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By Jo Nova
It wasn’t supposed to be this cold and windless in Australia
For some reason that no climate model can explain, Australia has run out of wind power three months in a row, which means we had to use more gas than expected. It’s also been colder than climate models predicted, despite global emissions being higher than ever in history. For some other reason that no rational adult can explain, the State of Victoria banned gas drilling for most of the last decade (to reduce the beachy-weather days in eighty years) and thus, as night follows day, the state is running out of gas. Ergo, predictably, it is also facing blackouts, cost blowouts and manufacturers dependent on gas are warning they may have to close down, or move to the US, where gas is still cheap.
If only the climate models could predict temperatures and wind even a month in advance?
The AEMO (our electricity grid manager) says Victoria will run out of gas before winter runs out of bite. Apparently Victorians are pulling twice as much gas out of their main storage as they can afford to at the moment. Not only does Victoria need the […]
Greenland by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
By Jo Nova
We may be living through some of the best weather in the last 100,000 years
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone reports on a new paper showing the incredible extreme climate shifts of Greenland. During the depths of the last ice age Greenland temperatures would swing abruptly by 10 to 15 degrees Celsius (or 30F) in the space of 30 years. And we’re panicking at the moment about warming at 0.13°C per decade.
These Dansgaard–Oeschger (D–O) events occurred 24 times from 120,000 years ago until 11,000 years ago. There were no humans living there at the time, as far as we know. The best estimate is that people first arrived in Greenland 4,500 years ago. As far as we know, it’s only Greenland that was gyrating wildly in temperature but the bare truth about climate scientists is the expert models can’t predict or explain any of this. So the seismic shifts came and went and went and came, and it had nothing to do with whether you turned the airconditioner on.
If any poor sodding homo sapiens did manage to wash up on Greenland during the peaks 30 or 40,000 […]
Clearing in the Snowy Mountains. Geoff Wise on Facebook, June 4th 2024
By Jo Nova
It’s just another day on the job to save the world from man-made pollution
In a quest to make the weather a bit nicer in 100 years these trees needed to be cut down now so we can connect up a big hydropower “battery” for holy solar and wind power. The towers will be 75m high and the path through the forest, 140m wide.
When we ran off coal and gas power, we didn’t need pumped hydro. Fossil fuels protect the forests and hills of Australia.
These photos were posted by Geoff Wise on the “High Country of Australia” show us what our clean green future will look like:
“Here is where the power lines from the Snowy Hydro 2, at Lobs Hole, will cross the Tumut River ravine to go to the recently cleared site of the switching station in the Maragle State Forest, before heading north to feed into the National Power grid. The power lines will come from near the distant horizon. Look at the photos for more information. You can see this for yourself, as I was […]
By Jo Nova
The Renewable Crash Test Dummy hits a fork in the road
Finally the Australian opposition is bravely popping the sacred cow of the Energy Wars. The Dummy nation was aiming for the holy grail “low emission” grid that no other nation had tried. The driest continent on Earth, with small hydro, and no extension cords to any nuclear power, were going to build the perfect grid based on the wind and sun alone. It was always doomed to fail, it was just a question of how much money would be burned at the pyre before the Crash Test Dummy crashed.
Because they didn’t do their homework, and the fan-media didn’t ask them to, the Labor Party set themselves up to fail. They left their left flank wide open, and the Opposition is finally launching the missiles that have been there all along in the mist. The ultimate low-emissions generator was always and obviously the unspeakable nuclear power. It’s a fifty year old technology. If anyone actually cared about carbon dioxide, they would have done this instead of the Kyoto scheme in 1997. But it was all a theater of grift and graft for unreliable, fairy energy, […]
By Jo Nova
The cost problem is solved (for all the wrong reasons), but it’s still not enough
Around the world, governments are trying to force people to buy electric vehicles because they are nice people who are worried about polar bears. And since drivers out there all believe in climate change, according to all the pollsters, it shouldn’t be a big ask. (Who wouldn’t want to save the Earth?)
Supposedly, just 10 years from now, they told us, we wouldn’t be able to buy a new combustion engine car at all. Instead, not only are sales of new EV slowing rapidly, to the point where there is a glut, but as prices fall for used cars customers are not rushing out to pick up the cheaper second hand EVs either.
Look at how fast the turnaround in this market has been in the last year — a 25% price premium– gone:
Used EVs are now selling for thousands of dollars less, on average, than comparable gas-powered vehicles.
Kaya Ginsky, CNBC
The difference between the price of a used Tesla Model 3 and BMW 3 Series shows how a “premium” associated with EVs in the […]
By Jo Nova
We’ve reached a point of Maximal Bureaucratic Psychopathy in Science
That’s where committees of committees aim to improve your health by giving one human the ability to kill a billion.
