PROOF of global warming(!)

A delightful article below by Thomas Levenson, a professor of science WRITING.  He applies his writing profession to explain and prove global warming.  It's a long article with a lot of initial  throat-clearing but rather than bother with the superficialities there, I reproduce below just his attempt to get down to tintacks in a 3-part argument.  But that argument is very simplistic and in fact falls at the first hurdle.

1). He begins by harking way back to the original Arrhenius experiment to prove that CO2 does cause warming.  I could argue with that but I won't.  As is usual with Green/Left writing, far more important is what Levenson omits.

He omits to tell us that Arrhenius gives us no figure on HOW MUCH warming a given amount of CO2 will cause.  That figure is called the climate sensitivity and what the figure is, is a matter of great dispute.  There are both theoretical and empirical grounds to believe that the figure is small and that global warming is therefore of trivial importance and may even be undetectable.   That is my position and the position of most climate skeptics.  So the whole Warmist argument falls at that hurdle.  Without a solid figure for climate sensitivity, the baneful effect of CO2 is mere speculation.

2). Levenson goes on to tell us that CO2 has risen a lot in the last century.  It has.  But so what?  We cannot conclusively tie any degree of warming to it

3). His third point is that human beings emit a lot of CO2.  But again, so what?

Levenson points to various climate facts but ignores the one crucial issue.  So he proves nothing.  Amusing that he tried though.  That's more than most Warmists attempt


Here are some key facts about humankind’s impact on the earth’s climate. Taken together they form a bedrock of understanding for which any attempt to dispute the global warming picture must account.

The founding insight can be traced back to a precise place and time: Stockholm, Dec. 11, 1895, when Svante Arrhenius stood before the Swedish Academy of Science to present his paper "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid upon the Temperature of the Ground." (Carbonic acid is now better known as carbon dioxide.) Arrhenius began by recalling how his predecessors had shown that the gas is transparent to visible light — the sun shines perfectly happily through all the CO2 between it and the earth’s surface — but absorbs energy at longer wavelengths of light — infrared radiation, what we feel as heat.

Arrhenius then took this basic physical insight and used it to build a picture of a planetwide process. He showed that "if the quantity of carbonic acid [in the atmosphere] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature [at the earth’s surface] will increase nearly in arithmetic progression" — which is to say, more carbon up there leads directly to more heat down here. He went on to discuss a possible link between CO2 levels and the ebb and flow of ice ages — and he even noted the possibility that burning coal or other fossil fuels might affect the carbon content of the atmosphere.

There it was: One hundred and twenty years ago physicists and chemists already knew that atmospheric CO2 molds global climate. There was and is no disagreement on this. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It allows visible light to penetrate the atmosphere, and it acts as a blanket, keeping heat from radiating back out into space. This knowledge does not depend on any indirect measurements, assumptions, or elaborate numerical analysis. Rather, it emerges directly from the extremely well established basic understanding of the behavior of atoms and molecules.

The second piece of the puzzle is equally solid. We know how much carbon is in the atmosphere; we know that its concentration is going up; we know by how much. This isn’t a case of argument-by-proxy, an attempt to reconstruct a record through pollen deposits or tree ring data or what have you (though such methods are powerful tools to extract information from the past). There is no question about these facts — because, more than 50 years ago, a guy climbed a tall mountain to find out.

In the mid 1950s, Charles Keeling was a postdoc in geochemistry at Caltech. While there, he built the first instrument that could accurately measure CO2 concentrations in atmospheric samples. He tried his new device out on trips around California, but it was only when he moved to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography that was able to begin an experiment that has outlived him. Beginning in 1956, Keeling and his successors have measured atmospheric CO2 at an observatory high on the flanks of Mauna Loa, one of the two giant volcanoes that dominate the Big Island of Hawaii. There is nothing there to confound the work — no smokestacks, cars, anything. The graph that records what they’ve found over six decades is now called the Keeling Curve — and it is unequivocal.

One of the first things Keeling saw was a jigsaw trace tracking the change of the seasons. As plants grow in the land-rich Northern hemisphere in spring and summer, they grab CO2 out of the air. In winter, as leaves die and fall, some of that carbon gets released back into the atmosphere. As one of the obituaries that followed his death in 2005 put it, Keeling "had discovered that the earth itself was breathing."

But such small fluctuations can’t hide the overall trajectory. When Keeling first began his measurements, carbon dioxide accounted for 310 parts per million of the atmosphere. Since then, each year has seen an increase, drawing a curve that is pretty close to a line pointing ever upward. As of April 13, 2016, the Mauna Loa observatory counted 408.70 parts per million of CO2.

That’s just the way it is: a number that corresponds to a real quantity out there in nature. Like the figure for acceleration due to gravity at the earth’s surface (about 9.8 meters/ second squared) or the chemical composition of water (two atoms of hydrogen bound to one of oxygen), it’s not subject to debate. It’s not an article of Trump’s (or anyone’s) belief. We live on a planet that until recently sported 310 parts per million of carbon dioxide as a thermal blanket — and now has more than 400. Any debate about global climate begins from that unvarnished, unchallengeable reality.

The third beyond-dispute fact about climate change concerns who’s responsible for that rise in atmospheric CO2.

It’s us.

Human society excretes a lot of carbon. The numbers are somewhat less precise than the Mauna Loa measurements — but they’re still based on direct observation. A number of different agencies and research centers collect the various data sets on industrial activity, power generation, deforestation, and the like. In 2014, all that work put together tallied 35.9 billion tons of CO2 produced by burning of coal, oil, and gas, plus or minus a small variance. Land use changes added another 3.3 billion tons of the gas per year over the last decade, though here the uncertainty is larger — plus or minus 1.8 billion tons. (There are other greenhouse gases for which good estimates of human production exist — notably methane — but CO2 remains the single largest culprit in the climate change story.)

From Arrhenius’s first musings about the impact of human action on climate, the key question was whether any possible carbon sinks — especially the oceans — could absorb both natural sources of CO2 (volcanoes, forest fires, and the like) and that released by everything people burn. Now we know — thanks to Keeling’s observations — that the answer is no. The oceans do absorb some of the annual production of CO2 from both natural events and what we produce, but the way we live now creates an excess of carbon that overflows all such natural reservoirs.

These three facts: Atmospheric carbon dioxide regulates temperature at the earth’s surface, its levels have been and are continuing to rise, and human beings are behind that increase — lead directly to a simple conclusion. All else being equal, human action is driving a global process that will create and likely already is leading to a warmer world.

Everything else isn’t equal, of course. The global climate system is intricate, difficult to untangle, tricky to measure, and home to plenty of uncertainties. But here’s the nub: Any claim that the world isn’t getting hotter now and won’t warm in the future can’t rely on just one scrap of information or another. It has to make a bigger argument — some coherent account of why ever increasing amounts of carbon produced directly by human activity won’t end up where at all our basic understanding of how nature works suggests it should.

So, when Ted Cruz argues that all of climate science is a hoax because one piece of information — squinted at just right — suggests a gap in the warming record, he’s not thinking like a scientist. Instead, he’s making a lawyer’s case, pounding the table for the defense. That’s fine work as rhetoric; we’re trained through cultural understanding and uncounted hours of TV courtroom drama to see cases turn on each individual piece of evidence. "If the carbon don’t fit, you must acquit" and all that.

But that’s not how science works, not when studying climate or anything else. A century ago, Albert Einstein produced his General Theory of Relativity, a radical conception of gravity that displaced Isaac Newton’s version. Yet Einstein’s theory didn’t erase all the successes the older idea had in explaining the motions of everything from the moons of Jupiter to tides here on Earth’s tides. That’s why one of the first calculations Einstein performed to test his new idea was to see if it could reproduce Newtonian results at the appropriate scales. Even the greatest discoveries don’t invalidate older knowledge. Rather they frame such prior ideas within their newly emerging picture.

Much of contemporary science has accumulated into a deep understanding of the natural world that is inconvenient for the leading Republican candidates for president. Willed ignorance is a disaster for climate policy in particular. It is worse as an approach to science in the public sphere. For centuries, human curiosity led us to the point where we know so much; it would be good — more, it may well be a matter of survival — to put all that knowledge to use.

SOURCE





The war against climate alarmism is over, and we won it

It just needed one person in a position of power to declare that the emperor had no clothes for the whole fantasy to fall apart -- and Trump has done that

There won’t be a formal surrender, there will be no armistice or cease-fire, there will be no shell-shocked soldiers staggering out of bullet scarred bunkers with their hands raised high waving white kerchiefs and there will be no trials for crimes against humanity for the genocide committed in the developing world, but it’s over.

They’ll just continue to melt away as the murderous craze drifts further into political irrelevance and what will be looked back on as yet another moral aberration of the it’s all about my feelings generation and the politics that pandered to it.

Politically, the whole thing is dead in the water and has been for some time. Global warming is at the bottom of everyone’s list of concerns even if it makes an appearance on the list at all, and we’ve just been through a year-long presidential campaign where it was barely mentioned. Trump being elected as president will be its long overdue coup de grâce, though not in the form of a bullet through the head but rather a knife cutting through its financial umbilical cord down which flow the government grants, concessions and loan guarantees that keep it alive.

For me, being a small part in stopping the harm it was doing if only by a week or two was always the modest ambition, and any idea of punishing those responsible for inflicting needless cruelty on the most vulnerable people on the planet I always knew was never going to happen. I always hated them, always wanted to beat them but at the same time always knew they’d escape any sort of punishment, and that is the way things have worked out. My anger towards them still burns incandescent, but I will not allow it to overrule my reason.

