
For the few megawatts,
Of crumbs from the Great Leader’s table.
— Ruairi
EDITED: The original headline was: SA Premier hailed “leader”: spends 20 times more to make one third of the electricity with solar — based on a comparison of spending $30m to keep Northern Coal running, or $650m to build a solar plant. With an offtake agreement, the unknown extra cost is spread over 20 years, and must end up being more than $650m in total. The SA government is buying most of the product; the Aurora project investors will expect some profits, plus there will be interest payments on the loans — all of which needs to be covered. Last year the SA government was asking for a tender for 480GW of electricity per year for government sites (but it’s not clear if this was the total demand). Hypothetically, if it was, the bill for getting that at a cost that was $40MWhr higher is about $20m extra dollars per year (please check my maths). Partly this is also funded by a federal govt concessional equity loan ($110m), not just funded straight up by SA taxpayers.
9.7 out of 10 based on 117 ratings
…
9.4 out of 10 based on 43 ratings
 … OK, a wind farm isn’t making sausages, but it’s also not a farm.
Nothing about this makes sense, unless you follow-the-money.
John Constable and Matt Ridley outline the absolute rort that Scottish wind generators are screwing out of British electricity customers. Scotland already has 750 industrial wind plants (the scammers) in their best moments making a total of 5,700 MW which is more than the peak demand of the whole Scottish grid. This is, at times, not just more than Scotland can use, but even more than it can safely absorb, so UK slaves were forced to spend £1.8 billion on giant interconnectors partly to send the excess down to England and whatnot, otherwise the profits of the unprofitable might suffer, and the weather might not be as nice in 2100 (or not).
If that’s not bad enough, these protected industrial plants sometimes produce a product when nobody wants it, and they still get paid. When it would be unsafe to dump it on the market. The geniuses who set this up promised the wind-generators that they would still be paid. And not only are they paid, but as Ridley and Constable document, before 2011 they were paid on average, four times what they would have lost, and one farm, 20 times as much. After that was exposed, the payments were trimmed to merely being 50-100% more than the loss. Nice work if you can get it, and even better if you can’t.
No free market here
In a free market, buyers connect with sellers. In a socialist-planet-saving-scam the buyers go to jail if they don’t pay for a product they didn’t use and don’t want, and the sellers connect with politicians who only represent 10% of the buyers. The people deciding whether to build or approve or invest in building most unneeded, unwanted, bird killing windmills are not the ones who pay for the product. Every new windmill is an automatic feeder off British forced consumers. So it’s in the Scottish governments interests to milk this situation for all it’s worth and approve every tower. What will stop them turning the whole of Scotland into a giant welfare windmill? Maybe only a hard Brexit with Scotland left behind.
Bear in mind some poor Scots have to put up with these towers, and they’re protesting, but drowned out by the river of gravy pumped from the south.
The layers of stupid don’t end there. Some corporates may be scamming both sides of the border. There are companies wanting to build even more towers in Scotland, but on the south side of the equation, they may be the same ones being paid high rates to rush in and fill in the missing supply at the last minute when the Scottish wind turbines are told to switch off. There is a unseen price for the volatility of wind power.
The Scottish wind-power racket
By John Constable and Matt Ridley
Imagine a sausage factory – the luckiest, most profitable sausage factory in the world. Its machines crank out their sausages, and lorries carry them to supermarkets. So far, so normal.
But this particular factory makes as many sausages as the management and staff choose. If they feel like taking the day off, the lorries and shelves stay empty. If they want to go a bit wild, they sometimes make so many sausages that there aren’t enough lorries to take them away. Or they carry on cranking out sausages even if the shelves are already full.
And here’s the really amazing thing: even when the lorries can’t cope or there is no demand for sausages, the factory gets paid. Indeed, they get paid more for not sending the sausages to the shops than for sending them. This is such great business that the factory is actually building an extension, so it can threaten to make even more unwanted sausages.
Does all that sound completely mad? Of course it does. But it’s what happens in the British electricity industry – where the blackmailing, money-printing sausage factory is a wind farm in Scotland.
