The whole State of South Australia blacked out during storm

This was expected.  The storm just pushed S.A. over the edge it was balanced on.  Their triumphant boast that they now rely on "green" power only had to lead to power loss. Green power only works under very favourable circumstances.  That the storm knocked down a few poles in one area should not have taken the whole State down.  Wind turbines have to be switched off during high winds so that was the most likely cause of the problem.  And once they were down, the lowered voltage would have hit hard the interconnector to Victoria and tripped it off

A “CATASTROPHIC” superstorm that left an entire state without power is far from over with warnings the worst of the wild weather is yet to come.

As the nation’s leaders stuggle to work out how South Australia was left in total blackout — causing travel chaos, hospital terror and reported looting of homes — forecasters say more is on the way.

The once-in-50-year storm is expected to move east through the south coast of Australia in the next 24 hours, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

Expect havoc across the country as the storm unleashes again, with flood warnings in place for five states as well as for the ACT.

It has already hit parts of Victoria and will move into NSW and Tasmania today. BoM senior meteorologist Craig Burke said a weather event of this size and intensity was unusual, especially when it affected so many locations.

“It’s extremely rare to see a low of this much pressure and intensity,” he said. “It’s fair to say it’s going to get extremely nasty again.”

The extreme weather saw gale-force winds, heavy rain and thunderstorms lash South Australia and parts of Victoria last night.

As the “worst storm in decades” struck the country with force, South Australia was plunged into darkness and triple-0 was down in isolated parts of the state.

SA Premier Jay Weatherill insisted it was not South Australia’s reliance on renewable energy that led to the blackout, as some have suggested.

“This was a weather event, this was not a renewable energy event,” he said, saying the whole electricity network was forced to shut down after a “catastrophic weather event” damaged infrastructure near Port Augusta at 3.48pm yesterday.

The Premier said powerful wind gusts and thunderstorms smashed 22 electricity transmission stations in the area, and the toppled towers were followed by a lightning strike, which triggered a shutdown for safety reasons.

“This is a catastrophic natural event which has destroyed our infrastructure,” he said in a press conference this afternoon. “These are events the Director of the Bureau of Meteorology has never seen in his whole career.

“There is no infrastructure that can be developed that can protected you against catastrophic events that take out three pieces of infrastructure.

He praised the rapid response of the Australian Energy Market Operator, SA Power and emergency services, as well as the “community spirit” among South Australians.

“This is certainly a system that was designed to get the system back up as quickly as possible. In a few hours we were beginning to restore power and now the lion’s share of the system has been restored.”

Ninety per cent of the power has been restored in the 38 hours after the blackout, with 75,000 still without power this morning.

Mr Weatherill warned about 40,000 households could be without power for the next two days. Large industrial users are among the last waiting to begin operating again.

“It’s not simply a storm, it’s an unprecedented weather event, the likes of which the bureau has not seen here,” he added. “There are things we have to reflect upon, but our present advice is this was an event which could not have been predicted, it was an extreme event.”

He said there would be a three-pronged inquiry into what went wrong, but said the priority now was to deal with people still suffering, particularly in the north of the state.

On reports of looting, he said: “There’s some isolated incidents the police commission might want to concern themselves with. If that’s happened, it’s disgusting.

“An isolated incident is disgusting and regrettable but I done think it reflects the overwhelming evidence of community spirit.”

LIFE AND DEATH

Hospitals came under serious pressure as they switched to back-up power generators to assist people on life support. Handheld battery packs and hand-operated respirators were used as 17 patients had to be moved.

People using life-support devices at home headed to hospitals for extra power, with the wards focusing solely on those in life-threatening situations.

By 7pm (local time) yesterday power had started to be restored to some suburbs, mostly in the metropolitan area’s eastern districts.

Adelaide Hills and northern suburbs were among the worst affected.

Hail, winds and wild weather made travel impossible with traffic lights out of action and trams and trains cancelled.

