Inflation be damned — Brown coal is still making electricity for 3c a Kilowatt hour

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 […]

Save lives, give us global warming: Even in cities, cold kills ten times as many people —

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 […]

Another skeptical Nobel Laureate of Physics — “Climate science has metastasized”

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 […]

‘Underground Climate Change’ Threatens to Destabilize Buildings

By Jo Nova

Fossil Fuels destroy skyscrapers now

The storms of 2,100 have gone underground and are wrecking your city as we speak. Climate Change has is weakening the foundations, shifting the ground underneath you.

If you don’t install enough solar panels, soon buildings will fall on your head.

Horror movie at 8pm. News headline for breakfast. What’s the difference?

This is the headline tonight in Scientific American, and many other media outlets:

Underground Climate Change Is Weakening Buildings in Slow Motion

Allison Parshall, Scientific American, July 11th 2023

The headline makes no sense at all unless you view it through the lens of the climate cult. It’s as if the words “climate change” have become a substitute for the word “warming”. This story doesn’t mention carbon emissions, and doesn’t talk about “the climate” either. It’s just a click-bait headline about the urban heat island effect and how apparently it is causing subsidence or shifting which may lead to cracks in buildings. We could write it off as the daft result of thirty years of propaganda on one university press team, except that it’s appearing simultaneously tonight in Scientific American, Daily Mail, Metro UK, SciTech Daily, andScienceAlert. […]

New Zealand might adopt new “UN-type” science curriculum without physics and chemistry

By Jo Nova

Apparently some New Zealand officials are toying with a whole new science curriculum which sounds like a return to the stone age. All the hard stuff about electromagnetism, elements, mass, motion, and molecular bonding has been replaced with UN Agenda 21 items like climate change and biodiversity.

Who needs to know the periodic table when you can learn the new religion of “Climate Change”? Knowing actual physics and chemistry will just hold you back in your drive to understand the intersectional suffering of the oppressed swamp antechinus.

NZ Teachers Shocked Physics, Chemistry, Biology Missing From New Science Curriculum

By Rebecca Zhu, Epoch Times

New Zealand science teachers have raised alarm over an early draft science curriculum, which lacks any mention of physics, chemistry, and biology.

Mr. Johnston [senior fellow of the New Zealand Initiative think tank] warned that if this draft went through, high school graduates wanting to pursue studies in physical sciences or engineering would need to be taught from scratch by their university.

Who is Mr Johnston kidding? As if universities will fight for the physical sciences… they didn’t even fight for “male and female”. Academics are driving this […]

After an accident, electric cars need to social distance in case they blow other cars up.

By Jo Nova

Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat

Damaged EV’s apparently need a lot more space than damaged petrol cars do. During the first couple of days, they need fifty times as much space…

In the race to make all new cars electric, so we get perfect weather, we haven’t quite ironed out all the wrinkles. Like what will we do with thousands of potentially explosive batteries in damaged cars awaiting repair (or an early grave). According to The Telegraph, a new report by Thatcham Research poses some rather big questions. Not only do insurance claims for EV’s cost 25% more than petrol cars, and take 14% longer to repair, but in a space where we could safely park 100 injured petrol cars, we can only park two crook EV’s.

The government recommends the cars stay 15m apart for at least 48 hours. Apparently this is rarely done at the moment, so current costs of repairs are no indication of future performance…

Thatcham Research helpfully mapped out the quarantine zones so we can see how realistic this is.

Thatcham Research

How does this fit into the WEF “15 minute city plan” I wonder? […]

Global Climate Police Thwarted: US Republican States win against Net Zero Insurance Cartel

Octopus in the city image by Эльвина Якубова

By Jo Nova

23 US state Attorneys General blocked the insurance wing of the global climate police

After the States fired the first “Antitrust” volley across the bows, the largest insurance giants in the world ran for the exits. Within weeks, what was a 30 member alliance became a shell of a dozen minor insurance companies. The NZIA has effectively admitted defeat — announcing that members won’t need to set or report on their carbon targets. Phew.

In 2021 many stars of the insurance world rushed to join the global climate activist cartel — the Net Zero Insurers Alliance (NZIA) — which would have turned their industry into another branch of the global UN and WEF climate police. The plan was to make it hard for unfashionable businesses to get insurance unless they went “Net Zero” and followed the policies the UN and WEF billionaires wanted. Democracy be damned. This effectively would have dragooned the coal miners, airlines, farmers, and publishers — practically everyone who needs insurance, into setting “Net Zero” targets above and beyond their legal requirements. All businesses would have to say the right prayers to the […]

Hottest day “in human history” was cooler than most of the holocene

By Jo Nova

The “hottest day” is not that hot, and very irrelevant

So the news cycle went hyperbolic over a single dubious hot day in records that only go back 0.01% of human existence. Remember when “30 year trends” were all that mattered?

Let’s ignore for the moment that the error bars on measurements of global temperature in 1899 would make any normal scientist blush. Who believes for one minute even today we can measure the global surface temperature to one hundredth of a degree? The cringeworthy insignificant digits were everywhere. On Monday the Earths surface was supposedly 17.01 degrees Celsius for the first time in “human history”. Then Tuesday it was 17.18C, Hallelujah. Who are we kidding?

Probably the biggest lie was to call this “human history” as if the ancient Egyptians were measuring the temperature on Earth and every day of the week. Are we really sure we know what the temperature was on July 3, 2201 BC? Maybe it was 17.31C that day — prove me wrong? We have no idea how hot the “hottest days” were for 99% of human civilization. The best proxies we have can’t tell us what the temperature was for 24 […]

EV Fantasia hits multiple speed bumps

By Jo Nova

This week, newspapers in the UK appear to be full of Carmageddon headlines.

