57 Bushfire Inquiries isn’t enough. We need one more for leaders to hide behind

Big Government strangles our ecosystems just like it strangles scientific research. Australia has had 57 bushfire inquiries since 1939. We knew what was coming and we knew how to stop it, and we’ve known for eighty years (and indigenous people for thousands). Instead we paid a garrison of gravy trainers to not-read-those-reports and to create the exact conditions we knew would turn into a pyroconvective catastrophe. State Premiers missed a major threat to their people, their industry, our environment. On top of the death and destruction toll, just one industry, tourism, is looking at a $4.5b loss. Heads must roll. If they were misled, then name the names.

Our institutions failed us: The CSIRO didn’t save us, the ABC didn’t. What’s the point of them? Academics and CRC’s could’ve warned the nation, but instead most experts and the “reporters” said renewable energy would prevent these fires, even though climate change has made no difference to rainfall or droughts, which are driven by ocean currents, and solar cycles, not carbon dioxide. Let’s promote those who got it right, and turn off the tap to those that didn’t. Who pays damages? Who gets sacked?

Just do it: less fuel, less rules, more […]

Climate change is the excuse to hide an Inferno of Incompetence — heads must roll for the billion dollar bushfire mistakes

Whose fault was it and will they get away with it (like all the other times)?

Twenty seven people died, a billion animals, 2,000 homes, tourism wrecked and a plume of smoke stretched from here to South America. Unless heads roll, this cycle repeats every 10 – 20 years. Imagine if the media was demanding to know how State Premiers had allowed this catastrophe, or if the opposition was accusing the government of listening to the Ivory Tower instead of the firies? The problem is, they’re all complicit. Both sides of politics are guilty, and the media didn’t see this coming either.

We can recognise those avoiding responsibility by the way they fob off hard questions:

1. Let’s blame “climate change” (because these fires are “normal” now, get used to it. Plus luckily no one ever says — “you mean it’s China’s fault?”)

2. Let’s say “now’s not the time to play the blame game” and,

3. Coming soon: “let’s wait for the Royal Commission, or Almighty Investigation, or 28th Fire Report” — or whichever comes last. (Who wants to preempt a report even if we already know what it will say. )

But […]

Hallelujah — rain coming

Good rain forecast for East Coast fire-grounds 15 – 50mm.

Probably thanks to the MJO which Joe Bastardi told us was strongly building nine days ago. The northern monsoons have finally started, and the peak MJO position for rainfall has arrived. It won’t end the drought yet, but it might put out some fires.

Rain forecast BOM Australia.

 

As Joe Bastardi explained, there is an extreme Madden-Julian Oscillation going on north of Australia. We’ve launched into “Phase 5” with a rocket, and “wow” — things are far out on the phase diagram. Looking at past MJO patterns the wiggles can loop, dive to the centre, swing wildly out, though I didn’t see any with such an extreme phase 5. They can resemble the flight path of a bee. Predicting what any MJO does next looks difficult, and next week it may have retracted to low normal “six”. Who can say?

Madden-Julian Oscillation map | Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

The BoM does an average forecast of what different phases of the MJO mean for Australian rainfall. I’m not sure how much it would change in an extreme MJO.

9 out of 10 based on 61 ratings […]

The Hotter-Drier “Climate change” myth — the rain in Australia has always been erratic, no CO2 trend

When will our BoM and Climate Experts correct the Fake Science and misinformation?

Climate change leads to a hotter-wetter world. This is a central canon of the theory of man-made global warming. Despite that, none of our paid experts are correcting the myths and misinformation of our public debate. Every man and his monkey (including M.P’s) are saying that Climate Change causes a hotter drier world which leads to fires, and the BOM, CSIRO and millions of scientists apparently agree. So if Australians are misinformed, who’s fault is it? — Not looking at you Andy Pitman, David Karoly, Tim Flannery, ABC Science Unit, Gergis, Sherwood, Trewin, Steffan and all the rest.

