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Sometimes an idea comes along that adds another chapter to the Book of Stupid. You might think windmills on land are an indulgent, pointless fantasy, but take that idea and make it worse: (CNN) A team of scientists has a surprisingly simple solution to saving the Arctic: We need to make more ice. A team at Arizona State University has proposed building 10 million wind-powered pumps to draw up water and spill it out onto the surface of the ice, where it will freeze faster. Doing so would be complicated and expensive — it’s estimated to cost a cool $500 billion, and right now the proposal is only theoretical. It’s not like we have anything better to do with half a trillion dollars. Should we cure cancer or refrigerate one of the coldest places on Earth? Should we teach our kids about the fall of civilizations, or teach them to bow before prophets who keep predicting the end of the Arctic and getting it wrong? Or we could add ice to the whole arctic for just $5 trillionTristan Hopper explains the beefed up plan would absorb the “entire steel production of the United States”, “half the worlds container fleet”, and cost about the same as the “GDP of Japan”. It would also make 163 million tonnes of CO2. He’s serious, and so are the ivory tower guys: “… the researchers from Arizona State University call the cost “economically achievable” and the environmental impact “negligible.”” We could fund it all by giving up on universities right now. When it comes to the Tertiary Sector — just say “No”. Mech-madnessThe giant water pumps would sit on buoys floating in the Arctic Sea. They would take up water from beneath the ice, store it in a tank and then spray the water on top of the ice. The machines would be powered by the wind, which is plentiful in the Arctic, in a similar way to windmills you see creating power on farms. Yes, it’ll be just like windmills on farms, except they float on water, are subject to extreme weather, and produces nothing that any human needs within a 3,000km radius. The team estimates in the paper that 10 million devices could add a meter of sea ice onto the current level of ice over the course of a winter. That’s a meter of ice on each tenth of a square kilometer. “That’s a significant change,” said Desch. The sea ice only grows two to three meters in thickness during the winter. To make a dent in the loss of ice, you would need to cover about 10% of the Arctic, which adds up to 10 million machines, he said. What could possibly go wrong? The noise from ten million wind turbines might drive ten thousand whales crazy and destroy the sleep of a million polar bears. Where is Greenpeace when you need them. h/t Vaun  Click to read. 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.  James Harrison (click to enlarge) Peter Hartcher points out that the country that invented refrigeration and thus airconditioning can no longer guarantee to keep them working. 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.”
But both the Libs and the media ignored the warnings for years. We didn’t have to waste billions. h/t David B Image: Harrison’s ice-making machine, 1861 South Australia suffered it’s fifth blackout in five months last week. The AEMO report on that incident came out today. There are lots of faults, errors and small problems, and one overriding theme — it’s too complex:
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? Finally the SA Liberals are talking about maybe, possibly, could be, saving the old coal plant: 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. AEMO: full report on the SA Feb 2017 Blackout h.t Pat, David B BACKGROUND to the SA Electricity crisis (all the links).People saw The South Australian black out coming. There were warnings that the dominance of renewables made it vulnerable. Then when it came, it all fell over in a few seconds — read the gruesome details of how fast a grid collapses: Three towers, six windfarms and 12 seconds to disaster. Ultimately the 40% renewable SA grid is crippled by complexity. The AEMO Report blames renewables: The SA Blackout was due to lack of “synchronous inertia”. The early estimates suggest the blackout costs South Australia at least $367m, plus their normal electricity is twice the price, and there are reserve shortfalls coming in January 2018 (pray for a cool summer). Welcome to the future of unreliable electricity: Rolling blackouts ordered in SA in 40C heat. And more bad luck for South Australia, yet another blackout, 300 powerlines down, 125,000 homes cut off. See all the posts on Renewable Energy and Electricity Grids.
