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By Jo Nova
Every scientific curiosity becomes a climate prayer
A year ago, within an hour, 120 seismometers all over the world started to record a freakish shake every 90 seconds like a metronome. People watching the waves were baffled. And even more so that it didn’t stop within a few minutes but continued on all day and night, eventually ringing out for nine days.
It turned out to be a landslide in an oddly shaped fjord in Eastern Greenland. A 1.2 kilometre mountain of rock and ice had collapsed, sending a 110m wall of water 10 kilometers across the gorge to smash 200 metres up the other side of the fjord. The water then came back down and the return wave apparently kept slopping back and forward for nine days. Spare a thought for the fish.
Dickson Fjord before (left) and after (right) the landslide. From Scientific American andSøren Rysgaard (left); Danish Army (right)
Thus “10,000 swimming pools” worth of repeating tsunamis keep rattling seismic detectors for days and then kept 68 scientists busy for a year figuring out what it was.
Predictably, they say, it was caused by climate change, because rock slides and ice collapses […]
By Jo Nova
Finally, 15 years and a trillion dollars too late, George Monbiot says what skeptics have been saying all along. Nearly every single carbon reduction scheme is a useless make-work machination that creates the illusion that the government is doing something. He calls it “perceptionware”.
A new paper was released in Science pointing out that in the last 25 years, barely 4% of climate policies in 41 countries have made any real difference. And by “real difference” we mean reducing a useful fertilizer, so it’s a good thing that 96% of the ploys failed, but a tragedy that a thousand billion dollars was stolen from decent people.
In any case, finally Monbiot sees the tip of the iceberg of grift and graft, but doesn’t realize his own role in it, doesn’t realize the same failures of journalists like him also failed the science world where 96% of papers have achieved nothing they set out to do as well — like predicting the climate. Climate science has been spinning its wheels, creating perceptionware and failing to figure out the climate for fifty years, but George hasn’t noticed.
Monbiot hasn’t even taken the obvious leap: Where were the Greens, […]
By Jo Nova
Cold is the Catastrophe
A hotter world might not be so horrible. Back in the early Holocene, 10,000 years ago, rivers flowed in the middle of the Sahara desert, and they were filled with fish. The photo above is what remains of Takarkori Lake today. If only climate change could bring back the fish?
While we were distracted in 2020, researchers published a paper about an trove of bones and body parts they had dug out of a cave in Southwest Libya, which is roughly the middle of the Sahara today. Surprisingly they found 17,551 bones, and even more surprisingly, 80% of them were from fish.
The people who dined there were catching tilapia and clariid catfish, and sometimes the odd mud turtle, mollusc and a crocodile or two. The lake (pictured above) is about 6 kilometers from the cave (below), and all the bones appear to be human refuse. It’s kind of the ultimate archaeological FOGO dump.
Somehow, this restaurant that stayed open for 6,000 years left behind layer after layer of undisturbed dining history. Gradually, over thousands of years the diners ate less fish, and more beef, goat and mutton.
Amazingly, 17,000 bits of […]
Image by Erik Nikolai Halsteinrud from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The silence is deafening
Matt Ridley wrote a whole book about the Covid lab leak, and now marvels that what was once an unthinkable conspiracy is now quietly accepted by two thirds of the population, but still exists under a cone of silence. The Wuhan Lab Leak was “worse than a thousand Bhopals” he points out, but the Royal Society said it wasn’t a suitable topic for discussion. It’s as if the deaths of millions, the economic chaos and the threat of bioweapons is a bore.
The World Health Organization never mentions it. The Academy of Medical Sciences said it was too controversial. Ridley was invited to debate the issue but no one would take the other side. He was invited to write a paper for a prestigious journal with a professor at Oxford. After they wrote a paper with hundreds of references, the editors rejected it out of hand, telling him that there was no evidence of people doing gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan, even though the Institute of Virology has published papers for six years detailing how they did exactly that.
Ridley was invited to debate at […]
By Jo Nova
Greenpeace USA say it may be bankrupted by a pipeline billionaire
Even though the evidence for a climate catastrophe is “overwhelming” and they have the media licking their shoes, Greenpeace have somehow failed to persuade the voters to share their outrage and cancel the pipelines that carry “fossil” fuels. So they moved to lawfare and allegedly a slow sabotage through dubious protests that stopped companies from carrying out legal business activity. Now finally, after years of battling, one pipeline billionaire is said to be “within spitting distance” of winning a $300 million dollar case against them. His company is called Energy Transfer.
In 2016, Greenpeace and some native American tribal groups and activists camped for months in a corner of North Dakota to stop the crude oil pipeline his company was building.
