Climate Change

Jo Nova- The Price of Renewable Energy in Australia

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Nearly a billion dollars for electricity for just one day — $500 per family

The Electro-pyre conflagration escalates.

The cost of electricity on Thursday in two states of Australia reached a tally of $932 million dollars for a single day of electricity. Thanks to David Bidstrup on Catallaxy for calculating it.

As Bruce of Newcastle says ““Three days and you could buy a HELE plant with the money wasted.” That’s a power plant that could last 70 years, and provide electricity at under $50/MW. (Forget all the high charges for 30 years to pay of the capital (in red below), we could just buy the damn thing outright, paid off in full from day one.)

Cost of Coal plants, lifetime, USA. Institute for Energy Research (IER):

Cost of old coal plants in the USA. From the report by Stacy and Taylor, of the Institute for Energy Research (IER)

Burned at the stake: $500 per family

In Victoria, per capita, that means it cost $110 for one day’s electricity. For South Australians, Thursday’s electricity bill was $140 per person. (So each household of four just effectively lost $565.) In both these states those charges will presumably be paid in future price rises, shared unevenly between subsidized solar users and suffering non-solar hostages. The costs will be buried such that duped householders will not be aware of what happened. Coles and Woolworths will have to add a few cents to everything to cover their bills, and the government will have to cut services or increase taxes. No one will know how many jobs are not offered or opportunities lost. This is the road to Venezuela.

If Hazelwood had still been open, the whole bidstack would have changed, quite probably saving electricity consumers in those two states hundreds of dollars. Eight million Australians could have had a weekend away, gone to a ball, or bought brand new fishing gear. And this is just one single day of electricity. If Liddell closes, things will get worse, no matter how much unreliable not-there-when-you-need-it capacity we add to the system. Indeed, the more fairy capacity we add, the worse it gets. NSW will soon join the SA-Vic club.

This is what happens when an electricity grid is run by kindergarten arts graduates who struggle with numbers bigger than two.

This is utterly and completely a renewables fail

The socialist Labor-Greens are already trying to blame it on coal, but we ran coal plants for decades without these disasters. Right now, no one is investing in coal because of bipartisan stupidity. What company would pay the maintenance fees on infrastructure so hated by the political class? The coal plants are being run into the ground. Maintenance is even being delayed to keep the plants running through peaks like this.

No country on Earth with lots of renewables has cheap electricity. How many times do I have to repeat it? This is my mantra for 2019.

In Australia when we had mainly coal and no renewables our electricity was cheap and reliable. Now we are still mainly coal, but all it takes is a poisonous small infiltration of subsidized unreliable renewables to destroy the former economic incentives, the whole market, the system: our lifestyle.

The Liberal Party needs to grow a spine

This is surely a crisis. As long as the Liberals are a Tweedledum version of the Labor party, they can’t solve this and deserve to lose. New renewables installations must be stopped immediately — put on hold indefinitely — until they no longer need forced subsidies, until the RET is gone, the carbon taxes, the hidden emissions trading scheme and we have a proper free market. Then new renewables can be permitted to compete with all generation alternatives, though all new generators will also have to be responsible for paying for extra transmission lines, back up batteries, and any other frequency stabilization required. On net a generator must be able to guarantee that when the people call on it, it can provide, lets say, 80% of total nameplate capacity. When that day comes (thirty, fifty, years from now or maybe never) I will be happy to support renewables. Until then, we are global patsies handing over glorious profits to energy giants, renewables companies, Chinese manufacturers, and large financial institutions.

Lets have a plebescite: How many Australians would rather have a weekend away with their family or make the world 0.00 degrees cooler in 100 years in a symbolic display to assuage the Gods of  Storms?

Australia’s Economic Suicide

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So why are we still in the self-destructive “renewables” obsession which is driving up power prices for no benefit at all to anyone except the subsidy seekers?

