Simply put, the climate has always been subjected to natural variations! The sun waxes and wanes. The joint warms up then cools down.

What can't happen is an new ice age when our solar furnace in the sky waxes, nor can we have record breaking heat waves when it goes into a waning phase!

According to NASA, our solar furnace has been in a waning phase since the mid seventies! All while heating trends have continued upwards with a rising Co2 level in uncharted territory.

That said, your point about ("Benedict Arnold") electricity prices is well made, and given the right supply paradigm, could be as low as 3 cents PKH! That energy supply paradigm is one whose name can't be mentioned!

But for the record I will mention it. And it is nuclear! Not just any nuclear but walk away safe, clean cheap molten salt, thorium nuclear energy!

Which we could have if our interests were first and foremost, rather than that of tax avoiding, price gouging, profit repatriating, foreign corporations and their gold plated delivery model? Your employer?

See Super Fuel subtitled, green energy. Or type into your search engine the case for thorium. Scroll down the page to a downloadable, technical, free PDF.

I don't know where you were last summer, as record after heat records were broken, all while the great solar furnace in the sky was and remains, still in a waning phase, with some western towns reporting near bankruptcy, as all the available discretionary spend was consumed by electricity charges, given the non stop maximised use of air conditioners was mandatory, to beat unrelenting record summer heat wave conditions, that reportedly routinely topped 50C. With some folk reporting quarterly charges topping $7,000.00!?

And sure to be suitably impressed by your endless crocodile tears and your manifestly disingenuous summation of subjectively selected facts, that would seem to tell all australians, if you think the joint has warmed a tad in recent decades you're dreaming? TBC.
Alan B.

The price of electricity is rising, we're told by a plethora of hand wringing politicians, due to the regulatory framework? All while adroitly avoiding the fact that that framework is created solely in the parliaments of this nation and by our alleged representatives.

The Finkle review has come and gone, with coal not taken off the table. But all but deserted by the smart money, holding fire until there is some certainty and sanity being generated in our parliaments and in the minds of our stubbornly uncooperative, recalcitrant, intrangient "public servant", regulators!

When thorium nuclear power is no longer the energy name that can't be spoken! But allowed by regulators as for peaceful purpose use only, maybe we can not just get energy prices down, but so low as to quite massively stimulate the economy, and resuscitate the essential to our economic survival manufacturing sector!

Thorium is fertile not fissile and therefore cannot be compressed to make a thermonuclear device or nuclear bomb! And given a substantially longer half life than uranium, is three times more abundant! With enough in our dirt to power the planet for 1,000 years. And thousands more if we mine igneous rock!

Couple the 3 cents PKH thorium based power to brand new space age desalination, i.e., deionization dialysis, that turns as much as 90% salt seawater into potable water, on the fly, for far less than quarter of the current cost of traditional desal. and inside 2-3 metre pipes, at around a million LPH, if that's your choice!

And after massively restructuring/resuscitating manufacture, we can start to farm this nation most arid regions, which could easily become this nation's most productive agricultural regions? If we can but get the naysayers and the "Benedict Arnold" Peabody coal and Co serving, types out of the road!
And if the cap fits?
Alan B.

Jenny:
Thorium can be used in LFTR's to burn and burn, again and again, nuclear waste! Until the entire available energy component is extracted and the remaining half life reduced to 300 years.

And given, walk away safe, molten salt reactors are used, able to operate at near normal atmospheric pressure, while so employed!

Moreover, given the reaction is fertile, consumes a smuch as 95% of its fuel type, with such waste as is generated being eminently suitable for long life space batteries!

Because they operate at inherently safe normal atmospheric pressure, walk away safe, molten salt thorium reactors can have a nuclear waste component added on the fly, without cost creating shut downs and restarts included!

Moreover, miracle cure nuclear isotopes can also be very safely extracted on the fly from the reactor flow stream, while in operation, thereby significantly improving production and reducing production times. [Yes it's a nuclear reaction that produces gamma radiation, so shielding and robotic arms would still be mandatory!]

And all while creating energy so cheap, nothing else can compete with it? All the costs are upfront! And factory mass production can produce power plants for far less than comparative coal fired power plants!

Why, the security guard out front costs more than the fuel!

