Weekend Unthreaded

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302 comments to Weekend Unthreaded

  • #
    Roy Hogue

    With so much hype about climate change and everybody and his brother jumping on the renewables bandwagon I thought I’d ask, does anyone know of a place to run to? All I know about are the places to run from. And it’s beginning to be frightening. California alone thinks it can save the world from a problem we don’t even have.

    But we do have a longshot at a Republican governor in November. And it’s a very long long shot. I’m hoping the voters will wake up in time and realize what Jerry and the legislature have done to us. Time will tell. But like I said, it’s a longshot at best.

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    • #
      Kinky Keith

      Roy, now you have two places to run from; California and The Vatican.

      It seems that there is now a new commandment about not burning oil.

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      • #
        Graeme No.3

        Obviously burning candles is out too. Do the New Catholics say OM, PADRE OM?

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        • #
          Kinky Keith

          Oh no.

          How could I have been so blind as to not see what must be many tons of wax.

          Perhaps it might be possible to use electric candles powered by wind and or solar?

          Who knows? the world is evolving each and every day.

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          • #
            beowulf

            Wax tax?

            What’s good for the goose is good for the pope or however that saying goes. Incense and joss sticks tax next. All that smoky carbon pollution.

            On a tangent, I miss the cracker nights and bonfires of my childhood/adolescence held on this Queen’s Birthday long weekend until one too many kids had his fingers blown off by a twopenny bunger and several too many letterboxes were demolished in the lead-up to the night. They were great family and neighbourhood events. The idiots ruined it for all. It was fun.

            In those golden days you could strike a match without being made to feel guilty for overheating the planet by your inconsiderate action.

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            • #
              Annie

              It sounds like Guy Fawkes Night (5th Nov) in England….I used to love the fireworks. If the idiots want to maim and even kill themselves, why should everyone else be deprived of a bit of fun? Let the Darwin Award candidates get on with it.
              Now let’s see how many red thumbs I’m awarded for saying that! I’m sick of the nanny-state syndrome.

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              • #
                Kinky Keith

                Annie
                Cracker night at our place was always great.
                We had access to a good sized paddock where we stacked wood for a week before the big night.
                The fire and the fireworks made it a night to remember.
                We always appreciated that fireworks could be dangerous and progressed from year to year as our understanding grew.

                Nobody bombed letter boxes: why would you do that?

                It was dangerous but when approached sensibly and respect for the danger and common sense, it was a good learning experience.

                Now nobody can do it because there are idiots who have no respect for themselves or others.

                KK

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              • #
                Annie

                We were still able to enjoy such occasions when we lived back in England for a few years KK. The little school in one of the villages in our benefice had a great evening each year in the field opposite the church. There was a great firework display, a huge bonfire, piled up for weeks before the event, probably a ‘guy’ on top of the bonfire and goodies to eat for sale. It was always a great social occasion.
                Many, many years ago, I remember one Bonfire Night on a freezing evening near Reading. On the way home we heard about the Hungarian Revolution…I remember being completely shocked by it. This year we had family members who had a wonderful time in Budapest….what a change from 1956.

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        • #
          Kinky Keith

          Shouldn’t that be;

          “Om mani padme Om”?

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        • #
          sophocles

          Sanskrit: OM MA NI PAD ME HUM

          I won’t try for an anglicized translation …

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        • #
          Greebo

          Not to mention the White/Black smoke when the next Pope is selected.

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          • #
            Kinky Keith

            Some people have absolutely no respect for the environment.
            First the wax candle thing and now the pollution to end all pollution: black smoke.

            Oh the humanity.

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      • #
        Roy Hogue

        Not to worry KK, I don’t burn oil. I do burn a lot of natural gas though. What does the Vatican say about that?

        Says he, pretending to give a hoot while not really noticing the Vatican’s pronouncements at all.

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      • #
        Old44

        Funnily enough, the centres of two major religions.

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    • #
      dinn, rob

      have you tried N. Korea? has a government, they say, stables for all the animals, perks for the more equal: http://balance10.blogspot.com/2018/06/world-news-update.html

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    • #
      Roy Hogue

      It’s seemingly worse than I thought. We have too many of the cities with the worst carbon footprints.

      I went out hunting last night for carbons to shoot a few so we would have a few less bad footprints around but then I realized something… …no one knows what a carbon looks like. And if that’s the case, how can we get rid of them to eliminate their footprints?

      What a dilemma. We’re doomed for sure. 🙁

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      • #
        Ian Hill

        Interesting list Roy, with some glaring errors of fact. For example, six Australian cities are in the top 500 including Fremantle (not Perth) and the population of Adelaide is shown as 800,000-odd instead of over 1 million, therefore pushing up its per capita ranking. One city in China gets a latitude/longitude name only because they can’t find its actual name.

        I agree those carbons are elusive devils, morphing from diamonds to graphite and lots of other things. Superman had the ability to make a diamond out of coal with his bare hands, polluting the air with oxygen in the process no doubt!

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        • #
          Roy Hogue

          Well, after all, it’s not my list so what do you expect?

          I would never make such a list in the first place. But some people are addicted to lists, especially those who disapprove of what others are doing.

          As for the carbons… …if I finally see one and manage to shoot it I’ll take a picture and have Jo post it so everyone will know what they look like. Actually I’ll make it 2 pictures, a frontal view and a profile just to nail those devils up on the wall — or the barn door for you who farm or ranch — once and for all.

          That ought to fix their wagon for them… …if I ever find one.

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          • #
            OriginalSteve

            Its a bit of a loaded dice….they pick Australia with its huge distances and poor infrastructure and cry “wolf”….

            Kind of like putting something illegal on someones ocmputer, then arresting them for it…..or buring the Reichstag down and blaming others for it…..

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          • #
            sophocles

            Roy:
            Are you telling us that the police haven’t stopped you and asked what you’re doing? That you’re still free …?
            Stalking the streets at night with a carbon-powered rifle looking for the carbons which made the footprints is not of interest?

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            • #
              Roy Hogue

              sophocles,

              I’m sneaky. Unlike those evil carbons, I leave no footprints. But it’s not easy and I was almost caught once when I made the mistake of stopping at my favorite all night place for coffee and a slice of pie. I shouldn’t have asked for carbon free apple pie. That mmust be what did it. But I escaped in time through the back door and got a way.

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              • #
                Bobl

                I loved those carbon free sugar adverts!

                I hope you get your wish for a trumpian governor. That would put the wind up the nanny state.

                It’s clear that the clear aim of the democrats was to import more democrats. Not that they should be called democrats because democracy is about as far from their blind ideology as you can get.

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        • #
          PeterS

          We also have the ability to make diamonds. In fact we have a number of ways of doing, at least one of which doesn’t require lots of pressure and heat – just the opposite; lots of vapour being deposited under a vacuum.

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          • #
            Annie

            Details on how you do dat?

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              • #
                Annie

                Thanks for that….interesting.

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              • #
                sophocles

                Dropping a very big rock on the planet from a great height makes billions and billions of nano-diamonds. The down side is that it kills off a lot of fauna at the same time. If it’s big enough and comes from high enough it can also set off volcanoes on the other side of the globe, like the Deccan and Siberian traps … 🙂

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              • #
                Annie

                A bit of a drastic method there Sophocles, although I suppose it could happen again. You’d have to be a bit desperate for a diamond ring!

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              • #
                Annie

                Nano particles mightn’t be much use for the purpose…might as well go artificial and not worry about insurance.

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              • #
                Annie

                Ooh! Thank you Red Thumber! That makes 20 extra Green Thumbs according to AndyG55 🙂

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              • #
                Graeme No.3

                Annie:

                What on Earth are the red thumber doing? Proof surely that they’re either stupid or very stupid.

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              • #
                Ted O'Brien.

                It’s not hard to do a red thumb accidentally. No comeback, either.

                BTW. I do like the red/green thumb facility very much. I don’t use Jo’s red much, but often wish other blogs had it.

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              • #
                sophocles

                Annie said:

                A bit of a drastic method there Sophocles, although I suppose it could happen again.

                It worked 66MYA and proved very effective: the quantity made was huge and spread over a very wide area.
                Pity about the dinosaurs, though. Only the birds made it.
                It has happened again many times since but the rocks weren’t as big as that one.
                It’s a bit like the weather: sometimes a really big one does come along.

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        • #
          MudCrab

          Perth is clearly not on the list since after it ran out of water and became one of Timmy’s Ghost Metropolises.

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      • #
        Sceptical Sam

        Follow the Carbon footprints. that’s how you find them.

        To do that you need is a Carbon Black tracker.

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    • #
      PeterS

      Roy you can run to pretty much anywhere except Australia and NZ. Pretty much all other nations of significance haven’t really taken the renewables nonsense that seriously. Why else are there so many coal fired power stations being built – something like around 1,000 either in construction or being planned? Then there are the numerous nuclear ones also being built. Also the news from US, Britain and others that they are now going to bolster their existing ones to extend their terms. So Australia is pretty much the only nation of any significance that’s bucking the trend and sticking to renewables and letting the only source of base load power to be destroyed. I take the view however this can’t go on for much longer without serious consequences finally being felt by the public. I do give Australians a lot of credit for their ability to react quickly when the opportunity comes up, and this one will come up like a medium sized asteroid crashing into the Opera House. It won’t go unnoticed. It’s just a matter of time before the public wake up and finally join the rest of the world and take base load power seriously, and in our case start building new coal fired power stations and/or bolster the existing ones. The only question is when?

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      • #
        el gordo

        ‘I take the view however this can’t go on for much longer …..’

        How much longer?

        The media has to be the first to break the nexus and its the Murdocracy which is forcing the ABC, Fairfax, SBS and Guardian to recognise reality.

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        • #
          PeterS

          Well that won’t be happening for a very long time if ever. Those news outlets are safe with LNP and ALP. Look the ABC, Fairfax, SBS and Guardian are not our only means of gathering information and news. How do you think Trump was elected despite the most vigorous campaign by their MSM against him and promoting Clinton? The ideal is the voters to switch on their brains and look at all the evidence, not just the MSM. In reality that rarely happens so what ends up happening more often instead is voters have to feel enough pain to wake up and see through the BS. It might be the case here by the time we have our federal election. Otherwise, it would prove too many voters are still asleep and need more pain and the wake up will happen later. As for the MSM here, anyone who thinks they will change for our benefit is living in a dreamland. By and large it still hasn’t happened even in the US despite Trump’s increased popularity. Their MSM is still carrying on how Trump is bad and that Clinton should have won. What makes you think our MSM, which is far more leftist than theirs will suddenly change and get on the side of truth?

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          • #
            el gordo

            The people won’t wake up until the ABC gives balance, by comparison the Australian is fair and balanced.

            We cannot expect a mass social uprising through the twittersphere.

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            • #
              OriginalSteve

              Once the collapse starts, it will take years, but will take at least 5 years to come up the other side.

              If Australians dont wake up, I think you will see a mass exodus of the brains out, and you will wind up with another Zimbabwe on your hands….

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              • #
                yarpos

                That started long ago, and is natural to some extent. There is a much bigger pond to swim in outside of Oz.

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              • #
                PeterS

                The exodus started a long time ago. A friend of mine who is a brilliant electronics engineer left Australia and went to the US over 15 years. He saw what was coming and I agree with him.

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              • #
                Greebo

                you will wind up with another Zimbabwe on your hands….

                Or Venezuela perhaps.

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            • #
              PeterS

              The ABC will never give balance. There are simply far too many leftists there.

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              • #
                el gordo

                Breaching is against the code, Tony draws a witless journalist to over step the mark.

                https://tvtonight.com.au/2018/05/abc-breaches-code-for-calling-tony-abbott-a-destructive-politician.html

                It would be nice to see Cory out there helping the ginger group, a honeypot of heretics saying CO2 doesn’t cause global warming.

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              • #
                PeterS

                It would be even nicer and more to the point if the new leader of the LNP, if and when it happens adopted all of the energy policies of the ACP. Until that happens to obvious decision is to vote for ACP.

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              • #
                el gordo

                Here is the ACP policy platform on energy and I think they should drop nuclear altogether because of the huge expense in building the plant, and the fuel cycle industry should also be avoided.

                ‘We support all forms of electricity generation.’ Cory is being ambivalent.

                Australians deserve the most reliable and affordable energy in the world.
                With electricity generation, we are technology-agnostic but subsidy-averse.
                We support nuclear power and a nuclear fuel cycle industry.
                We support all forms of electricity generation and will provide them with legislative certainty and legal protection.
                We do not support any renewable energy targets.
                We will remove all taxpayer and cross subsidies to electricity generation.
                We will require all electricity supplied to the grid to be useable – that is, predictable and consistent in output (kWhrs) and synchronous (at the required 50 Hz range).
                We will allow market forces to provide the most efficient power generation available.
                We will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.

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              • #
                sophocles

                We support nuclear power and a nuclear fuel cycle industry.

                Uh oh, that means U235 and Light Water High Pressure Reactors, The most expensive, dangerous and dirty way possible. R. Quick: somebody introduce them to LFTR and Thorium.

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              • #
                el gordo

                The ABC would find immediate balance if Cory said CO2 does not cause global warming, but there is nothing on his platform about weather or climate.

                So he doesn’t have a clue that this is the root cause of the dilemma and I couldn’t possibly vote for anyone who is ignorant about the most important issue of our time.

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              • #
                el gordo

                A line in the sand.

                ‘Federal Labor would end a funding freeze on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) if elected, effectively restoring $83.7 million to the public broadcaster over three years.’

                ABC

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        • #
          Ted O'Brien.

          When will the media wake up? Any day soon if Trump can get sense out of Kim.

          NK never made sense for me anyway, so I won’t stake my future on getting sense. Why do they stck with their austerity when prosperity can be seen just across the border?

          But why the dramatic change in NK’s approach? Did Trump nuke NK’s nukes?

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    • #
      David-of-Cooyal-in-Oz

      G’day Roy.
      Where to run to? My initial thought was to some place where they’re buying our coal, and using it to produce cheap electricity for themselves. But they also seem to be rather crowded places and with different cultural and other problems eg China and India. Japan maybe? But I’d hoped that some of your own states were waking up and following President Trump’s lead so that there was an option for you without emigration. Possible?
      At 80 I’ll have to stay here, in hope and a reasonable latitude.
      Cheers,
      Dave B

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      • #
        Lionell Griffith

        My escape from California in 2017 to Illinois was not a mistake. Largely because I can live in the rental property I own there and don’t have to have a regular job to live. Taxes are high but not as high as in California. The political situation is silly but not yet descending into psychosis.

        I won’t recommend moving to Illinois but any place not on either coast represents viable possibilities. Especially with the number of job openings growing greater than the unemployed numbers.

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      • #
        Lionell Griffith

        If you must be near an ocean and almost mountains (at least they are called mountains), North or South Carolina looks to be a an exception to not coastal. Some high tech, friendly people, good food, and mild weather (except for the occasional hurricane or tropical storm).

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    • #
      TdeF

      Please Roy, rage against ‘replaceables’. Let the Greens take offence. Isn’t that the same word as renewables anyway?

      I would love everyone to stop the language implicit in all this. In railing against ‘renewables’ you are inadvertently promoting the absurd concept of ‘free’ energy. It is the most expensive, unreliable, unpredictable energy in the world and the life span of the solar panels and windmills is very short. Solar is at least predictably off for half the time. No, they are replaceable, totally unserviceable. Talk about heavy metal pollution as disposables! All full of defined metals like Cadmium and disposal will be a massive problem, once people start sending solar panels to the tip.

      Then as China gets out of subsidies and super low solar panel prices, the cost of these replaceable facilities will rocket. As I said, houses will be devalued by them, especially when we get real energy. Imagine $1.5Trillion a year making Fusion work? We would have it by now.

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      • #
        Bobl

        Energy scavenging technology I call them, scavenging environmental ultra-low density energy over huge land footprints -land of course being the scarcest resource of all. The energy scavengers are totally unsustainable, leading me to my saying: Sustainability is totally unsustainable.

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    • #
      Rob Leviston

      Roy. I know you feel. The world has gone crazy, and we all need a safe place! But somewhere to run? I dunno. Sometimes, I think we will just have to stand and fight! I hope we we’ll win this war, even if we lose some battles along the way! Has it it indeed come to this? I fear, it probably has.

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  • #
    Ruairi

    Environmentalists can fall from grace,
    Like lesser mortals of the human race.

    Now China will no longer subsidize,
    Its solar panels, which must then downsize.

    Could Australians save their grids in some Green way,
    By working through the night, then sleep by day?

    Renewables fail grids throughout the land,
    And thus ensure they fail to meet demand.

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  • #
    Mark M

    Here’s an unthreaded mystery …

    June 3, 2018, abc: Ancient Egyptian visitors to Australia or miner’s mishap? Riddle of the rainforest coin-

    “Unearthed in 1912, squirreled away for a lifetime and then handed in to a museum — the story behind the discovery of an ancient Egyptian coin in far north Queensland is almost as mysterious as how it came to be there.

    The bronze coin — about the same size as a 50 cent piece — was minted during the reign of Ptolemy IV, between 221 and 204BC.

    More than two millennia later it was found about seven centimetres underground in the depths of the far north Queensland rainforest.”

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-02/far-north-queenslands-egyptian-coin-mystery/9708318?smid=Page:%20ABC%20News-Facebook_Organic&WT.tsrc=Facebook_Organic&sf190898744=1

    There are others …

    May, 2013: ” … five coins were found in the Northern Territory in 1944 that have proven to be 1000 years old, opening up the possibility that seafarers from distant countries might have landed in Australia much earlier than what is currently believed.”

    https://www.smh.com.au/national/ancient-discovery-set-to-rewrite-australian-history-20130519-2juck.html

    And the wharf supposedly built by Phonecians in Queensland …

    20 July 2000: “It has been reported in the media that Mr Val Osborn, a local from Freshwater Point near Sarina on the North Queensland coast, has discovered a 3,000 year old Phoenician harbour and mine, a discovery set to change Australian, if not world, history.”

    http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/phoenicians-in-queensland/3469860

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    • #
      Mark M

      One more …

      Egyptologist debunks new claims about ‘Gosford glyphs’

      “An Egyptologist from Sydney’s Macquarie University has rejected any new claims about one of the most mysterious and controversial sites on the New South Wales Central Coast, known as the ‘Gosford Hieroglyphs’.”

      http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-14/glyphs-reax/4428134

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      • #
        yarpos

        good name for a band

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        • #
          OriginalSteve

          Best ever I saw was a punk band in Melbourne “Exploding White Mice”……

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          • #
            yarpos

            sounds VW have been testing again

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          • #
            MudCrab

            Adelaide band dating back from that nearly forgotten era of history where people actually had enough electricity to use amps.

            Their bassist Andy MacQueen recently passed away unexpectedly, so Exploding White Mice and his later band, the Pro Tools, have been getting a lot of airplay with the cool kids recently.

            Unfortunately I don’t believe I have ever seen them. My Street Cred has peaked and troughed greatly over the years and their height was in one of my lows.

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            • #
              OriginalSteve

              Last I saw the band name was from a commuter train while at uni in the late 1980s, when they were playing at a pub in Burnley, in ( pre-hipster infestation ) melbournes inner east….

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    • #
      Yonniestone

      An occupation of Egyptian or people influenced by Egyptians may give answers to how the last indigenous Australians were found to have a knowledge of physics with the boomerang but didn’t know how to boil water or scribe text, an article I read last year even suggested the indigenous people found were initially bought here as slaves by Egyptians and left after they departed, also consider the Bradshaw hieroglyphic type paintings discovered in remote areas.

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        yarpos

        When you dont have a written history you can reinvent the past to be whatever suits the cause of the day. Overlay that with Chinese whispers and it wont be long until you arrive at Wakanda Down Under.

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      • #
        Gee Aye

        but didn’t know how to boil water

        wha???

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        • #
          el gordo

          BBQs were popular, but they couldn’t figure out the idea of a utensil to boil water in. Seems like a reasonable assumption.

          The boomerang and other traditional hunting tools were probably developed naturally over 60,000 years.

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          • #
            Dennis

            Actually Australian Aborigines boiled water for a number of purposes including making it safe to drink. They used bark containers and large shells, also hollows in rocks to pour water into and then place very hot rocks in the water.

