Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
I have good hopes that the Yes campaign isn’t cruelled by the rubbish that a number of clearly not genuine sources have been flooding social media companies with. There is a place for consideration of views that are opposed to the Voice, but man, it has to be fact based, or at least more than lies and misdirection. I am old enough to have heard of the 1967 referendum, to have seen the young firebrand Indigenous people on the telly, pushing their case, and for Mabo, Wik, Native Title, to have all occurred without any noticeable disruption to the lives of non-indigenous people in Australia, despite the many varied scare campaigns that we’d (i.e. the non-Indigenous people) would lose the houses, farms, etc. None of that came to pass. There is simply no good reason to think that the Voice referendum would somehow shatter that, and would provide power that has until now been unavailable to Indigenous people. To be blunt, the current scare campaigns are a reheating of what we saw with Mabo and Wik, Native Title, and as it transpired, those scare campaigns were all baloney. The same damn people are deeply involved in the current scare campaigns. Ignore them, please.
Leon Simons tweeted on Oct 9:
Is this a prelude to “off the chart” / “never before seen” temperatures next year (2024)?
Meanwhile, the Antarctic sea ice extent continues on its 5σ path.
Less sea ice; more darker ocean; means less albedo, means increased warming of the oceans in summer.
this referendum isnt necessarily about land rights but it buggers me why so many average people seem to think it matters to them whether Gina Reinhardt or indigenous people own parts of outback Australia . They are effectively arguing for Gina but dont seem to realise or care . I suppose its like how they usually unknowingly argue to protect billionairs interests in general .
One cent electricity – from James Wimberley
Let’s face it, you need a shot of techno-optimism to escape from the TV news.
Qualified guy I’d never heard of called Chamath Palihapitiya, a Sri Lankan / Canadian venture capitalist with a Substack feed:
“I think we will have a near zero marginal cost of energy by 2030. The incremental cost of generating power will approach ~$0.005/kWh in this time frame – essentially making power free and abundant.”
He is relying on simple extrapolation of cost trendlines, a very basic approach I’ve used myself before. It is certainly more reasonable than assuming things will stay the same. I do not vouch for his numbers, but there is no reason to think that the forces behind the renewables revolution – economies of scale, scientific and technical progress, and social acceptance of the need to change – have played themselves out. Most of us who follow the transition at all closely tend to concentrate on the critical tipping points in relative costs, like equality of renewable LCOE, including capital, with the variable costs of fossil generation excluding capital, or TCO and soon sticker price parity of EVs and ICEVs, etc. We therefore neglect the impact of very probable future progress beyond these benchmarks.
I reckon Palihapitiya is right to predict that costs in at least solar PV and batteries will keep dropping, and that the future is one of unlimited cheap electricity. I suspect that other components will not follow such dramatic curves, but that does not affect the qualitative conclusions. Several things follow from this.
One: the transition to zero-carbon electricity will speed up, with dramatic effects in China and India, the two countries still building large numbers of coal power stations, and in the worldwide fossil gas industry. Russian imperialism will end sooner.
Two: the transition to electric vehicles will also speed up, bringing forward the end of ICEVs and the cutting down to size of petrostates like Saudi Arabia and Iran. Democracy should do better against autocracy, as renewables are inherently dispersed.
Three: green hydrogen will indeed get cheaper, as its advocates insist. That does not remove the round-trip cost penalty of hydrogen vehicles, but it’s good news for green steel. Hydrogen will keep a niche in backup electric generation, not a large-volume business.
It ‘s all good news. You know, we could have a pretty nice future together if we stopped being stupid. Just now, this looks too much to ask.
Less stupidity?? I’d vote for that!
These times are too interesting for me.
I wrote my congressperson a pissy email about McCarthy. I wonder if I’ll get an answer.
Billions of people are at risk from lethal wet-bulb temperatures if global temperatures increase by +1 °C or more above current levels per latest PNAS paper:
PNAS published a paper on 9 Oct 2023 titled Greatly enhanced risk to humans as a consequence of empirically determined lower moist heat stress tolerance, by Daniel J. Vecellio, Qinqin Kong, W. Larry Kenney and Matthew Huber.
Figure 1 shows annual hot-hours under (A) 1.5, (B) 2, (C) 3, and (D) 4 °C of warming relative to preindustrial level, (E) population projection in 2050 following the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2, and (F) population subject to accumulated duration of 1 wk to 3 mo of uncompensable heat stress annually under 1–4 °C of global warming (the shaded area corresponds to the 10th to 90th percentiles of CMIP6 model spread).
Figure 4 shows Tw thresholds across a range of Ta and RH environments taken from laboratory-based measurements in young, healthy adults doing work associated with the minimal activities of daily living.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2305427120
Published by Axios on 10 Oct 2023 was an article by Rebecca Falconer and Andrew Freedman headlined Study: Climate change to drive temperatures too hot for humans, reporting on the PNAS paper. It included:
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/10/climate-change-heat-temperatures-billions-humans-study
What’s REQUIRED to avoid worst-case outcomes?
