JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
Paul Kelly in the Oz, the tide has gone out.
‘The Greens are an ugly sight under pressure. They are deluded by hubris and consumed by a moral vanity that wearies most.’
360
..but he also says, sadly
“The climate is changing and global emissions reductions are essential to address this. It is, by definition, a global issue. Australia, responsible for 1.3 per cent of global emissions, has a role to play as a constructive, contributing citizen.”
90
rollo
He left out the bit that said “by giving it a one finger salute”
210
Kelly has really perfected the earnest-and-worthy Newspeak. Amazing that this illiterate, pontificating, equivocating bore is the leading light of Murdoch’s faux-conservative flagship. The climate is changing? And I thought it was just standing there whistling Dixie? Global is by definition global? Learn something every day.
As a constructive, contributing citizen of JN I’d like to thank others who read the Australian so I don’t have to. They’re like the people who watch the ABC so I don’t have to. I suppose someone has to put their arm down into the septic if the pooch falls in. Let it not be me.
331
I read The Oz and contribute to the comments. We have to keep making our voice heard, and I believe that by doing this we will gradually impact the wider opinions. We cannot, and dare I suggest should not, meekly succumb and be mute. We have to speak out and continue to do so until the scam is fully exposed and finally ignored.
321
Yeah, I think it’s good if you hang and fight it out there. More power to you. My friend Michael “Genghis” C likes to put in very eloquently at the Australian. That’s one approach.
But I also think the Australian and its touts for Big Green and Turnbull should not be exempt from ridicule. In the end, drongos like Kelly, after emitting the odd conservative grunt, are pushing the same slop as the ABC harpies. Globalism is all about making us think we are choosing, and Murdoch is just great at corralling the conservatives to then herd them toward the globalist mainstream. It’s important to know he’s doing it.
181
mosomoso,
Agree
Paul Kelly was once very good.
These days, he has lost it.
141
Graeme#4, I used to subscribe but Patricia in the comments and the editorial animus towards Trump convinced me to do otherwise.
10
Speaking of the ABC, we’re into the 3rd week of March and there has been no threats of El Niño, La Niña & not even ‘ell or Eldorado. By now we’ve should have been threatened with at least fire & is brimstone. Could someone please check if there is still a pulse in our illustrious broadcaster!
Not sure which organisation, I’ve lost interest in them, has forecast a cyclone headed for Queensland this weekend. Thalst forecast was for at 9 cyclones this season.
I’m willing to grant them a small low pressure system. Any advances on that score?
20
ATM we have three, Marcus in the Indian ocean, Nora heading into the gulf and one that may not be fully formed near the Solomons.
00
I’ve just found this site showing the winds around the globe, the cyclones are visible.
https://earth.nullschool.net
10
Hanrahan
Windy.com is a good site for local weather forecasts for anywhere you want to choose.
00
I am beginning to wonder at the ABC news service anyway.
It was recently attacked by the Chief Minister of the ACT.
His attack was edited out of the ABC report
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drive/i-hate-journalists:-act-chief-minister-unloads-on-the-press/9540140
He, at fairfax,pointed out that the ABC news audience are made up of the over 65 year olds.
The question is, how much is the ABC worth as a media outlet?
This would explain its migration to numerous net platforms to retain any audience for news.
10
thats the greenest thumbiest quote I have seen in a long time
41
Indeed they are ugly. In fact they sometimes act as though they want to tear the nation down and destroy it. Given half a chance I suspect they would. The ALP really should be a shamed of themselves for being associated with them. Of course they are associated with them for political reasons, which actually makes it worse.
150
‘In fact they sometimes act as though they want to tear the nation down and destroy it.’
They are post modern neo romantics and deindustrialisation is a big part of the mix.
100
Can’t see the romance!
50
Medieval village life with solar on every roof and a nearby wind farm as backup, is the basis for an idealic life. Saving the planet for the next generation is of heroic proportions, in their minds the denialati are the evil ones.
In art the new romantics paint a sad picture of destruction, something to do with man’s inhumanity.
70
True some people have a sick version of “paradise” as their preferred worldview. For example, Hitler’s version of his paradise would a like hell for most of us. The Greens’ version would not be much different, possibly even worse.
70
That is the problem with all forms of totalitarian idylls. They all end up looking the same, and functioning the same.
For some reason most people living in them don’t like them. How Strange.
Maybe it’s because most people don’t like overt control …
30
sophocles, overt control in and of itself is not necessarily evil. In fact we all need overt control to avoid chaos and mayhem. The important point is the type of overt control is question; whether it’s absolute good or absolute evil. The problem there though is the definition of what is absolute good and what is absolute evil. Some even don’t believe there is such a thing as absolute good and absolute evil. That’s where we come full circle and see certain groups promote what is actually absolute evil while fooling themselves into believing it’s relative good. Now if you meant to say covert control instead of overt control then that could be a different topic of discussion, partly because overt and covert are opposites.
10
Romanticism it is not. Po-Mo don’t do literature,
the Arts, the individual, it’s Derrida reductivist
School of Resentment politicks –
all
the
way
down.
30
I propose making Australia into a single large nature park. All the evil peeples can be moved to Tasmania with a wall around to contain them. After all, it worked with the dingos. A few exceptions can be allowed. The most beautiful beaches can be carved into estates for the rich, and beautiful, and liberal academics. No taxes will be allowed and all revenue will come from reality shows featuring the elite and occasional saltwater crocs eating the deplorables. Climate will be controlled at a constant 20 degrees by a thermostat at Ayers rock. Sorry, Uluru.
I wish I had thought of this when I was younger. I could have been the leader of a new advocacy group ( sex cult.) Probably would have won a Nobel.
80
One problem: the crocs would get too fat to even waddle …
10
Rather than being an aberration McCarthy had it right, the communists HAD infiltrated all levels of government and they still do today. The Special Executive Service is the heart of it, the real “deep state” that is only being exposed now, at least I had never heard of them before.
00
I see that the Cathedral of Notre-Dame requires some serious restoration. It should be done IMO but the French say they cannot afford even half of the estimated cost. This despite the fact that the structure is one of the most important in the city and a huge draw for tourism which provides a considerable revenue stream for Paris. The Cathedral draws 13 million visitors a year but the Catholic Church does not want to charge admission because it’s still an active place of worship.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/news/notre-dame-cathedral-in-paris-is-falling-apart/vi-BBKsW3j
Anyway, in my view any structure that has been around since the middle ages should be saved and the sheer engineering genius and Architectural magnificence of the structure warrants the cost.
270
Have they consulted the Hunchback?
71
One of the claims I have heard concerning Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame novel is that it helped raise interest in the building with the public.
Once they were interested they made efforts to visit while in Paris and the growing amounts of tourists ended up guilt tripping the Government into spending money repairing and maintaining what was then a slightly poorly building.
So yes, maybe we should consult the Hunchback.
40
Ah but it has to be global warming that has ruined it! 😉 Nevermind that it was built in the medieval warm period. Hope they find the money!
10
After Quasimodo’s death, the bishop of the cathedral of
Notre Dame sent word through the streets of Paris that
a new bellringer was needed. The bishop decided that he
would conduct the interviews personally and went up into
the belfry to begin the screening process. After
observing several applicants demonstrate their skills,
he decided to call it a day when a lone, armless man
approached him and announced that he was there to apply
for the bellringer’s job. The bishop was incredulous.
“You have no arms!”
“No matter,” said the man, “Observe!”
He then began striking the bells with his face, producing
a beautiful melody on the carillon. The bishop listened
in astonishment, convinced that he had finally found a
suitable replacement for Quasimodo. Suddenly, rushing
forward to strike a bell, the armless man tripped, and
plunged headlong out of the belfry window to his death
in the street below. The stunned bishop rushed to his side.
When he reached the street, a crowd had gathered around
the fallen figure, drawn by the beautiful music they had
heard only moments before. As they silently parted to
let the bishop through, one of them asked,
“Bishop, who was this man?”
“I don’t know his name,” the bishop replied, sadly,
“but his face rings a bell.”
The following day, despite the sadness that weighed heavily
on his heart due to the unfortunate death of the armless
campanologist, the bishop continued his interviews for
the bellringer of Notre Dame. The first man to approach
him said,
“Your excellency, I am the brother of the poor, armless
wretch that fell to his death from this very belfry yesterday.
I pray that you honor his life by allowing me to replace him in
this duty.”
The bishop agreed to give the man an audition, and as the
armless man’s brother stooped to pick up a mallet to strike
the first bell, he groaned, clutched at his chest and died
on the spot. Two monks, hearing the bishop’s cries of grief
at this second tragedy, rushed up the stairs to his side.
“What has happened?” the first breathlessly asked, “Who is this man?”
“I don’t know his name,” sighed the distraught bishop,
“But he’s a dead ringer for his brother.”
Geoff.
70
Say, is that a Medieval version of a shaggy dog story? <:-)
20
I tell this joke and people make excuses and leave.
Geoff gets Green Thumbs.
I blame Global Warming.
Also, a drum kit walks into a bar. Boom Boom Thish!
00
I hope the Cathedral is repaired. It’s not one I’ve seen but if it is as beautiful as Chartres or Rheims cathedrals it must be stunning. Chartres cathedral had a lot of cleaning work going on when we saw it. The stone carving there is amazing.
72
St Denis in northern Paris is interesting also, but you have to be game to go these days, the area is particularly vibrant.
30
I worked in St Denis for a while in the mid-eighties, and the first thing my co-workers and I were told was to only leave the premises in groups of at least two, including at least one male staff member.
Plus ca change…..
00
There’s always some scaffolding and some works going on at Chartres. During the Revolution it was condemned but the job of wrecking it was so big they put it off. Probably too busy massacring peasants in the Vendee.
Love Chartres. It’s like wandering through Dorrigo NP on a still day.
40
RAH:
Considering the amounts they are wasting, and going to waste, on wind turbines their claims of lack of funds are spurious and probably just trying to get someone else to pay for it.
90
But worshipping the false gods is so much more lucrative in the pre-after-life.
80
Well, yes, as always, sc*ms are good money makers….
The Riot at Ephesus
21 When these things were accomplished, Paul purposed in the Spirit, when he had passed through Macedonia and Achaia, to go to Jerusalem, saying, “After I have been there, I must also see Rome.”
22 So he sent into Macedonia two of those who ministered to him, Timothy and Erastus, but he himself stayed in Asia for a time.
23 And about that time there arose a great commotion about the Way.
24 For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Diana,[d] brought no small profit to the craftsmen.
25 He called them together with the workers of similar occupation, and said: “Men, you know that we have our prosperity by this trade.
26 Moreover you see and hear that not only at Ephesus, but throughout almost all Asia, this Paul has persuaded and turned away many people, saying that they are not gods which are made with hands.
27 So not only is this trade of ours in danger of falling into disrepute, but also the temple of the great goddess Diana may be despised and her magnificence destroyed,[e] whom all Asia and the world worship.”
28 Now when they heard this, they were full of wrath and cried out, saying, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!”
29 So the whole city was filled with confusion, and rushed into the theater with one accord, having seized Gaius and Aristarchus, Macedonians, Paul’s travel companions.
30 And when Paul wanted to go in to the people, the disciples would not allow him.
31 Then some of the officials of Asia, who were his friends, sent to him pleading that he would not venture into the theater.
32 Some therefore cried one thing and some another, for the assembly was confused, and most of them did not know why they had come together.
33 And they drew Alexander out of the multitude, the Jews putting him forward. And Alexander motioned with his hand, and wanted to make his defense to the people.
34 But when they found out that he was a Jew, all with one voice cried out for about two hours, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!”
35 And when the city clerk had quieted the crowd, he said: “Men of Ephesus, what man is there who does not know that the city of the Ephesians is temple guardian of the great goddess Diana, and of the image which fell down from Zeus?
36 Therefore, since these things cannot be denied, you ought to be quiet and do nothing rashly.
37 For you have brought these men here who are neither robbers of temples nor blasphemers of your[f] goddess.
38 Therefore, if Demetrius and his fellow craftsmen have a case against anyone, the courts are open and there are proconsuls. Let them bring charges against one another.
39 But if you have any other inquiry to make, it shall be determined in the lawful assembly.
40 For we are in danger of being called in question for today’s uproar, there being no reason which we may give to account for this disorderly gathering.”
41 And when he had said these things, he dismissed the assembly.
( Acts 19 )
71
Maybe if they took the hat around some of those nogo areas?
30
Meanwhile, Europe is wasting billions on futile co2 mitigation, at the expense of the poor, the needy, and the elderly, the general economies, public infrastructure, even basic national defense. It’s not just the French. Germany can’t even afford to keep its navy operating:
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2018/02/19/can_the_german_navy_be_saved_113075.html
It’s madness.
110
And children in the poorer countries are dying because of poor water, something that could be easily remedied with a fraction of the money spent trying to stop the climate changing.
120
From the Real Clear Defence article:
Pictures of German Navy vessels assisting in the rescue of bedraggled refugees portrays the public face of the Bundeswehr in a way no Eurofighter or Leopard 2 tank ever can.
Yes…
20
The French are just being impatient. The Cathedral was started in 1163 and was mostly completed 182 years later —by 1345. It underwent a supposedly extensive restoration starting in 1845. I wasn’t able to find out when it was signed off but another restoration started in 1991.
Either the restorations were sub-standard or insufficiently extensive. I think it’s most likely the latter. Notre Dame is probably only still standing because of friction between the stone blocks it’s made up of. Any bonding of the mortar will most likely be minimal to none—I’ve seen block walls come apart after only 25 or so years because the mortar was like the blocks: just sitting there. One nudge and it fell over.
After all this time Notre Dame would be in the same state. So it’s literally a pile of stone blocks with seperate mortar sitting in formation waiting for a good shake.
The Christchurch earthquakes in 2008 showed the problems with these sort of buildings. They ranged in age from the 1920s to 1860s (for a few). Bricks stacked in formation with a separated layer of mortar in between.
A good earthquake would probably bring Notre Dame right down, in which case all the mortar could be easily replaced with fresh, and suitable steel support added. It would be a great shame, though, to lose those stained glass windows. They are really something.
If it could take 182 years to build, the French should do the restoration on the installment or time payment system. In the life of the building, what’s another couple of centuries?
It took 632 years to construct Cologne’s Cathedral. So what’s the hurry? The Cologne Cathedral was started on 15th August, 1248. Construction stopped in 1473 choir, nave and apse completed. The South Tower was complete up to the belfry level and was left with a large crane in place which became a Cologne landmark for over 400 years as seen here. The North Tower was nowhere in sight.
Construction restarted in 1842 to the original, freshly rediscovered plans, with a few modern touches such as iron girders holding up the roof. It was finished on 14th August 1880. Brings a whole new meaning to Under Construction :-).
No, Gaudi’s Cathedral (Barcelona) doesn’t count, yet. It’s been under construction for only 133 years, so far and has supposedly entered “the last stages of construction” sometime recently.
10
In England it was reckoned that old churches and cathedrals need some restoration work roughly every century.
You may be interested to know that Salisbury Cathedral was built in only 52 years. It has needed restoration work at times of course, not least on the steeple quite recently.
01
Hells Gate Dam technically viable, as reported by The Townsville Bulletin.
210
Don’t forget that the almost extinct purple frog lives there and a dam construction could be its end.
sarc
103
Probably they haven’t found it there – yet
90
But if they build the dam then the purple frog will be in danger of drowning.
90
Move the frog…..easy….
50
If you can find it.
Wink!
52
Don’t have to find it Dennis. When all else fails the old “…. evidence to suggest there maybe…” BS gets another run.
50
A friend was involved in a dispute over land clearing.
The official side hadn’t found an “endangered anything” but were sure that “if they kept looking they would”. Finding was cut off by the court date.
60
Its next to the sacred site
50
Secret Green women’s business.
41
They can soon plant some there if needed!
10
“And there is the opportunity for large-scale pumped hydro-electricity at the back of the dam that could generate 12,000 megawatts. That is the political clincher.”
I wonder what they understand when they say that 12,000 MW number?? not much I’m thinking.
80
Easy – imagine a bigger pump
30
12,000 MW WOW! that’s 40% of total Australian generation. I didn’t look at the figure when I posted the item, never do, what journos say is meaningless so why look.
00
I must be on a different planet???
Townsville has the Ross River Dam – which isn’t all that large.
Then it has Paluma Reservoir which is its source of water for most of the year.
If Paluma is not available, they then have the Burdekin.
Townsville probably has a more secure supply of water than anywhere else in Australia!!!!
30
To quote the council website:
I wouldn’t take much notice of the Paluma Dam catchment though.
With that small capacity it isn’t the complete answer but it could contribute more because it does spend much of it’s time full [it is 101% today] The limiting factor is pipeline capacity and/or treatment plant capacity. Even during the last dry when we had severe water restrictions Paluma never went below 70% and could have supplied what we were getting from the Burdekin Falls Dam, but gravity fed, saving $35,000 a day pumping costs.
I have no idea why no effort to extract more from Paluma is made but if I had to guess I’d say that the council would have to pay the capital cost themselves, they would rather blame other levels of government.
Find capacity history here:
https://www.townsville.qld.gov.au/water-waste-and-environment/water-supply-and-dams/dam-levels
00
Where is Hell’s Gate?
On my only excursion into that area I was very surprised to see that the top of the Great Dividing Range between Charter’s Towers and Hughenden is only 550 metres ASL.
20
Ted,
Hell’s Gate is just before you get to Hell’s Door.
20
It’s on the Burdekin upstream of Charlies Trousers. More details here:
https://tsvent-web.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/doc_2003022731_HellsGatesDamFAQs.pdf
Look it up in G earth, it is a gorge.
00
With the 2018 SA elections now history and Libs likely to gain power I thought it worth looking at how the rest of Australia is already directly contributing to the large scale wind and solar generation in South Australia.
This little table shows the state of play with LGCs in 2017 for each Australian State:
Million LGC 2017 by State
– Created |Required| Excess| Value $M
NSW:- 5.51 | 7.36 |. -1.85| -157.25
QLD:- 1.99 | 6.05| -4.06| -345.1
SA :- 4.89| 1.57 | 3.32| 282.2
TAS:- 2.13 | 1.19 | 0.94| 79.9
VIC:- 4.33| 5 | -0.67| -56.95
WA:- 1.77 | 3.75 | -1.98| -168.3
SA created a massive surplus of LGCs valued at $282.2M. By contrast Queensland had a massive shortfall corresponding to $345.1M.
Queensland, with its abundance of coal generation, has kept the lights on in the southern states on those long warm days in the 2017/18 summer. I expect that the power they send south earns maybe $300M per year. Not quite enough to cover the cost of the LGCs that the RET requires retailers to buy and pass on the cost to their customers.
Here I note that ERM Power took the fine of $123M for its 2016 RET LGC commitment rather than buying the LGCs. The fine was lower cost than the LGC purchase. With current LGC prices all retailers should be taking the fine rather than buying LGCs in the interest of their customers. But some retailers are also in on the positive side of the LGC payments Sao they need to play the game.
I gather the fine goes to federal or state government general revenue so if all retailers refused to buy LGCs it would starve the wind, solar and hydro of their generous subsidy.
190
Will, unfortunately I had absolutely no chance of comprehending what you’ve posted here.
Please understand that this is not a reflection on you or your writing ability, but is a sound condemnation of the impossibly convoluted and complicated and unnecessarily expensive dogs breakfast that electricity generation has become here in Australia.
When there is layer upon layer and intersection upon intersection of certificates, management organisations, distribution organisations, “renewable” energy targets, “NEG” whatevers, impractical pumped hydro, subsidies and the Lord only knows what else complicating and raising the price of electricity to insane levels, there is something totally and fundamentally wrong.
Those who have had any part, however small, in imposing this mess on us need to be run out of town by a raging mob. Even those who have not opposed the imposition of so much destructive and insane policy are complicit in my view.
380
Yes !!!!!!!!!!!!
160
Bush Kid:
“impossibly convoluted and complicated and unnecessarily expensive dogs breakfast that electricity generation has become” don’t you mean “impossibly convoluted and complicated and unnecessarily expensive dogs breakfast that has exited the dog?
Rick Will:
For heavens sake don’t tell the West Australians about this.
140
The post only the direct subsidy of LGCs; its simple. The 2018 target for these is around 11% of all electricity consumption. Queenslanders fare better in the STCs stakes because they are installing solar electricity and heating as fast as any state. The RET STC target component for electricity is around 7% and Old are probably self-sufficient in creating these.
The LGCs are the simple direct regular transfer from electricity consumers to grid scale wind, solar and hydro generators. The STCs are direct subsidies from electricity consumers toward the capital cost of rooftop solar power and water heaters.
Where it gets complicated is what I have termed the POWER SUPLLY INTERMITTENCY DISEASE (PSID – we need an FLA to make it cool). The Vic link to South Australia has enabled this insidious and debilitating disease to spread freely into Victoria. Intermittency is an effective destroyer of base load. It means that slow response, low cost coal fired generation gradually gets wiped out. The 600MW Vic link actually enables 1200MW of intermittency into Victoria because the link is bi-directional. That essentially matched the Hazelwood power station so it had to close as it could not make money when trying to respond to the intermittency from SA wind and solar. All that low cost coal generation has been replaced with high cost, fast response gas turbines and diesel ICEs with a little help from Snowy and Tassie hydro.
