Fleet is lovely…used to enjoy staying with friends there. That’s not where we are atm; we are further SW, near Petersfield. The countryside is absolutely beautiful around here.
I used to grab an overland from Clapham Jucntion out from Londinium each day, made for a long day but I used to enjoy the countryside. As much as the newer trains are nicer, one good thing about the older slam doors is you wake up each station if you snooze off…. đ
Nah! RW They’ve wrecked the beauty of Cumbria and the Solway Firth though and you can see the blighted bird mashers from the Yorkshire Dales looking eastwards and oodles of them after take off from MAN. Grrr đ
We went to Winchester today; very much Jane Austen country. Couldn’t stay for Evensong at the Cathedral unfortunately where they were going to sing S S Wesley’s ‘Ascribe unto the Lord’. I have an old recording of the Winchester choir singing this, which a musical acquaintance once told me was the definitive version of it. That would have been the icing on the cake of a great day.
You get neither of them right if you don’t do both; simultaneously.
Doing one is “near enough” for some Engineering purposes but the margins of error are wide; for which Engineering can allow, but climate models cannot because they wander off “at random”, unbounded by reality. (Refer back to Christopher Essex’s recent video for the grisly details.)
Bernd,
That tallbloke’s thread is between the engineers that cannot understand what it is that 97% of meteorologists spout, and the 97% of meteorologists that refuse to understand anything except what they spout.
BTW along with Die besten Gurkensalat und,
Die besten Kartoffelsalat Some Die besten Kalbfleisch, real Wiener Schnitzel, would be nice. đ
Hmm, MEGA eh! There’s not one unit larger than 125MW.
I wonder what they call single units at the big nukes which are driving 1800MW Generators. I wonder what they call single units at USC coal fired power plants driving 1000/1100/1300MW generators. I wonder what they call 1970’s technology units of 660MW, like at Bayswater.
The article mentions that these are Hybrid plants, you know renewable power straight from the Sun.
Oh, hang on, hybrid! So they are utilising Natural Gas fired turbines in conjunction with Solar, you, know, CO2 emitting natural Gas, similar to the failing miserably Ivanpah plant out in the Mojave Desert.
But hey, don’t worry, because soon they’ll be running them off biodiesel. Don’t worry about the CO2 emissions from that though, because this is the good CO2, not that foul disgusting CO2 from coal fired plants, just the good clean CO2, totally different stuff altogether.
They say they will also be getting 24 hour power. Umm, maybe for 30 to 50 days a year at best, if they can get the technology to work at all without using natural gas to start them, get them to operating speed, and then run them until the solar component is hot enough to take over for a few hours a day, and with the solar component closed in Winter, and running off the Natural Gas. The best they can currently manage to run for 24 hours is 20MW, and even that is for barely 40 days or so.
Competing with large scale coal fired power plants supplying a REGULAR and CONSTANT ABSOLUTE physical requirement.
Uh Uh! Sorry. Not on you life.
Mega. Give me strength.
Please excuse my sarcasm, but when I see (insert word equivalent to bovine waste here) like this, I don’t know whether to laugh or hum a nice quiet song to get my boiling blood temperature back down.
This might interest you Tony, Australia’s largest battery bound for Buninyong, stating that “The two-megawatt battery will provide about 3000 customers with an hour of back up power during an outage.” amazing this is needed when the Mt. Mercer Windfarm not 20kms away will generate 131MW enough to power the city of Ballarat.
A 2MW battery, that will give 3000 consumers backup for, umm, one hour, if the grid goes down.
Cheap too, at around $500K to $2 Million. (from what I can find so quickly)
One hour. For when the grid fails.
Hmm! Now, why might the grid fail now?
Oh, and if anyone else has done the Maths, that’s an average of 666 Watts per consumer per hour, well, after all, there IS only one hour. Let’s hope all those fridge compressors don’t come on at around the same time eh!
Difference between that battery and a diesel generator of equivalent load capacity is that the battery costs twice as much, lasts “an hour”; whereas the diesel generator will generate 2MW of electrical power indefinitely; as long as there’s diesel available. Specific fuel consumption is around 145 g/kWh â roughly 16 cents per kWh in (off-road) fuel costs.
Tony, Just has an interesting conversation with a solarhart guy about my solar hot water system. Been having trouble getting hot water (only 2 in house so not a lot of demand). He said lots of people have been complaining and the reason is the cold spell (I’m in Brisbane). When I pointed out that it has been cold but the sun has been shining and that I never had such trouble in the past he said the sun hasn’t been as hot so can’t heat the water up. True or not I don’t know, but it definately proves how useless solar is. If you lived in a cold climate (such as Southern Australia, UK or Europe why the hell would you install solar. The only time you would get hot water is summer when a cold shower is tolerable.
I found out something in the Cyclone we had through here recently, when we lost power for five days, and it just showed me, that even as an electrician, with a strong background in that electrical trade, there are still things you either do not not think of, have forgotten, or think too deeply about, hence missing the simplest part of the whole lot.
Even though our power went out, I thought we would still be OK for hot water at least, because we have solar hot water also.
So, when we lost hot water by the end of that first night, I was puzzled, and thinking too deeply about it all, I could not figure out way we had no hot water.
About a week after the power came back on, we had an unrelated electrical problem with the airconditioning unit, and even though an electrician myself, our home is a rental, so everything has to be done through the rental agency.
The electrician duly arrived, and he worked the problem out, and went off for the replacement part. I mentioned that I was an electrician, which became pretty obvious when he mentioned that I knew as much about airconditioning as he did, which is a throwback to my days teaching the Trade when air conditioning was one of the ten or so subjects subjects I had Trade responsibility for, as well as teaching the subject.
I quizzed him about the hot water problem, and he went outside to look at the unit, and saw the problem straight away.
I have one of those newer units which have become ‘trendy’ in the last few years, and ours is now almost ten years old, so it was new at the time it was fitted.
The older units had the whole ‘deal’ on the roof. The panel, and the water tank attached at the top of the panel, with mains supplied water fitted directly to the tank, and the water was just fed into the home under gravity, always hot.
The new, umm, ‘trendy’ ones just have the panel on the roof, and the water tank in its normal place at the side of the home.
So, now the electrician knew I was also an electrician, rather than tell me the problem, he asked me what I might perceive the problem to be.
And then the penny dropped.
The hot water is fed back into the tank under gravity from the panel on the roof where it is heated, but to get the water up to the panel for heating, it requires, wait for it, an electric pump, which runs off the mains power.
So, no mains power during the blackout, no water pumped to the panel for heating, and no hot water.
I saw the almost stupidity of the process, and asked him what the savings might be for this umm, ‘trendy’ system as opposed to normal mains power heated hot water.
He said around a quarter to a third cheaper than just the mains hot water part of the power bill, barely much at all.
On top of that, they actually cost a lot more as well.
Ah, well, another trap to keep away from in future.
The lesson I learned is to always start out with the simple things. You get so used to looking deeply with a trade related thing that you sometimes completely overlook the simplest things.
Sounds like mine is like yours. Tank on the roof. When the big storm hit in 2012 we lost 3 power poles and the lines to the dam were on the ground. We were without power for a week. Don’t remember no hot water but the electrician got power to the shed and I paid for a pole and temporary line to the house. Probably about 2 days/nights with no power in the house. I was more worried about getting power back to the irrigation pumps to irrigate the plants (I have a nursery). While everyone was ‘praying’ for the rain to stop, I was ‘praying’ for it to keep raining. But I will remember not to expect hot water next time power goes down. Thanks for the info.
Tank on the roof is thermosyphon. It Uses the heat as a pump.
Check the insulation. It rots pretty quickly and there’s very little installed on older systems so the hot water gets chilled via the copper pipe before it enters the house.
TonyfromOz’s problem would be resolved by using a small PV panel (about 40W nominal is plenty) to run a DC circulation pump when the sun shines. Seems obvious, doesn’t it?
TonyfromOzâs problem would be resolved by using a small PV panel (about 40W nominal is plenty) to run a DC circulation pump when the sun shines. Seems obvious, doesnât it?
In a rental home!
Fat chance I’ll get that done, ever.
By the way, I get at least 2 calls a week from spruikers wanting to sell rooftop solar to me. As soon as I mention that I am renting, they can’t get off the phone quick enough.
I once asked one of them to explain Islanding to me. Not a clue from the other end of the line. I mentioned that with grid connected solar, when there is a power cut, then even rooftop solar owners lose power for the duration of the cut. Still no idea at the other end of the phone. I said rental and he went click.
I’d read somehwere when houses in Holland I think it is catch fire, the firies wont put it out becasue they cant isolate the solar cells on the roof…..so water jet + 240V = cooked firies.
Apparently the problem exists at night too – the fire truck spot lights are enough to make the cells work….
We have an ionisphere to protect us from microwaves, be we bright bunch then stick microwave transmitters next to our ears….makes me wonder sometimes….
Looking back at the Billions of dollars wasted on ‘bird chomping ecocrucifixes’, I wonder where we’d be if the money had been spent on electrical storage instead.
The most frustrating thing about the waste is that battery storage technology would make wind and solar more viable for isolated places.
I agree. Wow, a whole hour of backup. Here our average outage has about 2 to 3 hours, so I guess we’d need at least 3. Plus, there are 60,000 people needing backup.
13% of Australia’s grid was powered by renewables in 2014. But beyond that, how much do you we about renewable energy?
We explore the different types of renewable energy – from hydro-electric (45% of Australia’s renewable output) to geothermal (0.002% of Australia’s renewable output). How much has renewable technology improved in the last decade – and has that changed the feasibility of a renewable Australia?
How much has renewable technology improved in the last decade?
No improvement except solar PV panels are cheaper, thanks to chinese dumping.
Whether they are really cheaper depends on their working life.
The feasibility of 100% renewables in Australia was zero.
The feasibility of 100% renewables in Australia is zero.
Graeme, when something is dumped, (in economic terms,) the dumper makes a loss on the product. The consumer gets a product at a lower than cost price. Therefore, the average Chinese is subsidising our solar lunacy.
It’s not a point I’ve seen made before.
You mention Bayswater. Four 660mw generators, four cooling towers. The order for six x 660mw generators was placed with Toshiba in February 1980, four for Bayswater and two for Mt Piper. NSW already had six such under construction. These were surplus to requirements, “on spec”, and had a bearing on NSW’s power system into recent times. I had to wonder at the time what might have passed under the table.
Two x 500mw generators were under construction at Wallarawang, with a single cooling tower identical to those at Mt Piper for cooling. However, when brought into use, that cooling tower yielded only two thirds of its design capacity. They had to rush out and build the low profile coolers to the NW of the station to make up the difference. Wallarawang, which as a result would have been producing more expensive power, has now closed.
The contracts had already been let for construction of the cooling towers at Bayswater. So Bayswater, designed to have 50% surplus cooling capacity, has none. Mt Piper, built later, has bigger towers.
Also, Liddel, four x 500mw generators, was built in the 1960s, was designed for sea water cooling, because it was recognised that at some times drought might leave insufficient water in the river for the power station. When that happened they would build a pipeline to the sea to bring in their 34 cusecs.
However, when 40 years later that did happen, the Carr government didn’t build any pipeline. They took the water from the farmers.
Hybrid? Meaning, I suppose, that they intend to farm both the wind and the sun at the same location? Too bad it’s possible to have both stagnant wind and heavy overcast at the same time. Oops! đ
Stay calm Tony. Talk is cheap. Accomplishment is a little more difficult. I suspect they will fail.
Anyway, did anyone notice the reporting on the protests over the weekend? Who were the people with balaclavas, masks etc attending the rallies that appeared to be targeted by police for violence? Why were these people not prepared to show their faces?
A couple of people from work were going to the Melbourne rally so I’ll find out tomorrow, the ones arrested were leftoid’s probably from the Socialist Alliance (S.A. is quite ironic) who seem to be the regular rent a mob in this state at least.
Calling themselves anti-racism is an obvious strawman to discredit Reclaim Australia, I wonder if the luvvies supporting the “religion of peace” will mind being sexually repressed or thrown off buildings when the Caliphate has power to do so?
Might make putting up with “rednecks” voicing an opinion seem quite trivial.
John Safran made some tweets relating to all races representing Reclaim Australia, honestly I think I’d be the clichĂŠ ‘white trash redneck’ looking one at such an event, a handsome one though LOL!
Update: Talking to the people that went to the Reclaim Australia Rally Melbourne they went early and got in no problems, they copped a few choice words from lefties on the sidelines but said it was a good atmosphere and the speeches were good especially Daniel Nalliah from RUP.
The trouble was outside the rally where people trying to get in were targeted by the left scum, when my friends departed they got protection from the United Patriots Front who in turn were working in with Police to maintain order, they were initially a bit dubious about them but found them to be normal people just trying to have a say like them.
No, because everyone knows that only white Australian males are capable of racism.
Anyone else has been misrepresented, and/or forced into expressing opinions they don’t believe, or have been brainwashed by the all powerful right-wing Murdoch media. Otherwise, they are just expressing their unique cultural identity, which we should all celebrate and accept without question.
(If this isn’t recognised as the sarcasm/attempt at humour it was meant to be, I will deport myself immediately.)