No ending of war is ever that neat and tidy, and any notion of just deserts or some kind of balancing out of cruelties in the real world is a self-indulgence reserved only for those innocent of its callous realities. Punishment, if it ever occurs, will be in their afterlives, if perchance there should be such a thing.

I’ve done the best part of a decade in it, doing in recent years some things above the waterline like this blog and some other stuff well below it, not one of which I regret. For me, it was initially intended to be a quickie, my last war, because in one form or another, I’d seen too many of them but you do get sucked in, and once you go over a certain event horizon, you’re committed and have to see the thing through.

Like most skeptics, that event horizon was when you reached a point where you knew that by going any further off the orthodoxy reservation, you were going to lose friends and be disappointed in people you formerly respected as they hurriedly distanced themselves from you in fear. You were about to learn all about being shunned, both professionally and personally, and that when it came to a “climate criminal” like you, all the rules of civilised behaviour didn’t apply.

You’d become some sort of new age nigger of a freshly unenlightened twenty-first century, of whom anything could be said and to whom anything could be done, just short of actually lynching us though some of them would if they’d the guts to go further than anonymous verbal threats. To compound the jollies, you quickly found out you were going to be adopted as some sort of Saul on the road to Damascus convert by a variety of fringe loonies, all of whom were a bit higher up the insanity scale than a Grand Wizard of the KKK and just as unpleasant.

In the face of that amount of hate, you needed to cultivate not only some fortitude but a pretty robust sense of humour.

On the plus side, you made some new friends who were also engaged in the same push back against what was presented as a massive consensus. Though different in their own approaches to the conflict, they’d all passed over their own particular event horizon, and for the grand reward of not a penny but a lot of pretty vile abuse, soldiered on through the hard years. As Churchill said, when you’re going through hell, keep going, and they did.

It’s when you see people under that amount of stress and still doing the lonely courage thing, you’ll see the worst or the best come out of them. The abiding thing I’ll always take away from my time in the climate wars is I had the honour to serve in the company of heroes and heroines. They were and still are the right stuff.

We’re now in better years, times have changed and alarmism is in various stages of implosion around the world. In some like the USA and UK, it’s a corpse on the receiving end of copious amounts of makeup larded on with a trowel by the legacy media in an effort to kid people there’s still life in the thing, in others such as Europe and the Antipodes the alarmists are aware that though it’s not quite over, the writing is on the wall. They’re busy stuffing their pockets with as much cash as they can get their hands on before the big cleaver comes down on the easy money that used to flow from government coffers.

For some time it’s seemed plain to me that we were engaged in the endgame, they were in a self-destruct spiral downwards and it was just a matter of not interrupting its progress to a satisfactory conclusion, since the passing of time and the momentum of the forces that favoured our side have been irresistible for some years, and are by now unstoppable.

We were certainly a factor in its demise, but not as big a one as some people in the daily fray of the thing might think. After what was a hard start nearly a decade ago, it was just a matter of letting it play itself out.

The big learning to take away from the skeptic campaign was that it was waged primarily on the internet. The legacy media had not only bought into climate alarmism because it offered a non-stop stream of dramatic headlines, but the supposed cure for the non-problem was in essence a social re-engineering of western society along lines that agreed with their overwhelming liberal or outright socialist leanings.

It was information war posing as journalism and as with all infowar, any viewpoint opposing the official line had to be denied any means of expression. No platform for deniers, so we created our own ones.

The response by skeptics scattered around the world was to use the only means of communicating their message that wasn’t under the control of government or hostile media conglomerates – the internet. The elements of what was a diffuse and disconnected opposition independently came up with that way to break the information blockade that there was an alternative narrative available on the dangers or not of global warming.

An unexpected but in retrospect an obvious product of what I suppose you’d have to call the emergent behaviour of the internet, was the gradual creation of a skeptic community centered about a few blogs, their contributors, commenters and readers. A lot of mainline science and technology practitioners gravitated anonymously into that community, but you’d have to nail them to a cross before they’d ever admit it. Certainly in some quarters we were the furtive equivalent of science porn in the early years.

As it turned out, we played the infowar game a lot better than the opposition, helped in no large part in that our content had an element only rarely present in theirs – the truth, and a truth which could genuinely be argued about by the commentators under the blog piece. When you’re paid absolutely nothing for your efforts, there’s no way to exert pressure on you by the legacy media and its owners, so you can just tell it as you see it.

What’s vital though, is that without a free and unrestricted internet, our views would never have been heard.

We pioneered campaigning using primarily the internet because we had to, and Trump presented with the same problem of an overwhelmingly hostile media, did in essence the same with very little usage of a legacy media which could be guaranteed to distort his message.

We merely bypassed the legacy media, but he’s practically made it obsolete. Since people no longer trust them, they’re now the walking dead.

SOURCE





“Hottest Year Evah” Update

Supposedly 2016 was the banner year for global warming. So what has it brought?

Arctic sea ice extent finishes the year at the level of the last few years:

NH snow extent was at the second highest on record this autumn:

Greenland’s ice sheet has been growing at a phenomenal rate:

Hurricane activity for the last 12 months has been normal:

The US tornado season has been one of the quietest on record:

US wildfires have been below the 10-year average:

The decline in Central England temperatures since the peak a decade ago continues:

Rainfall in Australia continues to defy the drought doomsters:

Sounds pretty much like any other year to me!

SOURCE (See the original for links and graphics)





UK: The great green guzzler con

Shortly before midday on March 16, 2016, Richard Whittemore opened the gate of a 20-acre field near Plaistow in West Sussex to find a scene of devastation.

The babbling stream that flows through it had become a glutinous slick of black, toxic sludge.

He knew exactly what it was. The same thing had happened nine months earlier: a massive chemical spillage from the huge ‘green’ energy plant at the neighbouring Crouchland Farm, subsidised each year with millions of pounds from taxpayers.

In all, the spill, rich in poisonous ammonia, contaminated 70 of Mr Whittemore’s acres. In the following days, 28 of his pregnant ewes perished, along with 35 lambs and the fish and other wildlife in the stream for a distance of several miles. The Environment Agency warned that children and animals should stay well away from the polluted water.

‘Part of my reason for farming is to enjoy the countryside, and to work with animals,’ Mr Whittemore said yesterday. ‘To have this happen twice in a year was shattering. I felt like giving up.’

The toxic spill came from an anaerobic digester (AD), one of a fast-growing fleet of industrial machines that turn food and agricultural waste into methane, which is then fed into the national gas grid.

Their supporters claim they are a cost-effective and environmentally-friendly way of producing gas to heat homes while curbing greenhouse gas emissions. According to the Anaerobic Digester and Bioresources Association (ADBA), the industry’s lobby group, they will lead to ‘stable energy prices, fewer carbon dioxide emissions, and a financial saving for homes and businesses across the country’.

But the reality is this supposedly green energy source comes at a heavy cost to taxpayers and to the environment it is supposed to protect. An investigation by this newspaper has revealed that:

There is a massive shortage of food and farm waste, which ADs were originally supposed to use as ‘feedstock’. They rely increasingly on specially-grown crops from prime arable land, such as maize and sugarbeet.

New Government figures show that in June 2016, a staggering 131,000 acres of UK land were being used to grow maize for ADs – an increase of 50 per cent in one year. Environmental experts say maize is extremely destructive, permanently damaging soil.

Toxic spills from ADs are common and fast increasing. According to the Environment Agency, ADs caused 12 ‘serious pollution incidents’ in 2015 – a rise of more than 50 per cent on the previous year.

ADs don’t just leak, they sometimes explode. In 2014, an AD blast at Harper Adams University in Shropshire destroyed a huge containment tank and the building housing it, showering the surrounding land with tons of toxic slurry.

ADs making gas for the grid suck up £216 million a year in taxpayer-funded subsidies, making their gas more than three times as expensive as that from conventional sources – money that could be spent on the NHS or schools.

The Plaistow AD has been operating without planning permission since 2013 and faces a planning demolition order – yet in that time has received some £5 million in subsidy.

A Government ‘Impact Assessment’ warned last March that ‘agricultural crops are … not a cost effective means of biomethane production’. Crop-fed ADs might reduce emissions – but only at a cost many times higher than that of burning equal quantities of fossil fuel.

Ecotricity, owned by green multi-millionaire Dale Vince, says it wants to increase the number of ADs producing gas for the grid tenfold, by building 1,000 new plants. Construction of the first, at Sparsholt in Hampshire, is imminent.

The burgeoning AD gas industry is a relatively late addition to the ‘green’ energy scene. The first, small-scale plants, fed mainly by farm waste, did not ‘inject’ gas into the grid but burnt it to generate small amounts of electricity. About 400 of such plants have been built.

However, in 2011, the Coalition government introduced the Renewable Heat Incentive – a subsidy that made it profitable to build much bigger ADs to make gas for the grid, despite their enormous running costs. The first gas-to-grid plant came on-stream that year.

They rapidly took off. In December 2015, there were 70 gas-to-grid ADs, and now there are 86, prompting ADBA chief executive Charlotte Morton to comment: ‘Green gas has gone mainstream… Biomethane-to-grid is a real success story for the Renewable Heat Incentive.’ According to Ms Morton, AD gas heats 170,000 homes.

Others have long been more critical. Before his untimely death in 2016, the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, Professor David MacKay, warned: ‘Biofuels can’t add up.’

Farming and processing their feedstock took up so much energy that it almost cancelled out the energy they might produce, so that overall, ‘biofuels made from plants deliver so little power I think they are scarcely worth talking about’.