Read it all at CapX…
h/t Matt Ridley. @mattwridley
9.7 out of 10 based on 104 ratings
It’s another day in a DroneAge religion
 English Mastiff, Planet warming dog. It took 12 “researchers” to discover that the best way you, personally, can change the future global climate is to avoid having kids. If you do have kids, you can make up a bit, apparently, by all going vegetarian. If that’s too hard, consider swapping your dog for a hamster. But if you have to have kids, dogs, and eat meat, at the very least, assuage your green guilt for living in the easiest, most bountiful time and place on Earth, by feeding your dog some sweet potatoes occasionally instead of Chum.
Got that? How many tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer funds did it take to discover this while not ever once google searching for “reasons climate models are wrong/skillless/barking fairy failures?
Marvel at the Washington Times sentence construction — this study comes with cows?
The study comes with livestock, notably cows, already targeted by the environmental movement for their prodigious methane production, prompting calls for people to reduce their beef consumption in order to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
This news is popular with all vegetarian, childless, dogless, lizard owners:
His study, which found that dogs and cats have a significant impact on carbon emissions as a result of their meat-based diets, met with howls from pet owners and a lukewarm reception even from some environmentalists who also happen to love dogs.
So did the study calculate how many degrees forgoing all dogs in the US would cool the planet by? It doesn’t seem to say…
In his paper published last week, UCLA professor Gregory S. Okin found that meat-eating dogs and cats create the equivalent of 64 million tons of carbon dioxide per year based on the energy consumption required to produce their food, or the same impact as driving 13.6 million cars.
There is great care to package this message as the height of reasonableness, as if the people suggesting the climate changing effects of dogs were all amicable flexibility and sense. Readers can find an option that suits their level of penance: everything from not having kids at all down to occasional sweet potato snacks for your 250 pound mastiff. (Remember its not the outcome that matters when it comes to the planet, it’s the intent…)
“I like dogs and cats, and I’m definitely not recommending that people get rid of their pets or put them on a vegetarian diet, which would be unhealthy,” Mr. Okin said in a statement. “But I do think we should consider all the impacts that pets have so we can have an honest conversation about them. Pets have many benefits but also a huge environmental impact.”
What they are really afraid of, is that the Chinese will get as many pets-per-capita as the US:
“Americans are the largest pet owners in the world, but the tradition of pet ownership in the U.S. has considerable costs,” Mr. Okin said in his Aug. 2 paper, published in PLOS One. “As pet ownership increases in some developing countries, especially China, and trends continue in pet food toward higher content and quality of meat, globally, pet ownership will compound the environmental impacts of human dietary choices.”
It’s only the Earth at stake, so don’t put yourself out too much:
What’s the answer? Mr. Okin suggested making the transition from dogs and cats to smaller animals including hamsters, reptiles and birds, or herbivores such as horses.
For a moment I had an image of him studying dogs that are bigger than horses.
Lastly, listen to the committed environmentalist — so committed to saving the Earth that he runs a digital media company called One Green Planet. Not committed enough to give up his dog:
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9.7 out of 10 based on 86 ratings
Matt Howell, the CEO of Tomago Aluminium Smelter, told a few home truths on ABC radio Monday.
To paraphrase in my own words:
1. Aluminium Smelters gobble electrons for breakfast. His smelter uses 10% of the entire electricity supply of the most populous state in Australia (NSW).
2. If power goes out without warning for more than three hours, the smelter pot lines freeze, permanently. The company goes to the wall.
3. The largest battery in the world would keep their smelter going for all of 8 minutes. There is a good reason there are no solar or wind powered aluminium smelters anywhere in the world.
4. The government can ‘t let the market solve anything whilst it is simultaneously destroying the free market by propping up the market failures at the same time.
5. Electricity pricing has suddenly got very ugly. Their electricity bill may now be subject to price spikes where it could cost them $4 million just to keep one pot line running during that spike. It is as if suddenly gas stations only sold $400 per Litre petrol. (Which would be $1800/per gallon). What he doesn’t say, but which logically follows from that, is that heavy industry in most of Australia can no longer get reliable electricity at an affordable price, even with forward contracts. Cry, scream, run with your factory.
6. In Australia, if we achieve “zero coal” we will also achieve “zero heavy manufacturing”.
7. If we want heavy industry, we need a HELE Coal plant. There are hundreds being built around the world, and we are selling our coal to them. How crazy are we?
Howell makes some great points. It’s good to see an ABC presenter willing to let the evil capitalists speak. Well done Matt Wordsworth. I found something worth listening to on the ABC this year.