Oh well, we had Ian Plimer here to promote his book.the SturmAbteilung wsathere.Was tempted to elbow a nice chap with a ChĂŠ shirt who was getting a bit aggro.
if CAGW was banned from ABC, what programming would be left?
coming down the pike with Joel:
AUDIO/TRANSCRIPT: 17 July: ABC Blueprint for Living: Jeremy Story Carter: Addressing threats to world food supply
Award-winning environmental journalist Joel K Bourne: Climate change is coming down the pike and it’s making water less available. Australia has endured an epic drought over the last four or five years, so your farmers know what I’m talking about…
We are starting to see very serious water limitations coming down the pike, not just in the developing world but also in the developed world itself…
We are in the midst of the sixth great spasm of extinction that the planet has ever seen. Wildlife is gradually going away as the human population has risen. But at the same time, climate change is coming down the pike and just hammering our production…
Russia, one of the largest exports of wheat, lost a third of its crop in 2010 thanks to the hottest summer since 1500.
The consensus is we need to keep our global average temperature increase to about two degrees Celsius to stave off the global alter in climate change, but our emissions are currently on track to hit between 3.6 to 5.3 degrees increase by the century’s end.
A big study by the Royal Society in London a few years ago said if that happens, if we hit a four-degree increase in global average temperatures, then half of our farmland could become unsuitable for agriculture by 2100…
But honestly, climate change is this sword of Damocles that is hanging over our heads.
If we don’t get on a low carbon economy and low carbon diet, then our food problem is going to be much, much worse…
So reducing our carbon footprints, eating lower on the food chain certainly helps in that regard, but also absolutely encouraging our governments to get to that post-carbon economy as quickly as we possibly can…
***Overall, I am optimistic… http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/blueprintforliving/the-five-challenges-and-solutions-for-feeding-the-world/6628454
***Joel has absorbed the meme – don’t be all doom & gloom.
AUDIO/TRANSCRIPT: 19 July: ABC Background Briefing: A burning question
Burning native timber for renewable energy could prop up an ailing native forest industry, but the forests could earn millions in carbon credits if they’re not logged. Both options are hotly disputed and the argument opens a new front in the long running and politically-charged ‘forest wars’. Gregg Borschmann investigates… http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/a-burning-question/6616386
ABC inserts CAGW into the Books & Arts program: the Antarctic as a cultural state, a special kind of “momentary utopian international state”. want to bring our “Ship of Fools” to Antarctica. if we care about climate change, we need cultural mediators. sending 100 artists on the “Ship of Fools”:
AUDIO 12 mins: 15 July: ABC Books & Arts: The Antarctic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
The Antarctic Pavilion. And it is back for this year’s Biennale of contemporary art.
Many countries send artists for residencies in Antarctica, Australia included, but the curator of this year’s pavilion wants art to travel to Antarctica to feed the minds and souls of scientists…
Guest: Nadim Samman, Curator, the Antarctica Pavilion
Interviewer: Vincent O’Donnell http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/the-antarctic-pavillion-at-the-venice-biennale/6620780
Guest, Nadim Samman, in his own words below, shows just how appropriate a guest he is for “their ABC”:
Nadim Julien Samman, Curator: Other Antarctica Antarctic Pavilion, Oceanic Fund Projects, Paris, AVC Charity Foundation, 2014
The repressed cultural dimension of Antarctica is no mere concern for gourmands of exotica…
The lack of an architectural/analytic enterprise is, at least in part, a symptom of geo-political conditions that limit and even contradict the transnational project of Antarctic occupation as pure science…
In concrete terms, many state actors are only paying lip service to the singular importance of the Antarctic Treaty â and we must worry that it may be amended for the worse if enough members deem it expedient.
All of this points towards the abrogation of Antarcticaâs utopian potential. In order to rehabilitate it we must entertain visions of living there that go beyond the mission…
At present, the hegemonic image of human activity there is squeaky clean â with residents commonly portrayed as morally unimpeachable ciphers solely engaged in the pursuit of eco-scientific inquiry. They go there to penetrate its crust and scale its peaks without guilt or egoism â for knowledge. Their tests are impersonal and hygienic. They leave nothing behind and take only ice-cores and photos back home â clinical twenty-first century negations of trophy hunting… http://nadimsamman.com/other-antarctica
Every time ABC TV talks about climate change you get that image of dark clouds coming from a power station’s cooling towers silhouetted against a setting sun. Water vapour is whitish and CO2 colourless aren’t they?
March 2009, Prince Charles:
The Prince of Wales is to issue a stark warning that nations have “less than 100 months to act” (8 years) to save the planet from irreversible damage due to climate change.
July 18, 2015 Prince Charles:
His Royal Highness warns that we have just 35 years to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.
You seem woefully underinformed. HRH has been relentlessly zeroing-in on the final date for action.
Charles Narrows in on Deadline for Climate Action
⌠His Royal Highness today stated we have just 35 years to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.
⌠In May 2008 he urged action within 18 months to avoid a climate change disaster. Then again, in mid 2009, he reminded us that we had only 96 months to avert catastrophic climate change.
It may be too late to wait for the next warning in ca. 23 years; renewing the call for decisive action within the next 175 years to avert a real climate catastrophe.
Ahhh, bless the people’s wing-nut has spoken.
Just you wait for when he’s enthroned as Lord High Emperor of the UN and it’s ‘regions and dominions beyond… ‘
one i’ve saved for ‘Unthreaded’. note the different headline for the print version. entire text is quite sensible, but note the ***conclusion/final word:
13 July: NYT: SABRINA TAVERNISE: Unraveling the Relationship Between Climate Change and Health
(A version of this article appears in print on July 14, 2015, on page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: Global Warming, Local Health Risks.)
Temperatures may be rising, but overall deaths from heat are not, in part because the march of progress has helped people adapt â air conditioning is more ubiquitous, for example, and the treatment of heart disease, a major risk for heat-related mortality, has improved…
A recent review of heat mortality in the United States found that the rate of heat-related deaths declined by more than half from 1987 to 2005…
A study in The Lancet in May analyzed 74 million deaths from 1985 to 2012 in more than 10 countries, including the United States, and found that about 8 percent of the deaths had been caused by abnormal temperatures. Of those, the rate of death from cold â more than 7 percent â far outnumbered that
from heat, about 0.42 percent…
The dangers of heat are greater in New Delhi than in New York, not only because it is hotter in the Indian city, but because fewer people have electricity, sturdy houses and modern medical care. That makes drawing broad conclusions tricky.
***But it does not mean the risks are not there. As Dr.
Kinney noted, âif we wait for the health evidence to be ironclad, it may well be too late.â http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/health/unraveling-the-relationship-between-climate-change-and-health.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimesscience&_r=0
Working through these will take some time. Still, there is no way to claim you’re skeptical about CAGW unless you do this. This is where the action is.
I’m not sure what the outcome of this foray will be, but at this stage it’s hard to see how they could really conflict with the evidence already found by other research.
It’s also interesting SkS will concede 40% of 1900-1950 warming was due to solar activity shielding cosmic rays, but they don’t attribute much of post-1950 change to solar activity. They show a graph of CRF versus temperature to support this. At first glance this seems like a flawed test, as the CRF is like the derivative of temperature, the temperature is altered by the integral of the CRF, so even if CRF remains almost unchanged over 40 years their own graph shows it to be above the levels that were normal before 1940. That would imply warming, which co-incidentally (?) is what happened.
All of the other fundamental SkS memes have to be analysed like this. There is much yet to do.
If anyone goes to some effort to study these arguments and finds them valid or invalid, please tell us all.
Those evil conservative billionaires are all OK, as long as they are investing in a 1000 turbine wind farm..
“…All told, Anschutzâs wind farm would be able to produce more than 3,000 megawatts of power, four times the electricity produced by the Hoover Dam and enough to power every home in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It could also cut carbon emissions by as much as 13 million tons a year…”
Yeah, I’m sure he’s doing this just ‘for the environment’
Hi folks just wanted to pop in today to mention the plight of one of my favourite bloggers . Visiting climate sceptical blogs like Jo’s over the years has taught me how to be sceptical about several other issues such as big pharma and big religious institutions,one of my favourite sceptical religious researchers is D M MURDOCK a lady that studies mythology , astrotheology and comparative religion in the Abrahamic religions, especially the new testament. I’ve often noticed how similar Murdocks work is to that of our hostess here Jo Nova , two feisty intelligent ladies dedicated to their sceptical struggle against big powerfull organisations, here is D M MURDOCK in action defending herself against her critics from big religion , notice that many of the words and phrases that she uses are the same as those used by Jo and others sceptical of big green,and i like to think that Jo and D M are soul sisters, a kindrid spirit . https://youtu.be/rsaRQDxmLqY
D M MURDOCK like JO runs her own bloggs [since 1995] and receives no funding having to rely on donations and sales of her books.The reason i’m posting about her is that i found out recently that she has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer and so now is in the fight of her life for her life and is currently trying to raise money for her medicine and treatment by selling some of her books at bargain prices, so those that are interested in her field please find a few moments to visit her blogs and have a look at her work and maybe purchase some of her books and help out in my view one of the great minds of our time. http://www.truthbeknown.com/ and http://freethoughtnation.com/ the relevant donate info is on freethoughtnation thanks and cheers everyone
Perhaps Ban Ki Moon should get out more and discover all glaciers calve. Maybe a trip down memory lane to the pre-industrial days where the glaciers STILL calved. Wow, who would have thought?
Under the article “France says climate deal must avoid US Congress vote”. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius warned on Monday.
Fabius, who will host a high-stakes UN climate summit in Paris later this year, made the remarks at preparatory talks in the German city of Bonn. âWe know the politics in the US. Whether we like it or not, if it comes to the Congress, they will refuse,â
So they want to frustrate the Congress in the world’s oldest democracy by working closely with the Obama administration. Nice. Who said it was about science? High stakes for whom?
I am constantly amazed at the wisdom of the framers of the US Constitution. Nobody has done more to circumvent and tear down the US Constitution than our current president, though. He will try to re-define any deal as an Executive Agreement rather than as a Treaty.
But if the US Congress ultimately shoots down any deal and you Aussies stand with the world’s skeptics come Paris, it may become a win for freedom fighters everywhere. Brothers in arms I hope will be.
It is extraordinary that the first country to adopt the philosophy of the French revolution of liberte, egalite and fraternite was the fledgling United States, assisted to the point of bankruptcy and bloody revolution by the French. The French then had two hundred years of disasters and the US and France have been in the divorce court ever since. Perversely only a French Foreign minister would seek to subvert the US democracy by conspiring with the President’s men, let alone say so publicly.
According to my homogenised data, you’re already at 402K. The comments counter is settled.
I would tell you how I adjusted corrected the data, but, well, it’s a secret. To the untrained eye, it may have just looked like a a few beers, a list of random numbers and a dart board, but I can assure you that only the most advanced and relevant statistical methods were used. Cook and Lewandowsky helped me out with the difficult bits.
(I’m just awaiting peer review, so don’t treat it as official just yet).
Now that solar power is cheap (well it is not but some people claim so).
It means we have finally cheap energy to desalinate Atlantic water and pump it to Sahara, where it can be used to grow food. And of course, greening Sahara will be cooler and mitigate global warming.
Lets wish our solar experts to Mauritania. There they can do all the good they try to do in north, where the weak Sun has a low incidence angle.
But he doesn’t seem to know the rules. He has a headline that says, “… But the Climate Deniers won’t win”. Thus giving credence to those he sees as his foe.
Propaganda 101: Never acknowledge that a real enemy exists.
LESS POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Nicole Hasham
The Age Sunday July 19,2015 p 17
“When a power cut plunged his street into darkness a week ago, the solar panels on Mal Owen’s roof kept his television running”
I do not think so!
If Nicole Hasham read the comments in the Blog regularly she would not make such an unbelievable statement.
I wrote to Nicole Hasham and asked her if she was sure that the statement was correct.
To her credit she replied. She said that Mr Owen had made the claim, but that she would check it out.
There is absolutely NO (warming) sensitivity to carbon dioxide or water vapor. Thereâs enough water vapor for us to see by measurement that more moist regions have lower mean daily maximums and minimums, as my study with data from 15 inland tropical regions on three continents showed to be the case.
All planets and moons have inner regions (lower troposphere, mantle, core etc) which are maintained at higher temperatures than the effective radiating temperature. This requires an input of thermal energy to those lower regions, but that energy does not mostly come from direct solar radiation, let alone back radiation. It comes from the non-radiative mechanism about which you can read here and that is confirmed by a correct application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is all about entropy maximization and nothing else.
You cannot prove me wrong on this. Your discussion of so-called âradiative forcingâ is about a totally imaginary process which simply does not happen because all that back radiation can do is slow the rate of radiative cooling, not the rate of non-radiative cooling. But the Sunâs direct radiation cannot explain the existing surface temperatures on Earth or Venus, just for starters. So the rate of cooling is irrelevant. You think in the wrong paradigm altogether because you have been gullible enough to believe James Hansen and his cronies who simply do not understand entropy and the related thermodynamics.
“Much of the independence that was once cherished within the scientific community, in other words, has gone by the wayside as these major publishers have taken control and now dictate what types of content get published. The result is a publishing oligopoly in which scientists are muzzled by and overarching trend toward politically correct, and industry-favoring, “science.”.
You have to wonder if new Cloud based publishing is not a surer, faster way to reach an audience both in your field and outside it, if that is your real intention. What point in future the libraries, reference libraries, even book printing and binding become obsolete? These things will take time to die, but if the objective is to inform the world of your discovery, there are so many other ways. If you are looking for formal recognition from your peers, then you are bound by an old tradition which will die. Look at the new library of Alexandria. Magnificent building but now a computer centre. The whole romance, the whole point of its reconstruction was lost during its construction.
If anything, patenting is the new publishing. Not only does it require full disclosure, peer review, examination and a real cost in every country, it is the chosen path for the giant innovators including IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple and so many more. Patenting the human genome is not only a way to get recognition, it is a way to justify the immense cost. If an idea is good, it has value. Value means income. Incomes need to be protected and the only way to do this is to patent, not just publish. Albert Einstein was a patent clerk. That was no coincidence. He understood the power of publishing and publicity and how to challenge the establishment with dramatic demonstrations. Naturally many of the greatest ideas are not published at all, to protect them.