Forget Paris: 1,600 New Coal-fired Power Plants are Planned or Under Construction in 62 Countries

Here’s a small sample of how many coal plants there are in the world today.

  • The EU has 468 plants building 27 more for a total of 495
  • Turkey has 56 plants building 93 more total 149
  • South Africa has 79 building 24 more total 103
  • India has 589 building 446 more total 1036
  • Philippines has 19 building 60 more total 79
  • South Korea has 58 building 26 more total 84
  • Japan has 90 building 45 more total 135
  • AND CHINA has 2363 building 1171 total 3534

Here come our AUSTRALIAN politicians that are going to shut down our 6 remaining plants and save the planet!!

Source and read more: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/03/forget-paris-1600-new-coal-power-plants-built-around-the-world/

AuthorAdminPosted onJanuary 21, 2019CategoriesUncategorised

Coral Reefs Can Take The Heat, Unlike Experts Crying Wolf

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Interesting article from reef scientist Peter Ridd about why coral bleaching is not the disaster some would have you believe. From Watts Up With That

 

Coral Reefs Can Take The Heat, Unlike Experts Crying Wolf

From The GWPF
  • Date: 26/12/18
  • Peter Ridd, The Australian

This unreliability of the science is now a widely accepted scandal in many other areas of study and it has a name: the replication crisis. When checks are made to replicate or confirm scientific results, it is regularly found that about half have flaws.

Scientists from James Cook University have just published a paper on the bleaching and death of corals on the Great Barrier Reef and were surprised that the death rate was less than they expected, because of the adaptability of corals to changing temperatures.

It appears as though they exaggerated their original claims and are quietly backtracking.

To misquote Oscar Wilde, to exaggerate once is a misfortune, to do it twice looks careless, but to do it repeatedly looks like unforgivable systemic unreliability by some of our major science organisations.

The very rapid adaptation of corals to high temperatures is a well-known phenomenon; besides, if you heat corals in a given year, they tend to be less susceptible in the future to overheating. This is why corals are one of the least likely species to be affected by climate change, irrespective of whether you believe the climate is changing by natural fluctuations or because of human influence.

Corals have a unique way of dealing with changing temperature, by changing the microscopic plants that live inside them. These microscopic plants, called zooxanthellae, give the coral energy from the sun through photosynthesis in exchange for a comfortable home inside the coral. When the water gets hot, these little plants effectively become poisonous to the coral and the coral throws them out, which turns the coral white — that is, it bleaches.

But most of the time, the coral will recover from the bleaching. And here’s the trick: the corals take in new zooxanthellae, that floats around in the water quite naturally, and can selectselecting different species that are better suited to hot weather.

Most other organisms have to change their genetic make-up to deal with temperature changes — something that can take many generations. But corals can do it in a few weeks by just changing the plants that live in them.

They have learned a thing or two in a couple of hundred million years of evolution.

The problem here is that the world has been completely misled about the effects of bleaching by scientists who rarely mention the spectacular regrowth that occurs. For example, the 2016 bleaching event supposedly killed 93 per cent, or half, or 30 per cent of the reef, depending on which headline and scientist you want to believe.

However, the scientists looked only at coral in very shallow water — less than 2m below the surface — which is only a small fraction of all the coral, but by far the most susceptible to getting hot in the tropical sun.

A recent study found that deep-water coral (down to more than 40m) underwent far less bleaching, as one would expect. I estimate that less than 8 per cent of the Barrier Reef coral died. That might still sound like a lot, but considering that there was a 250 per cent increase in coral between 2011 and 2016 for the entire southern zone, an 8 per cent decrease is nothing to worry about. Coral recovers fast.

But this is just the tip of the exaggeration iceberg. Some very eminent scientists claim that bleaching never happened before the 1980s and is entirely a man-made phenomenon. This was always a ridiculous proposition.

