Global Warming, R.I.P

FROM-American Thinker

By Claude Sandroff



In a remarkable monograph, Roy W. Spencer presents hard evidence that 75% of the observed warming since the start of the 20th century is due to natural processes. He offers a detailed model describing how one of these processes, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), operates in the real world. Most importantly, he demonstrates that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a minor contributor to a global climate largely insensitive to man-made CO2.



Thanks to this highly skilled climatologist and his The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled The World's Top Climate Scientists, we can now taunt the often corrupt and overtly political planetary high priests with this: PDO means AGW is DOA.


Written in a style that should be attractive to both warming newcomers and scientists from other fields, the volume's appearance is not a welcome event for the world's strident purveyors of global warming orthodoxy. For in the gentlest language possible, Spencer is telling the AGW clingers that they are scientifically incompetent lemmings.



The "blunder" Dr. Spencer (a leading analyst of satellite-derived atmospheric data) refers to is a basic one: confusing cause and effect. Most would-be scientists who make this mistake once, let alone repeatedly, often go into another kind of work. It's the equivalent of the graduate student who forgets to plug in his detector and then reports a successful negative check experiment.


The effect Spencer seeks to explain is the 1.8ºC warming of the earth since 1900. He argues effectively that accepted global warming dogma and funding agency prejudices had discouraged potential heretics from seriously entertaining the idea that long-term, natural variations, rather than man-made CO2 "pollution," could be operating over the timescale of a century to warm and cool our planet.

And as the recent Climategate scandal has confirmed, the AGW church fathers will discredit, shun, and excommunicate any deviant member of the warming consensus congregation.


Indeed, it is frustration with the controlling climate hierarchy that led Spencer to communicate his findings directly with the public in book form rather than in the peer-reviewed literature. He guides the reader through the fundamental blunder that has led almost every scientist astray.

Observing increasing CO2 levels and increasing temperatures, scientists assumed that the former must have caused the latter. How did the warmers know that it wasn't the other way around, and that higher temperatures caused higher CO2 concentrations? Or how did the warmers know that there wasn't another process, a naturally occurring one, that caused the temperature rise, with increasing CO2 just along for the ride? Answer: They didn't, because they never bothered to look.


They never felt that they had to look, since emitting CO2 for the true believer is a kind of original sin, a crime committed by affluent societies that requires no corroborating evidence, let alone a scientific trial to determine guilt. But Spencer decided to look, peering into the CERES (Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System) satellite data more deeply than anyone else in the field.


And ultimately, with just four parameters, keen insight into the behavior of the PDA and clouds, a simple program, and a few thousand Monte Carlo simulations, he was able to produce a model that explains our current climate system and man's role in it with unprecedented clarity.

Spencer devotes several chapters to the important role of feedback in understanding climate and the need to carefully separate it from existing forces (causes) to avoid overestimating the sensitivity of climate to external changes.


At the end of Spencer's careful analysis, a simple picture emerges. The PDO is a long-lived ocean-to-atmosphere heat transfer process (similar to the better-known El Niño and La Niña) but of much longer duration. Cloud cover decreases significantly during the positive PDO phase, allowing more sunlight to reach the earth's surface. In the ocean, this extra energy is stored as heat. In its negative phase, the PDO acts in reverse and cools the atmosphere. And all of this occurs in roughly thirty-year cycles. While this mechanism is operating, mankind is dumping a small, vanishing amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. Big deal.

The most prominent frauds active in promoting AGW have always tried to bury evidence of natural warming and cooling cycles. Truly, the Medieval Warming Period and Little Ice Age are threats to their very CO2-obsessed existence. But these eras occurred centuries ago, with only proxies (like tree rings) to indicate the actual prevailing temperatures. Hence, data from these eras are easily brushed aside and forgotten. Not so with recent thermometer measurements, and temperatures from two periods in particular that have always plagued the theory of AGW.