NIAID image of Monkeypox
In 2015 a scientist at Anthony Fauci’s agency thought it would be neat to mix two Monkeypox strains together to make a nastier one. For no reason anyone can explain, the National Institutes of Health’s Institutional Review Board thought it would be neat too, and approved it.
A normal person might worry that doddery Joe Biden has the nuclear codes, but all along, unnamed, unaccountable countless others might have their fingers on equivalent bombs, and they won’t need to input any codes to set off the bombs, just have a bad day.
The idea was to mix a deadly but slow strain of monkey pox with a tamer monkey pox strain that spread quickly. This could have created a virus with the “best of both” — an agent with a 15% fatality rate and a reproduction rate of 2.4, which would make it very much “pandemic potential”. (With one infected person infecting 2.4 others, this was a similar rate of […]
By Jo Nova
Here we go again. It’s another round of the climate wars in Australia. It’s the issue that never dies, because global weather control is a stupid idea levitating on righteous indignation and a hundred billion dollars. As long as it floats, it’s the Hindenburg of National Energy Policy. It will only end when there’s nothing left to burn.
This time, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has said what all the grown ups already know — that the 82% renewables target by 2030 that Labor legislated is doomed and we should delay it. Two years after ignition, everyone knows the NetZero rocket is impossible. Renewable investment has ground to a halt, people are not buying EV’s, farmers don’t want the transmission lines, coastal towns don’t want the wind towers, project costs are doubling and tripling, and Florence the borer is still stuck in a short hole that is meant to be a long one. Worse, we’ve already got more solar power than the grid can handle and extra solar power is so useless we’re about to start charging people who carelessly add to the glut at lunchtime.
Peter Dutton is sadly still saying we should do “Net […]
By Jo Nova
The spell is broken
Thirty years of crafting a fantasy narrative was fine while countries floated on a cloud of endless easy money, but those days are over.
Counting is still underway in the EU elections, but the Greens appear to have lost around 20 seats, shrinking from 74 seats to 53. In Germany, the Green-stranglehold of Europe, exit polls suggest the Green vote fell from 20.5% to 12%.
In a shock, Marine Le Pen’s party in France doubled Macron’s party vote achieving 30% of the vote to his 15%, whereupon Macron called an emergency election, hoping to save a few extra spots in France’s Parliament before the “Far Right” really wakes up.
The “Far-Right” of course, being any party which doubts that bicycles can stop storms:
Despite 242% of Nobel prize winning experts being certain that life on Earth will be destroyed by 2034*, climate action was not a priority for most Europeans.
Newspaper journalists though have different priorities to most voters. There go those climate ambitions…
The result comes amid a broader shift to the right and a green backlash — or “greenlash” — against policies designed to tackle […]
By Jo Nova
Call it an anti-subsidy to kill the product the customers want, and call it an anti-tariff to help foreign manufacturers
The Suicide of The West continues apace.
All around the West governments are concocting rules that force car manufacturers to sell a certain ratio of EV’s to petrol cars. In the UK if they breach the ratio they’ll be fined a savage £15,000 for every petrol car. In other words, if customers don’t voluntarily want to buy as many EV’s as the government thinks they should, the rules will force the car manufacturers to restrict the petrol car sales. Obviously, what’s left of the free market will pay big money for the rare and desirable petrol cars that are permitted to be sold. Soon only the wealthy will be able to afford them, while the riff raff have to catch a bus.
One Ford manager is helpfully telling the world what these rules mean:
Ford threatens to restrict petrol car sales to meet the UK’s EV targets
By Tom Jervis, Auto Express
Introduced at the start of this year, the ZEV mandate requires manufacturers to ensure that a minimum percentage of their […]
By Jo Nova
This new study pokes holes in the dogma five different ways
Credit to Kenneth Richards who found the study and discussed it at NoTricksZone
Bones in a cave inside the Arctic circle show that the world was hotter, the climate is always changing, and life adapts very well.
A special cave in far northern Norway has a a trove of thousands of old bones. They are deposited in layers that stretch back from 5,800 years ago to 13,000 years ago. And it’s been a radical change: at the start, the cave was submerged under the ocean, so the bones are mostly marine species. But a few thousand years later the weather was warm, and birds and mammals had moved in. By 6,000 years ago the researchers estimate it was the hottest part of the Holocene and 1.5°–2.4°C warmer than the modern era of 1961–1990.
After that, the cave was blocked by scree, and the bone fragments sat there seemingly undisturbed for nearly 6,000 years while the ice sheets moved and the Vikings came and went and the world cooled. Then in 1993 someone happened to build a road nearby and found the cave. Now a team […]
By Jo Nova
Good news: despite 2023 being the hottest year since Homo Erectus, there was a 17% fall in the number of 18 to 34 year olds who call “Climate change” a very serious problem. Even though there were hottest-ever-headlines month after month, the punters lost the faith.
