AUSTRALIA’S ageing coal fleet has been named one of the nation’s biggest risks to the electricity grid, according to the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).

The latest AEMO report shows Australia’s reliance on ageing coal and gas generators, along with any delay in rolling out renewables, poses a significant risk to electricity supply during extended heatwaves.

The report exposes as false the Federal Government’s repeated claims that coal is reliable.

Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie said this report highlights the urgent need to rapidly bring online sufficient new renewable energy and storage technologies in advance of the inevitable retirement of coal power stations across the country.

“This report further validates the importance of Australia’s immediate and ongoing transition to clean, reliable and affordable renewable energy and storage technology,” she said.

read more:

http://www.climatecouncil.org.au/coal-a-major-risk-to-our-power-supply-e...

 

read also: 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

 

AS THE Turnbull Government ties itself in yet more knots over the future of coal-fired power, it’s worth reflecting that climate and energy policy have been a bloody business for almost a decade now.

There was a brief period of consensus ushered in by John Howard’s belated realisation in 2006 that a price had to be put on carbon dioxide emissions. But by December 2009, the Nationals – and enough Liberals – had decided that this was a mistake and have opposed explicit carbon pricing ever since.

The resulting policy uncertainty has caused an investment drought which has contributed to higher energy prices. Now, with prices a hot potato, there are thought bubbles about extending the life of coal-fired power stations and a new effort to set up a Conservatives for Conservation group.

But the Liberal Party’s tussles over climate and energy policy (as distinct from denying the science itself) go back even further — some 30 years.

Early days and "early" action

It’s hard to believe it now, but the Liberal Party took a stronger emissions target than Labor to the 1990 Federal election. Yet green-minded voters were not persuaded, and Labor squeaked home with their support. After that episode, the Liberals largely gave up on courting green voters and, under new leader John Hewson, the party tacked right. Ironically, considering Hewson’s climate advocacy today, back then his Fightback! policy was as silent on climate change as it was on the price of birthday cakes.

In his excellent 2007 book High and Dry, former Liberal speech writer Guy Pearse recounts how, in the mid-1990s, he contacted the Australian Conservation Foundation, offering to to canvass Coalition MPs to 'find the most promising areas of common ground' on which to work when the Party returned to government. The ACF was 'enthusiastic, if a little bemused at the novelty of a Liberal wanting to work with them'. Most Liberal MPs – including future environment minister Robert Hill and future prime minister Tony Abbott – were “strongly supportive” of the idea. But others (Pearse names Eric Abetz and Peter McGauran) were 'paranoid that some kind of trap was being laid'. Nothing came of it.

Elected in 1996, Howard continued the staunch hostility to the United Nations climate negotiations his Labor predecessor Paul Keating had begun. Not all businessmen were happy. Leading up to the crucial Kyoto Summit in 1997, theSydney Morning Herald reported how a 'delegation of scientists and financiers'led by Howard’s local party branch manager Robert Vincin and Liberal Party grandee Sir John Carrick lobbied the prime minister to take a more progressive approach. Howard did not bend.

Howard stayed unmoved until 2006 when, facing a perfect storm of rising public climate awareness and spiralling poll numbers, he finally relented. Earlier that year a group of businesses convened by the Australian Conservation Foundation produced a report titled 'The Early Case for Business Action'. “Early” is debatable, given that climate change had already been a political issue since 1988, but more saliently the report tentatively suggested introducing a carbon price. And Howard finally relented.

read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-liberal-p...

 

Despite being woeful, the difference between a bad NBN and a bad climate policy is huge. The NBN Liberal (CONservative) fucup is a transient stuff-up that can be fixed later on with more pain and loads of cash. Global warming regards the entire health of the planet and it's not good to fiddle with arse-up Trumbleshit solutions, designed to delay doing something proper.

 

One week after the record deluge in Texas, the biggest hurricane ever measured in the mid-Atlantic is tearing through the Caribbean.

Hurricane Irma, a category-five storm, is destroying homes and threatening lives in the Leeward Islands with 185mph winds and 11ft coastal surges, and in the coming days it is forecast to hit Puerto Rico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Florida. The governor of Florida has already declared a state of emergency.