1. Reduce;
2. Remove;
3. Repair.
The Sustainable Australia Party is moving on a UBI policy.
More from SAP president William Bourke at:
https://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au/a_universal_basic_income_for_australians
It looks like a good start that with further development and a bit of polish will shine green.
– Svante
Dr Robert Rohde tweeted yesterday (Oct 11):
Berkeley Earth’s latest report titled September 2023 Temperature Update by Robert Rohde was published 11 Oct 2023.
https://berkeleyearth.org/september-2023-temperature-update/
What has happened in Israel? There are stories filtering through that the stories of baby decapitation, rapes and at least some murders are false. In some cases the Hamas invaders are described by Israelis as treating them well. I haven’t got a clue what is going on here – all the original horror stories may be 100% accurate. The reason for doubt is that there are incentives for Israel to exaggerate so that they can justify the annihilation of Gaza and a possible land invasion. The graphic evidence of the effects of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza and the slaughter of civilians look horrific – it’s amazing to me that only 1000 Palestinians have been killed. But maybe that footage is also inaccurate and the Palestinians are providing false information.
The old cliche: The first casualty of war is truth might be truth or the news stories we are getting might be accurate. I don’t know.
I feel much the same about the war in Ukraine where one side states that Ukraine is making slow but steady progress and the other side suggests Ukraine is being slaughtered with up to 450,000 troops dead and entire sections of the military surrendering to the Russians. Are the stories of Russian atrocities in Ukraine real or manufactured? Again I have no idea where the truth lies though I know the Americans are expert in fostering false information and the Russians likewise have strong skills in this direction.
I think it is important to maintain caution in adopting a particular side in these debates. Of course it doesn’t matter a damn what I think. But it does matter what nation states think and how their foreign policies respond to events. The Israeli PM describes Hamas as “animals” who should be “wiped-off the face of the earth”. This is being used to collectively punish 2.5 million residents of Gaza many of whom strongly resent Hamas. The US media – even newspapers as reputable as the New York Times and the Washington Post – are universally damning of Hamas and the Palestinians. They are, however, increasingly more ambivalent about the state of the war in Ukraine as are several European Governments.
I mistrust the mainstream media. The less prominent news sources don’t seem to offer convincing alternative sources of information.
Harry Clarke: enough with the false equivalence, please.
The Israel-Palestine conflict really does have two sides, with real grievances and tragedies going back centuries, and inglorious or worse contributions from a large cast of outsiders including the Ottoman, Russian and British empires and the Third Reich. The Ukraine war is the clearest case morally of any conflict in my lifetime. And beyond that: Germans in the Sudetenland did have real grievances that Hitler seized on as a pretext for destroying independent Czechoslovakia. Russian speakers in Ukraine were not discriminated against. Zelensky is one such.
The invasion of Ukraine in March 2022 by Putin’s Russia had no justification at all other than imperialist myths and cynical propaganda about the “nazification” of a country with a Jewish President. After 2014, independent Ukraine, with a weak army and no nuclear weapons, was no threat to Russia. It had no prospects of recovering the Donets, let alone Crimea. Russia objected to Ukraine’s application to join NATO – which had been turned down. The invasion has of course changed the situation. The invasion, and the brutal way it has been conducted, have united Ukrainians in the determination to restore the 2013 frontiers. A flood of advanced weapons, ammunition and training from NATO countries has transformed its military into a force that is far better than its adversary in most dimensions, and given it the capability to achieve its goal.
The contrast is even more clear-cut in the methods of fighting the war. Russia has invaded Ukraine, but Ukraine has not invaded Russia, even though the laws of war would allow retaliation. Its few (but very successful) incursions into Russian territory have been strikes on legitimate military and economic targets or support to a handful of Russian rebels. Russian forces have carried out atrocities against civilians, notably at Bucha – extensively reported on by numerous non-Ukrainian journalists and NGOs, as soon as the Russians withdrew. Russia has systematically attacked purely civilian targets with bombs, shells and missiles, including shopping centres, the theatre in Mariupol, and – recently in the village of Hroza – a funeral. Contrast the current state of the centres of Kharkhiv and Donetsk, cities on opposite sides of the front line. Russia has abducted thousands of Ukrainian children for “re-education” as good Russians, a crime under Article II.e of the UN Genocide Convention.
Even Russian state TV has not SFIK tried to manufacture claims of atrocities committed by Ukrainian forces, other than the useful lie that they don’t take prisoners. In fact, and rather surprisingly, prisoners are regularly exchanged, roughly one-for-one. Score one for the ICRC.
If you don’t believe me, read Timothy Snyder’s Substack posts. if he’s not credible, nobody is.
James Wimberley
Solar electricity for Gaza
Spitting into the wind, here’s a simple idea to patch up the electricity supply in the Gaza strip. This depended on a single diesel power station with a nominal rating of 140 MW. It’s out of fuel and the supply has stopped. That’s for a population of 2m. If it had the same capacity per capita as Spain, it would have 5,000 MW.
