The Kyoto Protocol was dreamed up by the Climate Jet-set in Kyoto, Japan in 1997.

One of the first decisions of born-again-green PM, Kevin Rudd, was to commit Australia to Kyoto Phase 1 in 2007. This treaty required signatories to reduce production of carbon dioxide to 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.

As a late joiner, Australia got a lower target, involving no actual cuts. And they achieved that easy target by robbing Australian landowners – they stole carbon credits from landowners by imposing tree clearing bans. That larcenous trick can’t be pulled twice.

Ironically, the death notice for the Kyoto misadventure was posted by Japan, the birthplace of Kyoto, when they announced at Cancun in 2010 that Japan would not agree to any further targets. Japan was shocked at the billions in liabilities they had accumulated by not meeting Kyoto 1 target cuts.

Undeterred by this warning, another ALP/Green government agreed to Kyoto 2 in 2012 – 5% below 2000 levels by 2020.

This target, agreed to without due diligence, is dreamland stuff for Australia. Once the growing population is taken into account, this target would require Australians in 2020 to maintain industries and create new jobs using 30% less hydro-carbon energy per capita than was used in 2000.

Mining and mineral processing, agriculture, manufacturing, transport, tourism, electricity generation, cement, forestry and fishing are the backbone industries of Australia.

Not one of these industries could maintain production while also significantly reducing their production of carbon dioxide, unless Australia embarks on a crash program of building new hydro and/or nuclear power stations. The chance that green regulators or politicians will allow either of these options any time soon is zero.

The use of carbon fuels, more than any other indicator, measures the growth and health of modern economies. The only way to kill carbon is to kill the economy – close industries or send them overseas. The Global Financial Crisis probably did more to reduce the use of hydro-carbon fuels than Kyoto will ever do.

Japan’s exit from Kyoto obligations was soon followed by Canada and Russia. USA never signed, nor did China, India, South Africa or Brazil.

Thus the four biggest economies in our region (USA, China, Japan and India) are not burdened by Kyoto. Nor are our big competitors – Brazil (iron and beef), Indonesia (coal), Chile (copper) and Canada (wheat). We only have the Kiwis and the faraway Europeans sharing the sinking Kyoto ship.

The Kyoto Agreement is a failure. Australia repealed the costly carbon dioxide tax. Next we should get rid of Kyoto liabilities.

Read more, as well as:

• Penguins Pray for Global Warming
• Enviro-Hypocrites
• The Overflow Column for other items of interest

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/kill-kyoto.pdf [PDF, 154KB]

Keywords: Kyoto liabilities, Antarctic ice, penguins, environmental hypocrites, climate summits, false consensus, species extinction, kill climate sceptics, climate summit, natural gas car.

By Ian McClintock.

There is an old scientific tenet that says “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”.

I commenced an independent, comprehensive investigation of CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) some 25 years ago because of the direct potential impact this would have on my farming enterprise.

Farmers work directly with nature and climate as they pursue their farming and grazing activities and if the world was going to warm, possibly catastrophically, it would at the very least mean a substantial change in my enterprise mix and management approach, and at worst, might mean I could no longer continue to farm.

I therefore had a strong vested interest in attempting to understand the science (and politics) behind the claims that were being made so that I could take appropriate action as future climatic events developed and demanded.

It goes without saying that I needed to seek out the actual truth with an open mind as it would be clearly counter- productive to delude myself with preconceived or incorrect ideas and assumptions.

It is a long story but what I found, quite early on in my investigation, is that the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), despite having spent many billions of dollars on attempting to find compelling evidence to substantiate their hypothesis, have been totally unable to do so.

At first I could not believe this, I must be wrong, so I carefully and critically re-read the IPCC Reports and much other relevant information. The result was the same, NO valid empirical evidence 1 has ever been cited. I was and am astounded.

A very careful study has shown that ‘Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming’ has proven to be no more than a politically generated fairy tale, yet the media, most Governments, many scientific organisations, Universities and others continue to ignore any and all evidence that challenges the IPCC claims and blindly accept what they say.

Why?

