35 degree days make blackouts more likely, but new power stations won’t help

Summer is here with a vengeance. On hot days it’s very likely something in the power system will break and cause someone to lose power. And the weather bureau expects this summer to be hotter and drier than average – so your chances of losing power will be higher than normal.

Whether your energy comes from coal or renewable sources
 isn’t likely to make a difference to your risk of a blackout this summer.

We’ve analysed outage data from the electricity distribution networks over the past nine years and linked it to Bureau of Meteorology maximum daily temperature data for each distribution network. The findings are stark: customers are without power for 3.5 times longer on days over 35 degrees than on days below 35.

Read the piece from The Conversation - “35 degree days make blackouts more likely, but new power stations won’t help.”

Australia was ready to act on climate 25 years ago, so what happened next?

There’s something about climate change that almost everyone in Australia has either forgotten or never knew in the first place.

 John Howard with Rupert Murdoch. Both men helped
 to hold back climate action in Australia in the 1990s
 and beyond, according to a new book by the author
 Maria Taylor. 

In 1990 Bob Hawke announced his government wanted the country to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by the year 2005.

For a fleeting moment, it seemed the Australian public, politicians and the media were in agreement with the science.

But a new book investigates how the industries that stood to lose the most worked to undermine the science and entirely reshape the story being told to the public.

“We have been propagandised,” says the author, Maria Taylor.

Read the story from The Guardian by Graham Readfearn - “Australia was ready to act on climate 25 years ago, so what happened next?”

What might appear to be common sense is not always based on scientific evidence

The term “evidence” has a fascinating linguistic and social history – and it’s a good reminder that even today the truth of scientific evidence depends on it being presented in a convincing way.

The quest for scientific evidence can trace its
roots back to the classic masters of rhetoric.

As recent climate change scepticism shows, the fortunes of scientific evidence can be swayed by something as fleeting as a tweet.

But what does it even mean to speak of “scientific evidence”?

History reveals that scientific forms of evidence have rarely, if ever, been detached from rhetoric. In fact, the very idea of evidence has its origins within the context of classical rhetoric, the art of persuasion.

Read the piece from The Conversation by a Research Fellow from The University of Queensland,  James A. T. Lancaster - “What might appear to be common sense is not always based on scientific evidence.”

Strange clouds deliver much-needed rain to central Victoria

Dion Costigan was watching his boys skate in Eaglehawk, in central Victoria, when he turned and saw something in the sky like nothing he had ever seen before.

A shelf cloud formation looms over Bendigo
 as Victoria receives much-needed rain.

"I just thought, wow!" he said on Saturday morning.

"The line, the formation of clouds just had amazing colours in it, these light greys all the way down to black.”

Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Tom Delamotte said the cloud mass Mr Costigan and many other social media users captured was a shelf cloud formation.

Read the story by Joe Hinchillfe from The Age - “Strange clouds deliver much-needed rain to central Victoria.”

Piloting aviation industry through a changing climate

There’s something rather unsettling about eerie pictures of flooded airport runways, and it’s not just the submerged jet bridges. Such photos capture the type of disruptive scenes that could become more common in the future, as the effects of climate change continue to ramp up.

Flying into a changing climate.

New attention to the issue shows that airports and airlines around the world will be affected by climate change in various ways. Consider this past summer’s spate of heat-related groundings in Phoenix, when 120 degree-air temperatures spurred a single carrier to cancel more than 40 flights out of the city. A recent study by scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, at Columbia University, anticipates more troubles along those lines in coming years).

“There are a number of potential climate change impacts on aviation operations,” said Perry Flint, a spokesperson for the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Impacts range from “reducing the take-off performance of aircraft, to increased storminess – meaning flights have to route around weather more frequently,” he said.

Read the Yale Climate Connections story by Daisy Simmons - “Piloting aviation industry through a changing climate.”

'As individuals, none of us have much incentive or reason to pollute less'

(Jason Brennan is something of a contrarian, but his views are worth considering, both about democracy and how and why we should respond too climate disruption. The following passage is taken from his book, “Against Democracy”)

How Do We Respond to Pollution? Most of my readers and fellow philosophers believe that the government not only may but instead must regulate carbon emissions. Their basic assertion is that pollution is a collective action problem. On an individual basis, any one of us can pollute to our heart’s content, and it would have no real impact. But if we all pollute to our hearts’ content, the results can be catastrophic. The problem is that as individuals, we have little reason to change our behavior. Consider some of my behaviors. I fly over twenty times per year. I drive a twin-turbo sports sedan, which I generally leave in Sport or Sport + mode for maximal acceleration. I play electric guitar through a high-wattage tube amp rather than acoustic guitar. I leave the air conditioner on in my house all summer. I almost never shut off any of my three computers. Out of the goodness of my heart, I might reduce my energy usage, but what good would it do? My individual impact is so small that such sacrifices would make no difference. I would suffer, but it wouldn’t help. This line of reasoning applies to each of us. As individuals, none of us have much incentive or reason to pollute less, even though we all want everyone to pollute less. Unilateral reductions in consumption have purely symbolic value. Therefore, most of my colleagues conclude, we should license the government to regulate pollution levels. Government can solve our collective action problem. Call this kind of reasoning the public goods argument for environmental protection. As we saw in chapter 2, we face something similar to this collective action problem when it comes to voting. It’s not precisely the same: if I were the only voter, my vote would make all the difference, while if I were the only polluter, my pollution would still make little difference. But it’s similar enough: given that there are so many other voters, for each of us, our individual votes make no difference. We have every incentive to free ride on others’ efforts, externalize the cost of our biases onto others, and pollute democracy with our uninformed, misinformed, or irrational votes. If the argument for regulating air pollution is sound, why not regulate votes as well? Why does the public goods argument justify regulating air pollution, but doesn’t justify regulating voting pollution? Why is it legitimate to regulate pollution to protect us from ourselves, yet not legitimate to regulate voting to protect us from ourselves? In chapters 4 and 5, I examined a series of deontological arguments that tried to show that voting rights are different, but none of these arguments succeeded. So these questions remain open.