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Japan will use Australian coal to build 45 modern coal fired plants: 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 US meanwhile is ramping up oil and gas production: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, “ —Engineers Australia submission Nov 2016 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. h/t GWPF, David, Scott of the Pacific. It is easy to forget we stand on a molten lava ball. Worth a minute of your time. Wow. It’s being called the Lava fire hose — 70 feet of flowing liquid rock. Pure Geo-voyerism. I gather Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano has been erupting pretty much all the time since 1983 so this is not “evacuation time”. But I’m guessing this waterfall variety is pretty unusual. If it keeps up, it’s one helluva tourist attraction. All the forces of nature are pretty much just showing off here — wrap your mind around this steam: “The steam plume created by the lava reaching the water is also a concern.
“It’s something to be avoided.” The story: Massive lava stream exploding into ocean in Hawaii (ABC)
James Delingpole dropped in at the GWPF press conference where Myron Ebell says Trump will pull the US out of the Paris agreement and says “I’ve just watched the London liberal media’s heads exploding like ripe watermelons.”. They hated it. (Especially the bit where Ebell told them that Trump would definitely be pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate treaty) They couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They curled their lips. They laced their questions with the bitterest scorn. But they didn’t really tune into Ebell’s measured, silken, soft-spoken answers because, hell, they knew what he was saying just had to be wrong and they didn’t really understand what he meant anyway. The reporter who set the tone – and if nothing else, you’ve got to admire his honesty – was the one from Channel 4 News who told Ebell: “It will occur to you that this room is full of people like myself who consider that nothing you say has any basis in fact. So what you’ve been telling us is essentially meaningless.” Ebell replied with some painful home truths. “Elections are surprising things…” he began and went on to explain to the mystified audience why and how it was that Brexit happened and Trump happened. Basically, he argued – perhaps channelling Michael Gove – people have had enough of the “Expertariat”. And with good reason: “The expert class is full of arrogance and hubris.” — Breitbart There is a meltdown at the EPA:“Looks like the EPA may need its own doomsday clock, because its time of promoting dubious science to back up a political agenda is running out.” — Julie Kelly, National Review A key advisor Myron Ebell brings the bad news to a room full of believers. The GWPF ran a press conference with Myron Ebell, head of Trumps transition team on the EPA: US president Donald Trump will honour his campaign pledge to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement and defund UN climate programmes says EbellArgus Media: Ebell expects Trump “to be very assiduous in keeping his promises despite all the flack he is going to get from his opponents,” adding that he brings a “message of hope” in terms of the new administration’s energy and environment policy. The first hopeful aspect is that the US will clearly change course on climate policy, Ebell said. Secondly, the new US president has undertaken to unleash US energy production growth. Trump said he wants to make the US the world’s largest energy producer and achieve a position of global dominance for the country, he said. This will help the US and hurt the middle east and Russia: “This is obviously good for the US, but also for the world because in becoming the top global energy supplier the US will reduce the influence of certain countries in the Middle East and of Russia,” Ebell said. “This is going to happen because the US has the world’s largest fossil fuel reserves — by far the largest coal reserves and also, because of the shale revolution, gigantic fields of natural gas and oil.” Three ways to get the US out of the Paris deal:1. Cut the funds: …the president can simply stop any US financial contributions to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In any event, all US funding to the UNFCCC, including to the Green Climate Fund, represents a violation of US law ever since Palestine — which is not internationally recognised as a legitimate state — was accepted as a UNFCCC member, Ebell argued. 2.Congress can reject a treaty that was illegally passed by executive order: Trump can have the US Congress reject the Paris agreement on the basis that legally it is a treaty and does not qualify as an executive presidential order. He can also withdraw the US from the UNFCCC altogether, which according to Ebell would be “the cleanest way” as it would absolve the US from any commitments, financial or otherwise, under the UNFCCC and the Paris climate deal. 3. Fix the laws based on bad science and get rid of the EPA Endangerment finding on CO2. In 2009 the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases were a threat to public health ie “pollution“. The Supreme Court finding is scientifically wrong because the hot spot does not exist, and the cause-and-effect correlation of CO2 emissions on global temperatures is lousy. (See the long report there for the details). The science-industry is up in arms that someone could try to stop junk-science:The Union of Concerned Scientists called the Trump administration’s move “an attack on scientific integrity,” and the group’s president sent a letter to U.S. senators claiming that “freezing grants and contracts would almost certainly increase health risks for children and other vulnerable people in our country.” The group has also set up a hotline so federal scientists can anonymously tattle on their new bosses.
Scientists feel so threatened by the Trump administration that some are planning a protest this spring modeled after the Women’s March on January 21.
The agency’s junk-science promoters are flipping out. In his recently released and timely book, Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA, author Steve Milloy says this about the Environmental Protection Agency:
The EPA has over the course of the last 20 years marshaled its vast and virtually unchallenged power into an echo chamber of deceptive science, runaway regulations and fatally flawed research derived from unethical human experiments. The EPA’s conduct runs the gamut from subtle statistical shenanigans to withholding key scientific data, from seeking to rubberstamp baseless research data to illegally spraying diesel exhaust up the noses of unsuspecting children and other vulnerable populations.
