‘Yet another Australian activist judge, usurping the role of parliament in a democratic society, has given Lawfare’s economic saboteurs a new lease of life. If you thought that environmentalists’ abuse of the legal system in their mission to destroy fossil fuels, whatever the economic costs, was already excessive, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Federal Justice Mordecai Bromberg’s incredible 27 May determination that the Morrison government has a duty of care to protect Australian children from climate change devastation and death, requires that duty to be met before approving any further fossil fuel developments that add to CO2 emissions. It ushers in an unlimited round of legal battles aimed at destroying Australia’s biggest export earner (fossil fuels – coal, oil, LNG – together exceed iron ore) that are a key element in our post-Covid economic recovery. From now on, every governmental approval can be actionable under the common law for negligence on the basis that the ‘catastrophic climate change’ interests of children (unspecified as to age!) ‘have not been adequately taken into account’.’https://spectator.com.au/2021/06/business-robbery-etc-70/
Coal
All posts tagged Coal
Hey, Joe, ‘The CCP won’t let America’s climate industrial complex interfere with its economic ambitions, key to which is its burgeoning supply of reliable and affordable coal-fired power.
Whereas Australia’s suicidal renewable energy obsession has destroyed this country’s competitive advantage, the only interest China has in wind turbines and solar panels is making them and flogging them off ASAP. If the object was assisting virtue signalling Western nations to wreck once reliable power grids and undermine their energy security, the CCP’s approach is well on the way.
At the other end of the spectrum, a doddery and confused 78-year-old American gent – under direction from the climate carpetbaggers and renewable energy rent seekers – is attempting to bully Australia, among others, into accelerating the process that’s left Australians suffering among the world’s highest retail power prices, with a supply so erratic that energy hungry businesses are on life support and power rationing is the new normal.
Here’s Alan Moran taking a look at how we landed here and where we’re headed, if Australia keep following the path it’s on.
Joe Biden’s bid to enforce climate club
The Australian
Alan Moran
22 April 2021
The urgency of the Biden administration in pursuing green policies signifies the prominence of the issue in terms of world diplomacy and domestic policies in the US, Australia and elsewhere.
Even though the long-planned UN Climate Change Conference will take place later this year in Glasgow, the Biden administration determined that it would call a two-day online conference, scheduled to begin on Thursday US time, addressing the issue of energy, climate change and the actions it deems necessary.
The US administration now proposes to spend $US2.9 trillion ($3.76 trillion) on infrastructure, most of which is climate-related and which is before congress — this is almost as much as total annual revenue and comes on top of a $US2 trillion deficit.
This fusillade of policy measures and diplomatic pressures from the US has magnified enormously the same pressures that have been exerted by the EU. They include threats of trade discrimination — a carbon import tariff — on goods from nations not deemed to be doing sufficient to suppress their emissions.
Such threats even register with China (the emissions of which exceed those of the EU and US combined), which has assured the world that it will achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2060. China’s assurances are somewhat hollow in view of having one million megawatts of coal power capacity (Australia has 25,000MW) with a further 200,000MW planned.
In contrast to fast-growing economies, Australia’s reduction in coal generator capacity has been under way for years. It stems not from a lack of competitiveness on the part of coal but as a result of regulations and direct support that subsidises wind and solar. These subsidies affect the profitability of coal plants by forcing them to run below capacity and operate stop-start. Growing nations in our part of the world — India, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — have recognised the road to prosperity is cheap, dependable electricity and all have rapidly expanding coal-generating capacity.
Australia wastefully has spent much more than most other nations on measures targeted at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The ultimate test of this is per capita spending on wind and solar, where Australia has spent twice that of the next highest nations (US and Japan), three times as much as Germany and six times as much as China.
In discriminating against coal (where our domestic resources have no peers in quality and cost) Australian policy amounts to self-harm. It is actuated by a variety of factors. Originally the policies were to give a leg-up to renewables that were seen as potentially cost competitive. The lobbying power of renewable energy interests have augmented this. More recently we see added fear of being ostracised by the Western nations club as a result of the carbon emissions suppression orthodoxy.
