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by Jo Nova
The scariest thing is that a communist dictator seems more sensible than any democratic one.
He’s a tyrant, true, but one that can add up numbers. So it has come to pass that the largest coal fired nation in the world will burn even more coal because energy security today is more important than theoretically slowing storms in 2100 AD. China makes no secret of it, but hardly anyone is even talking about it.
In other news from the CCP convention, unlike the West, China won’t blow up their coal plans until the new replacement energy is ready to use. Which is handy if the replacement turns out to be a trillion dollar lemon.
Rather soberingly, for transition-fans, China makes 80% of all the solar panels on Earth but that’s not enough to dent the growth of Chinese coal demands. If these solar panels were so cheap and effective China would ban the sale of them.
China boosts coal output as energy security trumps climate
Michael Smith, Australian Financial Review
China’s state planner, the National Development and Reform Commission, said while China would continue to invest heavily in wind and solar, annual coal […]
by Jo Nova
There is extraordinary flooding across Victoria lately in the land of Droughts and Flooding Rains. The Australian ABC is telling us that “flooding in Victoria is uncommon“. But a ten second search on Trove Australia turned up the forgotten floods of 1870, just as one example, with these glorious drawings (below). Those floods 152 years ago seemed to affect many of the same places as the floods of 2022: the Murray River was a “vast inland lake” and almost the whole distance from Sandhurst to Echuca, about sixty miles, was underwater. Melbourne became an “antipodean Venice”. A rain-bomb dropped on the Keilor Plains and three feet of water fell “in minutes”. Train lines were left suspended in the air, and men, women, children, horses, cattle and sheep sadly drowned. And at Echuca, the water stayed high for two whole months, starting on Sept 9th but not peaking finally until November 7th.
Imagine what the ABC could do for Australia if it had a billion dollars and access to the internet?
Floods in Victoria — Sandhurst, from the top of Bridge Street | Click to enlarge
For the record, here’s the effect of all that […]
Make no mistake, the story of our lifetimes is that we got wildly lucky. It’s not just that most our economy is no longer dedicated to finding fuel (for our corporeal bodies or our machines) but that a vast share of our lives is not consumed with collecting wood or dung, rolling up hay, or gathering berries.
The graph below shows a remarkable transformation from a lifestyle where 80% of all the work done was just the daily task of finding fuel. The advent of the industrial revolution cut that effort in half, but the wild success of coal power and technology in the 1800s cut it by factor of ten. It almost appears as if coal did not just fuel the 19th Century, but created the 20th Century too. It was the great disruptor…
The real energy transition in the last 700 years
This was the economic transformation of the United Kingdom
By the 1990s the hunt for all the energy we needed was just a tiny 7% of the economy. And the most remarkable thing about that which is not shown in the graph, was that the total energy consumed had not shrunk at all, it […]
by Jo Nova
“Trust the science” has morphed into “attention-seeking children toss soup on 8o million dollar painting”. This can happen when a generation is taught that their own culture is worthless, that weather is controlled by light bulbs, and that vandalism is an achievement.
This is end stage absurdity in the climate religion. Their words don’t even make sense:
“Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of the planet and our people.” “The cost of living crisis is part of the cost of oil crisis. Fuel is unaffordable. To millions of cold hungry families, they can’t even afford to heat a tin of soup…”
Someone needs to explain supply and demand to the people at Just Stop Oil. If fuel is unaffordable the solution is more fuel. Drill for Oil baby, make civilization great again so people can heat up their soup.
I think the main message is: “don’t let anyone in wearing “Just Stop Oil t-shirts”.
Apparently the painting is covered with glass. To protect our national treasures perhaps it’s time we stopped rewarding vandals with prime time TV spots? Ten thousand farmers can protest for two months […]
By Jo Nova It’s the Reality TV version of “Democracy”
For three years the workers of France revolted in Yellow Vest protests week after relentless week, even though the media ignored them, they kept returning. President Macron had to do something that looked like he was listening. So 150 people won the lucky dip draw to be the actors in a show pretending to be “the People’s Government of France”. Only they, apparently, thought they were doing something important. For nine months these 150 people were supposed to learn climate science and figure out what the other 65 million French citizens would have chosen had they been there. Naturally, they were marinated and baked in approved ClimateThink, and no dissenting scientists or citizens were invited.
