Hello Earthians! It’s time to say thank you to Edison, to Faraday and Maxwell, it’s time to celebrate the Gift of Light.
Saturday night at 8.30 – 9.30pm this week is the Hour of Power
(Don’t confuse this with the splinter group celebrations called Earth Hour, where people sit in the dark — so they can appreciate the glory of luminosity come 9.31).
The Glory! We are the lucky generation with light at the flick of a switch
The CEI gets the thumbs up too. They are running Human Achievement Hour. (Click the image for more info).
In the hundred thousand years since homo sapiens came to be, people have fled bondage, wars, small-pox, dysentery, died from minor scratches, starved to death, been ravaged by lions, stricken by cholera, and survived the odd ninety thousand year stretches of hypothermic, abysmal ice age. We lived in the darkness for 99,900 years, cowering in corners, listening to drips, waiting for the sun.
There is only one type of Freedom – and all else is servitude, slavery or tyranny.
It’s your chance to show your commitment to fighting the forces of darkness. Be brave, stand up to the people who want to tell you what kind of globe you are allowed to buy. Feed the world by helping to boost global CO2 to lift crop yields and fertilize farms all over the planet. Children are hungry in Haiti and, since CO2 is a well mixed gas, sooner or later, you will be helping them.
Things you can do at 8.30 on Saturday:
- Write down the tally on the electricity meter.
- Turn on all the lights you can find (bonus points for incandescents from the stash.)
- Put on the party lights, the patio light, the pool light, the mozzie zappers, unpack those Christmas decorations. Get out your torches. Switch the movement detector spotlights to continuous operation. (Involve the kids — they love to help).
- Light your backyard with the landcruiser headlights! (Don’t flatten the battery, make sure you keep that engine running.)
- Don’t forget those bar radiators — revel in that infra red! (Light the kitchen with the ones in the oven and grill.)
- Eat Argentinian Lamb steak, Danish butter, Argentinian Cheese, Belgian Chocolate, and Californian Oranges.
- Drink German Beer and or French Champagne. Drink toasts to coal miners, oil rig workers, and power station staff.
- Take a photo, take lots of photos, and send them to myself, and Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt.
- At 9.30pm read that meter and tell us how many KWhr you’ve liberated. Who will win The Hour of Power?
Some of those fossil fuels have been waiting for 100 million years to return to the sky.
The cheapest most cost-effective way to liberate those fuels is to buy Hard Coking Coal which is as cheap as $1/ton on Alibaba (enough for every power hour for the rest of your life, and there’ll be some left for the kids too: the minimum order is 30,000 t. Send your bulk carrier.)
Failing that, just fill up a jerry can.
“I promise to turn every light in the house on as well as fill a small metal container with gasoline, light it on fire and watch it burn in my front yard,” read one message in a Syracuse online paper in 2009. That, my friends, is the true Hour of Power spirit”. [From Tim Blair]
Why is your participation important?
Our future depends on electricity. Governments need to know that they mess with it at their peril. They will raise the price of electricity until the public rebel– so rebel now, while you can afford to.
The Hour of Power raises awareness of how precious the Gift of 24-7 light, heat, cooling, hot water, and emergency hospital departments are. It’s hard to get an x-ray without electrons.
There is but one civilization on Earth which has, albeit imperfectly, managed to give more people the right to pursue happiness than any other.
You can help to save it.
———
This post was inspired by Tim Blair. Thanks Tim.
I’ve been running everything continuously anyway, even illegal drugs wouldn’t register for the hour I don’t think.
P.S. Please Julia Gillard, just sock me a perfect right foot in the face. I’d love that thanks mate!
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“Human Achievement” <– there's a laugh given all the diatribe from Green Alarmists.
Celebrate reverse evolution would be a proper headline ; )
10
Great Idea!
For maximum effect, do we need to consider Time Zones?
10
If in doubt just keep your lights on for 24 hours. That way you get every timezone and you don’t have any pangs of conscience that you haven’t done your part.
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LOL………. Done. I’m gonna turn on the outside floodlights and leave ’em on all night… The gekos will go apeshit.
‘The hour of power’… Love it. 🙂
10
According to the WWF site it’s happening at 2030h on Saturday 31 March in the UK, so I imagine that ‘Earth Hour’ will be 2030h local time around the world.
I’ll be tucking into an Indian takeaway so I’ll have to remember to get up and switch everything on.
If anybody wants a good reason to support anti-earth hour – eco loon, Prince Charles (he talks to plants) is a supporter of EH. What better recommendation could you have!
Light up the world.
PS: If you’re an ‘Earth Hour’ supporter, remember to keep your cat away from naked flames!
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Talking to plants is good for them. You effectively ‘feed it’ with the CO2 from your breath.
It’s not just an old wives tale.
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I admit it- I too talk to my favourite plants. Why wouldn’t you, since they respond so well. 400 ppm just isn’t enough for optimum growth.
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Charles does seem to be into everything. His watercolours are currently on display at the Meller Merceux in Oxford until the 31st. March, alongside the likes of David Freud, son of the late, great Lucian Freud.
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They don’t exactly seem to be selling like hot cakes. All still available for any budding art lovers.
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I’m well aware of this Baa, but I think PC expects to get a response!
Why not just breathe on them if you want to promote plant growth – you’ll be less likely to be visited by the men in white coats!
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That’s Brilliant Doug. You’ve just made us realise why talking to plants might just work.
Barmy as it may seem, it’s actually the breathing on them, whilst talking that is promoting their growth.
Now this might be tested by talking to one group of plants, while playing a recording to another control group for instance.
Three cheers for Charles though, for insisting on reporting what he’d observed, while perhaps not understanding the reasons for it. That is worthy of the scientific method.
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As well as not being afraid to appear barmy. That is another important scientific trait. Whilst wanting to conform, and to be seen as part of the club by join Academies for instance, these are something else.
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Credit to Baa for that realisation actually (sorry hadn’t read back through the comments).
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Hooray to that!!!
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Let’s celebrate the achievements mankind has made because of cheap energy.. Turn on everything and let it burn and most all have fun 🙂
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Well, as I’m going out I’ll have to remember to turn everything on before I leave. Anyone know where I can find a T-shirt with a big X through the Earth Hour symbol?
By the way, the company where I work has been making a big hoo-ha about Earth Hour on its website. The only thing worse than an organisation greenwashing for attention is one that is actively and knowingly engaged in Agenda 21. As as global company, I’m not sure which one mine is, but it still stinks…
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“There is only one type of Freedom – and all else is servitude, slavery or tyranny.”
Here here.
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Did you just mention the who’s who of electrification without mentioning Nikola Tesla?
Tesla was the genius behind the arc lamp, induction motor, improved dynamos, AC electrical power transmission, and over 100 other patents.
Mind you, Tesla also predicted that one day we would send electricity between planets using radio waves. I think Tesla just liked to troll the journos every once in a while for a bit of fun. 🙂
The Japanese scientist at Nichia Chemical who invented bright blue LEDs in the 1990s ought to get a toast too, because white LEDs are not possible without them. Shuji Nakamura is the Blue LED guy.
So many people have added new layers to our civilisation. The only trouble with picking something to do for Human Achievement Hour is we have so many options to choose from. Nice problem to have.
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When I was a young bloke just starting my working life, I worked as a ‘rousie’ in shearing gangs that stayed away on big sheep stations, where we lived without electricity – muttons for our tucker were hung high in trees to keep them above the blow-flies, wood stoves for cooking, Kerosine-fuelled Coleman lanterns for lighting at night, the shearing plants driven by big old single-cylinder stationary engines that were a bugger to start and could smash your thumb if they backfired when cranking them.
Great days, but it was wonderful to get back home at the end of Summer and enjoy all the benefits of electricity – hot water for showers, refigeration for a range of tucker a bit more ambitious than spuds and mutton. And being able to read in bed without being in danger of burning the house down.
I’ll be using everything I can turn on for the Hour of Power!
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Yay! Hour of Power!