The AD planned for the Agricultural College in Sparsholt illustrates what he meant. According to Ecotricity, the gas it makes will have an energy output of 49,000 megawatts per year – enough to heat 4,000 homes.

But this, according to the firm’s calculations, will require 60,000 metric tonnes of feedstock from grass and rye to be grown on 3,000 acres of farmland and transported to the site. The AD will occupy 13 acres – an industrial site in the middle of exquisite countryside, the size of seven football pitches.

Growing and harvesting the feedstock, and shipping it to the plant, will consume vast quantities of fossil fuel, mainly diesel.

As well as gas, ADs produce ‘digestate’, which weighs 85 per cent as much as the original feedstock. (Diluted, this can be used as a fertiliser.) To keep the Sparsholt AD operating, every year loads totalling 60,000 tons must be shipped in, and 50,400 tons shipped out.

According to Sparsholt campaigner Stewart Wooles, the 110,400-ton total is the same weight as two ships as big as the Titanic – ‘all being driven through the lanes of Hampshire every year’.

In its planning application – fiercely resisted by residents – Ecotricity admitted that the AD would trigger 12,792 separate vehicle movements a year, mainly tractors pulling trailers, on the narrow local roads – a recipe for traffic chaos.

Mr Wooles said: ‘Ecotricity claims it can get all its feedstock from a 15km (nine mile) radius. I very much doubt that, because they do not yet have a single contract with local farmers for supplying it, and another nearby AD is having to source its feedstock from many times that distance.

‘But even taking them at their word, transporting loads to and from the AD will consume 220,000 litres of diesel a year. That much in a family car would get you the distance to the moon and back five times.’

Yet still the plant is officially classed as ‘green’. John Constable, director of the Renewable Energy Foundation, said that provided it is ‘registered’ by April, Ecotricity can expect to receive £2.43 million a year from taxpayers, on top of about £1 million from selling its gas to the grid. The subsidies mean AD gas costs about three-and-half times as much as that from fossil sources.

Ecotricity and Sparsholt College declined to comment to the MoS, claiming all these issues had been dealt with by the planning process.

Critics say ADs cause problems other than traffic. According to the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), they can provide some local employment, but overall do damage to the local economy: ‘Pubs, hotels, stables, shoots, B&Bs, campsites, wedding venues and any parts of the tourism sector are adversely affected by the smell, the unsightliness and the traffic of a large-scale AD.’

A CPRE report on crop-fed digesters in the West Country added: ‘The countryside around the digesters is becoming an extension of the industrial nature of the AD sites themselves to the detriment of public amenity, the environment and the long-term welfare of the soil.’

In 2016, the Soil Association told the parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee that the area of land being diverted into growing AD feedstock would be enough to produce two billion loaves of wholemeal bread. Growing maize, it added, was ‘subsidised soil destruction’.

In December, the new department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) announced that from April the subsidy per unit of gas would increase. But henceforth, it added, it would only be payable on half a new AD’s output if all its feedstock came from crops. The new policy may jeopardise Mr Vince’s plans to build 1,000 new ADs, although ADs that register before it comes into force will not be affected. Here again, Ecotricity declined to comment – although it continues to trumpet its ‘green gas’ campaign on its website.

Elsewhere, those who live near existing plants must continue to grapple with their consequences. Richard Whittemore farms rare breeds of grass-fed mountain sheep and Highland cattle. On the day of the March 2016 toxic spillage, caused by a flood of liquid digestate from one of the AD’s several open lagoons, he had 500 ewes due to give birth in a fortnight, and had been relying on the field’s lush grazing to feed them.

He was forced to sell almost 400 at knockdown, ‘fire sale’ prices, along with several bull calves. In all, the leak cost him £54,000 – for which he has not been compensated. The earlier leak in June 2015 also forced him to sell 400 animals and the cost was even higher, about £60,000.

Yet the Plaistow AD, run by Crouchland Biogas, has been refused planning permission and is currently subject to an order to demolish it – a decision the firm intends to appeal against in April. It is also covered by a separate order saying it must not truck in feedstock maize – which it still continues to do, in loads that sometimes total hundreds of tonnes per day.

Astonishingly, neither this nor the spillages have affected its subsidy. According to a BEIS official, the subsidies were still being paid ‘because biomethane is being produced’.

The fact that the plant did not have planning permission was a matter for the local authority.

Crouchland’s spokesman insisted the plant was ‘lawful’, saying its planning status would finally be determined at a public inquiry in April. He claimed it was opposed only by a ‘handful of our neighbours who continue to campaign against our farm’. In fact, the planning inspector has so far received 450 individual submissions opposing the plant and a 1,050-signature petition – and just five letters supporting it.

SOURCE






Australia: Big storm in June 2016 in Sydney area

Some extensive excerpts below from an end-of-year climate report by shifty Peter Hannam, environmental reporter for the Leftist Sydney Mourning Harold. In a possible example of a Trump effect, Peter for once mentions "climate change" not once!  Is he losing the faith?

Out of all the weather in the whole vast continent of Austraila, the only extreme weather event Peter could find to mourn in the whole year was a big mid-year storm in Sydney that caused a lot of beach erosion. But storms that cause beach erosion are old hat in Eastern Australia, including places just North of Sydney  like Byron Bay.  Note the following quote:

"Since settlement, the Byron Shire coastline has endured a long history of large coastal storms and coastal erosion and as a result suffered major losses to its dunal system. The properties that lie along Belongil Beach have lost significant portions of their land as the relentless effects of the ocean have eroded away its foredune."

So beach erosion proves nothing. It's routine.

Peter then goes on to temperature, heading his subsection:  "Record breaking heat".  And Peter goes on to give a careful selection of statistics about temperature.  And its all laughs from then on.

The one thing he does not give is the actual maximum temperature for Sydney 2016.  He just says vaguely: "40-degree readings".  But those readings were all in Western Sydney, far from the sea, where it is always hotter.  From what I can gather, coastal Sydney stayed BELOW 40.

He then goes on to say: "Sydney will notch its highest readings since reliable data gathering began in 1858 for each of the main measures: for minimum, mean and maximum temperatures"

Note that date, 1858.  Convenient. You can prove almost anything by choosing your starting point. Watkin Tench in 1790 was at least as good a scientist as many modern meteorologists -- he didn't "interpolate" [guess], for instance -- and he recorded a maximum temperature in coastal Sydney of 108F (42C).  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

See here and also here for a confirmation of Tench's observations

But the funniest bit of all is Peter's link to a study by dear little Acacia Pepler. I have for many decades had the habit of going back to the original text of anything quoted. And it has been my impression previously that Acacia has got more honesty in her than most BoM personnel -- maybe because she is still a student. And she did not disappoint this time.  She was just using rubbishy models -- as they all do -- but reported a run that others -- I suspect -- would have quietly hidden away.

I give the Abstract at the foot of Peter's eructation.  She actually predicts a DECREASE in big storms!  Pesky! And big East Coast storms are actually Acacia's area of expertise.  So Peter certainly gave me a few laughs today.


The storm was generated by a monster east coast low, arguably the state's most significant weather event in 2016, if not Australia's.

In its special climate statement on the event, the Bureau of Meteorology list the tempest's remarkable features. For NSW, it dumped an average of 73.11 millimetres of rain along the state's coastline, the most ever for a single day for any month, beating the previous high set on January 19, 1950, of 68.89mm.

The scale of this mid-latitude cyclone also stretched further, from Queensland to Tasmania, where it broke the Apple Island's drought with record rains.

Also, to underscore the tropical features of the event, all previous storms approaching the amount of rain dumped on eastern NSW had occurred during summer rather than the start of winter, and were linked to tropical cyclones or former ones.

As with other big natural events, social, economic and environmental impacts have lingered long after the storm. Insured losses alone were about $250 million. It has also laid bare vulnerabilities, particularly for coastal communities, of the more intense storms expected as the climate warms. The challenges facing governments include trying to boost resilience and adaptability for residents in a manner that's fair and foresighted.

While major east coast lows have hammered the coastline previously, such as in 1974 and 1978, impacts are likely to worsen with climate change, researchers including Acacia Pepler, a bureau climatologist and UNSW scientist, have found.

For one thing, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture – 7 per cent more per degree of warming – and therefore dump more rain. The impact of storms on coasts will also likely be made worse by rising sea levels, with storm surges riding on a higher base.

Record-breaking heat

For Sydney, 2016 had other noteworthy weather, perhaps none more so than the outstanding warmth even if heatwave peaks weren't as frequent as the summer of 2013-14.

As parts of Sydney closed out 2016 with their first 40-degree readings of the summer, the year's last burst of heat was a fitting end to the city's hottest year on record, Weatherzone says.

Sydney will notch its highest readings since reliable data gathering began in 1858 for each of the main measures: for minimum, mean and maximum temperatures.

For day-time temperatures, the city's average day in 2016 will come in at about 23.8 degrees, and nights about 15.5 degrees, Weatherzone estimates. The bureau will release its assessments next week.

For perspective, it's as if Sydney's average year-round conditions matched those of a typical November.

Compared with long-run average, days were about 2 degrees warmer than normal and nights 1.5 degrees. Should similar anomalies by overlaid on 2016 in future years – an increase within the bounds of projected climate change – year-round temperatures would start to feel like a typical December.

'Persistent warmth'

Looking back over the year, Sydneysiders might be forgiven for thinking 2016 was not a remarkably hot year – the last few days notwithstanding.

The city did set a few high marks, including the hottest April day on record with 34.2 degrees set on the 6th. December 14 was another standout with its warm minimum of 27.1 degrees, the hottest overnight temperature for the month but the second for any month.