If you are looking for formal recognition from your peers, then you are bound by an old tradition which will die
But there is an even older tradition of placing papers in escrow, and then sending copies to colleagues in the field, to obtain their critique and feedback.
Having a “formal publication process” is a comparatively modern idea that benefits the publishers more than the authors.
In some fields, such as geopolitics, and economics, the world moves faster than a formal publishing system can keep up.
My point exactly. Passing an article or report or paper among your peers is just sensible. The concern through time though is someone stealing your work or claiming the invention. That is why patents are becoming the place to publish, even essential for many, especially in areas where there is commercial value in the idea. The big companies file thousands of patents are year, just in the US.
Charles Darwin only published when it looked like someone else was onto the same idea and wrote to him. Darwin was reasonably afraid of the repercussions of publication of a theory which challenged accepted beliefs, especially which challenged the role of God in evolution and the teachings of the Old Testament.
Basically I agree that formal publication is becoming obsolete in the days of blogs and web sites and google search, just as newspapers and the ABC are becoming obsolete, just parroting information which was freely available hours or days before. Possibly listing publications is simply part of the academic qualification process. One great idea is worth a hundred boring publications.
Tdef. What you describe about passing among colleagues is exactly what is done. Also there is a backlash in science against the money making publishers. I also am unsure about your use of the term “corruption”. Who is being corrupt? If that is widely known authorities would crack down. Perhaps you mean opportunistic or unethical?
switched briefly to 4BC from the cricket last nite just after 1am. a caller driving around melbourne called in to say it was 2 degrees in kew, brunswick & one other location in melbourne. the radio presenter checked the BoM figures for melbourne and said, the Bureau says it is 3.8 degrees – i don’t know where they got that from – probably at the airport (paraphrasing).
***funny how UHI gets acknowledged these days!
20 July: The Age: Robyn Grace: Melbourne weather: City on track for coldest July in 20 years
The temperature plummeted to 1.9 degrees at 4.42am, marking only the third time in 20 years that there’s been two consecutive mornings under 2 degrees…
July has so far recorded an average maximum of only 12.6 degrees – a full degree under the 30-year average of 13.7.
Melbourne’s average July maximum hasn’t been less than 13 degrees since 1995.
The last time we recorded two consecutive mornings under 2 degrees was last August but before that, it was in August 1997.
Mr Williams said that was actually a pretty common occurrence in the 1930s (in 1937 there were eight consecutive days under 2 degrees).
“Compared to the historic record it pales into insignificance. ***Big cities with lots of cars and heating don’t get as cold,” he said…
Back to the present day, Mr Williams said Monday was an improvement on Sunday’s big chill, but it was still cold.
“It’s generally cold everywhere. There’s really no hiding from it,” he said…
The next significant cold snap is likely to arrive late on Saturday… http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/melbourne-weather-city-on-track-for-coldest-july-in-20-years-20150719-gifxwt.html
I’m a bit disappointed with the warmists.
I’m yet to see the headlines: “Freezing spell is in line with climate change models.”
“Expect colder and more frequent Antarctic vortexes due to cold trapping CO2.”
“Within eight years our children won’t know what a summer is.”
as unlikely as it may sound, i’ve never heard talkback shows from so-called shock jocks, (perpetual outrage doesn’t appeal to me). however, by chance, i’ve heard Alan Jones a couple of times since his program has gone out on 4BC.
as everyone here knows, i am not at all anti-coal, but i agree with Jones’s stance against coal seam gas on Qld’s Darling Downs (not because of Jones, but because i have listened to some farmers from the region).
now to Shenhua and the Liverpool Plains. i have not heard anyone, as yet, give a convincing defense of this coal mine, and would welcome TonyfromOz (& anyone else) weighing in on this issue. i tend to think the location is wrong for such a venture and does damage to those of us who support coal:
15 July: SMH: Georgina Mitchell: Alan Jones takes aim at Tony Abbott in 30-minute spray about Shenhua mine
2GB is owned by Fairfax Media, the publisher of this website.
It can’t be fun to be on the receiving end of a blast from Alan Jones.
But that’s the position Prime Minister Tony Abbott found himself in on Wednesday, when the broadcaster told his listeners on radio station 2GB that the Abbott government’s approval of the Shenhua Watermark coal mine was “disgraceful”, “beyond belief”, and tantamount to selling their soul to mining…
“The NSW government have the final say on all of this,” he said on The Alan Jones Breakfast Show.
“Quite frankly, Tony Abbott and [NSW Premier] Michael Baird are going to have to understand that governments rise and fall, sometimes, on a single issue. And the single issue, about selling this country out to foreign interests, no matter whose interests they are, is now emerging as a massive issue in this country.”… http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/alan-jones-takes-aim-at-tony-abbott-in-30minute-spray-about-shenhua-mine-20150715-gicten.html
i understand Jones will be appearing on ABC’s Q&A tonight for more of the above.
this morning, i did hear a portion of Jones’s program, with Tim Buckley, anti-coal campaigner, & director of Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, which advocates solar and wind.
June 2014: AFR: How former Citigroup analyst Tim Buckley became the new face of anti-coal activism
His aim is to convince superannuation funds, lenders and governments that funding infrastructure for the projects would be a bad long-term investment and they should focus on energy sources with more promising futures, such as solar and wind…
Buckley is one of a new breed of Âclimate change activists. Former US Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs chief executive Hank Paulson , former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the retired founder of Farallon Capital, Tom Steyer , have formed Risky Business, which will this week release a report designed to Âinfluence business decisions about the risk of not taking the prospect of unmitigated climate change seriously…
He would like to convince the big four banks to stop lending to coalÂminers, but says that is unlikely under the current government…
Buckley says fund managers for a long time resisted the idea of cutting coal from their portfolios, saying they did not have a mandate to do so and needed to earn the maximum return.
âBut what I think Martijn Wilder from Baker & McKenzie has made very clear in his paper about fiduciary duties, you actually have a fiduciary duty to invest sensibly for the long term,” he says. âThat is your number one criteria. The number one criteria is not to maximise returns this week, this month, next month. It is actually to maximise the sustainable returns for the long term.”… http://www.afr.com/business/mining/coal/how-former-citigroup-analyst-tim-buckley-became-the-new-face-of-anticoal-activism-20140623-jgqcu
Buckley threw in every CAGW cliche about coal – China is running away from coal, the world doesn’t want coal, our Govt is backward in its support for coal – with Jones repeating every line as gospel truth. cleverly, Buckley didn’t bring up solar and wind, instead claiming agriculture and tourism are our future, not mining, & Jones didn’t bring up solar & wind either.
nonetheless, Jones is employed by Macquarie Radio, now majority owned by Fairfax, and i would like Fairfax to disclose how much they receive in advertising revenue from the solar & wind industries, tho i realise they are not obliged to do so.
as for Buckley, these are just some of his headlines in RenewEconomy:
Chinaâs declining coal dependence is evident in the data
Indiaâs plan to stop importing coal deals another blow to Australia
Wind energy surges in China, as demand for coal fades
Carbon repeal leaves Australia isolated and vulnerable
Massive Australia coal project dumped in face of China energy revolution
Oz coal at risk as major economies turn on fossil fuels
Stranded assets: Australiaâs biggest coal project already at risk
Merkel is a visionary, and we should be grateful
from LinkedIn: Tim Buckley
Director of Energy Finance Studies, Australasia
Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis
Tim is working in the low carbon finance space, looking at both the risks to potentially stranded fossil fuel assets and the opportunities and valuation of renewable energy, energy efficiency and other low carbon finance assets, both in Australia and from a global perspective.
2010-2013 Portfolio Manager Arkx Investment Management
Arkx Is a high conviction fund manager investing in global, listed clean energy companies…
1991 – 2007 Citigroup – Head of Equity Research
“He said other open-cut projects in the Hunter Valley looked like a “crater of the moon”, and an “industrial wasteland” will be left behind behind when the mine â a “desecration” â closes.”
Doesn’t Australia have any rules on reclamation? In the US, you can’t identify old coal mines, or any other mine, unless you know what to look for. They blend in perfectly with the landscape and are reclaimed to original contours. Is Australia that lax or is Alex exaggerating?
You’ve made several wrong assumptions in your comment
Yes indeed, Aus has stringent rehabilitation requirements, including very large cash deposits at the beginning of operations that are debited against rehab as it progresses
The “moonscape” comment slyly refers to current operations (ie. still in progress) without stating this. Areas that have already been completely re-habbed are indeed difficult to pick
The essential assumption you made that is wrong is that demagogue sprouters such as Jones tell the truth, or at least all of the facts. I do believe the USA suffers from this affliction too đ
now to Shenhua and the Liverpool Plains. i have not heard anyone, as yet, give a convincing defense of this coal mine
Just download the EIS (free) from the Shenhua website and read it, Pat. BTW, defense against what, exactly ? Read the EIS before you answer that
For those who will most assuredly claim that the EIS must be biassed and inaccurate because Shenhua paid for it, just realise that the law requires them to pay for it and they wisely chose highly reputable and independent environmental consultants
TonyOz is well adequate on power station analyses, but he struggles mightily with actual mining. I’m a mining geologist of over 40 years (including most countries). Geological ignorance such as yours I can excuse (it’s very widespread), but I consider pontificating and preaching on the back of it is beyond the pale – long experience has shown me, though, that such ignorance is irrelevant to emotive activism (it may even be necessary to it), so I’m probably wasting my time
Ian there are too many know alls in our country and most are the Not In My Backyard variety.
During the final term in government of Prime Minister Paul Keating of Union Labor I attended a budget breakfast function at which a senior mining company executive was the guest speaker, at that period in time we suffered from the recession we had to have, according to Keating, which was the worst for sixty years. And there were sacred site claims, Mabo land rights debates, etc. The mining industry was not doing well and the guest speaker spoke about the vital funds from foreign investment drying up as the problems of investing into Australia turned the investor’s attention to other nations.
In short, the guest speaker said that many Australians fail to understand how much the mining industry contributes to their way of life, to national prosperity. And that the full impact would not be felt for about a decade if the investment stopped or slowed to a trickle.
In my opinion too many Australians do not understand what you have pointed out, apart from a huge amount of compliance requirements a mining venture must meet, an Environmental Impact Statement is an important one. And the decision to permit mining is made at both the Commonwealth Government and State Government levels.
In conclusion, from what I read too many Australians today have much the same prejudice against the Chinese and Australians had a long time ago against the Japanese, but sanity prevailed.
I add to the above, consider the enormous loss of jobs and taxation revenue Australia has experienced over the past few decades and the increased number of businesses that have left Australia or have announced that they will be leaving in recent years. The artificially too high cost of electricity, the ridiculous carbon tax too added to an even more ridiculous (un) Fair Work Australia industrial relations legal system that handed power to the unions (the same unions now being exposed as home to many criminal activities as witnesses appear at the Trade Union Royal Commission, including former trade union executive Bill Shorten) and the mind boggling list of red and green tape regulations, and more.
Our standard of living cannot be sustained on reducing taxation revenue, by not attracting mining ventures and anything else that adds to GDP. And look at the gross debts (Commonwealth, States and Local Government and government owned private businesses such as NBNCo), I estimate that the total exceeds $800 billion. The Commonwealth Government borrowing mostly by Union Labor, taking it from zero debt in 2007 after the LNP had repaid the previous Union Labor debt of $96 billion plus interest from 1996 to 2006, to over $400 billion plus hidden off budget NBNCo borrowing and the interest on gross (amount borrowed not offset by assets, how ridiculous to kid us this way) is now over $1 billion a month, therefore at all levels the interest must be over $2 billion a month. And consider that the budget liability for welfare amounts to 34 per cent of total budget expenditure.
And Australians complain about important Free Trade Agreements, mining and CSG, etc?
it was the first time i’d heard Buckley & he was speaking in a strange, low-key voice. what i found bewildering was Jones repeating the nonsense about China and the world turning their backs on coal. he made no defense of coal whatsoever.
something else i find interesting, especially as my main concern is the CAGW plan to grab retirement/superfunds:
there is just one sponsor listed on 2GB/Alan Jones Breakfast Show webpage:
Challenger – Environment
Challenger aims to minimise our impact on the environment by raising awareness with our people, employing technologies that minimise our use of resources and occupying sustainable places of work…
Challenger has also joined forces with ***Climate Friendly, an organisation that specialises in assisting companies to offset carbon emissions, and continue to offset 100% of the carbon emissions generated by our Sydney office power usage, as well as taxis, paper and waste disposal.
Challenger: About Us
Corporate social responsibility
Challenger recognises the responsibilities we have as a company in relation to sustainability and the environment, our people and the community in which we operate.
We aim to minimise our impact on the environment by raising awareness with our people, employing technologies that minimise our use of resources and occupying sustainable places of work…
Challenger is a member of the FTSE4Good Index.
from FTSE4Good Index Series website:
The FTSE4Good Index Series is designed to measure the performance of companies demonstrating strong Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices. Transparent management and clearly-defined ESG criteria make FTSE4Good indices suitable tools to be used by a wide variety of market participants when creating or assessing responsible investment products…
The FTSE4Good Environmental Leaders Europe 40 Index is designed as a tool to aid market participants to identify the European companies that are leading the way in how they manage their environmental risks and impacts, whilst reducing their environmental footprint…
pdf: Challenger: CHALLENGER LIMITED ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
CHAIRMANâS ADDRESSES 26 NOVEMBER 2012
We continue to believe that the retirement incomes market is particularly attractive as we enter a 20 year growth phase due to Australiaâs baby boomer population, who at 65 started to retire in 2011.
