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Mar
2018
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Climate Change Debate on Q&A & in The US

The ABC ‘s Q&A program tonight has a panel discussing global warming and Tim Flannery will be on the panel, but apparently with no skeptics. Below Andrew Bolt suggests some questions that might be posed to Flannery.

Also below is a report on a public debate which occurred recently in the US between two experts on climate change with different views. Note in particular the different rate of increase in electricity prices between the US state which has a high usage of renewable and the rest of the US.

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Andrew Bolt: Don’t expect Q&A panel to get answers on dud Tim Flannery predictions(Herald Sun, March 11)

THE ABC finally has a big chance to confront global warming alarmist Tim Flannery with his astonishing record of dud predictions.But will anyone dare hold him to account when he appears on the ABC’s Q&A panel?

Unfortunately, the omens are bad. Not one panellist tonight is a sceptic who might ask the Climate Council chief tough questions.

Even host Tony Jones has been MC or moderator for four CarbonExpo conferences for the warming industry.

But here are the most important predictions Flannery should be asked to explain:

FLANNERY in 2007 said global warming was so baking our Earth that “even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems”.

Instead, dams for Brisbane, Canberra and Sydney later filled to overflowing.

FLANNERY in 2015 said we’d see severe cyclones “more frequently in the future”. But the very next year, Australia for the first time recorded not one severe cyclone, continuing a pattern over four decades of fewer cyclones.

A paper in the Nature journal said: “Studies project a decrease in the frequency of tropical cyclones towards the end of the 21st century in the southwest Pacific, southern Indian, and Australian regions.”

FLANNERY in 2005 predicted Sydney’s dams could be dry in as little as two years, leaving the city “facing extreme difficulties”. In 2008, he said: “Adelaide … may run out of water by early 2009.” In 2007, he claimed: “In Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane, water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months.”

All three cities — and Melbourne, too — then built hugely expensivedesalination plants, convinced by the likes of Flannery that the rain would not return. All four plants have essentially been mothballed since.

FLANNERY in 2007 urged us to invest in “green” geothermal power — pumping water on to hot rocks underground.

He claimed hot rocks in South Australia “potentially have enough embedded energy in them to run Australia’s economy for the best part of a century”, and “the technology to extract that energy … is relatively straightforward”.

The Rudd government gave $90 million for a test plant in SA’s Cooper Basin, but a well collapsed, the site flooded and the project was abandoned.

I could add more dud predictions, but these are the most important and costly.

So will Q&A tonight demand Flannery explain?

Climate Policy & Implications for Electricity Prices

In the US a public debate occurred recently between two experts on climate change and what to do about it, Dr Willie Soon of The Harvard-Smithonian Centre and Dr Jon Christensen, an adjunct assistant professor at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. I list below some of the points made and also a graph comparing the increase in electricity prices for California and for the rest of the US between 20011 and 2017.

According to this graph, the increase in California was five times greater than the increase in the rest of the US. California is the greatest user of renewables and might be compared in that regard to South Australia.

More detail is provided in the attachment

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