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Terrible fires destroyed 69 houses and 30 caravans and another 39 houses were damaged in Tathra in SE Australia last Sunday.
Greens Chieftain, Richard Di Natale, waited at least two minutes before exploiting their pain to make advertisements for the Green Industrial Complex:
Government’s climate stance ‘like NRA’s on guns after a massacre’
Greens leader Richard Di Natale has controversially likened the government’s refusal to recognise climate change as a cause of the southern NSW bushfires to the National Rifle Association’s failure to acknowledge the role of gun laws in preventing mass shootings in the US.
Asked what the government could do about a global problem when Australia accounted for just 1.3 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, Senator Di Natale said the risk of extreme weather events could be mitigated if the nation transitioned “away from coal”.
“We have to stop the Adani mine from being built. We have to recognise that coal doesn’t have a long-term future. We need to ensure that we take advantage of the huge jobs* that come with building more solar farms, more wind farms,” he said.
According to the Greens, fires are mostly a one variable […]
By Crikey! Birds are deliberately using fire as a tool. Humans are not the only animals on Earth setting things on fire.
Aerial arsonists are on the loose. Sneaky Australian raptors have been spotted picking up burning sticks, or even stealing them from a campfire and then deliberately dropping them on grass so they can feast on rodents fleeing from the fire. Apparently they do this in hunting packs, and will drop the burning stick half a mile away on the far side of waterways or roads. Aboriginal people have been talking about this for years, but no one quite believed it.
This really puts a spanner in the works of the fire management plans. So much for firebreaks.
Someone is going to have to get these birds to apply for permits.
Australian raptors can spread fires. Credit: Bob Gosford
Australian Birds Steal Fire to Smoke Out Prey
Live Science, Mindy Weisberger
Three species of raptors — predatory birds with sharp beaks and talons, and keen eyesight — are widely known not only for lurking on the fringes of fires but also for snatching up smoldering grasses or branches and using them to kindle […]
In less than 24 hours The Guardian can turn personal disasters into political advertising:
Climate change and the Victorian bushfires: this is not a coincidence
Cambell Klose
Klose tells us climate change is too complicated for stupid people:
“The issue of bushfires can’t be divorced from climate change. For too many people climate change remains an esoteric concept – something that may happen to someone else in the hazy, far-off future.”
Luckily gifted people, like Cambell Klose (political adviser) can “feel” the causes of climate change.
“Clearly this isn’t the case. The effects of climate change are being felt right now and it is having real impacts on Australians and people all across the world.”
Who needs computer models? (Or for that matter, thermometers?)
What not to do when faced with infernos:
“Yackandandah is trying to do something about this. The community has committed to powering themselves entirely by renewable energy by 2022.”
Some people reduce fuel-loads, others fight off the flames with a solar panel.
Wind farms may reduce bush fires if we have to chop down large tracts of forest to install them. Otherwise they make expensive fire-breaks.
What warming? […]
Globally, fires have been overlooked as a key player in the global CO2 cycle. Tom Quirk has dug up some studies showing that CO2 emissions from fires can be as high as half of the total emissions from human fossil fuel use.
“In October and November 1997, the haze from fires in Indonesia spread as far the Philippines to the north, Sri Lanka to the west, and northern Australia to the south. In the Malaysian state of Sarawak on Borneo, there was a pollution index reading of 860.” | Annette Gartland
Peat deposits can be an extraordinary 20 metres thick. In 1997, a fire consumed 8,000 square kilometers of mostly peatland in Borneo. Researchers estimated 0.2 Gt of carbon were released in this one area that year, and that carbon emissions from fires across Indonesia in 1997 emitted between 0.8 and 2.5 Gt — or “13 to 40%” of the size of global human fossil fuel emissions.[1] Obviously uncertainties are large, but so are the numbers. It all makes the idea of a “carbon market” pretty meaningless: the largest players in this market can’t play and don’t pay. In carbon accounting, fires are “an act of God” (non-anthropogenic), and […]
A major stormfront in NSW has dropped 170mm on rain on Ulladulla, ploughed down trees, drove waves 8m high onshore, and put the airport underwater in Sydney. It has carpeted the Blue Mountains in 20cm of snow. 30,000 homes lost electricity and 60 people were stuck in a train for two hours. This time last year the region was burning. Amazing photos at the Daily Mail.
Proof of man-made global warming…
h/t to Eric Worrall and Waxing Gibberish.
Image (Top) Photographer Nick Moir, SMH | (Bottom) No photographer listed, Daily Telegraph.
Story of the Fires in 2013 in the SMH | Story with the photos of snow Daily Telegraph
Doreatha Mackellar 1908:
I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains.
We hope everyone is safe.
