JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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OK a question for those that live in Perth or have visited often, we are travelling there soon and as I’ve never been and Mrs Yonnie was there 30+ years ago I would like to know what the traffic and travel times are in the city and suburbs and how is the airport laid out for access?
Were only there for a weekend and need to get around a bit, its not a holiday so sightseeing is off the table, cheers.
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The taste of Perth’s desalinated water may come as an unpleasant surprise to a visitor.
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I am visiting Perth at the moment. Just got off a train from Fremantle – 35 minutes (all stops), one way fare $4.80 full adult fare. Interstate seniors cards seem to be accepted. Apparently mon- fri peak hours the traffic is slow, otherwise no problem. Weather is great – 28 degrees and low humidity (much nicer than bris at the moment). Apparently all the shops close at noon on Saturday and don’t reopen till Monday morning. Enjoy your trip, I am!
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Thanks for that, looking forward to seeing it.
The shops closing at noon used to happen in regional Victoria three decades ago, gave people more time with family.
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Most shops in Perth city are open on Saturday 9am to 5pm. Myer is open on Sundays 11-5pm.
If shopping is what you want go to ‘Watertown’, Wellington St, West Perth. Open 7 days a week. Good bargains and cheap eats there. Free public buses (CAT) will take you anywhere in Perth.
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Does Fremantle have any resemblance to a freemartin?
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Hilarious but no. I am looking forward to a visit to Fremantle Market sometime in the not too distant future. We went there years ago. Some of our family have now moved back to Perth so we have an excuse to visit again.
Freemartin! Is that supposed to mean it is a sterile twin of Perth?!
11
We had one once; grass fed and delicious!
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Fascinating, Freemartin.
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Nope, the shops don’t shut at midday Saturday any more – that was eons ago. Shops open in Perth CBD around midday Sunday.
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Perth CBD shopping times – outside areas experience may vary… Sat is 8am to 5pm, and Sun 11am to 5pm. CBD can be a touch dead at night, but it is gradually becoming more active. There are some interesting micro-bars, for example.
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Hi Yonnie, the Perth Airport access roads have been substantially upgraded recently and it’s now very easy to arrive and depart the airport. The main traffic blockages are on the north/south Mitchell and Kwinana freeways at peak hours, but at other times easy to traverse.
Welcome to Perth, I hope you enjoy your time here. “Freo” is worth a visit, particularly when the Freo Markets are open, and the Fishermans wharf area is great on a warm night. A pity that you won’t have time to head down south this visit – perhaps next time?
21
Access to and from airport is good. Easy access to city and suburbs. No train but plenty of buses. If you have a car, the roads have been upgraded in recent years and provide clear and easy access.
Traffic in all directions is slow at peak hours (7 am to 9 am and then 4 pm to 6 pm) Apart from hot spots, pretty clear at other times of the day.
Beaches are great places to visit, but take notice of the shark warnings. I have just about given up surfing in WA now, and go to the Sunshine Coast for about 12 weeks a years to do my surfing. Beaches, especially this summer, have been very windy (south westerly) from fairly early on in the day.
Perth is a great place to live, and to visit. It’s isolation is both a blessing and a curse.
10
Thanks so much for the replies everyone, unfortunately we’re going to pick up my wife’s sons ashes and attend a service, It’ll be a bit stressful but we’ll take notice of the place I’m sure, the place can’t be too bad if Joanne comes from there.
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No good Yonnie , when we were there it rained and rained heavy most of the time and although we did enjoy Fremantle the fish and chips were grease and soggy .
I do love Western Australia and believe they are spoiled as to location and now have family and friends living there I hope to get there more often .
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If Mrs V. wants something a little different, then there’s the Swan valley. Lots of little wineries (avoid the tourist trap ones), the chockie factory, some distilleries, the nougat shop is worth a look (right next door to the nuts place). You can go up one side of the valley, turn at the bridge at the top, and come back down the other side. Potter around Guilford is nice, I’d personally stick away from the city and the crowds but maybe that’s just me. There’s some good fruit stalls on the side of the road and the grapes are crunchy and flavoursome – nothing like you get at the supermarkets!
Toodjay is nice but a little out of town – about 1 hour north-eastish in the Stirling foothills. Nice for a poke around but you have to be done and dusted by 3pm because everything shuts down after that. Nice countryside but.
I’m sorry to hear about the reason for your visit but hope you get some peace and comfort from the journey.
Cheers,
Speedy.
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Visited Fountain Gate shopping centre yesterday and imagine my surprise. A big sign over a metre high and 400mm wide declaring this shop sold “cruelty free milk”.
What, wait, not cold hands while ,um, squeezing a body part or something else. Well it turns out that this dairy farm does not cull old working bulls not does it castrate or sell any bull calves born on the property. All animals live out their entire lives grazing on lush pastures. Sounds like a perfect business model to me. Five years in, and what you have is a farm full of angry bulls in their prime, fighting for favours from any females that remain. No cows producing milk because all the grass is being consumed by the non producing and not being sold boys. What could possibly go wrong.
While ignorance can be relieved with knowledge, stupidity knows no bounds !
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I read a comment by a vegan to the effect that milk was the worst animal product, because it involved cows being ‘raped’ (yup!) and then their calves turned into veal. Raped?
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Visiting Mr Bull on our place has probably had his fun! He can go home soon and let the beautiful girls do their part in producing their beautiful girls and boys. I didn’t notice any of the cows objecting to Mr Bull having his ‘wicked way’ with them…on the contrary!
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Hussies!
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Vegans constantly argue that fish isn’t meat. That’s how demented they are and I wouldn’t take a word of theirs seriously. Interestingly tho:
https://www.techly.com.au/2016/08/15/life-lie-fish-dont-actually-exist
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How are they dealing with fungi now being moved to animalia in classification?
That ought to take mushrooms off the menu
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More fake science?
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I doubt if vegans do they would be pretty clear, vegetarians and part timers would argue the toss. I had a friend that basically went with she wouldnt eat anything with a face, so eggs and milk got a pass.
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Lols.. So gingerbread men stayed on the shelf.. 🙂
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More city ninny stuff…ye gods!
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I have no issue with Vegans and other minority groups making their own choices.
But please DO NOT try and force your choices on the rest of us!
Nor lecture us with inane argument.
Our teeth tell me that we’re omnivores…
PS I like my beef rare please.
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sambar:
There’s a shop in Hahndorf (Adelaide Hills) which sells Organic Leather products. The sign guarantees that they are made only from free range grass fed cattle.
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What next…”all our cattle euthanized using organic copper jacketted projectile while listening to whale music” ?
It would be funny, if….
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Sambar
Next attraction “First bull fighting arena in Australia”?
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I wasn’t aware bulls produced milk. No wonder I don’t drink the stuff.
Oh, and you can keep Fountain Gate.
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Greebo they don’t only cream , or so I’m told .
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BoM now issues tornado warnings for Townsville.
Will the tornados be mildly catastrophic or severely catastrophic?
What else can these creeps dream up?
How about a volcano caution or some “Beware of the Dinosaurs” signs.
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The Energency Services app used in VIC, while a good effort, does tend to spam you with lots of notices. I was trying to work out what it was saying the other day and ended up at the State level page and noticed a “dangerous animal alert”
Apparently a Great White was munching on a whale carcass off Mallacoota and we all needed to know. I will have to report my cat, she’s vicious if not fed on time.
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I didn’t load the app this year…too many irrelevant notices last season. I just regularly take a look at the situation via the CFA site. I also go outside and look at the sky and sniff the air. There was a lot of smoke yesterday from a fire west of Buxton.
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Its a stupid app.
It kept wanting my location and wouldn’t take no for an answer trying to intrude into my privacy, so like all Dangerous Dan nonsense, it was duly deleted without ceremony…..
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It’s never happened before tooright, Barron gorge, Tully gorge all produced by rainbow serpents. Thats the truth I’m tellin ya, true.
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TRM
It’ll be a Category 5 with unprecedented gusts of wind approaching 48kph. There’ll also be a king tide of, at minimum, 127mm.
So the Queensland government is asking all citizens to adopt a sit, look, listen and watch approach, not drink too much alcohol, and be prepared to kiss your a_se goodbye if they happen get it wrong on this occasion.
I’ve based all of my predictions and accurate assessments on BOMs last Cat 5 effort.
Cheers,
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Congratulations Popeye, my first EVA red thumb. The BoM has been pretty good with the possible exception of the wind, but the fat lady is yet to sing.
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There was rain driven by some wind when we were loading the car with our groceries an hour ago.
It’s been raining for over a week and it has almost been biblical in the measured rainfall. Our dam is over 200% full and SunWater is having the devil of a time trying to release water without flooding more of the city than necessary.
Will someone tell the flim flam man that our dam is full?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-01/townsville-as-flooding-emergency-continues-fake-text-concerns/10768656
Strangely news dot com doesn’t mention these floods.
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I presume that your dam is designed for Flood mitigation and should not normally be filled above 50% capacity. Now it is really full and can no longer store any additional water. Does that make things worse?
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2018 march:
Disaster plan reveals what happens if the Ross River Dam fails
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/disaster-plan-reveals-what-happens-if-the-ross-river-dam-fails/news-story/227ca5135f6f688fc3b36c9bd41d63
It appears the BoM/Qld govt. learnt nothing from 2011 floods …
5000 homes without power, 20,000 could go under water
“Many of us have seen what happened in the Brisbane floods (in 2011),” she said.
“We are trying hard to ensure we do not make any of those mistakes.”
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/weather/north-queensland-on-high-alert-as-catastrophic-floods-expected/news-story/95a7bd2118e12b25a0908841a45aab16
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abc Update:
Townsville residents have been urged to move to higher ground, with the council announcing the spillway gates of the city’s Ross River Dam may be fully opened from 8:30pm on Sunday.
The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) issued a severe weather warning at 4:53pm Sunday predicting heavy rainfall, destructive winds and significant flash flooding between Ingham and Bowen, potentially extending as far south as Mackay from Monday.
BOM said the monsoon trough was expected to shift slowly south over the next day or two to extend from Bowen, west to Hughenden and into the Gulf Country.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-03/townsville-flooding-catastrophe-dam-spillway-gates-fully-open/10774312
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There is ample room for the Townsville population on Mt Stuart.
Unfortunately, the road ain’t too good!!!
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Anyone attempted to link it to CAGW yet? Has to happen sooner or later….
The Warmistas remind me of those bobbing head dolls you used to see on car dashboards in the 1970s….
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Original Steve:
Now there’s a money making project. Think a bobbing head with a notice “It’s caused by Climate Change”.
All the trolls will want one. It saves them having to write something that sounds coherent.
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I think the doll might be smarter than a lot of them….heavy metal headbanger warmistas…..now there is a picture….
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are you talking about one of these?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_doll
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It was originally built as flood mitigation but as the city has grown it has developed as the main water storage by installing radial gates, hence the dilemma facing the guys controlling the gates. It must be remembered that the dam hasn’t filled in the last six wets, one of which was a near disaster. We had to pump water from the Burdekin at $30,000/day if my memory serves me well. So we were in the same situation as Brisbane was when they opened their gates too late. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
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Bigger dams is the answer , also pumping some over hill wouldn’t hurt .
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Yes!
Pumping over the hill into the upper Darling catchment. That would be win win.
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Umm!
Maybe you ought to check the map
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For Ian , over the hill and far enough to get to the catchment .
10
The city has been warned that in two hours the gates will be opened and MUCH more water will be released from the dam. I look down on the roofs of houses down the street so they should be preying I’m OK.
The dam was surveyed in the sixties and I serviced the surveyors’ 4X4s. The surveyor told me they were building a flood mitigation dam. This was in the days when the country party governed and governments could find some money for capital works. It was an earth wall with a lateral wall running some distance upstream but it had a deep, narrow spillway. Ten years ago they did remedial work on the wall and installed radial gates because the city had grown and water storage was a priority.
It has taken 50 years but the dam has proven it’s worth and the upgrade is shown to be money well spent. After paying for welfare do governments have the money for these things today? Any money they have is spent on unreliables, not things of permanent value.
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And since that original sixties construction date Hanrahan to what extent has Townsville’s residential area expanded into the flood plain or plains?
Which government entity approved those developments?
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There is no difference between “plains” which is where sane people build and “flood plains” when it hisses down for over a week.
Even those who build on the hill slopes can’t guarantee they won’t be impacted by a mud slides. One of Townsville’s richest men had his house filled with mud in ’98.
So tell me, why do people build in the Hunter or Hawksbury Valleys where water can go over their roof or in southern bushland where the chance of being burnt to death are greater than being seriously flooded here where there will be zero drownings within the home. Fridges don’t count. A lot could be said for building “on stilts” as our grandfathers did but WH&S makes working more than a couple of feet off the ground prohibitively expensive. I could not afford to build my house today.
Someone above suggested that we could all live on Mt Stuart. Maybe. I do and even weeds struggle to grow in this stony ground. Any gardener would take their chances on the fertile ground which, by definition, is flood plain.
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Well, there you go then.
Build in a flood plain – get flooded.
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Yup.
And last week they used all the mythical CAGW fairy dust keeping the Victorians lights on, so Townsville will have to wait for a new batch….
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My feeling too. This applies NOT just to Townsville BUT ALL other metropolises that are on rivers. Paris (floods from 1911 and recent) is a good example and London etc etc. Flood plains are flood plains its nature. Build up high or else!
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I just looked at the dam levels for the Ross River dam, it is showing almost 250% full and the graph (without an accurate date on the x axis) shows an almost vertical line from less than 100% full to the present 250% mark. As they have only opened the spillway 50% in the last day or so, and can only spill at 2000 m2 per second max, I fear for both the dam and the poor sods living below it. Anyone know any more?
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They started spilling water days ago.
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The dam gates were supposed to be opened fully about a half hour ago , no word yet but when they open there will be a lot of water coming out .
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My understanding is that the max outflow is 2000 m2 per second, or 2 megalitres/sec, or 7200 megalitres per hour, but there are 500000 Ml in the dam, so it will take many hours to get it down to 100%, if there was no inflow, but it’s still raining heavily, so not looking good. Good luck Townsvilleites!
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TRM
Some spray paint artists have been creative on a road around here. Only thing they didn’t put up was a sign saying
“Caution: bunyip crossing ahead”
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As usual there is a lot of blame shifting when these things happen. Nobody should be allowed to build where there is risk etc. Where, prey tell is that?
Specifically some have asked why people were allowed to build on flood plains. The short answer is that we can’t all live in North Shore.
I just found a city map:
http://disaster.townsville.qld.gov.au
That opens to road closures and really that is not a disaster. Click on the “storm tide layer” button and you will see the the areas at risk of flooding. There is a broad swathe of red which, surprise surprise is mainly mud flats. There is some of Sth Townsville and Railway Est included but development there was not approved by anyone in living memory. They were the earliest areas built as were Hermit Park and Hyde park, the areas of concern. There is some blue and mistakes have probably been made there but again most of that was developed over a hundred years ago. The new suburbs around Kirwan, Thuringowa and Aitkenvale are unlikely to get much more than surface water. If they are too dumb to build with some freeboard, so be it.
Personally I think we are doing quite well, thanks to Sir Frank Nicklin and Premier Joh who built the dam and those who upgraded it ten years ago. Don’t worry, the bill will be nothing like some others in the south.
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A tornado ripped through the Townsville suburbs of Garbutt and Vincent a few years ago. Very localised, infrequent and not predictable like cyclones are, so BoM are making it up as usual. On the other hand, people expect the unpredictable to be predicted, so I guess they have no choice.
Fair amount of misinformation here about Ross Dam. The height of the dam was raised in 2008. It started this year at around 60% and is now at 246%. Maximum capacity is around 360%. Saturday night’s rainfall was less than expected, which bought a bit of time. Spillways opened partially during low tide periods but will now be fully open over the period of high tide which is about now eg 8:40pm Sunday. Cannot be avoided. Limit State Design = ok to about 300%, could fail any time above that. If the dam fails, the Ross River surcharge will not turn the corner when it gets to the Riverway Centre, but could rip through Kirwan and into the Bohle basin. If it fails, it will be a major civil disaster.
