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We can also go further back by using ice cores. "Continuous ice core records from Antarctica provide direct measurements of atmospheric \(\text{CO}_{2}\) going back 800,000 years. [1, 2] However, specialised, discontinuous ice samples (specifically "blue ice" from the Allan Hills, Antarctica) have enabled scientists to measure \(\text{CO}_{2}\) from air bubbles trapped as far back as 2 million years ago, with experimental studies extending even further. [1, 2, 3]" Two million-year-old ice cores provide first direct observations of an ancient climate

Everyone goes on about rising CO2 levels in the atmoshere. But rising compared to what? How does science determine a base value for comparison. There must be some way to determine exactly what "fresh air" is. Just south of the isolated north-west tip (Woolnorth Point) of Tasmania, at a place called Cape Grim, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) fund and operates the Cape Grim atmospheric observational facility. The Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station first began measuring the composition of the atmosphere in April 1976 and has been in continuous operation since that date. The air sampled arrives at Cape Grim after long trajectories over the Southern Ocean, under conditions described as ‘baseline’. This baseline air is representative of a large area of the Southern Hemisphere, unaffected by regional pollution sources. Air samples are analysed at the station to determine concentrations of greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases, other air pollutants, including aerosols and reactive gases, and radon. Since sampling began at Cape Grim, more that 3 billion measurements have been taken. Among these are measurements of greenhouse gases (GHGs), including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and synthetic GHGs such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). The number of atmospheric greenhouse gases measured at Cape Grim now exceeds 50, as well as concentrations of natural and anthropogenic aerosols (particles such as sea salt, mineral dust, carbon particles etc). Some of the air samples collected at Cape Grim have been archived for further analyses as required. This picture shows some of the samples stored in "fresh air archives". Because we have these measurements and samples going back 50 years, we are in the position of being able to say that the atmoshere has changed over that time. Happily, all is not doom and gloom. The growth of some GHGs (for example methane) has slowed recently and some are in decline (CFCs and halons for example). Read more here: https://capegrim.csiro.au/

Imam Albo and Tony Burqa said the Govt is not going to help them.

Even those without solar are better Off. You can Have electricity for free at certain times and the Price is less because of the Cheap % which will only become Greater if we get on with it. Nev

I agree with Nev. It's not ideal and there is a potential risk but if they are Australian citizens and legally entitled to live here, then the Government has a responsibility towards getting them out of the refugee camps and facilitating their return. The rest is a rehabilitation and risk management exercise.

People are being subject to Propaganda a constantly everywhere.. Look at the Non ISIS Hate here and in the USA. WE have obligation under Law . It's a bit of a No Win for us but I'm sure it can be handled. IF they get Here and really, where else should/could they go? A lot of them are Just Kids.. We have Bigger Problem than this to worry about. Nev

(Common? Decency)? Humanity.. It's nothing to do with Helping ISIS. Nev

A concern that I have does not involve future terrorist activities of the wives, but the attitudes of their children. Those kids have grown up an an certain environment. They have been indoctrinated by the controllers of that environment. Just consider the outlook of German kids who grew up under the NAZI regime. At the end of WWII, when the world hey grew up in came to an end, they lost all that they knew. They had to undergo education to let them learn that what they believed in, one could say their morality was not the truth. I wonder how many of them were mever able to fully change their ideas. The same can be said for all children, no matter what ideological system they grew up in. Isn't the Aussie Spirit we try to instill in our children just another ideological system? I say, let those adults amongst them who were Australian citizens, return. However, let us give the children of those people all the help we can to detoxify from what they have been lead to believe was acceptable.

Why should Australia be associated with ISIS in any way whatsoever?

When I’m asked what I pay per kWh, I’d usually say around 30 cents. But thinking about it, that’s not really accurate for my situation. Because I have rooftop solar—and the system has already paid for itself—a portion of the electricity I use is effectively free. A better way to look at it would be to take my total electricity bill over a period and divide it by the total kWh I’ve used (including both grid and solar generation). That would give a blended cost per kWh, which is likely much lower than 30 cents—probably somewhere around 10–15 cents. When you think about it this way, electricity doesn’t seem especially expensive for households with solar. Given there are now over 4.5 million homes with rooftop solar in Australia (roughly a third of households), that’s a large number of people benefiting from relatively low effective electricity costs. That said, this raises a genuine equity issue. Not everyone can access rooftop solar, particularly renters or lower-income households. The solution, in my view, isn’t to reduce the benefits for those who have solar, but to expand access for those who don’t.

If you want more expensive energy build new coal fired power stations and you will also get added pollution and greenhouse gasses we are trying to reduce. Plus it would take up to 8 years to build. The problem is venture capitalists and banks won't touch this option with a barge pole. Why? Among many reasons it is just not financially viable. The grid was neglected for 20 years by successive governments & population increase along with increased demand for electricity and the costs associated with upgrading the grid are enormous. Add the constant complaints from people who don't want transmission lines on their land and the costs of compliance and you get a logistical and financial nightmare. Storage is the answer. See Octaves comments. I have 9kW of Solar & an 18.6 kWh battery & don't use any grid power and I charge my EV for free as well. Rooftop solar produces more power during the day than all of Australias fossil fuel power generators combined. There is so much the wholesale price in the middle of the day is almost always negative. I sell most of my stored energy during peak demand & keep enough to cover my use overnight & during the peak morning period. Not everyone can do what I do but there are 4 & a half million houses with rooftop solar & all of these could have a home battery. The state and federal home battery subsidies have been so successful that half of the original $2.3 billion expected to last to 2030 was used up in 6 months. Now an additional $4.9 billion has been added along with changes based on battery capacity.