But generally few months set new high marks and autumn was the only season to do so for mean, minimum and maximum temperatures. The average of day and night temperatures easily eclipsed the previous high set in 2014 by 0.4 degrees, the bureau says.

SOURCE

Projected changes in east Australian midlatitude cyclones during the 21st century

Acacia S. Pepler et al.

Abstract

The east coast of Australia is regularly influenced by midlatitude cyclones known as East Coast Lows. These form in a range of synoptic situations and are both a cause of severe weather and an important contributor to water security. This paper presents the first projections of future cyclone activity in this region using a regional climate model ensemble, with the use of a range of cyclone identification methods increasing the robustness of results. While there is considerable uncertainty in projections of cyclone frequency during the warm months, there is a robust agreement on a decreased frequency of cyclones during the winter months, when they are most common in the current climate. However, there is a potential increase in the frequency of cyclones with heavy rainfall and those closest to the coast and accordingly those with potential for severe flooding.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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What does Greenland's Petermann glacier tell us?

Warming evangelist Chris Mooney below focuses on a glaciologist, Andreas Muenchow, who studies the Petermann glacier and notes that Muenchow has become more convinced that, over time, the glacier has been shrinking.  It probably is.  Glaciers advance and retreat all the time.  As some melt, others will be advancing -- usually in response to movements in precipitation.   So you can make no valid generalizations from what one glacier does.

And the amusing part is that the Petermann is a SHELF -- floating ice -- and we have known since Archimedes that the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level.  Mooney indirectly acknowledges that by saying that the Petermann is "holding back" other ice.  Maybe.  But if the other ice is grounded why should anything move it other than its own internal processes?

Mooney is just a teller of tall tales

So let us look at what Mooney does NOT tell us.  I have long said that volcanic heat at both poles stands behind a lot of occasional ice melts.  So let us see what Muenchow says about that.  Below is a recent (2016) abstract from an article by him:

Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet represents a major uncertainty in projecting future rates of global sea level rise. Much of this uncertainty is related to a lack of knowledge about subsurface ocean hydrographic properties, particularly heat content, how these properties are modified across the continental shelf, and about the extent to which the ocean interacts with glaciers. Early results from NASA’s five-year Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission, based on extensive hydrographic and bathymetric surveys, suggest that many glaciers terminate in deep water and are hence vulnerable to increased melting due to ocean-ice interaction. OMG will track ocean conditions and ice loss at glaciers around Greenland through the year 2020, providing critical information about ocean-driven Greenland ice mass loss in a warming climate.

Muenchow explicitly admits that subsurface heat might cause the melting, not anthropogenic global warming.  Need I say more?


As one of Greenland’s largest ice shelves shrinks, a once-doubtful scientist has come around to the role of climate change in melting it.

Half a decade before he took this trip to the farthest reaches of the north, Andreas Muenchow had his doubts about whether warming temperatures were causing one of the world’s great platforms of ice to melt and fall apart.

He even stood before Congress in 2010 and balked on whether climate change might have caused a mammoth chunk of ice, four times the size of Manhattan, to break off from this floating, 300-square-mile shelf. The University of Delaware oceanographer said he wasn’t sure. He needed more evidence.

But then the Petermann Ice Shelf lost another two Manhattans of ice in 2012, and Muenchow decided to see for himself, launching a project to study the ice shelf intensively.

He was back again in late August, no longer a skeptic. It was hard not to be a believer here at 81 degrees north latitude, where Greenland and Canada very nearly touch. The surface of the bumpy and misshapen ice was covered with pools and puddles, in some cases frozen over but with piercing blue water beneath. Streams carved through the vast shelf, swelling into larger ponds or even small lakes.

The meltwater was a sign the ice shelf was growing more fragile, moving closer to the day when it might give up more city-size chunks of ice.

The Petermann Ice Shelf serves as a plug of sorts to one of Greenland’s largest glaciers, lodged in a fjord that, from the height of its mountain walls down to the lowest point of the seafloor, is deeper than the Grand Canyon. There’s enough ice piled up behind Petermann to raise oceans globally by nearly a foot someday.

The question for Muenchow is no longer whether Petermann is changing — it’s how fast it could give up still more ice to the seas.

SOURCE




Update: Honest scientist rehired after legal threat

In the eyes of the law, lying to Congress is a crime. In the eyes of liberals, NOT lying to Congress is a crime.  Dr. Noelle Metting learned that the hard way.

She was fired by Obama administration officials for honestly answering questions from members of Congress, instead of reading from a lobbying script prepared for her.

Dr. Metting, a scientist and manager in the Energy Department, met with members of the U.S House Committee on Science and Technology in 2014 to discuss a research program into how low doses of radiation effect humans.

Representatives wanted to learn more about the program before voting on a bill to officially codify it and require a report to Congress.  Energy Department officials secretly opposed the bill. They wanted to spend that money on "global warming" programs.

In an effort to sabotage the vote, a prepared script was provided to Dr. Metting and the other Energy Department officials, which was intended to hide information from Congress and mislead Members.

"DOE management developed a scheme to withhold information from congressional staff," a newly-released congressional report read. "Dr. Metting was directed to omit information from a presentation to congressional staff given during the briefing."

Rather than read from the script, Dr. Metting fully and honestly answered questions.

Not only did the Obama administration ask Dr. Metting to lie to Congress, they also asked her to illegally lobby. They prepared the script in an effort to dissuade Congress from passing the legislation.

However, it’s illegal for government employees to lobby Congress in their official capacity, which the Obama administration asked Dr. Metting to do.

The Energy Department fired Dr. Metting after the meeting.

They eventually re-hired her after she threatened legal action.

While Dr. Metting was eventually exonerated by her re-hiring, rogue Energy Department officials must still be held responsible for illegal lobbying and lying to Congress. The House is now investigating the matter and has released a report.

SOURCE





MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen urges Trump: "Cut the funding of climate science by 80% to 90% until the field cleans up’

Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT and a member of the National Academy of Sciences who has long questioned climate change orthodoxy, is skeptical that a sunnier outlook is upon us.

"I actually doubt that," he said. Even if some of the roughly $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars currently spent on climate research across 13 different federal agencies now shifts to scientists less invested in the calamitous narrative, Lindzen believes groupthink has so corrupted the field that funding should be sharply curtailed rather than redirected.

"They should probably cut the funding by 80 to 90 percent until the field cleans up," he said. "Climate science has been set back two generations, and they have destroyed its intellectual foundations."

The field is cluttered with entrenched figures who must toe the established line, he said, pointing to a recent congressional report that found the Obama administration got a top Department of Energy scientist fired and generally intimidated the staff to conform with its politicized position on climate change.

"Remember this was a tiny field, a backwater, and then suddenly you increased the funding to billions and everyone got into it," Lindzen said. "Even in 1990 no one at MIT called themselves a ‘climate scientist,’ and then all of a sudden everyone was. They only entered it because of the bucks; they realized it was a gravy train. You have to get it back to the people who only care about the science."

SOURCE



The Climate Science Challenge

I keep hearing people say that 97% of climate scientists are on the same side of the issue. Critics point out that the number is inflated, but we don’t know by how much. Persuasion-wise, the "first offer" of 97% is so close to 100% that our minds assume the real number is very high even if not exactly 97%.

That’s good persuasion. Trump uses this method all the time. The 97% anchor is so strong that it is hard to hear anything else after that. Even the people who think the number is bogus probably think the real figure is north of 90%.

But is it? I have no idea.

So today’s challenge is to find a working scientist or PhD in some climate-related field who will agree with the idea that the climate science models do a good job of predicting the future.

Notice I am avoiding the question of the measurements. That’s a separate question. For this challenge, don’t let your scientist conflate the measurements or the basic science of CO2 with the projections. Just ask the scientist to offer an opinion on the credibility of the models only.

Remind your scientist that as far as you know there has never been a multi-year, multi-variable, complicated model of any type that predicted anything with useful accuracy. Case in point: The experts and their models said Trump had no realistic chance of winning.

Your scientist will fight like a cornered animal to conflate the credibility of the measurements and the basic science of CO2 with the credibility of the projection models. Don’t let that happen. Make your scientist tell you that complicated multi-variable projections models that span years are credible. Or not.

Then report back to me in the comments here or on Twitter at @ScottAdamsSays.

This question is a subset of the more interesting question of how non-scientists can judge the credibility of scientists or their critics. My best guess is that professional scientists will say that complicated prediction models with lots of variables are not credible. Ever. So my prediction is that the number of scientists who ***fully*** buy into climate science predictions is closer to zero than 97%.

But I’m willing to be proved wrong. I kind of like it when that happens. So prove me wrong.

SOURCE




The California Gathering That Hatched Plan to Prosecute Skeptics of Climate Change

Environmental activists meeting in this seaside cottage in June 2012 strategized on how to prosecute corporations, institutions, and individuals that don't agree with the Obama administration's view that man-made climate change threatens the world. (Photo of the Martin Johnson House: Scripps Institution of Oceanography)
Just before joining climate change activist and former Vice President Al Gore for a press conference in New York City, seven state-level attorneys general huddled with a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The political activist, Peter Frumhoff, called for them and other elected officials to move decisively against major corporations and institutions for "denying" climate change.

The seeds of that call to action in March were planted four years earlier at a gathering of environmental activists, trial lawyers, and academics across the country in San Diego.

The Daily Signal found this and other revealing bits of information among material produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against Virginia’s George Mason University, home to six academics who urged the Obama administration to prosecute individuals and organizations for not agreeing that man has caused climate change.

