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The obvious headline:
“Worst drought in history was 100 years ago, nothing to do with CO2”
The Carbophobic headline:
Drought of 1891 to 1903 reconstructed shows today’s conditions likely to have more devastating effects
Indoctrinated ABC copy-writers can’t see anything other than future doom and a chance to advertise the government religion. Figure that the Australian GDP per capita is 13 times larger now than in 1900. We have phones, planes, antibiotics, air-conditioning, satellites, and super computers, yet somehow we wouldn’t cope as well if the drought hit now?
It’s great, for a change, to see the ABC reporting on historic Australian extremes, and the BOM researching our amazing documentary history, shame they miss the bleeding obvious.
By Nikolai Beilharz, ABC Enviro-propaganda Unit.
A reconstruction of the Federation drought has found that if it were to occur again today, its effects would likely be even more devastating in some areas of the country.
The ‘once in a century drought’, which went from 1891 to 1903, caused an ecosystem collapse affecting more than a third of the country. The drought was one of the world’s worst recorded ‘megadroughts’, which […]
Unfortunately this survey closes Saturday Sunday at 5pm EST. One DAY to go now. [Correction: Day was wrong, go for it. h/t Eric Worrall].
Apologies to those who would have liked to send in a submission. Hopefully I covered much on your behalf.
The National Environmental Science Programs wants feedback and to figure out priorities for environmental research in one specific program. This funding is $145m, among other things they fund David Karoly at CSIRO. The form promises a receipt and a PDF reply.
NESP is seeking your feedback
The National Environmental Science Program (NESP) is scheduled for completion in 2021. Early planning for a future environmental research program to succeed NESP has commenced. The details of a future program are subject to Government decisions.
Feedback on key aspects of NESP will help inform the design and administration of a future program. A survey is now available via the Department’s online consultation hub. The survey will close on 30 June 2019.
Consultation on the National Environmental Science Program
h/t Darren Nelson
________________________________________________________________________________________
6. What have been the barriers to engagement [with NESP research]?
1. Data and methods are not always publicly available. […]
Oregon’s Eleven Update: The eleven Republican Senators remain in hiding to block a vote on the HB2020 Cap N Trade bill. The ruling Democrats have now said the bill is dead — even suggesting that they don’t have the numbers in the Senate themselves. But Republicans are wondering if that’s just a ploy to trick them into returning. After all, if the Democrats didn’t have enough votes from their own Senators why did they put the bill up for a vote?
If the State Troopers caught them, would they detain them “in the Chamber”?
So much for a high trust society:
Top Oregon Democrats Say Climate Change Bill Is Dead After GOP Senators Fled the State
Chip Browlee, Slate
9.3 out of 10 based on 66 ratings […]
State troopers have been called in to get Oregon’s Republican senators back to vote on a climate change bill, but all 11 senators are in secret locations apparently interstate. No vote can take place on anything without at least one of those senators being in the chamber to vote.
…
Oregon’s Republican state senators go into hiding over climate change vote amid militia threat
ABC News USA.
Eleven Republicans refused to show up to work on Thursday and went into hiding in protest of HB2020, a bill that establishes a carbon cap, in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Industries that emit carbon dioxide — power plants, manufacturers, etc. — would have to buy an “allowance” for each metric ton emitted, thereby reducing the incentive to produce carbon dioxide in the first place.
The goal of the bill is to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050 versus 1990 numbers.
It’s a question of democracy: On the one hand, if Oregonians voted for this draconian cut, they ought get it. On the other, the Republicans are incensed and want a democratic solution — a state wide ballot. The legislation is such a disaster for a […]
If only we had built more windmills, and changed more light-globes we could have prevented the British voting to control their own nation. It all makes sense — if you are insane, or a broadcaster paid one billion a year to promote Big Government.
What a disaster — the fifth largest economy choose to trade more with the rest of the world and be less under the thumb of Germany and Brussels. Such madness needs an explanification. So here it is: Our coal plants caused a terrible drought in Syria which made lots of nice people seek refuge in rich countries, I mean “globally”, and that made people talk about a refugee problem in the UK (which wasn’t really a problem, see) and that made scared, selfish and small minded populist voters choose fear and Brexit over the glorious wonder of the EU.
