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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Here is the official UN website.
https://unfccc.int/cop30/
Parking for private jets is always a problem at the COP conferences.
I was concerned that there wouldn’t be enough parking for private jets but Goolag AI says they’re upgrading the airport and other facilities so there should be enough room to park your private jet.
I guess such indulgences is where your carbon taxes and other taxpayer tribute to the UN get spent.
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Also see https://unfccc.int/cop30/ifp
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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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“Carbon units”? Not heard of them before.
I’ll hazard a guess: 1 C U = 1 microgram of CO2??
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They continue to get away with using non-scientific and even nonsensical terminology or using inappropriate terminology (like “carbon” when they mean carbon dioxide) but they never get questioned about it except on esteemed sites like this one.
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I always thought that “Carbon Units” were those things that infected the USS Enterprise (See Star Trek: The Motion Picture) but according to the CarbonStore website:
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In Star Trek: The Motion Picture the V’Ger alien refers to the humans as “carbon units”.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/0a1bed6c-ab47-49a5-af00-893a9907e37e
Meanwhile in real life Voyager 1 is currently 22.5 light hours from earth. However the Voyager in Star Trek is the fictional Voyager 6.
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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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I see the current leader and Chancellor of Germany (as the largest party) has suddenly changed his mind about banning the AfD.
Could he be thinking ahead** and realises that a coalition between his “Conservatives” and the AfD would be a majority?
**Unlikely from his capitulations to The Greens since the election.
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If you want to read a rather caustic piece, by a German, about this whole sorry episode.
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/spy-agency-report-on-the-alleged
He must be walking a thin line given their pollies propensity to engage lawfare over criticism and satire.
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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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And make a lot more money for the proponents tapping the government largesse. This is the green dream.
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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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And the Dutch government has had to “delay” 2 offshore wind farms as no one will bid for the installation WITHOUT ANY SUBSIDIES.
If Australia adopted the Dutch way (NO subsidies) then we wouldn’t get any “cheapest source of electricity” would we?
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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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I would say 90000 is far to few.
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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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Media statements on RFK Jr vary according to which outlet they come from. All those with a left-wing bias, including news feeds like AAP and Reuters, will produce reports like this. But they keep quiet about the fact that all RFK Jr’s childten are vaccinated and that the mRNA Covid “vaccines” are not vaccines as defined at the time of the Wuhan outbreak. The latest left-wing obscenity is that RFK Jr’s attempt to make vaccines subject to the same industry-standard level of testing applied to all pharmaceuticals has been misrepresented as “anti-vaxx”.
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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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Here’s the part in V for Vendetta (2005) where the police inspector suspects that the government creates a virus that kills 100,000 people just so it can seize more power over the people.
Sounds a familiar scenario?
https://youtu.be/HbvsgpAXV2E
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Inside the CIA’s Secret War: How the U.S. and NATO Trained Ukraine to Target Russia | Redacted
28 minute video
https://rumble.com/v6th1pb-inside-the-cias-secret-war-how-the-u.s.-and-nato-trained-ukraine-to-target-.html
Fascinating topic.
Such depravity.
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OK, so the US and NATO helped Ukraine build its defences against Russia. If they did, that’s good, because in case you didn’t notice at the time, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine about three years ago, and penetrated quite a long way towards Kiev before Ukraine managed to stop them. Without those defences, Ukraine would now just be a part of Russia.
I hope the US can do the same for Taiwan when Xi Jinping launches his military at them.
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Here’s a fascinating video by Scott Manley about the interstellar software update that NASA had to do on Voyager 1 to correct the problem it developed causing it to send gibberish.
The problem is that it’s a nearly 50 year old spacecraft and the original programmers are no longer alive and documentation is scattered and the software systens are old and obsolete.
But they worked out what to do. I wish most contemporary programmers were so knowledgeable and so careful. The NASA engineers only got one chance, else they could “brick” it. Recall what happened due to the faulty update of Viking 1. Killed it.
