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Expert scientists immediately predict climate change causes triple La Ninas… right after they happen

ENSO is playing games with climate scientists — mocking their ability to predict the single greatest natural short term climate swing factor. The El Niño–Southern Oscillation drives floods, droughts, bushfires, and essentially pushes the planetary temperatures up and down on a year by year basis. Nothing determines the year’s climate headlines more than this one thing, yet climate scientists haven’t the faintest idea what drives it.

Imagine what it would look like if they could? They’d be able to say … blah… solar wind changes driven by, say, solar barycentric dynamics will lead to El Ninos in 2023, and ’25, a weak one in 2026. Farmers could plan ahead. Dam managers would know when water would be scarce. The UN would know which years to ask for even more money.

Instead we get this vague post hoc prophesy:

Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely — what does the future hold?

Nature

Meteorologists are forecasting a third consecutive year of La Niña. Some researchers say similar conditions could become more common as the planet warms.

On ongoing La Niña event that has contributed to flooding in eastern Australia and exacerbated droughts in the […]

Australian Intelligence Chief to assess climate threat but ignore risk of running country on windmills and batteries

Cunning Plan: New Australian PM to set up an Office of Climate Change Threats, but not an Office to study the Threats of Climate Action

Shut down Australia and save 0.01 degrees.

Admiral Chris Barrie will be paid to worry about how seas rising by 1mm a year might affect our supply chains, but not about how making electricity ten times more expensive might destroy manufacturing in Australia.

If we had to actually build our own nuclear submarines will China still be happy to sell us the steel? Will we have an aluminum smelter left in the nation, and how long can we run that on solar panels and batteries? Are 2,000 kilometer long high voltage lines an easy target for hostile forces? Will electric vehicles be easier targets for cyber hackers or EMF weapons? Could dust bombs sabotage 2GW of solar panels? Would paint bombs be worse?

If we managed to build one nuclear submarine by 2040, will it be the most reliable baseload generator left in the national energy market and should we plug it back into the grid so we can build another sub?

So many questions…

Anthony Albanese to order intelligence chief to examine […]

Europe wants coal: Austria, Netherlands, switch on old coal plants, Poland pays for coal to homes

In an emergency everyone wants coal

Just like that — Europe is hitting the panic button. Thank the Russians for demanding rubles for their gas and threatening supply. Not only has Germany decided to rescue old coal plants, but so has Austria, which had gone blissfully “coal free” two years ago. How long did that fairytale last? In the Netherlands coal power plants were forced for years to run at only 35% capacity by government ruling, but now, suddenly, full tilt is fine. Sweden and Denmark have both issued an “early warning” to flag potential energy shortages.

In Poland, energy prices are so expensive that three weeks ago the government told people to go and collect wood from forests to keep their homes warm. Last week they the government said it would pay a large part of the cost of buying three tons of coal for each household. It’s that bad.

Much of the EU rely on Russian gas for about 40% of their supplies. The Austrians have storage sites for gas so large they can hold an entire years worth, but they are only 39% full and they want to double that before November.

Germany is now calling this […]

More bad luck! Snowy Hydro can’t run much because it has *too much water*

Would you like blackouts or floods with your Green Burger?

Tumut Generation Station No. 3 Snowy scheme | Joe “velojo” A

Here in Weather-Dependent Renewable World the chief crash test dummy is struggling because of yet another bit of terrible luck. We desperately need the only reliable renewable energy we have to generate while reliable but-badly-maintained-coal is breaking — and our national grid sits on the edge of blackouts. But Lordy No! Oh the schadenfreude — the dams are all full. Seems we have too much water thanks to the La Nina we didn’t predict, and the excess rainfall that wasn’t supposed to happen, and the dams that weren’t supposed to fill. Now if Snowy Hydro releases too much water to make electricity they may flood lower areas.

You can’t make this stuff up. Hydroelectric dams serve two purposes and sometimes they conflict. If we are lucky, we might avoid both blackouts and floods, but we won’t avoid the bonfire of electricity bills that are coming.

Ponder the impossible quandry of the Green religion. Like the Escher puzzle of Energy — It’s always the weather’s fault. If only we could use enough renewables to get perfect weather we […]

It’s that desperate: Even bitter German Greens say we must “burn more coal”

Amazing how fast the Sacred Cows get pushed aside. Until a few months ago, Germany had been planning to close its last nuclear plants and gas production had been falling for 20 years. But the Russians are cutting back the gas feed and even the German Greens understand what will happen by winter if they don’t have enough energy. Though on twitter, a lot of commentators are wondering why they don’t reopen the nuclear plants they just closed first and why they still plan to shut the last three later this year?

