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Bob Carter received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Heartland Institute in Washington in June 2015.
He was a major player at the COP21 conference in Paris
Back Issues of Climate News
Climate News: December 2014
By Alan Moran
The science is settled
More trouble for the global warming theory – historically warming is confirmed as preceding the increase in CO2 .
A new paper by X.H. Zhao and X.S.Feng of the Chinese Academy of Science affirms previous studies that the rise in global temperature in the followed changes in solar activity by about 30-40 years. But their findings are that there is neither a strong nor stable relationship between temperatures and carbon dioxide increases.
WHO continues the UN tradition of fabricating disaster from man-made climate change. This time it accepts the evidence of rising oceans but assumes some people, rather like cattle, will fail to recognise the water lapping at their ankles and will drown and just invents deaths from malaria. Indur Goklany takes down the WHO report which predicts a quarter of a million extra deaths a year after 2030.
The warm-mongering media is all a-quote with BoM propaganda saying 2014 is the hottest year on record. A couple of on-line messages was all it took from Jo Nova to disprove this and asks when the BoM will realise that we have satellite data.
The march of subsidised renewables
The NY Times reports that renewables like wind are now winning markets on price. Oh what good news – now we can stop the subsidies that add 12 per cent to Australian electricity prices and will, if left unchanged, cost the economy $29-37 billion
Unfortunately, wind fans have been saying this for 30 years
In the US the subsidy to wind expired at the end of last year after having been in place for 30 years, at a cost of $7.3 billion in subsidies per year. One highly regarded source estimated the subsidy in 2010 was $56 per MWh generated (Australian coal generated electricity gets no subsidy and supplies the market at under $40 per MWh).
The South Australian Premier hosted an “emergency Clean Energy Summit” on December 1. Delegates comprised South Australian public servants and green energy interests. Unsurprisingly, the summit’s communique called the Renewable Energy Target to be continued with its on-going subsidies to the industry. It cited Professor Garnaut as saying that such subsidies “would create a cost advantage for local industry into the long term future”.
No Surrender is the call of the Australian renewable energy lobbyists, who want the whole enchilada of subsidies to ensure continued increased supply. But according to the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute’s Craig Froome, who has a Masters degree in Environmentalism, new installations are down because of fears of a cutback in government subsidies. Mr Froome’s work is supported by the CSIRO and other government funding.
Rupert Darville, one of the experts who have contributed to the forthcoming Climate Change 2014, has published the sad history of the demise of the UK electricity industry, which sacrificed the world lead it achieved following the Thatcher reforms, on the altar of green subsidies and regulatory interventions.
Pandanomics and diplomacy
China’s pledge on emissions means last year’s 2.7 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent becomes 4.8 billion in 2020 and continues to rise to 2030.
Coal’s share declines due to nuclear increasing. Wind forecast increases are pure speculation and President Obama has been shown to be the fool that he is for claiming China has agreed to his own suicidal carbon-suppressing agenda in return for $100 billion a year in subsidies from developed to developing countries.
Lima Beans: Talking from Peru, sociologist-cum-climate guru, Christiana Figueres, thinks the $100 billion a year is insufficient for the climate change fund being called for from 2020 (within which Obama has sought to commit $3 billion to his successor). China agrees with her. Actually the funding will mostly evaporate with the failure of the Paris Summit this time next year. And, that's just as well since UN research of people's concerns in a survey with 6 million respondents put climate change dead last of 16 priorities offered.
Thin end of the wedge – the Commonwealth has cut back alms to international climate propagandists by $1 million a year.
Finally, the rent seekers discover another weapon to add to their armoury. Apparently climate change will promote violence against women.
:Climate News: November 14, 2014
By Alan Moran
America's chop suey: Promises, promises
Joy and consternation as the US says it will move in earnest to curb emissions. Obama celebrates his nation’s self-destructive measures but China’s reciprocal pledge is 16 years away. Even Laura Tingle the Financial Review’s resident greenhouse alarmist sees the agreement as a retreat from punitive measures and a faith in technology changes meaning relatively low cost transition, though she remains credulous that the US will, in the face of a Republican legislature achieve its vaunted 28 per cent reduction in emissions and is wide eyed in appreciation that China “would seek to expand zero-emission energy sources to around 20 per cent by 2030”.