A recent study of 400-year-old corals has found that bleaching has always occurred and is no more common now than in the past. Scientists have also claimed that there has been a 15 per cent reduction in the growth rate of corals. However, some colleagues and I demonstrated that there were ­serious errors in their work and that, if anything, there has been a slight increase in the coral growth rate over the past 100 years.

This is what one would expect in a gently warming climate. Corals grow up to twice as fast in the hotter water of Papua New Guinea and the northern Barrier Reef than in the southern reef. I could quote many more examples.

Read the full GWPF story  here.

Peter Ridd was, until fired this year, a physicist at James Cook University’s marine geophysical laboratory.

More Extreme Weather Events?

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When the earth failed to burst into flames, or even to heat at the rates the computers predicted, the activists pointed to what they called extreme weather events such as tornadoes and cyclones. They were supposed to increase in number and intensity. 

The reality? Not so much. In fact the long term trend is actually the reverse of that, at least in Australia and the U.S.

From wattsupwiththat.com

2018 will be the first year with no violent tornadoes in the United States

 / 6 hours ago December 27, 2018

 

From LMT Online

In the whirlwind that is 2018, there has been a notable lack of high-end twisters.

We’re now days away from this becoming the first year in the modern record with no violent tornadoes touching down in the United States. Violent tornadoes are the strongest on a 0 to 5 scale, or those ranked EF4 or EF5.

It was a quiet year for tornadoes overall, with below normal numbers most months. Unless you’re a storm chaser, this is not bad news. The low tornado count is undoubtedly a big part of the reason the 10 tornado deaths in 2018 is also vying to be a record low.

While we still have several days to go in 2018, and some severe weather is likely across the South to close it out, odds favor the country making it the rest of the way without a violent tornado.

If and when that happens, it will be the first time since the modern record began in 1950.

2005 came close to reaching this mark. That year, the first violent tornado didn’t occur until Nov. 15, much later than typical for the first of the year, which tends to come in early spring.

This year’s goose-egg may seem to fit a recent pattern.

In simple terms, there have been down-trends in violent tornado numbers both across the entire modern period, and when looking at just the period since Doppler radar was fully implemented across the country in the mid-1990s. A 15-year average as high as 13.7 in the mid-1970s will drop to 5.9 next year.

Expanding to include all “intense” tornadoes, or those F/EF3+, this year’s 12 is also poised to set a record for the least.

Right now, the mark there is held by 1987 when there were 15 F3+ tornadoes. As with violent tornadoes, this grouping is also exhibiting both a short and long-term decrease in annual numbers, likely for similar reasons.

The causes for 2018′s lack of violent tornadoes are many, but one key factor is high pressure tending to be more dominant than normal throughout peak season this past spring. This was particularly so during April and May, when tornado numbers were below to well below normal.

Although the country ended up seeing a number of memorable tornado events after the spring, including several this fall, in most years over half of the tornadoes occur from March through May. Making up those numbers is difficult at other times of the year when ingredients for them are less likely.

Despite the downtrend in annual numbers, studies continue to find that more tornadoes are happening on fewer days. In that light, it is certainly possible this drought won’t last much longer

Another Al Gore Failed Prediction

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From wattupwiththat.com

Ten years ago, @AlGore predicted the North polar ice cap would be gone. Inconveniently, it’s still there

 / 56 mins ago December 16, 2018

On December 14, 2008, former presidential candidate Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap would be completely ice free in five years. As reported on WUWT, Gore made the prediction to a German TV audience at the COP15 Climate Conference:

gore_2008_icefree-2013

Al warned them that “the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in 5 years.”

Watch the video:

Here’s the polar ice cap extent today:

As you can see from the graph above, Arctic sea ice came nowhere close to disappearing during the summer minimum, and has rebounded to be within 2 standard deviations in the last few weeks.

During the summer minimum, the North polar ice cap looked like this:

Arctic sea ice from September 18 – 24, 2018, image from MODIS

The sea ice extent today:

Why does anyone listen to Al Gore ?