The BoM has warned that gale-force winds of up to 120km/h and plenty more rain is expected across the state today.

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First shipment of American shale gas arrives in Britain to open 'virtual pipeline' despite fierce protests from environmentalists

The first shipment of American shale gas arrived in Britain this morning amid fierce protest over the future of the controversial fracking process.

The tanker Ineos Insight passed beneath the Forth Bridge with 27,5000 cubic metres of ethane produced by fracking shale fields in the eastern United States.

It then docked at Grangemouth - the Scottish refinery and petrochemicals plant owned by global chemical giant Ineos.

Ineos bosses said the shipment represents the culmination of a £1.6billion ($2billion) investment, with eight tankers creating a virtual pipeline from America.

They hope shale gas will replace dwindling supplies of natural gas from the North Sea - where production has fallen by 60 per cent over the past decade - supporting 10,000 jobs.

The decline has forced petrochemical companies to source basic raw materials, such as ethane, from outside the UK.

Jim Ratcliffe, Ineos founder and chairman, said: 'This is a hugely important day for Ineos and the UK. Shale gas can help stop the decline of British manufacturing and today is a first step in that direction.'

But environmental campaigners have warned about the climate consequences associated with fracking.

Friends of the Earth Scotland's Head of Campaigns, Mary Church, said: 'It is completely unacceptable to attempt to prop up INEOS's petrochemicals plants on the back of human suffering and environmental destruction across the Atlantic.

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Fake Nobel Laureate Uses Super PAC To Attack Trump On Global Warming

A handful of scientists are using a super PAC to get their colleagues to align against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump over his “embrace of conspiracy theories, anti-science attitudes, and disregard for experts.”

“We urge our peers to join us in making it clear that Mr. Trump’s statements are not only at odds with scientific reality, but represent a dangerous rejection of scientific thinking,” reads an online petition started by anthropologist Eugenie Scott on the website of Not Who We Are PAC.

Scott, who made her name fighting against teaching creationism in schools, joined up with Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann and three others to attack Trump for his beliefs on issues, like global warming, vaccines and evolution.

“Vaccines save lives every day, but Mr. Trump has stoked discredited fears about vaccines and autism and accused doctors of lying to people about them,” reads Scott’s petition.

“Every major country on Earth is adapting to a changing climate and reducing emissions from fossil fuels, but Mr. Trump has claimed it is a hoax, a statement that prompted a response from hundreds of members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the country’s leading scientific advisory body,” she wrote.

Scott also attacked Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, for giving “a speech to the House of Representatives challenging the teaching of evolutionary science in classrooms based on a misreading of how evolution works.”

Trump was recently criticized for trying to hide the fact he’s called global warming a “hoax.” Trump denied ever saying such a thing while debating Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on network television Monday night.

“Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese,” Clinton said during the debate. “I think it’s real.”

“I did not. I did not. I do not say that,” Trump responded.

The Trump campaign was quick to rebuff arguments Trump thought global warming was a hoax in the hours after the debate. Pence told CNN “the reality is that this climate change agenda that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want to continue to expand is killing jobs in this country.”

This isn’t the first group of scientists to come out against Trump. Some 37 scientists affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences signed an open letter decrying Trump’s intention to pull out of a United Nations global warming treaty.

“People who embrace conspiracy theories, spread misinformation, and dismiss science should have no place in our government,” Scott wrote in her petition.

“We all have different political backgrounds and this isn’t about partisan politics for us. As Americans – and as members of the scientific community – Donald Trump is simply not who we are,” she wrote.

Not Who We Are PAC hasn’t done much this election, compared to the tens of millions spent by other super PACs. The group has only spent 23,000 on ads targeting Trump, according to federal filings.

So far, only five scientists have signed Scott’s petition, including Mann, the climate scientist who gained fame for his “hockey stick” graph showing global temperature rise. Mann was also involved in the “Climategate” email scandal, and he’s been repeatedly called out for falsely claiming to have been a “co-winner” of the Nobel Prize.

