I’m happy to help a few dedicated skeptics and sane candidates with the gumption to try to improve the system from within. So this is a quick note for residents of the Central Wheatbelt WA. Check out Bill Crabtree, the no-till farming expert running for the Liberal Party at the State election in three weeks, he’s as honest and hardworking as they get. I know Bill personally, and he’s just the kind of guy I’d want in Parliament. A real farmer, not a career politician.
Meet him tomorrow: Sunday 4pm-8pm, Northam Country Club, 15 Wood Drive Northam.
In 1854 [James Harrison of Geelong] invented a commercial ice-making machine. He expanded it into a vapour compression refrigeration system, the basis for modern refrigeration.
“That’s right – an Aussie invented the fridge and it’s first real use was making beer,” remarked the US technology website Gizmodo. “You have to love this country.”
And one more big coal generator shuts down soon in Victoria:
In the next few weeks 4 per cent of Australia’s power supply will vanish when Victoria’s big Hazelwood power station shuts down, clapped out after 50 years of turning coal into electricity. It’ll be the ninth coal-fired power station to close in the past five years. New solar and wind plants are being built, but they are intermittent, and that means they are unreliable.
“Taking out Hazelwood is taking out a big buffer,” says Tony Wood, energy program director at the Grattan Institute policy research centre in Melbourne. And, as we’ve just witnessed, Australia’s power system lacks buffers. “Managing intermittency is an increasing problem.”
Not only has South Australia suffered three major power failures in the last half-year, NSW last week ordered industry to cut power usage so that households could turn on their airconditioners on a hot day. The chief executive of the Tomago aluminium smelter, Matt Howell, who was ordered to cut electricity usage but is entitled to no compensation, says that “it’s fair to say the way the energy system is working at the moment is dysfunctional.” He told the Financial Review that last Friday was “a genuine system security risk.”
In Australia, for the moment, the national debate about climate change is taking a back seat to the debate about electricity security. The Libs seems to have finally realized they can win votes by keeping the lights on and costs down. The media is covering blackout stories as if they were real news outlets. It’s nice to see an SMH article that isn’t an advert for renewables.
But both the Libs and the media ignored the warnings for years. We didn’t have to waste billions.
AEMO (Grid market managers) thought they’d have more wind power. It fell to only 2% of “total output.”
There was a computer glitch which “load shed” more people than necessary. Oops. SA Power Network apologized today.
Demand was higher than expected.
The gas plant generators at Port Lincoln were ““not available due to a communications system problem”. (Whatever that means.) That was 73MW out of action.
One turbine at Torrens Gas plant was out for maintenance (120MW gone). Another was running 50MW low because of the heat. (Seriously, these machines operate at hundreds of degrees and work at 35C but not so well at 42C? (Or whatever it was). Color me skeptical. Perhaps some grid engineers can comment and tell us if this is normal?
So in a modern renewable grid we have variations in supply and demand that are of the order of the average grid load and at the whim of The Wind. What could possibly go wrong?
Opposition Leader Steven Marshall said on Friday the Government must do everything it could to “press the pause button” on the demolition of Port Augusta’s Northern Power Station and take nothing off the table in its quest for energy security.
“Maybe the infrastructure at Port Augusta can be used for new technology, what we’re saying is don’t take anything off the table,” he said.
The SA Energy Minister is still promising “dramatic intervention” but not saying what that will be.
The SA Premier is blaming AEMO – the market operator.
“Mr Weatherill said on Thursday he had concluded the state had been abandoned by the national electricity market and he was preparing plans for SA “to take control of our own future”.”
The Solution?
The word is the solution might be an interconnector (hands up who has a spare billion dollars?) but the SA gov is still hoping for a a new gas plant and has offered the carrot of a bulk deal with the public sector for who ever wins that tender.
Independent Senator Nick Xenophon said the State Government must underwrite a new gas power station to deliver energy security and lower prices for consumers.
Why should taxpayers have to pay for the energy and also pay for the investment risk? It doesn’t have to be this way. Gradually the complex, fragile grid “needs” more and more centralized control. Pretty soon the government will set supply, demand, pay for generation (and compensate for non-generation), and underwrite the investments — it’s that creeping communist-style takeover of our energy.