Such dynamics strengthen the hand of domestic true believers in cataclysmic global warming. True believers and vested interests happily accept CSIRO fantasies that renewables are now cheaper than coal, while considering renewables subsidies to be essential.
The estimated cost of new actions announced by Scott Morrison this month comes on top of a plethora of support measures for renewables already in place. Such support costs $7bn a year in a wholesale electricity market worth under $12bn and a retail market worth only $30bn. On top of these costs is the $10bn Snowy 2.0 pump storage facility.
The Morrison government has not bought the fable of low-cost wind but, at least in part because of international pressure, it is doubling down on the penalties to coal that the renewable subsidies have brought. This includes the announcement of a further $1bn for the South Australian electricity grid, made unworkable by subsidised renewables, as well as additional support for the impossible economics of carbon capture and storage and hydrogen. The latest measures are icing a cake that government policies have already over-sugared.
For his part, Anthony Albanese has gone the full Sanjeev Gupta, chasing the mirage of green manufacturing. He has foreshadowed even greater subsidies for renewables, despite claiming them to be cheaper than coal, as a foundation for a resurrected manufacturing industry.
As a nation, we continue to sacrifice competitiveness and increased income levels to pursue wokeness. All this said, it has to be recognised that the outcome of a forced reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, if brought about, would have only a trivial effect on the climate. Global temperatures have been increasing for 150 years and it is only in the past 50 years that human emissions could have had any effect. Contrary to assertions, the deleterious effects sometimes mentioned have not taken place: there has been no increase in hurricanes, bushfires or other natural disasters, no rise in the oceans, the ice caps are not melting, polar bear communities are flourishing and, as all Australians will be aware, the dams are full when activists claimed this would never happen again.
We have a mix of genuine fears that mankind is irretrievably changing the world’s climate that no amount of evidence that this is not presenting serious threats will calm. We have businesses seeking to take advantage of this by seeking subsidies. And we have politics seeking to chisel out a prime role for itself in harnessing the world economy. These factors are a potent brew with drastic implications for a prosperous Australia. They also have wide-ranging geopolitical implications given the seemingly unstoppable growth of an aggressive China that, irrespective of its pledges, will not allow its wealth to be curtailed by adopting high-cost forms of energy.’https://stopthesethings.com/2021/04/26/last-man-standing-china-defies-bidens-climate-crusade-against-coal-fired-power/
You have to hand it to Xi Jinping. The Chinese “president for life” last September schmoozed the royalty of the United Nations with his unexpected pledge that his country aims “to have CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality (Net Zero) before 2060.”
Xi then urged other nations “to pursue innovative, coordinated, green and open development for all” through rapid deployment of new technologies so as to “achieve a green recovery of the world economy in the post-COVID era and thus create a powerful force driving sustainable development.”
The eloquent sage, confident that the mantle of world leadership was passing from the United States into his hands, concluded his prepared remarks as follows:
“The baton of history has been passed to our generation, and we must make the right choice, a choice worthy of the people’s trust and of our times. Let us join hands to uphold the values of peace, development, equity, justice, democracy, and freedom shared by all of us and build a new type of international relations and a community with a shared future for mankind. Together, we can make the world a better place for everyone.”
And just how is China preparing itself for Net Zero?
The London-based energy and climate research group Ember reports that China generated 53 percent of the world’s total coal-fired power in 2020, a jump of 9 percent from 2015, while adding 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power installations in 2020 alone. China is also financing billions of dollars’ worth of coal-fired power plants in other “developing” nations.
[It should be noted that in 2020 China also added a record 71.7 GW of wind power and 48.2 GW of solar. And China has set a goal of 70 GW of installed nuclear energy by 2025. But “progress is nowhere near fast enough,” according to Ember power analyst Dave Jones. Jones added that “coal power needs to collapse by 80 percent by 2030 to avoid dangerous levels of warming.” Or so he believes.]
