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Blind Freddy on Green Hydrogen

By Geoff Derrick

Everyone knows “Blind Freddy”. He’s the man who sees problematic issues with extreme clarity, who identifies projects based on humbug, who calls out scams and wrong-doings, who is our quiet protector on many controversial social and business issues, and who keeps many of our radical politicians, businessmen and policy makers in check.

It is Blind Freddy who could see that “Green Hydrogen” was set to fail (“Writing on wall for green hydrogen”, Weekend Australian, 5-6 Oct), simply because making green hydrogen by passing an electric current through water is extremely expensive and energy consuming. It is Blind Freddy who sees that this process uses more energy than hydrogen can produce, and that it costs more to make this green hydrogen than its world sale price.

Operating at a loss may well be standard socialist philosophy, but it is not the way capitalism works.

And it is Blind Freddy who can see that renewables will never replace fossil fuels because they cannot do the job of powering a nation 24/7.

Tipping Points

By Graham Pinn

The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) describes a tipping point as a “critical threshold beyond which a system reorganises, often abruptly, and/or irreversibly”. Their examples include melting polar ice with sea-level rise, increasing extreme weather events, and release of methane from thawing permafrost; currently nine potential such events have been identified, none currently occurring.

When initially discussing such events, the IPCC believed a temperature rise of 4C would be necessary for these events to occur, this figure was progressively revised down, to a 1.5C rise making them more probable, the latest figure is 1.5 – 2.5C. When looking back, to what we know has occurred historically, even the concept of temperature increase depends on the starting point.

Politicians: If Net Zero is Achievable, Why Not Give Us A Small-Scale Demonstration?

By Dr. John Happs

Imagine a company that claimed to have a battery-powered airliner that would carry 200 passengers over a distance of several thousand kilometres. Imagine also that the government funnelled a few million taxpayer dollars into the development of such an aircraft, politicians and the public would demand a demonstration of its capabilities and safety before anyone boarded for a flight.

By the same token, if anyone makes the claim that a constant, reliable, zero emissions electricity supply, based on wind and solar, is achievable, surely it’s essential that we verify this claim before rushing into such an expensive, untested nation-wide scheme.

The claim was made in the 1950’s that nuclear energy was a viable source of reliable energy and a demonstration was quickly and successfully provided in Arco, Idaho when the city was powered by nuclear energy on July 17^th, 1955. The Borax III reactor supplied the small town of Arco with nuclear power.

The Arco success was followed by another nuclear power demonstration at Shippingport, near Pittsburgh, in 1957 when the plant was completed in just over 2 years. It was reported:

“So, on December 18, 1957, after having operated the reactor and the plant’s steam systems on and off for about two weeks, it came to pass that the first full-scale atomic power station to be built in the United States was synchronized with and connected to the grid. At first, the plant was operated at just low power levels. It didn’t take long to complete some tests and reach full rated power on December 23, 1957, with the plant putting its full rated 60,000 kilowatts onto Duquesne’s commercial grid.”

https://www.ans.org/news/article-2093/atoms-on-the-grid-shippingport-1957/

Continue reading: https://papundits.wordpress.com/2024/09/02/politicians-if-net-zero-is-achievable-why-not-give-us-a-small-scale-demonstration/

The Web of Deceit

By John McRobert

Farms grow food. Solar panels, wind turbines, transmission lines and access roads sterilise land, locking it away from real farming. To call these installations ‘farms’ is a travesty.

And to read that 182,000 solar panels have been approved to cover 393 ha of land near Canberra despite the overwhelming objections from nearby landholders, demonstrates the Government agenda of net-zero targets will stop at nothing.

These Net Zero targets must be challenged. They will do nothing to change the climate for better or worse but they are impoverishing our nation by closing down a reliable energy source in favour of a logistically impossible network of dilute energy collectors interconnected by a web of transmission lines – a shocking misuse of governmental and electrical power – a great web of deceit.

Eat your Veg, and Save the Planet!

By Dr Graham Pinn

After reaching an impasse with fossil-fuel bans, the COP 28 conference in Dubai, moved on to a new climate and life-threatening target; the latest activists’ mission, to save the planet, is to stop us eating meat. It is apparently a win/win, with less land required for animal husbandry, and reduced methane output from cows. The conference, coming from the desert sands, discretely failed to mention that camels, although not ruminants like cows, have multiple stomachs and also produce large amounts of methane.

This development is now being inappropriately incorporated into the National Health and Medical Research (NHMRC) official guidelines, on the grounds of environmental sustainability, rather than human development; the NHMRC has no mandate to involve itself in environmental issues.

