Ive been away this week in Augusta (hence the gaps in posts). Driving back. This is the most south west point where the Indian Ocean meets the Great Southern. Have enjoyed the Blackwood river and canoes. Jo
In all the noise surrounding the fires last week, a small story may have gone un-noticed. South Australia is planning to approve the new Ceres Wind Plant on The Yorke Peninsula.
They use the same old hackneyed and misleading information.
However, keep in mind what has been said over the last few years by renewable power supporters saying that the more of these type of plants that get constructed, the cheaper they will become. As I have said all along, this is an outright lie, and this further proves that, as this project is proposed to cost $1.3 Billion, and it’s barely 600MW Nameplate Capacity. They also claim that they will be getting greater than a 40% Capacity Factor, something not consistently achieved yet anywhere on Planet Earth for a Wind Plant.
I’ll mention just 3 points from that information sheet and explain what the misleading information really means.
1. Enough electricity to power 225,000 homes every year.
Well, that is the usual furphy. Those 225,000 homes are not connected to this Plant, as the Plant’s power goes straight to the grid only, and even so, as this plant’s power is variable, then it could not supply those imaginary homes 24/7/365 anyway. Using that same incorrect analogy, then Bayswater supplies enough electricity to power more than 2 Million homes every year
2. Up to 2,500,000 tonnes of Global Warming Pollution (CO2) avoided each year.
Note here how they refer to CO2. This statement again is misleading. Those CO2 savings would be that amount IF this were a coal fired plant. They are also assuming that if this wind plant was built, then that same amount of CO2 would be saved because the power would not be required from those CO2 emitting sources, and here they use the highest case scenario for those CO2 savings, again to make the wind project look good.
3. Up to 2,600 million litres of clean water saved if this generation was produced from a coal fired source.
Unwittingly here, and relying on the reading punter not knowing how electrical power is generated, here they take a direct swipe at Concentrating Solar Power. (Solar Thermal) These types of solar power plants use mirrors to concentrate light on a focal point to make a compound molten. This molten compound boils water to steam to drive a turbine/generator complex, so that clean water also applies for a solar plant, so I guess that wind is now preferable to solar. Also note how they use the word saved in relation to the water, again having a dig at coal fired power as if it consumes all that water.
The water is boiled to high temperature, high pressure steam, and this is used to drive stage 1 of the turbine. Some of that steam is then diverted to stage 2, and some back to the boiler. From stage 2, the same thing, some to stage 3 and some back to the boiler. From stage 3, some back to the boiler and then the remainder to the cooling ponds under those fat concave stacks where some steam escapes to the Atmosphere as it cools in the pond. From those ponds, it then goes back to the boilers. The water is not consumed during the process. Nearly all of it is recycled through the process.
So then, all that aside, here’s a stark point I want you all to see.
Let’s look at the total power delivered for consumption over the life of this mooted wind plant, and an equivalent coal fired plant.
In the last couple of Months, information from a number of sources now are saying that a wind plant’s life span is realistically down around 10 to 15 years, and not the claimed 25 years. That same information is also saying that the generators lose up to a third of their power generating capability after 10 years. So, here I’ll use (probably a best case scenario for both factors here) a lifetime of 15 years and a lifetime CF of 25%
Now in the case of an equivalent coal fired plant, it is not economic to have one this small. I mean why bother making a small one, when it is probably better economically to make a large scale plant of say 2000+MW Nameplate Capacity, but this is an equivalent scenario I’m making here. I’ll also go way over the top and actually say that this equivalent coal fired plant will cost the same as this mooted Wind Plant, $1.3 Billion, when for perhaps double that (at worst) you could get one of those large scale 2000+MW new generation USC coal fired plants, but I’ll use worst case for coal in much the same manner as I’m using best case for the Wind Plant. The life span for this coal fired plant is the usual average 50 years.
Okay now, so here we have this particular Ceres Project 600MW wind plant and an equivalent 600MW coal fired plant.
Total lifetime power from this Wind Plant is 19,723MWH
Total lifetime power from the coal fired plant is 210,384MWH
The coal fired plant will deliver 10.7 times the power delivered from the Wind Plant, and deliver that power on a reliable 24/7/365 basis as opposed to the variability of wind power.
Can you see now how utterly useless Wind Power is.
There is no contest.
Having said all this, my bet is that this wind plant will be approved with all boxes ticked. God, how stupid have we become.
Kevin…14 thumbs up and 3 thumbs down but you worry enough about the fanatical fringe to reply to them. That actually illustrates the problem we have in our society and why it has got into this obsessive compulsive nightmare.
In journalistic circles it is a pleasing custom to speak of the media as a ‘Great Power’ within the State. As a matter of fact its importance is immense. One cannot easily overestimate it, for the media continues the work of education even in adult life. Generally,the medias recipients can be classified into three groups:
First, those who believe everything they hear and read;
Second, those who no longer believe anything;
Third, those who critically examine what they hear and read and form their judgements accordingly.
Numerically, the first group is by far the strongest, being composed of the broad masses of the people.
The third group is easily the smallest, being composed of those whose natural aptitude and education have taught them to think for themselves and who in all things try to form their own judgements, at the same time carefully sifting through the medias productions.
The problem appears to be in the national staff of the Republican Party for all accounts.
I very much agree Len, the Party has lost sight of itself. Either that or has been ‘white anted’. (love that term I learned here) It will take a groundswell of grassroots effort to take it back.
And in a Democracy it is believed that the majority is smarter than the minority.
Kevin,
Nothing is “believed” in a democracy. You always get the default operation, which is majority rule. If in fact the majority is wise, good. But if not, then also good because that’s what democracy is, rule of everyone by majority vote.
Nothing in democracy requires wisdom. This may be unfortunate, even tragic but that is the way it works. Democracy may a terrible system but what would you put in its place?
Our real problem is that we no longer have our democracy. The citizen voter’s place has been usurped by political parties and the citizen legislator replaced by professionals. You and I are now beggars at our own table.
George Washington was right; never form political parties. Had he lived today he would have added, never form a United Nations.
This quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin has been on my mind for a long time.
In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, — if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.
I took a look at what Google found on “sortition”. Without a lot of time to go over it all I can say is that I like the idea of a single term in office.
Random appointment of officers I presume means random appointment to elected office. It sounds like a good way to get rid of the power brokers but then we would have a very high likelihood of plain old incompetence instead.
I really don’t believe there’s any magic formula. If the people are not making good choices then nothing can save them because there’s no system that can’t be manipulated to the benefit of those on the inside. And no one I ever saw wants to give up power voluntarily.
Well, that’s not 100% true. Ronald Reagan never wanted power or money though he had both. So when his second term ended he was quite content to go back to civilian life.
“Those who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants”. William Penn
“Whereas the Kingdom of God was first instituted by the ministry of Moses, over the Jews [Israelites] only; who were therefore called his peculiar people; and ceased afterward, in the election of [King] Saul, when they refused to be governed by God anymore, and demanded a king after the manner of the nations; which God Himself consented to………..Nevertheless, He promised by His prophets to restore this His government to them again [Jews and Israelites in Spirit], when the time His secret counsel appointed for it shall be fully come, and when they shall turn unto Him by repentance and amendment of life. And not only so, but He invited also the nations to come in, and enjoy the happiness of His reign, on the same conditions of conversion and repentance. And He promised to send His Son into the world, to expiate the sins of them all by His death, and to prepare them by His doctrine to receive Him at His second coming…….”
Thomas Hobbes, “Leviathan”
Correct. Whether or not you believe in God is irrelevant. As soon as you let humans give you your rights and not God you’re doomed. That’s why the leftists in the US are trying hard to remove references to God, attack Christians, and are trashing the US constitution.
You can choose any god you want. Far be it from me to tell you otherwise. But do be careful because not all gods are safe to follow. Life is littered with human wreckage caused by false gods.
If you want evidence for that claim go prowl around the seedy underbelly of Perth for a few nights (if you dare).
This week I spoke on live radio talkback to the QLD Member for Cook.
Currently, a proposal for 120 of these monsters is in the pipeline in his electorate up on the beautiful and scenic tablelands of far north Qld.
His main reason for the project to go ahead was this;
The closest power station is at Rockhampton over 1000 Km’s away and as such we lose a lot of power through transmission loses,
Therefore if we build this wind farm, we can make the system more efficient !!
Can you believe this crap!!
I voted LNP at the last election and I tell you Tony…
They are all as stupid as the previous Govt.
What hope is there for us when these inmates are running the asylum…
Although I agree in general about the uselessness of windfarms, I am not so sure that this one might not warrant consideration.
There are hydro power stations on the Barron and Tully rivers capable of quickly coming online when the wind fails. There is already a wind farm outside Ravenshoe, so transmission upgrades there might not be too expensive.
The sugar mills generate predictable surplus power during the crushing season (unfortunately probably the period of least demand) and a wind farm proposed for Archer Point (maybe the windiest place on earth) just might be a success.
1000kms of transmission losses might be a reasonable excuse for Cairns to get more of its power locally, even after the huge recent (and ongoing) expenditure on HV transmission upgrades south of Cairns.
I don’t care about CO2 emissions, they seem beneficial in the real world, but local generation, even if it costs a little more in capital outlay seems to make sense when very long transmission distances are involved.
As well, the possibility of disruption between Cairns and Rockhampton seems high enough that if FNQ could be separated from the National grid at times of disruption, reliance on local generation makes sense.
Windfarms will probably never add up as an investment, but as a nation, we can afford some experimentation, and this looks as close as possible to a worthwhile experiment in decentralisation.
If they can generate energy at a cost that does not require subsidy and guarantees by the government, then ok … if they need taxpayer subsidy to be ‘competitive’ them I call this BS.
Wind power = BS … just like solar power, LET THE MARKET DECIDE FREE OF INTERFERENCE !!!!!!!!!!!!
Building two power plants instead of one makes little sense. Hydro seems pretty reliable except in extreme droughts. Wind is “hunt and gather” — you get it when you get it. It costs billions. How does that make sense?
I have thought of something useful that Wind farms is North Queenslad could do. You rig spring loaded devices on the ground around each tower and when a cane toad hops onto one, they are catapulted upward into the swinging blades of turbine!
They may as well chop up something that is a pest as well as birds and bats …
I’d rather depend on electricity from a conventional generator and not a set of windmills if there was damage from a cyclone.
Imagine the windmills near Cairns and you love near Innisfail. If a cyclone does not knock over the windmills, but just the transmission lines, where do you get your power when the wind stops later on? There’s limited hydro output.
Maybe the lines south of Innisfail lead to the fossil fuel plant at Townsville, which is far safer than windmills in a cyclone.
Besides, the windmill power in this scenario will cost roughly 5-10 times per unit of electricity as fossil fuel and do next to nothing for GHG.
I’ve posted in an earlier thread on the David/Goliath battle that an Irish engineer Pat Swords is having with the Irish Govt to have them publicly examine this very issue you post on
The Irish Govt has both signed on and ratified through its’ Parliament an EU Convention requiring a full public consultation/justification process before allowing construction of any wind farms. The Irish Govt has simply ignored this requirement through the simple process of leaving the justification pages of approvals completely blank ! Billions of euro have been committed this way to windfarms
Pat Swords went through amazing hoops to score a victory in an EU Court whereby the Irish Govt was declared derelict in these approvals. He then achieved a Court date hearing 3 days ago with the President of the Irish High Court to test this
This case has now been postponed for 2 months to allow the Irish Govt to prepare its’ defence documents.
The excuse given by the Irish Govt was absolutely astonishing, viz:
“we signed onto the Convention in 2010, over 2 years ago. Although we have held absolutely no public consultations/justifications, and the Parliament has ratified the Convention, no one has been to the High Court in those 2 years (actually, no opportunity to do so was afforded), the passage of time allows us to ignore our own law !”
Pat Swords will NOT give up. One may also hope and expect that the Irish High Court will spit the Govt defence out. If so, the result will be a full public examination of all that you have been posting, held in full view of the world MSM
Yes, I know … hope springs eternal etc but it looks like a good bet to me
Tony:
Recipe for waste of money:
Take one money hungry (German) wind farm operator.
Add one gullible State Premier.
Season with a cabinet of dills.
Decorate with a chorus of bird brains in the media.
S.A. is going broke, again. The Labor Government is so desperate that they sacking civil servants! Premier Weatherill wants to take over the Treasurer’s portfolio leading up the the next election in 2014. Presumably he intends increasing the deficit with “give away money for votes” schemes. No one, with the possible exception of himself, thinks he is up to the job.
He has swallowed the nonsense about making electricity cheaper and about the project creating jobs (which it will do, but in Germany not SA). Sadly, the truth won’t come out until after the next election. They still have to build the 70km undersea DC power cable and conversion centre.
By the way, your figures for the lifetime output should be in GWh. It doesn’t affect the conclusions.
And from those costs, the cost of that wind power will be $110 per MWh (optimistic), compared with coal at $40, gas at ~$65 and nuclear ~$95. So much for cheaper power!
I proof read in Preview everything I Post here, and I usually pick up a mistake or two. Then I hit the Post Comment button.
I came back later and read the Post and it hit me then. How basic an error can you get.
It’s automatic these days, and I use my trusty Casio FX-110C plastic brain for all these calculations, so bear with me while I explain this to all the other readers.
Nameplate Capacity X 24 X 365.25 X Capacity Factor and then divide by 1000 and then multiplied by life span.
Nameplate is in MW, and dividing by 1000 gives the resultant in GWH, and not the MWH I quoted here
So, for the the Wind Plant that is:
600(MW) X 24 (hours in a day) X 365.25 (days in a year, leap year accounted for with the 0.25) X 0.25 (CF of 25%) and the divided by 1000, (to convert from MWH to the GWH) X 15. (years) giving 19,723GWH
And for the equivalent Coal Fired Plant:
600 X 24 X 365.25 X 0.8 divided by 1000 X 50 giving 210,384GWH.
Note here I used a CF for the coal fired plant of only 80%. These new tech plants are regularly running at around 87.5 to 90% CF, dropping slightly over the years, and here, keep in mind that one generator at the Stanwell plant near Rockhampton ran at 100% every day for almost three continuous years constantly after commissioning.
That should read Casio fx-100C. Used mine for 25 years now, and only replaced the batteries once. Great engineering calculator.
I was reading through the ubiquitous junk mail the other day, and they still do that model Casio, only now it’s the fx-100AU, and there’s not much extra on what mine does, and it’s around the same price as they were back then too.
There is an overwhelming consensus among the scientific community about the contribution of human activity to global warming.
In the 1820s, Joseph Fourier discovered the greenhouse effect that was preventing the planet from freezing and John Tyndall identified the insulating molecules: carbon dioxide and water vapour.
There is very little we can do to prevent the evaporation of water but we can do a great deal to minimise the release of carbon dioxide.
Unfortunately, we are up against the vested interests of those who benefit from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas), such as the owners of coalmines, the oil companies, whose product is refined into the petrol we burn in our cars, and the automotive industry, which makes cars that burn petrol.
The generation of electricity depends mainly on the burning of coal, in spite of the fact that there are renewable non-polluting sources of energy available, such as wind turbines and photovoltaic cells.
Cyclical processes will result in another ice age, but our immediate problem is global warming. Amid the worst bushfires we have ever had, what more will it take to make us face the facts and act to confront the greatest problem homo sapiens have ever had?
Ian Edwards Glebe
Don’t worry about it too much Janama. Readership of the Sydney Morning Herald is falling. Tosh like that letter may have something to do with the decline.
Yes but doesn’t it bother you that vast amounts of complete shite information is being peddled by pimply left wing activists posing as journalists?. Do any of them even understand or are aware of the sacred duty that they should be fulfilling?. If they want to be politicians then they should put their names on a ballot (if they had the guts). There should be a huge difference between a politician and a journalist. One should be subjective and passionate the other objective and inquisitive. I hate activist journalism, it’s an act of treason on itself and society as a whole. Without a fair and objective media any democracy is in a whole heap of trouble. Remember that most people tend believe that what they see in a “news” article must be factual. Many people are gullible and easily led, but they are generally not stupid and will make good judgments if they are given the correct information (it’s called common sense). Which brings me back to the Education sector…..
THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT (and note to Mods, if I could highlight this in red, I would)
Thanks Frank.
If any of you have taken this link Frank provided, you will see a graph at mid page, and some may even click on the graph to open it in a new and larger window.
Of those who did, perhaps even more than 9 out of 10 who did would not really comprehend what is shown there. It’s just a pretty meaningless looking chart with a huge plethora of lines.
Each line tracks the week of power consumption, and the emphasis is on the thing that is meant to be emphasised for this article. Of note here is for readers to look at how every line dips at the right, and that’s for power consumption for the Saturday and Sunday, and note how they are lower than week days, when everyone is at their workplace, and all consuming much larger amounts of electricity.
(Damn, I hit Post Comment instead of Preview, so mods, if you could add the rest of this to the above Comment 1.6.1 ….. I would be appreciative, thanks.)
Now here is the IMPORTANT thing I want you all to look at.
Notice at the very bottom of the chart, there is one day there that sits out all on its own, Christmas Day, the Tuesday this year.
Look at the consumption for that day, and here in Queensland, it was a hot day.
Nothing however was open, perhaps even just like nearly every Sunday.
Except that NOTHING was open. No Shopping Malls with Coles and/or Woolies, and/or K Mart and Big W, the major chains inside nearly every large Mall, that even on nearly every Sunday still operate.
Christmas Day ….. NOTHING. Lowest power consumption day of the year.
Now note how much electricity was still being consumed across Queensland.
120,000MWH
The top of the page, total available (possibly) is 175,000, so, on that day when NOTHING was open, Queensland still consumed almost 70% of every Watt being generated.
Take the average even and that’s around the 150,000MWH mark, and that means that on Christmas Day, when nothing was open, there’s 80% of every watt being generated actually being consumed.
THAT IS THE BASE LOAD.
That is consumption that is still required absolutely when no one is at work, just to run things.
Just because no one is in those shopping malls, all their places of work be they Commerce or Industry, all those malls, Coles, Woolies etc, they don’t just turn the power off to them.
That power is needed, and it’s 24/7/365, every day of the year, even those days when nothing is open.
So, having said that, the total power consumption for Christmas Day across all of Queensland, NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT, was 440,000MWH.
Across that same area there is 2072MW in Nameplate Capacity for Wind Plants, coming in at just on one thousand of those wind towers.
For that same day, Christmas Day, those 1,000 towers delivered a tick over 20,000MWH, or 4.5% of the total power consumption.
Now, had it been a normal working day Tuesday, consumption would be 600,000MWH, (which was the consumption for the Tuesday 7 days prior to Christmas Day) so the delivery of power from Wind would have been only 3.3%. (had it been your typical working Tuesday)
However, on that same day, seven days prior to Christmas Day, it was really slack for Wind as the total stumbled along at only 150MW for 19 hours (total output from 2072MW and 1,000 towers from Midnight through to 9PM) and then rose slightly, and the total daily output from those thousand towers came in at 4450MWH, which was 0.75% of total demand for that day, less than one percent. That gave wind power across the most populous area of Australia a Capacity Factor for that day of 8.8%. That’s an equivalent of having just 88 of those one thousand wind towers fully operational over that whole 24 hour period.
Wind Power is utterly useless, even when we have a day when total daily power consumption is at its lowest for the whole year.
Ditto for Hydro Tasmania’s proposed two billion dollar wind farm on King Island.
Of course King Island itself has been served by diesel reciprocating engine gen sets for a long time. Comparing wind to diesel into the future wouldn’t look so bad if only for the King Island load. However this proposal is to flood the entire island with bird blenders, in order to satisfy some of the demand for electricity in Melbourne. This of course is in place of existing coal fired plants that are more expensive due to the Communists Green/ALP carbon tax nonsense. Lord, save us from these idiots.
Rod,
They closed the meat works and moved it to the mainland at great dislocation to the King Island brand of high quality meat.
The addition of bird mixers would NOT enable the meat works to reopen.
Frank
We operated the King Island Scheelite Mine on King Island for a number of years. Part of it went underground under the sea. It was a large tungsten mine by world standards, yet it was powered by diesel generators whose cost had to be absorbed into the operation. There were tax rebates for some primary producers using diesel, but what we did was to avoid paying a small amount of extra tax by consent, and in return add a great deal to the global inventory of much-needed strategic metals. In other words, there was a high benefit:cost ratio.
That is what is needed, not a zealots’ scheme of plastering the place with windmills. Has anyone done a proper benefit:cost ratio of the windmills? Including the cost of ships to get them to King Island? The cost of a town to take a few hundred people out of the productive workforce to build and maintain these commercially unviable machines whose electricity costs 5-10 times that from the existing fossil generators?
The weather on KI can be savage. There are many recorded shipwrecks. Some say that the success of King Island beef arises from the mixture of grasses and legumes that were washed from shipwrecks and started growing on the island. It was not uncommon for ships to carry livestock and food and to be wrecked.
As an aside, KI is infested with some of the most venomous tiger snakes in Australia, whose numbers will surely grow if they are fed a great new lot of food from shredded birds. Windmills also take out raptors and the like, the hunters of snakes.
I have nightmare visions of a cross between Medusa and Hydra, as each windmill problem leads to 7 or 9 more among the snakes.
I have no doubt that Hydro Tasmania has done a cost:benfit ratio, for Hydro Tas.
That will include exporting power to Victoria to be sold at an unreasonable cost due to the stupid carbon rort. It will no doubt include grants from both the Commonwealth taxpayers, and if there are any left, from the Tasmanian taxpayers. But of course Hydro Tasmania is nothing if it is not the organ of a Fascist regime.
Well said Tony all we have to do is convince the alarmists and the media and the politicians you know, the ones who prove that being brain dead is not fatal.I hope Jo and Co had a great time canoodling.
Wind mills are ideological symbols for the leftist as religious symbol buidings is for religious persons?
For everybody else it’s a loony symbol of national/international socialism?
Most of The environmental movement was kidnapped by ex-communists and ex-peace activists after the wall came down, end of Western communism.
If you look at all the solutions behind all the radical environ “problems” upon will find communism/socialism.
The reason Western communism failed was that more capitalistic countries gave more economic growth and technological development and that the people in communist countries lost faith in communism, serve the people, when people in Western non communist countries had better and longer lives.
The lesson for socialism and communism must have been that they realized that communism nor socialism can be sustainable in competition with more or less capitalism?
So in order to have sustainable socialism/communism you need to implement it globally and deny capitalism globally an environment where it can prosper. Hence cap and trade and energy quota etc. Even Chavez realized in Copenhagen 2009 that the climate treaty was an attempt to “get rid of capitalism”
I call it international socialism?
The Berlin Wall falling was a catalyst. They took up the green banner and went in search of a multitude of new “useful idiots.” Many of the new recruits were acolytes anyway. AGW is their trojan horse whereas before it was “social justice”. Two birds one stone. Then an amazing thing happened. We now have an unholy alliance between those on the left with a political prescription and those on the right with financial interests and those in the middle like Gore who have feet in both camps. This I believe is why it’s so damn hard to kill this thing.
The reason that European Communist states crumpled like a cheap suit was because of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Their willingness to face off against Soviet military expansionism quite rapidly bankrupted and demolished the communist states. It was a military defeat without military action. Except at the periphery, such as Afghanistan.
European Communism, of the non-state variety, now flourishes.
With the destruction of the DDR and USSR which had sustained subversives in Western Europe the motive to monitor and check subversion seemed to dissapear and that gaurd was dropped.
Marxist ideology has now metastised like a cancer into the very fabric of Western societies and their institutions, education, academia, media, non-elected government, even electoral parties, where it thrives under the stealth titles of Political Correctness, womens rights, minority rights, and of course Environmentalism.
Ace, consider for a moment that the “cold war” never ceased.
That is to say, the Kremlin realised that it could not win that way so came up with a smoke screen of capitulation, while at the same time attacking the West from within. Jeff Nyquist has devoted years to researching documents in Russian and interviewing KGB who have defected. There is considerable evidence that this is exactly what took place. Non proliferation treaties cause the Western defense to deteriorate, while the other side ramps up their military capabilities covertly. The cold war strategy changed; it did not end.
Rod Stuart, thats a fascinating idea. I had never heard of it. So I guess the most -out-of-the-box Marxist idealists might have been such like as Gorbachev and that watsisnam the drunk. I can imagine a whole new generation of commisariatchiks with a kind of post-modernist reassesment of the Internationalist agenda. A very advanced version of that good old Russian trick the deceptive retreat. it beat Napoleon, it beat Hitler. maybe it has beaten us!
The rearmament isnt so stealthy though. I mean the Russians are arming themselves to the teeth with new strategic nuclear weapons at an astonishing rate. Its astonishing because theres nothing about this in the arena of popular debate.
Meanwhile, with the retirement of MX Peacekeeper the most modern strategic ICBM the US possesses is almost half acentury old. I wouldnt even trust them to launch now, in spite of periodic tests.The computers in the command centres were originally on board the Ark. Charles Babbage probably had a hand in their design.
People under Communism did not lose faith because they were able to compare with the benefits of Capitalism. The access to the outside world was rigidly censored. Rather people knew that the information was distorted, and that the statistics were false. You cannot tell people how glorious their system is, when relatives have disappeared in the gulag, they wait 5 years for a car, and two hours a day to get bread. People learnt to read between the lines, and keep their mouth’s shut.
The same is true of climatology. Even if (God forbid) the likes of Lewandowsky or Cook got blanket censorship of sceptics, people would not still not trust the propaganda thrown at them. It is simple human psychology. If people undermine or betray your trust, then that trust once lost is difficult to regain. It is true in politics, business and in personal relationships.
You comment typifies the inability of alarmists to classify.
Anti-AGW people are a sub-set of anti-CAGW people. That is, many (Lindzen, Nova, Monckton) accept that that higher CO2 leads to higher temperatures, but it is nothing like catastrophic. In turn, anti-CAGW people are a sub-set of the anti-policy crowd. That is reducing CO2 emissions will have little or no positive impact, but has lots of harmful ones (destroying jobs, reduced living standards, providing opportunities for fraud).
On the other hand the ex-cold war warriors (anti-communists) who are opponents of alarmism, are dominated by a sub-set. That sub-set are Libertarians. What is consistent is with the cold war era that they are anti-authoritarian. Naomi Oreskes uses a term that implicitly excludes the major group.
So alarmists will not name their opponents properly because it raises uncomfortable questions they cannot answer. That is questions of climatology, economics, statistics, morality and political philosophy. Further, like past totalitarians, alarmists exaggerate, don’t examine their own arguments, and shut down opponents through smears, censorship – and worse.
You triggered a question I’ve had for a long time. When I grew up it was about conservation, conservation and protection of natural resources specifically but also about a conservative approach to spending money and so-on.
How did a worthy cause like conservation suddenly become environmentalism, something bordering on, if not actually evil?
I’ve never seen a single person put anything on this blog that even remotely advocated irresponsible living or irresponsible use of resources, much less wasting anything or doing intentional harm.
There are so many real problems… …if anyone wants to solve real problems, deal with the mess left behind by manufacturing solar cells and the high flux density magnets required in wind turbines. To Hell with CO2!
The common denominator is “the money trick” Roy.
Part and parcel of this whole thing is the expansion of credit by the central bankers in the West.
By expanding the money supply through credit, thereby debasing fiat currencies, the central banks were able to create the illusion of wealth and the Sheeple didn’t recognise it. As Henry Ford said in the twenties, if more than one in a million people understood the banking system, there would be a revolution tomorrow.
A couple of generations gradually became educated to spend, baby, spend! IF you save, you lose, because the fiat currency you believe to be money is constantly being debased. That killed the concept of conserving anything, otherwise known as “conservatism”.
That reminds me of something I saw on Youtube once maintaining that the “Commonwealth of Australia” is actually a corporation incorporated in the USA.
I dismissed it as someone’s imagination, and now I can’t find it.
It was in connection with Customs having no authority to demand duty on good received by post.
The guy was rather convincing that when Customs withholds a parcel and demands GST and duty, that a counter demand that Customs prove that it has the authority to charge duty, it just releases the parcel.
Methinks the guy that created the video got the idea from the document you cited.