Read the full paper: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/enigma.pdf [PDF, 2.6MB]

By Kimball Rasmussen | President and CEO, Deseret Power | November 2010
With Acknowledgement to: John Droz at the Alliance for Wise Energy: http://www.wiseenergy.org/

“Wind energy has a highly intermittent output that significantly mismatches demand and delivers energy largely when it is less needed. Wind cannot satisfy the demand requirements of a utility unless it is backed up with fossil fuel plants and/or energy storage projects. This results in duplication of resources and additional costs, with little, if any, carbon mitigation. Further, the steep increases and declines in power delivery of wind put the reliability of the grid in question. The tactic of switching off excess wind supply only diminishes the already weak pattern of intermittency and adds to the per kWh cost of wind. Typically, wind resources are located far away from where the power is needed and require significant additional costs of building new transmission. Intermittency, duplication and grid operations all significantly increase the already high cost of wind energy.

“Wind becomes even more questionable when proven solutions like natural gas can deliver even greater reductions in emissions at half the cost.

“While solar power is much more grid friendly than wind, it is generally the most expensive form of renewable energy. Solar energy quasi-matches system peak load periods, but the peak solar output significantly misses actual electric system load peaks. In addition, solar facilities still produce only about 18 to 25 percent of the time. Without electricity storage, solar energy will not be able to do more than serve as a supplement to other forms of energy. It is not currently a full-scale alternative to baseload energy.

“A Renewable Portfolio Standard, or mandate of 20 percent, can result in a utility-scale duplication of net investment in generating plant of 100 percent or more. The mandate can also cause the wide variation of rate impacts, depending on availability of renewable energy projects and other utility specific parameters.”

Full detailed report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/rational-look-at-renewable-energy.pdf [PDF, 3.5MB]

Wind Power – it’s all about trying to extract energy from Free Air.

Wind turbines try to catch the kinetic energy in the moving cylinder of air that is sliced by the turbine blade. Because air is so light, and wind has a generally low speed (compared to a jet engine thrust, say) there is a limited amount of energy to be collected.

And turbines can only catch a limited amount of this energy – to collect it all would require the turbine to catch all of that air and bring it to a dead stop. Naturally this never occurs and wind leaves the turbine will significant speed and energy. For an ideal turbine in an ideal wind speed the power co-efficient may only be in the 30-40% range.

Conversion of the energy collected by the blade to electrical energy is achieved in an electric generator, where more energy is lost. The generator is designed for the optimal blade speed. If the wind blows harder than expected, the excess energy cannot be caught by the generator and electricity generation levels out, until at about 25 m/s wind speed, the turbine cuts out to prevent damage in high winds. A standard power factor is about 35%.

Unfortunately generators are designed to run at high speed but turbines turn at low speeds. Therefore they need huge gearboxes which develop massive forces for which no effective lubricant is available. At high winds, gearboxes may overheat and catch fire.

For specific information of these and many other factors affecting the efficiency and costs of wind power see this document: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/wind-power-hayden.pdf [PDF, 2 MB]

THE CARBON TAX
By Cliff Ollier

Hurrah, Hurrah the Carbon Tax
Just pay up and then relax.

We’ll stop warming, have no fears,
(Maybe take a thousand years).
Like Canute we’ll stop the waves.
Make sure that the sea behaves.

Hurrah, Hurrah the Carbon Tax
Just pay up and then relax.

Drought and floods will all be gone
(Miss Mackellar please move on).
Cyclones, bushfires, locusts, pests,
Carbon Tax will put to rest.

Hurrah, Hurrah the Carbon Tax
Just pay up and then relax.

Carbon’s nasty, so they say
(scientists, within our pay)
So we tax it through the nose
Don’t ask where the money goes.

Ministers for this and that,
Lots and lots of bureaucrats
Wish to use the Carbon Tax,
So pay up, and just relax.

Hurrah, Hurrah the Carbon Tax
Just pay up and then relax.

All the horrors we endure
Carbon Tax is sure to cure.
We will fix them, bye and bye,
Were we ever known to lie?

Notes for Non-Australians.