Green Foods Fail Olympics

By Viv Forbes

The first occupants of the Olympics village in Paris quickly taught the caterers that athletes did not favour their “climate-friendly” diet of things like avocados on toast plus almond-milk coffee. The athletes demanded more meat and eggs.

Paris Olympics CEO, Etienne Thobois, told reporters they suddenly needed more animal protein, causing them to order “700 kilos of eggs and a ton of meat, to meet the demands of the athletes.”

The Olympic caterers should have read a bit of French history – Vikings brought cattle to Normandy in the 10th century and valued them for both meat and milk.

The Paris organisers could also have also looked at some French cave paintings, such as the one in Lascaux, which depict aurochs, the ancestor of domestic cattle, being attacked by ancient hunters

by Klaus Hausmann from Pixabay: Hunting for Meat in the Stone Age

The Normans took their love of beef to Britain. In 1611 King James knighted his loin roast so it could be worthy item on a King’s table – since then it has been known as “sirloin”.

Snowy 2.0 Digging into Debt

By John McRobert

Into the valley of debt rode the encumbered. Kamala-nomics is already being practised in the land Down-Under. ‘What can be, unburdened by what has been’ can only explain the news that Snowy 2.0 has ordered another tunnelling machine, at a probable cost of over $100m – for delivery hopefully next year – hopefully in time to help the struggling boring machine, Florence reach the fault zone. Who knows what will happen then? The price has already escalated from $2b to $12b, and no one mentions another $10b or so for transmission lines. Shareholders of a private company faced with such an appalling record of expenditure with no guarantee the project can be completed without more calls for funds, would have pulled the plug long ago.

If and when it is completed, if some water is available during drought, if there is surplus power from unreliable energy sources, and if enough water has been pumped to the top of the hill, there will be sufficient hydro-power for three million homes – for a week. Then the battery runs flat. Forget the needs of industry. Forget living standards. Or spend the money maintaining and upgrading our coal-fired power stations. The climate won’t even notice.

The SunCable Gambit

By John McRobert

Refreshing to read Nick Cater’s exposé of the SunCable gambit ‘Sun sets on renewables superpower fantasy’ (The Australian, 26/8/2024). The ‘green tick’ given to the project had the usual weasel-word caveats of strict conditions to completely avoid important species such as the greater bilby and critical habitat. But clearing and cladding with imported glass panels 12,000-hectares of land, would be more devastating to native wildlife and ecosystems than a wildfire, and with far greater long-term damage inflicted on the landscape and our economy.

One might ask what has this fanciful project already cost the Australian taxpayer in subsidies and so-called ‘carbon credits’?

Welcome the Warmth

By Viv Forbes

At dawn today (30^th July) mid-winter in sunny Queensland, it was zero degrees on the lawn outside our kitchen and the small water tub for our chooks was iced over.

Every morning, as soon as it gets light, Judy puts a winter coat over her jamas, adds gloves, glasses, rubber boots, a beanie and a walking stick (icy grass is very slippery). She then trudges down the hill to check any new-born lambs and then lets the sheep out of their dingo-proof night-camp into their paddock for the day. As soon as they are let out, they dribble into a long line and, led by the wisest old ewe, they wend their way across the frosty flat and then make their way up the hill to the highest point facing the morning sun.

The chronology of the Climate Change / Global Warming debate

By R. G. McKellar

Early Science.

The Swedish chemist Arrhenius published a significant advance toward the mathematical treatment of global climate in a paper published in 1896. Until that time the dynamics of a rotating planet with the familiar passing of daylight into night had defied scientists. Aarhenius devised a simplified model with the surface area of the Earth converted to a flat disc receiving solar energy at the rate of one-quarter of the incoming flux at the equator (at the equinox). All temperatures were treated as global averages—-a very difficult thing to do when most stations recording temperature were in the northern hemisphere & on land. The method employed an Ideal Atmosphere, which unfortunately did not include water vapour. Water vapour, by its volume, is the most important Greenhouse gas, and by its phase changes solid>liquid>gas>liquid>solid>gas, heat is extracted or released into the atmosphere.

Currently, all computer models use Arrhenius’ basic maths. Aarhenius arrived at the conclusion that there would be a welcome 3-4 degrees C of European warming in the 20^th century—-a very high estimate ( versus ~1degreeC later observed), and much like that coming out of climate models from various universities and meteorological offices to this day. Interestingly, Aarhenius in a 1906 paper did acknowledge the importance of water vapour, but that was subsequently over-looked .