Doomed Planet

The Climate Cult’s Blackout Brigade

co2 smokeAs Australia’s electricity systems slide towards unreliability and more blackouts – half a dozen so far, at last count —  let’s pin the responsibility on the true culprits: activist climate “scientists” peddling their dodgy CO2 alarm and insane zero-emission targets.

At their forefront is the climate cabal within the Australian Academy of Science, our peak science organisation.  In  2015, speaking for the Academy, they blithely recommended to the federal government that Australia embarks on “significant, urgent and sustained” emissions cuts. Their desired 2030 scenario — which remains the Academy’s policy — is for  CO2 emission cuts 30-40% below 2000 levels, en route to the Academy’s desired zero- emissions regime by 2050.

I emailed the Academy the following questions about its submission:

1. I don’t see any costing of the Academy’s 2030 and 2050 targets. Can you provide me with best estimates or something on costings anyway — I assume the report authors did some work on that.

2. I don’t see any breakdown of Academy targets into solar, wind, coal, nuclear, hydro, whatever. Can you assist me by detailing such breakdowns?

3. The report has little/nothing to say about how a reliable base load electricity system will operate on your 2030 and 2050 scenarios. In light of recent events, does the Academy have any suggestions on how blackouts will be avoided as Australia moves to the desired RE [renewable energy] targets?

Th reply:

“The Academy has a broad brief across the sciences. Its Fellows step up in a voluntary capacity to write documents such as this… We don’t have the in-house expertise or resources to answer your detailed questions.”

This reply went on to list the contributors to the Academy’s submission, namely Dr John A Church FAA FTSE FAMS;

Dr Ian Allison AO; Professor Michael Bird FRSE; Professor Matthew England FAA; Professor David Karoly FAMS FAMOS; Professor Jean Palutikof; Professor Peter Rayner; and Professor Steven Sherwood.

The Academy of Science itself admits that it lacks the “in-house expertise or resources” to explain why it wants to destroy the country’s electricity security and raise the price of power to all Australians. But wow, it’s great at puffing itself. The same cabal that is clueless about the real-world impacts of its emissions recommendations bragged in their 2015 submission:

“The Academy promotes scientific excellence, disseminates scientific knowledge, and provides independent scientific advice for the benefit of Australia and the world… The Academy would be pleased to provide further information or explanation on any of the points made in this submission.” (My emphasis. But the Academy wimped out when I actually asked for such information).

The Academy has form in pandering to green nostrums.

  • It sponsored and helped bankroll its Fenner Conference on the Environment at UNSW in 2014, themed as “Addicted to Growth? How to move to a Steady State Economy in Australia.” The flier compared the pursuit of economic growth to “the ideology of the cancer cell”.[1] Some speakers urged economic contraction and drops in living standards of up to 90%.[2]
  •  It trumpeted its divestment of shareholdings in supposedly-abhorrent fossil fuel companies in 2015, although the Academy  HQ in Canberra continues to enjoy unprincipled use of fossil-fuel-powered electricity. The Academy lumps in coal-related outfits like Rio Tinto with its other pariah companies in gambling, tobacco, the sex trade, and napalm production.
  • The Academy swept under the rug a damning 2010 audit of the IPCC by the 15-nation InterAcademy Council, although its then-president, Kurt Lambeck, played an important role in the audit process.[3] An Academy office-bearer justified its non-disclosure in an email:“Needless to say, any adverse findings do great damage to the credibility of climate scientists as a whole, especially in the current climate of almost religious opposition to the acceptance of climate change science.”
  • The Academy authored and promulgated climate lessons for high-schoolers, urging them to embrace green activism and political lobbying. Teachers were advised, in all seriousness, to “ask [15-16 year old] students if they have ever taken action or advocated for a cause. Do they know of anyone who has?” The teens were also asked,“Which is more effective, science awareness or advocacy, when it comes to generating 
community action? What cause would you sign up for?”
  • The Academy’s  latest chief executive is Anna-Maria Arabia, formerly Federal Labor Party adviser and climate activist, with a track record of seeking suppression of “denier” views.  She was director of policy/principal adviser to Bill Shorten for three years, earlier spending half a decade as adviser to Kim Beazley and Anthony Albanese.

