By Jo Nova
Shamen and fortune-tellers are back preying on suggestible minds
A new “study” warns us that the most populated cities on Earth have a distinct trend towards, wait for it, wetter or drier weather. Somehow, 95 of the 100 biggest cities do not have the exact same amount of rain that they had 40 years ago. (The horror). And this is “weird” they say, as if shifting patterns of rain have not been normal for the last four billion years.
The new term this week in Climate Bingo is “Climate Whiplash” — which means a city that has had more droughts and floods lately. It’s just another sort of Global Weirding which was predicted by exactly no models anywhere until after it happened, and sometimes not even then.
The trick here is to study some random permutation in an obscure weather metric over an absurdly short time frame — like for example the moisture surplus/deficit difference between precipitation and evapotranspiration, and voila, we find a “40 year trend”. Given that the Pacific ocean oscillates on 20 – 30 year cycle, and the Atlantic on a 60 to 80 year one, the world will never run out of 40 year meaningless trends in watery parameters.
Thus paid Blob scientists have come up with another scary headline to justify their grant, and trick a few teenage girls into voting for Big Green Governments that will give more money to Blob Scientists.
The Guardian, as always parrots the Blob nonsense without so much as 2 seconds of googling “Drought cycles of China” where they could have found out that droughts were worse in the 1960s and 70s just before this study started.
‘Global weirding’: climate whiplash hitting world’s biggest cities, study reveals
Swings between drought and floods striking from Dallas to Shanghai, while Madrid and Cairo are among cities whose climate has flipped
Damian Carrington (Chief of Environmental Propaganda) The Guardian
Wed 12 Mar 2025 11.01 AEDT
Climate whiplash is already hitting major cities around the world, bringing deadly swings between extreme wet and dry weather as the climate crisis intensifies, a report has revealed.
Dozens more cities, including Lucknow, Madrid and Riyadh have suffered a climate “flip” in the last 20 years, switching from dry to wet extremes, or vice versa. The report analysed the 100 most populous cities, plus 12 selected ones, and found that 95% of them showed a distinct trend towards wetter or drier weather.
The shamen and fortune tellers are notorious for ambiguous projections, and it’s right there in the press release. Climate change can look like any change at all, and any change could be climate change:
Professor Katerina Michaelides, Lead Scientist from University of Bristol, said: “The findings from our study illustrate just how differently and dramatically climate change is expressing around the globe – there is no one-size-fits-all.”
Everything is changing and none of it’s predictable. These forecasts come with excuses built in:
“Our study shows that climate change is dramatically different around the world,” said Prof Katerina Michaelides, at the University of Bristol, UK. Her co-author, Prof Michael Singer at Cardiff University, described the pattern as “global weirding”. “Most places we looked at are changing in some way, but in ways that are not always predictable,” Singer said.
All told, 17 cities are apparently suffering Climate Whiplash, though they were not important enough to list in the Guardian or the press release. Possibly because the full list included Canberra, Chicago, and Melbourne, where millions of Guardian readers live — who might realize they are not being whipped.
The eye candy graph definitely looks jagged and scary:
The Guardian (of The Blob)
But in the long run, these are bumps of nothing. For example, here’s the last 700 years of recharge rates in one part of China where rain has come and gone. Curiously, there are 200 year long cycles in groundwater recharge rates in China that seem to vary with cycles on the Sun.
R.K. Tiwari1,* and Rekapalli Rajesh2 (2014) Imprint of long-term solar signal in groundwater recharge fluctuation rates from North West China. Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060204
Warn the children that the Global Weirding lot are just government marketers wearing labcoats. They fish for random 40 year fluctuations that no one predicted. It ain’t science.
POST NOTE: See this is the tragedy of one-sided government funded science. The people writing these junk studies up probably think they are doing a decent job, they just don’t realize how vacuous this is because there is never any criticism of green-promo-science. They’ve never attended a conference where someone talked about long term drought cycles, they don’t know there are 10,000 proxies that show continuous variation in every climate parameter. If they had been reeled back in a few times as honours students they wouldn’t grow up to be scientists making these baby mistakes.
REFERENCE
Water and climate: Rising risks for urban populations, Cardiff University, 12 March 2025 in Climate change, published by WaterAid.
Unlike fake climate change as Jo described above, the Chicomms understand the impact genuine natural climatic variation over many centuries has on their country which is why they are developing and building robust power sources like coal, gas, nuclear and real hydro. Plus they are also colonising Africa as an alternative food supply as well as buying vast tracts of farmlands in stupid countries like Australia. They are long term planners and can see us entering a cold period.
During these historic natural climate change events they suffer famine, war and disease.
