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By Jo Nova
The perennial problem: Who watches the Watcher?
The Founder of Wikipedia reveals to Glenn Greenwald that he’s shocked at the bias and that CIA and FBI computers have been used to edit Wikipedia and that the intelligence agencies pay off “the most influential people to push their agendas” or they just develop their own talent within the [intelligence] community.
This is the problem: create something great, and powerful people can take it away, unless checks and balances stop them. But what stops the FBI and CIA — Who do the intelligence agents with guns fear?
Wikipedia Founder Larry Sanger to Glenn Greenwald: “CIA and FBI Use Wikipedia for Information Warfare”
Richard Abelson, Gateway Pundit
Speaking to Greenwald, Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger said that Wikipedia “used to be kind of anti-establishment” but “between 2005 and 2012 or so, there was this very definite shift to Wikipedia becoming an establishment mouthpiece. It was amazing. I never would’ve guessed that in 2001,” when he first founded the site, Sanger said.
Wikipedia became just another version of the left-wing media:
“By the time Trump became President it was almost as bad as it is now”, […]
By Jo Nova
What looks, acts, and smells like an unelected World Government telling us what to do?
The Australian government bragged about getting a six month free-pass from the global UNESCO naughty corner but in reality they were craven patsies to an absurd unaudited, unaccountable foreign committee.
The UN was threatening, as it always does, to lumber The Great Barrier Reef with an “In-Danger” sticker, despite the coral on the largest reef in the world being healthier than it’s ever been since estimates began in 1986.
To avoid the dreaded sticker of reef sin, apparently Labor saved the day by putting in a 43% emissions cut which will kill eagles and bats with wind turbines, plaster the wilderness with high voltage towers, infect the alpine lakes with feral pests and threaten whales with off shore wind plants. (That’s just for starters).
The price to appease the UN apparently includes spending another $1.2 billion to “protect the reef” (which will expand the bureaucrat class) and twisting the thumb-screws of regulation on fishermen and farmers (thus punishing the workers). The UN gave the Australian government a pat on the back for canceling the Urannah and Hell’s Gate dams. Since when […]
By Jo Nova
A local extreme protest has dragged in the national broadcaster to an embarrassing national debate.
Everyone wants to know why the ABC didn’t call the police…
The climate activists turned up at the family home of Meg O’Neill at 6:50 am on Tuesday morning in Perth, Western Australia. They had spray paint and padlocks because she’s the CEO of Woodside Energy which will, in their words “emit 6 billions tonnes of carbon over the next fifty years”. Police say CCTV footage shows they had already done surveillance on the house to find out what time she left for work. O’Neill lives with her partner Vicky Hayes* and teenage daughter and was described as “shaken” by the incident.
For some reason, the national public broadcaster, the ABC, was coincidentally also there to film the likely criminal activity at this unlikely hour, but having filmed it, for some other reason, they didn’t show the footage or even report the incident at all on the ABC News Tuesday night, while it made headlines around the state and was “the biggest news of the day”.
The Australian: ‘Please explain’ for ABC
Woodside on Tuesday pointed to the […]
By Jo Nova
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak
The seismic shift in UK politics that started with the Uxbridge byelection continues apace. It’s the dawning realization that anyone who tries to gift wrap Climate Pain at the election is a sitting duck if their opponents only oppose it. As fast as Rishi Sunak backtracks on Green sacred promises, the Labor Party is working out that their green flank is exposed to election winning missives.
Writers in both The Telegraph and The Financial Times in the UK are suggesting it’s “the end” — the political collapse of the open support for a reckless race to NetZero from both sides of politics. CNN reports that Rishi Sunak is “stoking a culture war on Green policies”. Hallalujuh. Since Uxbridge, “leading Conservatives have gleefully picked up the anti-green baton.” They’re taking a “populist approach to the climate”. Glory be! How dare they, in a democracy, do something that’s popular?