But who will win the hour of power? Probably Al Gore.
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Pull back the curtains and let the Sun shine in.
http://www.ozunited.info/Gillard1.htm
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Don’t forget to turn on the spa to full!!
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Our family have been turning on the lights ever since Earth Hour was started. Instead of just our house we now have five households illuminated. Andrew Bolts column today has a email address where you can write to the SMH, instigater of Earth Hour here in Australia, and tell them how you will celebrate.
loadeddog@sunherald.com.au
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What a pathetic commentary on the attempted hijacking of civilisation by a new regulating class with taxing powers that the self-proclaimed global information monopoly on climate is so untrustworthy its new report, Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, released on Wednesday (28/03/2012), must now be fact-checked by a small unpaid, unfunded army of physicists and other experts without a pecuniary interest in the outcome.
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If you live in the rural area, don’t forget your bore pump. That’ll ramp it up! 🙂
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[snip – no thanks –Jo]
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I would love to turn on all my lights but I am a pensioner and it is clear that the price of electricity in Oz is probably a great deal lower than in the UK!
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Not in South Australia. 3rd most expensive electricity in the world (behind Germany and Denmark).
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Only if you ignore the “supply availability” charge. At least that doesn’t go up when you use more power.
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Earth Hour is an attempt at mind control c/- Socialist International through the UN.
http://www.wakeup2thelies.com/2011/08/08/julia-gillard-pm-contours-of-a-new-world-order-are-emerging-but-not-yet-apparent/
Section 44 of the Australian Constitution says –
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As section 44 of the Constitution voids the eligibility of all members of parliament to sit therein due to there allegiance by treaty to the edicts of the United Nations,a foreign power, then the CO2 Tax is null and void – in my opinion
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Juliar says:-
” … blah de blah … United Nations have we faced such uncertain times, when the contours of a new world order are emerging but not yet apparent.”
What she’s referring to is her new job role, which she’s not quite sure what it’ll be yet, but certain it’ll be something at the axis of UN dictatorial power, after all her recent sucking up to the General Secretary.
The trouble with the UN is its not so much foreign, as just being everywhere.
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For many years, ReSurge (formerly Interplast) has been doing plastic/reconstructive surgery in poor countries. Some cosmetic surgeon you’ve been told to hate may well be a volunteer in this great charity.
So many of the disfigurements they deal with are from those kerosene pressure stoves, but one can well imagine how much sickness and injury world wide occurs through all primitive means of lighting, cooking and heating. Of course, bad waste disposal, low water-pressure and insufficiently hot water – eco-fetishes now fashionable in our multi-million dollar homes – do to poor people’s insides what crappy stoves do to their outsides.
Does this mean that Earth Hour is just an impious orgy of ingratitude where the Silly intersects with the Sinister?
Yep.
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I will be ignoring Executive Order No. CL 445-2012.
(h/t to Tim Blair)
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Many Philippine fashions seem to hark back to fashions of our past. The Rubicks cube was massive a couple of years ago. Now it’s green-washing and being worried about the environment; everywhere you go now you see messages about respecting the environment. Which in my mind is not a bad thing given how polluted Filipino urban centres (and natural environments like beaches etc) can be.
As for Earth Hour, virtually every night for many Filipinos who live outside the major cities it is Earth Hour, due to unreliable electricity supply. One of the endearing qualities of Filipino world-view is their unshakable optimism. A 24 hour power outage, every 3rd day is referred to as a ‘brown out’.
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“…. . A 24 hour power outage, every 3rd day is referred to as a ‘brown out’….”
I’m sure we’ll think of Bob , when they come to Aus.
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Jo’s zeal reminds me of back in the early 1980’s when I was eco-nutter in Northern California working as a “community organiser.” It was coming up on April and another boring, useless Earth Day festival was in planning. We reckoned it had all become too suburban bourgeois. People thought that they could Save The Planet™ by one day a year driving their SUVs to a festival and buying a few tasteless vegan cupcakes… Imagine that!
So we came up with the idea of “Earth Night.” With slogans like “EARTH NIGHT..do something good for the Earth tonight.”…and “Every Night is Earth Night!”
We designed images for Earth Night t-shirts and printed thousands. My favourite was two dark shadows carrying wrenches towards a parked bulldozer by moonlight. At the Earth Day festival our Earth Night t-shirts easily outsold the Che Guevara ones the socialists were selling in the next booth over…
I Just Googled Earth Night and it seems our meme wasn’t naturally selected to survive into the information age. Shame that.
Yet, here we are in 2012 and the same sophomoric spirit of outrage over banally idiotic pretensions survives, only this time coming from the other end of the spectrum.
So, fellow Earthians, if you really want to make a statement during the Hour of Power Saturday night, don’t hold back….
Rent yourself a searchlight!
http://www.chameleon-touring.com.au/Chamweb/sra.html
Imagine — Sydney, Perth, Brissy and Melbourne lit by dozens, aye, hundreds of spotlights during the Hour of Power…now that would be a glorious sight against the backdrop of the New Endarkenment.
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Let’s see now,
I’ve got a brand new box of baking soda and 2 litres of vinegar. My indoor plants are looking slightly wilted at the moment. I should be able to raise the CO2 level from 0.04% to at least 0.4% for quite some time. I’m sure the extra lighting and heating, some water and heaps of CO2 are just what my plants need. Human Achievement Hour – Yay!
See, we can improve the environment, we just need more CO2.
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I spent the last Earth Hour swilling champange (bubbles of CO2) while generously funding the enrichment of the worlds atmosphere with CO2 via Jet engines
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I’ve always wanted to see my heating and cooling do battle. Actually the stove and oven might tip the balance to the heating side. If heating gets on top I can always let the cold air in so that it does not switch off.
Seriously though “precious gift”? sheesh
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A bit understated wasn’t it? Try this:
“Incalculably precious gift, as demonstrated by the permanent and utter dependence of even the most blase.”
Better?
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Shall we debate the presence of a gift giver? Gaia perhaps? Precious is so cloying.
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Donna has the real story.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/03/26/the-wealthy-corporations-behind-earth-hour/
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The biggest problem I have in explaining anything about the generation of electrical power is that the data is in numbers so astronomically huge, it’s sometimes difficult to understand, hence difficult to believe, hence sometimes easily discounted.
The same applies for consumption.
So then let’s do a simple sum to calculate the savings at a residential electricity account level if you were to observe the Earth Hour fallacy.
The average electricity account for a 90 day period is around $350, so it works out at around $4 a day for all the electricity you consume in your home.
Household lighting makes up only 8% of your total consumption, so that means lighting your home costs you 32 cents a day.
This is Earth Hour, so turning off all your lights for this one hour amounts to a personal saving of around ….. ONE CENT.
That’s one cent in total on a $350 bill.
So then, we all just know that this is just a purely symbolic thing really, don’t we?
Let’s then look at overall CO2 emissions savings for Earth Hour.
Those large scale coal fired plants run flat out all the time, because that is how they operate at their most efficient. To actually shut them down, and then run them back up again is something that takes a very long time, sometimes many hours, even days, so any shut down is a very long procedure. The electricity that these large plants supply is the absolute Base Load Requirement, so they will not be shutting down at all.
No CO2 savings there.
However, because this is in that period of time when Peaking power is at its highest (4.00PM until around 10PM) then during this period other plants come on line to ‘top up’ the overall power needed for demand.
In the main, these are Natural Gas fired plants, and the design of these is such that they can run up to speed quickly and supply power to the grid.
These plants emit CO2 as well, but only around a third as much on a watt for watt equivalence when compared with coal fired power.
Trust me on this. No grid controller in Australia would risk shutting down any of these plants just for that one hour, and then firing it back up again, also consuming more fuel in this process than leaving it running.
So, no CO2 emissions savings from this area either.
Overall residential cost benefit – A personal saving of ONE CENT.
Overall CO2 emissions savings – NIL.
Still, I guess we get to wear a hair shirt and sing Kumbaya!
Tony.