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            • #
              Peter C

              Actually Australian Aborigines boiled water for a number of purposes including making it safe to drink.

              Really?

              Can you boil water in a bark container?

              Hot rocks in a shell containing water will make the water hot, and might even boil on the surface of the rock, but not overall boil (IMHO).

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                el gordo

                According to Geoffrey Blainey (The Triumph of the Nomads) boiling water ended at Torres Straight and the Solomon Islands, didn’t happen on the mainland.

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    • #
      el gordo

      Its all beginning to make sense, the Phonecians in Queensland, the arrival of the dingo with Indian sailors who intermarried with the indigenous population.

      Going back much further, what do you make of the Bosnian Pyramids?

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      • #
        el gordo

        What I have discovered, after a quick perusal, might be of interest to the engineers and mathematicians who loiter here.

        ‘Researchers have found an energy beam (electromagnetic in nature) coming through the top of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun. The radius of the beam is 4.5 meters with a frequency of 28 kHz with a strength of 3,9 V.

        ‘According to researchers, the beam is continuous and its strength grows as it moves up and away from the pyramid. This phenomenon contradicts the known laws of nature, physics, and technology and might as well be the first ever “tangible” proof of non-herzian technology found on Earth.’

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          yarpos

          field strength in volts? thats creative

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          • #
            sophocles

            El G:
            Are you referring to those natural flatiron formations near Visoko in Bosnia-Herzegovina? The ones made (in)famous by Osmanagić and co. back in October 2005? (co. = cohorts, company, conspirators. You choose).

            They seem to attract numbers of those with pseudo-scientific beliefs. Archaeologists and geologists are adamant that any belief that Visočica hill and the surrounding hills are an ancient pyramid complex is nothing but pseudo-scientific at best. One has to wonder how much they made from it.

            The European Association of Archaeologists has condemned the so-called ‘Bosnian pyramids’ as a “cruel hoax”;

            [Wikipedia]

            There’s the so-called ‘Russian Twin Pyramids’ in Vladivostok, another natural flatiron geological formation. Someone could always start a rumour/hoax about them … Might be money in it … 🙂

            The big giveaway about its pseudo-science was the “electromagnetic energy beam” with an electric potential of 3.5 Volts. (2 Evereadys …) That set off my pseudo-science alarm bells which were deafening … for anything electromagnetic to create voltage or electrical potential, there has to be induction into an electrical conductor, or it would have to be a plasma beam (which is electrically conductive) and they are way out of the scope of a couple of Evereadys; sort of the same order of magnitude, power and effect as a lightning bolt.

            Air is a very good electrical insulator and has a dielectric strength (or breakdown voltage) of approximately 3,000V/mm or about 76,000V per inch. That’s why those Grid high voltage power lines (500kV 3 phase)* don’t flash over. Now you can calculate the voltage of Ye Average Lightning Bolt and if you have any idea of the current (huge), the average power.

            I was getting c. 12 inch long flashes from a Honda motorcycle ignition coil across my garage bench (wood) when I tested a home-made CDI (capacitive discharge ignition) system for that motorcycle. It was impressive and I was impressed. Even more impressive was that the coil survived that mistreatment. I was operating the fireworks from a very safe distance, indeed.

            * 500kv AC = 500,000 V rms or c. 700,000 V pk or 1,400,000 pk to pk. per phase.

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          PeterS

          Mathematicians? You mean physicists don’t you? Nothing against mathematicians but their fields of expertise do not include matter, energy, time and space. As for the mysterious energy source apparently it has been debunked many times. I’m not sure though of the real truth as I haven’t studied it myself, just like I haven’t studied hundreds of other mysteries. I prefer to keep my mind open to such ideas until proven one way or another with exhaustive studies by real scientists, what’s left of them.

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        • #
          el gordo

          Without strong evidence it will remain a SF mystery.

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          • #
            PeterS

            Indeed. It’s like so many other mysteries, like those who claim they can generate “free” electricity using certain mixture of frequencies at specific phase differences. If they actually have achieved it surely they can provide a working model where anyone can see it in real-time. If they did that I would be prepared to go there and see it for myself to make sure there are “no strings attached”. More likely than not they are just fakes.

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              el gordo

              This is theoretical physics and ‘Osmanagich believes that archaeologists are too stubborn to admit that they might have been wrong, and that changing the history books is completely out of the question, so archaeologist just refuse to admit that he might have a point.’

              Hmmm …. physics is not his discipline, yet he tries to budge the accepted paradigm and comes up against a solid wall of opposition.

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              • #
                Graeme No.3

                el gordo:

                I’ve been reading Brian Fagan’s books recently – not The Little ICE Age but – The Long Summer about the various climate changes in the last 15,000 years and how mankind had to adapt and generally advance, and have been struck by his insistence at the end that man made climate change will be upon us real soon and have drastic effects.

                Also The Great Warming where he repeats the disasters which must follow the hypothetical temperature rise.
                An excerpt “From the tenth to the fifteenth centuries the earth experienced a rise in surface temperature that changed climate worldwide – a preview of today’s global warming. In some areas, including Western Europe, longer summers brought bountiful harvests and population growth that led to cultural flowering. In the Arctic, Inuit and Norse sailors made cultural connections across thousands of miles as they traded precious iron goods. Polynesian sailors, riding new wind patterns, were able to settle the remotest islands on earth.”goes on from there to the disasters to come.
                Talk about a belief impervious to evidence, even that gathered by himself. But then he lives in California.
                For all that the books are worth reading, just ignore the last chapter.

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              • #
                el gordo

                Yeah, they say the Holocene is unprecedented, is it because the Younger Dryas put a damper on temperatures?

                ‘The Earth’s climate has always been in flux: glacial periods and warm ones have slowly and relentlessly alternated for millennia. But the period of global warming of the last 15,000 years is without precedent, and it set the conditions which enabled civilization to arise. It is our ‘long summer’.

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                sophocles

                Some seem to have some difficulty understanding that the Holocene is just another warming period—an interstadial (about #30-something) of a real Ice Age: the Quaternary Ice Age, which started 3MYA and has many more MYears to run. The Holocene is only slightly unusual in that its peak temperature has been a little lower and lasted a little longer than some of its more recent brethren.

                One thing is certain: the ice will return.

                Looking into the near future, we are living in “Interesting Times.” The cuckoos, ah, warmists, are unfortunately partially right that odd weather has been occurring more over the last decade or so and somewhat more extreme (but still within natural variation) than at other times. And they’re right about it getting worse but not in the ways or for the reasons they think. What makes things exciting is that the sun is going into a minimum (some say a Grand Solar Minimum) and our dear old planet (it’s been around for 4.3 Billion years or so, after all) appears to be trying to swap it’s magnetic poles. Soon. Both are happening around us, now.

                I’ve seen a claim that the magnetic field of the Kilauea lava’s magnetic field is opposed to the current field and is “sending compasses crazy” but the Express is not exactly a reliable source and I haven’t made the effort to search the USGS site yet.

                There is no known evidence of the results of both a magnetic pole swap and a solar minimum happening together. That’s why I say we’re in “Interesting Times.”

                There’s been about a 15% weakening of the planetary magnetic field over the last 10 – 15 years. The Ignorati are also unaware of the extent to which the sun actually drives weather on the The Big Blue Marble. That’s how Piers Corban (Weather Action in the UK) was able to take so much money from Hills Bookmakers some years ago. 🙂

                Since the IPCC proclaimed The Solar Constant (now that’s a big laugh: a variable star is Constant! Yeah, Right! Fantastic!) nobody in the Klimate branch of Science has raised their eyes heavenwards. That’s where the action is. Their fabulous (in the true sense of the word) Models can’t do clouds, they don’t do Cosmic Rays at all and they sure don’t do Ice Ages. Fabulously Fictional stuff. It’s little wonder they have never been right over the last twenty three years.

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    • #
      Mark M

      The latest link with the ‘rainforest coin’ reminded me of the other links.

      They are just random links with a common thread easily collated on an inter web site.

      It’s that, or someone has gone to great lengths over a 100 year period in anticipation of having a good laugh from the grave.

      Even Cook was looking for a fabled land.

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      • #
        el gordo

        You would have heard of the ancient Chinese fleet visiting Australian shores, its quite plausible because they had the technology, nevertheless it has been heavily panned.

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        • #
          sophocles

          Gavin Menzies’ books “ 1421; the Year China Discovered the World” was the book which made that claim. The Pacific and Indian oceans were pretty much a Chinese pond and it’s entirely possible, but not necessarily so.

          The sequel is about a Chinese fleet visiting Italy a few years later: “1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance.” The books are well written, making interesting and entertaining reading. He produces ample “evidence” in support of his theses but without validation, the evidence is suspect. His ideas have been almost universally panned. Still, the books are certainly readable. (Added salt is at your discretion.)

          They must have eased his retirement handsomely. 🙂

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          • #
            MudCrab

            That is a LOT of salt, Sophocles.

            Menzies is either completely bonkers, or came up with the idea as a bit of a laugh and is not just seeing how much stuff he can blatantly make up before his publishers call him out on it.

            The prime grounds for his theory for the 1421 world adventure is that there is no record to say they didn’t. There was a large Chinese fleet dating from that period, but due to a gap in the historical record due to numerous court documents being destroyed there is a vague period of a few years.

            Conclusion? They were sailing the world!

            That’s it. There is no proof that they didn’t, ergo they did.

            Very very little of what Menzies claims is remotely plausible – I think his claim that China existed as a major civilisation is pretty safe, but it goes rapidly downhill from there. Simply comparing the route with the maximum sailing speed of the vessels involved proves there is no way the voyage could have happened. The entire concept (pun intended) is Junk Science.

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            • #
              el gordo

              This from wiki:

              ‘China was the leading maritime power in the years 1405–1433, when Chinese shipbuilders began to build massive oceangoing junks.’

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            • #
              sophocles

              Mudcrab said:

              That is a LOT of salt,

              🙂

              Of course, that’s why it’s at your discretion.

              That’s it. There is no proof that they didn’t, ergo they did.

              There’s no proof that the West knows of they didn’t.

              Menzies grew up in China so he would have had most of his early education there. None of us nor those who pan him weren’t and none seem to have to followed up by finding out what Menzies may have met/seen/read there. Their loss. He could be an honest player … which is why I neither believe nor disbelieve him. Some who believe seem truly pseudo-scientific, but neither does that disprove any of his ideas.

              Have you tried reading any of his books?

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      • #
        el gordo

        ‘Even Cook was looking for a fabled land.’

        They thought there must be a large island in the Southern Hemisphere otherwise the globe would be unbalanced.

        The Harrapan also had explorers and they discovered this small continent. The sailors, finding the local people similar in appearance yet stone age, jumped ship. Which explains why 11% of aboriginal DNA is of of Indian origin.

        ‘The Indian Ocean system developed out of the gradual integration of earlier regional networks. By 3000 B.C., travelers in small canoes and rafts moved between towns and trading ports along coastlines from Arabia to the Indian subcontinent.

        ‘By 2000 B.C., millet and sorghum — grains imported from the East African coast — were part of the cuisine of the Harappan civilization, which stretched across today’s Pakistan and northern India. Archaeological evidence and genetic studies suggest that the first major settlement of Madagascar came not from Africa — a short hop across the Mozambique Channel — but from Indonesia, 4,000 miles away.’

        Discover

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  • #
    TdeF

    You have to laugh, Delingpole on the total lack of wind power in the UK for 7 days plus as reported here, the crash of solar subsidies in China. Consider that when it comes to renew the renewables, they will be unaffordables, unjustifiables.

    If people seriously think that coal power stations are somehow exhausted or tired after a mere fifty years, how are they going to be able to replace their home solar panels after twenty? How are investors going to replace their offshore or mountaintop windmills? Or is that someone else’s problem? Houses dependent on antique and dysfunctional solar panels may well be substantially devalued.

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    • #
      TdeF

      The implication of this is profound. 7 days without wind! Of course 7 nights without sun.

      Whatever a country’s electricity needs, the ‘backup’ system has to be capable of fully supplying the country for at least 7 days.

      It’s summer in the UK. What would we do on breathless dry summer nights? Water batteries won’t work. The water ‘batteries’ would run dry as you do not have the energy to pump the water back up the hill. Then you would have emptied the dams and have to wait for winter and floods and no water for irrigation . Close the country for a week? A week long version of Adelaide where nothing worked? Then six months waiting for rain as the rivers ran dry? Where would we get water?

      The British have nuclear and gas and coal and French nuclear as backup. Our politicians plan to have carbon free Diesel farms. Genius.

      The push to replace coal with wind power is beyond logic. It is willful destruction of an adequate working system for political beliefs.

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        TdeF

        Tasmania went through this, having sold their gravitational power to Victoria for the high prices only to run out of irreplaceable water. Adelaide went through this without Pelican point or coal power. Both now use diesel for power. Why?

        Will someone please explain that fresh water is a limited, precious resource and is needed to keep us alive, not replace coal. All the rivers run, out to the sea. Once it is gone, we are in real trouble.

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        PeterS

        That’s the strange thing about all this. The UK has announced they will be building several new nuclear power plants. So it appears they have woken up to the renewables nonsense. Of course they might have made that decision too late and they will still have to suffer some serious power outages while they wait for the new power plants to be built. We in Australia are now facing a similar situation and so we need to either bolster our existing coal fired power stations and/or start building new ones ASAP.

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        • #
          tom0mason

          Maybe some in the UK government saw part-time NSA employee Leif Svalgaard prediction for solar cycle 25. He says it will be below cycle 20 but above cycle 24. Either way the climate will probably be cool, cloudy, and maybe with a few more storms overall. That would not bode well for the ruinable electricity generation.

          See more at https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2018/06/09/leif-svalgaard-reveals-his-solar-cycle-25-prediction-at-last/

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          • #
            Another Ian

            Perfect for the generation of “ephemeral energy” though

            (this was coined on Jo’s a while back)

            20

          • #
            PeterS

            It would bode ever less well for food prices. If the prediction of that much cooling happens then food prices will sky-rocket. We all know what happens after that. Large scale famine and war.

            20

            • #
              sophocles

              then food prices will sky-rocket.

              Only until the croppers sow the short growing season seeds. The only problem is recognizing what change is needed and effecting it. That gap/window could be problematic, and the plebs could be revolting.

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            • #
              tom0mason

              PeterS,
              Yes, the weather may go bad more often than the currently usual, and that gives big farming concerns the perfect excuse for profiteering.

              The big question is when will solar cycle 25 properly get going as SC24 fades away. If it is as long as SC24 took then we got the best part of 2 to 3 years of more low solar activity to get through.

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                PeterS

                Well given there is ample warning about the risk of word-wide food shortages the smart thing for Australia to do is to embark on a massive campaign to grow more food and stock pile as much as we can. Instead we are giving subsidies to renewables. That’s about how stupid this country has become. When the time comes and food shortages to become a far more serious issue than global warming would ever be even in the worst case scenario then I really hope the decision makers go to prison. The have been given more than enough warning about the potential for global cooling.

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              • #
                sophocles

                the smart thing for Australia to do is to embark on a massive campaign to grow more food and stock pile

                The smart thing for Australia to do is start moving to the short growing season varieties and lay in seed stocks. Food stocks elsewhere may be threatened before the move is made elsewhere. The seed stocks are already available.

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      • #
        yarpos

        The icing on the cake would be 10 million EVs

        50

        • #
          OriginalSteve

          I was in Gundagai last week…6 visits in the last 3 months and every time never saw a vehicle charging once…..

          50

          • #
            yarpos

            OK then, we will delay the announcement of the the death of the ICE until next month

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            • #
              OriginalSteve

              Well it occurred to me that the Telsa charging stations would be good for campercans to use to plug into while overnighting in Gundagai.

              Given the number of times Ive gone through Gundagai, I should logically have seen a Tesla charging once, but alas…..the worlds most pointless vee-hicle continues to evade me….

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    • #
      PeterS

      The only people who seriously think that we can survive without a lot of coal fired power stations for the forseable future (say 20+ years) are the loonies from the enviro-left, which have infiltrated both major parties. However, reality will bite soon and then things will have to change. Otherwise, crash and burn. Also understand Britain has recently made several announcements saying a number of new nuclear power plants are going to be built. Trump has made a commitment to bolster their existing coal fired and nuclear plants. Even though “investments” in more renewables might not stop now the message overseas is clear; coal and nuclear power are not only here to stay all around the world but they are growing. Part of the problem in the West is they have to play catch-up due to the over-reliance on renewables “dream” which in fact is turning out to be a nightmare as we have discussed, because the West have ignored their base load power sources. Now things have changed overseas in the West. It remains to be seen how long before we change here to follow the new trend. Meanwhile non-Western nations are still building hundreds of coal-fired power plants as we speak with many more hundreds planned. So one has to ask the question, why bother so much with renewables here? Is it to appease the enviro-left? Tell them where to jump!

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    Yonniestone

    I came across an story from 2013 on an interesting man named Boyd Bushman a Former Lockheed Martin Skunkworks Senior Scientist who made incredible claims of alien interactions with the US government and proof of anti gravity devices and technology, a video is here Boyd Bushman On Antigravity

    My question to anyone is does his rock magnet experiment stand up to scientific testing and is it possible to apply this with our knowledge of earths systems?

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    • #
      OriginalSteve

      I recall reading about anti gravity some time back and figure if the West knows less than the Russians on Scalar tech, chances are someone has already done it.

      I have my doubts about aliens though, from a Christian perspective, i would suggest demons posing as “greys” is however entirely feasible. Some Christians have postulated that the rapid tech advances have come from demons passing “higher” knowledge to those receptive to demons…makes you wonder then who would foolishly sell thier souls for this knowledge…..

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      tom0mason

      My inevitable question is if aliens from another planet are here assisting us through the government then why have they let so much sh|t go on? Anti-gravity machines — phewee!

      As basic requirements go we need good sources of reliable power, water, food and methods of keeping food safe and palatable in hot countries with cheap methods of distributing that food.

      And as a luxury an unhackable communication system. 🙂

      They can keep the anti-gravity machine!

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  • #
    David Maddison

    Oh what a surprise, Daddy is in “renewables”. There needs to be more stories published like this to demonstrate how subsidies paid for by consumers are transferred to the suppliers making them very wealthy at consumer expense.

    ///As uni student accommodation goes, the Darling Point digs bought by one 20-year-old medicine undergraduate this week is likely better than most given its $8.67 million price tag. But then Julia Cooney may well have had a little help from her father, yachtie and renewable energy boss Jim Cooney, in funding her first home.///

    https://www.domain.com.au/news/julia-cooney-leads-young-and-rich-with-867m-firsthome-buy-in-darling-point-20180609-h1123d/

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    Yonniestone

    For the Mod Squad, THE WEEK IN PICTURES: FEARFUL SUMMITRY EDITION

    My pick the Democrats waiting to be told.

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    • #
      Yonniestone

      I told the mods a while back that I’d put this link up just for them for their own enjoyment, I didn’t want it to be shown on the blog.

      If the mods don’t want to see it please let me know, I was being nice wanting to do something for people doing a good job.

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        Annie

        Ummm…what link Yonnie?!

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        • #
          Annie

          Is it visible to the mods?

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          • #
            Yonniestone

            Yes Annie, the link always goes into moderation don’t know why its just a collection of humorous cartoons/memes with a conservative bent, nothing sinister.
            The mods said they liked them so I just put it up for them every weekend.

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            • #
              Annie

              They seem to have been allowed through on other occasions. I have had a good laugh at some and found others a bit iffy!

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              • #
                Yonniestone

                Considering what content can be viewed online its virtually G rated, but its Jo’s blog and she can make the rules for content.

                We do agree the hypocritical 18c laws need to be wiped from existence.

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                PeterS

                True Yonniestone. Once the 18c laws and all other ones like them are removed people own’t be so worried telling the truth about situations like what’s happening the aboriginal children being assaulted, raped and murdered. Then we might get somewhere rather than being called a racist by the left every time decent people try to make life safe for those poor children only to be hauled into court and treated as though they committed the crimes. The only ones that ought to be hauled into court are the real perpetrators of the crimes and the left who protect them.

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              • #
                PeterS

                Looks like it’s moderation happy day. I’ve given up for now with two of my posts moderated for what I consider as totally hamrless. See you all another day – perhaps.

