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Monthly Archives: November 2017

The misinformation and selective information of Craig Kelly

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by Chris Pearce in Articles

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Australia, blackouts, coal, Craig Kelly, diesel generators, electric cars, electricity, Facebook, GCF, Green Climate Fund, John Howard, Liberal Party, misinformation, National Energy Guarantee, NEG, network upgrades, Nicaragua, nonrenewables, Paulo Oquist, Peta Credlin, petrol cars, power bills, Renewable Energy Target, renewables, RET, selective information, Sky News, solar energy, South Australia, subsidies, UN, United Nations, Victoria, wind energy

I posted the following to Australian Liberal Party politician Craig Kelly’s Facebook page but it seems to have been deleted. He spoke with Peta Credlin on Sky News on 27 Nov 2017 about renewable and nonrenewable energy sources. The interview contained a large amount of misinformation and selective information …

Interview is full of misleading information.  

The RET [Renewable Energy Target] was introduced by the [John] Howard govt in 2001. It adds a negligible amount to power bills; one study says 1-5%; others are similar; one study has it reducing power bills by about 2030, which is one of the ideas of the RET. 

Yes, subsidies to renewables are about $3b a year but those to nonrenewables are about $10b a year.  

The NEG [National Energy Guarantee] is long on rhetoric and short on detail. Unlikely to get state agreement.  

Various savings figures have been given re the NEG ($100-115, $120, $140, $400 a year) but no detail of how it’s calculated is given; you can feed anything into a model and get the answers you want.  

With solar and wind energy, it still works when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow; Google it.  

SA [South Australia] blackouts were caused by severe storms, not renewables. Transmission towers blew over in high winds. Authorities made a decision to shut off all power as a precaution. SA electricity, like the rest of Aust, is expensive due largely to $45b network upgrades in 2009 to 2014; very large country and fairly small population means high per capita costs for poles and wires etc.  

Diesel generators in SA will be used as back-up in peak periods over summer; ditto Victoria which also used them in 2014 (under a Liberal state govt) after forecasts of a long hot summer.  

Electric cars can be bought for under $40k [not $200,000 as indicated on the show]; running costs per km are much less than petrol cars except when coal is the energy source. Electric cars aren’t the problem, coal is. 

Yes, we’re contributing $200m to the UN Green Climate Fund to help developing countries cope with climate change/global warming. Paulo Oquist of Nicaragua is set to be a co-chair of the GCF. The position steers the meetings. The 24-member board of the GCF makes the decisions on a consensus basis. Nicaragua isn’t running the show. 

No wonder the hard right isn’t in charge.

Climate change deniers get it wrong again

29 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by Chris Pearce in Articles

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Australia, buildings, bushfires, climate change, cooling, correlation coefficent, Craig Kelly, deaths, deniers, early warning systems, emergency services, extreme events, fatalities, fossil fuels, global warming, heating, heatwave, insurance losses, natural disasters, p-value, population growth, safety campaigns, temperatures, weather, wild weather

I’ve been posting comments to Australian politician Craig Kelly’s Facebook page. Kelly and his followers are climate change deniers, so there’s a lot of misinformation, selective information and non-information there. I posted the following after Kelly put up a graph showing the number of deaths from natural disasters in Australia from 1900 to 2010 normalised for population growth only (although he didn’t say it was only normalised for population growth and nothing else such as huge changes in building quality, early warning systems, emergency services, etc). The graph shows a declining number of deaths. To Kelly, this is proof that fossil fuels have done a great job in providing heating, cooling, etc in homes and elsewhere and therefore the number of deaths from natural disasters has fallen. His followers agreed, without of course checking the rest of the report the graph came from. I made an edit to my post on two occasions and on the second one, Facebook wouldn’t post it; it disappeared. I think they’ve got some algorithm in there to try and prevent spam or something, like I’d posted it three times. Anyway, I thought I’d post it here. The study and report, linked to below, is by the Australian Department of Industry, Innovation and Science …

I would question a number of things about this government study (which includes figure 3 shown above [in Kelly’s post]). Here’s the link: http://www.bnhcrc.com.au/news/2015/century-natural-disasters-what-are-costs.

It looks firstly at annual weather related insurance losses from 1966 to 2013. In nominal dollar terms, the losses go up a lot, which you would expect. These dollar figures are then normalised for such things as increases in the number of houses and their value, building code changes and better construction (which is a broadly similar process that temperature data goes under to get it from raw to adjusted, for factors such as weather stations moving, more concrete and steel around existing stations, and different temperature measuring instruments, although climate deniers prefer raw data as it shows much less of an increase in temperatures over time). The report says there is ‘no statistically significant upward trend’, which is broadly true over the whole period. The correlation coefficient (which can be between -1 and +1), r, for the years 1966 to 2013 is 0.09, or a possible slight increase in normalised losses. Leaving off 2013 (which was a year of many natural disasters and for which claims don’t appear to have been complete at the time of the study), r = 0.12. If we start at 1980, the time when temperatures started to increase rapidly, r = 0.23, and leaving off 2013, r = 0.29. The p-value for this last one is 0.053, so it’s just over the threshold (0.05 or 1 chance in 20 of no actual increase) between ‘reject’ and ‘not reject’; so we can reject, and only just reject, the hypothesis that there is a statistically significant upward trend in insurance losses. However, the graph (figure 1) doesn’t seem to include the 2011 Qld floods of $2.5b normalised (table 1). Adding this in, r = 0.366 for 1980 to 2012, giving a p-value of 0.018 or about a 1 in 55 chance of there being no actual increase in normalised losses over the period 1980 to 2012.

The study then looks at fatalities. The raw data for annual fatalities from 1900 to 2010 is shown in figure 2 and there looks to be no long term increase or decrease. This is then normalised in figure 3 for population growth and now shows a significant decrease in fatalities. But it doesn’t take into account the huge leaps in early warning systems, the vastly larger and better emergency and rescue services, much better knowledge, and all the community safety campaigns, all of which were virtually non-existent in 1900 (some dot points near the bottom of the page suggest that further studies might include some of this). We of course have better buildings, and they do have better heating and cooling from electricity which so far has mainly come from fossil fuels. We probably also spend more time indoors both at work and when not at work these days, therefore staying out of the heat more. I would also question the raw numbers in figure 2. Table 2 has 8256 deaths from natural disasters from 1900 to 2011. This is an average of 74 deaths per year. Yet figure 2 shows an average of perhaps around 25, with only six years where the number exceeds 74, and in four of those years it’s not much above 74. Further, a list of disasters at Wikipedia shows that fatalities from Australia’s worst disasters far exceed what is shown in figure 2, e.g. a heatwave in Victoria claimed 438 lives in 1938-39, one in SE Australia 374 lives in 2009, a heatwave in the southern states 246 lives in 1907-08, bushfires in Victoria 173 in 2009, and many more.

Thus there seems to be an increase in normalised losses, certainly since 1980. But we really can’t make much out of the normalised fatalities numbers as they only take into account population increase.

The increase in wild weather worldwide due to climate change between 1980 and 2014 is shown quite vividly in a National Geographic article: ‘Wild weather’, which starts off: ‘Torrential hurricanes, devastating droughts, crippling ice storms, and raging heat waves—all are extreme weather phenomena that can claim lives and cause untold damage. Climate change influences severe weather by causing longer droughts and higher temperatures in some regions and more intense deluges in others, say climate experts.’ The number of extreme events increased steadily from 291 in 1980 to 904 in 2014, nearly all of them weather related. See https://www.nationalgeographic.com/climate-change/how-to-live-with-it/weather.html.

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