The Bullroarer - Thursday 17th July 2008
Posted by aeldric on July 17, 2008 - 1:48am in The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand
Canberra Times - Catching the wave of renewable energy
Australian renewable energy technology will play a key role in helping Britain meet its interim greenhouse emission reduction targets.
Sydney-based company Oceanlinx is one of four wave energy device developers chosen to take part in creating the world's first large-scale wave energy farm, 16km off the coast of Cornwall.Sydney-based company Oceanlinx is one of four wave energy device developers chosen to take part in creating the world's first large-scale wave energy farm, 16km off the coast of Cornwall.
Stuff.co.nz - Oil companies hold firm on prices
Oil companies are standing by their pumps as the Automobile Association calls for a three-cent drop in petrol prices after crude oil prices dipped.
Crude oil prices have jerked up and down in the last week, with Texas crude diving $6 a barrel on Tuesday in the largest single session drop since 1991.
AA spokesman Mark Stockdale said it took time for crude prices to flow through to refined, a major driver of pump prices, but this time there was certainly room for a 3c-a-litre cut.
Oil companies, however, have said the AA is out of touch with the oil pricing game; and they are holding prices firm.
ABC - Thinking through our move to a low-carbon economy
Ross Garnaut has made a valuable contribution to the necessary and difficult issue of climate change. Irrespective of the debate about the urgency of action, it is wise to adopt the precautionary principle that says we do not wait until we have certainty before we begin preparing for a low-carbon future.
News.com.au - Greens attack fuel excise cut
"The best thing the Government could do for Australia is to use the fuel excise to invest in public transport," Senator Milne said.
The Australian - Nelson backs ETS fuel excise cut
PLANS to include petrol in an emissions trading scheme, but with a cut in the fuel excise to offset a cost increase, have won support from Federal Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson.
But Dr Nelson says the excise cuts should be permanent, not temporary, as the Rudd Government has proposed.
Reuters - Australia considers first new coal port in 25 years
CANBERRA, July 15 (Reuters) - Australia's Queensland state is considering new coal mines and the country's first new export terminal in 25 years, investments that could increase shipments from the world's largest exporter of the commodity by 40 percent.
Bloomberg - West Australia Restarts Collie to Ease Gas Shortage
Western Australia, generator of more than a third of the nation's exports, restarted the state's biggest power station late yesterday, helping to ease a gas shortage that may cost A$6.7 billion ($6.4 billion).
The coal-fired Collie Power Station, able to produce 330 megawatts of electricity, will reduce the shortfall triggered by a June 3 explosion that damaged pipelines at Apache Corp.'s plant on Varanus Island, state Energy Minister Francis Logan said in a statement today.
The Age - Aussie oil, gas industry 'could suffer'
Investment in Australia's oil and gas industry could decline as companies that provide drilling, engineering and construction services reallocate their skills to work with national oil companies, a survey says.
National oil companies are shifting from allowing foreign ownership of reserves to utilising service contracts, as the price of oil increases, according to a survey by professional services firm KPMG.
International service companies now have the opportunity to expand their business model from being specialist contractors to operating entire projects on behalf of national oil companies.
"In the context of the global oil and gas industry, Australia is a small component, and if service companies reallocate their resources to large NOC [national oil companies] opportunities and projects, the potential exists that the Australian industry will suffer," KPMG's Brent Steedman said.
The Age - Plan trashed as $7bn down a hole
IF SIR Rod Eddington's $7 billion rail tunnel is built, the Brumby Government will have used the largest infrastructure investment in Australia's history to mask its incompetence, and that of rail operator Connex, a public transport advocate says.
Sir Rod's proposed rail tunnel from Footscray to Caulfield was not needed, and would be built only if mistruths were
believed, RMIT transport planning lecturer Paul Mees said in his submission to the Government's Eddington review.
Sir Rod and the Government's transport department argue the tunnel must be built because the rail system is approaching capacity.