There have been four 1 in 200 year events (ARI, = 0.5% AEP) affecting Townsville in the past 20 years; 1998 Night of Noah, 2000, March 2018 (all ex-cyclone rain depressions I think), then this thing.
They are now calling these 1 in 100 year events which makes a bit more sense, but not much. Part of the problem is the occasional tendency of rain depressions to stop dead over Townsville, instead of moving. The Bible, “Australian Rainfall and Runoff” doesn’t adequately deal with stuff that stops. Many older properties in Townsville have insufficient stormwater systems, and floor levels at about 1.9 AHD, so are vulnerable. More recent developments have better systems. Unlike most places on the north-east seaboard, Townsville was not built at the estuary of rivers with massive catchments of 1/2 million km2, but there has been a tendency in recent years to build at the minimum habitable floor level and on the ground, instead of on 1 or 2m stumps.
My place is dry at 4m AHD, and everything else I designed is also dry. A number of places where my advice was ignored aren’t dry.
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Has the BOM got the massive rain event in Qld very wrong? Its driven by the intense low now north of Mt Isa, but its not cyclone-level central pressure. But judging how the Townsville rain is approaching a 1-in-100 year event, maybe central pressure is not that important.
This looks like a repeat of the 2011 Brisbane floods, only this time further north. With parts of Townsville likely to be flooded by the way overfull Ross river dam, how much warning of the rain event was the BOM able to give the dam authorities?
51
97% BoM … 100% fail:
November 29, 2018, Summer forecast: scorching heat and heightened bushfire risk
“Drier than average conditions are likely for much of northern Australia.
Large parts of Western Australia, most of Queensland and the Top End of the Northern Territory are expected to be drier than usual.”
https://theconversation.com/summer-forecast-scorching-heat-and-heightened-bushfire-risk-107893
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Actually Mark the Bom have a track record with long range forecasting , it’s usually the opposite so going by that metric they were spot on wouldn’t you say .
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There is a 992 hPa low just south of the gulf, that’s low, and it has been stuck there for over a week. THAT is the culprit. BoM has been talking up the rain all week and SunWater partly opened the gates before capacity reached 100%.
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The upside is that the fishing is going to be beaut when things settle down.
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With flooding, does it increase risk of crocs getting where they shouldnt be?
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Definitely.
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Fishing might be good but surely the Reef won’t like the flush of fresh water , should be a bleaching event coming up and the squealing will start straight away .
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As rivers go the Ross is pretty little and the GBR is 70KM out to sea. There is a LOT of water flowing down the Burdekin though. The B Falls Dam wall is 1 KM wide and regularly runs 3 M over. With Macrossan bridge well under and not expected to clear for days there will Syd Harbs/H of water down the river, as Harry Butler used to measure water.
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Gojira….
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Unprecedentedly catastrophic , I would think.
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In the meantime and much more seriously, we are remembering Black Saturday here.
There was a very good ceremony in Marysville last Friday, when the old Police Station flag was returned to Marysville. It was discovered the day after the fire came through and was a miraculous survival, especially as it was coated with plastic. It was treated by the Police Museum to clean and preserve it and where it remained until last Friday. It is now on display in the foyer of the police station. If you are on a visit to Marysville do take a look.
Next Thursday there will be an ecumenical service at Christ Church at 6pm, followed by a visit to the Memorial in the park with a minute’s silence for the victims of the fires.
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Hope it wasn’t to stressful for you Annie. Sat around with a couple of friends and told lies about how brave we were. Conspicuous by her absence was a former police commissioner
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She wouldn’t dare show her face. The greatest abrogation of the leadership that was required from a person in her position. The level was set by CCP “Mick” Miller in the Ash Wednesday fires.
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Just a quick note Annie – I do hope the red thumb for your post was in error.
WHO THE HECK WOULD RED THUMB YOUR POST IN EARNEST?????
Cheers,
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I’m afraid the answer is:-
The average red thumber
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Thanks all. More explained below in #4.3.3
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I’m giving yr a green thumb, Annie, to balance that mean response to Black Saturday Remembrance. What is it about green leftists that their only emotion towards the human race is hate.
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Hi Beth and other JoNovians,
I will be outside the Chemist Warehouse, 128 Burgundy St, Heidelberg tomorrow from 9-11. I will be promoting Kevin Bailey AM, ex Australian Army SAS, true patriot and Senate Candidate for the Australian Conservatives in the nearly here Federal Election.
If you are in the area please call past and say hello.
What do we want? Well basically to save our country for the creeping and insidious demands of the lefty socialists. Times Up!
Actually, having just read another essay by James Delingpole, I think the Party might be misnamed. The current situation is the Status Quo (owned by the left) and we do not want that, so we should be the New Radicals!
Policy on the Canberra Swamp is here:
https://www.conservatives.org.au/bursting_the_canberra_bubble
The best bit, for me, is the policy of No pay Rise for Politicians until they return our Federal budget to a surplus. It is just too easy for them to promise and spend Our Money!
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VOTE CONSERVATIVES in the senate,
Pity they have so few House of Reps candidates.
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The way to go I believe. Liberals/Nats need renewing. Too beholden to whim and stupid memes.
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Progressives are just bonkers Beth:
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/kristine-marsh/2019/02/01/actress-raves-environmental-racism-will-cause-world-end-2030-rips
I used to like Ellen Page. Now I gotta seriously rethink watching her movies. Does Hollywood do this to people or does it simply attract such retreads?
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Totally lost touch with reality.
I do agree with her on one thing.
Conversion therapy is an appalling thing, totally contrary to science.
That said, the LBGQTIR nutters have politicised the issue to the point that getting the truth out there is not a big priority.
The world has lost its marbles.
KK
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True, but I’m wondering if conversion therapy was something the Left invented in the early days. It’s just insane and intrusive enough to have their dirty prints all over it.
11
It’s just the churches trying to virtue signal the way they do with Global Warming.
Like politicians, the big item for most churches sadly, is more numbers.
21
We were not actually here at the time of the fires but our daughter and grandson were living at our property. Somewhere, I must find it, I have a transcript of the texts we exchanged on that awful day. All during that time I contacted her twice a day using Skype Out to her mobile, keeping her informed of what I could get online via The Age and the Heraldsun and listening to 774. This was info she couldn’t get where she was evacuated to, in Rubicon. A temporary mobile tower had been quickly established. There was a time she could get home briefly to check the animals (one horse had a burnt nose) and she saw long lines of fire trucks lined up along the road in front of our place. I had a visit here already planned and when I was about to leave Dubai there was still another warning for bad fire weather. Arriving at MEL, having flown over a ghastly amount of smoke (from the fire at Daylesford as it turned out) I still had no idea of the situation and once out of the airport I tried to ring her. A very crotchety voice answered…they had had rain the night before and it was the first time they had managed to sleep! She was put out at being woken up!
There’s a lot else but this is enough…nothing like the experience of some of our friends in Marysville which was terrible. The house we used to have there was gone of course.
All during this time in England we were surrounded by snow and I had a fluey cold; bizarre to be locked onto my computer keeping informed about the fires.
Looking back at photos of that time, the recovery of Marysville is a true resurrection. It can’t be the same as it used to be and the people who’ve gone can’t be replaced but it is a beautiful place again with lots of good people.
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I feel your pain red thumb person; I feel your anguish and righteous rage, for just like you, I too am foaming at the nostrils at the insensitivity and offensiveness of this woman Annie and her commentary on the black Saturday fires; what an obscenity, what an outrage! You and I should get together my friend, so we can froth at the mouth together, in solidarity, at these vile, venal deplorables!
sark
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Ooh! I will have such a lot to live up to now. Annie the Deplorable.
10
Our first climate change victim , a white possum that lives in the tropics but can’t sweat or pant to keep cool .
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-03/white-lemuroid-possum-under-threat-from-climate-change/10774516
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I think this is a re-run of the possum scare story from a few years back. Thing is, that particular bit of rain forest is at a very high elevation and is extremely remote. The canopy is high and won’t take the weight of intrepid sticky-beaks. Probably like the presumed extinct tree frogs. I found several species in my yard blown out of the canopy by Cyclone Yasi. I’m sure at least one of them was supposed to be extinct. Did my best to get them to safety before the kookaburras ate them.
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Readership Surge and Facebook.
Over the past 5 or six days I have noticed a surge in the number of people logging on to read Jo’s blog. It seem to be a lot, currently 36 out of 70 readers and it has been up to 100 additional.
They all seem to be reading; Forgotten History, and they all seem to be coming from Facebook.
Facebook Readers: Can one of you tell me what directed you here to the JoNova web site?
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I’ve been sharing Jo’s posts and have noticed relatives have been sharing it on with their friends , every little bit helps to get the word out .
I noticed an increase when Jo went on Outsiders .
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Thanks Robert,
That is true. But some thing different has happened just in the past few days and it has attracted a lot of attention. Could a face book reader explain?
Also Hi to my red thumber.
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Could it be that the populace is a little sceptical of the ABC, SBS, Fairfax and Guardian pronouncements of imminent climate catastrophe.
It has been warm, but its not unprecedented. Any stories going the rounds that suggests AGW is making Australia drier, is simply not true.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/#tabs=Tracker&tracker=timeseries&tQ=graph%3Drain%26area%3Daus%26season%3D0112%26ave_yr%3DT
00
.
❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶
❶①❶①
❶①❶① . . . The Upside-down Comb of Death . . .
❶①❶①
❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶
.
What, you may be wondering, is the “Upside-down Comb of Death”?
In simple terms, it is like the “Right-side-up Comb of Death”, but upside-down.
“Right-side-up Combs of Death” became an overnight success. Even bigger than Furbys. We have had people working around the clock, trying to keep up with demand.
Many people have complained to me, that standing on their head, and looking at the “Right-side-up Comb of Death”, was giving them a headache. I don’t like to see people suffer needlessly. So I turned my computer screen upside down, and took a screenshot of the “Right-side-up Comb of Death”. When I turned my computer screen back up the right way, I had created an “Upside-down Comb of Death”. Nobody needs to get a headache any more.
There is only one problem. The “Upside-down Comb of Death” makes global warming look so insignificant, that people are getting eye-strain, trying to see the global warming.
The “Upside-down Comb of Death” displays temperature ranges, for more than 24,000 real locations on the Earth. And I am talking about REAL, ACTUAL, ABSOLUTE temperatures. Not those weak, pale, temperature anomaly things. But real, actual, absolute temperatures.
https://agree-to-disagree.com/the-upside-down-comb-of-death
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It is probably more meaningful upside down.
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It’s an odd thing really. Doing this daily data collection for electrical power is nowhere near as boring as I thought it might become. It’s still a lot of work, around three hours a day, but each day shows me something to add to the knowledge base.
One thing it has shown me (conclusively, and not just once, but every time) is that wind power is having ZERO effect on coal fired power, and there’s no way known I can highlight that word ZERO enough.
The only sources of power that wind has any effect at all on are natural gas fired power and hydro power.
If wind power is high, then those other two are low, and if wind power is low, then natural gas and hydro power are both higher.
The problem I have with this is that no one will believe a single word I say about it, because they have been conditioned to believe that wind power is causing coal fired power to collapse, and NOTHING could be further from the truth.
The secondary problem I have is that this is ACTUAL DATA for what is now almost eight and a half Months, and it’s not Modelling from an
Electrical EngineerEconomist, so therefore what I have found is patently wrong. (and need I add the /sarc here)There’s no point in my going to those other pro renewables sites and mentioning it. I don’t need that sort of grief, from what is usually ad hom attacks on me. I know what I know, and I have the data to back it up.
Take yesterday as a case in point, and compare it to the day before. I’ll just link in to today’s Post detailing yesterday’s data, and while all the data and graphs for each source are there, if you just want the text, then scroll down to the section titled Comments For This Day and read it there.
I know it sounds like I’m just shamelessly linking into my own Posts, but it says it all there, and those who are interested would probably want to see the whole thing, because I refer back to those graphs, and I cannot Post the images here anyway.
I would say again, that this is not an isolated thing, but is happening all the time. If the Overall is up, then more likely than not coal fired power is also up, and vice versa. It doesn’t matter what wind power does, as coal fired power just delivers what it does deliver all the time.
I could also say exactly the same thing about rooftop solar power as well, because it also is having no effect on coal fired power.
When there is a Base Load of an average of 18000MW, the lowest power consumption falls to, then you need a constant and reliable source of power across the whole day, not just a few hours either side of Midday. And even during those daylight hours coal fired power is either stable or rising. It NEVER falls by any amount even close to what rooftop solar power may be delivering.
The actual data does not lie.
The link into today’s Post is below.
Australian Daily Electrical Power Generation Data – Saturday 2nd February 2019
Tony.
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Hi Tony
You are a champ, and I thought you could inform me about ?
The AEMO grid (SA, Vic, NSW, Tas, QLD) has a wildly fluctating price
The WA grid seems very much more stable price wise, and almost always way less than $100
Have you knowledge about the major differences between WA electricity production and the AEMO electricity production
I would value your contribution
Thanks
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Easy Tiger,
area
I have enough time to just manage all the AEMO East of that WA border, and I confess, I hardly ever, if at all, look at what’s happening in WA. Not enough hours in the day sorry.
Tony.
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That’s an easy answer, WA is not connected to the east coast NEM. It’s an isolated set of distribution assets that is mostly government owned, the WA government sets the (rather high) prices but only the south west and karratha / headland area have interconnected systems the rest of the state runs from microgrids (diesel or gas reciprocating defines) with a smattering of renewables that help to ease fuel logistics. There are only two non competing GBEs that deliver power Western Power in the south west interconnected system and Horizon power in the rest of the state.
A microgrid is basically a small system that doesn’t involve transmission (33kV or above). Solar is effective in WA because of long fuel supply lines and very reliable sunlight (except notably the south west which is quite wet). Solar can reduce fuel transport logistics quite a lot.
The reliance on Diesel (fuel costs around 20c/kW) means that most WA systems are not profitable and need to be subsidised by the state government.
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I don’t think I was clear in answering the question, in WA there isn’t a bidding system, wholesale pricing is set to a fixed pricing model in long term contacts, (or operated by Horizon/Western power themselves.)
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A greenie site called ” renew economy” are saying a coal generator breaks down every three days , so I asked the question can you guarantee the wind will blow over the same amount of time .
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Breaks down every three days?????
That is absolute bovine waste.
Each day I detail coal fired power, and there is nothing like that happening at all, and I have the details for every day.
If ever there is a Unit ‘fail’, then it is handled within minutes. First on line are the big Hydro Units (usually Murray One and Two or sometimes even Tumut 3 pumped hydro) because they can handle something like that in minutes. While they are on line and delivering, gas fired Units are running up. More often than not, the hydro Unit are only on line for a short time, until the gas Units take over.
As to shutting down, I would say 90% of the Units going off line, especially in the benign Months are for scheduled maintenance, and sometimes, it’s so carefully planned you can watch as the ‘down’ Unit comes back up, and another one at another plant starts the shut down procedure. It’s hardly ever at the same plant. It’s also an easy thing to see, as normal shut down for maintenance takes a slow process over a couple of hours or so, as does the winding back up, usually taking a little longer from two to five hours or so, and NEVER the three or four days claimed by those anti coal people.
Tony.
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Tony
For your future reference Liddell has a scheduled 6 week major maintenance job coming up commencing in early March. Generally you can tell what kind of maintenance they are doing by the specific trades they advertise for. This time they want everyone.
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beowulf,
thanks for that.
Note that this is at the end of the huge power consuming Months of Summer, in the benign Months of the Autumn, hence the lower power consumption Months, so they can get as much out of it as they can before having to do that maintenance. All those Summer Months of generating large amounts of electricity for the high prices that they get for it during these Summer Months.
And hey, why would AGL be doing major maintenance on this plant if they are supposedly closing it down, spending an enormous amount of money that will necessitate the plant running a longer time to recover that cost for that maintenance. You’d think they would just run it into the ground eh!
Surely it’s not a case of saying one thing to appease the green punters and actually doing the opposite.
Tony.
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Not true according to Tony.
The Coal Plant do not break down (usually). They do programmed maintenance.
More Lying from the Greens.
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You could say the same about renewables when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine!
One could say that the solar generators break down every day at dusk.
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StephenP. I reckon a placard near election time that depicts a coal-fired station with side by side shots of black smoke and water vapor. Which is the real one? So many are convinced it’s the former.