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              • #
                PeterS

                I leave you all with this video, which so happens explains what I mean (which coincidently I didn’t watch until after I made my earlier posts that went into moderation):
                The Spiritual Death of The West | Michael Walsh and Stefan Molyneux

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  • #
    Mark M

    Good News!

    Seems BoM carbon (sic) induced “permanent droughts” are now ‘a thing of the past’ …

    April, 2018: After a downpour, where does all the water go?

    “Because they know where the hills are, the bureau, along with other science agencies, have been able to work out where the water will tend to go wherever it falls in Australia.”

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-10/where-does-all-the-water-go-after-it-rains/9622280

    January, 2008:

    “IT MAY be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent, one of the nation’s most senior weather experts warned yesterday.

    “Perhaps we should call it our new climate,” said the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate analysis, David Jones.”

    https://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/this-drought-may-never-break/2008/01/03/1198949986473.html

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    David Maddison

    We don’t seem to be making much headway alerting people to the real science that there is no AGW so how about we use a different strategy.

    How about focusing on the enormous profits made by those installing and selling power from the unreliables and explain that those profits don’t come from legitimate free market activity but by the consumers being forced to subsidise the suppliers?

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      PeterS

      That would help but there is a more realistic way – enough pain over a long enough period. When that happens people come to their senses. That’s already started to happen in the US and UK where they are now either building new nuclear power stations or bolstering their existing ones, plus in the case of the US also bolstering their coal fired power stations. So we can hope that the pain here is high enough to wake people up in the LNP and force a leadership change and a dramatic change in energy policies, or if all that doesn’t happen then hope for voters to feel enough pain by the time the next election comes to make the necessary change in the power structure of politics to refuse either major party from gaining majority rule in either or both houses of parliament, and give the ACP who have the right energy policies enough support to put pressure on one of the majors. Meanwhile all we can do here is keep posting news about what’s happening overseas in particular the West where things are now changing for the better.

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      TdeF

      Hard to do after thirty years of teaching man made Global Warming in schools. Increasingly it is treated as accepted fact, despite the fact that it is self evidently not true.

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        PeterS

        Yes I forgot about that. The schools and Universities are definitely teaching lots of untruths about climate change, man-made or otherwise. Then again I don’t believe all students lack critical thinking that much not to realise the real world is not how the education systems portray it to be. One can see the effect by how much students portray their teachers in a bad light and as a result misbehave. It’s perhaps a form of silent revolution against the current establishment’s view of AGW. I met a number of students who believe the whole AGW story is a hoax. Not all is lost, not yet anyway.

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          OriginalSteve

          My niece who finished school last year was always very cautious of saying the “wrong” thing lest the thunderclap of the PC land upon their heads.

          She used to greet all her anglo mates with a greeting of “hey, whitey…”

          I believe its a form of thumbing their nose at the PC per-leece

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    • #
      RickWill

      There is a very strong view in Australia that there will be no new coal power stations. It appears that prices have to rise more and the frequency of blackouts increase to alter that widely held opinion. The problems in NSW this week were widely viewed as being caused by dilapidated, clapped out coal fired generators that need to be replaced with fast tracked wind and solar generation.

      Have a look at this article and see how entrenched the view is that ambient sources can solve all the problems in Australia:
      https://reneweconomy.com.au/whats-behind-scare-campaign-on-rooftop-solar-blackout-threat-78729/
      In the comments I point out the reality of the situation but get delusional responses on how it will all be sorted out with wind/solar/storage and prices will come down. I even demonstrate that I am a big winner in the solar rort but that did not help my case for one the repliers.

      It will be interesting to see what comes out of AEMO’s Integrated System Plan. I have some inkling that grid defection is a real concern there. If they do valid modelling they will realise they can never offer grid power from ambient sources cheaper than you can make yourself. That will pose a dilemma as it means the eventual demise of the grid as an economic entity. The worst case will be hyping supply diversity, which is a fairy tale just like Global Warming.

      As I state in the comments to the renew article, I view that the grid will become the second class service like pubic transport and will need support from public funds as has occurred in South Australia. If you want reliable, on-demand electricity then better to make your own; just like owning a car. It gives you independence and you are in control.

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      • #
        PeterS

        If it does continue to go down that path as you described then Australia will be in a unique position. More and more Western nations have finally woken up to the fact base load power, be it from coal or nuclear, is not only essential it now needs an injection of large amounts of money to keep them going for much longer. As you say things might have to get worse before most Australians wake up and realise the same thing.

        20

        • #
          OriginalSteve

          Yes and those who can escape whats fast becoming the energy deprived New North Korea will do so, leaving only telephone sanitizers and the slow ones in the class….

          20

          • #
            PeterS

            The left will also attack the telephone sanitizers because they are not using environmentally friendly cleaning fluids.

            10

            • #
              OriginalSteve

              We could always assist the Left with a Regimental Scrubbing…use of eco friendly cleaning solutions are optional, but encouraged….

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  • #
    Ross

    I have friend ( he has a science/technical background) who has not really read, a lot on the AGW “issue”(I’ll be polite).
    He now wants to find out more –I have linked him to Jo’s handbooks.
    Can someone suggest a more detailed book that gives a good balanced review of the issue. He says everything he has looked at so far is just pushing one side or the other. He will be able to wade his way through the technical aspects of any book.

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    • #
      PeterS

      In a science world with so man scam artists and charlatans it’s hard to decide which source material to study if one is interested only in the truth. After all how does one decide if the evidence let alone the interpretation of the evidence by any author is valid or not? The topic is complex and full of unknowns. It involves predicting the climate decades in advance, which to any real thinker has to say it’s an impossibility given our current understanding and knowledge of the climate and how it works. The best we can do is to observe what happens compared to the predicted models by the so called climate scientists, and we have been doing that long enough to realise that AGW is a myth.

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        Ross

        There must be a bot working on the site PeterS. Why would someone down tick my simple request for information and your polite reply?

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          Annie

          It must be a bot…it red thumbs totally mindlessly!

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          • #
            TdeF

            No, mindless red thumbing is at peak intelligence. Robots would be smarter and content based.

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              Annie

              If that’s peak intelligence I dread to try to think what is at the bottom!

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              • #
                OriginalSteve

                The Labor Party….

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              • #
                Annie

                No Steve…the Greenies.

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              • #
                Greg Cavanagh

                No, I actually agree with OriginalSteve. The Labor Party.

                The Greens know what they want and know what would happen, Labor is clueless.

                30

              • #
                PeterS

                Actually I think it’s the LNP for one reason. They are hypocrites. At least the ALP and the Greens are honest and open for what they claim to stand for. The LNP on the other hand stood for something else and now have reneged on that and turned to the left but still call themselves the LNP. That’s one reason why will never vote for them again until they change back to what they actually stood for. The ACP is the only party that now stands for what the LNP used to stand for.

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          RickWill

          Sometimes the mouse movement and click are uncoordinated and the wrong thumb comes up. But two in a row would be unlikely for that.

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        • #
          Graeme No.3

          Ross:

          It is a little dated (published in 2006) before Climategate ( from the hero FOI ) but SCARED TO DEATH by Richard North and Chris Booker has a good description of various scares including Global Warming and what is wrong with them. (Chapter headings such as Listeria Hysteria and Mad Cows and Madder Politicians will give you the flavour). It is easily readable and avoids technicalities.
          If you would like it contact me through Jo as I have a spare copy.

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        • #
          Dave in the States

          Red Thumbing is an indication that your cutting to bone with the truth or have done so in the recent past.

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    • #
      RickWill

      Ross
      I have posted this link below and repeat here for your friend:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjKJyn_uoIE
      The speaker is a scientist at NASA GISS. He annihilates the basis for Radiative Transfer in climate models. In the question/answer section at the end he describes the unscientific basis of climate models.

      So here you have a scientist/physicist working at NASA GISS, the body that started the scare, completely undermining the foundations of climate science.

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        Ross

        Thank you Rick.

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      • #
        Peter C

        Rick,

        I watched the video by Dr Michael Mishchenko.

        I don’t disagree with him, but I don’t think it is a good introduction to climate skepticism. For a start it takes an hour to watch! Then you have to understand Russian American to hear it all.

        Michael Mishchenkon makes some good points, especially about the lack of actual physics in the Warmists Science.

        10

        • #
          RickWill

          Peter C
          It was not intended as an introduction. The talk rovides a sound physical basis for the irrelevance of current climate models. For a NASA GISS scientist to offer that; it has huge credibility in the climate science community.

          Mischenko trashes the basis of climate models by tearing down the naive basis used for the radiative transfer in the atmosphere. For those who have an understanding of field theory and then taught radiation transfer equations they would already smell a rat; Mischenko gives the reasons why. Mischenko explains why the classic radiation transfer equations are long outdated and do not apply to radiation transfer in the atmosphere.

          If you want to skip to the real telling points on understanding the basis then just listen to his answer to a question on climate models from 47 minutes. He describes climate models as being based on “ad hoc formulas … that can be shown to be unphysical … there are thousands of tuning parameters used to produce whatever”

          My post below at #10 gives more detail and a link to his paper that makes the key points about energy transfer by EMR. However the simple fact that Mischenko states the climate models can be tuned to produce whatever they want tells you all you need to know about the validity of the models.

          10

    • #
      Another Ian

      Ross

      Have a look at

      https://chiefio.wordpress.com/gistemp/

      “GIStemp- Dumber than a Tomato!”

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    • #

      The two critical books any of us need are called skepticism and curiosity. (Okay, they’re not books, but they get us opening and re-opening a whole lot of books.)

      We’re all tuned differently for our perspective on climate. I’m no scientist and applying simple maths and physics to a complex world will never float my boat anyway. Maths and physics people can get on the queue with everyone else who knows a bit and they can say their bit along with everyone else.

      My curiosity was stoked when claims about history ran counter to what was fairly common historical knowledge. Why would anyone do that? From that it was a short step to asking about shorter-term prehistory conditions which might still prevail, namely, what geological period do we live in (answer: an ice age known as the Quaternary) and what epoch within that ice age (answer: an interglacial known as the Holocene which was warmest some eight thousand years back, and didn’t manage to get as warm as the Eemian and Holsteinian shortly before it).

      None of the knowledge I refer to here is firm, nor am I likely to be a competent critic of it. It’s just non-political, disputable stuff that’s never been in major dispute and is more likely to be ignored than challenged. The lack of smirking media super-stars is a plus. So, a better punt than Brian Cox, DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye or whoever was last doing the voice for Hawking.

      What amazes me is the lack of curiosity about the period since modern humans emerged and about the meagre ten thousand years of relative warmth which contain all of what we call human civilisation. Especially when thousand years is your likely ballpark ration. I repeat: that amazes me.

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      • #

        I meant ten thousand years in my second last sentence.

        My attitude is a bit different in that I don’t care if overall temps are up or down a bit. As for climate extremes, nobody has pointed me to even a short period without them, or shown me a metric to prove that extremes are more frequent or intense. Reportage has increased, but reportage is not event. Sea level rise is an inconspicuous dribble since the 1700s, to be expected after the LIA, and we have clear evidence of radical Arctic ice fluctuations from the early 1800s on (including less ice around the Year Without Summer).

        So I find the comments here on faulty physics, distortions of temp records etc to be very valuable and interesting but they’re not central to my amateur’s thoughts on climate. Awareness of actual climate change started for me as a youth reading the Greenland Sagas. I truly do not see any evidence of abnormal climate in the context of the last ten thousand years. I see lots of change, lineal and cyclical, and lots of bad stuff…but that’s normal. If there’s anything odd about the last few thousand years it’s the narrow range of temp along a comfortable plateau, which helps to explain civilisations. You don’t get this every little interglacial!

        So I guess if I was suggesting a book it would be something like a work by Brian Fagan, who writes popular archeology and has some works on climate. Among them are:

        Floods, Famines, and Emperors
        The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History
        The Long Summer
        The Great Warming

        I’m sure lots of this is on the speculative side, but it helps to provide context, and if anything is missing (deliberately?) in the climate debate it’s context.

        Oh, and there’s always the Saga of Erik the Red!

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      Peter C

      Here is a reading list Ross:

      Skeptics Handbook, JoNova
      Taxing Air -facts and fallicies about Climate Change, Bob Carter and John Spooner
      Climate Change- the facts 2014 , Alan Moran Ed, IPA
      Climate Change – the facts 2017, Jennifer Marohasy ed, IPA
      Heaven and Earth, Ian Plimer
      The Inconvenient Skeptic, John Kehr

      Any one of those books should be enough to convince an open minded person that CAGW is a myth.

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    RickWill

    I have found that few people have any grasp of electromagnetic radiation. The majority of people view radiation as rays coming out of an energised object. The concept of the photon reinforces this shooting particle notion of EMR.

    In this world view the idea of back radiation can exist. The idea is so well entrenched that places like Mauna Lao Observatory have a long record of measured so-called back-radiation. In fact what they are measuring is the air temperature and then applying the Stefan-Boltzman relationship, assuming black body, to derive what they term back radiation.

    EMR is not a particle. It is a field. Like gravity is a field. The energy in those fields is transported at the speed of light. There is only a single electric field and magnetic field existing at any point in space and time. Like gravity fields, all the objects within the field are influencing each other at the speed of light in the mediums they exist in.

    The so-called Poynting vector describes the energy transport in an electromagnetic field. The electric field and magnetic fields are always normal to each other and the Poynting vector is normal to both the electric and magnetic fields.

    I found a very interesting paper that analyses the Poynting vector resulting from scattering particles in an EMR field:
    https://www.osapublishing.org/DirectPDFAccess/0493910C-D00F-EA90-D4062C3CB3843466_205485/oe-18-19-19770.pdf?da=1&id=205485&seq=0&mobile=no
    The maths is not simple but the insights are. The following quote is from section 7:

    7. Physical meaning of specific intensity

    The traditional definition of the specific intensity in the phenomenological RTT states that I(r,q) gives the amount of electromagnetic energy transported in the direction qˆ per unit area normal to qˆ per unit time per unit solid angle (e.g., Chandrasekhar 1950). This notion of the specific intensity implies that at the observation point r, electromagnetic energy propagates simultaneously in all directions and does it according to the angular distribution function I(r,q).

    Our microphysical derivation of Eqs. (23) and (24) directly from the MMEs reveals that in the case of radiative transfer in a turbid medium this interpretation of I (r, qˆ ) is profoundly incorrect. Indeed, the instantaneous local flow of electromagnetic energy is given by a mono- directional real Poynting vector S(r, t) = E(r, t) × H(r, t). Averaging over a time interval 2π ω << ∆t <> T2 (or, equivalently, over all particle positions and states) still yields a monodirectional Poynting vector given by Eq. (24). Thus under no circumstances is the local flow of electromagnetic energy polydirectional.

    This fundamental disagreement between the microphysical and phenomenological approaches is not surprising. Indeed, the computation of the local electromagnetic energy flow in the framework of the microphysical RTT is based on the solution of the MMEs.

    This proves the fictional nature of back radiation and the fairy tale shown in all the IPCC reports:
    https://www.ipcc.ch/report/graphics/images/Assessment%20Reports/AR5%20-%20WG1/Chapter%2002/Fig2-11.jpg
    It does not disprove that Earth’s surface temperature is dependent on the constituents of the atmosphere but it does highlight the lack of science in what gets produced by the IPCC.

    Note that the author is from NASA GISS although he was educated and worked in Russia:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjKJyn_uoIE
    This is a brilliant talk that is worthwhile passing on to people who believe in IPCC fairy tales rather than science. Any scientist who understands ” standing on the shoulders of giants” should listen to the very end of the talk. The answer to questions is also worthwhile if you have any doubt about the uselessness of climate models..

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    TdeF

    Two interesting facts during the week, facts which change your thinking.

    The man who introduced the minimum wage to England was new Liberal MP and Boer war hero, former soldier and journalist Winston Churchill. Not the Labor party.
    It was based on the revolution in Australia where the 40 hour week, female suffrage were also years ahead of Britain.

    Again it was Winston Churchill who saved Britain, not the head of the Labor party, Malcolm Turnbull’s great uncle who fought rearamament and assured Britain that Adolph was a humble unambitious Christian who meant well. So how did we get Labor Royalty as our PM, head of our former Liberal party?

    Then favorite of Labor, the Gaza Strip, that violent, poverty struck enclave on the seaside run by a declared terrorist organization gets the record as having the most foreign aid per capita in the world. Nett result, more poverty. As if we did not know that from our own ab*riginal communities. This, like Global Warming, is where leftist political dogma collides with obvious facts.

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      TdeF

      An observation. If someone were to do a survey of the incidence of the phrase “Global Warming” vs “Climate Change” in the press in 2007, peak Warming and then again in 2018, you would probably find that they have given up on “Global Warming”. It is almost never in the headlines, because everyone knows it is not true. Not with snow in Cairo. Not with blankets being handed out by emergency relief in tropical Bangladesh. Not after the drought finished in Australia.

      So they go for the far more nebulous “Climate Change”. However the shift tells you that any argument about CO2 producing steady heating is completely dead. It is now bluff and bluster and cherry picking hot days and floods and bushfires and that unscientific nonsense that more CO2 produces more hurricanes and hotter water around the Great Barrier reef. What has happened to our former salaried Climate Commissioners? How do they make a good living from Global Warming today?

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        TdeF

        I found this, Global Warming as the most popular phrase in the world in 2000. The most popular phrase now is “post truth”. Not surprising when connected to Global Warming.

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    Graeme#4

    I see that Tesla has refunded around 23% of the 450,000 orders for their Model 3 car, while so far delivering just over 8100.

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    Say, let’s have some fun here.

    I was thinking of way to gauge how people’s perceptions about electricity consumption stand, and here keep in mind that 95%+ probably have absolutely no idea whatsoever just how much electricity is required (eg consumed) on a daily basis across the whole of Australia. And here, keep in mind that the current population of Australia is just a tick under 25 Million people.

    So, I’ll ask the question here (me pretending to be Eddie McGuire) and if you would like to try it yourself with family and friends, watch the looks on their faces when you end up telling them the correct response.

    (While I normally use just the main AEMO coverage area in nearly everything I do, here I have actually added in the data for WA as well, so this actually IS for the whole of Australia.)

    Question: If the average Australian home consumes 17 KiloWattHours of electricity on a daily basis, what factor higher than that constitutes the total power consumption for the WHOLE of Australia?

    A: 36,000 (Times Higher)
    B: 360,000
    C: 3.6 Million
    D: 36 Million

    (Here you can guess if you like or even try and work it out, but at least have a go)

    Tony.

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      Dave

      D 36 Million Times Higher

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      TdeF

      Tony, what % of total electricity consumption is domestic? This might be a figure which would surprise people.

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        In the already developed World, that average for the Residential sector is between 25 and as high as 40%. In the U.S. over the last ten years, it has crept up to 38%, mostly at the expense of the Industrial sector, which is now the lowest consumer at around 24% with Commerce around 38% also.

        Here in Australia, it varies from State to State, and that is most evident in Victoria, the second most populous State but only the third highest consumer of electricity. That’s because there is more gas usage in homes in Victoria than for any other State, for cooking, heating, and water heating.

        The overall electrical power consumption on an Australia wide basis is (around) 30%, and that is anomalous when compared to the U.S. only because of that gas consumption in Victoria and to a lesser extent the other States.

        Europe is close to the U.S. in that residential sector.

        In China however, residential power consumption is still only at 13.7%, and that’s way up from the figures in 2010, when it was barely 5%, and that’s due only to the fact that so many huge coal fired (HELE USC) plants have opened, and the availability of electricity has flowed on from the primary consumer, Industry to now include the ordinary people in their homes in that vast Country.

        In Countries still Developing, more than 150 of them, residential power consumption is still around that figure of 5% to 6%.

        Interestingly, similar happened in the U.S. following WW2, when they ramped up their power generation and consumption, and I have an in depth analysis of that at the following Link, and the availability of power on a wide scale for consumption in homes only came about as they ramped up the construction of coal fired power.

        The Benefits That Coal Fired Power Gave Us

        Tony.

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          TdeF

          Thanks. It does explain the new approach, when you need power to not annoy the voters, pay the factories to close. Pure socialism.

