Green Energy is Part of the Past, not Fuel for the Future
The growing failure of green energy in Europe should warn Australia to abandon bi-partisan policies dictating targets, mandates and subsidies for “green” energy.
I grew up at the end of the last green energy era – solar energy powered our growing crops and dried the washing, but it was weak in winter and ceased under clouds and at night; wind energy pumped water, but only when the wind blew; draft horses powered farm machinery, but they had to be fed whether they were working or not; wood gave us home heating and cooking, but it consumed energy to collect and chop it up; kids walked to school or rode bikes or ponies and ladies took the horse and sulky.
Our only help from carbon energy was kerosene for the kitchen lamp and coke used to smelt and forge the metals for farm tools and machinery.
We also practiced “sustainability” – we purchased little, and most of the farm produce was consumed on the farm by family, farm labourers and draft horses.
We were rescued from this life of sustained labour by carbon energy – a kerosene-powered tractor, a petrol-powered truck, and coal-powered electricity for lighting, heating, cooking, refrigeration, milking machines and pumps. The horses and farm labour were no longer needed and, for once, the farm produced a decent surplus of food for the growing cities.
Wind, solar, wood and muscle power are tools of the past and they work no better now than they did then. Forcing people to use these ancient technologies will just return us to laborious poverty on the farms and hunger in the cities.
Green energy should not be forced on consumers – those who want it should pay for it.
Green energy will eventually be abandoned, but the cost rises for each day’s delay.
For those who would like to read more about the green energy disaster in Europe:
Keywords: Green energy, wind power, solar power, renewable energy targets, global warming, computer model failures, oceans warming, election advice, how-to-vote, Labor, Greens, LNP, no-carbon-tax-party.
BACK in the 1980s anthropogenic global warming was resurrected. Its emphasis was that man-made CO2 would dangerously heat up the world and had to be controlled.
And there was lots of money available if this could be proved. So a multi-billion dollar industry was born.
The first thing was to speed up the rate of warming. This was done by ignoring a large number of temperature measuring stations from cold areas like Siberia, places with altitude such as Bolivia and only one above the Arctic Circle. So far so good.
Two distractions were the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age. Michael Mann removed those with his hockey stick graph. It has since been shown that feeding random numbers into his program always resulted in a hockey stick. It rapidly went from the 1995 IPCC report’s cover and Al Gore’s presentations into obscurity.
There was also a problem with the record high temperatures from the 1930s–1940s. To lower them, the major measuring agencies started to adjust the original temperatures. This can be legitimate if weather stations have been moved or their surroundings compromised. A photographic record of every station in the US shows that 80% are no longer correctly positioned mostly due to urbanisation (green fields are now asphalt parking lots). Logically the old readings should have been regarded as valid and current readings would need to be lowered. They’ve done the opposite.
They started reducing the temperatures pre-1960 (give or take) and increasing them since then. NOAA for example was adjusting temperatures this way by 0.01 Fahrenheit per month, but then went to doing it twice a month. But hey, when you’re on a good thing, do it more often! The Australian, NZ and GB BOMs, and the US’s NOAA and NASA have all been doing this. They have also stopped providing historical data to other weather forecasters.
Parts of NOAA were so concerned with their official figures they established 100 green field stations across the US. After 10 years they show a steady drop, whereas the “official” adjusted figures just keep rising. Satellite measurements, which are difficult to fudge, are also showing a stable or dropping temperature pattern.
So what does this all mean? Our temperature records have been modified to meaningless; the computer models are useless (87 of 89 major models can’t get within two standard deviations of actuals); the actuals haven’t risen for 17 years; our governments do not class CO2 as a pollutant (look it up); environmentalists should embrace the benefits of more CO2; windmills and commercial solar should be junked.
Let’s get back to using coal and gas, which are more reliable, cheaper and are less dangerous (actually beneficial) to our environment.
We have experimented with square wheels and they have been a failure; we need to get back to ones that make the world go round.