It was never about CO2 was it?

Germany to fire up coal plants as Russia turns down the gas

DW

As Russia reduces its supply of natural gas, Economy Minister Robert Habeck has said Germany must curb its usage. Otherwise, things “could get tight in winter,” he said. Germany must limit its use of gas for electricity production and prioritize the filling of storage facilities to compensate for a drop in supply from Russia, Economy Minister Robert Habeck said Sunday.

In a move that goes against the principles of his environmentally-friendly Green Party, the country will also have to increase the […]

UK to save world by burning 120 million trees a year and stuffing some under the North Sea

If it involves destroying trees, we know it’s a Green trying to save them:

Government’s plan to reach ‘net zero’ by 2050 by removing carbon from the atmosphere relies on BURNING the equivalent of 120 million trees a year just to ‘balance the books’, report claims

DailyMail

The UK government‘s plan to reach ‘net zero’ by 2050 by removing carbon from the atmosphere relies on burning the equivalent of almost 120 million trees a year, a new report claims.

The government’s Net Zero Strategy, released in October 2021, aims to capture up to 58 million tonnes of CO2 from the burning of biomass and piping it under the North Sea.

But to create this much carbon, a whopping 32,534,939 tonnes of wood pellets would need to be burned every year, according to a report by The Telegraph — the equivalent of 119,834,572 trees.

The UK plan assumes trees are carbon neutral, though some of these forests are shipped from America, and probably not via sailing ships. Who can forget how in 2015 Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, received more than £450 million in subsidies for burning biomass, which was […]

Nanny State rules: French events banned “for the heat” — Climate lockdowns begin

In France the government is banning events “because of a heatwave” of 40 degrees C (104F) — as if adult mammals cannot figure out whether the temperature is too hot for their own health. Ancestors of mice and rats worked out their own temperature sensors and behaviour changes 200 million years ago. It’s a Big Government attempt to infantalize and gaslight the whole population. Will they obey?

It’s only the region around Bordeaux but will French teenagers accept being told to stay home in forty degree heat, something that millions of humans live with all over the world every summer?

The Counter Signal: Heatwave lockdowns: Region in France bans outdoor gatherings

“Everyone now faces a health risk,” official Fabienne Buccio told France Bleu radio, after announcing the regional restrictions around Bordeaux. Outdoor events – including, ironically, annual ‘Resistance’ celebrations – are banned until the officials declare the heatwave is over. They’re even restricting some indoor events that don’t have air conditioning.

BBC: Outdoor public events have been banned in an area of France as a record breaking heatwave sweeps across Europe.

Concerts and large public gatherings have been called off in the Gironde department around Bordeaux. […]

Welcome to a weather dependent nation — whether you can use your dishwasher depends on the wind

Renewable Crash Test Dummy: Friday edition

For energy-nerds following the Australian experiment, today is a big day. On the up-side, three coal turbines have rebooted adding another 1200MW to the grid. On the down-side, the wind has slowed and 3000MW has disappeared. On the hope-side, another 4 coal turbines may possibly get back in gear by Sunday, and you never know, the wind might pick up. Though it doesn’t look good.

Wind generation. June 16, 2022, Australian NEM. | Anero.id

It doesn’t matter how many wind farms we build when one High Pressure cell arrives to sit on them all

And here is the cell that stops a million dishwashers.

One high cell to stop them all | BOM

This is where all 76 Australia NEM grid wind farms are which could, in theory be generating as much as 9.8GW but are turning out 10% of that now.

Map of Wind generation Australia

Ninety percent of Australians are being asked to be careful with their electricity today while we wait for the wind to start blowing again or the weather to warm up. And millions of dollars is being burned in electricity bills (assuming […]

Holy Battery Powered Australia: Chris Bowen thinks we can store electricity “like water in a dam”

Someone needs to tell the Australian Energy Minister the bad news about batteries

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says we just need more renewables and more storage:

Bowen says we can store water, we should be able to store power

“You can say the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. Well, the rain doesn’t always fall either but we managed to store the water,” Bowen said.

Chris Bowen isn’t having any of Uhlmann’s ‘wind doesn’t always blow’ rhetoric.

“the rain doesn’t always fall either, but we manage to store the water – we can store the renewable energy if we have the investment”#auspol pic.twitter.com/LjJkEr3zJy

— Squizz (@SquizzSTK) June 16, 2022

Is this Chris Bowen’s Zuma-numbers moment with electricity?

He doesn’t seem to realize that electrons won’t politely sit in a shoe box waiting for the day they run your toaster. When South Australia got the worlds biggest battery in 2017 everyone got excited but few realized it would only power the state for two whole minutes before it ran out. South Australia is just 6% of the total National Energy Market, but if we were trying […]

Global-Woe: The transition has stalled — the world is using more fossil fuels than ever (Still 80%!)