A man I respect and admire very much once said to the effect that there’s nothing wrong with having money. Wanting and having money is not the problem. Money simply enables having the things necessary for successful, fulfilling living.
The problem comes in when your money and your things have you instead of the other way around.
I think we both know that it’s not even the central bankers who are to blame for anything. It’s the great temptation to put self ahead of responsibility to others, not to mention plain greed and abuse of power that goes with our human nature that has always been our undoing.
Roy I suspect you are familiar with the principles of root cause analysis or perhaps the concept embedded within the Japanese manufacturing technique of Kaisen “Ask why five times”.
In that vein, I suppose I was suggesting central banks (which aren’t necessary anyhow) and fiat currency are at the root of the problem.
By asking “Why” one more time, I suppose you are tracing the root to human nature, claiming that “plain greed and abuse of power” is human nature. Are you certain?
The problem with this of course is “what can we do to change human nature?”
There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio.
Ayn Rand made a pretty good case for “selfishness” as being the solution!
We agree more than perhaps you think. But Ayn Rand didn’t make a case that when you take a position of responsibility to someone else you should simply line your own pockets, enhance your own power and screw those to whom you owe a duty of some kind. Yet it’s done all the time.
Your are indeed correct, and I suppose it illustrates the drawbacks of this medium of exchange when things are taken out of context. (by me)
As I am certain you understand, the concept of selfishness advanced by Rand has numerous caveats, including the idea that with responsibility comes accountability, and that philanthropy is at the very foundation of the selfishness ideal.
As has been said before on this blog, there are no free markets left, and there is no real capitalism. Only lies, spin, and immoral behaviour in general. This is of course the very thing that the power elite requires in order to institute totalitarianism.
The great dilemma of the human condition is that we want to improve our own status in society, get a better mate, and confer advantages on our offspring. But we are also an incredibly cooperative species. A human on his own is a human lost.
I’ve been talking to some of my friends lately about work. Within their organisations they bemoan the existence of people who are not so much interested in the job they are doing, but in moving on to the job they will do next, i.e. climbing the ladder. These people “play the game”, whereas my friends “stick to their knitting” and actually get the necessary work done.
Which makes me wonder to what extent the people who keep everything working should put up with people on the make, and people who just manipulate the system to further their own interests.
jb, you describe bureaucracies perfectly … your employer would be a perfect example. If one’s worth was directly proportional to their effective contribution to corporate value, bureacrats would starve to death.
Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, anothers brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this others brass; always promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick banks; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.
I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.
Your are indeed correct, and I suppose it illustrates the drawbacks of this medium of exchange when things are taken out of context. (by me)
I think that’s not so much the problem — taking out of context — as it is that this particular medium is totally unsuited for any real conversation about anything.
————–
John Brookes,
That statement hits right at the heart of our human problem, doesn’t it? It also exposed a little of the real John Brookes that I’ve never seen before, something I wish you would do more often.
I definitely like this John Brookes over the former.
The collision of the currents at Cape Leeuwin is not to be missed for the demonstration of energy exchange. And the contrast of the relative quiet of small coves in close proximity.
Michael has a 2 minute audio message on his blog stating how he has just recieved the very best news in a long long while. He’s presently not at liberty to reveal any details, but it has something to do with Vic police, their hatred of theives/burglers,the slap on the wrist they usually recieve after being prosecuted, and police satisfaction followed by frustration in bringing them to account.
Seeing as how Michaels main focus for quite some time has been to gather evidence of Gilliards involvement in the Wilson AWU scandal,his euphoria at the information he has become privvy to surely must be in connection to official investigation into this case.
Yes, and Pickerings blog gets hacked several times a day. Don’t know what the hackers think they are acheiving,as it only slows down the flow of information, it doesn’t stop it.The case has progressed over a period of 17 years, so a delay of an hour here and there is not going to make any difference.
Even Paul Murray got up the courage to ask the Red Queen in an interview if she would refuse to discuss it with police. In typical Gillard doublespeak, rather than answer yes, she said “the question doesn’t really arise”.
Hitler was a fantastic orator as well.
The thermal gradient in a gravitational field has been confirmed by over 800 experiments since 2002. Details are in “Planetary Surface Temperatures. A Discussion of Alternative Mechanisms.”
This autonomous “lapse rate” fully explains that “33 degrees of warming” without any need for any greenhouse effect.
All should read this comment by, Geoff Wood, qualified in astrophysics.
As Doug has said about a dozen times, gravity modifies the mean free path between collisions. That is ‘every’ upward, ‘every’ downward ‘every’ sideways, ‘every’, ‘every’ free molecular path between collisions is modified. Therefore it is impossible for the modified ‘collisions’ that result, not to impart the gravitational ‘information’ into the macroscopic development of the gravitational thermal profile. This is the ‘diffusion’ process.
At this point, we have a reasonable depiction of the thermal profile of ANY atmosphere. FROM BASIC PHYSICS.
Given a simple reason why any atmosphere tends towards this isentropic profile as depicted and described by entry level physics, why would anyone look for a more complicated reason to explain what we already know!
The point which Geoff and I make is that the “33 degrees of warming” supposedly caused by water vapour and carbon dioxide etc was already there due to the effect of gravity on the atmosphere. This happens on all planets, and also fully explains why the poles of Venus are over 720K, even though they receive less than 1W/m^2 of direct insolation from the Sun. For more detail read my article “The 21st Century New Paradigm Shift in Climate Change Science” easily found with Google. I’ve also recorded an introductory 10 minute video here http://youtu.be/r8YbyfqUvfY
Yes Andy, they are quite unteachable because they don’t try to learn the truth. But the truth will prevail. Gravity produces the 33 degrees of warming. The IPCC description of the GHE violates the First Law of Thermodynamics, creating energy every time a molecule moves upwards in the atmosphere, retaining kinetic energy and gaining potential energy, just so they can have an isothermal atmosphere at 255K to start with. It’s all in my article “The 21st Century New Paradigm Shift in Climate Change Science” but they don’t dare read it as it would have them stumped, just like KR and “Dr Strangelove” and others are now stumped on Roy Spencer’s thread. Keep watching!
If you are still breathing after you tell “the Missus” you can give us all a heads up on how you went about it. Into the Valley of Death and all that stuff.
Roy, David, before we got married (almost 30 years ago) I mentioned a certain list of people that if ever they called I’d get a “free pass” so to speak. She probably doesn’t believe I was serious and since they were all long shots anyway it didn’t make much sense to convince her I was serious (yet).
There are quite a few named on my unwritten list besides Jodi, like Farrah F. (R.I.P.), Raquel W. (she still looks fine I might add) Barbara Eden (also holding up very well), Maureen McCormick (Marsha Brady), are a few of them. I’ve been able to slip a few new ones onto the list like the singers Jewel and Shania Twain (wifey has capitulated). There are more but you get the idea.
Mostly my very understanding wife hopes that I’ll run off with one of them and send money back to her. I can only hope!
So girls, my number is: 555-555-1212 I’m still waiting……..
I’ve always believed that the bird in the hand is worth at least two in the bush. Jodi, Farrah, Raquel…: quite a notable list there. But they aren’t going to keep you warm through those cold Midwestern nights you were talking about not so long ago. Get grip man! Get a grip! 🙂
I’ve never met your wife of course. But like my wife, she must be quite a jewel if she puts up with your haunting this blog constantly the way we both do.
And was it news to you that Jodie Foster was gay too?
Since I don’t have to sleep with Jodi Foster I don’t care. I don’t care what her politics are either. I enjoy her acting skill and I think it’s a dirty rotten shame that she wasted it on that piece of junk, Inside Man. Same for her co-star, Denzel Washington. There are some other films and actors in that category too. Some who are at the top of their field can suddenly descend into worthless drivel. I don’t get it.
You could bet your bottom dollar that all the other cyclists were on something as well. When doing my Level Two Coaches Course in the 1980s, the Course Coordinator told us that cyclists were always discussing the latest drugs they were using.
I don’t think that all of them used drugs. Somewhere in the peleton was a bloke who was actually the best non-drug assisted rider out there.
But the temptation would have been strong. Imagine you are coming into the last stage of a tour, with a lead of 20 seconds, and you haven’t doped. But you know your chief rival dopes, and will likely beat you. The temptation of just taking one little dose of EPO to ensure a win would be enormous.
With all the crap that is going on in the world the US anti doping agency has finally got Lance Armstrong;
Big Deal.
It must feel great to get something right at last.
Now perhaps they can try to sort out all the bankers and financial fraudsters who have ripped the savings out of ordinary people for personal gain over the last 5 years and who are still not in jail.
After that they can sort out all the corruption in the UN.
There might be a few other high priority items, like the murderous shambles in Africa, if they have the energy.
THE STORY IS IN REALITY A STORY ABOUT cycling AND YOU HAVE TO ASK, GIVEN THE WIDESPREAD use of “assistance” in cycling why nobody knew about it?
Lance hurt mostly himself; cycling was already damaged.
Remember the stories about Lasse Viren? – – that was 1972 in the “clean sport of athletics and yet; he will always be inspirational- a great runner.
I think Lance Armstrong proves that you shouldn’t make heroes for such trivial reasons as athletic prowess.
His determination to lick his cancer is what he should be remembered for.
I agree with the first bit but not the second – if it’s to imply alternate heroism. It was in his self-interest to survive cancer. Survival is a basic instinct. The praise for his recovery should go to medical technology, but even that shouldn’t be confused with heroism. I think that the term, ‘hero’, gets used too liberally and has now become somewhat meaningless.
To me the important point is that Lance wrote a book about his fight with cancer (entitled “It’s Not About the Bike” ISBN9780224060875).
He had brain and lung secondary deposits, yet survived to become a professional athlete again.
This book offers a message of hope and encouragement to those with cancer – a major contribution to humanity.
To clarify — I would not make him a hero for his determination to lick cancer. I don’t make him a hero at all. But I do believe he’s an inspiring example of how to meet adversity.
I have some experience that tells me attitude counts. And it counts even when it’s medical help that you need.
Here is some reality—and it even covers the “CO2 is plant food” line:
Parts of the world where the fire risk is rising can learn from Australia’s experience, says John Handmer, director of the Centre for Risk and Community at RMIT University in Melbourne. A good place to start would be “uninhabitable zones” – places where the fire risk is so high no homes should be built.
Such zones became a reality after “black Saturday” in 2009, when fires killed 173 people and destroyed over 2000 homes in the state of Victoria alone. A royal commission recommended a “retreat and resettlement” strategy for areas of “unacceptable fire risk”. Under a voluntary buy-back scheme, the state bought more than 100 properties destroyed in the fires, and new buildings in high-risk areas now require a special permit.
Handmer says Australia should be mapped based on fire risk, and the government should buy up the spots that are too dangerous for houses. North-facing ridges or gullies, where we know fires tend to funnel, should be considered out of bounds for housing development.
Many of these areas have been developed in the absence of such policies, he warns. “They’re setting us up for the catastrophes of the future.”
There is little doubt that climate change is already making fires more likely in Australia, says Andy Pitman of the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Australians were warned that they faced the highest ever risk this year. A couple of wet years led to extra growth in forests and grasslands, then a record heatwave dried everything out, turning it into a tinderbox.
The heatwave smashed records and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology has called it “consistent” with climate change. The average temperature across the country reached 40.33 °C last week, beating a 1976 record of 40.17 °C. In 1973 the average maximum temperature sat above 39 °C for four days. Last week, it stayed that way for seven days. “We are absolutely annihilating records,” says Pitman.
Such records are made more likely by rising greenhouse gas emissions (see graph). Additional factors that help fuel fires will also worsen as the climate continues to warm, says Pitman. Elevated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will fertilise plants during moist periods, creating more fuel. Increased variability means wetter wet periods will boost plant growth, and be followed by drier dry spells – a perfect storm of conditions for fires to break out. So fires are more likely, and likely to be bigger, says Pitman.
Wow, there is so much wrong with this reality, it difficult to know where to begin. Well, let’s start at the beginning …
Parts of the world where the fire risk is rising can learn from Australia’s experience, says John Handmer, director of the Centre for Risk and Community at RMIT University in Melbourne.
Being the directory of the Centre for Risk and Community, how surprising is it that he will see risk under every shadow?
A good place to start would be “uninhabitable zones” – places where the fire risk is so high no homes should be built.
A good place to finish is proper land management so that fire fuel is not allowed to build up over the years. Here is an excellent piece by Roger Franklin showing that it is Green stupidity that is causing fire deaths, not people living in the “wrong” places.
Such zones became a reality after “black Saturday” in 2009, when fires killed 173 people and destroyed over 2000 homes in the state of Victoria alone. A royal commission recommended a “retreat and resettlement” strategy for areas of “unacceptable fire risk”. Under a voluntary buy-back scheme, the state bought more than 100 properties destroyed in the fires, and new buildings in high-risk areas now require a special permit.
How about just letting people make their lives where they choose to and allowing them to make fire brakes to protect their homes and do regular controlled burning to reduce fuel and allow many animal and plant species to thrive? Almost no government involvement and almost no cost to the taxpayer. Many native plants require fires to germinate, but that does not work if the fire is too intense, which is what happens if there is too much fuel for the fire to use.
Handmer says Australia should be mapped based on fire risk, and the government should buy up the spots that are too dangerous for houses. North-facing ridges or gullies, where we know fires tend to funnel, should be considered out of bounds for housing development.
Many of these areas have been developed in the absence of such policies, he warns. “They’re setting us up for the catastrophes of the future.”
Only a watermelon would think that government has enough money to buy large tracks of land and then do nothing productive with it. Socialism is fine until you run out of other people’s money.
There is little doubt that climate change is already making fires more likely in Australia, says Andy Pitman of the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Australians were warned that they faced the highest ever risk this year. A couple of wet years led to extra growth in forests and grasslands, then a record heatwave dried everything out, turning it into a tinderbox.
There is little doubt that climate change is making no difference to the likely hood of fires in Australia. There is nothing remarkable about this summer in terms of hot days, but what is remarkable was how relatively cold the previous summers were. The only problem is land management. Hot summers have always occurred in Australia, even before we got here.
The heatwave smashed records and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology has called it “consistent” with climate change. The average temperature across the country reached 40.33 °C last week, beating a 1976 record of 40.17 °C. In 1973 the average maximum temperature sat above 39 °C for four days. Last week, it stayed that way for seven days. “We are absolutely annihilating records,” says Pitman.
No they didn’t. There is nothing remarkable about this summer when you look back in time. Only intelligence is being annihilated. No temperature records are.
Such records are made more likely by rising greenhouse gas emissions (see graph). Additional factors that help fuel fires will also worsen as the climate continues to warm, says Pitman. Elevated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will fertilise plants during moist periods, creating more fuel. Increased variability means wetter wet periods will boost plant growth, and be followed by drier dry spells – a perfect storm of conditions for fires to break out. So fires are more likely, and likely to be bigger, says Pitman.
He says “greenhouse gas” but does not say how a trace gas actually creates a greenhouse in the open atmosphere. The extra CO2 is causing more plant growth as shown by satelitte photography and measurements of the greening of the plant, but apparently this is a now a bad thing?!? So this extra CO2 is causing both more rain and more dry periods. Well that makes sense … not! How can we prevent large fires? Simple, just burn the excess fuel during winter and keep fire breaks along roads and around houses.
You might need to open a free subscription to New Scientist.
I am not surprised that they are now giving subscriptions away. Their paid membership subscriptions have been in free-fall for a number of years since they have been more “Left Activist” instead of “New Scientist”.
“The average temperature across the country reached 40.33 °C last week, beating a 1976 record of 40.17 °C”
So the temp has risen 0.16C in 33 years, on a meaningless value calculated goodness knows how, using values where the past has been adjusted downwards. Are they even using the same stations, or adding values from “selected” extra stations like the 2012 US, “non record” did.
Another BIG FAIL from MinBrain.!!
What was the average temperature in 1939? or this only calculated since the 1970’s, making it even more meaningless.
You are an ABSOLUTE and TOTAL FOOL to take anything from the Pitman as worth bothering with.
His job depends solely on him creating this type of JUNK, its his job description !!!
I used to subscribe. In fact, I have a “man-bag” with their logo on it, that they sent me for being one of their most loyal subscribers.
But then they had a change of Editor, who was more motivated by circulation numbers than by informing their readership.
Two or three crap articles in my particular areas of interest raised my eyebrows. And when I mentioned this to colleagues, I found that it wasn’t just my field they were fantasising about, it was across the board.
The final straw was an article about using crystals and wind-chimes to improve the rate of healing in bone fractures.
So I cancelled the subscription. But I didn’t send back the man-bag. That at least remains useful.
BTW Maxine – so now you must think that the UN IPCC is wrong on the science as the UN IPCC Special Report on Extremes (SREX) 2012 states…
A few quotable quotes from the report (from Chapter 4):
“There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change”
“The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados”
“The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses”
The report even takes care of tying up a loose end that has allowed some commentators to avoid the scientific literature:
“Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses (e.g., Mills, 2005; Höppe and Grimm, 2009), but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.”
New Scientist Activist is simply providing “reviews and commentary rather than empirical research”.
If BOM says it is “consistent”, then their is knowledge of uniform patterns of the past that caused “climate change”.
How often in BOM’s relatively short experience has “climate change” occurred?
Is this “climate change” global warming or just regional warming due to ocean temperatures causing desert type winds to move from warm land to the cool Southern ocean?
How does “carbon pollution” enter into the equation?
Australia should be mapped based on fire risk …. North-facing ridges or gullies ….
How come just north-facing gullies? Fires are only driven in from the north are they?
Large parts of the country are already mapped.
No mention of Australian Standard 3959:2009 of course.
This guy Handmer is a bit of a worry …
Handmer says Australia should be mapped based on fire risk, and the government should buy up the spots that are too dangerous for houses.
If you haven’t looked at Agenda 21, you wouldn’t have realised that this is just what is planned. All humanity herded into urban areas and as much land as possible returned to ‘nature’.
BTW, you don’t need to copy & paste all the text from your links, we all know how to click on one now. A summary would do and then you wouldn’t cause other comments to become buried…..Oh hold on!
@Maxine #10
I always thought Australia was historically a HOT and DRY continent. It’s not the Yorkshire Dales is it. I suspect it always has had bushfires and much of it’s flora is adapted which is basically why it’s still there and thriving. If anything, we humans are interfering with the natural order of things by restricting fires. If Aussies choose to build houses in the path of fires and get burnt out, that’s not proof of AGW, it’s merely a lack of foresight isn’t it?
Under a voluntary buy-back scheme, the state bought more than 100 properties destroyed in the fires, and new buildings in high-risk areas now require a special permit.
Gee, that’s starting to sound like the beginning of Australia’s very own ‘Wildlands Project. – Agenda 21.
Here is some reality—and it even covers the “CO2 is plant food” line:
Nice whine, Maxine. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
2013 looks a good year for the Climate Catastrophe Whinery. Their vines are as prolific as ever and they always have that marvelous growing environment, nurtured as they are with all the greatest manure available.
Whatever you serve up is always the best of the best.
Andy Pitman; one of the Tom Foolery, Willy Stiffen, Andy Glickson, and David Karoly mob.
Oh yes, the crowd that faked the death threats and when they were exposed the Alarmist BS Corporation defended them.
I remember him. The professor of meteorology without an undergraduate degree in Meteorology?
There is real science, pseudo science, junk science, and fake science. Andy is outstanding with the latter.
Certainly not dumb; the so-called “climate commission” lives very high on the hog thanks to a gullible public.
Isn’t he the one responsible for the analogy of a CO2 molecule and an Ebola virus? Any troll would hang on his every word.
173 people died in the 2009 Victorian fires because the necessary Hazard Reduction Burns during winter were stopped by Green Leaning Governments desperate to grab a few more votes.
Even the Chief CSIRO Bush Fire officer ( now retired) knows this.
Besides the extra green votes obtained by this moronic ban, the government can pocket cash saved in not having to pay for “cool burns” and use it to buy even more votes by pork barreling in hard seats.
Somebody, is responsible for these 173 deaths and over 400 fire injured survivors.
It was not an Act Of God; it was an act of greed, ignorance and stupidity that defied all known “science” relating to fire prevention and land management.
I don’t know Maxine. There are many houses in the Perth Hills that could be defended most of the time, but would be impossible to defend on a 44 degree day with strong dry north easterlies. Rather than not build these houses, you should just realise that you may have to abandon them in some situations.
Without referring back to Maxine’s comment, I just gave you a thumbs up, John. Where I live the problem is westerlies. I was looking at this fire protection system – came across it by accident. It looks rather drastic and expensive, but it might work even in a wild fire.
How many fires are deliberately started? How many “Green” councils stop cool burns? Theres a lot more to bush fires than extremes of climate and CAGW. Right now in the UK they’re getting snow. Not unusual for this time of year but doubtless the Met Office and the BBC will scream Climate Change. Funny how climate change, previously known as global warming which was dropped when the Northern hemisphere started to get very cold winters, is the root cause for all forms of weather.
The heatwave smashed records and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology has called it “consistent” with climate change.
Translated, it is saying the heatwave does not falsify the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. Though, without knowledge of the cultural context, it literally means that new records show that the climate varies over time – without attribution of the causes of that change.
There is little doubt that climate change is already making fires more likely in Australia, says Andy Pitman of the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
By making a statement with little content, you get away with a lot. If temperatures have risen slightly, then fires could be more likely. This statement is not contradicted if there has been a natural rise in temperatures is 0.1 degrees, making the occurrence of fires between 0.1% less likely and 0.2% more likely. It is also not contradicted if there are far more important reasons at play. For instance, making minor fires less likely (providing natural fire breaks), land use changes making fires more likely, or preventing the creation of fire breaks.
We should distinguish between scientific statements and political statements.
A scientific statement has a high degree of content, that tells us something about the world and is capable of being falsified by observations. A political statement has little content, and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
16 Jan: Bloomberg: Andrew Herndon/Christopher Martin: Private Equity Flees Clean Energy as Investment Falls
Private equity companies and venture capitalists including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Braemar Energy Ventures reduced renewable-energy investment to the lowest since 2006 as once-promising companies failed or were sold at a loss…ETC
***The decline is the result of waning government incentives for renewable energy and weak performance in the stock market, which made it harder for investors to extract value, said Ethan Zindler, an analyst at New Energy Finance in Washington… http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-15/private-equity-flees-clean-energy-as-investment-falls-energy.html
so now Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs come up with this??? Watch your Super:
18 Jan: Bloomberg: Ehren Goossens: Goldman Leading Renewable Offerings Says Slump Is Ending
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), the top arranger for renewable-energy stock offerings last year, is accelerating its funding efforts as it anticipates a rebound in an industry that’s slumped every year since 2009…
“It feels like the worst is behind us,” Bernstein (Stuart Bernstein, the Goldman partner overseeing its renewables unit), 49, said in an interview from his office in San Francisco. “I’m a contrarian, so when everyone else is capitulating, I think it’s time to invest.”… http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-17/goldman-leading-renewable-offerings-says-slump-is-ending.html
Looks like California doesn’t want any of Australia’s stinking carbon credits.
DAVIS, CALIFORNIA, Jan 16 (Reuters Point Carbon) – California officials said they have no plans to sign any agreement with Australia linking their carbon markets down the road, despite interest on the part of Australian officials to expand its coming emissions trading system.
Meanwhile the EU Carbon market continues to slump.
LONDON, Jan 17 (Reuters Point Carbon) – EU carbon prices hit a fresh record low on Thursday as poor economic data from Germany and relatively healthy supply of coal continued to force European power and coal prices lower.
Looks like California doesn’t want any of Australia’s stinking carbon credits.
Please don’t worry about it. There’s more than one road to the bottom. It’s just that in California our government restrooms don’t stink. You can understand I’m sure.
Say, it, umm, is an Unthreaded Post here, so forgive me because this may sound like a bit of a brag, but it does highlight an irony, me being categorised as ….. Green.
People sometimes ask why I contribute to the blog I do, and why I don’t have one of my own, something that has never bothered me in the slightest, as the blog I contribute at is indeed quite widely read, and has a considerably wider base than any blog of my own I may start here in Australia.
One of the ratings agencies for blogs is Technorati, and they do a daily rating of blogs.
Note the major rating there in the largest figures is the overall Technorati Authority rating. Our rating ranks our site as Number 1355, and that’s out of a total number of blogs of 1,318,469 which places us in the top 0.1% of all blogs.
Technorati places blogs into 7 categories from the Minnows right up to the Majors, and our Blog is categorised in the Very Large Blog category, just one category below the Majors.
However, the really spooky thing in all this is we have a rating also as a Green Blog, and in fact we are in the Top 100 of Green Blogs, and have been as high as Number 22 in that Green Blog category.
If I started my own blog here in Australia, I would be back with the almost Minnows I would guess.
The fact that we have such a huge readership base from all across the World also amazes me, and when I look at the World Map for visits to our site, (at this link) it’s amazing to see the coverage we do get.
So, contrary to what I believe, someone has put me in the Green basket. I don’t know whether to be happy that I’m in the Top 100, or offended that I’m considered as Green.
Hey, for some perspective, go to that main Page I linked to. At the top, alongside the large Technorati title in that area that says ‘search for …..’, hit the blogs button and in that search area type in Andrew Bolt. Now I’m no Andrew Bolt, and once, a couple of years back he made it into the Top 100 Overall and was as high as 40 something. Admitted, he’s away on holidays now, so his rating is down, but he’s down around the 5000 mark at the moment, way way below the blog I contribute at. All that indicates is that while Andrew’s blog is huge here in Australia, and mine is tiny here in Australia, it highlights overall World readership.
Wouldn’t worry about it. During the course of my career I have been accused of being a “rabid b****y greenie” and an “environmental vandal”. With my colleagues I was once accused (in writing) of being a member of the international communist conspiracy. Thought that was kind of cool, so I framed it and put it up on the wall with the gongs and other awards. Boss (lacking any sense of humour) took it down.
I was once called a bleeding heart liberal on a blog. Considering I am about as far right as you go without falling off the edge of the flat earth, I found it very, very amusing! Only someone who had never read anything I wrote could possibly come to that conclusion. People read one comment or a few words and drop you into whatever box they think the comment indicates you belong in.
I’m really surprised to hear that you’re so far right, Sheri. Why would anyone think that from anything you’ve written?
However, since you are about to fall off the right side of the flat earth, I have a spare seatbelt you can use to prevent that. It’s just like the one I use to prevent me from falling off. They’re very effective. 😉
I realize there may be some confusion with the terms “right” “left” “liberal” and “conservatives” when the words mean different things in different countries. However, I could come up with no clever (or not clever) way to label my political and social philosophies at the time. I suppose I could have said “libertarian” to a degree, realizing that humans can probably not actually be bright enough to manage a libertarian government.
Anyway, you should get the point–people pick out phrases and then label the speaker by that phrase with absolutely no idea what the speaker actually stands for.
3:16 pm Sydney is experiencing its hottest day ever. The temperature reached 45.8C at 2.55pm.
The previous record, of 45.3C, was set on January 14, 1939.
Does anyone know whether the 1939 record has been “adjusted” down in line with other inconvenient records from the 1930s? Do the BoM activists have amnesia about other historical temp records for Sydney? Is BoM quoting a temperature station that didn’t exist in the 1930s?
Bureau of Meteorology: a business unit of Greens-ABC Inc. Data fixes by arrangement. FOI: tell ’em they’re dreaming.
And let’s note that is the official Sydney Observatory site, that was not even the hottest temp recorded today.
46.4 at the airport
46.5 at Penrith
46.4 and Campden
46.4 at Richmond
46.1 at Bankstown
And also for the record Tom, yes that record of 45.8 is for:
“Observatory Hill, where the weather bureau started recording temperatures in 1859.”
My thermometer read 46 this morning. Seems we have the same phenomenon, Matt.
Oops, mine is not Celsius. But what’s a number among friends? They’re so hard to understand anyway – and so easy to fudge too.
What I mean to say is, why don’t we quit playing this game of my thermometer is bigger, more official, more [insert superlative here] than yours and start trying to deal with the underlying issue that is so divisive. And the underlying issue still is that absolutely no empirical evidence links atmospheric CO2 to anything.