9.4 out of 10 based on 81 ratings
Tom Quirk has taken look at the numbers for the Australian Government’s direct action plan (someone had to do it). Not surprisingly in a vast nation with hardly any people, the numbers that matter are the ones about “land-use” — which means anthropogenic changes to farms and forests. Electricity is our largest emitter of CO2, but without shutting down the nation there are no easy gains to be had. Demand is inelastic. Cuts are expensive. Renewables are pathetic. Ditto for industry and agriculture. Whether we meet our targets and whether there is P-A-I-N all depends on whether we count the CO2 molecules that come and go from agricultural land and managed forests.
The big question then is do we pretend those CO2 molecules coming and going from plants, soils, lakes and animals are irrelevant? (Greenpeace and the EU seem to think that’s a good plan). It’s a make or break thing in the carbon accounting world. But if carbon is causing global warming, surely all CO2 molecules are equally to blame. However only net emissions caused by humans (and which wouldn’t have been emitted naturally) count towards the national tallies and targets.
If we […]
The year 1851 and CO2 is 287ppm in Law Dome Antarctica. The climate is perfect, but Australians are dealing with the worst fires in recorded history, scorching heat, drought, searing wind and by the sounds of it, an arabian dust storm. There are no skycranes, no mobile phones, and no helitankers. Temperatures in the shade hit 117F in Melbourne (that’s 47C), 115 in Warnambool, 114 in Geelong. But those are not BOM official records (the BOM didn’t exist until some 50 years later). The conditions were unprecedented in living memory even though, at the time, many people said fires and droughts were commonplace. Businesses stopped, and it was described as “wanton martyrdom” to go out in the streets. People fighting the fires realized they had to flee instead and took en masse onto galloping horses to head for bare hilltops or watercourses. One writer two weeks later suggests the fire consumed 150,000 pounds of life and property, “to the utter ruin of many families.” The population was around 80,000. Despite the devastation, no one suggests a carbon tax.
‘When the smoke turned day into night’ Painted by William Strutt | Library Of Victoria
Apparently the pall of smoke was […]
The Age in Melbourne said they were “keen” to get a piece like this from David on Tuesday, but on Wednesday decided not to go with it.
Unfortunately figures on fuel loads are rare. David used to do carbon accounting for the Australian Government, which included developing the ability to estimate forest debris in Australian forests from a combination of plant models, satellite data on vegetation, and weather data. That capability exists in the Department of Environment, in the unit that produces Australia’s carbon accounts. However the figures here are only what David has heard from other sources over the years, and do not reflect any official or government figures. – Jo
UPDATE: Skynews tells us Defence admit starting the mega Lithgow fire last Wednesday. “A massive fire burning in Lithgow and the Blue Mountains was caused by explosives training which was being carried out in the area by the department of defence.”
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Fuel Loads Not Climate Change Are Making Bushfires More Severe
Dr David Evans
The bibles of mainstream climate change are the Assessment Reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) every six years or so. The latest was issued recently, in September […]
The Australian media are going all out on climate change and bushfires.
The ABC 7:30 Report last night clearly laid out the options for preventing mega bush-fires.
Funded by you whether you like it or not.
Watch the whole bizarre post-modern witchcraft here: ABC Channel 1
Yes, the world has warmed by 0.7C since 1900. We are living in a new climate. Before, when things were, on average imperceptibly cooler, megafires did not happen. Right?
Thanks to Peter Ritson for the short video version.
“The Science is in”. Annabel Crabb tells us “The link is established between climate change and bushfires”. (What “link” would that be Annabel? — That when there is a bushfire there are more media stories about climate change?)
As Simon at ClimateMadness jokes, obviously there is no groupthink at the ABC because they put forward all the views from every side of Greenness:
9 out of 10 based on 109 ratings […]
Note the mass emissions in the Amazon and Africa in Sept 2007
The Carbon tracker shows the major CO2 polluters as they splurt out CO2. See the massive plumes of CO2 around the planet.
Look at China… watch clusters of coal fired power stations bursting into life only to shut down a month later. (Or maybe not.)
Is that mass rallies of four wheel drives each August in the Congo? No, it must be air-conditioners in Kinshasa…
😉
Tom Quirk tells me that the intermittent polluters around the equatorial region are likely to be massive fires. (And there are even monster fires as far north as Siberia).
I’m intrigued but I want some data. The NASA Earth Observatory obviously have some data — see the picture here of the same month as the picture at the top (sept 2007). It is not enough though. The dots represent the number of fires, but not the intensity, and not the fuel load…
Note the active fires in the Amazon and Africa in Sept 2007
Watch the global wildfires rage and die out in this animation below:
8.2 out of 10 based on 36 ratings […]
Good on you Chris Tangey.