Weatherill talks about “controlling their own future” but even Malcolm Turnbull can see the absurdity of that. SA is more dependent than ever on brown coal in Victoria.
The new marketing move by Kelloggs to insult half its customers doesn’t seem to be working out too well. Last year Kelloggs jumped into politics by loudly cancelling advertising on Breitbart saying the new media outlet didn’t fit their values. It was an attempt to punish the big winner in the new media for reporting politically incorrect news. Breitbart responded with the DumpKelloggs petition, and 436,000 people pledged never to buy Kelloggs again.
To get some idea of the depth of the goodwill crater left by the Kelloggs political bomb, check out Chiefio’s Bye Bye Kelloggs flaming rant last December. He won’t give a trigger warning, but tells people who need one to “get out now”. I’ve picked a tamer paragraph:
Dear Kellogg’s:
We, the Average Joe and Average Jane have put up with this Protest Shit to the absolute limit, and we were pushed past that. It’s now broken. That means full on war. Yes, you have a pissed Germanic-Celt in your grill. I’ll “forgive and forget” in about 20 years.
When I Die.
In one simple stupid move, you have alienated about 1/2 of the country….
In Marketing 101, Kelloggs will be the star example of How to Trash A Century of Good Branding.
There are lots of reasons a company can lose money. But social media polling nosedived 75% in the weeks after Kelloggs started selling political cereal:
“There is definitely what you would call ‘climate fatigue’ on the part of scientists,” said Dr Andrew Glikson, from the Australian National University’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology.
“There were hundreds of scientists there, and my impression is while we continue to do the science as best we can, there is a fatigue when it comes to arguing in public.
“You can explain to them as long as you like but if they don’t wish to understand, they won’t.”
The only solution that stops the sadness is for unskeptical scientists to meet reality. Then at least they won’t have to worry the planet is going to hell. Though they will have to start thinking about the demise of science and the way the research industry has become a cheap political tool full of B-graders who don’t even know the basics of Aristotelian reasoning and the most important parts of the Scientific Method.
Dr Glikson is one of Australia’s leading voices on climate change and last year penned an open letter to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, signed by more than 150 scientists, demanding more action be taken to ease greenhouse gas emissions.
Andrew Glickson and I had a long debate once. A rare thing. It started here, lasted five long rounds and he asked if I’d publish his sixth reply which I said I’d be happy to, in full and with every reference and graph he wanted.
This coming May it’ll be seven years later and we’re still waiting.
James Burnham, 1941 foresaw so much in “The Managerial Revolution. It’s a book that George Orwell used for inspiration.
According to Burnham, the civil democracies of the second half of the 20th century would – more or less gradually – be overgrown with backroom bureaucratic networks that make the actual decisions, all far away from the electorate and public debate.
He predicted that separate nation states would still exist, but as their sovereignty was gradually absorbed into a superstate, the nation states would become just administrative subdivisions.
Elections will also remain in place; they will provide managers valuable insights into the preferences of the consumer-citizen, while at the same time functioning as an exhaust valve to possible opposition forces. Burnham predicted a form of political theatre in the guise of sham elections between candidates who happen to be like-minded on every fundamental subject, who are paid to debate in front of clueless spectators in mock parliaments, while the results were known in advance – after all, the actual decisions have already been made.
Like a rachet, power gets centralized gradually, step by step:
These Eurocrats label their strategy as “functionalism“, behind which the idea is that due to the so-called “spillover effect“, inevitably, ever more power ends up being centralised. One ‘function’ automatically forces another ‘function’. So: you sell open borders as a nice convenience, and after a while, you act surprised when they force you to adopt a centralised immigration policy. You present a monetary union as a facilitator of trade without having to hand over national sovereignty; and when the (inevitable) credit crisis presents itself, your push through a centralised budgetary system.