The detail is important because Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, demanded that 17 state attorneys general who call themselves "AGs United for Clean Energy" provide documents on interactions among their offices—and with various environmental organizations.

Such details obtained through the lawsuit "reveal the incestuous relationship between climate change activists and partisan state attorneys general," Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. He added:

They are subverting our democratic system by using the courts to silence the opposition to their economically costly, unneeded policy solutions for an unproven scientific theory. Americans should be outraged by this abuse of governmental powers by the chief law enforcement officials of these states.

Smith’s letters to the attorneys general refer to the meeting held in June 2012 in California and billed as a Workshop on Climate Accountability, Public Opinion, and Legal Strategies.

A total of 23 environmental activists, trial lawyers, and academics came together in the seaside San Diego neighborhood of La Jolla to devise a "strategy to fight industry in the courts" over climate change, the House committee chairman says in the letters.

Another goal of the meeting was to find ways to confront what attendees described as a "network of public relations firms and nonprofit front groups that have been actively sowing disinformation about global warming for years."

According to a summary of the La Jolla gathering, the activists came up with the idea of using the federal law known as RICO—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—against the fossil fuel industry.

Congress passed RICO in 1978 for the purpose of prosecuting mob crimes. In recent months, though, climate change activists have sought to use it against organizations, corporations, and scientists that aren’t convinced human activity is responsible for catastrophic climate change.

Early on in the workshop, Richard Ayres, a Washington lawyer who is a co-founder and trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, first mentioned the RICO tactic as a possible weapon against fossil fuel.

Ayres’ environmental organization is a well-endowed, tax-exempt advocacy group headquartered in New York City. Public records show it had financial assets of $268.1 million as of 2013.

Reached by telephone Tuesday by The Daily Signal, Ayres said the meeting "was a long time ago" and declined comment.

Other workshop attendees included Frumhoff, director of science and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, who met with the attorneys general in New York in March, and Matthew Pawa, an environmental activist and trial attorney who founded the Global Warming Legal Action project.

More HERE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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How To Tell Who's Lying To You: Climate Science Edition

If you are a reasonably intelligent person, and you are willing to spend a few hours on an issue, there is a very workable method to discern which side of a debate is not playing straight with you.  This method is the same method generally used by judges and juries in deciding which side is going to win a trial.  The method is this:  look to which side has and provides the best answers to the hard questions posed by the other side.  If one side refuses to answer hard questions, or is evasive, or refuses to provide the underlying methodology by which it came up with its answers, then that side has a problem.  And rightfully so.

I'll give just a few examples of this phenomenon relevant to the climate change issue.

(1) The Hockey Stick graph.  The so-called Hockey Stick graph first appeared in a paper by Mann, Bradley and Hughes that was published in Nature magazine in 1998.  It purported to show a reconstruction of worldwide temperatures from the year 1000 to present, in which the temperatures had remained almost completely stable for the first 900 years (the "shaft" of the Hockey Stick), and then suddenly shot up in the twentieth century in the time of human CO2 emissions (the "blade").  This reconstruction effectively repealed the prior accepted version of climate history, in which temperatures had been warmer than the present at least in the so-called Medieval Warm Period of about 1000 - 1300, and probably also in the Roman Warm Period around the year 0.  When the UN's climate-evaluation body, the IPCC, issued its next Assessment Report in 2001, the Hockey Stick graph had suddenly become the icon of the whole endeavor, appearing multiple times in the Report.  The Hockey Stick seemed like the perfect proof of the proposition that global warming must be caused by humans, because anyone could see from the graph that the warming had all occurred in the era of human use of fossil fuels.

Unfortunately for Mann et al. and the IPCC, numerous people -- those nefarious "skeptics" --promptly began to ask questions about the source of the information behind the "shaft" of the stick.  Thus these skeptics were questioning the ideas that temperatures had remained essentially stable for a millennium and that there had been no Medieval Warm Period.  The most famous of the skeptical researchers was a Canadian named Stephen McIntyre.  McIntyre began a blog called Climate Audit, and started writing many long posts about his efforts, all unsuccessful, to replicate the Mann et al. work.

Requests to Mann et al. for their data and methodologies were met with hostility and evasion.  Over time, McIntyre gradually established that Mann et al. had adopted a complex methodology that selectively emphasized certain temperature proxies over others in order to reverse-engineer the "shaft" of the stick to get a pre-determined desired outcome.

The coup de grace for the Hockey Stick graph came with the so-called Climategate emails, released in 2009.  These were emails between and among many of the main promoters of the climate scare (dubbed by McIntyre the "Hockey Team").  Included in the Climategate releases were emails relating specifically to the methodology of how the graph was created.  From the emails, skeptical researchers were then able to identify some of the precise data series that had been used by Mann et al.  Astoundingly, they discovered that the graph's creators had truncated inconvenient data in order to get the desired depiction.  A website called Just the Facts has a detailed recounting of how this was uncovered.  As a key example, consider this graph:



The bright pink represents data that was deleted from the Mann et al. reconstruction because, obviously,  it would have thrown off the nice, flat "shaft" of the stick, while also revealing that this particular "proxy" had totally failed at predicting the twentieth century rise in temperatures.  Most would call this kind of data truncation "scientific fraud."

Note that the revelations that came out of the Hockey Stick controversy do not prove that the human-caused global warming hypothesis is wrong.  However, those revelations did show beyond doubt that the leading promoters of the hypothesis had resorted to fraud in the effort to get the public to accept their position.  Once that was established, why would you believe anything else they say?

Even today, the Wikipedia write-up of the Hockey Stick controversy takes a position favorable to Mann et al.  If you are willing to devote some time to this issue, read that article next to the write-up at Just the Facts linked above.  I would call the Wikipedia article evasive in the face of highly credible allegations of fraud.  See if you agree.

(2) Adjustments to the instrumental temperature record.  World temperature records based on ground-based thermometers date back to about the late 19th century in most cases.  These records are far more accurate than what we have from earlier times (which are mostly "proxies," like tree rings and ice cores); but the ground thermometer records still have plenty of problems.  As examples, the location of a ground station could have been moved over time, sometimes multiple times in over 100 years; the physical surroundings of a station could have changed (trees could have grown up, or an adjacent parking lot could have been built); the type of instrument could have changed; and so forth.  Most would agree that some sorts of adjustments to the record, known as "homogenization," are appropriate to make the earlier data comparable to the more recent data.  However, here the adjustments are in the hands of small numbers of people who are committed to the global warming cause.  Most of the adjusters are government employees working for weather agencies like NASA and NOAA in the U.S., and comparable agencies in other countries.

As with the Hockey Stick graph, independent researchers interested in the topic have gone to work at their own expense to try to understand the government's adjustments and evaluate if they are appropriate.  Notable among these researchers are Tony Heller at the website Real Climate Science and Paul Homewood at Not a Lot of People Know That.  What these researchers find is that, in literally every case, earlier temperatures have been adjusted downward, and to a lesser extent, later temperatures adjusted upward.  Obviously, such adjustments can create warming trends where they do not exist in the raw data, and enhance what otherwise might be small warming trends to make them look significant and even scary.  Here at Manhattan Contrarian, I have covered this issue in a now ten part series called The Greatest Scientific Fraud of All Time.  All ten articles are collected, along with others, here.

And literally every time anyone looks at raw temperature data, and compares it to current "final" version temperature data, the same phenomenon is found.  Just this week at Watts Up With That, an Australian meteorologist named Brendan Godwin reports that Australia is subject to the same pervasive corruption as other places:

The Australian Climate Observations Reference Network–Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) Technical Advisory Forum released a report in 2015 confirming that the Surface Air Temperatures were being adjusted, confirming the process is called Homogenization, confirming that other weather monitoring institutions around the world are making these same adjustments and purporting to justify why the adjustments are being made. Observing practices change, thermometers change, stations move from one location to another and new weather stations are installed. They refused to release their complex mathematical formula used to make the adjustments.

Go to the link to see how a slightly declining temperature trend at Rutherglen, Australia, has been turned into a more-than-one-degree-C-per-century increasing trend through supposed "homogenization" adjustments.  Huh?

But the most important part of this story is not the suspicious nature of the adjustments themselves, but rather the flat refusal of the adjusters to reveal the methodology by which the adjustments have been made.  Real, honest scientists would gladly provide the full, unedited computer code that made the adjustments, and would answer any questions that would help an independent researcher to replicate the results.  Yet read through posts of people reporting on the adjustments, and you will universally find that they have been rebuffed in their attempts to find out what is going on.

For example, as I reported in this post in July 2015, a heating consultant in Maine named Michael Brakey, who was just trying to get accurate temperature data to inform his business, stumbled on major recent downward adjustments of earlier temperatures in that state.  Attempting to get the details of the adjustments, the best that NOAA would give him was this vague and preposterous statement:

“…improvements in the dataset, and brings our value much more in line with what was observed at the time. The new method used stations in neighboring Canada to inform estimates for data-sparse areas within Maine (a great improvement).”

All you need to do is read my series of posts on this topic, and/or some of the many links found in those posts, and you will know that what is going on is not remotely honest.  You don't need any specialized scientific training to figure this out.

(3) Hottest [week/month/year] ever.  Readers of my series on The Greatest Scientific Fraud of All Time are aware that our government bureaucrats at NASA and NOAA regularly put out breathless press releases announcing that some given month, or series of months, or year, was the hottest such period on record.  For example, in this post from August 2015, I reported on government press releases as to March, May and July 2015, declaring them each to be the "hottest ever" on some or another criterion.  That post also reports on how the press releases are then picked up and repeated, more or less word for word, by every news source going under the banner of "mainstream": CNN, Bloomberg, Washington Post, USA Today, BBC, AP, LA Times, CBS News, and many, many more.

