History has proved all the hysterics wrong, but they are not interested in history, and so the hysteria continues, at great cost to us.

Yes ttbn and it does not matter anyway !
The disaster that happened in Sth Aus the other day should give a
lot of people an opportunity to rethink their opinions.
Some news items said that the wind generators could not self reboot
up and come on line. The item said they need to have supply to come
up on frequency.
It seems that the controls on the wind generators only have primitive
functions.
They can have crystal oscillators to give them the 50 cycles
reference and then put them on line.
Needs more control to synch up if other m/cs come on line but I
have done it by hand and to computerise that function would be a
straight forward operation.

I have been looking for information on how long people were stuck
in lifts. There are many times the number of lifts than the number
of lift mechanics to get around them all and let them out.
For each bank of lifts it would require one to walk up to the lift
house to release the brake and a second to supervise the levelling
and opening the doors.

These people advocating alternative generation only just do not have a clue.

History does no such thing! But confirmation bias and cherry picked data does!

That said, is it too late anyway? No! But only if we stop wasting valuable time with this endless prevarication and sabotage? What can we actually do? And is there any appetite whatsoever for now essential change in the corridors of power and influence!?

Or can we expect some of those with the power to usher in the necessary change to die in a ditch resisting essential change? And sadly that seems the case, demonstrated so ably by the diehard author!?

If that should ever change? And don't hold your breath, what is possible and doable?

First, we need to end with the nonsense mantras, that one, the government has no business in business, when only the government can do what must be done! And that is the embracing and rollout of nuclear energy! And if we need twenty years to get up to speed with our knowledge basis, then nothing but willful ignorance or a hidden agenda, prevents us importing the expertise needed!

And that expertise is on molten salt thorium walk away safe reactors!

Look, a banana is more radioactive than thorim, and we need to stop with the ideologically motivated hysteria that persistently compares apples with oranges!

This very technology will enable us to extract comparatively copious Co2 directly from seawater and combine it with hydrogen collected from the same source to produce liquid synthetic fuels! And done, not theoretical!

Thorium is around three times more abundant than uranium and child's play to extract and refine!

Step outside, collect a cubic metre of soil from virtually anywhere, and you'll collect some thorium with it!

On average around three MM's of it and collected and refined for around a hundred dollars, and enough energy to power your house and transport option for the next 100 years!

That's a dollar a year! And energy that cheap, clean and SAFE is enough to completely reverse our industrial fortunes and manufacturing sector! And turbocharge our economy! TBC.
Alan B.

Paleoclimate research suggests we can expect a changing climate.

http://www.nap.edu/read/11676/chapter/1#x

and

http://www.nap.edu/read/11676/chapter/2#4

An article published in an Insurance Journal relating to the summer of 2016:

http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2016/09/23/427368.htm#sthash.5nIshEys.dpuf

Typhoon Meranti has done much damage since, and Nagasaki has just received 118 mm of rain in an hour.

In a cooling climate the number of rain bombs happening would not make sense. Transpiration and evaporation are natural processes; unless I'm mistaken more evaporation takes place in higher temperatures, which means more ammunition for those rain bombs. The other factor is warm Oceans and water bodies generally. The so called "blob" has reappeared off the West Coast of the US; the expectatation had been with the last El Nino that the warmth would have dissipated; it hasn't. The "blob" had serious impacts on the drought in California, the shell fish industry was badly hurt, and there was culling of many marine organisms. A report lodged just lately suggested that a number of domestic wells in California have dried up.
Louisiana was hit hard by a rain bomb created in part by the very warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico; billions of dollars in damage was created.

The cryosphere is what moderates our climate; Arctic sea ice, Greenland ice shelves, the Third Pole and Antarctica are losing huge amounts of ice. Many glaciers have disappeared or are on the way out. In relation to the Arctic; the volume of sea ice had been 16,700 km3 in 1979, in 2015 it had been 5,700 km3, and the provisional volume for 2016 is about 4,400 km3 (rounded up). it means taking a very conservative drop in volume from 1979 to 2016 that 12,000 km3 has been lost.

Trend lines for temperature and loss of ice and sea ice have been going up.

The comment was made on Foreign Correspondent that nobody living on the island of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean have doubt about climate change. Occasionally I've checked temperature at Svalbard and found them to be above average.

continued

Extracting Co2 directly from seawater as discussed results in some of it being dragged directly from the atmosphere, given the natural affinity of water and Co2!

Atmospheric Co2 is now in uncharted territory! And it didn't need to be anywhere that high the last time it, together with consequently melting methane, nearly exterminated all life on planet earth!?

And if you like historical evidence, then that is exactly what it shows!?

What prevents us building and operating a dozen molten salt thorium reactors (demonstrably cheaper and safer than coal) in downtown Adelaide and elsewhere? (my backyard) To prevent another state wide blackout as in the news now?