The incoming Liberal government in SA has promised a stronger link to NSW in order to spread PSID more easily into NSW and Queensland. There are already solid links between NSW and Old so if SA can spread PSID into NSW it will easily get transferred to Old. In effect, giving SA wind and solar open access to your network guarantees the spread of PSID and the very high costs that go with it where coal is the dominant source of generation. It is a much faster way of getting booster rockets on the electricity price than letting the other Labor State Governments go their hardest with their own RETs. SA has been at it for a long time now and I expect PSID is so ingrained that it is accepted as the way it is and will ever be. The Samsung big battery supplied by Tesla indicates that there is some recognition of PSID in SA but this form of control would be incredibly expensive at an effective level.
Economically, PSID is far worse than fruit fly, which has long standing border controls, however AEMO has no effective control for PSID and has the priority requirement to openly spread the disease.
Interestingly Tassie is immune to PSID. They are the only state that already has low cost, fast response generators in abundance. So despite the solid BassLink, South Australia has no scope to spread PSID into Tassie. In fact Tassie welcomes intermittency as they help Victoria limit the damage caused there and get paid well for the provision of the service through power price arbitrage.
130
If you are wondering about Old, it is the spell check version of Qld.
110
RW
I need Tony to chime in here.
AFIK the Qld power only goes into northern NSW. So it is probably unlikely that SA power will get to Qld. Any clue on how that will affect the magic money flow?
But then that doesn’t allow for smoke, mirrors and other things magical either.
60
The network is connected from Cairns to Port Lincoln on the mainland and south of Hobart in Tassie. So It is possible to pump power from anywhere on the grid to anywhere else within capacity constraints. Significant PSID introduced anywhere in NSW could be reflected in Queensland because the capacity of the main QLD/NSW link is 1078MW south and 278MW north. NSW has a solid HV transmission backbone from border to border. The aim of a higher capacity link from SA would be to access power flows on that 330kV backbone more directly and at higher capacity than available now.
60
Thanks Another Ian,
that’s the common fallacy about electrical power, how it can be used to cover vast distances. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve seen friends of the dirt greenies saying that one solar farm constructed over a ‘million billion trillion’ square miles in Oz can supply the whole Country, or that old crock, how a line of huge wind towers constructed almost tip to tip along the Great Australian Bight (GAB) can also supply the whole of Oz with electrical power. With both of those examples, transmission losses would see very little power reaching the extremities of Oz, so with those GAB wind towers, there would be not enough power left to light up one peanut bulb in a string of Christmas lights in Cairns, etcetera.
So the way those interconnectors work is like this.
Maybe Callide and Milmerran in Queensland will consistently supply into Northern NSW, there’s no power left to reach probably even Newcastle, let alone Sydney.
The South of the Continent is better placed because of the closeness of the big cities, Melbourne and Adelaide, and Melbourne and Tasmania. Tasmania can supply its hydro in Southern Victoria. (only, and not enough to reach Adelaide) Conversely, Victoria’s brown coal fired plants can supply into Tasmania via Basslink, and also into South Australia (and if Adelaide was on the WA border, then SouthAus would really be strapped for power because those two Interconnectors would not have enough left in them for that proverbial peanut bulb) SouthAus can supply its excess wind power (when it’s on) back into Victoria, but if you check that interconnector usage, you’ll see it’s mostly the one way, Victoria into SouthAus.
Victoria can also supply some into Southern NSW, but my guess here is that would mostly be Murray Two Hydro, closest to the border. Conversely, Southern NSW, perhaps the gas burners at Uranquinty or Snowy Hydro can supply into Northern Victoria.
Note from what I have said here is that the areas supplied need to be in (relative) close proximity to the actual power plants.
Queensland does not supply into Victoria, Tasmania or South Aus.
It just looks like that because of that interchange of power between States, when people look at sites like NEMweb or whatever its called and add up the totals, and where it’s coming from.
That’s why Northern Queensland is so strapped for power, with no large scale coal burners north of where I suit here in Rockhampton. People see ….. THE TOTAL ….. power being generated in Queensland and say that State already has more than enough to cover its needs. What they fail so miserably to understand is that Stanwell (near where I am now) supplies us here and the South East Corner, topping that up, and supplying places in between here and Brisbane, and perhaps a little to the North, but even our closest city to the North, Mackay has a gas burner, and there’s very little North of that. If they want to ramp up tourism, then they will need new power of a constant and reliable basis.
Totals are great to look at but you need to also take into account where those plants are located, and what they supply close to them, and the extent of their supply.
The maths is complex, but think of this. Power is transmitted at the speed of light and at 50HZ, so for one fiftieth of a second that thumping big 750MW Unit at Kogan Creek can transmit its power and push it to a distance of perhaps 3700 Miles. Okay you say, that could cover all of Australia. Now think of how many consumers there are taking power out of that total every couple of miles, some big some small. At the end of that fiftieth of a second, there’s (without fraction of doubt) nothing left at all.
Tony.
PostScript – That last paragraph is worded so basically so it can be better understood, because it’s way way more complex than that.
140
Tony, would the Mackay gas burner be an open cycle RR 211 turbine, originally meant to burn Avtur? If so that was installed in the ’70s by NEA and switched from their control room in Garbutt. It was never meant for base load.
20
If SA gets a solid connection into the 330kV backbone in NSW they have the intermittent capacity to influence Queensland generators.
Off course the flow of power will not be all the way from SA directly to QLD or from QLD directly to SA but the point of net zero power flow in the network will shift in the NSW grid depending on the ups and down of the SA generation.
The QLD-NSW link can supply into Queensland so the point of net zero flow can shift from say Tamworth when QLD is pumping in 1078MW and to somewhere near Brisbane when NSW is pumping 273MW into QLD.
The point of net zero flow for the SA-NSW link would shift from say Adelaide to maybe Yass depending on how much SA is consuming or generating. None of these distances are greater than the current distance that power is being transmitted frequently in Australia. For example Broken Hill is near enough 1000km from the Hunter Valley or the Latrobe Valley. It can get power from either location or even SA wind farms maybe 500km away.
21
Electrons are fungible, If Qld is exporting a GW and Vic and SA have a GW deficiency, Qld is taking up the slack. Like a millipede moving it’s legs, each substation exports to the south. The result is like me depositing $100 in a bank in Qld and someone withdrawing same in Adelaide. He wasn’t given the notes I deposited but as money is also fungible it could be said that I exported the money and he imported it. Same with LGCs in my mind – Qld pays SA.
With some humility I must query Tony.
21
In defence of Tonyfromoz, the shiftt the balance does not work. If the line loss is IsqrdR, many short or one long hop gives the same total loss. Stop it or it goes dark.
10
There has to be a way. Perhaps we could set up a rail link and transit fully charged batteries to wherever they are needed in Oz. That would eliminate line losses… hmmm….thinking….
30
I like it! especially if they move the batteries with diesel locomotives. Sounds like the ultimate Green scheme.
30
Tony, I thought other countries are looking at HVDC for long distance interconnectors.
40
Years ago there was an urban myth built on a grain of truth that you shouldn’t use an extension cord coiled up. The grain of truth becomes a hard truth when you speak of high current and all transmission lines are expected to carry the max possible current if demand is high, regardless of voltage, ergo the conductors must be well separated to reduce reactance over long distances with AC. Once you have built the tower and installed fifty insulators separating the conductors is no biggie.
All that changes with submarine cables where the conductors are, of necessity, bundled so DC is the only way. Basslink is DC but I assume you know that.
20
(I am not and expert.) A problem with high voltage DC is stepping it up/down and converting it back into ac, or a usable voltage. Using transformers to step down high voltage AC is so much easier and bullet-proof/reliable. The switch gear to handle DC is always vastly bigger and subject to what some call, “big sparks”. AC sparks/arcs have a tendency to extinguish themselves, and so smaller switch gear can be employed.
My brief thoughts/take.
60
saw a guy drop a shifter across some 50v DC busbars once. Exchange had 4000A capacity but realistically where he was maybe 1000A. It was quite sparky, the shifter was mostly gone but welded onto one bus bar, just enough to make removal interestingly tense.
40
Probably, the remainder of the forgone shifter was on the positive terminal bus-bar….the negative terminal side is usually the hottest according to my DC welding skills experience.
20
Actually……………i had that around the wrong way….the remainder of the shifter was on the negative side….OMGosh…must have been a typo. In welding, ..to get the most heat into the weld/work, the terminals of the welder need to be connected so that the negative terminal is connected to the work. The positive side is the coolest….Pheww!!
20
Might still have that around the wrong way
20
Ok….here is the autopsy for the shifter.
From: http://www.esabna.com/euweb/awtc/lesson2_6.htm
“Electrode negative (-) produces welds with shallow penetration; however, the electrode melt-off rate is high.”
Therefore:….the shifter is vaporised a lot more on the negative side. The remaining shifter is most likely on the positive bus bar.
30
That was the battle between Edison and Tesla who championed AC.
Another issue is switching: Because DC is continuous, switch contacts can arc for some time but AC voltage passes through zero 100 times per second which, of course, extinguishes the arc. This is why you don’t use domestic light switches in your car or truck.
20
Hanrahan
Have you checked power cords lately? I think you’ll find they have that warning on not using coiled up. The power and regulatory authorities wouldn’t lie to us would they?
00
I didn’t know Basslink was DC. Just researched HVDC long lines and it seems they may be cheaper for long distances. Currently longest is over 2300kms, but China building 3000km version. Another advantage is that they can link two different AC systems without having to worry about syncing.
10
Hmm, a possible distance of 3000kms worries me because it’s only 2700kms from Perth to Adelaide. I hope nobody wants to connect Perth to the “national” grid.
20
Another Ian
I’ll not accuse “them” of lying, merely greatly exaggerating.
00
I see all sorts of problems with HVDC. Can’t use transformers with that.
00
Spill chick catches me out too
31
spellink chekers r ovarayted
30
I love my spell checker, it’s the auto-correct I can’t switch off that pi$$es me.
30
Bushkid
That is a pretty good description of what is going on with woody vegetation management in Qld too
10
Bushkid stated:
The key point is that every electricity consumer in Australia is providing strong financial support to grid scale wind, solar and hydro generation through purchase of the LGCs they create. The information is readily available on the REC Register for LGCs
https://www.rec-registry.gov.au/rec-registry/app/public/lgc-register
For example, if you search all generating sources in all states for year 2017 you will see there were 20,770,890 certificates created. The LGC price averaged $85 in 2017. So all electricity consumers have been obligated by their Federal Government to hand over their hard earned money to the LGC creators amounting to $1765M in 2017. Over the term of the RET since inception there have been 220M LGCs created. That amounts to roughly $19bn that electricity consumers in Australia have paid for grid scale wind and solar generators that they have no share in. It has been gifted to the asset owners.
The number of LGCs required to be purchased is increasing every year till 2020 and most states have policies to keep it going upward after that.
Now LGCs are only part of the direct cost. Electricity consumers are also gifting installers of rooftop solar significant funds. The total quantity of STCs created now totals 225,244,327:
https://www.rec-registry.gov.au/rec-registry/app/public/stc-register
These have averaged around $37. So the amount consumers have gifted those installing rooftop solar now totals $8332M.
If you are an electricity consumer you have made significant direct contributions to wind and solar generation in Australia and your Government has guaranteed that you will continue to make ever increasing financial contribution.
Thank you for your generosity.
60
LGCs are Large scale Generation Certificates, earned by wind and solar and on-sold to coal and gas burners. These TLAs can be confusing, I had to look it up before it made sense. 🙂
10
LGCs are purchased by electricity retailers and their cost is passed on directly to electricity consumers.
If the retailers do not buy the required number they are fined $64 for each LGC liable.
40
The difference stopping a stampede to paying the fine instead, is that the cost of the LGCs is tax deductible, whereas the Fine is not. If the Fine became deductible????
20
With a bit of practice you’ll soon be able to handle ETLAs and even EETLAs fluently. 🙂
ETLA: Extended Three Letter Acronym (aka 4-letter acronym)
EETLA Enhanced Extended Three Letter Acronym (aka 5-letter acronym)
[with thanks to the computer industry and IBM)
20
Geeks are a funny lot. I’ve seen a glossary in ‘puter book: Endless loop … See endless loop.
30
When writing tech docs, always found it beneficial to the readers to define each acronym//abbreviation fully when it was first used. And also restrict the use of these acronyms/abbreviations if not used a lot of times in a text.
20
What he is saying, Bushkid, is that the ingenuity of thieves is ever remarkable.
20
It is the social equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics. Social entropy must increase overall every time there is a political intervention.
00
Thanks RW for taking the time to collate and post that data…
Very informative.
90
Science!
Adani groundwater plan could permanently drain desert oasis, scientists say
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-21/adani-groundwater-plan-risks-permanent-damage-to-desert-springs/9569184
Whoa! Wait. What?
Coal miners to blame for Queensland floods, says Australian Greens leader Bob Brown
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/coal-miners-to-blame-for-queensland-floods-says-australian-greens-leader-bob-brown/news-story/cbfe12042fa9c4149ea3c10524f57344
97% consensus science.
You couldn’t make it up?
162
Damage to groundwater systems by large scale open cut mining is actually a possibility.
That coal miners are responsible for the recent flooding caused by the monsoon doing what it normally does in FNQ – mmmmnot so much.
70
I forgot to add: That the Greens are dangerously addled fruit loops is beyond question and needs no scientific investigation.
180
McDonalds have just announced a new hamburger with Australian Wagyu beef.
When will the Greens demand it be withdrawn from sale because of climate change emissions?
72
Don’t give them ideas. The greenie veggies are trying to go for beef eaters in the US as it is.
62
Too late: todays ABC Nonsense-du-Jour: ( it always amuses me they file this stuf under “science”…..)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-03-21/americans-greenhouse-gas-emissions-red-meat/9566792
“A small number of Americans are responsible for almost half their country’s food-related greenhouse gas emissions, due mainly to very high red meat consumption.
The diets of just 20 per cent of Americans contributed 45.5 per cent of total greenhouse-gas emissions from all food eaten by Americans over five years, according to a study published today in Environmental Research Letters.
The food eaten by people in the highest-emissions bracket produced almost eight times the emissions of people in the lowest category — the bottom 20 per cent.
The greatest contributing factors to high-emissions diets were the types of food eaten as well as volume, according to researcher Dr Martin Heller from the University of Michigan.”
Blimey….sign me up …I love the CO2 producing BBQ and meat and all that goes with it….while the climate worriers are nibbling carrot sticks and worrying the sky may fall on their heads, I know who’s having the better time.
20
I am a second-hand vegan.
The cows eat the grass and I eat the cows.
100
They have their own crack pot ideas, they don’t have time to steal ours.
I think about two years ago there as a serious (as much as anything by green/leftie groups can be taken seriously) to force a fast food company to erect a monument for all the chickens killed in a traffic accident.
A semi transporting live chickens was involved in a traffic incident resulting in several chickens being killed. The green group involved pushed for the fast food venue to accept responsibility and fork out for a memorial on the grounds that this venue had chicken nuggets on their menu.
Yeap. Leftie-Green logic at it’s best.
30
Bushkid said:
With the recent very public examples, I think we can accept lack of supporting evidence for such a claim. There’s been plenty.
20
Perhaps.
“It’s the single biggest cause – burning coal – for climate change and it must take its major share of responsibility for the weather events we are seeing unfolding now,” he said in Hobart today.
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/coal-miners-to-blame-for-queensland-floods-says-australian-greens-leader-bob-brown/news-story/cbfe12042fa9c4149ea3c10524f57344
30
Ingham had a minor flood: Big deal. They are used to them and can minimise damage. The Macnade pub, for example, can lift their pool table above the water.
50
Hanrahan,
Now I can sleep soundly knowing that the pool table in the Macnade pub is safe.
20
Weather events unfold every day , almost since forever, its sorta what the weather does, unfold that is.
40
It’s a fact of life!
00
Interesting fact, even if it spoils a few panic parties. After Gundagai 1852 (in June, go figure) the two biggest death tolls from flooding remain those of Qld in 1916 and 1927.
Mind you, if the Ipswich region had been more populated in 1893 it’s a fair bet that many more lives than 35 would have been lost when 914mm of rain fell in a 24-hour period. (I’m being all scientific here, for Bob Brown. What I really mean is that three feet of rain fell in a day.)
And do I need to point out that the 1852 Gundagai Flood, still our biggest killer flood, came just a year and a few months after what is probably the world’s greatest known inferno, involving at least one quarter of Victoria?
But such scrapings rescued from the memory hole would be lost on Bob Brown. He’s probably far too sciency for all this anecdote. An upholstery-in-space kind of guy, doncha know.
171
housing and mobility. Go figure.
10
?
40
I think he’s trying to say that in the old days housing was built on floodplains because the settlers had no records going back 200 years to tell them that those areas flooded – regularly.
As that information became available through experience those old towns shifted up the hill (become mobile) and so, mobility accounts for the reduced number of deaths from drowning due to floods.
Or something. But he should also have mentioned levies.
There’s no doubt Gee Aye is a master at clear and concise communication. No?
30
the “housing” was poorly constructed and in vulnerable positions. Mobility was they could not escape due to lack of warning and lack of roads and transport.
10
Also, three foot of rain did fall in one day, measured, in the 1893 flood. Which flood was more than matched in height by a flood in the mid-1820s. No houses, no death toll, no coal…just a huge bunch of rain.
Interesting that the Gundagai flood has since been topped in terms of river height. Not much coal involved, though. The record height was reached in 1853. No coal!
http://floodlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/flood-marks-gundagai-australia.jpg
Gundagai records are a bit thin, but nearby Tumut has an old gauge back to 1886, still read. It shows that the driest year was 1967 (ahead of 1944) and the wettest year was 1956, which just pipped 1950. The highest daily fall was 125mm (1897).
Of course, floods come in different ways and don’t even need to result from local rain. There is only one thing amazing about any of this, and that is the fact that Bob Brown or Tim Flannery can still buy lunch anywhere in Australia. There are even people who still buy lunch for them. Now that really ought to be unprecedented, to borrow a favourite term of the climate ‘Ndrangheta.
40
And usually close to water supply
00
re 5.2.111 as to why towns were built on flood plains
00
No poly pipe!
10
Historic record of weather variability so inconvenient to the
Warmista massage …’Yikes, it’s unprecedented!’based on the Myth of
the Hockey Stick shaft …’We hafta’ get rid of the Medieval Warming
Period’ and lo!
See-saw climate revealed in the longest temperature record, CET, cross -referenced by historical data, farmers’ almanacs, glacier records,
ships’logs etc. See Tony Brown’s ‘Long Slow Thaw.’ Warmista’s sheeple
don’t choose to go there.
https://judithcurry.com/2011/12/01/the-long-slow-thaw/
20
ABC’s most prolific spokesman “Max Hype” in action again
60
‘Major Edmund Lockyer mentioned the evidence of a large flood while in the area of today’s Mount Crosby pumping station – “marks of drift grass and pieces of wood washed up on the sides of the banks and up into the branches of the trees, marked the flood to rise here of one hundred feet”. Lockyer’s descendant, Nicholas Lockyer, in 1919 made the following remarks: “the official record of the flood level of the river on the 4th February 1893 at the Pumping Station, the site of which is within a mile of Lockyer’s camp, was 94 feet 10.5 inches. His remarks would seem to suggest that between Oxley’s visit in September 1824 and his [Major Edmund Lockyer] own in September 1825, the river had experienced a flood as great as that subsequently experienced in February 1893.”‘ – Brisbane City Council 1976 info
Er, yes, that was a hundred feet, decades before the 1893 deluge. Of course, the Fed Drought was just around the corner after the 1890s. 1902 remains the region’s driest year, ahead of 1919 at the main gauge. Can’t win on this continent, can you?
Look ma, no coal! (Go figure.)
50
M
Some of our local info.
According to the available rainfall records nothing much happened around here in May 1917. In actuality one morning it was observed that overnight the next creek down was running the main stream uphill. The only rainfall recording of note was one of the properties on that creek had a kerosene tin bucket filled to overflowing overnight. I found an old one and that was 14 inches high.
2012 was likely the biggest flood seen by Europeans in that main creek. Our house is built on a cypress pine sandhill beside the creek, which likely provided the sand. We would need around another metre of water to get under the house, which would put floodwater a long way east of the creek where Europeans likely have never seen it.
Geoff Pickup (was CSIRO Rangeland Alice Springs) used to talk of the evidence of paleo floods.
40
That’s interesting mosomo, have you a link or other reference? I’d love to read the whole record.
20
https://tinyurl.com/y73tcg9b
Page 65 for the quoted bit.
Cheers Ted.
10
Thanks
10
Talking of drought years. Mostly people talk of calendar years, but right now another week without rain will give us a very low twelve month period’s rainfall.
10
The absence of ants — entomologist confirms first Saharan farming 10,000 years ago
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-03/uoh-tao031618.php
50
I’m 67 years old, and I keep myself fit, and hopefully, I have many years left in me yet.
I’m of the opinion that there will not be Nuclear Power Plants in Australia in my lifetime.
When the real truth gets out about coal fired power, the Nuclear Power Plant debate will become redundant.
Either way, EVERY political party will just shift it into the ‘too hard’ basket.
Tony.
70
Hmm, pressed the wrong reply button, as this was meant for the comment immediately below this one, Ian1649 Comment 7.
Sorry.
Tony.