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The could always use the image of a USC Plant (ow referred to as HELE) I used in a guest post here at Joanne’s site back in March of 2013, shown at this link.
No one would believe that this is a coal fired Unit.
(Hard to believe that was six years ago now)
Tony.
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That’s probably true, one unit out of many is down for maintenance, that’s how we engineers used to design, it’s called N-1 redundancy, there is mostly 1 of N+1 down for maintenance. For example in a 5unit 1GW plant there would be six 200MW units installed to ensure reliability of supply. Contrast with renewables where you could double the number of units but at midnight each day or when the wind isn’t blowing you would still be generating 0.00 MW.
The common failure most (no wind/sun) dominate renewable where Coal is mostly random failures.
Renew economy is fibbing in that scheduled maintenance is NOT failure. They also don’t account that fossil fuel plants can tolerate a 10% overload almost indefinitely, so a failure in one plant can be taken up in the overload capacity of 10 nearby units without the need to rush up more generation. Try doing that with unpredictable wind/solar generation.
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I read you every day on PA Pundits. I believe your work is critically important, because one day people will want the truth, and a clear understanding on what is really
going on as the blackouts kick in. They will want to see exactly where the power is generated, and the absolute need for coal.
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Tony I repost your charts on Mayo For Mayo facebook page here in SA.
No one has ever challenged them..
For want of being able to refute the facts thye just shut up !
Keep up your good worthy labor of love !
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Yes and No. Just post and don’t go back to worry about or reply to the Ad Hom’s.
Or post here and others may take up the battle.
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There are already two coal fired power stations closed down. That is due to a reduction in base load primarily from the increase in wind turbines in SA. That means that the remaining coal power stations have base load until more wind is installed and results in the next coal station going – Liddell around 2022. Gas and hydro provide the buffer for wind.
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Oh, Tony, well done you! Sometimes, even I get the chance to give myself a pat on the back.
I was going to come in yesterday (Sunday) and mention exactly what I am going to say here. However, I thought to myself ….. no, wait, someone will undoubtedly come in and make the expected comment that indeed wind has caused coal fired plants to close, so just wait a bit. There’s always one out there.
Well, it happened here, eh!
So then, let’s look at it those closed coal fired plants shall we?
All of these plants between 40 and 50 years old plus when closed down.
Playford – time expired.
Northern – old technology already, when constructed – time expired.
Wallerawang – time expired.
Hazelwood – time expired.
Liddell – when it closes – time expired.
ALL of them, nothing at all to do with the onset of wind power.
ALL of them, bean counters deciding that the cost of ongoing maintenance of ancient plants was too high, and that those costs could not be recovered in the time left for the plant if it was to stay in operation.
And again, the usual quoting of South Australia. The Base Load in S.A. may have fallen a few hundred MW, due solely to big industry moving out of the State, hence lowering the overall power consumption in a tiny State which only consumes 6.2% of Australia’s total power consumption, so that lowering is but a small fraction of a small fraction.
Overall, the Base Load across the whole of Australia has not changed by very much at all from the year round average of 18000MW in the more than eleven years I have been watching. When you NEED an ABSOLUTE 18000MW FULL STOP 24/7/365, there is only one source which can deliver that.
Read this again:
Open mouth, change feet.
Tony.
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Keep up the excellent work Tony as greatly appreciated by many.
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TonyfromOz:
I live in northern Ohio in the US and I find your posts about the Australian grid very informative and also a window on the path the US grid will travel if some of our local politicians are able to implement their plans for the US grid.
Thanks for the work you do in putting your posts together each day.
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I have been tracking Tony’s excellent daily power generation statistics for the last two weeks (and weekly averages for the last six months).
In the last 2 weeks, total AEMO generation has varied from an overnight low of 19.2 GW to a high of 34.0 GW, average 25.8 GW with daily average varying from 23-29.5 GW depending on temperature and weekday/weekend.
In response to demand, coal has varied from 15 GW to 20.3 GW, gas 1.1-8.5 GW, and hydro 1.0-5.1 GW.
Then we have the intermittents: Wind varied from 0.2-2.9 GW, large solar 0-1.5 GW, and rooftop solar 0-4.6 GW, completely unrelated to demand.
Peak solar is also a variable, large solar 1.1/1.5 GW, small solar 3.9/4.6 GW, and it cuts back midday gas generation but in the evening gas/hydro must power up to meet peak demand.
Coal reduces by 25% overnight, but then delivers a consistent baseload up to 18-20 GW throughout the day.
Wind is the greatest unknown, range 0.2-2.9 NW, varying by up to 2 GW during a 24 hour period, but rarely delivering more than 50% of nameplate capacity.
At current wind contribution, that is manageable with gas/hydro, but consider the implications if wind was delivering up to 9 GW.
Gas and hydro already cut back on a daily basis to near zero, so coal would be forced to further curtail production, yet must still be there for those windless days.
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Tony:
There is a useful site for collecting data on the European power sector, called Energodock:
This came up on https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2019/02/03/western-europe-power-mix-in-january/
http://energodock.com/germany/electricity-generation
The article on notalot…. has some graphs that back you up for Germany and the UK. Hope this is of interest.
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Stellar work Tony
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TONY,
Another important point is that neither wind nor solar would be putting virtually any reactive power into the grid to control voltage and provide field excitation for transformers throughout the transmission system. And that is vitally important
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Just heard Bill Shorten on the news declaring how self funded retirees will loose francing credits under a government that he may lead. Apparently we “old farts” never crontibuted anything to the economy of this once great nation. We are not going to recieve anything for nothing. I only payed tax directly for over 50 years, and indirectly through GST. This counts for nothing. And yet, I personally know a young lady with 4 children, two fathers, neither married her as this would reduce her benifits. Never worked a day in her short life, and yet thinks that she gets paid by Centrelink. The benifits recieved by this person are simply astounding. ( the rumour is $ 1700.00 per fortnight but this is unsubstantiated ) I on the other hand i live just below the poverty line and am fortuneate that meat and vegies are supplied off the block. I probably wont vote Labour at the next election.
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Entitlement? I suppose it seems so to recipients, because it comes from the Government.
However she has contributed 4 Australian children who can all serve in the Armed Forces and defend our country when the time comes, which is probably about now!
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Ya kiddin me!
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Yeah, he was jus jokin.
Can you imagine the product of that environment volunteering for the army or being any use if conscripted?
KK
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They join for their free gender reassignment benefits…. What my son ( Iraq vet ) calls them is unprintable.
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Couldn’t they be utilized as suicide bombers?
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Yes KK, I got sucked in. Those 4 will prolly be overweight with diabetes.
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Labor created imputation, franking credits on dividends when PM Keating Labor were in government, they left office in 1996 and the Howard Coalition Government took over.
The policy to deny cash credits to retirees who are no longer liable to pay income tax is ridiculous, the credits for company tax paid on pre-tax profits before dividends are distributed offset some income tax liability for shareholders so why not cash instead for shareholders who are no longer income taxpayers?
Investing is risky, there is no guarantee of operating profit being achieved and at times losses, the share value is subject to market movements and when company tax has been paid on profit before company tax it is fair and reasonable that the owners of a business, the shareholders, receive a tax-free dividend. Credit or cash regardless.
The insulting part of Shorten Union controlled Labor was the comment from the shadow treasurer Bowen that self funded retirees won’t vote Labor so they can go jump, or words to that effect.
In his ignorance he obviously doesn’t realise that even Labor voters are shareholders and included in the people the policy hurts financially are women, including widows.
Unfortunately for us at this point in our nation’s history we have the worst choices for government. The now controlled by the Union Movement Labor Party with their Green partners in politics also receiving funding from unions and sharing the GetUp import from the US activist organisation receiving donations from Soros and others. The CFMEU alone donate millions of dollars to GetUp, 2010/11 they gave $1.2 million. I understand every year since large union donations poured into GetUp. The AWU when Shorten was a senior executive helped to establish GetUp and he became a Director of GetUp.
On the other side we have a split Coalition with the Liberals “black hand faction” or Turnbull Party, the “LINO” (Liberal In Name Only) mob. Since Turnbull snatched the seat of Wentworth from sitting Liberal MP King by stacking Liberal branches there with Turnbull supporters he has been on a mission to wreck the Coalition. It has been on agenda since at least the years when his Australian Republican Movement was formed. He wants to create a single party or alliance government with Labor Green. Shorten says now that Labor if elected will conduct a plebiscite to ask yes or no if voters support a republic before holding (I trust) a referendum. The last republic referendum failed by a wide margin of no votes.
From what I have read at the StopTurnbull website a major part of the republic for Turnbull is the opportunity to make major changes to the Constitution.
And don’t ignore his close Labor Green relationships and business career with Labor figures such as former NSW Premier Wran and a son of former PM Whitlam.
Right now there are associates of the above masquerading as independent candidates for the 2019 federal election with GetUp organising door knocking to talk to voters. They apparently front up asking questions as if polling the voter and when they learn what bugs him or her they have a blame sheet to explain that their local MP has let them down. The reasons are based on politics but by quoting out of context or leaving words out, or adding words, they blame the Liberal MP.
So far GetUp have held meetings in electorates, Tony Abbott is a primary target but all of his colleagues are also targets, the real Liberals. It is interesting that a son Alex Turnbull is “assisting” various “independent” candidates as he did for now Independent Phelps MP for Wentworth.
When PM Turnbull declined from facing a leadership spill last year and resigned from Parliament Tony Abbott commented on Sydney Radio 2GB that the worst was over for the Liberal Party. However candidate Dutton was beaten 45 to 40 for the position of Prime Minister. Only Liberals, no Nationals, vote for Liberal leaders who as leader of the Coalition majority always become PM.
I have noted that several LINO MPs have announced their retirement, they will not contest the 2019 federal election as Liberals. I wonder how many will become “trustworthy independents”? One is already, Ms Banks who has abandoned her constituents and will compete against Minister Hunt in his electorate. The Turnbull Family are supporting her. So, obviously Hunt has moved out of the LINO? And PM Morrison appears to have turned his back on them as well noting his comment after former PM Turnbull was given a role representing the government at meetings in New York and then Bali where he spoke outside of his brief. Morrison commented afterwards that it won’t happen again.
What to do? Obviously don’t vote for no brand independents who have the known political brands backing. I will put Green last and Labor above. But I am now thinking that as the flawed preferential system of voting favours one of the unofficial two-party system brands to form government better Liberal or National candidate for primary vote. And hope that the end of the LINO results in big changes away from the socialism globalism period of Turnbull Party.
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The advisor to the “independent” candidate standing against Tony Abbott is Mr.Tim Flannery, a Green and member of the Wentworth Group associates of the extreme WWF.
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The advisor to the “independent” candidate standing against Tony Abbott is Mr.Tim Flannery, a Green and member of the Wentworth Group associates of the extreme WWF.
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Dennis, I fill out my ballot papers in FULL, don’t care that there may be 160 boxes to mark, I aways take the time to know where my preferences go. I do get frustrated by whinging friend who only ever vote above the line then wonder why obscure candidates get in I’m with you Greens last, Labour one above.
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Sambar:
Me too, although I did hesitate one year when a mob who sounded like nazis ran (no where fortunately).
I find that once you know the number of candidates it is easier to count upwards rather than down. So the head Green gets the lowest number etc. It prevents my preference going to any of the parties I disagree with too because a (preference transfer) vote for the number 3 on their ticket doesn’t help them at all.
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Beware of the fake independents next federal election, the big brand name political parties candidates masquerading as independents.
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Remember Windsor and Oakshott from a few years ago.
Voting against their electorate’s wished to put Gillard in power.
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So, what you are saying Dennis is that Turnbull444 is going to win this election.
I suspect he’s already won.
KK
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Prepare for perfect climate/weather in WA …
Western Australian state government’s chief energy advisor expects the state’s largest coal plant will be retired before 2025.
Muja CD power plant: Secret report puts Collie plant at 2025 shutdown
https://thewest.com.au/news/wa/muja-cd-power-plant-secret-report-puts-collie-plant-at-2025-shutdown-ng-b881091407z
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I have unearthed an early example of climate alarmism from Edward Teller, who was known as “the father of the H-bomb.”
CO2 levels are now 29% higher than in 1959, yet the tide gauge at the tip of Manhattan New York has failed to show any acceleration in rate of sea level rise in the last 60 years.
Such extreme alarmism from a leading physicist should cause embarrassment to the current protagonists of climate consensus. Seemingly not. The quote is from a document submitted to a California Court in January (and hence publicly available), and whose authors include Dr Naomi Oreskes and Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky. Details are here.
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Teller was an advocate of Nuclear Power. What better way to advance civilisation and Save the World?
I am just finishing reading a biography of Freeman Dyson, celebrated Physicist and Climate Sceptic. He also thinks (or used to think) that sea level rise was the most serious threat of Global Warming.
Dyson is 96 but still alive. He would probably agree that sea level rise has not yet turned out to be the problem that he thought it might be.
https://www.thegwpf.org/professor-freeman-dyson/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson
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Teller pushed the H bomb development to counter the USSR he said was going to ‘get there first’ = USA doomed., well history is the rest.
But Enrico Fermi was the father of nuclear power/energy.
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For those interested in turbine infrasound effects.
“Finnish Study Finds Wind Turbine Infrasound Unsafe For Residents Living Within 15 km”
https://stopthesethings.com/2019/02/01/home-wreckers-finnish-study-finds-wind-turbine-infrasound-unsafe-for-residents-living-within-15-km/
Remember also that in VIC Dan Andrews reduced the offset distance from turbines to homes down to 1km if I recall.
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I haven’t heard the results of the study they were redoing in Victoriastan about infrasound, possibly best to keep it quiet .
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I didn’t know that DD had done that. Can we sue him for damage to health from infrasound?
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Probably secretly legislated that no one can sue with the help of the Libs .
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Open ‘transparant’ government for you; our ‘obedient’ servants…yeah right!
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Annie
When the Andrews government came to power it halved the previous legal set-back distance of wind turbines from homes to just 1km and to 0km from roads to pander to pressure from Big Wind interests.
Here’s another link you might like to read: a letter to Andrews from the Waubra Foundation. It is 4 years out of date and there is much more hard clinical evidence against wind farm infrasound now, but it lays out the case against wind turbine effects, putting the government on formal legal notice that it will be held responsible for serious adverse health effects due to wind farms.
http://en.friends-against-wind.org/health/letter-of-notice-to-victorian-premier-daniel-andrews
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Thanks beowulf…very helpful. I’ll have a good look at that this evening. A
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Excellent, I’ve downloaded it for future reference.
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The letter in this one refers to noise but the real issue isn’t noise.
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Yes I know KK, but it’s a start. If it was written now it would be full of infrasound effects too. I was more concerned with the principle of government liability for windfarm effects in general.
There are new procedures for testing for sound by independent auditors, but they too are for sound in the audible range. As I have posted in the past, all of these sound tests are open to rigging quite easily. They put sound loggers behind trees etc.
They do a before and after test when turbines are erected. In one case the ambient sound of birds and butterflies and rustling grass was louder than the sound level with turbines running!!! They can feather their turbine blades which puts them into quiet mode while the testing is under way — they spin and don’t produce any power in that mode, but they pass the test — then they crank them up again as soon as the auditors have left the area and the VLF pulsing resumes. That is just one of their stunts.
Another stunt is the “dog ate my homework” excuse. This was used 3 times at Macarthur wind farm (our biggest), when instead of presenting weeks of data which would have shown non-compliance, they claimed that the batteries on their noise loggers had repeatedly gone flat, such that there was no data at all. Once, possibly, but on three separate occasions . . . yeah right. Worse yet, they appear to have been let off scot-free.
The tests are a farce as is the National Wind Farm Commissioner appointed by Abbott as an ombudsman, but whose main function has evolved into cheering the windfarms on regardless of all complaints.
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VLF Pulsing is a serious health issue and has been hidden, especially in the transport industry where heavy equipment gives low frequency pulsing.
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Twenty years ago the only research available was from iron curtain countries where you couldn’t sue your employer anyhow.
Wonder what happened to allow it to be kept hidden in the West.
KK
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Thanks beowulf,
A fascinating paper. Makes me think of a headline we won’t see: “Finnish paper shows up Australian politicians as dills”.