          When you think it through it is utterly nuts. Factory owners are paid, the workers are paid and nothing comes out so the workers can leave their homes running and public servants can tax everyone. A country run by politicians who have no idea why anyone works, but with what we pay them to do nothing, you can understand their view. Then the Greens who now want to pay everyone a basic wage for not working. At least they are consistent.

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      Robber

      Too easy Tony. But the problem is that the vast majority of people have no idea what a kWhr is or what it takes to produce it.
      Perhaps an illustrated fairy story might help? Any cartoonists out there?
      Once upon a time, some pollies decided to build lots of windmills to provide free power for everyone in Australia. Each windmill has a big turbine on top of the tower with huge blades that spin in the wind. >
      When the wind blows hard (but not too hard) each turbine can produce 3 megawatts (that’s 3 million watts) of power, enough to light 300,000 globes, or run 3,000 microwaves. That’s enough power for about 3,000 people. Sounds wonderful? <<Add cartoon of windmill and light bulbs??
      In Australia we use about 21,000 megawatts of power on average, so that means we would need 7,000 windmills. Oh wait, you want enough for peak power at 6.30pm, that would need 10,000 windmills. But wait, the wind doesn’t always blow strongly, in fact on average it only blows at less than one third of that strength. So we really need at least 30,000 windmills.
      Now just imagine, if we put all those windmills in a line, each 300 metres away from the next one, they would stretch for 10,000 kilometres. That’s 2,000 kms more than the distance from Sydney to Perth, plus the distance from Melbourne to Darwin. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have our very own Southern Cross criss-crossing our continent providing free power for all? <>
      What’s that, you have some questions?
      – How much would 30,000 windmills cost? Well, about $6 million each, or about $180 billion in total. But don’t you worry about that, our wonderful Australian government collects over $400 billion each year, so over the next 10 years this would just require some small additions to borrowings. <>
      – And what happens when the wind doesn’t blow? Um, I think it’s time to turn the lights out and go to bed.
      For brighter children and some pollies, you might have to explain that on windless days you do need to keep in reserve existing coal and gas fired stations, equal to 100% of peak demand. Alternatively, at peak wind there is surplus production, so you could spend even more $ billions to install huge batteries and/or lots of pumped hydro. But that’s another unwritten story.
      A similar fairy story could be written about solar panels.
      But given the wonders of our political system, how long before some ‘enterprising’ pollie campaigns on a promise of “Free Electricity for All”?
      That would be better than Josh Frydenberg’s folly: “Modelling undertaken by the Energy Security Board (ESB) shows that wholesale electricity prices will decrease by 23 per cent under the Guarantee, flowing through to households and businesses”. By when? How? Presumably, like the Qld govt’s “can’t release amount of guarantee given to Genex Kidman Solar plant as it’s commercial in confidence”, the ESB modelling is top secret. The federal government website is full of facts about emissions and reliability, but says virtually nothing about affordability. Any whistleblowers available?

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      Hanrahan

      Before I overstayed my welcome on hot copper I tried to give the idealists a concept of scale but the people who I had been discussing power with or years refused to grasp the idea that you can’t power a city with batteries or that batteries will not become much cheaper. I would post pics of cities at night or of Times Square but they still reckoned batteries will be cheap enough next year to keep the lights on.

      Another thing that stands out to me as an obvious truth is that “clean energy” discriminates against the desperately poor. The idealists’ assertions that THEY were were the humanitarians were baseless.

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        Mary E

        I am not concerned with keeping the building lights on, night or day.

        I am concerned with the water pumping stations, the sewage pumping stations, the treatment stations. The things we take for granted each time we turn on a tap or flush a toilet. Above all else, in a city or town or village, water supply and sewage handling is the #1 thing for me. The farmers, the country dwellers, they have the land to set up outhouses and dig wells. They are best equipped to live without all the niceties of electricity. The rest of use, well, we’re doomed.

        After water and waste come other niceties to be concerned about – not in any particular order.

        Street lights.

        Jobs. Income. Ability to feed the family.

        Hospitals.

        Jails and police stations and fire stations and dispatchers.

        Communications. Phones.

        TV and radio.

        Military?

        Food.

        Of course some concerns can get by with solar, wind – running when there is power. But supplies will be haphazard, costly. Everyone who has the money can run diesel, foul the air with those fumes, far worse than a coal plant with scrubbers. But buy your generators and fuel now, as the means to make more will go by-the-by. Refining that raw oil takes power (pumping is mechanical and can still be done, albeit on a slower and smaller scale) and aside from the military, and maybe a few very rich and lucky souls (government, maybe) no one will have the means or the money.

        There’s a lot more. Most people don’t think about it.

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      Graeme#4

      I’ll bite. If I assume an average of 3 persons/dwelling, the gives me 8.3m dwellings. If this is 30% of total power usage, this puts the total power usage at around 27.4m times greater. Your closest figure is D or 36m.

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        Graeme#4

        Now I’m not that sure. If I assume Australia’s total usage to be 30,000 MW, this means that the average dwelling to total ratio is only 1.765:1, or closer to C, 3.6m. Need to think about this more…

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    pat

    read this during the week:

    5 Jun: WUWT: Claim: Teaching Inmates Climate Dogma Helps them “Feel Connected to Something Larger”
    by Eric Worrall
    h/t Willie Soon – anyone else worried about where this government funded programme could lead?…
    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/claim-teaching-inmates-climate-dogma-helps-them-feel-connected-to-something-larger/

    then found this…debates must ***avoid topics that could make the inmates resent the government…so they debated ***“The United States should abolish the Electoral College”! (lol).

    Harvard argued for its abolition…and won. what a surprise. Hillary will be pleased:

    16 Apr 2018: New Yorker Dept of Resolution: Malcolm X’s Prison Debate Team Takes On Harvard
    At MCI-Norfolk, the two teams jabbed and parried over the Electoral College.
    By Jill Lepore
    (Lepore received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1995 and is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. In 2012, she was named a Harvard College Professor, in recognition of distinction in undergraduate teaching)
    This article appears in the print edition of the April 16, 2018, issue, with the headline “Norfolk vs. Harvard.”

    But, after a storm cancellation, the debate at last took place at the end of the month, at MCI-Norfolk, a medium-security prison an hour outside Boston.
    The prison, which was designed in the nineteen-twenties by a Harvard alumnus and modelled on a college campus, started a debate team in 1933…
    When the Norfolk debate team disbanded, in 1966, its record stood at a hundred and forty-four wins and eight losses…

    The prison team had re-formed in 2016, and since then had battled Boston College (a win) and M.I.T. (a loss, on a technicality). The month of storms had been a problem for the Norfolk debaters. They are allowed only one hour a week to prepare together, and they hadn’t been able to talk through their arguments while walking around the yard, as they usually do, because it was closed. The inmates also aren’t allowed to use the Internet, and had to rely on research materials brought to them by friends and family members…

    Each debate topic has to be approved by the Massachusetts Department of Correction. The Norfolk team explained to the Harvard students that the idea was to ***avoid topics that could make the inmates resent the government. This day’s topic was ***“The United States should abolish the Electoral College.” Norfolk had volunteered to argue against the resolution, granting to their guests the easier argument, and the one that would win over the prison audience.

    Harvard went first, arguing that the Electoral College disenfranchised the poor and decreased voter turnout. “O.K., O.K.!” inmates in the audience interjected approvingly, or, more enthusiastically, “Ya-ya, ya-ya!”

    Steven Quinlan opened for Norfolk, seizing the attention of the room. He had a five-contention argument, much of which he recited from memory, including long passages from Cato Institute publications, Federal Election Commission rulings, and the Federalist Papers. Norfolk emphasized the importance of the Electoral College for the stability of the Republic. (This is a hard sell.)

    Spector, in Harvard’s first “pro” rebuttal, pointed out the origins of the Electoral College in the Constitution’s pro-slavery three-fifths clause, and noted a modern analogue: just as slaves were not allowed to vote, so people convicted of felonies are not allowed to vote; nevertheless, they are included in the census count that determines each state’s number of Electoral College delegates. The crowd cheered and urged him on. Collegiate debaters are not used to having an audience, and Spector, overwhelmed, briefly lost his thread…

    First, Ronald (Lefty) Leftwich, for Norfolk, came to the lectern, without notes, and, in an otherwise flawless recitation, stumbled, and forgot a line. He paused. “Take your time, man,” a member of the audience called out. The room fell silent, except for the crackling of the guards’ radios. Leftwich stepped away from the lectern, grabbed a page of notes, and resumed.
    Caldera, of Harvard, picked up on Spector’s argument about felons, and added undocumented immigrants. Much of the audience rose to its feet.

    ***When the debate was over, a panel of judges ruled Harvard the winner, sixty-eight points to sixty-one.
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/malcolm-xs-prison-debate-team-takes-on-harvard

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      pat

      this looks like the previous debate, post 2016 presidential election…which Norfolk Prison won for arguing “the U.S. should impose a tax on greenhouse gas emissions”. lol.

      hmmm! debates should avoid topics that could make the inmates resent the government, so they debate “climate change”? the long march through the institutions continues:

      27 Dec 2016: NPR Morning Edition: After Half A Century, Inmates Resurrect The Norfolk Prison Debating Society
      by Natasha Haverty
      On stage, five Boston College students sit opposite the prison debaters as the moderator introduces the topic: the future of our planet, ***climate change.
      Resolved: that the U.S. should impose a tax on greenhouse gas emissions. Norfolk Prison will argue in favor. James Keown speaks first.

      “There’s a storm coming,” Keown says in his opening statement. “When it first hits the Boston area the ocean will surge into East Boston, the seaport, and parts of the downtown waterfront.”
      And while the idea of sitting through two hours of environmental policy arguments might sound really boring, every guy in this audience is smiling, head up.
      Dan Throop, captain of the prison’s debate team, adds some spectacle, coming on stage in a surgical mask…

      For the last two years, this group of inmates has been fighting to resurrect the Norfolk Prison Debating Society. Keown says everything comes down to this debate.
      “This is a humanizing event to me,” Keown says. “I mean, this is about we have a place in this world and we have a voice and we have something to share.”
      It’s meant hours of training. They got one day a week together in a classroom, then back to their cells to rehearse alone.
      While their opponents had the Internet, these guys — several of whom didn’t finish high school — relied on their sisters and moms to send them articles…

      Which meant for a debate to happen in Norfolk Prison in 2016, the Massachusetts Department of Correction kept a tight grip on everything — from what topic the men could debate, to who was allowed to speak, to the pair of reporters there to cover the event…

      Minutes later the judges announce the winner — ***Norfolk Prison defeats Boston by a hair, just 0.6 points. Some men held a hand over their heart, the other raised up at the stage.
      But the standing ovation came when, on behalf of the entire prison, the moderator thanked their visitors for being willing to brave the journey inside.
      https://www.npr.org/2016/12/27/506314053/after-half-a-century-inmates-resurrect-the-norfolk-prison-debating-society

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        pat

        reply to New Yorker article in moderation re NPR article on earlier prison debate on CAGW. meant to include this NPR excerpt, with the prisoners agreeing with NYT’s evidence! lol:

        George Vicente is up for parole on a second-degree murder charge in a few months…
        “Regarding the con team’s eloquent and obviously passionate position, the pro team respectfully disagrees,” Vicente said to the judges.
        He speaks for almost 10 minutes, before the timekeeper lifts up a red card, signaling Vicente has just a few seconds left…
        Vicente leans in, and slows down.

        ***”Because, the evidence proves, and we agree with The New York Times that, quote, ‘A carbon tax is indeed the most sensible tax of all.’ Mr. Moderator,” Vicente says…

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    yarpos

    Surprised that there has been little comment about the demise of Kathleen Wynne at the hands of the voters of Ontario, Canada. Another renewable zealot bites the dust Weatherdill style. Hopefully another sign of the tide turning.

    The appear to have elected a bit of a boofhead, but the pendulum probably needs to swing from one extreme to the other before it settles back to sanity. Go Canada!

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      Another Ian

      Y

      You should see my email and other list!

      I’m even bringing it to the attention of our local MP’s – one of which seems to have had a bad dose of coolaid.

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    pat

    this was hard to access and impossible to copy, so have typed most of it, but try to access it and read it all.

    THIS IS WHAT THE PUBLIC SHOULD BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND. THIS IS THE NIGHTMARE END-GAME OF THE CAGW MOB AND MUST BE STOPPED.

    NOTE THEY WANT RULES SET BEFORE SUCH AN IDEA CAN BE PUT TO THE PUBLIC PRIOR TO THE NEXT EU ELECTIONS.

    9 Jun: Brussels changes rules to boost trust in green financial products
    European Commission steps up fight against climate change but it will cost fund firms
    by Chris Flood
    Rigorous rules to prevent climate change from causing catastrophic economic damage are set to be imposed on asset managers, pension funds and insurance companies in Europe.

    The proposals by the European Commission will impose extra costs on asset managers.
    Huge new investment, estimated at Euros180 billion a year until 2030, will be required for Europe to meet the ambitions goals to limit warming agreed at a landmark conference in Paris in 2015.

    The commission is determined to make it easier for savers to buy trustworthy green financial products to help meet the Paris targets. It has suggested that funds could have new green labels, similar to those rating the energy efficiency of domestic appliances such as fridges.

    Investment managers will also have to consider environmental risks as a part of their duty to act in the best interest of clients and to disclose how future returns may be affected by climate change…

    New low-carbon and positive carbon impact indices may be developed as sustainable investment benchmarks and retail investors asked about environmental preferences when they are assessed by financial professionals.

    Christian Thimann, a senior adviser at French insurer Axa, has acted as one of the driving forces behind the policies in his role as chairman of the EU’s expert group on sustainable finance.
    Environmental risks, say Mr. Thimann, are widely mispriced across Europe’s energy, transport and food production sectors.

    ***He argues that asset managers are “uniquely placed” to help capital flow towards more sustainable investments…

    ***Policymakers face a race against time as the aim is for the proposals to become law before the lections to the European Parliament next May…

    A study published this month in the journal Nature Climate Change warned that between $1trillion and $4trillion could be wiped off global wealth due to “stranded assets” – fossil fuel reserves that will not be burnt because of improvements in energy efficiency.

    “Divestment from fossil fuels is both prudent and necessary. Investment and pension funds need to evaluate how much of their money is in fossil fuel assets and reassess those risks,” says Jean-Francoise Mercure, the lead author of the study, who is employed by Radbout and Cambridge universities.

    ***Caroline Escott, a senior policy officer at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, which represents the interests of 1,300 UK retirement funds, says that it is imperative for…pension fiduciaries consider the effect that climate change could have on their investment portfolios.
    “Pension funds should consider voting against directors that are not doing enough to limit the risk of climate change on their business models,” says Ms Escott.
    https://www.ft.com/content/d8c23336-697f-11e8-8cf3-0c230fa67aec

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      pat

      the study referenced in the FT article:

      4 Jun: Science Daily: ‘Carbon bubble’ coming that could wipe trillions from the global economy
      Demand for fossil fuels will decline in the near future with major macroeconomic and geopolitical consequences
      Source: Radboud University Nijmegen
      Unlike current expectations, new research suggests that the prospects of the fossil-fuel industry are not bright, and that its demise may have profound economic and geopolitical consequences…
      Relying on ground breaking modelling techniques, researchers from Radboud University, the University of Cambridge (C-EENRG), Cambridge Econometrics, The Open University (UK) and the University of Macau show that the consumption of fossil fuels will slow down or decline in the near future, as a result of ongoing technological change, potentially exacerbated by new climate policies…

      This transition will result in clear winners, importers such as China and the EU, and losers, exporters such as Russia, the USA or Canada, which could see their fossil-fuel industries nearly shut down. If these countries keep up their investment and production levels despite declining demand, the global wealth loss could be huge: 1-4 trillion dollars, a loss comparable to that which triggered the financial crisis in 2007…

      These findings by researchers from Radboud University, the University of Cambridge (C-EENRG), Cambridge Econometrics, The Open University (UK) and the University of Macau are published in Nature Climate Change.
      A dangerous ‘carbon bubble’…
      https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180604121041.htm

      plus a similar “pensions” call in the UK, which I posted on jo’s UK Met Office thread:

      4 Jun: BusinessGreen: Madeleine Cuff: MPs call for mandatory climate risk reporting
      Following inquiry into green finance, Environmental Audit Committee concludes large companies and asset owners – such as ***pension funds – should be forced to report their exposure to climate change risks and opportunities…
      Members of the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) said today large companies and asset owners, such as ***pension funds, should have until 2022 to prepare for a mandatory system of climate risk reporting, requiring firms to set out how they plan to cope with the impact of the low-carbon transition…

      We want to see mandatory climate risk reporting and a clarification in law that ***pension trustees have a duty to consider long term sustainability, not just short-term returns.”
      The government has backed the voluntary guidelines set out last year by the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), which aim to help companies assess and disclose their climate risk…
      But the EAC argued the government’s encouragement for publicly listed firms to adopt the guidelines does not go far enough, and urged ministers to ensure climate risk reporting applies equally to asset owners (such as ***pension funds) and their investment managers, not just listed companies…

      Ben Caldecott, director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme at the University of Oxford and a Member of the UK Green Finance Taskforce, said the UK should aim to be a world leader in sustainable finance. “Information is the lifeblood of financial markets,” he said. “Ensuring that the City of London has the best and most reliable information on sustainability-related risks, opportunities and impacts will be fundamental to its continued success and its ability to act as the leading green financial centre. We must become the first country to properly and completely integrate the TCFD recommendations into our corporate governance and reporting framework.”…
      https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/3033443/mps-call-for-mandatory-climate-risk-reporting

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        OriginalSteve

        Its all going to collapse like a black hole….

        Living proof fools can easily convince other fools of thier folly.

        Id be buying shares in chinese power companies…ha ha

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    EFF says that The EU’s Copyright Proposal is Extremely Bad News for Everyone, Even (Especially!) Wikipedia

    If passed, those who host users’ shared content will need to filter “uploads” to ensure that it doesn’t breach the rights of others in order to not fall foul of those EU laws. Such filters are only reasonable realized by implementing automatic filters that surveil all content to prevent anything that refers to or included that content of others from appearing. This can impact most bloggers.

    This has global impacts as sharing content in the form of fair comment, parody, critique and links of the Internet is critical to the sharing of ideas. It has chilling effects on everybody around the world who has previously used or linked to the work of others fairly. How can one present an online argument without at least linking to the points made by others?

    If you are in the EU, contact your MEP urgently and convince them to delete Article 13. You are in the best position to stop the insanity. The voices of all should be heard and seen on the Internet; including those who have arguments or comments on things that have an effect on their lives and on the lives of the people about whom they care. The article is gagging legislation that curtails free speech and the fair use of Copyright material.

    See saveyourinternet.eu for a simple summary of the impacts. Julia Reda, German MEP calls for the deletion of the article.

    A video by Tim Pool for a view from the outside.

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      OriginalSteve

      Ha…i can see north korea hosting peoples’ web sites in order to preserve free speech…oh the irony….

      Were getting close tp the end game now…this is full blown censorship, no different to China.

      The Russians openly call the EU the European Soviet….

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        OriginalSteve

        Actually, you could host your content outside the EU, and use a VPN to upload to that site, bypassing the filtering.

        Or, you could VPN to a remote lication, author the content offshore, then upload to a non EU location.

        Easy to get around…..

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      Dave in the States

      Information is power. Disinformation is also power. He who controls the dissemination of information and disinformation has power.