The Nobel committee has consistently gone on record that Mann and other climate scientists were not awarded the prize in 2007. That year, the Nobel Prize was awarded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore for their “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”

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Sen Dem Report Blasting EPA’s Critics Has Ties To Enviro-Group

EPA’s critics are in cahoots with shadowy figures in the fossil fuel industry, a report posted Monday on Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s website claimed.

The document appears to have been created by an attorney in conjuction with EarthJustice, a green legal group currently defending the EPA in the courts, according to data obtained by The Washington Free Beacon.

After reporters reached out to Whitehouse and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a new version of the report materialized online, scrubbed of digital fingerprints and linked to David Baron, an EarthJustice attorney working on behalf of the Sierra Club.

The original report was released Monday by Whitehouse, Reid, and Sens. Barbara Boxer of California, and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and is crafted to resemble a lawsuit challenging environmental regulations on carbon emissions.

Metadata of the report indicates that Baron assisted the Democratic senators in putting together the report. Baron is listed as the “author” of the report in the metadata.

The updated version of the report was submitted to the website at 9:42 a.m. Wednesday, according to the document’s metadata, and lists a White House staffer as its author.

While Baron is slated as the “author” of the initial report, there is clear evidence that he or EarthJustice explicitly had a hand in writing the report.

The report “demonstrates that the state officials, trade associations, front groups, and industry-funded scientists participating in the [EPA regulation legal] challenge actually represent the interests of the fossil fuel industry,” a press statement on Whitehouse’s website states.

Ironically, many of the same senators involved in Whitehouse’s report were also instrumental in carrying out a clandestine effort to publicly shame on the senate floor non-profit groups they considered global warming “denialists.”

Whitehouse directed 19 of his fellow Democratic senators July 11 to attack conservative and libertarian organizations such as Americans for Prosperity and the Cato Institute on the chamber floors for engaging in what the senators call a “web of denial.”

Democratic Sens. Al Franken of Minnesota, Boxer and Whitehouse needled various groups – the Heritage Foundation, the Reason Foundation, and the Hoover Institute among the various groups targeted.

Whitehouse is also known for browbeating groups into divorcing from the fossil fuel industry, in addition to those refusing to fall in line with environmental political narratives.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU), which boasts more than 62,000 members worldwide, announced in May, for instance, that it would review and possibly reconsider a decision it made in April to continue its relationship with Exxon after Whitehouse and California Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat, harassed the group into separating from the oil company.

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Are The Promoters Of Global Warming 'Catastrophe' The True Deniers?

In a recent column for USA Today, climate writer Gregg Zoroya breathlessly asserted that the clock is ticking when it comes to saving the world from a climate-induced disaster.  Zoroya referenced interviews he’s conducted with climate scientists that have led him to the conclusion that even if world leaders follow every recommendation laid out in the Paris Agreement such that “global warming is slowed,” it’s not certain at this point that what he foresees as a climate “catastrophe” will be “averted.”

Zoroya concludes that “Tough love is needed on climate change,” but political and global realities make it certain that no substantial legislative action meant to slow so-called “global warming” is going to happen anytime soon.  This is certainly true if it’s expected that the U.S. will take the lead.

We know this simply because whatever readers think of Donald Trump, he’s on record as saying that all the talk of global warming is a “hoax.”  Market signals so far reveal Trump as correct, but that’s really not the point.  If Trump is elected, even he’s not so arrogant as to believe that he can centrally plan nature.  This will not be a legislative priority for him, but even if so, his polarizing countenance ensures that he’ll not be able to do much of anything about anything.  Amen.

Ok, but what if Hillary Clinton beats Trump? Polls show her as the likely victor in November. Yet if Clinton wins, she, like Trump, will happily have no legislative mandate.  With both candidates we’re talking about intensely weak competitors for the world’s top policy job such that either one will reach office as the least popular entering president in the history of the United States.  It’s worth rejoicing yet again that neither will have backing to do much of anything legislatively, not to mention that Democrats will raise billions to regain control of the House and Senate if Trump is elected, and Republicans will raise billions to maintain control of the House and Senate if Clinton wins.  The future is gridlock, not climate legislation.

