Its been quite humid up here today in Newcastle.
It’s only 26 degrees, but 70% humidity.
We don’t usually get humidity this early in spring.
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Tony Abbott - “Bushfires keep us warm”. 
“There’s nothing better than a lovely toasty bushfire to chase away those post winter blues,” said Mr Abbott. 
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Whatever crazy comment will he come up with next?
Something like… “Earthquakes are good because it generates employment for builders” perhaps?
He probably shoukd be a comedian, not a politician.
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It’s a satire article guys.
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Abbott loves fighting fires
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Yes quite obviously, but sadly - like with Trump - it’s not that far of a stretch from the shit he has been saying.
PS: Another one of Abbott’s ‘benefits’, to keep the kiddies warm during the cooler months?
“How come we can smell it streets away? Why does nothing grow well there? We need documented evidence to state that our children are, and always have been, safe.”
Haha, well I never! Here I thought it was fair dinkum!! 
To be truthful though, his birdbrain would be thinking something like that no doubt. 
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A great analysis piece from Katharine Murphy:
Australia’s energy sector is operating in an environment where there is no future investment certainty because there is continuing carbon risk.
…the risk of a future government suddenly implementing serious policies aimed at reducing emissions to try to head off the worst climate-change scenario.
That ongoing policy uncertainty has a price impact. Unless the new government investment framework explicitly addresses carbon risk, the price pressure in the system – the one we all feel through our nasty, nasty, power bills – will continue to be a problem.
One way to deal with carbon risk would be to adopt the clean energy target proposed by the chief scientist Alan Finkel.
And here’s the kicker:
If the [LNP government] policy response is tokenistic – tokenistic enough, say, to subdue Tony Abbott, and the conservatives he speaks for in this wretched debate – it will not actually reduce carbon risk, which is what drives investment uncertainty, and pushes up energy prices.
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The lack of bipartisan consensus is a big problem in climate and energy policy, not just a minor inconvenience.
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I know people inside the Coalition who equate public life with bar brawling see opportunity in having another zero sum bout with Labor – but standing on the fringes of the big stupid-off are a bunch of serious corporate interests who have to make decisions very quickly about new energy infrastructure, and a bunch of businesses that might well go to the wall if power prices keep rising.
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[Business] need a policy that won’t be ripped up at the next election.They need this stupidity to stop.
So does the country.
In fact, we needed that at least a decade ago.
Sadly it looks like the self-interested idiots like Abbott will continue their destructive behaviour.
These appalling people see delaying action as a victory (over what, logic?), despite not only the impact on the climate, Australia’s reputation, but also continuing the pain their actions have caused via unnecessarily high prices for energy for everyone.
They’ll keep destroying the economy, jobs, the future, until they’re stopped.
Voters need to kick these people out, including (as it seems necessary) the rest of Australia’s LNP/right-wing/‘conservatives’, and keep them out until they stop denying the reality of global warming (reluctantly, like they eventually backed off from outright destroying Medicare).
Right wing parties in other countries don’t have this same denialist madness (for example the UK’s Conservative party).
Today an awesome piece from Jessica Irvine showing Turnbull’s own warnings from 2010 and how they’ve come true:
“Decisions to build new power stations and replace old ones will involve tens of billions of dollars over the next few decades and a critical element in making those decisions is being able to form a view about the direction of carbon pricing,” Turnbull warned, in a moment of piercing clarity.
He went on to quote the following passage from the Shergold report, commissioned by the Howard government, which also argued a carbon price was necessary for business certainty: “This is particularly the case for projects with a high degree of carbon risk. There is growing evidence that investments are being deferred due to uncertainty about the future cost of addressing climate change. Without a clear signal on future carbon costs, these investments will not be optimised.”
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Today, three-quarters of Australia’s energy generation continues to come from coal-fired power stations.And they’re reaching the end of their lives.
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Assuming an operational life time of 50 years…
By 2035, only one-third of today’s coal-fired electricity generation capacity will remain.
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Herd, the former executive director of emissions and environment at Westpac, says credit risk departments of Australian lenders, in the absence of a clear price on carbon, simply have no way to accurately assess what investments will be profitable over the life of a new project.“It’s just not believable for investors to assume that there will be no carbon constraint. So in the absence of any clarity, what everybody does is just apply a shadow carbon price.”
This can yield a wide range of results, with investors forced to consider worst-case scenarios, meaning proposed upgrades to secure continued energy supply simply lie dormant.