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    pat

    NYT wants us to read this. Trump Derangement Syndrome at its worst. nuclear diplomacy – not CAGW – suddenly the most pressing geopolitical need! NYT still pining for Obama:

    9 Jun: NYT: In the Trump Administration, Science Is Unwelcome. So Is Advice.
    As the president prepares for nuclear talks, he lacks a close adviser with nuclear expertise. It’s one example of a marginalization of science in shaping federal policy.
    By Coral Davenport
    The lack of traditional scientific advisory leadership in the White House is one example of a significant change in the Trump administration: the marginalization of science in shaping United States policy…
    There is no chief scientist at the State Department, where science is central to foreign policy matters such as cybersecurity and global warming…
    These and other decisions have consequences for public health and safety and the economy. Both the Interior Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have disbanded climate science advisory committees…

    The White House declined to comment on these and other suggestions that the role of science in policymaking has been diminished in the Trump administration. Regarding the coming talks with Mr. Kim, a spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council, Garrett Marquis, emphasized that “the president’s advisers are experts in their fields.”
    The larger matter, though, is the president’s lack of a close senior adviser at the White House level, someone who has Mr. Trump’s trust and his ear, said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton…

    The most pressing geopolitical need may be in the realm of nuclear diplomacy…
    And Mr. Marquis, the National Security Council spokesman, emphasized that many of the president’s advisers “have advanced degrees and have worked on these complex issues in and out of government.”
    “The materials that have gone to the president ahead of the negotiation reflect the work of more than a dozen people at the Ph.D. level in relevant fields,” he added, including “at least one” in nuclear engineering…

    Nevertheless, as Mr. Trump prepares for the talks, he has no close aides on par with those who helped President Barack Obama negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran. Mr. Obama’s advisers included Ernest J. Moniz, a nuclear physicist who led the Energy Department and oversaw the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal, and John Holdren, a physicist and expert in nuclear arms control who served as the White House science adviser…
    Of course, Mr. Trump was an outspoken critic of Mr. Obama’s Iran deal and withdrew from it last month…

    In Washington, the administration’s excising of science is particularly evident at the Environmental Protection Agency…
    Scott Pruitt, the embattled head of the E.P.A., is the subject of at least 12 government investigations into his first-class travel, costly security detail and management of the agency. At the same time he has won praise from Mr. Trump for his speed at rolling back environmental regulations.
    Mr. Pruitt has initiated more than a dozen regulatory rollbacks, including signing a measure declaring his intent to undo or weaken Mr. Obama’s climate change regulations known as the Clean Power Plan…
    “It’s not Pruitt’s exorbitant spending, but rather a lot of these less sexy things they’re quietly doing on science that will cause the real long-term damage,” said Gretchen Goldman, the research director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group…

    The new rules would require that the data from all scientific studies used by the E.P.A. to formulate air and water regulations be publicly available. Mr. Pruitt has touted that as a step toward increasing scientific transparency. “The era of secret science at E.P.A. is coming to an end,” he said in a statement. “The ability to test, authenticate and reproduce scientific findings is vital for the integrity of rule-making process.”…

    Last year, Mr. Pruitt significantly altered two major scientific panels that advise the E.P.A. on writing public health rules, restricting academic researchers from joining the boards while appointing several scientists who work for industries regulated by the E.P.A.

    These and other changes “will diminish the characterization of pollution as risky,” said William K. Reilly, who headed the E.P.A. under the first President George Bush. “This tolerance for more exposure to pollution is altogether different from anything we are used to.”

    In a statement defending the changes to the committees, Jahan Wilcox, an E.P.A. spokesman, said that the agency “sought a wider range of voices” and “was thrilled with the response of over 700 applicants.” The boards, he said, are not only highly qualified but also “independent and geographically diverse.”

    This year, Mr. Pruitt sent a memo to the E.P.A.’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee ordering steps that could effectively diminish the role of scientific evidence in air pollution enforcement. The committee is required by law to prioritize the health effects of pollution, but Mr. Pruitt’s memo orders it to consider potential economic consequences of meeting tighter clean-air rules — for example, the possibility that tougher pollution standards could make air-conditioning more expensive, leading to more deaths from heat.

    “This memo flouts the clear evidence of medical science,” said John Walke, an expert in clean-air policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy organization. “Pruitt wants to set a definition of clean air that is medically unsafe.”…

    A little-noticed change at the Justice Department could have far-reaching impact on the role of science in federal policy across the government.
    This year the Justice Department announced it would no longer use “guidance documents,” which are written by experts at other agencies, to enforce laws. “This change makes a lot of the big, science-based laws unenforceable,” said Dr. Goldman of the Union of Concerned Scientists…

    A spokesman for the Justice Department said in an email that the new guidance policy would not affect the enforcement of science-based laws. “The Department of Justice continues to aggressively and successfully enforce the nation’s laws, including environmental and health laws,” the spokesman said, on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. “Assertions to the contrary are incorrect.”…

    The Interior Department secretary, Ryan Zinke, is working to carry out Mr. Trump’s campaign pledge to open public lands to extract oil, gas and coal. At the same time, though, his agency has pulled back from examining the health risks to fossil fuel workers…
    Last June, at least two dozen senior career officials at the department were told they would be reassigned to new positions. While it is not unusual for new administrations to make personnel moves, some said the moves appeared intended to undermine the department’s environmental research…

    Among them was Joel Clement, a climate change scientist who was reassigned to an office overseeing fees from fossil fuel drilling. He viewed it as an effort to push him to resign. Months later, he did.
    “The reassignment letter seemed clearly retaliatory,” he said. “I was a top climate adviser, and they reassigned me to collect money from oil companies — come on.”…

    Tony Knowles, the former head of the board, said that Mr. Zinke “appears to have no interest in continuing the agenda of science, the effect of climate change, pursuing the protection of the ecosystem.”…

    Among the scientists who have chosen to move on is Ben Sanderson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., whose research focuses on the impact of climate change on society. In the Trump administration, “To talk about climate risk when connected to human activity is now a no-no if you want to get government funding,” Dr. Sanderson said.

    Last year, he saw a way out: the French government’s “Make Our Planet Great Again” program. Dr. Sanderson was awarded a $1.8 million, five-year grant to work for Météo-France, the national weather forecaster, at its campus in Toulouse.

    “The French program was offering an opportunity to work on climate impacts — the work that’s at the core of my research,” Dr. Sanderson said. That kind of science, he said, “is increasingly difficult to do in the U.S.”
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/climate/trump-administration-science.html

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    pat

    comment in moderation re: 9 Jun: NYT: In the Trump Administration, Science Is Unwelcome. So Is Advice.

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    Hanrahan

    What causes water vapour to form clouds? It isn’t saturation, when air becomes oversaturated the excess simply falls as dew without ever forming clouds.
    I think it needs aerosols and gamma rays or something like that but again solar activity is involved.

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      Peter C

      What causes water vapour to form clouds? It isn’t saturation, when air becomes oversaturated the excess simply falls as dew without ever forming clouds.

      It is Saturation or perhaps supersaturation. Clouds form when air rises and cools. If the rising is due to local thermal currents then cumulus clouds form. If there is a gentle uprising over a wider area then stratus (layer ) clouds form, sometimes with rain. Dew is a special case. So is fog.

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        sophocles

        It is Saturation or perhaps supersaturation.

        Nope. Cosmic Ray particle showers. Every little cloud droplet needs an electrically charged particle to use as a cloud condensation nucleus. Cosmic Rays, pollen particles, soot, dust, even a bacterium, anything will do as long is has a nett electrical charge. That enables sulphuric acid molecules to attach and they harvest water molecules (at about 6 h20 for each h2so4) to build the droplet.

        You might find this useful.

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          sophocles

          I wasn’t very clear with:
          Cosmic Ray particle showers.

          The top of atmosphere is under continuous bombardment by cosmic rays of various energies. The GCRs (Galactic ones) are of high energy,
          and are the remains of smashed atoms from Super Novae. And that’s exactly what they do: smash air molecules into pieces. These bits enter the atmosphere as Secondary cosmic rays and on the way down they smash ever more molecules. Energy is conserved and these secondary CRs are still of high energy. Then the bits hit the troposphere and the ‘shower’ of these secondary rays is huge. It’s a big `knock-on’ effect. These are almost all electrically charged particles (known as specks) and they attract H2SO4 molecules which grab passing H20 molecules and start growing into cloud droplets.

          Not all cloud droplets are formed this way. The rest come from other sources. For example, forests emit turpenes and these can form cloud over the forests. (If you’ve heard of forests making their own weather, that’s how.) It does help to have a lot of available water vapour but water doesn’t condense unless it has a surface to condense on (macro) or a charged particle (micro).

          There’s a good animation illustrating these secondary cosmic ray showers 46 seconds in … enjoy.

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    David Maddison

    Google has a facility to examine word useage in books through time. You might like to examine “global warming” and “claim mate change” for example.

    https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Climate+change%2C+global+warming+&year_start=1970&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CClimate%20change%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cglobal%20warming%3B%2Cc0

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    RickWill

    Long running blog at Reneweconomy:
    https://reneweconomy.com.au/whats-behind-scare-campaign-on-rooftop-solar-blackout-threat-78729/
    Last two posts of mine were deleted as they were tough facts to counter.

    I did some sums based on the wind generation in Australia over the first few days of this month. Basically there was nothing from 2nd June to 5th June. I did the numbers scaling the storage requirement to the NEM average demand.

    The ambient energy proponents design on on capacity factors. For wind they work on 30%. So 5222MW of wind should produce, by design, 150GWh over 4 days. In fact what they actually produced from 2nd to 5th of June 2018 was 34GWh so the shortfall is 113GWh. That means the system would need the equivalent storage of 1000 Hornsdale Power Reserves to keep lights on.

    Scaling it up to meet the NEM demand they would build 86GW of wind capacity, based on 26GW at 30% CF, and that would need 15,800 HPRs to ride through those 4 days.

    The bad news for ambient energy is that I only looked at this month. There are many periods worse than this.

    I think my point was not well received as the comment has disappeared. The interesting thing is I provided a little bit of personal information about being a sailor in one of the two replies scrubbed and there was a following comment about sailing. I have asked the question how do they know I have a boat!

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      Peter C

      I read some of your comments Rick.

      You make good points but I don’t think that the readers at Renew Energy are receptive.

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      RickWill

      Update – my comments were reinstated, not in the original order, after I caught them out. So at least a different view is tolerated there.

      This is what was reinstated:

      I can do better than BOM data. This link shows the actual wind generation in the NEM network for June 2018. Look at Saturday 2nd through to Tuesday 5th:
      http://anero.id/energy/wind
      Next to nothing over the entire 4 days from the entire 5222MW fleet.

      If a system design was based on 30% capacity factor it would have anticipated 150GWh from wind over those 4 days. That is 116GWh more than the wind produced. So to make up the shortfall there would need to be at least a 116GWh battery. That is 1000 times bigger than the Hornsdale Samsung/Tesla battery. AND that only suits a 1700MW demand.

      To scale this up to the NEM current average demand designing on a CF of 30% you would build 87GW of wind generators. That then needs a 1.9TWh battery to ride through the 4 days of low wind. That is 15,800 Hornsdale Power reserves. Some might suggest this is easy with pumped storage but Australia simply does not have the availability of suitable perched water sites to achieve this level of storage.

      Bear in mind I have only used the current month.This is not the worst case. Look at June 2017:
      http://anero.id/energy/wind
      The output over the entire month only exceeded 30% for brief periods and yet all the reports are based on CFs of 30% or higher – those reports are fairy tales disconnected from reality.

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      yarpos

      Its amazing how gutless Renew is about allowing anything but mindless fanboy stuff.

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        Rob Leviston

        If Renew was really serious about RE, they would face and answer the tough questions! But, no. Just wanna keep spruiking as if RE can supply ALL our energy needs!
        Read Giles little piece on the coal gens that went offline last week, Couldn’t help but gloat! But failed to realise that it was still coal that provided the majority of our power!
        And then when faced with very low wind and solar output, what do you get? Crickets!

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    David Maddison

    Here’s something I didn’t know. In the US in places with cold winters they add calcium chloride to water when a water filled tractor tyre/tire is required. It acts as an antifreeze.

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    pat

    10 Jun: Politico: Typhoon Trump blows G7 off course
    Other leaders thought they’d kept the club together — until the US president tweeted his fury.
    By David M. Herszenhorn
    As host of this year’s G7 summit, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seemed to have just one over-arching goal: to get through the gathering without U.S. President Donald Trump blasting it to pieces. Trudeau succeeded — for all of about 90 minutes.

    Just an hour and a half after Trudeau finished his concluding news conference, an irate Trump tweeted that he had “instructed our U.S. reps not to endorse the Communique” and threatened to impose tariffs on automobiles. He accused Trudeau of making “false statements” to the press.

    Other G7 officials said Trump was too late. The communiqué was agreed, the summit done, the leaders packing up or already gone — like Trump himself, who tweeted his fury en route to Singapore to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

    Technically, the others may be right. But from a political perspective, Trump’s rant — and his proven willingness to tear up international agreements — effectively rendered the leaders’ joint declaration moot…

    Trump arrived late and left early, and his standoffishness — on trade, climate change, the Iran nuclear deal and other issues — dominated the meeting in Quebec at an elegant château on a bluff over the St. Lawrence River…

    The statement, like last year’s statement at the summit in Taormina, Sicily, included language on commitment to the Paris climate change accords that did not apply to the United States.
    https://www.politico.eu/article/typhoon-trump-blows-g7-off-course/

    communique is full of stuff and nonsense, but this is the CAGW section. note US not included in main parts. not sure how US figures in any of it, given Trump’s later position:

    The Charlevoix G7 Summit Communique
    Date modified: June 9, 2018
    Working Together on Climate Change, Oceans and Clean Energy
    23.A healthy planet and sustainable economic growth are mutually beneficial, and therefore, we are pursuing global efforts towards a sustainable and resilient future that creates jobs for our citizens. We firmly support the broad participation and leadership of young people, girls and women in promoting sustainable development. We collectively affirm our strong determination to achieve a clean environment, clean air, clean water and healthy soil. We commit to ongoing action to strengthen our collective energy security and demonstrate leadership in ensuring that our energy systems continue to drive sustainable economic growth. We recognise that each country may chart its own path to achieving a low-emission future. We look forward to adopting a common set of guidelines at UNFCCC COP 24.

    24.Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the European Union reaffirm their strong commitment to implement the Paris Agreement, through ambitious climate action; in particular through reducing emissions while stimulating innovation, enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening and financing resilience and reducing vulnerability; as well as ensuring a just transition, including increasing efforts to mobilize climate finance from a wide variety of sources. We discussed the key role of energy transitions through the development of market based clean energy technologies and the importance of carbon pricing, technology collaboration and innovation to continue advancing economic growth and protect the environment as part of sustainable, resilient and low-carbon energy systems; as well as financing adaptive capacity. We reaffirm the commitment that we have made to our citizens to reduce air and water pollution and our greenhouse gas emissions to reach a global carbon-neutral economy over the course of the second half of the century. We welcome the adoption by the UN General Assembly of a resolution titled Towards a Global Pact for the Environment and look forward to the presentation of a report by the Secretary General in the next General Assembly.

    25.Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the European Union will promote the fight against climate change through collaborative partnerships and work with all relevant partners, in particular all levels of government; local, Indigenous, remote coastal and small island communities; as well as with the private sector, international organizations and civil society to identify and assess policy gaps, needs and best practices. We recognize the contribution of the One Planet conferences to this collective effort.
    26.The United States believes sustainable economic growth and development depends on universal access to affordable and reliable energy resources. It commits to ongoing action to strengthen the world’s collective energy security, including through policies that facilitates open, diverse, transparent, liquid and secure global markets for all energy sources. The United States will continue to promote energy security and economic growth in a manner that improves the health of the world’s oceans and environment, while increasing public-private investments in energy infrastructure and technology that advances the ability of countries to produce, transport, and use all available energy sources based on each country’s national circumstances. The United States will endeavour to work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently and help deploy renewable and other clean energy sources, given the importance of energy access and security in their Nationally Determined Contributions. The United States believes in the key role of energy transitions through the development of market-based clean energy technologies and the importance of technology collaboration and innovation to continue advancing economic growth and protect the environment as part of sustainable, resilient, and clean energy systems. The United States reiterates its commitment to advancing sustainable economic growth, and underscores the importance of continued action to reduce air and water pollution.
    https://g7.gc.ca/en/official-documents/charlevoix-g7-summit-communique/

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    pat

    whoever wrote this under the “sundance” moniker at CT provides some good laughs:

    9 Jun: ConservativeTreehouse: sundance: Justin Trudeau: Tariffs are Only Illegal When U.S. Does It…
    Delivering remarks in a post G7 press conference, Prime Minister Justin from Canada outlines his perspective on the summit and takes questions from a pre-selected media audience. Many of the questions centered around U.S. positions on trade/tariffs and the Canadian/EU position that U.S. tariffs are illegal; whereas Canadian and EU tariffs are quantifiable expressions of magnanimous intellectual superiority and Americans should spend more time thanking them, instead of these feeble efforts to gain trade reciprocity.

    The underlying Trudeau trade premise is that the U.S. should be thankful for the products brought into the U.S. market by Canadians and Europeans. And Americans should express their appreciation through unilateral indulgence-fees for friendship. If President Trump does not agree to continue the cycle of abusive trade policies, the Europeans and Canadians might stop saying they are our closest and most valuable ally…

    •On the horrors of plastics and climate initiatives, the G7 agreement morphed to a recycled G5 as Japan and the United States refused to sign on to the planned planetary elimination of all plastic, petroleum and carbon-based products…
    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/06/09/justin-trudeau-tariffs-are-only-illegal-when-u-s-does-it/

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    pat

    lengthy, detailed, depressing:

    Spring 2018: City Journal Mag: How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences
    Universities and other institutions are watering down requirements in order to attract more women and minorities.
    by Heather Mac Donald
    (Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute)
    https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-identity-politics-harming-sciences-15826.html

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    pat

    9 Jun: Calgary Herald: Don Braid: Doug Ford’s victory a five-alarm warning for Alberta NDP
    Doug Ford likes pipelines.
    That’s the end of the good news for Premier Rachel Notley.
    For her, Ford’s success is a five-alarm warning that a populist wave could swamp Alberta in the election next spring.
    It’s been a strong possibility since Alberta’s conservative parties united. Now, the UCP has a potent role model…

    Ford didn’t even lead the fractured PC Party until March 10. He remains vague about details. Despite promises, the new premier never delivered a platform detailing costs.
    But he won anyway — 76 seats, for an all-powerful majority over the NDP, which captured 40.
    Notley has also lost a major ally, exiting premier Kathleen Wynne, on issues like carbon pricing and climate change policy. Ford doesn’t believe in any of it…

    Wildly energized, Kenney’s UCP crew rushed out a long, ecstatic statement minutes after Ford was declared the victor…
    The election is “a repudiation of Ontario’s liberal elites who spent months viciously attacking the Ontario PC Party and its leader Doug Ford,” Kenney said…
    David Taras, political analyst at Mount Royal University, attributes his victory to “this anti-elite rage, a feeling of being left out and ignored. It’s something you just can’t capture in the (opinion) polls.”

    Ontario has its rust belt of small towns and cities with shuttered industries. There is wide income disparity between much of Ontario and sovereign Toronto.
    Alberta has its own centres decreed obsolete by the NDP coal phase-out, as well as the shrunken oil and gas towns and general anger at political and economic devaluing of the oilpatch…ETC
    http://calgaryherald.com/news/politics/braid-doug-fords-victory-a-five-alarm-warning-for-alberta-ndp

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    pat

    lengthy investigative piece on a new scandal (not 1MDB):

    ***RM1.25 billion would be $400 million-plus Aussie dollars, I think.

    10 Jun: SarawakReport: Najib Signed Off Hundreds Of Millions On ‘Scam’ Solar Project For Sarawak Schools
    Sarawak Report has viewed copious documents indicating that in January 2017 the former Prime Minister personally pushed through an extraordinary ***RM1.25 billion project, which was awarded to a car rental company in Bintulu, purporting to install solar energy supplies for 369 Sarawak schools in the interior…

    So far, eighteen months into the three year contract, not a single solar power unit has yet been installed at any of the designated schools, although the money has continued to flow from the Department of Education…READ ON
    http://www.sarawakreport.org/2018/06/najib-signed-off-hundreds-of-millions-on-scam-solar-project-for-sarawak-schools/

    note: Wikipedia: Sarawak Report is an investigative journalism online news resource operated from London since 2010 by Clare Rewcastle Brown, sister-in-law of the former British prime minister Gordon Brown…
    FBC Media scandal
    In August 2011, an investigation by Sarawak Report revealed that FBC Media, a media production company had been acting as a public relations firm for Malaysian politicians including Abdul Taib Mahmud and Najib Tun Razak. The exposé caused BBC and CNBC to sever their relationships with FBC Media, and resulted in FBC Media going into administration on 24 October 2011. The BBC later issued a worldwide apology and revised its commissioning procedures after the revelation that it had been commissioning programming from FBC at token prices, which the company had then used as a PR platform for its business and political clients…
    1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB)…READ ON
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarawak_Report

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    pat

    behind paywall, not even sure of the order of the two excerpts, but that’s all I have found so far. hope someone will access and excerpt more:

    AEMO: Warnings Australia “does not have” the electricity reserves for times of need
    The Australian – 2 hours ago
    At the same time AEMO noted a thick cloud cover and rain reduced the output of solar generation across the state by up to 254MW a day across several days…
    The nations energy market operator has warned Australia does not have the energy reserves it once had to lean on in times of need as the …

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    pat

    amazing website covering Singapore summit. tons of pics/data etc:

    10 Jun: TheDrive: Kim And Company Arrive In Singapore Via A Procession Of Chinese And North Korean Jets (Updated)
    The North Koreans have pulled off an impressive display of aerial logistics with the help of their Chinese friends.
    By Tyler Rogoway
    Meanwhile, Air Force One (VC-25A) has taken an interesting route to Singapore as well, flying east across the Atlantic and making a fuel stop in Souda Bay, Greece. This direction is longer than the polar route but doesn’t fly over Russia and China. Currently Air Force One is somewhere near India on its final leg to Singapore.
    A USAF C-32A—commonly used as Air Force Two—is also heading to Singapore along a similar route, although it stopped at Ramstein Air Base in Germany for an overnight fuel stop. The U.S. airlift contingent, including and the myriad air lifters used to carry the presidential motorcade and helicopters from HMX-1, including ‘Marine One,’ will be using Paya Lebar Air Base in Singapore instead of Changi Airport. The two airfields are quite close to each other but geographically splitting up the North Korean and American delegations has been a common theme when it comes to the planning of the summit.

