The Queensland State Government has announced a plan to create a new category of restricted land called “Strategic Cropping Land” which bans mining or development. This could blight 4% of Queensland, representing an area more than twice the size of Holland and including many areas likely to contain the mineral and energy resources for tomorrow.
Farmers should not celebrate this cynical move by an anti-farming state government to pepper Queensland with more restrictions on their land titles. (more…)
Beginning January 1, 2011, energy prices will skyrocket in California, due to the required use of renewable energy sources as established in AB32. This will add tremendous stress to an already struggling economy. With more money being spent to pay for basic necessities, less money is available to spend on discretionary items. This will hurt small businesses that will also be paying higher energy bills. Prices will have to be increased to cover the higher overhead costs. The loss of money in the economy combined with the rising cost of operating a business will result in many businesses having to close their doors. There is no better prescription for job killing legislation than this.
Alternative sources of energy are dramatically more expensive than conventional coal power. An article in The Morning Bell from The Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2010 reveals the prices of energy that President Barack Obama’s very own Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects for various sources of electricity per megawatt hour in 2016 (based on 2008 dollars) as follows:
• Conventional Coal Power $ 78.10
• Onshore Wind Power $149.30
• Offshore Wind Power $191.10
• Thermal Solar Power $256.60
• Photo-voltaic Solar Power $396.10
When I was a kid, Mum did the washing in a copper of boiling water over an open fire in the back yard. We collected the wood from the back paddock with a horse and dray. It was all very “green” (but we thought it was just hard yakka).
Greens want us to return to this primitive method for generating heat, and even electricity.
It is sensible for industrial plants such as sugar mills to burn readily available organic waste such as bagasse to generate power. But to deliberately build power stations to run on wood chips is a step back to the BC (before coal) era when forests were clear-felled to produce fuel and charcoal to feed boilers and furnaces.
Coal is an energy-dense fuel, and often has huge deposits in a concentrated area. Long-life power stations can be built close to the coal deposits, thus minimising transport costs and land disturbance.
Wood, however, has very low energy density and biomass energy is always spread over large areas of land. The fuel gathering operation must move every day, with enormous waste of transport energy and displacement of plants and animals.
Burning coal or burning biomass produces exactly the same harmless combustion gases, and a switch of fuels will have no measurable effect on climate.
Even more stupid than wood power are Green dreams to feed power stations with low grade fuels such as wheat stubble or fowl manure. The collection and transport costs for such inferior fuels will exceed the value of electricity produced. It also robs the bio-sphere of valuable mulch, fertiliser and humus.
Burning biomass to generate electricity is Green madness. Speculators should be free to fritter their own funds on such nonsense but public subsidies, carbon credits and market mandates should not be used to support them.
Here is a new slogan for true environmentalists: “Don’t Burn the Bio-sphere”.
300 kilometers off the coast of Oregon there is an undersea volcano, The Axial Seamount. It erupted in 1982, 1998, 2011 and 2015. New Scientist July 9 th , 2007 suggests that there are roughly 3 million volcanoes under the oceans of the world, this one is the only under sea volcano ever, regularly, studied. It is estimated that about 80 % of all volcanic activity on Earth occurs under the oceans. Almost nothing is known about these volcanoes. Scientists do not even have a scale by which to measure volcanoes that erupt under the sea. No system has ever been developed to describe or rate their magnitude like the systems rating Volcanoes above land.
Environment Canada – August 2015 . . . arrow pointing to ’Axial Seamount’- by author
This document aims to contextualise the scientific debate concerning Climate Change (CC) and Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Examining Earth history, it is indisputable that CC has been operating for many hundreds of millions of years, in cycles that span many different time-scales (millennial-plus to decadal), all without human influence. Understanding the causative factors in past CC provides a solid basis for framing the present debate. AGW is a notion which says that human activities, notably the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere, are causing an increase in the global heat budget. That higher-energy state of Earth’s environment it is argued sets the stage for damaging CC effects. Political and economic decisions have been influenced by this claim. Some of those decisions harm efforts to better the health and welfare of the world’s population, including both the poorest and those who are better off. If the CC and AGW arguments are incorrectly based, as we outline here, there is a need to re-consider those decisions.
CC in Earth History
Paleo-temperature (of atmosphere and ocean) is taken as a proxy indicator of climate, since climate is a complex concept that includes precipitation amounts and patterns, wind, etc whose history and future cannot be extracted or classified in a satisfactory way
Earth’s equatorial region has had a consistent temperature during the climate swings over hundreds of millions of years, but the polar areas have varied, thus altering the pole-to-equator gradient of heat energy, which is the principal driver of climate on the planet
Causes of CC (changes in temperature gradients) are dominated by orbital and solar effects, with added signals from volcanoes (both dust and chemicals), tectonics and plate motions, and biological feedbacks
Oceans (which cover ~70% of the planet) are the main heat reservoir, but with patterns of warmer and colder water distributions that reveal decadal and longer cyclicity that is not understood
Global Warming
Earth’s temperature has been generally rising since the end of the last ice age, with an apparent acceleration during the last century, but not since
Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have also been rising more uniformly, now reaching 410ppm or 0.04% of atmosphere
CO2 has been identified as a ‘greenhouse gas’, based on an argument that it traps and reflects heat
The physics of CO2 heat retention are over-stated, as only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (wavelengths of heat energies) can be captured by this molecule
Because CO2 concentration is rising and is implicated in global warming, and because CO2 is a by-product of combustion, energy sources from fossil fuels have been demonised – via social and political suppression of their use, and a push towards 100% renewable energy
There are three key challenges to the idea that CO2 is the primary cause of GW:
Long-term records of CO2 and temperature show good correlation, but the CO2 concentrations lag behind temperature increases by thousands of years. Thus, CO2 increase is the consequence of rising ocean temperature, not the cause
Numerical models of climate systems, which involve simplifying assumptions and methods that are associated with serious artefacts, consistently fail to ‘predict’ the known past temperature patterns. Such models cannot justify the suppression of hydrocarbon fuels.