20
Tony
I had to look and see if you’d answered the question before it was posed. But no.
20
I am older, so don’t expect to see nuclear power here either.
However, barring the intervention of Armageddon, nuclear will be recognized well within 50 years as the way of the future. Even now the biggest factor negating nuclear is the dream of a far better nuclear becoming available.
As for Armageddon. The AGW scam is working hard to bring it on.
30
From the first paragraph of that article;
In addition to revelations about early agricultural practices, there could be a lesson for the future, if global warming leads to a necessity for alternative crops.
Sigh.
Had to squeeze a GW reference in. They really can’t help themselves, can they?
10
Why a nuclear industry would be good for SA and be it’s economic salvation. I live in hope that one day an Australian Donald Trump will lead us rather than the wishy washy socialists in both major parties.
https://stopthesethings.com/2018/03/20/power-vacuum-australias-energy-crisis-screaming-out-for-nuclear-option/
100
I like it,
but perhaps “socialists” doesn’t quite get the idea.
How about “opportunists”.
60
Opportunistic Socialists.
80
That certainly has more direction to it.
50
Vultures, you mean?
50
OSVs?
10
Seems you gots real vultures down der; yours only eat the already dead folk! Here in da USA we gots political vultures that consume everything including each-other, and even small rocks! 🙂
21
Yo, KK, nice little bit of rain 🙂
Hunter region needed this.
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/radar/nsw/newcastle/128km
23
Certainly is. A few weeks ago we had that first rain and the lawn went from 80% brown to 80% green in two days.
This should restore normal. Bloody mowing.
30
Kinky Keith
March 21, 2018 at 1:21
“This should restore normal. Bloody mowing.” Da kids need do mowing, along wid weeding da strawberries. Wat else are kids useful for? 🙂
01
The idea of building a nuclear power plant in South Australia is a good idea, a tender process is required and the competition fierce.
China plans to start building eight more in their homeland this year and would no doubt relish the opportunity.
Forget the China Infrastructure Bank for financing, Beijing will orchestrate a private company (off the shelf in Hong Kong) to carry the load.
40
Without large scale reneging on LGC and FIT contracts it would destroy what is left of the dispatchable base load generation, and the windmills will keep coming and demanding market access.
Renewables must be loudly denounced years before any new conventional or nuclear power plant can be built.
50
True, but beforehand there has to be a change in the weather and the ABC admit they got climate change all wrong.
At that point we could expect a renaissance in traditional power generation.
40
On that particular post I commented:
“Little of this is credible. One does, I seem to recall from somewhere, require a considerable cadre of nuclear engineers to run such a plant. From where are they to come?
“The argument from a survey without details is rarely if ever convincing. South Australians have made it perfectly clear they prefer nuclear waste kept in hospitals rather than a dedicated waste facility. They will not accept nuclear power generation in their backyard. Rightly or wrongly, “Fukushima” trumps anything on offer. And mention of Fukushima brings us to the final point here.
“That is the notion, implicit in the above, that the Government of South Australian might be entrusted with managing such a facility. The proposition is risible. Government here cannot run a nursing home efficiently or effectively. The hospitals are full and it’s only March. Government has, over the past half-century and more (possibly beginning in 1960 or thereabouts), reduced its systems of education, notably schools but universities (so-called) as well, to the pitiful purposes of the replication of linguistic and disciplinary ignorance and prejudice.
“It’s worth recalling that Roxby Downs only happened because one Labor member of the Legislative Council voted with the government of the day. SA has yet to erect a statue of Norm Foster. Why? A basic distrust of history I suspect. Think of SA without the Olympic Dam mine.
“Coal offers the only real alternative to penury, ever diminishing public morale and depopulation.”
Further on coal see “Clean Coal Is The Way To Power Africa – And South African Academics Know How“.
30
So best we buy some nuclear subs to train up operators.
00
Ian1946, the only way we will ever get a nuclear industry here is to wait until the crash and burn scenario plays out in full and as long as China doesn’t take us over we can look forward to a new age in politics once all socialist tendencies are purged. Until then we have no choice but to put up with the current two major leftist parties. Of course voters could wise up and vote overwhelmingly for the AC Party but I know that’s just a dream.
30
‘… a new age in politics once all socialist tendencies are purged.’
Predicting political outcomes is no easy road, but its more likely that Australia will continue to move left under federal Labor.
The smaller parties, the splitters, need to join forces with a solid platform, otherwise they will slowly drift into oblivion.
10
Indeed that’s the current trend, and if it continues the logical conclusion is a crash and burn scenario. It won’t take much for our economy to go over the cliff if Shorten becomes PM. Then again a much slower path to the same end under LNP would be so unbearable. Much like a very bad toothache. Better to get it fixed sooner rather than later no matter how much one hates going to the dentist.
20
The economy won’t go over the cliff because our biggest trading partner won’t allow it.
In a worst case situation, another economic rout like the GFC coming out of the USA, would only have a limited impact.
If the yuan took the place of the US dollar then economic depressions should theoretically become a thing of the past.
So when Shorten becomes PM after the next election the pseudo Marxists will reign supreme, with the blessing of Xi.
00
Yes China will very likley save us but if they do Australia will be a very different country to what is is today. That I can be 100% certain about. Unfortunately for the Greenies they will be the first to be disposed of.
20
The first wave has already arrived and they are polite, sober and hardworking.
Some of you who are still in capital cities may need to consider your future.
00
Peter S mention the Australian Conservatives.
The C energy policy is;
https://www.conservatives.org.au/our_policies#energy
80
Yes their policies are highly commendable. Unfortunately for this nation they are falling on deaf ears. Anyone with intelligence, common sense and deductive reasoning powers greater than those of a rodent would not be hesitating at voting for them instead of the LNP and ALP+Greens. So as I said many times we get the government we deserve so don’t blame the government, blame the voters. Democracy is a wonderful thing only when the voters are not fools.
30
AUDIO: 20 Mar: Breitbart: Exclusive–‘Smash and Grab’: Schweizer Explains How Obama Weaponized Regulations to Enrich His Buddies
by Robert Kraychik
Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, joined Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight to discuss revelations in his latest book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, including how former President Barack Obama’s “smash and grab” strategy allowed friends to buy up various companies for “pennies on the dollar” following market devaluations resulting from the Obama administration’s regulatory policies. Some of the ill-gotten funds later found their way into the Obama Foundation.
“This one was really surprising because, I have to say, I did not think of Barack Obama as somebody who was necessarily involved in financial corruption,” replied Schweizer. “I mean, there are all these controversies or certain issues about his policies, but Barack Obama has this best friend that few people have ever heard of, a guy named Marty Nesbitt. When Barack Obama is reelected in 2012, his best friend in the world, Marty Nesbitt, sets up this private equity fund called Vistria, and Vistria says in its corporate documents, explicitly, that it is designed to invest in highly regulated industries, and when your best friend is the regulator-in-chief, I guess that makes sense, and what happens is, they make a series of investments or deals based on companies or industries that are being smashed by the Obama administration’s regulations.”…
Schweizer described Obama’s “smash and grab” strategy as repeatedly used across Obama’s presidential tenure, with beneficiaries such as Tom Steyer and George Soros. He further noted that such ill-gotten funds partly find their way into the Obama Foundation via Nesbitt’s financing.
“This pattern is repeated over and over and over again, not just with Marty Nesbitt, but with people like the environmentalist investor Tom Steyer [and] George Soros,” Schweizer said. “Barack Obama smashes coal companies, [and] what do these guys do? They go in, they buy them for pennies on the dollar, and when the regulatory weight is lifted, their valuations increase, and they make a lot of money, and you see that pattern in all of these industries. So what you see is these crusades that Obama is going on related to companies that are supposedly doing all these evil things really has this profit or money-making component to it that I was unaware of, and a lot of other people were unaware of. Now, in a sense, the favor gets returned because Marty Nesbitt is now the chairman of the Obama Foundation and is pouring money into that institution and is responsible for raising it so Barack Obama’s legacy can be applauded in Chicago.”
AUDIO: 23mins08secs
http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2018/03/20/smash-grab-schweizer-explains-how-obama-weaponized-regulations-enrich-buddies/
70
Ah! This explains another revelation in the book: Joe Biden’s son flew with him on Air Force 2 to China when discussing the disputed islands in the South China Sea. Opinion is that he was soft on China but it is not opinion that ten days later China gave the younger Biden $1.5 bill for a private equity investment. Pat’s post explains what that money was used for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vghoyKoR2NQ
40
20 Mar: WashingtonExaminer: Obama used executive powers to benefit close friends’ private investment firms: Book
by Katelyn Caralle
President Obama used his executive powers to attack industries to lower the value of certain companies, allowing his friends in the private sector to swoop in and buy them up at reduced prices, according to Peter (Clinton Cash) Schweizer’s new book Secret Empires: How Our Politicians Hide Corruption and Enrich Their Families and Friends.
The book, released Tuesday, said Obama and his administration would deem industries either destructive to the environment or exploitative for the financial and professional gain of his friends, including industries such as coal mining, offshore drilling, cash advance companies, and for-profit colleges…
Schweizer described emails that he said show department officials were talking to Wall Street investors and leaking information about regulations.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/obama-used-executive-powers-to-benefit-close-friends-private-investment-firms-book
20 Mar: Fox News: ‘Follow the Money’: Schweizer Exposes How Political Elites ‘Hide Corruption’
Claims money from China influencing decisions
In “Secret Empires” Schweizer argues that China gained leverage over powerful American politicians like former Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell by targeting their families with investment opportunities and business deals.
On “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday, Schweizer said he went after lawmakers on both sides of the aisle because he followed the evidence wherever it led.
“I think that people are very interested and concerned about corruption in Washington, D.C.,” he said…
Schweizer said that Biden and his son, Hunter, traveled to Beijing in December 2013, and the vice president was criticized for “going soft” on China on critical issues like the South China Sea and trade. Ten days after they left, an investment firm owned by Hunter Biden scored a $1.5 billion private equity deal from the Chinese government, he explained.
“If Joe Biden gets a $1,500 campaign contribution or a $1,500 gift or his wife does, it has to be disclosed. But if your kids or a sibling or a parent scores $1.5 billion from a foreign government, they’re not required to disclose it. That’s gotta change,” Schweizer said…
Schweizer also pointed out that McConnell is married to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, whose family is in the shipping industry and is “basically completely dependent” on remaining in the good graces of the Chinese government.
In 2008, he said, Chao’s father, James Chao, gave McConnell a gift of somewhere between $5 million and $25 million.
“What people don’t realize is, where did that money come from? It came from Chinese government, specifically the China state shipbuilding corporation, who’s the business partner with the Chao’s. It’s the largest military contractor in China,” Schweizer said. “If you look at Mitch McConnell’s record in the Senate, he has become increasingly soft on China, as it relates to military issues or trade issues.”
“It’s about follow the money. This is where we always end up when we look at corruption in politics. Follow the money.”…
Editor’s Note: A spokesman for Chris Heinz denies Schweizer’s claims from the interview, saying Heinz and his family were not involved with the private equity deal in China.
http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/03/20/peter-schweizer-biden-kerry-mcconnell-chao-hide-corruption-china-deals
20
Heartfelt commiserations to the people of Tathra, on the south coast of NSW, devastated by Sundays catastrophic bushfire.
Miranda Devine’s article in the Daily Telegraph today (pg 13) talks of the contribution of environmental protection zoning to the bush and forests around Tathra (as well as Merimbula and Eden). The lack of hazard reduction over the last few decades has contributed significantly to the intensity of this event.
Of course the idiot greens are trying to link it to Climate change, warming , climate catastrophe, Climate Armageddon or whatever the latest Meme is they can invent.
The locals know better.
Much of the east coast of new south wales has towns in same situation.
It may take a few more of these events unfortunately (it was pure luck that there were no casualties) before a back lash fully develops.
Unfortunately inner city greens who mostly live in an urban inner city virtual reality world probably will most likely never understand or comprehend.
Ideology for them will always take precedence.
141
mal,
Spot on but let me also add that the whole of the South coast of NSW between Batemans Bay and the Victorian border is ripe for conflagration. Most of it is National Park or nature reserve or State Forest. It is all appallingly managed.
I just spent three months walking through much of it. Gulaga is set to explode; as is the Deua and Moruya State forest. The fire trails, where they exist, are overgrown and impassable, many of the access roads are barred by locked gates. The management seems to be restricted to erecting signs in trees saying that there are hidden cameras in trees watching everything you do whilst in the forest – so don’t take a leak without looking up and smiling.
The NSW government needs to open the whole area up to well managed forestry activity. Get the mills running again and let the forest workers manage the vast areas of unproductive resource. The NPWS people have no idea.
60
That’s bad news re. NSW. Our major problem here is the regrowth of scrub along the roadsides. I do know that Forest Fire Management Vic have been working very hard in this area to keep tracks clear and making sure unsafe trees are dealt with in the state forests. You have to trust that most visitors appreciate this and behave sensibly. Unfortunately, some do not, as last week’s fire in the Cathedral Range proves.
32
The National Spark and Wildfire Service?
80
That needs to be put around more widely.
That’s all they’re good for.
They put big signs up after a new national park is declared, then lock the gate and let nature take it’s course.
20
As Trump says, your fired.
20
I see that Canada’s Justin Trudeau may be having some problems with his popularity: “Justin Trudeau Approval Rating Now Below President Trump as Right Wing Parties Surge In Canada”
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/03/20/trudeau-approval-rating-trump-right-wing-parties-surge-canada/
90
Yes it appears left wing elements all over the Western and European world are starting to falter, except here in Australia where for some reason they are still flourishing, in particular in the only significant conservative party we once had – the LNP. One term with Shorten though should turn the tide once and for all, unless we are dumber than I thought.
30
To echo an alarmist phrase “Australia is falling behind” …the conservative trend
00
20 Mar: Breitbart: Exclusive: Peter Schweizer Calls for ‘Corrupt Practices Act’ to End Foreign Government Buyoffs of U.S. Politicians Through Family, Friends
by Robert Kraychik
Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, joined SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight co-hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on Monday to explain how politicians corruptly monetize political power as detailed in his latest book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.
***Schweizer described the Chinese government as “freaked out” over the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, owing to the 45th president’s decades-long view of the “rising threat of China.”
“So the election of Donald Trump, there’s no other way to say it, it completely freaked out the Chinese government because Trump has really been focused — whether one agrees with him on trade policy or not — he has focused since the 1980s on what he regards as a rising threat of China; whether it relates to trade, economics, or military power,” surmised Schweizer.
According to Schweizer, China’s decision to appoint McConnell’s sister-in-law, Angela Chao, to the Bank of China’s board of directors — ten days after 2016’s presidential election — was a response to the election of Trump to the White House.
“So when [Donald Trump] gets elected in 2016, China is in a panic. So one of the things that happens is, they appoint, really, the first American, or only the second foreigner to the Bank of China,” Schweizer said. “Now, the Bank of China is government-run, government-controlled, is sort of the backbone of the Chinese government’s economic diplomacy around the world. Ten days after Donald Trump is elected, they put Elaine Chao’s sister — Mitch McConnell’s sister-in-law — on the board of directors of the fourth largest bank in the world, which is run by the Chinese communist government. It’s a shocking development, and, again, unprecedented in American history that you would have senior political leaders have immediate family members that are sitting on the board of foreign government-owned businesses.”
Schweizer explained what he dubbed Barack Obama’s “smash and grab” approach to enriching his friends and allies. The 44th president, he said, would weaponize regulatory policy to devalue certain companies to make them vulnerable to acquisition…
“What can we do stop this?” asked Mansour. “What is your solution? You always offer solutions in your books.”
Schweizer recommended a domestic version of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: criminalize the purchase of political influence via business arrangements between foreign governments and the children of politicians.
“First of all, we have something on the books in the United States called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” indicated Schweizer. “So, for example, J.P. Morgan, the big investment house, was charged and fined for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Why? Because they were hiring the children of communist party officials in China in the hopes of getting business favors from the government down the road. My approach is, why don’t we apply the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and create a Washington Corrupt Practices Act? Think about this for a second. J.P. Morgan — an American company — does something like this, it’s illegal. China does it to our politicians, there’s nothing illegal about it, at all, and that is outrageous, and the rules are written that way because the rule makers want their children to be able to cash in.”
Schweizer also called for the extension of financial disclosure requirements for politicians to include politicians’ immediate family members.
“The second solution is, there needs to be wider disclosure” advised Schweizer. “There needs to be a requirement that if you are an elected official in Congress or in the executive branch, and you have a family member, whether that’s a parent, a sibling, or a child, who has foreign governments with which they are making money and they are doing deals, that needs to be disclosed. Right now, it’s not. Again, I go back to the Biden example: $1,500 campaign contribution has to be disclosed. A $1,500 stock investment in a German company has to be disclosed. A $1.5 billion private equity deal to his kid doesn’t have to be disclosed, and that has got to change.”
http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2018/03/20/schweizer-calls-corrupt-practices-act-end-foreign-government-buyoffs-u-s-politicians-family-friends/
50
And the same idea in Australia e.g. the Turnbull offspring?
100
Shhhhh! That’s top secret.
42
Merely bridge rules – one peek is better than two finesses
20
20 Mar: SOFREP: Schweizer book details Chinese influence peddling on the halls of American power
By C. Danielle Bizier
(SOFREP: Trusted News and Intelligence From Spec Ops Veterans)
Another notable attempt to peddle influence on prominent Americans was China’s efforts to get into business with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, by offering him $600 million towards an outstanding debt on a Manhattan property owed by Kushner’s family business. Kushner turned down the offer but it outlines the hands that the Chinese try to play at the highest levels of American power…
https://sofrep.com/100960/schweizer-book-details-chinese-influence-peddling-on-the-halls-of-american-power/
4mins30secs in: Hannity mentions Jared Kushner is also on the cover of the book. Schweizer responds that he has included Kushner to warn him. (btw this is the first of a number of interviews Hannity has planned with Schweizer):
20 Mar: Youtube: 6mins03secs: Sean Hannity Show: Peter Schweizer on Hannity: Joe Biden’s Son 1.5 BILLION Private Equity DEAL with China just 1 of 3!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vghoyKoR2NQ
10
The Chinese play the long game and just get on with doing real things. A bit less focussed on the grand gestures. Participating, engaging, building, influencing everywhere that will benefit them , all the time.
00
READ ALL. if you have problems with the WND website (for years it has been difficult to access easily), try to link to the “Print” version, which opens easily:
18 Mar: WND: FOREIGN INFLUENCE? HOW MCCONNELL GOT RICH OFF CHINA
Senate leader, Transportation secretary spouse exposed in new book
It’s a dirty little Washington insider story that has been under the radar for 18 years.
How Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife, current Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, used their political influence in Washington to tap into what has become a personal fortune thanks to direct or indirect Chinese cash…
Along the way, McConnell went from being a Senate leader wary of China to its biggest booster, while Chao parlayed more Chinese cash into turning the Heritage Foundation’s policy toward China and securing a Cabinet post in George W. Bush’s administration…
The story is about to get hotter as investigative reporter Peter Schweizer’s newest book, “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” releases Tuesday. It was Schweizer who authored 2016’s “Clinton Cash,” exposing the remarkable ways Bill and Hillary Clinton used their family foundation to rake in cash, much of it foreign, even when she was serving as U.S. secretary of state…
WND has been reporting these ties, the China-to-Washington money-go-round and even Chao’s influence at the Heritage Foundation when she worked there in the 1990s and again, following her time in the Bush administration, from 2009 through 2012, as a rainmaker who turned the leading conservative think tank into one that had virtually negative to say about Beijing during her time there…
She (Chao) has lobbied for normalized trade with China and has downplayed concerns about China’s growing military threat, espionage campaigns in the U.S. and human-rights abuses…
Wu, a Hoover Institution fellow, criticizes Chao for glossing over the fact that China is and was run by Communist hard-liners who pump proceeds from U.S. trade back into military front companies run by a privileged class. A prominent human-rights activist, Wu spent about two decades in Chinese prisons for his political views.
“I’m very surprised Bush would pick her to head labor, especially when most of the profits from trade with China goes into the pockets of socialist leaders, not workers,” Wu said.
Both Chao and McConnell served on the board of the China Foundation, a nonprofit charity devoted to helping develop rural parts of China.
McConnell has been China’s biggest Republican booster in the Senate. Chao sought out John Huang to help raise money for Republican senators in 1989 – beating Bill and Hillary Clinton to the punch in 1992. In 1993, Huang, then head of Lippo Bank, rounded up a coalition of Chinese banks and individuals to sponsor Chao’s visit to Los Angeles as the new head of United Way. Huang gave McConnell $2,000 in illegal donations as part of a foreign money-laundering scheme – one of only two contributions Huang made to Republicans…
***As recently as November 2016, when President Trump nominated Chang for secretary of transportation, WND reported on her relationship with China and other concerns including her deep ties with the ***anti-coal Bloomberg Foundation, as well as her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership…
What has Chao been up to more recently – before being selected by Trump for the Cabinet post?
Chao served on the board of directors of Bloomberg Philanthropies, the foundation started by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, another anti-Trumper who flirted with the notion of running a third-party candidacy against him. Bloomberg gives the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign $50 million a year. The objective? To end the country’s reliance on “dirty coal, plant-by-plant, community-by-community, state-by-state.” Trump promised to put the coal miners back to work.