Analysis by the Asia Society Policy Institute and Climate Analytics, as reported in Climate Change News, indicates that to reach the Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5o C temperature reduction by 2060, China would have to achieve peak CO2 emissions by 2025 and rapidly reduce them thereafter, with a total phaseout of coal-fired power by 2040.
Yet, according to the Renewable Energy Institute, the typical coal-fired power plant has a lifespan of about 40 years. Would China throw away massive investments just to kowtow to the UN? Zhang Shuwei, chief economist for the Draworld Environment Research Center, claims Chinese coal may have to absorb over $300 billion in stranded assets if the nation follows through and undertakes a “cliff fall of coal power generation after 2030.”
But, as the New York Post recently editorialized, China’s betrayal of its commitment to Hong Kong, together with its duplicity regarding the COVID pandemic and its dissembling on treatment of the Uighurs, signals that the Middle Kingdom cannot be trusted to keep its word. The trampling of Hong Kong’s freedoms, the paper argues, demonstrates that there is no point negotiating with the Chinese Communist Party on long-term issues like climate change.
Agence France-Presse reported in March that China’s latest five-year plan increases investment in coal and omits any cap on total energy consumption. Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, compares Xi’s words with China’s deeds, stating that, “The central contradiction between expanding the smokestack economy and promoting green growth appears unresolved.”
Similarly, Japanese journalists also question China’s commitment to the Green economy – in contrast to the “excellent” responses of Japan and its Western allies (despite the fact that new Japanese coal plants in 2020 exceeded retirements and that high-efficiency coal plants are unlikely to disappear soon. [The Japanese in their zeal to single out China ignored the fact that India and many other nations are also beefing up coal mining and power generation.]
Other journalists are equally offended at China’s apparent duplicity. Michael Standaert, a China-based free-lancer, wrote in Yale E360, under the headline, “Despite pledges to cut emissions, China Goes on a Coal Spree.” Standaert argued that there is a “real and figurative haze about how strong [China’s] climate ambitions really are and how quickly the country can wean itself from … coal.” [When Mother Jones reposted Standaert’s article, the headline read in part, “China Is Bingeing on Coal.”]
Vox correspondent Lili Pike provides a backstory excuse for China’s seemingly odd behavior. She notes that China’s provinces, who gained authority to approve new power plants in 2014, see new coal plants as a way to boost their GDP and provide jobs. The economic slowdowns linked to COVID provided extra incentives for these provincial plants.
Perhaps Vox thinks that, once the provincial economies are rolling along, they will recognize their bad investments and shutter their coal plants almost immediately. Perhaps pigs will fly.
China’s “slouching towards Net Zero” approach belies the panicked warnings of UN
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who insists “the climate emergency” — the defining crisis of our time — is happening even more quickly than we feared. It “is a race we are losing, but it is a race we can win.”
Guterres made a toothless plea to China last July to stop building new coal plants, but he giddily applauded Xi’s rhetoric in September. Xi has also won praise from mega-billionaire Bill Gates, who in a February 2021 interview with China Daily gushed over China’s “determination” to prioritize the climate and its contributions to carbon reduction.
According to Gates, “It’s great that President Xi is making climate a priority and wants to work with other countries on this…. Without the contributions of China, many of the key ingredients (in fighting climate change) like the batteries and solar power wouldn’t be so affordable.” [We’re on the same team, babee!]
In the real world, not every environmental disaster prediction has come true – actually, hardly any of them have. Paul Ehrlich’s best-seller, The Population Bomb, opened with this frightful bit of “news”:
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
Today, we have the wisdom of apparent REM fan Greta Thunberg: “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change…. Around 2030 we will be in a position to set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.” In criticizing China for detaining a young Chinese “climate striker,” Thunberg added, “Billions of people will die, and children will die while parents lose their jobs!”