The Academy  believes that global warming can be explained and predicted by using CO2 emissions as a control knob – turn up the knob (CO2 emissions) and warming occurs proportionately. This childishly-simple relationship enables the climate scientists to imagine CO2 “budgets” and use them to hypothetically keep global warming to some magic 2degC limit. Any other climate complexities, such as multiple superimposed ocean temperature cycles, cosmic rays, or 1000 other factors as yet only sketchily understood, are deemed irrelevant to global-warming forecasting.

This type of thinking fits what eminent Princeton atomic physicist Will Happer described last week as “cult” mentality. Happer said, “It’s like Hare Krishna or something like that. They’re glassy-eyed and they chant. It will potentially harm the image of all science.”[4]

The Academy’s eight authors are also in love with the idea that because Australia is a rich country, it should be first to make sacrifices to its living standards, while so-called “developing” countries like (nuclear-armed) China, India and Pakistan enjoy a holiday to crank out emissions without restraint.[5] The submission cites approvingly “the common but differentiated responsibilities of nations” – this being code from  the UN’s Third World corruptocrats for handing them the developed world’s wealth. The Academy also imagines that “it is in our national interest” to show “international leadership” on emissions cuts. These  dubious and self-damaging propositions are political not science-related and the Academy squanders its intellectual/scientific capital by canvassing them.[6]

Another characteristic of the Academy’s climate scientists is to assume that more global warming will be a bad thing. It will bring, their submission says, more and worse extreme weather, degrade farm output, drown Asian megacities from sea-level rise (if so, when? In 2200?), drown low-lying tropical islands (Charles Darwin scotched that idea in 1837) and, of course, kill the Great Barrier Reef, which mysteriously survived several comparable warming episodes in the  past 10,000 years.

Reality checks

  • The Academy’s “extreme weather” meme is not, in broad terms, even endorsed by the IPCC’s 5th report. The most comprehensive study to date, published last week, “found that the frequency of hail storms, thunderstorms and high wind events has decreased by nearly 50 percent on average throughout China since 1960.”
  •  The less than 1degC of global warming in the past 150 years has been accompanied by record output of food crops, sufficient to feed a global population increased by 2.5 billion  in the past 30 years. With the global food import bill at a six-year low, the amazing rise in crop productivity shows no sign of stalling. Another 1degC of warming would seem, on past form, an excellent thing for food output for the world’s under-nourished.
  • The fertilizing effect of our emissions-caused CO2 increase has greened the planet, creating the vegetative equivalent of two continental United States. What’s the Academy got to say about that?

The Academy-eight’s submission cited only six external papers, one of them co-authored by a “R.K. Pachauri” (who happens to be devoid of science qualifications). Rajendra Pachauri resigned abruptly as IPCC chair in February 2015 (three months before the Academy submission citing him) after a 29-year-old female subordinate at his TERI think-tank  alleged the 75-year-old  had spent the previous 15 months pursuing and sexually harasing her.[7] Soon after, New Delhi police charged the Academy-cited author with molestation, stalking, sexual harassment and criminal intimidation. His initial and wildly improbable defence (later abandoned) was that some “climate enemy” had hacked his phone, computer and whatsapp account to send the woman all those dirty texts and lurid suggestions.[8]

For those in the Academy who would claim Pachauri’s sex obsessions are nothing to do with his IPCC work, please note that while chairing the 37th IPCC plenary in Batumi, Georgia, in 2013, attended by 229 politicians from 92 countries, Pachauri was surreptitiously firing off come-hither notes to his outraged and much put-upon staffer. Prosecutors are yet to have their charges against him tested in the notoriously slow and corruptible Indian courts.

