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By Jo Nova
Where do people live?
These marvelous spike maps mark out a 3D representation of the population density on each two-kilometer-square pixel of Earth’s surface. There are no outlines for countries, yet for the most part we can still see where the land meets the sea.
Credit goes to Alistair Rae, formerly a professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Sheffield. He used the EU’s population density data with the mapping tool Aerialod to create these glorious 3D maps.
And the map shouts “India”.
UPDATE: Do click to see the larger maps!
Alistair Rae, Stats, Maps n Pix Click to enlarge | CC 2.0
This is the global distribution of 8 billion people. The abundance of South East Asia is undeniable, as is the emptiness of the Sahara and the vacancy of Siberia. Antarctica is an invisible continent.
Australia and New Zealand are barely there. We can see how isolated Perth Australia is (where I live).
Annotated by Jo to show friends in the USA where Perth is.
Hawaii and Auckland likewise, stand apart.
Most maps originally came from Alastair Rae on Twitter in 2020 and later from the Visual Capitalist […]
Emden, Germany by Gritte, @gritte
By Jo Nova
Germany is at the leading edge of the climate wars and the Greens are starting to lose both in polling and policy. Despite the claims that the energy crisis will push everyone into renewables, one year later, the dominant energy source for German electricity is coal, up by eight percentage points to 33% of generation.
While the world is supposedly caught in a renewable rush to 2030, the German government just announced it will build 25 gigawatts of gas powered plants by 2030 so they are there when “when [the] wind and sun do not provide enough”. And this week Germany is doing a backflip on their recent EU deal to ban sales of petrol and gas powered cars by 2035. It appears now they will ban the ban, rather than the car, and Germany has the power in the EU to do that. Though it’s not freedom to buy any car you want, but quixotic car loophole.
It’s still a mess of awful, subsidized craziness in a futile quest to control the clouds — but there are signs it is getting less crazy.
Thanks to NetZeroWatch for the links:
[…]
By Jo Nova Remember how the war with Ukraine was going to accelerate the green energy revolution?
The Flakpanzer Gepard needs more ammo, not solar panels. Photo By Hans-Hermann Bühling
For some reason, unreliable wind and solar power are not helping German industry build more tank ammunition. Instead, the federal government is allegedly talking to the state governments about taking green subsidies and spending the money on factories to build shells instead. And they are building those factories near the coal plants.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the chief of Germany’s army warned that sending weapons and arms to Ukraine has left military stockpiles “bare”.
Germany led the way in the great Green Energiewende transformation spending in the order of €32 billion a year, every year, in a quest for green electrons. Instead of creating peace on Earth and better weather, it just made the legendary economic powerhouse of Europe weak and vulnerable.
Tell the world, if the Germans can’t run a nation efficiently on “renewable” power, who can?
It’s perhaps not the Reset Klaus had in mind:
Great Reset Fail? Germany Mulls Diverting Green Agenda Cash Aimed at Killing Coal to Arms Industry
Kurt […]
By Jo Nova
What if the news media formed a global monopoly to control the news?
Imagine if the media and tech giants of the world banded together behind-the-scenes to rule certain stories were “misinformation” and all their agencies thus reported the same “news”?
That’s what the Trusted News Initiative aimed to do — decide what ideas were and were not allowed to be discussed.
It’s like “free speech” but without the free part.
Not only could the media bury things but they could get away with it if no upstart competitor could red-pill their audience.
It would be the death of the Free Press
In a world like that the people would be ruled mostly by whomever it was that decided what was “misinformation”. Those controllers would be the defacto Ministry of Truth.
We all saw it happen over the last three years, so it’s good to put a name on the beast, but even better, Robert F Kennedy is suing them for anti-trust violation.
Trusted News Initiative, TNI,
The Trusted News Initiative is everything journalists should hate. It’s basically there to “protect” voters from hearing about things like the Hunter-Biden Laptop, good climate news and […]
By Jo Nova
The headline is a PsyOp all on its own. You didn’t know you were not allowed to eat crickets and powdered mealworm larvae before. Rejoice in a freedom won:
Europeans now also allowed to eat cricket powder and small mealworms
Retail Detail
The European Commission declares new insect products safe for consumption. So from Tuesday, powdered house crickets and the small mealworm will also be allowed in food.
Back in February last year, the European Union announced that three species of insects would henceforth be allowed for human consumption: the migratory spider cricket, the yellow mealworm and the house cricket. Now the European Commission is adding several more insect products to the authorised list…
Insects, they tell us, are “highly nutritious” in a vague non-specific way that does not list a single nutrient which we can’t get enough of at the moment. Instead the main, “unique” selling point is that if we eat crickets we might slow storms eighty years from now:
Insects are also seen as part of the transition to a more environmentally friendly and plant-based food system. The creatures emit less greenhouse gases, have a lot […]
By Jo Nova
Kap København is almost the closest point there is to the North Pole on dry land.