But does any one of these press releases, or any one of these news sources, so much as mention that these so-called "records" are based on temperature records that have been "adjusted" to enhance warming trends?  Given how widespread is the information on unexplained warming-enhancing "adjustments," it is almost incomprehensible that not one of these news sources would even ask the question, "How much of the warming is in the raw data and how much is in the adjustments?"  But if such a thing exists, I can't find it.

I could give many more examples, but undoubtedly you are getting the picture.  A reasonably intelligent person who investigates the situation will quickly find that the promoters of the global warming scare refuse to reveal their detailed methodology, refuse to allow independent researchers to try to replicate their work, and refuse to answer any and all hard questions.  (By contrast, when, for example, skeptical scientists a few months ago released a major Research Report claiming to invalidate all the bases for the EPA's Endangerment Finding, all data and methods were released simultaneously.)  This is all you need to know to make up your mind.

SOURCE




A Republican snake in the grass

Ohio Gov. John Kasich vetoed a bill pushed by Republican lawmakers to extend a freeze on the state’s green energy mandate on electric utilities.

Kasich, who failed to win the GOP presidential primary in 2016, said delaying Ohio’s green energy mandate another two years would be bad for jobs and investment. Ohio law forces utilities to get 12.5 percent of their energy from green sources, like wind and solar.

“It is apparent that Governor Kasich cares more about appeasing his coastal elite friends in the renewable energy business than he does about the millions of Ohioans who decisively rejected this ideology when they voted for President-elect Trump,” Republican State Sen. Bill Seitz said in a statement.

Republicans have been trying for years to get rid of the state’s green energy mandate, only to be vetoed by Kasich. Republican’s latest bill would have delayed the law another two years and made complying with it voluntary.

“Ohio workers cannot afford to take a step backward from the economic gains that we have made in recent years,” Kasich said in a veto statement.

The law was passed in 2008 by a Republican-controlled state legislature, but it has been scaled back in recent years as Ohio underwent a natural gas boom due to hydraulic fracturing. Natural gas production in Ohio has increased 1,000 percent since 2006.

The mandate first required utilities to get 25 percent of their energy from green sources by 2025, but that was decreased to 12.5 percent by 2027 by lawmakers in 2013. Republicans voted to freeze the law in 2014.

The green energy freeze ends this year, and utilities will be required to meet 2017 goals. Utilities will still have to get 3.5 percent of their energy from green sources or buy green energy credits to comply with state law.

Nearly two-thirds of Ohio’s electricity comes from coal-fired power plants, while another 23 percent comes from natural gas and 14 percent comes from nuclear energy. About 1 percent of Ohio’s electricity came from green sources in September 2016, according to federal data.

Environmentalists have backed green energy mandates in dozens of states to boost wind and solar power.

Proponents of so-called “Renewable Portfolio Standards” (RPS) say they’re necessary to diversify energy portfolios, but opponents say such policies force high-cost electricity onto residents.

SOURCE




What Rick Perry Could Do to Prevent Future Solyndras

Departing Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz has announced a conditional loan guarantee for a fossil fuel project—a blatant, taxpayer-backed subsidy of up to $2 billion for Lake Charles Methanol, LLC.

Such federal government meddling in the energy sector is the exact wrong approach to America’s energy policy. By contrast, incoming Energy Secretary Rick Perry has called for the abolition of the Department of Energy. A good place to start would be the abolition of the loan guarantee program.

The Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program provides taxpayer-backed loans to politically favored clean technologies that are “typically unable to obtain conventional private financing due to high technology risks.”

Lake Charles Methanol, for example, is building the world’s first methanol plant using carbon capture technology for enhanced oil recovery.

The risk involved is likely a factor increasing their financing costs. Too much risk is often a reason why projects do not receive financial backing. Or, companies may have better options for their investment dollars.

There’s a long list of reasons why projects do or don’t receive investment funding, but it’s not a legitimate function of government to fill the void for projects that do not.

The Department of Energy’s loan program is a double-edged sword for the American economy. Either the government subsidizes likely-to-fail projects, thus throwing away taxpayer dollars, or they provide corporate welfare, keeping politically favored activities alive while diminishing the innovative role of the entrepreneur and private investment. It’s a lose-lose proposition.

In the first case, the federal government has lent out taxpayer dollars to projects that could not survive even with policies trying to prop up favored technologies.

Solyndra is the poster child for the government’s failure as an investment banker, but the loan program has several other black eyes with other currently struggling companies.

In the second case, the Department of Energy has awarded money to very profitable, well-established companies. In fact, some of the more successful projects in the agency’s loan portfolio have backing from some of the largest companies and financiers in the world.

Neither these nor any other companies should be allowed to hedge their bets on the backs of taxpayers. If they’re willing to risk some of their own money, they should pony up the full amount if they truly believe the technology is promising and worth the risk.

In almost every instance, the company receiving the loan guarantee also stands to benefit from the plethora of federal, state, and local subsidies at their disposal. Their current and long-term success depends on more subsidies. Whether the company ultimately succeeds financially or goes belly up, the policy itself is a loser.

At the bottom of the heap are American entrepreneurs competing against the gargantuan federal government for investment. Because capital is in limited supply, a dollar loaned to a government-backed project will not be available for another project.

This means that the higher-risk, higher-reward companies that drive innovation and bring new services and technologies into the marketplace may not get support, while companies with strong political connections or those that produce something that politicians find appealing will get support.

During his eight-year tenure in office, President Barack Obama railed against fossil fuel subsidies, some of which weren’t even subsidies but broadly available tax credits.

In discussing the elimination of oil subsidies in his 2012 State of the Union speech, Obama said, “It’s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that’s rarely been more profitable.”

But now he’s risking taxpayer dollars for a fossil fuel project as he walks out the door.

The next administration should do as Obama said, not as he did—the federal government shouldn’t be dolling out taxpayer giveaways to the fossil fuel industry, or any energy technology for that matter.

We have a robust energy market that efficiently supplies Americans with their energy needs. If we want to drain the swamp, Congress and the next administration need to drain the Department of Energy’s investment bank account.

SOURCE





Doing the right thing at EPA

The boss-to-be says he’s against federal overreach, not for dirty air and water

Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of Oklahoma and Donald Trump’s nominee for director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, calls himself “a national leader in the cause to restore the proper balance of power between the states and the federal government.” He established a first-ever Federalism Unit in the Office of Solicitor General in Oklahoma to combat “unwarranted regulation and overreach” by the federal government. Federalism is the new shorthand for “states’ rights.”

That’s what commended him to the president-elect, because nowhere else in the vast federal bureaucracy is overreach so out of control as in the Environmental Protection Agency. Nowhere else is the panic in the Washington swamp so pervasive. “At the risk of being dramatic,” says Dan Pfeiffer, a onetime senior adviser to President Obama and a man willing to take the risk, “Scott Pruitt at EPA is an existential threat to the planet.”

Mr. Pruitt and his fellow state attorneys general, who have gone to court to stall the EPA’s regulatory excesses, have rejected the childish slander that because they question the EPA’s excesses they’re for “dirty air and dirty water.” This is odd, because the attorneys general drink the water and breathe the air everybody else does, and have never shown a taste for suicide.

But what they actually oppose is the bureaucracy at the EPA doing things they know they have no legal or statutory mandate from Congress to do. They think the ends, sometimes good and sometimes not so good, justify the means. The left tried that argument, with all the accompanying pressure they could muster, to harass the Electoral College to abandon its moral and legal obligation to vote for the man who fairly carried their states.

Mr. Pruitt earned the enmity of the radicals by organizing the coalition of state attorneys general to block the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s costly and cumbersome policy to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions, so called, in the electricity sector, and to block the EPA’s scheme to curtail the emissions of methane in oil and gas production.

“What concerns the states is the process, the procedures, the authority that the EPA is exerting, that we think is entirely inconsistent with its constitutional and statutory authority,” he told The Washington Post. “The overreach is that the statutes do not permit [EPA officials] to act in the way they do.”

The 1970 Clean Air Act, under the auspices of which the EPA claims to be acting, is long overdue for an overhaul by Congress. If Congress wants the EPA to have the authority it clearly covets, it could expressly and explicitly say so.

Contrary to the hysteria on the left, Mr. Pruitt, who is from a major oil- and natural gas-producing state, is not pro-pollution. “Some people believe we don’t need an EPA, that they don’t have any role at all,” he told an interviewer for National Public Radio three years ago. “I’m not one of those folks. I think the EPA can serve — and has served, historically — a very valuable purpose.” But he wants to hold the EPA to do the right thing in the right way.

That’s a big difference, one lost on Gina McCarthy, the current EPA administrator whom Mr. Pruitt is poised to replace. She promised after the election to make the transition as difficult for her successor as she could, reminding her agency: “We’re running — not walking — through the finish line of President Obama’s presidency.” But in less than a month there will be another finish line.

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Obama Couldn't Win a Third Term, Because He Would Have To Own His Global Warming Policy

In March 2010, the New York Times reported that President Obama “dropped all mention of cap and trade from his budget.” That summer, after a cap-and-trade bill died in the Senate, several sources in the Senate and in the environmental community privately complained to ClimateWire’s Evan Lehman that the Obama administration “failed to take a leadership role.” During his 2012 re-election campaign, President Obama ran to the right of Mitt Romney on energy policy, and he studiously avoided talk of climate change on the campaign trail.