Looks kosher, although I don’t think its the same station where the 1939 record was measured, and there has been a HUGE amount of urban development since then.
Seems that natural climate cycles have fiinally bought us back to the temp peak of 74 years ago.
High probability that the temp will now start to drop over the next several years.
Thanks, Janama. As I suspected, it’s not even subtle. If someone was diligent, I bet they could calculate how many millions of dollars in research grants to the usual suspects depended on the catastrophisation of the data.
Looking at the unadjusted data [obviously they did not know how to read thermometers a hundred years ago] The trend for Sydney since 1860 is cooling the only warming shown is by dropping the past temperatures big time. If they took modern UHI into the equation it would show about 2c fall in temperatures. No wonder the BOM has a problem with credability.
Even more interesting is that Simon Torok who made the adjustments did it as part of his PhD. (with Neville Nichols)
Here’s the acknowledgments posted at the end of their paper.
“Acknowledgments
Wasyl Drosdowsky produced Fig.1 Scott Power produced analyses in Fig. 5. Beth Lavery produced the spacial averages for Fig. 6. Phil Jones provided his average temperatures for the comparison in Fig.7. Neil Plummer provided the ‘Detect’ suite of programs. Alex Kariko tested Fahrenheit and Celcius thermometers. This research was a PhD project funded by The National Greenhouse Advisory Committee.”
That’s THE Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia. Torok was a student there at some stage and that’s where he learnt how to adjust climate data.
And let’s note that is the official Sydney Observatory site, that was not even the hottest temp recorded today.
46.4 at the airport
46.5 at Penrith
46.4 and Campden
46.4 at Richmond
46.1 at Bankstown
And also for the record Tom, yes that record of 45.8 is for:
“Observatory Hill, where the weather bureau started recording temperatures in 1859.”
Snowing where I am, I was out earlier in the afternoon and the skin on my face was literally hurting from the cold within about 10 minutes of exposure.
Paris – btw.
But what does any of this mean – it’s just silly anecdotal evidence – means nothing. Really – it means nothing.
if you can’t see the irony in Sydney’s temp record being smashed LESS THAN A WEEK after a front page feature on WUWT was some moron Aussie politician waxing lyrical about how one hot day in the past in Sydney meant there was no AGW…
Sorry, do they mean to tell us that all we needed to do was to have vastly more expensive power, pay billions of tax every year since 1939, convince everybody else in the world to do likewise (including chief offender China), and eliminate our entire coal export industry, and our 46.5 could have been a mere 46?? Or that if we had started in 1973, we could have made that day 0.16C colder??
if you can’t see the irony in Sydney’s temp record being smashed LESS THAN A WEEK after a front page feature on WUWT was some moron Aussie politician waxing lyrical about how one hot day in the past in Sydney meant there was no AGW…
I’ll match your local extreme records and raise you sixteen years of Global Warming flat line.
Evidential proof of every abuse documented in the film is available in the report and exhibit sections of this website.
Re the wrongful imprisonment of Schappelle Corby in a Bali Prison.
How a government wilfully withheld vital evidence from a court of law, deceived its public, orchestrated an unprecedented media campaign, and ruthlessly deployed its organs of state against one of its own citizens. This is a frightening but entirely true narrative; a grotesque political horror story which is still unfolding today. It exposes what happens when an individuals human rights conflict with strategic political need. It reveals the ruthless use of a governments organs of state, and a regime of unprecedented opinion management, against a single working class woman and her desperate family.It presents, and demonstrates, the crushing, pre-meditated, and often brutal acts which a western government is prepared to inflict upon a helpless citizen, in pursuit of political expediency.
New record, 45.8 in Sydney today. This must be due to adjustments!!! Well it’s certainly not due to a heatwave because we certainly aren’t having one of those, right?
Actually, the term “heat wave” is very appropriate. All waveforms are cyclic, and temperature trends are no exception.
In fact, you can do a Fourier Transform on a plot of temperatures over a longish period, and extract the fundamental frequencies.
They pretty much match the cycles of nature that we have already identified, and have even sparked some new research into variations in the cosmic background radiation. Unfortunately, you will not read about that in New Scientist, apropos my earlier comment at 10.4.1.
Cycles of nature? Peer-reviewed science cited where???? Or are you about to direct me to some blog site where anyone can make stuff up? There’s an infinte number of formulas you can create to match temps, so what? You guys still have trouble when it comes to attribution.
Well sunshine Sydney has not had any heatwaves this January yet and today included.
BOM heatwave=3 days over 35c
Sydney has had 3 days over 30 for the month so far and tomorrow is not going to add to that.
Next scare please.
No, I am asking for evidence that the recent warming is natural. You can’t provide that evidence. Studies that do look at attribution show that greenhouse gases are mostly to blame.
You fail to provide anything to counter those peer-reviewed studies. You say “it’s all models and they’re allwrong”, but then you offer NO ALTERNATIVE but guesses.
I am asking for evidence that the recent warming is natural. You can’t provide that evidence.
In the natural world, things that occur naturally are the null hypothesis. And since neither you, nor I can prove a negative, and prove that they are not natural, the onus is on you to demonstrate the cause and effect, from empirical evidence (i.e. not models or computer games), that the recent warming is anything other than random variation.
The ball is in your court. Where is the empirical proof that this warming is in any way different to previous warming periods?
And don’t quote me papers that refer to modeled results – I have worked as a professional modeler, and I am well aware of their limits and shortcomings – and I know that they can be easily fudged to show correlation, but they still can not demonstrate causation.
The null hypo tell us that from the known inputs of nature and GHG, GHGs are causing the warming
And how, exactly does the null hypothesis tell you that?
We started this conversation back on the thread, “The Message from Boreholes”, at the end of which, I put up a comment which said:
Models have never constituted evidence of anything. Whether you are using Mathcad or the nuts and bolts approach of Assembler and Fortran2, all you are doing is stitching together algorithms – subroutines and functions – that simulate mathematical formula. The field used to be called Numerical Methods, or Applied Mathematics by the more pretentious.
You want to do a Fourier Transform of a complex waveform – get the routine and plug in the relative amplitude for each time interval, and let her rip. You want to measure the heat transfer around a closed metallic ring, just grab the appropriate routine, specify the ring dimensions, thermal conductivity of the material, and energy applied, and let her rip. Easy. And the models always gave you the right answers.
The problem is though, that you need to ask the right questions. You need to have the right hypothesis, and to express that hypothesis in mathematical terms that the models can understand, and do so unambiguously.
Garbage in equals garbage out. And it does it every time, without fail.
This is why the climate models (or any mathematical models, for that matter) can never provide proof of anything.
The best you can say is, “If the current hypothesis is true, then this should be the result we would observe”. When you don’t observe the results you expect from your hypothesis, you either change the hypothesis, or you change the models by changing the functionality.
What CAGW has done politically, is to define the hypothesis and then cast it in concrete. Politically, it is then left it to the modellers to try and tweak the models to best match that predetermined hypothesis. And that is why the models cannot, and never will, constitute evidence or proof of the hypothesis. It is a circular argument.
But if the hypothesis is correct, as it well might be, then there would be other empirical evidence that supports it. Evidence other than a bunch of algorithms thrown together by the modeller.
That empirical evidence is what we ask to see. Not model output. And especially not model output where the input data has been “adjusted” to make the output appear closer to the hypothesis.
We know the models are not perfect, but they are based on the ideas behind the hypothesis, and it is that hypothesis that is the alarmist’s current position. But it is no scientific position at all, it is a political position for which models will never be able to provide proof.
So, Nice One, it is put-up or shut-up time. Where is the empirical evidence (not models) that supports the hypothesis of anthropogenic global climate change?
Would you like to answer that question now, or are you going to walk away from this conversation as well?
There you go, wriggle wriggle, avoiding the questions.
1. Where is the definitive demonstration of cause and effect between variations in carbon dioxide and average global temperature? Note: I want cause and effect, not mere correlation.
2. Where are the observations that exclude the possibility that some agency other than carbon dioxide might be responsible for the variations in global temperature?
3. Where is the evidence that the observed variations in average global temperature are anything other than random?
And, just to clarify, in case you didn’t take any science subjects in University, these are really valid scientific questions to ask.
You can make a computer model do practically anything you want — in the wrong hands, it is no better than a Shamans’ juju rattle. Models are superb at identifying what you don’t know, and where you have parameters or algorithms that are incorrect. But they are never evidence and, at least in my part of the world, they are not admissible as evidence in a court of law.
Any child can make a ludicrous statements and then insist that the grown ups prove them wrong. But that is not science. I suggest you toddle off back to SkepticalScience, and ask for further instructions. But be aware, I am going to keep pushing at this until you either come up with some empirical evidence, or go away to play somewhere else.
Nice One questions whether there are natural cycles and quintuple questions whether there is any peer reviewed literature.
Nice One, try reading a primary school science textbook and you will learn about the tilt of the earth’s axis and the earth’s orbit around the sun. These result in what we call spring, summer, autumn and winter all of which occur within a 12 month cycle.
Did you know that heat waves and summer often occur together?
Your questions indicate that you are unaware of these facts, yet you claim we have trouble with attribution?
‘we omit from the analyses eight locations classified as urban, either because they are in the centres of major urban areas, or are in more peripheral locations but show evidence of anomalous temperature trends, in comparison to their surrounds. Those omitted stations are; 023090 Adelaide (Kent Town), 032040 Townsville Aero, 039083 Rockhampton Aero, 066062 Sydney (Observatory Hill), 067105 Richmond RAAF, 086071 Melbourne Regional Office, 087031 Laverton RAAF, and 094029 Hobart (Ellerslie Road)””
oh look, isn’t Observatory hill where this new record was set ?
and it shows “evidence of anomalous temperature trends”
I suggest you read a bit more of the report you quote from rather than the small snippet you wish to hear. Sure, some cites do show “anomolous trends” but the others still show warming. Here’s some text from the Conclusion:
Australian temperatures showed little or no change during the first three decades of record, followed by accelerated warming over the last 50 years. Just over eighty percent of the total (100-year) change in Australian-averaged temperature occurred in the last five decades. The ACORN-SAT data are similar to all other datasets, including sea-surface temperatures in the Australian region, during the period of most significant warming. This underlines the likely physical reality of the changes diagnosed in Australia’s recent climate.
They conclude:
1.Like the old HQ series, the Acorn record is also still impossible to replicate.
2.The record is much shorter than 100 years for many sites. It’s supposed to be high quality, but it has many gaps and spurious errors. If volunteers can write code on laptops to check for errors — and find, for example, that one 36.8C was accidentally changed to a 26.8C (and there are many) why can’t the Australian BOM?
3.Like the old series, Acorn’s trends are very different from what the raw data shows. (Why do we bother with thermometers?)
4.Hot and cold extremes have been adjusted, for the most part warming winters and cooling summers, and at some sites new and more extreme records have been set.
1. The “BOM analysts” you refer to are not BOM people, nor are they the people you cited previously. That your “BOM analysts” cannot replicate something may simply be highlighting their incompetance.
2. Period of time does not change the quality. Accidents might happen, and they may occur in both directions, something “skeptics” seem unwilling to consider.
By “independant analysis” you mean, “some guys on the internetwho think they are doing it right, but are making dumb mistakes like not accounting for change of site”.
Wonder what is the relevance of the Sydney specific highest recorded temperature. The maximum high in each State, except Tasmania, occurred years ago. For example the highest recorded temperature in NSW was in 1939 and the result is similar in terms of the other mainland States.
The US recorded its highest average temperature in 2012 yet that year, in global temperature anomalies, did not make the top 25% of the previous 33 years.
Though Australia is not the globe one is likely to find that overall, thus far in 2013, the longer standing maximum temperature records, representing the whole mainland have not been broken. That would seem to be a more significant measure, than one thermometer site in one city, of the relevance of January 2013 in terms of Australia’s highest temperatures history.
Well it’s certainly not due to a heatwave because we certainly aren’t having one of those, right?
You said this sarcastically, but actually Sydney was not having a heatwave on Friday, according to the WMO’s technical definition of a heatwave.
See my comment below at #30.2.
The Noxious One poisons the debate with misinformation yet again.
The meaning of what you said, parsed by plain English, was the rhetorically sarcastic statement: The new record of 45.8 in Sydney today was certainly not due to a heatwave because we certainly aren’t having one of those, right?
Your sarcasm applied both to the Sydney record being not due to a heatwave and to the “we” not having a heatwave.
Whether the “we” are in Sydney is then irrelevant, the first half of your comment is wrong by itself. You implied a heatwave set the new record for Sydney. You needed another 4 days of high temperatures before that statement could be true.
The Noxious One tries to wriggle away worm-like, but is trapped by its own deception.
If you started posting comments that were both polite and accurate, the brand name of “Nice One” might experience a resurgence in ratings – a sort of… reputation hockey stick, if you like.
I really like the way you don’t understand the meaning of the word “reading”.
It requires interpreting words according to pre-arranged language rules and cultural norms.
Well this is really getting down into the weeds now, which is exactly where we would find worms wriggling.
You do not have to be the worm. You could fly like an eagle, but you must change your ways.
There is still good in you. You just have to turn away from the dark side. Your models deceive you, don’t trust them. Believe that the climate is still changing naturally because “for many regions and variables the signal of anthropogenic change has yet to clearly emerge from the ‘noise’ of natural climate variability.” [Hawkins & Sutton, American Geophysical Union, 2011]
Even if you believe the models are reliable, they prove that your leaders have deceived you. The models predict the “anthropogenic signal” could not emerge from background noise (S/N > 2) until 2010 for some regions and will not emerge until after 2020 for the vast majority of regions [Fig 4] due to the different level of noise in each region. How then can any statements made prior to the year 2020, such as those from the IPCC in 2007, possibly tell us “There is very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, with a radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] W/m^2” and “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”.
Of course it was a deception. A lie driven by politics not genuine science.
Their lies have built you a prison, NiO. A prison for your mind.
That was an excellent summary of this whole matter being one of Deception and Not Science.
As for the little one to whom it was directed, well, who knows.
Some of them are genuinely pure at heart and want to save the planet.
Others are activists for various “shades of grey” in the AGW Tax Pye.
Some are organisers for the WWF and the like who gain excessive financial kick backs by association and for support rendered.
Others are idealistic Party hacks for parties whose voting numbers require that voters be led like lambs to the ballot box. They don’t get much but bask in the glory of saving the planet.
Others are the Academically associated, whose job it is to bolster and propagate the Myth with the aim of continuing grant money.
Then there are the mysterious ones like Gee Aye who seems to be more of a Monitor, or spelling checker, who just mostly “watches”.
In this group may also be the Lonely who just want to be noticed, and so take a contrarian stance to enhance feedback. Perhaps JB fits inn there?
But back to the topic: an analysis of the Man Made Global Warming Science by Mainstream Scientists reveals NO SCIENCE and just a pumped up Gaia theme that has only one general aim; damage to Science and the rorting of Tax money from the Host Body – Western Democracy.
You have to wonder if civilisation has any hope now that common sense and morality have been replaced by Twitterised Political Control of thinking within the community.
As I write this I am experiencing another wet, cold start to what should be a summers day in Australia and reading about massive losses of livestock in the Northern Hemisphere caused by the new meme:
Sydney broke a record that stood for over 60 years, that’s weather for you, although a warming climate makes the breaking of records more likely.
The heatwave, if anything, would have been the period of days in Jan this year when Australia recorded the highest two days on record.
In Aus, the first 8 days of 2013 are in the top 20 hottest days on record.
I’d be interested in seeing how you want to worm your way out of calling that a heatwave. Perhaps you can add your own “interpretation”? If you read with your head cocked to the left, the graphs don’t look so bad.
When exactly did the BOM start recording a daily average temperature then.
So now we can have a heatwave even when some parts of Australia are having snow.
Country wide heatwaves now there is a novel concept.
‘Skeptical Science’ (SkS) in a recent post show a picture of a marine snail, Linacina helicina antarctica, which they claim shows ‘acute levels of shell dissolution’, and that despite a ‘highly corroded shell the pictured specimen was alive at the point of capture.’
This doesn’t look like dissolution to me – the appearance is more suggestive of shearing. I find myself wondering how many reasons there are which might account for this appearance before invoking CAGW. For example, is this part of the normal course of life-cycle events for these creatures, or is this possibly an effect caused by pressure changes as the snails are removed from the oceans? Could these shell changes merely be post-mortem artefacts?
The image is a scanning electron microscope (SEM) picture – which seems an exotic technique to use given that the snail (according to SkS) is half a millimetre in diameter. Processing of specimens for SEM can lead to artefacts.
In a press release dated 25/11/2012, the British Antarctic Survey say that ‘the team examined an area of upwelling, where winds cause cold water to be pushed upwards from the deep to the surface of the ocean. Upwelled water is usually more corrosive to a particular type of calcium carbonate (aragonite) that pteropods use to build their shells. The team found that as a result of the additional influence of ocean acidification, this corrosive water severely dissolved the shells of pteropods.
Ocean acidification is caused by the uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere emitted as a result of fossil fuel burning. A number of laboratory experiments have demonstrated the potential effect of ocean acidification on marine organisms. However, to date, there has been little evidence of such impacts occurring to live specimens in their natural environment. The finding supports predictions that the impact of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems and food webs may be significant.’
Yet actual pH values of the ocean are not mentioned!
Are there any marine biologists and people with laboratory tissue preparation experience out there who could comment?
Given that the heated debate over global warming is so highly polarised, what we have is certain senior people on one side actively supplying ammunition to the other. Why would they go out of their way to damage their own area of science, that they themselves must have invested years of their life in? How on Earth could such an extraordinary situation have come about?
It might be useful to read Velikovsky’s posthumously published book “Mankind in Amnesia” in order to have one unorthodox opinion of the issue of catastrophic global warming.
Even if you accept Velikovsky’s thesis (based as it is on Freudian psychobabble), all you are implying is that catastrophic global warming has happened in the past and we have collectively repressed our memory of it since we fear it will happen again.
This is problematic mainly for the reason we cannot unconsciously repress a memory of an event no human has ever experienced, because the most intense global warming event that has been inferred from paleoclimatology (the PETM) occurred 50 million years before homo sapiens diverged from the other apes.
Even ignoring the complete inapplicability of Velikovsky’s theory to CAGW, it still does not actually help us predict when another CGW event will occur or whether it will be exacerbated by industry and by how much.
I cannot say this is pseudo-science without knowing if Velikovsky ever claimed his thesis was scientific.
Aside from all that, it’s possible the thesis of “Mankind in Amnesia” is true and relevant on shorter time-scales for more pressing political concerns. i.e. – We aren’t inevitably doomed, but we are doomed to repeat histories forgotten.
Velikovsky’s theory is that humanity tends to replay its memories of past catastrophes as expectations of future ones. As I suggested, it’s worth reading his ideas, because this incessant anticipation of future catastrophes, AKA millennialism, needs to be looked at. The psychological basis is that individuals who experienced some trauma during their youth, say sexual abuse, subconsciously try to replay that when older in order to understand it. Velikovsky thought that this could be extended to humans as a species with some collective memory. CAGW is but the latest variation of that submerged memory according his hypothesis.
Of course it helps to study the primary sources and not the secondary ones.
Have the climate scientists over egged the pudding.
Using current values some back of the envelope calculations.
Humans as of 2011 emitted 36Gt of CO2 into the atmosphere.We are told that to fix AGW we have to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere so we have to go back to a time when the CO2 in the atmosphere was stable that was about 1880 after which levels started to rise.In 1880 humans emissions were something less than 1Gt so we need to get back to that level to stop AGW but it would appear that the 7 billion people already on the planet emitt over 2Gt just to remain alive so even if we ended all CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning or ice melting we would still be way over the limit of what is needed to stabalize CO2 levels.
We are screwed what am I missing here?.
Not sure, but half of what we currently emit is absorbed by the ocean, and forests etc. A lot more is absorbed now than in 1880, because the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 50% higher than back then. So if we reduce emissions a lot, then the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will fall until emission and absorption are in balance again.
‘we omit from the analyses eight locations classified as urban, either because they are in the centres of major urban areas, or are in more peripheral locations but show evidence of anomalous temperature trends, in comparison to their surrounds. Those omitted stations are; 023090 Adelaide (Kent Town), 032040 Townsville Aero, 039083 Rockhampton Aero, 066062 Sydney (Observatory Hill), 067105 Richmond RAAF, 086071 Melbourne Regional Office, 087031 Laverton RAAF, and 094029 Hobart (Ellerslie Road)””
oh look, isn’t Observatory hill where this new record was set ?
and it shows “evidence of anomalous temperature trends”
As I said.. URBAN HEAT EFFECTS !!!
A CLAYTON’S record if ever there was one !!!
Notice that the HOBART record site is also on the list of “shows evidence of anomalous temperature trends”
You can see in the distance, a lot of hi-rise has gone in, but that little patch is historic and has been protected from building. The sensor box is in the middle of a local grass patch, and there are other grass patches nearby, but also a lot of roadway (see the map) and beyond that, the whole area is on a hilltop overlooking the harbour so there’s a lot of water nearby.
Sydney’s monthly mean temperature currently stands at 28.43 for this month that includes todays 45.8.
Sydney’s highest monthly mean for January is 29.5
Lets see how it ends up.
Can someone make sense of the maximum temp being a whole degree higher than ALL of the recorded temperatures, and not even looking like it sits on the trend line? This is not just at one site, but at many sites in Sydney today.
I mean it certainly was hot today, but in the past I’m pretty sure the maximum temperature didn’t look like that as a big outlier. What’s going on here?
Can people double-check this, maybe I’ve just been an idiot or something.
Going back over older days, the maximum recorded is quite regularly around one degree higher than ALL the recorded temperatures for that day… so today is not special in that sense, seems to happen normally.
Does anyone know if this has always happened? What causes this? Is it comparable with the way max/min was measured 50 years ago? Can someone find the BOM explanation of exactly how their temperature measurement works?
Sydney (Observatory Hill) is not used in BoM’s ACPRN-SAT network.
“Out of the 112 locations in the ACORN-SAT network (Trewin 2012a ; Trewin 2012b), we omit from the analyses eight locations classified as urban, either because they are in the centres of major urban areas, or are in more peripheral locations but show evidence of anomalous temperature trends, in comparison to their surrounds. Those omitted stations are; 023090 Adelaide (Kent Town), 032040 Townsville Aero, 039083 Rockhampton Aero, 066062 Sydney (Observatory Hill), 067105 Richmond RAAF, 086071 Melbourne Regional Office, 087031 Laverton RAAF, and 094029 Hobart (Ellerslie Road)”
On the sensitivity of Australian temperature trends and variability to analysis methods and observation
networks – CAWCR Technical Report No. 050 – March 2012
The temp of 45.8C was reached at 1455. So the temp rose 0.9C in 6 minutes and dropped 1.1C in 4 mins.
You may still see this at weather.ninemsn.com.au.
AndyG55
Usually the AWS recording is in 30 min intervals, on the hour and half-hour. However, if there are quick fluctuations in temp, there will be 10 minute intervals and even 1 or 2 min intervals. It is very unusual that changes of 1.0C in 5 mins. (up then down) wouldn’t be recorded especially so close to a record temp.
Yeah, that’s the weirdness. However, similar sorts of stuff seems to happen regularly with maximum temps measures by Automated Weather Stations, so it isn’t like just that one Friday is behaving differently to the other days.
My current theory is that the platinum wire electronic thermometer has a low time constant (i.e. it measures quick fluctuations) and in a typical day the AWS will see some burst of warmth from somewhere (possibly even less than a minute of this) and then note that down as a maximum. In order to make the half-hourly data a bit more sensible they probably average it out a bit.
This puts a bit of a question mark over the concept of a daily maximum, even in principle. If you think about it, temperature is by it’s very nature a statistical measurement, and thus sensitive to sample size (both in physical volume of the sensor, and in sample over time). So you get a significantly different maximum when you measure with a big, heavy sensor (such as a bulb of alcohol) as opposed to a lightweight sensor (thin platinum wire). But then, if a maximum is a property of the sensor, then as a measurement it is intrinsically poorly defined. You would be forced to specify a precise sensor size, and a precise sample time interval. Even then, two identical boxes side by side might record significantly different maxima, if they just happen to be sampling slightly out of synchronous with each other.
You see where I’m going with this? A median of all the day’s readings would be better… much less sensitive to such problems.
I think this could explain why surface temperature records are broken so easily.
Tel
How long has the platinum wire ET been in use? Most AWS facilities only started operating in the 1990s.
Were platinum resistant thermometers used in 1939 and would have they been as sensitive to the changes in temperature that you mention above?
The old systems were the James Six Thermometers (which have the U-shaped bend) and I can still remember seeing them in weather stations when I was young which certainly was a lot more recent than 1939!!! The temperature sensing element in this type of thermometer is an alcohol bulb which pushes a metal “maximum” marker.
It seems to me that a platinum wire is only useful in conjunction with an electronic data collection system, in theory a human could manually twiddle a wheatstone bridge or something like that, but in practice that would be incredibly cumbersome.
Yes, I often see this in the temperature records. A sudden rise or fall of a degree or so in a very short time. In Perth, the maximum temp often occurs when the wind changes from easterly to south westerly. There is a short time where there is very little wind, and I think that is when the max happens. A dramatic rise in temps due to a lack of wind. If you look at how a Stephenson screen is designed, it does rely on the movement of air through the sreen. Without that, the air inside the screen would become considerably hotter than the air outside.
But this is just uninformed conjecture, and the more resourceful among you can find out why there often seems to be an anomolously rapid temperature increase just before the maximum is reached.
Are you going to put a link, or just leave some philosophical sounding mystery?
At any rate, it doesn’t matter what the physical mechanism for this might be, the point is that the measurement of the maximum temperature is actually ill-defined as a consequence, because it depends partly on the thermal mass of the sensor, and partly on just the luck of the day. There’s no point doing scientific data collection, if the thing you are measuring is ill-defined.
Maybe Tel, but since the method of collecting the max is always the same, it provides a useful comparison. And though there may be many factors that influence the max readings, over time the statistics will give a real trend.
The method is NOT always the same. They used to use mechanical thermometers, and they switched to electronic data collection. Not comparable over the long term. Beyond that, there’s known to be variations in the sampling rate of various AWS systems, and almost certain to be changes in future. We don’t know that the thermal mass is consistent across equipment either because it is not documented.
That’s the whole problem of an ill-defined variable!
If the platinum wired ET has only been used since AWS were introduced, it begs the question – in 1939, had there been a quick peak and then drop as happened last Friday, would the thermometers have picked it up?
You are correct, Tel. I think the different thermometers, ways of measuring and positioning mean that it would difficult to compare temps.
And what ACORN has done to the temp record is beyond belief.
Interesting, looks like the Australian BOM did NOT standardize on James Six Thermometers (which were common overseas) but they used two separate thermometers: mercury bulb for maximum (with a constriction to stop the mercury going back, thus locking in the maximum temperature until shaken down again), and alcohol bulb with a marker pin for minimum (where the marker pin sits in the alcohol and is pushed back by the air when the alcohol contracts, reset by tilting).
They also mention that the min/max comes from the AWS sampling at 1 second intervals which would be way and above faster than any mercury bulb could possibly react. The maximum temperature reported by the BOM would possibly only exist for as little as one second in a whole day! For “global climate” temperature calculation, the maximum and minimum values are used but everything else is thrown away. In effect, they are depending on the least stable metric they have available.
What looks at a glance like the dual scale of a James Six Thermometer on the left hand side is on closer inspection a pair of regular mercury bulb thermometers (dry bulb and wet bulb) with no memory capability.
The memory thermometers are laying horizontal and judging from the man’s hand near the box the length of these is perhaps 35 cm to 40 cm with a bulb perhaps 10mm long. Thus, they are physically largish devices, not capable of changing value quickly.
It would be very interesting if anyone can get hold of one or both of these and run it in the same box as a modern electronic AWS, find out how big the difference really is. At any rate, the modern practice of sampling once per second and pulling the maximum out of that stream will surely result in higher maxima (by somewhat random amounts each day) than the old method.