Milloy who runs Junkscience.com is thrilled: “I can think of no agency that has done more pointless harm to the U.S. economy than the EPA — all based on junk science, if not out-and-out science fraud.” Article from Julie Kelly, National Review  Click to enlarge map. 2016 was a good year for coral surprizes. Until recently no one even knew that corals could grow just out from the river-mouth of the Amazon. Then 9,300 square kilometers of reef was found living in a region no one thought corals could grow. Volunteers found very nice reefs in Morton Bay, not far from the ferry route, but entirely “unexpected” and “better than tourist sites”. Researchers also found another 4.000 square kilometers of reef off Queensland, hidden under 20m of water. In every media article the corals were immediately called into action against mining, farming, stuff like that. Journalists talk to scientists and head straight over to Greenpeace. The poor corals are politicized before they’d even been put on a tourist map. Somehow scientists that are wrong are always described as surprised, excited or astonished. Other professions dream that their errors would be recounted this way. (Think –tax accountants, pilots, politicians…) . In terms of hard questions from the media, the only group that gets it easier than Hillary Clinton are scientists. Not that I’m saying they should have known, but the same profession that talks about 97% certainty can’t also get a free run every time their assumptions are 100% wrong. The corals discovered near the Amazon might be quite important. The journalists describe the zone as having a”unique pH”, which is a funny way to say that it was almost certainly a lower pH (because rivers are naturally low). Why hide that — it might show that corals aren’t under as much threat from “acidification” as some people want you to think. Amazon Reef: First images of coral system discovered at mouth of river releasedScientists were surprised to find the reef in “unfavourable conditions”, beneath a muddy plume where water flows from the Amazon River. The riverine discharge, which generates a plume and muddy bottoms, affects a wide area of the tropical North Atlantic in terms of light penetration, sedimentation, salinity and pH, according to Science Advances — the journal that announced the discovery last year. “This reef system is important for many reasons, including the fact that it has unique characteristics regarding use and availability of light, and physicochemical water conditions,” Nils Asp, researcher at the Federal University of Para in Brazil, said. “At the moment, less than 5 per cent of the ecosystem is mapped,” he said. From The Guardian in April last year: … the reef appears to be thriving below the freshwater “plume”, or outflow, of the Amazon. Compared to many other reefs, the scientists say in a paper in Science Advances on Friday, it is is relatively “impoverished”. Nevertheless, they found over 60 species of sponges, 73 species of fish, spiny lobsters, stars and much other reef life. Then, all this time, there were giant 250m wide donuts of corals under the water, but nobody noticed because they were all of 20 -50m deep, below the reach of the average diver. Ponder that it was only 20m of water hiding these when the average depth of the oceans is 4km. Scientists puzzled by fields of giant donut-shaped reefs found off north QueenslandAustralian scientists working with laser data from the Royal Australian Navy have discovered a reef system covering around 6,000 square kilometres, north of the Great Barrier Reef. James Cook University’s Dr Robin Beaman explained the ‘inter-reef’ structure sits just behind the familiar coral reefs, on a deeper seafloor. “The mapping that had been done earlier said that there are about 2,000 square kilometres off the Great Barrier Reef inter-reef area. Well, we’ve tripled that now,” Dr Beaman said. AUSSIE SCIENTISTS FIND NEW REEF BEHIND THE GREAT BARRIER REEFThe 6,000 square kilometre reef was hiding in plain sight. — National Geo And the Ferries kept driving past some great corals in Morton Bay: Moreton Bay coral discovery mapped out by scientists seeking better protection for reefScientists have discovered and mapped out new parts of the coral reef system in Moreton Bay with the hope the work will help inform decisions to better protect it. The area’s secret spots were revealed during the most detailed reef mapping ever done of the south-east Queensland coastal region. “On Goat Island, not far from where the ferry travels to go to North Stradbroke Island, there’s quite a lot of coral there which most people would be really surprised to know,” Reef Check Australia’s Jennifer Loder said. The researchers called for more time and money to be spent on Moreton Bay’s reefs. Perhaps those same scientists who want money could speak up when other colleagues say they’ve mapped the reef and x.xx% has died? Surely they know something about the uncertainties that the public who fund them deserve to find out? h/t David B
Those scientists shocked and surprised, — Ruairi Wait, wait – someone made an assumption that carbon life forms would not like more carbon, and that they might not be able to adjust to a change even after surviving for 100 million years of other changes. But now researchers are surprised that some shells are not only as good in an “acidic environment” but might be even better. Indeed formanifera turned out to micromanage pH levels so that in the right spot, where they need a higher pH, they can create that. The researchers say “such an active biochemical regulation mechanism has never been found before” and wonder “what if” the majority of organisms can do this? More carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air also acidifies the oceans. It seemed to be the logical conclusion that shellfish and corals will suffer, because chalk formation becomes more difficult in more acidic seawater. But now a group of Dutch and Japanese scientists discovered to their own surprise that some tiny unicellular shellfish make better shells in an acidic environment. This is a completely new insight. Researchers from the NIOZ (Royal Dutch Institute for Sea Research) and JAMSTEC (Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology) found in their experiments that so-called foraminifera might even make their shells better in more acidic water. These single-celled foraminifera shellfish occur in huge numbers in the oceans. The results of the study are published in the leading scientific journal Nature Communications. Since 1750 the acidity of the ocean has increased by 30%. Well… at least in theory. (Number of pH meters in 1750 = 0.) Models predict the oceans have become less alkaline. According to the prevailing theory