Stop it, President Xi! You are making her cry!
But perhaps Xi Jinping knows Greta is dead right. Perhaps he knows it is too late to save the planet. So why not just “binge” on coal, keep the peasants happy, and stay in office until the end. Maybe Xi has read the tea leaves, or the astronomical charts, and rightly foresees the second coming of the killer asteroid.
Or maybe he figures that by 2030 the whole world will be under his control.’https://papundits.wordpress.com/2021/04/15/chinas-strange-endorsement-of-net-zero/
‘If you believe that solar & wind are ‘cheaper’, then you’ve been tricked by liars and spivs that want to pocket commissions on selling the country out to China. https://www.bloomberg.com/…/coal-india-approves-32…Coal India Ltd. approved an investment of about 473 billion rupees ($6.4 billion) on mining projects as the company seeks to boost output to replace imports of the fuel, the Kolkata-based miner said in an emailed statement.The approvals include eight new projects as well as expansion plans for 24 existing mines, Coal India said. The 32 sites will have a combined peak output of 193 million tons a year, the highest capacity approved during a fiscal year, it said. The projects will produce 81 million tons annually from the financial year starting April 2023, by when the miner targets reaching 1 billion tons of annual production.The world’s biggest miner is counting on a revival in demand for the fuel as the Indian economy emerges from a pandemic-induced slump. Besides industrial consumption, the approaching summer is expected to boost demand for electricity and spur power generators to replenish their declining coal inventories, Coal India’s Chairman Pramod Agrawal said last month.India’s coal users imported a record 248.5 million tons of the fuel in the fiscal year ended 2020. Increasing domestic production will be key to weaning them away from overseas purchases, Coal India said.’ https://www.facebook.com/CraigKellyMP
This is coming to your neighborhood if you are depending on renewables! Renewables will NEVER replace COAL for reliability! While CHINA gets more wealthy due to wind turbines and solar panels we underlings will pay for it dearly! Thank you to the elite politicians pushing this agenda! NOT!!
Genesis 1:28 “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
Wouldn’t it be marvelous if God had given us a material from which we could extract energy? The material could be solid so that its energy content would be concentrated, and it could be mostly carbon, so that when we burned it, the most common product of combustion would be safe, non-poisonous carbon dioxide. Perhaps it could contain small amounts of other useful materials which we could easily extract for multiple purposes while burning it to prevent these materials polluting the air. And the material could exist in large quantities underground, even in areas of the world where other natural resources are few.
God has given us such a material. It is called coal. It is very possible that a lot of the Earth’s coal was formed during the worldwide Flood.
It is popular to despise coal today. It is true that smoke and sulfur dioxide are pollutants, but today they can easily be removed. Meanwhile, we have frequently explained in these Creation Moments that carbon dioxide is actually beneficial for plant life and is not causing the problems ascribed to it by certain climate alarmists. Moreover, large deposits of coal are being found in developing countries that could lift their populations out of poverty with the utilization of this God-given resource.
Let’s not overlook the resources that God has given us in our pursuit of other alternatives. Such resources are for our blessing, and it is ungrateful for humanity to ignore them.’https://creationmoments.com/sermons/god-gave-us-coal/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=god-gave-us-coal&mc_cid=57f550fdd6&mc_eid=00c1dcff3c
Cheaper electricity would be a nice Christmas present but that’s probably not to be. You see, ‘Santa will be busy this year because 2020 marks the final year of the Kyoto climate change agreement signed way back in 1997. Santa has a long list of naughty countries, and only a few in the nice column.
There is good news for Australia. Santa has checked the list twice and confirmed that we should be getting more than a piece of coal this Christmas thanks to our Kyoto efforts.
The latest version of Australia’s emissions projections, released this month, shows that we have reduced our emissions by 403 million tonnes more than necessary to meet both our Kyoto and Paris targets.