What are our parliamentarians/"energy regulators" waiting for? Permission?
Alan B.

simply put the gw religion is usually a mask to cover corrupt humans who want to display some sort of moral superiority. The problem is the pensioners are the ones paying for the shameless charlatans involved in the ' renewable' scams. Never have so many been as dumbed down. Chinese doctors are saints compared with this lot and to the Governments shame they have brought into the nonsense.

Well certainly more scientists and activists can attract government research grants and jobs if they argue man caused global warming.

They can even sell more books and films [1] or revive political careers like global messiah Al Gore.

[1] Around 2006 Al's "An Inconvenient Truth" grossed $24 million in the U.S. and $26 million at the international box office...It is the first documentary to win 2 Oscars and the first to win a best original song Oscar"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth

That's science entertainment.

The price has risen simply because governments, bullied by rent-seekers, are subsidising totally impractical wind and solar ratbaggery. There is no great mystery involved.

Another missive from a member of the head firmly in the sand & selective quotes tribe hope less your a joke madam

Hey John Ryan, which carriage of the global warming gravy train are you riding.

With so much new research showing it is garbage, only those profiting from the scam, or too stupid to understand the physics could possibly believe the rubbish

Well, for those claiming some basic knowledge of science or physics or what a gravy train GW is?

Please explain a couple of things! How can a solar furnace in a waning (cooling) phase produce record after record breaking heat waves and unprecedented ice melts/retreating polar and glacial ice!

When historically such natural cyclical events usher in a cooler period which usually accompanied by advancing polar and glacial ice, not the very opposite!

And given our solar furnace in the sky has been in a cyclical waning (cooler) phase since the mid seventies, NASA. Has the Co2 levels now up in uncharted territory got anything to do with this, cyclically impossible result and who really is getting wealthier as a consequence? Certainly not farmers, who reportedly were suiciding at the rate of four per week at the height of the last exceptionally enduring drought!? ( Bob Katter.)

My money's on the coal fired power producers and the extra squillions they are raking in, from gold plated, price gouged tax, avoided power delivery power!? Aided and abetted by quisling, Benedict Arnold, regulators and the current, created by them, power regulations/energy market!

I think an appropriate name for this particular gravy train, wrung out to the very last drop, from an adoring, captive energy market, would have to be the Hasbeen express?

All aboard, destination mass extinction!
Alan B.

hasbeen: one of the gravy trains is the one where companies such as Exxon who make squillions out of polluting, have been and are still willing, to pay amounts of around $10,000 for articles denying GW.
Some even get fully funded trips all around the world and big bucks to lecture about their crazy theories when they get there.
Not a bad incentive.
Others are just barking mad and their brains cannot handle what is happening.
Not to worry it is happening anyway.

The main reason for the steep rise in power prices is the privatisation of power companies who are in it purely to make the biggest profit they can squeeze out of the customers.
Energy companies should never have been allowed to be privatised and that includes oil and gas companies. The gas companies are now squeezing for all they are worth and gas prices are now so high because of this.
This is in a country that has enormous supplies of gas and exports the bulk so they can make even more profit.
The number of houses with PV on the roof is escalating and the power companies are seeing their cash cow withering before their eyes.
This is why there is a push back against "renewable energy" and it is denigrated by energy companies and their paid lackeys, politicians.

it could only be global warming that caused Scott Ludlam to forget he was a NZ citizen. Which high priest of gw will the Greens use to replace him?

A bit late in the day.
This reference provides a sobering perspective on the situation.
http://www.ecosophia.net/july-2017-stormwatch-climate-change

And yes both of Robert Lepage's posting were correct - especially how the privatization SCAM was/is one of the principal causative factors of our energy problems.

Malcolm Turnbull has hit the airwaves recently, saying, and I paraphrase, if you think that we can have a future without coal and oil you're delusional! Now he is essentially correct, if you replace, two words. Coal fired, with one word, baseload!

Now baseload can be cheaper than coal thorium or rolled out for comparative infrastructure cost, with coal, as solar thermal.

Always providing economies of scale allow automation to be included in the manufacture of the reflectors.

Nobody in politics is going to allow that, given the inclcuable sovereign risk that would ensue?

We could have publically supplied power for less than 3 cents PKH, if it were rolled out as cheaper than coal, thorium. And as government facilitated and financed co-ops.

And as much chance as a snowflake in hell, given the implacable and insane ideological imperative against cooperatives in the (no, nay, never) conservative wing of the "Liberal" party!?

And in all politicians with coal or coal fired share holdings? Even as arm's length investments? And the self serving ideological rage maintained, even as the smart money deserts coal and oil!