and related experiments with calcareous algae and shellfish, limestone (calcium carbonate) dissolves more easily in acidic water. The formation of lime by shellfish and corals is more difficult because less carbonate is available under acidic conditions. The carbonate-ion relates directly to dissolved carbon dioxide via two chemical equilibrium reactions. Self-regulating biochemical magic trick Keep reading → More Fake News from the NY TimesHere’s a creative effort to sell the story that the people with billion dollar industries, all the academic positions and a sympathetic media entourage are going underground, forced to disguise their belief about “climate change”. This is a death-throes type article, clutching for ways to pretend Global Worriers are still relevant, and to feed a fantasy that they might be the underdog. In America’s Heartland, Discussing Climate Change Without Saying ‘Climate Change’So while climate change is part of daily conversation, it gets disguised as something else. “People are all talking about it, without talking about it,” said Miriam Horn, the author of a recent book on conservative Americans and the environment, “Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman.” “It’s become such a charged topic that there’s a navigation people do.” What really happened is that climate change is overused agitprop and people are tired of being beaten over the head with it. The first most compelling example the NY Times can find is a farmer called Doug Palen who talks about “carbon sequestration” in his soil (and what crop farmer wouldn’t?) Palen is painted as a “believer”: In short, he is a climate change realist. Just don’t expect him to utter the words “climate change.” But this is the strongest statement he makes: “If politicians want to exhaust themselves debating the climate, that’s their choice,” Mr. Palen said, walking through fields of freshly planted winter wheat. “I have a farm to run.” And he is so much of a believer “he didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton.” Need I say more? Apparently anyone who discusses weather problems or ecology could be painted, via some kind of fantasy, as a believer in disguise who is hiding the topic of climate change. This is the best they could do? Palen may be a believer (who knows), but there’s no evidence of it in his quotes. The article goes to quite some length to tell us about him, but it’s all just good farming science. Palen has “a conservationist streak” and is a no-till farming advocate. He looks after his soil, and feels alienated by environmentalists because he uses chemicals. Palen even says he wants to “be left alone” by the EPA. He sounds like every skeptical farmer I know yet this is the guy painted as the star example of an underground believer? Last week, Mr. Palen, the farmer, was again talking weather — if not climate change — at a conference of no-till farmers in Salina, Kan. Sessions included “Using Your Water Efficiently,” “Making Weather Work for You in 2017” and “Building Healthy Soil With Mob Grazing,” a practice that helps to fertilize the land. As evidence the topic is too hot to discuss, The NY Times writer, Hiroko Tabuchi, tells us a science teacher has even suffered “car keying” (like that never happens) and once got a letter from a student saying: “Know that God’s love surpasses knowledge.” Scary stuff indeed. Why even mention these? To be fair though, the teacher did get a book bag thrown at him, so now he asks students if they like light bulbs as a soft way to lead into climate talk — as if climate science was anything like the science of light bulbs. (Light bulb models can predict things…) Tabuchi manages to find some real believers who have realized they have to change their boring messaging. This also fits with my theory that ‘climate change’ is a dead dog topic on its way out. The last die-hards are repackaging the message, but few people care. The editor of one magazine admits people hate the term “climate change”:Mr. Kurns spoke candidly over concerns of a backlash in an editor’s note that led the issue. When he became the magazine’s editor two years earlier, he said, he had been warned, “Never use the words ‘climate change.’” “I was told: ‘Readers hate that phrase. Just talk about the weather,’” he wrote. Here is some of the hate mail he got in this “hot” arena: “When you start quoting ‘climate scientists’ and the United Nations,” wrote in one reader, Bill Clinger, a farmer based in Harpster, Ohio, “you are as nutty as Al Gore.” Measures to control emissions, he said, “are just seductive names for socialist programs intended to micromanage people and businesses.” If he got more aggressive or nasty letters you think they would have used them. So “that’s it”. A snowflake editor? The NY Times Fake News moments:The classic false memes get pushed: “…well-financed push by fossil-fuel interests…” How well financed are skeptics when believers get 3,500 times as much (and the rest). The NY times has never even found a reason for oil companies to back skeptics since most of them lobby for carbon action, and profit from gas sales and like it when wind farms are subsidized. More fake news: She has sat through committee meetings where climate skeptics, including the discredited scientist Wei-Hock Soon, blasted the science behind global warming. “Carbon Dioxide, CO2, is merely a bit player in climate change,” reads one slide Mr. Soon presented in 2013. “Rising CO2 is largely beneficial to plant and human life.” “I remember being horrified,” Ms. Kuether said. Horrified that CO2 increases crop yields? Willie Soon is merely explaining the basics and his work stands up well on its own merits. If he could be discredited because his university received “fossil fuel” money, that rules out everything the East Anglia Climate Unit has ever said. Since Big-government benefits from pushing the climate-panic button, this kind of reasoning rules out 97% of climate research. If anyone could find a serious error in Willie Soon’s work we would all have heard about it. This article is an experimental, floundering step in the transmogrification of the climate debate. Most of the science here has nothing to do with climate science and everything to do with plain old ecology, agriculture, and soil care. Tabuchi is blending together successful science with failures so he can rescue something from the disastrous climate change crusade. January 29th, 2017 | Tags: Media bias, Psychology, Soon (Willie) | Category: AGW socio-political, Media-matters, Pseudoscience, Psychology |  Print This Post | | .. No elected representative has done more to speed climate research up: Donald Trump to sack climate change scientistsMyron Ebell, who led Mr Trump’s transition team at the