Climate Change Research
100% agree Distracted. You only have to walk in national parks in NZ to see how underfunded and undervalued our parks are. In the remotest parts of South Island the tracks are well formed and (importantly) maintained to a standard rarely seen here ... but do you reckon Scotty's RC will recommend a massive increase in funding?
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Doubt there would be an increase in funding, particularly as that will be a State issue. Possibly towards infrastructure such as fire trail maintenance.
Difficult thing with hazard reduction is that modern society has a complicated land ownership system and trying to coordinate burns between adjoining property owners who have different objectives for their property is not easy. As soon as a hazard reduction goes next door and burns down a fence or shed then the owners will be out to sue, which makes any land manager very hesitant about lighting up.
uh huh...
Anyway...for those interested...
Some super easy to read infographics etc on which countries are responsible for what, including an interesting graphic at the end of the second piece on those impacted. Note, that graphic is only for a +1.5C in global mean...which isn't all that far away if trends continue.
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-019-02711-4/index.html
Haven't seen that second one before, that a good one, it's a much better visual and gives a better perspective of things
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-019-02711-4/index.html
Yeah it's way better that one. For once someone put effort into communicating the science visually.
For those interested in what it could all mean from a national security perspective, this is the place to start. As you can see, the advisory board is clearly stacked with self-entitled tree-hugging snowflake socialists...
Yup. Unless someone can come up with a totally different battery technology (and the folks at RMIT/Melb Uni may have), liquid hydrogen produced with renewable energy seems to be the way things will go. The CSIRO and a couple of billionaires are putting serious dollars into it. On top of which, CSIRO has developed a means to cheaply and efficiently convert the hydrogen for seaborne travel. Not to mention, the Japanese and Korean automakers are pushing pretty solidly on hydrogen fuel-cell EVs. With hydrogen, you get the same range as a petrol car, it takes the same amount of time to fill up (2 mins), and the only tailpipe emissions are....water droplets.
All of this means that, even using a conservative estimate Australia could make 5 times as much in export $$$ from hydrogen than from coal.
Hydrogen tech is interesting and I'm sure it will have its part in the future in some way but after watching this video the other week (more focussed on cars), if true it's far from the holy grail some make out.
Always hard to know what to believe but these video series seems pretty well researched and not agenda driven.
Im curious though why you think it would be viable for us to produce and export hydrogen?
The price of hydrogen is dictated by energy prices and other overheads, all of which we have some of the highest in the world.
Why would it be viable for us to produce and export hydrogen, when any country that has water and electricity can produce it or even export it and if they have lower energy prices and other overheads can make more profit or charge a lower price.
Natural resources are a different ball game because very few countries have them and if they do sometimes it comes down to quality or accessibility.
Yeah most hydrogen is currently produced using natural gas. So currently it has a pretty bad energy conversion coefficient. However producing it using large scale renewable energy plants (namely solar, wind, or geothermal) represents an opportunity to producing readily distributed, high-concentration energy commodity, that won’t require the kinds of changes on the scale (both technological, infrastructure, and psychological) that a battery based society will (again, based on current battery tech). Right now, the kind of batteries used in EVs are uber expensive (~1/3 of car cost) and they weigh HEAPS (so all this energy has to be used to just carry the battery along).
So why does H present such exciting potential for Australia? Because we could produce ooooooooodles of the stuff using the abundance of renewable energy we have here (mainly solar) and export that to places that can’t. For simplicity’s sake, we use around 230 TWh of electricity per annum.
The Warwick solar farm is 154 ha (obvs not all of that is panels – I did this deliberately). It produces around 160 GWh/year. That’s 1.03 GWh per hectare. So to get all of Aust’s electricity needs from solar would require 230,000 GWh, or roughly 230,000 hectares. To put that in perspective, the Northern Territory is 142,100,000 hectares. Australia is ~770,000,000 hectares. So we’d only need 0.03% of our land area used for solar farms to get all our electricity needs sorted. That leaves a whole lotta (love) land to create that hydrogen to sell to Japan, Sth Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore...