The growing number of retirees moving from the accumulation phase to the drawdown or retirement phase within superannuation each year is increasing. In 2012, $53 billion moved from accumulation to retirement, up from $47 billion in 2011 and this is expected to grow strongly for the next decade…
Sustainability is an area Challenger has also embraced and we aim to minimise our impact on the
environment.
We have recently committed to further reduce our carbon footprint by offsetting 100% of our power usage from our head office in Sydney. Through a partnership with ***Climate Friendly, Challenger will invest in environmental projects to offset carbon produced from our energy consumption. This will lead to a reduction of approximately 1,100 tonnes of carbon annually… http://www.challenger.com.au/group/Chairman_Address_-_2012_AGM.pdf
Dark matter Huge dark matter halos around a group of small galaxies appears to have saved them from being ripped apart as they fell into one of the largest galaxy clusters in the universe, scientists say
What is it with the arrogance of scientists that they can pretend to know something about something they know nothing of.
Star systems that they have only just noticed, that suddenly they now know all about them.
The problem with science is that it can preach whatever it likes and no-one will censure them for it very much like psychiatry and law,once someone sets a precedent then anyone can.
Stick to the facts let religion deal with the mystic.
some info on Challenger’s “partners”, Climate Friendly:
Climate Friendly – About Us
Climate Friendly – helping you help the world
Do you need sustainability solutions that make financial sense? Climate Friendly has you covered…
The four key areas we focus on are:
Onsite energy and efficiency
We can help your business save on energy costs and reduce emissions at the same time. Our solutions include solar panel installations, energy efficient lighting installations, voltage optimisation and more.
Carbon management (carbon offsets/credits and related services)
Whether you are buying for a large corporation, or just yourself, we can meet your needs. Our carbon management solutions include offsets from a wide range of different projects. These include forest regeneration projects, cook stove projects, wind farm projects and more. Each project does more than just help the environment – they help people and communities around the globe.
Renewable energy certificates
Green energy is available to both individuals and businesses. Whether you need GoldPower, our premier international RECâs, or GreenPower, made in Australia, we can help you.
Australian carbon farming
If you own large tracts of land with native regrowth, you may eligible for a carbon farming project on your property. These kinds of projects can supply you with an additional income stream, even in times of drought.
Weâve been in this ***game for over ten years. In this time we have worked with big brand names like Hilton, The Body Shop and Tetra Pak. http://www.climatefriendly.com/AboutUs/AboutUs/
Climate Friendly – Board of Directors
Joel Fleming, Founding Chairman (Innovations & Partnerships)
Joel Fleming is an environmental scientist and Founding Chairman of Climate Friendly and previously a scientist with CSIRO…
Dr. Christoph Grobbel, Director
Christoph joined South Pole after 12.5 years with McKinsey & Company, Inc. where he worked as a Senior Expert for Emissions Trading and Electric Power & Natural Gas….
Freddy Sharpe, Director
Before running Climate Friendly, Freddy was Chief Operating Officer of Australia’s largest residential energy efficiency company…Freddy speaks regularly on climate change and related topics and was included in the inaugural ABC Carbon 50, a list of the 50 most influential people in Australia who are committed to the environment, the planet and the future of life on earth…
some of the Team:
from Climate Friendly – The Team
Darren Willman, Business Development Manager
He applied this experience in founding and leading G-1 Billion, a multilingual news website that covered the United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen (Denmark), COP-15…
Justin Pilgrim, Business Development Manager- Melbourne
Justin recently completed a Bachelor of Environment (Social Science) at RMIT University…
Josh Harris Manager â Australian Projects
He has advised large corporates on carbon management including Virgin Atlantic, BSkyB, BP, JP Morgan and Tesco and headed up the Climate Groupâs carbon market team in China. In his most recent role before joining Climate Friendly, Josh was an advisor to the Western Australian Environment Minister…
Alexander Quarles van Ufford – Renewable Energy Manager Europe
Prior to joining Climate Friendly Alexander worked for WWFâs global Climate Business Engagement team, where he established and managed partnerships with high-profile, sector leading multinational companies… In his WWF capacity Alexander contributed to WWFâs global guidelines for renewable energy procurement and he was closely involved in the collaboration with Climate Friendly on the development of GoldPower, the only global renewable electricity certificate endorsed by WWF…
At the moment the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is in negative territory, which suggests Europe maybe in for some cool weather.
A new paper published on the NAO if you’re interested. What caught my attention, a volcanic eruption has the capacity to turn a negative NAO into its positive phase.
20 July: Crikey: Ben Sandilands: Ice makes a rare impact on Australian flights
While frost is relatively common over many Australian airports, delays caused by aircraft icing like those being reported from Melbourne Airport this morning are rare…
There has been at least one earlier occasion this century when jets at Melbourne airport had to be towed and repositioned on the tarmac to let the rapid rise in air temperatures after dawn remove the âfrost biteâ as such.
Similar precautions have been taken in living memory when isolated snow flakes or sleet grains have been observed at Tullamarine. Melbourneâs metropolitan weather reports and anecdotal accounts including televised events have recorded transient snow in the Tullamarine and Essendon areas in recent times, however the last significant fall of settled snow in the CBD and inner suburbs comes up in a quick search as happening in 1951…
COMMENT: By blueloo: âBut the rarity of the problem at the major Australian airports makes the installation of de-icing gantries or mobile units impossible to justify.â
QANTAS bought a mobile de-icing unit for Melbourne within the last 10 years or so )i believe there were delays in it being approved due to lack of airport fluid containment facilities for the runoff). The de-icing truck usually sits somewhere near gate 7 on the domestic terminal. It used to look quite new but apparently as it doesnât get much use it has been left to fade and waste away. Other news sites reported that the de-icing unit/truck was brokenâŚâŚâŚ
REPLY from Ben Sandilands: Thatâs sad news about the Melbourne de-ice truck. I noticed this morning that there are still drifts beside some roads three days after most of the snow fell and some of them show signs of being caused by the use of a grader to clear at least one lane.
What I meant about a major de-ice investment was the sort of industrial strength units used in much of the northern world.
These are designed to deal with tall vertical stabilisers on wide bodies like the A330 shown in the photo… http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2015/07/20/ice-makes-a-rare-impact-on-australian-flights/
18 July: UK Telegraph: Christopher Booker: C of E backs Pope in lunacy that could only hurt the poor
We are on the edge of a disaster â and the Churches seem intent on going over it
Like the Pope, the ruling powers of the C of E have fallen hook, line and sinker for the belief that the worldâs reliance on coal, gas and oil is somehow bringing unprecedented droughts, floods and disastrously rising sea levels (when the actual evidence shows no increase in any of these things). This, they all agree, is hurting no one more than the worldâs poor. Their only answer is that we must âdecarboniseâ the worldâs economy as fast as possible, and rely on that wonderful ârenewableâ energy from wind, sun and the tides.
Two reports last week gave further evidence of where, in the real world, all this fanciful nonsense is leading us. One was the National Gridâs warning that we are closing down our coal-fired power stations so fast that the âspare capacityâ needed to keep our lights on has plummeted from 16 per cent in 2012 to a mere 1.2 per cent. We are on the edge of a disaster from which not all those thousands of diesel generators for which we pay astronomic sums to provide emergency back-up can save us.
The second was an update from the Office for Budget Responsibility projecting that, within five years, the price we shall be paying in green subsidies and taxes to âdecarboniseâ our economy in favour of ârenewablesâ will have almost quadrupled to ÂŁ13.6âbillion a year, driving millions more households into âfuel povertyâ. And still wholly unanswered is how, once we lose the remaining fossil-fuel power stations that provide 70 per cent of our electricity, we can keep our lights on at all those times when the wind doesnât blow and the sun doesnât shine.
The real irony is that the treaty the Pope and the C of E want us to pray for is not going to happen, because China and India, the countries already responsible between them for more than a third of all the worldâs CO2 emissions (and rising fast), have no intention of signing it. The reason they give is that they see fossil fuels as the only way to lift more of their 2.5âbillion people out of precisely that poverty the Pope and his chums so piously deplore. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11748914/C-of-E-backs-Pope-in-lunacy-that-could-only-hurt-the-poor.html
‘The Climate Tribe is far more about common purpose now than it is about science. The science was simply the means to the end. The end is controlling society for âthe common goodâ. Itâs a feelgood motivation. Thatâs why the public buy into it, and thatâs why believers feel threatened whenever anyone tries to challenge it â the challenge is seen not as debating the science of climate change, but a direct attack on the Tribe and its deeper purpose.
‘To change the outcome, you cannot just âdebate the scienceâ. You have to deprogram members of the Tribe.
âYou take the blue pill,â Morpheus told Neo in The Matrix, âthe story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goesâŚâ
Greetings to all from a very pleasant morning in deepest Hampshire đ After the cold in Victoria and humid 40s in Dubai this is very relaxing.
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Not too hot not too cold, is Hampshire the Goldilocks zone of earth Annie? đ
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Yup, Yonnie!
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I used to work in Fleet…very nice area….
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Fleet is lovely…used to enjoy staying with friends there. That’s not where we are atm; we are further SW, near Petersfield. The countryside is absolutely beautiful around here.
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I used to grab an overland from Clapham Jucntion out from Londinium each day, made for a long day but I used to enjoy the countryside. As much as the newer trains are nicer, one good thing about the older slam doors is you wake up each station if you snooze off…. đ
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When we lived down in western Hampshire we relied on the ‘square wheels’ section of the track to wake us up after a tiring day in Londinium !
00
Wot! D’yer mean that yer ain’t got yer quota of windymills? Me an’ the lads will ‘ave ter see ter that. Jus’ you see if we don’t. … Bloody toffs.
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Nah! RW They’ve wrecked the beauty of Cumbria and the Solway Firth though and you can see the blighted bird mashers from the Yorkshire Dales looking eastwards and oodles of them after take off from MAN. Grrr đ
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Lovely countryside,Chawton the home village of Jane Austen is worth a visit for those with a literary bent.
40
We went to Winchester today; very much Jane Austen country. Couldn’t stay for Evensong at the Cathedral unfortunately where they were going to sing S S Wesley’s ‘Ascribe unto the Lord’. I have an old recording of the Winchester choir singing this, which a musical acquaintance once told me was the definitive version of it. That would have been the icing on the cake of a great day.
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joanne… David’ help is needed!
Start here:
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/atmospheric-convection-what-does-it-mean/comment-page-2/#comment-103991
for:
Die besten Gurkensalat Rezepte vs.
Die besten Kartoffelsalat Rezepte
or those that can not see vs. those that will not see!
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You get neither of them right if you don’t do both; simultaneously.
Doing one is “near enough” for some Engineering purposes but the margins of error are wide; for which Engineering can allow, but climate models cannot because they wander off “at random”, unbounded by reality. (Refer back to Christopher Essex’s recent video for the grisly details.)
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Bernd,
That tallbloke’s thread is between the engineers that cannot understand what it is that 97% of meteorologists spout, and the 97% of meteorologists that refuse to understand anything except what they spout.
BTW along with Die besten Gurkensalat und,
Die besten Kartoffelsalat Some Die besten Kalbfleisch, real Wiener Schnitzel, would be nice. đ
46
Now there you go… …the Wiener Schnitzel I can understand. đ
00
Umm, just read the headline first.
Mega hybrid solar projects ready to take on baseload fossil fuels (and this is not old, in fact from only 7 weeks ago)
Hmm, MEGA eh! There’s not one unit larger than 125MW.
I wonder what they call single units at the big nukes which are driving 1800MW Generators. I wonder what they call single units at USC coal fired power plants driving 1000/1100/1300MW generators. I wonder what they call 1970’s technology units of 660MW, like at Bayswater.
The article mentions that these are Hybrid plants, you know renewable power straight from the Sun.
Oh, hang on, hybrid! So they are utilising Natural Gas fired turbines in conjunction with Solar, you, know, CO2 emitting natural Gas, similar to the failing miserably Ivanpah plant out in the Mojave Desert.
But hey, don’t worry, because soon they’ll be running them off biodiesel. Don’t worry about the CO2 emissions from that though, because this is the good CO2, not that foul disgusting CO2 from coal fired plants, just the good clean CO2, totally different stuff altogether.
They say they will also be getting 24 hour power. Umm, maybe for 30 to 50 days a year at best, if they can get the technology to work at all without using natural gas to start them, get them to operating speed, and then run them until the solar component is hot enough to take over for a few hours a day, and with the solar component closed in Winter, and running off the Natural Gas. The best they can currently manage to run for 24 hours is 20MW, and even that is for barely 40 days or so.
Competing with large scale coal fired power plants supplying a REGULAR and CONSTANT ABSOLUTE physical requirement.
Uh Uh! Sorry. Not on you life.
Mega. Give me strength.
Please excuse my sarcasm, but when I see (insert word equivalent to bovine waste here) like this, I don’t know whether to laugh or hum a nice quiet song to get my boiling blood temperature back down.
Tony.
411
This might interest you Tony, Australia’s largest battery bound for Buninyong, stating that “The two-megawatt battery will provide about 3000 customers with an hour of back up power during an outage.” amazing this is needed when the Mt. Mercer Windfarm not 20kms away will generate 131MW enough to power the city of Ballarat.
Do I need to add /sarc.?
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Wow! Wow again! What mega news. (/sarc)
A 2MW battery, that will give 3000 consumers backup for, umm, one hour, if the grid goes down.
Cheap too, at around $500K to $2 Million. (from what I can find so quickly)
One hour. For when the grid fails.
