JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).

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Statistics
I really hope they vote conservative, but I suspect America’s cousins in the Great White North have learned nothing from the past decade and will vote liberal yet again. Trump’s needling of Canada as the 51st state and the tariffs have really ramped up the level of Trump Derangement Syndrome among the residents of America’s Hat, and the feeling I am getting from my Canuck friends is that the conservative party is going to reap the whirlwind from Trump sowing the wind.
But who knows? Maybe the liberal comeback over the past few months will turn out to be a media ‘horse race’ narrative and not real. Hope springs eternal.
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There is a very big problem with most elections, namely one usually has to vote for a politician. This means that in all probability you will be voting for someone who has no knowledge of energy, the environment, mechanisms of climate change and science in general. It also means that your politician will think that what he has been told by his scientific advisers is true. Bankers that become politicians are particularly to be feared if they have been sold on the idea of anthropogenic global warming and the need to decarbonise the economy!
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I have for many years used the aphorism “No matter who you vote for, a politician gets elected” when I run across people arguing the ‘virtues’ of voting for one candidate over another.
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Here in Oz the incumbent PM is streets ahead for a few simple reasons!
1) he’s a better & more profuse liar.
2) he makes & breaks promises as often as he visits the toilet.
3) We have a really thick electorate who believe his lies & promises due to the attention span & memory of said electorate, being comparable with that of a retarded goldfish. After all we’ve just suffered 3 years of lies & broken promises which the majority have apparently forgotten, whist being “ taken “ for a second time.
Go figure!!😵💫😵💫
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Yes, the Liberals in Canada are ahead in the polls, but an upset victory for conservatives is possible. Comments from political pollster Brian Lilley.
“Elections are decided by those who bother to show up. Which is why a Conservative victory on Monday is still possible and desirable.
We’ve seen a lot of change in the polls already this year from a 15-20 point lead for the Conservatives at the start of the year, to a 12-point lead for the Liberals near the start of the campaign to some polls in the last week having the two parties tied or a slight lead for one or the other. As my maxim goes, voters are fickle, polls can change and campaigns matter.
He also noted a trend over the last several election cycles: Voters are making their minds up late.
“Increasingly, it’s in the last 72 hours. And the reason for that is because partisan attachment isn’t what it used to be,” Bricker said.
“People are making up their minds very late in the election campaign. And, you know, in most of our polls, and we do this globally, in the range of, you know, 5% to 10% actually make up their mind the day they’re voting or actually in the booth. So, there’s still a lot to play for and the momentum at the moment is on the Conservative side.”
We know who Carney’s voters are, they tend to be older, in the 55-plus category. They are retired more often than Conservative voters, and they are wealthy.
This is the most reliable voting block there is in Canadian politics and until Mark Carney and the Liberals harnessed their fear of Donald Trump, many of these voters would have backed Pierre Poilievre.
That said, Millennials and Gen-Z voters far outnumber Baby Boomers now and if those younger voters show up, then victory will go to Poilievre.
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What percentage of Canadians had even heard of this Carney person prior to several weeks ago?
And now he will be PM?
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Honk, Trudeau resigned (since he was losing by the 15-20 points) so they could make Carney PM, and he could run as the incumbent. But his baggage has been made known to the public:
https://rclutz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/canada-carney-outsider.png
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Sorry, poorly worded.
I knew he was current party appointed PM.
How well known was he to the average Canadian before?
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Strangely, if you do a Goolag search for “terrorist attack Canada” without quotes, you only get the news of the one in Kashmir in India.
You get nothing about the terrorist attack in Vancouver that killed 11 people and injured many more.
Oh, the driver who drove into the crowd had “mental health issues” it officially wasn’t terrorism.
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Not their first incident like that either, I wonder what the word ‘terrorism’ means these days?
I would’ve expected it, at the least, to be called a racist attack.
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Revolting ! So many words in that article but no name of the suspect !
00
THE SOURCE OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 ?
Motivated by recent comments by TdeF about the amount of CO2 contained in the oceans I decided to search for an image I remembered from the Orbiting Carbon Observer 2 satellite (OCO-2). My motivation was to look for evidence of outgassing from upwelling deep cold ocean bottom water. The image is here;
https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/PIA18934_modest.jpg
The concentration of CO2 is not quite uniform and varies from place to place with some “hot spots” of CO2 shown in orange/red while areas of lower CO2 are shown as blue/green.
I had anticipated finding the red spots along the west coasts of South America, Africa and Australia, because those areas are said to be places where cold bottom water upwells to the surface. That is not what I found! At the time of publication climate scientists had supposed that the “hot spots” would be found over the industrialised areas of the USA and Europe but that did not happen either. There is a “hot spot” over China.
The surprising thing for me is the “hot spots” over land areas of South America and Africa. These areas cannot be described as heavily industrialised. So what is causing the increased CO2?
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The original OCO mission was a launch failure in 2009. OCO-2 was launched in 2014 and is still active.
https://www.google.com/search?q=oco2+and+oco+3&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-au&client=safari
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I am still wondering how CO2 warms the Earth?
Yes, I know that CO2 absorbs a small amount of infrared in the Troposphere, but that is about 200K (or minus 60-70℃).