Just our so called endlessly prevaricating leaders and almost as useful as a hip pocket in a singlet!? Those resisting absolutely essential change (like he who must be Obied) as if their every financial outcome rested on it!?

Cannot be expected to ever put the national interest (yours, mine, our kids) ahead of their pecuniary interests?

Where this not the actual case? We would have already built a couple of dozen clean SAFE thorium reactors and placed them in our industrial heartlands!

Molten salt thorium reactors are a good news story that will not only provide clean carbon free power for just a fraction of the economy killing charges now sending our economy to hell in a handbasket!

[Don't take my word for it, just look at our total combined record debt burden!]

But can be used to very safely burn current nuclear waste, to reduce the half life o just 300 years, while other folk pay us billions for doing so! Get on U tube, listen to numerous highly credential experts confirm what I've posted on SAFE, CLEAN, CHEAP carbon free thorium!

Then stop allowing our so called leaders to get away with the same old same old! We just don't have the luxury of wasting our time and the future prospects of our kids and their kids!
Alan B.

continued

There was no mention about prior to the article about Earth cooling in Newsweek, there had been one about global warming.

There has been increasingly more sophisticated research since the 1970s, commenting on that era is a blind alley, when ExxonMobil is taken into account a very unproductive area for deniers to write about.

Eunice Foote completed experiments in relation to greenhouse gases; her results were discussed at a Symposium in 1856. More sophisticated experiments have been conducted since; deniers provide a lot of verbiage often misrepresenting the science completed by actual scientists.

Hear hear and well said ant! We can serve the national interest or those of obfuscating fossil fuel industry obsessing on how to wring every last dollar from a kidnapped and captive energy market!?

I mean miniaturisation and laser actuated thorium reactors, will power the motor vehicle, tractor, harvester, irrigation pump etc, for the next 100 years without refueling!

As one OPEC oil minister was heard to remark, the stone age didn't end for a want of stone!

There are just three kind of folk posting here, those who assemble and present facts (you, me and ?) and let the chips fall where they may. Or those, who deny them! Or last but not least, those who studiously and oh so cleverly reinterpret them, then select those that serve a patent confirmation bias?

Get on U tube, listen to a number of highly credentialed experts exposing the truth on safe clean cheap thorium reactors and molten salt technology.

Factual information accompanied by blue prints and operational history! Some memory chips might be useful, if only to prevent the material being pulled to prevent promulgation?

If there is one thing to believe in? That one thing has to be, the mighty irrefutable truth!
Alan B.

Is Ivo Vegter really seldom wrong? Such a proposition is of course laughable.
Or his he, like all libertarian "free"-market fundamentalist apostles essentially wrong much of the time, and who specializes in cherry-picking his information, and completely wrong in his overall vision on the origins of, the present-time condition of, and the future of the humanly created world in the 21st century?

Not everyone at the Daily Maverick agrees with his cherry-picking hype, for instance

Don Pinnock Calling Out Ivo Vegter's Fractious Fulmination

The Fallibility of Critique: A Response to Ivo Vegter by Egan & Tungay who are both Jesuits

Another essay at The Thought Leader
Igo Vegter vs the Fracking Fringe by Aragorn Eloff

Defying other long-winded posters, my expert comment is: DOOM SELLS.

And DOOM boosts the political platforms of heavy carbon using politicians, like Al Gore.

Here's Al Gore's HUGE "I'm rich and waste carbon suckers" houses http://www.urbansplatter.com/2014/05/al-gores-house-environmental-hypocrisy/

Ah yes, DOOM sells! everyone posting here is in the final throes of enthrallment? Has a built in deathwish/wants the world to stop so they can get off?

And the very reason why good news never sells! And there is good news, like a confirmed ability to collect and combine carbon and hydrogen from seawater to produce jet fuel, diesel and methanol.

All doable just by adjusting the carbon content of the chosen hydrocarbon fuel product! And no not theory, already operational!

However, we don't need to junk 6 trillions worth of infrastructure, later model cars, trucks trains and buses etc. But enable us to get off the merry-go-round of imported fuels and reliance on problematic producers who currently have us by the economic short and curlies!

Coal fired power stations replaced by thorium reactors, in a timely manner that doesn't throw money away is doable!? And as we extract carbon from seawater, the atmosphere gets on with the job of replacing what we extracted!

Simply put Pete, whether we are doomed or not is immaterial, given embracing the requisite extremely low cost, cheap clean SAFE molten salt thorium energy first. Is a recipe for endless wealth creation and economic growth! [And who doesn't want that!?]

Always providing we are the ones rolling out what we've built and own! And therefore decide what it'll used for and by who? And or, just how rich we want to be? That's a freedom currently denied us by our (seemingly bought and paid for?) decision makers!?

Who waste time on endless waffle, connected outrage and diabolical delays! [Never do today what you can do tomorrow or kick down the road into never never land!?]

For which we the mugs in mugsville pay through the nose for? And straight from the political handbook, how to waste time and money on the inconsequential! And like the allegorical warm and comfortable frogs being slowly boiled alive, don't know enough!