After this intense love in, they came up with a list of policies as big as a phone book, the government picked the ones they were probably going to do anyway, and flicked the ones they weren’t and then proclaimed the citizens had spoken! In theory there was supposed to be a Referendum option at the end, but this, well, nevermind, became just another round of votes in Parliament.
The 150 were selected from […]
By Jo Nova
The Wall Street Journal — bless them — analyzed 12,000 officials at 50 federal agencies and sifted through 850,000 financial assets to uncover a seething well of graft, grift and pilfering. As the WSJ prosaically says, “The federal government doesn’t maintain a comprehensive public database of the mandatory financial disclosures of all senior executive-branch officials. So The Wall Street Journal built its own.”
There were problems everywhere but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) got the first mention on the “Six Takeaways” list of government corruption. Who would have thought that a public body holding the purse-strings to the rest of the economy, with vague ill-defined, unmeasurable long term goals would become so corrupt. More to the point, who would have thought they wouldn’t?
With so many public officials making out like bandits the point of carbon credits is not to change the weather, it’s a Bureaucrat Investment Tool. With the power to ban or gift exemptions to favoured firms, bureaucrats can insider trade their way to retirement.
Six Takeaways From WSJ’s Investigation Into the Stock Trades of Government Officials
By Michael Siconolfi, Wall Street Journal
Numerous […]
By Jo Nova Ironies don’t get better than this: Thanks to the renewable energy transition, Europe can’t afford to make renewable energy.
When will the message get through that renewable energy is not sustainable?
European photovoltaic plants and battery cell factors are temporarily closing or quitting altogether because of obscenely high electricity prices. When the plants were built they expected to pay €50/MWh, but now they are €300 – 400/MWh. And the situation may last another couple of years, so it’s hard to see how these manufacturers can avoid leaving permanently.
So much for all the solar jobs. Europeans are being reduced to being installers while the production of panels shifts to coal fired China because electricity is so much cheaper. Most of the wind turbine industry has already moved to China.
European solar PV manufacturing at risk from soaring power prices – Rystad By Jules Scully, PV Tech
Around 35GW of PV manufacturing projects in Europe are at risk of being mothballed as elevated power prices damage the continent’s efforts to build a solar supply chain, research from Rystad Energy suggests.
The consultancy noted that the energy-intensive nature of both solar PV and battery cell […]
Apparently only 0.3% of cars in Florida are currently EV’s, which is lucky, because after the Hurricane Ian a few of them are catching fire. Imagine what happens when all the cars are EV’s and firefighters need to pour on 100,000 liters of water and stick around for hours to baby sit what’s left:
Electric vehicles catching fire in Florida after Hurricane Ian
David Propper, New York Post.
Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s chief financial officer and state fire marshal, said on Twitter.
“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian,” he tweeted. “As those batteries corrode, fires start.
“That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale.”
@JimmyPatronis …
At least one other twitter account North Collier Fire Rescue reports that “I’m in Naples there have been multiple fires like this in areas impacted by Ian.”
In the twitter thread people warn that that they shouldn’t be using water to put out a lithium battery fire, but there is so little that anyone can do to stop these fires, that pouring hundreds of gallons of water a minute continuously is the official […]
By Jo Nova
Just to recap: Energy prices are so wildly high in Europe — thanks to a quest to alter the planetary climate — that 70% of fertilizer plants have already shut down, half the aluminum and zinc smelters have closed, and glass-makers and tilers who survived both world wars may go out of business. German homes are reduced to being wood fired (if they can find the firewood). Meanwhile someone very naughty set off explosions on the Nordstream gas pipes from Russia, and since a third of all UK gas comes from an underwater pipe to Norway now suddenly people are very nervous about that. Before most of this unfolded, UK consumer confidence was at minus 44 — the lowest ebb ever recorded since 1974 when people started recording these things. Now it’s even lower (minus 49). As many as one in four people in the UK were saying they won’t heat their homes in winter. It’s the most dramatic fall in European energy since the late Middle Ages. Luckily, at least the UK and Germany both have some old coal plants they haven’t blown up.