Cheers,
Dave B
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The important point in the research paper is to the reference to “sub audible” problems: at last, the noise issue is seen for what it is: a distraction used by politicians, green groups and the money hungry windmills owners.
The problem is very low frequency pulsing that overrides the central nervous system. Very dangerous.
KK
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Chiefio in learning mode. Scroll down to the last one
“Graph Of Global Thermometers”
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2019/02/03/graph-of-global-thermometers/
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And previous posts if you’re interested in Python, Pandas and Julia
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The solar NAO connection comes under heavy bombardment.
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2019/01/22/debunking-solar-cycle-north-atlantic-winter-weather-connection/
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200 years of data?
Is that enough?
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Don’t know, but with a quiet sun I think the North Atlantic Oscillation should be in negative territory.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/nao_index.html
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According to Ulric Lyons over at Climate Etc.
‘The NAO responds most to the solar wind, which shifts in and out of phase with sunspot cycles. Major lows in the solar wind associated with negative NAO around 1969 and 1979/80 were at sunspot maximum. But from SC23, the major lows were around a year past sunspot minimum, centered around 1997 and 2009.
‘In the 70’s and 80’s plasma pressure was higher around sunspot minimum, since the 90’s that has shifted to around 2-3 years past sunspot maximum.’
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I often wonder why we ever bothered to have engineers build and run our power grid when all we needed were more law and economics graduates to do it. Omniscient degrees those. They seem to know more about power generation than anyone else these days.
The NSW Minister for Energy and Utilities, Don Harwin, is a case in point. A full-on green zealot, honours degree in economics, big fan of Finkel, best mate of Michael Photios (the lefty Liberal king-maker, GetUp supporter, and with his missus, both renewables lobbyists, reputed by some to be corrupt although I wouldn’t say that.
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Most of that failed to post from the preview. Try again.
I often wonder why we ever bothered to have engineers build and run our power grid when all we needed were more law and economics graduates to do it. Omniscient degrees those. They seem to know more about power generation than anyone else these days.
The NSW Minister for Energy and Utilities, Don Harwin, is a case in point. A full-on green zealot, honours degree in economics, big fan of Finkel, best mate of Michael Photios (the lefty Liberal king-maker, GetUp supporter, and with his missus, both renewables lobbyists, reputed by some to be corrupt although I wouldn’t say that.
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Failed again. I give up.
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It probably got delayed in appearing because the parser had to time out waiting for the right parenthesis to close the Photios aside.
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This is the missing half of my original comment if it works . . . 3rd time lucky. Something dodgy is happening between preview and post.
Harwin is on a one man crusade to bring the NSW grid to its knees with his wild promotion of renewables and his thuggish, arrogant way of dealing with anyone who speaks out. He makes Dan Andrews look like a choir boy. He’s been champing at the bit to do his thing with our grid and it looks like Premier Gladys has let him off the leash.
He’s the minister who, after the February 2017 heatwave when the NSW grid nearly crashed, claimed that “there was plenty of wind power at all times” and it was coal power that let us down. At around 2pm on 10/2/17 for instance, wind was meeting around 3.75 % of demand, but it only went downhill from there. At 8pm wind was approximately down to 15% of nameplate and meeting just 0.7% of demand, but wind saved the day . . . and there goes a pig in a tutu flying backwards Don.
His plan is to hook up every worthless solar and wind scheme to the grid, regardless of how far off-grid it is. He has stated that only 1 in 20 renewables projects can currently connect to the grid and he thinks that is outrageous. I think it’s outrageous too — outrageous that NSW power customers have to pay for the bloody things in the first place and will be slugged even more to connect them to the distant grid, to the exclusive benefit of their owners. After he has his misguided way, NSW will be criss-crossed with transmission lines and we’ll be broke.
What is it about an electricity grid that attracts what some would call psychopathic zealots like Harwin and Zibelman (AEMO boss) and Schott (Energy Security Board chair & NEG architect) to work their despotic ways?
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They’re just limbering up at this stage beowulf, wait until they’ve gotten into their stride and dynamited the last coal fired power station and the country is subdivided into renewables powered cantons and on windless days there is the background hum of tens of thousands of small domestic diesel generators. I’m loving it already…
50
Yes, and a 100m exclusion zone around our homes, with a red dot centre of mass for anyone who tries it on….
I think you’ll find it will be more a Venezuela experience.
The Mad Max scenario is actually preferable, because its a complete reboot. The current mob would rather have everyone hamstrung in a legal limbo, akin to holding someone down while they punch them in their kidneys every once in a while just coz they enjoy it…..
An ex-South African army chap who became a Christian Missionary in southern Africa, said of all the people he feared the most, it was the Communists.
He said they were Godless but had a form of brutality completely devoid of humanity.
Some people would just call it evil.
Some of their favourite tortures were heads being dunked in buckets of urine or faeces, then 30 people locked in a 10 x 14 cell each night, no washing allowed.
Now put into perspective the Communists now wish to do this country harm. You have to look at their core beings like God does – some people have what Christians call an “unteachable spirit” , or in other words they are so far gone, so evil, they are literally are a lost cause, beyond salvation, abandoned even by God.
When the jackals roam free, its not good.
20
Dante’s Tolomea: some iniquities are so great that the soul goes to Hell while the the body remains on earth, inhabited by a demon.
10
I wonder if this the “zombie” phenomena we are seeing? Just a thought….
10
beowulf say…’Omniscient degrees those. They seem to know more about power generation than anyone else these days.’
Yes, but it’s ‘power’ as in power to corrupt, undermine, enforce – political power, not ‘power’ as in ‘energy’ security, 24/7.
60
Interesting opinion piece on Faifaz atm, where some idiot accusses Jordan Peterson of talking “obfuscating drivel” I am sure many here have watched Peterson, and he could hardly be seriously accused of obfuscation. He normally hones in on the core issues very quickly.
Comments were closed after one contrary comment, but interestingly their “respect” thumbs up button still works and the comment had attracted 150 up votes when I last looked.
64
Faifaz? Fairfax
but Faifaz sort of has a ring to it , like Grauniad
40
Fairfaux News?
20
G’day Yarpos,
The SMH link for that article is:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/the-world-doesn-t-have-time-to-take-jordan-peterson-seriously-20190131-p50utr.html?btis
and the most offensive section is:
” For someone who claims to be grounded in science, Peterson holds some distinctly unscientific views, from his own personal diet (red meat and greens only), which he claims is anti-inflammatory, to his statements on climate change and gun control. While he concedes that humans have contributed to rising global temperatures, he downplays the seriousness of the science. In an interview with Good Week. ”
But I suppose we should be grateful. His presentations and basic honesty must be really getting up Green noses, and those of SMH fellow travellers.
Cheers,
Dave B
50
Weird that all the green-loving anti-gun celebs in Hollywood have armed body guards and fly on private planes.
All that is missing is the Dacha by the Black Sea…..
40
From tomorrow afternoon we will be swamped by recommendations from the banking royal commission.
The ALP, media and do gooders will be demanding immediate action be taken, hangings if necessary.
Three years ago, an excellent royal commission report and recommendations into union and business corruption was handed down.
What was done by Turnbull (in cahoots with Shorten)?
SFA
80
31 recommendations.
10
Jo, when you gave a talk in London back along, I was not able to get to it unfortunately.
Is there a recording of it on YouTube or somewhere else? It is something I would really appreciate if there is.
30
Is this the one ?
https://youtu.be/JYHX-Ib3Q5Q
00
Thank you Ava, this was just what I was looking for.
10
Interesting that the lowest minima temp and the highest minima temp ever recorded in NSW come from the same place , even more interesting is the suggested age of the site – mid 2017 ?
Thank you Fitzy for pointing this out .
50
Attention red-thumber.. Yeh, hi. Umm.. You’re aware that your red-thumbing everyone has no impact on us at all yet will help destroy the planet because you’re wasting valuable mouse clicks that use energy and create heat? Just FYI. Have a nice day.
93
Roy Spencer has updated the UAH temperature charts:
http://www.drroyspencer.com
For January there was a bounce back up to 0.37C above the 30 year average to 2010.
40
Milder winter in the Arctic. Lovely 🙂
Almost +1.5C anomaly. Wonderful.
40
Sorry. It was 2018. Australians took my warming 01/2019.
50
Were like that, you have to keep an eye on us warming grabbers
40
Hello friends around the world. We in the states are one year away from the Iowa Caucus. This is a beer and bar-b-q event that helps us decide who our president is going to be. It is the culmination, however, of a period of what is called ‘retail politics’, wherein
those wishing to hold arguably the most important political post in the free world (whatever that is anymore), gather with very small numbers of people in quaint locations for photo ops and discussions of the issues (er, trying to formulate a set of lies that will get folks to select you to move on into the equally bizarre process of ‘primaries’, followed by an election, followed by lawyers and conspiracy theorists.
Climate change will be a big part of the ‘discussions’. They will, as usual, be fact free. I am looking forward to some of the more amusing efforts of campaigns to pretend to greenness, whilst disembarking from private jets as they fly to and from their day jobs to campaign. There are likely to be more than a dozen folks vying for votes.
But, the cauci (pretenting to remember grade school Latin) are held in Iowa. Not one of the candidates is likely to have a damn thing in common with the Iowans who will decide his or her fate (I apoplgize for not referencing additional genders of which I am ignorant, for they will surely be at issue in a Democratic discussion (and don’t call me Shirley….or cis, or whatever).
Iowa is the world leading producer of ethanol, which, for the period of the campaign, will be God’s gift to environmentalism, as an additive to gasoline, which is of course the scourge of the earth. Er, that may be a tough argument this time around, unless the ‘carbon’ you get from burning biofuels is different than the ‘carbon’ you get from burning fossil fuels. Dems may believe Iowan’s may believe that.
There’s a lot of corn in Iowa. The kind that is grown, and the kind heard at political dinners. Iowa is a farm state — well, it’s technically true that a majority of the personal income doesn’t come directly from farming, but when one state produces about 18% of our corn, and 18% of our soybeans, and 18% of our pork…its a farm state dude. Farms are bigger than suburban lots. Ag implements run on gasoline. An electric vehicle in Iowa is likely a hard sell. But hey, there were about 1100 registered in 2017. Wonder how many were in the two big university towns.
The farming background of the bulk of the candidates for president on the Democratic side is ….. actually, it isn’t. This is not to say, between the University towns and a strain of farmers of Scandinavian background, there aren’t s few friendly audiences.
But have ya ever heard anyone explain how large scale labor efficient farming takes place in a world without fossil fuels? Have ya ever listened to someone who hasn’t been outside of conditioned air for more that twenty minutes at a time in ten years try to explain the climate to someone who lives in it?
Years ago, a pol could say one thing to one audience, something different to another, and we’d not know. Starting in Iowa, if not well before, the candidates will have to take positions on environmental matters. With so many voices, expect extremism to be the rule of the day.
On some other issues I can’t mention here without going to moderation, the left has already gone to extremes well outside the mainstream. There is no reason to believe they will show more restraint in climate matters. I hope this is the case.
I have a tiny bit of optimism…if we can keep our heads, and, as the extreme and outlandish idiocies gush forth, simply point them out to the public and let them fall on their own demerits (with a slight push from a few stubborn facts), the overreach of the left to gain power might swing the pendulum back to common sense environmentalism. Lets spend our money getting ready for the next hurricane/drought/cold snap/heat wave/tornado/insect infestation…..rather than throwing way civilization for a few PPM of the magic molecule CO2.
140
Yes, fact free Climate Change. Climate Change is the cause of all the weather in the world. No explanation needed. All very hot weather, all very cold weather, every storm is Climate Change. Obviously. Only corn can save us. Too bad the pigs have to go. Plus the humans of course, but getting rid of coal is the first step in getting rid of the humans.
130
But what happens if the pigs then evolve into using coal. The Left will lose a lot of pig votes as well as humans; they will have to rely on Bulls.
40
…They grow wings , of course!
20
,,, oink, flap, flap, oink, flap. Pink Floyd were well ahead of the bunch … 🙂
20
It causes land slips as well! 🙂
At least in NZ’s North Island:
Cape Kidnapper’s cliff face falls down Two Korean tourists had a narrow escape but both are alive, thankfully, and only lightly damaged. One is undergoing surgery in a local hospital for a compound leg fracture.
<sarc>
The cliff face collapsed because of Climate Change! The heatwave from last week heated the rock up causing it to expand and crack. Cooler temperatures this week allowed the rock to cool and shrink back. Down it came.
</sarc</>
There. That’s gotten the mythology cr@p in before all the other idjits, fools, science deniers and believers in Seventeenth Century Witchcraft have had a chance to. 🙂
My best wishes to the pair who had the “big rocks” thrown at them. Thankfully, nobody was killed and they were only relatively lightly hurt, successfully escaping.
It could have been far worse.
The Northern Queensland rain looks like a tropical cyclone which didn’t quite get kick-started. The Solar Wind was low most of last week with the Kp Index right down on the floor, apart from a brief geomagnetic storm at the end of the week which touched Kp 4 for half a day.
30
Every morning we get climate change like that.
The Sun comes up in the East without any warning and heats the Rocky cliffs along our coast.
Some significant new blocks appear down below from time to time. The message is don’t walk under the cliff when the Sun is on it.
KK
21
I would walk well out from the cliff all the time 🙂
20
Absurd rambling rebuttal in the Australia newspaper Opinion section to Prof Ian Plimmer’s article by Dr. Geoff Edwards. So I looked up his qualifications
“Dr. Edwards’ first degree was in ecological science (Monash). He returned to the Department of Mines and Energy to work on energy policy. He studied public administration (University of Queensland) in an endeavour to understand why environmental consciousness remained at the fringes of public policy. He obtained his doctorate (Griffith) for a critique of the mainstream view that the market is the optimum vehicle for determining where the ‘public interest’ lies. He has published in animal biology, economics, foreign affairs and public policy.”
He argues that the market is the way to get the delivery of non coal power right, that governments are only ‘steering’ the markets gently with carbon taxes.
However you would think that the $3-6Billion a year (dependent on markup) ripped off electricity users to pay for other people’s windmills and solar panels was ‘steering’ and owners of windmills and solar panels were making great sacrifices and doing their ‘civic duty’.
At present we not only paid for the windmills owned by the Hepburn Wind community group, paid them off ten years early, we are giving them $800,000 a year cash as a reward simply for generating wind electricity. This whether they sell it or not and in addition to any payments for their product, electricity.
Amazingly we also give them full tax depreciation on ‘their’ investment in the two windmills so they pay little tax this outright gift to a company with no debts and which apparently does no work at all.
Wouldn’t it be nice if every small business was given enough money to buy their equipment and was paid most of a million dollars a year cash to operate (on top of the income from selling electricity at the world’s highest prices) and then allowed a tax deduction on the depreciation of the equipment for which we, the public paid.
I am not picking on the owners of Hepburn Wind. They did not create this wrong theft of our cash from our electricity bills, but the insanity of giving anyone millions in cash for nothing because wind electrons are preferable to coal electrons. They have no debt. Why are we giving this business an additional million dollars a year, tax free?
As for the “Royal Society of Queensland”, this is what they presumably say in Wikipedia..
The Royal Society of Queensland was formed in Queensland, Australia in 1884 from the Queensland Philosophical Society, Queensland’s oldest scientific institution, with royal patronage granted in 1885.
The aim of the Society is “Progressing science in Queensland”. “Science” is interpreted broadly and includes a wide range of learned disciplines that follow scientific method. The Society is a non-partisan, secular, learned society, not an activist lobby group and does not campaign on environmental or planning issues.
You would have to disagree with all of that. What scientific method? The piece is clearly a vague fact free rebuttal of Prof. Plimer’s piece purely on the idea that the Royal Society of Queensland represents real and independent and objective science. Rubbish.
191
Plus the get out free disclaimer at the end.
“Climate contrarians should note I am not arguing renewable generation is the solution to our or the world’s energy challenges.”
Apart from changing ‘deniers’ to ‘contrarians’ this scientist also has no idea what to do to replace coal, oil, gas and even uranium. He hangs his entire thesis on the word ‘renewable’. What does that mean?
