Utopia, you are standing in it!

To call Australia’s energy debacle a ‘crisis’ is mastery in understatement: its obsession with wind and solar means its economy now operates around the vagaries of mother nature. The availability of sunshine and suitably beneficial breezes dictates when and where electricity gets delivered to power consumers.

The cause of Australia’s power pricing and supply calamity is so simple and obvious it can be laid out in a handful of pictures.

Depicted above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits to the Eastern Grid so far this month.

Spread from Far North Queensland, across the ranges of NSW, all over Victoria, Northern Tasmania and across South Australia its entire capacity routinely delivers just a trickle of its combined notional capacity of 7,728MW.

Collapses of over 3,000 MW or more that occur over the space of a couple of hours are routine, as are…

At Inside Higher Education, Jonathan Zimmerman has a great essay on why professors should support other professors who voice unpopular views. He focuses on the case of Harald Uhlig, the Chicago economics professor who, quite simply, thinks Black Lives Matter is lame. In summary, Uhlig thinks BLM has completely unrealistic goals, he implies that BLM protesters are childish, and he compared them to flat earthers. Soon thereafter, there were calls by many prominent economists to have him removed from his position as the editor of the Journal of Political Economy and some alumni accused him of racist actions in the class room.

Zimmerman thinks people should lay off:

What I cannot accept is the way they called for his head, which is different from criticizing his comments. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago cut ties with Uhlig, who had been a consultant in its research department. And economists…

I’m a feminist from a working-class background. I was social-class conscious before I was sex-class conscious. I’d been a member, admittedly largely inactive, of the Labour Party for most of my adult life. I’d managed to hold my nose when Tony Blair changed Clause IV in 1995, and it was removed from membership cards, symbolising to me, a move away from the party’s proud socialist history. But I resigned at some point about  ten years later when his promises to reform the House of Lords failed and I was angry that a party supposedly based on equality baulked when it came to dealing with such a blatant example of inherited privilege.  I can’t remember when I re-joined but I resigned for a second time in 2018 when the then General Secretary, Jennie Formby, announced that all-women-shortlists would no longer be women only. The conflict between my feminism and the party’s…

Excess mortality in Europe has fallen in recent weeks, to the point where fewer deaths are occurring across the continent than you would expect at this time of the year. This doesn’t mean that Covid deaths aren’t occurring or that the problem has disappeared. It does mean it’s in a different phase.

And you could say Europe’s governments are converging on an approach which is looking more and more like that of Sweden’s – that is governments targeting a more limited range of specific public health measures, modifying policy in light of outcomes, and relying more on an informed public to make a sensible trade off between economic (and social) activity and safety-related social distancing.

In a few previous posts (e.g., here and here), prompted by claims of African-American linguist John McWhorter, I examined the various biases and difficulties that plague attempts to see if police kill black suspects at a higher rate than whites. This new article in FiveThirtyEight, though not providing an answer to the problem, shows further complications in the attempt to get answers, so that at present we have no idea if there are racial disparities in who becomes the object of police violence.

Click on the screenshot to read:

There are three ways to compare racial disparities:

1.) Proportion of racial populations who are victims of police violence.  As is well known, about 0.096% of black men and boys will be killed by the cops during their lifetime. That compares to 0.039%  among whites: a 2.5-fold difference. But this doesn’t mean that blacks are more likely to…

Word on the Street, the blog of the Urban Violence Network, has a short piece by me on the research linking violence to negative outcomes. A key clip:

In the current context, these findings have sparked much online debate, including critiques of Wasow’s work and a sustained rebuttal by the author of claims that his research “allows people to blame ‘inner-city rioters’ and ignore other causes.” But the overall message of research on violence during protests is coming into focus. Violence, in the form of protests or riots, may receive attention and some policy response, but it comes at great cost. In the case of Black social movements, violent protest has been associated with more repressive administrations and sustained damage to Black communities. More generally, violence allows counter-movement actors (e.g. far right activists) to depict African American activists (e.g. of Black Lives Matter) as unreasonable and not worthy of…

It’s always a pleasure to interact with Roger Pielke Sr. A climate scientist who is open to debate, respectful of honestly held opinion, and willing to concede ground where the facts dictate.

Roger A. Pielke Sr@RogerAPielkeSr·Nice to see sfc moist enthalpy that we proposed being added to the assessment of heat. “Outdoor Thermal Comfort and Building Energy Use Potential in Different Land-Use Areas in Tropical Cities: Case of Kuala Lumpur” https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/atmosphere/atmosphere-11-00652/article_deploy/atmosphere-11-00652.pdf… Our paper is https://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/r-290.pdf…

Rog Tallbloke @RogTallbloke·My experiment ended today Roger. It took 25ml of water at 20C at sfc pressure 12 days to evaporate compared to 2.5 hours at 20C in 266 times less pressure. What do you think really makes Earth’s surface ~90K warmer than the moon’s; GHGs or atmospheric pressure?

Personal Life

Earl Mountbatten admitted “Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.” He maintained an affair for several years with Yola Letellier, the wife of Henri Letellier, publisher of Le Journal and mayor of Deauville (1925–28). Yola Letellier’s life story was the inspiration for Colette’s novel Gigi.

Yola Letellier

After Edwina’s death in 1960, Mountbatten was involved in relationships with young women, according to his daughter Patricia, his secretary John Barratt, his valet Bill Evans and William Stadiem, an employee of Madame Claude.

Sexuality

Ron Perks, Mountbatten’s driver in Malta in 1948, alleged that he used to visit the Red House, a gay brothel in Rabat. Andrew Lownie, a Royal Historical Society fellow, wrote that the FBI maintained files regarding Mountbatten’s alleged homosexuality. He also interviewed several young men who claimed to have been in a relationship with him. Barratt has denied Mountbatten was…

Admiral of the Fleet Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (born Prince Louis of Battenberg; June 25, 1900 – August 27, 1979), was a British Royal Navy officer and statesman, a Maternal Uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and second cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. During the Second World War, he was Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command (1943–1946). He was the last Viceroy of India (1947) and the first governor-general of independent India (1947–1948).

Lord Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma

Lord Mountbatten was known as His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg from the time of his birth at Frogmore House in the Home Park, Windsor, Berkshire until 1917, when he and several other relations of King George V of the United Kingdom dropped their German styles and titles.

Lord Mountbatten was the youngest child…

Credit: Wikipedia
H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

Or relying on any climate modelling, some might say given its current tendency toward overheated predictive mediocrity.
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The purpose of global climate policy is to get us from the dangerous upper end of the forecast range down to the safe bottom end. In fact, we are already there.

Whenever you read a media story about how we’re heading toward catastrophe if we continue operating “business as usual” — i.e., if we don’t slash carbon emissions — the reports are almost always referring to a model simulation using RCP8.5.

And you can bet that nowhere in the story will they explain that RCP8.5 is an implausible worst-case scenario that was never meant to represent a likely base case outcome, or that scientists have begun castigating its usage as a prediction of a doomed business-as-usual future.

Charles (November 19, 1600 – January 30, 1649) was King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from March 27, 1625 until his execution in 1649. Charles was born into the House of Stuart as the second son of King James VI of Scotland, but after his father inherited the English throne in 1603 (as James I), he moved to England, where he spent much of the rest of his life. He became heir apparent to the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1612 on the death of his elder brother Henry-Frederick, Prince of Wales.

Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland

In 1620, Charles’s brother-in-law, King Friedrich V of Bohemia was defeated at the Battle of White Mountain near Prague and his hereditary lands in the Electoral Palatinate were invaded by a Habsburg force from the Spanish Netherlands. James I-VI, however, had been seeking marriage…