The Radical Greens at MASG constantly tell us we in Castlemaine are putting out too much CO2 and we have to stop to “save the planet” (From what?, some might ask).

Well, just how much CO2 do we really account for in the scheme of things.

Some rough maths:

The “experts” tell us the whole of Australia accounts for a whopping 1.5% of total carbon emissions in the world.

Australia is roughly 7.8 million sq. Km in area; the whole of the Shire of Mt Alexander is about 1500 sq. Km in area.

That means our entire shire is very roughly 0.0003% of the area of Australia.

SO dear Green lunatics, if the whole Shire of Mt Alexander totally shut down and stopped all CO2 emissions, we would reduce carbon by 0.0003% OF 1.5%.

In other words…… ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

Shades of “One flew over the cuckoos nest”.

While the writing style is humorous, there’s an awful lot of truth in the following piece from the Telegraph in England.

Do you feel anxious when you see a television set left on standby? Does the sight of a plastic bottle haphazardly tossed into a paper-only recycling bin make you feel nauseous? Are you consumed with rage when someone has left an empty room and not switched off the light?

Have you recently found yourself overcome with a desire to spit on your car-driving friends and family? When a loved one tells you that he is flying off for some winter sun, do you feel like bludgeoning him over the head with a blunt instrument until he appears no longer to be breathing?

If so, don’t worry! You are probably suffering from “carborexia”, Or “energy anorexia”. Psychiatrists in America have identified a new mental illness that threatens the very fabric of society: an obsession with saving the planet. Some people are so addicted to cutting their carbon emissions that they seem to have gone quite mad.

Take, for example, Sharon Astyk, who makes her four children sleep in a huddle so she doesn’t have to turn on the heating (if she was that concerned about the planet, perhaps she could have stopped reproducing after baby number two).

Or Jay Matsueda, who waters his lawn with his own urine so that he doesn’t have to flush the loo; he says that it was his ex-girlfriend’s choice of gas-guzzling car, rather than his habit of weeing on the grass, that led to the break-down of their relationship.

“If you’re criticising friends because they’re not living up to your standards of green, that’s a problem,” said Elizabeth Carll, a psychologist who specialises in obsessive compulsive disorder.

We reckon there’s around 700 people in this area who suffer from Carborexia. That’s the number of members a certain environmental  Greens lobby group claims to have.

California grape growers feeling the freeze

This year’s grape harvest has manifested the impact of varying weather on the local winemaking industry, as many growers are reporting lower quantities due to frosting. Although the end result might be higher prices for your favorite wines in a couple of years, some winemakers also touted how the crop should produce better-tasting grapes, especially the Pinot variety common to San Benito County.

The local drop in production, though, is shared across California with many winemaking and vintner organizations reporting the same trend. Some state estimates indicate a 20 percent decrease from last year and one-third fewer grapes than in 2005. “In San Benito County, we had the same problem as everywhere else in California - terrible weather during the flowering season,” said Steve Pessagno, owner of Pessagno Winery.

He noted that from April to May, cold weather and overcast skies created perfect conditions for frost. “My notebook reads, ‘April 12 to 16, coldest string of five days in the last 70 years.’” The result is demonstrated in Pessagno’s Syrah fields, where he obtained one ton of grapes per acre - about a third of a normal year’s harvest. He wasn’t the only one reporting such a stunning decline, as Rob Leve, a vineyard manager at Gimelli Wineries, gave a similar estimate. “And that gives winemakers a difficult time meeting demand or making a living with that type of yield,” Pessagno said.

Josh Jensen, owner and winemaker at Calera Winery, had vineyards yielding as little as half a ton per acre where they usually produce around twelve times that in a good year. “We are seeing a very small harvest because we were absolutely slammed disastrously by the frosts during April,” he said. Allessio Carli, Pietra Santa’s winemaker, also reported a low-production harvest and said he hadn’t seen frost - before 2008 - in his 18 years there. …

Source

Australia: Global cooling hits Sydney

After the coldest winter in a decade, weather experts are warning Sydney to expect an erratic summer….

Bureau of Meteorology climate officer Mike de Salis said the mercury plunged most in August. The average maximum temperature was 17.3 degrees, more than half a degree lower than the average and the coldest monthly average since 1989. The average maximum temperature throughout the three winter months was the lowest since 1998.

“That was due to a blocking system. [It was] a low pressure operating in the Tasman Sea for half the month [of August], dragging a whole lot of cold southerly air over NSW,” Mr de Salis said. “It kept the temperatures down, day time and night time.” ….

Source

Temperatures plummet as cold wave breaks 83-year old records in Hungary

A cold weather record set in 1925 went by the books on Monday, as temperatures in Hungary plummeted. The coldest temperature on record as a daily maximum for September 15 was 10.5 degrees Celsius measured in the SW city of Zalaegerszeg 83 years ago. It fell by the wayside when the city of Sopron, in the NW, reported a high of 8.6 degrees, meteorologist Zoltan Fodor reported.

Budapest also set a cold record, with a high temperature of 11.5 degrees Celsius. That did in a record set on September 15, 1912, of 12.4 degrees. Fodor promised more of the same on Tuesday, with temperatures rising slightly afterwards, to peak at about 18 degrees Celsius on the weekend.

Source