140
What ‘renewable’ does not mean is energy which is any of the three essential things provided by coal. Adequate. Reliable. Cheap.
So he recommends the destruction of Western economies because he is not a Climate Contrarian. Good for him
120
Coal is also renewable and often appears magically in children’s stockings at Christmas. How this happens I have absolutely no idea but I bet Dr. Edwards would avoid all knowledge of it because it’s coal, not a unicorn fart to turn a propeller.
81
It means he is yet another mis-educated idiot. The World Bank set about squeezing everything “socialist” it possibly could out of global economies over the seventies and eighties. Every problem was to be solved by “markets.” Since then, that’s been “the cure.” The World Bank is a very slow learner: it hasn’t get learned that artificial (or fake markets) always fail, and the bigger they are, the bigger they fail.. Fake markets don’t have the normal checks and balances to work properly. They are very vulnerable to political manipulation (variance for desired ends) or, to use another word: corruption. They lose users confidence very quickly.
The Classical Economists had it right. The present Neo-Classical economics is just like Klimate change: it relies on Unicorn farts and Pixie Dust.
As he has over those renewables.. He needs to lock himself away somewhere (where we can’t hear him and read all Dr Micheal Hudson’s works. Mike Hudson trained as an economic Historian and he isn’t afraid to call a spade a spade, instead of a
Of course, because of his mis-education, he is unable to learn.
Which reminds me:
The World Bank is going to be horrified at the new global government … totally socialist …. 🙂 “Markets” are just so Capitalist!
10
I should say: the proposed global government… All the World Bank’s favourite theories will just have to go.
00
“I am not picking on the owners of Hepburn Wind. They did not create this wrong theft of our cash from our electricity bills, but the insanity of giving anyone millions in cash for nothing because wind electrons are preferable to coal electrons”
I dont have problem calling them out. Just because a subsidy farming scam is possible doesnt mean that you need to get your snout in the trough. They are gleefully pocketing the proceeds and fully understand where that monet comes from.
80
It comes from the other electricity users as well as from taxpayers.
The glorious illusion of eco virtue and its human cost:
Slavery!
11
No SUCH THING AS THE *NOBLE* LIE. Gotta’ reduce guvuhmint. Power always corrupts.
20
Tde
The view from the nanosphere?
00
ready for a bit of news of China? Hope so. https://balance10.blogspot.com/2019/01/xinjiangeast-turkestan-overview.html and
https://balance10.blogspot.com/2019/01/china-under-xi-is-becoming-less-free.html
30
sabotage of Brexit perhaps https://balance10.blogspot.com/2019/02/tory-backbencher-warned-that-prime.html
00
Another admission that the IPCC “climate change” (natural as we all understand) hoax is socialism masquerading as environmentalism …
https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/global-warming-one-more-official-exposes-real-goal-of-climate-scare/
53
TdeF I sent the above link this morning to Dr Geoff Edwards via The Australian Letters email address.
40
Unbelievable: Check out the line that Japan’s average temperature has changed about 34 Fahrenheit degrees in a century:
https://cumberlink.com/live_well_in_the_cumberland_valley/researchers-climate-change-may-alter-newborns-gender-ratio/article_11de7c2c-b3a6-55e8-8b28-7f59d7b5cda6.html
Obviously, it’s worse than we thought!
70
Linear trend in Japan over 120 years is 0.12C/ decade.
This does not tell the whole story, because the actual warming occurred in two small step changes, one in the late 1940’s and one in the mid 1990’s
Between those changes, trend is essentially dead flat
1950-1990
1998-2018
102
From Notricks. “Major Aspects Of Japan’s Climate Have Seen No Change”
Precipitation — no change in 100 years, but plenty of oscillations
Number of typhoons making landfall — no change since at least 1951
Sea level — the same as it was in 1950 (with oscillations up and down in between)
Temperature — no change from at least 1951 to 1988 then a step-change in 1989 approx 0.8 Deg C with again no change in the last 20 years
http://notrickszone.com/2019/01/25/the-climate-non-problem-major-aspects-of-japans-climate-have-seen-no-change-in-100-years/
30
You see that all the time where a small change of temperature in degrees C is converted by journalists (presumably) as if it was an actual temperature reading. Hence 34.07F results from a change of 1.15C.
20
Quick, lets stop all fossil fuel use right now! it’s so easy!!
When it comes to living in an alternate reality bubble, the author of this scaremongering drivel is eclipsed only by those in the comment section.
https://theconversation.com/immediate-phase-out-of-fossil-fuels-could-keep-warming-below-1-5-c-109672
60
“Cows produce a lot of methane, so if we ate them all over the next three years without breeding any more, we could certainly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions considerably while having a gluttonous time doing so.”
We’re gonna need a bigger sauce bottle.
50
Cows release no more “carbon” than they eat, far less actually.
They are carbon neutral.
Tell these vegan fools to go eat dirt.. !!
101
That sounds so modern and inspiring.
Cows are carbon neutral.
Good one.
61
Mark: methane is no threat at all: it’s at a mere smear 1 part per million in the atmosphere and it’s atmospheric life is a mere 4 days. It’s rapidly oxidised by ozone
and methane-eating bacteria …
… 1 part per million. And that’s after all these millions of years of herbivore farts. Think about how much Argentinosaurus must have emitted per fart 68 MYA… that’s a big herbivore which weighed in at 73-88 tons and was somewhere in the region of 25 metres long, and strolled along at about 8-9kph. Hmmm, wouldn’t fit my back yard … and at modern low low CO2 levels, I wouldn’t be able to feed it.
30
Fossil fuels will not be phased out any time soon. On the contrary. Such warnings are being ignored by the vast majority of the world while hundreds of new coal fired power stations are being built.
Message for PM Morrison. Pull your finger out and join the current world-wide trend of creating incentives for new coal fired power stations. The rest of the world is leaving us behind and before long we will crash and burn unless we change direction.
90
The rest of the world is permitted to build coal-fired power stations and to burn coal. It’s just the European countries who aren’t. They have to die.
20
Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungry, Poland and Romania have in total 7 in construction and another 11 planned. How many do we have? Big fat 0. The only other major region not building new ones is the US but they are bolstering many of their existing ones (some 300 in total). We are not (some 20 in total). Of course Europe and US also have lots of nuclear. We have none.
10
Germany is the only one who was part of the post war West.
It’s probably because of East Germany that they’re `allowed’ to build a coal station or two. The rest were never parr of The West.
Australia and NZ were.
00
All true but the facts still refute your earlier point that European countries are not permitted to build coal fired power stations. I provided proof some of the European countries are in fact building them. The point I’m making is Australia is the odd one out in terms of the major regions. Although we are permitted to build coal fired power stations we are not building any simply because of the policies in place thanks to both major parties that make it economically unattractive to do so and make renewables more profitable. Both major parties are not acting in the best interest of the people. They are willingly ignorant if not delinquent. Unless we change direction we will crash and burn well before Europe does.
00
Source: https://endcoal.org/tracker/
10
Lets hope that Chris Smith is freezing his balls off there at the University of Leeds i the frozen northern hemisphere.
Maybe he will then feel the warmth of a gas heater to keep himself warm, and see the necessity of fossil fuels..
Or more likely he has decamped for a warmer climate to save himself the intellectual embarsssment.
40
It would be remiss to not note the exit of Clementine Ford from the mainstream media (at lest for the short term). I am usually a supporter of all kinds of views being aired , and find a lot of constructive feminism quite interesting.
Sadly Ford took it to the extreme and continued to just spout ever more venemous bile, generally at the male half of the species. For a long time there were no consequences so predictably it ramped up until she went a step to far.
I imagine she will still be ranting in some weird corner of the InterWeb, but now with a deservedly reduced profile. I suspect a reappearance with the ABC or SBS in due course after a sin bin period.
93
The ABC is helping her …
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/abc-throws-liferaft-to-foulmouthed-clementine/news-story/e3ed7c8b9f107aecf754cf36073a787b
50
Loverly lady that one. On her own admission has had a couple of abortions which i presume involved males getting her pregnant. Adds a lot of truth to that old adage about alcohol consumption and increasing beauty.
75
I think you just proved her point, and by the way, this post is says more about you, and your values, than it does about her. You shame yourself
38
You would have to admit she makes Ross Cameron look like a saint.
53
As opposed to Andrew Broad?
46
The fact that YOU defend this most disgusting of persons, says all that is needed to be said about YOU and your empty values and empty morals, pfutz.
122
Would you have someone say that about your sister, daughter, mother or wife. Sambar can not possibly know about Clementine’s circumstances, nor do you.
39
OMG, we have triggered pfutz’s moral sensibilities, roflmao
Didn’t know he had any.
Stop trolling, pfutz…. You should be ashamed, but you are incapable of that.
84
Andy, please.
What moral sensitivities.
All he’s paid to do is divert the discussion away from the issue of how human origin CO2 cannot possibly heat the atmosphere.
Even using a person of obvious disrepute as a foil.
What morality.
KK
63
He’s responded, on topic, to someone’s post in an unthreaded blog
35
Precisely, KK,
He has none.
Only his pretend outrage.
53
“He’s responded, on topic, to someone’s post in an unthreaded blog”
And exposed himself for the gullible leftist victim hugger that he is, no matter how putrid that self-victim is..
He, like you, would always be better not typing anything, lest their real self is exposed.
12
thanks for agreeing AG
10
like all of us, her “circumstances” are very much what she has created for herself. I am not a great believer in first world victimhood and externalising the causes what happens to me over the long haul. Generally they are consequences , good and bad , of choices that I have made.
71
Peter F, may I suggest that you read Dennis’ link at #30:1 before placing your halo in place?
92
Oh I see, she’s not allowed to swear, she’s not allowed to get her top off. Did I just stumble into a blog about the handmaid’s tale? Of course men can do those things and it is not offensive is it? Shame on you Annie. Her life is her’s it is not for you to moralise about.
413
SHAME on you, pfutz, for your childish trolling !
Not moralising, Clem is just a truly disgusting person.
No wonder you support her.
If a male swore like she continually did on air, they would have been sacked the very first time.
But heck, at least she didn’t eat a raw onion.
114
So you’re a she…
Fascinating…..that little outburst was spot on
Never dull round here….
Patricia Fitzroy?
22
OS
I think Petulla has more harmonic synergy.
Petulla Peta.
KK
32
Oh dear. PFutz stuffs up again. He races to the defence without doing his research.
In NZ, it’s illegal to swear on air, ie, to transmit “Obscene Language.” which is why our (NZ) radio/TV stations here *bleep* those words out. It’s written into our Broadcasting Act. You would do well to look up your Australian Broadcasting Act. I don’t think you have and you have fallen into the ignorance trap. I’m not Australian, so I don’t know Australia’s Act. Before you rushed to Miss Potty Mouth’s defence, you should have checked your Law.
If it’s written into your Law, as I suspect it is, then your statement “ Of course men can do those things … ” is utter nonsense. Bilge Water—Smelly at that. Silly boy. Breaking the law can result in a station losing its Broadcast Licence along with pots of money in fines. All broadcasting stations are required to keep a comprehensive log (a written record at the minimum) of everything which is broadcast, and the date and time it was broadcast. Most keep a recorded version, as it is easier and so the authorities can easily check it in event of a complaint.
If Clementine Potty Mouth has used “Obscene Language on air and been booted from the station, as my reading of Dennis’s link strongly suggests, the station is protecting it’s broadcasting licence and its purse by taking the necessary action to not be prosecuted. Good on it. Despite firing her, it can still be prosecuted. It doesn’t matter what the sex of the offender is: break the law and they’re gone. Dismissed.
I repeat: Go check your Broadcasting Act first before you rush to her defence. If she has broken the law, she deserves the full penalties no matter that she is somebody’s poor ickle liddle girl. As the Judge will tell you, PFitz: Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Personally, I prefer to use words/phrases such as cretinous coprocephalic. microcephalic moron, Ossification of the intellect Cognitive Malfunctioning Percipient Collapse Inverted Genius <nullius intellection and others. They’re all to the point, all contain no legally proscribed words, and are suitably scathing. Most people have difficulties with some of them. (Worked out
Cretinous Coprocephalic yet, PFitz?)
When you’ve checked your Broadcasting Act, and found what I think you will find: that Use of Obscene Language aka Swearing, is explicitly Forbidden, then you can do the decent thing and apologise to everyone here for wrongly defending Clementine Potty Mouth. Got the balls for it?
I wonder …
32
I see she has had 2 terminations = Very slow learner. Dumb and Dumber.
32
“It doesn’t matter what the
sexgender of the offender is”PLEASE , use the word “gender”, not “sex”
“Clementine” and “sex” should NEVER be uttered in the same sentence…
…. For the sake of the human digestive system.
Yet someone did.. !!
23
Words have gender;
life forms have sexes and there are only two,
so keep your mind above your navel.
32
ad by the way – any red thumbs – you should also be ashamed
318
9 of you are happy to let another of you denigrate someone on the basis that she may had 2 terminations. Like Andrew Broad, you do not see the utter hypocrisy of blaming one person in a situation where the male is let off scot free. They you point to the hatchet man of the far right, who says she swore, she made rude word t-shirts, she took her top off. So she did. If it was on air, then the producers, host etc were fine with that. Making t-shirts is not a crime (at least legally). I tell you for free, I would gladly stand beside Clementine Ford, but I would cross the street if I ever encountered one of that 9.
37
Don’t give a toss about her terminations.
Its her whole ugly non-personality, her spiteful hatred of men, her utter disdain for moral and society respectability. Just your type, as you admit.
… then her utter hypocrisy at getting pregnant…. twice.
Poor pftuz, always supporting the unsupportable.
93
Hear hear Peter Fitzroy. I’m glad there’s at least one here willing to stand up for this maiden’s virtue.
I can only imagine how grateful she would be of your gentlemanly intervention.
62
Robert, I’m guessing you are trying to be sarcastic? funny perhaps? As I said, would you let someone say that about your daughter, wife, sister or mother? Would you like it if it was said about you?
35
Nice distraction, but the debate is all about what is politically correct.
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/in-defence-of-sacked-ross-cameron/news-story/13fda6fc2b2f868e5510a7717111dacd
40
She quit, el gordo
25
Actually el Gordo you are distracting by decreeing what the topic is so as to make the claim of distraction.
No mention is made specifically of “politically correct”. The discussion could be linked to this phrase but it is clearly not the thrust of the debate.
33
Should have been kicked out years ago.
But that’s the far-left form you,
Put up with even, even applaud, the most UGLY behaviour, so long as its one of their own.
83
‘She quit, el gordo’
Fell on her sword.
‘… it is clearly not the thrust of the debate.’
She was socially incorrect.
50
You and Robert Swan go read my post above at 30.2.1.4. It’s about the Law & Breaking the Law.
My guess (and it’s one based on experience) is that she was told to resign so that her employer would not be obliged to expose the reason she was dismissed to other potential employers. Otherwise …
Hobson’s Choice. Isn’t “Voluntary” dismissal wonderful?
Go read my post above. All of you.
42
Peter Fitzroy:
No, it wasn’t sarcasm, it was irony — similar effect, but sarcasm would have called for different wording.
I suspect the Clementine Ford personality, as seen on TV and in the papers, is largely a fiction. Nobody would last long in real life with her public persona. To me, she’s merely a modern and unamusing new take on Norman Gunston.
But I really do think, of all the commenters here, she’d have to reserve her strongest tongue-lashing for you mansplaining on her behalf, as if the harpy couldn’t defend herself.
11
Clementine Ford comes across as abrasive, wilfully ignorant, petulant, and as a professional victim, amongst others things. Every time she opens her mouth, or puts pen to paper, she does a grave disservice to any legitimate feminist movement.
There’s no way I would prevent her from carrying on, because the more she talks, the more that reasonable people see just how warped her world view is.
As for her personal life – she is the one airing this information, knowing that she will get sympathy, and knowing that she can play the victim when people express negative views about her choices in life. Such an infantile personality wins either way.
90
Will the Grave disservice rub off on the ABC, who are giving her employment?
31
Possums go back 50 million years, but the heatwaves in north Queensland should see them out.
‘That heatwave came in late November last year, when the Cairns region was hit by the highest temperatures since records began.
“It scared the pants off me basically. One of the rangers sent me some data from the highest mountain in the wet tropics, where it got up to 39 degrees, which is off the charts.”
