Deniers, At It Again

ON TUESDAY, Paul  Biegler informed Age readers that those not entirely sold on the idea of imminent climatic catastrophe suffer from a mental disorder, a sort of advanced immaturity, if you will. Being an ARC bioethicist at Monash, he was able to dismiss deniers with an anecdote of toddlers and marshmellows which left no doubt whatsoever that polar bears will drown. Obvious, really.

In any case,  Biegler is so very enthusiastic about "the science" and general trustworthiness of AGW advocates he just cannot imagine how anyone could harbour the slightest doubt, except if they had been misled. "In the climate realm," he explains, "fabrication is also rife. Enthralled by their emotional biases, sceptics mouth desperate appeals to the corruptibility of scientists, or to the fallibility of climate prediction models." So there!

Yesterday and also in the Age, which cannot go 24 hours without delivering a catastropharian sermon, Sydney University's Professor of Public Health, psychologist Simon Chapman endorsed the glories of wind power, to wqhich he attributes 20% of South Australia's electricity supply. As that is a remarkably high figure it seemed worth a little googling to establish if Chapman had been misled by the sort of "fabrication" which some cynics say is "also rife" amongst advocates of the anti-carbon cause.

Well, it turns out there are a lot of available figures about electricity production, many of them very confusing. But there is also this, a learned, peer-reviewed analysis of wind power's utility by Andrew Miskelly and Tom Quirk.  As they conclude that wind power makes no practical contribution to the certainty of power supplies, Biegler and Chapman would no doubt dismiss Miskelly and Quirk's paper as the handiwork of vile deceivers. Still, it does boast those many pages of graphs and charts, and they do seem firmly rooted in the real world. At the end of it all the paper makes this observation:

The general conclusion from this analysis is that wind farms in South East Australia are not likely to supply any significant base load power that can be relied upon, and thus system operators will have to schedule generators as if there were no wind power at all. Wind farms will load the distribution system with variations in power that are certainly not predictable at the present time and are as significant as the random variations of user demand.

The analysis was published some two years ago and immediately decried by people like, well, Biegler and Chapman. Indeed, the Age's tabloid dopelganger, Green Left Weekly, was quick to pounce on what it saw as the researcher's great ruse. When the authors say wind energy cannot contribute to baseload supplies, GLW noted, they neglect to factor in new technology and capital investments that would allow energy to be stored for those many periods when the wind  refuses to blow. If water is pumped to dams, for example, it could  be released to spin hydro plants during still spells.

Trouble is, South Australia does not have those dams and, if it did,  no less an authority than Tim Flannery swears there will be no rain to fill them. Flannery is a dedicated warmist, hence incapable of telling a fib,so Beigler, Chapman and the rest have no choice but to believe him.

After all, it is not as there is any fabricatin' going on amongst the settled scientists.