There are currently 80 GW of unsold solar panels sitting in European warehouses. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/10/05/european-warehouses-now-storing-more-than-80-gw-of-unsold-solar-panels/ I have no idea why, but it’s a fact, not a guess. The EU could buy say 1 GW of panels and ship them to Gaza. At the current wholesale price of about 25c per watt, this would cost €250m. Double this for inverters and shipping. Don’t bother with mounts, forget about skilled installation and just lay them flat on the ground. Supply IKEA-type instructions for hooking them up.
Problem solved? Not quite, as they only work in the daytime. That is still an awful lot better than no electricity: for instance, you can keep a fridge going 24h by turning it up in the daytime. For the few really critical users like hospitals and telephone exchanges, you can supply batteries. Some DIY installers will probably get killed by electric shocks. Many panels will be destroyed by the fighting. Got a better plan?
James Wimberley, you totally misread my comment. It’s important to try to understand what people seek to say rather than to invent their intent. There was no asserted dichotomy and no attempt to assert moral equivalence. The difficulty identified was to find out what is going on. A discouraging non sequiter from you,
“Australia’s Huge Mistake of Selling All Their Water” seems like something that JQ might enjoy.
“Australia’s Huge Mistake of Selling All Their Water”
There are some good points, but too many errors to count, starting with the claim that Australia previously had riparian rights. Foreigners own about 10 per cent of our water, but they also own about 10 per cent of our agricultural land (a proportion that is shrinking, and was probably higher in the 19th century). So, there’s not to suggest the idea that they are primarily speculators.
Harry Clarke: OK, so your claimed equivalence only applies to the conflicts in the information space. But it doesn’t hold any more in that subset of the wars. For Israel-Hamas, third-party journalists have pretty free access to combat zones on both sides, and synthesis by both CNN and BBC seems pretty even-handed and well-sourced in the circumstances. For Ukraine-Russia, on one side you have a free society with good access by third-party journalists, numerous pretty credible official sources (Ukrainian General Staff and front commands, Pentagon, UK MoD, NATO ..) and many competing NGOs like Oryx, Reporting from Ukraine, etc. I follow ISW, a conservative but scrupulous Washington think tank. For Russia, nothing coming out of the Kremlin (Peskov), the MoD, or state TV can be taken at face value. Recall that when the HQ of the Black Sea fleet was hit by two Storm Shadow missiles carrying 450 kg each of high explosive, the initial official report was of one missing sailor. Same story for every wrecked warship. The damaged Kilo-class submarine was reparable, until photos came out showing a giant hole in the hull. It isn’t even competent propaganda. The ISW for one is forced to rely for Russia on the only group that enjoys any freedom of speech at all, hard-right milbloggers like Girkin (now under arrest) whose complaint with the Russian MoD is that it isn’t aggressive or brutal enough. It’s like the comparison of the BBC with Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose in 1942.
Professor James E Hansen tweeted earlier today (Oct 14):
It looks like a major inflection point in the whole Earth System is perhaps beginning to emerge.
Based on historical experience, my default expectation in a conflict like this one is that there will be atrocities committed by people on both side and also that there will be some false stories about atrocities. That’s what usually happens; why should this instance be an exception? Anybody who wants to convince me it is will need a strong case.
Now, if I were on the prosecution team for a war crimes trial, it would be important to comb through the evidence to establish in detail exactly who perpetrated exactly what atrocities, and exactly which stories are unsubstantiated. But I’m not. So of what value is it for me to know more? If what I know is that, although not all the stories are true, there really were atrocities perpetrated by both sides, how are more details of value to me?
J-D
https://mailchi.mp/caa/el-nino-fizzles-planet-earth-sizzles-why
Thanks for the Hansen update Geoff.
“Global temperature in the current El Nino, to date, implies a strong acceleration of global warming for which the most likely explanation is a decrease of human-made aerosols as a result of reductions in China and from ship emissions.
…Although it is difficult to predict future aerosol climate forcing, we expect a continual decline of the aerosol effect because of desire to reduce particulate air pollution, which causes several million deaths per year. Much of the aerosol pollution arises from fossil fuels, so, as the world moves to clean energies, aerosol amounts should decline and unmask the GHG warming that had been compensated by aerosol cooling. (We long ago[9] described this aerosol cooling as a Faustian bargain, and later[10] discussed it in more detail.) Thus, for the next few decades – barring purposeful actions to reduce Earth’s energy imbalance – we expect the global warming rate will be accelerated to at least the rate (50% increase) of the lower boundary of the yellow area.”
No word yet… from Guy McPherson covering and amplifying this latest aerosol warning from Hansen. McPherson’s view is that falling aerosol levels cause fast temperature rise triggering rapid global ecological and civilizational collapse, and no doubt nuclear war to boot. Nature bats last.
So, is ISW the Institute for the Study of War?
I’ve heard of Snyder but I’ll look him up too.
Imho, the NYT is providing plenty of coverage of the plight of regular people in Gaza.