Climate change seems to have jumped the shark so far as the average punter is concerned but having been told that the science is settled governments are busily regulating vacuum cleaners, preventing gas extraction and pursuing policies which will soon lead to rolling blackouts in Britain and Europe and increased energy costs in the US.
Predictions based on the only settled science have proven to be somewhat inaccurate, and the smart new technology somewhat inadequate.
Germany’s state of the art offshore wind farm shows what a state the art is in …
The wind farm was officially turned on in August last year but was shut down again almost immediately due to technical difficulties that have still not been resolved – and now lawyers are getting involved.
The wind farm comprises 80 5MW turbines situated 100 km off the north German coastline. The difficulty facing engineers is how to get the electricity generated back to shore. So far, every attempt to turn on the turbines has resulted in overloaded and “gently smouldering” offshore converter stations.
Built at a cost of hundreds of millions and costing between €1 and €2 million a day to service, the project is estimated to have cost €340 million in lost power generation over the last year alone. And if the problems with the technology are deemed not to be the fault of the operator, German taxpayers will be on the hook for the running and repair costs, thanks to the German Energy Act 2012.
In the Arctic sea ice is disappearing because of global warming meanwhile in Antarctica sea ice has reached its greatest extent since satellite recording began because of global warming. A situation that prompted one commentator to ask …
The answer, Duggie me old mate, is only in the southern hemisphere. But rest assured it will be very bad for the wildlife and also for Kiribati where the surface area for each Kiribatan is just a third of what it was in 1960.
Just this very day the ABC set aside its fascination with interspecific sex and brought us this gem …
JAKE STURMER: The nation of Kiribati is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to climate change.
It’s about 7,000 kilometres north east of Australia and is already feeling the devastating impacts of rising tides.
The water is destroying homes, making soil more salty and decimating crops.
If some climate scientists are correct, the majority of Kiribati could be underwater by the end of the century.
If we are going to evacuate Kiribati the sooner we do it the better … whilst there is still room to put them somewhere else.
Meanwhile the surface area of Kiribati has not diminished and the sea level graph shows that the risk of being swamped by the sea is considerably less than the risk of being swamped by their own population …
I take comfort in the fact that a substantial part of Australia is still above water and that we haven’t been swamped by climate refugees …
In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption to food production.
But like any good doomsday cult nothing seems to be disproved when the end of the world fails to happen.
Another pronouncement of the illuminati concerned wetness, reported in the Sydney Morning Herald April 27 2012 …
WET areas have become wetter and dry areas drier over the past 50 years due to global warming, a study of the saltiness of the world’s oceans by a team including CSIRO researchers has shown.
Just imagine the floods get worse and the drought gets worse simultaneously. It remains a popular meme in the settled science.
This effect can be abbreviated to DDWW, dry dryer, wet wetter, and apparently it works well over the oceans (especially dry oceans) but it was tested on land (Greve et al 2014) and it’s true … for only about 10% of the land area. And for about 10% of the land area the opposite happens. Which leaves about 80% of the land area where there is no clear signal of what happens. (DDWW/DWWD/D?W?). Go figure.
One commentator has obviously been keeping up with our Bureau of Meteorology’s secret adjustment business and points to the truth …
bobmcgee 