No one is cracking champagne, because 50% of young adults still tell pollsters they think it is a “very serious problem”. But when all is said and done, at least half the generation that was drip-fed the dogma since kindergarten, can not only see through the catastrophism but they are brave enough to tell a pollster that too.
For the most part, after a few hot El Nino years, “climate fear” is back where it was in 2016 or so. Most people still want the government to solve the weather with someone else’s money. But where younger people were once much more enthusiastic about a Big Government fix than older people were, now that gap is almost closed. What was a 21% difference between those age groups is now only 2%. That’s a whopping fall in faith in the government to do something useful, or probably, a recognition that whatever the […]
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By Jo Nova
About 90% of solar panels installed in Germany come from China, and earlier this year one of the last solar panel manufacturers closed in Germany. Last week, what was left of the industry begged for mercy (and subsidies) which they didn’t get. Now another German solar panel manufacturer has closed down.
For some cruel reason German factories which are close to their customers, can’t compete with distant foreign factories which have access to slave labor, fossil fueled shipping and cheap coal fired electricity?
The bigger question, seemingly, is how did the country that invented the printing press, diesel engines, and the theory-of-relativity get fooled by such a stupid ploy? Someone told them they could save the world with unreliable energy, so they converted their generators to unreliable ones, only to discover that they can’t afford to use unreliable generators to make the unreliable generators they need to keep saving the world?
The only government stupider than Germany is the one that has already seen how badly this worked out and announces they’re going to do the same thing. Australia is not only ten years too late, but China has flooded the market to the […]
By Jo Nova California was the Land of Solar Panels at the top of the Magic Subsidy Tree but that boom went bust
If solar panels were actually cheap and useful, everyone could have them, they’d pay for themselves, and there would be no point where the panel-party would grind to a halt. But if they were expensive, made something useless, and their product became toxic to the grid itself the government would have to artificially subsidize them to get them onto the grid in the first place, and then pop its own bubble before the bubble popped the grid. And so that time has arrived in California and there is carnage in the market.
The Duck has quacked
In a strange coincidence the Californian government cut the payments for solar-powered-electricity by 75% last year, and sales of solar panels fell to a quarter of what they were a year ago. That’s a “to” not a “by”. One in five solar contractors has already left the market. Careers and businesses — gone.
The new price for solar-powered-electricity is probably slightly closer to the true market value, which is almost zero, or even less for holy-green electricity at noon. The Duck […]
By Jo Nova
Strange sightings of Batman and Robin have been occurring in London
Thousands of ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) cameras have been installed to record numberplates of offending older cars so their owners can be charged £12.50 for daring to drive a non-compliant car in London. This usually means any diesel car made before 2014 or a petrol car made before 2006, so the fines especially hurt low paid workers, students and retirees.
The two masked crusaders have been seen helping the local bat population by installing homes for them in front of ULEZ cameras. Since bats are a protected species (unlike motorists) once the bat boxes are installed they can not be tampered with nor disturbed by law. Batman and Robin helpfully also place legal notices on the poles so workers coming to fix the cameras know they risk a six month jail sentence or an “unlimited” fine if they so much as touch the bat box.
The bat boxes cost £10.
Bat roosts have legal protection:
Vigilante anti-ULEZ campaigners hang bat boxes on cameras to stop engineers fixing them
By Adam Toms and Rom Preston-Ellis, The Mirror
The £10 animal homes […]
Youtube link
By Jo Nova
Trust us, Kids, We’re Climate ‘Educators’
Tony Thomas has uncovered a plot in Tasmania to turn our schools into leftist activist assembly lines (more than they already are). Luckily it appears to be so boring, no one is watching. (OK, that’s hardly luck, just a fact of life. Beating people up with propaganda is, by definition, and especially after 30 years, not that exciting.) But Curious Climate Schools is still harming children and teachers too, and wasting the taxes of bus drivers, builders and bakers.
In the end, publicly funded academics are shamelessly exploiting eight year olds. They work on their youthful anxiety and naivete (and their dreadful science education) to create political lobby groups which will help academics get more funding. Vote for Big Government! Vote for Climate Change Grants! Write letters to the M.P. you are too young to vote for! It is disgustingly self serving, though all the Doctors of Climate Trauma would be mortified to hear that. They are saving the world, after all. They are the saints who collect salaries. The prophets on academic pay scales.