David Rose and the Daily Mail let rip, telling the world that retired NOAA insider, John Bates, was blowing the whistle on how global warming was being exaggerated by scientists to score political points. The hallowed pause-buster paper (Karl et al) broke practically every rule: it was based on misleading “unverified” data processed with a highly experimental, unstable program. There were bugs in the software, the results changed with every run, the data wasn’t archived, and no one could repeat it. They tripled the previous rate of warming by using old-bad-data to adjust better but still-not-very-good-data. They ignored the much better data from ARGO buoys and the satellites (see below) which showed they were wrong. (Rose didn’t even mention that the error bars on the magical adjustment were 17 times larger than the adjustment itself. Too many errors….)
It’s hard oo believe it could be worse, but then the one sole computer holding the program broke, and apparently (what bad luck) none of the eight authors had their own copy either. Nor did the reviewers. The Planet is going to hell, but no one thought to back up the data.
It all got a bit much for Dr Bates when he heard melodramatic news reports that a few triggered scientists feared Trump might trash their climate data.
The NOAA scientists have nothing to hide (especially not data since it’s gone) but when the subpoenas came for their emails, they refused to hand them over.
The black line of best fit is for the same period, and shows a warming trend that is essentially zero (0.01 C per decade). That is, satellites say it didn’t warm from 2000 to 2014 — the exact same period that the NOAA team refer too.
Yet here is the graph that NOAA presented to Obama and Congress, saying “the rate of global warming during the last 15 years has been as fast as or faster than that seen during the latter half of the 20th Century.” Sure.
Oroville Dam erosion on the emergency spillway. The road washed away.
Oroville Dam Spillway erosion (the arrow points at the people inspecting one part of the erosion which was headed for the spillway wall.
A close up of the erosion looking down from over the spillway wall. We can see just how much ground disappeared on the weekend.
UPDATE #1: For the moment the dire threat is lessening as water has been successfully released, but the evacuation order remains in place, and around 130,000 people are or have been moved. They are even evacuating some baby fish.
Flows over the auxiliary spillway have ceased. 100,000 cfs continue down the main spillway. @ButteSheriff
_________________________________
A remarkable situation in California is taking place where tens of thousands of people and animals are being shifted away from Oroville Dam as a precaution.
“EVACUATION ORDER. Use of the auxiliary spillway has lead to severe erosion that could lead to a failure of the structure. “
RAW: Chopper Footage Of Damaged Auxiliary Spillway In Danger Of Failing
If you thought seas were constant 6,000 years ago…
Microatolls are apparently very accurate proxy for sea levels, giving a higher resolution estimate of sea levels. But the extra data suggests more natural oscillations in seas than the experts used to think. Six thousand years ago, near Indonesia, seas apparently rose and fell twice by as much as 60 centimeters in a 250 year period. A similar pattern happened 2,600km away in SE China. Seas were changing so fast researchers estimate the shift occurred at 13mm per year and comment that these regional changes are “unprecedented in modern times.” (Or unrepeated, perhaps?) At the first peak 6,750 years ago, seas were 1m higher than today. The current rate of sea level change is 1mm a year in hundreds of tide gauges and 3mm in “adjusted” satellite data).
From the paper I gather that sea levels in this region change a lot even now. ENSO and the Indian Ocean dipole slop the oceans back and forward. Meltzner et al don’t know why the seas around asia changed so much in the holocene, nor do they know if this is a global phenomenon. They talk about other studies on the Great Barrier Reef and …suggest that oscillations may be more common than previously appreciated,.. (but they don’t have the resolution yet to know. )
You and I might think this shows that the climate changes all by itself (and CO2 was irrelevant). You might also think that it shows climate models are incomplete because they have no idea what caused this. But sieve your brain through the Global Worrier Cult and you will come to realize that a sea level event that we don’t understand, and can’t predict, means we should worry even more about CO2. Because why? Because, who knows, bad stuff might happen again. This is what Meltzner et al conclude. Perhaps it’s a “safe caveat” so Nature will still publish their inconvenient results, but they do go on in the paper a bit.
If they’d found no swings, presumably the press release would tell us how the modern 1mm a year rises are unprecedented. There is a relentless progression of papers showing past climate was wilder than we thought, and natural climate change is more important. Whatever they find, the press release message ends up being “panic more”. Trite.