This is the genius analysis we pay Sabra Lane and the ABC for:
SABRA LANE: Could it be that Brexit, the UK voting to leave the EU, is the result of a cascading series of events due in part to climate change?
…
ROBERT GLASSER: Yeah, so there was a […]
The leaderless Yellow Vest — #GiletJaunes protest against living costs is escalating in France and spreading around the world to Belgium, The Netherlands, Serbia, even Basra and Bagdad in Iraq. A Yellow Vest protest is planned for Saturday in Vancouver. The workers are fed-up with being ignored and milked for causes they don’t support, fed up with being shamed for driving cars or for voicing their concerns. On twitter both the left and right sides of politics are trying to claim ownership (though most of the left are silent, recognizing that this is driven from the provincial and rural population and aims right at their sacred cows). Oil refineries are being blockaded. Ambulance workers and firefighters have joined in. Students have aslo started to protest about education changes — blocking over 100 high schools. So far four people have been killed and 133 people injured. Shops and hotels have lost 20% or more of their revenue. They’re flipping over Porsches. Macron’s popularity is down to 23%. The protesters are now starting to cite other issues like the UN migration pact which they don’t want Macron to sign.
Even after the violence and damage over 70% of people surveyed in France […]
Obviously, if you are a thirsty solar panel, Australia is the place to be. We have ready-made irrigated high quality agricultural land set to be covered with an uneconomic and unreliable solar panels.
Only collective-coerced taxpayers are stupid enough to pay for this.
It’s so silly, groups of unconnected farmers of all different kinds are rallying together to oppose the flagrant waste.
Prime agricultural land loss or booming future energy? That’s the solar planning conundrum for Victoria
Residents near Shepparton are concerned that farmland the Victorian Government has invested in under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan will be lost to agriculture as the state undergoes a solar farm boom.
Four applications for solar farms in the Greater Shepparton region that could produce up to 243 megawatts of electricity have been proposed for Tatura, Tallygaroopna, Lemnos and Congupna, and have been ‘called in’ by the Victorian planning minister.
Critics say there has been no thought put to where the solar farms are being placed and how much prime agricultural land is being lost, and while there is suitable, more arid land available close by.
At least two of the solar farms have […]
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 […]
…
The Western media was apoplectic about Russia!Trump!Hillary! but apparently missed the real game. Behind the scenes, the Russians were feeding the eco-gullibles “Frack-hate” campaigns in the UK and elsewhere in the hope of curbing the threat Fracking posed to Russian gas exports. It’s paying off — British people are buying Russian gas.
Did the Russians capture Victoria and South Australia? Who knows. The ABC won’t ask, and environmentalists won’t tell. Possibly Putin didn’t need to bother — we’re pretty good at destroying our export industries ourselves.
Before we’d even had a debate here in Australia, everyone “knew” fracking was bad.
h/t to GWPF which has a whole string of stories.
Green Russian Anti-Fraking Campaign paying off: Britain becomes more dependent on Putin’s Gas
David Sheppard, Financial Times, 14/03/18
Half of Britain’s imports of liquefied natural gas so far this year have come from Russia, illustrating how UK households have started sending more money to Moscow after Vladimir Putin made boosting exports of the super-cooled fuel a priority.
The background —Russia’s War on Fracking
Tom Rogan, National Review Online, Feb 2015
Today, Russia is waging another active-measures campaign. But this time Russia’s target is fracking. […]
Tim Flannery, 2004, The West Australian.
Flannery will be on Q&A tonight (bet you can’t wait, copy your questions and tweets below please!). Let’s check the exact wording of his original 2004 prediction that Perth would become a ghost town. It tells us something, not just about Flannery and a messiah complex (he really does talk of himself as an old testament prophet), but about journalism. Back then journalists interviewed critics too. Flannery was even called “alarmist” in 2004.
The original story had the calm headline: “Perth Will Die, says Top Scientist”. That article has gone beyond the space time continuum, but thankfully, it was preserved by the Wayback Machine.
Perth will become a ghost city within decades as rising global temperatures turn the Wheatbelt into a desert and drive species to the brink of extinction, a leading Australian scientist warns.
–Carmelo Amalfi, The West Australian
Perth in 2018, is wet, cool and productive and 30% larger:
Dams are at their equal highest level at the end of summer since 2002, and Perth has 67 billion litres more than any year of the last seven. The desert seems to be shrinking, arid regions […]
How much do we hate Lignite Gas?