Hmm! Now, why might the grid fail now?
Oh, and if anyone else has done the Maths, that’s an average of 666 Watts per consumer per hour, well, after all, there IS only one hour. Let’s hope all those fridge compressors don’t come on at around the same time eh!
One hour!
What!
Tony.
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I wonder what a 2MW invertor looks like.
90
Probably uses old valve triodes….
00
Difference between that battery and a diesel generator of equivalent load capacity is that the battery costs twice as much, lasts “an hour”; whereas the diesel generator will generate 2MW of electrical power indefinitely; as long as there’s diesel available. Specific fuel consumption is around 145 g/kWh â roughly 16 cents per kWh in (off-road) fuel costs.
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Tony, Just has an interesting conversation with a solarhart guy about my solar hot water system. Been having trouble getting hot water (only 2 in house so not a lot of demand). He said lots of people have been complaining and the reason is the cold spell (I’m in Brisbane). When I pointed out that it has been cold but the sun has been shining and that I never had such trouble in the past he said the sun hasn’t been as hot so can’t heat the water up. True or not I don’t know, but it definately proves how useless solar is. If you lived in a cold climate (such as Southern Australia, UK or Europe why the hell would you install solar. The only time you would get hot water is summer when a cold shower is tolerable.
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Brill,
I found out something in the Cyclone we had through here recently, when we lost power for five days, and it just showed me, that even as an electrician, with a strong background in that electrical trade, there are still things you either do not not think of, have forgotten, or think too deeply about, hence missing the simplest part of the whole lot.
Even though our power went out, I thought we would still be OK for hot water at least, because we have solar hot water also.
So, when we lost hot water by the end of that first night, I was puzzled, and thinking too deeply about it all, I could not figure out way we had no hot water.
About a week after the power came back on, we had an unrelated electrical problem with the airconditioning unit, and even though an electrician myself, our home is a rental, so everything has to be done through the rental agency.
The electrician duly arrived, and he worked the problem out, and went off for the replacement part. I mentioned that I was an electrician, which became pretty obvious when he mentioned that I knew as much about airconditioning as he did, which is a throwback to my days teaching the Trade when air conditioning was one of the ten or so subjects subjects I had Trade responsibility for, as well as teaching the subject.
I quizzed him about the hot water problem, and he went outside to look at the unit, and saw the problem straight away.
I have one of those newer units which have become ‘trendy’ in the last few years, and ours is now almost ten years old, so it was new at the time it was fitted.
The older units had the whole ‘deal’ on the roof. The panel, and the water tank attached at the top of the panel, with mains supplied water fitted directly to the tank, and the water was just fed into the home under gravity, always hot.
The new, umm, ‘trendy’ ones just have the panel on the roof, and the water tank in its normal place at the side of the home.
So, now the electrician knew I was also an electrician, rather than tell me the problem, he asked me what I might perceive the problem to be.
And then the penny dropped.
The hot water is fed back into the tank under gravity from the panel on the roof where it is heated, but to get the water up to the panel for heating, it requires, wait for it, an electric pump, which runs off the mains power.
So, no mains power during the blackout, no water pumped to the panel for heating, and no hot water.
I saw the almost stupidity of the process, and asked him what the savings might be for this umm, ‘trendy’ system as opposed to normal mains power heated hot water.
He said around a quarter to a third cheaper than just the mains hot water part of the power bill, barely much at all.
On top of that, they actually cost a lot more as well.
Ah, well, another trap to keep away from in future.
The lesson I learned is to always start out with the simple things. You get so used to looking deeply with a trade related thing that you sometimes completely overlook the simplest things.
Tony.
50
Sounds like mine is like yours. Tank on the roof. When the big storm hit in 2012 we lost 3 power poles and the lines to the dam were on the ground. We were without power for a week. Don’t remember no hot water but the electrician got power to the shed and I paid for a pole and temporary line to the house. Probably about 2 days/nights with no power in the house. I was more worried about getting power back to the irrigation pumps to irrigate the plants (I have a nursery). While everyone was ‘praying’ for the rain to stop, I was ‘praying’ for it to keep raining. But I will remember not to expect hot water next time power goes down. Thanks for the info.
20
Tank on the roof is thermosyphon. It Uses the heat as a pump.
Check the insulation. It rots pretty quickly and there’s very little installed on older systems so the hot water gets chilled via the copper pipe before it enters the house.
TonyfromOz’s problem would be resolved by using a small PV panel (about 40W nominal is plenty) to run a DC circulation pump when the sun shines. Seems obvious, doesn’t it?
00
In a rental home!
Fat chance I’ll get that done, ever.
By the way, I get at least 2 calls a week from spruikers wanting to sell rooftop solar to me. As soon as I mention that I am renting, they can’t get off the phone quick enough.
I once asked one of them to explain Islanding to me. Not a clue from the other end of the line. I mentioned that with grid connected solar, when there is a power cut, then even rooftop solar owners lose power for the duration of the cut. Still no idea at the other end of the phone. I said rental and he went click.
Tony.
10
I’d read somehwere when houses in Holland I think it is catch fire, the firies wont put it out becasue they cant isolate the solar cells on the roof…..so water jet + 240V = cooked firies.
Apparently the problem exists at night too – the fire truck spot lights are enough to make the cells work….
We have an ionisphere to protect us from microwaves, be we bright bunch then stick microwave transmitters next to our ears….makes me wonder sometimes….
10
Well you could get the place condemned as being unsuitable for human habitation. đ
00
Looking back at the Billions of dollars wasted on ‘bird chomping ecocrucifixes’, I wonder where we’d be if the money had been spent on electrical storage instead.
The most frustrating thing about the waste is that battery storage technology would make wind and solar more viable for isolated places.
00
How do we change our gravatars for this site?
00
I agree. Wow, a whole hour of backup. Here our average outage has about 2 to 3 hours, so I guess we’d need at least 3. Plus, there are 60,000 people needing backup.
20
If you don’t mind spoiling what’s left of the week end, Tony, have a listen to this puff piece about you beaut renewables from our ABC overnight radio.
This a description from the page linked.
50
How much has renewable technology improved in the last decade?
No improvement except solar PV panels are cheaper, thanks to chinese dumping.
Whether they are really cheaper depends on their working life.
The feasibility of 100% renewables in Australia was zero.
The feasibility of 100% renewables in Australia is zero.
So, no change.
161
Graeme, when something is dumped, (in economic terms,) the dumper makes a loss on the product. The consumer gets a product at a lower than cost price. Therefore, the average Chinese is subsidising our solar lunacy.
It’s not a point I’ve seen made before.
00
Previous stuffups.
You mention Bayswater. Four 660mw generators, four cooling towers. The order for six x 660mw generators was placed with Toshiba in February 1980, four for Bayswater and two for Mt Piper. NSW already had six such under construction. These were surplus to requirements, “on spec”, and had a bearing on NSW’s power system into recent times. I had to wonder at the time what might have passed under the table.
Two x 500mw generators were under construction at Wallarawang, with a single cooling tower identical to those at Mt Piper for cooling. However, when brought into use, that cooling tower yielded only two thirds of its design capacity. They had to rush out and build the low profile coolers to the NW of the station to make up the difference. Wallarawang, which as a result would have been producing more expensive power, has now closed.
The contracts had already been let for construction of the cooling towers at Bayswater. So Bayswater, designed to have 50% surplus cooling capacity, has none. Mt Piper, built later, has bigger towers.
Also, Liddel, four x 500mw generators, was built in the 1960s, was designed for sea water cooling, because it was recognised that at some times drought might leave insufficient water in the river for the power station. When that happened they would build a pipeline to the sea to bring in their 34 cusecs.
However, when 40 years later that did happen, the Carr government didn’t build any pipeline. They took the water from the farmers.
30
Big error there. The tower at Wallarawang, not Mt Piper, is the same as those at Bayswater. Too many distractions.
10
Hybrid? Meaning, I suppose, that they intend to farm both the wind and the sun at the same location? Too bad it’s possible to have both stagnant wind and heavy overcast at the same time. Oops! đ
Stay calm Tony. Talk is cheap. Accomplishment is a little more difficult. I suspect they will fail.
10
You know what hybrid means: In plain language it’s “mongrel”. đ
10
TonyfromOz,
Tony. Any power plant that can produce 1Mega-watt or more of electricity is a Mega-Plant!
Please keep up! đ
Abe
10
The weekend is nearly over!
Anyway, did anyone notice the reporting on the protests over the weekend? Who were the people with balaclavas, masks etc attending the rallies that appeared to be targeted by police for violence? Why were these people not prepared to show their faces?
130
A couple of people from work were going to the Melbourne rally so I’ll find out tomorrow, the ones arrested were leftoid’s probably from the Socialist Alliance (S.A. is quite ironic) who seem to be the regular rent a mob in this state at least.
Calling themselves anti-racism is an obvious strawman to discredit Reclaim Australia, I wonder if the luvvies supporting the “religion of peace” will mind being sexually repressed or thrown off buildings when the Caliphate has power to do so?
Might make putting up with “rednecks” voicing an opinion seem quite trivial.
132
There were people of all races on the Reclaim side, it makes the “anti-racist” side look quite stupid, doesn’t it?
121
John Safran made some tweets relating to all races representing Reclaim Australia, honestly I think I’d be the clichĂŠ ‘white trash redneck’ looking one at such an event, a handsome one though LOL!
20
Update: Talking to the people that went to the Reclaim Australia Rally Melbourne they went early and got in no problems, they copped a few choice words from lefties on the sidelines but said it was a good atmosphere and the speeches were good especially Daniel Nalliah from RUP.
The trouble was outside the rally where people trying to get in were targeted by the left scum, when my friends departed they got protection from the United Patriots Front who in turn were working in with Police to maintain order, they were initially a bit dubious about them but found them to be normal people just trying to have a say like them.
00
No, because everyone knows that only white Australian males are capable of racism.
Anyone else has been misrepresented, and/or forced into expressing opinions they don’t believe, or have been brainwashed by the all powerful right-wing Murdoch media. Otherwise, they are just expressing their unique cultural identity, which we should all celebrate and accept without question.
(If this isn’t recognised as the sarcasm/attempt at humour it was meant to be, I will deport myself immediately.)
120
Love your comment in parentheses! I feel that way a lot!
20
Oh well, we had Ian Plimer here to promote his book.the SturmAbteilung wsathere.Was tempted to elbow a nice chap with a ChĂŠ shirt who was getting a bit aggro.
30
A good article by Andrew Bolt regarding the nefarious treatment by the media of the Reclaim rallys………
There were two sets of protesters on the street. The media savaged the more peaceful
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/there_were_two_sets_of_protesters_on_the_street_the_media_savaged_the_more_/?nk=27229483d0d775f077fab614629c16dd-1437346949
More and more we see the main stream media behaving as enemies and traitors of the Australian people !!!
50
I don’t understand why Australian Police aren’t using dyes to mark especially the violent offenders.
60
They actually were, but the effects wore off after a painful while.
40
Lots of sickies for the sickos?
30
Bernd,
“I donât understand why Australian Police arenât using dyes to mark especially the violent offenders.”
As in most other progressive countries Australians uses ink to mark their offenders.
The marks are known colloquially as ‘Gaol tatts’.
60
if CAGW was banned from ABC, what programming would be left?
coming down the pike with Joel:
AUDIO/TRANSCRIPT: 17 July: ABC Blueprint for Living: Jeremy Story Carter: Addressing threats to world food supply
Award-winning environmental journalist Joel K Bourne: Climate change is coming down the pike and it’s making water less available. Australia has endured an epic drought over the last four or five years, so your farmers know what I’m talking about…
We are starting to see very serious water limitations coming down the pike, not just in the developing world but also in the developed world itself…
We are in the midst of the sixth great spasm of extinction that the planet has ever seen. Wildlife is gradually going away as the human population has risen. But at the same time, climate change is coming down the pike and just hammering our production…
Russia, one of the largest exports of wheat, lost a third of its crop in 2010 thanks to the hottest summer since 1500.
The consensus is we need to keep our global average temperature increase to about two degrees Celsius to stave off the global alter in climate change, but our emissions are currently on track to hit between 3.6 to 5.3 degrees increase by the century’s end.
A big study by the Royal Society in London a few years ago said if that happens, if we hit a four-degree increase in global average temperatures, then half of our farmland could become unsuitable for agriculture by 2100…
But honestly, climate change is this sword of Damocles that is hanging over our heads.
If we don’t get on a low carbon economy and low carbon diet, then our food problem is going to be much, much worse…
So reducing our carbon footprints, eating lower on the food chain certainly helps in that regard, but also absolutely encouraging our governments to get to that post-carbon economy as quickly as we possibly can…
***Overall, I am optimistic…
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/blueprintforliving/the-five-challenges-and-solutions-for-feeding-the-world/6628454
***Joel has absorbed the meme – don’t be all doom & gloom.
AUDIO/TRANSCRIPT: 19 July: ABC Background Briefing: A burning question
Burning native timber for renewable energy could prop up an ailing native forest industry, but the forests could earn millions in carbon credits if they’re not logged. Both options are hotly disputed and the argument opens a new front in the long running and politically-charged ‘forest wars’. Gregg Borschmann investigates…
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/a-burning-question/6616386
41
ABC inserts CAGW into the Books & Arts program: the Antarctic as a cultural state, a special kind of “momentary utopian international state”. want to bring our “Ship of Fools” to Antarctica. if we care about climate change, we need cultural mediators. sending 100 artists on the “Ship of Fools”:
AUDIO 12 mins: 15 July: ABC Books & Arts: The Antarctic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
The Antarctic Pavilion. And it is back for this year’s Biennale of contemporary art.