To make things more exciting, last week, after the underwater bombs went […]
By Jo Nova
Once upon a time Google had the best search engine in the world but solo unfunded skeptics had all the fun and were outscoring the UN, academia, and official government sites.
So the UN stopped competing and just colluded with Google to rig the game:
Melissa Fleming: (Under-Secretary for Global Communications at the UN) “We partnered with Google. For example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top. So we’re becoming much more proactive. We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do. But again, it’s a huge, huge challenge that I think all sectors of society need to be very active in.” (Full transcript here)
Naturally this bragging was at the World Economic Forum — the hippest conference-cum-holiday club that can be called a tax deduction for the uber-ultra-rich and their minion political puppets.
Where else could people say smug totalitarian lines with a […]
by Jo Nova
Jacinda Ardern gave a speech to the UN last Friday which has suddenly gone viral in an Ebola kind of way. The new weapon in war she tells us, is misinformation. Since she is the single source of truth (she told us that in July) that means the disinformers are anyone who disagrees with Jacinda. See how easy this is? It’s just another Ministry of Truth plan to save the world from climate change and Covid.
Who needs Free Speech?
Following in the foot-stomps of dictators everywhere Jacinda Ardern lays out the threat of speeches from people more inspiring than her:
The face of war has changed. And with that, the weapons used.
Traditional combat, espionage and the threat of nuclear weapons are now accompanied by cyber-attacks, prolific disinformation and manipulation of whole communities and societies.
After all, a bullet takes a life. A bomb takes out a whole village. A lie online or from a podium does not. But what if that lie, told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others to take up arms? To threaten the security of others. To turn a blind eye to […]
By Jo Nova Warn the bankers, our climate models are not something to invest in say the modelers
A group of top climate modelers have come together to warn bankers that climate models are wonderful but basically useless for predicting things that financial models need — like the trends in the hottest, wettest or windiest weather in any city on Earth. Often the expert models can’t even agree on the sign. Will it get bigger or smaller? It’s that bad.
The raw truth of just how unskilled these models are is laid bare in the graphs. The modeling team chose London, Mumbai, New York and Beijing and picked the nearest 100km x 100km “square” on the map. They ran about 37 models on 3 scenarios and achieved something that looks like a painting done with a jet engine.
The modelers can’t say if the hottest maximums in Beijing will get hotter. Even if the world warms 2 degrees (by random happenstance), Beijing’s hottest-days might actually get cooler. The rainiest days of the year could be more extreme unless they’re less extreme. And the windiest days will definitely be stronger, weaker, or about the same. Get it?
The quote of the […]
The UK is pretty much one wayward submarine away from losing a third of its gas supply. Even if the pipe stays intact, it’s already a national security crisis. It’s a vulnerability that will affect the UK’s ability to bargain with confidence or battle right now.
German authorities are saying that the pipelines will be rendered unusable if salt-water has entered the pipes. Corrosion will make them unrepairable.
And lets not forget there are a lot of other underwater cables which nations with unreliable energy are now utterly dependent on. Here in Australia, an interconnector trip led to the Statewide blackout in South Australia, and the Bass Strait cable break (not even an act of war) left Tasmania on the verge of one for five months. In both cases they lost hundreds of millions of dollars, but it would be so much worse if that happened today during a global energy crisis when there’s is already a bun fight for spare parts and spare fossil fuels.
The UK imports 11% of its power from Europe, half from France, and two years ago President Macron was threatening to block an interconnector in a battle over post-Brexit fisheries. […]
“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 […]
by Jo Nova
Blockbuster Review papers like this are very useful to pass on to your doctor or officials. And until all patients get some synopsis of this or equivalent, there is no informed consent.