agency, said that he expects the new President to sack at least half of the staff there. He also hopes that the organisation will have its budget cut significantly, he said. Trump will save the state based EPA roles, but chop the federal monster which has 15,000 employees: Ebell suggested it was reasonable to expect the president to seek a cut of about $1 billion from the EPA’s roughly $8 billion annual budget. About half the EPA’s budget passes through to state and local governments for infrastructure projects and environmental cleanup efforts that Ebell said Trump supports. We live in hope: “President Trump said during the campaign that he would like to abolish the EPA, or ‘leave a little bit,”‘ Ebell said. Not surprisingly, climate scientists are reacting with their usual calm demeanor: GOVERNMENT SCIENTISTS AT U.S. CLIMATE CONFERENCE TERRIFIED TO SPEAK WITH THE PRESS The mood was understandably gloomy at the National Conference and Global Forum on Science, Policy, and the Environment. “It’s strange,” the woman said. “People keep walking up to me and giving me hugs.” Like several others I spoke to for this story, she declined to tell me her name out of fear that she might suffer retaliation, including being fired. Imagine not being able to speak freely? Welcome to the world of skeptical scientists.On the other half of the divide people aren’t just afraid of being sacked, they get exiled, sacked, evicted, blackballed, terminated, punished, vilified and general bullied. I’m thinking right now of a friend at an Australian University who I can’t name, who isn’t even in the field of climate research but was specifically warned not to speak publicly about climate issues, even in his personal time, “or else”. We’ve had messages from people in Australian and US institutions which study the climate or meteorology and who tell us there are other quiet skeptics “in the office”. And there is at least one other story of what sounds like quite appalling treatment that I have yet to cover. The thing about being a skeptic is that, it’s not just scientists, but all kinds of people who can face punishment — even skeptical farmers can get suddenly slapped with severe new license conditions, and bled cash til they lose their farm.
Trump is rattling the climate cagesMeanwhile Trump is putting the environmental establishment off-guard — romping, as it were, through any semblance of normal. He is not playing by the usual rules: climate change is gone from the website and the EPA have been told to freeze all grants and contracts. As a negotiation technique, this is the hammer blow opening move. He is forcing those he wants to deal with to rewrite entirely what they expect they can get. A gambit. He is reminding them he is the boss, and that they can take nothing for granted, and that he is not afraid of them calling him names like: “a racist anti-science, flat Earth, climate denier”. Trump rightly calculates that they have already called him all of the above, and they will continue to do so, no matter what he does. They don’t have much ammo, he knows it, and he’s getting them to show their hand, and betting that they haven’t got much left to fire. How big are those protests going to be? Will the public really care? (His popularity might go up.) Trump is overloading the media. By doing everything at once, immigration, the environment, the TPP, the love-media will have to pick their target. As Judith Curry notes, it’s “seismic”:Trump administration tells EPA to freeze all grants, contracts “They’re trying to freeze things to make sure nothing happens they don’t want to have happen, so any regulations going forward, contracts, grants, hires, they want to make sure to look at them first,” said Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-backed group that has long sought to slash the authority of the EPA. So what is going on? If you are not familiar with the U.S. constitution, take a look at Article 2, The Executive Branch. Here is a good Summary. Excerpt of the key section: Clause 1. The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment. Here the Framers spell out several of the president’s more important powers. First and foremost, he is commander-in-chief of the military. Second, he is the boss of the heads of all the civilian departments of government; the bit here about requiring their written opinions provides the constitutional basis for the cabinet. And third, he has the power to pardon individuals convicted of crimes. Basically, the civilian departments such as EPA, USDA and NOAA now work for President Trump, with the Directors of these agencies working with the administration to further the President’s policies. A serious US and UK partnership reshapes everythingThe UK Prime Minister will on Friday become the “first foreign leader to hold talks with the new President….” Here’s a shift in the global powerscape — (the new-normal may be a revival of the old-normal). “Britain and America will have the opportunity to “lead together again” with renewed confidence after the surprise results of the US election and Brexit vote, Theresa May will say today. The leadership provided by our two countries through the special relationship has done more than win wars and overcome adversity. It made the modern world,” she will say. “The institutions upon which that world relies were so often conceived or inspired by our two nations working together. It is through our actions over many years, working together to defeat evil or to open up the world, that we have been able to fulfil the promise of those who first spoke of the special nature of the relationship between us. The promise of freedom, liberty and the rights of man.” So much has already changed. Only in November 2015 the same Theresa May as Home Secretary was considering whether to ban Trump from entering the UK over his divisive comments. She, clearly, has adapted to the Brexit-Trumpocene era. Can other world leaders do the same — (In Australia there’s no sign Turnbull or Bishop have any idea about going with the new flow — like dumping the TPP and doing one-on-one trade deals.). The US and UK are talking about slashing tarriffs and making it easier for workers to move back and forward. That would be gold for the UK in its Brexit negotiations: Sources believe any agreement on tariffs would give Mrs May significant leverage in her negotiations with Brussels and allow her to demand that EU leaders give Britain a good deal. Government sources also said that Mrs May wants to explore ways in which it is easier for US citizens to work in the UK and vice-versa. There are around 230,000 people born in North America aged between 16 and 64 living in Britain. The British population in the USA has been estimated at 700,000.