Another of the meagre citations in the Academy’s submission is to a report on “Deep Decarbonisation in 2050” from the Monash/Myer ClimateWorks think-tank (2014) and authored by sundry Climateworks, CSIRO and ANU warmist fanatics.

This document posits a $60 per tonne carbon price by 2020 (current price on European markets, five Euros). The carbon price would rise thereafter by more than 4% a year to 2050, at which happy date Australians will supposedly  bask in unprecedented riches and affordable electricity per capita, along with  zero thermal coal usage.

Climateworks outlines a scenario in which, thanks to “very strong abatement incentives” i.e. subsidies,  cars by 2050 are running on electricity and hydrogen, while trucks, planes and mining machinery are powered largely by biofuels. (The authors also hope to see a return to wooden buildings, rather than old-fashioned brick, steel and concrete). The implications include that Australia would need to plant in the very broad vicinity of between 600,000 hectares and 1.7 million every year of forestry for carbon credits and biomass.[9] Needless to say, the  Science Academy’s climate team took the document seriously, although it more resembles a Greens senator’s wet dream.

A third citation in the Academy submission of  Professor Lesley Hughes, David Karoly et al is to an IPCC document on Australasian warming which, just coincidentally, happens to have been lead-authored by Professor Lesley Hughes and reviewed by David Karoly.

The main citation, however, is to the Academy’s own 2015 booklet, “The science of climate change: Questions and answers”. One of that document’s remarkable feature (citation 45) is the trust it places in Michael Mann’s notorious and discredited 2000-year ‘Hockey Stick’ temperature reconstruction.

The document’s main surprise is that the Academy imagines output of climate models constitutes “compelling evidence” that human-caused CO2 increases are warming the planet.[10]  In fact, the model outputs are “compelling evidence” of nothing other than the assumptions and tweaks chosen by the modellers, such as inordinately-high sensitivity of temperature to CO2 increases. This, and the satellite-measured 18 years of warming hiatus,  have led to models over-forecasting recent warming two- or threefold, and to the IPCC’s acknowledgement that 111 out of 114 model runs have exaggerated actual warming. Yet so-called predictions from these models out to 2100 are the basis for the Academy wanting trillion-dollar decarbonising of the world’s energy usage and prolonged energy poverty for the Third World.

Even more absurdly, the Academy booklet’s “proof” of man-made CO2 warming is that climate models are supposedly poor with 150-year hindcasts (recreation of past temperature trends) when only “natural” influences are included, but more accurate when human CO2 outputs are included.[11]

The reality is that modellers have no idea about the impact of a host of natural and crucial variables such as cloud feedback effects. The IPCC in its 2007 report listed more than a dozen climate forcing factors for which it rated scientific understanding as “Medium to Low”, “Low” or “Very Low”.  In several key passages, the IPCC acknowledged serious defects in the models.[12] Yet the Australian Academy, despite its normal fawning over IPCC findings, continues to assume the models are more or less perfect.

This misplaced trust allows the  Academy to claim that juxtaposing pairs of (flawed and unvalidated) models can   “prove” CO2 impacts. It’s a mystery how the so-called climate scientists have hoodwinked the world with such nonsense for decades.

A particularly lame and incestuous line in the Academy Q&A document reads, “Some models predict that, when the current slowdown [ie warming hiatus] ends, renewed warming will be rapid.” Flip to the citations (No. 87) and you discover that the document co-author Matthew England is citing is his own 2014 paper, which purports to explain away the hiatus with modelled stuff about Pacific trade wind changes pushing heat into the ocean – one of more than 60 different and often contradictory hypotheses to date on the “pause”.[13]

Instead of sledging each other over renewables target levels, the political parties would benefit from auditing the climate science behind the targets – and discovering that it’s tainted and threadbare. And in the case of the Academy of Science, it’s activism.

Tony Thomas’s book of Quadrant essays, “That’s Debatable – 60 Years in Print” is available here.