There is an example of platinum film sensors, note that they come in a whole bunch of sizes and that the 90% response time can vary from 2.5 seconds up to 40 seconds depending on the sensor. That’s just one supplier, there are no doubt others, depending on housing, etc.
Thanks for that info, Tel.
Re your comment about thermometer comparisons ( although not quite the same scenario you mention).
Casino (NSW) had a manual and an AWS operating 300m apart. The manual was next to a tarred road with buildings close by. The AWS was situated on an oval with no buildings close by.
The AWS always recorded lower temps (especially max temps) over the 15 years they were operating together, probably more due to the UH effect. The manual station was closed in August, 2012.
– they don’t work!
– they don’t produce power, they consume it!
– they don’t let the neighbours sleep!
– they don’t ever rate to their capacity!
– they don’t discriminate on slicing and dicing….
– they don’t save CO2 emissions!
– they don’t work 24/7/365 days a year!
– they don’t work!
Well the UK Met office assured us a decade ago that in a few years snow would be a foggy memory. Now Ive a feckin great thick blanket of the stuff to wade through outside my front door.
Turned out OK in the end. I took a camera. Everything was slow and low key with a festival atmosphere. Some girls posed for me to photograph them. Plus lots of trees. Very Victorian Christmas card. Not as slippery as I feared but I needed the wellies and three pairs of sock.Then a great deal of trouble getting the boots off on my return.
Maybe in the future the derelict windmills could be recommissioned as fans to blow snow bearing clouds away from us.
(Note for Maxine, thats meant to be a joke, now you can tick your thumbs down).
Can someone explain how increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have caused the Sydney heatwave disaster, panic, channel 7 special please. I need to know.
It’s quite simple when everything is based on fantasy. People now love catastrophes and care nothing about if anything is really done to fix them. All they need to be told is “it’s handled”, so CO2 is the bad thing because scientists said that and they are the smart people and everyone else is too dumb to understand. So we should all “care” about the planet but really, doing anything is not necessary. After all, none of the bad stuff ever actually happens, no one moves to correct the “problem” and life remains more or less the same. Until reality slips in, CO2 will be the bad thing and no amount of facts mean anything. Thirty years ago, I had a poster that said “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts.” I was ahead of my time.
All things are possible when you live in a fantasy world.
More pertinently, you need an actual heatwave in order to have anything in need of an explanation.
First elect to use the definition of heatwave recommended by the World Meteorological Org., which is:
Heat wave duration index: maximum period > 5 consecutive days with Tmax >5°C above the 1961–1990 daily Tmax normal
Secondly note that since the 4 days preceding Friday had daily Max temps less than 29 Celsius, no matter how hot it was in Sydney on Friday, one hot day does not qualify as a “heatwave” under the internationally accepted technical definition of a heatwave.
As for explanations of this total non-event…
See also page 192 and page 199 Fig 4 of Frich 2002 (fair warning: cited by Wikipedia) in which the duration of heatwaves globally has changed over the last hundred years in a manner consistent with a cyclic phenomenon. The authors themselves judged in 2002 that…
The mixed results shown in Fig. 4a are supported by the fact that, although there appears to be a globally upward trend in HWDI (Fig. 4b), it is not statistically significant.
Surmising how this judgement might have been affected by an additional 10 years of no significant change in globally averaged temperature is left as a reader exercise.
For Sydney on Friday in particular, Backslider noted yesterday that even the official explanation is far from dramatic.
The Urban Heat Island effect was one factor in the intensity for central Sydney. (Tip’o’t’Hat to Backslider)
Yes Andrew apparently Australia has a daily Tmax for the whole country now.
I just can’t wait for July when the Tmax is 5deg above the daily average for July for five or more days and we are told we are having a heatwave.
Maybe we could have a world daily Tmax then the whole world could be having a heatwave.
Imagine the people in England now being told they are having a heatwave.
NSW is now an IMPORTER of electricity during peak times.
Previously, we used to EXPORT power to VIC and SA, and also help transmit QLD power to those states as well. Now, we are also USING QLD power during peak times because we do not have sufficient generating capacity to supply the demand. Nor can we reasonably expect to be able to build a coal-fired 2.4GW power station to meet the demand, nor build a couple more to replace aging infrastructure, so unless things change in the next decade or so, NSW residents can expect blackouts during periods of high demand. If QLD follows the path taken by SA, VIC and now NSW, they will have precious little to spare themselves, which will make things even worse.
Looks as if Eastern Australia are in for some turbulent times regarding energy as local gas supplies are all marked for export and suppliers to the domestic market can’t buy any gas. Here in WA the government has set aside 15% of gas for domestic use
Regarding radiation,here’s a little story from a month ago or so that didn’t make the MSM (via Jerry Pournelle’s blog)
Linear No Threshold Theory Wrong UN Admits – Media keeps Quiet
For 60 years the Linear No Threshold theory (LNT), that low level radiation is harmful, has been the foundation of the anti-nuclear movement. It has never had any scientific justification whatsoever and this has now been publicly acknowledged by the The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR).
The fears engendered by this scare story have been directly responsible for the standstill in nuclear energy generation and thus in most energy generation overall in the world since 1970. Without that scare the world would be producing at least twice as much electricity and would thus be thought twice as well off.
Such paradigm shattering news is of massive worldwide significance and has thus been ignored by virtually all the world’s conventional media with the almost sole exception of this from Forbes:
I don’t care what anybody says in respect of a scare campaign. It only needs contain the word ‘nuclear’, and people arc up with fear, virtually an unfounded fear when it comes to nuclear electrical power generation.
The uranium bearing ‘dirt’ is dug out of the ground, and the Uranium separated from that. This is called Yellowcake, and naturally existing Uranium is already in a partially enriched state, and in it’s natural state, is at around 0.7% enrichmant. So, even while still in the ground it is partially enriched.
150 thousand tons of rock and ore will yield around 200 tons of the Uranium.
From this first stage, that of separation, it then undergoes further enrichment.
The process to enrich it to a level where it can be used for fuel in Nuclear power plants entails 5 separate steps, and at the end of those 5 steps, it is enriched to around 3 to 5%, and most typically just that 3%.
The process for enrichment to weapons grade Uranium (typically 95 to 98%) is a completely different series of processes altogether, so if the process is to manufacture Nuclear power plant fuel, it’s not just a matter of ‘holding down the button’ so to speak and just keeping on enriching it, perhaps until it reaches weapons grade enrichment. At the end of the 5 processes for manufacturing Nuclear power plant fuel that is the absolute maximum that it can be enriched, that being the 3 to 5%.
During those processes for nuclear power plant fuel, the Uranium is converted to a powder which is then pressed into pellet form. Those pellets are then fired in a high temperature furnace to create hard ceramic pellets. The pellets are then machined into specific sizes. The machined pellets are then inserted into the rods, usually tubes manufactured from Zirconium alloy material.
I mentioned above that the original ‘dirt out of the ground’ yields 200 tons of Uranium from 150,000 tons of ‘dirt’. At the end of the 5 process, you will have 24 tonnes of nuclear fuel. The cost is $2200 per kilogram, so that amount of fuel has cost $52.8 Million to produce.
That 24 Tonnes of Nuclear fuel is what a large reactor might use in a year, and again, you may consider that a large amount but compare it with a large coal fired power plant that burns around 7 million tons of ‘steaming’ coal each year.
With judicious and carefully planned use, the rods in the ‘stack’ can be ‘rotated’ during the process so they can work out the maximum number of exposed rods to make the steam required to drive the turbine. In some cases in the U.S. single reactor fuel replenishment can be 18 months apart. With nearly all Plants having two reactors, that means one reactor going under refuel, and the second reactor 9 months after that, and then the first reactor again 9 months later. (an 18 month interval)
So even while refuelling is under way, the Plant is still providing half its total power. Routine maintenance is usually carried out while the refuelling process is under way.
As the fuel is consumed by the nuclear reaction, enrichment levels are diminished somewhat and when they fall back to around 1%, they are considered to be spent, and no longer much of a contribution towards the process. That careful planning means that every bundle of rods should be back at their minimum when refuel time comes around.
The bundles or rods are removed from the central core, and stored in the reactor, usually for one, sometimes two refuelling cycles. By this time enrichment has diminished even further, and in most cases back to the same level as Uranium existing in the ground, at around 0.7%. The rods are then removed for dry storage at the storage facility for these nuclear fuel rods, or in the best case scenario, sent for reprocessing.
The newer types of plant can store all the bundles of rods consumed during the life of the plant inside the Reactor for the life of the plant, usually 50 tears, but this can be extended to 60, and even to 75 years.
So, the waste fuel in the expended rods in the bundles is now at an enrichment level the same as for the existing ore still in the dirt in the ground.
The loudest voice, usually green, and completely uninformed, and unwilling even to be informed, or to even bother to check, sparks fear with that boogedy boogedy word, nuclear.
Try even beginning to offer an explanation, and you get shot down before you even start.
Tony,
It isn’t the uranium(U238 or U 235) that is all that radioactive. It is the fission products that are the problem and they are nasty. However after 6 months or so many have largely gone away. That’s the nice thing about radioactives – they go away on their own. Imagine telling greenies that stable isotopes have half lives of FOREVER.
It also needs to be pointed out that substances with long half lives aren’t all that radioactive. Things with very short half lives are highly radioactive but go away quickly. The problems are with things that give up their nuclear energy in times comparable to human lifetimes like Sr90. So you engineer systems to keep them out of contact with the environment and food chain.
The actinides can be “burnt” in a fast-breeder reactor while producing useful electricity. It’s a mistake to try to store those products for hundreds to thousands of years as they can be “immediately” useful.
Tony,
The tonage numbers for an epi-thermal/thermal 232-Th/233-U MSBR are far better in terms of ore to fuel than for the U/Pu fuel cycle. People will pay you to take away the nasty Thorium from their rare-earth refining plants. 🙂 But there’s some work to be done to sort out commercially-viable technologies that can scale to global energy needs.
One of the favoured (by nuclear physicists) salt components, Lithium is the hardest thing to find; because only the 7-Li can be used within the reactor or it’ll gobble up too many neutrons. And that isotope occurs in a minority amongst the element for which there is already a very strong market in e.g. batteries. So even if 7-Li were vastly more common, the price would escalate steeply with greater demand. And the known economically recoverable resource is only about 7kg/capita, globally.
Chlorine salts get mess with thermal neutrons to which Cl presents anything from huge to miniscule absorbtion cross sections in a non-monotonic variation – which is no good as “designing” the energy decrements of neutrons to “skip” the levels at which Cl is “large”; is unworkable. But Cl remains tiny from about 1eV and higher; which is sufficient to make the 232-Th an enormous target for absorbtion, hence providing a useful, if marginal breeding ratio. It should also leave many neutrons sufficiently energetic to “burn” any actinides from other nuclear reactors; with which the salt mix has been “doped”.
Don’t worry if you don’t understand this. I’m only imagine that I might. 🙂
Kneel,
This is because of reduced overall electricity demand on the Eastern seaboard due to various factors, economic downturn being one,closure of industrial plants due to carbon tax being another. This caused an oversupply of power plant capacity on the eastern seaboard.
Victorian brown coal power stations are able to bid the cheapest price and hence are now supplying S. Aust and NSW over significant periods.
Consequently some older NSW power stations have been closed and others are mothballed.
There was a significant duration when the brown coal stations were unavailable due to the Victorian floods.
Frank
California is that known hotbed of CAGW. (Hey, pardon the pun, I couldn’t help myself)
I have a good friend who lives in Stockton in California, and we share emails, sometimes as many as ten a day, and say, what did we do before email eh.
All the talk there currently on their News bulletins is how Sydney is quite literally cooking, and he’s sent me a couple of emails about it.
Interest piqued, he went looking for California temperature records, and he sent me the following link.
Note the Maximum recorded temps for each of those cities shown there.
Nearly all of them are pre the CAGW scare.
The highest is 118F which is 47.8C (118 – 32 and then multiplied by 5 and divided by 9) That was in Redding and was recorded in 1971.
Even for the two largest cities L.A. and San Francisco, both on the ocean, the max was recorded in 1961 for both, as was their State Capital Sacramento, 115F. (46.1) and Sacramento is inland a ways from the Coast, with Stockton just to the South of Sacramento.
Can anyone tell me if the monsoon in norhtern Austrlia was late in 1972/3,1992/3 and 2012/3. If it was would the tempatures in central Australia be hotter than normal before its arrival
More questions about wind direction later
Very well then, some random headlines that may spark interest….
What do GoldNerds think about this recent discovery of a 5.5kg gold nugget near Ballarat?
Twenty years of prospecting for $250,000 is a poor rate of return compared to buying shares in gold mines, I’d guess.
On a cynical black-humour note…
Be careful about coming into a large fortune suddenly. This guy won the lottery. Yay! He’s gone to The Island! 🙁
And finally a recent opinion on putting academic research behind paywalls.
I’m sure when searching many of you discover relevant articles about pet CAGW topics are usually behind a paywall at Nature, or Science Direct, or Elsevier. When I hit a paywall, I turn back. I know the truth is important but… I assume SOMEBODY ELSE located SOMEWHERE will have exposing CAGW claims as their main job and will use a sponsored subscription to read on my behalf at SOME FUTURE time. It’s a bit of a cop-out, I know, but we should not all have to pay to read this knowledge. In some cases there is a time window for the paywall, afterwhich it becomes free, and sometimes publishers will make a frequently-cited article free just out of public interest. But that’s hardly the point.
Anyway it’s a pretty interesting read.
Heatwaves are jetstream caused and weather related. The fact is the NORTHERN HEMISPHERE is the coldest and getting COLDER THAT (see ALL the coldest events at http://iceagenow.info/) (http://iceagenow.info/2013/01/pakistan-severe-cold-breaks-previous-records-video/ that is a SMALL part of it) is indication of REAL LIA approaching which is postulated by Russian scientists. Downturn of Solar cyc 24 is now confirmed. The spots are going looks like cyc 25 will be a nonevent! Roll on the next LIA. Poor earthlings!
Australia Burns. There’s an article with this title (an interview with “Australian philosopher and climate activist”, Professor Clive Hamilton) on the New Left Project website. The comments are interesting: link.
We are overly familiar with this style of uncritical, channeled thinking, Politicised analysis but?
Are you saying that this is one of the worst examples of lack of critical thinking, and therefore an indictment of some sectors in our Australian University system?
This post epitomises for me one of the worst features of the climate debate: why are many supporters of the dangerous AGW hypothesis so unpleasant about those with whom they disagree? Thus Clive Hamilton refers constantly to “deniers”. It’s a nasty word anyway, but why use it when, so far as I can see, most people who question the hypothesis do so because of a sincerely held view that it’s not properly verified?
My point is nicely illustrated by Hamilton’s extraordinary attack on Christopher Monckton. I find Monckton pompous and irritating and, despite the praise he gets from many sceptics, I doubt if he is an asset to their cause. Nonetheless, he is very knowledgeable about the issues involved and (if you ignore his pomposity) makes his case cogently. Therefore, to describe him as “demented” and a “Loopy Lord” is plainly ridiculous.
Such lack of courtesy and apparent disinclination to try to understand a different perspective is not something I would expect from a Professor of Public Ethics – especially one who has been appointed to the Australian government’s principal advisory body on climate change policy. Surely a modicum of objectivity is a requirement for such an appointment?
It’s an attitude that discredits those who adopt it.
I would have thought that was clear enough … hmm? But please don’t focus on my comments – look at a few of the others. Interesting for a left-wing web site.
Roy, I ran across this piece by George Carlin. It is about the USA, but it applies equally to the Land of Oz.
“Politicians are put there to give you that idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, and they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, and the City Halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They’ve got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want—they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. You know something, they don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting crushed by a system that threw them overboard 30 years ago.
It’s a big club and you ain’t in it! You and I are not in the Big Club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you in the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks, the game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans are and will probably remain willfully ignorant… Because the owners of this country know the truth, it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” – George Carlin
Here’s an interesting article on China’s clean energy venture from a leading Left Wing source. Like many commentaries it fails to distinguish between CO2 and harmful to health emissions.
Just heard over radio that the US is to remove ALL of those X-ray scatter machines from their airports by May this year. Any of our contributors over there heard more on this.
I know there are those who would gladly stoop knicker less in order to prove that they have nothing to hide, but for me, these devices are an abomination.
3:16 pm Sydney is experiencing its hottest day ever. The temperature reached 45.8C at 2.55pm.
The previous record, of 45.3C, was set on January 14, 1939.”
I saw the same report from the SMH on the 19th Jan. However I did some cross referencing and found this annomaly on the BOM site:
BOM….AWS …….SMHfromBOM Diff
18/03:00pm 44.7 02.54 45.7 1.0C
18/02:30pm 45.1 02.27 45.3 0.2
18/02:00pm 44.9 01.58 45.2 0.3
18/01:30pm 43.6 01.43 45.0 1.4
18/01:00pm 43.0
18/12:30pm 42.7 12.30 43.3 0.3
I think two instruments are used for these readings. How often are they cross calibrated?
There is no point pretending that a few points in a letter can demolish the CAGW theories, and I am not even going to attempt to write about the debates about CO2 and atmospheric physics, but I mention the points above to illustrate that climate science is an embryonic scientific field working with data of limited accuracy and geographical coverage which has produced a number of competing and emerging physical theories and that we know very little about the determinants of climate. The reasons for putting into this letter the graphs is to show that there is no equilibrium climate, which some CAGW alarmists seem to imagine that there is, that “natural variation” is present in climate over all time periods and above all that the analyses of climate change over periods of 150 years or even less which are so common are meaningless. In this context, the only explanation of the fact that some governments have legislated in a quixotic attempt to influence global climate is that it is an extreme example of a type of millenarianism which the ongoing age of scientific enlightenment has unfortunately not prevented. Perhaps today’s political leaders should follow the well known advice of Cnut the Great who supposedly said, after demonstrating that he could not command the tide, “All the inhabitants of the world should know that the power of kings is vain and trivial, and that none is worthy the name of king but He whose command the heaven, earth and sea obey by eternal laws”.
Wonderful, kids who should have bolted, instead having access to an assault rifle at any time they want. Hope arguments i that family dont ever get out of hand?
I am not interested in the figures “Enough electricity to power 225,000 homes every year.” and “Up to 2,500,000 tonnes of Global Warming Pollution (CO2) avoided each year”
Tell me the guaranteed maximum number of homes it will power and the maximum number of tonnes of CO2 they will guarantee to be avoided each year.
Thermal Gradient in a Gravitational Field DEBUNKS GREENHOUSE conjecture
There is still a lot of discussion about whether or not an autonomous thermal gradient develops in gravitational field. It does, and thus it fully explains all that “33 degrees of warming of the surface” that they unnecessarily developed a radiative greenhouse effect to try to explain – because they didn’t want to agree that Loschmidt was right way back in the 19th century, and 800 experiments by Roderich Graeff are also valid now in the 21st century. There’s valid theory and there’s valid empirical evidence, not only on Earth, but on Venus and other planets also.
The WUWT attempted rebuttal has been rebutted in my paper, simply because the wire itself develops a thermal gradient due to the same conduction/diffusion process in the air. The net gradient is always based on the weighted mean specific heat of all substances, solid, liquid or gas in the system, and the wire becomes part of the system.
Other attempts at rebuttal have started out with an incorrect assumption that the Zeroth Law is valid itself in a gravitational field, then used it to “prove” the original old Clausius statement of the Second Law is valid in a gravitational field. The conclusion will be wrong if the original assumptions are wrong. (Just like the conclusion that we need back radiation to raise surface temperatures is wrong because the original assumption of an isothermal troposphere is wrong.) Why do you think physicists even needed to introduce entropy into the Second Law, if all they had to worry about was temperature? We need to consider all kinetic energy (KE) and potential energy (PE), the latter including chemical energy, which is not relevant for inert molecules making up nearly all the troposphere. There’s an analogy with Newtonian physics and Einstein’s “refinement” with the Theory of Relativity. The Clausius statement had to be refined because of the effect of force fields. Temperature comparisons are only valid in horizontal planes wherein PE = constant and thus does not affect entropy.
So the Second Law of Thermodynamics can now be expressed: “An isolated system, if not already in its state of thermodynamic equilibrium, spontaneously evolves towards it. Thermodynamic equilibrium has the greatest entropy amongst the states accessible to the system “
If you correctly understand what entropy is all about, then, as I have said, it is obvious, for air which is initially isothermal, that some of the air molecules in the top half of an insulated sealed cylinder (with more total energy per molecule) will have a propensity to move to the lower half, thus having the capacity to do work. Hence entropy increases when molecules thus move. And so some more do move downwards than upwards, and thus the lower half ends up warmer, because air molecules which move there gain KE at the expense of PE as they move between collisions.
Similarly, imagine three equal sized volumes in a cylinder with physical dividers that can be slid out. Now, pump three times as much air as you normally would have into the central cylinder and create a vacuum in the other two sections above and below. Remove the partitions and what happens? Those molecules which move into the lower section lose PE and gain KE. Those that go into the top section gain PE at the expense of their own KE. Temperature is a measure of mean KE and has nothing to do with density. So the top section is cooler than the bottom section.
There can be no other valid explanation for the temperature of the Venus poles and the troposphere above them. There’s no significant convection above those poles, yet there is a thermal gradient in the troposphere surprisingly close to -g/Cp. The poles can only be that hot if diffusion of KE can cause absorbed thermal energy from the Sun (KE) to appear to pass up the temperature gradient. Entropy considerations show that this is possible iff the absolute magnitude of that gradient were anywhere less than -g/Cp. Hence the vertical temperature gradient will be autonomously maintained by diffusion of KE, as explained in my paper. Diffusion, over the life of Venus, has also ensured horizontal isothermal conditions right around the globe, because of its slow rotation and relatively still atmosphere.
So, as I have said, there simply is no other way to explain the temperatures of the Venus poles and the troposphere above them. Nor is there any other way to explain over 800 experiments by Roderich Graeff who measured a temperature gradient in well insulated sealed cylinders here on Earth.
Some time back I asked people if they could explain how the required thermal energy gets into the surface of Venus. At least 98% of all incident Solar radiation is absorbed by the thick atmosphere there, so the Sun does not heat the surface significantly with direct radiation.
No one on any climate blog has provided the correct answer, so I guess it’s time to explain what does happen.
The thermal gradient in an atmosphere evolves even in still air. We have proof that it does in over 800 experiments by Roderich Graeff, and it is logical that it would if you consider my thought experiment about a cylinder divided into three sections. If the top and bottom sections are a vacuum and then gas is released from the middle section by removing the dividers, then, at thermodynamic equilibrium, there has to be a cooler temperature at the top and warmer at the bottom. If KE were homogeneous, then the extra PE in the molecules at the top would cause a general propensity for some gas to move downwards gaining KE as it does so. After all, each individual molecule has mass, and thus has KE (as we know) and also PE. So it must obey Newton’s laws in free flight between impacts.
The Venus surface would not be as hot if all convection moved away from the surface. If that happened we have no explanation as to how the required energy gets into the Venus surface. Because IPCC and cohorts could not conceive this heat transfer by convection, they postulated that back radiation could do the job of raising Earth’s surface 33 degrees, and the surface of Venus by about 500 degrees. But 10W/m^2 of direct solar radiation reaching the Venus surface could hardly produce much back radiation anyway! Surface bound heat transfer by convection is the missing link which we have all been looking for, and no one it seems has previously described this as being the only explanation.
We must understand that diffusion of KE (even in still air) sets the gradient of the thermal plane in an atmosphere. Then any additional heat absorbed from the Sun (such as when night becomes day) will spread out over that thermal plane (moving away from the source in all 3D directions) just as if it were the level surface of a lake receiving rain (extra water) in some section of the lake. This is the only way we can explain how energy moves up the thermal gradient and into the surface of Venus. Radiation cannot transfer heat from the cooler atmosphere, but non-radiative convection can flow towards the surface over the thermal plane whose gradient is set by diffusion of KE in a gravitational field.
In all the noise surrounding the fires last week, a small story may have gone un-noticed. South Australia is planning to approve the new Ceres Wind Plant on The Yorke Peninsula.
This is the link to the release of the fact sheet from the Ceres Company. (pdf document of 4 pages)
They use the same old hackneyed and misleading information.
However, keep in mind what has been said over the last few years by renewable power supporters saying that the more of these type of plants that get constructed, the cheaper they will become. As I have said all along, this is an outright lie, and this further proves that, as this project is proposed to cost $1.3 Billion, and it’s barely 600MW Nameplate Capacity. They also claim that they will be getting greater than a 40% Capacity Factor, something not consistently achieved yet anywhere on Planet Earth for a Wind Plant.
I’ll mention just 3 points from that information sheet and explain what the misleading information really means.
So then, all that aside, here’s a stark point I want you all to see.
Let’s look at the total power delivered for consumption over the life of this mooted wind plant, and an equivalent coal fired plant.
In the last couple of Months, information from a number of sources now are saying that a wind plant’s life span is realistically down around 10 to 15 years, and not the claimed 25 years. That same information is also saying that the generators lose up to a third of their power generating capability after 10 years. So, here I’ll use (probably a best case scenario for both factors here) a lifetime of 15 years and a lifetime CF of 25%
Now in the case of an equivalent coal fired plant, it is not economic to have one this small. I mean why bother making a small one, when it is probably better economically to make a large scale plant of say 2000+MW Nameplate Capacity, but this is an equivalent scenario I’m making here. I’ll also go way over the top and actually say that this equivalent coal fired plant will cost the same as this mooted Wind Plant, $1.3 Billion, when for perhaps double that (at worst) you could get one of those large scale 2000+MW new generation USC coal fired plants, but I’ll use worst case for coal in much the same manner as I’m using best case for the Wind Plant. The life span for this coal fired plant is the usual average 50 years.
Okay now, so here we have this particular Ceres Project 600MW wind plant and an equivalent 600MW coal fired plant.
Total lifetime power from this Wind Plant is 19,723MWH
Total lifetime power from the coal fired plant is 210,384MWH
The coal fired plant will deliver 10.7 times the power delivered from the Wind Plant, and deliver that power on a reliable 24/7/365 basis as opposed to the variability of wind power.
Can you see now how utterly useless Wind Power is.
There is no contest.
Having said all this, my bet is that this wind plant will be approved with all boxes ticked. God, how stupid have we become.
Tony.
685
Are you sure you want to know?
294
And in a Democracy it is believed that the majority is smarter than the minority.
284
To whoever gave the thumbs down,all I was pointing out out is that in a democracy wisdom counts for nothing and majorities for everything.
284
Kevin…14 thumbs up and 3 thumbs down but you worry enough about the fanatical fringe to reply to them. That actually illustrates the problem we have in our society and why it has got into this obsessive compulsive nightmare.
52
Ah which democracy would you be referring to Kevin? Surely not the “Peoples Democratic Minority Of Australia”
122
In journalistic circles it is a pleasing custom to speak of the media as a ‘Great Power’ within the State. As a matter of fact its importance is immense. One cannot easily overestimate it, for the media continues the work of education even in adult life. Generally,the medias recipients can be classified into three groups:
First, those who believe everything they hear and read;
Second, those who no longer believe anything;
Third, those who critically examine what they hear and read and form their judgements accordingly.
Numerically, the first group is by far the strongest, being composed of the broad masses of the people.
The third group is easily the smallest, being composed of those whose natural aptitude and education have taught them to think for themselves and who in all things try to form their own judgements, at the same time carefully sifting through the medias productions.
91
I think that is why we still have the Electoral College in the US.
Unfortunately, we had a significant number of idiots vote and the College went the same way.
How do we fix that?
101
I could offer some suggestions, but I would probably get snipped by the moderators … 😉
61
The problem appears to be in the national staff of the Republican Party for all accounts.
31
Len,
I very much agree Len, the Party has lost sight of itself. Either that or has been ‘white anted’. (love that term I learned here) It will take a groundswell of grassroots effort to take it back.
31
Which is exactly why the last great bastion of old style left wing activism can be found in the education sector.
21
This post is out of sync (obviously). It should have appeared under #1.1.1.1 (Kevin Moore,)
11
Kevin,
Nothing is “believed” in a democracy. You always get the default operation, which is majority rule. If in fact the majority is wise, good. But if not, then also good because that’s what democracy is, rule of everyone by majority vote.