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tony,
Surely you are not the same person who coined the term “Earth hour fallacy”, now writing again about how it is a fallacy? Might be time to try spiraling outwards lest you disappear up something dark.
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Hey Gee, thanks for that.
I never even bothered to look.
I wrote that Post three years ago.
Who would have thought it would be number one on a Google Search.
And here’s me thinking Google didn’t like those who spoke out against the green meme, and shuffled all their Posts off into the ether never never.
So, thanks mate. You did me a favour here.
And no, I’m not claiming that it was me who coined the term.
It was true then, and it’s just as true now.
Tony.
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Statement: I have nothing to do with Earth Hour and have never participated.
Tony, the strawman fallacy does not gazump another fallacy. Making arguements against soft targets to an appreciative and compliant audience is at odds with the detail and effort of your statement.
This is from the Earth Hour FAQs and it is repeated elsewhere in policy-like statements and in media releases.
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Gee,
thanks again for confirming exactly what I said in the original comment.
Doesn’t stop MSM from boldly stating just how much CO2 was saved by Earth Hour.
Strawman, oh nyuk nyuk nyuk!
Tony.
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Tony,
MSM and public perception of Earth Hour is as you critiqued but Earth Hour itself, which is ambiguously both a self-proclaimed “hour” and the name of the organisation that runs it, never claims the things you are critiquing.
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so it works just like the carbon tax then?
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So, Tony, you double-writing outward-spiraler, the one cent saved is just a bonus.
Earth Hour “aims to encourage an interconnected global community to share the opportunities and challenges of creating a sustainable world.”
You might call that singing Kumbaya.
I would call it filling the night air with the fumes of foul ingratitude.
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Who are they being ungrateful to?
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The people who created the modern, industrialised country in which they live.
The ones that went before them, and built the very things that they now complain about.
Whingeing about electric light power while not being prepared to live without it is the height of ingratitude and selfish, idiotic behaviour.
Just as we all cringe when a spoilt child smashes their toys out of spite, we all cringe when people voluntarily want to wind back civilisation.
NOT ONE PERSON PARTICIPATING IN EARTH HOUR WILL KEEP THEIR LIGHTS OFF. They’ll all switch them back on, boil the kettle, restart the TV. Then sit and bask in the warm glow of their pointless smugness.
Singing Kumbayah might at least sound nice if their voices are in tune.
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not sure why you are shouting this at me but really the answer to my question was pretty pathetic.
01
Hopefully, this week’s zombie lovefest will actually result in an increase in power consumption as a protest reasserting our collective intelligence and our opposition to the carbon dioxide tax. Thankfully, the most-read political columnists in Australia, such as Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair, are campaigning against Earth Hour, part-owned by the competing Fairfax Media, which has decided to promote the event rather than report on it objectively in spite of rising levels of public anger about the impact of the tax on the cost of living. Needless to say, this unconscionable conflict of interest, in which a major media company has a formal shareholding with a large environmental organisation actively lobbying the Australian government (World Wildlife Fund), means Fairfax has a vested interest in minimising its reporting of dissent against the tax.
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No need for EH or for the ‘Hour of Power’, simply just get regulation mandating 24 hrs of daylight saving and………bingo…….no more blackouts or the need for any lighting. If Gillard can change the climate, why not the amount of sun/sarc
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Hi Jo,
Some other ideas to supplement this Saturday’s festivities:
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Tim Blair has a poll going. I like “He must be ravenous”. Maybe I should link to the SMH travel article where a guy said he was chased by a puma. Earth Hour in Brazil anyone?
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29 March: Daily Telegraph: Alison McMeekin: Gillard Government ‘way out of step’ on carbon tax says Reserve Bank board member, Heather Ridout
She said she was “concerned” about the impact the Australian price – which is at least double some international carbon prices – would have on the economy.
“I don’t know how much more pressure can be brought to bear on the government and on the Greens on this issue because they are way out of step with what most Australians and Australian business think,” Ms Ridout told ABC Radio this morning.
“And the Queensland election result, I’m not sure how much carbon played in it, but there’s this feeling that people aren’t listening.”…
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/gillard-government-way-out-of-step-on-carbon-tax-says-reserve-bank-board-member-heather-ridout/story-e6freuy9-1226313146105
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instead of Earth Hour, let’s have Federal Election Hour!
29 March: Southern-Courier: Carbon tax strikes blow to Randwick council’s budget
Randwick Council will be hit with a $1,500,000 annual carbon tax bill from July 1 – an impact of $27.34 per rate-paying property in Randwick City…
Mayor Nash said of the $1,500,000 increase, $1,115,000 is for increased waste disposal charges, $210,000 is for increased electricity prices and $140,000 is for increased street lighting charges.
“This means that, for Randwick City ratepayers, our annual domestic waste management fee is being forced up by the carbon tax. It’s a double-whammy for residents as Council is also facing higher tipping charges which will compound the effect of the carbon tax,” he said. “From July 1, the annual domestic waste management charge is set to increase from $429.30 to $465.11 per annum. This represents an 8.34% increase of which 4.75% (or $20.40) is directly attributable to the carbon tax.”…
“The remaining street lighting and electricity carbon tax increase of $350,000 will need to be absorbed within Council’s budget,” he said. “That’s money which the Council won’t have to spend on road repairs, footpaths, playground upgrades or building works.”
Cr Nash said council would continue to provide the same high level of services and a substantial capital works improvement program, but the $350,000 carbon tax impact would obviously be an unwelcome, big hit to Randwick residents.
“For some people, $27.34 per year may not be much, and for others it will be,” he said. “But what’s most alarming is it’s the overall effect – the $1,500,000 hit to the budget – which stops that money from being spent on other important initiatives. The council, and hence ratepayers, are not receiving a cent in compensation for that hit to the budget.”
http://southern-courier.whereilive.com.au/news/story/carbon-tax-strikes-blow-to-randwick-councils-budget/
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Why is anyone paying council rates at all, considering the Australian Constitution doesn’t recognise LOCAL government, only Federal and State..
Council (local gubberment) have no legal right to charge for anything, including parking fines.
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http://basic-fraud.com/
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http://loveforlife.com.au/node/6883
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28 March: News: Olga Galacho: Carbon tax to raise hospital food costs
Hospitals are big consumers of power and food, and these items will increase in price when the carbon tax is applied, UBS healthcare analyst Andrew Goodsall said today.
“We didn’t think regulation around climate change would affect the hospital sector at first, but when we analysed the likely price rises for power and food, it became clear that hospitals’ costs would also rise,” Mr Goodsall said during a briefing this morning.
He added that hospitals would pass the extra costs on to health insurance funds, who would pass the higher costs onto consumers…
http://www.news.com.au/money/cost-of-living/carbon-tax-to-raise-hospital-food-costs/story-fnagkbpv-1226312358614
29 March: Geelong Advertiser: Peter Begg: Council could slug residents over carbon tax
“Council is also looking at what government funding opportunities might be available to retrofit council buildings with a view to further minimising our energy consumption…
“We are planning for significant increases in electricity, gas and water utility costs…
Geelong city councillor Stretch Kontelj, who has been involved in this year’s city budget discussions, said it was likely the council would absorb some of the effect of the carbon tax by finding savings in other areas.
“We are going to absorb some of the carbon tax in any projected rate increases,” he said. “What that’s going to mean is less playgrounds, less footpaths, less road maintenance, to the extent of whatever that carbon tax impost is going to be.”
http://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/article/2012/03/29/316681_news.html
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And Gillard puts $50 billion? of taxpayer money on the table betting on no change in technology over the next few decades.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/starting-laughing-now-about-nbn/story-fn6e1lzz-1225974106994
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28 March: Brisbane Times: Philip Hopkins: Property’s carbon liability
IT’S ”nonsense” that only big companies will pay the carbon tax – everyone is going to pay, and commercial property will be affected.
That was the message from consultant Peter Ramsay to a retailers property conference in Melbourne on Friday. The conference was sponsored by Lease Eagle.