[1] As 95% of Academy Fellows live off the taxpayer, the Academy presumably took the view that the vast unemployment  from a no-growth economy would be other people’s problem.

[2] “(P)resent rich world levels of consumption are grossly unsustainable and we will probably have to reduce them by something like 90% if we are to achieve a sustainable and just world. Most people concerned about the state of the planet don’t seem to realise how huge the changes would have to be.” Ted Trainer, quoted by speaker Haydn Washington.

[3] The InterAcademy Council, representing 15 national science academies, found “significant shortcomings in each major step [i.e. every major step] of IPCC’s assessment process”.

[4] A classic “cultist” example, also common in Australia, is claiming that any unusual weather event – such as the Californian drought – is linked to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The Californian drought has been overtaken in the past month or two by torrential rain. The more brazen climate “scientists” are now trying to link that rain to AGW as well.

[5] China plans for its emissions not even to peak until 2030. In the three years to 2020, it will add  coal-fired electricity generation equivalent to the entire electricity generation of Canada.

[6] The Academy submission is not 100% loopy as it acknowledges (twice) that “it is not possible to avoid all climate change”. Congrats, guys, on that profundity.

[7] “I feel broken and scarred in body and mind due to Dr. Pachauri’s behavior and actions. I get frequent panic attacks due to the constant harassment and being made to feel like an object of vulgar desire from this man, who is old enough to be my grandfather … I was very scared of losing my reputation and employment if I complained to anyone.” 

One of Pachauri’s messages reads: “I find it now very difficult to hug you. What haunts me are your words from the last time that I ‘grabbed’ your body. That would apply to someone who would want to molest you. I loved you in the soul, mind, heart…”

[8] The Academy-cited Pachauri previously published a sari-ripping novel, Return to Almora, featuring orgies, masturbation and unsettling descriptions of sex with reluctant women.

[9] Climateworks: “The analysis suggests that the total biofuel use would amount to about 15GL in 2050, which is equivalent to about 44 percent of today’s domestic petroleum refining capacity.”

[10] The Academy: “Together with physical principles and knowledge of past variations, models provide compelling evidence that recent changes are due to increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. They tell us that, unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced greatly and greenhouse gas concentrations are stabilised, greenhouse warming will continue to increase.”

[11]  The Academy: “Models can successfully reproduce the observed warming over the last 150 years when both natural and human influences are included, but not when natural influences act alone. This is both an important test of the climate models against observations and also a demonstration that recent observed global warming results largely from human rather than natural influences on climate.”

[12] (a)       “There may also be a contribution from forcing inadequacies and, in some models, an overestimate of the response to increasing greenhouse gas and other anthropogenic forcing (dominated by the effects of aerosols).” [WG I SPM, section D.1, page 15, bullet point 2, and full Synthesis Report on page SYR-8).

(b) “This difference between simulated [i.e. model output] and observed trends could be caused by some combination of (a) internal climate variability, (b) missing or incorrect radiative forcing and (c) model response error”. (WGI contribution, chapter 9, text box 9.2, page 769)

[13] Rather than vainly trying to account for the pause, “pause-buster” climate people at America’s NOAA now alter past data to remove the pause from the climate record.

41 thoughts on “The Climate Cult’s Blackout Brigade

  • Peter OBrien says:

    Tony, your last paragraph is the clincher. It is beyond me why the sceptics in the Coalition, such as Craig Kelly, aren’t singing this from the rooftops everyday. What better way to bolster your case for coal fired power than to expose the dubious nature of the CAGW scam. There is more than enough evidence for, even, Turnbull to say there’s not enough evidence.

  • ian.macdougall says:

    Going by this Tony Thomas revelation, it would not surprise me to learn that (a) the Australian Academy of Science is a total cesspit of sexual predators, unfit even for the company of the present POTUS, and that (b) it has been moved in on by the Flat Earth Society and the Von Daniken League, and is flogging homeopathic remedies as a sideline.
    I honestly don’t know what this whole wide world is coming to.