Now some Christmas Grinches are suggesting that we should get no presents from Santa’s sack for these good deeds, not even a lump of coal. Indeed, some of the more zealous Scrooges think we should give up even more of the coal we have this Christmas despite our hitherto overachievement.
But that’s not what our non-Christian, secular, gender-neutral, modern Christmases are about! We all know that the modern interpretation of Christ’s message is that you only do a good deed to get something in return.
So what Christmas presents should we get for our 400-million-tonne carbon budget over the next 10 years – before our Paris targets come due in 2030? Here is my overflowing list for us all to choose from.
The closure of the Hazelwood power station – which once provided 25 per cent of Victoria’s electricity supply – doubled electricity prices. We now have the chance to correct this enormous mistake.
A modern, high-efficiency, low- emission (or HELE) coal-fired power station, of Hazelwood’s size, would generate around 9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year. That is about 35 per cent less than the old Hazelwood power station.
And, with 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to spend over the next ten years, we could build four HELE coal-fired power stations. These power stations would not just make for an inspiring one-off Christmas present, they would be able to power the factories that make children’s presents for decades to come. Perhaps even in the future, when the wrapping paper is ripped off, we could find a ‘Made in Australia’ stamp underneath to replace the ubiquitous ‘Made in China’.
Speaking of China, why do we send almost all of our world’s best iron ore and coking coal to a communist dictatorship to bolster its steel industry? We could instead use our carbon budget to build steel mills in Australia again. That would easily end the shame that we are the world’s largest iron ore and coking coal exporter but a net importer of steel.
It takes about 1.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to produce a million tonnes of steel. So accounting for our carbon budget to 2030 would allow us to produce an extra 22 million tonnes of steel a year – around seven new steel mills. To become self-sufficient in steel production again we would only need to build a couple more steel mills roughly equivalent in size to the two steel mills left in Australia at Whyalla and Port Kembla.
So far I have considered all Australians equal when allocating credit for carbon good deeds. However, there is one group of Australians that have in fact been responsible for the bulk – in fact all – of Australia’s carbon ‘achievement’.
At the Kyoto negotiations, our diplomats successfully argued for the inclusion of terms that became known as the ‘Australia clause’. That let us use a baseline year of 1990 for the amount of land clearing that would normally occur in any one year in Australia. In 1990, 688,000 hectares of land in Australia were cleared, which was a record. Since then state governments have stripped farmers of their rights to develop their own land.
If it had not of been for the theft of property rights from farmers, Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions would have increased over the past 15 years. The only reason we can say we have achieved our Kyoto targets is because we stopped developing land in the bush. City people have emitted more over the past 30 years but that seems to have just recommitted them to the task of shutting down industries perceived as evil to atone for their sinful conduct. Australia once rode on the sheep’s back, now we are riding to international climate change conferences on our own farmers’ backs.
So why not give our farmers a break this Christmas and give them some of their property rights back? With 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to spend, we could let farmers develop an extra 300,000 hectares a year for the next 10 years. That would take us back to the 1990 heyday levels of clearing when we used to build dams to grow food. We would all then benefit from better Christmas lunches with lots of Aussie produce.
Before we get too carried away though, we should remember that more beef roasts at Christmas means more belching and farting cattle, and that means, you guessed it, more carbon dioxide emissions.
So the mooing cattle you see on your Christmas travels are not as innocent as they look. Each of these bovine sinners emits around 70 kilograms of methane a year. Factoring in methane’s potency as a greenhouse gas, means that we could double our cattle herd and remain on Santa’s nice list in 2030. Given the government’s stated goal of doubling Australian agriculture, what are we waiting for?
Unfortunately other nation’s are not rushing to reward our good behaviour. They instead laud the empty promises made by countries like China, which despite increasing its carbon emissions fivefold in the past 40 years promises to go to ‘net zero’ by 2060.