Dr Aseem Malhotra
As Dr Aseem Malhotra says: “It’s perhaps the most important work of my career so far…”
The great thing is that he is speaking at medical conferences in the UK, and senior doctors are astonished. There is hope that things may yet improve after the worst medical experiment in history.
The figures that hit the hardest are that for the young, thousands of people need to be vaccinated to save one life, yet in the UK 1 in 120 people suffer from something defined as more than mild effects, and in Norway 1 in 1,000 end up in hospital or with “life changing” effects.
Dr Malhotra was the cardiac specialist I wrote about in November last year, who put forward the first very convincing case I had seen that not only were cardiac inflammatory risk factors doubled after vaccination (Gundry et al) which might double the risk of heart attacks, but that reports and images of cardiac damage and an […]
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The vainglorious shunning of gas production in Europe in quest for weather salvation will hurt the world’s poor the most. As Europe scrambles to replace the astonishing loss of 70% of their own fertilizer production they will be competing to import fertilizer from stretched markets around the world.
The price rises in gas, fertilizer and next year in food, will hurt the poorest of the poor far more than the theoretical temperature rise ever could. Thank the EU. Thank the Greens.
Click to enlarge: It’s a wipeout
Higher gas prices deepen Europe’s fertiliser crunch, threaten food crisis
Europe’s fertilizer crunch is deepening with more than two-thirds of production capacity halted by soaring gas costs, threatening farmers and consumers far beyond the region’s borders.
As Europe becomes a net importer of fertilizer, the fallout from the supply crunch will spread. The region will start competing for scarce supplies with poorer nations, especially in Africa, where food insecurity is exacerbated by persistent droughts and conflict.
These prices cause third degree burns:
Fertiliser shortage threatens farming, food security in Europe
According to the CRU Group, a business intelligence firm specialising in commodities, fertiliser producers in the EU […]
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 […]
by Jo Nova Banks suddenly threaten to abandon the Glasgow GFANZ “climate action” group
It was the massive miracle-funding coalition of Glasgow but it is already starting to unravel as the banks figure out that conspiring to force “climate action” puts them at risk of antitrust suits.
A month ago I wrote that 19 US States were pointing out that it’s not OK for asset managers like BlackRock and co to join together in cartels to block investment in fossil fuels. These corporations bragged about belonging to groups like GFANZ (the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero) as if it made them into saintly environmentalists. But belonging to the group meant they are also effectively restraining trade, reducing competition and acting against the interests of their clients and against the wishes of voters.
Don’t underestimate how important this is or how ugly these monster cartels are: GFANZ has attracted some 500 members which control $130 trillion in assets. But the carbon targets they are told to aim for are set by the UN through something called the Race-To-Zero campaign. So this is a quasi World Government in cahoots with world bankers. Like a Great White Shark meets a pod […]
by Jo Nova
Just another day saving the Earth from pollution
Highways were shut for 12 hours and people had to seal themselves in their homes for hours.
Green Inferno: Tesla Battery Catches Fire in California Causing Shelter-In-Place
A Tesla Megapack battery caught fire at PG&E’s Elkhorn Battery Storage facility in Monterey County, California. A shelter-in-place advisory was in place for 12 hours due to fears of toxic smoke from the fire caused by Elon Musk’s battery system, with county officials announcing that even though the fire was “fully controlled” by 7:00 p.m. PT, “smoke may still occur in the area for several days.”
Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, North County Fire Protection District, and Pacific Gas & Electric had all issued a shelter-in-place advisory for nearby areas, including an interactive map showing which areas are affected and closing roads for over 12 hours.
Local residents were told to shut all windows and turn off ventilation systems due to the hazardous waste material that may have entered the atmosphere due to the Tesla Megapack fire.
Also this week, but so much worse:
Electric scooter battery fire kills 8-year-old in US
New York: Amid […]
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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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