Chao has also served on the board of Wells Fargo, which has bankrolled anti-coal efforts. Ironic since McConnell’s home state is Kentucky – coal country…READ ALL
http://www.wnd.com/2018/03/foreign-influence-how-mcconnell-got-rich-off-china/
10
note: WND article has no attribution. apparently a WND staff piece.
10
20 Mar: ClimateDepot: Marc Morano: ‘Global warming’ on trial: Prominent scientists submit climate skeptics’ case to federal court
Climate Depot Exclusive
Three prominent skeptical scientists have submitted their climate report to the federal court for the landmark March 21 climate science on trial hearing. See: Federal court will hold first-ever hearing on ‘climate change’ science – “A federal judge in San Francisco has ordered parties in a landmark global warming lawsuit to hold what could be the first-ever U.S. court hearing on the science of climate change.”
Full submitted skeptical scientists report: Tutorial Professor Presentation (LINK)
Excerpts:
Professors William Happer, Steven E. Koonin, and Richard S. Lindzen respectfully ask the Court to accept their presentation (attached to this motion as Exhibit A) in response to the Court’s questions. The professors would be honored to participate directly in the tutorial if the Court desires. A. Identity of the
William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics Emeritus at Princeton University. Dr. Happer also has extensive experience advising the government on energy research and policy, having served President George H.W. Bush’s administration as the director of energy research in the Department of Energy.
Steven E. Koonin is the founding director of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. Dr. Koonin previously served as the second Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy in President Barack Obama’s administration. In this role, Dr. Koonin oversaw science, energy, and security activities.
Richard S. Lindzen is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Lindzen’s research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity. Each of the professors has been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, a highly selective nonprofit organization recognizing the country’s most distinguished researchers.
The Court’s specified questions include topics that have been the subject of the professors’ study and analysis for decades. These men have been thought and policy leaders in the scientific community and in the administrations of two different U.S. Presidents. They have extensive research experience with the specific issues the Court identified. As such, they offer a valuable perspective on these issues.
The attached presentation contains three sections…READ ALL
http://www.climatedepot.com/2018/03/20/global-warming-on-trial-prominent-scientists-submit-climate-skeptics-case-to-federal-court/
10
Christopher Monckton has also contributed to this tutorial — here.
20
Crossroads
paste into VLC
Awesome!
20
Sorry Kevin but the 2005 Albert Hall version is much better
00
Pierre Gosselin reports at NoTricksZone on Germany’s War On Diesel Takes A Setback … Environment Ministry Activism Exposed, Absurd Risk Claims
Those of us who’ve educated ourselves with the help of John Brignell’s Sorry, wrong number! and its companion The epidemiologists – Have they got the scares for you! will immediately suspect the figure to be on derived from bad epidemiology serving political purpose.
The absurdity of the 6000 premature deaths is that the “causal extrapolation” of notional exposure and premature deaths instructs us that pack-a-day smokers will likely be dead after about 3 months after they develop the habit. (Not a good business model for the tobacco industry and in many places worse for the government revenue collectors.) But millions of smokers aren’t dropping like flies; so the assumption causality is demonstrably false.
The sane among us understand that we should measure waht is important; not make important what we can measure.
Not surprising to find that the single interest fanatics have their thumbs on the scales.
It has not gone unnoticed by administrations that the poor location of their measurement stations has been exposed; but they argue that they’ve done nothing wrong; even after measurements taken just a few metres into the adjacent parkland (at the required 25 metres from intersections) are less than half the figures of the roadside stations.
The setting of environmental exposure limits has been arbitrary for decades. Limits are in places at less 1% of what is clinically considered to be a health concern (e.g. US CDC limits on NO2). Limits have been constantly reduced because bureaucrats have perceived it their duty to reduce and those who “guide” them understand how to boil a frog.
Pursuit of the absurd has resulted in e.g. vehicle emissions controls being unnecessarily complex, expensive, heavy and requiring energy to fuel them. None of that can be justified by rational health concerns.
30
Classic make it happen tactic, and then frighten the people will wild threats of death and destruction.
And then push for a transition to ….. say, EV.
21
from westcoast usa http://balance10.blogspot.com/2018/03/assorted-artwork-and-photos.html
00
Thunderstorms and heavy rain all day so far and forecast to continue …
Issued at 12:12 pm Wednesday, 21 March 2018.
INTENSE RAIN OVER NEWCASTLE, HUNTER AND MID NORTH COAST
Weather Situation: A coastal trough along central parts of the coast, cradled between two strong high pressure systems, is bringing widespread rainfall to the New South Wales coast. Intense bursts of rain, especially associated with thunderstorm activity, are expected about Newcastle and large areas of the Hunter and Mid North Coast during Wednesday and Thursday. This may lead to dangerous conditions in these areas.
HEAVY RAIN which may lead to FLASH FLOODING is expected over Newcastle, the Lower Hunter and parts of the Mid North Coast during Wednesday and Thursday, particularly associated with thunderstorm activity.
VERY HEAVY RAINFALL, with rainfall rates exceeding 70 mm in one hour, are also possible with thunderstorms in these areas.
100mm to 200mm is expected over the warning area during Wednesday. Similar amounts are expected on Thursday. Some locations are likely to receive more than 200mm in a 24 hour period.
Locations which may be affected include Newcastle, Gosford, Cessnock, Maitland, Dungog, Barrington Tops, Singleton, Wyong, The Entrance, Lake Macquarie, Woy Woy, Dungog, Port Stephens, Port Macquarie and Buledelah.
Dungog recorded 68mm in 1 hour from 4:10am to 5:10am associated with thunderstorms.
21
20 Mar: RealClimateScience: Tony Heller: NOAA Data Tampering Approaching 2.5 Degrees
https://realclimatescience.com/2018/03/noaa-data-tampering-approaching-2-5-degrees/
10
Interesting the calls for the Andrews govt to be sacked over the diddling of tax payer money to help with the last election .
Apparently stealing from your employer is ok if you pay it back when caught and never mind the million spent trying to keep it out of our gaze in the first place .
30
If bored with some time to kill and in need of a good laugh, check this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdu1q-RFG_w
I’m gobsmacked at the stupidity some pedal. It’s funnier than chem trails.
20
Same sort of people who don’t believe man went to the moon and the earth is flat. Complete fools.
00
thats how some see the participants here 🙂
10
20 Mar: CarbonPulse: Green groups join Sierra Club lawsuit against San Diego carbon offset plan
A number of environmental organisations on Monday signed on to a lawsuit against the County of San Diego’s revised Climate Action Plan (CAP), alleging that the programme relies on offsets imported from out-of-state or abroad to counteract local, potentially environmentally-damaging development.
20 Mar: CarbonPulse: China’s HFC-23 producers gear up for annual pay-out, as subsidies continue to eclipse lost CER revenues
Carbon credits from HFC-23 projects were banned from most of the world’s carbon markets in 2013 amid concerns over market manipulation, but Chinese HFC-23 projects still earn almost twice as much as projects still selling UN-issued offsets thanks to a government subsidy programme.
20 Mar: CarbonPulse: Singapore parliament approves carbon tax
Singapore’s parliament on Tuesday approved the government’s new tax on carbon emissions, meaning from next year the city state will be the first Asian nation to implement a national tax on CO2 emissions.
can’t imagine Carbon Pulse would mention the reason for the “carbon tax”…nothing whatsoever to do with CAGW, of course. it isn’t even mentioned. read all:
2 pages: 15 Mar: Nikkei Asian Review: William Pesek: Singapore is about to raise taxes, and good for them
City-state’s brave move shows leadership and a new model for Asia
by William Pesek
(William Pesek is a Tokyo-based journalist and author of “Japanization: What the World Can Learn from Japan’s Lost Decades.” He has written for Bloomberg and Barron’s)
As Singapore meddles with breaking the ultimate taboo of hiking taxes, Lee Hsien Loong’s government is offering something truly shocking — leadership…
Japan’s population is aging as rapidly as Singapore’s and fertility is just as scarce, yet Tokyo keeps pushing the central bank to save the day. China faces risks of social unrest due to similar demographics, yet Xi Jinping thinks becoming president forever is the answer. Donald Trump’s U.S., like Singapore, has an inequality dilemma, and Trump’s response is massive welfare for plutocrats.
Singapore is moving boldly, and wisely, in a different direction. The government is raising levies on property, goods and services, ***carbon and certain imported services…
https://asia.nikkei.com/magazine/20180315/Viewpoints/William-Pesek-Singapore-is-about-to-raise-taxes-and-good-for-them
10
Well it’s 04:00 Eastern time here. On this first day of Astronomical Spring I awoke to 2″ of global warming on the ground in North Central Indiana and it’s still snowing lightly. I have about 500 mi to drive today taking a refer load of Nestles product to a grocery warehouse in Milton, PA. Anticipating bad road conditions I’m going to depart about 2 hours earlier than scheduled. It’s going to be a long day but since Milton is north of the worst of the global warming just off I-80 it should not be nearly as bad as if I had to drive further south on I-70. The real question is where my backhaul will be picked up after I deliver. The brokerage department who sets up those loads doesn’t pay attention to weather forecasts or road conditions. So there is a chance that after I deliver tomorrow morning I will be forced to try and drive south from Milton into the teeth of this Nor Easter where snowfall could amount to 2 feet or more and shippers will be shutdown. These are the times this driver is happy I’m paid a salary.
100
Latest anti Adani propaganda claims the mine could/ possibly/ might/ affect the desert oasis that’s nearby ,last I looked the mine was not in the desert and according to the watermelons it was smack bang in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef .
31
But Robert, everybody knows the Great Barrier Reef is a desert now.
All the coral has gone and the water is so hot the geotechnicians are looking to install geothermal electricity generators over the full 2,500 kilometres of what once was coral reef.
There is a problem though, and that is the competition for access to the site since the massive heat in that part of the Coral Sea generates consistent winds 24/7/365 and the Windmillers are determined to use it for sea based windturbines and need to keep the geothermal techos out of the place so that they don’t steel the heat.
30
Robert,
And who is the carrier of this doom and gloom?
None other than leader of the ant-Adani gang – THEIR ABC.
40
That Max Hype again!
10
I think their concerns where more about the loader and traffic through the reef
00
talk about lost the plot…or lost their minds. why is it ok to print this kind of rubbish? naturally, it is all over the British FakeNewsMSM.
20 Mar: Daily Mail: Anyone for ANCHOVIES and chips? The classic British dishes ‘under threat due to climate change’ (and it means we could be eating the salty fish instead of cod)
Key ingredients in iconic meals face shortages and price rises, the WWF warns
It could result in anchovies replacing cod in fish and chips, the report states
Chicken to be fed on insects and algae instead of soy, making it more expensive
By Imogen Blake
Other key ingredients of a tikka masala, such as rice, tomatoes and onions could all face price rises and shortages as a result of warmer conditions and changing weather patterns.
Other increasingly popular dishes such as ‘smashed avocado on toast’ and even the morning staple for millions, a cup of coffee, are at risk from global warming…
In a report published ahead of Earth Hour, a world-wide environmental event, WWF warned other dishes such as cheese ploughman’s and lamb cawl – Welsh lamb stew – could also be under threat by 2050…
Even the apples that make up part of the dish may be softer and sweeter in warmer weather conditions, which may also threaten existing orchards and force growing to move north as trees need a period of cold to ensure yields.
Dairy farmers also face increased volatility in sourcing feed as a result of global changes to weather…
It found the most polluting dish was lamb cawl, as a result of the methane produced during digestion by sheep, followed by the ploughman’s, due to the methane from the cows needed to produce the milk for cheese…
This Earth Hour, which takes place at 8.30pm on Saturday March 24, WWF is urging people to make promises to change their life in one small way to help the environment, such as refusing plastic cutlery, carrying a keep cup or cutting back on meat.
Many scientists have predicted that edible insects could be the answer to the world’s looming food crisis – which could lead to them being incorporated into classic dishes too.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-5520691/Favourite-British-dishes-threatened-climate-change-report-warns.html
21 Mar: UK Express: Snow to engulf UK as temperatures plunge over Easter weekend
EASTER 2018 is set to be bitterly cold as forecasters warn of snow and plunging temperatures over the bank holiday weekend, making it the third huge cold spell this month.
By Charlotte Davis
The Met Office has revealed there are signs of a second Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW) of the air high in the atmosphere over the Arctic…
BBC Weather meteorologist Simon King wrote on Twitter: “Who likes trilogies? When you get a sudden stratospheric warming event like we saw in Jan, it often means you can get more than one/two/three bouts of colder weather. #BeastFromTheEast to be continued….?”…
https://www.express.co.uk/news/weather/934364/Easter-weather-2018-forecast-BBC-news-UK-Britain-snow-Met-Office
00
challenge the “endangerment finding”. in the meantime, any business going along with the CAGW scam, even if it’s only by agreeing to disclose their CO2 emissions, deserves to go broke:
20 Mar: Guardian: Can climate litigation save the world?
Courts are a new front line of climate action with cases against governments and oil firms spiralling, and while victories have so far been rare the pressure for change is growing
by Damian Carrington
PHOTO: CHIMNEYS, BLACK SMOKE
On Tuesday, action by 12 UK citizens reaches the high court for the first time, while on Wednesday in San Francisco, the science of climate change will effectively be on trial at a key moment in a lawsuit.
The litigation represents a new front of climate action, with citizens aiming to force stronger moves to cut carbon emissions, and win damages to pay the costs of dealing with the impacts of warming.
They are inspired by momentous cases from the past, from the defeat of big tobacco to the racial desegregation of schools in the US. Big oil is fighting back hard, but though victories have been rare to date wins are more likely in future, as legal experts say the attitudes of judges often shift with the times…
Scientists are now confident they can quantify the emissions resulting from each big company’s fossil fuels – just 90 firms are responsible for two-thirds of all emissions. But lawyers for the fossil fuel companies are robust in their response, saying a causal link to damages is “unprovable”…
Industry lobby groups are also mobilising against climate litigation in the US, with the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) launching a campaign against “politically motivated legal attacks” in November. “It has become clear that these activist plaintiffs’ attorneys, sympathetic academics and agenda-driven media outlets are distorting the use of tort litigation to advance their narratives with the ultimate objective of undermining manufacturers and the engine of the American economy,” said Linda Kelly, NAM general counsel…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/20/can-climate-litigation-save-the-world?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Slack
10
20 Mar: GovernorsWind&SolarEnergyCoalition: Science reform eyed as path to unravel EPA’s endangerment finding
by Scott Waldman
The plan now being developed at U.S. EPA to restrict the science the agency uses could affect the crafting of regulations for years and become one of the most enduring parts of Administrator Scott Pruitt’s legacy.
The plan under consideration is expected to limit the science used in EPA regulation to studies where the data could be published and reproduced. And while the agency is still considering the exact scope of its restrictions, both critics and supporters of the plan agree that it will fundamentally transform the way EPA uses research.
Supporters say it will prevent opaque “secret science” from being used to form regulations that could affect billions of dollars in economic activity. Opponents say it will eliminate from consideration much of the groundbreaking research the agency has used to protect Americans against pollution…
But a group of influential conservative voices, including Trump EPA transition team members and researchers from conservative think tanks, want Pruitt to go further. They want Pruitt — who recently told a group of conservatives gathered at the Heritage Foundation that the agency was working on the issue — to impose the requirement on all science used at the agency. Some even see it as a way to potentially go after the endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, which is the legal underpinning of EPA’s climate regulations.
Science transparency can be used to go after the supporting documents for the endangerment finding, to evaluate its quality, said Pat Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science at the libertarian Cato Institute, which had a representative at the Heritage Foundation meeting. Michaels has long criticized climate models used in future predictions, and he believes that making data around the models transparent would prove his theory and make it easier to pick apart the models.
“We’re all for rigorous examination of the models that are being used, especially the models for the endangerment finding,” he said. “It’s pretty apparent they’re not working well, and if, for some reason, it’s left to me and my few friends to point this out, I think it would be a good idea [and] that the agency should do it.”…
Pruitt mentioned that a plan was forthcoming to a group of conservatives gathered at the Heritage Foundation last week. Some of those who were there, or whose group was in attendance, want Pruitt to go further than the “HONEST Act.”
“I hope that it’s tighter than that,” said Steve Milloy, a former coal executive and member of Trump’s EPA transition team who has pushed the agency to impose such restrictions for years. “I hope that EPA does not regulate at all unless the underlying scientific data can be made available, and I don’t think there is any legislation yet that is that strong.”
Milloy said the final plan would likely not go as far as he would like, because some industry groups, including the pharmaceutical industry, are lobbying against it. He said his goal is that EPA does not rely on any data that cannot be challenged.
“If they don’t want to defend their data, I’m hoping that is the last we see of it,” he said…READ ALL
http://governorswindenergycoalition.org/science-reform-eyed-as-path-to-unravel-epas-endangerment-finding/
00
meant to excerpt this line from Guardian/Damian Carrington litigation article:
But cases are being brought across the globe, with more than 1,000 suits now logged by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia law school in New York.
enough is enough.
00
Heard about the US fracking miracle? Seems it’s going to be a less than miraculous energy source for eastern Europe.
Yep. US politicians and their buddies in Poland, Lithuania, Moldova etc are going hard against North Stream 2 which will vastly increase the flow of Russian gas into Germany and northern Europe. The South Stream has already gone, along with Ukraine’s profits from hosting it.
So what gets put in the place of Russian gas falling cheaply downhill? Why, fracked US gas. There are cost problems…and some embarrassment when supply is short and the US has to rebrand Russian gas import as US export. But you get that.
All should be okay as long as people have money to burn and provided the LNG ship heading to Lithuania doesn’t bump the wood pellet ship heading to the UK.
And to think all we have is a few centuries supply of durrrrdy coal, the North West Shelf and a continent chocka-block with CSG and uranium. No wonder our power is so pricey.
90
Reference please.
12
Here is the American way of “competing”
“US threatens to sanction European firms involved in Russian gas project”
https://www.rt.com/business/421900-us-sanctions-nord-stream-companies/
If US gas were good value for money, they would not need to do this nonsense.
31
“Reference please.”
There are a number of things said by mosomoso. Which of them do you not believe:
1- That Poland and the Baltic States are trying to sabotage Nordstream II – obvious I would have thought.
2- That Poland, the UK and the Baltic States do exactly whatever Washington demands – again obvious.
3- That Ukraine had destroyed its gas-transit business – once again obvious
4- That piped Russian gas is cheaper than gas that can be diverted and that travels by ship – obvious.
5- That the USA is trying to control the gas supplies to Europe – again obvious … do you think the proxy invasion of Syria was to bring about democracy? Like in Iraq?
50
Qatar, Turkey, Sunni pipeline corridors, nice Kurds, naughty Kurds, black-clad villains who execute Westerners against Lawrence of Arabia backdrops, today’s white helmets who look a bit too much like yesterday’s head-loppers…Whew!
It all just got too complicated, didn’t it? Too much script from Bomber Barry and his helpful opponent McCain.
Now it’s on to Eastern Europe, and a gas war with or without the sausage eaters? Gazprom’s CEO points out that already “European LNG terminals are working at one-third of their capacity due to the price competitiveness of Russian gas compared to U.S. LNG.” Even if that claim is half-true, imagine the competitive situation with NS2 operating.
I’m actually sentimental enough to want to see America great. Trying to catch a hundred flies with ten fingers is not the way. Nobody cares that the USSR built the Aswan dam, nor that France went broke fighting the American Revolution. Manipulation is weakness, and the bill is never long in coming.
60
***tell these unelected groups nothing:
19 Mar: BusinessGreen: Mind the gap: Are corporates translating climate risk disclosure into business action?
Analysis by ***CDP and the ***Climate Disclosure Standards Board shows that while more and more corporates are aware of climate risks, few are driving meaningful action to address them.
After all, since the release of the ***Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) guidelines there has been a marked uptick in corporate and investor interest in both the proposed reporting best practices and the wider physical and economic climate impacts they address…
Looking at almost 1,700 companies across 14 countries and 11 sectors which disclose climate-related information to CDP, the report looks at the four main areas covered by the TCFD — governance, strategy, risk management and metrics and targets – and highlights whether companies are adequately prepared for the recommended level of disclosure…
The vast majority of companies, it found, now acknowledge that climate change poses financial risks to their business, with 83 percent recognizing physical risks and 88 percent identifying risks from policy changes and new regulations associated with the low carbon transition.
However, at the same time taking responsibility for climate action is rarely linked to boards’ or management teams’ wages, remuneration packages, bonuses or performance assessment. Moreover, while more than eight in 10 companies oversee climate change issues at boardroom level, only one in 10 provides incentives for board members to effectively manage climate-related risks and opportunities, the report shows…
Jane Stevensen, Task Force Engagement Director at CDP: “Overall, we see there is a surface level of preparedness from companies globally to have board-level oversight of climate risk and opportunity,” she said, pointing to key drivers such as investor pressure, reputational factors, and consumer reaction to climate risks. “What we are not seeing is increased governance translating into climate change mitigation. 2018 is the year when companies need to step up climate action as we approach a ***tipping point. Fundamental to this is driving board level engagement with climate risk throughout the organization.”…
The best performers tended to be found at European countries, with the UK, France and Germany boasting the most effective disclosure. In contrast, companies from China and across the healthcare and financial sectors were found to be lagging behind when it came to enhanced disclosure…
But it is Germany which has the highest number of companies actually providing incentives to the board for management relating to climate change issues — although the proportion is still a fairly low 29 percent, closely followed by France on 25 percent.