The first is the period from 1900-1940. A full 60% of the temperature increase measured in the last century occurred during these forty years, when less industrialization existed worldwide and therefore less CO2 had been spewed into our atmosphere. The mild cooling period that ended in the mid-1970s is also baffling. But like any good theory, Spencer's PDO-focused model fits the temperature data during these decades amazingly well. Natural processes -- cloud formation and heat transfer -- dominated the temperatures during these decades, as in every other decade in the modern era.


There is no greater pleasure in a scientist's life than being able to explain phenomena more simply and comprehensively than anyone else did before him. This sense permeates Spencer's book, along with something else: moral outrage.

Some wealthy, spoiled, self-hating Westerners might in their affluence be able to afford expensive energy alternatives to power -- things like wind and solar that don't directly involve the emission of CO2. But the rest of the world cannot. Cheap, affordable energy, the kind that comes from coal, natural gas and oil, is a prerequisite for any society to rise economically. Spencer seems thrilled to be able to tell the developing world that they have a free pass to burn hydrocarbons and prosper.
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The Climategate Whitewash Continues

Global warming alarmists claim vindication after last year's data manipulation scandal. Don't believe the 'independent' reviews.

FROM-WSJ

By PATRICK J. MICHAELS


Last November there was a world-wide outcry when a trove of emails were released suggesting some of the world's leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called "a nice, tidy story" of climate history. The scandal became known as Climategate.

Now a supposedly independent review of the evidence says, in effect, "nothing to see here." Last week "The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review," commissioned and paid for by the University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of East Anglia. The review committee was chaired by Sir Muir Russell, former vice chancellor at the University of Glasgow.

Mr. Russell took pains to present his committee, which consisted of four other academics, as independent. He told the Times of London that "Given the nature of the allegations it is right that someone who has no links to either the university or the climate science community looks at the evidence and makes recommendations based on what they find."

No links? One of the panel's four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia's School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)—the source of the Climategate emails—was established in Mr. Boulton's school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia "adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity."

This purportedly independent review comes on the heels of two others—one by the University of East Anglia itself and the other by Penn State University, both completed in the spring, concerning its own employee, Prof. Michael Mann. Mr. Mann was one of the Climategate principals who proposed a plan, which was clearly laid out in emails whose veracity Mr. Mann has not challenged, to destroy a scientific journal that dared to publish three papers with which he and his East Anglia friends disagreed. These two reviews also saw no evil. For example, Penn State "determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community."

Readers of both earlier reports need to know that both institutions receive tens of millions in federal global warming research funding (which can be confirmed by perusing the grant histories of Messrs. Jones or Mann, compiled from public sources, that are available online at freerepublic.com). Any admission of substantial scientific misbehavior would likely result in a significant loss of funding.

It's impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren't looking. In a famous email of May 29, 2008, Phil Jones, director of East Anglia's CRU, wrote to Mr. Mann, under the subject line "IPCC & FOI," "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report]? Keith will do likewise . . . can you also email Gene [Wahl, an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce] to do the same . . . We will be getting Caspar [Amman, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research] to do likewise."

Mr. Jones emailed later that he had "deleted loads of emails" so that anyone who might bring a Freedom of Information Act request would get very little. According to New Scientist writer Fred Pearce, "Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this."

The Russell report states that "On the allegation of withholding temperature data, we find that the CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data." Really? Here's what CRU director Jones wrote to Australian scientist Warrick Hughes in February 2005: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it[?]"

Then there's the problem of interference with peer review in the scientific literature. Here too Mr. Russell could find no wrong: "On the allegations that there was subversion of the peer review or editorial process, we find no evidence to substantiate this."

Really? Mr. Mann claims that temperatures roughly 800 years ago, in what has been referred to as the Medieval Warm Period, were not as warm as those measured recently. This is important because if modern temperatures are not unusual, it casts doubt on the fear that global warming is a serious threat. In 2003, Willie Soon of the Smithsonian Institution and Sallie Baliunas of Harvard published a paper in the journal Climate Research that took exception to Mr. Mann's work, work which also was at variance with a large number of independent studies of paleoclimate. So it would seem the Soon-Baliunas paper was just part of the normal to-and-fro of science.