For Donald Trump, these twin megastorms are a source of awe. “Hurricane looks like largest ever recorded in the Atlantic!” he tweeted of Irma on Wednesday. “Even experts have said they’ve never seen one like this!” he posted of Harvey last week.

But for many scientists they are a worrying sign of a “new normal” in which extreme weather events become more intense as a result of manmade climate change. Rather than expressing astonishment, they say policymakers need to strengthen long-term countermeasures and act more effectively on reducing carbon emissions.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/06/twin-megastorms-irma-harve...

 

read also: 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33287

 

Hurricane scientists say they've "never seen anything like this in the modern record". 

Satellite images show three hurricanes currently lined up in the Atlantic Ocean threatening to make landfall.

The US National Hurricane Centre (NHC) has issued advisories on Hurricane Irma, Hurricane Jose, and Hurricane Katia, all of which have the potential to hit land at the same time.

This is something Eric Blake, an NHC scientist, said is "unparalleled here and totally ridiculous given [the scale of] Irma".

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-08/irma-katia-and-jose-hurricane-trio...

One would be unlucky that two or the three hurricanes combine and destroy something like New Orleans for good... There is 10 per cent chances that Katia and Irma could do so...

Read from top...

There is a beach and a village north of Sydney, Australia, called Pearl Beach. It was named such because the the wave action and the current along the sand creates even-spaced eddies that often make the beach look like a necklace of pearls. We sometimes observe the same "spacing" phenomenon with clouds at a certain altitude. It's a bit as if the upper atmosphere had waves and the trough of the waves contained a delicate cloud. Weather phenomenon can have resonance and while the distances are large, there is the same "pearling" effect. Here in the picture from the NHC (NOAA) we can see three "pearls" — three hurricanes neatly spaced out and a little puff further east-south east that could become yet another hurricane — say Hurricane Lionel...  While most meteorological predictions tell us that Irma is going to hit the south of Florida and it will, the next line of sight could be New Orleans, as the hurricane is sucked in by Katia. Irma has lost quite a lot of its punch and is degraded to a category 4 and travelling west as it edges Cuba at 12 knots (nearly 300 nautical miles in 24 hours). Jose has increased in speed and is travelling at nearly 444 nautical miles by 24 hours, while Katia is only doing 120 nautical knots in 24 hours. There is a certain "rapprochement" between the three hurricanes that could spell far more trouble, plus the possibility at this stage of a fourth one coming from mid-Atlantic... (the little puff of clouds between the 10 and 15 degrees of latitude North...)

pearls

If you were one of the many impacted by Hurricane Harvey or Irma, you might not be contemplating the effects of climate change. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for some top level government officials.

"To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm is misplaced," Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, told CNN in an interview. "To use time and effort to address it at this point is very, very insensitive to people in Florida."

Yet while Pruitt says talk of climate change is just too insensitive to Floridians — and by extension even Texans impacted by Harvey — not everyone agrees.

"It's denying reality," Florida's Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, told Politico. "You can call it politics or whatever, but the Earth is getting hotter. This storm is another reminder of what we're going to have to deal with in the future."​

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201709141057373964-epa-head-scott-pruit...

more

In the picture above, the NHCM, F had already upgraded Maria to level 5 — while most media was still having it on level 3. Jose is still a "one" that could be sucked in by a trough (see clouds in US "mid-west") like Sandy was a couple of years ago... Meanwhile Lee is slowly developing as the centre barometric pressure is falling... At this stage, Maria won't reach Florida but destroy a lot of the islands before hand...

 

 

How Maria grew quickly

Maria's intensification has shocked meteorologists - it was not even a hurricane a day and a half ago, but grew rapidly.

In the few hours before striking Dominica, it went from a category three storm, to a category four, before making landfall as a "potentially catastrophic" category five.

read more:

http://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-latin-america-41315877

 

Maria
Vittorio Grigolo
The most beautiful sound I ever heard
All the beautiful sounds of the world in a single word
Maria
I just met a girl named Maria
And suddenly that name
Will never be the same to me
Maria
I just kissed a girl named Maria
And suddenly I found
How wonderful a sound can be
Maria
Say it loud and there's music playing
Say it soft and it's almost like praying
Maria
I'll never stop saying
Maria
Maria,…

This song from West Side Story... a musical that involves Puerto-Rico...