— Jo
PS: For perspective, sea levels around Australia in the Holocene peak 7,000 ya were 1 – 2m higher and have been falling since then. (But notice the resolution on those Australian graphs at that link are nowhere near as good as this new study). Further back in the past, sea levels were 9m higher around Kalbarri Western Australia circa 120,000 ya.
[ScienceDaily] For the 100 million people who live within 3 feet of sea level in East and Southeast Asia, the news that sea level in their region fluctuated wildly more than 6,000 years ago is important, according to research published by a team of ocean scientists and statisticians, including Rutgers professors Benjamin Horton and Robert Kopp and Rutgers Ph.D. student Erica Ashe. That’s because those fluctuations occurred without the assistance of human-influenced climate change.
Mid holocene sea level estimated at three sites: (a) TBAT; (b) TKUB; and (c) Leizhou Peninsula17.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, Horton, Kopp, Ashe, lead author Aron Meltzner and others report that the relative sea level around Belitung Island in Indonesia rose twice just under 2 feet in the period from 6,850 years ago to 6,500 years ago. That this oscillation took place without any human-assisted climate change suggests to Kopp, Horton and their co-authors that such a change in sea level could happen again now, on top of the rise in sea level that is already projected to result from climate change. This could be catastrophic for people living so close to the sea.
“This research is a very important piece of work that illustrates the potential rates of sea-level rise that can happen from natural variability alone,” says Horton, professor of marine and coastal sciences in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. “If a similar oscillation were to occur in East and Southeast Asia in the next two centuries, it could impact tens of millions of people and associated ecosystems.”
What this study shows is that we need to figure out what really drives climate change (like something on the Sun, perhaps?)
The plans are “advanced” but they apparently don’t know what that intervention is. It could be a script for “Yes Minister”:
Premier Jay Weatherill said the plans were well advanced, and all options remained on the table.
“One option is to completely nationalise the system,” Mr Weatherill said.
“That’s an extraordinary option. It would involve breaking contracts and exposing us to sovereign risk and the South Australian taxpayers to extraordinary sums of money. “It’s not a preferred option but we’re ruling nothing out at this point.”
Even if there were no more blackouts in SA, how much stress is added by not knowing if the electricity will be cut off without warning? How many people are preemptively running air conditioners early or all day?
The situation has changed so much that even Malcolm Turnbull, the man who fell on his sword for a carbon tax in 2009, is now scathing about renewables:
“What they did in a lazy and complacent way is they just assumed they could suck more and more energy from Victoria from those very emissions-intensive brown coal generators in the Latrobe valley,” he said.
Which is quite unfair. SA was not lazy. It took real effort and a lot of money to create this much instability.
Malcolm-come-lately’s warning to SA might have been more useful had he said this before they drove their last coal fired plant out of business. The “stunning Turnbull turnaround” on renewables is being received with dismay by some at the ABC. (Shame the ABC doesn’t allow comments on that story).
Is it a “state of emergency”?
The Federal Minister thinks so, the state Minister doesn’t:
Yesterday Perth had it’s coldest ever February day (since 1910) with temperatures only making it up to 17.4C. This is not just 0.1 or 0.2C below the previous coldest record in February, but a whole 1.7C colder. Perth also got its second wettest February Day (of any season) with a 106mm of rain.
(To put a fine point on just how far from normal this is, the actual coldest observation in February before this was in 1991 at 19.8C, but that was adjusted down by 0.7C in the All-Wondrous-ACORN data set. So yesterday was a “sigma-lot” below normal). I’ll post soon on how this is not just a one-day thing, but part of a longer curious record for the region.
Another bazillion gigatons of coal emissions since 1991…
How long before the “hot-n- cold” floods-in-summer thing is blamed on air conditioners? – Jo
________________________________________________
Perth cold records smashed
Guest Post Chris Gillham
As predicted, a new cold record has been set in Perth.
Just 10 days after Perth Metro had its 4th coldest January maximum since 1897 and Perth Airport its coldest January day since opening in 1945, the February daily record has been smashed at both stations.