But Mr. Jones wrote Mr. Mann on March 11, 2003, that "I'll be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Chris de Freitas of the University of Auckland. Mr. Mann responded to Mr. Jones on the same day: "I think we should stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues . . . to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

Mr. Mann ultimately wrote to Mr. Jones on July 11, 2003, that "I think the community should . . . terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels . . . and leave it to wither away into oblivion and disrepute."

Climate Research and several other journals have stopped accepting anything that substantially challenges the received wisdom on global warming perpetuated by the CRU. I have had four perfectly good manuscripts rejected out of hand since the CRU shenanigans, and I'm hardly the only one. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, has noted that it's becoming nearly impossible to publish anything on global warming that's nonalarmist in peer-reviewed journals.

Of course, Mr. Russell didn't look to see if the ugly pressure tactics discussed in the Climategate emails had any consequences. That's because they only interviewed CRU people, not the people whom they had trashed.

Mr. Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia from 1980-2007, is now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.





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"Notable Quotes"

"If this woman really has a sample of Al Gore’s DNA, can’t we use it to make some clones? What’s going to happen on the day when, Gaia forbid, Al’s not flying around the planet anymore telling people not to fly around the planet? The fate of the Earth is too important. We should make an entire army of Al Gores. The Green Lamenter Corps!"


Jim Treacher






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The Problem With Cap and Trade

FROM- The American Spectator

By C. Boyden Gray

The pending climate legislation that has spent so many months languishing in Congress was stripped of its initial momentum by the deep worldwide recession, the administration's failure in Copenhagen to get commitments from China sufficient to allay concerns about continued job migration from the U.S., the scandal over some of the science, and the struggle over health care reform. But the principal reasons for the demise -- the huge tax and trading boon to the banking industry in Wall Street and London -- deserve some further scrutiny.

The sponsors of so-called cap and trade legislation claimed that it was based on the hugely successful acid rain cap and trade program put into effect by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA). As will be discussed more fully below, this characterization is highly inaccurate, because the Waxman-Markey bill and Senate counterparts created a $3 trillion tax and commodities market where the CAAA had done nothing of the sort. This feature of the climate legislation hurt its electoral chances by allowing Republicans accurately to portray the bills as a huge tax while scaring off at least half a dozen centrist Democratic senators worried about having to contain another Wall Street derivatives meltdown because of the proposed pollutive materials commodities market.

As criticism of the tax intensified over the course of the last year, climate bill sponsors responded by promising the return of the allowance revenues to taxpayers and by erecting a whole set of new financial protections parallel to the current financial reform effort. This triggered understandable skepticism -- since if the money were truly to be returned to its source there would be no point in collecting it in the first place. Moreover, there would also be no need for financial protections, unless there were something else going on. It's the "something else" that is really at the heart of the problem and that deserves further examination.

That "something else" has to do with the only true short-term beneficiaries of the whole exercise -- namely the bankers and traders of London and Wall Street who were ready to collect huge profits from trading carbon under the proposed legislation. The junior senator from New York put it best in an October 21, 2009, op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, where she said that as a result of the legislation, the "financial market [was] poised to deliver significant growth." She explained that the "carbon permits [under the climate bills] could quickly become the world's largest commodities market, growing to as much as $3 trillion by 2020," and that "New York's financial talent, expertise and institutions are uniquely suited" to run this new market.

Acknowledging the need to address the regulatory aspects of a new set of derivative trading, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand observed that "Congress should integrate carbon trading into comprehensive financial reform," but she cautioned that the derivatives contracts should be allowed to be customized and not forced to be standardized and thus made fully transparent in any new regulatory structure. Finally, she noted that it was essential to the "ultimate benefit for New York that the market for carbon-emission permits is internationally integrated."

London was equally enthusiastic. Carbon could become "one of the fastest-growing markets ever, with volumes comparable to credit derivatives inside of a decade," said the head of emissions trading at Merrill Lynch's offices in London. According to another promotional article, London already "trades more carbon than any other city in the world," thanks to the European Emissions Trading System (ETS) set up by the EU after the Kyoto Treaty. As a result of carbon trading requirements, said the article, "carbon emissions are bound to become the world's biggest market....this is a bull market and great to invest in."