But Dr Mees said overcrowding was occurring on Melbourne's trains because there had been a 25% increase in peak-hour passengers over the past five years but almost no increase in peak-hour trains.
Regular announcements of extra trains by the Government were "pure spin", Dr Mees said, because all but a handful were either added to off-peak periods or were extensions of existing services.
NZ Herald - Cost of train work alarms local body politicians
Auckland transport politicians are alarmed that their region's share of almost $1.9 billion of rail improvements will be at least five times higher than the local cost of upgrading Wellington's trains.
NZ Herald Brian Fallow: The price of keeping lights on
It looks like the winter power scare has passed. What a relief.
We also learned this week that consumer electricity prices have risen 6.6 per cent over the past year. Over the past five years the average increase has been 5.5 per cent.
But evidently these relentless rising power bills have not brought us a more secure electricity supply.
We go through this drama just about every other year: 2001, 2003, 2006 and again this year.
A distant observer, perhaps one contemplating investment in New Zealand, could be forgiven for thinking the electricity supply hangs by a thread.
Energy Minister David Parker says it is ridiculous to describe the recent rains which have replenished the hydro lakes (though they remain well below average) as lucky.
"We don't criticise farmers for planting crops in the expectation of rain and sunshine. Likewise we do expect rain to fall and fill our hydro lakes on a yearly basis," he said.
Radio NZ - Petrol, food rises push inflation to 4%
ABC - Emission trading revenue should go back to households: Origin
The company planning to build a gas-fired power station at Mortlake says revenue raised through an emissions trading scheme must be funnelled towards households.
The Age - How to reduce emissions?
[For] Professor Jeffrey Sachs the timing was perfect; for Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong, it was somewhat less so. The economic adviser to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon breezed into Canberra's Australian National University this week to announce that emissions trading - the Rudd Government's biggest weapon in the fight against dangerous climate change - was, in effect, a dud. It was, he said, messy, complicated and bound to be unpopular.
"It's such a mess administratively. It covers only a fraction of what needs to be covered. It's hard to implement, it's hard to monitor, it's not transparent, it's highly manipulative - which is why the banks love it," he said.
Tackling Climate Change Together , NT Media Release, 17 July 2008
Here's an MP who gets it:
ABC - MP challenges state electricity report
The claim that solar thermal can't provide baseload has major implications. It means under the ETS that coal fired generators could be on permanent compo or free permits. Either that or a switch to gas fired baseload which will run out before coal. It may also mean that renewables targets get harder and harder to meet after 20%.
On ABC Lateline there was an item with Marn saying
1) Australia 'needs' 135,000 migrants
2) undeveloped gas leases will be confiscated.
Here's an alternative view;
1) Australia has enough people who can be retrained if necessary
2) gas needs a long term plan with strategic reserves.
Solar thermal can provide "baseload" power (if you must obsess about this nebulous idea from an age when much of the supply was static and demand wasn't price aware).
There are already lots of countries that get far more than 20% of their power from renewables - the question is who will be first, and when will we get there.
Al Gore is apparently proposing that the US make the shift by 2020:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/7/17/144426/316/203/553055
Probably a little ambitious, but I'd hope that by 2040 - 2050 this is the reality - plenty of time to depreciate the existing stock of generators and replace them with solar/wind etc.
Boof,I agree Australia has enough people,either for retraining or any other thing.This immigration nightmare is just making everything worse by increasing demand for resources,including energy,creating a future food supply problem and reducing the quality of life through overcrowding.
The baby bonus should be consigned to wherever idiot social welfare is scrapped.I would think a migration level of about 10,000/year would be about right.This is actual migration,not net.
The KRudd government appears to be determined to OutHoward Howard - ie - a government composed of of retards.
