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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 […]
Photo by Spiritrespect.
By Jo Nova
Everything just changed. For the first time in Climate Bureaucracy, Nuclear power can save the world too.
Until today, only renewables had the Holy Sacred Power against Climate Change. But last night the UK and US signed a new agreement at COP29 to share “billions of pounds worth of nuclear research” in order to “decarbonize” the world.
They did this backflip in such a tearing rush, they didn’t even have time to phone the Prime Ministers they were offering this bonanza to. They accidentally listed all the countries they expected to sign up, only to find the Australian government is going to an election waving the anti-nuclear flag, while the opposition demons carry the pro-nuclear pennant. Oopsie indeed. The press release was reissued, but the Labor government in Australia are now trying to explain why nuclear power is great in submarines, but too expensive and slow for sites that don’t move and aren’t underwater. It’s entertaining.
Apparently, Australia has too much sunshine, and thus we’re stuck with solar power. We also have the largest uranium reserves in the world, but shh. This is like energy lessons on Sesame Street.
Image by GrumpyBeere from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Maybe it’s lucky Australia didn’t have to fight a war when Chris Barrie was the Australian Defence Force Chief.
Admiral Barrie says “ security threats from climate change dwarfed those posed by China”. Apparently the land of drought, fire and flood is will be overwhelmed with a one millimeter annual sea level rise. The things that really scare him are not the subs, drones, propaganda programs, embedded spies or hypersonic missiles, what really freaks him out is a half a degree of warming.
So, five or six retired defence types are calling for an “emergency mobilization” and another government bureaucracy — a dedicated office of Climate Threat Intelligence — which if it was intelligent would do what no government has ever done, and audit the UN climate models. They’d discover the models fail on humidity, drought, rain, clouds, the upper troposphere, the Antarctic, the sea ice, the short term, the long term, ocean currents, and practically everything else.
They also want some kind of “early warning system” — in case the cyclones develop Stealth mode perhaps?
You never know when a tropical storm will sneak up on you. Especially if […]
Battery bombs in the suburbs?
By Jo Nova
You think exploding pagers was a wicked trick….
Hypothetically, suppose you were distracted while you tried to change tropospheric jet streams, and accidentally gave away your national manufacturing to a foreign adversary. Next thing you know, you’re buying the batteries they make, and installing them in essential grid infrastructure and thousands of homes. You’re patting yourself on the back for getting a cheap deal (never mind the slaves) and it all seems dandy until one sunny day, a leader who was cheesed off with a trade deal, quietly switched off the “overcharge protection” on all of them remotely.
At that point, millions of solar panels are pumping excess electricity into batteries that have no safety cut off. A few houses start to go off like popcorn, and an hour later we’re all living at the Western Front.
Brian Craighead – chief executive of Energy Renaissance, has come to warn us — it’s a hidden threat to national security. He says Australia has already installed 220,000 batteries that were made in potentially unfriendly places, and each home battery has roughly 7,500 times as much energy as a pager. As he […]
Lest we forget, the Luton airport carpark fire October 2023.
By Jo Nova We know it’s coming. One day, sometime there will be a skyscraper inferno started by an EV or a scooter and made so much worse because there were other EV’s in the basement carpark.
At the moment companies are fined $100,000 in Australia for failing to include high fire danger warning labels on kids beach towels, but it’s no problem if children sleep in a tower above a carpark full of EVs.
But after a spate of fires in China, Hotels there are starting to ask customers with EVs to park in open areas outside the building.
China bans electric vehicles from underground carparks
by Jamie Seidel, News.com
… Chinese hotels and property managers have begun to ban all electric vehicles – scooters, e-bikes, family cars or commercial vans – from their undercroft car parks.
“Hotels and other buildings in Hangzhou, Ningbo, Xiaoshan and other places in Zhejiang have banned electric vehicles from entering underground garages for safety reasons, sparking heated discussions,” Chinese online dissident “Mr Li is not your teacher” reported in a post to X (which is […]
By Jo Nova
For some reason our long climate proxies work for hundreds of years but always seem to stop working just before the man-made catastrophe appears. It seems to me that if a coral-tree-clam-sediment thermometer worked in 1393, it should work in 2020. It’s not like Earth has run out of trees, mud, pollen or corals.
