Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for June 26, 2014

Palmer Gored: A Win for Mandated Carbon “Markets”

By

A new alliance between Al Gore and Clive Palmer is likely to result in the repeal of the carbon tax, but the big winner is probably the global warming industry, not the ordinary Australian. Indeed if you think your electricity bill is about to plummet, you’ve been mislead. gore and palmer

Much of the increase in the price of electricity over recent years can be attributed to the mandatory Renewable Energy Target (RET): a government legislated requirement on electricity retailers to source a specific proportion of total electricity sales from renewable energy sources including wind and solar, with the extraordinary costs paid by all electricity users.  

Al Gore appears to have convinced Clive Palmer, to support the repeal of the carbon tax on condition that the RET is consolidated. Earlier today Dennis Jensen spoke in the Australian parliament about some of the lucrative deals that Gore has done over the years:

Indeed Dr Jensen’s speech provides some historical context, while Jo Nova explains what the conditions Palmer has placed on repeal of the carbon tax will mean longer term for Australia:

It seems now that Palmer’s amendments to repealing the carbon tax do not include an Emissions Trading Scheme …  but keeping the $10b Clean Energy Finance Corporation is a win for Gore, and so is keeping the RET (Renewable Energy Target) and the Climate Change Authority — it’s another government funded advertising unit for the carbon scare campaign. The more patrons who are dependent on the carbon-subsidies, the more pro-carbon lobbyists there are. And they lobby like their livelihood depends on it — because they have nothing if the government policies don’t prop up their pretend free market.

As Ross Garnaut, a long-time proponent of climate alarmism and phony markets, commented today:

We’re in a better position than when we were facing abolition of carbon pricing, major tampering with the Renewable Energy Target, abolition of the Climate Change Authority, abolition of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

It may not be the ideal way of doing things, but Mr Palmer’s support for keeping existing arrangements will have important effects.

Warming Never Completely Negated Earlier Cooling: Some Thoughts on NSW Temperature Trends

By

Last night I presented a paper for the Sydney Institute entitled ‘Modelling Australian and global temperatures: what’s wrong? Bourke and Amberley as case studies’. The paper written with Ken Stewart, Dennis Jensen and John Abbot concludes with some thoughts on the New South Wales annual mean maximum temperature record. In particular we suggest that the record can be thought of as showing a cooling trend of -1.95 degree per century to 1960, and a warming trend of 2.48 degree per century since, Table 1.

Table 1

Taking these values and thinking about them in terms of a rate of cooling for approximately 70 years (1890 to 1960) and then a rate of warming for 54 year (1960 to 2013), we can estimate how much New South Wales cooled and then warmed. The sum of these values gives us the net change, a value that if we then multiple by a total period of 124 years, gives an indication of the rate of cooling per century.

This trend of -0.021 degree C per century suggests that the earlier cooling was almost, but not completely, negated by the later warming. To be clear, the overall temperature trend for New South Wales, calculated from the unhomogenized maximum temperatures as recorded at locations with long series, is one of cooling.