At the other end of the scale, the US has the lowest proportion of companies providing board oversight of climate issues at just 66 percent, while China has the lowest number of firms (HOW MANY?) disclosing their greenhouse gases across Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. Canada takes the wooden spoon for the lowest proportion of firms incentivizing their boards to manage climate change issues, at a mere 2 percent…
Simon Messenger, managing director of the CDSB: “Companies are acting fast on renewable energy, reducing emissions and setting a price on carbon…”The next level of action requires a business-wide, strategic approach, which will need board-level involvement. There is still some room for improvement in boardrooms about understanding the links between climate change and business resilience. Incentives are key to motivating people, but the report shows that not every firm has these in place just yet.”…
https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/analysis/3028667/mind-the-gap-are-corporates-turning-climate-risk-disclosure-into-action
00
guess the Greens will rule the countryside:
20 Mar: Guardian Cities: Empty half the Earth of its humans. It’s the only way to save the planet
by Kim Stanley Robinson
(Cities is supported by The Rockefeller Foundation)
(Kim Stanley Robinson is a sci-fi writer. His latest novel, New York 2140, is out now in paperback, and his next novel, Red Moon, will be published in October)
There are now twice as many people as 50 years ago. But, as EO Wilson has argued, they can all survive – in cities
PHOTO CAPTION: ‘We are mongrel creatures on a mongrel planet, and we have to be flexible to survive’ … Wind river, Yukon, Canada. Photograph: Peter Mather
There are nearly eight billion humans alive on the planet now, and that’s a big number: more than twice as many as were alive 50 years ago. It’s an accidental experiment with enormous stakes, as it isn’t clear that the Earth’s biosphere can supply that many people’s needs – or absorb that many wastes and poisons – on a renewable and sustainable basis over the long haul. We’ll only find out by trying it.
Right now we are not succeeding. The Global Footprint Network estimates that we use up our annual supply of renewable resources by August every year, after which we are cutting into non-renewable supplies – in effect stealing from future generations. Eating the seed corn, they used to call it. At the same time we’re pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a rate that is changing the climate in dangerous ways and will certainly damage agriculture.
This situation can’t endure for long – years, perhaps, but not decades…
With people already leaving countrysides all over the world to move to the cities, big regions are emptier of humans than they were a century ago, and getting emptier still. Many villages now have populations of under a thousand, and continue to shrink as most of the young people leave. If these places were redefined (and repriced) as becoming usefully empty, there would be caretaker work for some, gamekeeper work for others, and the rest could go to the cities and get into the main swing of things…
They will have to be green cities, sure. We will have to have decarbonised transport and energy production, white roofs, gardens in every empty lot, full-capture recycling, and all the rest of the technologies of sustainability we are already developing. That includes technologies we call law and justice – the system software, so to speak. Yes, justice: robust women’s rights stabilise families and population. Income adequacy and progressive taxation keep the poorest and richest from damaging the biosphere in the ways that extreme poverty or wealth do. Peace, justice, equality and the rule of law are all necessary survival strategies…
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/20/save-the-planet-half-earth-kim-stanley-robinson
Wikipedia: Kim Stanley Robinson
Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes running through them and feature scientists as heroes…According to an article in The New Yorker, Robinson is “generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers.”…
In 1982 Robinson earned a Ph.D. in English from the UC San Diego. His initial Ph.D. advisor was literary critic and Marxist scholar, Fredric Jameson, who told Robinson to read works by Philip K. Dick…
In 2008, Time Magazine named Robinson a “Hero of the Environment” for his optimistic focus on the future…
In 2009, Robinson was an instructor at the Clarion Workshop.[8] In 2010, he was the guest of honor at the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Melbourne, Australia…
Robinson was appointed Muir Environmental Fellow in 2011 by the John Muir College, University of California San Diego…
Virtually all of Robinson’s novels have an ecological component; sustainability is one of his primary themes (a strong contender for the primary theme would be the nature of a plausible utopia.)…
Economic and social justice
Robinson’s work often explores alternatives to modern capitalism. In the Mars trilogy, it is argued that capitalism is an outgrowth of feudalism, which could be replaced in the future by a more democratic economic system. Worker ownership and cooperatives figure prominently in Green Mars and Blue Mars as replacements for traditional corporations. The Orange County trilogy explores similar arrangements; Pacific Edge includes the idea of attacking the legal framework behind corporate domination to promote social egalitarianism. Tim Kreider writes in the New Yorker that Robinson may be our greatest political novelist and describes how Robinson uses the Mars trilogy as a template for a credible utopia…
Scientists as heroes
Robinson’s work often features scientists as heroes. They are portrayed in a mundane way compared to most work featuring scientists: rather than being adventurers or action heroes, Robinson’s scientists become critically important because of research discoveries, networking and collaboration with other scientists, political lobbying, or becoming public figures. Robinson captures the joy of scientists as they work at something they care about…
Robinson’s scientists often emerge as the best people to direct public policy on important environmental and technological questions, of which politicians are often ignorant…
Climate change and global warming
In 2017, in the novel New York 2140 Robinson explored the themes of climate change and global warming, setting the novel in the year 2140 when the New York City he imagines is beset by a 50-foot sea level rise that half-submerges the city…
In 1982, Robinson married Lisa Howland Nowell, an environmental chemist…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson
00
seems it’s not CAGW that’s threatening “smashed avos on toast”, but CAGW POLICIES:
***a low carbon shipping expert? hope that job description endangered:
19 Mar: ClimateChangeNews: Megan Darby: Avocado trade threatened by shipping climate measure, say Chile, Peru
Speed limits at sea could cut shipping’s carbon footprint fast, but fresh fruit exporters are raising concerns about trade impacts ahead of a critical UN meeting
The trade in avocados, cherries and blueberries could suffer from a proposed short-term measure to cut carbon emissions from shipping, according to Chile and Peru.
Both Latin American exporters have signed a declaration saying international shipping must “take urgent action” to limit its climate impact, in line with the Paris Agreement.
But ahead of a critical UN shipping meet in April, they warned against speed limits at sea, one of the few regulations being considered for implementation before 2023…
A 13-page submission from Chile and Peru, seen by CHN, urged the IMO to work on “optimal speed” instead of “speed reduction”, citing the impact on fresh fruit. Geography must also be taken into account, it said…
Tristan Smith, ***a low carbon shipping expert at University College London, told CHN it was “plausible” that speed reduction would cause significant issues for a minority of shippers.
“It would be a pity to decide the viability of a global measure on one cargo type,” he said. “No-one is proposing using speed limits as an end in themselves, but as a relatively simple and proven means to reduce carbon intensity.”…
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/03/19/avocado-trade-threatened-shipping-climate-measure-say-chile-peru/
00
In the UK, Theresa May’s alleged Conservatives are bending the knee to Europe, stalling, giving in, letting 10,000 unelected overpaid bureaucrats in Brussels continue to write British laws and foreigners take their fish. The people voted for BREXIT. What they have are two groups of politicians who both believe the politicians in France and Germany should run their country. Winston, we miss you.
In Australia we have a choice between two Labor parties and two Labor Prime Ministers, Bill Shorten and Malcolm Turnbull. The only difference is that the leader of one Labor party hates the Greens but will let them run the place and the leader of the other wants carbon taxes, carbon credits and to stop all development and export of coal and gas and would form a coalition with the Greens tomorrow. Both believe the planet is being dangerously warmed by CO2 caused by coal. Both believe we can stop this by taking everyone’s money. Neither believe in the fantasy of balancing a budget, small taxation and control of immigration.
Not much of a choice at an election. Never have Australian politicians been so driven by their overseas masters or cared so little for their own constituents.
Meanwhile we are told that Captain Cook was a white supremacist, windmills will save us and we should all pump water up hill and borrow a billion dollars a week overseas and pay carbon taxes. The good times of the Eloi, brought to you by a choice of two Labor Prime Ministers. Coal causes climate change, warming, cooling, bushfires, floods and uncontrolled migration will save us. Can anyone save us? Climate Change is crap. Where is Tony Abbott?
160
“”…entrail divination” That describes AGW/Climate Change in a nutshell”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2018/03/the-sound-of-sw.html#comment-1161574
20
More big battery madness in Victoriastan. Paid for with taxpayer money.
http://amp.abc.net.au/article/9573710
23
usa beginning to ressemble australia: http://balance10.blogspot.com/2018/03/miami-concrete-pedestrian-bridge-our.html
01
or vice versa http://balance10.blogspot.com/2018/03/designing-polarization-between-1-and-99.html
00
This very interesting court document was posted at Andrew Bolt’s blog, climate change …
http://1ggye33lc4653z56mp34pl6t.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Tutorial-Professor-Presentation.pdf
32
Section I: Climate science overview
Our overview of climate science is framed through four statements:
1. The climate is always changing; changes like those of the past half-century are common in the geologic record, driven by powerful natural phenomena
2. Human influences on the climate are a small (1%) perturbation to natural
energy flows
3. It is not possible to tell how much of the modest recent warming can be
ascribed to human influences
4. There have been no detrimental changes observed in the most salient
climate variables and today’s projections of future changes are highly uncertain
We offer supporting evidence for each of these statements drawn almost exclusively from the Climate Science Special Report (CSSR) issued by the US government in November, 2017 or from the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) issued in 2013-14 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or from the refereed primary literature.
32
Story over at Wuwt and the judge for once seems to have said no evidence no case to answer for the oil companies .
A big win for us and a big blow for the scammers and frordsters of this world
21
How come the Facebook fiasco in the USA (re 2016 electioneering) was NOT a big deal at all in 2012 when the Oh Bummer team did EXACTLY the same thing?
It wouldn’t have anything to do with the media being left wing, by any chance?
40
Quick! Look! A squirrel over there!
40
might as well have some links for those who have only heard the story from the FakeNewsMSM:
at least 10,000 words in praise of Obama using FB etc:
20 Jun 2013: NYT: The Obama Campaign’s Digital Masterminds Cash In
by Jim Rutenberg; Editor: Ilena Silverman
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaigns-digital-masterminds-cash-in.html?mtrref=undefined&gwh=FE5D8B781283D80A161292A7765C1DA2&gwt=pay
20 Mar: The Hill: What’s genius for Obama is scandal when it comes to Trump
By Ben Shapiro
http://thehill.com/opinion/technology/379245-whats-genius-for-obama-is-scandal-when-it-comes-to-trump
20 Mar: WashingtonFreeBeacon: Alex Griswold: Obama Campaign Alum: Facebook Allowed Us to Exploit User Data Because ‘They Were on Our Side’
…Carol Davidsen, former director of Obama for America’s Integration and Media Analytics, acknowledged on Twitter that the campaign had taken advantage of a similar exploit…
In 2013, the New York Times likewise reported that Facebook knew about the exploit but treated it with indifference. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7,’” a former Obama campaign data staffer recalled.
But Davidsen went even further, revealing Facebook told the campaign after the election that it would continue to allow access because the social media giant was “on [their] side.”…
The revelation comes after a whistleblower alleged in 2016 that Facebook’s news “curators” had a liberal bias, boosting liberal stories and outlets while blocking conservative outlets from “trending” on the site.
http://freebeacon.com/politics/obama-campaign-alum-facebook-allowed-us-to-abuse-exploit-because-they-were-on-our-side/
00
TRM
More of the same
“President Obama Congratulates Putin in 2012, Media: “Statesman” – President Trump Congratulates Putin in 2018, Media: “Treason”…”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/03/21/president-obama-congratulates-putin-in-2012-media-statesman-president-trump-congratulates-putin-in-2018-media-treason/
30
one more:
21 Mar: Breitbart: Mark Zuckerberg’s Fatal Error — Not Leaving Everyone the Hell Alone
by John Nolte
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/03/21/zuckerbergs-fatal-error-not-leaving-everyone-hell-alone/
needless to say, I’ve never joined FB, or Twitter, tho I will occasionally find interesting stuff on both.
10
Snoopy dance time!
Hoist by his own petard
“WIND BLEW WEATHERILL OUT”
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/wind-blew-weatherill-out/news-story/efdb4e3f20459c5a7fe6869ebb526cb7
30
Spent $388,000 of taxpayers monies and then $1,000,000 of taxpayer’s monies fighting the Ombudsman’s investigation.
But repaid the $388,000 so all is good.
sarc
43
According to the red thumbers stealing from your employer is ok as long as you give some back after your caught .
10
TC Marcus (Indian Ocean) currently has a pressure centre of 921mb.
That’s the lowest I have ever heard of.
Do any of you good folk know of any past system with a pressure that low?
10
FWIW
http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/product.php?color_type=tpw_nrl_colors&prod=ausf×pan=24hrs&anim=html5#
00
I just checked G’earth to confirm that there is just a vast expanse of sea and no islands [true] and they have thoughtfully located Marcus for us. As long as shipping has kept out of it’s way it will be of no concern.
10
Cyclone Marcus now has a central pressure of 916mb!
But how do they know? How can we know? How can anyone know?
It does seem that Marcus is the most severe cyclone in all recorded history, based on the BOM estimates.
30
Tooright
Heaps below 921 in fact. Gwenda 1999, 900mb. George 2007, 902mb. Orson 1989, 905mb. All of the following on 910mb: Theodor, Hudah, Inigo, Fay & Glenda. There are others, and that’s just the ones we know about.
The BOM has an obscure little spreadsheet in its Cyclone section that contains historic cyclone data if you search around. It is only updated infrequently and looks like it was done by a 7 year old, and is next to useless in the form offered, but if you have some reasonable Excel skills you can whip the data into a useable form.
I seriously doubt that Marcus is the WORST EVAH!
40
Thank you beowulf.
20
And just for completeness, Camille (1969, US Gulf Coast) came in at 900 mb; note that this was “before” there was any significant CAGW … … …
30
More green folly this time in the north of the country .
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-22/green-groups-call-for-nt-climate-policy-as-emissions-rise/9573404
20
It would have nothing to do with politics and in this example preparing to oppose the development of northern Australia into an agriculture irrigation area extending the Ord River Scheme agricultural area across WA, NT & NQ opening up land the area of eastern Europe (CSIRO identified as just add water perfect land for agriculture)?
The Abbott and Newman governments (Federal & Queensland State) overturned Labor’s Wild Rivers legislation and world heritage application in preparation for the huge nation building project including new dams and other infrastructure.
An extended food bowl to feed the growing demand from Asia Pacific, Australia is already self sufficient and exporting food.
32
Robert:
These people trying to dictate to us believe that rising CO2 causes GlobalWarming© which leads to ClimateChange© etc. and also at the same OceanAcidification© which will wipe out the Great Barrier Reef etc.
Most of the CO2 dissolved in sea water is there as an unreacted gas (about 98%) and this is governed by Henry’s Law, which states that the amount dissolved is governed by the temperature and the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere. Thus if the partial pressure goes up (i.e. the concentration increases) more CO2 will dissolve and allow more reaction. Such reaction is buffered by the calcium and magnesium in solution and by the pH in that the reaction slows as the pH drops.
But if the partial pressure of CO2 increases, then according to the Alarmists the Earth will warm, but that would reverse the dissolution and prevent OceanAcidification©. Despite this the Alarmists claim that both are occurring. They want to have
theiryour cake and eat it too.50
‘Graeme Pearman said the Territory could expect to see more cyclones as sea temperatures continue to rise.’
True or False?
10
This from a warmist outlet, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (2018).
‘It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.’
20
“greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming”
I’ve noticed that in Climate Science these words are put together so often that they will eventually just become one word, Greenhousegasemissionsthatcauseglobalwarming or perhaps just GGETCGW.
20
I wonder if any of these Genii at Global Warming Central Fluid Dynamics Institute, have given ANY consideration at all to other energy inputs into the world’s atmosphere?
As a preliminary they would have done an assessment of the causation of hurricanes and cyclones and only then looked at the part played by CO2.
Have they shown that CO2 is directly related to the intensity of these events: I’d seriously doubt it.
If, and only if they could find CO2 causation of hurricanes, they could then move to the next step.
This is to then calculate 4 % of that effect which is the amount attributable to CO2 of human origin.
Then, this tiny amount must be compared with the Main energy inputs combining the action of gravity, Earth’s Rotation and daily Solar flux.
Any CO2 effects have not been demonstrated or even theoretically outlined at this point , and such is not likely.
How do they get away with it?????
The Sun itself is dwarfed by the magnitude of this scam.
KK
10
21 Mar: EuroNews: Gaddafi’s son offers to give evidence that Libya funded Sarkozy election bid
By Alasdair Sandford
The son of the deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has welcomed the detention of Nicolas Sarkozy and repeated his offer to provide evidence that the former French president’s 2007 election campaign was funded illicitly by the Libyan government.
Saif al-Islam – who made the allegations in an exclusive interview with Euronews in 2011 – told our sister channel Africanews (LINK) that he regretted it had taken the French authorities seven years to act…
http://www.euronews.com/2018/03/21/gaddafi-s-son-offers-to-give-evidence-that-libya-funded-sarkozy-election-bid
Assange has a ton of interesting stuff on his Twitter page today, including:
Twitter: Julian Assange: Other than eliminating Gaddafi, what were Sarkozy’s reasons for destroying Libya, according to this email sent to Hillary Clinton from her operative, Sidney Blumenthal: EMAIL
https://twitter.com/JulianAssange/status/976547097448189952
anyone paying attention (and not following FakeNewsMSM) knew of the above as it was happening.
00
20 Mar: Sara A. Carter: Questions Still Surround Robert Mueller’s Boston Past
Mueller’s involvement in one of the FBI’s most embarrassing cases
https://saraacarter.com/questions-still-surround-robert-muellers-boston-past/
21 Mar: Sara A. Carter: Trump, Putin Convo Leaker Could Face Criminal Charges
Speculation Now Surrounds NSC, White House Staff
https://saraacarter.com/trump-putin-convo-leaker-could-face-criminal-charges/
21 Mar: TWEET: Donald J. Trump: I called President Putin of Russia to congratulate him on his election victory (in past, Obama called him also). The Fake News Media is crazed because they wanted me to excoriate him. They are wrong! Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing…….
21 Mar: TWEET: Donald J. Trump:…..They can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the coming Arms Race. Bush tried to get along, but didn’t have the “smarts.” Obama and Clinton tried, but didn’t have the energy or chemistry (remember RESET). PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH!
00
bow out of the Paris Accord and get on with your development unhindered by phony CAGW policies, India:
21 Mar: EconomicTimesIndia: PTI: Increased coal usage a serious setback for carbon reduction in Indian steel ind: Moody’s
MUMBAI: Global rating agency Moody’s today said that Indian steel industry is yet to introduce more stringent emission regulations, and an increase in coal usage poses a serious limitation to the potential for carbon reduction.
The global steel industry’s progress in reducing emissions and energy use continues to be limited. The challenge for the industry will be to lower carbon intensity at a time when demand for steel is forecast to grow 31 per cent by 2030, from 2016 levels…
Under the Paris agreement India has agreed to reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP by 33 to 35 per cent by 2030 from 2005 levels. India has yet to introduce more stringent emission regulations. We expect measures to be introduced, but they could be more gradual given India’s abundant supply of iron ore, which could delay the shift to electric arc furnaces (EAF’s), Moody’s Investors Service said in its report here.
Potentially offsetting the benefits of China’s rationalisation is the expected doubling of Indian steel production by 2030, challenging the industry’s efforts to correct overcapacity and reduce carbon intensity.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects India’s share of energy dedicated to steel making will rise to 29 per cent by 2040, up from 21 per cent in 2013, while energy consumed by the industry is set to more than quadruple over the same period.
India’s anticipated steel growth is due to the country’s rapid urbanisation, large infrastructure needs, and an increasing preference for steel and cement over materials such as clay bricks…
Steel-makers across the globe are facing increasing pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions…
Yet the industry’s carbon intensity will likely continue to rise through 2020, coinciding with a period of strong demand growth, Moody’s said…
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/indl-goods/svs/steel/increased-coal-usage-a-serious-setback-for-carbon-reduction-in-indian-steel-ind-moodys/articleshow/63402441.cms
***hilariously, Mooney doesn’t even say what renewables increased by – can’t be good!
21 Mar: WaPo: Chris Mooney: Bad news for the climate: Coal burning, and carbon emissions, are on the rise again
After three flat years that had hinted at a possible environmental breakthrough, carbon dioxide emissions from the use of energy rose again by 1.4 percent in 2017, according to new data released by the International Energy Agency (LINK) on Wednesday.
The increase in emissions of the all-important greenhouse gas came as global energy demand itself increased thanks to strong economic growth — and that demand was sated by all types of energy, including renewables but also oil, coal and natural gas…
***Global coal demand increased 1 percent last year, following two years of declines, the IEA found. Demand for oil and gas surged even more, at 1.6 percent and 3 percent, respectively…
“I’ve just returned from India and China, where coal will continue to act as the base load for the foreseeable future — in China and India coal provides more than 50% of the energy mix,” (World Coal Association CEO Benjamin Sporton) continued.