Perth’s forecast was 20C. Perth Metro today had a maximum of 17.4C and Perth Airport 17.1C. That’s absurdly cold and won’t be repeated in our lifetimes.
…
Courier Mail headlines yesterday were ‘Hell on Earth’ Heat Coming Our Way and the headlines today have been about South Australia’s latest mass blackouts because the windmills couldn’t supply enough power when everybody turned their air-conditioners on in 42.4C heat. What will happen if Adelaide ever matches its record 46.1C set in 1939? (I note that on Monday Kent Town, Adelaide, had its equal 5th coldest February day since the station opened in 1977).
Here in Perth, the most likely cause of a mass blackout is everybody turning their heaters on in the middle of February, but nothing to worry about because coal and natural gas keep it humming along. I’ve had a jumper on since getting out of bed.
The media will have to mention Perth’s coldest February day on record but it’ll be quickly forgotten and I doubt any media will reference the coldest January and February max happening within 10 days of each other while the planet supposedly melts because of global warming. This after the coldest winter since 1990 and the coldest September on record for southern WA. Since the media has been in fits about the eastern states heatwave (you call that a heatwave?), it’s probably worth somebody blogging about what’s happening in the west – if only to point out what the media doesn’t point out.
Yesterday 90,000 customers lost power in SA (making it Blackout Round 5 since the big one last September).
This time it was due to load shedding.
SA power woes to spread nation-wide, starting with Victoria, Australian Energy Council warns
The Federal Government needs to take urgent action to improve its energy policies before the rest of Australia falls victim to the type of large-scale blackouts experienced in South Australia, the Australian Energy Council has warned.
It’s not just that renewables muck up the electricity supply (with frequency and instability issues), they also drive a pike through the energy market. These are two separate disruptors. We’ve seen inexplicable spikes in power prices in SA in seasons when it shouldn’t happen, but this might be a new form of volatility. Wind power produced 900MW earlier in the day, but that fell to below 100MW within 6 hours (which is not that usual, see the post yesterday for the graph). The problem, apparently, was that no one thought it was worth turning on their generators?
SA has enough generation (if only it was running), but when the crunch came, the market failed:
It asked for more power generators to be switched on but did not receive “sufficient bids” and said it did not have enough time to turn on the second unit at Pelican Point.
The “free market” will be blamed, but the energy market is not a free market — but a bit of a creeping Soviet style takeover. The government subsidizes some, punishes others, then has to pay some not to produce, and when the punishees start to go broke it has to pay them to standby “as needed” or nationalize them. We are not free to choose our energy supply. Retailers are not free to compete. If you wanted to build a power station with your own funds and sell cheap electricity to willing consumers, the government would not let you do it.
But AEMO executive general manager of stakeholders Joe Adamo said they did not have enough time to switch on the plant yesterday.
“When we were talking to Pelican Point, it was decided that the lead time for Pelican Point to actually bid into the market was too short a timeframe and as such we had to take the load shedding action,” he said.
The operators of Adelaide’s back up power station at Pelican Point, ENGIE, said in statement it could not provide additional power for South Australia unless directed to do so by AEMO.
WA Labor has just promised to go to 50% renewables and look quite likely to win in four weeks at the state election. We are a small grid with no connection to the rest of the nation. South Australia can’t make it with 40% renewables and two interconnections. WA is aiming for 50% with no interstate back up and a depressed economy. This’ll “be fun”.
Widespread power blackouts were imposed across Adelaide and parts of South Australia with heatwave conditions forcing authorities to impose load shedding.
About 40,000 properties were without electricity supplies for about 30 minutes because of what SA Power Networks said was a direction by the Australian Energy Market Regulator. — The Australian
Premier Jay Weatherill blamed the AEMO for not ordering a gas power station to come online.
Electricity prices spiked to $13,440 MWh. Total demand was about 3,000MW. Things are expected to be the same tomorrow.
At 6pm tonight wind power was producing less than 100MW (about 7% of its rated capacity):
Perhaps with better planning and more money they can reduce the need for planned blackouts — but why bother?I guess they’ll have those gas powered stations running tomorrow.