Average temperatures are no longer increasing despite the inexorable rise of CO2
Human activities are not the driver of global warming (or cooling). Earth’s systems are governed by processes that operate over a wide range of time- and length-scales, many of which far exceed the usual scope of human perceptions. The demonization of carbon is scientifically unjustified.
Notwithstanding a data gap from 1791 to 1859, there appears to have been little or no change in the trends of monthly maximum and minimum temperatures for a period of 230 years, from 1788 to 2018, based on comparisons of two data sets—one recorded by First Fleet officer William Dawes, and one from the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM).
Gergis et al 2009, authors of a major study and compilation of the data, conclude that “Remarkably, the records appear comparable with modern day measurements taken from Sydney Observatory Hill, displaying similar daily variability, a distinct seasonal cycle and considerable inter-annual variability.”
This runs counter to the climate alarmism normally published by these authors.
Bushfires are normal events in this season in tropical and sub-tropical latitudes of the southern hemisphere – in Australia, Africa and South America. Even Captain Cook noted many fires in Eastern Australia in 1770, long before the era of “global warming” hysteria.
What is unusual is the number and ferocity of recent Australian fires.
Destructive bushfires need three things – a big load of dry fuel, hot dry winds and a point of ignition.
A big load of dry fuel, close to towns and buildings, in this season, is a sign of gross mis-management (seen most commonly in public lands). That fuel should have been raked, dozed or burnt in safer weather conditions.
Hot dry winds are not unusual in this season in these latitudes – no use whinging.
But how do 100+ bushfires start suddenly? Machinery occasionally starts fires but not 120 fires in a short time. There have been no lightning storms so who are the arsonists or idiots starting these fires?
Viv Forbes
Viv Forbes and his wife Judy have spent a lifetime in the bush of Queensland and NT. They were both volunteers in a rural fire brigade for over 25 years. They have fought many bushfires and have seen several fires lit – some deliberately, some naturally, some carelessly. One careless fire burnt out their exploration camp in Arnhem Land, another accidental “fire with nine lives” threatened their grazing property in SE Qld, and a deliberate fire on another property cleared a lot of lantana and leaf litter from their property and also made the adjacent National Park a much safer neighbour.
Below is a true unpublished story about one fire we fought on our grazing property during the Millennium Drought. We hope you find it interesting:
“The Fire with Nine Lives”:
The Green-ants said “You can’t burn coal” – so we sent our coal to China. Then our factories and our smelters closed and followed the coal to China.
The Green-ants said “You can’t eat beef” – so we sent our beef to China. Then burger chains and canneries closed and followed the beef to China.
The Green-ants said “Protect the trees” – so our grasslands went to weeds. Then China’s wool cheques disappeared and graziers went on welfare.
The Green-ants said “Don’t mention nukes” – so we shipped those fuels to China. Then Chinese power costs fell while ours just kept on soaring.
The Green-ants said “You can’t frack gas” – so we sent our drills to China. Then geologists and engineers were fired and followed the rigs to China.
Then blackouts came and jobs got scarce, so our kids chased jobs in China.
Today we import what we need and our cash is shipped to China.
And now we sit in flickering light, dreaming of times when factories and smelters flourished, work was honoured, explorers and builders were heroes, miners and farmers paid the nation’s bills, electricity was cheap and reliable, and to produce things was no crime.
It’s time we sent all of our Green-ants to China – there should be lots of work for them there.
There has been NO significant sea level rise in the harbour for the past 120 years, and what little there has been is about the height of a matchbox over a century.
Along the northern beaches of Sydney, at Collaroy there has been no suggestion of any sea level rise there for the past 140 years. Casual observations from Bondi Beach 1875 to the present also suggest the same benign situation.
A rush to judgement by local councils and State Governments by legislating harsh laws and building covenants along our coastlines now seems misplaced.
The falsehoods and mendacity of the IPCC and climate alarmists should be rejected out of hand, and efforts be made to ensure that science, not propaganda, defines our school curricula in matters of climate and sea levels
By Ian Plimer
The 27th COP event is preceded by breathtakingly shrill predictions of forthcoming disasters from speculated catastrophic climate change. Here are a few cold hard facts:
No one has ever proven that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. For more than two decades I have been asking scientists for this proof. If proven, it would also have to be shown that natural carbon dioxide emissions, 97% of the annual total, don’t drive global warming. This also has never been done. Furthermore, if had been proven that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming, there would be endless citation of the dozen or so seminal scientific papers demonstrating this proof. Instead, there is obfuscation and deafening silence.
Continue reading at Quadrant: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2022/11/the-biggest-public-policy-disaster-in-a-lifetime/
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