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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Amazon forest felled to build road for climate summit
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9vy191rgn1o
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Carbon Capture Scam Does Not Even Offset Its Own Emissions
From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Paul Weldon
Read the full story here.
…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/05/17/carbon-capture-scam-does-not-even-offset-its-own-emissions/
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AFD party in Germany probably won’t be banned after all as report asking for it appears to be deeply flawed
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/05/16/spy-agency-report-on-the-alleged-extremism-of-afd-turns-out-to-be-so-stupid-that-it-destroys-all-momentum-for-banning-the-party/
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Unfortunately the full article from the Daily Sceptic is paywalled but this segment of an article by Ben Pile on a solar farm in Suffolk, gives a good idea of the utter stupidity of solar farms in the UK.
“Using Google Maps, it is possible to calculate the size of these two plants. The solar farm occupies an area of 366,678 square metres. The ‘B’ part of the Sizewell site (including the visitor centre and car parks but excluding the older, ‘A’ site) occupies roughly 233,082 m2. In other words, the nuclear plant is about two thirds the size of the solar farm.
The nameplate capacity of the solar farm is 19.525 megawatts (MW). But because of the unfortunate rotation and seasonal tilting of the Earth, this is very far from the farm’s output. According to renewable energy generating data, the farm’s output has deteriorated since its installation in 2013. In 2014, it achieved 11.3% of its capacity. But the average for three years to 2024 is just 8.6%, meaning that it provides an average of 14,778 megawatt hours (MWh) of power to the grid per year.
By stark contrast, the nuclear plant has a gross capacity of 1,250 MW. And it achieves well in excess of 80% capacity on a yearly basis. In 2022, it supplied 10,357 GWh to the grid – 700 times as much as the physically larger solar farm.
Talk of megawatts and square miles often yields little but glazed eyes. Whereas a pint of milk or a kilo (or perhaps a pound) of spuds are familiar to us all, quantities of energy, especially electricity, are difficult to comprehend. But perhaps the above picture helps to explain what we critics of Net Zero have been trying to say.
If the solar farm were to be expanded so that it could provide the same annual output as the nuclear power station – i.e., by 700 times its current size – it would have a footprint of 257 km² or nearly 100 square miles.”
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An article on the problems caused by solar and wind farms
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-climate-scaremongers-milliband/
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Digital driving licences to come to UK but physical ones will still be available (for now!)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/cars/article-14718917/Digital-driving-licence-arrive-soon-physical-ID-valid.html?ico=mol_desktop_home
These will be used on smartphones. There have been numerous cyber attacks over the last few weeks. We are rushing into a mad digital world. At present some 90000 smartphones are stolen a year in London alone. Most are resold overseas. However as our physical identity transfers ever more to the smartphone-already many people will be lost without them-its plain to see that peoples digitally based identities will increasingly be stolen.
In effect you will become a non person if the smartphone thief wants to sell your identity rather than wants to sell a physical smartphone.
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For the events in UK restricted to entry with a ‘COVID Vaccine pass’, I understand the un-jabbed youth who valued their ability to attend said events more than the need to tell anyone doing this to go to hell, were able to use a photo of a QR code taken on their phone from the phone of someone who was jabbed to gain entry.
This story got me thinking of that – the lack of a digital ID to link the phone – person – QR code was a reason for it’s failure.
Anyway, probably time to think about picking up a few different IDs for ourselves, just to have ready – use whichever one suits the occasion.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/05/hhs-anti-vax/682831/
But in their public comments, and in several publications, they contended that the virus was far less dangerous than most public-health officials thought, and that the measures that the U.S. was taking against it were far too extreme. They argued against mandates and boosters, especially for children and for young and healthy adults; they exaggerated the side effects of the shots, extolled the benefits of acquiring immunity through infection, and dismissed the notion that people who’d already had COVID should still get shots later on. In October 2020, Bhattacharya and a group of colleagues advocated for reopening society before vaccines had debuted; Makary, although initially supportive of COVID vaccines, went on to praise the Omicron variant of the virus—which at one point killed an average of 2,200 Americans each day—as “nature’s vaccine.” Prasad, meanwhile, has said that COVID-vaccine makers should be sued for the rare side effects caught and disclosed with standard monitoring. And Høeg, who’d previously worked with Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, influenced his decision to recommend against the COVID vaccine for healthy children.
But truly rigorous science also rests on the foundations of previous data—and a willingness to accept those data, even if they conflict with one’s priors.
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Just a transparency comparison:
Annual Report provided in the US on the status of regulation and reportable events during the period: https://www.selectagents.gov/resources/publications/annualreport/2023.htm
We only get the rules and regulations and forms but no reporting on what is actually happening: https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/ssba-regulatory-scheme
The Silent State: Secrets, Surveillance and the Myth of British Democracy contrasts the US openness to the UK closed shop. I fear we tend towards a closed shop and cover up more than transparency.
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