Bowing to the God of Political Correctness, Macquarie Dictionary has just named “Fake News” as Word of the Year. In real English, “Fake news” is two words, otherwise known as a phrase. Separately both words have real and easy-to-understand meanings. Together they have become the the latest meaningless slur as the mainstream media realize they are losing power and influence to the real news on blogs and in the alt-media. The old-media is trying to stop the bleed by labeling the new media as “fake”. Instead of namecalling, the old-media could win easily if it just reported the real news. When a word that isn’t a word wins Word of the Year prize, we know Macquarie has lost it. If any Macquarie products are on your back-to-school booklists, buy something else. Who wants to teach our kids fake English? This is the latest attempt by wordsmiths to destroy the language honest people use. We need accurate words to slice and dice arguments of parasites, freeloaders, and self-serving fools. “News” used to mean the whole story and all the facts that matter. Fake news is what happens when a reporter hides half the story from their audience. h/t and thanks to David B. January 25th, 2017 | Tags: Language | Category: Academia, Media-matters, Science Communication | Print This Post | | Back in 2011 Anton Lang, Tony Cox, and I wrote here about why Australia would be better off with super critical hot coal generators (which China already uses, and which even Indonesia will get before us). Not only do we get cheap reliable power, but it would be a better way to reduce our emissions (if we want to pretend to change the weather). Now, finally, in 2017 Malcolm Turnbull is saying the same thing as the skeptics he mocked years ago. This is how the “climate meme” dies, one unacknowledged step at a time. Gradually all the skeptical positions get picked up, years later and after burning billions at the altar of “climate control”. This is a big win for skeptics, but don’t expect Turnbull or the ABC to be honest enough to say so. This marks a major turning point in the discussion about coal in Australia which has mostly never got past the “coal is dying” and the “stranded assets” inanity which implied that coal has no future and our massive coal reserves were useless instead of being our major export industry. Last week Tony Abbott, former PM, called for stop to subsidies for wind power – an end to the RET (Renewables Energy Target) certificates which stop normal competition in the electrical market and force us all to buy a power we don’t want at prices far higher than we need to pay. This week, with no acknowledgement that Tony Abbott is right, Turnbull does a major about face. He calls this “cleaner coal” but it has nothing to do with the futile fantasy of carbon capture. It is the newer high tech coal which Greens will hate (because it works and it solves the fake problem they pretend to worry about). Turnbull backs cleaner coal for hitting renewable targetAs revealed in The Australian yesterday, research commissioned by the Turnbull government has estimated the country’s emissions would be cut by up to 27 per cent if coal-based power generation ran on “ultra-super-critical-technology” used in other parts of the world. Carried out by the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, the research showed emissions would be reduced even further — by up to 34 per cent — if the technology now in development was adopted across Australia. Turnbull attacks wind power now, but he didn’t warn about that train wreck coming as skeptics did: Mr Turnbull acknowledged coal would be part of the world’s energy mix “for a very, very long time” as he attacked the Labor state of South Australia, which generates 40 per cent of its energy through wind, for having the “most expensive and the least reliable electricity” in the country. If Turnbull had said this in 2009 he would have been PM in 2010 and we would have saved billions and have cheap electricity now: “We are the biggest coal exporter in the world. If anybody, if any country has a vested interest in demonstrating that clean coal and cleaner coal with new technologies can make a big contribution to our energy mix and at the same time reduce our emissions in net terms — it’s us,” Mr Turnbull said. Here is Turnbull pretending to be pragmatic about energy, but the only thing Turnbull is somewhat pragmatic about is his own political position: “Our approach, and my approach, to energy is absolutely pragmatic and practical … Renewables have a role. Fossil fuels have a role. Every type of energy — storage, all of it — has an important role to play.” The new coal plants cut emissions by 50% “compared with existing plants” (presumably the oldest brown power stations) and are as “clean” as gas plants says the Minerals Council of Australia using the Department of Industries projections. Bear in mind that this in itself is hugely important — wholesale coal power is 3 to 4 c KWhr. (I don’t know the cost of new “hot” coal power because those big plants cost a lot to build). But gas is 7 to 8 c per KWhr. More coal power means much cheaper electricity. How much do we thank Donald Trump for this transformation? A whole lot. The writing is on the wall, Australia will lose more jobs, profits and companies to the US if they have cheap energy, and that is one of Trumps absolute priorities. Now if we can just kill off the RET.