We're short of gas we're told, even as millions of tons of wasted biological waste is routinely flushed into our already massively polluted oceans! And in part, adding to the destruction of the reef!

Other poorer nations already convert this endless waste into endlessly sustainable energy and use it as manufactured biogas, to run diesel generators. A bit of steel wool in the air intake manifold, all that's required to run a diesel on bladder stored biogas. TBC
Alan B.

So, how could we have a cooperative model that could power this nation with the world's (ideologically opposed) cheapest thorium industrial power?

Well some intelligently lead government entity would need to assume an overarching control position. Then create and finance employee owned cooperatives.

The workers wouldn't receive wages, but rather a fully franked dividend, and all the entitlements of shareholders?

Moreover as shareholders they wouldn't need to belong to any union whatsoever, to have their interests protected!

They could use some of the profit stream to create a housing cooperative, a member's health insurance and a member's credit union.

Some of the unemployed partners could voluntarily man a collective creche, so that gender could be eliminated as a reason for not being inclusive as an employer.

With those with their families already large enough! Taking turns at voluntarily manning the creche and the canteen? And a mandatory requirement to membership in the credit union/buying cartel etc?

The buying union an adjunct to purchase ordinary household items wholesale or factory direct, to quite massively decrease, household expenditure burdens, while quite massively improving household disposable incomes. And place huge downward pressure on the bane of western economies, the wages price spiral.

It would be almost utopia! Particularly if this extraordinarily cheap power could be deployed in part to desalinate, massive (cooperative) income earning water projects!

And the cooperative nature of these enterprises would likely guarantee cradle to grave, positions for life? And Australia enroute to becoming the world's premier economy, with the most efficient manufacturing sector!

What prevents it?

Self serving vested interest and implacably opposed blockhead pollies!? That's all! We have all the needed expertise and the finances!
Alan B.

As Albert Einstein or Dump Trump said:

One's ability

at comment brevity

saves precious minutes-hours-days-months over a lifetime.

Comment brevity dumbs down debate! Or serves those with nothing to say, or those who would gag informed debate!

During the Great Depression the only free market, private enterprise model that survived largely intact was the cooperative model! And an absolute anathema for extreme/exploitive capitalism!

Moreover, the only free enterprise model with a snowflake's chance in hell, of competing with the emerging economies, in the manufacture sector!

Always providing, individual industries are limited to a single site, with their own thorium reactor providing all the power.

Thus we could have the lowest costing steel, with the smallest carbon footprint anywhere that utilises the Aussie invented single step smelting. Or a carbon free aluminium smelter set up as an employee co-op; and for the very same reason as outlined above. Ditto all manufacture!

Our taxpayer funded grants paid for the upgrades and robotics in the car industry!

Surely we can then claim them as property, preferably before the current cohort, does a Mitsubishi and absconds out of the joint taking our bought and paid for robotics with them.

Robotics that could be tasked with manufacturing solar thermal arrays or a employee manufacturing co-op or both?

Time to finally reject the endless BS and chart another saner course!

Tired of being the captive cash cow of tax avoiding price gouging profit repatriating foreign corporation/hedge funds! You?
Alan B.

All have valid points of view.
The unfortunate reality is that we have come to a point in this society where things have become too easy.
The saying that ' life is in the struggle ' is true.
There was far more intensity and appreciation of our achievements, as little as they may have been, we enjoyed the opportunity of being able to try and if we succeeded we we encouraged to continue.
The social camaraderie where a simple 'good morning' made us feel it was worth while getting out of bed. There was greater clarity, and any direction could be taken with confidence.
Then the psychologists arrived...and we were all told there was a better way of achieving social harmony and in some ways they were right....and in a lot of ways they were wrong. We all became part of a social experiment that instead of binding the social fabric, it became frayed and disjointed with the end result being what we have today.
We lost that fine balance of social growth through learning and understanding to letting politicians tell us they know better while lining their pockets. A politician is the quintessential 'Im in it for me' make no mistake and if some benefit along the way, well! all the better because it gave legitimacy to the position.
And we all vote accordingly. Lost is the proverb, you look after the family, the neighbours, the street, the suburb, the town.
Cultural customs that evolve over time were changed overnight.
One upon a time governments protected the people...today the mealy mouth charlatans are all vying for their place at the trough and what we have now is the residual effect, the consequences of not being true to ourselves