This shows how we are playing the Climate Christmas game all wrong. St Nicholas knows when you have been bad or good but St. Al Gore only cares what you say you are going to do. We need a new approach then. By all means let’s go one further than other nations and commit to gross zero emissions by 2050, and then like all other countries, do absolutely nothing about it. Then we will at least get coal (fired power) for Christmas.’https://www.spectator.com.au/2020/12/christmas-notes-5/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=OZWH%20%2020201219%20%20AL&utm_content=OZWH%20%2020201219%20%20AL+CID_0b510a6ee1dcac8731006dfaf495edd4&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Australia&utm_term=Christmas%20notes
Watched a little of the morning news on Sky and the little bit I saw was a big shot from the ANZ Bank talking about the state of the bank. The only thing I realy took away from what he said was the ANZ bank will cease putting money in coal by 2030. Now I say that because many if not most of these financial institutions are cultural warriors appeasing the Leftists as Leftist/Communist China continues to consume more and more coal! Now this hatred of coal is supposedly to save the planet because of CLIMATE CHANGE! Now, have you noticed that these climate change scare mongers are predicting what will occur in ten or twenty years unless something is done NOW BUT the simple weatherman cannot guarantee what the weather will be the next day! That brings me to Part One of the article WEATHER MADE (sort of) UNDERSTANDABLE. This is a long article so just in case you don’t take time to read the entire article this sentence pretty much sums it up and that is ‘AS YOU LEARN MORE ABOUT WEATHER IT WILL BE COME CLEAR TO YOU HOW PREPOSTEROUS IT IS THAT PEOPLE THINK THEY CAN PREDICT AND CONTROL WEATHER A CENTURY FROM NOW.’
‘We shall start at the beginning with possibly a shocking exclamation. Weather is nothing more and nothing less than nature trying to equilibrate the balance of all energy transmitted to the Earth by the sun. It is a never ending multilevel show of physics trying to overcome imbalances and irregularities too numerous to accurately quantify and yet we try hour after hour day after day all across the Earth.
Climate is simply the trends of weather over a long period. We never stop talking about it. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. I’m tired of the rain. I wish this spring would last forever. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of snow at the top of the mountain. This is the weather. We talk about it, we complain about it, we wish about it, but nobody can do anything about it.
With the help of technology in recent decades, like satellites, Doppler radar, telemetry, etc., we are getting pretty good at predicting how the weather is most likely to change over the next SEVERAL days. In Florida and Hawaii, it’s so easy, we don’t even need weather persons. At other locations, say, near tall mountains or along the coastlines, predicting the weather is harder, and forecasts are less reliable.
THE WIND
Wind is simply the movement of air. Its action is caused by temperature differences and atmospheric pressure differences from one place to another. Some differences are the result of the sun heating the earth in one area and not another. It also happens where a portion of the land that’s heated is a mountain, and another part is a valley. Along the coast, the earth is warmed faster than the ocean or if half of the sky is cloudy and half is not. Warm air is lighter than cold air, so it climbs into the sky, and then colder air rushes in to fill the void created by the warm air rising. Nature doesn’t like imbalances of any kind.
Near a warm and sunny beach in the early afternoon, we will get a gentle, cooling summer breeze coming in from the ocean to replace the rising warm air which heated up faster than the water. As shown in Fig 1 at night, the process generally reverses, because the water is now warmer than the land.
At other locations and circumstances, it can be a wild ride, like a jet stream. These are fast-moving rivers of air at the boundaries of massive weather fronts. Here one is hot and the other cold. They flow west to east in the opposite direction in response to the sun’s warming rotation from east to west. At the jet stream core, which is about ten to fifteen kilometers high, the airspeeds can reach several hundreds of miles per hour and move in serpentine paths over continents. These fast-moving core winds drag the adjacent air, forming a velocity gradient that’s very -very fast near the center and keeps slowing down and down until it reaches near-zero speeds some hundreds of Kilometers away. Naturally, if mountains or tall buildings get in the way, the wind changes directions and speed in many turbulent and unpredictable ways.