See the following graph:
https://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c01b8d0f76684970c-pi
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Dead Aid is also a good read.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-West-Was-Lost-Economic/dp/0141042419
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Australia is filling to the brim with over-qualified people with degrees in silly subjects.
We are a “university qualified”, silly country.
Generally these “qualified” people get jobs for government in big cities.
This leads to silly policies and yet more silly regulations.
Cut off the money and all this silliness will not evaporate. It has become L-A-W.
Legislation is very difficult to change as the upper house is controlled by small parties.
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This “climate whiplash” term apparently originates from Tim Flannery’s Climate Council, Australia’s crowd and millionnaire-funded leader of the green blob. From its 23-24 Annual Report of CEO Amanda McKenzie:
Show the community that climate change is
harming Australians now. Our phrase “climate
whiplash” perfectly describes the horrible
experience of communities swinging from flood
to fire. This long-term work helps to elevate
climate on the national agenda when there are
many issues also top of mind…
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The only thing that is constant is change
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A tragic belief promoted by the Klimate Kult as part of the general anti-science agenda is the Aristotlean belief that the earth system is static and unchanging.
As I have said before, warmists are staticists, for lack of a better word. They fundamentally don’t believe in natural variation of the climate. In the past, within recorded history, there have been periods of both wonderful warmth and miserable cold.
Civilisations have thrived during the naturally warm periods of the Minoan, Egyptian, Roman and Medieval eras.
Plus, we are coming to the very end of a rare interglacial. As the world cools, it will be impossible for civilisation to survive without coal, gas and nuclear power stations (and real hydro where possible, not SH2).
The idea that the earth and universe is static is a very primitive one and articulated by Aristotle in “In the Heavens” 350BCE.
It is only in the last 100 years or so that the ideas of Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), a real climatologist, geologist, geophysicist, meteorologist and polar researcher came to be accepted that the earth is not static. Among other ideas he conceived of continental drift which led to the discovery of plate tectonics.
However, as early as 1840 Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) hypothesised that much of North America was once buried under glacial ice up to 3km deep and that climate must change.
Milutin Milanković (1879-1958) also discovered natural cycles in the climate.
Warmists have to do a lot of catching up with modern thinking.
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These “scientists” will not get jobs as checkout operators once the climate scam is finally buried. Then again Monash employ “professor” Bruce Pascoe the famous Aboriginal whose only flaw seems to be no Aboriginal forebears. Universities have really cra**ed in their own nests and don’t deserve the funding from taxpayers.
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It’s drier ‘cause it’s wetter
It’s colder ‘cause it’s warmer
It’s dearer ‘cause it’s cheaper
(Climate “logic”)
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Standard Leftist logic straight from their instruction manual.
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You forgot the fourth line:
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Does the omnipotence force of carbon pollution know no bounds?
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Perhaps some change is coming:
” The cuts affect 23 people, eliminating among others the Office of the Chief Scientist led by Katherine Calvin — a renowned climatologist who contributed to key UN climate reports. ”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-12/nasa-fires-chief-scientist-in-first-round-of-trump-cuts/105044394
Cheers,
Dave B
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NASA, like all other US Government departments has also cancelled DEI.
And I guess it’s the ABC’s or Klimate Kultists’ interpretation that Calvin was “renowned”. Contributing to an anti-scientific UN report ought not to make one renowned.
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Heroes and villains can both be renowned.
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“Heroes and villains can both be renowned.”
For one of those groups, I like ‘notorious’.
Or ‘convicted’, of course!
And ‘imprisoned, and stripped of their pension and worldly wealth’ for all the harm they have done.
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As I recall, ‘weird’ was one of the labels the Harris campaign tried to use against Trump … that was a short lived failure.
Maybe this comes out of the same marketing consultants.
At least they’re recycling.
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‘recycling’?
More like regurgitating.
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That weird thing really was weird. I still shudder that the attempted steal got Harris as close as she was.
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Unbelievable nonsense, yet enough clueless dopes still believe their BS and fra-d.
Again we are living in the safest period in Human history and all because we are protected by Fossil Fuels like coal, gas and oil.
Today a much smaller percentage of farm workers actually grow enough food and fibre for 10.5 billion people and we also waste a lot of food as well.
Again deaths from droughts and floods have seen a massive decline since 1960 and global life expectancy has boomed over that same period.
Why do they lie to us when we know that deaths from extreme weather events have dropped by 98% since 1920. Under 2 billion then and 8.1 billion today. So why do they refuse to find and then think about the available data?
All these donkeys have to do is spend a few minutes online and look up OWI Data. So what’s their problem?