    An E-4B Advanced Airborne Command Post aircraft that always shadows the President during trips abroad also made its way to Asia for the summit, tanking up over the western Pacific while en route. The E-4B will not land at Paya Lebar, it will stage out of another location within a couple hundred miles of the President’s destination as is the common protocol.
    http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21430/procession-of-chinese-and-north-korean-jets-have-airlifted-kim-and-company-to-singapore

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    toorightmate

    Two bits totally unrelated to matters of climate:
    1. It is not right to speak ill if the dead. However, in the case of the late Bob Ellis, he can rot in hell. Nothing but a sick paedophile who hid behind Whitlam and Bob Carr for his “fame”.
    2. Great to see Trump calling out Trudeau for what he is – a spineless jerk.

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      el gordo

      [[Let’s leave that out] AZ] and I second the motion that Ellis should rot in hell.

      I agree that Trudeau is only puff and wind, so Donald will continue to belittle him and the Europeans who retain old world thinking.

      Donald can see the situation intuitively and will fight to bring back the jobs, which should get him a second term in office.

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        el gordo

        Thanks AZ, very judicious.

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        Roy Hogue

        I might agree with what got snipped if I could read it. Oh well…

        Trudeau is a diehard socialist who doesn’t seem about to give up his favorite economic system, even in the face of the fact that nowhere on earth has it ever succeeded.

        Trump shows himself to be a masterful poker player, keeping everyone at the table off balance while he thinks for the long term and doesn’t seem much concerned for the short view of things. I might add, …unlike every talking head and government type I’ve heard on the subject up to now. They don’t understand the man and while I can’t say I thoroughly understand him either I will say he’s without a doubt the most misunderstood and therefore underestimated man in the world today. And I’m loving every minute of this poker game.

        That so few can connect Trump’s unprecedented success in business with his management of the people’s business is unfortunate because it will turn out to be a joke of immense importance on those who don’t succeed in figure him out.

        The Democrats are reeling now that the Singapore Summit is over and there’s a step ahead under Trump’s belt without his having to give up anything. No matter what he promised to give Kim Jong Un, Un can’t get it until Trump gets complete dismantling of the NK nuclear program. And the best of it is that Un came begging, essentially groveling at Trumps feet with that letter.

        Donald Trump has been an amazing president.

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    Richard Ilfeld

    From time to time, the left takes up the cause of the arts, as they have been a reliable propaganda wing for many years. The arts are populated, we are told, by wildly creative and perspacacios individuals, who can show us both the future and our true nature. Hollywood has been less heavy handed than the Chinese state opera, but fits the mold.

    Didja ever notice that most of the futures these solons see are pretty dystopian? The left makes policies promising a land of milk and honey, then sees a bleak landscapes with roving bands of thugs, and perhaps a narrow elite (surely not themselves) ruling over a miserable proletariat.

    Of course, the artists suggest they are portraying the worlds as it will be if we don’t hew to leftist values, yet the few optimistice future views emerging seem based on traditional values.

    And artists seem to be the only ones left who can have a conversation, under the guise of fiction and set in a future or imaginary time.

    Blunt statements that can be made about a comic book kingdom are prohibited if descriptions of real events…heck, you have to publish a disclaimer that there is no reference to any real person, place, or thing in your work. Read the credits.

    I exaggerate, of course. If one is well outside the mainstream, and can be easily marginalized, a modicum of free speech is permitted.
    But about that “conversation” liberals always want to have.

    One could make a movie about a country that followed a zealot into energy poverty, collapsed, and suffered awful consequences before redemption by hero engineers.
    One could make a movie about an air traffic system that hired controllers based on diversity as opposed to qualifications, suffered a catastrophic failure but was saved by hero pilots.
    One could make a movie about a school system that destroyed its best schools in that name of diversity, but was save by hero parents who home schooled their kids and eventually reclaimed the system.
    One could make a movie about a society of children without parents.

    There are lots of movies.

    Didja notice that the hero is never a Marxist politician who solves the problem through collectivization followed by repression.
    Just sayin’.

    You can get away with a lot claiming the source is a comic book…not real life.

    There was a time when the artists were closer to reality, and perhaps had more influence. If there is a subtle or sophisticated critique of Mr. Trump, I’ve not seen it, but you might watch or read “all the King’s men”. How does voting really work? Spend 90 minutes with Key Largo. We don’t actually live in a ‘black and white’ world, something artists who worked in ‘black and white’ understood. And they did comics too ….. and could get away with saying things like “Truth, Justice, and the American way”

    Oh, and those films about a post energy Australia?? Mad Max??? nah!

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      Annie

      Very interesting video on that thread re. infiltration of the Vatican by Soros and his henchmen.

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    Another Ian

    Behind the news

    “BIG PICTURE – Bottom Line: Justin and Chrystia Decided To Play Left-Wing Politics With The Canadian Economy…”

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/06/10/big-picture-bottom-line-justin-and-chrystia-decided-to-play-left-wing-politics-with-the-canadian-economy/

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    el gordo

    Pope Francis speaks on a subject of “epochal proportions.”

    “Civilisation requires energy, but energy use must not destroy civilisation.”

    Contemporary society with its “massive movement of information, persons and things requires an immense supply of energy”.

    “But that energy should also be clean, by a reduction in the systematic use of fossil fuels.”

    “Our desire to ensure energy for all must not lead to the undesired effect of a spiral of extreme climate changes due to a catastrophic rise in global temperatures, harsher environments and increased levels of poverty.”

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      Kinky Keith

      Gordo,

      That is an extraordinary quote considering who said it.

      His access to wealth and information would be topped by very few around the world, and yet this is what he comes up with.

      There is something incredibly wrong when I, a poor person from the back of beyond in world terms, can form a better picture of things than the Pope.

      The concept that there is something called “man made global warming” and that this church accepts this and promotes it reminds me of a point made in the Bible.

      Thou shalt not worship false Gods nor have Idols.

      This is a false idol; it doesn’t relate to the Truth.

      For such a large organisation to go off the rails like this is just crazy.
      They haven’t even picked themselves up from the recent exposure of a horrible culture within their organisation and it seems that the Pope doesn’t want to work through it, but simply divert attention to a manufactured problem that is conveniently high profile.

      Who could maintain Faith in a system with those values?

      KK

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      yarpos

      You would think he would get his own house in order before pretending to save the world. Or is this a look squirell!!! moment

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    TdeF

    A comment on the historic meeting between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump. Underneath all this you have the Chinese government with men in space, the atom bomb since the 1950s and an unpredictable nuclear nation only 800km away. North Korea has been a buffer against Japan, South Korea and the US since WW2. However they have had enough with the real risk of nuclear conflict within a stone’s throw. Kim Jong Un will have been read the rules and China will be ready to invade and take out his nuclear capability. Then his mountain fell down, wrecking the testing facility anyway. Kim Jong Un was summoned to Beijing. He went.

    So he now has a choice. Face off both China and the US or achieve what his father and grandfather could not, peace with South Korea, freedom for himself and to remain as the dictator and religious head of North Korea with his millions of fanatical followers.

    I would not be surprised that the job he has to do is extract the maximum price possible from Donald Trump, relieve the sanctions and with the absolute assurance that he will continue as absolute ruler of his hermit kingdom. I think South Korea may have some theme parks too and Seoul a great place where everyone speaks Korean because no one else does.

    I am hopeful that we get verifiable and total denuclearization of the region, a region where blowing up everyone is considered reasonable if you don’t get what you want. At least according to Lee Kwan Yew who said the Chinese were reasonable, have never invaded anyone and the Koreans were extremely dangerous.

    It would be a great relief to everyone in the world, but especially the rulers of Beijing. I do not think there would be a meeting if Kim Jong Un was not prepared to denuclearize and told to do so by Beijing. After all, the assassination of his brother recently in Kuala Lumpur was because Kim really feared his brother would be put on the throne.

    Both parties would then revel in unprecedented fame and applause. For a President who left G7 before the Climate Change meeting to stop the greatest sudden Climate Change in human history, it would be vindication that appeasement does not work. For Kim, it would justify his grandfather’s nuclear ambitions. Besides, everyone is developing these things in secret anyway. Testing is no longer necessary. Kim will want his ICBM projects to continue, so he can launch satellites, of course.

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      TdeF

      I was puzzled as to how Kim Jong Un was going to get to Singapore. The hermit kingdom does not own a plane capable of the journey without stopping. China has been stepping up sanctions and North Korea has no power and no food.

      So what do you see in the background photo of his arrival in Singapore, a shining clean China Air 747. For one man.

      Now you see the Chinese so obviously driving this rapprochement. Korea hardly needs nuclear weapons with China as an ally. China does not want Korea with nuclear missiles provoking war with Japan and the US and frankly, everyone else including Russia. The Chinese are going too well to play with Mutually Assured Destruction to please their protege dictator.

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        yarpos

        Doubt if he travels alone any more than the Donald does.

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          TdeF

          In that sense, sure. Lots of support staff. People who are there to look after him. Still, all for one man. Helps if you are a deity to your people. I doubt Trump qualifies.

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    el gordo

    Cool south east winds onto the Queensland coast is a regional cooling signal.

    http://www.weatherzone.com.au/synoptic

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    • #
      TdeF

      Now why would anyone red thumb a weather report for Queensland?

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      • #
        Another Ian

        Like the Qld ALP’s veg management act –

        because they could

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        yarpos

        they are red thumbing the mention of a cooling signal, must be old school alarmist that havent boarded the “change” bus yet. Warming is so 90s.

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          el gordo

          Correct, in north east Queensland regional warming came to an end in the early 21st century.

          ‘As part of ongoing research into natural rainfall patterns in Queensland, Professor John Abbot and I have been studying the temperature record for northeastern Australia, as temperature is a key input variable in our neural network models (e.g. Abbot and Marohasy 2014). Considering the data from the late 1800s until 1960, a cooling trend is evident, followed by warming between 1960 and 2001. In contrast, the last 12 years show quite dramatic cooling,’

          Jennifer Marohasy 2014

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    pat

    11 Jun: ABC: How bad is the drought and why has it been so dry?
    ABC Weather By Kate Doyle
    This autumn has been the fourth-warmest on record in Australia, with below average rainfall for most of the country, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s autumn summary.
    So how bad is the drought and why has it been so dry?
    According to Blair Trewin, a senior climatologist at the bureau, the areas experiencing the most significant drought at the moment are in New South Wales, north-west Victoria and eastern South Australia…

    Dr Trewin said the current conditions were the driest on record over a 14-month period for areas of NSW, including the upper Hunter, parts of the Illawarra and Southern Highlands, and an area in the central-west.
    “When you look at the time scale of six months through to a year, it’s a significant [drought] in the worst-affected parts of NSW,” he said.
    The only autumn on record drier than this one in southern Australia was in 1902, the year the Federation drought peaked, the Boer War ended, and women got the right to vote in New South Wales and federal elections.
    During the Federation drought, the Darling River virtually ran dry at Bourke in NSW, and the Australian wheat crop was all but lost.

    The current dry is not as extensive as the long-term droughts of the past.
    “We certainly don’t have those long-term drought conditions in New South Wales in the way that we had in the 1900s or the 1940s or 2000s,” Dr Trewin said.
    “1902 was a very bad year in its own right, but it actually came at the end of a prolonged period of dry weather which spanned seven to eight years.
    “We’ve had nothing like that recently because 2016 was a really wet year for just about all of the regions.”…
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-11/drought-how-bad-is-it-and-why-has-it-been-so-dry/9826130

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    pat

    11 Jun: Reuters: Investor LGIM seeks removal of eight company chairs over climate change inaction
    * To ditch eight companies from Future World Funds range
    * To vote against chairs using remaining LGIM shares
    * Rosneft, Subaru, Japan Post Holdings among laggards
    By Simon Jessop; Additional reporting by Taiga Uranaka in Tokyo
    Britain’s biggest asset manager wants to remove the chairmen of the board at eight companies worldwide, which it says have failed to confront the threats posed by climate change.
    Legal & General Investment Management, the fund arm of insurer Legal & General, has been among the most vocal asset managers on the topic, recently writing to some of the world’s top companies calling for more action.

    On Monday, it said it would vote against the chairs of China Construction Bank, Dominion Energy and Japan Post Holdings, as well as Occidental Petroleum, Rosneft Oil and Subaru. The other two companies on its list were Loblaw Companies and Sysco Corp.
    As well as demanding the removal of the companies’ chairmen, LGIM also said it would sell any shares of the eight companies held in its 5 billion pounds ($6.7 billion) Future World Funds index funds range.

    After spending a year engaging with 84 of the world’s biggest firms over their climate strategies, LGIM, which manages nearly 1 trillion pounds ($1.3 trillion) in assets, said some were not doing enough to prepare for a low-carbon economy…
    “We’re going to keep ratcheting up the minimum standards and our expectations from the companies; it’s not a finished business,” said ***Meryam Omi, head of sustainability and responsible investment strategy at LGIM…
    https://www.reuters.com/article/lg-funds-climatechange/investor-lgim-seeks-removal-of-eight-company-chairs-over-climate-change-inaction-idUSL5N1TA34K

    ***Meryam Omi in good company!

    May 2017: Imperial College: Low-carbon tech requires investment, but the payoff is a clean, strong economy
    by Miss Lottie Butler
    The event, entitled Investment opportunities in a low-carbon economy marked the launch of a Responsible Investment Club at Imperial.
    The Club is led by students Nicholas Spooner and Sarah Clements, who are studying the MSc Climate Change, Management and Finance, a programme that the Grantham Institute runs jointly with Imperial College Business School, led by Dr Mirabelle Muuls, Assistant Professor in Economics at the Business School. The event was co-hosted by the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment…

    Similarly, ***Meryam Omi, Head of Sustainability and Responsible Investment Strategy at Legal & General, highlighted that society is on a dangerous path that could lead to average global temperatures rising by 3-5°C. Although the commitments to the Paris Agreement, cheaper alternatives to high-emission technologies and societal pressure is starting to change the dynamic in investment, everyone needs to do more she said.
    “Market regulators need to create an environment in which good management of environmental social and governance factors is valued, and companies need to integrate low carbon opportunities into their culture.”
    Ms Omi also emphasised that individuals have to take responsibility on where their money is invested if we are to create a sustainable future. “If you don’t put your money into low-carbon solutions now, they simply won’t develop,” she said. “By tilting our portfolio to be more exposed to opportunities, we can start to change the conversation.”…
    https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/179565/low-carbon-tech-requires-investment-payoff-clean/

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    TdeF

    Please Roy, rage against ‘replaceables’. Let the Greens take offence. Isn’t that the same word as renewables anyway?

    I would love everyone to stop the language implicit in all this. In railing against ‘renewables’ you are inadvertently promoting the absurd concept of ‘free’ energy. It is the most expensive, unreliable, unpredictable energy in the world and the life span of the solar panels and windmills is very short. Solar is at least predictably off for half the time. No, they are replaceable, totally unserviceable. Talk about heavy metal pollution as disposables! All full of defined metals like Cadmium and disposal will be a massive problem, once people start sending solar panels to the tip.

    Then as China gets out of subsidies and super low solar panel prices, the cost of these replaceable facilities will rocket. As I said, houses will be devalued by them, especially when we get real energy. Imagine $1.5Trillion a year making Fusion work? We would have it by now.

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    pat

    ***give us your pension funds and we might call off the activist shareholder attacks on the oil and gas industry!

    5 Jun: Quartz: British lawmakers want to force big companies to report on their climate-change risks
    by Eshe Nelson
    When it comes to climate change, the phrase “ignorance is bliss” couldn’t be further from the truth, at least not anymore. British lawmakers want to end ignorance — willful or not — by big companies and asset managers when it comes to the risk climate changes poses to them.

    A report by the British parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee, published yesterday (June 4), calls for mandatory public reporting by large companies and asset managers, ***particularly pension funds, on their exposure to climate change by 2022.

    Right now, there are no such requirements. The closest thing is probably the reporting guidelines established by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), an international organization that includes Bank of England governor Mark Carney and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. But these disclosures are voluntary…

    Were the UK to make climate-change disclosures mandatory, it would follow the lead of France, where investors have been required since 2016 to disclose how they integrate environmental, social, and governance criteria into their investment policies and specify the risks posed to them by a transition to a low-carbon economy. French banks are now considered to be some of the global leaders in sustainable finance, particularly because several have decided to stop or restrict business with oil and gas companies…

    Last month, the committee published a report finding that less than half of the UK’s 25 largest pension funds, which combined manage £550 billion ($733 billion) in investments, had pledged to use the TCFD’s reporting guidelines…

    If the MPs in this committee get their way, within four years there would be mandatory climate-risk reporting and a clarification in law that pension-fund managers have a duty to consider long-term sustainability.

    ***This may relieve the pressure activist shareholders have been applying to companies, especially in the oil and gas industry.
    https://qz.com/1295904/british-lawmakers-want-to-force-big-companies-to-report-on-their-climate-change-risks/

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    TdeF

    It is interesting how the pundits are thinking Malcolm Turnbull just might win, despite his accidental win by one seat.

    The only argument in Turnbull’s favor, a man who removed a very popular leader as head of his very left Black Hand, is that people hate serial assassin Bill Shortern more than they hate single victim Turnbull.

    However as with Hawke replacing Hayden as leader on the day the election was called in 1983, Shorten will be tossed overboard in a day for Albanese. As Wikipedia says, this was an amazing coincidence. However this is all planned.

    What no one wants, especially Turnbull, is for the former Liberal party to toss him out for Abbott. Of course we are assured repeatedly and reflexively that Abbott is unelectable, coincidentally by the same people who tell us Turnbull is wonderful. However when Turnbull loses the election as he surely will and resigns as he currently plans, who do you think will lead the party back from the Wilderness? Is there anyone Malcolm has not trashed? Julie Bishop will have her New York job planned, like Helen Clarke and Julia Gillard.

    My hope is that it is Albanese vs Abbott. Then the Media will see and resent how popular Abbott is, not with their journalists. All the One Nation votes will go to Abbott. Australian Conservatives as well. As with America, most hate Abbott and Trump in equal proportion. Basically because both know Global Warming is a hoax. Actually, who doesn’t?

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      Dennis

      I don’t know why Albanese has not been referred to the High Court, as an adult he has admitted that his father was an Italian citizen, that he has a half sister and half brother who are Italian and Anthony has birthright Italian citizenship.

      Yet he completed a declaration late 2017 stating he has no right to dual citizenship relative to Section 44?

      He admitted his father’s background on ABC 7.30 Report where he discussed a book on the subject written by Karen Middleton.