Thanks to NetZeroWatch
Starmer is about to be humiliated by the global retreat from Net Zero
SHERELLE JACOBS, The Telegraph
Tories aren’t just playing politics. The geopolitical ground is shifting beneath the eco fanatics’ feet
This […]
Freedom is steak and cars. Picnic at Albert Park Lake, Melbourne 1974 | by Rennie Ellis | NLA
By Jo Nova
How much is The Planet worth?
Polling shows Australians don’t believe there is much of a climate crisis. If they thought the planet would boil, they would surely be willing to spend more than $20 a week.
When it came to other climate-punishments to save the planet, the average person rated giving up meat as the worst option, followed by giving up petrol and diesel cars, and appliances.
The Greens were willing to pay more, but they weren’t so happy about giving up their overseas flights. Doesn’t that say everything? Which will it be, no more polar bears or no more skiing trips to Chamonix?
The truth laid bare in this poll is that Australians have no idea what the real cost of NetZero fantasies are. If they had any idea what the true price was, they’d be livid.
The great success of the green parasites has been to hide the costs of wind and solar schemes
The big message here for the Coalition is that all they had to do to win the last election […]
By Jo Nova
How many solar panels does it take to stop an arsonist?
For two weeks the global media circus has been blaming climate change for the fires in Greece. But finally, belatedly we find out it’s arson (again) and not because Europe doesn’t have enough solar panels yet.
The way the Guardian reports this, it’s as if arsonists hit Greece every year, but this year was different because of “climate change.” So if your civilization has thrill-seekers running amok, laying waste to land and property, the problem is not law and order, unemployment, or a sense of community, it’s “coal fired power plants”.
Can we stop calling them wildfires when they are synthetic?
Thanks to NetZeroWatch
Most fires in Greece were started ‘by human hand’, government says
Helena Smith in The Guardian
Most of the 667 fires that have erupted across Greece in recent weeks were started “by human hand”, the country’s senior climate crisis official has said.
Kikilias said that, in certain places, blazes had broken out at numerous points in close proximity at the same time, suggesting the involvement of arsonists intent on spreading fires further.
Arsonists are […]
By Jo Nova
How to hide $100b storage, transmission lines, battery costs in a dodgy accounting trick
The cost for our whole national $100 billion dollar energy transition apparently rests on a CSIRO report that assumes we’ve already spent the infrastructure money “therefore” future costs after 2030 are almost nothing. It’s like a Nigerian email scam… except that it has fooled our Minister for Energy.
You have been selected to win a new national electricity grid, just give us your economy…
Chris Bowen, said Minister, thinks wind and solar will reduce the cost of electricity, despite them doing the opposite so far.
The CSIRO GenCost report says that renewables are cheap if we pretend we have already spent the money on the transmissions lines, the pumped storage, the “firming” of the grid. It’s like a used car salesman that says the second hand electric car will be cheap to run while hiding the twenty grand you have to spend on a new battery before it can move out the door…
There is a circular reasoning here that says we assume it’s worth spending bezillions now because renewables will be cheap after we have spent bezillions. […]
By Jo Nova
Will EV’s cause more damage to the environment?
A freighter with nearly 3,000 cars on board is burning off the Netherlands. The Coastguard is working hard to try to stop the freighter sinking in a delicate environmental area. Only 25 cars are EV’s on a burning ship of 2,857 cars. No one is sure what started the fire, but a coastguard spokesperson told Reuters “it began near an electric car”. Firefighters estimate it may burn for days. Even if it didn’t start in an EV, the EV’s on board change the nature of the battle.
The fire spread so fast sadly one crew member was killed. Seven others leapt overboard and were rescued from the ocean. The ship carried a crew of 23.
UPDATE: As commenter James Murphy suggests — maybe they need to be transported like explosives can be – on the main deck, in a container that can be dumped overboard under its own weight. Just pull a pin or 2… more or less.
I’m thinking “ejection seats” for EV’s?