Nothing in democracy requires wisdom. This may be unfortunate, even tragic but that is the way it works. Democracy may a terrible system but what would you put in its place?
Our real problem is that we no longer have our democracy. The citizen voter’s place has been usurped by political parties and the citizen legislator replaced by professionals. You and I are now beggars at our own table.
George Washington was right; never form political parties. Had he lived today he would have added, never form a United Nations.
This quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin has been on my mind for a long time.
The last part of that statement hits real hard.
21
Google “sortition”.
Limited powers of government with random appointment of officers for a single term of limited duration from defined citizens.
10
I took a look at what Google found on “sortition”. Without a lot of time to go over it all I can say is that I like the idea of a single term in office.
Random appointment of officers I presume means random appointment to elected office. It sounds like a good way to get rid of the power brokers but then we would have a very high likelihood of plain old incompetence instead.
I really don’t believe there’s any magic formula. If the people are not making good choices then nothing can save them because there’s no system that can’t be manipulated to the benefit of those on the inside. And no one I ever saw wants to give up power voluntarily.
Well, that’s not 100% true. Ronald Reagan never wanted power or money though he had both. So when his second term ended he was quite content to go back to civilian life.
00
In a healthy democracy, yes. In a dying one, no.
11
My previous post was answering Kevin–the order here is interesting.
As for how we fix this, we probably can’t. That’s what natural consequences are for–you get too stupid and Nature smacks you down. 🙂
20
Yep!
10
“Those who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants”. William Penn
32
Correct. Whether or not you believe in God is irrelevant. As soon as you let humans give you your rights and not God you’re doomed. That’s why the leftists in the US are trying hard to remove references to God, attack Christians, and are trashing the US constitution.
40
G.K. Chesterton….. “When a man does not believe in God, he does not believe in nothing; he will believe in ANYTHING.”
41
I can only agree wholeheartedly with you, Kevin. And I say that in spite of the fact that we’ve disagreed rather strongly in the past.
When a man is right he’s right.
20
Yeah, but you can choose your god, can’t you?
02
John,
You can choose any god you want. Far be it from me to tell you otherwise. But do be careful because not all gods are safe to follow. Life is littered with human wreckage caused by false gods.
If you want evidence for that claim go prowl around the seedy underbelly of Perth for a few nights (if you dare).
10
Tony,
This week I spoke on live radio talkback to the QLD Member for Cook.
Currently, a proposal for 120 of these monsters is in the pipeline in his electorate up on the beautiful and scenic tablelands of far north Qld.
His main reason for the project to go ahead was this;
The closest power station is at Rockhampton over 1000 Km’s away and as such we lose a lot of power through transmission loses,
Therefore if we build this wind farm, we can make the system more efficient !!
Can you believe this crap!!
I voted LNP at the last election and I tell you Tony…
They are all as stupid as the previous Govt.
What hope is there for us when these inmates are running the asylum…
I need a drink!!!!
132
Although I agree in general about the uselessness of windfarms, I am not so sure that this one might not warrant consideration.
There are hydro power stations on the Barron and Tully rivers capable of quickly coming online when the wind fails. There is already a wind farm outside Ravenshoe, so transmission upgrades there might not be too expensive.
The sugar mills generate predictable surplus power during the crushing season (unfortunately probably the period of least demand) and a wind farm proposed for Archer Point (maybe the windiest place on earth) just might be a success.
1000kms of transmission losses might be a reasonable excuse for Cairns to get more of its power locally, even after the huge recent (and ongoing) expenditure on HV transmission upgrades south of Cairns.
52
Gee whiz Gnome, I did not expect that!!
I was actually talking about the Mt. Emerald Wind Farm proposal, but yes there is another one for Archer Point I believe!
Both are useless, both do not save CO2 emmisions and both cost us the taxpayer billions…
Where is the benefit in any of that?
63
I don’t care about CO2 emissions, they seem beneficial in the real world, but local generation, even if it costs a little more in capital outlay seems to make sense when very long transmission distances are involved.
As well, the possibility of disruption between Cairns and Rockhampton seems high enough that if FNQ could be separated from the National grid at times of disruption, reliance on local generation makes sense.
Windfarms will probably never add up as an investment, but as a nation, we can afford some experimentation, and this looks as close as possible to a worthwhile experiment in decentralisation.
65
If they can generate energy at a cost that does not require subsidy and guarantees by the government, then ok … if they need taxpayer subsidy to be ‘competitive’ them I call this BS.
Wind power = BS … just like solar power, LET THE MARKET DECIDE FREE OF INTERFERENCE !!!!!!!!!!!!
10
Building two power plants instead of one makes little sense. Hydro seems pretty reliable except in extreme droughts. Wind is “hunt and gather” — you get it when you get it. It costs billions. How does that make sense?
41
Well he is from Far North Queensland – Cane toads and banjoes?
62
I have thought of something useful that Wind farms is North Queenslad could do. You rig spring loaded devices on the ground around each tower and when a cane toad hops onto one, they are catapulted upward into the swinging blades of turbine!
They may as well chop up something that is a pest as well as birds and bats …
82
Money, TS- money is what they chop most of.
32
The closest power station to North Queensland is actually at Collinsville near Bowen and is only about 100 klms south of Townsville.
11
Adder,
The man needs a reason to ask you to reelect him. That may be all it boils down to. If the voters settle for crap…
11
Stupid doesn’t choose sides.
00
I’d rather depend on electricity from a conventional generator and not a set of windmills if there was damage from a cyclone.
Imagine the windmills near Cairns and you love near Innisfail. If a cyclone does not knock over the windmills, but just the transmission lines, where do you get your power when the wind stops later on? There’s limited hydro output.
Maybe the lines south of Innisfail lead to the fossil fuel plant at Townsville, which is far safer than windmills in a cyclone.
Besides, the windmill power in this scenario will cost roughly 5-10 times per unit of electricity as fossil fuel and do next to nothing for GHG.
10
Thanks, TonyOz
There may be some hope on the horizon
I’ve posted in an earlier thread on the David/Goliath battle that an Irish engineer Pat Swords is having with the Irish Govt to have them publicly examine this very issue you post on
The Irish Govt has both signed on and ratified through its’ Parliament an EU Convention requiring a full public consultation/justification process before allowing construction of any wind farms. The Irish Govt has simply ignored this requirement through the simple process of leaving the justification pages of approvals completely blank ! Billions of euro have been committed this way to windfarms
Pat Swords went through amazing hoops to score a victory in an EU Court whereby the Irish Govt was declared derelict in these approvals. He then achieved a Court date hearing 3 days ago with the President of the Irish High Court to test this
This case has now been postponed for 2 months to allow the Irish Govt to prepare its’ defence documents.
The excuse given by the Irish Govt was absolutely astonishing, viz:
“we signed onto the Convention in 2010, over 2 years ago. Although we have held absolutely no public consultations/justifications, and the Parliament has ratified the Convention, no one has been to the High Court in those 2 years (actually, no opportunity to do so was afforded), the passage of time allows us to ignore our own law !”
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/1/16/pat-swords-writes.html
Pat Swords will NOT give up. One may also hope and expect that the Irish High Court will spit the Govt defence out. If so, the result will be a full public examination of all that you have been posting, held in full view of the world MSM
Yes, I know … hope springs eternal etc but it looks like a good bet to me
171
Tony:
Recipe for waste of money:
Take one money hungry (German) wind farm operator.
Add one gullible State Premier.
Season with a cabinet of dills.
Decorate with a chorus of bird brains in the media.
S.A. is going broke, again. The Labor Government is so desperate that they sacking civil servants! Premier Weatherill wants to take over the Treasurer’s portfolio leading up the the next election in 2014. Presumably he intends increasing the deficit with “give away money for votes” schemes. No one, with the possible exception of himself, thinks he is up to the job.
He has swallowed the nonsense about making electricity cheaper and about the project creating jobs (which it will do, but in Germany not SA). Sadly, the truth won’t come out until after the next election. They still have to build the 70km undersea DC power cable and conversion centre.
By the way, your figures for the lifetime output should be in GWh. It doesn’t affect the conclusions.
And from those costs, the cost of that wind power will be $110 per MWh (optimistic), compared with coal at $40, gas at ~$65 and nuclear ~$95. So much for cheaper power!
143
We are so broke he is even considering asking Lance Armstrong to give back his appearance money!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But what is the alternative?????????????? Redmond…………….give me a break we have to chose who is the least incompetent at the next election.
71
It could be Alexander Downer soon.
21
Thanks Graeme for the GWH MWH clarification.
I proof read in Preview everything I Post here, and I usually pick up a mistake or two. Then I hit the Post Comment button.
I came back later and read the Post and it hit me then. How basic an error can you get.
It’s automatic these days, and I use my trusty Casio FX-110C plastic brain for all these calculations, so bear with me while I explain this to all the other readers.
Nameplate Capacity X 24 X 365.25 X Capacity Factor and then divide by 1000 and then multiplied by life span.
Nameplate is in MW, and dividing by 1000 gives the resultant in GWH, and not the MWH I quoted here
So, for the the Wind Plant that is:
600(MW) X 24 (hours in a day) X 365.25 (days in a year, leap year accounted for with the 0.25) X 0.25 (CF of 25%) and the divided by 1000, (to convert from MWH to the GWH) X 15. (years) giving 19,723GWH
And for the equivalent Coal Fired Plant:
600 X 24 X 365.25 X 0.8 divided by 1000 X 50 giving 210,384GWH.
Note here I used a CF for the coal fired plant of only 80%. These new tech plants are regularly running at around 87.5 to 90% CF, dropping slightly over the years, and here, keep in mind that one generator at the Stanwell plant near Rockhampton ran at 100% every day for almost three continuous years constantly after commissioning.
Tony.
92
That should read Casio fx-100C. Used mine for 25 years now, and only replaced the batteries once. Great engineering calculator.
I was reading through the ubiquitous junk mail the other day, and they still do that model Casio, only now it’s the fx-100AU, and there’s not much extra on what mine does, and it’s around the same price as they were back then too.
Tony.
51
Schools use them almost universally ! I remember organising bulk buys to on-sell to students. As you say, price is basically the same.
Actually I think they were the FX-82. Not much difference.
Obviously a good solid design.
10
Daughter bought a new calculator from Aldi in the last fortnight, Aldi brand less than $5.00.
Users Guide list the following models.
fx-82ms, fx95ms, fx100ms, fx115ms, fx350ms, fx991ms, fx570ms, fx911ms.
A Casio by any other name is stilla Casio
10
Ahh! I use a Casio fx-82TL (in fact 2 of them) and have had them for ? years. Over 25 years anyway.
This is the model with 6 memories, great when you want to use a constant or 2 repeatedly.
10
yet the SMH prints this letter to the editor!
62
Don’t worry about it too much Janama. Readership of the Sydney Morning Herald is falling. Tosh like that letter may have something to do with the decline.
61
Yes but doesn’t it bother you that vast amounts of complete shite information is being peddled by pimply left wing activists posing as journalists?. Do any of them even understand or are aware of the sacred duty that they should be fulfilling?. If they want to be politicians then they should put their names on a ballot (if they had the guts). There should be a huge difference between a politician and a journalist. One should be subjective and passionate the other objective and inquisitive. I hate activist journalism, it’s an act of treason on itself and society as a whole. Without a fair and objective media any democracy is in a whole heap of trouble. Remember that most people tend believe that what they see in a “news” article must be factual. Many people are gullible and easily led, but they are generally not stupid and will make good judgments if they are given the correct information (it’s called common sense). Which brings me back to the Education sector…..
40
Good letter.
02
jb, you wouldn’t know a “good letter” from a roll of Lewpaper.
12
Tony,
I am not sure if you are across this site which gives most demand and cost data for Queensland over the last hot spell.
http://www.wattclarity.com.au/2013/01/some-factors-that-contributed-to-the-remarkable-volatility-in-queensland-over-the-weekend/
The mind fades to black if our system becomes all renewable.
Frank
20
THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT (and note to Mods, if I could highlight this in red, I would)
Thanks Frank.
If any of you have taken this link Frank provided, you will see a graph at mid page, and some may even click on the graph to open it in a new and larger window.
Of those who did, perhaps even more than 9 out of 10 who did would not really comprehend what is shown there. It’s just a pretty meaningless looking chart with a huge plethora of lines.
Each line tracks the week of power consumption, and the emphasis is on the thing that is meant to be emphasised for this article. Of note here is for readers to look at how every line dips at the right, and that’s for power consumption for the Saturday and Sunday, and note how they are lower than week days, when everyone is at their workplace, and all consuming much larger amounts of electricity.
30
(Damn, I hit Post Comment instead of Preview, so mods, if you could add the rest of this to the above Comment 1.6.1 ….. I would be appreciative, thanks.)
Now here is the IMPORTANT thing I want you all to look at.
Notice at the very bottom of the chart, there is one day there that sits out all on its own, Christmas Day, the Tuesday this year.
Look at the consumption for that day, and here in Queensland, it was a hot day.
Nothing however was open, perhaps even just like nearly every Sunday.
Except that NOTHING was open. No Shopping Malls with Coles and/or Woolies, and/or K Mart and Big W, the major chains inside nearly every large Mall, that even on nearly every Sunday still operate.
Christmas Day ….. NOTHING. Lowest power consumption day of the year.
Now note how much electricity was still being consumed across Queensland.
120,000MWH
The top of the page, total available (possibly) is 175,000, so, on that day when NOTHING was open, Queensland still consumed almost 70% of every Watt being generated.
Take the average even and that’s around the 150,000MWH mark, and that means that on Christmas Day, when nothing was open, there’s 80% of every watt being generated actually being consumed.
THAT IS THE BASE LOAD.
That is consumption that is still required absolutely when no one is at work, just to run things.
Just because no one is in those shopping malls, all their places of work be they Commerce or Industry, all those malls, Coles, Woolies etc, they don’t just turn the power off to them.
That power is needed, and it’s 24/7/365, every day of the year, even those days when nothing is open.
Take that away, and there is NOTHING, literally.
Tony.
50
So, having said that, the total power consumption for Christmas Day across all of Queensland, NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT, was 440,000MWH.
Across that same area there is 2072MW in Nameplate Capacity for Wind Plants, coming in at just on one thousand of those wind towers.
For that same day, Christmas Day, those 1,000 towers delivered a tick over 20,000MWH, or 4.5% of the total power consumption.
Now, had it been a normal working day Tuesday, consumption would be 600,000MWH, (which was the consumption for the Tuesday 7 days prior to Christmas Day) so the delivery of power from Wind would have been only 3.3%. (had it been your typical working Tuesday)
However, on that same day, seven days prior to Christmas Day, it was really slack for Wind as the total stumbled along at only 150MW for 19 hours (total output from 2072MW and 1,000 towers from Midnight through to 9PM) and then rose slightly, and the total daily output from those thousand towers came in at 4450MWH, which was 0.75% of total demand for that day, less than one percent. That gave wind power across the most populous area of Australia a Capacity Factor for that day of 8.8%. That’s an equivalent of having just 88 of those one thousand wind towers fully operational over that whole 24 hour period.
Wind Power is utterly useless, even when we have a day when total daily power consumption is at its lowest for the whole year.
Tony.
91
Ditto for Hydro Tasmania’s proposed two billion dollar wind farm on King Island.
Of course King Island itself has been served by diesel reciprocating engine gen sets for a long time. Comparing wind to diesel into the future wouldn’t look so bad if only for the King Island load. However this proposal is to flood the entire island with bird blenders, in order to satisfy some of the demand for electricity in Melbourne. This of course is in place of existing coal fired plants that are more expensive due to the
CommunistsGreen/ALP carbon tax nonsense. Lord, save us from these idiots.61
Rod,
They closed the meat works and moved it to the mainland at great dislocation to the King Island brand of high quality meat.
The addition of bird mixers would NOT enable the meat works to reopen.
Frank
20
We operated the King Island Scheelite Mine on King Island for a number of years. Part of it went underground under the sea. It was a large tungsten mine by world standards, yet it was powered by diesel generators whose cost had to be absorbed into the operation. There were tax rebates for some primary producers using diesel, but what we did was to avoid paying a small amount of extra tax by consent, and in return add a great deal to the global inventory of much-needed strategic metals. In other words, there was a high benefit:cost ratio.
That is what is needed, not a zealots’ scheme of plastering the place with windmills. Has anyone done a proper benefit:cost ratio of the windmills? Including the cost of ships to get them to King Island? The cost of a town to take a few hundred people out of the productive workforce to build and maintain these commercially unviable machines whose electricity costs 5-10 times that from the existing fossil generators?
The weather on KI can be savage. There are many recorded shipwrecks. Some say that the success of King Island beef arises from the mixture of grasses and legumes that were washed from shipwrecks and started growing on the island. It was not uncommon for ships to carry livestock and food and to be wrecked.
As an aside, KI is infested with some of the most venomous tiger snakes in Australia, whose numbers will surely grow if they are fed a great new lot of food from shredded birds. Windmills also take out raptors and the like, the hunters of snakes.
I have nightmare visions of a cross between Medusa and Hydra, as each windmill problem leads to 7 or 9 more among the snakes.
20
I have no doubt that Hydro Tasmania has done a cost:benfit ratio, for Hydro Tas.
That will include exporting power to Victoria to be sold at an unreasonable cost due to the stupid carbon rort. It will no doubt include grants from both the Commonwealth taxpayers, and if there are any left, from the Tasmanian taxpayers. But of course Hydro Tasmania is nothing if it is not the organ of a Fascist regime.
20
Well said Tony all we have to do is convince the alarmists and the media and the politicians you know, the ones who prove that being brain dead is not fatal.I hope Jo and Co had a great time canoodling.
92
Wind mills are ideological symbols for the leftist as religious symbol buidings is for religious persons?
For everybody else it’s a loony symbol of national/international socialism?
153
And an icon of environmental destruction..
The Greens ARE NOT environmentalists in any way shape or form.
153
Most of The environmental movement was kidnapped by ex-communists and ex-peace activists after the wall came down, end of Western communism.
If you look at all the solutions behind all the radical environ “problems” upon will find communism/socialism.
103
The reason Western communism failed was that more capitalistic countries gave more economic growth and technological development and that the people in communist countries lost faith in communism, serve the people, when people in Western non communist countries had better and longer lives.
The lesson for socialism and communism must have been that they realized that communism nor socialism can be sustainable in competition with more or less capitalism?
So in order to have sustainable socialism/communism you need to implement it globally and deny capitalism globally an environment where it can prosper. Hence cap and trade and energy quota etc. Even Chavez realized in Copenhagen 2009 that the climate treaty was an attempt to “get rid of capitalism”
I call it international socialism?
111
The Berlin Wall falling was a catalyst. They took up the green banner and went in search of a multitude of new “useful idiots.” Many of the new recruits were acolytes anyway. AGW is their trojan horse whereas before it was “social justice”. Two birds one stone. Then an amazing thing happened. We now have an unholy alliance between those on the left with a political prescription and those on the right with financial interests and those in the middle like Gore who have feet in both camps. This I believe is why it’s so damn hard to kill this thing.
41
The reason that European Communist states crumpled like a cheap suit was because of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Their willingness to face off against Soviet military expansionism quite rapidly bankrupted and demolished the communist states. It was a military defeat without military action. Except at the periphery, such as Afghanistan.
European Communism, of the non-state variety, now flourishes.
With the destruction of the DDR and USSR which had sustained subversives in Western Europe the motive to monitor and check subversion seemed to dissapear and that gaurd was dropped.
Marxist ideology has now metastised like a cancer into the very fabric of Western societies and their institutions, education, academia, media, non-elected government, even electoral parties, where it thrives under the stealth titles of Political Correctness, womens rights, minority rights, and of course Environmentalism.
It is not at all clear who won the Cold War.
31
Ace, consider for a moment that the “cold war” never ceased.
That is to say, the Kremlin realised that it could not win that way so came up with a smoke screen of capitulation, while at the same time attacking the West from within.
Jeff Nyquist has devoted years to researching documents in Russian and interviewing KGB who have defected. There is considerable evidence that this is exactly what took place. Non proliferation treaties cause the Western defense to deteriorate, while the other side ramps up their military capabilities covertly. The cold war strategy changed; it did not end.
21
Rod Stuart, thats a fascinating idea. I had never heard of it. So I guess the most -out-of-the-box Marxist idealists might have been such like as Gorbachev and that watsisnam the drunk. I can imagine a whole new generation of commisariatchiks with a kind of post-modernist reassesment of the Internationalist agenda. A very advanced version of that good old Russian trick the deceptive retreat. it beat Napoleon, it beat Hitler. maybe it has beaten us!
The rearmament isnt so stealthy though. I mean the Russians are arming themselves to the teeth with new strategic nuclear weapons at an astonishing rate. Its astonishing because theres nothing about this in the arena of popular debate.
Meanwhile, with the retirement of MX Peacekeeper the most modern strategic ICBM the US possesses is almost half acentury old. I wouldnt even trust them to launch now, in spite of periodic tests.The computers in the command centres were originally on board the Ark. Charles Babbage probably had a hand in their design.
10
Ace sais.. “It is not at all clear who won the Cold War.”
Its not that clear who won WWII !
Look which country is now in charge of much of the EU !
11
People under Communism did not lose faith because they were able to compare with the benefits of Capitalism. The access to the outside world was rigidly censored. Rather people knew that the information was distorted, and that the statistics were false. You cannot tell people how glorious their system is, when relatives have disappeared in the gulag, they wait 5 years for a car, and two hours a day to get bread. People learnt to read between the lines, and keep their mouth’s shut.
The same is true of climatology. Even if (God forbid) the likes of Lewandowsky or Cook got blanket censorship of sceptics, people would not still not trust the propaganda thrown at them. It is simple human psychology. If people undermine or betray your trust, then that trust once lost is difficult to regain. It is true in politics, business and in personal relationships.
20
Which is interesting, because Naomi Oreskes asserts that a lot of those leading the anti-AGW charge are ex-cold war warriors.
14
You take notice of Oreskes ? Sad boy!
11
Yeah…We believe in freedom!
Idiots believe in rumours.
10
John,
You comment typifies the inability of alarmists to classify.
Anti-AGW people are a sub-set of anti-CAGW people. That is, many (Lindzen, Nova, Monckton) accept that that higher CO2 leads to higher temperatures, but it is nothing like catastrophic. In turn, anti-CAGW people are a sub-set of the anti-policy crowd. That is reducing CO2 emissions will have little or no positive impact, but has lots of harmful ones (destroying jobs, reduced living standards, providing opportunities for fraud).
On the other hand the ex-cold war warriors (anti-communists) who are opponents of alarmism, are dominated by a sub-set. That sub-set are Libertarians. What is consistent is with the cold war era that they are anti-authoritarian. Naomi Oreskes uses a term that implicitly excludes the major group.
So alarmists will not name their opponents properly because it raises uncomfortable questions they cannot answer. That is questions of climatology, economics, statistics, morality and political philosophy. Further, like past totalitarians, alarmists exaggerate, don’t examine their own arguments, and shut down opponents through smears, censorship – and worse.
20
Andy,
You triggered a question I’ve had for a long time. When I grew up it was about conservation, conservation and protection of natural resources specifically but also about a conservative approach to spending money and so-on.
How did a worthy cause like conservation suddenly become environmentalism, something bordering on, if not actually evil?
I’ve never seen a single person put anything on this blog that even remotely advocated irresponsible living or irresponsible use of resources, much less wasting anything or doing intentional harm.
There are so many real problems… …if anyone wants to solve real problems, deal with the mess left behind by manufacturing solar cells and the high flux density magnets required in wind turbines. To Hell with CO2!
60
The common denominator is “the money trick” Roy.
Part and parcel of this whole thing is the expansion of credit by the central bankers in the West.
By expanding the money supply through credit, thereby debasing fiat currencies, the central banks were able to create the illusion of wealth and the Sheeple didn’t recognise it. As Henry Ford said in the twenties, if more than one in a million people understood the banking system, there would be a revolution tomorrow.
A couple of generations gradually became educated to spend, baby, spend! IF you save, you lose, because the fiat currency you believe to be money is constantly being debased. That killed the concept of conserving anything, otherwise known as “conservatism”.
40
Rod Stuart,
I think it possible that this site may be of interest to you.
http://free-energy-info.co.uk/Chapter15.pdf
00
That reminds me of something I saw on Youtube once maintaining that the “Commonwealth of Australia” is actually a corporation incorporated in the USA.
I dismissed it as someone’s imagination, and now I can’t find it.
It was in connection with Customs having no authority to demand duty on good received by post.
The guy was rather convincing that when Customs withholds a parcel and demands GST and duty, that a counter demand that Customs prove that it has the authority to charge duty, it just releases the parcel.
Methinks the guy that created the video got the idea from the document you cited.
20
Rod,
A man I respect and admire very much once said to the effect that there’s nothing wrong with having money. Wanting and having money is not the problem. Money simply enables having the things necessary for successful, fulfilling living.
The problem comes in when your money and your things have you instead of the other way around.
I think we both know that it’s not even the central bankers who are to blame for anything. It’s the great temptation to put self ahead of responsibility to others, not to mention plain greed and abuse of power that goes with our human nature that has always been our undoing.
10
Here it is. I found it. What the fuq? (Frequently unanswered questions)
20
Rod Stuart,
More information can be found here —
Educational Speaker Winston Shrout –
http://www.winstonshroutsolutionsincommerce.com/
00
Roy I suspect you are familiar with the principles of root cause analysis or perhaps the concept embedded within the Japanese manufacturing technique of Kaisen “Ask why five times”.
In that vein, I suppose I was suggesting central banks (which aren’t necessary anyhow) and fiat currency are at the root of the problem.
By asking “Why” one more time, I suppose you are tracing the root to human nature, claiming that “plain greed and abuse of power” is human nature. Are you certain?
The problem with this of course is “what can we do to change human nature?”
There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio.
Ayn Rand made a pretty good case for “selfishness” as being the solution!
10
Rod,
We agree more than perhaps you think. But Ayn Rand didn’t make a case that when you take a position of responsibility to someone else you should simply line your own pockets, enhance your own power and screw those to whom you owe a duty of some kind. Yet it’s done all the time.
00
Your are indeed correct, and I suppose it illustrates the drawbacks of this medium of exchange when things are taken out of context. (by me)
As I am certain you understand, the concept of selfishness advanced by Rand has numerous caveats, including the idea that with responsibility comes accountability, and that philanthropy is at the very foundation of the selfishness ideal.
As has been said before on this blog, there are no free markets left, and there is no real capitalism. Only lies, spin, and immoral behaviour in general. This is of course the very thing that the power elite requires in order to institute totalitarianism.
30
The great dilemma of the human condition is that we want to improve our own status in society, get a better mate, and confer advantages on our offspring. But we are also an incredibly cooperative species. A human on his own is a human lost.
I’ve been talking to some of my friends lately about work. Within their organisations they bemoan the existence of people who are not so much interested in the job they are doing, but in moving on to the job they will do next, i.e. climbing the ladder. These people “play the game”, whereas my friends “stick to their knitting” and actually get the necessary work done.
Which makes me wonder to what extent the people who keep everything working should put up with people on the make, and people who just manipulate the system to further their own interests.
50
jb, you describe bureaucracies perfectly … your employer would be a perfect example. If one’s worth was directly proportional to their effective contribution to corporate value, bureacrats would starve to death.
20
J.B.
Henry David Thoreau,
Walden; or, a Life in the Woods, 1854
00
Rod,
You said,
I think that’s not so much the problem — taking out of context — as it is that this particular medium is totally unsuited for any real conversation about anything.
————–
John Brookes,
That statement hits right at the heart of our human problem, doesn’t it? It also exposed a little of the real John Brookes that I’ve never seen before, something I wish you would do more often.
I definitely like this John Brookes over the former.
20
He’s playing with you, Roy … that’s his raison d’etre.
Either that or he’d recently swallowed his meds.
00
I try Roy, but actual thinking is something I find difficult (but I’m sure its the same for most people).
00
Or is he playing with himself?