The message was loud and clear: climate change is loser electoral politics.

After gaining re-election, upon which he no longer faced electoral accountability, President Obama pivoted hard to climate change. It became his legacy issue. In July of 2013, Obama announced his “Climate Action Plan.” In the speech, the president struck a far different tone than he did during the re-election campaign. When he was trying to win a popular vote, the President wouldn’t touch climate change policy with a ten foot pole. However, at the announcement of his signature climate plan, Obama presented global warming as an existential threat to our children. At one point, he asked whether “we will have the courage to act before it’s too late.” In August 2015, President Obama unveiled his marquee climate policy. It’s called the Clean Power Plan, and it is a cap-and-trade program. That is, it’s the very policy that died in the Senate in 2010, reportedly due Obama’s reluctance to lead.

The upshot of all of this is that I strongly doubt that President Obama would win a third term, as he claimed yesterday. This is in no way an endorsement of Donald Trump. It is, rather, a statement of my belief that Obama took electoral poison when he made climate change his big legacy issue.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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2016: Historic Year for Climate (?)

Jeffrey Berardelli, the writer below, says he has a degree and career expertise in Atmospheric Sciences.  He heads his post with the graph below, which is correct in saying that CO2 levels have increased greatly in recent years



But that is actually an embarrassment. He knows perfectly well that the effect of that rise is supposed to be a leap in global temperature.  If there is no such accompanying leap, the entire Warming theory is wrong.  But there has been no such leap.  Now that the effect of El Nino has faded, temperatures have dropped back to the plateau that they have been on for the whole of this century.  See my favourite graph below:



He circumvents that awkward truth by saying that the earth probably had its warmest year this year. It probably did. But that is an excellent example of lying with statistics: Using an inappropriate statistic. As my favourite graph shows, all the high temperatures were in the first half of the year. So if you average the temperatures of all the the months of the year, you get an elevated average mainly because of those early high temperatures. But is an average meaningful in those circumstances? Not if it disguises a trend, which it does. An average would be meaningful if there were highs and lows randomly throughout the year -- but that was not the case. The average does not reflect where the temperature was going and where it ended up. In failing to acknowledge that, Berardelli is simply being dishonest.

Furthermore Berardelli is imprecise in what he says about CO2 levels.  They did NOT rise during the Warming event.  I monitored the CO2 figures from both Cape Grim and Mauna Loa right from the onset of the warming -- beginning roughly in August 2015.  And I noted that the 400ppm peak had been reached BEFORE that warming event and then plateaued during the warming event.  There was no rise in CO2 levels accompanying the rise in temperature.  So the temperature rise COULD NOT have been caused by a CO2 rise -- because there was no CO2 rise. And it's now  in the journals that CO2 levels plateaued in 2015 and 2016.  So El Nino did not merely contribute "part" of the 2015/2016 warming event, it contributed the WHOLE of it.  So if we remove the influence of El Nino, we can see that there has been NO anthropogenic global warming for the whole of this century.  The present high levels of CO2 have done nothing.  Warmist theory is wrong


Why is Carbon Dioxide such an important part of our climate system? First I should mention that C02 makes up less than 1% of the atmosphere. But as you may have read CO2 is a Greenhouse Gas. That means it is very effective at absorbing energy in the infrared spectrum (ie. heat). Basically the sun heats the Earth. The Earth releases that heat and it is then absorbed by greenhouse gases like C02 and methane. So the more greenhouse gases you have, the more heat that is absorbed. It's really quite simple.

So why are we so alarmed? From ice core data we know that C02 has never been over 300 parts per million in the last 800 thousand years. Before the industrial revolution (in the 1800s) C02 concentration was at 270 parts per million. But in the last 150 years, with the increasing population and increased burning of fossil fuels for energy, that number has leaped to an unprecedented 400 parts per million.

To repeat what was just stated: in 800 thousand years of records we have never had C02 concentrations above 300 ppm, but now we have leaped to 400 ppm. Clearly humans have changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere. We have changed the balance that has existed for 800,000+ years. That's how an exponentially expanding population of tiny people can overwhelm a relatively large Earth.

Regardless of feelings, this jump in greenhouse gases, most notably CO2, is now driving the Earth's temperatures to record levels year after year. Although not completely done yet, 2016 is on pace to be the warmest ever. Part of that is due to El Nino. But it should be noted that El Nino ended in the Spring of 2016 yet record Global heat was observed well through summer. Since 1880, all of the top 15 warmest years globally, except 1998(an El Nino year), have occurred since the year 2000. We could go on and on about the record setting heat.

SOURCE





Regional voodoo

It was reported recently that Canadian scientists have warned their colleagues in the United States with Trump. It seems science is losing support from governments especially U.S. and Canada. And this issue is closely associated with climate change.
According to New York Times, Donald Trump along with his nominated Cabinet members sided with the idea that climate change is not an urgent threat that should be treated and should be financed with great money and effort. One of these Cabinet members is the future secretary of state, Rex Tillerson.

Tillerson just like other Cabinet members expressed that since climate change is not a settled science then it must not be treated alongside with other much serious problems. The dialogue from Donald Trump which scientists have worry a lot is "climate change is a Chinese hoax and very expensive bullshit".

These caused climate scientists to increasingly try to quantify economic and health impacts for specific regions in shorter time frames. They made attempts to provide these more localized, near-term risk assessments to help inform policy-making for everyone from lawmakers and water managers to firefighters and average residents.

While scientists are pursuing to urge from every individual in the world to large industries and world governments to act with urgency for the solution of climate change, more individual today, as the issue has been franked is urging science in return to give proof that climate change is really that important to settle immediately.

Judith Curry, professor in the School of Earth and Athmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology accepts that Earth is warming but isn't sure of the links between human activity and climate change. "It becomes voodoo once you start trying to attribute regional extreme-weather events to climate change, when it gets down to regional extreme events, like droughts in California or hurricane landfalls in Florida or wildfires in Canada, then it becomes compounded by the fact that you need hundreds of years of data to really make sense of the statistics."

This situation puts science in the risk of losing trust. That's why the urgency to give convincing proof that indeed climate change is attributed to human activity should be presented as soon as possible.

SOURCE





Is global warming going to cancel the ski season? Popular resorts are completely shut down after no snow falls

The beginning and end of the ski season has always varied, sometimes by a little and sometimes by a lot. It is absurd to attribute snowfall variations to global warming.  If we are going to draw inferences from regional variations, what are we to make of the recent snow in the Sahara? Does that prove global cooling?  Inferring global processes from a local one is voodoo science

Unusually high temperatures and a lack of slow is threatening the ski season as popular resorts in Europe have completely shut down.

Some resorts in France have not seen so much as a snowflake in almost a month leaving pistes completely bare.

An estimated 45,000 workers have been left temporarily unemployed, lifts remain stationary and nobody is skiing on the slopes in the worst-hit areas in Massif Central, The Vosges and The Jura in France as well as Charmey in Switzerland.

Weather expert Sandra Larue said December 2016 could end up being the calmest on record due to a 'blocking anticyclone', which can lead to long periods of stable weather, according to BFMTV.

Resorts in the south-western Pyrenées have barely seen any snow all season and some haven't had a fresh dump since November, according to The Local.

It means anybody wishing to get on the slopes have been forced to climb above 2,500m where the temperature is cold enough to cling onto the limited downfalls.

Even high up the mountain in resorts such as Haute-Maurienne near the Italian border and Haute-Tarentaise in the heart of the Alps, no snow has fallen since November.

A top ski resort in Switzerland has had to close its slopes because there is no snow at all on the pistes.

No snow has fallen in Charmey since December 19, leaving the mountain completely bereft of skiers with 2016 registering in the top 10 warmest since Swiss records began back in 1864.

With no snow forecast for at least a week, and with the temperature pushing a balmy 10C, it appears the lifts will remain shut well into the New Year.

The temperature trend in Switzerland is in line with the rest of the world, with 2016 set to be the hottest year on record across the world, the World Meteorological Organization said in November.

Described by My Swizterland, Charmey is a 'fairtytale winter landscape', the delights of the resort are meant to include deep, fresh powder and days in the snow.

With only the odd speck of white, the pistes have been turned into an uninviting sea of discoloured grass.

In Switzerland, the whole year has been up to 0.7 degrees warmer than normal, according to MeteoSuisse - the country's equivalent to The Met Office.

But it's the winter temperatures that have been of particular concern.

In the three months of last winter - from December 2015 to February 2016 - the thermometers hit 2.5 degrees higher than normal, according to The Local, and the trend looks set to continue this year.

Spring was wet in Switzerland, but the summer in Geneva saw a record high 33.5 degrees registered and the heat persisted through autumn.

The ski season looked good in November when a sudden drop in temperature brought with it a fresh dump of snow, but an anticyclone in December melted it all away.

Very little snow has fallen since, leaving the slopes bare and the resorts like Charmey empty.

Some 45,000 seasonal staff have been left in limbo by the weather, according to The Local, with their employers having no need to call them in to work.

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Federal Permits Will Allow Wind Farms to Kill More Bald Eagles

New 30-year permits that will be issued next month by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) will quadruple the number of bald eagles that wind farms will collectively be allowed to kill per year and avoid prosecution under the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.

Under the new $36,000 “incidental take permits” - which are to be reviewed every five years by an independent third party – the number of bald eagles that can be killed by permit holders will increase from 1,100 currently allowed under 2009 regulations to 4,200 when the Final Rule goes into effect on Jan. 17, 2017, according to the Associated Press.