‘http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2016/s4714262.htm
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9.5 out of 10 based on 127 ratings
A little update on our favourite green state.
SA tries to fix a Big-Government mess with a Bigger Government:
Man-made regulations created the grid-crisis in South Australia, so the Weatherill government has decided to take what didn’t work and “do more”.
Australian rulers subsidized unstable energy, and lo, created an unstable system. The SA state govt thinks it can solve it by running an opposing scheme simultaneously. The Renewable Energy Target (RET) scheme meets the Energy Security Target (EST). Don’t laugh. The Electricity Price Target (EPT) is probably next. This is magic wish-fairy governance where the guy in charge doesn’t take the effort to understand the cause of a problem and unwind it, he just waves a wand and issues a decree. Perhaps Weathrill thinks the hamstrung-market can squeeze some stable electrons out the ether, but cheap stability only came from coal in SA. His kind of stability-on-command comes out of wallets instead.
The fairy plan looks so bad even the wonder-hero, Elon Musk, is getting nervous that electricity bills will stay painfully high (making his battery power solution not look so attractive to the rest of the world). SA is going to be held up as the global text book example of how not to run a state. It’s the impossible bind for Tesla — the only politicians crazy enough to buy their biggest battery are too crazy to run an efficient, productive polity:
Battery giant Tesla has joined power generators, retailers, major energy users and experts in voicing concerns about a central component of the South Australian Government’s $550 million energy plan.
The SA scheme operates in a similar way to the Federal Government’s Renewable Energy Target (RET). But instead of incentivising new renewable projects, it would require retailers to source 36 per cent of the state’s electricity needs from gas generators and other synchronous power sources.
Join the dots: There are no other serious synchronous sources in SA outside coal, nukes or gas. Coal and Nukes are forbidden on religious grounds, but gas prices are at record highs. So the SA govt chooses gas, gas and more gas, plus some diesel in the interim.
Everyone –Elon Musk, industry, the AEMO, even, fergoodnesssake the owners of the gas power plants themselves, can all see what’s coming — pocket-busting power bills.
Fellow power retailer Alinta said while it supported the Government’s pursuit, it was not convinced and thought it “would lead to inefficient pricing outcomes [at least in the short term], sub-optimal dispatch outcomes, increased uncertainty and deter new investment in generation in the South Australian market”.
Energy Users Association of Australia (EUAA) chief executive Andrew Richards echoed those concerns by writing “we believe it will add significant cost to the annual electricity bills of South Australian energy users without necessarily altering the nature or structure of the local market to provide greater system security”.
The EST is a second-degree fixit to solve a side effect of the first-degree fixit. The solution is to stop trying to change the global weather with our electricity grid. Until the RET is axed, and every other clean-green-scheme — every fixit will need another fixit, and so on forever.
SA to emulate Soviet Union
As it is, the SA solution is to get the government not just to pick the winners, but to own them. (Let’s face it, private industry won’t be building two “spare” gas generators to sit around, and do nothing most of the time, just wait there, burning capital, to rescue the state at peak moments. Governments are the only organizations that are inefficient and stupid enough to do this.) The state is becoming a money-hole, where capital goes to die. Only West Australian GST dollars plug the drain.
Do I hear diesel jet engines?
On August 1, the SA Govt announced an updated “plan” which includes something that sounds like giant jet engines running on diesel:
They will operate on diesel fuel over the next two summers before being relocated to a new site to become a power plant and be switched to gas, the Government said.
The Government has bought nine new General Electric aero-derivative turbines through US company APR Energy.
In his $550 million energy plan announced in March, Premier Jay Weatherill had proposed the installation of temporary generators before a new Government-owned generator could be built.
Together, the turbines will be capable of quickly producing up to 276 MW of energy, more than the 250 MW originally outlined in the government’s plan. The state-owned generators will be tested monthly and only used when required to prevent an electricity supply shortfall.
Those blackouts, which occur when the total demand for electricity exceeds supply, occurred three times last summer.
The power plant will have a lifespan of 25 years.
The Australian helpfully pointed out that other states use GE turbines like this to cope with summer demand — namely Indonesia, Algeria, Greece and Egypt. Add SA to that list of economic powerhouses.
Fast-starting turbines running on diesel will temporarily back up South Australia’s intermittent power supply for the next two summers..
The GE TM2500 turbines, a derivative of the jet engines used by Boeing and Airbus, will be purchased from APR Energy.