The Times of London further quoted a leading London trader as saying that "Europe will be the centre of the global market as a result of taking the lead....London is the leading centre and will remain so for years to come. The preparation has taken place here, and other financial centres are not so advanced...."

It is entirely true that climate leadership originated in Europe, especially in the UK, where much of the scandal over possibly manipulated science has also been centered. Given this background, it is hard to believe that ordinary greed did not trigger the rush to create an unnecessary windfall for traders. But the resulting backlash against bankers who stood to profit from cap and trade could have been easily avoided by actually following the model the measure's advocates said they were copying.

As noted, the White House and the sponsors of the Waxman-Markey legislation passed last year prominently asserted that their proposals were based on the successful acid rain cap and trade program by the CAAA in 1990. But the acid rain reduction and other successes based on it did not involve the impossibly complicated $1 trillion auction/tax/allowance reallocation scheme that Waxman-Markey features, as a result of the political logrolling necessary to secure the close 219-212 House vote.

To the contrary, all previous cap and trade programs have been based on an annual reduction of allowances initially allocated on the basis of an average of previous emissions that were well documented -- a simple formula that has been totally abandoned by Waxman-Markey.

Moreover, no one ever accused the acid rain program (or any of the others) of giving away "free" allowances, despite the lack of an initial auction for the permits. There was in fact nothing "free" about any of it, because utilities had to start reducing their acid rain emissions from day one, ultimately having to spend billions ($6 billion in the case of Duke Energy alone) to meet the requirements. But without a huge float of auctioned allowances, there were no financial machinations, and with no revenues collected, no political fights over revenue distribution that have so poisoned the current climate debate.

The acid rain program was itself based in part on a similarly successful -- and auction -- free-trading system established in 1982 to accelerate the phase-out of lead in gasoline. The next pro-posal after the 1990 CAAA was RECLAIM, which was established in 1994 by California and which successfully initiated nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide trading within the state -- again without an auction.

Subsequently, the EPA established successful trading programs for nitrogen oxide in the eastern U.S. and later, during the George W. Bush administration, for sulfur oxide in the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) intended to achieve a further 70 percent reduction beyond the original 50 percent cut in the 1990 CAAA. There were no auctions for these successful programs. (The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit subsequently questioned the legality of the CAIR trading system, which is now being revised.)

Supporters of the carbon dioxide auction have frequently cited the European ETS as the real reason auctions are necessary. The first phase of the ETS did not use an auction and over-allocated the allowances, producing utility windfalls and carbon dioxide prices so low as to be meaningless. But the proximate reason for the problem was that there was no reliable baseline emissions data, as we have had for decades in the case of utilities here in the U.S.

The European Commission has corrected this mistake for the second (and successful) phase that is now in effect -- but without an auction, it must be quickly noted. There are proposals to launch a 60 percent auction for the third phase, but that auction would probably be discretionary with the member states, which may not impose them for many of the same reasons militating against an auction in the U.S.

To be sure, the Waxman-Markey legislation tries to avoid the trillion-dollar tax implications of a 100 percent auction by temporarily seeking to provide "free" allowances to coal and natural gas customers. But these allowances will have to be auctioned to the emitters anyway, and there is no guarantee that the proceeds will actually get into the hands of those who have to pay the tax.

Over time, in any event, the system would revert to a 100 percent auction to provide trillions of dollars in revenues for unrelated budget proposals (and triggering protectionist import tariffs to curb trade with nations that have not imposed the same tax). One can understand the desire for deficit-reduction revenues. But they should not come out of a climate change program, which will be costly even without auctions and the success of which depends on the cap reduction level, not on the revenues collected. (Indeed, one group that has pushed for an auction, U.S. Climate Action Partnership, stresses that emission reductions under cap and trade are the same whether an auction is used or not.)

The superior efficiency of emission trading markets has been demonstrated over and over again. But the efficient reduction of carbon emissions need not depend on the levy of a huge tax or the establishment of the biggest commodities market ever created, and benefits of the trading should go to the public, not Wall Street or London.