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      James Murphy

      I can’t decide who is worse – Shorten or Albanese. They both strike me as people who have no real character, no real initiative, or new ideas, and just try to fit in with whatever seems popular at the moment.

      I guess this could be applied to a lot of politicians, but these 2 remind me of the types of school children who desperately want to be the centre of attention, and want to be well respected by all, but actually achieve the opposite by not being capable of excelling at anything social, academic or athletic, and trying way too hard to be everyone’s best mate.

      Actually, this isn’t just limited to the schoolyard, if I look at the behaviour of some of the people at my current workplace…

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    pat

    just one of the hypocrisy of the G6 CAGW mob, as it relates to Trudeau:

    10 Jun: Seattle Times: Canada acquires key pipeline link to Washington refineries
    This is a piece of the much larger acquisition of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, announced last month. An option to more than double the capacity of the small Washington spur line would create the potential for exports from the state — and huge pushback.
    by Hal Bernton
    The Canadian government has purchased a vital link in Washington’s oil network — a nearly 70-mile pipeline spur running through Whatcom and Skagit counties that feeds crude oil to four refineries, according to financial-disclosure documents.
    This is a piece of the much larger acquisition of the Trans Mountain Pipeline — announced May 29 — that runs more than 700 miles from Edmonton, Alberta, to tidewater at Burnaby, British Columbia…

    ***The expansion would nearly triple the flow capacity through the Canadian mainline pipeline so that oil could be exported from Burnaby to California and Asia. But there also is an option — noted earlier this year in a Kinder Morgan financial-disclosure document — to more than double the capacity of the small Washington spur line. That would create the potential for exports from Washington, where tankers have a more direct path to the open ocean than those departing from Burnaby.

    But any move to export oil from an expanded pipeline through Washington would face huge pushback from tribes, environmentalists and their political allies.
    “We will not accept this risky project, not here in Washington or in British Columbia,” said Rebecca Ponzio, a Washington Environmental Council staffer and campaign director for the Stand Up to Oil Coalition.
    This export strategy would also face formidable legal obstacles.
    Whatcom County has imposed a temporary moratorium on permitting any new projects intended to increase shipments of crude oil, and environmentalists are lobbying to make it permanent.
    Congressional legislation championed by the late Sen. Warren Magnuson, D-Wash., also throws up a roadblock…

    The Alberta provincial government — led by Premier Rachel Notley — also is a player in the restructured project, and could contribute as much as $2 billion to help finance the expansion. The Seattle Times on Friday asked a spokesperson for Notley whether there was interest in expanding the pipeline spur to facilitate export from a Washington port.
    “Our government’s focus is squarely set on getting our resources to Canadian tidewater,” responded Leah Holoiday, the Notley spokesperson…

    Bullish on oil exports
    The Canadian government is taking over the U.S. spur line at a time when tensions between the two countries are on the rise as President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau feud over trade. But they both are bullish on exporting oil, with Trudeau’s acquisition of the pipeline project representing a striking affirmation of the quest to carve out new markets for the vast oil-sand reserves in Alberta.
    “Trans Mountain expansion project is of vital interest to Canada and Canadians,” Bill Morneau, the federal finance minister, told reporters after the sale was announced. “Our government’s position is clear: It must be built, and it will be built.”…

    Brandon Lee, Canada’s consul general in Seattle, in an opinion piece in The Seattle Times, said Canada’s government is committed to pipeline and tanker safety.
    “Marine vessels have been transporting oil from the Westridge Marine Terminal (at Burnaby) without incident since 1956,” Lee wrote. “We are proud of this safety record. Once the expansion project is complete, Trans Mountain tankers will represent less than 7 percent of the total large commercial marine vessels transiting the Juan de Fuca Strait.”
    https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/canada-acquires-key-pipeline-link-to-washington-refineries/

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      pat

      should have prefaced previous comment with “the hypocrisy of the G6 CAGW mob, as it relates to Trudeau” as what I typed was poor grammar.

      Megan still pretending the G6 are “climate leaders”!

      10 Jun: ClimateChangeNews: G6 leaders advance climate agenda while Trump’s US defends fossil fuels
      European leaders, Japan and Canada back carbon pricing and a “just transition” to clean energy at G7 summit in Charlevoix, as Trump refuses to engage
      By Megan Darby
      The US asserted its position in a separate paragraph, prioritising economic growth and energy security. It would support countries in using “all available energy sources”, including to “access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently,” the statement said…

      “It is true that we didn’t resolve all the problems facing the planet this weekend in Charlevoix, but we made significant progress,” said Canadian prime minister and host Justin Trudeau at the closing press conference…

      German chancellor Angela Merkel released a photo to illustrate the dynamic of talks, which immediately went viral: she and the leaders of France, UK and Japan standing over a defiant Trump, seated with his arms crossed…

      “Trump’s petulant refusal to join G7 climate talks must finally banish any illusions of working with him,” said Nick Mabey, head of European environmental thinktank E3G. “The other G6 leaders must react by forging a partnership to drive forward climate action as the glue to the maintain the global rules-based system.”…

      Trudeau has been criticised for backing – and indeed buying – an oil pipeline in the face of strong opposition from climate campaigners and indigenous Canadians.
      “Canada showed leadership by stickhandling this climate outcome as the G7 host,” said Catherine Abreu, head of Climate Action Network Canada. “However, to be a true climate leader, Prime Minister Trudeau will need to change his approach to fossil fuel infrastructure at home, and take tangible actions that match his stated commitment to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.”

      Absent from the statement was any reference to an existing G7 pledge to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. The Overseas Development Institute estimates they are channeling a collective $100 billion a year to coal, oil and gas interests.

      “Pledges to address the climate crisis will continue to ring hollow as long as governments keep propping up the industry that drives it,” said Adam Scott, campaigner at Oil Change International. “If G7 leaders are serious about climate action, they need to counter Trump’s climate denial by taking much more ambitious action to fight climate change, including an end to destructive fossil fuel subsidies.”
      http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/06/10/g6-advance-climate-agenda-trumps-us-defends-fossil-fuels/

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        pat

        FakeNewsMSM has been going overboard about the photo of a seated Trump with his arms folded, surrounded by Merkel, May and co, which most Trump fans actually love.

        at 3min30secs in: Fox question re MSM claiming pic of Trump seated at G7, surrounded by Merkel, etc shows Trump in a moment of weakness.

        Sean Spicer: let’s just stop for a moment. this is where the results get lost. at the end of the day, the Communique talks about all of them agreeing to lower their tariffs, so the President got results for the American people and they’re (MSM) are focussed on what a picture looked like.

        so think about it from the American worker, the American manufacturer, services industry or the agriculture industry, we’re getting results for the American people because the President is bringing a tough line, and putting an end to generations of the American people getting taken advantage of through high tariffs.

        so what do you care about? what a picture looks like, or the results that this President is achieving and, again, it’s just amazing to me that the focus is on the picture and what is perceived in that. I look at them as all looking at the President, saying what do we have to do to solve this problem. they’re coming to him, not the other way around.

        VIDEO: 10 Jun: Fox News: (Sean) Spicer: There Isn’t ‘a Bar High Enough’ Trump Can Reach for Media’s Approval of (NK) Summit
        http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/06/10/president-trump-north-korea-summit-sean-spicer-says-media-will-criticize-no-matter-what

        from the Communique posted in comment #25 – evidence of the Trump agenda:

        G7 Communique
        (at the end of #4)
        We commit to modernize the WTO to make it more fair as soon as possible. We strive to reduce tariff barriers, non-tariff barriers and subsidies.
        5. We will work together to enforce existing international rules and develop new rules where needed to foster a truly level playing field…

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        • #
          Annie

          Actually, my immediate reaction to that photo of President Trump seated with his arms folded and, to my mind, an expression of derision, was that they are standing there trying to bully him and getting nowhere!

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          TdeF

          As the US economy has the turnover of three of them put together, he is holding all the aces. Consider also that a lot of their trade is with the US anyway. America has been the whipping boy of Europe for too long. Without America, they would all be speaking German, just as we would be speaking Japanese. It’s about time someone said that Europe should pay their way, remove their own tariffs and defend their own countries, not rely on the US to do everything and host and pay for the UN.

          If the top companies in the world are all US IT companies, what choice do they have, except to rage against Google, Facebook, Microsoft, UBER, Amazon and the rest. Where is the innovation from Germany? At $6Bn a year, public donations to Stanford University total more than that of all German universities put together. Of course the Americans are leading the world. Of course it is a one way street. Yes, the Americans can make their own cars, their own planes and their own ICBMs.

          As for the Crimea excuse, consider that Britain, France and Germany have all invaded the Crimea themselves, to take it off Russia. Now they want to exclude Russia for taking it back, again. Anyone over 60 in the Crimea was born in Russia anyway and they all speak Russian.

          The Crimea was never really Ukraine and was only 2% of the land, but the sheer effrontery of Germany, France and England complaining that Sebastopol is Russian again is beyond belief. If in London, visit the huge Crimean War memorial near Trafalgar square to commemorate the last time the French and English stormed the place, without reason.

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            TdeF

            Most of the people in the punitive Crimean war died from cholera. That’s why the Charge of the Light Brigade was necessary. To cover it up. No one even declared war. At the same time the British navy blockaded St. Petersburg. Now they accuse Russia of taking the Crimea illegally? Everyone in the Crimea wanted to go home!

            I was there on Russia day in Sebastopol about five years ago, a huge celebration. However the significance of this very poor, non industrial and former holiday area and economic basket case is zero, unless you have spent two hundred years fighting the French, the English and the Germans for the place.

            No the Donbass is a very different proposition, also Russian. It is rich in coal and heavily industrialized and prized. That is what the continuing war in Ukraine is all about. We will see, but do not be surprised if they vote democratically to leave hopelessly corrupt Ukraine and rejoin Russia. That’s not how Germany and France and Britain will see it though and they should know.

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    pat

    hilarious…

    10 Jun: TimesOfIndia: Climate change? Freak snow in May, June dashes hopes of mountaineers in Garhwal
    by TNN; with inputs by Gaurav Talwar
    Uttarkashi: For those planning a trek or climb in the Garhwal Himalayas, a not-so-good news. Snowfall in the months of May and June — a possible fallout of changing climate patterns in the higher reaches of Garhwal — has restricted many mountaineering expeditions from successful summiting of peaks this year.
    As a result, organisers of mountaineering expeditions say, the current climbing season which began from April 15 has so far been ‘a dismal one.’ “Seven expeditions have gone to the Gangotri region to climb peaks in the area, but only two succeeded and five had to return because of adverse weather conditions,” said Jayendra Rana, president of Uttarkashi Trekking and Mountaineering Association. He added that usually, the area receives snowfall till March-end, after which the weather becomes conducive to climbing. But not this year.

    Providing examples of the expeditions whose plans were thwarted by the weather, Rana said, “An Indo-British team which was attempting to summit the Bandarpunch peak could not make it due to heavy snowfall. Then, a recent expedition to the Kedardom peak could not succeed for the same reason. Besides, teams that went to the Satopanth and Bhagirathi II peaks also had to return without summiting after it started snowing.”
    Mountaineer Vishnu Semwal, a Mt Everest summiteer, said he found the weather pattern ‘puzzling.’ “Usually till May-June, fresh snow in the area tends to melt and only hard ice remains on the peaks, which is helpful to fix ropes and harnesses. However, during this season, most mountaineers are witnessing heavy snowfall in the peaks…

    Manish Kumar, another mountaineer who was part of a recent expedition to Kedardom, added, “In the past five years, I haven’t witnessed snowfall in the month of May in this region. Our team had made preparations hoping for a moderate climate but had to face heavy snowfall due to which we had to retreat. It is an indicator that weather patterns are changing in the Himalayas.”…

    ***According to Dinesh Chandra Goswami, professor of Geography in Rishikesh PG College, the unusual snowfall during these months could be linked to climate change. “Earlier, our months were defined by the particular weather conditions that exist in that particular period of time. For example, snowfall in January-February, summers in May-June and rain in July-August. However this climatic cycle has changed in past few years due to factors like global warming, deforestation, excess human intervention etc. Besides this, many global and local factors have also shifted the climatic cycle, which may be causing snowfall in May-June.”

    However, meteorologists hold another view. According to Bikram Singh, director, meteorological centre, Dehradun, snowfall can occur over peaks having an altitude of over 4000 and 4500 meters in the month of June as part of a normal weather pattern. “Depending upon the intensity of western disturbance and location of zero degree isotherm (the freezing level), which is usually located between the height of 4000 to 5000 meters,snowfall can take place before the onset of monsoon. However, after the onset of monsoon, snow activity does not usually take place below 6500-7000 meters of altitude,” he said.
    https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/dehradun/climate-change-freak-snow-in-may-june-dashes-hopes-of-mountaineers-in-garhwal/articleshow/64533579.cms

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    Rob Leviston

    Ok, I have a question relating to the AEMO website. It is in relation to the Data Dashboard, and specifically the NEM page.
    I can follow pretty much what is going on, except for two things, and they relate to the interconnectors.
    What does it mean when they go red?
    What does it mean when they show a direction of feed, but the value is negative?
    There doesn’t appear to be any info on the site to describe what the symbology is showing?

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      Rob,

      When looking at those Interconnector boxes (2 for QLD-NSW, 2 for SA-Vic and one each for NSW-Vic and Vic-Tas) and here I will use the Qld-NSW right hand side box, well see the number at the top with the minus sign before it, (-1113) that’s the maximum amount of power that Qld can send into NSW via that Interconnector. The number below that is the amount that can flow back the other way from NSW into Qld.

      The large number to the left of those smaller ones is the amount of power currently being transmitted in the direction of the flow of the arrow under that box.

      When the box is red, it is transmitting the maximum power (for that direction) that it can transmit.

      Tony.

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        wal1957

        Thanks for your response Tony.
        Good question from Rob and you, as always, have responded with an easily understandable reply – (for us mere mortals).
        I always enjoy reading anything that you have to say on this site.
        Your contributions are always insightful, and enlightening for me.
        Cheers

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        Robber

        Thanks for your great work Tony. I have started spreadsheeting your weekly summaries to see if trend lines become evident.
        What has already surprised me is the size of rooftop solar generation over the last 4 weeks.
        Coal 16878 MW 71.2%
        Gas 2171 9.2%
        Hydro 2323 9.8%
        Wind 1356 5.7%
        Solar Large 92 0.4%
        Solar Roof 882 3.7%
        Total 23,702 MW
        Rooftop Solar is excluded from the Large Scale Renewable Energy Target of 33,000 GWhr generation in 2020, or about 3770 MW on average. That is supposed to be 23.5% of generation, but in fact it’s only about 16%.
        It appears that during the last 4 weeks Renewables (Hydro, Wind, Large Solar) have delivered that 2020 target in Gwhr, but not 23.5% – please check my numbers. It may be that hydro is above it’s annual average.
        The estimated relevant acquisition of electricity used in setting the 2018 RPP (renewable power percentage) is 212,400 gigawatt hours (GWh) or about 24,000 MW average. But then 23.5% is 50,000 GWhr or 5640 MW. What am I missing?
        I couldn’t readily understand the target for small scale (rooftop) generation. “The 2018 small-scale technology percentage (STP) is 17.08%”. But is that calculated on expected delivery over the next 13 years?
        One request, not sure why you use GWhr for the weekly report rather than the average MW that we are so used to seeing.

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          Thanks Robber.

          One request, not sure why you use GWhr for the weekly report rather than the average MW that we are so used to seeing.

          That’s a real easy one to answer.

          This is the link to my Weekly summary at the end of Sundays daily post, and for the weekly and rolling total, scroll almost to the bottom of the Post.

          I have the totals for 8 sources written across the page there.

          In the individual section for the dailys, I have the average power generation in MW written there, and from that, I then convert that to actual power being generated (in GWH, which is MW X 24 and then divided by 1000) mainly because I wanted to show actual generated power.

          Another thing I have found is that losses (generated power always higher than consumed power) are around 3.5% to 4%.

          At those weekly and rolling average figures, if I was to write them in MWH, that means adding three zeros to every number, and (a) the numbers would then not fit across the page or (b) they would blend into each other and still not fit.

          However, thanks for the input here as from now on I will add an ‘explainer’ to the heading there indicating the difference between GWh and MWH (MWH multiplied by 1000)

          When this coverage area is consuming more than half a TeraWattHour (TWH or MWH multiplied by a million) of electricity each day, the numbers start to become huge. I’m only up to week four and this vast coverage area has consumed more than 15TWH.

          Also keep in mind here that Rooftop Solar (RTS) is behind the meter, so it will not show up in the data except as a factor of the 100% of existing power generation. Those green followers who support RTS like to say how huge it all is, but when you drill it down, to the average (it’s almost a sinusoidal graph, so the average of one half of a full sine wave is 0.637 of Peak) and then convert that to a 24 hour basis, based on hours of actual power generation, it only amounts to very little indeed, and after 4 weeks, it only comes in at 3.87% of actual power consumption.

          Tony.

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          Robber,

          sorry, I almost missed this.

          The estimated relevant acquisition of electricity used in setting the 2018 RPP (renewable power percentage) is 212,400 gigawatt hours (GWh) or about 24,000 MW average. But then 23.5% is 50,000 GWhr or 5640 MW. What am I missing?

          It’s Winter so the Insolation rate is lower, as the sun is (angularly) lower in the sky, and the hours of generation are a lot less as well.

          Tony.

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            Robber

            Thanks Tony. To get from MW to GWhr multiply by # hours and # days. So 24,000 MW equals 210,000 GWhr per year. What’s puzzling me is the 33,000 GWhr large scale RET target that I thought was intended to be 23.5% of generation, but it seems to be only a 16% target that we have already reached at 634 GWhr per week?

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            Robber

            Doing some more analysis per Anero.id, and found that hydro/wind are at year high rates at present.
            Coal/Gas Hydro Wind Lge Solar Total % Renewables
            Jun 19000 2500 1500 100 23100 MW 17.7%
            May 18500 2000 1500 100 22100 MW 16.3%
            Avge 2017/18 19250 1444 1211 100 22006 MW 12.5%

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    TedM

    Has anyone noticed just how cold the Indian Ocean is at the moment. (anomaly)

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/ocean-page/

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    pat

    no surprise:

    11 Jun: ABC: Opposition leader Bill Shorten vows to restore ABC funding if elected
    By political reporter Henry Belot
    Federal Labor would end a funding freeze on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) if elected, effectively restoring $83.7 million to the public broadcaster over three years…

    Opposition Leader Bill Shorten says Labor would guarantee funding certainty over the ABC’s three-year budget cycle if elected, noting the broadcaster had already lost 800 jobs since the Coalition came into power.
    “Enough is enough,” Mr Shorten said

    “From Playschool to Bananas in Pyjamas, from cricket to the Hottest 100 Countdown, to getting critical warning messages out about floods and fire, the ABC is a part of our national fabric.
    “That’s why Labor will stand up for the ABC and fight against the conservatives’ ideological war against our public broadcaster.”..
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-11/labor-vows-to-restore-funding-to-abc-if-elected/9857468

    only surprised Shorten didn’t include CAGW in the critical warnings bit:

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    pat

    no surprise:

    11 Jun: ABC: Opposition leader Bill Shorten vows to restore ABC funding if elected
    By political reporter Henry Belot
    Federal Labor would end a funding freeze on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) if elected, effectively restoring $83.7 million to the public broadcaster over three years…

    Opposition Leader Bill Shorten says Labor would guarantee funding certainty over the ABC’s three-year budget cycle if elected, noting the broadcaster had already lost 800 jobs since the Coalition came into power.
    “Enough is enough,” Mr Shorten said

    “From Playschool to Bananas in Pyjamas, from cricket to the Hottest 100 Countdown, to getting critical warning messages out about floods and fire, the ABC is a part of our national fabric.
    “That’s why Labor will stand up for the ABC and fight against the conservatives’ ideological war against our public broadcaster.”..
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-11/labor-vows-to-restore-funding-to-abc-if-elected/9857468

    only surprised Shorten didn’t include CAGW in the critical warnings bit.

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    David Maddison

    So I just booked a flight with Qantas. On the website you have the option of paying extra for a “carbon neutral” flight. If you wish to decline this option the only alternative offered is “not at this time”.