Victoria is suffering the largest rises in wholesale electricity prices in the country, as it sits on large gas fields that it won’t touch. Why — geniuses hope to reduce global droughts and floods and sea level in 2100.
Robert Gottleibsen savages the state governments that conducted the renewables experiment without mentioning the real costs or the cheap alternatives.
If Victoria allowed its gas to be developed the energy scene in Australia would be transformed, as would the outlook for the nation.
But that’s not much consolation for those in vast areas of rural NSW and Victoria plus suburban Melbourne and small areas of South Australia who suffered blackouts or reduced power on Sunday night. It’s true part of the outages were caused by fuses, but the outages were too widespread. It’s another smokescreen.
If similar conditions are repeated on weekdays and/or extend over several days the blackouts will be devastating as a result of the political vandalism. Government spin doctors and others are desperately trying to conceal the truth about the damage governments headed by Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian (plus her predecessors […]
While geniuses are bragging that the Australian grid survived two normal hot summer days without falling over, they don’t mention the flaming spectacle of the cost.
Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly, after a couple of suggestions from me, have calculated the full staggering electricity bill at $119m for SA and $267m for Victoria, making it nearly a $400 million dollar bonfire — for two days that were neither the hottest ever, or records for peak electricity use. See their work and details below.
To put this in perspective, a whole new gas plant could have been built for around $230 million. Instead of vaporising this money, Australians could have constructed one whole new gas generation plant, paid it off, and had money left over to give away free electricity.
Every household of four in Victoria just lost something like $170 of productivity for two days of electricity, and in South Australia, $280. Respectively, $45 per Victorian and $70 per South Australian. While businesses also share this burden, ultimately companies are made of people, and this is productivity lost to both states. The losers are shareholders, customers, and employees. Some will be interstate, but the pain flows back. The price is […]
How many people have died prematurely because they swapped their fats for carbohydrates?
More fat meant less death (left). More carbs (right) meant the opposite (at least above 60%). (Click to see the full table of Figure 1 results).
New research published in the Lancet shows that low fat diets could increase your risk of death.
Specifically, those who are in the top fifth of carbohydrate-eaters are also about 28% more likely to die than the fifth eating the lowest amount. This is a correlation (only), but the PURE* study was tracking the thing that matters most — all-cause mortality — and they followed the diets of 135,000 people in 18 countries for 5 – 9 years. Loosely, if people avoided high carbohydrate diets, they were less likely to die.
The graph flattens off below “60% carbs” (that’s a percentage of total calories). However, the mortality numbers keep improving for the highest fat intakes which rather skewers 40 years of headlines. I’m guessing that some people who kept carbs below 60% ate more protein instead, which, judging by the “fat” graph, wasn’t as useful.
The McMaster University team announced this quiet bomb, slightly obscured, in a press release […]
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.
[…]
The seismic shift continues.
In the new Trumpocene, executives have suddenly realized that there is whole other world out there. This is pretty big stuff. People in Manhattan are even thinking they might need to hire country folk, or, crikey, set up country offices. They are suggesting maybe Big Data from internet surveys is missing the point (and half the country), and wait for it… they may have to really talk to rural people, and (pause, because this is so profound) … face to face.
Even possibly in their homes.
Trump’s Win Has Ad Agencies Rethink How They Collect Data, Recruit staff
Wall Street Journal
“This election is a seminal moment for marketers” says Joe Tripodi, Subway sandwich chain.
Trump’s win spurs concerns that ad agencies are out of touch with consumers
In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, advertisers are reflecting on whether they are out of touch with the same people who propelled the businessman into the White House. By ALEXANDRA BRUELL and SUZANNE VRANICA
A few days after the Nov. 8 election, the chief executive of the ad agency giant McCann Worldgroup summoned top executives to discuss what […]
This is such a change. It used to be that the best a skeptic could hope for was a politician who “believes the science” but spoke in a code about wanting more evidence. But here’s a candidate openly wooing skeptics — no pandering to political correctness. Imisides is equipped with a PhD in chemistry and he wants a debate: Look at me as a type of scientific Dirty Harry, he says. He explains why lawyer-politicians use the wrong reasoning and we need scientist politicians (like him, obviously). His points are not just about Australian politics but all Western governments. He skips the scientific details here (we all know them), but I can vouch that from his past emails he’s not only done the homework on aerosols, hotspots, ice cores, and different IPCC reports, he’s even familiar with the devastating Thompson’s case (skeptical farming family). This man is a serious skeptic. Well informed, and he understands how to reason. In a double dissolution election, he’s tackling a big vacant niche so he has a real chance (and with a lucky #1 spot on the ticket to boot). I wish there were more like him in every state — scientifically […]
It’s another month of BOM Bingo. The ABC and BOM are trumpeting a “hottest” ever headline yet again, and Warwick Hughes is onto them already.