Blame the ocean currents for our bush fires

The biggest cause of bush-fires in Australia is the drought. A lack of rain allows the nation to get scorching hot days and dries out the fuel. Yet our long term records show that obscene megatons of CO2 from China has no detectable effect on our long term rainfall. Not in the fire zones, and not across the whole country either. The main driver of droughts and fires therefore is the El Nino oscillation, the IOD, and the SOI. Tax […]

Inferno on Black Friday 1939: 71 deaths, 3,700 buildings, too much fuel and “lit by the hand of man”

Omeo . Image courtesy of Department of Environment and Primary Industries, Victoria. More photos

Those who don’t know history…

On Black Friday 1939, on a day of high wind and savage 45 degree heat (110 Fahrenheit) many separate fires joined forces in Victoria to make mass conflagrations, one of which burned most of the western flanks of the Snowy Mountains all the way to New South Wales. In the end the conflagration burned through two million hectares, 3,700 buildings, 69 mills and killed 71 people. Five towns were completely destroyed — never to be rebuilt. At the time, the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide was 310ppm and 90% of all human emissions were yet to be made. Climate Change has nothing to do with it.

In the end, they were horribly unprepared, the forests were horribly overgrown and the weather was horribly extreme.

Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough.

The Stretton Royal Commission into the Black Friday fires […]

The information war about astonishing arson figures

ABC News Australia, from the Australian Institute of Criminology

Rapidly the word about the astonishing rate of arson and man-made accidents* is spreading, but it doesn’t help “the cause” (which for left-leaning journo’s appears to be getting left-leaning politicians elected).

For example, the awful Binna Burra fire in September was blamed on climate change. Instead it turned out to be caused by two teenagers with cigarette butts. Who looks silly pushing a carbon tax agenda to stop fires?

So The Guardian and the ABC are now compiling stories with conspiracy theories about how a thousand or so tweets with a pedantic error mistaking legal action for arrests somehow demonstrates a mysterious disinformation campaign (it’s pro-ject-ion.) The main mystery here is how a prof in Qld can mind read through twitter — Dr Graham tells us “The motivation underlying this often tends to not be changing people’s opinions about the bushfire itself and how it’s happening, but to sow discord and magnify already existing tensions in polarised political issues.”

Maybe people are just angry at the wanton, pointless and avoidable destruction, yeah?

The Love Media are downplaying the arrests in a situation where catching, charging and convicting people must be […]

“Bombshell” Nostra-Ross-Garnaut got one thing accidentally right

The Daily Mail breathlessly recycles Ross Garnaut’s 2008 Climate Change report which predicted every kind of disaster. They don’t mention that nearly every fire report since time began predicted extreme widespread uncontrollable fires from unmanaged fuel loads. But those experts have cause and effect. Garnaut has magic spells from climate models.

He apparently mentioned the first effects wouldn’t be seen til 2020, and here we are, “week one”. Spooky!

This is more and more like analyzing Climate Astrology.

How a bombshell report PREDICTED Australia’s bushfire crisis with eerie precision 12 years ago

The article is being derisively mocked in most comments there.

I predict that the Daily Mail Australia will soon ban comments like the ABC, and The Guardian.

8.9 out of 10 based on 69 ratings […]

A woodchip mill is better for the environment than greens are

Instead of vaporising a million trees we could have made money, saved lives, homes, property and millions of animals.

Local environmental groups rejoiced that the Eden Woodchip Mill burnt down, then deleted the comment. But ponder, after a man-made inferno, how much better off would the nation have been if we’d chopped down that forest and sold it instead.

“YESSS!!! Some really good news! The Eden Chip Mill is burning down. ” –– Environment East Gippsland EEG

Joy of joys. Even the woodchip pile is on fire? Credit to Jill Redwood from Goongerah who made the first post about the Eden Chip mill burning

Ask a koala: Is it better to chop half the trees down, or incinerate the whole forest?

A lack of hazard reduction hurts in so many ways.

 

 

 

9.5 out of 10 based on 94 ratings

The ScoMo-Bad filter: It doesn’t matter what he does, if it’s Scott Morrison, its bad

The bully media are carefully editing every bit of news through the ScoMo-Bad filter

Nothing he does is going to be well received by the ABC and cohort of Big-Government-freeloaders or artsy journo’s who want to run the country from the shouty sidelines.