John Ibbotson, Gulmarrad NSW
First published in The Daily Examiner 5 Sep 2014
In 2007 John wrote and published one of the first Australian books sceptical of AGW: Planning Ahead For Future Generations, by Highlighting Climate Change Myths. www.lighthouses.com.au
John is still actively involved in slaying global warming myths and fighting for a better deal for Murray Darling irrigators.
Twenty-two years ago a bunch of green activists calling themselves “The Earth Summit” met in Rio and invented a way to tour the world at tax-payers’ expense – never-ending conferences on environmental alarms.
Like any good bureaucratic committee, they soon established sub-committees on sustainability, pollution, development, energy, forestry, water, biodiversity, endangered species, poverty, health, population and Agenda 21 (this item alone had 40 chapters each with its own sub-committee). Environmental conferences became the greatest multi-national growth industry in the world financed mainly by tax-payers via participating public servants, climate academics, employees of nationalised industries and tax-sheltered green “charities” such as Greenpeace and WWF.
They really hit the Mother Lode with their creation of the “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” which, in good bureaucratic tradition, duplicated the work of the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (IPCC). These then created their own brand-names called “Global Warming”, and its proxies “Climate Change” and “Extreme Weather”.
U.S.-based CFACT, along with its Australian partners, is hosting a showing of its new ground-breaking documentary, Climate Hustle, and you’re invited! Following each event, join film director CFACT Executive Director, Craig Rucker and film host and publisher of ClimateDepot.com Marc Morano, for a question and answer session. Get the behind the scenes scoop on both the film and the US decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.
We are pleased to be working with the following Australian organizations:
The film will be shown in three locations: Melbourne, Brisbane & Sydney.
July 12 – Melbourne, Australia
Village Roadshow Theatrette- State Library of Victoria
Doors open at 5:30 PM, film to start at 6:00 PM
Reception and Q/A session to follow Event is Free, Get Melbourne Tickets Here
July 15 – Brisbane, Australia
Sponsored by the Australian Institute for Progress
New Farm Cinema
Doors open at 4:30 PM Get Brisbane Tickets Here
For more information about Climate Hustle, or to buy DVD, Blu-ray, or stream click here.
For more information about CFACT, click here.
We hope to see you at one of these great events!
FILM DESCRIPTION:
Scorching temperatures. Melting ice caps. Killer hurricanes and tornadoes. Disappearing polar bears. The end of civilization as we know it!
Are emissions from our cars, factories, and farms causing catastrophic climate change? Is there a genuine scientific consensus? Or is man-made “global warming” an overheated environmental myth being used to push for drastic government control and a radical “Green” energy agenda?
This film, hosted by award-winning journalist Marc Morano of CFACT’s ClimateDepot.com, features interviews and comments from no fewer than 30 renowned and well-regarded scientists and experts.
These include a number of individuals who were former global warming believers or came from the political Left but were compelled to speak out after re-examining the evidence or watching the debate about global warming degenerate into absurd political demagoguery.
These are people like:
Dr. Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology
Ivy League geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack of the University of Pennsylvania
Former Greenpeace co-founder and ecologist Patrick Moore
UN IPCC lead author and economist Dr. Richard Tol of the Netherlands
and the late Dr. Bob Carter of James Cook University.
Viewers of Climate Hustle will get an informative and entertaining look at the media hype stoking the climate fires, along with the science refuting the outlandish claims of activists and alarmists who want to blame every strange weather event – and bizarre societal evil – on man-made global warming.
According to Australian Climate Commissioners Tim Flannery, Roger Beale, and Gerry Hueston, in their recent report ‘The Critical Decade: International Action on Climate Change’, the reason why Australians are disproportionately to blame for global climate change is because of so called per capita emissions. According to the Climate Commissioners, (21) “the average Australian produces emissions almost five times that of the average Chinese person and 16 times that of the average person from India.”