Regarding the UN envoy's comments on Australia's abysmal performance on greenhouse gas emissions -
The first and most obvious step to remedy this would be a statement by the federal government that no more coal burning power stations would be built and there would be a crash program to build alternatives - solar thermal,geothermal,wind and nuclear.
Pigs might fly.
Reading this 1.8 MB pdf from the aluminium industry
http://www.aluminium.org.au/Page.php?d=1281
they reckon they've done the hard yards on efficiency. I gather if they can prove that alkaline bauxite waste absorbs CO2 they'll be looking for a carbon credit. However they use 14% of Australia's electrical output or more than 3 GW continuous average. However I see no mention of shifting electrical demand for time-of-day or availability. On p14
The industry is dominated by continuous base load electricity demand.
Dunno how you can do that with wind or solar.
Surely you aren't serious ?
By generating power from a wide range of renewables (distributed by both type and geography), by implementing a reasonable amount of energy storage, and by managing demand (via smart grids and dynamic pricing), you can generate the required amount of power across the grid.
This has been explained many times here now.
Do you not understand it, or are you just trolling ?
Sorry if this gets anyone's knickers in a twist but.....
www.theaustralian.com.au/story/0,25197,24036736-5013480,00.html
I'm NOT saying that I necessarily agree with this on face value, just putting it up for debate.
Hi Lefty,
It's Denialist Porn... ("Boltfodder"!)
Evans has posted these views previously - with colourful graphics of the supposed "missing signature" - in 2007. (http://mises.org/story/2795)
Evans is not a climate scientist, he's
As far as I can see (http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/ncas/reports/tr28final.html) the Carbon accounting model that he claims he "wrote" was completed back in 2001, and he was really the junior co-author. The "model" is an Excel spreadsheet!
(Gee, I'm glad Evans thinks he's a "rocket scientist". Maybe that means we Engineers who've churned out a few heuristic spreadsheets all have "the right stuff"!)
;-)
I've been searching just now to try and find out exactly who specified that a particular tropical high-altitude temperature profile should be the CO2 Greenhouse Signature - but no luck so far, Evans and everybody else who regurgitates his stuff simply refers to "UN Climate Models". Well the UN's a pretty big and diverse, and often self-contradictory, organisation. I smell a "straw man" argument!
The Bureau of Metrology graphs at the start of Penny Wong's Green Paper Summary clearly show what's happening in the real world. Warming and drying is real for us here in Australia - and the whole situation is not being helped by the hot air generated by the remaining denialists.
Hi Cretaceous.
Hehehehe, "Boltfodder" - I like that one! Akkerman fodder?
He isn't denying climate change though, merely disputing the cause. 31 000 scientists (and engineers I guess) signatures seems a fairly significant number agree with him. Unless they are falsified.
Evans may be exaggerating his credentials but he may also have a point regarding the level of human induced change versus natural change. Climate change to and from warmer/cooler/wetter/drier has been a constant fact of history long before the industrial revolution. The Daintree has grown and shrunk numerous times, expanding when it was wetter and shrinking back to along rivers and creeks and gorges in drier times.
I know this is not a popular veiw here but I just want to know the truth.
Re: Evans -
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/articles/DavidEvansbio.html
http://timlambert.org/2004/11/lavoisier/
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Lavoisier_Group
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Lobby_groups/Australia
As for the 31,000 "signatures" I couldn't find any reference to this (at all) in the article - where did you get that from.
Evans is just a propagandist for an astroturf outfit that is just another name bolted on front of the HR Nicholls society.
Its easy to make a whole lot of assertions without any references to data or paper in a newspaper. Its much harder to do so in a peer-reviewed journal - which is why this stuff only exists in conservative media outlets, not the literature.
Very informative links Gav. Thanks.
I've now added "astroturf" to my lexicon! ;-)
Lefty,
The important point for you to realise about Evans' piece is that "disputing the cause" delays the solution.