February 16th, 2017 | Tags: Electricity Grids, Renewable Energy, SA (South Australia) | Category: Global Warming, Renewable |  Print This Post | | 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. The company has now reported a $53 million dollar loss in the fourth quarter. It’s shutting down 39 distribution centres, potentially sacking 1,100 workers. Kelloggs share prices are back to where they were a year ago, but Kraft-Heinz is up 31%, and Post is up by 37%. Hey, but it could be a coincidence. 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: Keep reading → February 16th, 2017 | Tags: media, Political Correctness, US Politics | Category: Media-matters, Politics | Print This Post | | What happens when your world view is wrong and you can’t deal with reality? Climate change: Scientists sad, frustrated as extreme weather becomes the new norm“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.” There is major cognitive dissonance going on hereClimate scientists know they are right, the media loves them and repeats their message, their fears and even their mood swings. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, levels are rising, what could possibly go wrong? But despite pushing a simple message for 30 years, they can’t convince the people that matter most, the other scientists like meteorologists (survey one, survey two), most geologists and engineers, and thousands of doctors, physicists, chemists, maths guys and all the people who build planes, mobile phones, and walk on the moon and generally get stuff done. Perhaps the other scientists are all stupid, or here’s an alternate reality: perhaps the geography and ecology majors got the model architecture wrong, forgot one major feedback path and the energy they think is cooking our atmosphere is really leaking out the water vapor back door. See the missing hot spot, the decelerating sea levels, the record Antarctic Ice that wasn’t supposed to be there. See all the stories of warm and cold periods, and rising seas, their models can’t explain and all the evidence that shows the sun has a role on our climate that is non-existent in the models. See the scandalous adjustments they keep having to make to all that recalcitrant data that always seems to support skeptics until they “fix it”. 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. Eric Worrall has set up a petition to help scientists avoid personal CO2 emissions. It’s at change.org petition, Help Climate Scientists avoid Personal CO2 Emissions.
Thierry Baudet, leader of the Dutch political party “Forum for Democracy” writes about the inexorable attrition of democracy, as predicted 75 years ago.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. Keep reading → It’s been a rotten week for Pause denialDavid 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. Then on Sunday Rose fired out part II: How can we trust global warming scientists if they keep twisting the truth. The man deserves a medal. (Both men Rose and Bates). NOAA told Obama and Congress that there was no pause in warming. If only Congress had access to Google… they could have downloaded the satellite data:  Graph thanks to Dr David Evans 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.
For the record, there are two independent satellite sets, but the UAH data matches weather balloons better than RSS, and the RSS adjustments includes a likely calibration drift error that probably causes spurious warming. (And if Roy Spencer’s site doesn’t behave, there’s a copy of all his reasoning here). I’m guessing NOAA knows what the satellite data shows. Here’s the ARGO data, Hadley, GISS and UAH:  …. The Pause shows the models don’t understand what drives the climateIf you can’t explain the pause, you can’t explain the cause. Keep reading → February 14th, 2017 | Tags: Pause (in global temperatures) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | UPDATE #2: While the imminent threat is lower, the evacuations are still underway and now include 188,000 people. See what alarmed dam management: (Shots from the 7SanDiego News footage.)  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. LATEST NEWS: CA – DWR Flows over the auxiliary spillway have ceased. 100,000 cfs continue down the main spillway.