Just 25 EV’s among 3,000 cars
A freighter carrying nearly 3,000 cars catches fire in the North Sea and […]
By Jo Nova
Medieval “climate change” was filled with heatwaves, droughts, and crop failures
One thousand years ago, “rivers ran dry under the protracted heat, the fish were left dry in heaps and putrefied in a few hours.” Men and animals venturing in the sun in the summer of 1022 fell down dying.”
It was so hot in 1132 that the rivers ran dry and “the ground was baked to the hardness of stone”. Around 1200 at the Battle of Bela “there were more victims made by the sun than by weapons”. In 1303 and 1304, the Seine, the Loire, the Rhine, and the Danube could all be crossed with dry feet, and they dried up again in 1538-1541. In 1393 and 1394 the crops were “scorched up” and “great numbers of animals fell dead”. In 1625 in Scotland, it was so hot “meat could be cooked merely by exposing it to the Sun.”
And so it goes — history that was known in the 1800’s appears to be disappearing, leaving us with a generation of snowflakes who think they are the only humans who ever faced hot weather. They with their air-conditioned bedrooms, mobile phones and filtered water.
[…]
By Jo Nova
UK surprise byelection “shows why conservatives must stand against NetZero”
The Telegraph UK
Suddenly conservative Cabinet Ministers, who formerly cheered on green policies are telling Rishi Sunak, the British PM, to back off a bit on Net Zero. This phase shift is so deep, even the leader of the Labor Opposition is warning his Labor counterpart Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London to “reflect” on his expansion of the ULEZ car tax zone to outer London.
ULEZ is the Ultra Low Emission Zone, where a tax of £12.50 a day applies to high emission cars. Naturally, this hurts poor people with old cars living in outer suburbs much more than the inner city cafe latte set who can afford an EV and luxury religions.
The key point, perversely, is that Conservatives managed to barely hold onto Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. What apparently astonished the political masters was that the campaign to protect car drivers from the Mayor of London’s NetZero punishment was much more popular than they expected. The Uxbridge win plays against the backdrop of two whopping losses in other seats. The message is that salvation may yet arrive […]
By Jo Nova
What do you do when not enough people die to suit your religion? Distort the axis and hope no one notices.
Welcome to government-science, where one of top journals in the world uses graphic design tricks for political convenience. In this graph from the paper, 10 excess deaths from the heat looks “bigger” than 50 excess deaths from cold. Isn’t the whole point of a graph so we can compare the bars “at a glance”?
Björn Lomborg corrected this with chart on right. Doesn’t that tell a different story?
Thanks to Patrick Moore @EcoSenseNow:
The journal “Lancet” published the chart on left with unequal X-Axis* to downplay fact that cold causes 10X more deaths than heat in Europe. …This is disgraceful for a supposedly scientific journal.
Click to enlarge
Björn Lomborg‘s version shows us exactly how important heat deaths are. It’s no small thing. The news outlets are filled with heatwave porn trying to scare people about normal weather, while politicians try to justify spending billions to “cool” the world. These graphs hide the crime — increasing the cost of energy will kill far more than mythical cooling could ever save.
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By Jo Nova
Soon we may have hackable transmitters and receivers on every roof…
When storms hit Adelaide last November the first thing the AEMO did was ask people to switch off their own solar panels so they didn’t swamp and crash the fragile wounded grid. Some 400MW of rooftop PV was also remotely shut down through the combination of smart inverters and voltage controls. Imagine if a foreign power could launch a cyber attack — one that switched a large energy source on or off at the wrong moment?
Last year “a hacker gained access to PV systems in the Netherlands that were operated via a monitoring tool from China’s Solarman“. That meant a Dutch government agency was suddenly called on to investigate and report on the risks. According to PV magazine:
“The hacker was able to view the personal data of Dutch customers, create new customers and delete existing users,” reported Tweakers. “He was also able to find out how much electricity customers’ solar panels generate via GPS coordinates, and download, adjust and upload inverter firmware.”