00
Maybe the wind mills would have a better performance if the blades were designed in the shape of a swastika. A good symbol for the eco facists
83
I am now using the word “sympathiser” for the CAGW faithful.
I hope it catches on.
20
In a similar vein, I prefer to think of myself as an Infidel, not denier.
10
It appears there is an alarmist TROLL or 2 reading the comments
195
You can picture them at their computer,
“I know, I’ll give everyone a thumbs down. That’ll show ’em”
Good indication of their brain power.
Typical dead$hit trolls with nothing of substance to share.
165
Pusillanimous little worms, that they are.
185
Seems there are 2 of the slimy little slugs. 🙂
165
Little CAGW “sympathisers” hiding in the dark under their rocks.
11
Yeah…its hilarious, in the most anonymous of factors , a thumbs down, they identify themselves by their consistancy, three on every comment.
I think regular readers know who at least two of them are.
Its the measure of their intellectual impotence that a thumbs down is all they can “get up”.
42
…or 20.
26 are logged in as I type.
10
Augusta is quite nice.
The collision of the currents at Cape Leeuwin is not to be missed for the demonstration of energy exchange. And the contrast of the relative quiet of small coves in close proximity.
71
Augusta? I didn’t know Jo was a champion golfer?
20
Augusta, Western Australia, not Augusta Texas.
00
Or even Augusta Georgia for that fact.
Tony.
10
Ka-boom!
10
Why has PM Juliar not been arrested and charged yet over the AWU Scandal.
I tell ya, if it was me that had knowingly set up a fraudulent organisation to siphon off money to spend on wining, dining and ladies…
I would be in the dock quick smart!
The Red Dalek has gotta go and preferably go Nxt week.
Election now!!!
356
I am assuming those 3 red thumbs down I got…
….were 3 lost ALP Trolls looking for some fun… [snip]
Election Now!!
246
It would seem that Michael Smith has been told by the police that Juliar is a person of interest in their investigations of fraud.
172
Michael has a 2 minute audio message on his blog stating how he has just recieved the very best news in a long long while. He’s presently not at liberty to reveal any details, but it has something to do with Vic police, their hatred of theives/burglers,the slap on the wrist they usually recieve after being prosecuted, and police satisfaction followed by frustration in bringing them to account.
Seeing as how Michaels main focus for quite some time has been to gather evidence of Gilliards involvement in the Wilson AWU scandal,his euphoria at the information he has become privvy to surely must be in connection to official investigation into this case.
122
Larry Pickering also has some gossip on the subject
51
Yes, and Pickerings blog gets hacked several times a day. Don’t know what the hackers think they are acheiving,as it only slows down the flow of information, it doesn’t stop it.The case has progressed over a period of 17 years, so a delay of an hour here and there is not going to make any difference.
61
Even Paul Murray got up the courage to ask the Red Queen in an interview if she would refuse to discuss it with police. In typical Gillard doublespeak, rather than answer yes, she said “the question doesn’t really arise”.
Hitler was a fantastic orator as well.
51
The thermal gradient in a gravitational field has been confirmed by over 800 experiments since 2002. Details are in “Planetary Surface Temperatures. A Discussion of Alternative Mechanisms.”
This autonomous “lapse rate” fully explains that “33 degrees of warming” without any need for any greenhouse effect.
All should read this comment by, Geoff Wood, qualified in astrophysics.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/01/waste-heat-as-a-contributor-to-observed-warming/#comment-68988
The following are excerpts ..
As Doug has said about a dozen times, gravity modifies the mean free path between collisions. That is ‘every’ upward, ‘every’ downward ‘every’ sideways, ‘every’, ‘every’ free molecular path between collisions is modified. Therefore it is impossible for the modified ‘collisions’ that result, not to impart the gravitational ‘information’ into the macroscopic development of the gravitational thermal profile. This is the ‘diffusion’ process.
At this point, we have a reasonable depiction of the thermal profile of ANY atmosphere. FROM BASIC PHYSICS.
Given a simple reason why any atmosphere tends towards this isentropic profile as depicted and described by entry level physics, why would anyone look for a more complicated reason to explain what we already know!
The point which Geoff and I make is that the “33 degrees of warming” supposedly caused by water vapour and carbon dioxide etc was already there due to the effect of gravity on the atmosphere. This happens on all planets, and also fully explains why the poles of Venus are over 720K, even though they receive less than 1W/m^2 of direct insolation from the Sun. For more detail read my article “The 21st Century New Paradigm Shift in Climate Change Science” easily found with Google. I’ve also recorded an introductory 10 minute video here http://youtu.be/r8YbyfqUvfY
124
Doug, are all your fish called Eric?
62
Are all your gasses called carbon?
52
Keep up the good work Doug.
CAGW sympathisers seem to have very little umderstanding of how the atmosphere works.
Or electrical instruments 😉
95
Yes Andy, they are quite unteachable because they don’t try to learn the truth. But the truth will prevail. Gravity produces the 33 degrees of warming. The IPCC description of the GHE violates the First Law of Thermodynamics, creating energy every time a molecule moves upwards in the atmosphere, retaining kinetic energy and gaining potential energy, just so they can have an isothermal atmosphere at 255K to start with. It’s all in my article “The 21st Century New Paradigm Shift in Climate Change Science” but they don’t dare read it as it would have them stumped, just like KR and “Dr Strangelove” and others are now stumped on Roy Spencer’s thread. Keep watching!
105
I’ve repaired my 1964 vintage Hammond A100 organ a couple of times. Does that count?
Oh sorry, wrong type of electrical instrument…
30
http://media.crikey.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/NTNews.jpg the PMs showing her true colours Zeig Heil
74
I’ve just heard Lance Armstrong on the radio admitting to a lifetime of taking drugs…
Sigh, there goes another of my former heroes down the shit-tube!!
Armstrong was a source of inspiration to me, whilst undergoing Cancer treatment a few years ago!
I imagine many readers of this blog would have watched him win at least one of his 7 Tour de France’s.
This is indeed a sad day for all humanity, not just sport lovers…
103
And was it news to you that Jodie Foster was gay too?
52
What, that cute little girl out of Taxi is a dyke???
Nooooo!!!!
🙂
32
Jodie? Bugger! I think I was in love with her.
32
Jodie Foster was also in the movie made from that wonderful novel by Carl Sagan, Contact.
The novel was great, the movie almost made it, and then the end just drifted away.
Tony.
53
I still am in love with her. I’ll wait till she comes around.
83
Oh and I’ll figure out what to tell my wife when that cold day arrives.
72
If you are still breathing after you tell “the Missus” you can give us all a heads up on how you went about it. Into the Valley of Death and all that stuff.
43
Mark,
Exactly what excuse do you think will work? 😉
11
Roy, David, before we got married (almost 30 years ago) I mentioned a certain list of people that if ever they called I’d get a “free pass” so to speak. She probably doesn’t believe I was serious and since they were all long shots anyway it didn’t make much sense to convince her I was serious (yet).
There are quite a few named on my unwritten list besides Jodi, like Farrah F. (R.I.P.), Raquel W. (she still looks fine I might add) Barbara Eden (also holding up very well), Maureen McCormick (Marsha Brady), are a few of them. I’ve been able to slip a few new ones onto the list like the singers Jewel and Shania Twain (wifey has capitulated). There are more but you get the idea.
Mostly my very understanding wife hopes that I’ll run off with one of them and send money back to her. I can only hope!
So girls, my number is: 555-555-1212 I’m still waiting……..
23
Mark,
I’ve always believed that the bird in the hand is worth at least two in the bush. Jodi, Farrah, Raquel…: quite a notable list there. But they aren’t going to keep you warm through those cold Midwestern nights you were talking about not so long ago. Get grip man! Get a grip! 🙂
31
PS:
I’ve never met your wife of course. But like my wife, she must be quite a jewel if she puts up with your haunting this blog constantly the way we both do.
So take good care of her!
21
Cute chick, biy never did have her head screwed on right 🙂
22
but never….
22
Whoops.. got her mixed up with Linda Blair.. !! me bad.
00
Since I don’t have to sleep with Jodi Foster I don’t care. I don’t care what her politics are either. I enjoy her acting skill and I think it’s a dirty rotten shame that she wasted it on that piece of junk, Inside Man. Same for her co-star, Denzel Washington. There are some other films and actors in that category too. Some who are at the top of their field can suddenly descend into worthless drivel. I don’t get it.
21
You could bet your bottom dollar that all the other cyclists were on something as well. When doing my Level Two Coaches Course in the 1980s, the Course Coordinator told us that cyclists were always discussing the latest drugs they were using.
42
Well then Len, that is a sad indictment on cycling!
I played AFL for 20 years and the closest I got to doping was…
Having a flagon of Tawny Port at half time because it was so cold!! Lol…
But seriously, the case of Armstrong is a killer for the sport!!
No doubt about it, even more so if the UCI is found complicit.
A sad day for sport fans…..
11
I don’t think that all of them used drugs. Somewhere in the peleton was a bloke who was actually the best non-drug assisted rider out there.
But the temptation would have been strong. Imagine you are coming into the last stage of a tour, with a lead of 20 seconds, and you haven’t doped. But you know your chief rival dopes, and will likely beat you. The temptation of just taking one little dose of EPO to ensure a win would be enormous.
00
Goes to show, don’t cheat, there are bastards in this world who will find you out and and expose you. Ain’t that the truth…
11
With all the crap that is going on in the world the US anti doping agency has finally got Lance Armstrong;
Big Deal.
It must feel great to get something right at last.
Now perhaps they can try to sort out all the bankers and financial fraudsters who have ripped the savings out of ordinary people for personal gain over the last 5 years and who are still not in jail.
After that they can sort out all the corruption in the UN.
There might be a few other high priority items, like the murderous shambles in Africa, if they have the energy.
THE STORY IS IN REALITY A STORY ABOUT cycling AND YOU HAVE TO ASK, GIVEN THE WIDESPREAD use of “assistance” in cycling why nobody knew about it?
Lance hurt mostly himself; cycling was already damaged.
Remember the stories about Lasse Viren? – – that was 1972 in the “clean sport of athletics and yet; he will always be inspirational- a great runner.
KK 🙂
31
I think Lance Armstrong proves that you shouldn’t make heroes for such trivial reasons as athletic prowess.
His determination to lick his cancer is what he should be remembered for.
41
I agree with the first bit but not the second – if it’s to imply alternate heroism. It was in his self-interest to survive cancer. Survival is a basic instinct. The praise for his recovery should go to medical technology, but even that shouldn’t be confused with heroism. I think that the term, ‘hero’, gets used too liberally and has now become somewhat meaningless.
00
To me the important point is that Lance wrote a book about his fight with cancer (entitled “It’s Not About the Bike” ISBN9780224060875).
He had brain and lung secondary deposits, yet survived to become a professional athlete again.
This book offers a message of hope and encouragement to those with cancer – a major contribution to humanity.
10
To clarify — I would not make him a hero for his determination to lick cancer. I don’t make him a hero at all. But I do believe he’s an inspiring example of how to meet adversity.
I have some experience that tells me attitude counts. And it counts even when it’s medical help that you need.
10
Here is some reality—and it even covers the “CO2 is plant food” line:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729004.400-australian-inferno-previews-fireprone-future.html
You might need to open a free subscription to New Scientist.
327
Andy Pitman is a serial idiot.
Exactly where in Victoria does not have a history of bushfires Maxine?
http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/fire-and-other-emergencies/major-bushfires-in-victoria
192
Wow, there is so much wrong with this reality, it difficult to know where to begin. Well, let’s start at the beginning …
Being the directory of the Centre for Risk and Community, how surprising is it that he will see risk under every shadow?
A good place to finish is proper land management so that fire fuel is not allowed to build up over the years. Here is an excellent piece by Roger Franklin showing that it is Green stupidity that is causing fire deaths, not people living in the “wrong” places.
How about just letting people make their lives where they choose to and allowing them to make fire brakes to protect their homes and do regular controlled burning to reduce fuel and allow many animal and plant species to thrive? Almost no government involvement and almost no cost to the taxpayer. Many native plants require fires to germinate, but that does not work if the fire is too intense, which is what happens if there is too much fuel for the fire to use.
Only a watermelon would think that government has enough money to buy large tracks of land and then do nothing productive with it. Socialism is fine until you run out of other people’s money.
There is little doubt that climate change is making no difference to the likely hood of fires in Australia. There is nothing remarkable about this summer in terms of hot days, but what is remarkable was how relatively cold the previous summers were. The only problem is land management. Hot summers have always occurred in Australia, even before we got here.
No they didn’t. There is nothing remarkable about this summer when you look back in time. Only intelligence is being annihilated. No temperature records are.
He says “greenhouse gas” but does not say how a trace gas actually creates a greenhouse in the open atmosphere. The extra CO2 is causing more plant growth as shown by satelitte photography and measurements of the greening of the plant, but apparently this is a now a bad thing?!? So this extra CO2 is causing both more rain and more dry periods. Well that makes sense … not! How can we prevent large fires? Simple, just burn the excess fuel during winter and keep fire breaks along roads and around houses.
I am not surprised that they are now giving subscriptions away. Their paid membership subscriptions have been in free-fall for a number of years since they have been more “Left Activist” instead of “New Scientist”.
344
“The average temperature across the country reached 40.33 °C last week, beating a 1976 record of 40.17 °C”
So the temp has risen 0.16C in 33 years, on a meaningless value calculated goodness knows how, using values where the past has been adjusted downwards. Are they even using the same stations, or adding values from “selected” extra stations like the 2012 US, “non record” did.
Another BIG FAIL from MinBrain.!!
What was the average temperature in 1939? or this only calculated since the 1970’s, making it even more meaningless.
You are an ABSOLUTE and TOTAL FOOL to take anything from the Pitman as worth bothering with.
His job depends solely on him creating this type of JUNK, its his job description !!!
266
Maxine said:
Thank you NO!
Not worth that price…..
194
I used to subscribe. In fact, I have a “man-bag” with their logo on it, that they sent me for being one of their most loyal subscribers.
But then they had a change of Editor, who was more motivated by circulation numbers than by informing their readership.
Two or three crap articles in my particular areas of interest raised my eyebrows. And when I mentioned this to colleagues, I found that it wasn’t just my field they were fantasising about, it was across the board.
The final straw was an article about using crystals and wind-chimes to improve the rate of healing in bone fractures.
So I cancelled the subscription. But I didn’t send back the man-bag. That at least remains useful.
111
In which year did NS “jump the shark” in your opinion?
For Greg Egan, the year was 2006. The magazine of ideas, indeed.
00
New
ScientistActivist is best read while listening to the stirring music of the North Koreans…Just to get the full impact…
BTW Maxine – so now you must think that the UN IPCC is wrong on the science as the UN IPCC Special Report on Extremes (SREX) 2012 states…
New
ScientistActivist is simply providing “reviews and commentary rather than empirical research”.But that’s good enough for you to believe it? isn’t it Maxine.
Why resort to empirical evidence when you can point to anecdotal evidence to support your superstitious dogma.
And since you now reject the authoritative voice of the UN IPCC – what is to stop you also believing in Alien Abduction
123
Maxine,
If BOM says it is “consistent”, then their is knowledge of uniform patterns of the past that caused “climate change”.
How often in BOM’s relatively short experience has “climate change” occurred?
Is this “climate change” global warming or just regional warming due to ocean temperatures causing desert type winds to move from warm land to the cool Southern ocean?
How does “carbon pollution” enter into the equation?
62
How come just north-facing gullies? Fires are only driven in from the north are they?
Large parts of the country are already mapped.
No mention of Australian Standard 3959:2009 of course.
This guy Handmer is a bit of a worry …
21
If you haven’t looked at Agenda 21, you wouldn’t have realised that this is just what is planned. All humanity herded into urban areas and as much land as possible returned to ‘nature’.
BTW, you don’t need to copy & paste all the text from your links, we all know how to click on one now. A summary would do and then you wouldn’t cause other comments to become buried…..Oh hold on!
43
ColdOldMan says…
Herded is the operative term…
01
@Maxine #10
I always thought Australia was historically a HOT and DRY continent. It’s not the Yorkshire Dales is it. I suspect it always has had bushfires and much of it’s flora is adapted which is basically why it’s still there and thriving. If anything, we humans are interfering with the natural order of things by restricting fires. If Aussies choose to build houses in the path of fires and get burnt out, that’s not proof of AGW, it’s merely a lack of foresight isn’t it?
51
Under a voluntary buy-back scheme, the state bought more than 100 properties destroyed in the fires, and new buildings in high-risk areas now require a special permit.
Gee, that’s starting to sound like the beginning of Australia’s very own ‘Wildlands Project. – Agenda 21.
53
Nice whine, Maxine. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
2013 looks a good year for the Climate Catastrophe Whinery. Their vines are as prolific as ever and they always have that marvelous growing environment, nurtured as they are with all the greatest manure available.
Whatever you serve up is always the best of the best.
Thank you!
61
Andy Pitman; one of the Tom Foolery, Willy Stiffen, Andy Glickson, and David Karoly mob.
Oh yes, the crowd that faked the death threats and when they were exposed the Alarmist BS Corporation defended them.
I remember him. The professor of meteorology without an undergraduate degree in Meteorology?
There is real science, pseudo science, junk science, and fake science. Andy is outstanding with the latter.
Certainly not dumb; the so-called “climate commission” lives very high on the hog thanks to a gullible public.
Isn’t he the one responsible for the analogy of a CO2 molecule and an Ebola virus? Any troll would hang on his every word.
91
173 people died in the 2009 Victorian fires because the necessary Hazard Reduction Burns during winter were stopped by Green Leaning Governments desperate to grab a few more votes.
Even the Chief CSIRO Bush Fire officer ( now retired) knows this.
Besides the extra green votes obtained by this moronic ban, the government can pocket cash saved in not having to pay for “cool burns” and use it to buy even more votes by pork barreling in hard seats.
Somebody, is responsible for these 173 deaths and over 400 fire injured survivors.
It was not an Act Of God; it was an act of greed, ignorance and stupidity that defied all known “science” relating to fire prevention and land management.
KK 🙂
111
Clearly, CO2 is to blame. And here we are still putting CO2 into fire extinguishers!
40
I don’t know Maxine. There are many houses in the Perth Hills that could be defended most of the time, but would be impossible to defend on a 44 degree day with strong dry north easterlies. Rather than not build these houses, you should just realise that you may have to abandon them in some situations.
40
Without referring back to Maxine’s comment, I just gave you a thumbs up, John. Where I live the problem is westerlies. I was looking at this fire protection system – came across it by accident. It looks rather drastic and expensive, but it might work even in a wild fire.
00
Those acrylic heals must be hurtin’ bad, maxine.
00
How many fires are deliberately started? How many “Green” councils stop cool burns? Theres a lot more to bush fires than extremes of climate and CAGW. Right now in the UK they’re getting snow. Not unusual for this time of year but doubtless the Met Office and the BBC will scream Climate Change. Funny how climate change, previously known as global warming which was dropped when the Northern hemisphere started to get very cold winters, is the root cause for all forms of weather.
10
Consider a couple of quotes
Translated, it is saying the heatwave does not falsify the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. Though, without knowledge of the cultural context, it literally means that new records show that the climate varies over time – without attribution of the causes of that change.
By making a statement with little content, you get away with a lot. If temperatures have risen slightly, then fires could be more likely. This statement is not contradicted if there has been a natural rise in temperatures is 0.1 degrees, making the occurrence of fires between 0.1% less likely and 0.2% more likely. It is also not contradicted if there are far more important reasons at play. For instance, making minor fires less likely (providing natural fire breaks), land use changes making fires more likely, or preventing the creation of fire breaks.
We should distinguish between scientific statements and political statements.
A scientific statement has a high degree of content, that tells us something about the world and is capable of being falsified by observations. A political statement has little content, and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
00
posted this on the previous thread yesterday:
16 Jan: Bloomberg: Andrew Herndon/Christopher Martin: Private Equity Flees Clean Energy as Investment Falls
Private equity companies and venture capitalists including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Braemar Energy Ventures reduced renewable-energy investment to the lowest since 2006 as once-promising companies failed or were sold at a loss…ETC
***The decline is the result of waning government incentives for renewable energy and weak performance in the stock market, which made it harder for investors to extract value, said Ethan Zindler, an analyst at New Energy Finance in Washington…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-15/private-equity-flees-clean-energy-as-investment-falls-energy.html
so now Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs come up with this??? Watch your Super:
18 Jan: Bloomberg: Ehren Goossens: Goldman Leading Renewable Offerings Says Slump Is Ending
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), the top arranger for renewable-energy stock offerings last year, is accelerating its funding efforts as it anticipates a rebound in an industry that’s slumped every year since 2009…
“It feels like the worst is behind us,” Bernstein (Stuart Bernstein, the Goldman partner overseeing its renewables unit), 49, said in an interview from his office in San Francisco. “I’m a contrarian, so when everyone else is capitulating, I think it’s time to invest.”…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-17/goldman-leading-renewable-offerings-says-slump-is-ending.html
53
“Goldman Leading Renewable Offerings Says Slump Is Ending”
Look out for more stupid comments from Turnbull !!
122
Looks like California doesn’t want any of Australia’s stinking carbon credits.
Meanwhile the EU Carbon market continues to slump.
Cheap coal – Can I have some more?
102
Please don’t worry about it. There’s more than one road to the bottom. It’s just that in California our government restrooms don’t stink. You can understand I’m sure.
11
Say, it, umm, is an Unthreaded Post here, so forgive me because this may sound like a bit of a brag, but it does highlight an irony, me being categorised as ….. Green.
People sometimes ask why I contribute to the blog I do, and why I don’t have one of my own, something that has never bothered me in the slightest, as the blog I contribute at is indeed quite widely read, and has a considerably wider base than any blog of my own I may start here in Australia.
One of the ratings agencies for blogs is Technorati, and they do a daily rating of blogs.
This is the link to the page for the site I contribute at.
Note the major rating there in the largest figures is the overall Technorati Authority rating. Our rating ranks our site as Number 1355, and that’s out of a total number of blogs of 1,318,469 which places us in the top 0.1% of all blogs.
Technorati places blogs into 7 categories from the Minnows right up to the Majors, and our Blog is categorised in the Very Large Blog category, just one category below the Majors.
However, the really spooky thing in all this is we have a rating also as a Green Blog, and in fact we are in the Top 100 of Green Blogs, and have been as high as Number 22 in that Green Blog category.
If I started my own blog here in Australia, I would be back with the almost Minnows I would guess.
The fact that we have such a huge readership base from all across the World also amazes me, and when I look at the World Map for visits to our site, (at this link) it’s amazing to see the coverage we do get.
So, contrary to what I believe, someone has put me in the Green basket. I don’t know whether to be happy that I’m in the Top 100, or offended that I’m considered as Green.
Hey, for some perspective, go to that main Page I linked to. At the top, alongside the large Technorati title in that area that says ‘search for …..’, hit the blogs button and in that search area type in Andrew Bolt. Now I’m no Andrew Bolt, and once, a couple of years back he made it into the Top 100 Overall and was as high as 40 something. Admitted, he’s away on holidays now, so his rating is down, but he’s down around the 5000 mark at the moment, way way below the blog I contribute at. All that indicates is that while Andrew’s blog is huge here in Australia, and mine is tiny here in Australia, it highlights overall World readership.
Tony.
52
Wouldn’t worry about it. During the course of my career I have been accused of being a “rabid b****y greenie” and an “environmental vandal”. With my colleagues I was once accused (in writing) of being a member of the international communist conspiracy. Thought that was kind of cool, so I framed it and put it up on the wall with the gongs and other awards. Boss (lacking any sense of humour) took it down.
20
I was once called a bleeding heart liberal on a blog. Considering I am about as far right as you go without falling off the edge of the flat earth, I found it very, very amusing! Only someone who had never read anything I wrote could possibly come to that conclusion. People read one comment or a few words and drop you into whatever box they think the comment indicates you belong in.
40
I’m really surprised to hear that you’re so far right, Sheri. Why would anyone think that from anything you’ve written?
However, since you are about to fall off the right side of the flat earth, I have a spare seatbelt you can use to prevent that. It’s just like the one I use to prevent me from falling off. They’re very effective. 😉
20
Over here being to the right means you are Liberal.
10
I realize there may be some confusion with the terms “right” “left” “liberal” and “conservatives” when the words mean different things in different countries. However, I could come up with no clever (or not clever) way to label my political and social philosophies at the time. I suppose I could have said “libertarian” to a degree, realizing that humans can probably not actually be bright enough to manage a libertarian government.
Anyway, you should get the point–people pick out phrases and then label the speaker by that phrase with absolutely no idea what the speaker actually stands for.
10
From today’s Sydney Daily Telegraph online:
Does anyone know whether the 1939 record has been “adjusted” down in line with other inconvenient records from the 1930s? Do the BoM activists have amnesia about other historical temp records for Sydney? Is BoM quoting a temperature station that didn’t exist in the 1930s?
Bureau of Meteorology: a business unit of Greens-ABC Inc. Data fixes by arrangement. FOI: tell ’em they’re dreaming.
54
Tom…. it is the hottest temp ever recorded in Sydney. Live with the facts.
30
And let’s note that is the official Sydney Observatory site, that was not even the hottest temp recorded today.
46.4 at the airport
46.5 at Penrith
46.4 and Campden
46.4 at Richmond
46.1 at Bankstown
And also for the record Tom, yes that record of 45.8 is for:
“Observatory Hill, where the weather bureau started recording temperatures in 1859.”
20
My thermometer read 46 this morning. Seems we have the same phenomenon, Matt.
Oops, mine is not Celsius. But what’s a number among friends? They’re so hard to understand anyway – and so easy to fudge too.
What I mean to say is, why don’t we quit playing this game of my thermometer is bigger, more official, more [insert superlative here] than yours and start trying to deal with the underlying issue that is so divisive. And the underlying issue still is that absolutely no empirical evidence links atmospheric CO2 to anything.
42
Richmond had a 46.6C in 1939, don’t know about the other places.
so, cooler now. even with lots of urban developement.
I also wonder how close the current Richmond temp station is to the RAAF base. Jet engines are so cool !!
30
Looks kosher, although I don’t think its the same station where the 1939 record was measured, and there has been a HUGE amount of urban development since then.
Seems that natural climate cycles have fiinally bought us back to the temp peak of 74 years ago.
High probability that the temp will now start to drop over the next several years.
82
Yep its the same station been there since 1859.
20
Actually, from what I can find, it changed in from the actual observatory to a nearby lot in 1918, but same thing..
It would be interesting to do a comparison study of the surrounding area between the 1939 reading and today’s reading.
I suspect that signifcant changes would be found both quite near and within say 500m.
Regardless, we have only just now, reached temps of 74 years ago !! Which is a supposedly warming world is quite remarkable.
30
Andy you could try flickr for historic photos of Sydney there over 116 pages of them.
00
Yes Tom – here’s the original Sydney data (red) and the adjusted data by Simon Torok in 1996 in blue. The black shows the amount of adjustment.
http://users.tpg.com.au/johnsay1/Stuff/Sydney_re-adjusted.png
91
Gees you can really see the effect of UHI on those minimum temps !! WOW !!
72
Thanks, Janama. As I suspected, it’s not even subtle. If someone was diligent, I bet they could calculate how many millions of dollars in research grants to the usual suspects depended on the catastrophisation of the data.
71
Looking at the unadjusted data [obviously they did not know how to read thermometers a hundred years ago] The trend for Sydney since 1860 is cooling the only warming shown is by dropping the past temperatures big time. If they took modern UHI into the equation it would show about 2c fall in temperatures. No wonder the BOM has a problem with credability.
121
Even more interesting is that Simon Torok who made the adjustments did it as part of his PhD. (with Neville Nichols)
Here’s the acknowledgments posted at the end of their paper.
“Acknowledgments
Wasyl Drosdowsky produced Fig.1 Scott Power produced analyses in Fig. 5. Beth Lavery produced the spacial averages for Fig. 6. Phil Jones provided his average temperatures for the comparison in Fig.7. Neil Plummer provided the ‘Detect’ suite of programs. Alex Kariko tested Fahrenheit and Celcius thermometers. This research was a PhD project funded by The National Greenhouse Advisory Committee.”