Reality must be depressing for Green-believers. Here they are, after all this revolutionizing, they’ve installed more than a million megawatts of glorious solar and wind totems and it has barely made a dent. The world still stubbornly runs on fossil fuels.

The BBC laments:

Climate change: Green energy ‘stagnates’ as fossil fuels dominate

Matt McGrath, BBC

A new study says that the world is using more fossil fuels than ever as the transition to green energy stalls.

The Renewables 2022 Global Status Report says the share of wind and solar in the global energy mix has risen minimally in the last decade.

“The share of renewable energy has moved in the last decade from 10.6% to 11.7%, but fossil fuels, all coal and gas have moved from 80.1% to 79.6%. So, it’s stagnating,” said Rana Adib, the executive director of REN21. “And since the energy demand is rising, this actually means that we are consuming more fossil fuels than ever.” As the world rebounded from Covid-19 in 2021, there was a significant rise in overall energy use, most of which was met by fossil fuels.

Here is the […]

Still teetering: Blackout warnings across the Australian grid next three days

All the rules are breaking.

The price market broke on Sunday night and now the interconnectors rules are broken too. The whole Eastern five state “National” grid is flying seat of the pants — the reserves are so incredibly thin that there are LOR3 forecasts — meaning Lack Of Reserve Level 3 rolled out for all five states. It doesn’t mean blackouts will happen, but it means all the protective layers of this onion are gone. The system is running bare.

UPDATE: There were some blackouts in Sydney’s northern suburbs last night. “Millions of homes” were apparently told to conserve their power in Brisbane and Sydney. Welcome to RenewableWorld!

ht/ WattsUp, Eric Worrall, and RicDre

The price market broke on Sunday night when for the first time the AEMO imposed somewhat anachronistic price setting clauses it had never used. By fixing the wholesale price in Queensland, market bidding suddenly phase-changed into a twilight world where prices were set too low (at an obscenely high $300/MWh, but not high enough now), and generators didn’t want to bid. So offers to supply “Yo-Yo’d” and the AEMO had to run emergency orders of a different kind to […]

Uganda to build East Africa’s first nuclear power plant

Sobering thought for the day: Uganda may get a nuclear power plant before Australia gets one nuclear submarine:

Uganda is set to build East Africa’s first nuclear power plant after acquiring land for the project, according to Bloomberg. The Minister of State for Energy Okasai Sidronius Opolot announced the plans in a statement, but did not reveal where the site will be located.

President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has said that Uganda and Africa are only interested in nuclear power for energy supplies like electricity, and not for nuclear weapons. “For us, we want that power for electricity, for agriculture and not for nuclear weapons,” he said. President Museveni was speaking at a meeting this week, with the delegation of International Atomic Energy Agency at State House Entebbe.

Would the world be a safer place if Uganda had a new high tech coal plant instead?

The West could make that happen.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has approved Uganda’s plan to build East Africa’s first nuclear power station.

He added that land had been acquired to build a 2GW facility, although he did not say where. The project would be part of Uganda’s […]

Climate change causes inflation now too. Quick, put on more solar panels….!

Starving for any attention, the carbon-haters need to find a reason to get into the inflation debate. CO2 keeps rising but crops are up, forests are greener, tropical islands are growing, mangroves are expanding, and the world is in more danger of being overrun with cheap soy and corn than by rising seas. Whatever. The disaster-bus will find a way to blame fossil fuels for everything that’s bad, as if through some miracle EV’s and windmills will make pork cheaper.

It’s a cult:

Climate crisis is ‘battering our economy’ and driving inflation, new book says

Edward Helmore, The Guardian

Forget Ukraine, coronavirus, corporate greed and “supply chain issues”, when it comes to inflation the climate crisis is the real, lasting, worry, according to a new book, and one that’s only likely to get worse. Climatenomics lays out how ‘supply chain disruptions’ has become a euphemism for the effects of climate change

“I don’t think people have realized that climate change is an economic issue now because it’s always been seen as an environmental, health or social issue,” says Keefe. “The fact of the matter is climate change is battering our economy.”

Any long term […]

Sunday Open Thread

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Expert scientists wrong again: Bumper snow season kicks off in Australia

Year after year they told us it would get warmer, ski seasons would get shorter and children won’t know what snow is. Instead Thredbo in the Australian Alps has just had 125cm of snow, a full 4 feet in 7 days, which some are calling a 54 year record. Skiers in Australia are thrilled.

https://twitter.com/grand_solar/status/1534181676854788097

NSW snow season ‘best in 20 years’ as weather experts’ dire predictions fall flat

Daily Telegraph

In my many years living and working in Thredbo, I have never seen the Village so covered in snow ahead of the June long weekend,” Thredbo Resort general manager Stuart Diver said.