“In the last five years as China became the largest solar and wind market in the world — it also added 229GW of coal power. Thus, increasing coal generation by a third. Renewables complement rather than displace coal — a trend that we continue to see across Asia.”…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/03/21/bad-news-for-the-climate-coal-burning-and-carbon-emissions-are-on-the-rise-again/
10
Delingpole again. This time on adjustments to data and replacement of up to 50% of data by invented computer model data, showing warming of up to 4 degrees. The adjustments for missing data are based on computer models based on global warming and of course the end result is global warming. NASA relies on NOAA data. So NASA agrees with NOAA agrees with Michael Mann. Mann made hockey stick science.
60
Flannery is right. Who said being a meteorologist was boring. The scientists are the weather makers.
50
Happy meteorologist weather day .
10
When we live in a world
of virtual reality,
Naychur’s ‘n the Scientific
Revolution’s empirical
trial and error methodology
is dead. R – I -P.
20
Huh! There’s an article at the ABC site about back pain. (at this link)
I spent 25 years in the RAAF, and part of my work on the Mirages involved a lot of heavy lifting overhead in an awkward position, squatting on the ground under the Mirage and lifting heavy Alternators and Generators into position overhead. It didn’t help the lower back any, and being young, you can do it and recover relatively easily, but it’s a build up.
In late 2013, it came back to haunt me, and the lower back pain was absolutely horrendous. I could sit, just, get up again with difficulty, lay down, and just getting out of bed was a trial, taking anything up to five to ten minutes and a huge amount of pain. I could walk slowly, but only with the aid of a staff, which I held onto at around shoulder height. My GP was astonished when he saw me, because I was always so healthy and never had any problems at all.
He prescribed a small course of Endone, which I took very carefully, and not even at the required times, because the scare of becoming dependent scared me more than the back pain. He also sent me for X Rays. Once the source was located, and a visit to a Specialist, it was recommended that I have a Facet Joint Injection, and look it up, there’s enough info out there. It’s done under a CT Scan so they get the needle in the right place. They did that small local procedure and immediately after, the relief was just amazing. I (almost) walked out of there unaided with my Staff. I thanked then profusely, so happy was I from the relief. They asked me to come back for a second round, on the joint immediately below that one, and I thought I didn’t really need it. they persisted and I went back 2 days later for the second round. This time I did walk out unaided, totally cured. On the way home I dropped in to see my GP, and thanked him from the bottom of my heart for his recommendation. We talked for a few minutes and as I got up to leave, we shook hands and in a throwaway line on the way through the door, he mentioned that walking would help. He had been trying to get me to exercise for three years, just gently prodding me, all to no real avail.
The following morning at 7AM, I got up and went for a walk, slow at first and just one kilometre out and then back home. Over the next fortnight I built up to 6KM walk, and stuck at it. Four or five days a week. I went back and saw my GP and asked if I should be extending myself, and he said that I should try to get my heart rate up, as that was good for me also.
So, I worked hard at my walking and they call it ‘Fitness Walking’. (you can look that up also, and no, it’s not Power Walking at all)
Here I am now four years and four Months later, still doing it. I clocked up 3200Km earlier this year. On good days I can manage 8.15 for a Kilometre, so I’m really working hard at it. I had a knee meniscus problem for a while, a throwback to years of fast bowling from my cricketing days, and Cyclone Marcia knocked a Month out of doing it. The major cost is the shoes, and I use the Brooks Adrenaline, almost like there’s nothing on they are so light and comfortable.
If I get a twinge in my back, I know now that after my walk the following day, it will be gone, and it is.
So, even though some may say that it’s probably psychosomatic, this is what works for me.
During the Month or so of that original horrendous pain, all I could think of was this was my lot for the rest of my life, and that was also scary.
Now, I wouldn’t do without my walk. Still four or five days a week, and after the Summer, when I just do five KM, I’m back now at 6Km for the last few weeks.
My back pain is now a thing of the past, and the knee actually came good, so I can’t figure that one out, as the specialist said that was also degenerative. I wear a knee guard as a precaution, but I have no problems at all now stepping out. It’s now routine.
It’s also fun, seeing if I can beat my best time for 6Km ….. 47.18, set in Winter 2014, but I don’t think I’ll get back to that time again, now I’m 67,
Different strokes eh! It worked for me.
Tony.
70
A decade ago a GP advised me to take Glucosamine for healing body joints and helps with arthritis, and it does work for me but my present GP advised more recently that it does not work for everybody.
I use Glucosamine with fish oil Omega 3.
Because I was travelling a lot I somehow got out of the habit of taking a tablet each day for several months and started to get the old joint pains again, and on my hands where the tendons are lumps appearing, one far worse than the others. The GP had a look and said nothing could be done to stop the growth of the lump/s but I remembered Glucosamine and started taking a tablet twice a day. Over three months most of the lumps had disappeared or almost. The larger lump also reduced in size and is now less obvious and not as painful.
When I explained this to my GP he was delighted and told me what I wrote above.
32
Working on aircraft is a young man’s game. I was radio on Nepunes and you had to contort yourself in the radar well or when screwing in plugs [and there were a lot of them] behind the black boxes.
But it was lifting a pool table I did in my back but it is merely a discomfort now, maybe acetyl myrristoliate helps. For some reason it’s my knees that limit me and I don’t know why. I’ve had one replaced but with little improvement in mobility. I danced my a$$ off as a teenager [only a year younger than thou] maybe that wore them out.
20
Hanrahan
Re that pool table
Ever read “Flashman: The Mountain of Light”?
Enquiring minds – –
00
Walking is a great exercise for many reasons but after my back surgery and first stint in a pain clinic my right leg would almost double in size after a couple of hundred metres and foot would go dark purple , turns out walking sometimes isn’t the best option for all .
30
21 Mar: WUWT: Anthony Watts: BOOM! Federal Judge Dismisses Claim Of “Big-Oil” Conspiracy To Suppress Global Warming Science
In a rare event, sanity prevails in California – Climate skeptics rule, alarmists drool.
A federal judge overseeing a lawsuit dismissed a core section plaintiffs brought in the case — oil companies conspired to cover up global warming science…
The cities’ suits against oil companies, however, do not show an industry conspiracy to suppress climate science from the public, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said, according to journalists who attended the hearing.
Alsup said plaintiffs “shows nothing of the sort” regarding some sort of conspiracy against science, Conservative journalist Phelim McAleer tweeted…READ ALL
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/21/boom-federal-judge-dismisses-claim-of-a-conspiracy-to-suppress-global-warming-science/
earlier:
20 Mar: InsideClimateNews: Climate Contrarians Try to Slip Their Views into U.S. Court’s Science Tutorial
The judge in the cities’ lawsuit against fossil fuel companies has ordered the contrarians to reveal who paid for their research and any connections to the case.
by John H. Cushman Jr.
(Before joining (John H. Cushman Jr) worked for 35 years as a writer and editor in Washington, D.C., principally with the Washington bureau of The New York Times…He served on the board of governors of the National Press Club and was its president in the year 2000. He is the author of “Keystone and Beyond: Tar Sands and the National Interest in the Era of Climate Change.”)
Prominent climate contrarians are seeking to insert their views into an unusual science tutorial scheduled to be held in federal court on Wednesday by offering “friend of the court” briefs that run contrary to the prevailing mainstream consensus.
One group includes adamant nay-sayers like Willie Soon and Christopher Monckton, and another includes Richard Lindzen of MIT and Steven Koonin, an advocate of the “red team, blue team” approach to debating competing visions of how the world works.
It’s not clear whether U.S. District Judge William Alsup—who called the hearing as part of a case in which the cities of San Francisco and Oakland are suing fossil fuel companies over climate change-related costs—wants to drag such voices into the fray. He set up the hearing in a way that either side in the case may call expert witnesses if they wish…
***On Monday, the judge said he had received two “friend of the court” briefs and told the two groups of contrarians to each file a statement by the close of business on Tuesday declaring who paid for their research, whether they received support from anyone “on either side of the climate debate,” and whether any of them were “affiliated in any way (directly or indirectly)” with parties to the litigation.”
And why, he asked, did they wait so long to present their documents, limiting the time for others to respond to them?
The two groups of contrarians filed responses (here and here) and the cities said they didn’t object to their filings but warned the judge to be skeptical of their views…
Monckton, Soon et al., whose brief was submitted by a Heartland Institute lawyer, devote much of their effort to disputing that there even is a mainstream view worthy of the court’s consideration.
“There is no agreement among climatologists as to the relative contributions of Man and Nature” to the warming of the planet that has already been observed, they claim. As for the consensus view, it “says nothing about whether anthropogenic global warming was, is or will be catastrophic.”
The judge in the case did not, in his specific questions to the parties, ask if there was a consensus on the science, or whether climate change would present catastrophic risks.
The Soon-Monckton memo goes even further, claiming that they “have recently discovered and corrected a long-standing error of physics in the climate models” that would shows any climate change due to human causes will be “too small and slow to be harmful and will prove beneficial.”
They say this work was submitted for publication just three days before the judge issued his list of questions in this case. Though their research “has not yet passed peer review, it is simple enough to allow the Court, which has earned a unique reputation for rapid mastery of scientific questions, to understand it completely and to verify that [the] result is correct.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20032018/climate-change-denial-monckton-soon-koonin-california-cities-lawsuit-judge-science-tutorial
10
from cached version:
20 Mar: BusinessGreen: James Murray: Climate Change Act: UK carbon targets legal action set to continue
BREAKING: Judge adjourns permission hearing on crucial challenge to the government’s long term emissions goals, as legal battle continues
The government will have to provide a fuller explanation as to why it is yet to strengthen the UK’s long term emissions targets for 2050 and beyond, after a judge ruled a second preliminary hearing is required to assess the merits of proposed legal action.
Campaign group Plan B and group of 11 individual claimants have launched a legal challenge against the government arguing that as a result of the Paris Agreement Ministers should strengthen the Climate Change Act’s long term target to cut emissions 80 per cent against 1990 levels by 2050.
This morning Justice Nicola Davies conducted a permission hearing on whether the case was strong enough to merit a full hearing and in a surprise development ruled the issues under discussion were so complex that a longer full day permission hearing would have to be scheduled.
She also called on the independent Committee on Climate Change to provide a more detailed explanation of its position on whether current targets should be strengthened as soon as possible.
Tim Crosland, a former government lawyer and director of Plan B, welcomed the judge’s decision. “[The case] is going to get proper scrutiny, and that’s good news,” he said…
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) was considering a request for comment on the latest developments at the time of going to press.
However, in a statement issued ahead of today’s hearing the government reiterated its view that it would be premature to change long term emissions goals at this point.
“The advice of the independent Committee on Climate Change in 2016 was clear that now is not the time to set a new target,” BEIS said in a statement. “Our Clean Growth Strategy sets out how we will continue to cut emissions while keeping costs down for consumers, creating good jobs and growing the economy.”
https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/3028835/climate-change-act-uk-carbon-targets-legal-action-set-to-continue
00
insanity…yet the FakeNewsMSM publishes it, without question:
21 Mar: UK Evening Standard: UK weather latest: climate expert warns of more ‘Beasts from the East’ and says humans will struggle to produce food and clean water within 50 years
by Chloe Chaplain
A polar scientist has warned of more weather events like the Beast From the East as climate change worsens, saying with the world’s current carbon emissions, humans will struggle to produce food and enough clean water within the next fifty years.
Professor Martin Siegert, a glaciologist Imperial College London, said unusual weather patterns like the extreme cold the UK has been experiencing in recent weeks, are “in line with” the predicted effects of global warming.
And he warned that these will be more common as parts of the earth heat up at different speeds – which could lead to further catastrophic weather such as flooding and snow storms
Speaking to the Standard, Prof Siegert said that it is crucial for the world to heed to such warnings and head towards zero carbon emissions or risk being unable to produce food and use water in the way we have been.
Prof Siegert is a director of Imperial’s Grantham Institute, which collaborates with scientists, business schools, economists, engineers, health professionals and others to tackle the problem of climate change and prepare for its affects.
He explained that weather events such as the Beast From the East are in line with scientists’ predictions of how weather fronts would behave when the earth heats up.
“When we have extreme hot or flooding or cold – like we are getting at the moment – we hear a lot of contrasting views like ‘this is climate change’ or they say ‘this is proof that climate change is not happening’,” he said.
“How does that relate to climate change? It is fair to say that we had snow before we started talking about climate change. Humans began changing out climate at industrial scale in 1850 yet it was certainly snowing before then.
***“What we can say is that the extreme weather events we are witnessing are completely in line with climate change – extreme heat, flooding, cold….
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/uk-weather-latest-climate-expert-warns-of-more-beast-from-the-east-weather-events-and-says-we-will-a3794066.html
00
“I am currently seeking community feedback on the suggestion the NSW Government invest in a high energy, low emissions (HELE) coal fired power plant.
Over the last 7 years the NSW Government has made major investments and supported the private sector’s moves to cleaner power generation technologies in wind, solar and Hydro power projects.
As power prices continue to rise it is incumbent on me as a Member of Parliament to investigate ways to find a happy medium between reducing the cost of living that many families and seniors across the Myall Lakes are struggling with and a cleaner environment for the future.”
National Party
NSW
We learnt that Victoria’s Loy Yang B coal fired power station has sent a spare generator to Germany for maintenance earlier in 2018 and later the news that the Bayswater coal fired power station in NSW is going to be upgraded with latest technology. Last year the PM started admitting that when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine ….. and hinted that coal fired power stations were here to stay long term.
Are the winds of change blowing the ship of state onto a new post Paris Agreement course?
Is the wind coming from the direction of Washington?
91
The LNP in Queensland ran on that platform and was defeated, good luck convincing Premier Gladys to change her mindset.
20
https://stopthesethings.com/2018/03/05/renewables-hoax-australias-biggest-retailer-agl-gets-out-of-coal-by-spending-200m-fixing-coal-fired-power-plant/
11
All this being correct, I wonder if there is a really nice solution to this.
Keep in mind that the mentioned upgrade at Bayswater has nothing to do with HELE. They are just doing minor upgrades to the existing plant there on a Unit by Unit basis.
So, how about this then.
The nearby Liddell plant is within rock throwing distance of Bayswater, and the owners AGL are supposedly ‘getting out of coal’. Owning the plant as they do, and getting it for a pittance, what’s to stop the NSW State Government asking for it back at the same price they paid for it. Part of that AGL deal to purchase Liddell was to return the site to pristine, costing an absolute motza, hence the ‘throwaway’ price AGL paid for it, and the State buying it back would be attractive for AGL, saving them a fortune.
The State Government now has a perfect ‘brown field site’ for the construction of a new large scale HELE plant, and the cost while large, would be significantly less than for a green field site.
Now, the really nice part about all this, is that a while back now, when the former owners Macquarie were running Bayswater (and also owning Liddell as well) they did all the ‘necessaries’ to Upgrade Bayswater to HELE USC coal fired, a plan that fell by the wayside when this CO2 cr@p came into play.
So, it’s a sideways move from Bayswater to Liddell, just next door, and all it would take is a revamping of that original many (many) hundreds of pages of documents and the saving of years of grunt work to get ALL the approvals, every single one of them, all of them already done.
The coal is readily available, as they already own the mine and all the coal in it, which also supplies Bayswater.
Or is that all just too neat and easy?
I know it’ll be harder than that, but the savings would be significant, as would the time constraint, and they have four years to get it all up and running.
I even imagine that given the opportunity, even AGL might come to the party, even after what they say about getting out of coal.
Then, on top of that they could also revive the old HELE Upgrade for Mt. Piper as well, and all that is already in place to add two more Units at that (now) two Unit plant.
There’s two existing sites already. How easy is that?
Tony.
130
There is also a New South Wales state election due soon …..
21
Its on the Nats platform, they just have to sell it.
Somewhere in the Hunter region and as Tony mentioned a HELE upgrade for Mt Piper, this is popular politics and an opportunity for a debate in the media.
20
Not a hard sell in my opinion.
11
Gladys wants to stay in power and will take on the Green lobby.
‘On Monday the state’s energy minister, Don Harwin, announced the government would overturn a decision by the NSW court of appeal to block the extension of the Springvale colliery.
‘The mine, owned by Centennial Coal, is the sole supplier to Lithgow’s Mount Piper power station, which provides about 10% of NSW’s electricity.’
Guardian 2017
20
And of course we have the Deputy John Barilaro.
“Building HELE coal-powered plants and developing natural gas and CSG and yes, nuclear would be approximately the same as the $3 billion a year now spent subsidising renewables, two, experts agree, of the most unreliable and expensive forms of energy around.”
The Spectator
20
Okay we are in a state of political flux.
‘Almost 40 per cent of voters who would otherwise support the Berejiklian government would be less willing to because of its Sydney stadiums policy, a survey shows.
‘The $2.5 billion plan for two new stadiums announced by Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Sports Minister Stuart Ayres in November has become a running sore for the government, amid a consistent refusal to release analysis supporting the plan, and backbench unrest.
‘Multiple opinion polls have suggested the policy – which appeases the influential Sydney Cricket & Sports Ground Trust by committing to build a new stadium at Moore Park – is deeply unpopular.
‘And a new analysis suggests the policy’s unpopularity is extending across party lines.’
SMH
10
Tony, if the world was a sane and reasonable place you would be the government rep in charge of strategic planning of electricity production for our area.
How do you know all this stuff.
KK
10
Ten years of checking every site I can conceivably find.
And you know what? Sites like this one of Joanne’s are a huge help for me, because nearly everyone has a link for me to check.
Then, I’m positively @n@l about bookmarking sites. I have around 100 loose bookmarks, and ten folders, each with around 15 to 20 bookmarks sorted into that folio’s title. My Electrical alone folio has 50 or so loose bookmarks, and 11 sub folios, with anything from 10 to 30 bookmarks in each, some with further sub folios as well. I can find virtually anything just in that electrical folio alone.
It sounds unwieldy I know, but navigation is easy when you know what to look for. I can find what I want in seconds.
I have kept both of those Upgrade folders for ages now, both approved in 2010, and then delayed.
Tony.
50
Way to go Tony,
My own bookmarks and filing systems are pretty casual.
Consequently I often find it hard to find anything again!
20
Peter,
Did yr go to IPA Professor Robert Tombs?
Thoughtful overview of history of Western
Civilization, warts and all, but ultimately
the benefits, liberty, non fiat rule of law
for all, increased economic opportunity and
life expectancy. Democracy, always fraught,
never more than one one generation away from
Peter, did you go to IPA talk by Professor Tombs
on History of Western Civilization? A thoughtful,
warts and all overview,, but ultimately bringing
about more individual liberty, improved econonomic opportunities and increased life expectancy. All fraught, as he said, democracy never more than one generation away from being destroyed,likely by the
enemy within.
20
Oh, I’m the same PeterC! I never seem to have time to go back and see what I’ve bookmarked. There isn’t time to read all the interesting stuff that comes up here, let alone WUWT, Tallbloke, Notalotofpeopleknowthat, etc. Life is too short and the animals need feeding and the grass needs mowing, the house needs cleaning, etc.
01
Hope you have them backed up or shared between multiple devices, loosing a resource like that can be traumatic/maddening. Dont ask me how I know.
40
I wish my annual tax return was based on such ordered arrangement of material.
I feel inspired to make it all work a bit easier next year with a bit of regular attention to detail.
10
That makes me wonder if we could get away with modelling our income tax return , you don’t have to show how you worked it out just mention the carbon savings .
10
Just like the klimatariat said, cyclones are intensifying.
‘The Bureau of Meteorology estimated that 10 minute average wind speeds near the eye of Severe Tropical Cyclone Marcus were 230km/h at 8am WST today.
‘According to historical records, this puts Marcus above the estimated peak average wind speeds of Ernie in 2016 (220km/h), Hamish in 2009 (215km/h), Ita in 2014 (215km/h), Marcia in 2015 (205km/h), Yasi in 2011 (205km/h) and Debbie in 2017 (195km/h).’
Weatherzone
20
bit of a “if a tree falls in the forest , does anyone care” scenario. How long have offshore cyclones been whirling around before we even new they existed? let lone able to measure them.
50
If a tree falls in the forest it adds to the workplace health and safety problems
20
You are correct yarpos, but that small detail is not considered relevant because the science is settled.
10
21 Mar: ConservativeTreehouse: sundance: Peter Schweizer Explains How China Purchased U.S. Congress as a Trade Strategy…
A timely book by Peter Schweizer, “Secret Empires”, explains how Chinese companies purchased U.S. politicians to gain trade advantages. When you understand this process, you better understand why those same politicians today are against the Trump trade policy that is antithetical to their purchased interests.
Reminder (LINK): U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue is warning President Trump not to take any trade action against China or he will unleash his purchased control agents within congress and financial media to destroy his presidency…
Donohue takes-in hundreds of millions in payments from multinational corporations who hold a vested interest in keeping the U.S. manufacturing economy subservient to China. The U.S. CoC then turns those corporate funds into lobbyist payments to DC politicians for legislative action that benefits their Chinese trade deals. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the #1 lobbyist in DC; there are trillions at stake…READ ON
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/03/21/peter-schweizer-explains-how-china-purchased-u-s-congress-as-a-trade-strategy/
10
“Gravel supplies are reducing as we move into the future” said a Coffs Harbour council area spokesman, sorry person.
So we are looking at surfaces for the gravel roads.
……….. Decoding: Agenda 21 & Agenda 30 (Sustainability) is causing concern.
31
Good one Dennis I suppose lack of sand and sea water will be next .
20
lack of quality sand for building is actually a thing in some countries
30
Especially in the Middle East. Their sand has rolled around the desert for so long it has no angles, so they import aggregate for cement.