Many countries send artists for residencies in Antarctica, Australia included, but the curator of this year’s pavilion wants art to travel to Antarctica to feed the minds and souls of scientists…
Guest: Nadim Samman, Curator, the Antarctica Pavilion
Interviewer: Vincent O’Donnell
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/the-antarctic-pavillion-at-the-venice-biennale/6620780
Guest, Nadim Samman, in his own words below, shows just how appropriate a guest he is for “their ABC”:
Nadim Julien Samman, Curator: Other Antarctica Antarctic Pavilion, Oceanic Fund Projects, Paris, AVC Charity Foundation, 2014
The repressed cultural dimension of Antarctica is no mere concern for gourmands of exotica…
The lack of an architectural/analytic enterprise is, at least in part, a symptom of geo-political conditions that limit and even contradict the transnational project of Antarctic occupation as pure science…
In concrete terms, many state actors are only paying lip service to the singular importance of the Antarctic Treaty â and we must worry that it may be amended for the worse if enough members deem it expedient.
All of this points towards the abrogation of Antarcticaâs utopian potential. In order to rehabilitate it we must entertain visions of living there that go beyond the mission…
At present, the hegemonic image of human activity there is squeaky clean â with residents commonly portrayed as morally unimpeachable ciphers solely engaged in the pursuit of eco-scientific inquiry. They go there to penetrate its crust and scale its peaks without guilt or egoism â for knowledge. Their tests are impersonal and hygienic. They leave nothing behind and take only ice-cores and photos back home â clinical twenty-first century negations of trophy hunting…
http://nadimsamman.com/other-antarctica
51
“They leave nothing behind and take only ice-cores and photos back home”
You are right Pat, he definitely belongs on the ABC. Anything that keeps him off the streets where he might bite people or small dogs.
100
Every time ABC TV talks about climate change you get that image of dark clouds coming from a power station’s cooling towers silhouetted against a setting sun. Water vapour is whitish and CO2 colourless aren’t they?
00
Shhh. You are NOT supposed to know that. Besides, to be bad, it had to be dark and visible.
00
You mean like this picture of an evil baby-killing power station?
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01509/Didcot-Power-Stati_1509395c.jpg
00
Doomsday Delayed
March 2009, Prince Charles:
The Prince of Wales is to issue a stark warning that nations have “less than 100 months to act” (8 years) to save the planet from irreversible damage due to climate change.
July 18, 2015 Prince Charles:
His Royal Highness warns that we have just 35 years to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.
120
You seem woefully underinformed. HRH has been relentlessly zeroing-in on the final date for action.
Arithmetic progression is also progress. đ
130
Ahhh, bless the people’s wing-nut has spoken.
Just you wait for when he’s enthroned as Lord High Emperor of the UN and it’s ‘regions and dominions beyond… ‘
100
Prince Charles……..off with the pixies yet again !
40
Charlie has been smoking his veggies again!!!!
10
Camilla made him say such awful things.
00
Nice to see there is one “Protestant” Cardinal in the vatican. None other than Pell from Aus.
“Cardinal George Pell has publicly criticised Pope Francis’ decision to place climate change at the top of the Catholic Church’s agenda.
Cardinal Pell, a well-known climate change skeptic, told the Financial Times the church had “no particular expertise in science”.
“The church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters,” he said,
“We believe in the autonomy of science.”
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/cardinal-george-pell-criticises-pope-francis-over-climate-change-stance-20150718-gifhjt.html#ixzz3gK6kpSKH
140
He’ll be off to marry a nun next month after nailing 200 Theses to the gates of the Vatican.
20
one i’ve saved for ‘Unthreaded’. note the different headline for the print version. entire text is quite sensible, but note the ***conclusion/final word:
13 July: NYT: SABRINA TAVERNISE: Unraveling the Relationship Between Climate Change and Health
(A version of this article appears in print on July 14, 2015, on page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: Global Warming, Local Health Risks.)
Temperatures may be rising, but overall deaths from heat are not, in part because the march of progress has helped people adapt â air conditioning is more ubiquitous, for example, and the treatment of heart disease, a major risk for heat-related mortality, has improved…
A recent review of heat mortality in the United States found that the rate of heat-related deaths declined by more than half from 1987 to 2005…
A study in The Lancet in May analyzed 74 million deaths from 1985 to 2012 in more than 10 countries, including the United States, and found that about 8 percent of the deaths had been caused by abnormal temperatures. Of those, the rate of death from cold â more than 7 percent â far outnumbered that
from heat, about 0.42 percent…
The dangers of heat are greater in New Delhi than in New York, not only because it is hotter in the Indian city, but because fewer people have electricity, sturdy houses and modern medical care. That makes drawing broad conclusions tricky.
***But it does not mean the risks are not there. As Dr.
Kinney noted, âif we wait for the health evidence to be ironclad, it may well be too late.â
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/health/unraveling-the-relationship-between-climate-change-and-health.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimesscience&_r=0
41
ERSSTv4 supposed “bias” adjustments match decadal IPO:
http://s16.postimg.org/zbthw15fp/IPO_BIAS_ERSSTV4_HADNMAT2_ICOADSSST2_DOT5.png
Take a sober minute to deeply appreciate and understand firsthand that this is fatal:
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/suggestions-12/comment-page-1/#comment-104027
102
Confronting anyone who thumbs this down:
Are you denying this?
http://s16.postimg.org/zbthw15fp/IPO_BIAS_ERSSTV4_HADNMAT2_ICOADSSST2_DOT5.png
72
“Thumb People” don’t answer questions. It’s what makes them Thumb People.
52
Any relation to Tom Thumb? đ
00
Only a small one.
00
Regarding the warmists, it’s pretty much a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them”.
SkS have a whole heap of links to papers disproving any significant contribution from the Sun to late 20th century warming.
• http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-advanced.htm
• http://www.skepticalscience.com/cosmic-rays-and-global-warming-advanced.htm
Working through these will take some time. Still, there is no way to claim you’re skeptical about CAGW unless you do this. This is where the action is.
I’m not sure what the outcome of this foray will be, but at this stage it’s hard to see how they could really conflict with the evidence already found by other research.
It’s also interesting SkS will concede 40% of 1900-1950 warming was due to solar activity shielding cosmic rays, but they don’t attribute much of post-1950 change to solar activity. They show a graph of CRF versus temperature to support this. At first glance this seems like a flawed test, as the CRF is like the derivative of temperature, the temperature is altered by the integral of the CRF, so even if CRF remains almost unchanged over 40 years their own graph shows it to be above the levels that were normal before 1940. That would imply warming, which co-incidentally (?) is what happened.
All of the other fundamental SkS memes have to be analysed like this. There is much yet to do.
If anyone goes to some effort to study these arguments and finds them valid or invalid, please tell us all.
92
The climate sceptics party.com.au
Under the SS myth tab is a good start.
Always wanted to send the SS what I thought of their table but I was banned.
Apologies still did not learn how to make links.
62
Those evil conservative billionaires are all OK, as long as they are investing in a 1000 turbine wind farm..
“…All told, Anschutzâs wind farm would be able to produce more than 3,000 megawatts of power, four times the electricity produced by the Hoover Dam and enough to power every home in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It could also cut carbon emissions by as much as 13 million tons a year…”
Yeah, I’m sure he’s doing this just ‘for the environment’
50
Hi folks just wanted to pop in today to mention the plight of one of my favourite bloggers . Visiting climate sceptical blogs like Jo’s over the years has taught me how to be sceptical about several other issues such as big pharma and big religious institutions,one of my favourite sceptical religious researchers is D M MURDOCK a lady that studies mythology , astrotheology and comparative religion in the Abrahamic religions, especially the new testament. I’ve often noticed how similar Murdocks work is to that of our hostess here Jo Nova , two feisty intelligent ladies dedicated to their sceptical struggle against big powerfull organisations, here is D M MURDOCK in action defending herself against her critics from big religion , notice that many of the words and phrases that she uses are the same as those used by Jo and others sceptical of big green,and i like to think that Jo and D M are soul sisters, a kindrid spirit . https://youtu.be/rsaRQDxmLqY
D M MURDOCK like JO runs her own bloggs [since 1995] and receives no funding having to rely on donations and sales of her books.The reason i’m posting about her is that i found out recently that she has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer and so now is in the fight of her life for her life and is currently trying to raise money for her medicine and treatment by selling some of her books at bargain prices, so those that are interested in her field please find a few moments to visit her blogs and have a look at her work and maybe purchase some of her books and help out in my view one of the great minds of our time. http://www.truthbeknown.com/ and http://freethoughtnation.com/ the relevant donate info is on freethoughtnation thanks and cheers everyone
72
Ban Ki-Moon is upset by the state of the Arctic:
“…I have seen so many cracks in the glaciers. It was even dangerous because all these glaciers are falling and floating around us…”
Besides which, I thought the Arctic was already supposed to be ice-free in summer, according to some predictions? Maybe I imagined this?
140
We are upset and angry by this imbecile “Ban Ki-Moon”……….
40
Perhaps Ban Ki Moon should get out more and discover all glaciers calve. Maybe a trip down memory lane to the pre-industrial days where the glaciers STILL calved. Wow, who would have thought?
The “Ice Free” date is fluid!
30
Under the article “France says climate deal must avoid US Congress vote”. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius warned on Monday.
Fabius, who will host a high-stakes UN climate summit in Paris later this year, made the remarks at preparatory talks in the German city of Bonn. âWe know the politics in the US. Whether we like it or not, if it comes to the Congress, they will refuse,â
So they want to frustrate the Congress in the world’s oldest democracy by working closely with the Obama administration. Nice. Who said it was about science? High stakes for whom?
80
I am constantly amazed at the wisdom of the framers of the US Constitution. Nobody has done more to circumvent and tear down the US Constitution than our current president, though. He will try to re-define any deal as an Executive Agreement rather than as a Treaty.
But if the US Congress ultimately shoots down any deal and you Aussies stand with the world’s skeptics come Paris, it may become a win for freedom fighters everywhere. Brothers in arms I hope will be.
110
It is extraordinary that the first country to adopt the philosophy of the French revolution of liberte, egalite and fraternite was the fledgling United States, assisted to the point of bankruptcy and bloody revolution by the French. The French then had two hundred years of disasters and the US and France have been in the divorce court ever since. Perversely only a French Foreign minister would seek to subvert the US democracy by conspiring with the President’s men, let alone say so publicly.
60
Do we have to be brothers-in-arms, can’t we just be brothers-in-pen or even brothers-in-type?
And here’s one for the politically correct obsessed… what about the sisters, and don’t forget the LuGiT a Bit crowd too.
20
Obummer with his forged birth certificate isn’t even legally entitled to be the POTUS !
21
Are you sure it is COP21 he was referring to?
Laurent Fabius seems to like his high stakes.
Commenting on the Iran nuclear negotiations last week:
“French foreign minister Laurent said he hoped the high-stakes negotiations were finally drawing to a close.“
30
149 comments to go to hit 300k on the counter (for whatever that’s worth). Not long…
121
According to my homogenised data, you’re already at 402K. The comments counter is settled.
I would tell you how I
adjustedcorrected the data, but, well, it’s a secret. To the untrained eye, it may have just looked like a a few beers, a list of random numbers and a dart board, but I can assure you that only the most advanced and relevant statistical methods were used. Cook and Lewandowsky helped me out with the difficult bits.(I’m just awaiting peer review, so don’t treat it as official just yet).
181
So you took some counts from comfortable articles and in-filled the rest.
With enough super-computers, you can get a 97% confidence level.
121
That was going to be the subject of my 2nd paper. Hold your horses.
I started with the number I wanted, and then worked out a way of making the data show what I want. That’s the scientific method at work, right?
141
Of course James, you’ll need a half dozen supercomputers to run that simulated comment counter model… Just throw money…
40
I was about to request some funding, supercomputers aren’t cheap.
I should add that the science of comment counters is still settled, I just need a bit more cash to show just how settled it really is.
10
Rubbish!
IBM is giving them away with heating systems.
đ
00
Alright, this is my shot at being the 300,000th comment.
Eugene WR Gallun
50
And still 100 to go? Shame there are no numbers visible.
30
It would look like The Matrix, if numbers were visible.
00
Now that solar power is cheap (well it is not but some people claim so).
It means we have finally cheap energy to desalinate Atlantic water and pump it to Sahara, where it can be used to grow food. And of course, greening Sahara will be cooler and mitigate global warming.
Lets wish our solar experts to Mauritania. There they can do all the good they try to do in north, where the weak Sun has a low incidence angle.
Hush hush to Africa!
90
Does Mohammad approve of desalination?
20
Only if it is Kosher.
30
10
Don’t be shy Alan, Jo’s reporters are a friendly mob.
40
The lies and misrepresentations on this Facebook page are sickening. See https://www.facebook.com/climatereality
41
Migraine inducing.
00
It’s Al Gore’s vanity project.
But he doesn’t seem to know the rules. He has a headline that says, “… But the Climate Deniers won’t win”. Thus giving credence to those he sees as his foe.
Propaganda 101: Never acknowledge that a real enemy exists.
00
I do not think so!
If Nicole Hasham read the comments in the Blog regularly she would not make such an unbelievable statement.
70
Saw that but couldn’t educate them in comments because I don’t subscribe to the Courier Mail trash.
10
I wrote to Nicole Hasham and asked her if she was sure that the statement was correct.
To her credit she replied. She said that Mr Owen had made the claim, but that she would check it out.