Right now one could probably honestly describe it as “optimistic thinking”. But still, we’re approaching a juncture soon, where if there’s not a big jump in battery capability and affordability hydrogen may take the lead. Concurrent to a lot of these discussions is simply “piping” the electricity with undersea DC cables to places like Singapore.
From the source below – “Hydrogen has also been considered a renewable energy for the future. This has attracted significant attention in Japan in particular, with a “hydrogen society” being articulated in the nation’s most recent Strategic Energy Plan.”
Worth a read: https://bze.org.au/wp-content/uploads/renewable-energy-superpower-bze-re...
I’d add to the above, battery is still a much more efficient energy conversion process (i.e. you could power your car in essence direct from your rooftop solar array to your battery).
So I liken this to the VHS vs. Betamax battle. The better technology did not win the day due to some significant market players choosing the other, cheaper, tech.
We could see this with battery vs. hydrogren.
Mind you, it’ll be simple to export liquid hydrogen as it is much more energy dense (i.e. energy-to-weight ratio) than lithium batteries. So that may cause one to think we could do both? Perhaps….but if the main source of our private vehicles (Japan and Korea) are producing hydrogen cars…the battle may be over the supporting infrastructure rather than the technology…does the government support growth of battery EV stations, or hydrogen fuel stations? Again, they needn’t be mutually exclusive, as the former could simply get it’s energy from the latter, which has a large fuel cell type facility underneath. But then we’re back to the energy conversion efficiency dilemma…
It would handy if we had an energy policy and some sort of future planning for the next 5, 10.20, etc years currently there is SFA at a federal level other than a random hochpoch of projects popping up.
A plan like the Japanese, China or the rest of the world for that matter.
Hi I focus,
that's been tried a couple of times , primarily by the ALP. Sadly it was all undone by our budgie smuggler wearing firefighter and former PM, Tony "Ditch The Bitch " Abbott.
The current long term horizon is 2 years.
Come to think of it, ever since their great founder R G Menzies (aka Pig Iron Bob) sold scrap steel to the Japs (which they did return btw), the Libs have done nothing but screw this country and it's population over, time and time again. And don't forget the time they offered up our service personnel as human guinea pigs for the Poms atomic bomb tests, as well as a large tract of Australia at the expense of the indigenous population.
Anyway, people like Scomo, Abbott, Joyce, Kelly and Christensen etc will be held in contempt by future generations.
Watching QandA right now, I want to punch that fucking arse Jim Molan so hard.
ABC TV at its best, raw story telling about fire loss
Watching QandA, also.
Molan really is a complete fuckwit, not unlike many of his colleagues in the LNP.
Been shaking my head in disbelief while reading social media posts from a shaper who's renowned for trumpeting his pedigree and charging top dollar for his boards. His rationale is that he's been shaping for decades so you're buying his years of experience.
Put another way, we should respect his hard-earned knowledge, which is fair enough.
Lately he's been a running climate skeptic's campaign, the Earth is actually cooling, it's a UN-driven agenda, etc etc...the same old same old. He's arrived at his position because, "science is based on maths, and I'm good at maths".
So on one hand he undermines a scientific majority, people who've committed years to earning their qualifications, because he's "done his own research" and is good at maths, while on the other he demands respect for his craft because of his lengthy commitment to it.
It goes without saying that the irony is lost on him.
Who is this Einstein, Stu?
You can tell him that science is not based on maths; maths is the (main) language of science.
I just looked up that thread Stu, wow!
The same fella who copped a punch to the head on his own boat from a disgruntled customer ?
Yep.
Same guy who despite being in the Bronzed Aussies, years of pro surf clothes modelling contracts, and taking a paycheck to be a mouthpiece for Nihiwatu and surf exclusivity - among many other misdemeanours - is still considered a "soul" surfer.
Perhaps because he plays the guitar.
First guess was him. What platform?