There are powerful established interests in Australian society who imagine that they'll be dead before anything happens on Climate Change, and that they certainly don't want their gushers of income to be shut off in the meantime. It's amazing that the amount of lobbying money available hasn't bought better shills than David Evans, but there you go.
But in fact their actions are an enormous threat to the future viability of Australian lifestyles in our own lifetimes. The most frightening risk from climate change is that most of our coastal infrastructure (up to an elevation of 6m) will suddenly go under sometime within the next 20 years. This potential damage makes the risks from terrorism look like a joke.
Lefty, since you're an "Australian" reader, maybe you spotted this...
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23053212-11949,00.html
...But how's *this* for an update...
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/06/25/2283071.htm ... !
(Hey Gav, we in Sydney may actually need Morris Iemma's second airport if Mascot goes under - although Williamtown is only 8m above Sea Level! The good news is that Badgery's Creek is 82m ASL.)
Hmm. Rapidly melting antarctic ice kinda shoots down the theory that ice melting is caused by rising ocean rather than air temperatures, originating from something in the sun or deep in the earth itself - most antarctic ice rests on frozen land, not water.
However, the article also mentions the occurence of several warming and melting events over the past 75 000 years - cleary unrelated to human activity. How can we be certain that this is not just another of the same? That's a fair question isn't it?
I haven't read Gav's links yet, I'll do that before commenting further.
Hi again Lefty,
Yes, a very fair question. You're quite right that there have been several Antarctic melting events in the last 75,000 years. However Science has a pretty good handle on explaining the causes.
The main cause of ice-ages is the steady wobbling of the Earth as it spins on its axis, a bit like a wobbling spinning top. The wobble is caused because the Earth's spin is offset by 23 degrees from our plane of orbit around the Sun, and then our Moon has a further orbital offset of 28 degrees from the Earth's plane of rotation as well.
(Did you ever have a Spirograph when you were a kid? http://www.pietro.org/Astro_Util_StaticDemo/MethodsNutationVisualized.htm )
Anyway, the result of this wobbling is a big variation in the amount of solar energy landing on the surface of the Earth at various latitudes. These variations have been named the "Milankovitch Cycles". I'll let you read about them here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
My point in laying out all of this data is to say that because Science can now explain the past history of ice ages, that's why we can be so sure that the current warming is "not just another of the same", as you put it. The West Antarctic ice will melt in the usual unstable way, but the cause of it will be *us* this time, not the wobbling of the planet.
At the moment, the natural Milankovitch cycle should be taking us towards global *cooling*, but in fact this "natural" signal is being completely overwhelmed by the "Greenhouse Effect" of our own emissions. Every year it ticks inexorably up (http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/), and we are probably already well past the "safe" level.
(http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12/nasas-james-han.html)
There are further impacts on the planetary temperature from effects acting longer-term than 75,000 years, such as Continental Drift changing the pattern of ocean currents, and the natural balance of CO2 in the air. For instance, most of our oilfields appear to have been originally deposited in hot anoxic ocean conditions during natural runaway greenhouse events. (http://www.abc.net.au/science/crude/resources/)
But once Nature has sequestered enough carbon, things settle down again.
Here is the link Gav. It has nothing to do with Evans himself though I thought some of his material I read last night actually lead me to this. Doesn't mean it real, just means it's there.
www.petitionproject.org/index.html
I am as anti-HR Nicholls society as they come but it would be hardly surprising that anyone who stands to lose badly from severe cutting of carbon emissions would recruit a spokesman to present alternative veiws - but could there be some truth in those veiws?
I once believed unquestioningly in global warming being entirely man-made and a "delicate balance of nature", just as I once believed that capitalism would soon be swept away by a glorious revolution of workers. I no longer believe in the last two (though I am still pretty socialist in outlook) and I have lately seen some reason to doubt that global warming is all due to human activity. Unless you can point out something I have missed or haven't yet taken on board (which is entirely possible) I would like to know what makes this particular warming event (which I think I read somewhere ceased in 2001 and has actually reversed since then) man-made and not part of a natural phenomonon like all the others preceeding it?