January 24th, 2017 | Tags: Australian Politics, Coal, Renewable Energy, SA (South Australia) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | A funny thing happens when governments put “free energy” into an electricity grid. Wind turbines force down wholesale prices, but everyone’s electricity bill goes up. Those cheap green electrons look so seductive, but the advertising hides the effect that intermittent, unstable electricity has on the whole system. Armada Funds Management manages $400m dollars worth of South Australian shops. Look at the price shock these small business managers are dealing with, like $1200 a month, and only one employee: Power spike hits South Australian shopping centresChris Monaghan, Armada’s managing director [said]…costs for purchasing electricity for shopping centres in South Australia had increased by 87 per cent during peak times last year and 101 per cent in off-peak periods. Costs would increase again this year a further 57 per cent at peak periods and 15 per cent off-peak. The total extra cost to landlords could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nino Pilaia, who has been running Meats-N-More Carvery & Spuds … His business was among those affected by power blackouts last year and ever-increasing energy costs. “For this little place here of about 30sq m, it is about $1200 a month, which is ridiculous,” Mr Pilaia said. “The rising cost of power has hit us hard, but you can’t keep on passing on the costs to consumers — you have to try and absorb it. It’s money out of my pocket, it’s as simple as that. “I employ one other part-time person. I can’t afford to employ anyone else… The power costs are a business killer.” South Australia has the highest proportion of wind power of any state without 6 interconnectors. Somehow the Premier accidentally gives the right answer: South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill last week told ABC radio a lack of competition was to blame for high power prices, a claim rejected by the industry. It is a lack of competition, but its not about retail competition — one more guy selling a dead dog doesn’t make it live again. What South Australians need is the right to buy whatever damn electricity they like. They need competition between generators: no RET’s, no schemes no subsidies — and may the best one win. All Jay Weatherill has to do is get out of the way, and consumers and energy companies will figure it out. Bring it on, and watch those electricity prices plummet, and then watch big industry, shops, everyone clamour to live there. Right now, SA “leads the nation”:  … h/t David M January 24th, 2017 | Tags: Electricity Cost, SA (South Australia) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | How fast can we burn millions of dollars trying to stuff a perfectly good fertilizer down a sinkhole? This fast… Carbon capture must rank as one of the most flagrantly ridiculous ways to spend money (even more pointless than desal). To capture and bury the CO2 of a coal fired plant we have to spend around 60% more to build every new power station and then throw away 40% the electricity it makes. (See TonyfromOz’s calculations in the link below). Sputnik News reports on the second collapse of UK funding for Carbon Capture:
Other failures of carbon capture have also wasted wild amounts of money. The concept is so intrinsically futile we need some kind of miracle techno advance, or we need to break laws of chemistry to get it to work. TonyfromOz went through the exact details of the Cabon Capture and Storage fantasy. My introduction: Keep reading → January 22nd, 2017 | Tags: Carbon Capture (CCS), UK | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | … The Morning After: This is probably the best day for sane, honest, skeptical citizens in the last 30 years. In the long climate debate, this is the most significant political event — with more potential to restore science and free speech back to their rightful place. Ain’t democracy a great thing? Those who don’t like Trump say it was “populist” and a repeat of his campaign speech. Other people say “it’s about time”. Trump is putting together a package for his customers, and telling the competition the US won’t be giving anything away. UPDATE: and climate change disappears from the whitehouse website. Already Trump is in control of the Whitehouse.gov site and according to Jason Koebler “climate change has been deleted“. He writes: “It’s customary for www.whitehouse.gov to flip over to the new administration exactly at noon, but the only mention of climate on President Trump’s new website is under his “America First Energy Plan” page, in which he vows to destroy President Obama’s Climate Action Plan. A search of the website found no mention of “global warming,“… “Today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington D.C. and giving it back to you, the people,” he said. “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. “That all changes… … Today I take an oath of allegiance to all Americans. For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry, subsidised the armies of other countries, while allowing the sad depletion of our own military. We’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own. And spent trillion and trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay Keep reading → Don’t mention the trendThe warming in the last two decades is 0.06C/decade not 0.22C.The hottest ever year tells us nothing about the cause of global warming, but the 20 year trend does — and the message from the trend is “the models are wrong”. Despite the Chinese releasing gigatons of coal fired CO2 into the air, the warming that has happened has been tiny compared to what their models predict. It is so low the Global Worriers won’t talk about the trend. Gone are the days when they would discuss degrees per decade. Meh! The same people who scoffed at skeptics for mentioning one freak season are now reduced to picking on one freak El Nino, and pumping annual tiny fractions of “record” after “record”. If the sun caused global warming (the evidence is there) we’d still be getting warm records, especially in El Nino years. What’s amazing is that after a record El Nino the world hit pretty much the same temperature as it did in 1998. Dr David Evans has just recalculated the warming trend for the last two decades and found that the warming effect is a big six hundredth of a degree per decade, about one third the rate the expert climate models predicted. If the “best” models we have were right, the world would have warmed by around 0.22C per decade, not 0.06C. The current warming trend is equivalent to less than one degree a century, which is just like last century. Whatever. CO2 may have done all the warming the models predicted, but all it takes is one dang feedback loop that they forgot, which reroutes that energy to space and CO2 becomes irrelevant. If the ABC science team were skeptical instead of gullible, they’d know to ask Will Steffen and others about these trends. And if we use the trends from the entire satellite record since 1979 the warming still only comes in at 0.12C — half the rate those models predict. Far from accelerating as our emissions increased, the observations don’t fit the theory. Something else is more powerful than CO2 and the modelers don’t know what it is. — Jo _______________________________________________________ Guest post by Dr David EvansTemperature spin: World temperatures hit new high in 2016 for third year in a row, NOAA and NASA say, by the ABC.