The survival of some DNA for two million years is astounding all of itself — breaking the record for oldest known DNA by nearly a million years. Before this, the oldest DNA was thought to be 1.2 million years — beyond which all the global DNA of all the species that ever lived was assumed to be dissolved into unreadable mush.
But now we have found enough of the ancient code to identify a whole ecosystem on the northern edge of Greenland that no one expected to find. Apparently giant elephant-like Mastodons were wandering the far northern parts of Greenland — practically as close as they could get to the North pole without swimming.
At the time, the world was not just 1.5 catastrophic degrees warmer than today, but a full nuclear 10 to 17 degrees hotter.
Strangely life on Earth wasn’t suffering the sixth mass extinction.
Discovery of world’s oldest DNA breaks record by one million years
ScienceDaily
The incomplete samples, a few millionths of a millimetre long, were taken from the København Formation, […]
By Jo Nova
The impossible conundrum: Going Netzero cancels your ability to get to Netzero
The industrial death spiral grows: Europe is the king of renewables and it’s also got the most expensive energy in the world making it impossible for the EU to make the things it needs to get to NetZero.
The EU lost their solar panel factories to China years ago, and the wind industry was worried they were going the same Sino way the solar industry went. A few months ago, the Vestas chief admitted that they were losing money on every wind turbine they sell. (Good thing their orders were collapsing, eh?)
Now the Volkswagen chief warns that things are so expensive, it soon won’t be viable to make electric cars and batteries in Europe either — which must be a bit of nasty surprise given that they just started building the first of six planned battery factories in Europe.
How fast those balance sheets change…
Naturally, the whole industry is calling for more subsidies. Obviously they can’t ask for what they really need, cheap energy.
‘We are treading water:’ An energy crisis is grinding European industry to a halt as the U.S. and […]
Far from being destroyed overnight as the Australian ABC told was possible, Twitter has come to life. Banned Twitter accounts are reappearing like Jordan B Peterson.
Elon Musk ran a poll on reinstating Donald Trump which was pulling in a million votes an hour at one point. Elon Musk then declared that Donald J Trump’s account will be restored. And it appears to be live, though missing 75 million followers, and Trump himself, who still says he’ll stay on Truth Social.
Elon Musk tweeted, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” which means “the voice of the people is the voice of God.’
….
It’s is encouraging the vote was evenly split. It suggests Twitter might be able to be able to be a “town square”.
However the Corruptocracy that depends on censorship are not finished yet, and an EU spokesman said Musk will have to open his algorithms (did the EU demand this of the last owners?). Thierry Breton the EU’s internal market commissioner said Musk will have to “fly by our rules” and that he will have to increase the number of moderators in Europe. Breton said “we will have control, we will have access, people will no longer […]
by Jo Nova
For years they told us that the green transition would deliver cheap energy, and that if we just subsidized them enough, prices would keep falling. The promise of free energy on the horizon led whole nations (stupidly) to believe that closing coal plants was viable. But now that damage is done, suddenly the Vestas chief admits that telling people that wind can only get cheaper “was a mistake”.
“Vestas CEO says industry went too far with cheap-energy pledge”
Vestas Wind Turbine
There is carnage in Europe. Orders and profits are collapsing. The largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world has already raised prices by more than 30% this year but despite that, expects its profit margins to shrink to “minus five percent”.
Lucky their orders are down since they are losing money on every turbine.
The fall in sales landed as inflation bites, supply lines are squeezed and their costs are rising. (After all, wind turbine factories can’t run off wind turbines, they’re paying for expensive electricity too). So suddenly Vestas need to raise their prices even more, and their CEO is hoping a belated apology will somehow bring their market back.
Renewable […]
“It’s difficult to imagine it could be accidental”
The leaks are massive
Indeed “leak” does not seem like the right word.
@JavierBlas
The explosions are marked with stars.
The sites are 75 kilometers apart just outside official Danish territory.
Euronews –– Swedish national broadcaster SVT reported that national seismologists had registered “two clear explosions” around the area, first at 2:03 AM and then at 7:04 PM (CET) on Monday.
Hours after the explosions, coincidentally, Gazprom also warned that one of the two remaining major pipelines to Europe was at risk due to a legal dispute over fees. Gazprom was refusing to pay a transit fee that the Ukrainian energy firm said it was supposed to pay.
At this stage everyone is saying the leaks are sabotage, but no one is claiming to know anything for sure. The US government has said it is ‘ready to provide support’ to Europe.