The Point of No Return (Again and Again)

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Have you noticed something missing this year? No? Each time just before these conferences happen the World Meteorological Organisation normally pronounces that the current year will be the hottest or second hottest on record, often weeks before the end of the year. Then when the figures are actually collated and published well after the climate scare conference, a quiet retraction is published that says “We didn’t quite lie, but it wasn’t exactly true.” Maybe it’s because nobody’s listening any more, except the ABC.

Tim Blair on the religion of “Point of No Return”

It’s that time of year again when we join with friends and family to celebrate the annual Point of No Return religious festival.

On Sunday morning hundreds of politicians, government officials and scientists will gather in the grandeur of the International Congress Centre in Katowice, Poland.

It will be a familiar experience for many. For 24 years the annual UN climate conference has served up a reliable diet of rhetoric, backroom talks and dramatic last-minute deals aimed at halting global warming.

But this year’s will be a grimmer affair – by far. As recent reports have made clear, the world may no longer be hovering at the edge of destruction but has probably staggered beyond a crucial point of no return.

Hooray! This fine tradition truly unites all people and cultures in a spirit of holy panic and demands for cash prizes. Let’s take a look at how the world marked the Point of No Return in years past:

2017:

We’re Now Even Closer to the Point of No Return

2016:

Climate change escalating so fast it is ‘beyond point of no return’

2015:

Climate Change Goes Past Point Of No Return

2014:

Passing the “Point of No Return” on Climate Change

2013:

The Fast-Approaching ‘Point of No Return’ for Climate Change

2012:

Warming nears point of no return, scientists say

2011:

When do we hit the point of no return for climate change?

 Embedded video

BBC News (World)

✔

@BBCWorld

 “We’re facing a man-made disaster of global scale… time is running out” – Sir David Attenborough issues warning at UN Climate Conference #COP24 in Poland http://bbc.in/2Pd3yfP 

We are passing the point of no return on climate change

2009:

Climate Change: The Point of No Return

2008:

ARCTIC: POINT OF NO RETURN?

2007:

Beyond the Point of No Return: It’s too late to stop climate change – so what do we do now?

2006:

Environment in crisis: ‘We are past the point of no return’

2005:

Climate’s Point of No Return

2004:

Is Greenland Ice Sheet passing “Point of No Return”?

2003:

Beyond these temperature thresholds, evidence suggests a ‘point of no return’,

It’s quite mild here in Sydney today, by the way. How’s the end of the world going in your neighbourhood?

Read the full article here

So What Was The Perfect Pre-Industrial Global Temperature?

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According to the Climate Change Alarmism crowd the earth was once perfect in every way, then we started to use fossil fuels. We don’t have enough actual temperature measurements from back then so to find out what it was like in 1850 you can use the climate models to “hindcast” the temperatures. Yes, those same models that failed to forecast the 20 year pause.

And here we are spending trillions of dollars to fight a problem we can’t actually measure or define.

From “Watts Up With That”

What Was Earth’s Preindustrial Global Mean Surface Temperature, In Absolute Terms Not Anomalies, Supposed to Be?

 / 8 hours ago November 27, 2018

And What Have the Average Temperatures of Earth’s Surfaces Been Recently in Absolute Terms, Not Anomalies?

The answers may surprise you.

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED. The update is near the end of the post.

Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) have cranked up their alarmist propaganda, with the IPCC now pushing the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 deg C above preindustrial global surface temperatures.

That, of course, initiates the title question, What Was Earth’s Preindustrial Global Mean Surface Temperature, In Absolute Terms Not Anomalies, Supposed to Be?

Four years ago, in the post On the Elusive Absolute Global Mean Surface Temperature – A Model-Data Comparison (WattsUpWithThat cross post is here), we illustrated and discussed the wide (3-deg C) span in the climate model simulations of global surface temperatures on an absolute, not anomaly, basis. Figure 1 below is Figure 5 from that post. In that post, we started the graphs in the year 1880 because the GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Index (LOTI) and NOAA NCDC (now NOAA NCEI) data started that year.