Mobile plants have been used to provide peak summer demand in Indonesia, Algeria, Egypt and Greece. They will initially be installed at two sites — the Adelaide Desalination Plant at Lonsdale in Adelaide’s south and the Holden factory at Elizabeth to the north.
Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said the generators “are the type of generators every modern city in the world is putting in”.
“Every modern city” in this case means Lombok, M’Fila, Rhodes, Camama and Cazenga. Yeah.
South Australia, leading the world in solar-rubbish-power
Things are getting pretty desperate. The new plan is to put the solar panels right over the landfill (sorting out the end-of-life arrangements right there with pre-disposed panels?)
“The solar farm is designed to integrate with the landfill gas renewable energy facility situated at the Uleybury Landfill and supplement its output, therefore combining base-load and solar PV technologies that will produce renewable energy 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Mr Faulkner said.
“The collective electricity generated from both energy sources will be over 11,000MW hours per annum, which is enough to power more than 1800 homes.
So 1,800 homes will get stable rubbish-power, and the other 727,000 homes, not so much.
My sympathies to all the South Australians who didn’t vote for this.
9.8 out of 10 based on 124 ratings
Historic climate data is being destroyed
The Bureau have a budget of a million dollars a day, but seemingly can’t afford an extra memory stick to save historic scientific data.
In the mid 1990s thermometers changed right across Australia — new electronic sensors were installed nearly everywhere. Known as automatic weather sensors (AWS) these are quite different to the old “liquid in glass” type. The electronic ones can pick up very short bursts of heat — so they can measure extremes of temperatures that the old mercury or liquid thermometers would not pick up, unless the spike of heat lasted for a few minutes. It is difficult (impossible) to believe that across the whole temperature range that these two different instruments would always behave in the exact same way. There could easily be an artificial warming trend generated by this change (see the step change in the graphs). The only way to compare the old and new types of thermometer is to run side by side comparisons in the field and at many sites. Which is exactly what the bureau were doing, but the data has never been put in an archive, or has been destroyed. It’s not easily available (or possibly “at all”). We have this in writing after an FOI application by Dr Bill Johnston (see below).
These measurements from past years can never be re-recorded. A four-terabyte external hard drive costs a couple of hundred dollars and would probably store a whole years worth of text files. For just 0.02% of their budget they could buy one every day. Why, why, why wouldn’t a scientist who cared about the climate want to save this information?
 The two different thermometers sit side-by-side in a Stevenson Screen, this example is at Wagga Wagga airport, NSW. Photo: Bill Johnston. Dr Bill Johnston put in an FOI request for side-by-side data from both kinds of thermometer. He asked for six months of data from Sydney and Canberra Airports and was told it would cost him $460. That’s quite a barrier, and that was only to access the Sydney records. Look at what happened to the Canberra ones — the data was gone. No one could analyze it, no matter how much they were willing to pay.
Field books “disposed”?
Here’s the FOI decision regarding raw data from Canberra Dec 2014.
 ….
The BOM stated that “in accordance with records management practices”, the field books for early 2013 at Canberra Airport were “disposed of” twelve months after the observations were taken. By mid 2014 the situation was even worse (if that were possible). The more recent Canberra Airport records didn’t even have field books to be destroyed. There were no records to be disposed of.
For what it’s worth, the $460 data fee was helpfully reduced to $230 after a lengthy appeal. The four page assessment cost the taxpayer more than the $230 charge, but it did successfully stop taxpayers from analyzing the data. Was that the point? The Bureau has a budget of $365 million a year – how much does it cost to store a text file?
Johnston declined to buy the Sydney data (it was confounded by multiple site changes, and he’s not paid to do this work).
He commented this week on the scant evidence that was available and the potential for a undocumented warming effect:
Comparisons between screens were done at one site using PRT (Platinum Resistance Thermometer) only and reported as a “preliminary report”, which is available; but after Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) became primary instruments, as I’ve reported before, the Bureau had an internal policy that parallel liquid-in-glass thermometer data were not databased. Furthermore, they had another policy that paper-data was destroyed after 2-years. So there is nothing that easy available….
The only way to compare AWS and Liquid in Glass, is to hunt for sites where there is overlap between two stations; where the AWS is given a new number. This is possible BUT the problem is that the change-over is invariably confounded with either a site move or the change to a small screen.