So, below, this is quite an awkward flashback, to say the least. It’s from February when Joe Biden was trying to talk Russia out of invading Ukraine:
Biden: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream […]
A moment of hope in Civilization. Some elections appear to produce a result the unelected EU powerbase is not happy with. The speech trending on Twitter today after the historic win by the ultra far right fascist extremist who is practically Mussolini’s granddaughter (so they want you think, in echo’s). As an insight into the new PM of Italy, and also into the “free media” that portrays her as a danger to democracy, listen to her words.
Giorgia Meloni’s speech at the World Congress of Families 2018
I believe the state should incentivize the natural family based on marriage…
every choice has consequences and you accept responsibility for them…
I reject a society where every desire becomes a right.
On parents being the ones who know whats best for their child but only when it comes time to turn off the life support:
Why is the winner always the one who wants to disconnect the plug? Why is the winner always death?
Why do we spend all our time fighting all types of discrimination but we pretend not to see the greatest ongoing persecution, the genocide of the world’s Christians. […]
by Jo Nova
Quick, save the world now! Create nice weather and peace on Earth with coercive bargaining, threats and deprivation.
The PETA-FemoNazi recipe to stop floods and hot weekends is to demand men give up meat or live without sex. There’s no more persuasion for civilization — according to PETA it’s their way or the highway, and most men must be too stupid to realize the PETA powers of climate prophesy are unquestionable. After all, there’s no chance that animal activists could be fooled by emotional soppy propaganda pushed by Global bankers, billionaires and UN industrial cartels, right? PETA can tell those moist adiabatic lapse rates from the missing tropospheric hot spots. If only men could too!
PETA strays so far out their lane they end up in orbit. They alternately blame bad weather on meat-eating, then on men, on toxic masculinity and then they blame the babies too. It’s breathtaking in grandiose, overbearing, imperious intolerance. Apparently omnivorous men don’t deserve to have babies. A ban on procreation for meat-eating-men would be… purposeful. They actually say that. Your value to the world is measured in tons of carbon. A bit like a farm animal really? Except PETA select […]
The Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline from Russia to a desperate Europe was supposed to re-open yesterday, instead, Russia announced that it will remain closed due to an oil leak, indefinitely. The announcement was made after markets closed. Germany has about 3 months of gas in storage.
Gas prices are expected to rise Monday.
Ukraine war: Russia to keep key gas pipeline to EU closed
By Robert Plummer & Oliver Slow BBC News
Faisal Islam, the BBC’s economics editor, described the indefinite closure of Nord Stream 1 as a very serious development, noting that Russia had kept supplies into Europe flowing even at the height of the Cold War.
The stand-off with Russia has forced countries to fill their own gas supplies, with Germany’s stores increasing from less than half in June to 84% full today.
Apparently this is the oil spill that shut down a billion dollar pipeline:
Just bad luck then?
Twitter commenters have some doubts:
@PolemicTMM –– Masterful trolling of the EU by Mr P.
@PrivatinvestN — Is this a Friday night joke or have they actually published this?
@JavierBlas — They did. […]
It’s just another day in the global energy crisis: Years of climate goals are evaporating
When your currency is backed by renewables… | 1 year of Euro/USD
The threat of the Russians cutting off gas completely through Nord stream 1 has focused Europe on the blessings of coal and the reality of surviving winter with only windmills and solar panels to keep warm.
Germany, France, Austria, Netherlands, and the UK have already changed plans to shut coal plants or have plans to revive old ones. Poland is buying coal directly for homes. Hungary has now also declared a state of emergency and said it will boost gas production and stop exports. No sharing allowed now.
Only two years ago Greece was going green — phasing out brown coal but now the Greek power corporation has been told to stop the phase out of coal. Last year lignite provided only 5% of the electricity in Greece, now the aim is 20%.
Hungary declares ‘state of emergency’ over threat of energy shortages
Euronews
Budapest says it will boost its annual production of natural gas from 1.5 billion cubic metres to 2 billion cubic metres. The […]
In France the government is banning events “because of a heatwave” of 40 degrees C (104F) — as if adult mammals cannot figure out whether the temperature is too hot for their own health. Ancestors of mice and rats worked out their own temperature sensors and behaviour changes 200 million years ago. It’s a Big Government attempt to infantalize and gaslight the whole population. Will they obey?
It’s only the region around Bordeaux but will French teenagers accept being told to stay home in forty degree heat, something that millions of humans live with all over the world every summer?
The Counter Signal: Heatwave lockdowns: Region in France bans outdoor gatherings
“Everyone now faces a health risk,” official Fabienne Buccio told France Bleu radio, after announcing the regional restrictions around Bordeaux. Outdoor events – including, ironically, annual ‘Resistance’ celebrations – are banned until the officials declare the heatwave is over. They’re even restricting some indoor events that don’t have air conditioning.
BBC: Outdoor public events have been banned in an area of France as a record breaking heatwave sweeps across Europe.