Why do they still want to WASTE TRILLIONs of $ on a problem that clearly doesn’t exist?
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Again here’s the global death rates per 100,000 from all natural disasters from 1900 to 2024.
The drop from 1960 to 2024 is mind boggling proof that we live in the safest period in Human history.
So why can’t they spend just 5 minutes to look up the data and think?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disaster-death-rates
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If they did look it up, and they did think, their first inclination would be to censor or bury the non compliant information.
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Why, Neville. Some people are making lots of money out of the climate scam. Just think of the businesses that have prospered as a result of policies designed to stop climate catastrophes, solar hot water services, insulation installers, double glazing, rooftop solar, transmission companies, turbine makers and installers, Snowy 2, carbon credit schemes and so on. Some of these programmes did improve efficiencies but many are simply wasteful.
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The weather mechanism is chaotic and in chaotic systems the averages oscillate at all relevant scales. It is called strange statistics but there is nothing weird about it.
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There is a physical basis for the increased variability in rainfall. The decrease in temperature differential between pole and equator is causing a wavier jet stream which means weather systems get locked in one place for longer periods.
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Lake George is full.
When I first arrived in Australia 40+ years ago, Lake George was full.
In the intervening years, Lake George was empty. Sheep and cattle grazed there.
A paper a few years ago by Asten and McCracken showed an approx 80-year cycle in rainfall on the NSW coastal plain.
Ken McCracken is no light-weight, attested by an asteroid being named after him – asteroid 8258 McCracken.
I’ll take the Guardian’s article and raise them one ssteroid.
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Lake George is very interesting for many reasons.
Sadly, the general area is the subject of extreme visual pollution from the Capital Wind Subsidy Farm.
Article about the lake here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_George_%28New_South_Wales%29?wprov=sfla1
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When Europeans arrived the locals told them its “bad water”; even when full, the lake is one of the saltiest bodies of water in inland NSW, almost as saline as seawater.’
Lake Mungo flourished because of its depth, whereas Lake George is too shallow.
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Is it ever David, those windmills look dreadful. I haven’t seen so much water in Lake George since I went fishing there as a kid living in Canberra….circa 1965. I’ve seen it bone dry empty too with all the old fence lines exposed. Lot of water there at present !
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A recent ‘study’ was being pushed where a well-subsidised PhD student ‘discovered’ large swells traverse the Pacific Ocean (well d’uh!) some reaching Alaska from storms east of NZ while others arrived on NZ’s shores from storms up by Alaska – and of course they were getting BIGGER and FASTER and DEADLIER and MORE COSTLY because… 0.04% CO2.
Any surfer or sailor or oceanographer worth their salt have known these things since, literally, EVAAAH! Polynesians, living in the middle of it all, knew of ‘north’ swells and ‘south’ swells and a few more in-between; European adventurers, and more modern-day sailors, soon learned the ups-and-downs of waves seemingly coming out of nowhere; and for the last 70 years or so, surfers have cottoned onto long-distance groundswells that began life half-a-world (or ocean) away, and regularly scour weather maps for those lovely concentric circles which portend waves arriving in a week’s time… this is not new science.
The Americans developed an understanding of all this during WWII in order to safely land men on coral atolls and to keep their ships ‘safe’ from sneaker sets and other tidal fluctuations. They also detonated and dredged many an atoll for airstrips and wharves, yet now their grandchildren shout ‘Climate Crisis!’ as if that very same 0.04% is to blame.
If Charles Darwin, peering from the Beagle’s gunwales, could figure out how coral reefs adapt and – Gaia forbid! – change, surely these 21st-century upstarts with all their technological wizardry can deduce 1+1+1=3 and not 5 as they claim.
BTW Jo, great to see your labcoat-wearing voodoo-charm-encrusted feather-shaking shaman again as the header artwork, pleading with the storm god for a beneficial 10% cut of the peasants’ hard work. Dump Paris and dump the U.N. and let’s go surfing! 😃
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Its clever of the global weirding to just affect cities. I guess that means that those of us that have gotten out of Dodge will have benign weather in regional areas.
In other news a nice soaking of much welcome rain overnight
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Things are about to get weirder: the veritable BOMbastic Bureau is prophesying snow showers and freezing temps this weekend for the hills of NSW, VIC & TAS – this hasn’t happened since the last time!
Luckily for urbanites it doesn’t snow too often in Dodge… unless it gets really really really weird (and colder). You can have your rain, we’re enjoying our late summer drought, although rumours of a ‘heatwave’ are just that – weird rumours.
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Here’s the OWI Data global disasters graph again but I’ve removed earthquakes and volcanoes and left in only the extreme weather events.