Mr Ramsay said Treasurer Wayne Swan was wrong to say that only the top 500 companies would pay the carbon tax and that 97 per cent of families would be better off. ”It’s a bit of nonsense,” he said…
However, Mr Ramsay said retailers would be greatly affected. Electricity generators would pass on the carbon tax to consumers through higher electricity costs and higher rents, and the transport and manufacturing sectors would similarly pass on the higher costs. ”The entire supply chain will be impacted,” he said…
Mr Ramsay said the structure of the tax – a mixture of compensation and subsidies – distorted what it was meant to achieve. ”There is no incentive to change behaviour,” he said. ”What we will have is a high cost per tonne.”
Internationally, the approach should be a level playing field – Australia should not just ”fly the flag”, as the country only produces 1.4 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases. ”I’m not advocating doing nothing at all – I’m not a sceptic, I think climate change is happening – but I believe in facts, not spin,” he said.
If Australia did nothing, it would not have any impact on the world’s temperature….
The US, China and India were taking some action, but their total emissions ”are actually increasing”. China was installing solar power, but also putting in new coal-fired power stations every week…
Retailers faced the added disadvantage that international competitors were not paying a carbon tax, coupled with the competitive pressures of online shopping…
The trucking industry was exempt from the carbon tax until July 2014. ”Keep this in mind when negotiating long-term transport contracts,” he said. ”It would be prudent to revisit service contracts for logistics operations.”
Mr Ramsay said big landlords such as Westfield, Stockland and Centro expected retailers to contribute to the costs of air-conditioning and electricity. Clauses in leases passed increased costs on to tenants…
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/business/property/propertys-carbon-liability-20120327-1vwgk.html
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Hi Joanne. I follow your news and that of the Skeptics and am very grateful for the stands taken. I won’t go on about the stupidity of our Fed Govt and its belief in unproven hypotheses to our great disadvantage.
Just writng to counsedl against that can of petrol being lit on Power Hpour. It will be Power all right but a Molotov cocktail for those nearby . Tell your followers DON’T DO it’
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We are being counseled to death by pinko leftards about everything. It’s about time people took responsibility for their own actions.
If anyone is stupid enough to handle petrol carelessly, they’ll be up for a Darwin award.
We hold children by the hand, not adults.
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Taxation is an unfortunate necessity of modern society, but I have to concede that the carbon tax is based on lousy science and therefore should not exist. I’ll also concede that Earth Hour is a colossal wank, the purpose of which could be just as easily served by us all having a group hug.
However, the appropriate response to a colossal wank is not to propose an even bigger one — even satirically. There is no case for advocating needless consumption of resources.
You will be suggesting next that the best way to refute tree-huggers is to go and chop down a few more trees — because you can. And, perhaps, the next time some hommus-munching vegan objects to animal handling at abbatoirs, you can demonstrate your justifiable contempt by torturing something to death.
This article does not belong on a blog supposedly dedicated to science.
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Lefty,
You are absolutely right to say Earth Hour is a colossal wank, but it is also simultaneously a litmus test to show exactly how well the groupthink mentality is entrenched. As such, a show of defiance is somewhat justified- no virgins need be sacrificed, no limbs (tree or human) need be severed, no molotov cocktails need be thrown. Merely fighting fire with fire by subtly suggesting that we believe that not only is energy a necessity for man’s advancement, but also it is a sign of man’s mastery over his environment, which rather than a mortal sin in some pseudoreligious Green philosophy, but is an appropriate tool which can and should be used to benefit the freedom and standards of living of those fortunate enough to have access to it- “the light on the hill” perhaps for those unfortunates whose political masters seek to keep them in the dark where they can control and subjugate them.
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Left Out and Winston,
You both make excellent points and I enjoyed both comments very much!
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28 March: IB Times: Joseph Orovic: US Airline Group Drops Suit Against EU Carbon Tax, Looks to UN
A major U.S. airline lobbying group ditched a private lawsuit challenging the European Union’s recently imposed carbon tax on carriers using EU airports and instead called on Washington to join other major economies in opposing the EU tax through the United Nations…
“Our legal action was critical in bringing to light that the EU ETS violates international law and is an exorbitant money grab, which are now key points in the governments’ unified opposition to the scheme,” said A4A President and CEO Nicholas E. Calio in a statement. “There is a clear path for the United States to force the EU to halt the scheme and protect U.S. sovereignty, American consumers, jobs and international law.”…
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/320791/20120328/airlines-america-lawsuit-trade-group-eu-tax.htm
Hedegaard doesn’t seem to get it that A4A want to oppose the tax thru the UN, not get agreement for a tax!!!
28 March: USA Today: Bart Jansen: EU ‘would like to work with the Americans’ on airline carbon plan
WASHINGTON — Connie Hedegaard, the European Union’s commissioner for climate action, said Wednesday that a compromise on the EU’s controversial carbon emissions scheme is possible through the International Civil Aviation Organization.
“I certainly hope so,” Hedegaard said. “No one would be happier than if we could find a way of having a global way of regulation emissions.”…
Hedegaard said governments will be analyzing four market-based solutions, which will be discussed at another meeting in June. She would prefer a global solution, rather than simply Europe is charging airlines for carbon emissions to and from the region.
But she said any compromise must reduce emissions, in contrast to the voluntary goals that airlines have promoted to curb emissions.
“We have always wanted a global way of regulating it,” Hedegaard said. “We come to these negotiations with an open mind. The only thing is, that the solution must of course be a solution which actually does something to reduce emissions. It must contribute to solving the problem, obviously.”…
Airlines for America, the trade group representing most big U.S. airlines, dropped its own lawsuit against the EU, arguing that the government should bring the case via the ICAO, which is a branch of the United Nations.
Hedegaard said she remains skeptical of voluntary emission goals from industry.
“The fact is that emissions from global aviation is increasing, increasing, increasing. The projections for years to come is for substantial increase. That is a fact,” Hedegaard said.
But she said industry and policymakers may have become more willing to compromise because of the European law.
“I also believe that the signals we get from the American side is that there is a recognition of that fact, that it is time actually now to make ICAO move,” Hedegaard said. “We would like to work with the Americans as well as other parties on that. Then the question is not whether we should move, but exactly how do we move forward.”…
Hedegaard: “A trade war of course is in nobody’s interest. But I also think that all those Americans and others knowing the democratic tradition of Europe would realize that it’s not so you can threaten Europe into changing its democratically adopted laws.”…
“It’s not rocket science. I think we could know more or less what could fly and what could not fly,” Hedegaard said. “It has to be solutions that would do something to actually solve the problem.”…
http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/post/2012/03/eu-would-like-to-work-with-the-americans-on-airline-carbon-plan/659092/1
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Apart from lights on and a nice little fire to show where we have come from and where we are headed if we continue to follow the cult of man made CO2 causing global warming. I think a nice little mix of baking soda and vineger to create a little extra CO2 might just top the night off.
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This is O/T but I would like to know why these people are wrong
Because if they are right its goodbye greenhouse effect.
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Being a sceptic you have, of course, first asked yourself why are these people right?
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Why bother?
It is a 2007 paper and neither the first, nor the last, by REAL scientists (physicists) to correctly point out there is no such thing as a CO2 “greenhouse effect” by any connotation that term can be given.
Far from being a “blanket” that keeps the earth warm, the atmosphere acts as a great big evaporative air conditioner that keeps the planet cool by transferring heat accumulated in the oceans back to the top of the atmosphere where it can be radiated out into space. Any radiative contribution CO2 made would be to add to that cooling action, and in any case, would be too miniscule to measure.
As far as true atmospherics physics goes – as opposed to cultist climastrology – “blackbody radiation”, “back radiation”, “CO2 enhanced positive feedback” and all the other mumbo jumbo, is exactly that.
Epicycles, which at least had a demonstrable mathematical symmetry with observed phenomena, were more “scientific” than today’s “climate science”, which has about as much of a “scientific” basis as reading chicken entrails.