Because they make a virtue of NEVER EVER LOOKING if that conflicts with the wishes of narrow vested interest? The real political masters?
Alan B.

Alan said;
the stone age didn't end for a want of stone!

No it didn't, it became cheaper to build in timber and brick !

I daresay we might not see an apocalypse as it's dramatised on the movie screens, but we are still diligently walking towards world disasters if we don't change what we are doing in our different countries. Sure there are more people taking notice about climate change and all that, but it really doesn't mean that there is actual change happening to put a stop to all of it. We need to do MORE.

Soooo...Aragorn Eloff is quote: " a director of the Seff Efrican Vegan Society..."

So much to offer as do many green thinking, altruistically minded people. But like the tin foil hat brigade, I sincerely believe some doom-sayers have lost the plot.

Sure, in my childhood I lived on a Pacific island and my old classmates from those days send me photographs of the ocean now literally lapping at their doorway - no doubt the sea levels have (and continue to) rise.

What are the causes ? Certainly mankind has, since the burning of coal began in earnest during the Industrial Revolution, accelerated the addition of C02 and ODP gases into the various 'spheres' and this contributes to the warming of the planet. Today I ask, is it a cyclical event on a planetary scheme of things?

In the 12 years I resided in Darwin NT I noticed a marked change in the weather patterns and indeed the severity of the tropical cyclones as they formed each year from around 2003 onwards. Similarly here in Perth where I now live, the weather patterns have changed from when I resided here in the early 1980's. Events like tornadoes, severe cold cells and rapid formation of cold fronts off the coast wreaking havoc for longer periods than the Winter weather used to do. The intensity of the 'Fremantle Doctor' likewise has lessened during the Summer months.

One has to ask why the previous government under Fuhrer Abbott went to the extraordinary length of getting the BOM to destroy records on meteorology going back to the 1800's. This tells me something, and it runs in accord with what the climate change deniers espouse...oil is good, coal is good and renewable is bad !

When the very last litre of crude oil/lump of coal is auctioned off on prime time TV, or on E-Bay at some ridiculous figure. Then and only then will I believe that mankind and its masters have finally (perhaps) realised that fossil fuels have had seen their time.

Hard to know where to start in an article that attacks so many things in such trite, flippant, factless summaries of denialism.

Let's start with that tired old canard of "Those climate madmen predicted an ice age in the 70's, and now they've changed their minds!" Sorry, but I have to add some *facts* to this typical, cliche, tired old denialist claim.

1. The majority of 1970’s peer-reviewed papers actually predicted warming, not cooling.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB3S0fnOr0M

2. Climate science had already leaked out into the mainstream culture, and the video above also contains classic sciences from the 1958 Bell Telephone company Science Hour which detailed rising sea levels and classic old animation of a glass bottom boat skimming over the drowned buildings of Miami. There’s even a scene from the 1970’s Sci-Fi thriller, Soylent Green, in which they bemoan global warming and the effects on the economy.

3. The same sheeple who just rattle off “They predicted an ice age!” don’t even know what *causes* an ice age. Do *you* know what causes an ice age? The scientists tell us that (apart from super-volcanoes or a nuclear winter) the main natural cause is ‘wobbles’ in the Earth’s orbit and tilt which changes the direction of incoming sunlight. According to these Milankovitch cycles, we’re not even due for an ice age for 50,000 years! “No declines in 65° N summer insolation, sufficient to cause a glacial period, are expected in the next 50,000 years.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Present_and_future_conditions

4. The majority of the hype was from the media, not the scientists.
"However, these are media articles, not scientific studies. A survey of peer reviewed scientific papers from 1965 to 1979 show that few papers predicted global cooling (7 in total). Significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming (Peterson 2008). The large majority of climate research in the 1970s predicted the Earth would warm as a consequence of CO2. Rather than 1970s scientists predicting cooling, the opposite is the case."
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-
Those who predicted cooling overestimated global dimming, and underestimated global warming. They now admit they were wrong.

"One volcano could make more difference to global warming than humans ever could."
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/10/01/james-lovelock-godfather-green-climate-change-religion-totally-unscientific/

//"One volcano could make more difference to global warming than humans ever could."//

Yes, super volcanoes are bad. The Toba eruption ~75,000 years ago reduced global temperatures 3-5 C, and reduced the breeding population of humans to a few thousand people.

Thankfully, super eruptions are few and far between. Although the Yellowstone super volcano could go any minute.

The thing about super volcanoes is that if they're going to explode, even if we know about it there is nothing we can do about it. There is no way to stop a super volcanic eruption. Think of them being a bit like massive meteorite impacts or gamma ray bursts. Very unlikely but catastrophic if they occur and impossible to prevent.

We can reduce global warming; we know it's caused by greenhouse gases and we know how to emit less greenhouse gases. Stopping a super eruption is the stuff of science fiction at this point in time.