‘Professor Williams’s work has shown many tropical species just can’t handle extreme heat.
“They haven’t evolved mechanisms to cool their bodies down,” he says.
ABC
71
3 Feb: Bloomberg: Tesla Model 3 Owners Vent About Polar Vortex Affecting Cars
by Hailey Waller, Craig Trudell and Brandon Kochkodin
Cold conditions are a drain on battery range, no matter the car brand. But other predicaments are particular to Tesla.
Ronak Patel, a CPA auditor in New Jersey, bought a Model 3 last August. He’s driven about 150 miles in the cold over the last few days. “My biggest concern is the cold weather drained my battery 20 to 25 miles overnight and an extra five to ten miles on my drive to work,” he said. “I paid $60,000 to not drain my battery so quickly.”
Tesla isn’t alone in facing this flaw.
“It’s Panasonic that manufactures Tesla batteries,” said Salim Morsy, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “It’s not something specific to Tesla. It happens to Chevy with the Bolt and Nissan with the Leaf.”…READ ON
https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/companies/tesla-model-3-owners-vent-about-polar-vortex-affecting-cars/ar-BBT5ybG
60
pat:
What did they expect. Batteries are chemical so affected by cold and hot weather. Known fact for 150 years.
80
That’s funny.
Think seriously about what you have written. Then consider – How many Tesla drivers would know what a chemical reaction is! Even if they had a vague notion of a chemical reaction, how many would make the connection that a battery is a chemical reaction.
60
“I paid $60,000 to not drain my battery so quickly.”
I am usually not a fan of the phrase , but the is perhaps the ultimate “first world problem”
50
What I find amazing is the continual insistence that wind and solar electricity are cheap. We had the cheapest electricity in the world and now we have the most expensive. Prices keep rising too.
Why are we paying such a loading on coal and gas and petrol and diesel? Why are we giving this money away? To lower prices? It’s not working and the windmills and solar only last 20 years so we get nothing but pain and the end of manufacturing in Australia.
The politicians all know that.
130
TdeF;
The Greens have to keep saying it is cheap otherwise people will start asking why are we paying for expensive electricity?
I have a feeling that many are already asking that.
100
Peter C has mentioned a surge in jo’s readership in recent days, specifically for her “Forgotten History” page.
meant to mention last week that Jo had made it on to Reddit the Donald “New” threads (no doubt because of all the Australian heatwave stuff being hyped by FakeNewsMSM).
Reddit the Donald has over 700,000 members. “New” threads are posted every few minutes and do not generate a lot of comments, but do get a lot of readers. am guessing some of the traffic Peter C refers to comes via these mentions.
Reddit the Donald: Panic Time – Australia is Melting – 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) everywhere, right across Australia – In the 1800’s – OOPS – How scary (or real) is global warming when Australia knew many days of 50 Celsius 120 years ago? NSFCucks (archive.fo)
submitted 5 days ago by asiatrails
(LINKS TO ARCHIVE PAGE FOR JO’S THREAD)
(HOWEVER, THE DIRECT LINK IS IN THE COMMENTS)
Link to an interesting blog – http://joannenova.com.au/2019/01/forgotten-history-50-degrees-everywhere-right-across-australia-in-the-1800s/
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/akwffx/panic_time_australia_is_melting_50_degrees/
hope that helps.
60
Interesting to know. Thanks Pat!
50
Jo – I should add, though, that the CAGW-infested Reddit World News pages had two Aussie heatwave threads:
Reddit/World News: ‘It’s like hell here’: Australia bakes as record temperatures nudge 50C (theguardian.com)
submitted 14 days ago by idarknight
2734 comments
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ahtzmf/its_like_hell_here_australia_bakes_as_record/
the news.com.au submission attracted the auto-moderator – LOL:
Reddit/World News: Roads melt as heatwave escalates across parts of Australia | The Bureau of Meteorology warned Friday will mark the peak of the week-long heatwave — currently in its fifth day — for some of NSW’s most heavily populated areas (news.com.au)
submitted 15 days ago by jsquizzle88
296 comments
***Auto-moderator: Users often report submissions from this site and ask us to ban it for sensationalized articles. At /r/worldnews, we oppose blanket banning any news source. Readers have a responsibility to be skeptical, check sources, and comment on any flaws.
You can help improve this thread by linking to media that verifies or questions this article’s claims. Your link could help readers better understand this issue. If you do find evidence that this article or its title are false or misleading, contact the moderators who will review it
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https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ahovcu/roads_melt_as_heatwave_escalates_across_parts_of/
20
Also the miracle rain in Townsville. Like a lot of Northern Queensland, their dam was empty. They were importing water at great expense. Now there is a miracle in this land of droughts and flooding rains, just 250km North of the world’s highest rainfall. It’s pouring.
Where are the headlines? End of the drought! Relief.
No. It always rains after a drought, but unlike the ancient Nabateans at Petra, we are not allowed build dams, weirs and retaining systems. The floods have filled the dams and that’s it. The same story over and over. Miracle rains, total disaster.
It’s fifty years since we built a big dam. The weirs on the Murray save everyone through the longest drought but where are the weirs on the other rivers including the Darling, the dams, the provision for those rare but predictable floods?
Soon it will be Climate Change moaning again. Mass stupidity more like it. We knew this was coming. One in a hundred year event, sure but it happens every hundred years and we could always profit from it, not talk of disaster and sacred crocodiles in the street and politicians moaning. Their job was to make sure no one suffered, not raise taxes and prevent dams being built.
141
Many perfect sites for dams have been locked away in National Parks.
Three or four in NSW, land set aside by the Askin Coalition Government 1965 to 1975/76.
In Queensland Labor protected various northern rivers from development with their Wild Rivers legislation which was overturned by the Newman LNP Government supported by the Abbott Government in preparation for the extended Ord River Irrigation Area WA across northern Australia.
90
More dams needed.
Politicians see no votes in dams because it’s not a social security issue.
But, More infrastructure needed; dams.
What infrastructure have politicians added to Australia in the last forty years?
Nothing!
What new industry with a long term future has been started in Australia in the last forty years?
Nothing!
Absabloodylutely Nothing!
What are Politicians good for
??????????
53
Amazing KK. Three red thumbs for daring to suggest politicians were useless, self important opportunists looking after themselves first and their electorate not at all. I would have thought that was self evident, not only in Australia.
22
Accidental red , ,,small screen
As for the reds, I’m glad that they are paying attention.
A few noses out of joint over my anti blog clogging comments.
Most industry has been shut down and our kids have nothing to do but gaze at their navel, strum their mobile phones and develop an intensive sense of Victimhood.
Real politicians would bring real meaning to our kids lives by moving Australia forward.
A couple of suggestions:
1. Design and construct dams to harvest water and make our farmers freer from the horror of drought.
2. Clear rubbish undergrowth from bush areas and at least create meaningful breaks and access trails. Cut all vegetation back at least 5 metres from each verge on vital retreat roads from fire prone areas. No tree should be less than its height from the roadside in case of falls.
That should occupy all of our unemployed for the next five years. No social security payments for people under 50 with all workers being paid.
When that’s moving we will have a much better feel to the community with everyone in paid work building Australia _ like back in the fifties when EVERYONE had a job to go to that made them feel valued.
But: we have cr:p politicians who will find it easier to do a Democrat and encourage Victimhood.
Can we please have a Leader!
KK
21
Yes, in my youth they called it “breaking of the drought” and quite rightly it was romanticised in verse and song. Now they call it “unprecedented monsoonal flooding”. Note too how “snow” has lost its associations with Bing Crosby and the talented Clooney and it has become “potential spring flood risk”.
Here on the midcoast we’ve had a lousy summer with very little rain. Because of my annoying habit of checking I learn that we’ve had numerous such summers, with the first two months even drier than this year’s. Some old fave fire+drought summers pop up: 1887-8, 1899-1900, 1900-1, 1901-2, 1907-8, 1908-9, 1911-12, 1930-1, 1938-9 (La Nina but very disobedient), 1941-2, 1951-2, 1953-4, 1964-5, 1965-6, 2013-14…Yet there will be some to say this is “unprecedented”, if not many among the farming and fishing professions. It must be very relaxing to feel under no obligation to check.
When you reflect how zero rain fell here in Feb 1939 you can really see how the country got into trouble. Fingers crossed for this year.
Maybe I should learn from the climatariat and say this summer has been “radiant and flood-free”.
11
A Daily Telegraph post …
AGL ‘s profit from electricity generation was $2217 million in 2018. In 2015 with 10 per cent less output the profit was $426 million. The Vales Point plant was sold by the NSW government for just $1 million on the advice of Kerry Schott, who presently heads the Energy Security Board, is now worth over $800 million. The latest high price events will further boost the contract prices on which these profits are largely based The losers are consumers, household and business.
https://tinyurl.com/ybd8v6n5
100
Makes you wonder . . . . .
30
TdeF has questioned the legal situation relating to elected politicians assisting private sector companies to make super profits at the expense of consumers.
So do I.
60
Official: January 2019 Australia’s hottest eevveeerrr!”.
Why am I not surprised?
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-01/australian-weather-hottest-month-on-record-in-january/10769392
91
Hardly surprising when they get many of the temps from jet engines and then tamper with them further.
82
The ABC has done quite a bit of editing and does not provide a link to it’s source ( The link provided goes nowhere :-(. )
So here is a link to the actual BOM report of the 24th of January :http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/statements/scs68.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3f6MYMkb7gzWWm9fbGPfTyS7t_eopErBF4L5qky8YawgE415g99m-YWbk
This type of weather has happened before. Page 31 “Climate Drivers”is especially informative. And there is a . discussion of how the past couple of months are like 1972 etc when the monsoon was also late in Northern Australia as it has been this time 2018-19.
But the wets season though late, is now happening at last ! Flooding rains have cut roads through out Northern & Western Qld. Townsville is under water due to the big wet. And the BOM’s 4 day outlook shows this spreading across Northern Australia.
I what do I think ? Send it down Hughy !!
50
No doubt with a bit of help from some malfunctioning weather stations such as Borrona Downs .
52
NOT.
UAH has January 2019 in 4th place 1.1C anomaly
1979 is in second place 1.16C anomaly
52
Maybe next year Andy , even if it does snow in the Simpson .
50
yes and the temp in 1979 was lower than the observed temp in 2019. You are comparing apples to oranges, but I suspect you know that. Write this out 100 times. The anomaly is calculated from the running mean. It is not an absolute value.
37
You are WRONG as always, the anomaly is NOT calculated from the running mean.
It is calculated from the mean of a set period.
You are either grossly misinformed, or deliberately trolling with your usual ignorance.
UAH has January 2019 in 4th place 1.1C anomaly
1979 is in second place 1.16C
That’s warming for you. !
83
It’s a calculation from a model, it is not the measured temp. Even you should be able to see that plot (it was directly above your quote) and the temps are rising.
47
A pox on all the bloody models. Let the science weather climate idiots get outside and do some real science for a change !
81
It’s always amazed me as to why they take a temp , homogenise it then throw all temps in a pot and model it .
21
There are No models in Klimate Science, except the graph of the 100,000 to 110,000 year long ice ages that are driven by orbital mechanics.
Distance from Sun and angle of presentation of Earth to Sun drive climate variations.
KK
32
pfutz yet again shows that he has zero comprehension of different model types.
The models used by UAH are precise and take into account MEASURED, KNOWN and PROVEN elements of satellite orbits.
Climate models are based on whims, approximations, guesses.
Your Arts/biology non-learning, non-science is showing you up as a fool in every post you make, pfutz.
53
“and the temps are rising”
roflmao.. Proven wrong, you double down on a different tack.. so childishly predictable.
Yep a Grand Solar Maximum through the latter half of last century is likely to have that effect.
Thank goodness for the NATURAL solar forced warming out of the COLDEST period in 10,000 years, hey pfutz. !!
53
The fact that the oceans are now six metres below their peak of 7,000 years ago shows indirectly, but perhaps more accurately than any quoted “average” what’s going on.
The Earth is cooling.
Low oceans has a corollary: big polar ice caps.
And big polar ice caps can only exist in colder conditions.
KK
82
“And big polar ice caps can only exist in colder conditions.”
… and the Arctic ice cap is currently CHOCKA-BLOCK
Ain’t nobody sailing even a nuclear powered ice breaker through that lot.
Maybe in summer it will drop enough for a few of them to sneak through, (with satellite assistance, of course.)
You know, like in the MWP and before, when fishing and whaling were common-place.
73
From observation the moon seems to be colder than first thought.
‘The Chang’e-4 probe awoke from its hibernation to temperatures on colder than ever recorded before — negative 190 degrees, the space agency said.’
firstpost
00
‘Maps of the daily mean sea level pressure (MSLP) analyses for December and early January … showing the persistent low pressure system over Western Australia and low pressure trough over northern and central Australia. A notable feature of this period has been the absence of strong fronts to cool the country.’
They have it half right, BoM fail to mention the blocking high in the Tasman and the collapse of the subtropical ridge.
31
Why yes I am comparing apples and oranges – lowest minima temp and highest minima temp , the point is the same place recorded both but of course that doesn’t mean anything at all to you does it .
If I was Bom I would be embarrassed.
12
Apparently WA’s govt are planning to shut down one of our major coal power stations in Collie soon. Not clear what is is going to replace it. Our SW has had a very good run with 40% coal, 40% gas and only 11% renewables, so blackouts have been unheard of and energy prices reasonable. I guess all of that is about to change for the worse soon.
100
Expect it and plan ahead. Set up a bicycle with a dynamo.
40
Ahhhhh but Now you have a Labor Greenist government which has still not learned from the F**kups in South Australia & Victoria.
And that’s ‘situation normal’.
Even the idiotic greenists in SA & Victoria have not learned anything from these f**kups
71
Perhaps the mess-ups in SA and Vic are deliberate and have encouraged WA to set off on the same route?
62
Looking forward to the Super bowl and hope Brady can add another to his tally , go the Patriots .
20
I blame Donald for this.
‘Australian coal exporters face restrictions on imports into China for at least the next few months, China sources say.’ Oz
21
Maybe , maybe not , the Chinese won’t have great stock piles so it won’t be long before they restart imports of coal .
Either way it’s time China were called out .
40
Correct, they have an over supply of coal as their manufacturing eases.
I agree, China needed a wake up call and only a charismatic leader like Donald could have achieved this outcome.
40
FakeNewsMSM is fully backing CAGW activism:
4 Feb: YahooFinance: from OilPrice.com: Canada’s Most Crucial Pipeline Comes Under Fire
by Nick Cunningham
Police and private security contractors have been quietly preparing to head off protests of a key oil pipeline in the U.S. Midwest in an effort to avoid another Standing Rock.
According to The Intercept (LINK), Minnesota police have been planning for 18 months in case protestors try to block construction of the Line 3 pipeline. Police and private security contractors have tracked and identified potential protestors and have consulted with law enforcement in North Dakota who busted up the Standing Rock protests.
***It’s not clear why law enforcement is siding with industry, or why they are surveilling environmental and indigenous groups, but they clearly fear a rerun of the Dakota Access protests that garnered international attention in 2016…
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/canada-most-crucial-pipeline-comes-160000049.html
novel length:
3 Feb: Herald Scotland: The rebels willing to risk jail for our climate
by Neil Mackay
They may seem an unlikely bunch of rebels, but these five people, sitting around a table in a cafe in Edinburgh, are part of a movement, now many thousands strong across the UK, and they are all willing to break the law and go to prison for their beliefs.
What they care about is climate change and the ‘direct existential threat’ it poses to humankind. Their organisation is called Extinction Rebellion and already it’s carried out the biggest act of civil disobedience that’s been seen in the UK for decades when 6000 protestors brought London to a standstill in November by blocking city bridges. Just over a week ago, they occupied the Scottish Parliament. They are at least 1000 strong in Scotland, with around 20,000 supporters across the UK.