Note that droughts and floods were the big killers up to 1960 when population was just 3 billion but much LOWER since 1960.
Of course 8.1 billion at risk in 2024 and very few deaths.
Again what’s their problem?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disaster-death-rates?country=Extreme+weather~Flood~Wildfire~Extreme+temperature~Drought
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I wonder what ‘weirdness’ turned the Sahara from grassland to desert in a short geologic time period?
If only the Egyptians had mandated E-Chariots.
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There are even rock carvings in the Sahara showing a savannah climate depicting hippos, rhinos, elephants, giraffes, bubalus, aurochs, and antelopes, something that does Leftist/warmist heads in because they believe in a static earth. I presume these images will soon be written out of history and/or the carvings destroyed. The Wikipedia article below seems very short, given the importance of this natural climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saharan_rock_art?wprov=sfla1
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I have always wondered but never looked it up. I was probably taught in primary school, but don’t remember.
Need a few weather stations to see what they are getting today.
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The weird thing is the lengths to which the Kult will go to convince themselves that their silly schemes and science are sensible.
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A few days ago US Energy Secretary Chris Wright talked about Africa and the hope that the US can partner with them and help them to develop.
But China is already financing them and the US will have to play catch for a while.
This video is about 12 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvHB4yqlrYM
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Both China and Russia have well developed links with African States. There seems to be a lot of interest in the Sahel (the strip of land across the coninent at the botton of the Sahara)
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Soon for Australians suffering under Albanese’s Communist government?: Bring your own electricity!
https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2025/03/12/report-cuban-public-offices-tell-visitors-bring-their-own-electricity/
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If you want the police to come out in Zambia you take a gerry can of fuel. You can just pick them up, but then you just need to take them back to their station again whenever the matter you want resolved is resolved.
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There must be a prize out there for the next alarmist descriptor for theoretical man made climate change. Global warming became climate change -> climate catastrophe-> climate armageddon -> climate weirding. Then throw in biological system collapse, oceans boiling, tipping points- it never ends. Good thing I don read the Guardian or the SMH or the Melbourne Age or even watch their ABC.
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The wilder the better. In the absence of anything happening and after half a century of failed predictions , I think most of the public has stopped listening and now hears all that as chicken little background BS noise.
Every new coordinated buzz phrase just puts another chink in their credibility.
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It’s an absolute guaranteed bet,
That cities can be dry and then wet,
Or wet and then dry,
Which no warmist can deny,
And not a weird climate-change threat.
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The alarmists at it again.
Global warming
Climate change
Global wierding
Climate whiplash
They keep trying to grab the attention of the public by changing the name of their imaginary crisis.
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I wondered whether we had suffered through the threat of climate armageddon. I looked it up online.
Yep. Been there. Done that. And apocalypse. So what’s after armageddon? I looked it up online.
According to one source what comes next is … https://www.gotquestions.org/end-times-timeline.html
The judgment of the nations. Christ will judge the survivors of the tribulation, separating the righteous from the wicked as “sheep” and “goats” (Matthew 25:31–46). (It is thought that at this time the Old Testament saints will be raised from the dead.) The righteous will enter the Millennial Kingdom; the wicked will be cast into hell.
The good news is that in the end will be …
The new creation. God completely remakes the heavens and the earth. It is at this time that God wipes away all tears and there will be no more pain, death, or sorrow. The New Jerusalem descends from heaven, and the children of God will enjoy eternity with Him (Revelation 21–22).
So there is that to look forward to … if you’ve been good boys and girls.
Personally, I think I may be in a little trouble!
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The golden orb controls our earthly climate.
https://judithcurry.com/2024/04/18/how-we-know-that-the-sun-changes-the-climate-part-i-the-past/
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And? Are you saying that this is the only way climate is controlled. Urban heat Islands, deforestation, chemical changes to the atmosphere, can have not effect on local or world climates
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What chemical changes to the atmosphere of any significance?
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None of those things are significant when it comes to climate change.
Have another look at the China recharge graph and you’ll see a sine wave, indicating an astronomical force.
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Global warming began before the Industrial Revolution, which sort of leaves CO2 out of the equation.
‘Scientists at the University Western Australia Oceans Institute studied long-lived Caribbean sclerosponges and created an ocean temperature timeline dating back to the 1700s.
‘While the study claims that we surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius in 2020, other scientists question if data from just one part of the world is enough to capture the immense thermal complexity of our oceans.’ (Popular Mechanics)
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Ponder the CET and ask yourself whether the spike in temps around 1740 was caused by something other that CO2?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_England_temperature#/media/File:CET_1659_-_2014_using_Hadley_Centre_Data.png
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Honestly Peter. Get a better bot.
