Perfect storm of weather events sees coral bleached at Abrolhos Islands off West Australian coast
Nice to see a coral bleaching event that is NOT being attributed to global warming. Why are similar processes not at work on the other side of Australia? Why are similar processes not at work on both the East and West coasts? There is no reason why. Water levels fluctuate on both coasts
In what's been described as an important natural process, thousands of hectares of coral at the Abrolhos Islands off the West Australian coast have been bleached after a combination of weather conditions repeatedly exposed the coral to strong cold winds.
Fisher and pearl farmer Jane Liddon has watched the ocean around her fall over the past few days from her home at Post Office Island in the southern group of the Abrolhos.
She said water levels had fallen to an unusually low level due to a combination of strong winds, a high-pressure system and new moon tides.
"When the coral first came out [of the water], it was bright and beautiful … the second day, the water was even lower and still very windy and cold. By the third day it was completely white," Ms Liddon said.
"The tops were bright white. It was like new islands have formed everywhere here."
Ms Liddon, who has spent her life at the Abrolhos, said in 50-odd years, she had often seen events where a low tide had exposed some stag coral, but this was unusual.
"It's a coincidence of having these weather events all come together that has made it extreme, this time of year you do get low tides in the middle of the day, that's common, but not as low as this event," she said. "The low tide is like a lawnmower on the coral.
"For three days we haven't been able to take our dingy off our jetty because our jetty was not in the water anymore, so we are marooned by low tide, which is very rare."
Murdoch University PhD student Jo Buckee is studying coral mortality events and the role that they play in determining coral cover on shallow reef platforms.
She said a similar coral bleaching event at Abrolhos Island due to low tide in 2018 impacted the 7,000-hectare area of shallow reefs and saw about 30 per cent of the coral die.
However, Ms Buckee said the coral was able to regenerate and recover relatively quickly and had re-established itself back to pre-2018 levels.
"The bulk of the corals that you'll see sticking out of the water are the fast-growing Acropora corals, branching and plating corals, and they are capable of fast growth rates," she said.
"This trimming off of the tops is a natural event, it looks very dramatic but it is a naturally occurring process. "It's important for keeping up with sea level rise, for providing the material for reef and island building."
Ms Buckee said sea level variability along with coral growth and mortality over thousands of years had formed the coral reefs and the Abrolhos Islands themselves and allowed them to remain in position.
"That is the material that you're walking on when you're walking on the islands, it's from previous periods when the sea level was slightly higher than it is now, but also fragments washed up from reef flats that surround the islands," she said.
"In order for the reef to keep up with sea level rise over time, it requires fragments of coral to be produced so that the overall height of the reef is able to change.
"These environments are very dynamic with a mixture of seaweed and coral, a reflection of the Abrolhos's position in the transition zone between tropical and temperate ecosystems."
Ms Buckee said with the diversification of land and water activities at the Abrolhos, leading to year-round visitation, previously unwitnessed coral bleaching events were now attracting interest and attention.
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Economic Growth, Bad Science and Climate Alarmism
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Follow the science,” we are told, especially the junk science that climate alarmists invent. I recently debunked a piece of junk climate science whose alarmism was featured in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, CBS, and elsewhere. The junk science was produced by the Federal Reserve. Fed officials claimed that warming will cut economic growth by a third, but my simple statistical analysis showed their results were within the margin of error and that minor improvements and new data flip their result!
Mainstream economics shows that warming will have minor economic effects compared to the economic growth we expect over the next century. That is a problem for the climate lobby, which unfortunately includes the Fed. Since economic growth will swamp the economic effects of global warming, the Fed set out, it seems, to prove that warming will reduce growth. The fact that Florida, on average 26 degrees warmer than Michigan, has grown faster didn’t faze them.
The Fed isn’t the only institution to fall into chicanery. The study was published in a peer-reviewed academic economics journal, given wide media coverage, and cited in a congressional report to justify the Green New Deal. Bogus research makes big splashes. But when it is debunked, there isn’t a ripple.
The best economic model, validated by a Nobel Prize for William Nordhaus, shows that if nothing is done to reduce emissions, warming will reduce world GDP by about three percent by the year 2100. If global GDP continues to grow at the rate it has been growing, then the world in 2100 will be five times richer than it is today. A three-percent reduction in GDP would make us 4.8 times richer instead of 5.0 times. Not exactly catastrophic! Mainstream economics doesn’t deny climate change and accepts that some policies to mitigate it might pass a cost-benefit test. But it does not predict a climate apocalypse, even if we do nothing.
To support apocalyptic predictions, the Fed, it seems, went after growth. Their study looked at the relationship between seasonal temperatures and growth, state by state and year by year, from 1957-2012. Higher summer temperatures were statistically associated with lower growth, while higher fall temperatures were associated with higher growth, but the fall effect was smaller than the summer effect. There was no statistically significant association between growth and temperatures in the winter and spring, so they subtracted the summer effect from the fall effect and concluded that the overall effect of higher temperatures was to lower economic growth.