Modelled on the Suffragettes, the American civil rights movement, Occupy, and Mahatma Ghandi’s campaign for Indian independence, ‘non-violent direct action’ and civil disobedience are at the heart of their fight for a ‘full scale rebellion’. So far around 150 members have been arrested – the movement calls them ‘conscientious protectors’…
They are now stepping up their actions with Rebellion Day this April which will see mass civil disobedience across the country…
So, who are its members? Why did they join? And what are their plans? …READ ON
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17405430.the-rebels-willing-to-risk-jail-for-our-climate/
behind paywall:
Climate fight will upheave fund sector, says archbishop
Financial Times – 1 Feb 2019
The fight against climate change will lead to profound changes across the investment industry as more younger workers demand action to save the planet, according to Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Mr Welby said rising demand for responsible investment, as millennials accumulate wealth and pension savings, would lead to “enormous changes” in financial markets and asset management. “Millennials want to know that their money is doing more than earning a good return. We are seeing a major shift in attitude among huge numbers of young people from avoiding doing harm to wanting to do good, particularly in the matter of climate change,” he said…
20
4 Feb: Guardian: David Wallace-Wells on climate: ‘People should be scared – I’m scared’
The journalist and author has claimed climate change will soon render the world uninhabitable, leading his supporters to say he’s telling the terrifying truth and critics to brand him a reckless alarmist. Why is he so worried?
by Jonathan Watts
David Wallace-Wells’s apocalyptic depiction of a world made uninhabitable by climate chaos caused an outcry when it was published in New York magazine in 2017 etc etc etc…
Now he is back with a book-length follow-up.
Jonathan Watts: You have written a hell of a book. Your now-famous opening lines – “It’s worse, much worse, than you think” – are like a voice from a nightmare. Are you deliberately upsetting people about the climate?…BLAH BLAH
Wallace-Wells: I would absolutely support a carbon tax and what we are talking about now in the US: a green new deal of massive investment in renewable energy. But when you look around the world, small taxes on carbon haven’t had a meaningful impact. I think we have to learn from that and realise we need much more aggressive taxes or other solutions.
Jonathan Watts: In the past year, we have seen more radical action such as student strikers led by Greta Thunberg and protests by Extinction Rebellion. Do you think groups like this are useful?
Wallace-Wells: Absolutely. I’m an enormous admirer of Thunberg and I am in awe of how much energy and attention Extinction Rebellion has generated in such a short time. I think their imperative to tell the truth is very important and powerful…
Wallace-Wells: Air travel is the one thing that I really do feel guilty about. I make choices about travel with that in mind in a way that I didn’t even a year ago…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/03/david-wallace-wells-on-climate-people-should-be-scared-im-scared
3 Feb: Herald Scotland: Climate Strike comes to Scotland: Children skip school to protest
By Vicky Allan
AROUND forty school pupils skipped school last Friday in order to protest outside Holyrood against climate change. For some this was their third week of what’s called Climate Strike. They are part of a growing global movement inspired by Swedish schoolgirl, Greta Thunberg, who began striking from school 23 weeks ago and continues to do so every Friday…
Among them was nine-year-old Ruby and six-year-old Dougie, from Perthshire..
Some had even bussed up from Peebles. 16-year-old Charlotte Muller Stuart from Peebles said, “In school, no one talks about it. I didn’t even know that climate change was like a big deal until I researched it and the IPCC report. The thing that has got to me most is that figure from the report of eleven years until it’s insane weather and disasters happening and flooding. You say that to people and they don’t believe you.”…
Young members of Extinction Rebellion also joined the protest…
A UK wide student strike has been called on Friday 15 February 2019. One of the biggest waves of climate strikes took place in Australia in November last year, when, it’s estimated around 15,000 children left their classrooms.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17405463.climate-strike-comes-to-scotland-children-skip-school-to-protest/
20
The Anglican church has a tradition of promoting the clueless into positions high in the hierarchy. In fact the political elite are more comfortable with clueless occupy such positions.
So Welby’s dopey musings are no surprise to me or I suspect any one in the establishment in the UK.
20
Looks like the USA & Canada are in for another spell in the deep freeze. Major storm moving into California with 10 feet of snow and then onwards across the USA to Minnesota !
https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/discussions/hpcdiscussions.php?disc=pmdspd
60
10 feet? You jest surely.
30
No I don’t; and don’t call me Shirley!
70
Let it snow , let it snow , let it snow .
30
https://www.weather.gov/rev/ “Sierra Blizzard Warning… Heavy snow (through Tuesday) Tahoe: 4-8 feet… [wind] 100+ mph ridgetops… Zero visibility in whiteout conditions • High Avalanche Danger… Do not attempt to travel”. Yeehaw, they got themselves a humdinger winter dump [of carbonic catastrophe-sized coolness] otherwise known as a monster snow blizzard.
My guests today were a lovely retired couple from Canada, well-travelled and good-humoured, yet after telling me it was minus 23˚C the day they left Toronto (it was 23˚C above freezing here) they both then veered off the tracks to nail it all on ‘warming’ caused by ‘the polar vortex’ which was a result of ‘climate change’. Oh dear.
I tried a little light-hearted banter about lack of sunspots, wonky jet streams, the dearth of cyclones in these parts, the lovely calm warm summer we’re having – the second in two years, unprecedented! – but I could tell I’d lost them. So, keeping my mind on the job, I pointed out the low, rounded ridge we were driving along used to be a 3,000 m high mountain range which, over æons, had been worn down by successive ice ages, submerged, thrust up again, buried under volcanic ash, shattered by earthquakes, rained on and baked in the sun until, today in the 21st century, it was a well-tended and lovingly-manicured vineyard/restaurant overlooking the South Pacific Ocean, bursting full of happy-shiny-people on the grape juice, and that they were about to join them. What can I say – another lovely day.
61
Both Of the Qld – NSW interconnectors are running at maximum and the VIC – NSW interconnector is running at 90%. NSW has not generated enough power for quite a while yet renewable fanboys are convinced that wind and solar can provide 24/7 power. Are they idiots or just disingenuous zealots determined to destroy the economy.
80
Interesting thanks Ian1946.
There’s something here I was a little curious about, with respect to NSW not generating not enough power.
For the last week or two, on and off, NSW has had all its coal fired Units on line, and delivering close to their maximum.
Now, first thing each morning, Joanne’s is the first site I visit, after opening up and logging into my own. (well, the one I call my own anyway, even though I’m only the Senior Editor, and don’t own the site) One of the things I read up this same thread was that when a coal fired Unit goes down, unscheduled, others nearby can run at an increased output to make up for some of the loss. They just vary the excitation I suppose for a larger output. I can’t really say I have ever looked for something like this before.
Anyway, after visiting here and reading all the comments I had to catch up on from last visit here last night, I opened up the AEMO site and the twelve sites at Aneroid I go to for my daily electrical Post. Then I did the Admin at each site to get the date and the output for each of those sources. The last thing I do before taking the data at each of the thirteen pages is to isolate out every coal fired Unit, and then check them individually on a State by State basis to see what is ‘down’ in each State, and whether or not it’s scheduled or unscheduled, and it’s easy to tell really.
When I came to NSW, I noticed there was a problem at Bayswater. At around 6PM, all four Units started to lose power, and almost half of the plant’s total over a space of the next two hours. Then Unit 1 went off line, dropping to zero almost immediately. The other three Units stayed at half power output, so in all Bayswater had lost 1500MW all up, almost two thirds of its total power.
As I checked further, I noticed that all four Units at nearby Liddell, the two Units at Mt. Piper, and the two Units at Vales Point had increased their output at around the same time as Bayswater faltered. Those eight Units in all raised their total by a combined 800MW, so the overall loss was now only 700MW or so.
It’s the first time I took direct notice of something like this.
And again, my guess is that no one really noticed any loss of this proportion, because taking out 1500MW around peak power time is a problem, and luckily here, that daily peak had passed an hour earlier, so actual consumption was on the way down, losing 1700MW in the time from that peak at around 5PM till 8PM when the problem at Bayswater was at its worst, so it was resolved by the normal losing of power after that evening peak, so no major loss really.
Earlier on, Unit 1 at Eraring had also gone down as well, around three hours or so before the Bayswater incident.
All covered by Hydro, mainly a couple of hours of the pumped hydro at Tumut 3, and keeping Murray One and Two on line a little longer.
Tony.
100
Peter C –
check comment #34 which is out of moderation. also my reply to Jo.
the Reddit World News submissions were on the main page, so attract a lot of comments.
20
Thanks pat.
20
problems caused by CAGW policies in the UK?
behind paywall:
3 Feb: UK Times: Boss of £1.7m energy flop Future launches new firm … from his family home
The founder of one of 10 suppliers to go bust in the past year wants your custom again
by Ali Hussain
A businessman behind a failed energy firm he set up from his three-bedroom home has started up another supplier at the same address, a Money investigation can reveal. Tim Cantle-Jones was founder and director of Future Energy, which went bust last year with debts of more than £1.7m — leaving customers of other suppliers to pick up part of the bill.
Future Energy, which had about 16,000 customers, was initially registered to his detached new-build house in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Now Money has learnt that Cantle-Jones, 58, has started providing power via another firm, Northumbria Energy — also registered to his home address.
Just as Future did, Northumbria is offering some of the cheapest deals on the market…
3 Feb: UK Times: Rosemary Gallagher: Challenger energy suppliers must be competitive to recharge the market
The Scottish energy market is becoming a tale of the survival of the fittest in light of the collapse of new suppliers established to challenge the UK’s big six power companies. Just last month, Edinburgh firm Our Power — backed by the Scottish government and housing associations, and supported by actor and social campaigner Michael Sheen — ceased trading. On Wednesday, Ofgem appointed another firm, Utilita Energy, to supply Our Power’s domestic customers, under a safety net the industry regulator has in place to ensure people have a power supply and their credit balances are protected.
But there are big question marks over the effectiveness of the energy market. A total of 10 smaller UK suppliers have stopped trading since the start of 2018…
1 Feb: BBC: Energy firms under investigation are handed new customers
By Kevin Peachey
Two energy suppliers which have been handed the domestic customers of collapsed firms are themselves under investigation by the regulator Ofgem.
Economy Energy and Our Power recently ceased trading and their customers have been automatically switched to Ovo and Utilita respectively.
Both Ovo and Utilita are themselves the subject of continuing inquiries over the treatment of customers.
They say the issues are historic and Ofgem has been rigorous…
A new price cap will be announced this week. What does it mean?
A cap on the cost of energy for loyal customers who have not switched suppliers came into force at the start of January.
Many households in England, Scotland and Wales on default tariffs – such as standard variable tariffs – would have seen their energy bills fall as a result…
The level of the cap is updated every six months, at the start of April and the start of October, this year and next year, and possibly beyond.
Where the cap will be set from April 2019 will be announced on Thursday…
The cap is expected to rise, making energy more expensive for the customers on these default tariffs.
Widespread speculation has suggested that it will rise by about £100. Ofgem is expected to allow the companies to charge more owing to the greater cost of energy on the wholesale market than was previously the case…
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47092066
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Rise in price cap for energy bills puts watchdog in spotlight
Financial Times-20 hours ago
Britain’s energy watchdog will this week be forced to defend a “significant” rise in fuel bills for 11m households that had been promised protection from “rip-off” prices by Theresa May, prime minister. Ofgem will on Thursday announce a substantial increase in an energy price cap that only came into force at the start of 2019 and was intended to save £76 a year on average for 11m households on expensive, variable “default” tariffs…
Analysts and utility companies are expectingthe cap to be increased by around £100 from the £1,137 limit that came into force on January 1 for typical customers buying both gas and electricity. The higher limit, which will apply from April 1, will reflect a substantial change in wholesale prices between the start of August last year and the end of January compared to a prior five-month period used to calculate the first cap. Policymakers are nervous, however, that a rise so soon after the cap came into force will be a hard-sell to consumers…
3 Feb: UK Times: Li Ka-shing plots £2bn swoop on energy grid
Downing Street faces test as Chinese state bidders circle
by John Collingridge
Theresa May’s attitude to foreign takeovers is about to be tested as the Hong Kong-based billionaire Li Ka-shing and Chinese state power giants plot bids for a significant electricity network.
Electricity North West, which supplies 5m people from Manchester to rural Cumbria, is being sold by US bank JP Morgan and Australian investor Colonial First State for an estimated £2bn.
The auction, which is due to begin later this month, will attract a spectrum of infrastructure investors, with UK pension funds lining up against overseas bidders including Li’s Cheung Kong Infrastructure (CKI) and Spain’s Iberdrola. However, expected interest from State Grid Corporation of China and China Southern Power Grid will pose the biggest challenge to the government.
Several City sources said the two state-owned operators, which have been trying to acquire assets across Europe, were expected to participate in the auction. Electricity North West, one of 14 distribution network operators, covers an area that includes the Sellafield nuclear waste dump and Britain’s nuclear submarine factory at Barrow-in-Furness.
May’s wariness of Chinese investment led her to delay the go-ahead on the £20bn Hinkley Point nuclear power station in Somerset so the government could scrutinise the role of China General Nuclear (CGN) in the project. CGN has a 33% stake in the plant, Britain’s first nuclear power station for a generation, and wants to build its own reactors in the UK. May’s former chief of staff Nick Timothy has accused the government of “selling our national security to China”…
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/business/li-ka-shing-plots-2bn-swoop-on-energy-grid-h88hf3swx
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3 Feb: Reuters: Snow traps thousands of cars on Italy motorway, 200 occupants rescued
by Giulio Piovaccari
Thousands of vehicles were stuck in long queues caused by heavy snow on Italy’s A22 motorway on Saturday, and firefighters rescued 200 people who had been trapped for hours in cars and buses.
Queues on the route connecting northeastern regions to Austria reached 16 km (9.94 miles), said a spokesperson for the firefighters of the autonomous province of Bolzano.
He added it was hard to assess the number of vehicles involved but they were in the “thousands”.
Firefighters’ vehicles were used to evacuate about 200 people in need after they had been trapped for hours, with temperatures around freezing, the spokesperson said.
Due to bad weather several heavy vehicles, which were not equipped for winter circulation, had swerved, blocking circulation. An avalanche hit the motorway on Saturday morning, but no vehicles were present on that stretch of the motorway.
Some traffic started moving again in the late afternoon but many vehicles were still trapped. No casualties were reported.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-weather-italy/snow-traps-thousands-of-cars-on-italy-motorway-200-occupants-rescued-idUSKCN1PR0LP
VIDEO: 40sec: Weather Network: Thousands stranded on Italian highway amid heavy snow
Officials blamed the slow down on trucks and cars that attempted to traverse the stretch without the mandatory tire chains…
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/hundreds-rescued-thousands-stranded-on-italian-highway-after-avalanche-heavy-snow-brenner-pass-austria/123725
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VIDEO: 8min13sec: 3 Feb: Gateway Pundit: Jim Hoft: Boom! Rep. Jim Jordan: Bruce Ohr Met with Chris Steele and Glenn Simpson 13 Times and Immediately Went to Debrief Comey FBI
Rep. Jim Jordan, the ranking Republican member of the House Oversight Committee joined Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures (Fox News) this morning.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/02/boom-rep-jim-jordan-bruce-ohr-met-with-chris-steele-and-glenn-simpson-13-times-and-immediately-went-to-debrief-comey-fbi-video/
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at 3min40sec – Andy Pitman:
AUDIO: 5min06sec: 2 Feb: ABC The Science Show: Scientists awarded in Australia Day honours
Scientists recognised for their work in this year’s Australia Day honours include Peter Hoj AC, Liz Dennis AC, Mark Dodgson AO, ***Andy Pitman AO and Len Fisher OAM.
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/scientists-awarded-in-australia-day-honours/10771176
Len Fisher, ex-CSIRO:
AUDIO: 6min48sec: 2 Feb: ABC The Science Show: Antarctic protection vital for ecosystems’ long-term future
The first Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959. It was a treaty of science, outlining peaceful cooperation and the sharing of scientific results. But recently, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources rejected proposals for new marine reserves, to protect large species such as whales and dolphins, and krill, the basis of worldwide food chains. The fishing rights of some nations were placed ahead of the interests of the planet. Len Fisher outlines the history of Antarctic governance and says politicians need to be aware of the continent’s importance, and the views of those passionate for Antarctica’s protection.