    Not at this time?

    What, do they think I’m ever going to change my mind?

    Incidentally, when government agencies book flights they always pay the extra for “carbon neutral”.

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      Annie

      We haven’t flown with Qantas for quite a long time; we always declined to pay any extra for offsets.

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      yarpos

      can I pay for a bit more “carbon”, just bump the throtlle up a tick and get there faster?

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    Hanrahan

    Jo, can we have a Singapore unthreaded?

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    pat

    ***in other words, the advance payments will be passed on to taxpayers instead.

    11 Jun: ABC: Queensland budget: Could Queensland soon have its first waste to energy plant?
    By Josh Bavas
    The Queensland Government is setting aside $100 million in revenue from the incoming waste levy in a bid to move towards a European model of turning waste into energy, the ABC can reveal…
    The waste levy begins in January, 2019 at $70 per tonne for dumping general waste to landfill, aimed at curbing the transport of waste to Queensland from interstate.
    Almost 40 affected councils have been promised advance payments to offset the cost of the levy in the initial years and prevent it from being passed on to ***ratepayers.

    Surplus revenue from the levy will be rolled out as grants of up to $5 million on a dollar-for-dollar basis to encourage the construction of new large-scale facilities and infrastructure…
    The Local Government Association of Queensland’s (LGAQ) is developing a plan to have no waste sent to landfill by 2028 and said it believed councils could join together to build up to eight bio-gas power plants…

    The State Government hopes the new fund will help to attract seed funding to get large-scale projects off the ground.
    On her trade mission to the US earlier this month, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk attended a bio conference in Boston in a bid to encourage more private renewable investment in Queensland.
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-11/queensland-budget-bid-to-encourage-waste-to-energy-projects/9857812

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    Another Ian

    Yesterday the Australian record price for a sheep dog was $12,000

    Today it is $22,000.

    Black and tan kelpie

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    el gordo

    ‘A $500,000 scientific committee created by the Coalition government to monitor the health effects of wind turbines held one face-to-face meeting in two years, failed to provide any official advice and had its work repeatedly rejected by research journals.’

    SMH

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    Another Ian

    “Everything That Could Go Right”

    Link at

    http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/index.php/2018/06/11/everything-that-could-go-right/

    “Great moments in socialism”

    In comments

    “Once again proving the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton:
    “I was very tolerant of the idea of being behind the times, having had long opportunities of studying the perfectly ghastly people who were abreast of the times; or the still more pestilent people who were in advance of the times.” “

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    Robber

    In The Australian today: Paul McArdle of WattClarity: NSW power outages ‘threat to industry’.
    As generators worked to restore plant outages, leading electricity market analyst Paul McArdle of WattClarity said business users, accounting for more than twice the energy consumption of residential customers in Australia, faced growing concerns about reliability and ­prices.
    His analysis found there were “challenges last week with coal, gas, wind, solar, hydro, interconnection capability, demand forecasting” and other factors that contributed to the tight market conditions.
    McArdle said AEMO’s forecast of demand had contributed to problems during the week and was 800MW short of actual demand on Friday.
    Due to colder and cloudier conditions, projections of small-scale solar production in the Newcastle-Sydney-Wollongong area were too optimistic, leaving more demand to be serviced by the grid. Consumption would also have been higher to meet demand for lighting and heating as temperatures were 7C lower than forecast.

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      David-of-Cooyal-in-Oz

      Thanks Robber,
      I’m glad the Oz published that, but would have preferred that they said “provided by coal fired stations” rather than “serviced by the grid”.
      Cheers,
      Dave B

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    pat

    4 Jun: ScienceDaily: Ancient Greenland was much warmer than previously thought
    New knowledge helps researchers understand how Greenland’s ice sheet responds to warming
    Source: Northwestern University…
    Published June 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study included contributions from collaborators at Dartmouth College…
    Today, northwest Greenland hovers in the 30s and low 40s Fahrenheit and weathers snowstorms in summer. But average summer temperatures in the early Holocene (8,000 to 11,000 years ago) and Last Interglacial (116,000 to 130,000 years ago) climbed well into the 50s…

    This data will help the broader scientific community further hone climate and ice sheet models used to project future changes.
    “This is the kind of ground-truthing that we need to get really accurate climate models and projections,” said Magdalena Osburn, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern, who coauthored the study. “We’re finding that, in some cases, models don’t include temperatures that are warm enough for this part of the world.”

    ***There is one caveat. Well-known changes in Earth’s orbit caused warming during the early Holocene and Last Interglacial periods. Today, warming stems from human-made sources and is happening much faster than warming during those interglacial periods. That means there is a chance that Earth might not respond to current-day warming in the same way…

    This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Polar Programs (awards 1108306 and 1107411), an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the Geological Society of America and the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern.
    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180604151150.htm

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    TdeF

    I note also in the Australian, the idea that governments not run by elites are ‘populist’, a version of Hillary Clinton’s deplorables. Presumably ignorant people who act entirely in self interest, as if the elites act in the common good with everyone’s interest in mind. What utter nonsense.

    Plus an article on how world economies and trade are going to be quickly depressed by Trump. Are these the people who could not see the GFC coming? Or are they the people who made it happen? The reality in the US so far and in Brexit has been the complete reverse and they have seen boom times in trade and employment and profits.

    So it is not just the deep state, but the professional ‘economics’ pundits who are bemoaning their loss of control over society and blaming Donald Trump, the Republicans and appalling ‘populist’ governments. The non populist governments are proud of their elitism and so scornful of Trump and people who actually listen to what people want and people need. What are they thinking?

    Then of course, Donald Trump walked out on the G7 Climate Change meeting. Incredibly he thought preventing a nuclear war might be more important than banking profits from Climate Change. The media paint him as an opportunist. Does not one take the possibility of a nuclear war seriously? Bloomberg even argues that Trump is playing right into Kim’s hands.

    What Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Obama could not do, Trump is doing. Iran is next, but he has to get Russia on side first.
    Global Warming now called Climate Change is an absolutely absurd, unbelievable topic for a G7 meeting when nuclear war is imminent. That would redefine all the world’s climates.

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      TdeF

      By the way, France owns the nuclear technology and pushes desalination plants around the world (Australia for example), Germany makes windmills and giant engines for windmills and all profit massively from pushing Global Warming. Australia and smaller economies are all victims to these industrial giants. That is the basis for coordinated action on Climate Change at G7, making huge profits from carbon taxes and technology to prevent CO2 going up. Key canned laughter.

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      PeterS

      As the video explains the left today has only one goal – to destroy the West. It covers everything from PC to the worst side of humanity. It doesn’t take much intelligence to see at least most of it is so blatantly true if one only opens their eyes to what’s been happening and still is.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kONs7sQ5DQ

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    pat

    behind paywall:

    Coal boost to fund new Trad spending in Queensland
    The Australian-12 hours ago
    Queensland Treasurer Jackie Trad will bank on a $3.7 billion boost in coal royalties to fund a spending spree on services, infrastructure and industry incentives…

    theirABC goes for $1bn boost, and has Labor saying sustainable debt is what will grow Qld’s economy!

    12 Jun: ABC: Queensland budget: Surplus gets $1b boost due to higher coal royalties, Jackie Trad says
    By Kristian Silva and staff
    Higher-than-expected coal royalties have bumped Queensland’s annual budget surplus up by about $1 billion more than predicted six months ago, Treasurer Jackie Trad says.
    The State Government had predicted a net surplus of $485 million for 2017/18 in December, but on Tuesday morning Ms Trad said it was now “three times” that amount.
    “The coal price has remained quite high, so that has meant increased royalties back to the State Government,” Ms Trad told ABC Radio Brisbane…

    State debt is forecast to rise to $83 billion by 2022, with Ms Trad saying about half of that would be government sector debt, with the rest carried by government-owned corporations.
    “This debt that we accrue goes into building the infrastructure that we need,” she said.
    “Our debt is stable, it’s absolutely sustainable, but more than that it’s actually going into growing our economy and growing jobs.”…
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-12/queensland-budget-surplus-boosted-1b-due-higher-coal-royalties/9859298

    11 Jun: AFR: Soaring coal price boosts Adani mine prospects
    by Peter Ker
    The financing struggle comes, ironically, as thermal coal prices trade at six-year highs and as analysts at JPMorgan raised their long-term thermal coal price forecast by 15 per cent.
    JPMorgan had previously expected thermal coal, which was fetching $US112 a tonne in recent days, to fetch $US67 a tonne long term but raised that to $US77 in recent days…

    While coal’s role in power generation is falling in many developed economies, JPMorgan said growth in demand from south-east Asian nations and reduced exports from Indonesia (currently the world’s biggest thermal coal exporter) would create prices that would act as an incentive to open up the Galilee Basin.
    “Growth in coal-fired power generation through Asia is likely to support an additional 100 million tonnes per annum of seaborne demand by 2035. We therefore believe thermal coal prices will need to be strong for a sustained period, in order to incentivise the development of new coal basins such as the Galilee,” the JPMorgan analyst Lyndon Fagan said in a note…
    “In our view this is likely to require a new coal basin to be opened up, such as the Galilee Basin.”…
    Adani is not the only miner with ambitions for the Galilee Basin, with TerraCom, AMCI and companies linked to Clive Palmer having exposure to tenements in the region…

    Tim Buckley, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said the long-term coal price was more relevant to Carmichael’s viability than current spot prices…BLAH BLAH
    https://www.afr.com/business/mining/soaring-coal-price-boosts-adani-mine-prospects-20180611-h118gl

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    David Maddison

    It’s paywalled (maybe you can get a free view) but I find the claims in this article sickening. E.g. “renewables are now cheaper than coal”, that “gold plating” of the grid is responsible for high power prices and that coal power plants are subsised (because they were built by the taxpayer before being privatised).

    https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=2ahUKEwju_Oveh83bAhWMlJQKHe4BDEUQFjAAegQIAhAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.heraldsun.com.au%2Fbusiness%2Futility-fires-back-at-cheap-shot-renewable-energy-the-cause-of-skyrocketing-electricity%2Fnews-story%2Fc29682c1e7216003d553afd991f00a41&usg=AOvVaw2Vyr6MHrj9yQi-POpBRXJp

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    Another Ian

    JCU in deep

    “Give it up James Cook University – Even The Guardian Sympathises with Climate Skeptic Peter Ridd”

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/11/give-it-up-james-cook-university-even-the-guardian-sympathises-with-climate-skeptic-peter-ridd/

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    pat

    11 Jun: Financial Times: Neil Hume: Thermal coal defies sceptics as Asian demand rises
    Prices have more than doubled from 2016 lows, boosting profits of big producers
    Thermal coal, tagged the least-loved major commodity by analysts, is defying sceptics, with prices rising to the highest level since 2012 thanks to strong Asian demand.
    High-grade Australian thermal coal, the benchmark for the vast Asia market, was quoted at $112.60 a tonne on Monday by Argus Media.

    The fuel, which is burnt in power stations to generate electricity, has now jumped 130 per cent from its 2016 lows, boosting the profits of big producers such as Glencore and Peabody. The price of South African thermal coal has also hit a six-year high as consumers in Asia scramble for supplies…

    Demand from India, Japan and South Korea has been robust in the first five months of the year, while an early summer heatwave has lifted imports into China despite Beijing’s efforts to keep a lid on domestic coal prices…
    “The ongoing bull market in coal has been greatly under-appreciated and is not over yet,” the Jefferies analysts noted.
    https://www.ft.com/content/704554a2-6d51-11e8-92d3-6c13e5c92914

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    pat

    12 Jun: TimesOfIndia: TNN: High coal supply helps power plants avoid summer outages
    NEW DELHI: Coal is once again helping avert electricity shortage by making it possible for thermal power stations to raise output to more than 103% of their scheduled production target with a view to bridging generation shortfall from hydro-electric plants.

    Government data shows state-run Coal India Ltd, which is the lifeline for power plants, fed 82 million tonne of coal to power plants in the April-May period alone, marking a 15% increase in supplies over the previous corresponding period.
    The increased fuel supply helped coal-fired power stations to operate beyond their targets for meeting supply gap left by hydel units, which saw generation dropping to 88% of estimates as reservoirs ran low.

    The coal and railway ministries under Piyush Goyal’s watch have been preparing thermal plants for such an eventuality and ramping up fuel supply. This has resulted in thermal power generation rising 4.5% in 2017-18 from the previous fiscal, while hydro power generation has shown a drop of 20%.

    The higher fuel supplies to power plants underline the substantial growth in coal production in the last four years. Total coal production increased to 676 mt (million tonne) in 2017-18 from 609 mt in 2014-15. CIL’s output went up from 494 mt to 567 mt. In the April-May period of the current fiscal, total coal production stood at 111 mt, with CIL’s output pegged at at 92 mt.

    “What used to happen in 7-8 years (earlier) has happened in four years… This 105 mt (million tonne) increase in production in four years took almost seven years to achieve before 2013-14,” Goyal said on Monday. Though coal despatch too has risen apace with rising coal production, several power plants are still complaining of running low on fuel.
    https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/high-coal-supply-helps-power-plants-avoid-summer-outages/articleshow/64549726.cms

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    pat

    11 Jun: EconomicTimesIndia: IANS: We ensured better coal quality, output: Piyush Goyal
    The Central government has worked to ensure superior coal quality for consumers along with a focus on lowering the cost of electricity, Railway and Coal Minister Piyush Goyal said on Monday.
    Speaking here on the achievements of the Modi government, Goyal said the historic reforms undertaken in the coal sector, including allowing commercial mining, have led to increased energy capacity and fuel efficiency in the country.
    The Minister said that while coal production had gone up by unprecedented levels during this period, the efforts towards quality improvement had reduced the amount of coal required per unit of electricity in the country.

    “The Ministry has worked for ensuring superior coal quality by setting up third-party sampling procedures. The Uttam app has been launched for ensuring transparency and efficiency in the coal monitoring process,” he said.
    “Regradation has been done of all mines of Coal India and Singareni Collieries by the Coal Controller.
    “Focus has been on the cost of electricity through lower cost and higher quality … and the Specific Coal Consumption, or the amount of coal required per unit of electricity, has been cut by 8 per cent in the last four years,” he told the media.
    The Minister also said that the 105 million tonnes of increased production achieved by state miner Coal India in the last four years took almost seven years to achieve in the period prior to 2013-14…

    Obviously, coal output involves land acquisition, installation of necessary equipment and a whole cycle. As the demand is growing very rapidly in the last 8-9 months, the so-called feeling of (coal) shortages has crept in. The Coal and Railway ministries are working together to ensure that at no point of time, anybody loses the ability to generate power for lack of availability of coal.”…

    He described commercial coal mining as the “most ambitious reform” in the sector.
    “As far as the commercial coal is concerned, the process is underway. I had some discussions with the unions. We are also looking at more mines being auctioned out for power, non-power sectors,” Goyal said.
    As many as 89 coal mines have been auctioned and all revenues allotted to coal-mining states, he said…
    https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/coal/we-ensured-better-coal-quality-output-goyal/64543797

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    pat

    11 Jun: Bloomberg: Botswana Coal Miner Sees Opportunity in Regional Shortages
    By Mbongeni Mguni
    Botswana’s sole operating coal mine will increase output almost threefold within seven years as it eyes export opportunities created by a shortage of the fuel that’s used to fire most of southern Africa’s power plants.
    Morupule Coal Mine in the east of the country will ramp up annual production to 8 million metric tons by 2025 from 2.8 million tons now and is targeting shipments to South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe, Matthews Bagopi, the business development and strategy manager at Morupule Coal Mine, said in an interview Thursday in the capital, Gaborone.
    The mine mainly supplies the 600 megawatt Morupule B plant nearby, but also ships to South African cement-maker PPC Ltd.’s slurry plant near Zeerust in the northwest of the country, and Namibia Power Corp.’s Van Eck power plant…

    “A lot of producers in South Africa are sending everything they are producing abroad,” Bagopi said…
    Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., which accounts for about 95 percent of South Africa’s power generation, is experiencing shortages of coal at as many as six of its plants and has issued a request for proposals for the supply of an additional 100 million tons over five to six years…
    Morupule’s expansion plans include a new, open-cast mine near its existing underground operation that is due to be commissioned by the middle of next year. The new mine will have nameplate capacity of 10 million tons a year, though that level of output will depend on demand, Bagopi said…

    Shumba Energy Ltd. also sees supply troubles at Eskom and the region as an opportunity. It’s developing the Morupule South Mine, also an open-cast operation, that will produce 1.5 million tons a year at full capacity. Commissioning is scheduled for 2019.
    “There is an increasing shortfall in the supply of washed coal in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Namibia, Chief Financial Officer Thapelo Mokhathi said in a separate interview. “Eskom needs 130 million tons of coal a year and they are struggling.”
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-10/botswana-coal-miner-sees-opportunity-in-regional-shortages

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    pat

    12 Jun: The State Journal Editorial: Coal must remain part of nation’s energy plan
    by John Miller, Executive Editor
    For all the bombastic rhetoric and questionable personal traits, President Trump understands business. And we believe he understands national security.
    So with Gov. Jim Justice and the state’s congressional delegation, led by Sen. Joe Manchin (Democrat) and Rep. David McKinley (Republican), pushing for coal to remain a key part of the nation’s energy plan, we’re not surprised that the President saw value in their thinking.
    President Trump has ordered that both coal and nuclear power plants remain operational for the foreseeable future. The president used the Defense Production Act to support the order, saying it was a matter of national security.

    “Without question, this is the best news in my 40-year career in the coal industry,” said Chris Hamilton, who is vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association and co-chair of the West Virginia Coal Forum.
    “It’s bigger than big. Never before in the history of mining has our state and federal political leadership been able to achieve the benefits to coal that are embodied in the Trump-Justice plan,” he said.

    Coal Forum co-chair Fred Tucker said the decision is evidence that both President Trump and Gov. Justice are serious about coal’s future role.
    “President Trump and Governor Justice clearly have been working together to restore coal jobs and shore up our national energy security,” Tucker told The State Journal. “What began with an idea from Governor Justice has become a revolutionary national energy plan.
    “Coal remains our nation’s leading base fuel for securing states and countries all over the world with reliable electric power for households and industrial use.”

    We agree with Tucker’s statements in many ways. And applaud the efforts of President Trump and Gov. Justice.
    But the idea stems back more than a few months, actually to early 2014, when the polar vortex drove millions to the brink of major blackouts as the demand for heat generation almost overwhelmed the system.

    It was Sen. Manchin who first trumpeted the cause and the role that coal played in keeping the country powered and warm.
    Rep. McKinley, a professional engineers, also was a staunch advocate for shoring up the power grid, believing coal was the only reliable fuel source readily available.
    They both were right then and now. And, thankfully, we now have a White House administration that is listening…ETC
    https://www.wvnews.com/theet/opinion/editorials/coal-must-remain-part-of-nation-s-energy-plan/article_bc25efdb-3fde-51f6-9c79-82cca529188e.html

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    OriginalSteve

    Gotta love it – have the submissions to journals seem to have been “rejected” so the infra-sound reality isnt public knowledge?

    That nasty little thing called peer review…where some reviews…. may be more equal than others….

    https://www.canberratimes.com.au/politics/federal/500-000-wind-farm-experts-provided-no-advice-in-two-years-20180611-p4zks3.html

    “The committee is required to provide advice on developing wind farm standards, including sound measuring methods.

    The report, dated April this year, said it “is yet to provide this advice” because “it must first determine exactly what needs to be measured”, including whether it is necessary to measure low frequency sound and infrasound – sound waves so low they are inaudible to humans.

    In February last year the committee resolved to publish parts of their research as papers in learned journals, so they would be peer-reviewed.

    The first paper, covering wind turbine sound limits, was submitted to the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The journal asked for the paper to be modified after “extensive” peer review comments. The paper was resubmitted but again rejected.

    It was also rejected by the Journal of Sound and Vibration because it was “outside the scope of the journal”. In December last year the paper was sent to the Applied Acoustics journal.”

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    OriginalSteve

    Check this out…mum of autistic child has her comedy routine dumped after “seagull” SJWs persecute her for daring to have some fun with being the parent of an autistic child…..

    PC gone feral…..

    http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-12/autism-mums-comedy-routine-causes-controversy/9859092

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