    It’s a mystery how the so-called climate scientists have hoodwinked the world with such nonsense for decades.

    I would not stop there, and the scam won’t either. That strange gurgling sound coming from every point of the compass these days has to be not rising seas, but the whole world drowning in the snake oil it has been talked into buying.

  • ianl says:

    > ““The Academy has a broad brief across the sciences. Its Fellows step up in a voluntary capacity to write documents such as this… We don’t have the in-house expertise or resources to answer your detailed questions.””

    The old two-boot, leftwards shuffle. So genuinely disappointing.

    Accountability ? That’s not us, that’s in the building next door … empty now, though, no one there.

    0.8C (which is smaller than the error bars, anyway) in 150 years with anthropogenic attribution currently pegged at 50% – ie. 0.4C in 150 years. Just not scary. Oh well …

    • ianl says:

      In any case, it matters not, as I’ve commented before. The swamp cannot be drained, the Rennaisance is reversed, the Disenlightenment proceeds. And we have no clear end goal in sight, just deepening degradation.

      Just ask the SA population.

  • en passant says:

    Tony,
    A concise summary of the blatant lies and deceits of pseudo-scientists who would sell their soul for a grant. Senator Roberts has been calling for the very audit you suggest, but I suspect that there is a whole alternative globalist agenda in play. We know the totalitarian Reds, turned into the totalitarian Greens, but their dream of domination marched on despite the collapse of the Grey soulless USSR into the much more vibrant society it is today. China retains the Maoist ideals in name only, but retains the totalitarian bit – with bread and some honey.

    Maurice Strong, George Soros, the unlamented Obama, Clinton’s and Cameron, may have hit a speed bump, but their end goal has not changed. The ‘Finkel Report’ when it is finalised did not look at the near zero emissions nuclear option as ‘it is unpopular’ – how scientific and thorough is that? Also, as Alan Moran has pointed out it is the political poodle’s yap to the master’s voice. I have the answer, you just have to find the right question to fit it. If you think things are bad now, give the Finkel Report some credence and apply it and in a few short years you will see what fourth world power supply looks like.

    Terry McCrann pointed out in Today’s Sun-Herald that the government (the political machine) is being lubricated by political advocacy by every scientific and economic body that is supposed to lay before their political masters the unvarnished truth. Well, the truth will out eventually, but the strong, sovereign Australia we were once proud of, may never recover economically – or even survive as a nation. Treason is not too strong a word as it is wilful ignorance and an ideological position that cares not for Australian’s that our politicians are pursuing. What is the end result they desire?

  • Keith Kennelly says:

    Catastrafarian … ‘glassy eyed and chanting’ … global warming, rising carbon, rising seas, rising power prices, rising power bills.

  • ian.macdougall says:

    “In East Antarctica, 3,000km south of the West Australian town of Albany, an ice shelf the size of California is melting from below.

    “The concerning trend was confirmed by Australian scientists in December, who reported that warming ocean temperatures were causing the rapid melt of the end of the Totten glacier, which is holding back enough ice to create a global sea rise of between 3.5 metres and six metres.”

    DIRE WARNING: That report is in the (choke! caaargh! splutter! hawk! spit!*****) GROAN

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/15/totten-glacier-antarctic-voyage-to-map-seafloor-hobart-invstigator

    • en passant says:

      MacD,
      Easy money for you: $1,000 says there is not a 1.5m sea level rise in the next 5-years. I have bet my new home on it.

      What odds are you giving me as you see a minimum of 3.5m just around the corner?

  • Anthony Cox says:

    There is a case to be made that the increase in CO2 over the ‘Anthropocene’ period is either entirely or primarily natural so even if you believe CO2 is the shaper of the world’s climate, which it isn’t, there is nothing humans can do about it. CO2 does interact with radiation wavelengths in the infra-red spectrum but that radiation cannot heat the oceans and any heating effect is basically exhausted at levels of 200ppm due the Beer-Lambert Law and the log decline.

