just wait for the freezing winter Loudmouth when you have to cut down trees to light a fire to stay warm. You can be sure that the Greens from the leafy suburbs will still have their caol fired heating.

Complain, complain whinge whine about power outages, jobs disappearing, but if nothing changes on the supply side? These problems can only grow!

Put out a million more solar systems and when the sun goes down, back to system normal, with more factory closures etc. The folk with control can't seem to think beyond privatisation and the grid reliant 5 minute auction system, with foreigners and their profit expectations front and centre of this calamity!

Wind advocates say build more wind turbines, then rub their hands with glee when the wind picks up, until it gets too strong and blows their preferred business model away! Head down bum up coal advocates say it's not getting warmer, shovel more coal all while completely ignoring any consequent adverse results? Just as long as the dollars roll, these (cerchung, cerchung)cash registers with eyes, will ignore all else?

As always, all of the above will studiously ignore the blindingly obvious, safe, clean, cheap nuclear power and none safer, cleaner or cheaper than walk away safe, molten salt thorium based power! And because various cash flows would be decimated with the roll out of this tried and not found wanting, technology!

The only way we the people can get it is to change those at the helm, steering the ship of state, and essentially, none with a vested interest in the status quo, or the ultra deep pockets of profit gouging foreigners?

The time for this endless pointless squabbling/inaction, is well and truly over, as is the control of the do nothing hands on the helm!

One only has to listen to or experience the howls of (never was, parking attendants) derision to understand just that much? (cerchung cerchung)
Alan B.

Alan B our own ANSTO is working on one of the problems of thorium reactors
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Molten-salt-reactor-research-develops-class-of-alloys-08021701.html
They didn't say they'd solved it.

Climate change will definitely affect renewables. The implication of my earlier post was that wind is low in heatwaves with heavy aircon demand. I think in the last decade we've been getting windy heatwaves the sort that make bushfires hard to put out eg the time of the 2015 Toodyay WA fires. That's a mixed blessing of more power but also more economic loss.

In today's press it was suggested SA will get more hydro power from Tasmania particularly when Hazelwood Vic closes in a few weeks. A few months ago you could drive a kilometre out onto the dried lake bed on some of the dams, now (temporarily?) over 40% full. I'd advise SA not to depend on others.

dahh,

I'm just a little worried that we are running down the wrong road - the renewables path. The article makes a very obvious and good point. When climate issues arise it will be coal and other stored fuel sources that will make it possible to keep going.

An event I foresee is a volcanic explosion followed by a 'Dark Age', no sun, with high winds and subsequent droughts - its happened before, many times - about every two hundred years and its due again. (See David Key's book 'Catastrophe' for one glimpse at this)

Again, another variable that drives me nuts is the whole CO2 issue. It may or may not have something to do with the climate, but for sure the little we do as humans has little effect. What we do as humans with weed sprays, insecticides, GMO are far more immediate and horrifying - yet we are focused like sheep on an eye dog's shinny left eye.

And clean coal is easy, I've seen this time and time again in Germany. The CO2 issue is just irrelevant.

Climate changes all the time, big cycles, little shifts and major variables. Indeed the article makes the valid point - rely on the stored up energy, don't harvest as you go ...

Maybe I shouldn't worry, humans are rational, thinkers and smart ... our politicians will save us!

Put a heat lamp in a socket, connect a dimmer switch, turn it down a notch or two and as sure as hens lay eggs it'll produce less heat!

Similarly when the big heat lamp in the sky goes into a waning phase, it also puts out less heat! So, don't worry, Why are we breaking ambient heat records after record.

And if the clueless like you prevent anyone doing anything effective, with your do nothing advice? What happens when the big dimmer switch in the sky, ups the radiant output? [If you think it's hot now!]

It has all happened before you say and maybe so? And as always for every cause there is an effect! And for every effect there is a cause!

So if the sun is in a waning phase(cooler) and isn't creating the heatwaves and hottest recorded temperatures, with some weekend western sydney numbers set to break all previous highest ever records?

If the sun isn't responsible, given the waning phase since the mid seventies. (NASA) What's warming the joint up?

Millions of boy scout rubbing trillions of sticks together? Or millions of Trumps rubbing their ill gotten billions together? Levity aside, if not the sun and NASA has ruled it out, what then?

Burying the head up your razz and ignoring it, won't make it go away or fix itself!

And what's your problem with a turbocharged economy, record economic growth and unprecedented prosperity. Because that's what on the table with a decarbed economy and almost free energy!
Alan B.

I note Shell is looking at solar power stations with coal seam gas as a back up supply. Makes sense to me.

Given we have plenty of gas perhaps this could well be a medium term solution as we make the transition in to the likes of nuclear power which in my opinion is pretty much a given. We are simply going the long way about it.