The case is set for trial in February in North Dakota. Obviously the outcome is not known, but everyone seems to be acting as if they do know. The first line of the Wall Street Journal says the billionaire “is about to land a knockout punch on Greenpeace. ”
Donors to Greenpeace will not be happy if their money ends up with a crude […]
Image by Jacqueline Wales from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The modern media is like a form of hypnosis
Lord help us all. Climate change might wreck Ayers Rock, I mean Uluru. It’s been baking in the desert for 550 million years, but another half a degree C and it’s in “peril“. (You had to use the hair-dryer…)
It’s such bad luck. “Climate change” could hit anywhere but it’s going to hit airports, vineyards, national parks, and Bondi Beach? It’s ruining holidays and your favourite symbols. It’s so unfair.
I thought this was surely an AI joke, or a grade school project, but Graham Readfearn put his name on it and the Guardian editors didn’t run away. The whole story is a keyword salad of hot button words and random numbers. 620,000 tourism jobs will be at risk they say mindlessly, as if 26 million Australians will stop having holidays and 10 million international guests will stay home, scared off by a one degree Fahrenheit rise.
Almost 68% of Australia’s tourism sites at major risk if climate crisis continues, report says
Uluru, the Daintree and Bondi beach among iconic Australian locations that could be impacted if […]
8.4 out of 10 based on 28 ratings
By Jo Nova
Life on Earth is about to collapse but the government may have to keep their 2035 emissions target a secret until after our next election. Shucks…
The government was supposed to release the “2035 update” by February next year. It was part of the sacred Paris Agreement that they pump up the NetZero promises every five years, which means by February 2025. But when The Australian newspaper asked if the government would keep that deadline, the spokeswoman pointedly did not say “Yes”.
When asked by The Australian if the government would stick to its February deadline, the spokeswoman said: “The Albanese government is working to bring down energy prices and emissions after a decade of delay, dysfunction and denial – but our progress is precarious.
— by Rosie Lewis, The Australian
Australia will, of course, be caught in the wake of the US Election with our election due by May next year. It will be impossible to run on climate piety if Trump wins (beyond the margin of cheating). And the rise of skeptical parties in Europe is surely spooking campaign managers.
Suddenly climate activists don’t want climate on the agenda
In tandem, […]
By Jo Nova
It’s just another day of profligate waste in Renewable World
It’s barely spring in Australia and already we’re reaching the point where there’s too much solar. There’s such an excess of useless energy, prices are negative, meaning the hapless generators have to pay people to take the poison power away. And on Sunday, at a time when investors ought be making their peak profit for the day, they were rushing to turn 80% of their panels off.
Feel the pain — the stunted curve of the solar plants (below) is supposed to be the same shape as the rooftop PV.
In reality, this is how we make the parabolic curve of orbital solar physics fit a rectangular box — by building five times as much as we need and wasting most of it.
Anero.id
Bear in mind, this is just the start of a the lumpy road to nowhere. Even though we already have more solar panels than we can use, we’re supposed to be installing 22,000 more panels every day in Australia to reach our mystical NetZero target.
Paul McArdle of WattClarity noticed the dire situation. As he says “rooftop PV is killing […]
Phillippsburg Nuclear Power Plant by Lothar Neumann, Gernsbach
By Jo Nova
If the Germans just did nothing at all, it would have been Greener
Germany already had nuclear power in 2002, if they just kept it and didn’t build all the wind and solar plants, they wouldn’t have had to spend 697 Billion Euro on subsidies, and would have cut their emissions by 73% more.
If ever there is a statistic that says there is something rotten in the State of Climate Panic, this is surely it. I mean, does CO2 matter or doesn’t it? Do the Greens care at all, or even a bit? If there was a climate emergency and The Greens were worried about CO2, they might have protested that the EnergieWende was a reckless experiment. But if the Greens were tools for communists, foreign states or banker-investors, then they might keep choosing options that benefit other countries, help Bankers or just make Big Government bigger.
Either the German Greens have utterly failed at the very task they set out to do, or they were really aiming at something else.
Ross Pomery writes at RealClearScience and WattsUpWithThat
Study Quantifies Germany’s Disastrous Switch Away From […]
By Jo Nova
The Modern West is regressing to 8th Century occult science
Today the supposed “newspaper of record” for the most powerful nation on Earth is effectively telling people that the steak they eat, the car they drive and the heater they use could cause bridges to collapse “like Tinkertoys”. But you’ll have to join the dots yourself, because they never do. No one asks the experts: How many Tofu-burgers does it take to save Brooklyn Bridge? How many bus trips will we need to save the Golden Gate?