Bloody hell - for a lefty you're pretty gullible when it comes to taking political propaganda at face value (no offence - but jeez).
Have you tried checking out who put together that load of tosh ?
From the Union of Concerned Scientists :
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/skeptic-organizations.html
Of the 31,000 "scientists", over 2000 are doctors (for example) and only 9000 have PhDs (including the doctors) - pretty much anyone can sign the petition. Would you expect to get a definitive answer on this issue from your local GP ?
http://lefthandpalm.blogspot.com/2008/05/lurgees-paradigm-iii-31000-scie...
Scientific American looked at 30 signatures (at random) from the petition and 26 were verified as being scientists. Of the eleven who said they still agreed with the petition, only one was a climate researcher with releveant research experience, two had relevant expertise, and eight said they signed on the basis of informal knowledge. Six said they would not sign today, three couldn't remember it, one was dead, and five did not respond.
DeSmogBlog has the most comprehensive rundown on the topic I've found :
http://www.desmogblog.com/node/1067
Here's another one - "Another Climate Change Scientist Tells Skeptics: Stop Misusing My Research"
http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=58817&keybold...
To answer your question in a general way - yes - the climate has changed in the past. So what ?
The question is, do rising CO2 levels change the climate. The scientific consensus (as per the IPCC and peer reviewed literature) is that yes, they do.
Or to put it another way - people used to get lung cancer before tobacco smoking became a common past-time. People who don't smoke can get lung cancer today. Do you believe that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer ?
Somewhat ironically, I used to like the HR Nicholls Society and don't object to many of their positions - but their position on global warming is just criminal.
I take nothing on face value Gav, otherwise I would not have forwarded the question. I would simply have accepted the overwhelmingly popular veiw repeated by 99%+ of people, 99% of whom are not climate scientists either. In other words, most people are simply taking what they hear on the subject on face value. I appreciate that you have taken the time to dig up some more info on this, my main focus has been elsewhere. Which means I will have to put that aside so I can go searching for and ploughing through as much climate change literature as possible.
If I come to the conclusion that there is overwhelming evidence that current climate change is largely or entirely man-made, I will cheerfully admit it and come back to the fold on this one.
But right now all I have is: climates have swung wildly many, many times in the past without any help from us - but this time it's different. It's definately us.
If the data had shown a long term history of climatic stability, I would have little doubt that carbon emissions were behind it all. But I still need a bit more convincing yet.
Lefty,
It is possible to reach your own conclusions rapidly by reading the references above. I commend you to do so - and please do let us know how you go.
Gee, I'm very impressed with all the midnight oil that Gav has burned to try and help you out. - My only complaint is that he may have drowned out the info that I sent you about four posts up, about the exact cause of the "natural" cycles, and why we're sure that the current warming is not "natural".. ;-)
I've personally known about the Greenhouse Effect for 33 years, (in fact the first recognition of anthropomorphic warming was back before WW2 by Guy Stewart Callendar) and I've constantly been amazed at the lack of political action about a problem that's been staring us in the face. But there are many people who've put short-term profit before the long-term viability of their own planet - like David Evans.
Thanks for the links Gav and Cretaceous.
Having absorbed that, it does seem a bit more likely to me now that human activity is at least a major influence. Being new to the technicalities underlying this particular debate, simply accepting the assertion that current climate change is largely or entirely man-made would have been taking the most popular veiw at unquestioning face value.
I am cautious about simply accepting veiwpoints these days, even if I like the sound of them. I waited for the inevitable revolution - it never came. I became a permaculturalist and waited for the inevitable collapse of modern society due to the rape and pillage of the "delicate balance" of nature - it never came (yet). Unless we are talking about death and taxes, we need to be very carefull with the use of the word "ineveitable" because a crystal ball we do not have.