So here we are again, this time with a new Fijian coral that runs 627 years continuously from 1380 to 1997. And the experts have to slap “an instrumental record” on for the last twenty years to find the catastrophe. The actual single coral core shows the water of Fiji was the same or even slightly warmer in the Medieval warm period as it was in the 1990s. There’s no sign at all, in 600 years of this coral, that man-made carbon dioxide has had any effect at all on the water around Fiji.
The new data comes from a coral core drilled in 1999, which explains why it suddenly stops. It does not explain why the world is about to end, but worried scientists waited 25 years to assess the coral core.
The apocalypse is upon us, but no one can […]
By Jo Nova
It could have been so much worse
A Mercedes Benz EV started smoking in an underground carpark in Incheon, South Korea last Thursday at 6:15am. After the immolation, 40 other cars were burnt and another hundred suffered some damage. At least 16 people were taken to hospital for smoke inhalation. Some 48o households lost electricity, and later 121 people had to be relocated. It apparently burned for eight hours. Allegedly, eighty fire engines (or pieces of equipment) turned up with 177 firefighters. Some 209 residents were in the apartment at the time, and “nearly half” were rescued by firefighters from stairs and balconies.
The investigation is ongoing… but there are many puzzles. It wasn’t a cheap car, it wasn’t charging and had been sitting in that spot for 59 hours and nothing apparently triggered the blaze.
Not surprisingly, there are reports that residents in other Seoul apartment blocks are moving to ban electric vehicles from their basement carparks.
EV-phobia spreads, as police investigate cause of electric car explosion
The Nation
Incheon police on Tuesday said it is investigating what caused the mysterious explosion of an electric car last week, but some […]
By Jo Nova
The Crash Test Dummy Nation wins a Gold Medal in Electricity Prices
And you thought last week was bad. While the single spike at $17,000 a megawatt hour in five states simultaneously was a record, just a week later we have the double spike bonfire — peaking at breakfast and dinner on the same day in our two largest states. That’s a high degree-of-difficulty (to pay the bill). This was not just a 5-minute bid rocket — it was 90 full minutes of blitzkreig twice in a day for both NSW and Victoria. With admirable supporting efforts in burning money in Tasmania and South Australia for breakfast, and then in Queensland, which joined the financial bonfire for dinner.
The average price for the whole 24 hour period of August 5th was eye-watering. Last week the spike flattened out to about $300 per megawatt hour across the day. But yesterday in NSW and Victoria, the average price was $2,150 across both states for 24 hours in a row.
It’s possible the AEMO will have to take over the market again in some states to put the fire out.
Welcome to renewable hell
At both peaks Victoria was burning […]
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By Jo Nova
Shh: The great Power Grid Necromancers are at work
And you thought Blackouts were caused by bad management, but really, it’s “Climate Change”. The poor grid managers now have to cope with floods, fires, heatwaves and a tenth-of-a-degree of warming every decade, you know. It’s not their fault. It’s not the Ministers fault. It’s not the fault of the solar power glut, or the wind drought, or the lack of spinning inertia, the dearth of despatchable power, or the byzantine complexity of managing a grid full of unreliable generators being randomly unreliable. The grid is not more fragile because we built 100,000 kilometers of long delicate high-voltage-interconnectors, swaying in the wind, and made of cheap imported steel because we can’t afford to make proper steel ourselves. No!
It’s your fault the blackouts are coming. You didn’t ride your bike, you didn’t eat tofu and crickets, you didn’t buy enough solar panels and you drove your car to work, you planet-monster. What did you expect?
Climate Change is coming for your electricity grid.
It took four writers, five advisors, several editors and probably buckets of money to write an obsequious article radiating nonsense. It’s like […]
Image by Nerijus jakimavičius from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
They want you in an EV so they can use your battery to rescue the unreliable grid they built
There is a desperate need to add billions of dollars worth of batteries to smooth out our volatile grids. As I said last year:
The hapless homeowners will buy the back up battery for the grid and install it in their garage. (Sometimes they might drive it too.)
It’s so much the better if the unwashed masses pay for the batteries themselves, and so it has come to pass. Some academics in Canberra are excited that they finally proved the point and sucked some electricity out of 16 cars at a tight moment in February.
A vehicle-to-grid response: Electric vehicles fed power into Australian grid during blackout, says report
During a major storm event that eventually cut power to tens of thousands of homes, a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) were able to feed power back into Australia’s electricity grid, according to a new report from The Australian National University (ANU).
These 16 cars provided all of 107 kilowatts for an unspecified length of time.
They let slip […]
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