It’s just Big Government advertising itself, but disguised as “education”:
The […]
By Jo Nova
Two years late: Two legal wins, and a Senate investigation
Two years after police and ambulance drivers were forced to get Covid injections, the Queensland Supreme Court has ruled that the vaccine mandates were unlawful. Because this decision is about human rights, it’s may also apply to other humans (we hope). So lawyers all over the country are sitting up and paying attention.
This follows on from a South Australian decision a few weeks ago where the Employment Tribunal found that an employer (the state government) was liable for any injuries caused to staff by mandatory injections required in the workplace.
And possibly related to all this, in 2022 10,000 Australians died above and beyond the normal rate and no one (officially) knows why. The Australian Senate has decided (on the fourth try, and only by one vote) they can say for sure someone should definitely look into this. This banal, but good outcome was possibly a parliamentary world first — which says a lot about the state of democracies around the world because the same odd patterns of deaths is occurring in pretty much every democracy.
The Labor Party and Greens voted against it, presumably being […]
By Jo Nova
One of the most extraordinary interviews I’ve ever heard. Take everything you thought you knew …
Tucker Carlson talks to Mike Benz who worked in the cyber portfolio at the US State Department. He calmly lays out the dark power of the US intelligence network. This is the inside story of how and why the military industrial censorship complex grew in the last thirty years.
It’s obviously hard to confirm what he says, but we already know Twitter and Facebook were effectively acting as arms of the US government. We’ve got the emails showing they were colluding with US state agencies and the legacy media on a daily basis to cover up government failures and corruption, and to censor Americans. We know the CIA withheld a report on China because it might have helped Donald Trump, and we know the CIA has been feeding the media “misinformation” for 50 years because another insider told us so.
Mike Benz seems to be able to explain so many details on the forces that shaped history.
At first the agencies liked free speech
In 1991 the apparatus of the US State thought the internet and free speech was a […]
By Jo Nova
If coal is a planet wrecking problem, if it really mattered, about 30 countries are beating themselves up in acts of grandiose public flagellation, while one country is wrecking the planet and nobody cares. The truth is that no one is behaving like they think CO2 is causing a crisis. All over the West everyone wears the hippie-care coat while buying the cheapest fridges, phones and fashion they can get from the global coal furnace. And China nods the nod then keeps on adding coal power plants.
Climate change: China at risk of missing its goals unless it takes drastic action to rein in coal expansion, new research finds
Eric Ng, South China Morning Post
Last year, the Chinese energy sector’s carbon dioxide emissions increased 5.2 per cent, the same as gross domestic product, highlighting a failure to rein in energy-intensive growth, they estimated.
According to the Global Coal Plant Tracker 70 gigawatts of new coal power was built around the world in 2023. Of the 107 countries they tracked, one country built 47 gigawatts. The other 106 countries combined built 22 gigawatts. The distribution of new coal plants is thus:
The “hockey stick” graph as published in IPCC TAR (Figure 2-20, 2001)
By Jo Nova
Climate deniers must be punished
For newcomers: Michael Mann’s hockeystick graph was wildly different from hundreds of studies of other studies and instantly became the pet graph of the IPCC. It used the wrong proxy, the wrong tree, and the wrong type of averaging. Whole books were written on how bad it was. But when Mark Steyn called it fraudulent Mann sued.
Twelve long years after the case was launched, the six person jury decided that Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg have defamed Michael Mann, but awarded Mann one whole dollar in damages, because he hadn’t been able to prove he suffered any damage at all. Remarkably, though, the jurors felt the skeptics had been so malicious they added punitive damages too. Usually these are limited to a mere four or five times the compensatory damage, but this time it was decided Simberg should pay $1,000 and Mark Steyn $1 million. It sets a new record.
According to Law.com punitive or exemplary damages are saved for truly dreadful acts:
exemplary damages n. often called punitive damages… are damages requested and/or awarded […]
By Jo Nova
Farmers win the day after mass protests
Thousands of farmers in tractors and trucks protested in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Ireland, Sweden, Portugul, Greece and Spain. Farmers in Poland are planning to block the Ukrainian border. The French farmers held Paris under siege, blocking roads, pouring manure everywhere and leaving supermarket shelves empty, then after they won some concessions from President Macron, they kept on driving to Brussels and did it all again with help from farmers from other countries. The EU is the target.
The thing that made this so potent was not just that the farmers had heavy equipment that moved obstacles and drove over barriers, they also had huge public support. Something like 80 to 90% of French citizens supported the farmers and were willing to put up with the inconvenience. Then to cap it off, EU elections are coming in June, and they only happen once every five years. The Greens look like they will do badly. That people like Geert Wilders can win in national elections must have shocked the politerati class. But right wing governments have been elected in Italy, Sweden, and Finland too.
This looks like a major win. […]
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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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