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How to Expose a Warmist: Andrew Bolt Interviews Australia's Al Gore

FROM-RCP

By Tom Minchin


Introduced by Tom Minchin


The global warming movement is in heavy retreat in every Western country. But, as we have learned from the rise of leftist leaders like President Obama and Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, modern collectivists are resilient. If they can recover from the collapse of Communism, they can certainly rebuild the environmental movement. Now is not the time to celebrate, but to press home the exposure of their bogus claims and hidden interests.


TIA Daily readers will therefore appreciate the uncompromising interview style of Australian journalist Andrew Bolt as he eviscerates one of the world's leading warming alarmists, Tim Flannery-a man in the mold of Al Gore. The interview took place on radio in Melbourne, Australia on June 9.



Andrew Bolt has given TIA Daily permission to reproduce the interview in full.

The debate begins with Bolt asking Flannery about his disillusionment with the Australian government over its ditching of Cap and Trade:

Flannery: I'm unlikely to vote for him [Rudd] because my trust has been eroded away.... He promised to deliver an emissions trading scheme and he's then withdrawn that with very little justification....


Bolt: He said he wouldn't move now until the rest of the world did something which is a direct repudiation of what he said before. But, Tim, part of the reason, of course, that he's backed down is that there's been a great swing in sentiment against this kind of thing, there's a rising tide of skepticism. How much are you to blame for some of that?


Flannery : There is some swing in sentiment. And I think it's very hard to maintain any issue with that sort of very high level of support for a long time. So there's some, but what is happening around the world should give us all heart. We've seen China now pledged to reduce is emissions intensity by over 40 per cent.


Bolt: It's still going to build a coal-fired power station every week or so.


Flannery: And what that is going to do if that's achieved by 2020 is put us on track to avoid dangerous climate change. But for us to do that, places like Australia and the US, the wooden spooners in this debate, actually have to do their part.


Bolt: But, Tim, I'm just wondering, there has been a rise in skepticism. That's precisely why the Liberals [the Australian Liberal party is closer to the classical pro-free market 19th-century meaning of that term rather than its modern sense], for example, have switched from supporting an ETS to opposing it...and they dumped their leader over it. Now I'm wondering to what extent are you to blame for rising skepticism about some of the more alarming claims about global warming.


Flannery : Well, many of the things that scientists highlight may happen are very alarming. They're not alarmist but they are worrisome. Rises in sea-levels, for instance, are a significant issue.


Bolt: Well, let's go through some of your own claims. You said, for example, that Adelaide may run out of water by early 2009. Their reservoirs are half full now. You said Brisbane would probably run out of water by 2009. They are now 97 per cent full. And Sydney could be dry as early as 2007. Their reservoirs are also more than half full. How can you get away with all these claims?


Flannery: And thankfully, Andrew, governments have taken that to heart and been building some desalination capacity such as in Perth.


Bolt: Only in Perth.


Flannery: No, there's plans in every capital city.


Bolt: No, no, no, you said Brisbane would run out of water possibly by as early as 2009. There's no desalination plant, there's no dam.


Flannery: What I have said is that there is a water problem. They may run out of water. And ...


Bolt: 100 per cent full, nearly! 100 percent full.


Flannery: That's a lie, Andrew. I didn't say it would run out of water. I don't have a crystal ball in front of me. I said Brisbane has a water problem.


Bolt: I'll quote your own words: "Water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months." That was, on the timeline you gave, by the beginning of 2009. Their reservoirs are now 97 per cent full.


Flannery: Yeah, sure. There's variability in rainfall. They still need a desal plant.


Bolt: You also warned that Perth would be the 21 century's first ghost metropolis.


Flannery: I said it was...may.


Bolt: It's all "may." Right?


Flannery: Because at that stage there had been no flows into that water catchment for a year and the water engineers were terrified.


Bolt: Have you seen the water catchment levels here, see, they're tracking above the five year level. I'm showing you now.


Flannery: You know what I came in here to talk about, Andrew, here? It's our farm day we're doing with our Deakin lecture series in Bendigo, at the Bendigo town hall today. And it's a really exciting event...