In May this year a report by the Dutch National Digital Infrastructure Inspectorate (RDI) found that many […]
Late night road protestor pouring concrete in a former bollard-hole | Youtube
By Jo Nova
Build Back Worse suffers a set-back
It’s hard to believe someone thought that adding artificial blockages to roads would free people from their vehicle-addiction. As if making car trips artificially long, circuitous and inconvenient would teach people to love walking?
It’s part of the 15 minute city plan, where everything was supposed to be within a heavenly short walk from home, so we could give up cars, save the planet, change the atmosphere and get fit too. But the Deplorables didn’t like it.
The idea of a Low Traffic Network (LTN) sounded so apple-pie. Everyone wants fewer cars on the road. So when pollsters asked deliberately ambiguous questions, people would say “yes” they liked the idea. But living with LTN’s wasn’t much fun when it turned out it was their car the overlords wanted to get rid of. And so the protests and petitions began. Under the cover of darkness, people set bollards on fire, attacked them with chainsaws, and even poured concrete in the anchor holes so it was harder to replace them.
But what really seems to have got the attention […]
By Jo Nova
Does the planet matter or doesn’t it?
Today the headlines read “As the world sizzles, China says it will deal with climate its own way“, as if it made sense that the planet could be burning up and the largest emitter was clearly steaming ahead anyway. But no one got too upset in the Washington Post, or anywhere else either.
From a carbon-believer’s point of view this should be the main game, the big crisis, the drama to launch a thousand protests and fund-raisers. But there are no encampments outside the Chinese embassies, no one is calling for boycotts on Chinese goods “until they act”, and no people are gluing themselves to wharves to stop “the boats of doom” loading and unloading.
China’s intentions are pretty clear:
China’s output of carbon dioxide is set to reach a new record high in 2023. It grew 4 percent in the first quarter this year alone.
Apparently China is committed to deadlines but not to a path, or a tempo, or a public plan, or any kind of transparency:
China remained “unwaveringly” committed to reaching its peak in carbon emissions before 2030 and becoming […]
By Jo Nova
Is the Commonwealth Games just another target of the Culture Wars?
The Commonwealth is the largest cultural union of nations across the globe. It includes one third of the world’s population in a group of 56 nations with 2.4 billion people. It could also be the largest trading block in the world, if only member nations wanted it to be that way. And who wouldn’t — well, obviously the EU and the Chinese Communist Party wouldn’t. For them, The Commonwealth is a threat, a club they can’t control, a sleeping giant. It’s kind of an inverse “Belt and Road” — but one that spread democracy and human rights.
Maybe its nothing, but Dan Andrews (premier of Victoria) who signed up to host the 2026 Commonwealth Games, then abruptly sank it, also once signed the state up for the Belt and Road program, which the Federal government blocked.
So we have to ask — who benefits from the shock announcement to cancel the Commonwealth Games?
Why suddenly was an athletic carnival not worth doing for anything less than $7 billion dollars? As The Australian points out, The Gold Coast hosted the Games in 2018 for $1.8 […]
By Jo Nova
Germany is a lesson for the rest of the world
Few countries have placed a bigger bet on “renewables” than Germany, which installed some 28,443 wind turbines, and at its peak in 2016, employed 160,000 people just in the wind industry. But the effect on the rest of the economy is devastating.
The Energiewende Green program was estimated to have cost €520 billion plus and after 20 years of subsidies and effort, reduced fossil fuel use from 84% of primary energy “all the way” down to 78%. And those presumably were the easy wins.
The cost of expensive electricity vandalizes the rest of the economy. The Green policy gamble may change Germany forever. The former economic powerhouse of Europe is coming undone — losing iconic parts to the US and Asia.
BASF — the German historic giant founded in 1865, is the largest chemical producer in the world. In 1913 it bought the new Haber Bosch process that creates ammonia for fertilizer, and thus changed the world — making billions of lives possible. But now, BASF is shifting out of Germany — spending $10 billion on a new plant in China.