00
Joanne(and others)
There is absolutely NO (warming) sensitivity to carbon dioxide or water vapor. Thereâs enough water vapor for us to see by measurement that more moist regions have lower mean daily maximums and minimums, as my study with data from 15 inland tropical regions on three continents showed to be the case.
All planets and moons have inner regions (lower troposphere, mantle, core etc) which are maintained at higher temperatures than the effective radiating temperature. This requires an input of thermal energy to those lower regions, but that energy does not mostly come from direct solar radiation, let alone back radiation. It comes from the non-radiative mechanism about which you can read here and that is confirmed by a correct application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is all about entropy maximization and nothing else.
You cannot prove me wrong on this. Your discussion of so-called âradiative forcingâ is about a totally imaginary process which simply does not happen because all that back radiation can do is slow the rate of radiative cooling, not the rate of non-radiative cooling. But the Sunâs direct radiation cannot explain the existing surface temperatures on Earth or Venus, just for starters. So the rate of cooling is irrelevant. You think in the wrong paradigm altogether because you have been gullible enough to believe James Hansen and his cronies who simply do not understand entropy and the related thermodynamics.
210
And direct measurements be dammed!
00
“Academic oligarchy: Majority of science publishing is controlled by just six companies”
Scary and no wonder..
http://www.naturalnews.com/050457_science_publishing_academic_oligarchy_corporate_corruption.html
“Much of the independence that was once cherished within the scientific community, in other words, has gone by the wayside as these major publishers have taken control and now dictate what types of content get published. The result is a publishing oligopoly in which scientists are muzzled by and overarching trend toward politically correct, and industry-favoring, “science.”.
30
You have to wonder if new Cloud based publishing is not a surer, faster way to reach an audience both in your field and outside it, if that is your real intention. What point in future the libraries, reference libraries, even book printing and binding become obsolete? These things will take time to die, but if the objective is to inform the world of your discovery, there are so many other ways. If you are looking for formal recognition from your peers, then you are bound by an old tradition which will die. Look at the new library of Alexandria. Magnificent building but now a computer centre. The whole romance, the whole point of its reconstruction was lost during its construction.
If anything, patenting is the new publishing. Not only does it require full disclosure, peer review, examination and a real cost in every country, it is the chosen path for the giant innovators including IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple and so many more. Patenting the human genome is not only a way to get recognition, it is a way to justify the immense cost. If an idea is good, it has value. Value means income. Incomes need to be protected and the only way to do this is to patent, not just publish. Albert Einstein was a patent clerk. That was no coincidence. He understood the power of publishing and publicity and how to challenge the establishment with dramatic demonstrations. Naturally many of the greatest ideas are not published at all, to protect them.
30
But there is an even older tradition of placing papers in escrow, and then sending copies to colleagues in the field, to obtain their critique and feedback.
Having a “formal publication process” is a comparatively modern idea that benefits the publishers more than the authors.
In some fields, such as geopolitics, and economics, the world moves faster than a formal publishing system can keep up.
10
My point exactly. Passing an article or report or paper among your peers is just sensible. The concern through time though is someone stealing your work or claiming the invention. That is why patents are becoming the place to publish, even essential for many, especially in areas where there is commercial value in the idea. The big companies file thousands of patents are year, just in the US.
Charles Darwin only published when it looked like someone else was onto the same idea and wrote to him. Darwin was reasonably afraid of the repercussions of publication of a theory which challenged accepted beliefs, especially which challenged the role of God in evolution and the teachings of the Old Testament.
Basically I agree that formal publication is becoming obsolete in the days of blogs and web sites and google search, just as newspapers and the ABC are becoming obsolete, just parroting information which was freely available hours or days before. Possibly listing publications is simply part of the academic qualification process. One great idea is worth a hundred boring publications.
00
Tdef. What you describe about passing among colleagues is exactly what is done. Also there is a backlash in science against the money making publishers. I also am unsure about your use of the term “corruption”. Who is being corrupt? If that is widely known authorities would crack down. Perhaps you mean opportunistic or unethical?
00
Gee Aye,
And, of course, this would be the first time that the authorities turned a blind eye to corruption.
Abe
00
that is not an answer.
00
Friends came back from Bali and said it was unusually cool.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.gif
20
That’s because of the “frosty”relations between Australia and Indonesia,boom boom……sorry folks
30
switched briefly to 4BC from the cricket last nite just after 1am. a caller driving around melbourne called in to say it was 2 degrees in kew, brunswick & one other location in melbourne. the radio presenter checked the BoM figures for melbourne and said, the Bureau says it is 3.8 degrees – i don’t know where they got that from – probably at the airport (paraphrasing).
***funny how UHI gets acknowledged these days!
20 July: The Age: Robyn Grace: Melbourne weather: City on track for coldest July in 20 years
The temperature plummeted to 1.9 degrees at 4.42am, marking only the third time in 20 years that there’s been two consecutive mornings under 2 degrees…
July has so far recorded an average maximum of only 12.6 degrees – a full degree under the 30-year average of 13.7.
Melbourne’s average July maximum hasn’t been less than 13 degrees since 1995.
The last time we recorded two consecutive mornings under 2 degrees was last August but before that, it was in August 1997.
Mr Williams said that was actually a pretty common occurrence in the 1930s (in 1937 there were eight consecutive days under 2 degrees).
“Compared to the historic record it pales into insignificance. ***Big cities with lots of cars and heating don’t get as cold,” he said…
Back to the present day, Mr Williams said Monday was an improvement on Sunday’s big chill, but it was still cold.
“It’s generally cold everywhere. There’s really no hiding from it,” he said…
The next significant cold snap is likely to arrive late on Saturday…
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/melbourne-weather-city-on-track-for-coldest-july-in-20-years-20150719-gifxwt.html
41
Its undeniable that the cold air looming from the Antarctic landmass is having an impact on Australia.
http://www.bom.gov.au/fwo/IDY65100.pdf
Do I see another polar vortex in its infancy?
01
Pat – how do we know if those historical temperature figures are the real, original data, or the ones maladjusted by the BoM?
01
I’m a bit disappointed with the warmists.
I’m yet to see the headlines: “Freezing spell is in line with climate change models.”
“Expect colder and more frequent Antarctic vortexes due to cold trapping CO2.”
“Within eight years our children won’t know what a summer is.”
61
Be patient. It will come.
30
It may well, but the adjustment bureau are going to find it increasingly difficult to appear to remain in the real world n’est-ce pas?
01
Oui. However ,if much of the world lives in fantasy land, the mismatch will become less problematic.
00
as unlikely as it may sound, i’ve never heard talkback shows from so-called shock jocks, (perpetual outrage doesn’t appeal to me). however, by chance, i’ve heard Alan Jones a couple of times since his program has gone out on 4BC.
as everyone here knows, i am not at all anti-coal, but i agree with Jones’s stance against coal seam gas on Qld’s Darling Downs (not because of Jones, but because i have listened to some farmers from the region).
now to Shenhua and the Liverpool Plains. i have not heard anyone, as yet, give a convincing defense of this coal mine, and would welcome TonyfromOz (& anyone else) weighing in on this issue. i tend to think the location is wrong for such a venture and does damage to those of us who support coal:
15 July: SMH: Georgina Mitchell: Alan Jones takes aim at Tony Abbott in 30-minute spray about Shenhua mine
2GB is owned by Fairfax Media, the publisher of this website.
It can’t be fun to be on the receiving end of a blast from Alan Jones.
But that’s the position Prime Minister Tony Abbott found himself in on Wednesday, when the broadcaster told his listeners on radio station 2GB that the Abbott government’s approval of the Shenhua Watermark coal mine was “disgraceful”, “beyond belief”, and tantamount to selling their soul to mining…
“The NSW government have the final say on all of this,” he said on The Alan Jones Breakfast Show.
“Quite frankly, Tony Abbott and [NSW Premier] Michael Baird are going to have to understand that governments rise and fall, sometimes, on a single issue. And the single issue, about selling this country out to foreign interests, no matter whose interests they are, is now emerging as a massive issue in this country.”…
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/alan-jones-takes-aim-at-tony-abbott-in-30minute-spray-about-shenhua-mine-20150715-gicten.html
i understand Jones will be appearing on ABC’s Q&A tonight for more of the above.
this morning, i did hear a portion of Jones’s program, with Tim Buckley, anti-coal campaigner, & director of Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, which advocates solar and wind.
June 2014: AFR: How former Citigroup analyst Tim Buckley became the new face of anti-coal activism
His aim is to convince superannuation funds, lenders and governments that funding infrastructure for the projects would be a bad long-term investment and they should focus on energy sources with more promising futures, such as solar and wind…
Buckley is one of a new breed of Âclimate change activists. Former US Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs chief executive Hank Paulson , former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the retired founder of Farallon Capital, Tom Steyer , have formed Risky Business, which will this week release a report designed to Âinfluence business decisions about the risk of not taking the prospect of unmitigated climate change seriously…
He would like to convince the big four banks to stop lending to coalÂminers, but says that is unlikely under the current government…
Buckley says fund managers for a long time resisted the idea of cutting coal from their portfolios, saying they did not have a mandate to do so and needed to earn the maximum return.
âBut what I think Martijn Wilder from Baker & McKenzie has made very clear in his paper about fiduciary duties, you actually have a fiduciary duty to invest sensibly for the long term,” he says. âThat is your number one criteria. The number one criteria is not to maximise returns this week, this month, next month. It is actually to maximise the sustainable returns for the long term.”…
http://www.afr.com/business/mining/coal/how-former-citigroup-analyst-tim-buckley-became-the-new-face-of-anticoal-activism-20140623-jgqcu
Buckley threw in every CAGW cliche about coal – China is running away from coal, the world doesn’t want coal, our Govt is backward in its support for coal – with Jones repeating every line as gospel truth. cleverly, Buckley didn’t bring up solar and wind, instead claiming agriculture and tourism are our future, not mining, & Jones didn’t bring up solar & wind either.
nonetheless, Jones is employed by Macquarie Radio, now majority owned by Fairfax, and i would like Fairfax to disclose how much they receive in advertising revenue from the solar & wind industries, tho i realise they are not obliged to do so.
as for Buckley, these are just some of his headlines in RenewEconomy:
Chinaâs declining coal dependence is evident in the data
Indiaâs plan to stop importing coal deals another blow to Australia
Wind energy surges in China, as demand for coal fades
Carbon repeal leaves Australia isolated and vulnerable
Massive Australia coal project dumped in face of China energy revolution
Oz coal at risk as major economies turn on fossil fuels
Stranded assets: Australiaâs biggest coal project already at risk
Merkel is a visionary, and we should be grateful
from LinkedIn: Tim Buckley
Director of Energy Finance Studies, Australasia
Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis
Tim is working in the low carbon finance space, looking at both the risks to potentially stranded fossil fuel assets and the opportunities and valuation of renewable energy, energy efficiency and other low carbon finance assets, both in Australia and from a global perspective.
2010-2013 Portfolio Manager Arkx Investment Management
Arkx Is a high conviction fund manager investing in global, listed clean energy companies…
1991 – 2007 Citigroup – Head of Equity Research
01
“He said other open-cut projects in the Hunter Valley looked like a “crater of the moon”, and an “industrial wasteland” will be left behind behind when the mine â a “desecration” â closes.”
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/alan-jones-takes-aim-at-tony-abbott-in-30minute-spray-about-shenhua-mine-20150715-gicten.html#ixzz3gOeMSWaM
Doesn’t Australia have any rules on reclamation? In the US, you can’t identify old coal mines, or any other mine, unless you know what to look for. They blend in perfectly with the landscape and are reclaimed to original contours. Is Australia that lax or is Alex exaggerating?
00
You’ve made several wrong assumptions in your comment
Yes indeed, Aus has stringent rehabilitation requirements, including very large cash deposits at the beginning of operations that are debited against rehab as it progresses
The “moonscape” comment slyly refers to current operations (ie. still in progress) without stating this. Areas that have already been completely re-habbed are indeed difficult to pick
The essential assumption you made that is wrong is that demagogue sprouters such as Jones tell the truth, or at least all of the facts. I do believe the USA suffers from this affliction too đ
11
Try telling that to the Greeks and remaining alive long enough to hear the answer.
20
Just download the EIS (free) from the Shenhua website and read it, Pat. BTW, defense against what, exactly ? Read the EIS before you answer that
For those who will most assuredly claim that the EIS must be biassed and inaccurate because Shenhua paid for it, just realise that the law requires them to pay for it and they wisely chose highly reputable and independent environmental consultants
TonyOz is well adequate on power station analyses, but he struggles mightily with actual mining. I’m a mining geologist of over 40 years (including most countries). Geological ignorance such as yours I can excuse (it’s very widespread), but I consider pontificating and preaching on the back of it is beyond the pale – long experience has shown me, though, that such ignorance is irrelevant to emotive activism (it may even be necessary to it), so I’m probably wasting my time
21
Ian there are too many know alls in our country and most are the Not In My Backyard variety.
During the final term in government of Prime Minister Paul Keating of Union Labor I attended a budget breakfast function at which a senior mining company executive was the guest speaker, at that period in time we suffered from the recession we had to have, according to Keating, which was the worst for sixty years. And there were sacred site claims, Mabo land rights debates, etc. The mining industry was not doing well and the guest speaker spoke about the vital funds from foreign investment drying up as the problems of investing into Australia turned the investor’s attention to other nations.
In short, the guest speaker said that many Australians fail to understand how much the mining industry contributes to their way of life, to national prosperity. And that the full impact would not be felt for about a decade if the investment stopped or slowed to a trickle.
In my opinion too many Australians do not understand what you have pointed out, apart from a huge amount of compliance requirements a mining venture must meet, an Environmental Impact Statement is an important one. And the decision to permit mining is made at both the Commonwealth Government and State Government levels.