We hope he can rise above, because there is no pleasing them, and to try is to fail. It is to play right into their hands.

Like Trump, he has to make an asset out of the overt and ridiculous bias. Mock it, and make fun of it. Preempt their criticisms, beat them at their game by informing the people of how each decision will be received and by using every method of communication outside the mainstream media that he can. Trump does live venues and uses twitter. ScoMo has to find his own path.

When criticized for advertising during the crisis, just point out that Australians are scared right now, justifiably. A message of massive and unprecedented action by the government helps to calm and reassure the people. Many in the media amplify the fear. His advertising is the calm hand of government countering the 24/7 reality-TV-show-frenzy.

Scott Morrison letting the feral media get to […]

How many mushroom risotto’s does it take to stop a bushfire? Golden Globes goes Vegan “for the planet”

In the light of actual news happening around the world, it is a challenge for a committee of entertainment journalists to give some people who pretend to do things, a prize and make that “news”. It’s even harder for them to waltz down red carpets with wildly expensive fashion-set-pieces and pretend to care about anything other than their image. So veganism for weather control makes “sense”, if not for stopping storms, as a form of advertising.

Et Voila: It’s a big commitment after all — forgoing smoked salmon for one meal:

The Golden Globes announced Thursday that the menu for attendees at this year’s awards show will not include meat.

In a statement to The Associated Press, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which hosts the Globes, said that the decision was made to draw attention to the connection between Americans’ diets and climate change.

“If there’s a way we can, not change the world, but save the planet, maybe we can get the Golden Globes to send a signal and draw attention to the issue about climate change,” HFPA President Lorenzo Soria told the AP. “The food we eat, the way we grow […]

Coal stations more reliable in a crisis. Renewable power, interconnectors are fragile and risky!

Who wants to rely on renewables in a crisis?

Just when power is so important the interconnector went down yesterday between NSW and Victoria effectively cutting the East Coast “National” grid in half. It’s not clear if the transmission lines are damaged which will take weeks to repair or just tripped out. But there were blackouts yesterday in NSW, and coal fired power stations in Victoria that could be supplying customers were disconnected from most of NSW. Large industry was again forced to shut down temporarily. Call it “demand reduction” or call it incompetence. We’re a nation that can’t supply heavy industry with electricity. The people of Sydney have been told to turn off washing machines and dryers, spare appliances. Sure, it’s a national crisis, but what got us through the crisis was coal, and what would have stopped a price spike, and kept the industry online, was more coal.

During Black Saturday fires. | Source: Anero.id

Meanwhile electricity prices hit $14,700 for two hours in NSW, with a draw of 12,000MW. I estimate that’s theoretically up to $350 million in electricity costs that could have been used to help repair the damage instead. Some of that won’t be […]

Climate Change to make Boxing Day cricket extinct. ABC and Monash make history extinct.

It’s a taxpayer funded bonfire: The billion dollar ABC does cut-n-paste “journalism” from the largely taxpayer funded Monash Uni, which wrote a one-sided, badly researched piece as advertising for The Australian Conservation Foundation. Not only have Australians played cricket in 42 degree heat a thousand times before, but on days when the sun was obscured by smoke from bushfires. It’s all easy to find history from 150 years ago recorded on official sites and searchable for anyone with “the internet”.

No hard questions asked — the only question that matters is “how does this help Big Government?” Extreme heat due to climate change could send cricket’s Boxing Day Test into extinction, researchers say

By Richard Willingham and Joseph Dunstan, ABC, News

The Boxing Day Test may need to be moved to November or March in the future to avoid extreme heat, which is a danger to players and cricket fans, a new report has suggested.

Cricket Australia must also work to help grassroots clubs deal with extreme heat, the report from Monash University’s Climate Change Communication Research Hub has found.

The study, commissioned by the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), urges Cricket Australia […]

Mega-blazes run riot and witchdoctors rage against them in Australia

The big decision Australia faces — We could try to stop all arsonists, lightning, wind, droughts and cool the entire world, or we could reduce the fuel. Which will it be?

