Midsummer madness

"Lesley has a point," confided Perinotto. "The death spiral of the planet has started and no one yet knows how to bring it back. In addition, we have amongst us the enemy who are trying to actively stop us taking action."

But one person might have the answer. In his book, The Madhouse Effect, Professor Mann offers a solution that might save the day and planet - a "giant sucking machine" (Chapter 7, page 126).

Michael Mann: If, however, after doing everything possible to reduce our carbon emissions, we still find ourselves in need of a stop-gap scheme to avert catastrophic climate change, carbon-sucking artificial trees may be the safest and most efficacious of all the available geoengineering schemes out there.

Wonders never cease in the climate space. The determination of climate modellers to get reality to dance to their tune knows no bounds. Consider, for example, a paperpublished in Nature this month: "Regional cooling caused recent New Zealand glacier advances in a period of global warming."

At least 58 NZ glaciers advanced between 1983 and 2008. While "unusual" on a global scale, the authors claim it is "consistent with a climate system being modified by humans."

While their reassessment "may seem to be a surprising result in light of the protracted [glacier] advances", it nevertheless "confirms that New Zealand glacier mass balance was affected by anthropogenic forcing since 1980."

How can one ever falsify a theory when the orthodoxy seems determined to describe examples of (regional) cooling as "consistent with" (global) warming? As one blogger commented:

NZ glaciers, South Island, are gaining ice mass during the "hottest evaah period since records began. The MSM/activist hyperbole is utterly boundless and completely shameless. Hypocrisy is so deeply embedded that I'm of the view that the swamp cannot be drained. (ianl, February 16, 2017 at 1:52 pm)

One person who got it right this summer was not in the nation's capital, or tuning a clunky climate model somewhere, but in the Home of the Big Rocket.

"There's nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about Mother Nature," the Mayor of Moree Plains, Katrina Humphries, cheerfully informed ABC Radio's Thomas Oriti (here), as her shire struggled through a 40+C heatwave. "She rules the world."

Meanwhile, Father Time is turning the nation's RE dream into a nightmare. To meet the legislated bi-partisan magic-number target of 23 per cent, the amount of available RE must be increased by 50 per cent in three years.

If not, energy retailers will be required by law to pay a shortfall charge of $65 per megawatt hour for not fulfilling their obligations, thereby forcing up consumer prices. Indeed, some are already paying the penalty because they are unable or unwilling to source more RE.