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO — Matt Lozon became trapped, marooned, stuck in a holding pattern at the international airport here. He slept every night on the floor in Terminal D, part of a horde of travelers hoping to score a precious ticket for a flight off the island. He lives in Idaho, which might as well be on a different planet.

“I just feel like there’s no hope,” he said late Monday. “Why can’t we get out of here? Why won’t they get us out of here?”

Getting off Puerto Rico and other storm-ravaged Caribbean islands has been an exercise in frustration, often culminating in despair, rage and another grim night in a sweltering airport with no air conditioning and the steady boil of angry voices.

While travel within the U.S. territory remains perilous — with washed-out and debris-strewn roads and damaged bridges — airports are gradually reopening. But Hurricane Maria severely damaged the radar system in the island’s capital of San Juan, and, with limited air traffic control, there are safety concerns that curtail the pace of arrivals and departures.

read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/why-cant-we-get-out-of-here-airp...

 

 

Energy corporations started shutting down production of oil and natural gas from platforms in the Gulf of Mexico as Tropical Storm Nate approaches the coast.

Nate has already killed 34 people in Central America and is expected to turn into a hurricane before making landfall in Louisiana by the end of the weekend, threatening to damage cotton and orange crops.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/business/405906-oil-platforms-shut-tropical-storm/

 

If I were a Christian (I am an atheist) I would say that should the damage in New Orleans be extensive, God is punishing Trump for having left the Paris climate agreement...

Should I be an atheist (which I am), I would say that with the warming of the atmosphere, there are more chances of more storms with more damage. We need to shut down our CO2 emissions to zero as soon as possible which according to my calculations was June 1996. See "What is global warming?" on this site...

 

Read from top.

 

SANTA ROSA, Calif. — In one of the most destructive fire emergencies in California history, fast-moving wildfires raged across several counties in the northern part of the state on Monday, killing at least one person, forcing the evacuation of up to 20,000 people and destroying well over one thousand buildings, the authorities said.

Firefighters were battling blazes in eight counties — Napa, Sonoma, Lake, Mendocino, Yuba, Nevada, Calaveras and Butte — officials said.

In Santa Rosa, the fire gutted a Hilton hotel and flattened the Journey’s End retirement community, a trailer park not far from the freeway that crosses the city. Most of the trailers were leveled, leaving a smoldering debris field of household appliances, filing cabinets and the charred personal effects of more than 100 residents. Pieces of ash fell like snowflake flurries, and a pall of white smoke across the city blotted out the sun.

Janet Upton, a deputy director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said that at least 15 separate fires across the region had destroyed an estimated 1,500 homes and businesses and had burned over 73,000 acres since late Sunday night. One person has been killed and two were injured in Mendocino County, she said.

read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/us/california-fires-evacuations.html

 

Global warming is doing the trick...

 

Hurricane Ophelia is the latest weather system to whip up winds and rain in the Atlantic. But the storm is heading east toward the northwest coast of Spain and then up to Ireland instead of crossing the Atlantic toward the hurricane-ravaged Caribbean.

Ophelia officially gained hurricane status on Wednesday evening, according to the National Hurricane Center.

As of Thursday afternoon, Ophelia was meandering and expected to move slowly east and northeast. The storm has picked up strength and become a Category 2 hurricane with sustained winds of 100 mph and higher gusts.

Some of Ophelia’s rain bands are likely to hit the Azores islands over the weekend. Ophelia’s projected path then takes it in the direction of Spain and Portugal on the Iberian Peninsula, but current forecasts suggest the storm will gradually turn to the north and remain well offshore.

Only two known storms have hit the Iberian Peninsula — one in 1842, and one in 2005. The most recent was a tropical depression that was previously Hurricane Vince.

read more:

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/hurricane-ophelia-path-europe-spain-i...