Guest:
Len Fisher, Visiting Senior Research Fellow, University of Bristol, Bristol UK
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/antarctic-protection-vital-for-ecosystems%E2%80%99-long-term-future/10766804
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4 Feb: ABC: From drought to flooding rains as farmers celebrate drenching in Queensland’s west
ABC Western Qld By Kelly Butterworth and Zara Margolis
Farmers are rejoicing in parts of western Queensland after going from dusty paddocks to flooding rains.
While the drought is far from broken and plenty of graziers are yet to receive falls, for the lucky ones the past four days have brought a reprieve that is the stuff of dreams.
Days of steady, falling rain from a monsoon trough, with no storm activity or disastrous winds, provided the long-falling, beautiful moisture that outback paddocks were desperate for.
McKinlay Shire Mayor Belinda Murphy said the transformation was hard to fathom
“You just can’t believe that just over a week ago, you would have been standing in a paddock full of dust wondering how on Earth we’re going to deal with this year, and what’s going to happen with it being being consistently over 40 degrees [Celsius].
“A week later, you’re isolated [and] being surrounded by floodwaters,” she said.
“You know, that’s outback Australia.”
The Doyles were part of the lucky group who were given free meat off the Woolworths truck, something Ms Doyle said was appreciated by the stranded travellers.
“There are quite a few trucks stuck here, and as my mum says, it’s better to be born lucky than born rich, and there’s both a Woolies and a Coles truck stuck here,” she said.
“I think we’ve been hit in the backside by a rainbow.”
“They let us take all this meat and it’s been distributed all through the community in McKinlay and down to Kynuna.”…
Mr Patterson said, up until Friday, he had recorded an incredible 305 millimetres of rain, but over the weekend saw only 10mm drop into the gauge…
‘A godsend’
Cloncurry Mayor Greg Campbell has watched his region go from breaking a Queensland heat record of consecutive days over 40C, to receiving more than 300mm of rain…
“It’s been a fantastic weather system over the weekend,” Cr Campbell said.
“There’s been anything from 200mm to 300mm around the shire.
“The dam is full, Lake Julius is flowing quite high — it’s been a godsend.”
The dam, which was sitting at 30 per cent, is now at 100 per cent, which Cr Campbell said was important not just for town water for commercial use, but for town morale.
“We’re trying to save that water not just for commercial use, but for the barramundi fishing, the skiing, paddleboarding, and kayaking,” he said.
Cr Campbell said there had been no major complications from the rain…
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019-02-04/from-drought-to-flooding-rains-in-western-queensland/10776576
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===
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❶①❶① . . . Who are the real Deniers? . . .
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❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶
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Consider the contributions that the following 3 people have made, to our understanding of global warming.
.
1) Sou from HotWhopper
======================
Sou does a lot of bitching and moaning.
And she waves her arms around a lot.
And she insults people like me, by calling me a Denier.
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2) Tamino from Open(?) Mind
===========================
Tamino considers himself an “expert”.
Tamino does “biased” statistical analyses. If you only look for warming, then you are likely to find it.
Tamino deletes any post that I make on his website. He never replies.
Tamino tried to prove that a graph that I developed (called a “Global Warming Contour Map”), was “defective”.
I have over 35 years of experience in the computer industry. And my job is to test computer systems, and computer programs. My job title is “software tester”.
I can tell you, that Tamino botched the test of my graph. His work was incompetent.
I was so annoyed at what he did, that I wrote an article about it.
Tamino calls me a Denier.
.
3) Sheldon Walker from agree-to-disagree.com
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To read the rest of this article, click the following link:
https://agree-to-disagree.com/who-are-the-real-deniers
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Wear the Badge with pride.
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“do I deserve to be called a Denier.”
I find that asking them what I actually DENY, that they have empirical proof for, tends to lead to either a sustained silence, or a continued doubling-down of dribbling evasions in answering the question.
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???
4 Feb: RenewEconomy: How did wind and solar perform in the recent heat-wave?
by Peter Farley
(Peter Farley is a fellow of the Intitution of Engineers for almost 30 years who writes extensively on energy matters0
There has been a lot of commentary – in conservative media and political circles – about renewables failing during the power crisis.
Detailed inspections suggests the opposite is true. And it is worth clarifying a few points about the operation of power systems to illustrate why…
Some other useful observations to be made to counter the anti-renewable take on the load-shedding
In the last 30 days wind supplied 6.4% of Victoria’s power. At 11:30 on Friday it supplied 6.4% of the power,
1.In the last 30 days large scale solar supplied 1.4% of Victoria’s power at 11:30 on Friday it was supplying 2.1%….
For the full cost of US$30 billion, we could build 7,000 MW of wind, 7,000 MW of tracking solar, 10,000 MW of rooftop solar, 5,000MW of pumped hydro and 5,000 MW of batteries…
https://reneweconomy.com.au/how-did-wind-and-solar-perform-in-the-recent-heat-wave-40479/
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AGL ‘s profit from electricity generation was $2217 million in 2018. In 2015 with 10 per cent less output the profit was $426 million. The Vales Point plant was sold by the NSW government for just $1 million on the advice of Kerry Schott, who presently heads the Energy Security Board, is now worth over $800 million. The latest high price events will further boost the contract prices on which these profits are largely based The losers are consumers, household and business.
https://tinyurl.com/ybd8v6n5
NSW, one of three states connected to the world’s largest electricity grid.
Labor for 16 years supported the Federal Gillard Labor RET 28% and that Labor States complied. SA first, VIC and NSW following.
In NSW the Electricity Commission was split into government owned private companies by the Greiner Coalition Government to escape union power at the Electricity Commission.
After Federal Labor introduced 28% RET the States fell into line to support the “transition to renewable energy”.
By the time the O’Farrell led Coalition Government won office after 16 years of Labor government in NSW the transmission lines had been sold and sale of all the remaining assets was well underway, The sale, estimated assets value $12-15 billion, realised $5.9 billion.
After hidden in government owned private company accounts debts, used to pay extra dividends to the Labor Government for 16 years, was retired all that was left of $5.9 billion was $800 million.
So consider this;
AGL ‘s profit from electricity generation was $2217 million in 2018. In 2015 with 10 per cent less output the profit was $426 million. The Vales Point plant was sold by the NSW government for just $1 million on the advice of Kerry Schott, who presently heads the Energy Security Board, is now worth over $800 million. The latest high price events will further boost the contract prices on which these profits are largely based The losers are consumers, household and business.
https://tinyurl.com/ybd8v6n5
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1 Feb: EnergyNews: 7 takeaways on how grid operator PJM weathered this week’s polar vortex
By Kathiann M. Kowalski
Business closures helped moderate peak demand.
Various large manufacturing plants and businesses closed down, in addition to most schools. So, peak demand was more like that for a weekend than a weekday — under 140,000 megawatts Thursday instead of 143,000, as forecast…
Rules put in place after a 2014 polar vortex used a carrot-and-stick approach to make sure generators would be available next time…
The carrot was additional payments in the capacity market so generation resources could invest in winter weather preparations. The stick was heavy financial penalties if a power plant that cleared the auction wasn’t ready and able to supply power when needed…
Cold weather alerts issued one to seven days before very cold temperatures alert generation and transmission operators to restore any maintenance outages and defer other routine maintenance.
Generation plants also take steps right before the cold weather hits. So, for example, gas generation plants or other plants that depend heavily on water may use heat wrap and take other steps to make sure bitter cold doesn’t interfere with their supply. Other polar vortex events have also shown the importance of making sure cold air doesn’t penetrate the power plant. “You literally do that at the last minute,” Bryson said…
Coal and gas plants did not have fuel problems.
The PJM region hasn’t had large-scale coal pile freezes in the last couple of years, Bryson said. If chunks going into a pulverizer have a lot of ice, though, the quality of the fuel can go down…
Solar and wind generation kept performing.
***GRAPHS
Wind and solar energy make up a very small share of the total generation mix in the PJM footprint. Yet both continued to produce electricity. On Jan. 31, wind generation was highest in the early morning hours after midnight, while solar energy production picked up after dawn and grew as noon approached…
Prices did not skyrocket out of control.
“If there are units that thought they would incur costs above the $1,000-per-megawatt cap, [then] they had to get them precleared ahead of time,” Bryson said. “I don’t think we had any of those requests. But we had procedures in place to be able to handle and review them.” Nor did PJM see unusually high fuel prices for Jan. 30 and 31, he added.
https://energynews.us/2019/02/01/northeast/7-takeaways-on-how-grid-operator-pjm-weathered-this-weeks-polar-vortex/
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31 Jan: StarTribune: Bitter cold shows reliable energy sources are critical
by Isaac Orr
(Isaac Orr is a policy fellow at Center of the American Experiment)
This week’s bitter cold had the potential to be deadly. But thanks to reliable forms of energy like coal, natural gas and nuclear power, it wasn’t.
Lawmakers considering doubling Minnesota’s renewable energy mandate to 50 percent by 2030 should use this week’s weather as a moment to reconsider their plans to lean so heavily on wind and solar.
On Wednesday, when the morning temperature in the Twin Cities was negative 24 degrees, wind energy provided just 4 percent of the electricity and utilized just 24 percent of its installed capacity in a region monitored by the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO), a not-for-profit organization that ensures reliable, least-cost delivery of electricity across all or parts of 15 U.S. states, including Minnesota.
Meanwhile, coal-fired power plants provided 45 percent of MISO’s power and nuclear provided 13 percent — most of this from Minnesota’s Prairie Island and Monticello nuclear plants (which we should keep open, by the way). Natural gas provided 26 percent of our electricity use at that time, and the remainder was imported from Canada and other U.S. states.
Natural gas also heated the homes of approximately 66 percent of Minnesotans this week, by far the most for any home heating fuel, but there wasn’t enough gas to combat the frigid temperatures.
Because of the extreme cold, Xcel Energy urged its natural gas customers in Becker, Big Lake, Chisago City, Lindstrom, Princeton and Isanti to reduce the settings on their thermostats, first down to 60 degrees, then to 63, through Thursday morning to conserve enough natural gas to prevent a widespread shortage as temperatures remained 14 below zero. Some Xcel customers in the Princeton area lost gas service, and Xcel reserved rooms for them in nearby hotels.
Enacting a 50 percent renewable energy mandate will not replace coal-fired power plants with wind and solar. It will replace coal-fired power plants with wind, solar and natural gas — enough natural gas power plants to potentially generate up to 100 percent of our electricity needs in the very possible eventuality that wind or solar are generating zero electricity at a given moment. Or, on a day like Wednesday, 96 percent of electricity might have to be generated by natural gas, with wind contributing 4 percent…
At minimum, pursuing a grid powered entirely by solar, wind and natural gas would require more natural gas pipeline capacity, which is likely to be opposed by the factions that are currently challenging the replacement of the Line 3 pipeline.
Lest I be accused of unfairness, it’s true that any number of unforeseen circumstances could prevent a coal, nuclear or natural gas plant from being able to run during a cold snap like this. But the key word is “unforeseen.” The intermittency of wind and solar is a feature, not a bug, which is why Minnesota lawmakers should reconsider the wisdom of enacting a mandate requiring 50 percent of our electricity to come from intermittent renewable sources…
http://www.startribune.com/bitter-cold-shows-reliable-energy-sources-are-critical/505165032/
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InsideClimateNews fails to mention how much energy solar & wind provided!
2 Feb: InsideClimateNews: Power Companies vs. the Polar Vortex: How Did the Grid Hold Up?
By Dan Gearino
Utilities in some of the coldest parts of the Midwest and grid operators say their preparations before the temperature plunged below zero were informed by lessons from cold snaps in 2014 and 2018. Those events illuminated some of the problems and workarounds of managing a grid that relies increasingly on natural gas and renewables, and less on coal…
“There’s no reason to think coal performs better than any of the other systems,” said Jeremy Richardson, a senior energy analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
All power sources are at risk of weather-related outages, including coal and nuclear plants. For example, a reactor at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant in New Jersey had to shut down this week because of ice accumulation on screens that filter water going into the plant. And coal piles can freeze in severe weather…
Renewable energy is a growing power source in the Midwest region. Some renewable energy was affected on Thursday, mostly because of low winds in areas, with some issues of icing, according to PJM Interconnection, which manages the grid that runs from Illinois to New Jersey. Other resources pick up the slack during the hours needed…
PJM could have handled a much colder week, in part because of agreements with customers to reduce power use. These agreements add up to 4,800 megawatts, up from 1,500 megawatts in 2014, Bryson said…
Consumers Energy, which has a natural gas and an electricity utility, is seeking approval for a plan to increase renewable energy and phase out use of coal by 2040. A few cold days will not change that trajectory, said spokesman Brian Wheeler…
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01022019/polar-vortex-utilities-gas-coal-renewable-energy-midwest-demand-response
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read all:
1 Feb: Financial Post: Terence Corcoran: CBC admits it wrongly reported hyped-up insurance ‘climate risks’
Ombudsman said CBC ‘failed to comply with journalistic standards’ in assessing and reporting on the industry’s claims
On Wednesday, the CBC published corrections to its reports. “The ombudsman,” said the CBC correction, “has ruled in favour of the complainant. Certain statements relating to rainfall amounts and the so-called 100-year events deemed to be inaccurate or irrelevant to the story have been removed and/or replaced. Information from Environment Canada has been added to indicate their statistics show no increase in rainfall or extreme rain events beyond ‘normal’ variations … These changes to the original story have been made on Jan. 29, 2019 to comply with the ombudsman’s decision.”…
There are many angles to the ombudsman’s report. The ombudsman makes it clear that he is not passing judgment on the fundamental accuracy of any of the claims. His issue is with the CBC’s failure to report the other side of the story.
What the CBC news report failed to note, he said, were assessments by Environment Canada that contradict and in fact undermine the Feltmate/IBC claims. According to Xuebin Zhang, a senior research scientist with Environment Canada, there is no increase in extreme flooding and extreme wet weather events…READ ALL
https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/terence-corcoran-cbc-admits-it-wrongly-reported-hyped-up-insurance-climate-risks
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“The idea of a 50 MW (or 500 MW) reactor you can put in a modest rail car (or a large one) is just sooo 1960s 😉 Wonder if the folks in Australia could use a 1/2 GW of power on a rail car to put near places needing some extra? Yeah, you would need to add a boiler, but hey, that’s just some pipes 😉 Or Canada (and Chicago) where they could just use the heat directly to warm up! 😉 ”
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2019/02/04/nuclear-jet-missiles-anyone/
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The facts presented in this video pretty well accord with all the genuine science I have ever read about long term climate trends (not fraudulent anthropogenic global warming).
https://youtu.be/phaBUQ3NU1w
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Yep, and blessedly brief.
10
I’ve had no power for a day so I had to talk to my wife. She’s a nice lady. 🙂
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All’s for the best then, in the best of all possible worlds. H. 🙂
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Some trivia questions for those who demand our electricity be “sustainable” and “fossil free” and believe it will be “more affordable”.
1. What % of the AEMO electricity grid is currently supplied by:
a) Coal
b) Gas
c) Wind
d) Large and small Solar
2. If wind currently supplies on average 1.7 GW (from a nameplate capacity of 5.5 GW), what is the lowest power wind has delivered over 24 hours?
3. When the wind doesn’t blow, and the sun isn’t shining, what sources are used to keep the lights on and the air conditioning running?
4. What was the average wholesale price of electricity in Vic/SA in January 2017 before Hazelwood closed, and what was it in January 2019?
To check your answers:
TonyfromOz
And Tony gets his data from Aneroid Energy website “Energy data from the Australian Energy Market Operator”
And Aneroid compiles data from the AEMO website. (see average price tables)
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Aneroid Energy website link is blank Robber. I suppose you meant this: https://anero.id/energy/wind-energy
10
Oops, thanks Serp. Home page for anero.id
00
We have 11 years before the CSIRO and BoM “Representative Concentration Pathways” models can be definitively proven as junk!
A great analysis by Dr Basil Beamish (a mining engineer)
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/04/reassessing-model-projections-for-hot-days-from-rcps/
10
Not sure I’d be too keen on using BOM data to compare with CSIRO models !!
As they walk hand-in-hand into the sunset.
31
‘Australia will formally reject the United Nations’ intervention over the Adani coalmine.’ Oz
10
Read about Roger Andrews, who died recently. A retired engineer, he analysed energy schemes proposed by climate activists.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-2-5-eulogy-for-roger-andrews
00