Our government proposes to introduce a Carbon Tax, after promising it would not do so at the last election.

Canute was a king (around AD 1000) who commanded the tide to stop rising.

Dorothea McKellar wrote (1904) a great iconic poem about Australia that includes:

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.

Prof. Cliff Ollier
School of Earth and Environment
University of Western Australia
Nedlands, W.A. 6009
(08) 6488 2664

By Viv Forbes, Albrecht Glatzle and others

Grasslands and arable land cover just 10% of Earth’s surface but (with the oceans) they produce all of our food and fibre. But the productivity and health of our grasslands, farms and livestock are under threat from global warming alarmists and green preservationists.

We are afflicted by climate crazies and methane madness. It is poor public policy that condones restrictions on grazing operations, or taxes on grazing animals, based on disputed theories that claim that bodily emissions from farm animals will cause dangerous global warming.

New Zealand was the first cattle country to propose a “livestock fart tax”. Four hundred farmers then drove 20 tractors to the Parliament in Wellington waving placards and banners saying “STOP THE FART TAX”. The proposal was laughed out of Parliament. But the war on farmers and livestock continues.

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Permission is given to reproduce this cartoon providing the source (www.clexit.net) is credited.
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If it’s hot – that’s dangerous global warming.

If it’s cold – that just weather.

When there was deep snow over all the UK, record cold in Europe and Russia, and blizzards in the USA last winter, we were told “That’s not climate, that’s weather!”

Now after a 15 year period of flat or declining global temperatures, when we get a hot spell we are told “That’s not weather, that’s climate!”.

I’m not buying it, guys.

As for the heatwave and fires in Colorado, that is just bad weather and poor forest management. The wildfires are helped by a policy of not back-burning the forests to reduce fuel loadings, and by the idiocy of building housing among the trees without fire breaks between the two.

Don’t try to lay the blame for this on harmless, beneficial to plants, non-pollutant carbon dioxide.

If Rio didn’t give you the message then you are blind – Rio was the funeral rite for the busted hypothesis that was called anthropogenic global warming. Your theory is flawed, your cause is lost, and your god is dead: global warming is now a religion, not science. The IPCC computer models are known to have zero predictive power: nothing they predicted has come to pass. Temperatures are not rising, nor are the seas.

Your prophet Al Gore has led you to a desert of failed ideologies. You may fool the politicians for a few more budgets, but the common people are on to you.

My advice: Jump from this bandwagon before it plummets off the cliff!

Allen Horrell

The Editor,

Currently 99.96% of the atmosphere is made up of the non-carbon dioxide components.

If we don’t mend our ways, by 2050 that number will plunge all the way down to 99.94%.

Love your stuff.

Jack Sturgess
Kooyong, Victoria.

By Keith DeLacy AM, Queensland business identity and former Labor Treasurer of Queensland.
First published by The Australian [$ Paywall]

One policy which seems to have escaped scrutiny during this election campaign is Labor’s commitment to increase the Renewable Energy Target (RET) to 50% by 2030.

I am surprised because it is a proposal that has enormous ramifications for economic growth and living standards, and disproportionate impacts on traditional Labor constituencies.

The problem we have in Australia is when we talk renewable energy we are talking wind and solar only – low value, expensive, unreliable, high capital cost, land hungry, intermittent energy.

According to the Department of Industry and Science wind currently generates 4.1% and solar 2% of Australia’s electricity. But even this is highly misleading because it is such low value power. You could close it down tomorrow (which it regularly does by itself) and it would make no difference to supply.

If we talk about total energy, as opposed to just electricity, wind and solar represent 1% of Australia’s energy consumption. This despite billions of dollars of investment, subsidies, creative tariffs, mandates, and so on.

Solar and wind simply don’t work, not here, not anywhere. The energy supply is not dense enough. The capital cost of consolidating it makes it cost prohibitive.
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Dr David Evans
BSc, BE-EE, MA (Sydney), MS-EE, MS-Stat, PhD EE (Stanford)

[A slightly shorter version of this article appeared in The Australian newspaper on Friday 18 July 2008.]

I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector. FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology, and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.
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