“The fact is that Australia has the highest per capita emissions of all developed countries, about 27 tonnes per person. This compares to a world average of about 6 tonnes per person, and an average of about 14 tonnes per person in other developed countries. Developing countries consistently point to Australia’s high per capita emissions to justify why we should take strong action on climate change.” (more…)
Professor David Bellamy OBE died recently at the age of 86 and it’s fair to say he goes down in history as one of the first victims sacrificed on the altar of the new religion of climate change.
David Bellamy was a prolific broadcaster, respected authority on botany of the natural world. He wrote and appeared in, or presented, hundreds of television programs on botany, ecology, environmentalism and other issues. But was ultimately disowned by the BBC, never to appear again within their hallowed halls once his declared stance against the new religion of CAGW became known.
I never met him but we corresponded and both appeared on an Australian TV interview. He was very interested in our green sheep, see:
Dr. Howard Hayden is Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Connecticut. He is the editor of “The Energy Advocate” a pro-energy, pro-science, and pro-technology newsletter.www.energyadvocate.com
We have about a dozen pumped-hydro plants in the US. In some places (that’s why they’re not abundant) it is economically feasible to store energy by pumping water uphill to a higher reservoir, and then release it when demand is high.
Hydro has the advantage of being a system that can turn on or off in a hurry. Typically, a dam has a lot of independent water turbines. So you can turn on (say) 50 MW, 100 MW, and so on.
Greenies look at storage systems as their salvation. (Indeed, solar and wind are nearly worthless without back-up.) What they fail to realize is that back-up is far better used with conventional power.
If a back-up system (of whatever type you care to mention) is used with wind or solar, it has to have enough storage to last for days — possibly even weeks — to keep the grid from going down.
Now look what happens in you increase conventional baseload power (the cheapest, most reliable) beyond the actual baseload demand. During times of low demand, you store the excess energy, and then release it during times of high demand. The upshot is that you need to store only something like 20% of one day’s energy rather than 100% energy for many days. (Even a greenie ought to be able to see that 3 or 4 or 5 or … is greater than 0.2.
As to the Australian Snowy 2.0 project, I have no idea whether it makes any sense or not. But if it does, it makes far more sense for conventional power than wind and solar.
This is an age in which some aspects of science have completely reversed. Despite the planet remaining exactly the same, plus the sun, moon, stars, and people, nevertheless what we learned in school appears now to be irrelevant and replaced by concepts empirical physicists like Newton would have had difficulty comprehending. In this new age, new science is driven by funding rather than facts, and ideology rather than ideas. They are interesting times, because the future of science itself may be at stake. If the new trend of politically-directed science is to completely replace the scientific method, which called for rigorous standards of evidence and proof, then it will be entirely up to the politicians of the future to decide what is true or false. What follows is a brief description of some aspects of this new science. (more…)
Every time a north wind blows hot air over Adelaide, some Chicken Little cries “Global Warming”. And when an El Nino predictably causes a hot year like 1998 or 2015/16, some sensation-seeking celebrity will trumpet “hottest year eevah”.
They are watching short-term weather ripples and waves and ignoring the underlying climate tide. Daily, monthly and yearly temperature records will always be equalled or broken. That is what weather does – it fluctuates.
In the medium term, Earth temperature trends are influenced by variations in solar activities as evidenced by sun-spot cycles. These variations affect solar intensity, cosmic rays, clouds and Earth temperature, causing medium-term climatic events like the Little Ice Age and the Modern Warming. There are persuasive signs that recent solar activity has peaked. So maybe we can expect cooler weather soon.
But to see what the climate is doing we must look longer-term and study the glacial cycles. The Milankovitch cycles of Earth in the solar system control these.
See this very informative video by the late Professor Bob Carter:
There are many signs that Earth’s climate is gradually cooling (as Prof Carter shows in the video above).
For example, snow and ice is accumulating.
In the Antarctic, Mawson’s Hut and the Colbeck Hut are being progressively buried in ice.
In Greenland, “The Lost Squadron”, which was forced to land on the Greenland Ice sheet in 1942, was rediscovered 50 years later buried under 268 feet of ice.
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