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And to date, has probably proven to be less accurate in its forecasting abilities, given the ongoing abject failure of the computer models.
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Why bother? I’m a sceptic, that’s why.
As for the rest of your post… you are not into molecular firction and memory photons too are you?
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No, just basic physics. Nothing much else is needed.
Climate may be complex – certainly too complex to ever model successfully – but it is not complicated.
Energy comes in from the sun during daylight hours, some of it is reflected, and some of it is absorbed, by the atmosphere, the land, flora, and the oceans. That which is absorbed by the land and the atmosphere is mostly lost at night by radiation and convection. That which is absorbed by flora leads to photosynthesis.
Only that which is absorbed by the oceans remains as sensible heat (in any quantity) to actually “heat” anything. This energy, in turn, is ultimately transferred to the atmosphere via evaporation and thence via convection, upwards. Ultimately the energy is lost and radiated out into space, and the evaporated water falls back to earth as precipitation.
Since both the oceans and the atmosphere are fluid bodies, and the process of heating and shedding the heat is not uniform, both the oceans and the atmosphere are subject to movement of their mass, otherwise known as “currents”.
The interaction of these warm and cool currents in the oceans and the atmosphere is what gives rise to the phenomenon we call “weather”. The trend in the change of weather over time (traditionally 30 years), is what we call climate.
For reasons we don’t fully understand yet there appears to be a 25 to 30 year ebb and flow in the accumulation and loss of heat, leading to alternating warming and cooling periods, sort of like the tides.
These cyclical “tides” in the climate, in turn, appear – again for reasons we don’t yet fully understand – to fluctuate between “king” and “neap” tides, as evidenced by the MWP and LIA respectively.
I think that about covers it, and I didn’t have to firc a single molecule or remember even one photon to get there.
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a citation would be nice. You don’t need to provide it, there are six others at this moment in thumbs-up agreement who could also help out.
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A citation? It sounds like memoryvault is writing his own material – no doubt influenced by in depth research. It all sounds very plausible.
Here is the citation:
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Gee, I did one of those Thumbs up!
So here’s my citation on: Quoted MW 39.1.1.1.1
Sorry – can’t find anything on this – but look – pretty sure it doesn’t shine at night. So NIGHT is at any given time, one side of the planet Earth that is bathed in light from the Sun (the daytime) and the other side of the Earth is in the shadow caused by the Earth blocking the light of the sun. This shadow is what we call the darkness of night.
There’s more later – just researching for you! Or maybe one of the other 6 can help here!
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good one
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A citation?
I have explained it to my eight year old granddaughter, sitting on the beach, watching the sun set amidst a backdrop of clouds.
She had no trouble understanding.
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Will that do?
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MV,
Why believe in your eyes, your mind, or your powers of analysis and observation, when you can just appeal to authority by associating with other “experts” who are also too lazy to think for themselves and just rubber stamp the collective paradigm?
That was Newton’s mistake you know, instead of watching that apple fall from the tree and invoking an appropriate explanation of the phenomenon he was witnessing, he should have sent a carrier pidgeon to the Royal Society, asking them what he was seeing. The result would thus have been made valid through ratification by all those other scientists who observed objects falling previously, and never managed to
grasp that there was a phenomenon to observe!
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More or less a fact free zone here Gee Aye.
And there is no point saying where gin and tonic went wrong, because you would never convince a single “skeptic”.
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Sorry… also confusingly I wrote “immediately earlier” I meant the post immediately above my post with the bold bits.
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In other words, nothing to say, eh John B.
Come on, you can do better. Explain to us that cultist favourite of how the atmosphere heats the oceans’ surface in defiance of the Laws of Thermodynamics, and then the heat sinks down – without being detected – into the abysmal depths – where it can’t be detected, to lie in wait for forty years before coming back to make global warming “even worse than we first thought”.
Or maybe you’d like to expand on Will Steffen’s latest “compost heap” scenario which apparently will cause an “explosion of CO2” and end civilisation as we know it.
Heaven forbid that it could conceivably be anywhere near as simple as I outlined it above. After all the climate, along with the rest of the planet, has only been trending towards entropy for a few billion years. I’m sure there’s a hidden “tipping point” for every .000001 degrees C change in temperature just waiting to send us all to extinction.
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Its been explained a thousand times mv. Even Jo tried here. If you don’t want to accept something, then you won’t. It is your God given right to be willfully ignorant.
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I’m sorry John B, but you’ve lost me.
As far as I can tell there is absolutely nothing in my post at 39.1.1.1.1 that in any way contradicts anything maintained by skeptics here, including Jo. Heck, it wasn’t even my ‘opinion’, simply a paraphrasing of what I learned in Atmospheric Science 101 at high school in 1966.
But maybe that’s only because it is what is OBSERVED to happen, and is what has been MEASURED to happen. And since for you and Gee mere observation and measurement – you know – DATA – isn’t enough (“a citation would be nice”???), perhaps you’d be kind enough to point out the error of my ways, and enlighten us all.
Or could it just be that you can’t actually think of anything to write in actual rebuttal, so you’re going to instead attempt to hide behind a facade of “cleverness”, where you don’t actually have to commit to anything.
It isn’t working.
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ok… the citations are regarding your statement that standard climate models are at odds with the laws of thermodynamics. Apparently Jo and John would like to know as well as myself.
here are some statements that needs some observational data (data not “common sense” observation) or experimental data or modelling data.
It is a 2007 paper and neither the first, nor the last, by REAL scientists (physicists) to correctly point out there is no such thing as a CO2 “greenhouse effect” by any connotation that term can be given.
Far from being a “blanket” that keeps the earth warm, the atmosphere acts as a great big evaporative air conditioner that keeps the planet cool by transferring heat accumulated in the oceans back to the top of the atmosphere where it can be radiated out into space. Any radiative contribution CO2 made would be to add to that cooling action, and in any case, would be too miniscule to measure.
As far as true atmospherics physics goes – as opposed to cultist climastrology – “blackbody radiation”, “back radiation”, “CO2 enhanced positive feedback” and all the other mumbo jumbo, is exactly that.
Epicycles, which at least had a demonstrable mathematical symmetry with observed phenomena, were more “scientific” than today’s “climate science”, which has about as much of a “scientific” basis as reading chicken entrails.d
I’d be happy with some evidence that my brain was changed 11 years ago
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Gee, one of the things that never ceases to amaze me about you cultists is your collective ability to make liars and/or fools of yourselves without any help from the rest of us.
Trouble is, Gee, my first mention of the Laws of Thermodynamics was at 5.04pm on 30/3. Your demand for citations was made at 8.42pm on 29/3, pretty much a full day BEFORE.
So for your above quoted statement to be true, either you have mastered time travel, or you have a crystal ball.
Or you’re lying your face off. Choose.
Why? The comments you quote below this statement were from a completely different post from the one where I invoked “observable data”. My post that your cited comments are from is a statement of my opinion in an area in which much controversy still exists – even amongst scientists from both sides of the global warming fence. If you need citations as to the theory, google “Slaying the Sky Dragon”.
Conversely, the post where I mention “observable data” was a general explanation of how the water / evaporation cycle worked, which as far as I know, is not disputed by anybody – except, apparently, you and John Brooke.
Besides, when were you people ever interested in “observed data”?
This is disputed ??????
Sorry Gee, you had your chance. That was on a thread specifically about conspiracy theories, and any answer here would be totally O/T.
You’re now just going to have live with the fact that you’re brainwashed and you’ll never ever know how or why. Pity about that.
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True MV… my list of bolded things of course was from an earlier post and I was conflating that with the post immediately earlier.
If you don’t want to explain those statements and can’t see how they are at odds with Jo Nova’s own writings that is fine. Maybe you will indulge me with an explanation of what my cult is and the evidence you have to back this up.
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Everything I have said I have fully explained. Since neither Jo nor I belong to a cult with dogmatic, faith-based beliefs, we can, and often do, disagree on things.
Since unlike you, I don’t belong to a cult, I don’t have to lie, cheat and “conflate” to make a point.