Lomborg was more analytical pointing out “but China promised only 20 per cent would come from non-fossil fuels … China already plans to get 18 per cent of its energy from non-fossil fuels and solar and wind will make up only about 3 per cent. He points out that an earlier US administration with Al Gore as VP promised a 7 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions at Kyoto in 1998 but the outcome was a 9 per cent increase. He cruelly draws attention to the Canadian promise of a 5 per cent reduction contrasting the 24 per cent outcome. By fiddling with bush clearing (and thereby expropriating property) Australia claims to have beaten its target (a 7 per cent increase to 2012, with a mere 3 per cent increase) but this has created lawsuits and in any event Wikipedia puts Australia’s increase at 30 per cent. The editorial in the Wall Street Journal was scathing and the Washington Post pointed out that both legislature leaders had pungently condemned it.
And to promote his negative growth policy President Obama has pledged to divert $3 billion in aid funds to the third world. Tony Abbott soberly said “As for Australia, I’m focusing not on what might happen in 16 years’ time; I’m focusing on what we’re doing now and we’re not talking, we’re acting.”
Australia’s mystics are alive and well
Green blogger and Guardian journalist, Graham Readfearn, felt he had to write a lengthy rebuttal of the latest opinion Australian piece of Maurice Newman. He says Newman is wrong to say California electricity costs are driven high by its renewable and kindred policies because, in spite of its high prices, energy use is low; he appears unaware of the connections here! Somehow in Readfearn’s crazy world high taxes and high costs do not translate into lost jobs and he promotes that mistake in a critique of Calzado’s masterly analysis of the damage renewable policy has done to the Spanish economy. And he offers apologias for former Chief Scientist Penny Sackett and the ubiquitous Tim Flannery arguing the immediate forecasts of climate doom they projected were simply off a tad few years.
More blubbery from Flannery and the Climate Council calumnists with the myth that Australia is lagging the world in suicidal carbon restraint.
Meanwhile the BCA wants to reduce Australia's renewable subsidy from its currently envisaged economic impact of $22 billion to $16 billion but the ALP thinks even this is too great!
Propaganda works. Apparently one person in 10 suffers severe weather phobia - offering a solid base for the yarn sellers to work from.
Climate News: August 1, 2014
By Alan Moran
It ain’t half hot
Those claiming that the missing heat has been hiding in the deep oceans will find little comfort from this data by Roy Spencer which shows the ocean’s surface temperature with the same 17 years flat trend as the air temperature. The trend from 1995 is flat as a tack (but if you want to do a trend from 2011, it is shooting through the roof!)
Spencer
A new paper claims to have detected a human induced increase in water vapour in the upper troposphere; water vapour according to many scientists is an important amplifier of warming by carbon dioxide but if the finding is corroborated it still fails to explain the 17 year “pause” in warming.
That said, according to this research, most people around the world – ranging from 54 per cent of Americans to 93 per cent of Chinese - think that climate change is due to human action.
Warwick Hughes notes a USA today report that claims May and June were the hottest on record but he goes to the monthly satellite data and finds the claims are incorrect.
And confirmation of a long pre-industrial emissions gradual increase in global temperatures is provided by Don Aitkin who draws attention to the evidence of a 300 kilometre march south by the North American tree line in the two centuries to the 1970s.
Andrew Montford pillories a new article by University of East Anglia militant academic Heike Schroeder who has only absorbed alarmist stories and to save the world says we have to abandon modern agriculture.
Watts Up With That notes that the planet’s soil releases 60 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere every year, more than from burning fossil fuels. Land globally absorbs around 23 per cent of emissions from fossil fuels and cement. That’s 2.23 billion tonnes of carbon or a little over 8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. As Australia comprises 1.5 per cent of the world land area, our share is around 123 million tonnes a year, which is a sizeable proportion of the 174 million tonnes a year estimated to be emitted from Australian electricity production. Total Australian emissions are about 600 million tonnes a year.
Renewable energy
Renewable subsidies have cost Germany $884 billion, and have contributed to driving electricity prices to more than double those of the US.
For Australia, ACCI released a report by Deloittes which placed the national benefit from immediately abolishing the Renewable Energy Target at $29 billion and $14 billion, if it were to be cut back, to the 20 per cent of electricity as originally intended. In the Australian Financial Review, The Australia Institute maintains its idiotic stance that forcing consumers to pay for exotic renewables costing three times the price of commercial electricity means cheaper prices!
Policy and diplomacy
British climate sceptic Environment Minister Owen Paterson was fired by PM Cameron who bows to the ” Green Blob that besieged (Paterson) with their self-serving demands, many of which would have harmed the natural environment”. Paterson considers the UK Environment Department to be staffed by green activists or sympathisers. But Britain has said it won’t sign on for emission reductions without China and India, something that makes the Paris 2015 meeting redundant.