The problem is that even if two estimates are statistically significant individually, their sum is not necessarily significant. For example, if moving to Florida would increase one person’s income by $1,000, plus or minus $100, but would lower his spouse’s income by $1,100 plus or minus $100, it is reasonable to say that the move will almost certainly raise the husband’s income and lower his wife’s income, but it is not nearly as clear that their total income will be lower. Even though the wife’s expected loss is higher than her husband’s gain, the odds that their overall income will be higher are substantial.
In addition, I found that removing California from the sample switched the result to an increase in overall growth from a temperature increase, though without statistical significance. Using different data that measured the same things, the sign of the effect also flipped, though again without statistical significance. A statistically insignificant result that changes sign when estimated with different samples is exactly what we should expect if no true relationship exists. My work was published in Econ Journal Watch, another peer-reviewed academic journal that specializes in critiques of articles published in other journals.
That the Fed engages in politically biased research should not surprise us. A recent study of Fed personnel shows that the institution is very lopsided, politically.
Following the habits of good science is a good idea, but following the dictates of people who call themselves scientists is not the same thing. Climate change might be real, but there are good reasons to reject calls for draconian policies that fail cost-benefit tests.
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A German company is mothballing eight wind turbines, which will make room for expanding a nearby lignite coal mining operation
Germany has huge easily accessible brown coal deposits, particularly in the East, so is rational to make use of them
RWE is also re-activating three coal-fueled power plants, one of which had been scheduled to be permanently shut down last month, according to the company and government sources.
The German Bundeskabinett, or Federal Cabinet, authorized energy company RWE to re-open the coal plants to help offset lowered energy imports caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to Fox News.
“We realize this comes across as paradoxical,” RWE spokesperson Guido Steffen told The Guardian. “But that is as matters stand.”
After complaints from climate activists, some German government officials protested the dismantling of the windfarm.
“In the current situation, all potential for the use of renewable energy should be exhausted as much as possible and existing turbines should be in operation for as long as possible,” a spokesperson for North-Rhine Westphalia’s ministry for economic and energy affairs said. “We don’t currently see any necessity to dismantle the wind power plant by the L12 [road] near the Garzweiler surface mine.”
The windmills, however, have been slated to be removed beginning this year since they were first constructed in 2001.
“One of the turbines was dismantled last week to make way for the mine’s expansion, with two others to be taken down in the first and last quarter of next year, said a spokesperson for WPD, which manages a portion of the wind park,” The Guardian reported. “A spokesperson for Energiekontor, which built and runs the rest of the windfarm, said a time limit to its operational permit meant it expected to have to dismantle the five remaining turbines by the end of 2023.”
According to the report, each of the 20-year-old windmills generates only about 1 megawatt of electricity hourly, about one-sixth of the electricity produced by more modern wind turbines.
In contrast, the lignite-fueled power plants will generate about 300 megawatts each, the company said.
Lignite coal, it should be noted, isn’t even very efficient source of energy, as far as fossil fuels go.
Environmental activists consider lignite, sometimes called brown coal, to be the “most polluting and health-harming form of coal,” according to a 2018 “HEAL Briefing” from the Health and Environmental Alliance, which describes itself as “the leading European not-for-profit organisation addressing how the natural and built environments affect health in the European Union (EU) and beyond.”
This is in part because lignite’s low carbon content and higher water content requires more of it to be burned to obtain the the same amount of energy than would be produced by burning a smaller amount of higher quality “hard coal.”
“Originally, it was planned that the three reserve power plant units affected would be permanently shut down on September 30, 2022, and September 30, 2023, respectively,” RWE said in September.
“With their deployment, they contribute to strengthening the security of supply in Germany during the energy crisis and to saving natural gas in electricity generation,” the company added.
Reducing natural gas consumption is key to avoiding a “gas emergency,” Klaus Mueller, head of Germany’s national energy network regulator, said last month.
“We will hardly be able to avoid a gas emergency in winter without at least 20% savings in the private, commercial and industrial sectors,” Mueller said, according to The Associated Press. “The situation can become very serious if we do not significantly reduce our gas consumption.”
Germany has also elected to keep open three nuclear power plants through at least mid-April, another move by German leaders that has angered Green Party politicians, according to the BBC.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/energy-company-begins-demolishing-wind-farm-makes-room-coal-mine
*******************************************************Reviewer Exposes EV Truck's serious failings After Trip Takes 3 Hours Longer Than It Should've
Auto reporter Henry Payne is only the latest person to discover that electric vehicles are simply not ready to replace gas-powered cars, especially for long-distance driving, when his Ford F-150 Lightning got only just over half the mileage that the manufacturer claimed on a 280-mile trip.