    Alarmism is a failed theory and this failed theory is the entire justification for renewables which are a failed energy source. The SoB’s who promote and profit from alarmism and renewables will not stop until government grows a backbone and/or they are paraded before the courts. Neither are likely at this time.

  • Anthony Cox says:

    In respect of Matthew England’s ‘wind’ paper referred to in the 2nd last paragraph I do a rebuttal here:

    http://theclimatescepticsparty.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/england-passes-wind-and-discovers-heat.html

    • ian.macdougall says:

      Anthony:

      Your ‘rebuttal’ includes the following statement:

      The hiatus in temperature, that is temperature has stopped, is a complete contradiction to AGW. Lord Monckton shows this in his usual elegant fashion.

      The temperature of the planet is pretty well regulated by the icecaps at the poles and on the Himalayan Plateau. The heat absorbed shows up not as rise in thermometer readings, but as sea level rise as in:

      Global Mean Sea Level Rates
      CU: 3.3 ± 0.4 mm/yr
      AVISO: 3.3 ± 0.6 mm/yr
      CSIRO: 3.3 ± 0.4 mm/yr
      NASA GSFC: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr
      NOAA: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr (w/ GIA)

      (Please do not try a Climategate response on this, as that whole beatup is now and for very good reasons, dead in the water.)

      As to the elegance of His Lordship, it is as it may be, but I suggest you balance your enthusiasm for that denialist aristocrat by perusing perspicacity at the link below.

      https://perspicacity.xyz/2016/12/10/what-climate-skeptics-taught-me-about-global-warming/

      • en passant says:

        MacD,
        No denial from me, and just easy money for you: $1,000 says there is not a 1.5m sea level rise in the next 5-years. I have bet my new home on it.

        What odds are you giving me as you see a minimum of 3.5m just around the corner?

        Show some courage and put up or rabbit on without ever being other than annoying.

        Jody,.
        Help me out here

  • Keith Kennelly says:

    Ian, the newspaper article, you like too, doesn’t give any details nor references any ‘peer reviewed’ articles that provide any proof to support the claim about the alleged breakaway iceberg is caused by warming water.

    There is however a government funded jaunt for a few dozen catastrafarians on a big comfy cruise ship for a couple of months to check this out! Costing millions no doubt!

  • bemartin39@bigpond.com says:

    May I offer my simplistic yet utterly satisfying take on the matter of CO2 and climate:

    Ice core samples prove beyond doubt that over the millennia warming occurred first and an increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere followed some 800 years later.

    To the best of my knowledge, nobody, no scientist nor layman, contests this – although climate alarmists have concocted some “explanation” why it does not contradict their theories based entirely on CO2 driven CAGW – it makes me unreservedly satisfied that human induced CO2 emission has precious little, if anything, to do with the climate.

  • ian.macdougall says:

    Keith:

    It is all a GIGANTIC CON AND CONSPIRACY! Any fool can see that!
    If it was in my power to do so, I would appoint you as Chief Ostrich of the Ostrich School.
    “There is however a government funded jaunt for a few dozen catastrafarians on a big comfy cruise ship for a couple of months to check this out! Costing millions no doubt!”
    I wouldn’t go there if I were you, Keith. The cost of the ‘cruise ship’ is peanuts beside the money being trousered by the coal barons, thanks to their proprietary grab and enclosure of a highly valuable should-be-public resource.

    Still, here is a direct link to something you might find worthwhile: “What climate skeptics taught me about global warming.”
    at https://perspicacity.xyz/2016/12/10/what-climate-skeptics-taught-me-about-global-warming/

    “Long before research exposed evidence that humans cause global warming, science made another sensational claim – that smoking caused lung cancer.
    “That case has been proven beyond doubt. But there is a science story from this era that is mostly forgotten: The battle against cigarettes taught science how to prove.
    “Before linking cigarettes to lung cancer, science had no established method to prove that one thing caused another….”