What your cult is, is a dogmatic, faith-based belief in an already many times already disproven ideology. As for “proof” see the above two highlighted points.
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I’m sure you’ve talked about this before somewhere, so sorry If this is going around in circles, but…
You do accept that CO2 absorbs radiation much more strongly at a couple of key wavelengths than it does at other wavelengths, right?
I’m not trying to say this is a strong or significant effect in our climate, but I’m just saying it happens, CO2 does that.
Like in this short demonstration video. You’ll notice the faint outline of the flame is still sharp at the end, which proves it is absorption at key wavelengths and not just Raleigh scattering (which would blur the flame outline instead of just diminishing it).
Will you say this video has been faked, or will you agree that CO2 has a measurable absorption spectrum that is not a flat line?
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Andrew,
Nice experiment – and no reason to be faked – but at the end of the day all it shows is that CO2 absorbs photons at the same wavelengths as a candle emits them. Picking different light/heat sources and different gases, the same effect could be reproduced for any number of sources and gases.
Here are the spectroscopic analyses for Nitrogen and Oxygen respectively. I pick these two gases because A) – the cultists keep insisting that they don’t absorb electromagnetic energy, and B) – because together they make up most of our atmosphere.
http://www.coe.ou.edu/sserg/web/Results/Spectrum/n2.pdf
http://www.coe.ou.edu/sserg/web/Results/Spectrum/o2.pdf
Simply fill the tube with either of the above gases and then find something that emits photons in the same region as the lines for that gas, and hey presto!- disappearing act. Mind you, make sure the tube is closed if you are using O2, otherwise the flame will not be the only thing to disappear.
Not that this has very much to do with the post you are commenting on.
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One of the biggest frauds in so-called “climate science” is the constant conflation of light with heat. They are NOT the same thing, and they NOT simply interchangeable at the whim of the climate modeller, as best suits his needs.
When a photon (of the right wavelength for the gas in question) strikes a free molecule of that gas in the atmosphere it imparts energy to it. The molecule becomes more “energetic”, but unconstrained in the atmosphere, the molecule doesn’t get “hotter”. Instead it rises. There is no sensible heat transfer involved at all.
The only time there is a transfer of sensible heat (ie something gets “hotter”), is if/when our more energised molecule strikes another, less energised molecule. Then some heat is produced. Yes, this happens all the time in the atmosphere and yes, it contributes in some miniscule way to heating the atmosphere, at least until nightfall. Then it is lost.
However, keeping in mind that this occurs for ALL gases in the atmosphere – NOT just the GHG’s, and CO2 only represents 390ppm of that atmosphere, it can readily be seen that CO2’s contribution to this miniscule, and temporary heating, is microscopic.
The far more likely outcome for our absorbed photon is that our gas molecule will re-emit it AS A PHOTON (a unit of light, not heat), long before the molecule collides with anything in our unrestrained atmosphere (obviously in a contained system the probability of collision increases in proportion to the pressure of the restrained gas).
Now, the original absorbed photon was on a collision course with earth with a very high probability of being absorbed by the ocean or ground and actually being converted to sensible heat, which the earth would then have to shed as I described in an earlier post.
But on being absorbed and re-emitted our photon can be going in any direction, and if you care to do the math, it now only has a roughly one in four chance of reaching the surface and becoming sensible heat. Conversely, it has a roughly three in four chance of remaining a photon of light energy and being radiated back out into space, either directly, or following further collisions with atmospheric molecules.
Since this photon re-emission process occurs at the speed of light, compared to the ponderously slow process of evaporation and convection, and since the so-called GHG’s are particularly good at it for relevant wavelengths (which is why the cultists identify them as such), it can readily be seen that GHG’s do, in fact, help to COOL the earth, NOT heat it.
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Apologies for the length of the post.
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Empirical results from DIVINER confirm S-B Law was misapplied to Moon
I’ve just had an update via email to say the latest empirical estimate of mean temperature for the Moon is 192-197K. This figure pretty much splits the difference between the old 255K and Ned and Karls theoretical figure of 155-157K. Karl says they will be working a regolith heat retention term into their equations.
So this makes it easier to understand the falloff in temperature of around 20K through the lunar night, and the curves at dawn and dusk. It also means the Earth’s ‘greenhouse effect’ is around 91-97K. Which more or less matches a dry adiabatic lapse rate of 9.1K/km in a 10km high troposphere, so at least the numbers are starting to make good sense. I’ll do the necessary corrections to the figures in the article as everyone digests the new information.
[ … ] Of course, their claim goes further than that, but we can at least set off from the firm basis that non-radiative factors cause the majority of the ‘greenhouse effect’, or Atmospheric Thermal Enhancement (ATE), as they neutrally rename it.
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So the earth’s atmosphere has a much bigger effect on our temperature than we previously thought?
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Yes it would appear so John but not in the way you think.
If I am reading the paper correctly then what they are saying is the surface temperature on Earth is dependent on the atmospheric pressure at the surface and not some minuscule trace gas.
So how do they know the surface temperature on Venus has Phil Jones collected a whole heap of temps from their weather stations there.
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Well, the CERES and ERBE data suggests 2XCO2 is about 0.6-0.7 C. The papers look fine to me. My own analysis suggests about 0.7 C via a different method – which I should say could be contaminated by the effects of UHI. But the satellite measurements can’t be, and they’re going to be hard to explain if there is no greenhouse effect of CO2.
On the other hand at 2XCO2 of 0.7 C the CO2 climate sensitivity is so low that it is harmless anyway.
Any hypothesis must supply an explanation for validated direct empirical measurements. This was the problem for the Ptolemy model, which Kepler showed was wrong by developing an equation which correctly explained the data.
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Ok thanks guys just wanted to check that these people were legitimate.
I guess there is no power and money in everything being natural.
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“Except in special circumstances, all construction of power generating facilities should cease immediately, and power companies should be forbidden to encourage people to use more power. Power is much too cheap. It should certainly be made more expensive and perhaps rationed, in order to reduce its frivolous use.” Paul Ehrlich 1996
H/T masterresource.org
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Find a Greenie with an electric car, sneak into his garage and plug it in to the mains and switch it on during Earth Hour. Tell all his neighbours.
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Let’s call it, “Light Up the Earth Hour”.
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Wonder if the lights will get turned off for this EVENT?
There’s plenty residual garbage left from this Department of Climate Change that needs cancelling! They’ll save $50 grand just on the prize money given on the night!
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To paraphrase Campbell Newman; now that we have a Carbon Tax saving the planet, we don’t need Earth Hour.
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Funny that the Earth Hour supporters spend the hour walking around with torches powered by batteries which could only be made by the industries they wish to curtail.
On another matter I couldn’t help thinking about one of the world’s leading Climate Alarmists during a visit to the Kennedy Space Station in Florida on Saturday. James E Hansen heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has been leading the call for dramatic reductions in CO2 emissions for decades famously predicting off the scale temperature increases to the US Senate in 1988 if something drastic wasn’t done. Yet CO2 emissions have increased at a pace greater than his worse case estimate yet temperatures are under his best case estimated projections had massive CO2 emission reductions actually happened. http://tucsoncitizen.com/wryheat/2011/09/29/%E2%80%9Cclimastrologist%E2%80%9D-james-hansen-versus-reality/
The reason I was thinking of Hansen was because of all the CO2 emissions which would have been created from the NASA Space programme which couldn’t exist under Hansen’s desired CO2 emission reductions, and nor would his job!
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The Kennedy Space Centre is as vulnerable to sea level rise as a place gets. It sits in the middle of a giant swamp, with alligators everywhere.
Funny, though, I haven’t heard any NASA plans to knock it down and move it to higher ground.
Somehow, I think the space flight part of NASA would have very little positive to say about the climate-measuring department.
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better late, and more expensive, than never?
29 March: ABC: Mark DeBono: CSIRO backs carbon capture technology
The CSIRO has released a report saying carbon capture technology can work in Australian coal-fired power stations…
CSIRO spokesman Dr Paul Feron says the system works but it reduces the efficiency of power stations by about 30 per cent.