A “Climate Change Performance Index” concludes that no country is doing enough to prevent “dangerous climate change”; Australia is in the Heinz position, 57th with only Canada, Iran, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia lower. Predictably plucky Denmark is judged best ahead of a clutch of other EU countries. Poland, host of last years climate conference jamboree, comes under particular criticism for its “destructive position within the climate debate in the EU”.
The highly politicised weekly, Nature carries the torch for a 2015 international climate change agreement, arguing that Australia’s relapse is not fatal to consummating this and, in passing, claiming “parts of Australia, already plagued by frequent heat, drought and floods, are excessively vulnerable to climate change and its effect on extreme weather”. Yeah right, just like the past million years!
Miranda Devine traces the con trick that Malcolm Turnbull played on John Howard to persuade him to agree to a cap-and-trade climate policy and illuminates the rogues’ gallery of malice driven politicians and activists squealing at the Australian decision to abandon the tax. She reminds us that in 2009, Australia’s Chief Scientist, Professor Penny Sackett, said we had only five years to stop catastrophic global warming! Australia is among the many countries that appoints embellishers to guide its climate change policy.
The US Senate has revealed the Billionaire’s Club of charities funded by left wing individuals that are dominating Obama’s environmental policy and key staffing positions. As well as having received over $3 billion in grants from the EPA, favourable tax treatment has allowed the top 16 green groups to amass assets currently worth $7.9 billion.
James Delingpole has a great summary of the mutual assistance these leftists provide to and obtain from the Obama administration.
And budget crisis notwithstanding, the US government is flush with funds so much so that it is sending 10 students to witness climate change at a conference in Sydney in November.
Climate News: July 18,2014
by Alan Moran
Australian climate policies in the Parliament
The Senate has voted to repeal the carbon tax and Greens leader Christine Milne named 14 people who failed to show the leadership that the Greens had demonstrated and “in years to come” will pretend they did not “tear down the climate bills”. Among the names were Maurice Newman, Dick Warburton, George Pell, Andrew Bolt and John Roskam. The Labor Opposition will join with the Greens in restoring the tax if they are returned to office, claiming against all the evidence that “nations in every continent are taking new action” to reduce emissions, and seeking to retain all the wasteful programs the Labor/Green coalition introduced.
This piece of mine in the AFR outlines the deregulatory task ahead and here is a presentation that I gave on energy and renewables to backbenchers last Tuesday. The claim by renewable energy firms leeching off the Australian consumer that removing the subsidies they receive will constitute “sovereign risk” overlooks the fact that almost every government action disadvantages some firms.
Renewables: The Next Big Thing
Palmer United Party supported the government in repealing the carbon tax but guess what happened when the Palmer United Party said it would vote to keep the Renewable Energy Target? Yep, the price of renewable certificates jumped 20 per cent (which theoretically increases retail prices by half a per cent).
Renewable subsidies are at the centre of the Australian political stage with Renew Economy editor, Giles Parkinson, claiming that by 2040 half of electricity will be solar. Not to be outdone, Professors Jeffrey Sachs and Frank Jotzo argued Australia should move to 100 per cent renewables. The ABC also did a puff piece, which lamented the inadequate subsidies to renewables while at the same time saying that they were becoming more economic than coal.
Unsurprisingly, Acciona, one of the key beneficiaries of subsidies to worthless renewable energy, suggests “Australia is missing an enormous opportunity if it does not encourage more investment in renewable energy”.
Renewables featured strongly at the Heartland Conference in Las Vegas. Aside from cataloguing the trivial contribution exotic renewables like wind and solar make, a paper by Marita Noon describes the costs including that to green energy projects from the 2009 US stimulus package. This alone amounted to $100 billion with 90 per cent of the projects having personal or financial connections to senior Democratic Party figures. The dependency on these commercially worthless projects on regulatory intervention is corrupting the whole political and media establishment. The Heartland Conference also featured this outstanding roasting by Queensland MP George Christensen. And Bonner Cohen reported a falling out among thieves as the wind industry in California attacks subsidies to solar power.
Climate measures in the media
Andrew Bolt points out that eight years ago Rupert Murdoch favoured emissions reduction action to “give the planet the benefit of the doubt” and warmists were urging his sceptical columnists to listen to him; they are somewhat silent now that that his position has shifted to, “We can be the low-cost energy country in the world. We shouldn’t be building windmills and all that rubbish.’’ The environmental activists and arts grads who populate the BBC management have decided they will ensure that sceptical climate scientists are heard less. James Delingpole excoriates the policy and identifies its green left genesis; The Spectator contrasts the Beeb’s previous dedication to free speech with its censorship now the beneficiary is on the political right.