Figure 1

However, the spreadsheets I prepared for that post had the climate model hindcast outputs as far back as their common start year of 1861. (I say common start year of 1861 because the outputs of some models stored in the CMIP5 archive start in 1850 while others begin in 1861.) So I couldn’t use the climate model outputs stored on that spreadsheet for this post.

Note: The IPCC’s new definition of preindustrial, as stated in their Changes to the Underlying Scientific-Technical Assessment to ensure consistency with the approved Summary for Policymakers:

The reference period 1850-1900 is used to approximate pre-industrial global mean surface temperature (GMST).

It’s odd that the IPCC selected those years when not all the climate models used in their 5th assessment report (those stored in the CMIP5 archive) for simulations of past and future climates extend back to 1850. Some only extended back to 1861. Then again, no one expects the IPCC to be logical because they’re a political, not scientific, entity.

Luckily, the ensemble members that meet the criteria of this post do extend back to 1850. So we’ll use the ensemble member outputs for the full IPCC-defined preindustrial period of 1850 to 1900 for this post.

ACCORDING TO THE CMIP5-ARCHIVED CLIMATE MODELS THERE’S A WIDE RANGE OF SIMULATED PREINDUSTRIAL GLOBAL MEAN SURFACE TEMPERATURES

The source of the outputs of the climate model simulations of global mean surface temperature used in this post is the KNMI Climate Explorer. Specifically, as a pre-qualifier, I used the outputs of the simulations of Surface Air Temperatures (TAS) from 90S-90N from the 81 individual ensemble members. From those, I identified the ensemble member with the warmest global mean surface temperature for the preindustrial period and the ensemble member with the coolest global mean surface temperature for the same period. For those who wish to confirm my results, the coolest (lowest average absolute GMST for the period of 1850-1900) is identified as IPSL-CM5A-LR EM-3 at the KNMI Climate Explorer, and the warmest (highest average absolute GMST for the period of 1850-1900) is identified there as GISS-E2-H p3. The average global mean surface temperatures for the other 79 ensemble members during preindustrial times rest between the averages of the two ensemble members.

The outputs of the simulations of global mean surface temperature from those two (the warmest and coolest absolute temperatures) ensemble members for the preindustrial period of 1850-1900 are illustrated in Figure 2, along with their respective period-average global mean surface temperatures for the IPCC-defined preindustrial period of 1850 to 1900 (dashed lines).

Figure 2

As noted at the bottom of the illustration, The Scientists Behind the CMIP5-Archived Models (Used By the IPCC for AR5) Obviously Believe Earth’s Preindustrial Average Surface Temperature Should Be Somewhere Between 12.0 Deg C and 15.0 Deg C. The modelers at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and at the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (IPSL) would NOT have archived those models if they hadn’t believed they were of value.

Read the rest of the article here

Jo Nova: Wind Turbines New Apex Predator

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Everything that the environmentalists and Greens demand that we have to do to “save the environment” just does the opposite.

From joannenovaova.com.au

Wind Turbines are new top predator in the ecosystem

Wind turbines either kill or scare away three quarters of buzzards, hawks and kites at three sites in India. That makes them the new “top predator” in the ecosystem according to new research.  Perhaps not the niche that Greens were expecting wind farms to occupy.

It’s not all bad news though, fan-throated lizards are pretty happy about not being dinner.

h/t GWPF

75% of Buzzards Vote For Coal Power

Lizards vote for wind.