    • en passant says:

      MacD,
      If it is real, this is just easy money for you: $1,000 says there is not a 1.5m sea level rise in the next 5-years. I have bet my new home on it.

      What odds are you giving me as you see a minimum of 3.5m just around the corner?

      Show some courage and put up or rabbit on without ever risking anything, except being other than annoying to everyone else? Are you paid to do this or do you just have shares in a ‘renewable’ energy company?

  • Keith Kennelly says:

    Ian
    There is no evidence anywhere humans caused global warming.

    Mate if there was I wouldn’t doubt there was global warming caused by humans.

    The pause … remember!

    There is no doubt smoking causes lung cancer. But lung cancer is only one type of cancer. Maccatastrafrian your assertions are stupid and irrelevant… again.

    • ian.macdougall says:

      I repeat. There was no ‘pause’. Thermometers can say what they like. Sea levels have risen right through the lot of them.
      Have a look at the graph at
      http://sealevel.colorado.edu/

      • en passant says:

        MacD,
        Take the bet! This is just easy money for you: $1,000 says there is not a 1.5m sea level rise in the next 5-years. I have bet my new home on it, will you take the bet and show some courage (rhetorical question).

        Jody and I have a bet on Trump that she can surely collect in less than 2-years.

        What odds are you giving me as you see a minimum of 3.5m just around the corner?

        Show some courage and put up or rabbit on without ever risking anything, except being other than annoying to everyone else? Are you paid to do this or do you just have shares in a ‘renewable’ energy company?

  • Keith Kennelly says:

    What odds did you get from Jody? She hasn’t responded to my offer.

    • en passant says:

      3:1 that Trump is removed (by other than murder) by 31st December 2018.

      The Wind-Powered blowhard MacD warns of a 3.5m rise, so I have offered him a $1,000 bet based on a mere 1.5m rise, but naturally he has not yet accepted. I expect he will ignore this easy money and march on to repeat his fabulist mantra. The Clan MacD motto I believe is “Omm, Omm, evaaa ommward”.

  • Keith Kennelly says:

    Ian

    Thermometers say the temperatures have paused.

    It’s no wonder you now disbelieve what they say.

    Hahahahaha

  • ian.macdougall says:

    Hahahahaha all you like. This whole planet is a thermometer in its own right, and its ‘mercury’ is the one ocean: which is rising. Eny fule kno that.

  • Keith Kennelly says:

    Evey file belief dat.

  • ian.macdougall says:

    I strongly recommend that anyone interested in this question of South Australia’s electricity problems should read the excellent article on it by the economist Ian McAuley at the site below.
    And no, he is not in favour of SA ‘going nuclear’.

    https://newmatilda.com/2017/02/22/south-australias-electricity-problems-jay-weatherill-should-follow-the-coalitions-example/

  • Keith Kennelly says:

    Ian

    The problem in SA is the renewables cannot provide a secure base load. Supply. That baseload is guaranteed by the brown coal generated supply via the interconnector with Vic… provided of course SA doesn’t want excessive amounts and Vic has surplus supply.

    That’s what official reports conclude, not what some catastrafarian scribbler asserts.

    New Matilda … really Ian now you have reached the bottom of the pit.

    • ian.macdougall says:

      Hahahahaha:

      New Matilda … really Ian now you have reached the bottom of the pit.

      Hahahahaha, it may have escaped your attention (probably did), but I was not citing New Matilda. I was citing the economist Ian McAuley, who publishes some of his economic commentary there.
      To dump on the site of publication rather than on the article itself is an ad watchamaycallit: the converse of an ad hominem attack.
      If you wish to be taken seriously by me, and I suspect by a helluva lot of others, you will have to do better than that: like by going to the NM site, reading the piece in question, and then saying specifically what is wrong with it; avoiding generalisation and waffle as much as you can.
      Hahahahaha, it may present a challenge to you, but you might profit by giving it a go.
      Seriously profit.