No technical lies there, but it is misleading. People keep asking me, so here is the truth as measured by our best method of measuring temperature globally, the satellites:  …. I chose the start date as just after the warming of the mid 1970s to mid 90s was petering out, at a nice round 20 years, because it best makes the point that global warming has more or less stopped. Download the data yourself. Until global warming slowed dramatically, the warming crowd always loudly told everyone to ignore individual yearly temperatures and to focus instead on trends. So I put in a couple of trend lines on the graph. The current estimate of sensitivity to increasing carbon dioxide by the IPCC* corresponds to an underlying warming rate of 0.22 °C per decade, but for the last 20 years it has only been warming at 0.06 °C per decade, as shown. Keep reading → The same modelers were predicting drought and letting their friends nail their reputation to statements about how the dams would never fill, and Perth would be a ghost town. When Australia wasted billions on desal, they said nothing about the “extreme rain” coming. Then the endless drought broke, the rains returned, and now, years later, they’ve rejigged and tweaked their skillless models and put forward ambiguous, vague, yes-no-maybe, scare-scare-scary predictions that could have come from a tarot card reader. Get ready for the full genius of expert modelling: “There is no chance that rainfall in Australia will remain the same as the climate warms,” said an author of the paper UNSW Professor Steve Sherwood. “The only way that this intensification of extreme rainfall falls at the lower end of the scale is if the continent becomes drier overall. The long and the short of it is that with 2°C of global warming Australia is stuck with either more aridity, much heavier extreme rains, or some combination of the two,” said Sherwood, from UNSW’s Climate Change Research Centre. — A hard rain to fall in Australia, Phys org. Other, less astrological climate researchers have found that Australia has had megadroughts for the last thousand years (Vance et al 2014). Paleoclimate rainfall estimates likewise find that both droughts and floods used to be worse and longer (Tozer et al 2016). None of the UNSW climate modeling experts know why. Perhaps the CO2-addicted models just don’t work at all because it’s the sun driving rainfall patterns?Climate models don’t include any solar influence other than total sunlight. Yet Australian and Asian rainfall has been linked to solar activity for last 6000 years (Steinke et al 2014) . Solar effects seem to shift wind and rainfall patterns over last 3000 years in Chile, while low solar activity means more central European floods. (Varma et al 2011, Czymzik et al 2016). Another study showed that when the sun is less active winters are likely to be warmer in Greenland with an increase in snowfall and yet colder in Northwest Europe. (Adolphi, 2014) The sun appears to control half of the groundwater recharge rate in China for last 700 years (Tiwari et al, 2014). Models predicted that rain would fall more on wetter soils, but Taylor et al (2012) found rain fell on drier soils, and model feedbacks were wrong. See: Climate Models: 100% right except for rain, drought, storms, humidity and everything else. They looked at the heaviest 1% of rainfall events experienced in Australia across all seasons with a particular focus on precipitation in the very different climates of Darwin, Sydney and Melbourne. So they are investigating noise — rare events which need very long datasets to find a signal in. The paper also went beyond the 2°C international Paris Agreement target, looking at what would happen with a 4°C rise in global temperature, which is a likely outcome based on current increases in the rate of carbon emissions. It produced a projected increase in rainfall for extreme events of 22-60%. Why stop there? How about 6°C, 8°C, 10°C or eleventy-hundred*? hat tip Pat, Geoff Derrick, Scott, Another Ian, AndyG, Albert Parker REFERENCEAdolphi, Florian, and Muscheler R., Svensson, A., Aldahan, A., Possnert, G., Beer, J., Sjolte, J., Björck, A., Matthes, K., Thiéblemont, R. (2014) Persistent link between solar activity and Greenland climate during the Last Glacial Maximum. Nature Geoscience; DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2225 Jiawei Bao et al. Future increases in extreme precipitation exceed observed scaling rates, Nature Climate Change (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nclimate3201 Czymzik, M., Muscheler, R. and Brauer, A. 2016. Solar modulation of flood frequency in central Europe during spring and summer on inter-annual to multi-centennial timescales. Climate of the Past 12: 799-805. Stephan Steinke,*, Mahyar Mohtadi, Matthias Prange, Vidya Varma, Daniela Pittauerova, Helmut W. Fischer (2014) Mid- to Late-Holocene AustralianeIndonesian summer monsoon variability, Quaternary Science Reviews 93 (2014) 142e154 Christopher M. Taylor, Richard A. M. de Jeu, Françoise Guichard, Phil P. Harris & Wouter A. Dorigo ‘Afternoon rain more likely over drier soils’ will be published in Nature on 12 September 2012. www.nature.com DOI 10.1038/nature11377 R.K. Tiwari1,* and Rekapalli Rajesh2 (2014) Imprint of long-term solar signal in groundwater recharge fluctuation rates from North West China. Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060204 C. R. Tozer et al.: An ice core derived 1013-year catchment-scale annual rainfall reconstruction, The paper will be available for download from Hydrology and Earth System Sciences from 0900 AEST, 11 May 2016. Vance et al, Interdecadal Pacifi c variability and eastern Australian mega-droughts over the last millennium (2014) American Geophysical Union, doi: 10.1002/2014GL062447 Varma, V., Prange, M., Lamy, F., Merkel, U., and Schulz, M.: Solar-forced shifts of the Southern Hemisphere Westerlies during the Holocene, Clim. Past, 7, 339-347, doi:10.5194/cp-7-339-2011, 2011. [abstract] [PDF] *A cheeky dig at people struggling to count. January 19th, 2017 | Tags: Predictions (that went wrong), Rain | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Eric Worrall notified me of Obama’s parting present to the UN Gravy Train. By handing cash to the UN he can put it beyond Trump (and the voters) control.
President Barack Obama has made one final contribution to the fight against global warming on his way out the White House door. On Tuesday, Obama transferred $500 million to the UN’s Green Climate Fund, a key program set up to finance climate change adaptation and renewable energy projects in developing countries.
I predict this will reduce sea levels by a factor too small for anyone to detect, even in 2100. But it’s very effective advertising for the Obama brand. Who knows what UN Department head, University, or Foundation is out there right now looking for a former US Pres?
Call me cynical, Obama may really believe he can hold back the tide, but obviously this is not what US voters just voted for. (But who cares what they want, right?) As a form of resume-building, the gifting approach seemed to work well for Julia Gillard who donated $88million of our tax dollars and lo and behold, became Chairman of the Clinton affilliated Global Partnership for Education. Indeed, Australia said No to the Green Climate Fund in December 2014 under Tony Abbott, but it didn’t last. Julie Bishop gave $200m to it just a week later. Who’s head of the UN Green Climate Fund now — Julie Bishop. UPDATE: She is co-chairing with Saudi-Arabia, a country that arrests, tortures and beheads 13 year olds but is apparently concerned about polar bears? This is the sad joke that the UN is. Why is any democracy funnelling money into this corrupt bureaucracy? The Green Climate Fund is not just after the money though, in the past they have also sought to get exemption from prosecution (one law for you, and none for us, eh?!) If the GCF succeeds in its broader negotiations, not only billions but eventually trillions of dollars in climate funding activities could fall outside the scope of criminal and civilian legal actions It seems Obama promised $3 billion to the fund in 2012, but didn’t deliver anything til March 2016 when he handed out the first $500 million. So the $3b was advertising and PR, and the reality was a lot less. It’s still $1b too much.
 Wind farm in Xinjiang viewed from the Lanxin railway. | Image by “Train to Xinjiang Provnice” (sic) The command economy strikes again. China is touted as the renewables leader, installing a gobsmacking one third of all the worlds wind towers. But with a recent economic slowdown, when push comes to shove, coal power is used and wind farms are not. It Can Power a Small Nation. But This Wind Farm in China Is Mostly Idle. [NY Times] — More than 92,000 wind turbines have been built across the country, capable of generating 145 gigawatts of electricity, nearly double the capacity of wind farms in the United States. One out of every three turbines in the world is now in China, and the government is adding them at a rate of more than one per hour. But some of its most ambitious wind projects are underused. Many are grappling with a nationwide economic slowdown that has dampened demand for electricity. Others are stymied by persistent favoritism toward the coal industry by local officials and a dearth of transmission lines to carry electricity from rural areas in the north and west to China’s fastest-growing cities. Apparently the wind farms are not well connected to the cities that need the power (not to mention that the wind probably doesn’t power them at peak times, always needs back up, is unreliable, and unpredictable.) The transmission lines are just not good enough. A friend from Switzerland writes: “When I studied Communist Economic planning 1978, we called these type of investments Economic Bermuda Triangles.” As far as the death of the coal industry goes: China has been adding a new idle coal fired plant nearly every week. (It is building 368 coal fired plants and planning a further 803). India is doubling coal mining by 2020, and Indonesia has already doubled their coal consumption since 2010). Meanwhile in the US, the Amazon wind farm, a 104 turbine plant costing $400m is being built so close to military radars that people are saying it should be shut down before it starts because it is within the exclusion zone and is a threat to national security. Seven years later, nothing has changed. Back in 2009 Scientific American was saying the exact same thing about Wind in China: Keep reading → January 18th, 2017 | Tags: Renewable Energy, Wind Power | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | |
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