As for other major economic powers not the U.S., lots of luck there.  The economically-sagging electorate in Europe is not about to vote for economy-crushing legislation meant to combat what remains a theory about catastrophe, and then countries that are new to prosperity like China are not about to anger their citizens with economy-sapping anti-carbon rules that are once again rooted in what is a scientific assumption.

In that case, let’s assume that Zoroya, along with warming alarmists like Nick Nuttall, Katherine Hayhoe, and Michael Mann are correct that failure to act ensures what Mann describes as a “dystopian” global scenario not unlike Hollywood depictions of the Soylent Green and The Hunger Games variety.  Well, if they’re right, market signals indicate that almost no one believes them.  In particular, those with the means to convince a President Clinton or Trump about the need for climate action truly don’t believe the apocalyptic scenarios imagined by the alarmists just mentioned.

How we know this concerns Clinton’s recent cancellation of fundraisers due to health reasons.  Two weeks ago she cancelled a few in California.  As is the case with every presidential election, while candidates stump for votes in the non-coastal states, they raise money on the coasts: Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York most notably.  This all rates mention because the climate alarmists have repeatedly stressed that coastal cities and states will be harmed most profoundly by any supposed climate catastrophe as sea levels put those locales under water.

Where presidential candidates raise money, and in particular where Democratic candidates raise money (the coasts), signals that while Clinton partisans may support candidates who spew rhetoric about the alleged horrors of global warming, their own belief level in looming climate catastrophe relating to warming is rather shallow.  We know this because if they at all bought into the hysteria being promoted by Mann et al, they wouldn’t have so much of their wealth – commercial and residential – located right where the alleged horrors of climate change are projected to have the greatest impact.

National Republican candidates similarly raise a lot of money on the coasts, and that’s once again because the biggest donors live and work in coastal cities and states.  Republicans are less prone to buy into the prevailing warming wisdom, at which point we can say that the smart money in the U.S. at least subconsciously thinks as Trump does, that the warming alarmism is a major hoax.  Lefties like to say that the rich are “greedy,” but if so their alleged greed doesn’t have them shielding their life’s work from climate change that, according to the climate alarmists, is soon to erase their wealth.

What about insurance companies? They’re supposedly greedy too, their profits spring from pricing risk of all kinds, including existential risks to houses and businesses, but no less an investor than Warren Buffett (no warming “denier” himself) has observed that the threat of so-called climate change hasn’t driven up the cost of insurance premiums.  As an owner of Geico, Buffett would know.

Are global investors fearful of the catastrophe scenarios offered up by certain members of the scientific community? Apparently not.  New York and Miami are seemingly overrun with foreign buyers of property; property that in Miami is very much on the water.  And then a recent article in the Los Angeles Times revealed abundant investment from China in Los Angeles’s booming downtown; the latter seemingly a sitting duck should the predictions of Zoroya and the rest come true.  Interesting there is that the Chinese investors, if the article is to be believed, view Los Angeles as a long-term play; this despite the near certainty that the Paris Agreement recommendations will not be acted on.

So while scientists are aggressively promoting their theories about a horrid future thanks to no serious global response to what has them alarmed, the smartest investors in the world are plainly ignoring them as though their theories are bogus.  Just once it would be nice if the scientific community might address why the very people who have the most to lose from so-called “global warming” work, invest and live as though its impact will prove a non-factor.

Barring that, Michael Mann and the rest of the climate alarmists at the very least owe the rest of us a date in the future (whether tomorrow, next year, or fifty years from now) when, if their predictions don’t materialize, they’ll admit to having been hysterical about something that was never really a problem.  For now, market signals are indicating that they’re embarrassingly wrong.  Unknown is if the catastrophe religion will ever admit what markets have long known.

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