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I’m assuming you’re missing a question mark on your last question.
From el gordo’s link:
When you have a study deflecting critics by stating that “the Sun does not affect temperature” you’re in trouble.
.
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UHI has a non climatic distorting effect on the temperature record. It is NOT a measure of climate change. This has been known for a long time:
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/10/4/1520-0469_1953_010_0244_otcoio_2_0_co_2.xml
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So how many of our climate astrologer bloggers really think that the world will reach their so called net zero by 2030 or 2050?
You can check out co2 emissions since Dr Hansen’s Washington DC yap in 1988 and then tell us how this well take place?
The wealthy OECD countries emitted slightly under what we emitted 35 years ago while the NON OECD are emitting about 15.42 billion tons more per year in 2023.
The World also emitted about 15.42 billion tons more co2 in 2023 than was emitted in 1988. And all due to the NON OECD countries’ increase in annual co2 emissions.
Check out the OWI Data link and I’ve also included shipping and aviation annual co2 emissions as well.
BTW the world’s annual co2 emissions trend per year has shown a fairly steady trend for the last 74 years.
So how will that annual co2 emissions trend start to drop? Anyone have any ideas? Again the Royal Society tells us it would take thousands of years to reduce co2 levels, even if we stopped all Human co2 emissions today. Again who do the lefty extremists and fantasists believe?
So how does wasting 100s of TRILLIONs of $ FOREVER help the OECD countries’ citizens and why don’t the NON OECD countries show any net zero enthusiasm?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?country=Non-OECD+%28GCP%29~OECD+%28GCP%29~International+shipping~International+aviation~OWID_WRL
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“Climate Astrologers”. Very good analogy. kudos
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Around here we go for droughts and floods; our daughter’s place was flooded for 35 days. It didn’t do the recently renovated pasture a lot of good. Perhaps we should call her place Whiplash Farm?
I was reminded, in this article, of Dorothea McKellar’s poem. Maybe it should be retitled ‘My Whiplash Country’?
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I love a whiplashed country,
A land of soggy plains,
Of turbine-covered ranges,
Of dunkelflautes and gushing drains.
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Very good – looks like Ruairi has a competitor. Maybe we can get a rhyming match every day?. Winner gets a free subscription to this blog. (what’s that – oh, it’s free already?).
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Cheers, but l didn’t write it from scratch. Just took Annie’s cue and rehashed the most renowned verse from Dorothea’s poem on my lunch break.
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POST NOTE: See this is the tragedy of one-sided government funded science. The people writing these junk studies up probably think they are doing a decent job, they just don’t realize how vacuous this is because there is never any criticism of green-promo-science. They’ve never attended a conference where someone talked about long term drought cycles, they don’t know there are 10,000 proxies that show continuous variation in every climate parameter. If they had been reeled back in a few times as honours students they wouldn’t grow up to be scientists making these baby mistakes.
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Much of the language quoted in the Guardian article ranges from vague, unqualified non-factual statements to attempts to create the next melodramatic climate catchphrase. Climate whiplash? The phrase is chosen for effect rather than an accurate summarisation.
I remember back in the day at high school in English class being asked to analyse articles to see if they demonstrated elements of bias or simply reported the facts objectively. One can only hope that such lessons are continuing to be taught in class rooms today.
The climate gobbledygook quoted from the “scientists” in the article is an indication that science is drifting away from its principles and toward an era in which headlines outweigh facts.
Hopefully a few bright minds navigate their way through the academic system and are able to shed some light on the future.
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There will be another enlightenment. We won’t be around to see it. But I refuse to believe that humanity had its one shot and blew it.
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Headlines determine grants.
Grants determine tenure.
Tenure determines facts.
Q.E.D.
So, Jon Rattin, you are right.
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Jo, as part Native American (in the Elizabeth Warren way) … I take slight offense at the native American headdress in the illustration for this post.
I doubt that my great, great, great cousin three times removed on my mother’s side, would stand out in the open in the lightening.
Especially in a lab coat.
(Note: the beard is also ahistorical.)
However, the depicted hair style tradition I still maintain to this day.
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“Most places we looked at are changing in some way, but in ways that are not always predictable,” Singer said.”
And they used to be predicted without error!
Could it be we are loosing our ability to predict rather than the changes becoming more unpredictable.
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Either the models are, ahem, ‘poor’, or the scientist is no good.
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[Or both, of course!]
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In other news, Mickey Mann has been declared a liar by the judge.
https://x.com/RyanMaue/status/1899863562333389272
He can now forget that Nobel Prize for sure.
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