Chris Tangey captured moving images of a dust storm picking up a bushfire.
He’s turned down some income to stand on his principles.
Al Gore wanted to use the awesome shots of a dust devil picking up a bushfire, which happened on Sept 11, 360km southwest of Alice Springs at Curtin Springs Station. When Al Gores office asked for rights to use the footage, Tangey knocked him back. He felt its use in a climate change setting would be “deliberately deceptive” and that it was “difficult for me to imagine a fire event less relevant”.
“I am aware that you may have missed the reporting on the very localised nature of this firestorm,” Tangey wrote. “However, in any case, I am confused as to why you would offer to buy a licence to use it at all unless you had conducted even elementary research which might indicate that this Mt Conner event had direct linkage to global warming/climate change.”
9.3 out of 10 based on 120 ratings […]
Youtube link
By Jo Nova
Trust us, Kids, We’re Climate ‘Educators’
Tony Thomas has uncovered a plot in Tasmania to turn our schools into leftist activist assembly lines (more than they already are). Luckily it appears to be so boring, no one is watching. (OK, that’s hardly luck, just a fact of life. Beating people up with propaganda is, by definition, and especially after 30 years, not that exciting.) But Curious Climate Schools is still harming children and teachers too, and wasting the taxes of bus drivers, builders and bakers.
In the end, publicly funded academics are shamelessly exploiting eight year olds. They work on their youthful anxiety and naivete (and their dreadful science education) to create political lobby groups which will help academics get more funding. Vote for Big Government! Vote for Climate Change Grants! Write letters to the M.P. you are too young to vote for! It is disgustingly self serving, though all the Doctors of Climate Trauma would be mortified to hear that. They are saving the world, after all. They are the saints who collect salaries. The prophets on academic pay scales.
It’s just Big Government advertising itself, but disguised as “education”:
The […]
By Jo Nova
History shall record the ignominious boom and bust of a car genre forced on citizens so they could produce better weather.
Things are so bad, Joe Biden has even put the brakes on his aggressive EV scheme, stepping away from the 2030 deadline. “It’s just a delay” of course. The plan would have forced car manufacturers to sell 3 EV’s for every 2 cars with a combustion engine by 2030. If customers didn’t volunteer to buy enough EV’s, companies would be forced to jack up prices of the cars everyone wants in order to cross-subsidize the discounted sales of the unpopular EV’s. Car dealers were appalled and said so.
EV sales growing in some places but falling in others. The shift has been so fast the full length of the supply chain is in turmoil. The price of lithium has fallen 90% from it’s peak, nickel has halved. Ford has sacked 1,400 people. GM has cut its workforce by 1,000. Hertz is selling one third of it’s electric fleet and cancelling $3 billion dollars worth of forward orders. A month ago, the biggest political party in the EU decided it would rather drop the ban on […]
Paul Englher | ABC News
By Jo Nova
Just how wise is it to have a grid dependent on all this fragile infrastructure?
Nature seems to be telling us something about adding another 10,000 kilometers of vulnerable transmission lines.
Yesterday six high voltage transmission lines collapsed in Victoria leaving half a million people without electricity for hours. But only a few weeks ago five towers collapsed in Western Australia putting 30,000 in the dark. And out in Kalgoorlie, when the gas backup plants failed, thousands of people went for days without power in 40 degree heat. Some people were unable to call triple zero, freezers full of food were spoilt and nearly everything left to buy had to be paid for in cash.
In Victoria the towers fell at 1:10pm during a storm. Their loss triggered the shut down of 4 large coal power units at Loy B Yang taking out 2 GW of generation. It took three hours to get one turbine back on line, and eight hours to restore the second. Everyone is talking about “the coal fired outage” but about half the wind power running at the time was also lost, and over the […]
By Jo Nova
Farmers win the day after mass protests
Thousands of farmers in tractors and trucks protested in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Ireland, Sweden, Portugul, Greece and Spain. Farmers in Poland are planning to block the Ukrainian border. The French farmers held Paris under siege, blocking roads, pouring manure everywhere and leaving supermarket shelves empty, then after they won some concessions from President Macron, they kept on driving to Brussels and did it all again with help from farmers from other countries. The EU is the target.
The thing that made this so potent was not just that the farmers had heavy equipment that moved obstacles and drove over barriers, they also had huge public support. Something like 80 to 90% of French citizens supported the farmers and were willing to put up with the inconvenience. Then to cap it off, EU elections are coming in June, and they only happen once every five years. The Greens look like they will do badly. That people like Geert Wilders can win in national elections must have shocked the politerati class. But right wing governments have been elected in Italy, Sweden, and Finland too.