BAROMETRIC PRESSURE
This is the weight of the volume of air on top of you. At sunrise, if you are at the beach at sea level, and the temperature is 15° C, (69 F) there’s a column of air on top of you going all the way up into outer space. The weight of that air pressing down on you has a force of about 14.7 PSI (pounds per square inch) on your body. If you then go to the rooftop restaurant for brunch at 250 feet high, the pressure on you decreases from 14.7 to 14.3 PSI. Meanwhile, if you have a friend, who is mountain climbing at 2,400 feet, the pressure on him is only about 10.9 PSI. Now the heaviest air, meaning the densest air, is at sea level, and as we go up, it progressively gets less and less dense until near outer space, it’s about zero PSI. Figure 2 illustrators the impact of changing atmospheric pressure on a sealed bottle of water moving from 14,000 feet elevation down to 1000 feet.
BAROMETRIC PRESSURE AND TEMPERATURE RELATIONSHIP
Back at the beach the sun has been warming it up for about five hours. It’s the hottest time of the day when the sun is directly overhead, about noon. Now you might say, “But wait. Why does it usually feel warmer an hour or two into the afternoon, when the sun is no longer at its highest position (called the apex). That’s because an hour or two after the apex, while you’re getting a little less energy from the sun on your head, the earth you are standing on has already been heated by the sun and some of that stored heat in the ground starts radiating and convecting up to you. You are now heated on the top by the sun and from the bottom by the warm ground.
If you are a football fan you will remember Deflate-Gate where Tom Brady was accused of deflating footballs to his liking.Maybe he didn’t. It was noon at Indianapolis’ Lucus Oil Stadium, and the footballs are brought to the field for practice and then for play. The balls came out of a toasty locker room at 75° (Fahrenheit ), and the footballs and the air inside the footballs are also at 75° F, and the PSI is 13.0. Where the NFL likes them. But on the playing field, it’s a chilly 25° F. The footballs and the air inside starts to immediately cool down until the balls, and the air inside, reach 25° F. The question is – what’s happened to the balls? The simple answer is that the pressure in the balls decreased to 11 PSI the way Brady likes them.
Michael place picture of footballs Here
BAROMETRIC PRESSURE AND SPECIFIC VOLUME
Let’s now put together these three measures, pressure, temperature, and volume and see how they generate wind. If we decrease the air temperature, the air density will increase, and the volume will decrease. Alternatively, if we reduce the pressure, the air volume will increase, and temperature will rise. So, we will need to specify two of these variables to see what it does to the third. But, you may ask, if hot air rises, why is it colder at the top of the mountain than at the base? The answer is that on top of the mountain, the air is less dense because of the lower barometric pressure. Another example of this relationship is that at sea level, water boils/turns to steam at 100° C. But if you are at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro at 20,000 feet, it will start boiling at 81° C. Or if you’re below sea level, like in parts of Death Valley California, the boiling point is about 103° C.
THE WEATHER VEHICLE
We have laid out our crazy cartoon model weather machine, in Fig 3. The sun is the engine, and it provides nearly 100 percent of the power to drive it, which we’ll call “temperature.” The transmission, is the way, the heat from the sun is distributed geographically in one part of the world and not in the other. It’s like a transmission that sends different speeds to each wheel, resulting in erratic motion. We’ll call this “specific volume.”
We then have barometric pressure, which regulates how much air enters the engine. Does it all seem if not crazy, awfully complex. That is because it is.
How does the earth receive the sun’s energy. Let’s turn on the engine and see what happens. We have sunlight arriving on the planet and spreading out like a three-dimensional bell curve as shown in Fig 4. The top-center of the bell is precisely on the equator, and it’s at the highest point on the bell. That means that the energy density there is the maximum. At the bottom of the bell are the north and south polar regions. The amount of energy received from the sun is almost the same, but it’s now spread over a vastly larger area.