The worlds leading journalists never ask the obvious questions. They just leave a trail of breadcrumbs: Man makes CO2, CO2 causes Spooky weather and Spooky weather eats bridges. So good people drive EV’s!
Each breadcrumb looks like bread, like it might be real, but no one sees the whole loaf and before you know it, everyone is lost in the woods, installing solar panels to save their bridges.
Two days ago the breadcrumbs said “good people go without air conditioners”.
Things are so bad the New York Times tells us that on a 95 degree day in summer, one bridge in Manhattan got stuck open “for hours”. […]
By Jo Nova
And then the climate pledges evaporated
The Tech-Giants are backing away. Microsoft and Google have given up — they’re not bragging about their carbon neutrality anymore. Not now that their emissions have increased 29% and 50% respectively in the last four or five years. Over 500 companies pledged to get to net zero by 2040, but 96% of them are failing to stay on track. To distract us from talking about how the Climate Bubble has popped, some are blaming “AI”.
The world is facing mass death and boiling oceans, and wind and solar are still as cheap as they never were, but Big Tech are sneaking away from saving the world, wait, because Artificial Intelligence uses a lot of electricity? It’s like, these CEOs were saviors of Mother Earth not long ago, but the ice-caps be damned, there’s a race on to capture the AI market? Apparently, the planetary heroes just turned back into robber barons doing business.
Dr Jemma Green, who sells software for renewables markets, is trying to sell us a bad-luck story, as if it makes any sense. The truth is that if net zero technologies were cheap and useful, and the […]
By Jo Nova
And where was the ABC, the BBC, the CBC…
This week UN was scaring the kiddies again in order to increase the river of funds that it feeds from. Harder to understand, science journalists were rushing to sell-out their homelands and repeat their incantations. We’re worrying about a 3mm annual rise (at most) but while Grok was inventing the wheel circa 5,000 BC, oceans were 2,000 millimeters higher. That surging water left clues like piles of giant oyster shells that are still 20 kilometers inland at Taiwan.
In the frozen depths of the last ice age, the water piled up at the poles in the ice caps and the oceans shrank 125 unthinkable meters below where they are today. We’re getting precious about losing a sand dune, but Mesolithic people lost entire continental shelves.
Only a poorly educated high schooler, or a UN Secretary-General, might be silly enough to think that the oceans had stayed the same for a million years and just jumped up 20 centimeters…
Science communication is a train-wreck. When will the “journos” discover the Pleistocene.
Axios https://www.axios.com/2024/08/27/un-sea-level-rise-antonio-guterres
The prophesy reads like a new Bible:
UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned […]
By Jo Nova
In Great Achievements of Government mismanagement, there is a $1 trillion dollar boom in LNG infrastructure around the world, and Australia is one of the top three exporters of LNG, far ahead of the rest, yet we’re about to run out of gas to keep the lights on. It’s so bad we probably have to import gas.
As if anyone needed another example of how small-minded-dictocrat-decrees can screw up a free market and achieve the exact opposite to what they tried to arrange, feast your eyes on Australia.
It takes real planning to start this far ahead and still bollix this up:
Australia was literally the worlds largest LNG exporter in 2020
One of our large energy companies APA Group says a vital Queensland gas pipeline was already running at capacity this winter, and things are so bad, gas power stations here may have to run off diesel, which is stupid on many levels at once. Not only does it lose triple points in Climate-Scrabble, being a dirty high emissions fuel, it’s one of the only fossil fuels we aren’t swimming in. We have 300 years in proven reserves of coal and if we’re lucky, just […]
The clean green future doesn’t have much room for wilderness
By Jo Nova
John Constable puts some numbers on The terrifying scale of the green revolution in The Spectator this week.
Ponder just the scale of the Sophia Offshore industrial wind plant being built off the UK. The wind is free, but to collect enough of it to power 2% of the country, the UK will have to build 100 wind turbines, some 200 kilometers out in the North Sea. Each blade is 108m long and weighs 65 tons, or about as much as a semi-trailer. When the wind blows hard enough, about 200 tons of matter will rotate above the ocean. The box holding all the spinning parts together weighs another 500 tons and needs to be suspended 140 meters up in the air over the waves and during storms.
Each of the 100 turbines will reach 250 meters high, which is “only 60m short of Britain’s tallest building”. So much effort and so little to show for it.
To make sure the whole thing doesn’t fall in the drink with the first stiff breeze, the turbines need to be weighed down with more than a thousand […]
By Jo Nova
If anyone made a game shooting lasers at parasitic flying climate believers they would be arrested for hate-speech. But if a government agency promotes a game that dehumanizes, mocks and kills critics of the government “Green program”, they’ll probably get another grant.