But there are billions of tons of gravel in Qld rivers as a result of overgrazing and subsequent erosion. The Mighty Burdekin had swimming holes where you could catch barra when I was a boy., today it’s a beach where the old road bridge is under sand.
I used to travel to Charters Towers regularly and there was one property owner whose land was a moonscape. After some rain the grass on the side of the road was lush but he had cattle grazing on sprigs. The man was a vandal, not only for his own country but everything downstream including the GBR. Runoff from bare ground carries the cattle excrement before the dung beetles can do their magic. This high nitrogen runoff is poison for the GBR. Fortunately we have had a new breed of educated farmers taking over from their fathers for some time and the rogues are a dying breed.
50
Over here on this side (opposite yours) of the “Big Pond”, we have a saying:
“If the government was put in charge of the Sahara, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
40
despite this, SMH keeps to the CAGW/”unreliables” script!!!
22 Mar: SMH: Jenny Noyes: Rural Fire Service confirms Tathra fire caused by fallen powerlines
The bushfire that ripped through the NSW south coast town of Tathra on Sunday was most likely caused by fallen electrical wires, a preliminary investigation has found.
NSW Rural Fire Service confirmed the suspicions of residents on Thursday afternoon after fire investigators examined the scene where the fire originated.
“The investigation has found electrical infrastructure on Reedy Swamp Road as the likely cause of the fire,” NSW RFS said in a statement.
On Tuesday, Fairfax Media reported residents had witnessed “fires under the powerlines” that were moving under “hideous” winds (LINK).
Jo Dodds, a councillor with the Bega Valley Shire, said her stepson Noah Dean thought the location of the ignition was clearing of powerlines that run down the hill from his friend’s house on Reedy Swamp Rd.
“The power went out [about 12.30pm] and that was the first sign,” he said.
Ms Dodds, whose home was threatened by the fire, is among a chorus of residents calling for a conversation to be had about the role of climate change (***LINK).
Criticising comments by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull dismissing climate change as a factor, she said she watched “the monster bearing down on me … wondering if my friends are dying, knowing that the reason why all of that is happening in front of my very eyes, is because of climate change”…
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/rural-fire-service-confirms-tathra-fire-caused-by-fallen-powerlines-20180322-p4z5ro.html
***20 Mar: SMH: Peter Hannam: ‘I’m furious’: Tathra councillor says now is the time to talk climate
But what angered Ms Dodds on Tuesday was to hear Malcolm Turnbull’s comments a day earlier at an evacuation hall that the fire had nothing to do with climate change.
“I’m furious because [the Prime Minister] is not a clown,” Ms Dodds, an independent councillor for Bega Valley Shire, told Fairfax Media. “What is the debate?”
Ms Dodds said she watched “the monster bearing down on me … wondering if my friends are dying, knowing that the reason why all of that is happening in front of my very eyes, is because of climate change.
“It was not a normal fire”…
Mr Turnbull may well have picked the wrong community to be dismissive about climate change…
Tathra, and the wider Bega Valley area, has long had a goal of reaching 50 per cent renewable energy sources of electricity and cutting energy use by half from 2006 levels by 2020, led by the Clean Energy For Eternity group…
Matthew Nott, president of CEFE and an orthopaedic surgeon in Bega who lives in Tathra, said he was “actually disgusted” by Mr Turnbull’s comments.
Mr Nott said he did not wish to get political when “a lot of my friends have lost everything”.
Still, it was important the public understood science had been making great advances to identify the climate change signal behind extreme weather.
“In a world that’s warming, it’s very clear that the frequency and severity of bushfires is going to increase,” Mr Nott said. “And you can attribute that change to climate change.”
Tathra, he said, had “been at the forefront of coming up with community solutions”, including equipping all six surf clubs, 12 fire sheds and 30 community buildings with solar panels.
It had also installed 100 kilowatts of solar panels – laid out to spell “imagine” – at the cost of $100,000, entirely funded by locals to power the local sewage treatment works, Mr Nott said
“We’re very well aware of the risks of climate change, from rising sea levels and changing rainfall,” he said. “But we’re equally aware of the benefits that renewable energy can bring to the community.”…
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/i-m-furious-tathra-councillor-says-now-is-the-time-to-talk-climate-20180320-p4z5ab.html
00
Said with such certainty , but in relaity he doesnt actually “know” anything at all, and is attributions are based more on feelings and belief than reality. Its stunning that they have sat on unmanaged bushland for years, approving building, racking in rates, but learned zero from the 2009 VIC fires and the subsequent Royal Commission findings. Pointing at nebulous climate change is very convenient.
20
Crikey, you just can’t fathom some people.
Mr Notts community solutions of putting solar panels on anyting that stands still long enough didn’t seem to stop the bushfire. Big surprise there, mate.
That these folks believe so wholeheartedly in “climate change” (when the really mean anthropogenic catastrophic global warming) is proof that there’s just no cure for stupidity.
If these folks are silly enough to keep voting greens onto their councils, well perhaps they need to stand ready to accept the consequences of councils that forbid the clearing of roadsides, and policies that prevent controlled fuel hazard reduction burns – to lessen the ferocity of bush fires which will inevitably happen in this country, as they always have.
20
After witnessing the reaction from the Greens today on Peter Dutton wrt the white South African issue, it’s now a proven fact the Greens are hard line racists who hate white immigrants, which is ironic since some of them are white immigrants themselves. That proves beyond doubt another point. The Greens are insane.
131
Like the T-Shirt says: Racism – a word used by greenies when they lose an argument.
81
Tell me is this just my cynical nature ?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-22/new-sa-forecasting-system-could-predict-civil-unrest/9576746
20
Well, I guess when repeated and lengthy blackouts caused by wind generation failing in times of calm weather, and solar generation failing in times of cloudy or rainy weather, and maybe a fire in the WBB, or someone tripping over the big extension cords from Vic provoke the citizenry to march on the SA parliament with pitchforks – then yes, I suppose you could say it would be possible to predict civil unrest.
10
‘….to predict when unrest or industrial action will happen.’
Fat chance, that is a thing of the past.
00
Claims all four Victoriastan fires were caused by delapidated power poles falling over and suspected the same cause for Tathra .
21
it took months to sort this out?
PIC: 21 Mar: Chatham Voice Ontario: Taking down the toppled turbine
A crane moves the barrel section of a wind turbine out of the way as workers tear down the structure on 16th Line west of Blenheim on March 15.
The turbine, part of a 52-turbine farm owned by Terraform Power Inc., toppled over Jan. 19 just after midnight.
At press time, Terraform officials had not returned requests for information into the investigation that followed the turbine’s collapse. Other turbines on the wind farm were spinning again, after initially being idled while Terraform crews inspected them.
https://chathamvoice.com/2018/03/21/taking-down-the-toppled-turbine/
19 Jan: CTV News: Wind Turbine breaks in half in Chatham-Kent
A wind turbine has snapped in half and is currently sitting bent over in an open field in Chatham-Kent (Ontario).
The approximately 160-tonne turbine is located at Drake Road and 16 Line at Raleigh Wind Power facility in Dillon, Ont. The turbine buckled overnight, according to Terraform Power director of investor relations Chad Reed.
“The collapse involved a single turbine at our 52-turbine Raleigh facility,” Reed told CTV News. “TerraForm has not experienced any similar issues at any of its wind facilities globally.”…
The toppled turbine was discovered by a hunter scouting for coyotes early Friday morning in Harwich Township, according to The Blenheim News Tribune. The huge turbine blades and motor assembly crashed to the ground and the support structure appear to be folded in half.
Monte McNaughton, the Conservative MPP for Lombton-Kent-Middlesex, took to Twitter to alert Chris Ballard, the Minister of Environment and Cimate Change of what happened…
“17 families in Chatham-Kent cannot drink their well water and today, this from one of your local wind turbine projects,” McNaughton wrote on Twitter. “I again call for an immediate moratorium on North Kent and Otter Creek wind projects.”…
https://windsor.ctvnews.ca/wind-turbine-breaks-in-half-in-chatham-kent-1.3766991
10
following EDF Blog piece links to 173-page report –
Berlin, March 2018: Oko-Institut e.V: How additional is the Clean Development Mechanism?
Analysis of the application of current tools and proposed alternatives
21 Mar: EnvironmentalDefenseFundBlog: Michael Schwartzman: Carbon Credit Shell Game: the Clean Development Mechanism in New Climate Accords
Two new international accords are starting to move industry and governments in the right direction – the UN Paris Agreement, and the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) Carbon Offsetting and Reduction System (CORSIA), which this week launches a series of regional seminars to inform aviation stakeholders about the system’s implementation procedures…
But other dangers lurk. A shadowy lobby is pushing hard to revive the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – a relic of an outdated, failed attempt at climate action…
Twenty-one years and almost 3 billion tons CO₂e of purported “offsets” later, we know it didn’t work. Fully 85% of CDM projects are “unlikely to be additional,” says the most comprehensive, up-to-date study of the CDM (LINK). (It’s only “unlikely” because it’s typically very hard to tell what would have happened if the projects didn’t get done). The corruption has become systemic, especially in the biggest CDM countries – China, India and Brazil – where 90% of the credits come from. A US State Department analysis of wind power projects in India that could generate as much as 500 million tons of CO₂e credits found that project developers routinely keep double books. They do one term sheet showing the project is viable to get financing, and another term sheet for the CDM, showing that the project is inviable without CDM credit, i.e., is “additional”. A project that needed carbon credit to work would be far too risky for a bank to finance, investors said.
Brazil is a major offender. Its biggest CDM player, state power company Eletrobrás, told the CDM Executive Board that its Amazon mega-hydroelectric dams needed CDM credit to attract investors. At the same time, it told investors that the dams were fully viable on their own. We know this in part because the same dams (all registered, validated, and generating CDM carbon credit) are under investigation in the gigantic, Brazil-wide corruption investigations nicknamed “Lava Jato” (Car Wash). They are also prime exhibits in a lawsuit for fraud in US federal court brought by investors in Eletrobrás stock. The dams are, of course, socio-environmental nightmares too.
In short, there are excellent reasons why the EU Emissions Trading System no longer accepts CDM from Brazil, China and India, as well as whole categories of projects, and why California’s carbon market categorically rejects international credits from anything resembling the CDM. This in turn is part of the reason that CDM credits have effectively zero value in the market. They will go on having zero market value unless the CDM lobby (led by Brazil) in the Paris Agreement and CORSIA succeeds in foisting them onto the new markets…
http://blogs.edf.org/climatetalks/2018/03/21/carbon-credit-shell-game-the-clean-development-mechanism-in-new-climate-accords/
10
EDF article re Carbon Credit Shell Game: the Clean Development Mechanism in New Climate Accords is in moderation.
21 Mar: Townhall: John Stossel: Climate Exit
The climate change lobby has been trying to change Trump’s mind. Al Gore called his stance “reckless and indefensible.” Most of the media agree. So do most of my neighbors in New York…
That’s why it’s good that (proposed new secretary of state, Mike) Pompeo opposes the Paris deal…
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Oren Cass is the rare person who actually read the Paris accord.
Cass tells me it’s “somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” I interviewed him for a video project I am doing with City Journal, a smart policy magazine that often makes the case for smaller government. “You don’t even have to mention greenhouse gases in your commitment if you don’t want to. You send in any piece of paper you want.”
The Paris accord was just political theater, he says. “They stapled it together and held it up and said, ‘This is amazing!'”…
In truth, says Cass, “They either pledged to do exactly what they were already going to do anyway, or pledged even less. China, for instance said, ‘we pledge to reach peak emission by about 2030.’ Well, the United States government had already done a study to guess when Chinese emissions would peak, and their guess was about 2030.”…
“China was actually one of the better pledges,” says Cass. “India made no pledge to limit emissions at all. They pledged only to become more efficient. But they proposed to become more efficient less quickly than they were already becoming more efficient. So their pledge was to slow down.”…
“My favorite was Pakistan, whose pledge was to ‘Reach a peak at some point after which to begin reducing emissions,'” says Cass. “You can staple those together, and you can say we now have a global agreement, but what you have is an agreement to do nothing.”
However, Cass says one country did make a serious commitment. “The one country that showed up in Paris with a very costly, ambitious target was the United States. President Obama took all the zero commitments from everybody else but threw in a really expensive one for us.”…
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2018/03/21/climate-exit-n2462844
12 Mar: GWPF: Wall St Journal: Oren Cass: Doomsday Climate Scenarios Are a Joke
Debates over climate change are filled with dire estimates of its cost. This many trillions of dollars of damage, that large a share of gross domestic product destroyed, so-and-so many lives lost, etc. Where do such figures come from? Mostly from laughably bad economics…
This has nothing to do with the soundness of climate science. The games begin when economists get their hands on scientific projections and try to translate temperatures into human impacts. They conduct statistical analyses of the effects that small year-to-year temperature variations have on things like mortality and economic growth, and try to extrapolate to the effect of very large, slow shifts in underlying climate. This creates absurd estimates that ignore human society’s capacity for adaptation. This is the latest iteration of the same mistake environmental catastrophists seem insistent on making in every generation.
The best illustration lies deep in a 2015 paper (LINK) published in Nature by professors from Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. They found that warm countries tended to experience lower economic growth in abnormally warm years, while cold countries experienced higher growth in such years. Applying that relationship to a much warmer world of the future, they concluded that unmitigated climate change would likely reduce global GDP by more than 20% from what it otherwise would reach by century’s end.
That is roughly an order of magnitude higher than prior estimates, and it has received widespread media attention. But it is as preposterous as it is stunning…
As I show in a new report (***LINK) published by the Manhattan Institute, a small set of studies dominate this research. They reach their imposing dollar figures by refusing, like the Nature study, to consider how society will evolve and adapt…
***LINK TO FULL 19 PAGE REPORT BY CASS: OVERHEATED: HOW FLAWED ANALYSES OVERESTIMATE THE COSTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
FULL WSJ ARTICLE IS BEHIND PAYWALL.
https://www.thegwpf.com/oren-cass-doomsday-climate-scenarios-are-a-joke/
20
22 Mar: CNN: It’s official: NYC hasn’t seen snow like this in 130 years
Analysis by Harry Enten
The snow has been falling all day in New York City…
This marks the fifth consecutive season that at least 30 inches of snow have fallen in New York City. The only other recorded time it snowed this much, for this long a period, was back in the 1880s (records begin in the 1869-1870 season)…
The last five years of winter have been notable for other reasons as well. The largest snowstorm in New York City history — of 27.5 inches — occurred in January 2016. That same season also featured the only subzero temperature since 1994.
In other words, if you’re a New Yorker who thinks that the last few winters have been brutal to some degree, you’re exactly right…
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/21/politics/new-york-city-record-snow/index.html
30
VIDEO: 22 Mar: RealClearPolitics: Jeffrey Toobin vs. Dershowitz: Why Have You Been Carrying Water For Trump?; “This Is Not Who You Used To Be”
By Ian Schwartz
Alan Dershowitz went head to head with former student and CNN contributor Jeffrey Toobin on Wednesday night’s Anderson Cooper 360 on his statement that President Trump was correct to say there should have never been a special counsel investigation. Dershowitz’s comments received praise from the president in the form of a tweet quoting what he said about the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel and lack of probable cause for collusion, a crime, or obstruction of justice…
However, on CNN’s AC360 Toobin accused his former teacher of carrying Trump’s water and said he doesn’t recognize him anymore. Dershowitz criticized Toobin for not being principled and accused him of not taking a nonpartisan approach like himself.
“How has this come about that in every situation over the past year you have been carrying water for Donald Trump? This is not who you used to be. And you are doing this over and over against in situations that are just obviously ripe with conflict of interest. And it’s just, like, what’s happened with you?” a distraught Toobin asked the Harvard Law professor.
Dershowitz did not take the strike lightly and pointed out numerous times he has disagreed with Trump and how consistent his position has been on a special counsel…
I have attacked President Trump for many, many things. I’m not carrying his water. I’m saying exactly the same thing I’ve said for 50 years.”
“Jeffrey, you ought to know that. You were my student,” the teacher reminded the student.
Dershowitz called out Toobin for not being principled and turning against him, like others, for having the same position for Trump that he had for Bill Clinton.
“I have never deviated from this. I have never deviated from this point. The fact that it applies to Trump now, rather than applying to Bill Clinton, is why people like you have turned against me. Don’t you understand that principle requires bipartisanship than nonpartisanship and that’s who I am and I’ve always been,” he said.
“I am a civil libertarian. Civil libertarians criticize the law,” Dershowitz added.
“But, but, but you are criticizing it in the context of position after position that is in support of exoneration of Donald Trump,” Toobin said.
Dershowitz said Toobin is accusing him of the crime of “not being partisan.” The professor said he has been “utterly and completely consistent” and told Toobin he has not…READ ON
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/03/22/jeffrey_toobin_vs_dershowitz_why_have_you_been_carrying_water_for_trump_this_is_not_who_you_used_to_be.html
VIDEO: 21 Mar: RealClearPolitics: Dershowitz: Trump 100% Right There Never Should Have Been Special Counsel, No Probable Cause
by Ian Schwartz
Legal eagle Alan Dershowitz said on Tuesday’s FOX & Friends that President Trump is “100% right” that there should have never been a special counsel appointed. Dershowitz said there was “no probable cause” when Mueller was appointed and argued that there should have been a non-partisan “special investigative commission” with subpoena power appointed by Congress.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: First of all, the president’s 100% right. There never should have been an appointment of special counsel here. There was no probable cause at that point to believe that crimes had been committed. I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that crimes have been committed by the president…
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/03/21/dershowitz_trump_100_right_there_never_should_have_been_special_counsel_no_probable_cause.html
10
I’m afraid that Trump is about to screw the pooch. This Omnibus bill is a trap and he should veto it. It has things he wants in it but it has no real funding for the wall, funds sanctuary states and planned Parenthood. And it only lasts until just before the midterms.
10
What has he done?????? Trump has just handed the dems a house majority in Nov. Even Alex Jones has abandoned him.
00
“Climate Change is Killing Us: My Open Letter to Prime Minister Trudeau & Environment Minister McKenna”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/22/climate-change-is-killing-us-my-open-letter-to-prime-minister-trudeau-environment-minister-mckenna/
20
From above
“Instead, I prefer Albert Einstein’s statement that “The important thing is to never stop questioning” as the ultimate piece of scientific advice.”
11
Reference material
” johchi7
March 22, 2018 at 9:48 am
Some time ago I read a book called “Rules for Radicals” I then read the first book by Saul D. Alinsky “Reveille For Radicals”…to understand the leftist tactics.
Along came “Rules For Radicals Defeated” by Jeff Hedgpeth and another by a fake name David Kahane (Michael Walsh) called “Rules for Radical Conservatives” and one by Steve Deace called “Rules for Patriots” there are other books that help you to counteract the Alinskyite tactics.
You are both right in how people perceive the first thing they hear or read. This is why headlines often mislead people to think one thing; when the rest of the article is often the opposite, and the case in point being the headline to this article. It grabbed your attention because it was the opposite of what you’d expect on WUWT.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/22/climate-change-is-killing-us-my-open-letter-to-prime-minister-trudeau-environment-minister-mckenna/#comment-2771892
“
20
More reading
“@weatherchannel – The realization of a dream”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/22/weatherchannel-the-realization-of-a-dream/
10
On the horns of a dilemma
“With the dismissal of the #ExxonKnew lawsuits, climate alarmists are now in “bizarro world” ”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/22/with-the-dismissal-of-the-exxonknew-lawsuits-climate-alarmists-are-now-in-bizarro-world/
10
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/22/with-the-dismissal-of-the-exxonknew-lawsuits-climate-alarmists-are-now-in-bizarro-world/#comment-2772119
00
The Eddy Cycle, good post at wuwt by Javier.
https://i0.wp.com/debunkhouse.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/wpid-holo_mc_1_zps7041a1cc.png
00
BOM and ABC are at it again.
It’s 8:19 AM as I write this, and BOM have declared this below as a Cat-1 cyclone Nora. Just take a look at it.
No central dense overcast.
No closed circulation
No inner eye development.
No area of rapidly spinning clouds evident.
Only slow minor rain banding, of a weak disorganised tropical storm.
Get a look at it right now.
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDR091.loop.shtml#skip
That is what the snowflakes at BOM now claims to be a “tropical cyclone”, these days.
Observations be damned!
And BOM just had another ignorant breathless kid on ABC, claiming they were already “seeing winds of 110 km/h.
BS.
This will become a cyclone late today, but it certainly isn’t now.
But ABC presenters keep talking about the “threat to Darwin”! Don’t worry about putting up a track map ABC! … here it is:
http://www.bom.gov.au/fwo/IDD65001.png?1521746523895
is it going anywhere near Darwin?
ABC? … Beuhler? … Anyone?
/crickets
Warning Will Robinson!
The ABC hysteria-button has been pushed!
82
Cape Wessel
(closest BOM observations site to Nora)
8AM data (latest available)
ESE winds 61 km/h gusts 80 km/hr 997.0 hPc
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDD60801/IDD60801.94147.shtml
Where’s the “already seeing 110km hr winds”, BOM? There’s no Doppler radar coverage here for the eye.
Make-it-up day at BOM! … oh, hang on, that’s EVERY day at BOM.