 “The Service’s emphasis on eagle incidental take permits for wind facilities reflects [Obama] Administration priorities for expanded wind energy development and a desire to minimize the impacts of that growth on eagles,” FWS noted. “It does not reflect a belief that wind development poses a disproportionate risk compared to other activities that may incidentally take eagles.”

The FWS explained that the new National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations are intended to “minimize the impacts” of wind farms on the eagle population. “There is nothing in the revised regulations that will increase take, though we hope more ongoing unpermitted take will be captured under permits in the future,” the agency said.

The new regulations will require long-term permit holders to “search for injured and killed eagles” and then “estimate total take using methods approved by the Service,” according to the Final Rule published in the Federal Register on December 16th.

Permit holders will “be required to provide compensatory mitigation to offset predicted take over each 5-year period.”

Potential permittees will also have to “implement all practicable best management practices and other measures that are reasonably likely to reduce eagle take” to less than 5 percent of the LAP [local area population] for a project already in operation.  The “practicable” standard is a modification of the current “unavoidable” standard.

Any permitted facility that exceeds its authorized eagle kill limit would not be fined or criminally prosecuted, although it could still be “subject to an enforcement action at any time for unpermitted prior take of eagles,” according to the Final Rule.

“Only applicants who commit to adaptive management measures to ensure the preservation of eagles will be considered for permits with terms longer than five years,” according to FWS.

But Garry George, Audubon California’s director of renewable energy, pointed out that none of the new technologies used by the wind farm industry to lessen bird deaths “has been proven to work.”

The FWS “may be giving the industry certainty in a permit that allows them to kill eagles for 30 years, but they’re not giving us any certainty that it’s not going to send the population into a spiral,” George said.

Michael Hutchins, director of the American Bird Conservancy’s (ABC) Bird-Smart Wind Energy Campaign, also noted that the “lack of an opportunity for public input [during the five-year reviews] makes the rule vulnerable to legal challenges” under NEPA.

After being removed from the Endangered Species Act list of threatened species in 2007, the population of bald eagles is now estimated at 143,000 in the lower 48 states and Alaska. FWS estimates that it “will continue to increase until populations reach an equilibrium at about 228,000.”

But FWS believes the current stable population of 41,000 golden eagles “might be declining toward a lower equilibrium size of about 26,000 individuals.” For that reason, the permitted number of golden eagles killed “would still be set at zero, requiring that all authorized take be offset by compensatory mitigation,” according to the new regulations.

Under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, it’s illegal to kill or injure eagles – even unintentionally – without a permit. The penalties can range up to a $500,000 fine and two years in prison.

FWS says that “no progress has been made” in its efforts to create an “accurate estimate of collision probability” for eagles at wind farms because “to date, so few incidental take permits have been issued at wind facilities.”

In response to comments from the public, FWS noted that “in the last 18 months, the Service has resolved five civil enforcement actions concerning unauthorized incidental take of eagles… at 15 different wind- energy facilities,” resulting in $55,000 in civil penalties and another $1.8 million to develop technologies to reduce the number of bird deaths.

In 2013, North Carolina-based Duke Energy Renewables became the first wind power company to be found criminally liable under MBTA for killing 163 protected birds, including 14 golden eagles, at two of its wind farms in Wyoming. The company pleaded guilty and agreed to pay a $1 million fine and another $900,000 in restitution and compensatory mitigation.

Last year, Oregon-based PacifiCorp became the second wind energy company to be prosecuted. It was fined $2.5 million for killing 38 golden eagles and hundreds of other protected migratory birds at its wind energy projects in Wyoming.

“No animal says America like the bald eagle, and the Service is using the best available science to make eagle management decisions that promote eagle conservation,” FWS Director Dan Ashe said in a statement.

“Our success in recovering this bird when its populations plummeted in the lower 48 nearly a half-century ago stands as one of our greatest national conservation achievements. The final revised regulations build on this success, taking a comprehensive approach to eagle conservation and demonstrating the Service’s longstanding commitment to bald and golden eagles, responsible industry operations, and the interests of the American people.”

SOURCE




Renewable energy push to hit the Australian Labor Party's  heartland

Labor’s traditional working-class supporters will bear the brunt of spiking electricity prices and power failures in the fallout from the South Australian, Victorian and Queensland governments’ push towards ambitious renewable energy targets.

Energy experts have warned the shutting down of more coal-fired power plants and the rise of renewables risks leading to a future where wealthier households can pay for better reliability of supply while others are left in the dark.

Most of the impact of the ­nation’s rapidly changing electricity market would be on vulnerable consumers who do not have the resources to invest in technologies to reduce their demand on the grid or generate their own electricity.

Australia’s Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel, has warned that a class of consumers could be prevented from adopting new technologies — such as rooftop solar PV or battery storage — by a limited ability to pay large up-front costs or to ­obtain finance.

Dr Finkel, who is conducting a review of the electricity market for the federal government following the statewide blackout in South Australia in September, said people who rented properties or lived in apartments were limited in their ability to install new technologies.

Migrants with limited English, people with poor financial literacy and those struggling to make ends meet were at risk of paying ­increased costs to subsidise households or businesses able to invest in new technologies. Passive or loyal consumers who were not ­engaged in managing their electricity demand and costs were vulnerable too, Dr Finkel added.

The danger was that, as more consumers took greater steps with the aid of technological ­advance­ments to rely less on the grid, the cost of building and maintaining the network would be spread over a smaller number of “vulnerable” users.

The Australian Energy Market Commission has warned that electricity prices are set to surge during the next two years, largely driven by the ­close of coal-fired power stations in South Australia and Victoria and ongoing investment in wind generation.

Australian Stock Exchange data showed yesterday that base future contract prices for March were highest in South Australia, which yesterday had its third major blackout in four months. For companies to buy a megawatt of electricity in March, it would cost South ­Australian buyers almost $152.91, compared with $100 in Queensland, $63.75 in NSW and $54.50 in Victoria.

South Australia, under Labor Premier Jay Weatherill, has a renewable energy generation mix of more than 40 per cent, the highest of any state. The state’s last coal-fired power station closed in May.

Several peak industry groups canvassed by The Australian agreed that, without the correct policy settings in place, there was a danger of large numbers of consumers relying less on the grid.

Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Brendan Pearson said renewable energy targets hit low-income households harder, while the wealthy were able to ­access solar and other incentive schemes, the cost of which was then loaded on to other users.

“This is a double whammy for the poor,” Mr Pearson said.

Victoria’s Labor government has set a 40 per cent renewables energy target for 2025 and Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has a 50 per cent target by 2030. The federal Labor opposition has a renewables target of at least 50 per cent by 2030 compared with the Coalition’s target of 23.5 per cent by 2020.

Grattan Institute energy director Tony Wood said that, while consumers would not realistically be able to pay directly for more ­reliable supply from the grid, those with the means could install some form of back-up behind the meter, most commonly a generator. “Of course, some consumers can pay more to have their own supply via solar PV and batteries or via gas as did the Coopers Brewery that saved them during the (South Australian) blackout,” he said.

“The critical issue is how the grid is priced as consumers change the way they use it. Volume-based charging just isn’t fair and yet moving to demand-based charging is highly controversial.

“The extreme version is that homes and businesses are charged for the grid being there even if they never use it at all. These are questions that governments and regulators are grappling with and the answers are messy.”

Climate Institute head of policy Olivia Kember said there was a real risk of large numbers of households leaving the grid, which likely would be the result of ongoing policy failure by federal and state governments. “It’s not just a problem for lower-income households, but also apartment dwellers and large industry that needs grid-based power,” she said. “Currently we are seeing coal stations close with only six months’ notice, and no signals to tell the market what is needed to replace them.”

Australian Energy Council chief executive Matthew Warren said all consumers ultimately would want to be connected to the grid, even as a form of back-up, ­although there was a risk more would be less reliant on it. “The ­reality is if we are going to have a decarbonised system that is going to be reliable, it will cost more and we’ve seen that in South Australia — it is living proof,” he said. “There are a lot of inequities in the system and they are difficult to answer. The inequities can get worse.”

Mr Warren agreed there was a risk that those with the means to invest in new technologies would become less reliant on the grid and leave behind other more vulnerable groups.

“There is evidence that the largest household energy consumers are by far the poorest,” he said.

Warnings by Dr Finkel and the Australian Energy Market Commission that power prices are ­expected to begin rising is being blamed for generator closures, gas supply constraints and international parity gas prices.

The AEMC warned that, by 2018, the national electricity market would be divided into two price regions: cheaper in the north, Queensland and NSW; more ­expensive in the south, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.

Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg said energy security remained “our number one” ­energy policy priority. “Australians expect access to reliable and affordable electricity and that is what the federal government is determined to provide through the COAG Energy Council,” he said.

“Yes, we have to meet our emissions reduction targets, but it can’t be at the expense of the lights going out or Australians not being able to afford their power bill.”

South Australian opposition cost of living spokesman Corey Wingard said: “The surging price of electricity in South Australia is creating two classes of consumers for this essential service: the haves and have-nots. Sadly many will struggle to keep their airconditioners on this summer … The more consumers that withdraw from the grid the greater the cost that will be borne by those still ­reliant upon it and the greater number of households will be cut off.”

Australian Power Project chief executive Nathan Vass, said ­national energy policy must focus on a low-emissions future that ­included clean coal technologies as well as renewable generation to keep energy prices in check and supply stable. “The closure of the Northern Power Station in SA and Hazelwood in Victoria are driving up power prices and destroying regional economies,” Mr Vass said.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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