A bit like the 10:10 “blow up deniers children” video, this game accidentally reveals the intellectual and moral vacuum that Big-Government funding inevitably flows to, unless there is a true Free Media to embarrass and mock it. And unfunded blogs like this are that free media.
The State pays these Groomers of Hate:
German state media broadcaster develops virtual reality game in which players shoot lasers at flying climate denialists, in perhaps the most eccentric effort to propagandise teenagers known to man
By Eugyppius
Climatists at the German state media broadcaster Südwestrundfunk (SWR) have used the mandatory license fees they collect from all German households to produce an astounding virtual reality video game called GreenGuardiansVR. In this game, players shoot lasers at flying climate denialists to defeat disinformation and save the planet (h/t RatSays). This is literally true, this thing really exists. It will be released to the public sometime in […]
By Jo Nova
Mark the turning point: Climate activists know they have to hide “the climate” to win the election
Now that Trump is ready to make climate change an issue, the last thing the Democrats want is to put this debate out on the table. So their strategy is to say nothing about it, in case they offend the voters in the middle. As Marc Morano says “‘No one is buying their ‘climate emergency’ claptrap anymore’“.
In an extraordinary headline the New York Times is letting everyone know that the new “green” thing to do is to sit back quietly and wait for her to win. They don’t want activists to complain she’s gone soft on climate change and accidentally trick her into making public commitments which Donald Trump will use against her.
We’re at the point where the Climate die-hards openly admit that it will cost them votes if she talks about the climate. They know the voters don’t want it, and the only way keep the Green Gravy flowing is to hide it.
And these are the same people saying Trump is destroying democracy. They don’t want a mandate for action anymore, they just want to win. […]
ENI Katherine — might as well be a pagan temple to the Sun.
By Jo Nova
The Northern Territory is a test case for renewable energy and it’s a bonfire
In 2016, the new Labor Government waved a magic wand and commanded they would be 50% renewable by 2030. The experts said it was doable and would save $30 million a year. They gave out the permits for large solar installations, which began construction in 2019, but then suddenly changed the rules in 2020, and wouldn’t let the solar plants connect to the main Darwin-Katherine grid. Unbelievably, 64 megawatts of solar panels that cost $40 million dollars have sat, doing nothing, for four long years.
“It’s just reflecting back into space, not being used to power the grid and to substitute for diesel and gas turbine production,” said local vet Peter Trembath, who leased his land to energy company Eni Australia for the solar project.
“It’ll be some technical issue, but you’d reckon they would have sorted that out before Eni spent $40 million to erect it.” — Max Rowley, ABC News June 2022
It’s always the Grids fault…
The reason they […]
By Jo Nova
No one saw this car crash coming?
EV’s represent just 0.9% of all cars on the road in Australia but plans to install fast chargers are already grinding to a crawl. Last year, Ampol was planning to build 180 EV charging bays by the end of the year. Instead it’s proved difficult to even reach half that target. Eight months after they were supposed to have 180 in action they’ve reached 92.
Just throw money…
A mere 3 weeks ago Ampol announced that thanks to a $100 million dollar grant from the Australian government they would install more than 200 new fast chargers at Ampol’s national network of petrol stations this year. But presumably after making a few phone calls they’ve realized it’s not going to happen. (You’d think they might have made the calls before putting out the press release? Or the Minister might have phoned a friend before tossing $100 million to the wind?)
Power grid foils Ampol’s big EV charger plans
Ben Potter and Simon Evans, Australian Financial Review
Ampol, one of the country’s largest petrol retailers, has dialled back plans to triple the number of electric vehicle chargers […]
By Jo Nova
For some reason our long climate proxies work for hundreds of years but always seem to stop working just before the man-made catastrophe appears. It seems to me that if a coral-tree-clam-sediment thermometer worked in 1393, it should work in 2020. It’s not like Earth has run out of trees, mud, pollen or corals.
So here we are again, this time with a new Fijian coral that runs 627 years continuously from 1380 to 1997. And the experts have to slap “an instrumental record” on for the last twenty years to find the catastrophe. The actual single coral core shows the water of Fiji was the same or even slightly warmer in the Medieval warm period as it was in the 1990s. There’s no sign at all, in 600 years of this coral, that man-made carbon dioxide has had any effect at all on the water around Fiji.
The new data comes from a coral core drilled in 1999, which explains why it suddenly stops. It does not explain why the world is about to end, but worried scientists waited 25 years to assess the coral core.
The apocalypse is upon us, but no one can […]
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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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