  • Keith Kennelly says:

    Really Ian

    Let’s see three articles on site now

    1. A dump onTrump. standard leftie elitist crap.
    2. Excusing Weatherall’s renewables disaster. Standard catastrafarian nonsense
    2. An article imploring Givernments to spend in public service jobs and infrustructure in remote areas. Notably in NSW where a successful Liberal Givernment oversees a thriving economy, and not a mention of the rural areas in the Labor commie states where economies are contracting.

    And you think this left wing tag with a bunch of blinkered scribbles isn’t biased.
    You are recommending it because?

    A it provides fair and balanced reporting
    Or
    B it criticises policy regardless of the flavour of government
    Or
    C it totally reflects the flacky views of left wing ratbags and catastrafarians

    • en passant says:

      MacD,
      Put your money where your mouth is and accept my bet. How can you lose with 97% of alchemists on your side, the consensus, 1,281 true-believer organisations and now … Tra-Daa … new Matilda. It’s a lay down misere of money in the bank that I have mad a losing bet. Naturally, you will give me odds.

      Do you support the low-emissions nuclear option for power, or would that affect your Big Renewable’s share dividends?

    • ian.macdougall says:

      Hahahahaha:

      I repeat: If you wish to be taken seriously by me, and I suspect by a helluva lot of others, you will have to go to the NM site read the piece in question, and then say specifically what is wrong with it; avoiding generalisation and waffle as much as you can.

      You have gone there, found a few bits and pieces other than the one specified, and vented your spleen on them.
      Too easy. I can do that trick too, as it happens. There have been pieces on that site that I have ripped into with vengeance at full bore. BUT…..

      Read the McAuley article.. Then say what is wrong with the McAuley article.
      Why the reticence? Surely it can’t be too hard for an experienced and sophisticated critic like yourself…..

    • ian.macdougall says:

      Hahahahaha:

      Your task from here on as a lead spruiker for the Ostrich School is quite simple: you need to rewrite the laws of physics and chemistry. Should be easy enough.
      First, strip atmospheric and all other CO2 molecules of their heat-trapping properties. That in turn will require amendments to the atomic structures of carbon and oxygen, which will necessitate a boxcar effect amending the entire periodic table, and I guess a good deal of quantum physics.
      Should be a piece of cake for a confident young fellow like you.

  • Keith Kennelly says:

    Those are the first three articles on the site. Mere repetition of stuff spouted ad nausaum. Why would I delv further. I notice you posted a glowing praise of them on one of their forums.

    Really Ian, I’m not at all a sophisticate. I’ve more commonsense and decency.

    You are better off keeping you reading and assertions to that site. On balanced forums you come across as a raving f…ing looney. In them you are normal.

  • Keith Kennelly says:

    This one Ian.

    • ian.macdougall says:

      Hahahahaha:
      Balance? As far as I can see, I am the only commenter on this site who offers some sort of balance on issues of climatology, particularly since all the critics of the scientific mainstream, such as yourself, can offer is assertion, bluster and (appropriately) hot air.
      Meanwhile, the glaciers keep melting, the oceans keep rising, and you keep refusing to be specific in your criticism of the McAuley article:

      I notice you posted a glowing praise of them on one of their forums

      (without giving any specific reason as to why I should not have.) That was the McAuley article I was talking about there.

      • dchawcroft@yahoo.com says:

        Yes, I think you do well, Mr MacDougall. I am much impressed by your writing.

        I seek the truth. Have been much impressed recently by this web page: https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/01/03/how-to-discuss-global-warming-with-a-liberal-the-smoking-gun-files/

        The arguments for the role of CO2 seemed irrefutable to me.

        I’m still not sure if you have refuted them. Have you?

        From my position it is basically a nonsense inasmuch as caused by humans or by nature, by CO2 or H2O or whatever, the warming will continue and I think it is impossible for us, the humans on this planet, to do anything about it – given that we are humans with all that signifies.

        Please don’t let them provoke you to emotionalism. I would like to see more presentation of calm evidences.

        regards,

        b

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