Concerts and large public gatherings have been called off in the Gironde department around Bordeaux. […]
Once, when the West could build things, problems got solved
Back in 2007 at least a few people still remembered that golden era. Here’s Dr Ziggy Switkowski, who at the time was head of the Prime Minister’s nuclear task force:
The French in 15 years went from zero reactors to 59 reactors and 80% of their electricity is nuclear. — ABC
Now we don’t even dream of success. If we had started in 2007, Australia could have had ten plants finished already.
Back in the 1970s and 80’s eh? Wow look at that take off…
The first nuclear plant in France was built by the EDF in 1962. Then the 1972 oil crisis put a rocket under the industry. So Prime Minister Pierre Messmer came up with a plan to build an unbelievable 170 nuclear plants by 2000.
Theanphibian https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_in_France.svg
By the mid 1980s it was clear that would not happen, but not for the reasons you might think. The problem was not that they weren’t building plants fast enough, but that they were building them too fast. Demand wasn’t rising fast enough to keep up. The plants are most efficient running at 80-90% but by […]
Strategically, this seems like it matters.
The French nuclear power plants are the backbone of the EU grid, but this winter, just when Europe is trying to not-buy-Russian-Gas, the French might need to import power instead of export it.
France runs off 70% nuclear power — it’s highest proportion in the world, and the second largest fleet — after the USA. For some reason, known only to international bankers or Renewable Gods, Early in Macron’s reign, he decided to reduce the carbon-free reliable nukes to just 50% by 2035 and fill the gap with short-lived, unreliable generators that cost a lot, need storage, backup, rare metals from China and slave labor from the Congo. Perhaps he was afraid (or whoever it was that helped him get elected) that France would show up all the schmuck-countries going to renewables?
But then the gas crisis started in Europe last October, and like clockwork, in November President Macron muttered the words “energy independence” and belatedly announced that it wasn’t such a bad idea to build some new nuclear plants. As things got more serious, in late February the French nuclear safety authority decided to extend the life of the 32 oldest reactors for […]
Do EV’s make good reefs?
h/t to Paul Homewood who notes The BBC didn’t mention the burning lithium battery story.
The Felicity Ace cargo ship caught fire on Wednesday last week:
German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that an internal email from Volkswagen USA stated that the ship was carrying 3,965 vehicles of the VW, Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini brands.
It’s not clear if the fire started in an EV battery but once the flames got into them, the ship was abandoned to burn.
According to a study done in 2013 by the German Federal Ministry of Transport, Building, and Urban Development, the batteries burn extremely hot and produce noxious gases.
“In the event of a lithium ion battery catching fire, it is important to note that such a fire reaches very high temperatures, produces toxic gases and is inextinguishable,” the report concluded. — The Independent
Five days later the fire has finally run out of material to consume.
Now Felicity Burnt. | Reuters
Luxury cars on fire on cargo ships is a thing now
March 12th, 2019: The Grande America caught fire with 2,000 luxury cars on board and sank.
[…]
It’s not even winter yet but suddenly all eyes are on the gas prices
Gas through the roof…
Thanks to fear of climate change voodoo many nations in the EU have effectively stopped exploring for gas and decided not to frack their shale deposits to get cheap gas too. (In Australia too). Vainglorious governments aimed to change the weather instead of having cheap electricity and lo, wind-towers were built everywhere.
What could possibly go wrong? Nearly everything.
Even the massive size of the European market hasn’t saved them from price rises so large that retail suppliers are collapsing, and fertilizer factories are closing.
Its a great way to give your enemies the upper hand
The wind drought in spring and summer meant that wind farms failed. Then the Russians squeezed gas supply in to the EU looking suspiciously like they were hoping to push up prices and pressure Germany into approving the controversial Nordstream 2 pipeline. Now the Kremlin is suggesting a quick approval will alleviate the gas shortage (they’re just trying to help). In the latest news one large interconnector between the UK and France has suffered a fire and broken down and won’t be restored til […]
From Pierre Gosselin at No Tricks Zone:
Germany needs 80GW of electricity. It has 40GW of installed solar PV.
See the graph: The red line is what the country used, and the orange bumps are the solar contribution.
Clearly, solar power will take over the world.
…
In December, Germany got ten hours of sunlight. That’s not a daily figure, that’s the whole month. So in summer on a sunny day, solar PV can make half the electricity the nation needs for lunch. In winter, almost nothing. From fifty percent, to five percent.
Imagine what kind of havoc this kind of energy flux can do. Not one piece of baseload capital equipment can be retired, despite the fact that half of it is randomly unprofitable depending on cloud cover. Solar PV eats away the low cost competitive advantage. Capital sits there unused, spinning on standby, while wages, interest, and other costs keep accruing. So hapless baseload suppliers charge more for the hours that they do run, making electricity more expensive.
They just need batteries with three months supply. It will be fine once Germany turns the state of Thuringia into a redox unit.
Read about it: Dark Days […]
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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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