In the year 2000 the world’s top global warming experts at East Anglia University claimed “children just aren’t going to know what snow is” within a few years.

In 2003, a CSIRO report found that the total area covered by snow in Australian mountains could fall by up to 40 per cent.

“By 2020, the average annual duration of snow-cover decreases by between five and 48 days; maximum snow depths are reduced and tend to occur earlier in the year; and the total area covered […]

EnergyAustralia (a Chinese company) tells Government we need a plan to end Australian coal

EnergyAustralia is 100% owned by China Light and Power (CLP Group) and owns a suite of generators that include coal, gas, wind farms and battery storage in Australia. It was sold by the NSW government for $1.4 billion in 2011. According to Wikipedia, the mothership company, CLP, owns “a number of power stations in Asia” and most are either coal-fired or fossil fuel power stations. It also owns Hong Kong Nuclear Investment Company.

Yallourn Power Plant, | Malcolm Paterson, CSIRO

 

A year ago the same company that announced it was speeding up the closure of Yallourn coal power plant to 2028 instead of 2032, now warns the transition “may not be smooth” and the governments plan to pay incentives to keep them open “may not be enough”. But back in March last year, when EnergyAustralia said it wanted to close Yallorn, it also said that it wanted to show that the transition is possible “without disruption”. In fact the Managing Director raved at the time “”We are determined to show Australia, that it is possible to move from the old to the new in a way that does not leave people behind.”. Blah Blah Blah, eh?

The […]

Weekend Unthreaded

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Cold snaps and blistering electricity prices downunder — where one state burnt $2.4b in electricity in May

And the bonfire continues

As cold fronts sweep across the south east of Australia electricity prices are setting records nobody wants to set. The wholesale prices for electricity –across a whole month — soared past $300 a megawatt hour in three states of Australia. In NSW the cumulative cost of wholesale electricity for May alone worked out at $2.4 billion dollars. It’s enough to build a power plant. Back in 2015, before Hazelwood old brown coal plant closed and Australia installed more renewable energy per capita than anywhere else on the planet, the average price in NSW was $35/MWh. Back then it cost $260 million for the whole month. (And Hazelwood wasn’t even in NSW. ) The point is not about one coal plant, but about how recently the system still worked and how fast it fell apart. Hazelwood coal plant in 2017 was 53 years old and still selling electricity at $30 per megawatt hour when it was shut down. Since then the whole grid has so much more capacity yet so much less ability. There’s no resilience left. A few speed bumps wiped out the whole road train.

 

Wholesale electricity prices are higher across the […]

Sudden Adult Death Syndrome: because young people die, just like that

In the year of collapsing athletes, we now have the coincidental rise of SADS

Naturally, its nothing to do with new large medical programs done for emergency use. We know that because of all the detailed human trial data that the FDA and company in question wanted to hide until 2096, and which we still haven’t seen in full.

But if you hear of someone young and healthy dying there’s a word for that now — “normal”, I mean SADS.

Healthy young people are dying suddenly and unexpectedly from a mysterious syndrome – as doctors seek answers through a new national register

Daily Mail

People aged under 40 are being urged to have their hearts checked because they may potentially be at risk of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.The syndrome, known as SADS, has been fatal for all kinds of people regardless of whether they maintain a fit and healthy lifestyle. The term is used when a post-mortem cannot find an obvious cause of death.

The US-based SADS Foundation has said that over half of the 4,000 annual SADS deaths of children, teens or young adults have one of the top two warning […]

Trip in EV saves $100 but costs hours

So a lady tried to drive an EV from New Orleans to Chigago and back in less than four days with a car that had a battery life of 310 miles on a trip that was 2,000 miles long. She saved $100 in fuel but the fast chargers weren’t fast, the waits were inconvenient, and then there was the stress and uncertainty of just not knowing, and of wandering around unknown streets on foot, waiting for the car to charge, and trying to make appointments that failed. It took 12 hours to drive a 7.5 hour trip on the way there. But on the return as the weather got worse, so did the battery mileage. Just when you need it, it isn’t there… they ended up getting only 4 hours sleep on the last night so they could allow long enough to fit in the charges on the last leg.

Remember, you’re suffering so your great-grandchildren won’t have too.

Joel B. Pollak, Breitbart

The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend on a four-day road trip from New Orleans to Chicago and back in an electric vehicle (EV) that ended up as a disaster — one that left […]