Andrew: All that's lovely, Tim. But I think you need to be held to account for the alarmism that is in part your stock in trade, your shtick, and is responsible for what you now see-the retreat from global warming policies.


Flannery: You want to paint me as an alarmist.


Bolt: You are an alarmist.


Flannery: I'm a very practical person.


Bolt: I'm asking you to defend these quotes.


Flannery: Well, I've done that already

Bolt: You said the Arctic could be ice free two years ago. [Actually, last year.]


Flannery: No I didn't...


[The show host, Steve Price interrupts, and they argue over the questioning.]

Bolt: I'm asking Tim whether he repents from all these allegations about cities running out of water, cities turning into ghost cities, sea level rises up to an eight-story-high building. Don't you think that is in part why people have got more skeptical?


Flannery: I don't, actually, because some of those things are possibilities in the future if we continue polluting as we do. And we've already seen impacts in southern Australia on all of those cities. Everyone remembers the water restrictions and so forth. Just because we get a good, wet year doesn't mean we should forget about the problem. We actually have to deal with this long term drying trend and that means securing our water supply.


Bolt: You warn about sea level rises up to an eight-story building. How soon will that happen?

Flannery: Asking that question is it's a bit like asking a stock analyst when the next stock market crash is going to happen and how big it's going to be. No one can. We can all see the underlying weakness in the market in the months before the crash.

Bolt: Thousands of years?


Flannery: Could be thousands of years.


Bolt: Tens of thousands of years?


Flannery: Could be hundreds of years.


Bolt: Hundreds of years?


Flannery: It could be hundreds of years. The thermo- dynamics of ice sheets are very, very difficult to predict, but what we do know when we look back is the fossil record is that when the world is a degree or two warmer than it is now seal levels rise very significantly-between four and 14 meters above where they are. We can't say how long it takes for that rise to happen because the fossil record just isn't good enough, it isn't accurate enough...


Bolt: Should we also have nuclear power plants?

Flannery: In Australia I don't think so. We've got such a great load of assets in the renewable area that I don't think there's an argument here that they are ever going to be economic.


Bolt: Four years ago you did. What changed your mind?


Flannery: No, I never did. I've always had the same argument.

Bolt: No, no, no. Here's your quote: "Over the next two decades Australians could use nuclear power to replace all our coal-fired power plants. We would then have a power infrastructure like France and in doing so we would have done something great for the world." That was your quote.


Flannery: I don't recall saying that at all.

Bolt: You wrote it. You wrote it in The Age. There it is, highlighted.


Flannery: Well ,very good.


Bolt: That's the point, you know, you make these claims and when people confront you, you walk away from them.


Flannery: But that was about "may." No, no, you said "may." And Australia may be able to do that. It's not what I recommend and I never have recommended it. But what I do say...


Bolt: "We would have done something great for the world."


Flannery: But what I do say, nuclear power, right, getting away from coal would be great for the world. Why should we take the most expensive option in this country, which has always been recognized as having the most expensive and difficult option. We are going to see a whole lot of other technologies and innovations which are now well under way which we could use instead of nuclear power.


Bolt: Such as?


Flannery: Such as concentrated PV technology, geothermal technology, wave power, wind power...

Bolt: You're an investor in geothermal technology , aren't you? [Flannery's investment in geo-thermal technology received a $90 million grant from the Australian government last year.]


Flannery: Yeah, I am. Indeed.

Bolt: How come you don't declare that.


Flannery: Well, I've just done it.


Bolt: You just did because I told you. You said that geothermal, which you are an investor of, you've got a plant, you've invested in a plant in Innamincka and you said the technology was really easy. How come that plant...

Flannery: Not really that easy.

Bolt: Well, yes. It's actually had technological difficulties and it's been delayed two years because it's not that easy, after all, is it?

Flannery: Well, any new technology is going to be difficult to bring to fruition. It's a bit like generation for nuclear. There's challenges all the way. But in terms of geothermal there are many places in the world where you can actually drill down and get into a hot rock body such as...

Price: Andrew, we're going to have to go.

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