_________________________________ 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 … Keep reading → 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. Sea-level change in Southeast Asia 6,000 years ago has implications for today[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?) Keep reading → February 13th, 2017 | Tags: Australasia, Indonesia, Sea Level | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | …. Smell the desperationHere in Oz, political lives are in turmoil. Suddenly “load shedding” is the topic de jour, and there are hit lists of suburbs in the firing line. It’s a long list. Welcome to your green future. The language is ramping up. The SA state government is talking of a “dramatic intervention in the electricity market”. 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: Keep reading → February 10th, 2017 | Tags: Electricity Grids, SA (South Australia) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Plan for Ghost Town has been delayedYesterday 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 This is peak summer. So much for Tim Flannery’s Ghost Town prophesy. (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… POST NOTE: It’s sweltering on the east coast, and still cold and now flooding on the west. The tables below were updated — today was yet another “top ten” coldest ever day in Perth. How long before the “hot-n- cold” floods-in-summer thing is blamed on air conditioners? – Jo ________________________________________________ Perth cold records smashedGuest Post Chris Gillham
February 10th, 2017 | Tags: Perth, Western Australia (WA) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | 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 warnsThe 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. AEC chief executive officer Matthew Warren said there was no shortage of electrons and available power, but it was not dispatched when required. 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. A few more insights come from this article: 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. Note the costs: Another storm in December forced the power distributor to announce compensation payments totalling $20 million to about 75,000 customers after lengthy blackouts. 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”. Things must be getting serious – SA Liberals are talking about maybe, possibly, could be, the nuclear option. Keep reading → February 9th, 2017 | Tags: Electricity Grids, SA (South Australia) | Category: Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | South Australia, with 40% renewables, is lucky this has been a mild summer.* Welcome to your load-shedding future: Rolling blackouts ordered in Adelaide as city sweltersWidespread 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):
Look at the price spike and the forecast for tomorrow:  AEMO, Electricity Prices, Feb 8, 2016 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. It has been smack on average at Adelaide Airport at 28.1C for January 2017. *The Wind power graph was supplied in WA time, so I pushed the clock by 2.5 hours on the scale to make it “SA Time”. BACKGROUND to the SA Electricity crisis (all the links).People saw The South Australian black out coming. There were warnings that the dominance of renewables made it vulnerable. Then when it came, it all fell over in a few seconds — read the gruesome details of how fast a grid collapses: Three towers, six windfarms and 12 seconds to disaster. Ultimately the 40% renewable SA grid is crippled by complexity. The AEMO Report blames renewables: The SA Blackout was due to lack of “synchronous inertia”. The early estimates suggest the blackout costs South Australia at least $367m, plus their normal electricity is twice the price, and there are reserve shortfalls coming in January 2018 (pray for a cool summer). Welcome to the future of unreliable electricity: Rolling blackouts ordered in SA in 40C heat. And more bad luck for South Australia, yet another blackout, 300 powerlines down, 125,000 homes cut off. See all the posts on Renewable Energy and Electricity Grids.
February 9th, 2017 | Tags: Electricity Grids, Renewable Energy, SA (South Australia) | Category: Energy, Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | Got ten years of frustration after being mocked, scorned, and treated like dirt for talking about data? Adam Pigott unleashes some mockery back at the parody blog XYZ:Dear Climate Alarmists, We will never forget nor forgive. “…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. Read more: Dear Climate Alarmists, We will never forget nor forgive. XYZ News. :- ) H/t Jim at Five Dock. Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, is blind to the rampant censorship that’s been going on for 30 years: Australia’s chief scientist has slammed Donald Trump’s attempt to censor environmental data, saying the US president’s behaviour was comparable to the manipulation of science by the Soviet Union. 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 decadesThe real Soviet style censorship works by cutting funding to inconvenient research, giving awards and grants to namecalling activists, and funding incompetent psychologists who pump out sympathetic press releases that smear researchers who find the “wrong” result. It works by supporting a demonising culture that means honest scientists face exile, insults, threats to be sacked, evicted, blackballed, terminated, punished, vilified and bullied, not to mention government funded fun aimed at blowing up your kids (as a joke), as well as entertainment about killing people like you, and in some cases, talk of a RICO investigation. The role of Chief Scientist is obviously not to inform and challenge the PM, but to be the yes-man face for PR purposes.
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 50,0 Daily Telegraph has live coverage. 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. Pyne serves up a dose: 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? Tony Abbott’s facebook feed is full of people telling him to wake up:  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. David Rose at the DailyMail: Exposed — How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data: 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. Breitbart: Whistle-Blower: ‘Global Warming’ Data Manipulated Before Paris Conference by Thomas D Williams 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. Climate scientists versus climate data by John Bates 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. REFERENCET.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. |
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