That’s THE Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia. Torok was a student there at some stage and that’s where he learnt how to adjust climate data.
101
And let’s note that is the official Sydney Observatory site, that was not even the hottest temp recorded today.
46.4 at the airport
46.5 at Penrith
46.4 and Campden
46.4 at Richmond
46.1 at Bankstown
And also for the record Tom, yes that record of 45.8 is for:
“Observatory Hill, where the weather bureau started recording temperatures in 1859.”
79
It’s just weather, Matt.
42
yes conveniently you suddenly agree:)
12
Snowing where I am, I was out earlier in the afternoon and the skin on my face was literally hurting from the cold within about 10 minutes of exposure.
Paris – btw.
But what does any of this mean – it’s just silly anecdotal evidence – means nothing. Really – it means nothing.
21
So it’s taken 73 years during which the evil CO2 has fouled our planet to FINALLY beat the record ? Brilliant ! I rest my case.
11
Yep hot for a day Matt next.
20
if you can’t see the irony in Sydney’s temp record being smashed LESS THAN A WEEK after a front page feature on WUWT was some moron Aussie politician waxing lyrical about how one hot day in the past in Sydney meant there was no AGW…
26
And what exactly caused that previous record, which is essentially the same temp as this one ( .5C is easily accounted for by urban wraming effects..)
I repeat.. What caused the previous record?
51
um hot weather.
20
yep, NO AGW REQUIRED !!
22
Sorry, do they mean to tell us that all we needed to do was to have vastly more expensive power, pay billions of tax every year since 1939, convince everybody else in the world to do likewise (including chief offender China), and eliminate our entire coal export industry, and our 46.5 could have been a mere 46?? Or that if we had started in 1973, we could have made that day 0.16C colder??
Wow, if only we had a time machine!
20
How about, no global warming for 16 years? Or do a couple of hot days in Australia somehow trump that?
10
MattB said:
I’ll match your local extreme records and raise you sixteen years of Global Warming flat line.
Finland: Deep freeze records set across the country
10
Seen ABC’s Sarah Clarke’s Global Warming series ?
Part 4
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-17/global-warming-to-threaten-australian-wildlife/4468026
Links to Parts 1 – 3 at bottom of the article.
31
The greens are the biggest threat to wild life in OZ
73
Followed closely by the other political parties.
60
Well said RW… Hehehehehee!!
20
The media seem to have gone quiet on the alleged drug running at Sydney Airport.
http://thecrowhouse.com/
32
And she couldn’t feel the extra weight she was carrying?
20
KK.
The bag was made heavier after weigh in.
10
Did she tell you that or do you know the person who put the extra weight there.
If you know the person you have a duty to report them to the police.
If you don’t know this I suspect you may be speculating on the matter.
KK
00
And this is in the Science section?
http://www.stuff.co.nz/science/8190815/World-average-temperature-rising/
41
New record, 45.8 in Sydney today. This must be due to adjustments!!! Well it’s certainly not due to a heatwave because we certainly aren’t having one of those, right?
712
Actually, the term “heat wave” is very appropriate. All waveforms are cyclic, and temperature trends are no exception.
In fact, you can do a Fourier Transform on a plot of temperatures over a longish period, and extract the fundamental frequencies.
They pretty much match the cycles of nature that we have already identified, and have even sparked some new research into variations in the cosmic background radiation. Unfortunately, you will not read about that in New Scientist, apropos my earlier comment at 10.4.1.
64
Cycles of nature? Peer-reviewed science cited where???? Or are you about to direct me to some blog site where anyone can make stuff up? There’s an infinte number of formulas you can create to match temps, so what? You guys still have trouble when it comes to attribution.
414
Well sunshine Sydney has not had any heatwaves this January yet and today included.
BOM heatwave=3 days over 35c
Sydney has had 3 days over 30 for the month so far and tomorrow is not going to add to that.
Next scare please.
91
Ah, it now appears that Nice One denies that there are natural cycles in, um. nature?
Ok, I’ll play. For a start, you could try Copernicus – in the original High Latin, of course. You would not want to loose anything in translation …
82
No, I am asking for evidence that the recent warming is natural. You can’t provide that evidence. Studies that do look at attribution show that greenhouse gases are mostly to blame.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/a-comprehensive-review-of-the-causes-of-global-warming.html
You fail to provide anything to counter those peer-reviewed studies. You say “it’s all models and they’re allwrong”, but then you offer NO ALTERNATIVE but guesses.
310
Nice One,
Oxygen and Nitrogen are 4 times better at absorbing heat than Carbon dioxide.
Air is a mixture of gases – 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen – with traces of water vapor, carbon dioxide, argon, and various other components.
O and N make up 99% of Air mixture.
Which gases do you wish to nominate as being greenhouse? How do your nominated gases create a greenhouse?
41
And Nice One doesn’t agree that “skepticalscience” doesn’t just makes stuff up?
Sheesh!
40
Well Nice its only natural that it’s natural, how else could it be natural.
30
Nice One
In the natural world, things that occur naturally are the null hypothesis. And since neither you, nor I can prove a negative, and prove that they are not natural, the onus is on you to demonstrate the cause and effect, from empirical evidence (i.e. not models or computer games), that the recent warming is anything other than random variation.
The ball is in your court. Where is the empirical proof that this warming is in any way different to previous warming periods?
And don’t quote me papers that refer to modeled results – I have worked as a professional modeler, and I am well aware of their limits and shortcomings – and I know that they can be easily fudged to show correlation, but they still can not demonstrate causation.
60
Wrong Rereke dear. The null hypo tell us that from the known inputs of nature and GHG, GHGs are causing the warming.
Climate scientists on the other hand use observations and laws of physics to determine, to the best we can, what the causes are.
You guys don’t like models but can’t produce anything else. Flying blind as usual.
02
And how, exactly does the null hypothesis tell you that?
We started this conversation back on the thread, “The Message from Boreholes”, at the end of which, I put up a comment which said:
Would you like to answer that question now, or are you going to walk away from this conversation as well?
40
All you’re admitted to is not having any science to back your position.
vs
Those that do http://www.skepticalscience.com/a-comprehensive-review-of-the-causes-of-global-warming.html
04
There you go, wriggle wriggle, avoiding the questions.
1. Where is the definitive demonstration of cause and effect between variations in carbon dioxide and average global temperature? Note: I want cause and effect, not mere correlation.
2. Where are the observations that exclude the possibility that some agency other than carbon dioxide might be responsible for the variations in global temperature?
3. Where is the evidence that the observed variations in average global temperature are anything other than random?
And, just to clarify, in case you didn’t take any science subjects in University, these are really valid scientific questions to ask.
You can make a computer model do practically anything you want — in the wrong hands, it is no better than a Shamans’ juju rattle. Models are superb at identifying what you don’t know, and where you have parameters or algorithms that are incorrect. But they are never evidence and, at least in my part of the world, they are not admissible as evidence in a court of law.
Any child can make a ludicrous statements and then insist that the grown ups prove them wrong. But that is not science. I suggest you toddle off back to SkepticalScience, and ask for further instructions. But be aware, I am going to keep pushing at this until you either come up with some empirical evidence, or go away to play somewhere else.
30
“You guys still have trouble when it comes to attribution”
So do you guys. 😉
40
Nice One questions whether there are natural cycles and quintuple questions whether there is any peer reviewed literature.
Nice One, try reading a primary school science textbook and you will learn about the tilt of the earth’s axis and the earth’s orbit around the sun. These result in what we call spring, summer, autumn and winter all of which occur within a 12 month cycle.
Did you know that heat waves and summer often occur together?
Your questions indicate that you are unaware of these facts, yet you claim we have trouble with attribution?
40
from BOM itself
‘we omit from the analyses eight locations classified as urban, either because they are in the centres of major urban areas, or are in more peripheral locations but show evidence of anomalous temperature trends, in comparison to their surrounds. Those omitted stations are; 023090 Adelaide (Kent Town), 032040 Townsville Aero, 039083 Rockhampton Aero, 066062 Sydney (Observatory Hill), 067105 Richmond RAAF, 086071 Melbourne Regional Office, 087031 Laverton RAAF, and 094029 Hobart (Ellerslie Road)””
oh look, isn’t Observatory hill where this new record was set ?
and it shows “evidence of anomalous temperature trends”
As I said.. URBAN HEAT EFFECTS !!!
A CLAYTON’S record if ever there was one !!!
40
Oh and look……. there’s the HOBART record station as well…
what does it say again …. (from BOM)
shows “evidence of anomalous temperature trends”
50
LOL. You just countered Jo’s “It’s UHI” argument.
14
Hey, how do you figure that.??
Which particular arguement are you talking about?
30
“evidence of anomalous temperature trends” basically means UHI effects !!!
WTF do you think causes anomolous trends in a city !
I have NOT countered Jo’s ‘It’s UHI” arguement.
With the help of BOM, I have substantiated the UHI effect.
You are too much of a FOOL to realise that.
20
I suggest you read a bit more of the report you quote from rather than the small snippet you wish to hear. Sure, some cites do show “anomolous trends” but the others still show warming. Here’s some text from the Conclusion:
Wake up to reality.
00
The independent BOM analysts team have sliced and diced through the ACORN data.
They conclude:
1.Like the old HQ series, the Acorn record is also still impossible to replicate.
2.The record is much shorter than 100 years for many sites. It’s supposed to be high quality, but it has many gaps and spurious errors. If volunteers can write code on laptops to check for errors — and find, for example, that one 36.8C was accidentally changed to a 26.8C (and there are many) why can’t the Australian BOM?
3.Like the old series, Acorn’s trends are very different from what the raw data shows. (Why do we bother with thermometers?)
4.Hot and cold extremes have been adjusted, for the most part warming winters and cooling summers, and at some sites new and more extreme records have been set.
00
The FACT is that they are using a site that is even too anomolous for the massively corrupted ACORN data set, to claim a new record. !!
And that record doesn’t even show up on the automatic weather station data.
00
1. The “BOM analysts” you refer to are not BOM people, nor are they the people you cited previously. That your “BOM analysts” cannot replicate something may simply be highlighting their incompetance.
2. Period of time does not change the quality. Accidents might happen, and they may occur in both directions, something “skeptics” seem unwilling to consider.
3. Not according to the paper YOU quoted from before. http://www.cawcr.gov.au/publications/technicalreports/CTR_050.pdf I expect you base your conclusion on the amatures that tried to replicate and failed.
4. You still seem to be referring to the amature efforts which may be full of errors, rather than the study.
03
“The “BOM analysts” you refer to are not BOM people”
DOH ! that’s the whole idea of independant analysis.
That just means that their jobs don’t depend on them producing warming trends.
And its very hard to replicate something that has massive unaccounted for downward adjustments on past data.
10
By “independant analysis” you mean, “some guys on the internetwho think they are doing it right, but are making dumb mistakes like not accounting for change of site”.
02
poor Nonce One..
You know you can’t defend the the proven wholesale corruption of the raw data to suit BOM’s political agenda.
So, straight to the ad homs..
Typical CAGW sympathiser tactic.
11
Certainly some urban heat component, and yet we have only just pipped a reading from 74 years ago
ie. discount some UHI effect and IT IS BASICALLY THE SAME TEMPERATURE AS 74 YEARS AGO !!
Warming??? What warming ??
Sure if you cherry pick a start from the cooler 1970’s.. but in the longer record.. None, Nada, ZIP !!!
Just normal ups and downs.
60
Wonder what is the relevance of the Sydney specific highest recorded temperature. The maximum high in each State, except Tasmania, occurred years ago. For example the highest recorded temperature in NSW was in 1939 and the result is similar in terms of the other mainland States.
The US recorded its highest average temperature in 2012 yet that year, in global temperature anomalies, did not make the top 25% of the previous 33 years.
Though Australia is not the globe one is likely to find that overall, thus far in 2013, the longer standing maximum temperature records, representing the whole mainland have not been broken. That would seem to be a more significant measure, than one thermometer site in one city, of the relevance of January 2013 in terms of Australia’s highest temperatures history.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~jacob/worldtp.html
This site needs updating on Tasmania. The other States seem to check out OK.
00
If the US had used the same stations they had been using before, 2012 comes in about 12th.. (can’t find link, sorry)
But Hansen and his mates have added in several cherry-picked warm sites to push up the average.
Ignore all GISS land temp calcs from the US, they are too ocrrupted to be relevant.
00
Noxious One,
You said this sarcastically, but actually Sydney was not having a heatwave on Friday, according to the WMO’s technical definition of a heatwave.
See my comment below at #30.2.
The Noxious One poisons the debate with misinformation yet again.
41
I didn’t say it was a heatwave in Sydney. Your kickers seem twisted.
27
The meaning of what you said, parsed by plain English, was the rhetorically sarcastic statement:
The new record of 45.8 in Sydney today was certainly not due to a heatwave because we certainly aren’t having one of those, right?
Your sarcasm applied both to the Sydney record being not due to a heatwave and to the “we” not having a heatwave.
Whether the “we” are in Sydney is then irrelevant, the first half of your comment is wrong by itself. You implied a heatwave set the new record for Sydney. You needed another 4 days of high temperatures before that statement could be true.
The Noxious One tries to wriggle away worm-like, but is trapped by its own deception.
If you started posting comments that were both polite and accurate, the brand name of “Nice One” might experience a resurgence in ratings – a sort of… reputation hockey stick, if you like.
50
I really like the way you “interpret” words instead of reading what was written.
12
I really like the way you don’t understand the meaning of the word “reading”.
It requires interpreting words according to pre-arranged language rules and cultural norms.
Well this is really getting down into the weeds now, which is exactly where we would find worms wriggling.
You do not have to be the worm. You could fly like an eagle, but you must change your ways.
There is still good in you. You just have to turn away from the dark side. Your models deceive you, don’t trust them. Believe that the climate is still changing naturally because “for many regions and variables the signal of anthropogenic change has yet to clearly emerge from the ‘noise’ of natural climate variability.” [Hawkins & Sutton, American Geophysical Union, 2011]
Even if you believe the models are reliable, they prove that your leaders have deceived you. The models predict the “anthropogenic signal” could not emerge from background noise (S/N > 2) until 2010 for some regions and will not emerge until after 2020 for the vast majority of regions [Fig 4] due to the different level of noise in each region. How then can any statements made prior to the year 2020, such as those from the IPCC in 2007, possibly tell us “There is very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, with a radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] W/m^2” and “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”.
Of course it was a deception. A lie driven by politics not genuine science.
Their lies have built you a prison, NiO. A prison for your mind.
40
Hi Andrew,
That was an excellent summary of this whole matter being one of Deception and Not Science.
As for the little one to whom it was directed, well, who knows.
Some of them are genuinely pure at heart and want to save the planet.
Others are activists for various “shades of grey” in the AGW Tax Pye.
Some are organisers for the WWF and the like who gain excessive financial kick backs by association and for support rendered.
Others are idealistic Party hacks for parties whose voting numbers require that voters be led like lambs to the ballot box. They don’t get much but bask in the glory of saving the planet.
Others are the Academically associated, whose job it is to bolster and propagate the Myth with the aim of continuing grant money.
Then there are the mysterious ones like Gee Aye who seems to be more of a Monitor, or spelling checker, who just mostly “watches”.
In this group may also be the Lonely who just want to be noticed, and so take a contrarian stance to enhance feedback. Perhaps JB fits inn there?
But back to the topic: an analysis of the Man Made Global Warming Science by Mainstream Scientists reveals NO SCIENCE and just a pumped up Gaia theme that has only one general aim; damage to Science and the rorting of Tax money from the Host Body – Western Democracy.
You have to wonder if civilisation has any hope now that common sense and morality have been replaced by Twitterised Political Control of thinking within the community.
As I write this I am experiencing another wet, cold start to what should be a summers day in Australia and reading about massive losses of livestock in the Northern Hemisphere caused by the new meme:
Global Freezing.
KK 🙂
10
Sydney broke a record that stood for over 60 years, that’s weather for you, although a warming climate makes the breaking of records more likely.
The heatwave, if anything, would have been the period of days in Jan this year when Australia recorded the highest two days on record.
In Aus, the first 8 days of 2013 are in the top 20 hottest days on record.
I’d be interested in seeing how you want to worm your way out of calling that a heatwave. Perhaps you can add your own “interpretation”? If you read with your head cocked to the left, the graphs don’t look so bad.
03
“on record”
is the Raw data record, or the massively adjusted BOM record, that only goes back to 1961 or there abouts?
10
You lack evidence to support your claim.
“Cue the blogger amateur webpage” for “evidence”.
01
When exactly did the BOM start recording a daily average temperature then.
So now we can have a heatwave even when some parts of Australia are having snow.
Country wide heatwaves now there is a novel concept.
00
‘Skeptical Science’ (SkS) in a recent post show a picture of a marine snail, Linacina helicina antarctica, which they claim shows ‘acute levels of shell dissolution’, and that despite a ‘highly corroded shell the pictured specimen was alive at the point of capture.’
This doesn’t look like dissolution to me – the appearance is more suggestive of shearing. I find myself wondering how many reasons there are which might account for this appearance before invoking CAGW. For example, is this part of the normal course of life-cycle events for these creatures, or is this possibly an effect caused by pressure changes as the snails are removed from the oceans? Could these shell changes merely be post-mortem artefacts?
The image is a scanning electron microscope (SEM) picture – which seems an exotic technique to use given that the snail (according to SkS) is half a millimetre in diameter. Processing of specimens for SEM can lead to artefacts.
In a press release dated 25/11/2012, the British Antarctic Survey say that ‘the team examined an area of upwelling, where winds cause cold water to be pushed upwards from the deep to the surface of the ocean. Upwelled water is usually more corrosive to a particular type of calcium carbonate (aragonite) that pteropods use to build their shells. The team found that as a result of the additional influence of ocean acidification, this corrosive water severely dissolved the shells of pteropods.
Ocean acidification is caused by the uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere emitted as a result of fossil fuel burning. A number of laboratory experiments have demonstrated the potential effect of ocean acidification on marine organisms. However, to date, there has been little evidence of such impacts occurring to live specimens in their natural environment. The finding supports predictions that the impact of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems and food webs may be significant.’
Yet actual pH values of the ocean are not mentioned!
Are there any marine biologists and people with laboratory tissue preparation experience out there who could comment?
20
Given that the heated debate over global warming is so highly polarised, what we have is certain senior people on one side actively supplying ammunition to the other. Why would they go out of their way to damage their own area of science, that they themselves must have invested years of their life in? How on Earth could such an extraordinary situation have come about?
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/on-climate-science-and-all-those-leaks/
Pointman
40
It might be useful to read Velikovsky’s posthumously published book “Mankind in Amnesia” in order to have one unorthodox opinion of the issue of catastrophic global warming.
41
Please dont cite genuine pseudo-science again as it just gives the eco-fascists ammunition to slate all sceptics with.
30
OK, I’ll quote non-genuine pseudoscience then.
00
Even if you accept Velikovsky’s thesis (based as it is on Freudian psychobabble), all you are implying is that catastrophic global warming has happened in the past and we have collectively repressed our memory of it since we fear it will happen again.
This is problematic mainly for the reason we cannot unconsciously repress a memory of an event no human has ever experienced, because the most intense global warming event that has been inferred from paleoclimatology (the PETM) occurred 50 million years before homo sapiens diverged from the other apes.
Even ignoring the complete inapplicability of Velikovsky’s theory to CAGW, it still does not actually help us predict when another CGW event will occur or whether it will be exacerbated by industry and by how much.
I cannot say this is pseudo-science without knowing if Velikovsky ever claimed his thesis was scientific.
Aside from all that, it’s possible the thesis of “Mankind in Amnesia” is true and relevant on shorter time-scales for more pressing political concerns. i.e. – We aren’t inevitably doomed, but we are doomed to repeat histories forgotten.
10
Velikovsky’s theory is that humanity tends to replay its memories of past catastrophes as expectations of future ones. As I suggested, it’s worth reading his ideas, because this incessant anticipation of future catastrophes, AKA millennialism, needs to be looked at. The psychological basis is that individuals who experienced some trauma during their youth, say sexual abuse, subconsciously try to replay that when older in order to understand it. Velikovsky thought that this could be extended to humans as a species with some collective memory. CAGW is but the latest variation of that submerged memory according his hypothesis.
Of course it helps to study the primary sources and not the secondary ones.
00
Have the climate scientists over egged the pudding.
Using current values some back of the envelope calculations.
Humans as of 2011 emitted 36Gt of CO2 into the atmosphere.We are told that to fix AGW we have to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere so we have to go back to a time when the CO2 in the atmosphere was stable that was about 1880 after which levels started to rise.In 1880 humans emissions were something less than 1Gt so we need to get back to that level to stop AGW but it would appear that the 7 billion people already on the planet emitt over 2Gt just to remain alive so even if we ended all CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning or ice melting we would still be way over the limit of what is needed to stabalize CO2 levels.
We are screwed what am I missing here?.
10
Not sure, but half of what we currently emit is absorbed by the ocean, and forests etc. A lot more is absorbed now than in 1880, because the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 50% higher than back then. So if we reduce emissions a lot, then the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will fall until emission and absorption are in balance again.
11
And that is at less than 1Gt/year.
00
Wow, so Sydney records its highest maximum temp on record!
And not just by a bit, but smashes the record by 0.5 of a degree.
For those interested, Richard Holle’s map says it was going to be in the mid 20s today, so it was only out by 20 degrees:
http://www.aerology.com/?location=Australia&mapType=Tmax&date=1%2F18%2F2013
It also said it was going to snow:
http://www.aerology.com/?location=Australia&mapType=Snwd&date=1%2F18%2F2013
23
from BOM itself
‘we omit from the analyses eight locations classified as urban, either because they are in the centres of major urban areas, or are in more peripheral locations but show evidence of anomalous temperature trends, in comparison to their surrounds. Those omitted stations are; 023090 Adelaide (Kent Town), 032040 Townsville Aero, 039083 Rockhampton Aero, 066062 Sydney (Observatory Hill), 067105 Richmond RAAF, 086071 Melbourne Regional Office, 087031 Laverton RAAF, and 094029 Hobart (Ellerslie Road)””
oh look, isn’t Observatory hill where this new record was set ?
and it shows “evidence of anomalous temperature trends”
As I said.. URBAN HEAT EFFECTS !!!
A CLAYTON’S record if ever there was one !!!
Notice that the HOBART record site is also on the list of “shows evidence of anomalous temperature trends”
30
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/48929051
You can see in the distance, a lot of hi-rise has gone in, but that little patch is historic and has been protected from building. The sensor box is in the middle of a local grass patch, and there are other grass patches nearby, but also a lot of roadway (see the map) and beyond that, the whole area is on a hilltop overlooking the harbour so there’s a lot of water nearby.
10
Sydney’s monthly mean temperature currently stands at 28.43 for this month that includes todays 45.8.
Sydney’s highest monthly mean for January is 29.5
Lets see how it ends up.
30
Some temperature data from Sydney today…
http://lnx-bsp.net/news/2013/01/19/
Can someone make sense of the maximum temp being a whole degree higher than ALL of the recorded temperatures, and not even looking like it sits on the trend line? This is not just at one site, but at many sites in Sydney today.
I mean it certainly was hot today, but in the past I’m pretty sure the maximum temperature didn’t look like that as a big outlier. What’s going on here?
Can people double-check this, maybe I’ve just been an idiot or something.
20
Going back over older days, the maximum recorded is quite regularly around one degree higher than ALL the recorded temperatures for that day… so today is not special in that sense, seems to happen normally.
Does anyone know if this has always happened? What causes this? Is it comparable with the way max/min was measured 50 years ago? Can someone find the BOM explanation of exactly how their temperature measurement works?
30
Sydney (Observatory Hill) is not used in BoM’s ACPRN-SAT network.
“Out of the 112 locations in the ACORN-SAT network (Trewin 2012a ; Trewin 2012b), we omit from the analyses eight locations classified as urban, either because they are in the centres of major urban areas, or are in more peripheral locations but show evidence of anomalous temperature trends, in comparison to their surrounds. Those omitted stations are; 023090 Adelaide (Kent Town), 032040 Townsville Aero, 039083 Rockhampton Aero, 066062 Sydney (Observatory Hill), 067105 Richmond RAAF, 086071 Melbourne Regional Office, 087031 Laverton RAAF, and 094029 Hobart (Ellerslie Road)”
http://www.cawcr.gov.au/publications/technicalreports/CTR_050.pdf
On the sensitivity of Australian temperature trends and variability to analysis methods and observation
networks – CAWCR Technical Report No. 050 – March 2012
20
Tel
According to the AWS Sydney Ob we see:
14:49 – 44.9
14:59 – 44.7C
15:00 – 44.7C
15:09 – 43.7C
The temp of 45.8C was reached at 1455. So the temp rose 0.9C in 6 minutes and dropped 1.1C in 4 mins.
You may still see this at weather.ninemsn.com.au.
50
And alarmists say that a 1C degree rise per century is a disaster …
30
Say what ??????
Where did the 45.8C value come from then???
this needs further investigation !!!
Can you get 14:29, 14:39?
10
http://weather.iinet.net.au/index7day.html
Grab it while its still there.
The temp on the AWS DID NOT go over 45C !!
20
AndyG55
Usually the AWS recording is in 30 min intervals, on the hour and half-hour. However, if there are quick fluctuations in temp, there will be 10 minute intervals and even 1 or 2 min intervals. It is very unusual that changes of 1.0C in 5 mins. (up then down) wouldn’t be recorded especially so close to a record temp.
10
Yeah, that’s the weirdness. However, similar sorts of stuff seems to happen regularly with maximum temps measures by Automated Weather Stations, so it isn’t like just that one Friday is behaving differently to the other days.
My current theory is that the platinum wire electronic thermometer has a low time constant (i.e. it measures quick fluctuations) and in a typical day the AWS will see some burst of warmth from somewhere (possibly even less than a minute of this) and then note that down as a maximum. In order to make the half-hourly data a bit more sensible they probably average it out a bit.
This puts a bit of a question mark over the concept of a daily maximum, even in principle. If you think about it, temperature is by it’s very nature a statistical measurement, and thus sensitive to sample size (both in physical volume of the sensor, and in sample over time). So you get a significantly different maximum when you measure with a big, heavy sensor (such as a bulb of alcohol) as opposed to a lightweight sensor (thin platinum wire). But then, if a maximum is a property of the sensor, then as a measurement it is intrinsically poorly defined. You would be forced to specify a precise sensor size, and a precise sample time interval. Even then, two identical boxes side by side might record significantly different maxima, if they just happen to be sampling slightly out of synchronous with each other.
You see where I’m going with this? A median of all the day’s readings would be better… much less sensitive to such problems.
I think this could explain why surface temperature records are broken so easily.
20
Tel
How long has the platinum wire ET been in use? Most AWS facilities only started operating in the 1990s.
Were platinum resistant thermometers used in 1939 and would have they been as sensitive to the changes in temperature that you mention above?
20
The old systems were the James Six Thermometers (which have the U-shaped bend) and I can still remember seeing them in weather stations when I was young which certainly was a lot more recent than 1939!!! The temperature sensing element in this type of thermometer is an alcohol bulb which pushes a metal “maximum” marker.
It seems to me that a platinum wire is only useful in conjunction with an electronic data collection system, in theory a human could manually twiddle a wheatstone bridge or something like that, but in practice that would be incredibly cumbersome.
30
Yes it did………….briefly.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/IDCJDW2124.latest.shtml
00
Yes, I often see this in the temperature records. A sudden rise or fall of a degree or so in a very short time. In Perth, the maximum temp often occurs when the wind changes from easterly to south westerly. There is a short time where there is very little wind, and I think that is when the max happens. A dramatic rise in temps due to a lack of wind. If you look at how a Stephenson screen is designed, it does rely on the movement of air through the sreen. Without that, the air inside the screen would become considerably hotter than the air outside.
But this is just uninformed conjecture, and the more resourceful among you can find out why there often seems to be an anomolously rapid temperature increase just before the maximum is reached.
30
Are you going to put a link, or just leave some philosophical sounding mystery?
