Time to look seriously at what a Trump presidency would do to climate change.
They just need to keep pumping the skies full of carbon dioxide for 75 more years, slowly turning much of the planet into a wasteland.
Continue reading China to Trump: wise men don’t sneer at climate change
Elon Musk’s 100% clean energy vision is that the world’s energy needs will come from electricity – around one third transport, one third heating and manufacturing uses, and one-third electricity.
By the last category he clearly means everything else we use electricity for.
His new gizmo is a solar roof shingle:
In the post Scoping long-term sea level rise I indicated the possibility of 25 metres (±5) of SLR with emissions of 380 (360-400)ppm and a temperature variance of 2.7 to 3.7°C. The question was really how long it would take, and what were the prospects for the next century or three.
The received wisdom seemed to be that we could expect about a metre, by 2100, and some studies limited SLR to about two metres in the next millennium. A new study suggests we could get close to two meters in total by 2100. Moreover the melting of ice on Antarctica alone could cause seas to rise more than 15 meters by 2500. Continue reading Ice sheet decay spells danger from sea level rise
David Leitch’s article Battery storage: Bad advice about costs is fooling Australian governments reviews two American reports on grid-scale battery storage in the states of Texas and Massachusetts. He says the reports:
Leitch, the principal of ITK says in their view:
Continue reading Grid-scale battery storage: can it happen in Australia?
The Coalition government and the Murdoch press were already mounting a full-scale attack on renewable energy when the AEMO report on the SA blackout presented information in such a way as to cast further doubt on renewable energy. AEMO stands for Australian Energy Market Operator. That is AEMO is an operator in the game, not an independent watchdog. In fact an operator that may not itself have acted prudently.
On top of this Chris Uhlmann of the ABC has been virulently critical of the rush to renewables, using what turns out to be techno-babble to sound convincing. His views have skewed the ABC network coverage across all platforms.
So what happened? Continue reading Renewables under attack – again
The collapse of the Arctic sea ice volume has been even more dramatic than the extent, as shown in this graph:
It’s down from 16,855 cubic kilometres in 1979 to 4,401 in 2016, that’s an ice loss of about 74%. Continue reading Climate clippings 187
One of the more eye-catching comments on the SA blackouts was from AGL Energy’s CEO Andy Vesey telling the All Energy conference in Melbourne that a secure power system would be rooftop solar and batteries in a distributed power system with power being generated at the point of consumption. He also said that politicians were blaming the South Australian blackout on renewable energy because technological disruption was confounding their “mental models”.
Greg Hunt, a man clearly in a muddle, went in hard, as reported by Giles Parkinson at RenewEconomy:
Continue reading After the blackout, a new dawn for renewable energy
James Hansen and Makiko Sato have just released a new temperature graph, which highlights the underlying trend, and is more than a little alarming:
See also his blog post that looks at the implications and what we need to do. Continue reading Hansen’s new temperature graph heads north
In what is called ‘attribution science’ climate scientists are getting better at analysing how much climate change has influenced particular extreme weather events.
In short, it is no longer a question of weather there is an influence, rather how much.
It would be useful to know, for example, whether the kind of storm that hit South Australia is still a once in 50 years event. Continue reading Climate clippings 185
Tony Wood from the Grattan Institute is one of those lucky people who seems to know everything, and repeatedly sets us all to rights. So when he spoke about the Institute’s new report Keeping the lights on: lessons from South Australia’s power shock (Press Release, where you can download the report) my BS detectors were fully operational. On further investigation, however, the report has value, but there is a twist.
In brief, he points out that we have no climate policy that will reduce emissions in our power system beyond the RET to 2020, and that we need climate change and energy policies that combine to produce reliable, affordable and sustainable clean power. Continue reading Grattan weighs in on renewables
The Arctic sea ice extent has just reached the second lowest ever, tied with 2007. I got the story from The Guardian, but here’s the story at NSIDC:
Leaders from federal and state road and transport agencies, motoring clubs, local government and engineering and industry groups met in Brisbane in August to consider how government and industry can better collaborate to ensure a smooth transition to the world of connected and automated vehicles.
They are expecting partially automated vehicles on public roads before 2020, and highly automated and driverless vehicles within the ensuing decade. Continue reading Climate clippings 183