So, we suspect that the introduction and reliance on AWS has led to artificially higher maxima (and thus record temperatures) than in the past, but we have no way of knowing for sure and how much.
How can the CSIRO hope to produce reliable climate modelling with any number of climate scientists when the BOM cannot produce reliable temperature data? Garbage in, garbage out.
 This information and other oddities of Australian temperature records 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. Pre-order your copy now, the first edition, released last week, has sold out. REFERENCES
[1] Letter from Anthony Rea, Assistant Director Oberving System Strategy, Bureau of Meteorology, 23 December 2014. Reference: 30/5838.
[2] The Bureau of Meteorology Budget was $365.3 million in 2015-16.
9.7 out of 10 based on 126 ratings
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9.7 out of 10 based on 44 ratings
The story changes: first it was quality control, then equipment failure, now a smart card?
Jennifer Marohasy reports that the thermometers are working fine, but a smart card has been added to some to filter out “spurious cold” readings:
In particular, the Minister [Josh Frydenberg] was told that while the Goulburn weather station accurately measured the local temperature as minus 10.4 at 6.30 am on Sunday 2 July, a smart card reader prevented this value from being recorded as the daily minimum on the Daily Weather Observations page.
Apparently, the smart cards don’t filter out the spurious hot readings — on the hot side, all noise is good? I want the BOM to confirm or correct this. Despite knowing of this extraordinary, uncertain, situation, the Minister still has “full confidence” in the Bureau of Meteorology. A month ago, the BOM said the temperature clipping was a deliberate “quality control measure”, but then changed that to “equipment failure”. This week, Bill Kininmonth pointed out that the same equipment worked in Antarctica (where it gets to minus 50C). And I can add that David Stockwell spotted the data sheet for an Automatic Weather Station thermometer installed at Nerriga. It claims that particular resistance thermometer has a range from -200 to +600 °C. (You might think they can handle minus ten?)
Jen Marohasy claims that the BOM have made a fuss about replacing the faulty equipment, but all they had to do was take off the smart cards and leave the equipment alone:
All-the-while, the Minister has known that the problem is limited to the smart card readers.
To be clear, the problem is not with the equipment; all that needs to be done is for the smart card readers to be removed. So, after the automatic weather stations measure the correct temperature, this temperature can be brought forward firstly into the Daily Weather Observation sheet and subsequently into the CDO dataset.
Graham Lloyd has picked this up and adds more in The Australian in “Temperatures Plunge after BOM orders fix”. Jen Marohasy saw a -10.6C temperature disappear from the Thredbo recording last month, but now, after the BOM’s rushed fix, Thredbo has already reached -10.6C this week in the official record. The Bureau’s CEO, Andrew Johnson said they had replaced equipment that was “not fit for purpose”. Which begs the question that if thermometers were not fit to record cold temperatures, what purpose were they fit for? Politically correct thermometers? Thermometers to justify Renewable Energy Subsidies and ARC Grants?
Want to avoid answering basic questions — call a review!
Graham Lloyd asked the BOM about the smart cards, but got no answer:
The BoM declined to comment ahead of the internal review.
“The findings of a review into this matter will be made available after completion,” a BoM representative said. “We do not intend to publish detail prior to that.
Since when did a review become a reason not to explain a supposedly scientific process? Either there are smart cards there, or not. There are limits set (or not). And there is hopefully a record of the real raw temperatures recorded somewhere…
A Minister more concerned about public confidence, rather than accurate data?
The Minister has things back to front:
Josh Frydenberg: “I’m treating this seriously and am determined to get to the bottom of what has happened. I look forward to receiving recommendations as to how we can ensure that the public’s confidence in climate data is maintained.”
We, the paying, voting, public are more concerned that the BOM is worthy of public confidence in the first place. The way to maintain the BOM reputation is to fix the institution, not bury the flaws and political biases. Time for a real independent audit now. What are they afraid of? _________________________________
POST NOTE: Want to be a citizen scientist?
To watch BOM data come in (before the smart cards edit it), go to the BOM home page, look for “City Observations” (mid right hand side) or click on the state maps listed below.
Click right through til you see half hourly data for each site. (So most days this is not exciting, but if your pipes freeze, you might get a thrill. 🙂 ) Don’t forget to capture the screen shots.