Payne, an auto critic for the Detroit News, set out to travel from Detroit to Charlevoix, Michigan. His trip was to be around 280 miles, and he was driving a new 2022 F-250 Lightning EV.
Payne wrote that he charged the truck to a full 100 percent charge ahead of the trip, and that the manufacturer claimed that a full charge should have allowed him to travel the whole distance without another charge.
But it wasn’t even close.
Payne wrote that as he sat at his third charging station of the day, another driver asked what sort of mileage he was getting on his roughly $93,000 EV truck.
“I’m getting about 170 miles of range on this trip up I-75,” he told the other driver. “How about you?”
The man replied, “I’ve got the turbo-6 cylinder. I’m getting 600 miles and 22 mpg. I don’t think I’ll ever get one of those electrics.”
At the bottom of his tale of woe, Payne reeled off the F-150 Lightning’s statistics, which included that it was supposed to have a 320-mile travel range on a full charge. But Payne only got about 170 miles down the road before he had to find a charger.
Certainly, electric cars themselves are not entirely useless, especially for local driving. Instead, the problem comes with the Biden administration’s attempts to force Americans to switch to electric vehicles rather than allowing them to determine for themselves what kind of vehicle best fits their needs.
The auto writer noted that inside the city limits of his hometown of Detroit, the Ford Lightning was a great vehicle. But out on the open road, no so much, adding that out on the long haul, “the Lightning’s wattage starts to dim.”
Payne started out the night before with a full charge on his battery, but by the time he got to Saginaw, a little less than halfway to his destination, “the Lightning was getting just 60 percent of estimated range and it was becoming clear to the trip computer that we would not make it to Gaylord,” Payne wrote. He added that the “281-mile range (he was supposed to get) looked more like 168 miles.”
Saginaw had several charging stations, but even that experience left him with a less-than-satisfying outcome.
The first charging station that he found stated that other drivers were currently charging their vehicles. So, he tried a second location that supposedly had four charging stations. But when he got there, two were occupied and the other two were being serviced by technicians and were out of service.
Then it got worse. One of the drivers at one of the two portals pulled out and told Payne that the second charger was not working, meaning that only one of the four chargers at the station was any good.
A frustrated Payne then drove to the first station he found and waited, wasting a lot of time.
Perhaps it could have been worse. If Payne’s truck had needed a battery pack replacement on that trip, it could have cost him more than $35,000!
Payne also added that he had to calculate earlier chargings in areas he knew he could find a station instead of risking having to hunt for a charging station when he was dangerously low on power. It was a calculation about which he said manufacturers don’t warn buyers.
“Though I had traveled just 70 miles since Bay City, chargers are scarce in Charlevoix and so I wanted to top up. That’s something that in-car navi systems don’t tell you. Arrive at your destination with low battery and there may be no infrastructure to get you around town,” he wrote as a warning to his readers.
This fact brings to light the serious mental aspect about driving an EV. The phenomenon is called “range anxiety,” as drivers find themselves in anguish over whether or not they will make it to the next charging station before their EV conks out because manufacturer claims don’t ever seem to pan out.
Payne’s final report was a bit disheartening, especially for those who claim it is much cheaper to drive an EV.
“I arrived in Charlevoix after six hours, 40 minutes for what’s normally a stop-free, 4-hour trip by gas-fired pickup. I had been delayed by 45 minutes of construction and nearly two hours of charging detours across three stations. Cost? About the same as filling with $3.50 gas,” he wrote.
The disaster led Payne to conclude that road trips are the electric truck’s “kryptonite.”
Payne ruefully concluded his review of the F-150 Lightning with a statement made by the driver of a Rivian, an electric car made by a Tesla competitor.
“I recalled my conversation with the Rivian driver in Gaylord,” Payne wrote. “He said he hadn’t anticipated so many delays on his family trip to Mackinac Island. ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘I’m bringing a different vehicle.'”
That statement seems to be the common denominator in these stories. Everyone who tries using an EV for a long haul wishes they had driven a gas-powered car, instead.
For instance, a Colorado man found his 180-mile road trip through Wyoming took 15 hellish hours where it would take less than four hours in a gas-powered car.
In another case of an EV disaster, a Youtube user discovered that his electric truck was not suited for towing despite what the manufacturers said.
Towing is a particular problem which seriously limits the range of an EV. According to Autotrader, towing large loads reduces the range of electric cars significantly, sometimes by as much as one-third, or even by half.
American consumers are perfectly free to buy a far more expensive electric vehicle, of course, especially if they intend to use it only to drive locally. But the government’s idea that we all should be in an EV is simply not a logical goal considering the logistical and technological limits from which these vehicles suffer.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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