Wind farms are the ‘new apex predators’: Blades kill off 75% of buzzards, hawks and kites that live nearby, study shows

Harry Pettit for Daily Mail Online

  • Predatory bird numbers are four times higher in areas away from wind turbines
  • This is having a devastating ’ripple effect’ across the food chain
  • It means numbers of certain small animals are growing unchecked

Wind turbines are the world’s new ‘apex predators’, wiping out buzzards, hawks and other carnivorous birds at the top of the food chain, say scientists. A study of wind farms in India found that predatory bird numbers drop by three quarters in areas around the turbines. This is having a ‘ripple effect’ across the food chain, with small mammals and reptiles adjusting their behaviour as their natural predators disappear from the skies.

Study coauthor Professor Maria Thaker said:
‘Every time a top predator is removed or added, unexpected effects trickle through the ecosystem. What is actually happening here is the wind-turbines are akin to adding a top predator to the ecosystem.’

From the abstract:

The cascading effects of wind turbines on lizards include changes in behaviour, physiology and morphology that reflect a combination of predator release and density-dependent competition. By adding an effective trophic level to the top of food webs, we find that wind farms have emerging impacts that are greatly underestimated. There is thus a strong need for an ecosystem-wide view when aligning green-energy goals with environment protection.

300,000 wind turbines too late.

Paul Homewood: Why The Weather Doomsayers Need To Take A Raincheck

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In Australia we only have about 100 years of weather data, but in the UK they have about 250 years of reliable measurements. So if global warming were a thing it should be apparent there. If extreme weather events were becoming more frequent as we are regularly assured by celebrity scientists, movie stars and politicians, you would see a trend in the UK wouldn’t you? Apparently not.

From Watts Up With That:

Why The Weather Doomsayers Need To Take A Raincheck

 / 11 hours ago October 26, 2018

Recent UK climate trends offer absolutely no support for outlandish forecasts, which are of course the product of those computer models we hear so much about.

by Paul Homewood

How often do we hear claims that British weather is getting more extreme? Whether it’s heatwaves, droughts, rain or storms, it’s always ‘worse than it used to be’. We even had David Cameron saying that the winter floods of 2014 were linked to climate change. And it is not just laymen who make claims like these, but climate scientists. It does not help, of course, that we tend to have selective memories about the past.

However a new study by the Global Warming Policy Foundation has closely examined official Met Office data and found that such claims are baseless. In reality, apart from the fact that it is slightly warmer than a century ago, the UK climate has changed remarkably little during that time.

In particular, the report – Defra Versus Met Office: Fact-checking the State of the UK Climate  – finds that:

  • Heatwaves have been much less intense in the last decade than before, with no summer comparable to the heat of 1976 since then. (See Fig 1)
  • There has been a marked reduction in the number of extremely cold days in the last three decades.
  • Apart from Scotland, where rainfall has been increasing in recent years, there has been little long-term trend in precipitation. (See Fig 2)
  • In particular, winters are no wetter than they used to be in England and Wales, and summers no drier, contrary to popular myth.
  • Rainfall has also not become more extreme. The wettest year since records started in 1766 was 1872, followed by 1768. The wettest decade was the 1870s, and the wettest month was October 1903.
  • Droughts are also not becoming more common or severe.

 

Figure 1: Distribution of extreme temperatures in Central England Temperature Record

(a) days over 30C; (b) days under -10C

Fig 2 : Long Term Precipitation Record for England & Wales

In recent years the Met Office has taken great delight in naming all storms, although most of these have not technically reached storm force. In reality, as their own figures show, storms have not got any worse in the last four decades.

And despite misinformation to the contrary, sea levels around our coasts are rising only very slowly, and at a similar rate to the early 20th century.

What about temperatures? The data shows that there was a steady rise during the 1990s and early 2000s, but that this rise has since petered out and average temperatures levelled off. There was a very similar increase in temperatures in the early 18th century.

Even this summer was not a record-breaker. According to the long-running Central England Temperature series, it was only the fifth-warmest, and not even as hot as the summer of 1826.

The British climate has always been notable for its volatility, with big swings in weather from week to week, month to month, and year to year. This variability swamps whatever underlying trends there may be. But what we do know is that whatever weather we get now, we have had in the past.

Full story here