Assuming it does absorb then what does it do with that heat? It might do one of
radiate it down to the ground
radiate it to surrounding gas molecules in the Troposphere
radiate it out to Space
Pack the IR and have it sent (with police escort) to Swiss Bank vaults.
Option a) means that the ground would show warming but that doesn’t seem to be the case – even to those capable (they say!) of measuring 0.04℃.
Option b) means the Troposphere would be warming, but that doesn’t seem to be the case – even to those capable (they say!) of measuring 0.04℃.
Option c) would mean that the Earth doesn’t warm at all,
So that leaves Option d). At the very least we should demand that they pay the cost of police escorts.
The problem is that the Earth has been warmer at low levels of CO2 in the past, and cooler at higher levels of CO2 and these intervals occurred when Swiss Bankers weren’t around.
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When the results don’t make sense, it probably means you’re not measuring what you thought you were..
How many people in South America cook on an open fire? Plenty do in Africa still. Would that explain the high CO2 in Indonesia? ..and in the Pacific north of NZ?
The lack of CO2 along the equator is odd too, with global warming pushing it out of the oceans you would expect it to be highest at the equator and less where it is cooler.
Puzzling, so its a good thing it is irrelevant.
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Your last paragraph reminded me of the Lake Nyos disaster on 21 August 1986 when 1,700 folk and 3,500 livestock perished due to release of carbon dioxide from the crater lake in Cameroon.
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Could be related to soil outgassing of CO2? Hotter soils also tend to outgas CO2, with some soils worse than others. It’s why C sequestration via soil inputs (eg high crop trash incorporation in farming) wont work in hot soils, like in Australia. The sequestered C just gets oxidised to CO2 under warmer temps anyway. My impression of African soils are that they tend to be red soils (Red Ferrosols or Kraznosems) which may be more prone again compared to dark soils.
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Reply to Peter C – Look at deforestation in South America, Southern Africa & Indonesia in that time period. Australia was still deforesting for agriculture over that time period too, but its land mass was a CO2 sink because of vegetation ‘thickening’ on the much greater land mass area not being cleared. Probable cause – reduction in burning activity following the introduction of domestic livestock & greatly improved management & ability to control fires after WWII.
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Looks like the Houthis might be a bit short of Iranian missiles for a while.
https://youtu.be/da6yaP7BiFk
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PETER HITCHENS: You’ve been fed propaganda nonsense about Ukraine and the invented Russian menace. These are the lies you’ve been told
(paywalled)
I read a German translation I translated
from here
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What source is Grayzone, a good one?
https://thegrayzone.com/2025/04/23/uk-intel-ukraines-krynky-invasion/
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Fascinating, and quite expected in every detail. It has become clear the Brits are the ones pushing Ukraine to sacrifice itself to hurt Russia.
Maybe this is why he ended up in London as Ambassador.
“Britain – “perhaps Ukraine’s most active and determined ally” – had been pressuring Kiev to use marines “for waterborne operations and deceptive manoeuvres” since the proxy conflict began. However, these proposals reportedly “did not resonate” with then-Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi or President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
This changed in early 2023, when Britain dispatched a senior delegation to meet with Zaluzhnyi in Kiev, where London’s contingent promised to provide the Ukrainians with anything and everything they needed to conduct the “waterborne operations” the UK had so far avoided. According to Ukrainska Pravda, this came to pass in May 2023, when “the British team persuaded Zaluzhnyi, and he said: that’s it, we’re creating the Marine Corps.””
The Russians fell back from their front line at Mykolaiv, because they knew they couldn’t keep an army supplied across the Dnieper. It took the British to prove that was true…
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Bumped
FWIW
“Why the UK/EU fights Russia”
https://rumble.com/v6slvqx-why-the-ukeu-fights-russia.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp
01
“What source is Grayzone, a good one?”
Obviously part of the Russian Govt and puts out pure propaganda, none of which any reasonable British subject would read…
“The Grayzone has revealed Donnelly as a key figure behind a secret British military and spying cell dubbed Project Alchemy, which was created in early 2022 to keep Ukraine fighting “at all costs.” A core component of that effort was to silence journalistic voices and media outlets – including this one – deemed a threat to London’s control of the proxy war’s narrative…Professor Sakwa has long challenged dominant Western narratives on Putin’s Russia, criticizing both NATO’s rampant expansionism and its refusal to include Moscow in the European security structure following the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, he was effectively disappeared from mainstream debates on the conflict since the Ukraine proxy war erupted…While recently smeared as a Kremlin apologist and “disinformation” peddler in certain quarters, Sakwa’s works have historically elicited glowing mainstream reviews. ”
No!! Surely the world’s bastion of free speech and freedom wouldn’t be silencing critics of British Govt policy!! Oh wait, didn’t they just jail women for their facebook posts??
https://thegrayzone.com/2025/04/01/british-intel-top-russia-academic-leaks/
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Strangely no word here about Shahid Rajaee Port explosion.
I have got a feeling that is a game changer in military sense of course, but more drastically – more hardships to plain Iranians.
Yes, there are plain Iranians, like there are plain Russians.
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