In Australia, the situation is comi-tragic. As potential record-breaking heatwave heads eastwards across the country our fire-fighters are reduced to emergency backburning— an act of sheer desperation on the verge of panic in these conditions. The fires they light in the hope of stopping firestorms are causing firestorms — with flames 70 meters high — even burning down one of the RFS captains homes. This is fuel reduction six months too late. One twelve year old drove a car to escape a fire. 2,000 firefighters are battling 108 blazes. A coal mine and a power station are in the path in NSW. The Mount Piper Power Station generates about 10 per cent of NSW’s electricity and is 3km from a fire front. At the coal mine unprocessed coal lies on the surface. How much fun can you have?

Temperatures of 44C (111f) and 46C (114f) are forecast for the outskirts of Sydney on Friday and Saturday.

Fire has already consumed almost three million hectares of land across NSW this […]

NSW is “kindling to go”: Accumulated fuel is an environmental time-bomb

Photos just in from Bill Johnston in NSW show why Sydney is shrouded in smoke and why so much is still at risk this summer.

The sign marks the fire trail — which is lucky, otherwise no one would know it was there.

Spot the sign in the photo below. Spot the fire-trail.

How many fires would this stop? About as many as a solar panel.

Fire trail or fire trap? | Photo Bill Johnston

This is NSW fire preparation in 2019. ..

This is what a different fire trail looks like (one that works):

Fire meets fire trail, stops. | Photo: Bill Johnston

This break was small but still stopped a manageable fire. Only the ocean will stop a firestorm.

As as Bill says — rainfall lowers the temperature, and drought raises it. Wet soils are hard to heat. Wet woodlands are slower to burn. If there is fuel to burn, a lack-of-rain causes a high fire risk, and everyone knows climate models can’t predict rain on any short term or regional basis. The only thing we know for sure is that a warmer world is a wetter one. Thus and verily 1 + 1 = […]

What do we call it when the State turns off your air conditioner? A “Peaksmart” moment

You can’t make this stuff up.

The Government advertising bureau — the ABC — is telling Queenslanders that it’s good for them if the government switches off their air conditioning. As we pay more than ever for electricity, we also lose control of even our household appliances. If we get something back for the overpriced service, the propaganda unit calls this a payment, and a benefit. If you have a Christmas party and 30 guests and you can’t use your own air conditioner, don’t forget, the State knows best. If it causes “whitenoise” interference, adds one more failure point, or causes people to turn their air conditioners down in temperature preemptively, or program them to come on earlier, who cares?

If the ABC says something is smart, we know it’s …

Power companies will soon be paying you to cut your energy use

Stephen Long, ABC

The units installed on the walls of his apartment look the same as any other air conditioners, but there is a difference. They’re fitted with “PeakSmart” technology. It allows the electricity network company to send a signal that turns the air conditioning down for a […]

ABC discovers data (on facebook) showing wet rainforest has not burned once, ever, or at all, in “tens of millions” of years

This is striking new finding by ABC journalist Ann Arnold that for some reason has not yet been published in a science journal.

Some mystery remains, however as to which dataset could rule out any and all fires in the last 30,000,000 years, or indeed which dataset could prove that those forests and trees have existed in the same place continuously. We keenly await more details on the high resolution sedimentary pollen and missing ash deposit that could show that there were never fires, not one, especially during the Miocene when Antarctica thawed around 24 million years ago and stayed hot for ten million continuous years.

It’s all the more remarkable given that temperatures have varied in the Antarctic by 15 degrees Celcius over the same period, and for 20 million years out of the last 30, it was even hotter than today.

Scientists keenly look forward to seeing those error bars, though one critic, Dr Hyperbowlie suggested the p-values “might be greater than 1. ”

Global Temperature estimates over the last 65 million years.

Bushfires devastate rare and enchanting wildlife as ‘permanently wet’ forests burn for first time

Ann Arnold, ABC, Saturday Extra

These forests have […]

Tipping point in civilization: Experts say “listen to children” (sure, the adults are wrong)

Every day, grownups pay the bills, feed the world, and operate millions of heavy machines that move at deadly speeds. These same adults mostly don’t buy carbon credits, don’t vote Green, and don’t march in XR protests.