Conveniently the ABC forgets to mention that March Maximum Temps have been hotter before many times and with a pattern that has nothing to do with CO2. How many in the ABC audience would know that?
March temperatures sets record as hottest ever, Bureau of Meteorology says
“You could be forgiven for not noticing the end of summer — March was a hot one.” says Sara Phillips. But actually, if you are human, you could be forgiven for thinking this was just another hot March like so many before. For SE Australia where most humans live, the hottest March, and wildly so, was in 1940. Across the whole of Australia these kinds of maximum temperatures in March have been occurring for decades and 1986 was much much hotter. See the BOM graph below.
Hands up who can spot the horrid effect of CO2 in this graph?
Stick with the logic. Must be CO2 that caused the cold spike in 2011 (and 1967, 1942 and 1913). This is witchcraft.
You could be forgiven […]
A bike used to transport coal for domestic use in China.
The death tally: Real pollution kills 5 million people annually, CO2 saves 500 million with extra crops.
The problem: The poor lack cheap clean electricity.
The groupthink solution: Restrict coal consumption, reduce “emissions” (and make electricity more more expensive).
What do countries with low air pollution do? They burn coal. (75% of Australian electricity comes from coal.)
What do people who care about the poor do: A) Copy success, or B) Start a carbon market?
Some people are conflating issues here.
New research shows that more than 5.5 million people die prematurely every year due to household and outdoor air pollution. More than half of deaths occur in two of the world’s fastest growing economies, China and India.
Power plants, industrial manufacturing, vehicle exhaust and burning coal and wood all release small particles into the air that are dangerous to a person’s health. New research, presented today at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), found that despite efforts to limit future emissions, the number of premature deaths linked to air pollution will climb over the […]
The hysteria continues. Some public servants might get sacked. It’s unthinkable. But after the fuss, there will still be 5200 odd staff at CSIRO. The big evil here, apparently, is that we are choosing between two different sorts of scientists.
The lame arguments flow (especially in The Guardian). Prof Neville Nicolls says we need $90m-dollars-worth-of-climate-scientists to stop us being minnows at the “big table”. Maybe baby-climate-scientists have aspired to eat with the science guru’s, but I don’t think the average Australian has the same dream.
Tony Haymet was the Policy Director at CSIRO — and he thinks it’s like shutting down Australian cricket team (not one for exaggeration eh?). David Karoly — Shane Warne, what’s the difference? He also said, it’s a “kick in the guts” to farmers, fishermen and the navy, which it would be if only the climate models could predict things like rain, currents, and sea ice. Haymet barrells on — “We’ve only seen the beginning of climate change. We don’t know what the heck is waiting for us”.
Try to rationalise the statements “97% of scientists agree” with “we don’t know what the heck…”
If a certain Labor government hadn’t vaporised those scientist’s future salaries on […]
August 31, 201. This coronal mass ejection just missed Earth, according to NASA
There were two mysterious sudden spikes in carbon 14 in tree rings around a thousand years ago. Now some researchers at Lund University say they’ve matched those to beryllium layers in ice cores from the Arctic and Antarctic. Some wild event made these changes across continents all over the world at the same time, and about the only thing that could have done that was a massive solar storm (or two). There are estimates these extreme storms would have been ten times stronger than the biggest solar storms we have had in the last few decades. The two big bad storms are described as a few times bigger than even the largest solar storm in modern history, which was The Carrington Event in 1859. The radioactive spikes specifically show up in tree rings in 774/775AD and 993/994AD. It’s pretty cool that we can pin those years down so accurately, and as an aside, I imagine it makes a fairly handy calibration point for tree ring researchers now that we know it was global.
Unfortunately, if one of those happened now, it would not be fun. The […]
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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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