Carbon Sense- 23 December 2010

Thanks for all the messages of support and Christmas Greetings. We may not answer them all but we do read them all, answer some of them and appreciate most of them.

The deep freeze in the Northern Hemisphere has many people saying "If this is global warming, we have had enough". It is true that one blizzard or one heat wave does not prove climate change. But this one illustrates that the people claiming to forecast the climate in 100 years time cannot get it right even for next month, and they use the same massive computers to do it. But small private forecasters like Piers Corbyn, who do not feed speculative warming effects from carbon dioxide into their forecast models, are calling the shots better.

Virtually all the main electricity generators in New Zealand have wind farms in operation, under construction or going through the Resource Management Act approvals process.

The primary driver seems to be that we need more renewable energy to "fight climate change" and that wind power is a very good way of doing this. It isn't.

The fundamental problem with wind power is that it is intermittent and unpredictable. This means that the system operator must take a pessimistic view and assume that no wind power will be available over critical periods.

In other words, he has to make sure that there are sufficient conventional power stations available to meet peak demands. It is often claimed that New Zealand has ample hydropower that can easily back up wind. While this tends to be true during a normal rainfall year, it is most definitely not true during a dry year. Dry years, not normal years, dictate the need for new power stations.

NZHerald 5 January 2010

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10697845 

Unlike most other hot button environmental issues, global warming is widely misunderstood. As a climate scientist thinking about this, it struck me that it was not surprising since accounts of the scientific basics of global warming almost never appear anywhere in the press.

There is not space here to include all the charts and numbers that might accompany such an account. In its place is a necessarily brief summary.

Most people are not shocked to learn that global warming discussions evoke polarised views, but many are surprised to discover that the scientific basics are not contentious. An awareness of these is helpful in building an understanding of the extent to which there is a problem and how it might be addressed.

The Carbon Sense Coalition has called for an end to all subsidies, mandated markets and sweetheart pricing for solar and wind energy.

 The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that current energy policies were harming the existing power industry and robbing taxpayers and electricity consumers.

 Forbes continued:
 "It's time to end the mollycoddling of wind and solar energy toys before this stupidity does irreversible damage to Australia’s electricity supply and costs.

From the Pastural Farming Climate Research team...... 20 December 2010

It’s been raining consistently in the North for a few days. This is great news and I assume the drought has broken for now. David Carter attributed the drought to climate change. I don’t know what this rain says about climate change, we’ll have to wait and see what David Carter says, he’s the expert.

A study which was presented by Dr Bryce Buddle, an AgResearch scientist and Peter Hutton, a Massey University lecturer produced this graph which demonstrates that despite accelerated increases in ruminant numbers there has been no equivalent increase in global methane concentrations.

The New Zealand

Climate Science Coalition

Hon Secretary, Terry Dunleavy MBE, 14A Bayview Road, Hauraki, North Shore City 0622

Phone (09) 486 3859 - Mobile 0274 836688 - Email - terry.dunleavy@nzclimatescience.org.nz

19 December 2010                                                                    For immediate release

Call on NIWA to admit latest temperature review not valid

A call has been made on the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) to admit that that there is no valid statistical justification for its claims of a 0.91 degree C rise in New Zealand’s average temperature last century.  The call comes from Bryan Leyland, a spokesman for the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC), following the release this week by NIWA of its revised Seven Station Series (7SS), which the agency claimed has been vindicated in a peer review by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM).

Mr Leyland has also called on the Minister of Science and Technology, Hon Dr Wayne Mapp to ask for the resignation of John Morgan as chairman of NIWA. “Mr Morgan has misled New Zealanders about the robustness of the latest 7SS review. In his media release this week, Mr Morgan wrote that NIWA had asked the Australian Bureau of Meteorology to conduct the peer review to ‘ensure a thorough examination by an independent, internationally respected, climate science organisation. Mr Morgan confirmed that the scientists from the Bureau’s National Climate Centre concluded that the results and underlying methodology used by NIWA were sound.’”

From Cancun, Mexico, Dec 10, 2010: I usually add some gentle humor to these reports. Not today. Read this and weep. Notwithstanding the carefully-orchestrated propaganda to the effect that nothing much will be decided at the UN climate conference here in Cancun, the decisions to be made here this week signal nothing less than the abdication of the West. The governing class in what was once proudly known as the Free World is silently, casually letting go of liberty, prosperity, and even democracy itself. No one in the mainstream media will tell you this, not so much because they do not see as because they do not bl**dy care.

The 33-page Note (FCCC/AWGLCA/2010/CRP.2) by the Chairman of the “Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Co-operative Action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”, entitled Possible elements of the outcome, reveals all. Or, rather, it reveals nothing, unless one understands what the complex, obscure jargon means. All UNFCCC documents at the Cancun conference, specifically including Possible elements of the outcome, are drafted with what is called “transparent impenetrability”. The intention is that the documents should not be understood, but that later we shall be told they were in the public domain all the time, so what are we complaining about?

Since the Chairman’s note is very long, I shall summarize the main points:

Pastural Farming Climate Research newsletter, 9 December 2010 

Its danger time at Cancun, the bureaucrats have handed over to the politicians for the final week. Our politicians would still like to sign NZ up to a binding post Kyoto agreement. For NZ’s sake we hope they fail.

Our politicians are becoming increasingly moronic when it comes to global warming.

David Carter while visiting Northland and declaring a drought said the increase in significant drought events indicates we’re living in a time of significant climate change

That settles it, climate change must be happening, because we never used to have droughts before.

Climate is the overall conditions we experience over a 30 year period. Weather is what we get from day to day, month to month even year to year. Yes it is dry in Northland and it is the second year in a row after 15 reasonably wet years. How this says anything about climate, (the weather pattern over a 30 year period) is beyond me. I think it is beyond David Carter as well, I think a lot of things are beyond him.