9.8 out of 10 based on 100 ratings
The National Center for Public Policy Research released a report that tells us Al Gore’s swimming pool uses the same electricity as six average US homes. In kilowatt hours, his house draws a total annual load equivalent to 21 homes — averages 19,241 kWh per month. He probably lives alone now that Tipper and the kids have moved out. This is after he paid $60,000 to add solar panels which provide about 5% of his domestic electricity (Why doesn’t he just go solar, that’d be only $720k, plus batteries).
He owns two other homes.
I would never use this as an ad hom argument to say that man-made global warming crisis is wildly exaggerated (there are plenty of other reasons to say that). Obviously poor Al needs to use more electricity than most people so he can swim in between flights, because he is constantly being attacked in articles like this one:
How Al Gore Fooled The World Into Paying For His Giant Carbon Footprint
Jeff Dunetz …The real reason Al Gore wants you to read his books and go see his movies and even see his lectures isn’t because he is trying to save the Earth from global warming and climate change, but because he’s invested in products that will be successful as long as people are convinced by the climate change scare tactics.
He quotes Andrew Follett in the Daily Caller:
The former vice president’s global warming activism has helped increase his net worth from $700,000 in 2000 to an estimated net worth of $172.5 million by 2015. Gore and the former chief of Goldman Sachs Asset Management made nearly $218 million in profits between 2008 and 2011 from a carbon trading company they co-founded. By 2008, Gore was able to put a whopping $35 million into hedge funds and other investments.
Gore also has a remarkable record of investing in companies right before they get huge grants from the government.
Obviously Gore believes the planet is in a crisis and is doing his best to save it.
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9.7 out of 10 based on 94 ratings
Today, Graham Lloyd, and Jennifer Marohasy turn up the heat even more on the Bureau of Meteorology’s strange practice of “editing” raw data. The Bureau says it works to the “highest possible standards”. Natch. So an independent audit would clear them, silence the critics, and restore their reputation. Strangely, instead they have been apparently avoiding an independent audit for six years now and counting….
It is the biggest public scandal for BoM since furious debate was sparked three years ago over its treatment of historic and contemporary temperature records to compile its new homogenised national temperature data series known as ACORN-SAT.
For an agency that screams from the rooftops every time the mercury nudges to the slightest record high, losing a half a degree Celsius here and there at the lower extremities is a pretty poor look.
In reply, once again, the BOM promises another do-it-yourself review. The Minister (Josh Frydenberg) has insisted on two external independent experts, but if the BOM gets to approve or appoint them, that box won’t be hard to tick (just ask the NZ NIWA team). Apparently the last public scandal in 2014, the Minister then (Greg Hunt) killed off a proper investigation of the BOM to supposedly “protect the reputation and integrity of the institution” which, of course, did exactly the opposite. Given the BOM’s “excellence”, the effect of another hand-picked one-day forum to study none of the key issues that skeptics raised, told everyone that Hunt didn’t think its integrity would survive a high school debate, let alone a forensic investigation.
As “blogger Jo Nova” is quoted as saying:
“We audit banks, companies, government departments, energy flows, and projects, but we don’t officially audit science.
“Whenever big money is involved we assume things need to be checked.
When it’s just the planet at stake, who cares?
— from the just released new IPA Book — Climate Change: The Facts 2017 (pre-order your copy now!)
Automatic weather stations work in Antarctica, but not in Goulburn?
Bill Kininmonth — the guru himself, cannot figure out why the equipment would fail now:
William Kininmonth, a former head of BoM’s National Climate Centre, says he is puzzled that after decades of service the bureau now claims the automatic stations are not fit for purpose at some cold weather locations.
“My understanding is a lot of testing was done before the automatic weather stations were installed in all different sorts of conditions,” Kininmonth says. “Why this is happening now, unless they have changed their manufacturers who they get them from, I don’t know.
“I would have thought minus 10 would have been well within their scope. They take automatic weather stations down to Macquarie Island and Antarctica, I can’t understand this at all.
“It seems to me they have some sort of automatic collection system in the computer; once the data comes in, they check on it then. I don’t know why they would be doing that at that stage.”
The rise of citizen scientists
Major kudos and plaudits to Lance Pidgeon — one of the original unofficial BOM audit team that gathered together around this blog, who have been posting here for years. See Lance’s other savage BOM critiques here, none of which have been resolved.