In conclusion, from what I read too many Australians today have much the same prejudice against the Chinese and Australians had a long time ago against the Japanese, but sanity prevailed.
10
I add to the above, consider the enormous loss of jobs and taxation revenue Australia has experienced over the past few decades and the increased number of businesses that have left Australia or have announced that they will be leaving in recent years. The artificially too high cost of electricity, the ridiculous carbon tax too added to an even more ridiculous (un) Fair Work Australia industrial relations legal system that handed power to the unions (the same unions now being exposed as home to many criminal activities as witnesses appear at the Trade Union Royal Commission, including former trade union executive Bill Shorten) and the mind boggling list of red and green tape regulations, and more.
Our standard of living cannot be sustained on reducing taxation revenue, by not attracting mining ventures and anything else that adds to GDP. And look at the gross debts (Commonwealth, States and Local Government and government owned private businesses such as NBNCo), I estimate that the total exceeds $800 billion. The Commonwealth Government borrowing mostly by Union Labor, taking it from zero debt in 2007 after the LNP had repaid the previous Union Labor debt of $96 billion plus interest from 1996 to 2006, to over $400 billion plus hidden off budget NBNCo borrowing and the interest on gross (amount borrowed not offset by assets, how ridiculous to kid us this way) is now over $1 billion a month, therefore at all levels the interest must be over $2 billion a month. And consider that the budget liability for welfare amounts to 34 per cent of total budget expenditure.
And Australians complain about important Free Trade Agreements, mining and CSG, etc?
10
Forbes wades into the new mini ice age discussion.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewfrancis/2015/07/17/no-sunspots-will-not-cause-a-new-ice-age/
Which goes to prove even bright people in the science community, like the author of this shallow piece, have be brainwashed.
11
Could you tell if Tim Buckley was frothing at the mouth? It might be hard to pick up on radio.
But having seen him in the flesh, as it were, I was glad that I wasn’t sitting in the first three rows.
đ
30
Rereke Whakaaro –
it was the first time i’d heard Buckley & he was speaking in a strange, low-key voice. what i found bewildering was Jones repeating the nonsense about China and the world turning their backs on coal. he made no defense of coal whatsoever.
something else i find interesting, especially as my main concern is the CAGW plan to grab retirement/superfunds:
there is just one sponsor listed on 2GB/Alan Jones Breakfast Show webpage:
2GB: Alan Jones Breakfast Show – Show Sponsors
Challenger
Investing in retirement is different.
LINK to Challenger
http://www.2gb.com/shows/alan-jones-breakfast-show
from the link, u can go to:
Challenger – Environment
Challenger aims to minimise our impact on the environment by raising awareness with our people, employing technologies that minimise our use of resources and occupying sustainable places of work…
Challenger has also joined forces with ***Climate Friendly, an organisation that specialises in assisting companies to offset carbon emissions, and continue to offset 100% of the carbon emissions generated by our Sydney office power usage, as well as taxis, paper and waste disposal.
Challenger: About Us
Corporate social responsibility
Challenger recognises the responsibilities we have as a company in relation to sustainability and the environment, our people and the community in which we operate.
We aim to minimise our impact on the environment by raising awareness with our people, employing technologies that minimise our use of resources and occupying sustainable places of work…
Challenger is a member of the FTSE4Good Index.
from FTSE4Good Index Series website:
The FTSE4Good Index Series is designed to measure the performance of companies demonstrating strong Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices. Transparent management and clearly-defined ESG criteria make FTSE4Good indices suitable tools to be used by a wide variety of market participants when creating or assessing responsible investment products…
The FTSE4Good Environmental Leaders Europe 40 Index is designed as a tool to aid market participants to identify the European companies that are leading the way in how they manage their environmental risks and impacts, whilst reducing their environmental footprint…
pdf: Challenger: CHALLENGER LIMITED ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
CHAIRMANâS ADDRESSES 26 NOVEMBER 2012
We continue to believe that the retirement incomes market is particularly attractive as we enter a 20 year growth phase due to Australiaâs baby boomer population, who at 65 started to retire in 2011.
The growing number of retirees moving from the accumulation phase to the drawdown or retirement phase within superannuation each year is increasing. In 2012, $53 billion moved from accumulation to retirement, up from $47 billion in 2011 and this is expected to grow strongly for the next decade…
Sustainability is an area Challenger has also embraced and we aim to minimise our impact on the
environment.
We have recently committed to further reduce our carbon footprint by offsetting 100% of our power usage from our head office in Sydney. Through a partnership with ***Climate Friendly, Challenger will invest in environmental projects to offset carbon produced from our energy consumption. This will lead to a reduction of approximately 1,100 tonnes of carbon annually…
http://www.challenger.com.au/group/Chairman_Address_-_2012_AGM.pdf
00
Pat,
Out here we have 3 choices in radio
1. ABC
which wins in the broadcast power stakes and local news. The rest gives a chance to
2 Two local stations
Both on the edge of reception and with Allan Jones from both
He frequently reminds me of a UK newspaper summation of Ralph Nader’s first UK tour
“Vehemence and veracity are seldom synonymous”
3. Off
Which is frequently the station of choice
10
Dark matter Huge dark matter halos around a group of small galaxies appears to have saved them from being ripped apart as they fell into one of the largest galaxy clusters in the universe, scientists say
What is it with the arrogance of scientists that they can pretend to know something about something they know nothing of.
Star systems that they have only just noticed, that suddenly they now know all about them.
The problem with science is that it can preach whatever it likes and no-one will censure them for it very much like psychiatry and law,once someone sets a precedent then anyone can.
Stick to the facts let religion deal with the mystic.
20
some info on Challenger’s “partners”, Climate Friendly:
Climate Friendly – About Us
Climate Friendly – helping you help the world
Do you need sustainability solutions that make financial sense? Climate Friendly has you covered…
The four key areas we focus on are:
Onsite energy and efficiency
We can help your business save on energy costs and reduce emissions at the same time. Our solutions include solar panel installations, energy efficient lighting installations, voltage optimisation and more.
Carbon management (carbon offsets/credits and related services)
Whether you are buying for a large corporation, or just yourself, we can meet your needs. Our carbon management solutions include offsets from a wide range of different projects. These include forest regeneration projects, cook stove projects, wind farm projects and more. Each project does more than just help the environment – they help people and communities around the globe.
Renewable energy certificates
Green energy is available to both individuals and businesses. Whether you need GoldPower, our premier international RECâs, or GreenPower, made in Australia, we can help you.
Australian carbon farming
If you own large tracts of land with native regrowth, you may eligible for a carbon farming project on your property. These kinds of projects can supply you with an additional income stream, even in times of drought.
Weâve been in this ***game for over ten years. In this time we have worked with big brand names like Hilton, The Body Shop and Tetra Pak.
http://www.climatefriendly.com/AboutUs/AboutUs/
Climate Friendly – Board of Directors
Joel Fleming, Founding Chairman (Innovations & Partnerships)
Joel Fleming is an environmental scientist and Founding Chairman of Climate Friendly and previously a scientist with CSIRO…
Dr. Christoph Grobbel, Director
Christoph joined South Pole after 12.5 years with McKinsey & Company, Inc. where he worked as a Senior Expert for Emissions Trading and Electric Power & Natural Gas….
Freddy Sharpe, Director
Before running Climate Friendly, Freddy was Chief Operating Officer of Australia’s largest residential energy efficiency company…Freddy speaks regularly on climate change and related topics and was included in the inaugural ABC Carbon 50, a list of the 50 most influential people in Australia who are committed to the environment, the planet and the future of life on earth…
some of the Team:
from Climate Friendly – The Team
Darren Willman, Business Development Manager
He applied this experience in founding and leading G-1 Billion, a multilingual news website that covered the United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen (Denmark), COP-15…
Justin Pilgrim, Business Development Manager- Melbourne
Justin recently completed a Bachelor of Environment (Social Science) at RMIT University…
Josh Harris Manager â Australian Projects
He has advised large corporates on carbon management including Virgin Atlantic, BSkyB, BP, JP Morgan and Tesco and headed up the Climate Groupâs carbon market team in China. In his most recent role before joining Climate Friendly, Josh was an advisor to the Western Australian Environment Minister…
Alexander Quarles van Ufford – Renewable Energy Manager Europe
Prior to joining Climate Friendly Alexander worked for WWFâs global Climate Business Engagement team, where he established and managed partnerships with high-profile, sector leading multinational companies… In his WWF capacity Alexander contributed to WWFâs global guidelines for renewable energy procurement and he was closely involved in the collaboration with Climate Friendly on the development of GoldPower, the only global renewable electricity certificate endorsed by WWF…
01
At the moment the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is in negative territory, which suggests Europe maybe in for some cool weather.
A new paper published on the NAO if you’re interested. What caught my attention, a volcanic eruption has the capacity to turn a negative NAO into its positive phase.
https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/just-published/16205/revealing-europes-winter-weather-history
30
a bit of fun:
20 July: Crikey: Ben Sandilands: Ice makes a rare impact on Australian flights
While frost is relatively common over many Australian airports, delays caused by aircraft icing like those being reported from Melbourne Airport this morning are rare…
There has been at least one earlier occasion this century when jets at Melbourne airport had to be towed and repositioned on the tarmac to let the rapid rise in air temperatures after dawn remove the âfrost biteâ as such.
Similar precautions have been taken in living memory when isolated snow flakes or sleet grains have been observed at Tullamarine. Melbourneâs metropolitan weather reports and anecdotal accounts including televised events have recorded transient snow in the Tullamarine and Essendon areas in recent times, however the last significant fall of settled snow in the CBD and inner suburbs comes up in a quick search as happening in 1951…
COMMENT: By blueloo: âBut the rarity of the problem at the major Australian airports makes the installation of de-icing gantries or mobile units impossible to justify.â
QANTAS bought a mobile de-icing unit for Melbourne within the last 10 years or so )i believe there were delays in it being approved due to lack of airport fluid containment facilities for the runoff). The de-icing truck usually sits somewhere near gate 7 on the domestic terminal. It used to look quite new but apparently as it doesnât get much use it has been left to fade and waste away. Other news sites reported that the de-icing unit/truck was brokenâŚâŚâŚ
REPLY from Ben Sandilands: Thatâs sad news about the Melbourne de-ice truck. I noticed this morning that there are still drifts beside some roads three days after most of the snow fell and some of them show signs of being caused by the use of a grader to clear at least one lane.
What I meant about a major de-ice investment was the sort of industrial strength units used in much of the northern world.
These are designed to deal with tall vertical stabilisers on wide bodies like the A330 shown in the photo…
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2015/07/20/ice-makes-a-rare-impact-on-australian-flights/
01
18 July: UK Telegraph: Christopher Booker: C of E backs Pope in lunacy that could only hurt the poor
We are on the edge of a disaster â and the Churches seem intent on going over it
Like the Pope, the ruling powers of the C of E have fallen hook, line and sinker for the belief that the worldâs reliance on coal, gas and oil is somehow bringing unprecedented droughts, floods and disastrously rising sea levels (when the actual evidence shows no increase in any of these things). This, they all agree, is hurting no one more than the worldâs poor. Their only answer is that we must âdecarboniseâ the worldâs economy as fast as possible, and rely on that wonderful ârenewableâ energy from wind, sun and the tides.
Two reports last week gave further evidence of where, in the real world, all this fanciful nonsense is leading us. One was the National Gridâs warning that we are closing down our coal-fired power stations so fast that the âspare capacityâ needed to keep our lights on has plummeted from 16 per cent in 2012 to a mere 1.2 per cent. We are on the edge of a disaster from which not all those thousands of diesel generators for which we pay astronomic sums to provide emergency back-up can save us.
The second was an update from the Office for Budget Responsibility projecting that, within five years, the price we shall be paying in green subsidies and taxes to âdecarboniseâ our economy in favour of ârenewablesâ will have almost quadrupled to ÂŁ13.6âbillion a year, driving millions more households into âfuel povertyâ. And still wholly unanswered is how, once we lose the remaining fossil-fuel power stations that provide 70 per cent of our electricity, we can keep our lights on at all those times when the wind doesnât blow and the sun doesnât shine.
The real irony is that the treaty the Pope and the C of E want us to pray for is not going to happen, because China and India, the countries already responsible between them for more than a third of all the worldâs CO2 emissions (and rising fast), have no intention of signing it. The reason they give is that they see fossil fuels as the only way to lift more of their 2.5âbillion people out of precisely that poverty the Pope and his chums so piously deplore.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11748914/C-of-E-backs-Pope-in-lunacy-that-could-only-hurt-the-poor.html
31
‘The Climate Tribe is far more about common purpose now than it is about science. The science was simply the means to the end. The end is controlling society for âthe common goodâ. Itâs a feelgood motivation. Thatâs why the public buy into it, and thatâs why believers feel threatened whenever anyone tries to challenge it â the challenge is seen not as debating the science of climate change, but a direct attack on the Tribe and its deeper purpose.
‘To change the outcome, you cannot just âdebate the scienceâ. You have to deprogram members of the Tribe.
âYou take the blue pill,â Morpheus told Neo in The Matrix, âthe story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goesâŚâ
Ian Wishart / Climate Change Dispatch
31
Genetic “Adam” and “Eve” uncovered;
http://www.livescience.com/38613-genetic-adam-and-eve-uncovered.html
10
A simple mirror image clarifies that the “bias” NOAA adjusted out of ERSSTv4 was something natural: the IPO (interdecadal pacific oscillation):
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/suggestions-12/comment-page-1/#comment-104169
Folks: We simply cannot allow them to get away with this. They must be compelled to retract.
20