“…here’s the thing. Once this all unravels, and it will unravel very quickly as soon as the money stops flowing, those of us on the side that is ludicrously described as being “deniers” are not going to forget. We are not going to let you bastards off the hook.
Woe betide a civilization that can’t learn something from this:
“A decade of you retarded monkeys claiming that plant food is a pollutant. Years of you driving electric cars that only exist due to the biggest taxpayer subsidy in history, while you are seemingly oblivious to the fact that they need to be plugged into an electric power grid. Decades of you opposing nuclear power, which if any of your bogus claims were true would be the immediate answer if mankind truly were in some kind of climate peril. Decades of you pontificating at how the sea levels are going to rise while you buy palatial beach-front homes, and you then have the gall to sue local councils for sea erosion after you participated in demonstrations to stop them building a sea wall.
“Years of you advocating for corn to be turned into bio fuel while there are still people in the world with not enough food to eat. Morons who buy solar panels with taxpayer subsidies and then put them on the side of the roof facing the street which signals your virtuousness but fails to get any sunlight. Years of you actually believing that there is such a thing called renewable energy, and every time some country manages to get some above-average power from them due to a fortuitous combination of weather events, you scream it from the top of your lungs that this is incontrovertible proof that the entire world will soon be run on wave farms. Eleven years of you quoting total s— from An Inconvenient Truth.
Speaking at a scientific roundtable in Canberra on Monday, Alan Finkel warned science was “literally under attack” in the United States and urged his colleagues to keep giving “frank and fearless” advice despite the political opposition.
“The Trump administration has mandated that scientific data published by the United States Environmental Protection Agency from last week going forward has to undergo review by political appointees before that data can be published on the EPA website or elsewhere,” he said.
Governments have been attacking science for decades
With no mainstream alternative party standing up for freedom, free speech, small government, and free markets, Cory is about to make a speech to let Parliament know why he is quitting the Liberal Party and will now be an independent senator.
He is one of the many anti-establishment representatives out there. Australia has no Trump, but the vacuum left by the Liberal Party’s slide to the far left will pull something together. Perhaps Bernardi and the 50,000 people on his Australian Conservatives membership list will help achieve that.
The current Liberal party doesn’t want Australians to speak their minds in case they cause offense. It forces us all to pay big dollars for fantasies that we might change the weather for our great grandchildren by a hundredth of a degree. It won’t allow us to buy the cheapest safe energy. Won’t allow us to discuss real problems. Won’t audit foreign committees that tell us what to do. The Australian Liberal Party is an alt-left option that stands for nothing.
The Liberal Party’s values are not limited to conservatism. We are Liberals because we are open to new ideas; tolerant of difference; modern and forward looking; we believe in reward for effort and sharing Australia’s good fortune with those in need.
Those who tolerate all differences defend none. Those who stand for something draw a line. There are always differences we won’t accept.
As for our great fortune — we are blessed, but we are 24 million of 7 billion. Sharing has a limit. Innumerate motherhood lines are conversation spam — the only thing that matters are the numbers. How many people are we sharing our fortunes with?
Raymond Nolan Tony, the Liberal Party has left us, the Conservative voter. I don’t blame Cory one bit for making this move. I can only hope that you and others will follow him. The Liberal Party, as it is now, is not worth saving.
Jordan Thrupp Benardi has been conveying his position for a long time. There has been no apparent progress or shift in direction from the party, despite his contribution in hope to alter course. How long should he persist? How long should conservative liberal voters/supporters wait to bring national debate back to things that matter? Prosecuting conservative agenda/debate from within party room is falling on deaf ears.
The abominable Karl et al paper came out in the nick of time to pretend that the “pause” didn’t happen. We knew the paper was junk thanks to hard sleuthing, especially from Ross McKitrick, now Dr John Bates, a pal of Judith Curry is speaking up from the inside to confirm that the paper used bad and unapproved datasets which were so flawed they have already been revised. The data wasn’t archived either, which is a mandatory requirement. Bates retired from NOAA and was given a medal for setting up the “binding” standards which were ignored for the sake of generating headlines in time for Paris.