Then there is Linde, an industrial […]
By Thomas K
By Jo Nova
Despite twenty years of media stories telling us how every rain-bomb was “climate change” a new satellite study of rainfall suggests that in the last 20 years the intensity of rainfall has mysteriously declined a little in most places. This is despite predictions it would increase, and CO2 itself rising by 41ppm globally during the same period. In terms of total emissions released by humans since the stone age, it’s been a bonanza — in this 20 year period we emitted 38% of all the emissions we ever emitted.
So humans put out 656,000 Mt of CO2 and there’s been either a decline or no trend at all in rainfall intensity.
Is 38% of all human CO2 emissions enough of a test? The satellites cover all the Earth, including the oceans which the met bureau gauges don’t.
Thanks to Kenneth Richards at NoTricksZone for finding this paper:
New Study: 21st Century Precipitation Trends Have Become Less Intense Globally
Hydrological processes were expected to intensify with warming. The opposite has happened.
Per a new study, global precipitation intensity, measured in mm/hour per century, has exhibited flat (large precipitation systems) to declining (medium and […]
By Jo Nova
Don’t mention brown coal?
Last quarter I reported that the Australian Energy Market Operators (AEMO) had strangely “forgotten” to list the brown coal prices in its quarterly report, despite it being the second largest energy source in our national electricity market.
Other quarters, often they would include a graph comparing the average winning bids of all the major fuel types — a graph that surely is essential in these inflationary times where our electricity prices are setting record highs, rising by 25% this month, and we have a national debate on our energy crisis.
In the next quarterly report the AEMO did list the average “winning bids” of brown coal but didn’t do the comparison graph, so I’ve done it for them. If only they had room in their 68 page report and $450 million dollar budget so Australians can see, at a glance, which fuel source provides the cheapest wholesale generation by far, every quarter, all the time?
Despite all the inflation, the war, and the pandemic, brown coal generators are still making electricity for 3c a KWh. Shouldn’t Australians know that?
Click to enlarge (Or download the larger JPG file)
Compare that to […]
By Jo Nova
Across 30 countries heatwaves kill 20,000 people in European cities every year (and cold kills 200,000 but nevermind.)
The new paper by Pierre Masselot et al, is another round of medical investigation showing cold is somewhere between six and twenty times as deadly as heat is. Other studies looked at various countries, or specific regions. This study looked at cities across the whole of Europe. It was pretty big, covering 854 cities of 50,000 or more, and about 40% of the European population.
They picked cities because they are “particularly affected by environmental stressors and potential impacts of climate change”. So they’re admitting they looked at the worst possible living conditions for heat deaths. Obviously cities will be hotter than farms and ski resorts — so if heat deaths were a problem, this study would show it, except it didn’t.
The Lancet
Nobody mention coal, oil or gas…
Mysteriously Northern people in frigid climates were strangely “adaptable” to the cold compared to people in Eastern Europe. What could it be that helps people in Scandinavia deal with the cold so much better than people in Bulgaria?
Northern countries showed the lowest risks […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another climate denier with a Nobel Prize in Physics…
John Clauser, Nobel Prize winner.
Dr John F Clauser of quantum entanglement fame, leaves no doubt about his thoughts:
“…climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”.
Despite that, the ABC and BBC types won’t pick up the phone to ask Dr John F Clauser why a man with his remarkable reputation would risk looking like an idiot, and speaking up as a climate skeptic. It’s not that they are afraid he might bore the audience or sound like a kook. They won’t ask him because they’re afraid he’ll have a good answer.
How much damage would it do to the cause if the audience finds out that one of the highest ranking scientists in the world disagrees with the mantra? It would break that sacred spell. Suddenly, the unwashed masses will realize “there is a debate”, and that all the times they were told “the debate was over”, they were being lied too.
The same team that tells us that we must “listen to the experts”, won’t listen to any experts they don’t like. They rave about “UN Experts” that […]
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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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