On earth, where we have land, oceans, and air, they are all set in motion to eliminate these temperature and pressure imbalances. It does so in the atmosphere primarily by the wind. In the seas by water movements like the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic and in the Pacific with the “Pacific Oscillator” and “El Niño Nino/La Niña. On land, it does it primarily by radiation, convection mostly to the air. On the earth, some of this heat is also conducted deeper in the ground, which is essential for plants to grow. It warms up and dries out the soil in the spring, allowing plant roots to grow. Some of the heat in the warmed earth is radiated and convected back up into the air, creating vertical wind streams that help gliders fly around without engines, and birds without flapping their wings.
But along the way, the winds have to overcome many obstacles posed by obstructions like mountain ranges and narrow canyons, plus human-made buildings and cars, trucks, planes, and wind turbines. In rare cases, it can also be caused independently of the effects of the sun. For example, the low temperatures mass of the Antarctic ice will always be much colder than the sea and air temperatures of the southern temperate regions. Thus, like the jet stream in the north, it forms a planetary sub-weather system, which we call a “polar vortex.”
As you learn more about weather it will be come clear to you how preposterous it is that people think they can predict and control weather a century from now‘https://www.cfact.org/2020/12/10/weather-made-sort-of-understandable-part-one/
The Australian state of New South Wales is a place where the Leftist Climate scammers have taken over. It is said that if it walks like a Duck and quacks like a Duck it is pretty sure it is a Duck. Same with a tax and ‘Google lists 16 synonyms for the word “tax”. Politicians have used most of them over the years. Levies, tolls, excises, imposts have all been popular choices for those seeking to hide a sneaky tax.
No one beats innovation in this field of linguistic camouflage, however, than those seeking to justify a tax to prop up dud renewable energy investments.
The NSW Government has entered this competitive field with its *NSW Electricity Infrastructure Investment Bill 2020*. Section 57 of this proposed law would require electricity distribution companies to make a “contribution” to a Fund that will be used to support investments in renewable energy, batteries and other infrastructure.
A contribution! It sounds like the spare change you chuck onto the plate at mass but in fact there is nothing voluntary about this donation. The law would establish penalties for those who refuse to pay, potentially up to 220,000 for non-compliance.
A mandatory contribution is a tax. If we put a tax on electricity distribution companies, do you think these profit seeking companies will just absorb this extra impost? Of course not. These extra costs will be passed on to the long-suffering electricity consumers of New South Wales.
Electricity prices in Sydney have more than doubled over the past 15 years. There are many pensioners who can not afford to heat their homes in winter. This should be a moral outrage for a country that is blessed with abundant sources of coal, gas and sun.
In fairness, the NSW Government says that there is nothing to worry about. The “contributions” will only be required if prices get “too low”. That sounds a bit like saying our hospitals are very efficient, they only cater for those that don’t live too long. How can electricity prices be too low? I am pretty sure I speak for most when I say I want them to go as low as possible!
Worse, the NSW Government has not released any of the modelling that would describe exactly what level this artificial electricity floor price is set at.
The reason they won’t tell us is that this evidence would blow apart the myth that renewable energy is cheaper than coal. If renewable energy was the cheapest form of power why would they need government funded subsidies from a fund paid for by electricity consumers? If renewable energy was cheaper then they could undercut the coal electricity producers and make money without taxpayer support.
We didn’t need a tax on telephones for people to buy mobiles and we didn’t need a tax on typewriters to invent computers.
What this proposed law is actually about is trying to kill the coal fired power that supports so many NSW jobs. The NSW Government’s own documents admit this, with it planning for the closure of four coal fired power plants over the next 15 years.
They would be replaced by inexpensive and unreliable renewable energy. South Australia already tried this and it ended with its entire state’s lights going out. In the end it had to build a new gas fired power plant to restore reliability.’http://www.mattcanavan.com.au/dud_renewables_will_hurt_hip_pocket?utm_campaign=e_central_bulletin_3&utm_medium=email&utm_source=mattjcan
whatyareckon 