My favourite part was the ‘I’m glad to have a guy with science qualifications here express their opinion’ to the guy that agrees with him and the opposite to the next science guy that disagrees with him. Gold
Fucks sake just name him can ya? I’ve spent 15 minutes trying to look who it is!
All too fucking cryptic for me, there are articles in today’s papers about recent poll results, people what more action on climate but that divides down party lines but they also say this summer isn’t a game changer. I’ve given up trying to find logical thinking here, are people foolishly thinking this summer’s disasters are a one off? Good luck with that, chilling comment by the climate scientist on Q and A last night, if we act hard and immediately, this could be the new normal if we continue to deny the action, it all gets worse from here.
Thanks for the heads up Stu. As my teenage daughters say, 'that's cooked'. I'm on my own little mission at the moment to make sure I'm supporting those who are doing or trying to do something for 'the world'. Coincidentally, brought about by a surfboard purchase. I picked up a secondhand board, by a local shaper, on gumtree that suited my current injury induced needs. Enjoyed it and did a little research on him and found something similar to the one you mentioned above. Now off the list, as is the other, which I had as a bit of a bucketlist purchase. Anyway, call it my own little 'Religious Freedom' exercise, but life's too short.
In the 90's I bought one of his "Limited Edition. The Final Series" boards when he gave up shaping. Except he didn't give up shaping. He's like Johnny Farnham. Fuck it was a good board though, 7'0 pintail. I kept it in mothballs for a while thinking it might appreciate, then I saw he was still making and selling boards so I rode it for a while and ended up swapping it with a mate for a 7'6 Rawson which was an even better board. Goofy his name is Jim Banks.
It's a fucking bad look being a baby boomer climate change denier.
cunts should be yanked off social media by their kids.
Got a nice 9'0 off him a few years back. He even chucked in a free boardbag.
That's all that matters, ain't it?
Must be on Facebook yes? I no have..
I looked on his Instagram page and there’s only photos of surfboards. I reckon he has a marketing person running that anyway
Fuk there’s some nice looking pintails on his site though
Jim is a great shaper, but man he is a fruit loop, into every conspiracy theory going around his recent FB post shows that if it's written somewhere on the net it is true.
Not sure what happened to my original comment but he might shape a nice board but he's a conspiracy theory nutter. he's tried to tell me that NASA is able to control the weather. When challenged he accuses commenters of being fans of 'Big Oil' and didn't reply when I asked whether his stance is his own way of justifying continuing his work with the by-products of the petro-chemical industry. Whats also worrying is the number of loonies he's attracted who agree with him and make deluded reference to websites that have absolutely zero scientific cred. He's now on my rather long list of 'Shapers who display the effects of sniffing too much resin fumes.'
somebody forgot to explain to 90% of baby boomers that 90% of shit on the internet is made up
What’s this baby boomers garbage ?
You think the youth aren’t more than capable of being thick as shit ?
satirical cheap shot based on a convo with my old man the other day where he told me most of the bushfires were lit by arsonists
when i queried how he knew this, he told me his friend had read it on facebook
and yeah, i've got no doubt the 'youth' lap that shit up too
"Not sure what happened to my original comment but he might shape a nice board but he's a conspiracy theory nutter. he's tried to tell me that NASA is able to control the weather."
totally Murph, that's loony conspiracy stuff. Everybody knows the weather is not controlled by NASA:
https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/23/news/companies/vw-volkswagen-mexico-dro...
we've known how to, and have done so, seed rain clouds etc.
Coal power stations and every vehicle and piece of stationery plant burning liquid fossil fuels also "controls" the weather via the emissions of aerosols.
The youth can certainly be muppets. Especially when it comes to SJW topics.
Spot on
Unreal GS, honesty is the best policy.
Western Sydney is undergoing unprecedented development and transformation, reflecting the vast size and population growth of the region.
However, Western Sydney is also getting hotter. Data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology shows the mean of maximum daily temperatures each month is rising.
The dataset below shows this across summer months from data collected at the Penrith Lakes weather station.
Of the 24 years covered in this back series, a majority of temperatures at the 95th percentile or higher are concentrated in the past 6 years.