“That’s something that the power generators are very anxious about,” he said.
But he is confident they can improve upon that…
He says the technology could be in use in Australia within 20 years.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-29/csiro-backs-carbon-capture-technology/3920174
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“Reduced efficiency by 30%…”
I wonder who will pay extra to cover installation costs of this technology and then to cover the increased cost of electricity production. (Will need to burn 43% more coal to liberate each kW).
Looks like in the “future” today’s electricity prices will be viewed as ridiculously cheap!
It’s time to destroy the CSIRO
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Carbon capture technology is the 21st century’s equivalent of the perpetual motion machine in the 18th.
It takes little more than high school maths to demonstrate that the amount of energy required to capture, compress and store the CO2 generated by burning a set amount of coal, will ALWAYS exceed the total amount of useable energy created by burning the same amount of coal in the first place.
The closest anyone has ever come was a pilot effort at a power station in the US, where they managed to sequester under 20% of the total CO2 produced, for an expenditure of 40% of the total output of the power station. Simple arithmetic shows that sequestering ALL of the CO2 would then require 200% of the total power output – or in other words, another power station of the same size.
Charlatans used to claim to have discovered the secret of perpetual motion to fleece gullible investors.
Today carbon capture serves much the same purpose, but the payoff is called “research grants”.
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memoryvault
exactly correct.
Whenever I hear this CCS joke, it makes me laugh. Not a polite turning up of the corner of the mouth in a wry smile but side splitting, rolling around the floor, patently obvious flat out roaring laughter to indicate you stupid bloody idiot if you believe that bovine excrement type of laughter.
Then I ask the question.
How much CO2 are we talking about.
No response.
Describe the process.
No response.
How much power does it consume?
No response.
Ballpark the cost.
No response.
OK then simplify it in your own words.
I know this one. Take the Carbon out of the white stuff coming out the top, and then put it in the ground. I mean, what could be so simple as that.
The process consumes 40 to 45% of the whole power output of the plant, and costs one third to one half as much again as the original plant cost.
This is the only way they can make renewables even remotely competitive, and they add this to LCOE so coal fired power looks horrendously expensive, because it is so expensive to put in place, and they have less electricity to sell over the life of the Plant.
It will never be achieved on the scale required, and let me repeat that …..NEVER.
Decreased efficiency,my a**.
Tony.
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Now don’t hold it against me that I’m going to agree with you, but obviously CCS is highly suspect.
A recent tour by a visiting dignitory involved the VIP asking about the potential uses of a particular technology being developed. The company executive gave a long list, and tacked onto the end was identifying possible CCS sites. At which the VIP turned and said, “You’re not one of those nutters are you?”
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Thanks John,
well said, and it’s nice to see that on some points we do actually agree.
As to highly suspect, that’s just putting it mildly.
Tony.
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Tony from Oz had this excellent post CO2 Emissions Reduction – A Radical Plan that could achieve more!
Is CSIRO serious?
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29 March: ABC: Leone Knight: ‘How to’ carbon farm launched
The booklet outlines the methodologies currently approved under the carbon farming initiative, and sets out how farmers can generate carbon credits, and sell them on domestic and international markets.
Mark Dreyfus, the Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, says the project is breaking new ground.
“There is tremendous interest across the world in the development of these methodologies in Australia, it’s seen as ground breaking because it’s seen as a way the land sector can participate in the world task of reducing emissions.”
http://www.abc.net.au/rural/news/content/201203/s3466414.htm
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The firepit will be raging!
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Hope you ordered in extra tyres, we want all those ecotards in your neighbourhood to share the experience.
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GE has its fingers in every Australian energy pie, so there’s no doubt they would love unpopular Govts who give handouts etc. nice they are supplying the coal industry, isn’t it?
23 March: Bloomberg BusinessWeek: David Fickling: GE’s Rice Sees Activist Governments as Free Markets Fail
General Electric Co. Vice Chairman John Rice said he expects governments worldwide to become more activist and increase regulation because they fear discontent from populations who believe free markets have failed them…
“I don’t think people see free markets fixing their problems fast enough,” he said. “I don’t know of too many places where you see pure, unfettered capitalism any more, and I’m not sure there will be” such places in future…
In Australia, GE expects to double its business in the four years ending 2014 because of demand for equipment to support Chinese and Indian purchases of coal, iron ore and natural gas, with sales expected to rise by as much as 30 percent this year alone.
The country is now GE’s third-largest market by sales and is only behind the U.S. and China, Rice said…
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-03-23/ge-s-rice-sees-activist-governments-as-free-markets-fail
ABC, of course, only singled out those cuddly “wind turbines”:
25 March: ABC: GE chairman praises ‘gutsy’ carbon tax
GE makes a range of products, including wind turbines…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-25/ge-chairman-praises-carbon-tax/3910974
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After reading Tony’s posts i am starting to think that maybe we should make EH really mean something this year, maybe we should infiltrate our local coal fired power station and shut it down. I am sure Tony could got over the “weak spots” in a coal fired power stations defences with us, the beauty of it all would be that the ecotards would finally, truly be subjected to that which they seek most and simultaneously condemn this stupid religious ritual to the annuls of history.
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Steady on there Crakar.
There are several relatively simple ways to bring a coal-fired power station to a grinding halt.
However, since we are not “environmentalists” out to “save the planet”, any discussion of such action would almost certainly fall into the category of “conspiracy to commit a terrorist act”.
It is doubtful that James Hansen would be interested in appearing as a witness in our defense.
Not that the idea doesn’t appeal. I have a recurring dream where it gets to July 1 and rather than play the silly carbon tax game, all the privately owned coal-fired power stations just throttled back to the point where the government’s overall 5% CO2 reduction was achieved (roughly about 20% of their current output as a rough guess).
Then claimed all the federal incentive prizes and grants on offer as their reward for achieving in one stroke what the government planned to do over twenty years with a crippling tax.
Carbon reduction targets met – CHECK.
Removal of need for complicated tax – CHECK.
Elimination of uncertainty for business – CHECK.
The thought of Sydney and Melbourne’s watermelons waking up and finding out their coffee machines no longer worked – PRICELESS.
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I’m with memoryvault on this one crakar24.
Our side has absolutely no need whatsoever to do this. They’ll do it to themselves.
Just wait politely until one of those plants does get into difficulty and closes down, and wait for the bovine excrement to come into violent conflict with the rotating wind generating machine.
The fury will be tactile.
Tony.
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sorry if this has been posted but
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-28/abbott-quizzed-about-alpine-grazing/3917526
Abbot
Go Abbot
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HACKGATE DAY 443: Aussie authorities decide to get tough with Murdoch.
https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/hackgate-day-443-aussie-authorities-decide-to-get-tough-with-murdoch/
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I’d like to turn everything on for earth hour but I always seem to forget. I’m not big on symbolism.
Is there a more-than-etymological connection between “symbolism” and “simple-minded”?
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I would like to participate, but like many I fear my power bill these days.
How can i remove my catalytic converter on my car?
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O/T but Funny AF:
The Uncycopedia entry for the Australian LieBore Party
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And the entry on Gorebal Worming
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It is interesting that at the time Earth Hour is happening, it will most likely be trending on twitter therefore the Greens/Misanthropes will be using electricity. That is what happened last year during Earth Hour and will most likely happen last year.
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Juliar – you started with:
“It is interesting that at the time Earth Hour is happening”
Taking that further – it would make more sense to hold this at midday – save a lot of effort and then they would have a lot more people participating!
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OK – let’s get organised people! Don’t just talk about it –
“Turn on the lights” – as Renee Geyer once famously intoned…
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I’m going to embrace the powah of the hour, It does coincide nicely with spa time and I would normally have no lights so I don’t have to look at my bits being tossed about in the electrically driven turbulence. Tomorrow It’s full power and full illumination with an abundance of Flannery spilling everywhere.