Lloyd comments on the unofficial BOM team — the volunteers that won’t stop asking hard questions:
What cannot be controlled is a small army of largely amateur enthusiasts such as Pidgeon who pore over the millions of lines of BoM’s temperature data made public by the high-profile institution. Pidgeon, a freelance radio technician and citizen scientist, has found instances where thermometers accurate to a tenth of a degree were adjusted by as much as two degrees. Original cooling trends in temperature records were being revised to warming trends.
There are vast areas of the nation where identical temperature readings have been recorded over long periods and places where the daily minimum temperature has exceeded the maximum, changes that defy logic.
Records of extremely hot days before the turn of the century have been erased, in one celebrated case simply because a diligent worker had taken the observation on a Sunday, which was outside of usual practice.
Thanks to the dedication of the other volunteers and their cutting work, advice and cameraderie (Thank you Ken, Chris, Bill, Bob, and Geoff and Warwick (thorns for decades, long before me), and David, Andrew, Ian, Phil, John, John, Ed and Tony and of course, Jennifer Marohasy).
Last word from Anthony Watts:
[Anthony] Watts says a solution would be to calculate temperature trends from stations that have a long record, no moves, no equipment changes, no time-of-observation changes, and remain free of nearby infrastructure encroachment.
“Choosing only stations like this ensures that there is no need for adjustment of data, and that this data is representative of the true changes in the surface temperature over time,” he says.
“Until the existing data quality problem is fixed, which has created an artificial warming bias, it is nonsense for the mass media to promote the idea of any year being the ‘warmest year on record’ ”.
— Also from Climate Change: The Facts 2017 .
I’ll have a lot more to say about this article. Lloyd has done a great job. Credit to Jennifer Marohasy for this and for editing the magnificent new IPA book.
9.8 out of 10 based on 148 ratings
It’s a creative South Australian solution to an unstable, expensive grid: close large factories and have less blackouts. If they can close enough, it’s guaranteed to succeed:
Part of the soon-to-be vacated Holden factory in Adelaide is about to be transformed into a temporary power station to help stave off load-shedding blackouts this summer.
But the car industry’s closure will help the authorities manage the risk of blackouts in another way.
The exit of a once powerful manufacturing sector will see the state using less electricity, particularly during the all-important summer peak.
The information is contained in the latest Electricity Forecasting Insights published by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).
From a story last year:
The closure of Holden’s Elizabeth plant is expected to result in 13,000 job losses across the company and its supply chain.
Energy use in SA is set to fall from 3,116MW to 3,035MW in summer peaks. Even so, they’ll still need more temporary generators (time to cut more jobs?):
Nevertheless, AEMO is forecasting widespread shortfalls of reserve power over the next two summers, prompting the State Government to invest in temporary generators.
The ABC and other green-fans think this next point is a bonus:
“Minimum demand in South Australia is expected to be negative by 2027-28, as rooftop PV generation is expected to exceed customer demand in some hours,” the report stated.
They don’t realize that the lack of any demand during the middle of the day makes it very hard for any baseline power generator to invest in the South Australian market. That means SA is utterly dependent on either the interconnectors to ugly brown coal in Victoria or to government owned expensive temporary generation.
Last year the Premier of SA was blowing up cheap coal fired generators, and he was travelling to the US to beg for money from Holden:
Mr Weatherill has used a meeting with GM officials in Detroit to implore the carmaker to give the state a $5 million “community fund” as an “act of goodwill”.
And this is how you make a poor state that needs GST subsidies from other states.
h/t Mark M, Pat, Andrew, Dave B.
9.7 out of 10 based on 88 ratings
Front page scandal today in Australia: BoM opens cold case on temperature data
 Jennifer Marohasy, Lance Pidgeon, at the Stevenson screen, Goulburn Airport. Amazing, the power of the media. Suddenly, the Bureau of Meteorology needs to replace equipment and answer questions and set up an internal inquiry. But they’ve had weeks of warning. Lance Pidgeon and Jennifer Marohasy have been watching the automatic weather stations record very cold temperatures, and then astonished when those same readings either got entered into our national raw database as warmer, or simply disappeared. The BOM apparently has a filter set so that super cold temperatures need to be manually checked. Yet the filter is set so high, in Thredbo’s case, nearly five whole degrees warmer than temperatures already recorded.
Wow. Just wow. What does raw data mean anymore?
