A tale of two tipping points

The tipping point that keeps warming alarmists awake at night occurs when the level of CO2 reaches a point where interactions and feedbacks trigger 'runaway warming' with catastrophic effects.

Their collective nightmare is also a misleading rumour.

The geological record shows periods with much higher CO2 levels and higher temperatures than today, but curiously no 'tipping points'.

What's more, life on Earth flourished during the warm periods.

The best historical time for living things was during the Roman Warm Period. It was nearly two degrees warmer than present day, which suggests that we can welcome warming for many decades to come, while additional CO2 is greening the planet. For more on these matters, see this handy primer on climate and energy.

The other tipping point is an existential threat to the continuity of our power supply. This is the point where the downward trending capacity of reliable power (essentially coal) approaches the base load of power that is required, day and night.

Between 2012-24 the installed capacity of coal power declined from 30GW to 22 GW in round figures and that is near the base load that ranges from 17GW to 20GW depending on the season.

The earlier management of AEMO could see the problem coming when the Hazelwood power station in Victoria closed in 2017. They issued a warning that we were travelling without enough spare capacity to handle extreme conditions. Sure enough, in January 2019, parts of Victoria experienced rolling blackouts. Since then, the day of reckoning has been deferred by deindustrialisation which has kept the demand for power almost flat, despite population growth.

The rise of renewable energy is supposed to replace the diminishing capacity of coal power, but intermittent energy can displace coal without being able to replace it because during nights with little or no wind, there is little or no renewable energy regardless of the installed capacity.

We have reached the point where any further loss of coal capacity will place South-Eastern Australia, the NEM, in a red zone where blackouts will occur whenever the wind is low during the night.

In addition to the risk of blackouts, the cost of power is killing power-intensive industries.

Before the rise of renewable energy, our coal provided some of the cheapest power in the world, sustaining a substantial manufacturing sector including numerous smelters. Manufacturing has been gutted by the spiralling cost of power although it cannot be quantified due to the scandalous lack of official documentation. For example, two of the six aluminium smelters have closed, and all the others are at risk while the Copper, Nickel, and Zinc smelters are actively seeking state support.