Switching off the lights for a pleasant “Earth Hour” while we sip champagne by candle-light on the balcony is an annual green ritual.

However, Earth Hour is not such fun when it extends without electricity for 54 hours.

Here is a real story of life in a Megacity during an extended blackout: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/living-the-green-dream-in-megacity.pdf [PDF, 42 KB]

Volcanoes emit huge quantities of the main greenhouse gases – water vapour and carbon dioxide. They also affect wind patterns and put large amounts of other gases like sulphur dioxide and particles of ash, smoke and dust.

All of these have a dramatic effect on the weather events and the biosphere.

For an article on this subject by Wyss Yim of the University of Hong Kong, see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/yim-volcanoes-water-vapour.pdf [PDF, 418 KB]

Peter Lang
21 May 2011

This paper presents a simple analysis to estimate the amount of CO2 emissions avoided by wind generation and the cost per tonne avoided as wind penetration increases from 0% to 20%. The carbon price implications are discussed.

For wind power to be viable in Australia the price for electricity would need to be about $120/MWh. The current average wholesale price of electricity is about $30/MWhi. So wind energy must be subsidised by about $90/MWh. If we have a carbon price of $25/MWh then the Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) need to reach $65/MWh to make wind viable. (That means the consumer must subsidise wind by $90/MWh, or three times the current wholesale price of electricity.)

The paper concludes that as wind energy penetration increases from 1% to 20% the CO2 avoidance cost increases from $100 to $2,500 per tonne of CO2 production avoided.

Wind energy is a high cost way to avoid CO2 emissions.

For a print-friendly copy of the full article see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/lang-wind-and-emissions.pdf [PDF, 49 KB]

The first industries of Australia were farming and mining and these two have been the backbone of the nation ever since. Both are threatened by the taxaholics in Canberra.

Shorthorn and Brahman cattle arrived with the first fleet and coal was discovered by convicts at Newcastle in 1791, just three years after the First Fleet arrived. The first Merino sheep arrived in 1797 and coal mining started in 1798. Since then mining and farming have earned the majority of Australia’s income.

Wool and wheat, gold and silver, butter and cheese, copper and lead-zinc, leather and tallow, iron and steel, sugar and wine, coal and hydro-carbons, meat and mutton, aluminium and uranium, timber and fish, nickel and titanium – these comprise Australia’s Magic Pudding.

But the Gillard/Green/Garnaut Carbon Tax Coalition hate our primary industries because they all depend on carbon fuels and produce the carbon dioxide that feeds our crops. Our backbone industries are seen as dreaded “polluters” and treated like noxious weeds and serpents to be removed from the green Garden of Eden.

Full article: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/value-adding.pdf [PDF, 681 KB]

“The heating effect of carbon dioxide is minuscule. It is lost in the noise of the climate system. That is why the temperature of the planet today is exactly the same as it was 30 years ago. On top of all that, the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere is dangerously low. All living things would be better off if we had more of it in the atmosphere.”

“In a few short years, Sydney will start having blackouts because nobody will build a new power station while the carbon tax stalks the land.”

“It was 400,000 emails, letters and phone calls which stopped the carbon tax in late 2009. We need to resend those 400,000 emails, letters and phone calls, but this time with a sharp­er edge.”

“Finally, the world has entered a sharp cooling phase. I ex­pect growing conditions to shrink 300 kilometres towards the equator by the end of the decade. There will be a ma­jor reduction in agricultural productiv­ity in the mid-latitudes.”

For David Archibald’s full address to a NO-CARBON-TAX Rally in Sydney recently see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/archibald-carbon-tax.pdf [PDF, 203 KB]

“Having said that – one thing is pretty certain, wherever you live, don’t vote ‘Green’ because the Green Party does not any longer deserve its name, which implies a love of the natural environment. Let us hope that they do not pick up too many protest votes in council elections, mainly from people who do not realise this.”

Posted by Artists Against Wind Farms:
http://artistsagainstwindfarms.blogspot.com/2011/05/pressure-on-politicians.html

An anti-carbon tax rally will be held on Sunday 15th May, 1pm, at Town Green, Horton Street Port Macquarie.

More here: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/carbon-tax-rally-port-macquarie.pdf [PDF, 852 KB]

(The Repairman)

(SCENE: Front door of BRYAN’s home. Door bell rings. BRYAN answers door. It is JOHN.)

John: G’day. I’m here about the climate.

Bryan: What climate?

John: Your climate. Our climate. THE climate. I’m here to fix it.

Bryan: What’s wrong with it?

John: It’s buggered. Absolutely buggered.

Bryan: No it isn’t. I was using it this morning.

John: What for?

Bryan: For drying the washing out the back.

(more…)

The truth about greenhouse gases and the dubious science of the climate crusaders.

By William Happer

Will Happer is a physicist at Princeton University. This article appeared in the internet magazine First Things under the title The Truth About Greenhouse Gases.

“The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types—even children’s crusades—all based on contested science and dubious claims.

I am a strong supporter of a clean environment. We need to be vigilant to keep our land, air, and waters free of real pollution, particulates, heavy metals, and pathogens, but carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is not one of these pollutants. Carbon is the stuff of life. Our bodies are made of carbon. A normal human exhales around 1 kg of CO2 (the simplest chemically stable molecule of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere) per day. Before the industrial period, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 270 ppm. At the present time, the concentration is about 390 ppm, 0.039 percent of all atmospheric molecules and less than 1 percent of that in our breath. About fifty million years ago, a brief moment in the long history of life on earth, geological evidence indicates, CO2 levels were several thousand ppm, much higher than now. And life flourished abundantly.

To read the rest of this article, click: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/the-truth-about-greenhouse-gases.

“I think The Australian’s support of the carbon dioxide tax on the basis of the so-called precautionary principle and on the primacy of market solutions misses the point. This is not a real market but an artificial construct concocted by bureaucrats and academics to be rorted by merchant bankers.”

David Flint
A former head of the Australian Press Council.

Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/anti-murdoch-politicians-cant-stand-the-heat/story-e6frg6zo-1226095560219