51
http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/product.php?color_type=tpw_nrl_colors&prod=ausf×pan=24hrs&anim=html5#
20
Their leading presenter Max Hype at it again!
30
I have noticed of late an increasing amount of hysteria, silliness and aggressiveness on the part of the far left, in particular the Greens. I suspect it’s partly because they are seeing a definite trend away from them in certain places around the world. This trend started some time ago and we are only now starting to catch up here in Australia although we have a long way to go. LNP please take note, although at the moment they don’t have too much to fear since too many Australians are still asleep and walking around like mindless zombies. The two major parties no doubt prefer it to stay that way. Our only hope is it doesn’t. Time will tell.
10
“That is what the snowflakes at BOM now claims to be a “tropical cyclone”, these days”
well they sorta gotta, otherwise the intensity/frequency graph they publish gets embarassing and off narrative.
10
Bingo!
00
http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/satellite/
select 00 and hit play
00
We’ve been here before – the “warmist” claim is for less frequent and more intense.
A low intensity cyclone ruins both those claims so the BOM would be better off not claiming it to be a cyclone if they were sticking to the scamming
30
Ummm …. is Australia with the Alliance or agin it? Free Trade or Protection?
‘Echoing those comments, an editorial in the state-run China Daily newspaper on Thursday warned that “history has shown the pinpricks of protectionism can ultimately lead to the shots of war somewhere down the line.”
NBC
20
History only manages to teach us one thing successfully; history repeats. We forget the reasons why things eventually go pear shaped so we always repeat the same mistakes.
30
What is known about a fuel additive/octane booster NMA (N- Methylaniline)?
I just came across this on the local Caltex distributor’s site. I’m not plugging Caltex but it is they who are putting out the news. Note: This is two years ago.
So what’s the problem?
00
There isnt one, sounds like they just wanted to sow some fear , uncertainty and doubt about the competition
10
Substantial rainfall NSW mid north coast last few days and continuing with flooding now increasingly causing roads to be cut and traffic diverted.
Tom Foolery was nowhere to be seen.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-23/farmer-stranded-in-floodwater-moving-cattle,-swims-to-safety/9578688
11
Sorry Tom.
lol
Red Thumbster
01
21 Mar: ClimateChangeNews: Ex-UN climate chief calls for green bonds to hit $1 trillion by 2020
Christiana Figueres is urging public authorities and corporates to scale up climate-friendly infrastructure investment by 2020, under the “green bond pledge”
by Megan Darby
The initiative (LINKS TO ***PLEDGE) aims to scale up finance for projects that are resilient to the impacts of climate change and support the transition to a low carbon economy.
Unveiling the pledge in London, former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said green bonds issuance needed to hit $1 trillion a year by 2020 to support international climate goals.
“When green investments move from business plans into budgets and balance sheets a wealth of opportunity will be unlocked across the value chain,” she said.
“Organisations committing to the Green Bond Pledge will benefit from these opportunities and help the necessary acceleration of capital flows – before 2020 – to deliver a sustainable future for everyone.”…
Figueres is spearheading the campaign as part of her Mission 2020 programme (LINK) to mobilise short-term action towards the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement…
The pledge builds on CBI’s work to align the $90tn global bond market with climate goals. It has developed guidelines in several sectors for what counts as “green”. For example, buildings must meet certain energy efficiency standards to qualify.
These standards are not universal and criteria are still evolving. CBI does not endorse any kinds of fossil fuel energy applications, while China counts things like efficiency upgrades to traditional power generation as “green”…
Indian business mogul Anand Mahindra, who will co-chair a major climate action summit in California this September, agreed: “Greening financial flows now, and over the years and decades to come, can help take climate planning to the next level and in doing so, make a powerful and practical difference to people’s lives.”
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/03/21/ex-un-climate-chief-calls-green-bonds-hit-1-trillion-2020/
***About the Green Bond Pledge
The Pledge is a joint initiative developed and designed by international climate finance and environmental groups including the Climate Bonds Initiative, Mission 2020, CDP, Ceres, Citizens Climate Lobby, California Governor’s Office, California Treasurer’s Office, Global Optimism, NRDC & The Climate Group…
00
22 Mar: Bloomberg: Climate Change Judge Wants to Know What Caused the Ice Age
By Kartikay Mehrotra
Judge William Alsup is like a kid who loves science class, only his class is a federal courtroom and his teachers are the world’s sharpest minds on climate change.
***He screened Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” the 2006 documentary about the way global warming affects the environment, before Wednesday’s hearing and spent time watching National Geographic programs on volcanoes and the Great Barrier Reef to prepare. He even dressed the part for a presentation by attorneys for Chevron Corp. and leading scientists studying the issue:
“I wore my science tie today,” Alsup said from the bench, showing off the galaxy gleaming on the fabric around his neck. “Look, there’s the sun. There’s the earth. I hope someone noticed.”…
The judge, known for learning a computer programming language to prepare for an intellectual property trial, wanted to understand, among other things:
•What caused the Ice Age?
•How did the Ice Age end?
•Has Antarctica ever not been covered with ice?…
Chevron’s lawyer, Theodore Boutrous, was decidedly less absorbed by the variations in weather conditions over time and geological shifts. He acknowledged that climate change is “a global problem that requires global action,” but stopped short of the probing curiosity shown by the judge.
“It’s not the production and extraction that’s caused global warming,” Boutrous said, “it’s the way people are living their lives, it’s the way society is developing.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/climate-change-judge-wants-to-know-what-caused-the-ice-age
00
21 Mar: ScientificAmerican: Chevron Will Stick to IPCC Findings in Landmark Climate Change Trial
Oil companies are not questioning climate science, even as they move to dismiss lawsuit
By Anne C. Mulkern, E&E News
Oil companies accused of raising ocean levels might not question the existence of climate change in federal court today.
Chevron Corp. is expected to take a lead role in a climate science “tutorial” at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The unusual hearing was required by Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing lawsuits filed by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland claiming that five oil giants are contributing to damages related to climate change.
In the hours before the tutorial, which Alsup is using to gather historical observations about climatic conditions that can go back thousands of years, Chevron said it wouldn’t question the facts around rising temperatures.
***“Chevron is not going to be engaging in a debate on climate change science,” said Avi Garbow, co-chairman of the Environmental Litigation and Mass Tort Practice Group at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and a Chevron lawyer. He’s also a former official in the Obama administration who defended the Clean Power Plan as general counsel to then-U.S. EPA chief Gina McCarthy.
The company will “anchor its presentation” on the Fifth Assessment Report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), issued in 2014, he said on a call with reporters Monday.
“Chevron’s neither going to overstate nor understate degrees of confidence. Chevron’s simply going to present the conclusions of the IPCC because Chevron thinks that’s the best and the most accurate way of responding to the court’s tutorial request,” Garbow said…
Despite its open approach to the science hearing, Chevron yesterday filed a motion to dismiss the suits. So did ConocoPhillips, which claimed that the cases lack jurisdiction because it’s a Delaware company headquartered in Houston.
Chevron said claims that are similar to those filed by San Francisco and Oakland have been dismissed by other courts. Its key argument is that U.S. EPA has oversight over greenhouse gas emissions.
“This is not the first (or even the second or third) time a plaintiff has tried to plead global warming-related tort claims,” Chevron’s motion said. “Similar claims have been considered, and dismissed, by the Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit, and district courts around the country.”
Oil companies beyond Chevron declined to say if they would make presentations at today’s hearing or defer to Chevron. A spokesman for Exxon Mobil criticized the lawsuits.
“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a global issue and requires global participation and actions,” Scott Silvestri said in an email. “Lawsuits of this kind—filed by trial attorneys against an industry that provides products we all rely upon to power the economy and enable our domestic life—simply do not do that.”…
The oil companies have no real choice but to acknowledge climate science, legal experts said.
“They realize that the science behind climate change is so well understood and accepted that it isn’t in their interest to be seen as deniers,” Ann Carlson, co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said in an email. “Moreover, their own internal documents and research accept the validity of climate change and for several of them they’ve made public statements acknowledging the human contribution to climate change.”…
The Chevron lawyers discounted research attempting to pinpoint sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Garbow said it’s not emphasized in the IPCC report, which is considered scientific consensus.
“It is, as far as I’m aware, a line of, if you will, scientific study or inquiry that is not very developed, and certainly not at this juncture widely accepted by any stretch,” Garbow said…
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chevron-will-stick-to-ipcc-findings-in-landmark-climate-change-trial/
00
21 Mar: AP: Court as class: Judge gets climate change lesson in oil suit
By SUDHIN THANAWALA
Leading researchers taught U.S. District Judge William Alsup the basic science of climate change at the unusual court hearing after he asked lawyers for two California cities and five of the world’s largest oil and gas companies to present “the best science now available on global warming.”
He cautioned at the start of the hearing against expecting “fireworks” and said he wanted to avoid politics and “stick to the science.”
“This is a serious proposition to try to educate the judge,” Alsup said…
His teachers included Myles Allen, a professor at the University of Oxford who studies human influences on climate, and Don Wuebbles, an expert in atmospheric science at the University of Illinois who co-authored a 2017 U.S. government report on climate change…
An attorney for Chevron, Theodore Boutrous, also presented, saying the oil giant does not dispute the findings of an international panel of scientists that it is extremely likely people are the dominant cause of global warming since the mid-1900s.
But he pointed out how thinking about global warming has evolved and said the company does not agree with all proposals in place to deal with it.
“The notion that we know today of a dynamic changing climate is relatively new in human understanding,” he said…
The companies have asked the judge to dismiss the lawsuits…
San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said the hearing showed the science on climate change was “clear.”
“What we saw today was one oil company begrudgingly accept the scientific consensus while trying to overemphasize the extent of scientific uncertainty,” he said in a statement.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CALIFORNIA_CLIMATE_CHANGE_LAWSUITS_NYOL-?SITE=SCAND&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
10
22 Mar: Science Mag: In a San Francisco courtroom, climate science gets its day on the docket
By Warren Cornwall
The lessons broke no new scientific ground. But the day gave a preview of how science will fit into the two sides’ legal strategies, and a taste of the judge’s wide-ranging scientific curiosity. The day was also punctuated with its share of memorable moments. A leading British scientist did a “chicken dance” to show how carbon dioxide traps heat. At one point, a shrill alarm sounded as a scientist spoke about the threats of sea level rise. “Coastal flood alert,” Alsup deadpanned.
Spectators hoping for a showdown between climate science champions and people denying humans are causing global warming were disappointed. Alsup started the session by warning that it would not be a version of the Scopes trial, the famous 1925 case that pitted evolutionary science against creationism. “This will not be withering cross-examinations and so forth. This will be numbers and diagrams, and if you get bored you can just leave,” he told the audience. Many had waited hours for a seat in the high-ceilinged room. None left…
Speaking for the cities, Myles Allen, a physicist and climate scientist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom told Alsup the science was clear enough more than 3 decades ago to realize global warming would be caused by greenhouse gas pollution, even if measurements hadn’t definitively picked it up. “It wasn’t necessary for scientists in the late 1970s to detect the warming in order for them to predict what was likely to happen next as a result,” he said.
Gary Griggs, a geologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led an expert panel examining sea level rise threats in California, told Alsup that research suggests the coastal flooding that now happens in San Francisco once every 10 years is expected to happen once every 3 days by the end of the century, even if greenhouse gas pollution slows…
(Chevron attorney) Boutrous also highlighted IPCC’s emphasis on the roles population growth and economic development—rather than the actions of any one industry—play in rising greenhouse gas levels. The IPCC report “doesn’t say that it’s the production and extraction [of fossil fuels] that’s driving the increase. It’s the way people are living their lives,” Boutrous said.
Throughout the morning, Alsup—an appointee of former President Bill Clinton who is now in his 70s—showed an appetite for probing the minutia of climate science, and for heading down other scientific side roads. He is known for mastering the technical details of complex cases. He learned the Java programming language while overseeing a dispute between computer companies Google and Oracle. In a recently settled case between Uber and Google’s Waymo over self-driving car technology, Alsup in 2017 ordered a similar tutorial on the science in that field…
At one point, Alsup asked Griggs whether the country should have turned more toward nuclear energy decades ago. “We might get some radiation if we drive by, but we don’t get any [carbon dioxide],” the judge said. “Maybe in retrospect we should have taken a harder look at nuclear.”
Chevron was the only defendant to participate in the tutorial. The other companies—including Exxon, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Royal Dutch Shell—stayed away because they are challenging Alsup’s jurisdiction to even hear the case. But the judge on Wednesday put the missing companies on the spot. Speaking to their attorneys in the audience, he gave them 2 weeks to submit paperwork, noting any disagreements with the Chevron attorney’s presentation. Otherwise, he said, he’ll assume they agree. Said Alsup: “You can’t get away with sitting there in silence and then later saying, ‘Oh, he wasn’t speaking for us.’”…
The oil companies on Tuesday filed motions to have the Alsup cases thrown out altogether. They have filed similar motions in the New York City suit.
Because Wednesday’s session was so unorthodox, it’s not clear how it will fit into the legal case, says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. “Does any of this count as evidence? Or does it count as an admission or denial of facts that are pled in the complaint? I don’t think anybody really knows,” he says. “Maybe the judge knows.”
Given the legal wrangling ahead, Burger says, he’s sure of one thing: “A trial is a long ways off in any calculation.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/san-francisco-court-room-climate-science-gets-its-day-docket
10
Bizarre that there is no mention of the real science behind the mechanism blamed for global warming.
Does the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere have a significant, or even detectable “warming” effect compared with the other gases present.
If the atmospheric content of CO2 was replaced with any of the other gases in the atmosphere, would the temperature fall?
These are the questions to be answered.
The frequency of cyclones is irrelevant to the point of science.
KK
10
22 Mar: Union of Concerned Scientists blog: How do big oil companies talk about climate science? Four takeaways from a day in court.
by Kristy Dahl, climate scientist
(Deborah Moore, Western States Senior Campaign Manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, contributed significantly to this post)
In front of a standing room only courtroom audience, the case of The People of California vs. B.P. P.L.C. et al. took an important step forward yesterday…
Together with my UCS colleague Deborah Moore, Western States Senior Campaign Manager, I was lucky enough to get a seat in the courtroom. Here are four of our takeaways from the day:
1. Judge Alsup was highly engaged with the presenters from each side
The plaintiffs had three renowned scientists present their tutorial: Dr. Myles Allen of Oxford University, Dr. Gary Griggs of the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Dr. Don Wuebbles of the University of Illinois. The defendants had one representative–Chevron lawyer Theodore Boutrous–presenting…
2. The Fifth Assessment Report done by the IPCC no longer fully reflects the most current scientific consensus on climate change
For the defendants’ presentation, Mr. Boutrous relied almost entirely on results from the 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report…
3. Chevron continues to highlight uncertainties and cherry-pick information
…When questioned by Judge Alsup on the finer points of the graphics he was showing, Mr. Boutrous was often forced to admit that his scientific understanding of the issue was limited and that he could not answer. It was striking that the oil companies chose a lawyer to present their scientific narrative, and the choice contrasted sharply with the deep scientific knowledge that the plaintiffs brought to the table…
4. Science has a key role to play in public nuisance cases, and scientists are stepping up to the plate
As graduate students, many of us climate scientists were told to be wary of wading too close to the politics of climate change, that we’d best stick to the science. Yesterday, three very prominent scientists stuck to the science, but used scientific information to establish that fossil fuel burning has already and will increasingly harm public well-being. Rather than putting “climate science on trial,” Judge Alsup’s climate science tutorial provided the case with a strong scientific underpinning that can help support making a determination, based on a set of legal standards and precedents, about the liability and responsibility of big oil companies.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/kristy-dahl/big-oil-companies-and-climate-science-four-takeaways-from-a-day-in-court
00
22 Mar: WesternJournal: Big Oil’s Defense in Court Leaves Climate Alarmists Arguing Against Scientific Consensus
By Michael Bastasch
Something bizarre happened Wednesday after the U.S. District Court for the District Northern California held a “tutorial” hearing on global warming science.
Chevron agreed with the latest scientific assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released in 2013 and 2014, the oil company’s lawyer said.
California cities, environmentalists and some scientists argued Chevron’s use of the IPCC’s latest assessment was misleading since it was outdated.
Effectively, those seeking to punish oil companies are throwing aside the oft-touted “consensus” on climate science.
The irony was not lost on University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke, Jr., who published peer-reviewed studies on climate science and policies…
Chevron was the only defendant that chose to participate in the climate science hearing, but the oil company surprised plaintiffs by not challenging the “consensus” IPCC assessment.
That ruffled the feathers of some scientists and environmentalists, who immediately went on the offensive against Chevron, accusing the company of using the IPCC to discredit climate policies.
“Chevron’s lawyer plucked his strategy right from the climate-denier playbook,” environmental group the Center for Biological Diversity climate scientist Shaye Wolf told Earther.
Apparently, the “climate-denier playbook” includes citing the IPCC. Chevron agreed with the IPCC’s scientific assessment, while the company did not agree with policy proposals the international body suggests, the oil entity argued.
“He overemphasized and inflated narrow areas of uncertainty about global warming’s impacts. And he bobbed and weaved his way out of acknowledging the role of fossil fuels,” Wolf said.
Climate scientists Kate Marvel of NASA and Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech went on to argue the IPCC’s 2013 report was outdated and scientific studies in the years since have painted a more alarming picture of man-made warming.
“The most recent IPCC report came out in 2013, but the climate model simulations used in that report stopped in 2005,” Marvel told Earther.
https://www.westernjournal.com/big-oils-defense-in-court-leaves-climate-alarmists-arguing-against-scientific-consensus/
21 Mar: Daily Caller: Michael Bastasch: Federal Judge Dismissed Claim Of A Conspiracy To Suppress Global Warming Science
The cities’ suits against oil companies, however, do not show an industry conspiracy to suppress climate science from the public, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said, according to journalists who attended the hearing.
Alsup said plaintiffs “shows nothing of the sort” regarding some sort of conspiracy against science, Conservative journalist Phelim McAleer tweeted…
“Alsup dismissing the idea that there was some sort of conspiracy,” environmental journalist Amy Westervelt tweeted…
A group of scientists skeptical of man-made warming also submitted (LINK) briefs for the hearing…
However, all the cities claim fossil fuel companies conspired to suppress global warming science. The claim is largely based on reporting from liberal journalists at InsideClimate News and Columbia University.
http://dailycaller.com/2018/03/21/federal-judge-conspiracy-exxon-chevron/
00
and Then There’s Physics says: 1Mar18:18:55 –This is Ken Rice a Reader of Astronomy and Public Relations Director at the Institute for Astronomy, within the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh (UK).
But this Earth has a non-transparent atmosphere, and never had such, if you would bother to measure! So at what pressure\temperature altitude above sea level does Earth’s atmosphere appear opaque from space? Is that not 40kPa\255K? Why do you claim a lower altitude sea level as “some radiating surface”? Why is lower atmosphere not at elevated temperature as demanded by the gas Laws under gravitational compression?
What concerted SCAMing drivel having no observational\measurable evidence whatsoever!
30
Geoff Chambers says: 21 Mar18:16:50
This submission will likely un-impress the 9th Circuit! If the Oil companies have sufficient resources (and they do), to proceed to a ruling by SCOT-US. This CAGW-SCAM will be retired to the dust-bin!
All the best!-will-
30
The development of the cyclone will increase the number of thunderstorms in Queensland.
http://en.blitzortung.org/live_lightning_maps.php?map=20
00
The cyclone is in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
00
California will have a cold spring.
http://pics.tinypic.pl/i/00961/xc5cbjewf1ti.png
10
It’s still snowing in the north of the US.
http://pics.tinypic.pl/i/00961/070dakak00pm.png
00
Perth is waiting for a heavy rain.
http://pics.tinypic.pl/i/00961/ce0g1di75xws.png
00
ren
Yes but nothing over limits suitable for my lovable but ignorant Earthling cattle! Some of dese cattle are really sharp! I learn lots! Thank you Earth wondrous critters! Makes me wonder. GOD 🙂
30
It will be fine.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2018/03/25/0900Z/wind/isobaric/850hPa/overlay=total_cloud_water/orthographic=-241.68,-33.84,903
00
That’s odd. The nullschool.net site I link to looks different and puts Nora in a different place and disagrees with BOM’s warning.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-227.79,-6.58,850
00
Cyclone for 3 days will be still partly on the Gulf of Carpentaria.
http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/product.php?color_type=tpw_nrl_colors&prod=ausf×pan=24hrs&anim=html5
00
The current center of the cyclone is near Blue Lagoon Ranger Base.
https://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=IQUEENSL1352#history
00
OK the last midweek unraveled must do; as no weakend good stuff!This Earth’s very compressible atmosphere, mostly N2 and O2 consist of linear molecules with an “isentropic exponent” of 7/5 1.4! This accounts for the non-condensing temperature lapse of -10°C at pressure greater than 15kPa as demanded by the gas Laws under Earth’s compressive (for gas) gravitational forces!
Atmospheric H2O in all phases can lower that gravity lapse to -5°C because of continual transfer of inSolation flux in and back out to space as latent heat of evaporation with NO needed temperature change!
The entire 33°C Climate Clown anomaly called “Greenhouse Gas Effect” is but gravitational lapse! With the variable amount of airborne water; there is no need for Earth to emit EMR flux from any of Earth’s incompressible surface! You have been so had! Bend over again please! 🙂
00