The lack of respect for real observations is profoundly unscientific. How much does the BOM even care about understanding our climate if they are so flagrantly uninterested in the data? As I have said, the Bureau of Meteorology behaves more like PR agency than an institute of science. Based on past practice their internal inquiry will find excuses, not answer the questions, and will not fix appalling methodology. The BOM needs a full external audit (what are they so afraid of?). The BOM admits temperature adjustments are secret and thus completely unscientific. If we had a team to audit the dataset, as we requested in 2011, or to replicate the data as I requested in Sept 2014, this erasure of cold temperatures would have been fixed by now. How much data has been lost forever?
The Bureau of Meteorology Budget was 365.3 million in 2015-16. The Australian climate is a national crisis, but the Bureau won’t publish it’s methods in full, aren’t doing basic quality control checks, and can’t employ even one person to answer questions about its secret methods?
On July 5th I asked many questions, and now nearly a month later, we still have no answers:
… this opens a whole can of worms in so many ways — what are these “limits”, do they apply equally to the high side records, who set them, how long has this being going on, and where are they published? Are the limits on the high temperatures set this close to previously recorded temperatures? How many times have raw records been automatically truncated?
Jennifer Marohasy points out that these stations are used to homogenize other stations which are supposed the best stations used in the ACORN dataset. So when the BOM protest that they are not manipulating the data, it’s obvious that they are.
Graham Lloyd, The Australian
The Bureau of Meteorology has ordered a full review of temperature recording equipment and procedures after the peak weather agency was caught tampering with cold winter temperature logs in at least two locations.
Bush meteorologist Lance Pidgeon blew the whistle on the missing data after watching the minus 10.4C Goulburn recording from July 2 disappear from the bureau’s website. “The temperature dropped to minus 10.4, stayed there for some time and then it changed to minus 10 and then it disappeared,” Mr Pidgeon said.
He relayed his concerns to scientist Jennifer Marohasy, who has queried the bureau’s treatment of historical temperature data. After questions were asked, the bureau restored the original recording of minus 10.4C to its website. A bureau spokeswoman said the low recording had been checked for “quality assurance” before being posted.
The bureau said limits were set on how low temperatures could go at some stations before a manual check was needed to confirm them. “The bureau’s quality control system, designed to filter out spurious low or high values was set at minus 10 minimum for Goulburn which is why the record automatically adjusted,” a bureau spokeswoman said.
A similar failure had deleted a reading of minus 10.4 at Thredbo Top on July 16 even though temperatures at that station had been recorded as low as minus 14.7 in the past. That temperature was still blank on the bureau’s website yesterday.
The bureau did not respond to questions about how widely the quality control system had been applied and at what upper temperature the cut-off had been set.
Dr Marohasy has evidence of the initial minus 10.4C recording at Thredbo before it was deleted for quality assurance.
“This either reflects an extraordinary incompetence, or a determination to prevent evidence of low temperatures,” Dr Marohasy said.
Would the BOM be doing anything if The Australian was not being so dedicated and critical?
Where is the ABC or Fairfax? Do they care about the climate?
The Australian has an editorial position on this also: Bureau clouds weather debate
That adjustment process, known as homogenisation, has got the bureau in trouble in the past. Again, the issue has been one of transparency. The bureau has made a series of changes to historical records across the country. It says it does so to adjust for the movement of a weather station site, changes to surrounding vegetation or results that look wrong when compared with nearby sites. Such homogenisation is not unique to Australia but the bureau sometimes fails to convince when asked to explain the specific local adjustments it has made, especially if these bolster a warming trend. The same goes for any practices that discount cold temperatures.
The official record must be accurate and trusted. Otherwise, claims of historic extremes — the hottest winter day! — only mislead and public policy gets corrupted. Even if the bureau does have all the answers, it needs to do a better job of taking the public — sceptics included — into its confidence.
Background Information:
Jennifer Marohasy has been laying out the evidence on her blog:
Bureau Erases Goulburn Record Minimum Temperature: Set Sunday 2 July 2017
Bureau Now Sets Strict Limits on Cooling
Bureau Still Limiting Cooling to Minus 10 Degrees
Bureau Misleads Minister Frydenberg on Goulburn
My last on this: On Sunday, Goulburn got colder than the BOM thought was possible (and a raw data record was “adjusted”).
The Australian:
BoM opens cold case on temperature data
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