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I forgot to do this last year but this year I have some arc welding to do and 830PM is as good a time as any!
The best part of this whloe idea is that solar panel owners will earn nothing from it!
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Well thanks for the reminder Jo! After repairing the flood lights was complete, got that welding done. Just a bit of sparky spraying angle grinding prep to get the gal out of the way then into it for most of the hour. Strangely i heard another angle grinder in the distance. Mine was louder on those big pipes but and i drowned out the competition during the welding by turning up the stereo. Possibly because the current on the old transarc tradesman was up high to keep it bright the job was done too quick. So i turned on the bathroom heat lamps and aircon to compensate. Also got the drill battery charged and had a nice coffee!
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Geez, grow up. Earth hour is BS, but your idea is childish BS.
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It’s funny and I, like many others like to stick it up the Greens!
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a nice summary of what I think. This sort of thing is great if you want to be labelled a redneck, humourless (I think it is meant to be funny though) killjoy but that is about it.
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I posted this comment on WUWT earlier today. It seems appropriate here from my perspective. Consequently, I will do nothing different for “Earth Hour”.
Economical use of resources and efficient use of energy are always commendable goals. How WELL people use resources is a much better measure of stewardship than how LITTLE is used.
Waste and inefficiency is rarely, if ever, commendable. It is sheer folly to think that using less energy resulting from the high cost of ineffective, politically-inspired solutions will lead to a better future.
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Is it just me or is Earth Hour more prominent this year? In some years it passed with barely a murmur. Perhaps a sign of alarmist desperation as things have not been going so well for them in the last year. Especially in Australia where their ‘team’ is on the nose big time thanks to the Carbon Tax, general incompetence and dishonesty with the public.
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Humour –
http://barnabyisright.com/2012/03/29/who-can-take-your-money-with-a-twinkle-in-their-eye-the-government-can/#respond
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Don’t forget Tesla the electric genius who advocated AC power. Edison only used underground DC which was limited to a mile transmission. Tesla designed the Niagara Falls AC generators for Buffalo City many miles away. Tesla also invented brush less generators used in many of our small electric appliances too numerous to mention.
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I’ll be referring to you as SuperNova after this, Jo 😉
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[…] Joanne Nova website March 29, 2012 […]
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A few years ago when perched on a block with no power I used a carbide lamp for a while. Are the necessary products still available? Is it possible to make your own carbide?
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[…] BE A PARTY TONIGHT! Let’s celebrate Human Achievement Hour (video too) again in 2012 “Human Achievement Hour (HAH): a celebration of individual freedom and appreciation of the achievements and innovations that […]
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Last year I had a bonfire of galactic proportions of green gum trees, to ensure the proper ignition I was able to use 100 litres of used sump oil, one tractor tyre, two truck tyres and an assortment of smaller tyres buried in the bonfire.
Alas this year I only have a small bonfire, but I plan to light up my factory and run some plant, that should negate all the light switched off for twenty miles in all directions.
Human achievement hour advertised widely would overpower this earth hour nonsense.
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Interesting that this comment should get 2 thumbs down.
I can only assume it is because the PDF comes freely via Rapidshare.
I’ll give it a thumbs up.
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[…] http://joannenova.com.au/2012/03/the-hour-of-power-celebrate-human-achievement-this-saturday/ […]
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Enjoying Human Achievement Hour! Using all the great inventions that People have made! Go away Earth/Misanthrope Hour!
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Interestingly, some earth hour followers are on their computers asking other earth hour participants to use their cameras to post pics of their earth hour parties DURING Earth Hour. Earth Hour is at it’s hypocritical best.
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[…] There is only one type of Freedom – and all else is servitude, slavery or tyranny. […]
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[…] http://joannenova.com.au/2012/03/the-hour-of-power-celebrate-human-achievement-this-saturday/ […]
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Even as an astronomer hates light pollution, this is an hour for loving electric light!
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One of the signs of human prosperity is the ability to get so much for so little.
Earth HourPower Hour finished a less than an hour ago here in the UK. I decided to celebrate by seeing how much electricity I could consume without wasting, but by running everyday activities concurrently. My family of four has had the electric oven (with the Sunday roast), dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, iron, two PCs, a laptop and a 32″ television all running for an hour, as well as maybe ten light bulbs. The result was 4.2kwh of electricity usage. The maximum usage of all these things is nearer 15kw, so why the discrepancy? Human ingenuity, has created highly efficient devices. The oven only uses peak power for short periods, then maintains that power. The new washing machine uses around half the power of my old one purchased 20 years ago, and the dryer (with heat exchanger) less than a third of the old conventional one purchased 10 years ago. The iron is the same. They do this by using peak power in short bursts, and waste the heat less. Some will say that is a result of carbon credits and carbon taxes. They would be more than 90% wrong. Efficiency is spurred on by higher costs (the biggest of which is the recent rise in the oil price), but even if there were no rising energy taxes or oil prices, then incentives of getting more for less is still there.Finally – before anyone says otherwise – all my electrical devices, or not only more energy efficient, they also work better than the devices that I used to own, or the devices of my youth.
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Manicbeancounter provides an interesting point that is worth highlighting.
It’s a simple exercise to work out the power consumed in this one hour, by making a conscious decision to use as much power as is feasibly possible.
Read your power meter prior to starting, and then again at the end of the hour.
Interestingly, while he has tried to have as much on as possible, this immensely profligate waste of power (sarc off now, Tony) if it was done here in Australia would have resulted in an absolutely huge cost for the electricity consumed. (come on now Tony, I warned you about that sarc button)
All of this would have cost ….. around 80 cents.
Tony.
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Tony you seem to have an in with this electricity stuff could it be possible for you to check whether power consumption went up or down. This I understand would be a large task but worth while for gauging the mood of Australia.
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Wayne,
there’s no way you could gauge anything like this down to a one hour window, with any degree of accuracy, because there are so many variables.
My (reasonably accurate) guess would be that there would be so little change, one way or the other as be totally negligible, and let me stress again that word totally.
What I do notice, very wryly, is that, fancy that, they did it on a Saturday night, possibly the night where there would be the least night time power consumption of the week.
As an example I will direct you to two separate graphs which I will link to below.
Now, open the first in a new tab, and then open the second in a new tab.
Scroll down to the third graph on both of them, and compare the total power consumption for Eastern Australia, and if you set it up pretty closely, you can get the axes set up so that they do not move one from the other.
Then, click from one window to the next to see the difference.
Very very little indeed, and in fact both graphs show negligible difference one from the other, and keep in mind here that the scale indicates that the consumption is up around 21,000MW.
Power consumption 24 March 2012
Power consumption 31 March 2012
Now, do a separate exercise for me.
On that first chart, for 24th March 2012, scroll back up to the second graph. This shows the TOTAL output from all 24 Wind Plants, and that’s 2003MW from 965 of those huge towers. Notice how low it is at Midnight. That’s around 80MW, the total output of all 965 Towers, and even at Midnight, that still comes in at 0.4% of total consumption.
If that isn’t enough to make you wonder where $5.4 Billion went, then you’re immune to shock.
All right, how proud can renewable power be during Earth Hour.
Go back to that second link, the day of Earth Hour Saturday 31 March 2012.
Note that at the start of Earth hour, the total output from those 965 towers is 320MW and stays there for the whole of that hour.
That comes in at 1.4% of consumption for the whole of Queensland, NSW, Victoria and SA.
What an absolute joke.
Pity Joanne can’t highlight something like this.
Tony.
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Further to this, at Midnight on Saturday 24th 2012, when those Wind Plants were generating barely 80MW of power, this means that of those 965 Towers, only about 40 of them were actually rotating, or 96% of them were out of action.
Wind replace Coal fired power.
Tell ’em they’re dreamin’
Tony.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dik_wnOE4dk
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAWYSgJiu8k&feature=related
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she didn’t highlight this because she knows what the hour is about.
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8 kWh – take that Bob Brown!
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Thank you Jo, Christmas on April Fools Eve was just so unique!!!
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