A coal power plant may last 50 years, but during that time, it would undergo maintenance and upgrades. Private banks and investors are unwilling to finance new coal. The long payback means that even if it were viable now, the risk is that somewhere down the line it may become unviable due to advancing technologies. There is no law in Australia that prevents building new coal; there is simply no good business case. You keep talking about "intermittent power" without considering energy storage. Battery efficiency and cost fall every year. A builder of a coal plant that is burning coal whether it is generating at all, is competing with ever cheaper and more efficient battery storage. It is not just chemical energy storage. Underground Air Batteries — The Energy Storage You’ve Never Heard Of Generating electricity with renewables is extremely cheap; this is undeniable. However, the challenge is both long and short-duration storage. Batteries are being built at an astonishing rate, and there are other promising methods in the pipeline. An investor in coal would need to know that they could never be undercut during the payback time of the plant.

Yes it would, but it would also last for years to come, not changed out every 30 or so.

Any new generation, regardless of method, imposes a cost on the electricity they generate. New renewables impose a cost, but so would a bunch of new coal power plants. This cost would need to be paid for for many years to come.

France, US, Sweden (except for the south of the country where exporting to Germany has artificially raised them). Thats answering a question with a question nd all we hear from our intermittent supporting is that intermittents are the cheapest form of electricity. We don't need new infrastructure to stay where we are except if the population increases, just maintenance or replacing existing as it wears out. We are building a lot just for the intermittents.

Cheaper would be to replace coal fired power stations with new coal fired plants in a controlled manner. Nuclear would take a long time but newer reactors will last a long time and be cheaper in the long run. Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, second best is today. The problem is we aren't just adding renewables, we are adding intermittent renewables. If we replaced our coal with new coal and gas we don't need battery's (although some would be beneficial) extra transmission, artificial inertia etc it would be cheaper.

Can you name a country where building new coal or nuclear power plants recently has kept retail electricity prices flat or below inflation? You’re asking renewables to reduce total electricity bills while we’re simultaneously replacing an entire ageing system and building new infrastructure.

What's your point?

This paper examines the correlation between end-user electricity prices and the share of solar and wind energy in total electricity production in OECD countries. It is shown (i) that end-user prices in recent years (2020–2022) are positively correlated with the share of solar and wind and (ii) that the price of electricity in the majority of countries has risen with the solar and wind share since these types of energy came on the scene. (paper published 2024) Green Electricity Prices | Biophysical Economics and Sustainability | Springer Nature Link

You’re assuming prices are high because we’re adding renewables, but that skips the key comparison—what would be cheaper instead? New coal isn’t being built anywhere in Australia because it’s not economically competitive. If it were cheaper, companies would be investing in it—but they’re not. Nuclear might be reliable, but in Australia it would take 10–15+ years and cost significantly more than renewables. That doesn’t solve current prices. A big driver of recent price spikes has actually been coal plant outages and high fossil fuel prices, not renewables. That’s been highlighted repeatedly by Australian Energy Market Operator. The idea that coal is still reliably holding the system together is outdated. Plants like Eraring Power Station are ageing, breaking down more often, and becoming expensive to maintain—that’s not ideology, it’s physics and economics. You’re right that redundancy is needed—but that applies to any system. The difference is that renewables + storage are currently the cheapest way to build that redundancy at scale. So the issue isn’t that renewables are making power expensive—it’s that we’re replacing an ageing, increasingly unreliable system, and that was always going to come with costs no matter what technology we chose.

tell me anywhere in the world with a high penetration of intermittent generation that has cheap electricity to the consumer. Coal use to be reliable in Australia. It is now seen as a way large energy company's can make money from our stupid ideological government. They won't give them proper maintenance, they don't care about Australia's energy security and they will threaten to close them down and the government will pay to keep them open (Eraring) or in SA's case, pay some diesel generators to come out of moth balls for the summer period. If the grid is run properly you have enough overbuild so if one drops out the others have the capacity and inertia to take up the slack. Pretty basic redundancy thought process like aircraft have. Germany has 170GWs of installed solar for a max grid demand of 60 odd GWs and they still import power from France, Sweden and burn brown coal(one of the the most polluting of fuel sources) I am not a fan of coal. I think Nuclear should be seriously looked at and am sick of all the misguided hype about weather dependent intermittents. Electricity to the consumer has gone up over 30% in the last 12 months and old mate bowen is still saying how cheap the wholesale price is. Also saying that wind and solar don't care about the overseas conflict, but any spare part for a wind turbine does. I had real time experience with this during Covid. Hydro and geo thermal are the gold standard if they are readily accessible. Prove me wrong!

"I don't like you either" ... crikey that was funny - even Albo laughed at that one.

"thrown out"? Show me a Labor Govt that would deport them.

You mentioned "ISIS" and "Australia" in the same sentence! Were you aware that you did that? No one seems to have full control of their faculties when they think/talk about "ISIS brides".

Malcolm Turnbull had to get that from a Golfer. I think that Not overly stirring the Possum is the way to go.. King Charlie made a Point of saying to Trump that He was very Fond of Australia and I know he means it. Hastie has personal experience of Wars that can't be won. (Afghanistan). Nev