But evidently all those engineer-doctor-dentist-farmer humans are wrong:

It’s time to listen to the kids, Professor Steffen said.

“The bottom line is, we’re saying the schoolchildren have got it right — this is a climate emergency.”

The public broadcasting geniuses tell us we must listen to the experts, but the experts say we must listen to the kids.

Apparently the kids are invoking the unprovable endless tipping point. Anytime, anywhere, sorcerers can claim an event is just around the corner.

But the kids are right. The world is now dangerously close to tipping points that will set in motion unstoppable ecosystem collapses. This is a climate emergency.

That’s the message from scientists writing in Nature on Thursday, who say that for some systems, the window to act may have already closed.

As usual, Nick Kilvert writes good advertisements, but doesn’t ask a single semi-soft decent question like: “So Prof Steffen, do you have any empirical […]

Dumb poll, fake headline: Not climate change, 70% of Australians want cheap reliable electricity, 61% biggest worry is “cost of living”.

One survey — so much spin

The Fin Review headline is entirely misleading. “Climate rises as the No. 1 voter concern“. In fact, the same survey shows that two thirds of Australians didn’t even mention “climate change” as one of their top three concerns. The exact same survey shows that when prompted with different topics (rather than just asked what was on the top of their mind) the main concern of a whopping 61% was “cost of living”. Only 34% had said “climate change” in the unprompted question, and that was probably only because climate change is all over the media with bushfires, droughts and duststorms this month. It was the first issue that came into their heads, but not the issue they cared about when asked to choose among the major issues.

The exact same survey also showed that when it comes to Energy Policy fully 70% of Australians wanted cheap reliable energy more than they want “lower emissions”.

Australians prioritise energy affordability (38%), ahead of security and reliability (32%) and reducing emissions (30%).

So the message is unmistakable, yet JWS and all the media missed it. The JWS media release appears to have an agenda. How […]

Whole of NSW coast shrouded in dust and smoke, 47C in Hunter Valley (75 years ago)

This week 75 years ago. Dust storms, bush fires and unbelievable heat across New South Wales. 118 fahrenheit is 47 degrees C, and there were 100+ temperatures in many places. The sun appearred as a “red sky”. A dust storm created a “terror” in Mildura (just like last week in 2019).

In Parkes, it was the worst dry spell on record. People were going without milk because the cows have died. Thanks to Siliggy, Lance Pidgeon. Holy apocalypse!

RAGING DUST FURY INLAND, STRANGE CITY LIGHT GLOW The Sun, November 1944

The air was calm in Sydney today, but diffusion of sunlight through a dense blanket of fine dust bathed the city in a strange orange glow. Practically the whole of the NSW coast this morning lay under a shroud of yellowish-red dust and bushfire smoke blown from inland regions.

Maximum temperature in Sydney today was 98.7 degrees at 2.55 pm. Early reports at the Weather Bureau today indicated that a heatwave, unprecedented in intensity, was raging’ practically everywhere in northern, western and southern NSW.

Temperatures in many centres remained at over 100 degrees throughout the week-end. At Jerry’s Plains, Hunter Valley district, the mercury […]

Land of the free: in shock decision, US allows citizens to choose whatever light globe they want

In a rare move for consumers, US citizens will not be forced to buy LED soul-and-body-clock destroying globes next year as was planned. Instead they can frivolously continue to buy incandescent globes if they so choose.

Despite the Democrats best efforts to stop droughts and bushfires with indoor lighting, no US citizen will be denied the chance to save their own money and enjoy a more natural spectrum of lighting in the privacy of their own home.

If you like your sleeping patterns, you can keep them…

BBC

(This was announced in September 2019)

The US is scrapping a ban on energy-inefficient light bulbs which was due to come in at the beginning of 2020.

The rule would have prohibited the sale of bulbs that do not reach a standard of efficiency, and could have seen an end to incandescent bulbs.

Many countries have phased out older bulbs because they waste energy.

But the US energy department said banning incandescent bulbs would be bad for consumers because of the higher cost of more efficient bulbs.

The Department of Energy said it had withdrawn the ban because it was […]