In an exclusive interview, Dr Bates accused the lead author of the paper, Thomas Karl, who was until last year director of the NOAA section that produces climate data – the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) – of ‘insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy’.
Dr Bates was one of two Principal Scientists at NCEI, based in Asheville, North Carolina.
According to reports, NOAA has now decided to replace the sea temperature dataset just 18 months after it was issued, because it used “unreliable methods which overstated the speed of warming.”
A reported increase in sea surface temperatures was due to upwards adjustments of readings from fixed and floating buoys to agree with water temperature measured by ships, according to Bates.
Bates said that NOAA had good data from buoys but then “they threw it out and ‘corrected’ it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did – so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer.”
The land temperature dataset, on the other hand, was the victim of software bugs that rendered its conclusions “unstable,” Bates said.
The nitty gritty at Judith Curry’s where Karl et al is referred to as K15.
A look behind the curtain at NOAA’s climate data center.
I read with great irony recently that scientists are “frantically copying U.S. Climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump” (e.g., Washington Post 13 December 2016). As a climate scientist formerly responsible for NOAA’s climate archive, the most critical issue in archival of climate data is actually scientists who are unwilling to formally archive and document their data.
The computer ate my homework:
So, in every aspect of the preparation and release of the datasets leading into K15, we find Tom Karl’s thumb on the scale pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming and minimize documentation. I finally decided to document what I had found using the climate data record maturity matrix approach. I did this and sent my concerns to the NCEI Science Council in early February 2016 and asked to be added to the agenda of an upcoming meeting. I was asked to turn my concerns into a more general presentation on requirements for publishing and archiving. Some on the Science Council, particularly the younger scientists, indicated they had not known of the Science requirement to archive data and were not aware of the open data movement. They promised to begin an archive request for the K15 datasets that were not archived; however I have not been able to confirm they have been archived. I later learned that the computer used to process the software had suffered a complete failure, leading to a tongue-in-cheek joke by some who had worked on it that the failure was deliberate to ensure the result could never be replicated.
How to solve this? —
h/t David, Scott, Pat, Clipe and Don A.
REFERENCE
T.R. Karl; A. Arguez; B. Huang; J.H. Lawrimore; M.J. Menne; T.C. Peterson; R.S. Vose; H.-M. Zhang (2015) “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus,” by at National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Asheville, NC; J.R. McMahon at LMI in McLean, VA.
Japan is the largest overseas market for Australian coal producers, taking more than a third of all exports.
Why coal? It’s cheaper than gas:
Tom O’Sullivan, a Tokyo based energy consultant with Mathyos Global Advisory, said in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Japan started importing more liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Australia.
But he said the move to more coal fired power was because coal was cheaper than LNG, and the energy security was priority for the government.
The new ultra super critical coal plants burn hotter and are more efficient (hence, high energy, low emissions = HELE).
Finally, after blackouts and scandalously high electricity bills, Malcolm Turnbull is just starting to float the idea of building, maybe, one. China has them, even Indonesia will get one before us.
Japan needs to import 95% of its energy. Australia is the largest exporter of coal in the world, and has the largest known uranium resources in the world, but we voluntarily wear a hair shirt to appease GAIA. We sacrifice our cheap energy advantage for fear that loud ill-mannered people who are bad at maths will call us selfish and uncaring.
The world’s largest oil-consuming country could sell as much as 800,000 barrels a day of crude overseas this year, according to four analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. That’s more than OPEC producers Libya, Qatar, Ecuador and Gabon each pumped in December. The U.S. exported 527,000 barrels a day in the first 11 months of 2016, Energy Information Administration data show.
–Bloomberg
The Trumpocene is a new world, Australia is years behind.
“it is estimated that as many as three-quarters of Australia’s coal-fired power stations are operating beyond their original design life, “
This week in Australia HELE plants are being called “clean coal” because they produce 15 -50% lower emissions (depending on who you ask and how dirty the old plant is that they replace.) But almost no one even mentioned these plants until last week — clean coal used to mean only the fantasy of carbon capture.
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