Yet Abbott continues his moronic anti-business, anti-logic, pro-coal attacks:
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Masses of white fluff floating around the air in Canberra the last couple of days. It’s seeds from the poplar trees though it almost looks like snow. It’s terrible for my hayfever.
Yeah it’s everywhere, although visible it usually doesn’t actually trigger hayfever, but the other less visible stuff also being blown about in the air is triggering.
It looks like the SA Premier is going to be disappointed.
The Orwellian redefinition of dispatchable to apply to a coal-fired power station is just bizarre; they’re notoriously slow to ramp up & down (unlike gas, and of course the fastest is a battery):
Despite my dislike of the LNP’s stupid policies related to this, and I think batteries are a great answer for home solar generation, sadly this story seems to be primarily a whinge from a vested interest.
Just saw this on Twitter. I was coming up from the coast to Canberra but only copped heavy rain.
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Now if the LNP federal gov’t actually want their new policy in-place, they need to stop attacking the states (who they need to agree & implement changes).
I wonder if the CET was so named just to give Abbott & co. something to attack & feel they’d won by its replacement with something named differently?
PS: This is gold:
…Frydenberg had just presented to the Coalition party room details of the government’s long-awaited energy policy.
Flanked by government officials from the energy market regulators, his presentation, while lacking detail, was well-received.
Member after member rose to speak on the subject, and while there were some queries, no one was critical of the policy…
Then, towards the end of the three-hour meeting, Tony Abbott got to his feet.
“He said, ‘We need a longer time to talk about it as a political issue’,” said one MP who was present.
“He wanted to delay the decision, make it look like a more tortured process than it was. He wanted to have another meeting to have a political discussion.”
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“The PM slapped him down,” said the MP.“He said, ‘We are having a political discussion about it. We have a sensible policy’.”
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The room was so wholly with the Prime Minister that applause erupted once he put Abbott in his place.
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…if the planet is to avoid sea-level rise of more than a metre by 2100 as Antarctic ice sheets disintegrate faster than expected, new modelling by an Australian-led team has found.
On business-as-usual projections, sea-level rise by the end of the century could exceed 1.3 metres compared with the 1986-2005 average, or 55 per cent more than predicted in the Fifth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to research published in the Environmental Research Letters journal.
So much for denialists’ claims that past IPCC reports were exaggerating & scaremongering.
http://www.smh.com.au/cqstatic/12z7v7/2610_sea_rise_high_temps_graphs.jpg
“Coal as we know it today [without carbon capture and storage] will have to be gone pretty much [by 2050],” Mr Nauels said. “There is no future for fossil fuels, and coal in particular.”
Putting the lie to coal having a ‘long term future’; this is what we need (but for how long will idiots like Abbott keep getting in the way?):
“If we have a carbon price of $US100 [per tonne of CO₂-equivalent at 2005 terms] in 2050, according to the SSP scenarios, we could limit sea-level rise to around 65cm by 2100,” said Carl Friedrich Schleussner from Climate Analytics, and another of the report’s authors.
Gee, Melbourne’s turned it on for the Cup
Edit:
Well, it took until around or just after the Cup, but blue sky and sunshine now bathing Flemington.
With some stunning chopper shots of the CBD skyline, inner-west including Flemington, West Melbourne and Footscray over the gardens and Maribyrnong River.
South Australia’s renewables-heavy electricity market has been turned upside down, moving from importing power to exporting it, and from having some the most expensive wholesale prices in the country to having some of the cheapest.
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Dylan McConnell, an energy expert from the University of Melbourne who produced the analysis, says the switch is a result of the closure of the huge Hazelwood coal power station in Victoria. But the delay between its closure in March and the extra generation in South Australia coming on in July shows the need for a more orderly transition from fossil fuels, with more notice of closure required.
Now will the LNP federal gov’t stop attacking SA?
And now, just maybe, something positive…
I’m not going to support number 1, but the other six look good.
Now if only the pollies would stop fighting against progress.
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Following a week or so of pretty dismal weather, Melbourne & VIC is in for a run of crystal blue sky and warm days, over 30 degrees next week.
A few weeks ago was similar, with the Caulfield Cup bathed in glorious weather, fingers crossed for that again 
Where action is being taken… coal is declining rapidly. Until recently, the UK was Europe’s third biggest coal polluter, with the fuel providing 40% of the nation’s electricity, but this has fallen to 2% in just five years.
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“Coal is the single biggest polluter,” Bloomberg told the Guardian. “If you could just replace coal with any other fuel, you would make an enormous difference in the outlook for climate change.”He said rising concerns over air pollution, which causes millions of premature deaths every year around the world, is an even more immediate driver for phasing out coal…