Climate projections reported by the Australia institute projected that by 2030, Penrith could see 22 days of the year where temperatures surpass 35˚C.
Meanwhile, the eastern suburbs of Sydney are expected to remain relatively cool, with just 7 of these days projected in Coogee.
Reducing thermal discomfort is an increasing focus for urban planners. Water technologies, tree canopy and the use of cool materials are demonstrably effective.
But some of these heat management methods don’t mix well with the development in Western Sydney.
The construction of the Western Sydney airport for example, will require some level of mitigation for bird and bat strike, including limiting the amount of trees within a certain radius of the airport.
These complexities increase the challenge that rising temperatures place on the ambitious developments for Western Sydney.
Part of the problem is that Western Sydney’s extreme population growth and development is causing a loss of green space, thus exacerbating the urban heat island effect. As reported in The ABC:
Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) records show annual mean maximum temperatures in the western Sydney suburb have increased by approximately 1.1 degrees Celsius since 1980.
“In summer you can’t leave the house until about 5:00pm,” [mother Sophie Combs] said…
The 47-year-old said finding shade while playing outdoors with her young son, Asher, was getting harder.
“It’s just getting overdeveloped, so there’s less trees than there were,” she said…
A lack of new trees, along with the removal of established trees, has angered western Sydney residents.
Lisa Harrold, who has lived in the area for four decades, said the heat had become unbearable.
“Some days you literally cannot go outside,” she said.
“We find with the increased density of houses [and] road systems, it doesn’t cool down overnight”…
“They’re removing trees faster than they can potentially ever replace them and to exacerbate that issue, the green spaces are disappearing too under a mountain of concrete,” she said…
Climate researchers noted similar:
Last weekend was no exception with temperatures in Penrith, in the city’s west, peaking at 47.3C while the area by the Harbour Bridge topped out more than five degrees cooler.
But far from this being simply a natural quirk of geography, human interference has actually exacerbated the boiling temperatures in our inland suburbs, experts say, by creating a “heat dome” blocking cooler air.
And often, it’s less affluent areas that feel the worst of the heat while richer enclaves enjoy an altogether more comfortable day…
“There’s much more solar radiation absorbing materials in built-up areas, such as black asphalt and concrete, lots of anthropogenic heat from cars, airconditioning and industry and less greenery and water, and this increases the temperature and has a serious impact on energy consumption, productivity, health and morbidity,” [Mattheos Santamouris, a professor of high performance architecture at UNSW] said…
“Especially in western Sydney, we were able to make the close association that high-density housing developments had cleared land and lacked tree cover, and dark roads were corridors where heat just couldn’t escape,” [Dr Brent Jacobs, research director at the Institute of Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney] said.
According to the ABS’ projections, Sydney’s population is projected to nearly double to almost 10 million people over the next half century, with most of this growth occurring in Sydney’s West:
Citation?
Seems as if Covid-19 cleaned up the co2 & now it's fuckin' Freezing..
Pre industrialized Oz weather is back...
tbb is reporting in UGG boots here from the Qld Arctic Coast ...record Cold Temps.
May 1904 record 13.3*c
23rd May 2020 - 13.8*c (That's Qld Max' you heard that right)
Channel 9 have have an excellent State by State wrap on the Cold Snap.
Superb 20 part Gallery & each report is brilliant...Salute!
Never seen (Record) Weather feature front & centre as it now...
https://www.9news.com.au/national/australian-weather-forecast-wild-winds...
CLIMATE WARS [ABC] Four Corners
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/four-corners/series/2020/video/NC2003H015S00
The recent Australian bushfire season directly killed 400, with another 4000 hospital admissions, so says 60 minutes.
This is just the beginning of course, we are just warming up, excuse the pun.
Time to think seriously about voting Green fellas, and accept the economical hamstringing and other flaws that will come from this imperfect party.
No more letting it rip, it’s selfish, dangerous behaviour. Wake up
Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/10/07/australia-climate-ch...
I thought I might again.