This looks like a major win. […]
By Jo Nova
Australians are angry the BOM didn’t see the flooding rains coming
Worse, we’re betting the nation on the BOM’s ability to predict the climate.
The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) tells Australians that record breaking extremes are getting worse because of our cars and our air-conditioners (that’s “The State of the Climate“). But when the BOM can’t predict record breaking rain a month in advance, or even the day before, we know the BOM doesn’t understand what drives the climate.
Somehow the BOM expect Australians to spend trillions and rearrange their economy based on their fifty year prophesies, but not to mind when “this summer” goes right off the rails.
Back in September the BOM issued its El Nino alert, and Australians were told it would be a hot and dry and to prepare for a summer of bushfires. Farmer sold their lambs, and adjusted harvest accordingly.
This was the BOM solemn prediction in late October, for the very next month of rainfall
Across most of Australia the odds were only 20-40% of getting average rain.
Instead this is what happened:
BOM
And in December most of the country was predicted to have a fifty […]
By Jo Nova
Insurance companies just want to save the world right?
An anonymous insurance insider warns the plan is to force people to buy a digital car, and claims the push is so strong we won’t even be able to get insurance for a combustion engine vehicle. It sounds like a conspiracy theory except that insurers themselves admit Big Data from cars is worth a fortune, and they’ve have been lobbying to get your car data out of the hands of the car manufacturers (purely for your own good), and they’re already “involved in negotiations with the European digitalization and data protection manager”. Righto. Just six weeks ago, a Managing Director of Allianz insurance said he wants to track your car data so he can be “your invisible Guardian Angel.” Creepy, yes?
Wouldn’t you love to have your insurer, the police and the IRS as your back seat drivers?
Imagine a world in which the insurer acts as an invisible guardian angel to drivers, warning them of upcoming weather hazards or accident hotspots to avoid.
— Christoph Lauterwasser Managing Director, Allianz Center for Technology
According to GeoffBuysCars an insider at a large European insurance company has […]
By Jo Nova
Did they forget to mention a clean green planet is full of steel transmission lines?
Recently the International Energy Agency (IEA) told the world off for not preparing the Earth for the transition they want to force upon us. Apparently, we should have paid attention and built the right grid and now, due to our laziness, we will have to rush in another 80 million kilometers of interconnectors by 2040. Just like that.
All the high voltage lines we built in the last century, we have to build again in the next 17 years.
Remember, it’s not their fault that renewables need far more land, more space, more back up and more infrastructure — it’s our fault we didn’t build a world ready for their holy energy. Those sacred wind and solar gifts cannot be bestowed upon us! We are unworthy:
IEA Lack of ambition and attention risks making electricity grids the weak link in clean energy transitions First-of-its-kind global study finds the world must add or replace 80 million km of grids by 2040, equal to all grids globally today, to meet national climate targets and support energy security.
Notice how these changes “are essential” […]
By Jo Nova
Written just in time for the UN Climate junket, Anna Lee, 21, declares she’s too worried about climate change to have children.
In the past these declarations have been a part of a Doomer fashion show where people who probably wouldn’t have had children anyway brag about how saintly they are for not having them. They wear their childlessness as a badge of glory. But Anna Lee’s declaration sounds more like a cry for help from someone raised on a climate fantasy. She doesn’t feel she can offer her children a future, perhaps because she doesn’t have one herself. She has, after all, been raised by the village on a dead-end religion. The world will only be saved if impossible things happen. Storms, fires and floods can be stopped with whirly-gigs and magical silicon carpets, don’t you know? The solution is so obvious, and it’s cheap and free too, but people in our tribe are too stupid and greedy to do it. Imagine what a depressing message that would be — born into a craven mob of colonizing lemmings who didn’t do anything good like ending slavery, inventing antibiotics or walking on the moon. Losers…
Some subset […]
Who believes the UN anyway?
By Jo Nova
A few academics want to add apocalyptic climate labels to meat to turn people off their steaks
The aim, apparently, is to shame and harass people into buying the vegeburgers they aren’t voluntarily buying, and thus make the Weather Gods less angry in 2100 AD. Fortunately, in the trial, 90% of would-be meat-eaters just ignored the label and chose the meat anyhow. This must have disappointed the new prohibitionists.
Climate labels similar to cigarette packet warnings could cut meat consumption
The Conversation
To gauge the impact of graphic warning labels on the number of people opting for meat, we split participants into four groups. One group saw a warning label beneath the meat option depicting a deforested area and the phrase “eating meat contributes to climate change”. Another group saw the meat option labelled with an image of a man having a heart attack and the text “eating meat contributes to poor health”. A third group saw a label below the meat option depicting caged animals in a wet market, alongside “eating meat contributes to pandemics”. The final group saw the four meal options with […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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