The update was made even more difficult because it was done small portions at a time and the spacecraft is so far away that the round trip return time for radio signals is 45 hours.
https://youtu.be/p0K7u3B_8rY
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I guess that team can lay claim to the longest handled spanner set so far?
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In the following video Dr John Campbell talks about Herr Starmer’s insane experiments to blot out the sun.
There is a petition against it for UK people to sign.
US NOAA, now a pro-science agency under the TRUMP administration, are strongly warning against doing these experiments.
https://youtu.be/MQe17fBe7c4
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Frankly it is stupid but putting what amounts to a few boxes of SO2 into the upper troposphere is at best childish but likely a make work project for some B grade science grads and some sales grifters.
Think about a volcanic eruption its very big and I mean really big to quote the hitch hikers guide.
Fe fertilization of oceans that works and grows fish a lot of fish and makes shale.
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I wonder, could they hold all the data encrypted and throw away the keys?
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Paul Joseph Watson talks about the latest woke art in Times Square, NY, now being copied in European cities.
Like all “art” of the Left (usually taxpayer funded), utterly without merit.
https://youtu.be/6Ktd3gEmnI4
Here’s a related video:
Why is modern art so bad?
https://youtu.be/lNI07egoefc
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What’s your definition of ‘modern art’?
I like Impressionism onwards including Kandinsky, Miro and Klimt. The na*is in the thirties called it ‘degenerate art’.
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I think it’s fairly well explained in the second video, Tony.
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Matt Walsh talks about how TRUMP Administration is to remove mandatory car engine stop at traffic lights.
It’s always concerned me for reasons apart from being annoying. The loss of oil pressure during stopping must surely contribute to extra wear of the engine, unless there is an electric oil pump to keep the oil pressurised but I’m not sure if that’s done.
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One of the commenters on the video suggested that the stop/start “feature” was a deliberate annoyance introduced to encourage people to buy electric cars.
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Once I got used to it, I quite liked it, and reportedly it improves fuel economy too. But the idea that it should be mandatory is frankly ridiculous.
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Full story here: https://rmx.news/
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There are very few genuine environmentalists.
I can tell that because when I do bushwalks and wildness adventures I never see such people. Nor do I see them volunteering to do invasive weed removal or rubbish clean up.
“Environmentalism” is just another branch of the Left to regress society such as by destroying energy systems and other annoyances like the removal of plastic drinking straws and plastic bags at supermarkets.
And, in any case, plastic in the oceans comes from Third World countries where they dump rubbish everywhere including in rivers where it eventually gets into the ocean.
If so-called environmentalists genuinely cared for the environment (they don’t), they would be going to Third World countries (at their own expense) and teaching them not to litter and helping clean up their environment.
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FWIW
“Saving Greenery From the Greens”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/05/15/saving-greenery-from-the-greens/
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FWIW
“Trump’s Lesson in Remedial Education
by Dr James Allan 16 May 2025 5:00 PM”
Particularly legal education
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/05/16/trumps-lesson-in-remedial-education/
Via SDA
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FWIW
“Oops”
“Telegraph- Why Europe came to regret its ‘crippling’ nuclear power shutdown”
https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2025/05/17/oops-11/
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FWIW – more on bans of fluoride
“An entire era of conspiracy theories are quickly becoming conspiracy fact. Thursday, the Associated Press reported, “DeSantis signs a bill making Florida the 2nd state to ban fluoride from its water system.” It’s done! And the Florida ban takes effect in July, just over a month from now. I expect my horrible county to fight it, but the lawsuit practically writes itself.”
“Fluoride pushback is sweeping the country. According to an NPR story, five more states have pending anti-fluoride bills: Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and South Carolina. More anti-fluoride bills either failed or stalled in committee in North Dakota, Arkansas, Tennessee, Montana and New Hampshire. Other states like Hawaii, New Jersey, and Oregon already have fluoridation rates languishing in the low double digits.
Low-fluoride states like Hawaii don’t have epidemics of cavities, a fact the fake news media never mentions.”
More at
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/duly-processed-saturday-may-17-2025?
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