At any rate, it doesn’t matter what the physical mechanism for this might be, the point is that the measurement of the maximum temperature is actually ill-defined as a consequence, because it depends partly on the thermal mass of the sensor, and partly on just the luck of the day. There’s no point doing scientific data collection, if the thing you are measuring is ill-defined.
20
Maybe Tel, but since the method of collecting the max is always the same, it provides a useful comparison. And though there may be many factors that influence the max readings, over time the statistics will give a real trend.
10
The method is NOT always the same. They used to use mechanical thermometers, and they switched to electronic data collection. Not comparable over the long term. Beyond that, there’s known to be variations in the sampling rate of various AWS systems, and almost certain to be changes in future. We don’t know that the thermal mass is consistent across equipment either because it is not documented.
That’s the whole problem of an ill-defined variable!
10
If the platinum wired ET has only been used since AWS were introduced, it begs the question – in 1939, had there been a quick peak and then drop as happened last Friday, would the thermometers have picked it up?
You are correct, Tel. I think the different thermometers, ways of measuring and positioning mean that it would difficult to compare temps.
And what ACORN has done to the temp record is beyond belief.
30
Interesting, looks like the Australian BOM did NOT standardize on James Six Thermometers (which were common overseas) but they used two separate thermometers: mercury bulb for maximum (with a constriction to stop the mercury going back, thus locking in the maximum temperature until shaken down again), and alcohol bulb with a marker pin for minimum (where the marker pin sits in the alcohol and is pushed back by the air when the alcohol contracts, reset by tilting).
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/cdo/about/airtemp-measure.shtml
They also mention that the min/max comes from the AWS sampling at 1 second intervals which would be way and above faster than any mercury bulb could possibly react. The maximum temperature reported by the BOM would possibly only exist for as little as one second in a whole day! For “global climate” temperature calculation, the maximum and minimum values are used but everything else is thrown away. In effect, they are depending on the least stable metric they have available.
10
Here are some photos I found of the old mechanical station.
http://www.ozbc.net/weather_aws.htm
What looks at a glance like the dual scale of a James Six Thermometer on the left hand side is on closer inspection a pair of regular mercury bulb thermometers (dry bulb and wet bulb) with no memory capability.
The memory thermometers are laying horizontal and judging from the man’s hand near the box the length of these is perhaps 35 cm to 40 cm with a bulb perhaps 10mm long. Thus, they are physically largish devices, not capable of changing value quickly.
It would be very interesting if anyone can get hold of one or both of these and run it in the same box as a modern electronic AWS, find out how big the difference really is. At any rate, the modern practice of sampling once per second and pulling the maximum out of that stream will surely result in higher maxima (by somewhat random amounts each day) than the old method.
10
There is an example of platinum film sensors, note that they come in a whole bunch of sizes and that the 90% response time can vary from 2.5 seconds up to 40 seconds depending on the sensor. That’s just one supplier, there are no doubt others, depending on housing, etc.
http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/388391.pdf
I think in all cases they are going to be faster than the big, old mercury bulb.
10
Thanks for that info, Tel.
Re your comment about thermometer comparisons ( although not quite the same scenario you mention).
Casino (NSW) had a manual and an AWS operating 300m apart. The manual was next to a tarred road with buildings close by. The AWS was situated on an oval with no buildings close by.
The AWS always recorded lower temps (especially max temps) over the 15 years they were operating together, probably more due to the UH effect. The manual station was closed in August, 2012.
10
The thingabout wind farms is…they are just SOOOO
QUIXOTIC !
30
The thing about Windfarms is :
– they don’t work!
– they don’t produce power, they consume it!
– they don’t let the neighbours sleep!
– they don’t ever rate to their capacity!
– they don’t discriminate on slicing and dicing….
– they don’t save CO2 emissions!
– they don’t work 24/7/365 days a year!
– they don’t work!
I’m sure I forgot something…
60
…yeah, you forgot to understand what “Quixotic” means.
50
Some get it. 🙂
Some don’t get it. 🙁
20
I used to own a donkey once , named it Otto..
As in “Donkey Otto”
30
Should have been Otte…or Rosinante.
30
Well the UK Met office assured us a decade ago that in a few years snow would be a foggy memory. Now Ive a feckin great thick blanket of the stuff to wade through outside my front door.
51
…Im not looking forward to it.
10
Turned out OK in the end. I took a camera. Everything was slow and low key with a festival atmosphere. Some girls posed for me to photograph them. Plus lots of trees. Very Victorian Christmas card. Not as slippery as I feared but I needed the wellies and three pairs of sock.Then a great deal of trouble getting the boots off on my return.
Maybe in the future the derelict windmills could be recommissioned as fans to blow snow bearing clouds away from us.
(Note for Maxine, thats meant to be a joke, now you can tick your thumbs down).
40
Can someone explain how increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have caused the Sydney heatwave disaster, panic, channel 7 special please. I need to know.
40
It’s quite simple when everything is based on fantasy. People now love catastrophes and care nothing about if anything is really done to fix them. All they need to be told is “it’s handled”, so CO2 is the bad thing because scientists said that and they are the smart people and everyone else is too dumb to understand. So we should all “care” about the planet but really, doing anything is not necessary. After all, none of the bad stuff ever actually happens, no one moves to correct the “problem” and life remains more or less the same. Until reality slips in, CO2 will be the bad thing and no amount of facts mean anything. Thirty years ago, I had a poster that said “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts.” I was ahead of my time.
All things are possible when you live in a fantasy world.
40
I blame Peter Weir for Weired Weather in Sydney.Thats why its named after him. Him and the Aztecs.
10
It’s all Alice in Wonderland stuff —
“Through the Looking Glass”, by Lewis Carroll.[changed to suit]
˜I don’t know what you mean by carbon pollution”, Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t till I tell you —– I meant there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”
˜But carbon pollution doesn’t mean a nice knock-down argument”, Alice objected.
˜When I use words”,Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ˜they means just what I choose them to mean, neither more nor less”.
The Red Queen is a lawyer and speaks Legalese.
40
More pertinently, you need an actual heatwave in order to have anything in need of an explanation.
First elect to use the definition of heatwave recommended by the World Meteorological Org., which is:
Secondly note that since the 4 days preceding Friday had daily Max temps less than 29 Celsius, no matter how hot it was in Sydney on Friday, one hot day does not qualify as a “heatwave” under the internationally accepted technical definition of a heatwave.
As for explanations of this total non-event…
See also page 192 and page 199 Fig 4 of Frich 2002 (fair warning: cited by Wikipedia) in which the duration of heatwaves globally has changed over the last hundred years in a manner consistent with a cyclic phenomenon. The authors themselves judged in 2002 that…
Surmising how this judgement might have been affected by an additional 10 years of no significant change in globally averaged temperature is left as a reader exercise.
For Sydney on Friday in particular, Backslider noted yesterday that even the official explanation is far from dramatic.
The Urban Heat Island effect was one factor in the intensity for central Sydney. (Tip’o’t’Hat to Backslider)
20
Yes Andrew apparently Australia has a daily Tmax for the whole country now.
I just can’t wait for July when the Tmax is 5deg above the daily average for July for five or more days and we are told we are having a heatwave.
Maybe we could have a world daily Tmax then the whole world could be having a heatwave.
Imagine the people in England now being told they are having a heatwave.
10
Ace….go away!
11
…You mean you never saw “The Last Wave”!
20
No topic, so can’t BE off topic, I s’pose…
NSW is now an IMPORTER of electricity during peak times.
Previously, we used to EXPORT power to VIC and SA, and also help transmit QLD power to those states as well. Now, we are also USING QLD power during peak times because we do not have sufficient generating capacity to supply the demand. Nor can we reasonably expect to be able to build a coal-fired 2.4GW power station to meet the demand, nor build a couple more to replace aging infrastructure, so unless things change in the next decade or so, NSW residents can expect blackouts during periods of high demand. If QLD follows the path taken by SA, VIC and now NSW, they will have precious little to spare themselves, which will make things even worse.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
50
Looks as if Eastern Australia are in for some turbulent times regarding energy as local gas supplies are all marked for export and suppliers to the domestic market can’t buy any gas. Here in WA the government has set aside 15% of gas for domestic use
10
Time to build some small, modular nuclear reactors.
Coal is too valuable to burn domestically. And costly with the stupid taxes on energy production.
Of course, the ‘carbon free’ Greens are also against ‘radiation’ of any sort. Even when it’s organic. 😉
10
Regarding radiation,here’s a little story from a month ago or so that didn’t make the MSM (via Jerry Pournelle’s blog)
Linear No Threshold Theory Wrong UN Admits – Media keeps Quiet
For 60 years the Linear No Threshold theory (LNT), that low level radiation is harmful, has been the foundation of the anti-nuclear movement. It has never had any scientific justification whatsoever and this has now been publicly acknowledged by the The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR).
The fears engendered by this scare story have been directly responsible for the standstill in nuclear energy generation and thus in most energy generation overall in the world since 1970. Without that scare the world would be producing at least twice as much electricity and would thus be thought twice as well off.
Such paradigm shattering news is of massive worldwide significance and has thus been ignored by virtually all the world’s conventional media with the almost sole exception of this from Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/01/11/like-weve-been-saying-radiation-is-not-a-big-deal/?ss=business%3Aenergy :
10
Thanks for this Mike.
I don’t care what anybody says in respect of a scare campaign. It only needs contain the word ‘nuclear’, and people arc up with fear, virtually an unfounded fear when it comes to nuclear electrical power generation.
The uranium bearing ‘dirt’ is dug out of the ground, and the Uranium separated from that. This is called Yellowcake, and naturally existing Uranium is already in a partially enriched state, and in it’s natural state, is at around 0.7% enrichmant. So, even while still in the ground it is partially enriched.
150 thousand tons of rock and ore will yield around 200 tons of the Uranium.
From this first stage, that of separation, it then undergoes further enrichment.
The process to enrich it to a level where it can be used for fuel in Nuclear power plants entails 5 separate steps, and at the end of those 5 steps, it is enriched to around 3 to 5%, and most typically just that 3%.
The process for enrichment to weapons grade Uranium (typically 95 to 98%) is a completely different series of processes altogether, so if the process is to manufacture Nuclear power plant fuel, it’s not just a matter of ‘holding down the button’ so to speak and just keeping on enriching it, perhaps until it reaches weapons grade enrichment. At the end of the 5 processes for manufacturing Nuclear power plant fuel that is the absolute maximum that it can be enriched, that being the 3 to 5%.
During those processes for nuclear power plant fuel, the Uranium is converted to a powder which is then pressed into pellet form. Those pellets are then fired in a high temperature furnace to create hard ceramic pellets. The pellets are then machined into specific sizes. The machined pellets are then inserted into the rods, usually tubes manufactured from Zirconium alloy material.
I mentioned above that the original ‘dirt out of the ground’ yields 200 tons of Uranium from 150,000 tons of ‘dirt’. At the end of the 5 process, you will have 24 tonnes of nuclear fuel. The cost is $2200 per kilogram, so that amount of fuel has cost $52.8 Million to produce.
That 24 Tonnes of Nuclear fuel is what a large reactor might use in a year, and again, you may consider that a large amount but compare it with a large coal fired power plant that burns around 7 million tons of ‘steaming’ coal each year.
With judicious and carefully planned use, the rods in the ‘stack’ can be ‘rotated’ during the process so they can work out the maximum number of exposed rods to make the steam required to drive the turbine. In some cases in the U.S. single reactor fuel replenishment can be 18 months apart. With nearly all Plants having two reactors, that means one reactor going under refuel, and the second reactor 9 months after that, and then the first reactor again 9 months later. (an 18 month interval)
So even while refuelling is under way, the Plant is still providing half its total power. Routine maintenance is usually carried out while the refuelling process is under way.
As the fuel is consumed by the nuclear reaction, enrichment levels are diminished somewhat and when they fall back to around 1%, they are considered to be spent, and no longer much of a contribution towards the process. That careful planning means that every bundle of rods should be back at their minimum when refuel time comes around.
The bundles or rods are removed from the central core, and stored in the reactor, usually for one, sometimes two refuelling cycles. By this time enrichment has diminished even further, and in most cases back to the same level as Uranium existing in the ground, at around 0.7%. The rods are then removed for dry storage at the storage facility for these nuclear fuel rods, or in the best case scenario, sent for reprocessing.
The newer types of plant can store all the bundles of rods consumed during the life of the plant inside the Reactor for the life of the plant, usually 50 tears, but this can be extended to 60, and even to 75 years.
So, the waste fuel in the expended rods in the bundles is now at an enrichment level the same as for the existing ore still in the dirt in the ground.
The loudest voice, usually green, and completely uninformed, and unwilling even to be informed, or to even bother to check, sparks fear with that boogedy boogedy word, nuclear.
Try even beginning to offer an explanation, and you get shot down before you even start.
Tony.
50
Tony,
It isn’t the uranium(U238 or U 235) that is all that radioactive. It is the fission products that are the problem and they are nasty. However after 6 months or so many have largely gone away. That’s the nice thing about radioactives – they go away on their own. Imagine telling greenies that stable isotopes have half lives of FOREVER.
It also needs to be pointed out that substances with long half lives aren’t all that radioactive. Things with very short half lives are highly radioactive but go away quickly. The problems are with things that give up their nuclear energy in times comparable to human lifetimes like Sr90. So you engineer systems to keep them out of contact with the environment and food chain.
20
Mike,
The actinides can be “burnt” in a fast-breeder reactor while producing useful electricity. It’s a mistake to try to store those products for hundreds to thousands of years as they can be “immediately” useful.
Tony,
The tonage numbers for an epi-thermal/thermal 232-Th/233-U MSBR are far better in terms of ore to fuel than for the U/Pu fuel cycle. People will pay you to take away the nasty Thorium from their rare-earth refining plants. 🙂 But there’s some work to be done to sort out commercially-viable technologies that can scale to global energy needs.
One of the favoured (by nuclear physicists) salt components, Lithium is the hardest thing to find; because only the 7-Li can be used within the reactor or it’ll gobble up too many neutrons. And that isotope occurs in a minority amongst the element for which there is already a very strong market in e.g. batteries. So even if 7-Li were vastly more common, the price would escalate steeply with greater demand. And the known economically recoverable resource is only about 7kg/capita, globally.
Chlorine salts get mess with thermal neutrons to which Cl presents anything from huge to miniscule absorbtion cross sections in a non-monotonic variation – which is no good as “designing” the energy decrements of neutrons to “skip” the levels at which Cl is “large”; is unworkable. But Cl remains tiny from about 1eV and higher; which is sufficient to make the 232-Th an enormous target for absorbtion, hence providing a useful, if marginal breeding ratio. It should also leave many neutrons sufficiently energetic to “burn” any actinides from other nuclear reactors; with which the salt mix has been “doped”.
Don’t worry if you don’t understand this. I’m only imagine that I might. 🙂
00
Kneel,
This is because of reduced overall electricity demand on the Eastern seaboard due to various factors, economic downturn being one,closure of industrial plants due to carbon tax being another. This caused an oversupply of power plant capacity on the eastern seaboard.
Victorian brown coal power stations are able to bid the cheapest price and hence are now supplying S. Aust and NSW over significant periods.
Consequently some older NSW power stations have been closed and others are mothballed.
There was a significant duration when the brown coal stations were unavailable due to the Victorian floods.
Frank
10
Say, this is interesting.
California is that known hotbed of CAGW. (Hey, pardon the pun, I couldn’t help myself)
I have a good friend who lives in Stockton in California, and we share emails, sometimes as many as ten a day, and say, what did we do before email eh.
All the talk there currently on their News bulletins is how Sydney is quite literally cooking, and he’s sent me a couple of emails about it.
Interest piqued, he went looking for California temperature records, and he sent me the following link.
California Annual Temperatures And Records
Note the Maximum recorded temps for each of those cities shown there.
Nearly all of them are pre the CAGW scare.
The highest is 118F which is 47.8C (118 – 32 and then multiplied by 5 and divided by 9) That was in Redding and was recorded in 1971.
Even for the two largest cities L.A. and San Francisco, both on the ocean, the max was recorded in 1961 for both, as was their State Capital Sacramento, 115F. (46.1) and Sacramento is inland a ways from the Coast, with Stockton just to the South of Sacramento.
Hey look over there, isn’t that Britney Spears?
Say, do that same calculation for Minus 40C.
Tony.
30
No thanks … I’ve experienced that in northern Siberia and I have no intention of revisiting it, even in Fahrenheit 🙂
30
Actually Ian you already have as minus40C is minus40F/
01
Actually, the Russkis had thermometers in both scales but neither helped 🙂
I do tongue-in-cheek in my sleep, sometimes a bit too subtly for a blog, I fear
10
Can anyone tell me if the monsoon in norhtern Austrlia was late in 1972/3,1992/3 and 2012/3. If it was would the tempatures in central Australia be hotter than normal before its arrival
More questions about wind direction later
10
Very well then, some random headlines that may spark interest….
What do GoldNerds think about this recent discovery of a 5.5kg gold nugget near Ballarat?
Twenty years of prospecting for $250,000 is a poor rate of return compared to buying shares in gold mines, I’d guess.
On a cynical black-humour note…
Be careful about coming into a large fortune suddenly. This guy won the lottery. Yay! He’s gone to The Island! 🙁
And finally a recent opinion on putting academic research behind paywalls.
I’m sure when searching many of you discover relevant articles about pet CAGW topics are usually behind a paywall at Nature, or Science Direct, or Elsevier. When I hit a paywall, I turn back. I know the truth is important but… I assume SOMEBODY ELSE located SOMEWHERE will have exposing CAGW claims as their main job and will use a sponsored subscription to read on my behalf at SOME FUTURE time. It’s a bit of a cop-out, I know, but we should not all have to pay to read this knowledge. In some cases there is a time window for the paywall, afterwhich it becomes free, and sometimes publishers will make a frequently-cited article free just out of public interest. But that’s hardly the point.
Anyway it’s a pretty interesting read.
20
Sea level rise barely more tham 1mm pa, with large error bars.. And slowing
Its gunna take a really long time to reach the 6m or whatever the CAGW sypathisers are currently prophesising.
20
Heatwaves are jetstream caused and weather related. The fact is the NORTHERN HEMISPHERE is the coldest and getting COLDER THAT (see ALL the coldest events at http://iceagenow.info/) (http://iceagenow.info/2013/01/pakistan-severe-cold-breaks-previous-records-video/ that is a SMALL part of it) is indication of REAL LIA approaching which is postulated by Russian scientists. Downturn of Solar cyc 24 is now confirmed. The spots are going looks like cyc 25 will be a nonevent! Roll on the next LIA. Poor earthlings!
10
Australia Burns. There’s an article with this title (an interview with “Australian philosopher and climate activist”, Professor Clive Hamilton) on the New Left Project website. The comments are interesting: link.
40
Hi Robin
Not sure what you are saying here.
We are overly familiar with this style of uncritical, channeled thinking, Politicised analysis but?
Are you saying that this is one of the worst examples of lack of critical thinking, and therefore an indictment of some sectors in our Australian University system?
KK
KK
20
Well KK, here’s one of my comments:
I would have thought that was clear enough … hmm? But please don’t focus on my comments – look at a few of the others. Interesting for a left-wing web site.
50
Sorry Robin,
I missed your comments in the linked article as I nearly gagged a few times while reading/skimming through it and didn’t get as far as the comments.
Agree wholeheartedly.
KK
20
“is not something I would expect from a Professor of Public Ethics”
you have not met many, then 😉
30
Roy, I ran across this piece by George Carlin. It is about the USA, but it applies equally to the Land of Oz.
“Politicians are put there to give you that idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, and they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, and the City Halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They’ve got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want—they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. You know something, they don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting crushed by a system that threw them overboard 30 years ago.
It’s a big club and you ain’t in it! You and I are not in the Big Club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you in the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks, the game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans are and will probably remain willfully ignorant… Because the owners of this country know the truth, it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” – George Carlin
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Doesn’t matter how many times you see that piece it still hits hard.
The truth does hurt and it could be a bit depressing if you let it.
KK
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Here’s an interesting article on China’s clean energy venture from a leading Left Wing source. Like many commentaries it fails to distinguish between CO2 and harmful to health emissions.
“China’s Green Leap Backwards”
http://www.thenation.com/article/172263/chinas-green-leap-backward
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Now this is O/T even for an unthreaded topic:
Just heard over radio that the US is to remove ALL of those X-ray scatter machines from their airports by May this year. Any of our contributors over there heard more on this.
I know there are those who would gladly stoop knicker less in order to prove that they have nothing to hide, but for me, these devices are an abomination.
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OK. Found the story.
http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-technology/tsa-to-remove-controversial-xray-scanners-20130119-2czku.html
So the full image models have gone, most of the generic image models stay and some airports won’t use either.
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#15
“From today’s Sydney Daily Telegraph online:
3:16 pm Sydney is experiencing its hottest day ever. The temperature reached 45.8C at 2.55pm.
The previous record, of 45.3C, was set on January 14, 1939.”
I saw the same report from the SMH on the 19th Jan. However I did some cross referencing and found this annomaly on the BOM site:
BOM….AWS …….SMHfromBOM Diff
18/03:00pm 44.7 02.54 45.7 1.0C
18/02:30pm 45.1 02.27 45.3 0.2
18/02:00pm 44.9 01.58 45.2 0.3
18/01:30pm 43.6 01.43 45.0 1.4
18/01:00pm 43.0
18/12:30pm 42.7 12.30 43.3 0.3
I think two instruments are used for these readings. How often are they cross calibrated?
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Hope you checked out the boat harbour project down there Jo, that’s what I am working on!!
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Required reading for the warmistas: Open letter to David Cameron
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There are times when you just have to laugh at the things people do.
Safety Amongst Good Guys With Guns……Not. 🙂
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Lol, that reminded me of this. So funny! 🙂
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If Obama Had His Way, These Two Children Might Be Dead
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Wonderful, kids who should have bolted, instead having access to an assault rifle at any time they want. Hope arguments i that family dont ever get out of hand?
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I would just like to record that in 10 comments John Brookes has received 10 thumbs up and only 8 thumbs down.
Things must be cooling down.
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I am not interested in the figures “Enough electricity to power 225,000 homes every year.” and “Up to 2,500,000 tonnes of Global Warming Pollution (CO2) avoided each year”
Tell me the guaranteed maximum number of homes it will power and the maximum number of tonnes of CO2 they will guarantee to be avoided each year.
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A small AA battery can power 225,000 homes every year… for a few microseconds. 🙂
Make the proponents “live the dream” and be supplied by only those means.
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My response to all above comments which refer to what I have said is here:
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/01/tipping-point-boris-johnson-writes-bravely-maybe-its-the-sun/#comment-1227798
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Thermal Gradient in a Gravitational Field DEBUNKS GREENHOUSE conjecture
There is still a lot of discussion about whether or not an autonomous thermal gradient develops in gravitational field. It does, and thus it fully explains all that “33 degrees of warming of the surface” that they unnecessarily developed a radiative greenhouse effect to try to explain – because they didn’t want to agree that Loschmidt was right way back in the 19th century, and 800 experiments by Roderich Graeff are also valid now in the 21st century. There’s valid theory and there’s valid empirical evidence, not only on Earth, but on Venus and other planets also.
The WUWT attempted rebuttal has been rebutted in my paper, simply because the wire itself develops a thermal gradient due to the same conduction/diffusion process in the air. The net gradient is always based on the weighted mean specific heat of all substances, solid, liquid or gas in the system, and the wire becomes part of the system.
Other attempts at rebuttal have started out with an incorrect assumption that the Zeroth Law is valid itself in a gravitational field, then used it to “prove” the original old Clausius statement of the Second Law is valid in a gravitational field. The conclusion will be wrong if the original assumptions are wrong. (Just like the conclusion that we need back radiation to raise surface temperatures is wrong because the original assumption of an isothermal troposphere is wrong.) Why do you think physicists even needed to introduce entropy into the Second Law, if all they had to worry about was temperature? We need to consider all kinetic energy (KE) and potential energy (PE), the latter including chemical energy, which is not relevant for inert molecules making up nearly all the troposphere. There’s an analogy with Newtonian physics and Einstein’s “refinement” with the Theory of Relativity. The Clausius statement had to be refined because of the effect of force fields. Temperature comparisons are only valid in horizontal planes wherein PE = constant and thus does not affect entropy.
So the Second Law of Thermodynamics can now be expressed: “An isolated system, if not already in its state of thermodynamic equilibrium, spontaneously evolves towards it. Thermodynamic equilibrium has the greatest entropy amongst the states accessible to the system “
If you correctly understand what entropy is all about, then, as I have said, it is obvious, for air which is initially isothermal, that some of the air molecules in the top half of an insulated sealed cylinder (with more total energy per molecule) will have a propensity to move to the lower half, thus having the capacity to do work. Hence entropy increases when molecules thus move. And so some more do move downwards than upwards, and thus the lower half ends up warmer, because air molecules which move there gain KE at the expense of PE as they move between collisions.
Similarly, imagine three equal sized volumes in a cylinder with physical dividers that can be slid out. Now, pump three times as much air as you normally would have into the central cylinder and create a vacuum in the other two sections above and below. Remove the partitions and what happens? Those molecules which move into the lower section lose PE and gain KE. Those that go into the top section gain PE at the expense of their own KE. Temperature is a measure of mean KE and has nothing to do with density. So the top section is cooler than the bottom section.
There can be no other valid explanation for the temperature of the Venus poles and the troposphere above them. There’s no significant convection above those poles, yet there is a thermal gradient in the troposphere surprisingly close to -g/Cp. The poles can only be that hot if diffusion of KE can cause absorbed thermal energy from the Sun (KE) to appear to pass up the temperature gradient. Entropy considerations show that this is possible iff the absolute magnitude of that gradient were anywhere less than -g/Cp. Hence the vertical temperature gradient will be autonomously maintained by diffusion of KE, as explained in my paper. Diffusion, over the life of Venus, has also ensured horizontal isothermal conditions right around the globe, because of its slow rotation and relatively still atmosphere.
So, as I have said, there simply is no other way to explain the temperatures of the Venus poles and the troposphere above them. Nor is there any other way to explain over 800 experiments by Roderich Graeff who measured a temperature gradient in well insulated sealed cylinders here on Earth.
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Some time back I asked people if they could explain how the required thermal energy gets into the surface of Venus. At least 98% of all incident Solar radiation is absorbed by the thick atmosphere there, so the Sun does not heat the surface significantly with direct radiation.
No one on any climate blog has provided the correct answer, so I guess it’s time to explain what does happen.
The thermal gradient in an atmosphere evolves even in still air. We have proof that it does in over 800 experiments by Roderich Graeff, and it is logical that it would if you consider my thought experiment about a cylinder divided into three sections. If the top and bottom sections are a vacuum and then gas is released from the middle section by removing the dividers, then, at thermodynamic equilibrium, there has to be a cooler temperature at the top and warmer at the bottom. If KE were homogeneous, then the extra PE in the molecules at the top would cause a general propensity for some gas to move downwards gaining KE as it does so. After all, each individual molecule has mass, and thus has KE (as we know) and also PE. So it must obey Newton’s laws in free flight between impacts.
The Venus surface would not be as hot if all convection moved away from the surface. If that happened we have no explanation as to how the required energy gets into the Venus surface. Because IPCC and cohorts could not conceive this heat transfer by convection, they postulated that back radiation could do the job of raising Earth’s surface 33 degrees, and the surface of Venus by about 500 degrees. But 10W/m^2 of direct solar radiation reaching the Venus surface could hardly produce much back radiation anyway! Surface bound heat transfer by convection is the missing link which we have all been looking for, and no one it seems has previously described this as being the only explanation.
We must understand that diffusion of KE (even in still air) sets the gradient of the thermal plane in an atmosphere. Then any additional heat absorbed from the Sun (such as when night becomes day) will spread out over that thermal plane (moving away from the source in all 3D directions) just as if it were the level surface of a lake receiving rain (extra water) in some section of the lake. This is the only way we can explain how energy moves up the thermal gradient and into the surface of Venus. Radiation cannot transfer heat from the cooler atmosphere, but non-radiative convection can flow towards the surface over the thermal plane whose gradient is set by diffusion of KE in a gravitational field.
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