Our ABC lauds the Tory’s Lord Deben, another arts grad who owns an environmental advisory business, for opinionising against Tony Abbott’s repeal of the carbon tax, saying he “appears to be more concerned with advancing (his) own short-term political interests” than dealing with global warming. And the AFR has a piece by The Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss that argues that all we need is a carbon tax of $8 per tonne, which makes a nonsense to the Treasury’s $80 per tonne estimated requirement by 2020, and shreds Garnaut’s 2050 estimated requirement of $250 per tonne! Meanwhile Warwick Hughes assembled this chart illustrating Australia’s tiny carbon footprint.
Modelling, schmodelling …
The news that Brisbane has experienced near record temperature lows was not supposed to be part of the warming narrative. And, according to a press release from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), climate modelling indicates southern Australia is facing a drier climate as a result of global warming. Odd that this is not reflective of the actual rainfall record.
Climate News: July 2, 2014
By Alan Moran
Science and fudging
The UK Met Office’s 2007 warning of runaway warming over the next 7 years has been disproven. Forecast in red, actual in black – alarmists should stick to generalities!
Steve Goddard shows how US data is being continually “normalised” – the raw temperature data is adjusted and this fabricated trend is very much higher than the original data. The US has actually been cooling since the 1930s.
Although the IPCC is forced to acknowledge the lack of evidence for increasing droughts, in spite of previous warnings, Australia’s BoM and CSIRO have long promoted the inevitability of drought as a result of human induced warming. They persist with this line, having failed to climb on board with the revised IPCC thinking. Marohasy et al have sifted through the Australian BoM data and found it deficient, if not deliberately distorted. The BoM had claimed “We know every place across Australia is getting hotter, and very similarly almost every place on this planet. So, you know, we know it is getting hotter and we know it will continue to get hotter. It’s a reality, and something we will be living with for the rest of this century.”
Policy developments
The Clive Palmer/Al Gore alliance in favour of subsidies for renewable energy and the “Clean Energy Finance Corporation” shows the vacuum that is Al Gore and the stuntmanship of Clive Palmer. So much commentary. This from The Australian and this ($) also in The Australian on the policy matters: carbon tax to be replaced by highly conditional cap-and-trade; renewable energy target kept; wasteful green energy bank kept; superfluous advisory paraphernalia kept. Is Australia governable?
The Australian renewable regulations scheme was admirably excoriated by backbencher Kelly O’Dwyer, who shows how a minor program was massively expanded by the ALP/Greens into an economy-buster. And the Prime Minister said the RET, posed a “serious threat” to household budgets and energy-intensive industries. Many continue to believe the magic pudding of subsidies: green press commentators really thought ACiL, hired by the government to assess the renewable energy target, in showing that subsidies can temporarily lower prices, were actually arguing that the higher the subsidy the better off we’d all be!
Australia has its own equivalents of financial market experts like Hank Paulson and Michael Bloomberg who seek to direct financial resources away from coal. Still, all is justified once you realise that climate change has been the cause of the rise of ISIS, the Islamic terrorist group. Victor Davis Hanson notes that the climate of Iraq is similar to southern California, so there may be something worse than Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi!
Green ruminants
The new Indian Government has made its stance against growth-curbing emission reductions absolutely clear and the Indian intelligence agency continues to telegraph a targeting of Greenpeace and its funding of activists like Vandana Shiva and others for abusing regulatory procedures to inappropriately preventing the development of coal and modern farming.
Australia harbours similar enemies. Metgasco’s Len Gill has illustrated how the NSW government ($) is bowing to populist pressure to prevent gas development (Victoria with an outright ban is even worse). NSW now faces steeply rising gas prices. The US has a far more accommodating stance and over half of the world’s gas and oil drilling rigs are there, with Texas alone having 26 per cent.
What is it about green leaders refusing to live the lifestyles they urge on others? We have Al Gore with his multiple mansions, EPA chief Gina McCarthy with a weekly commute between Washington and Boston, and now we have the head of Greenpeace in Europe who has been “commuting between Luxembourg and Amsterdam” since he took the job in 2012. Is the price of leadership being forced into sacrificing personal preferences of frugality for the greater good?
If you want to learn more about the hypocrisy of the environmental movement don’t miss Professor Ian Plimer’s new book, Not for Greens. The IPA is hosting launches in Melbourne on 22 July and Brisbane on 28 July.