Thanks to NetZeroWatch and Ballyb, for the compilation of EV warning signs on the road to West Debacle.

The big advantage of an EV used to be the cheap fill but that’s all changed in the least year with the energy crisis. If the workers can’t afford to turn on the oven to cook a Sunday Roast, they can hardly afford to power up a car.

In a bit of a bombshell last week, Volkswagon admitted that people weren’t buying their electric cars, quaintly referring to this phenomenon as “strong consumer reluctance”. Sales were so bad though, 30% down on forecasts, that they have closed the factory at Emden, Germany for six weeks and are sacking 300 out of 1,500 staff.

Meanwhile, the UK is speeding towards the 2030 EV mandate five years faster than the rest of the world, and the backlash is growing. A Daily Mail poll finds only 1 in 4 people think it’s a good idea to ban sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2030. Fully 53% of people don’t like it. Is the UK a democracy or […]

It’s Biblical climate fire and brimstone, except the UN wants to be God

By Jo Nova

UN Human Rights commissioner turns into a hellfire prophet

Volker Turk has looked into his crystal bowl and sees five or ten plagues coming — there will be famine, flood, and fire, and the Earth is melting — it may cease to exist or perhaps even evaporate? Luckily, the UN knows how to save the world, we just have to do what they say and be nice to their friends at BlackRock, Microsoft and the Chinese Communist Party. That means buying lots of windmills and solar panels because climate change is a human rights issue, but slave labor camps in Xingjiang are not.

And who cares about child cobalt miners in the Congo?

U.N. Rights Czar — ‘Truly Terrifying’ Famines, Floods, Fires, Ahead Unless ‘Climate Change’ Addressed

Simon Kent Breitbart

Volker Turk

Volker Turk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, declared Monday the planet is “[…] burning. It’s melting. It’s flooding. It’s depleting. It’s drying. It’s dying,” as he evoked a “dystopian future” for all unless “climate change” is addressed.

The Austrian lawyer turned U.N. official said the time has come for everyone to heed the […]

Only 6,000 years ago the world was warmer and the Sahara was lush green and wet

Image by Hoeneisen from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

Perhaps Africa could use some global warming?

Thanks and credit to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone:

New Study Finds The Early-Mid Holocene Sahara Had Lakes With Depths Of ‘At Least 300 Meters’

During the hottest part of the Holocene, for thousands of years, there were deep lakes filled with water in the middle of the Sahara Desert. From 9,500 years ago to 6,000 years ago the monsoons rained on the Sahara, freshwater plankton frolicked in the lakes, and greenery grew far and wide. The wetter conditions made it possible for “widespread human occupation and the development of agriculture across North Africa”. Amazingly, that last quote comes from Kuper and Kropelin fully seventeen years ago. Strangely the UN experts don’t mention very often that in the warmer world not that long ago, the hyperarid Sahara desert was rich, green and filled with water? We wouldn’t want people to start wondering if climate change might mean Chad and Libya could be nicer places for Africans to live? Instead we’re told that global warming will turn into our whole world into the Saharan desert, only to find out that in a warmer world […]

R F Kennedy Jnr: Not one childhood vaccine was pretested in a long term placebo controlled trial

By Jo Nova

Thirteen remarkable minutes everyone needs to see.

Remarkably, despite the aura of modern space-age medicine — not one childhood vaccine of the 72 that are recommended in the US — has ever been subject to a long term pre-licensing placebo controlled safety trial. Kennedy knows, because he took legal action to get Anthony Fauci to supply one study. After a year of litigation, they admitted they could not provide a single study.

As Kennedy says, he’s not anti-vaccination, he just wants good safety studies — something everyone wants, except maybe certain shareholders.

“Calling people “anti-vaxxers” is a way of silencing them.”

So, for decades, our highly trained doctors have been injecting babies and children with medicines that we didn’t test properly.

The four big companies that make vaccines … Merck, Sanofi, Glaxo and Pfizer, have paid over $35 billion dollars in criminal penalties in the last decade, for lying to doctors, falsifying science, for defrauding regulators…

RF Kennedy Junior’s site is Children’s Health Defense. They have a list of safety studies and controlled trials that use active ingredients in the comparison arm instead of inert placebos like sugar pills. Putting active compounds in both […]

5 Megawatt solar plant destroyed by hail

By Jo Nova

Hail destroyed most of the three year old Scottsbluff community solar project in Nebraska this week. Solar energy might be free but collecting it requires vast acreages of fragile and expensive infrastructure.

Imagine if a three year old coal plant was “destroyed by hail?”

Scottscliffe was a 5.2MW plant with 14,000 panels that started operating in the Spring of 2020. In theory it was going to reduce the “carbon footprint and stabilize city costs for the next 25 years”. Instead it will increase the toxic metal in landfill.

There were tornadoes in the area at the time, but there doesn’t appear to be damage to the fences, trees or poles surrounding the plant.

About a quarter of the panels may have survived, or at least don’t have damage visible from 100 meters away…

We hope they had insurance.

Baseball-sized hail took out a 5.2-megawatt solar farm in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, on Friday

Kevin Killough, Cowboy State Daily

[Don Day, Cowboy State Daily meteorologist] said that the region around southeast Wyoming has some of the highest frequencies of hailstorms in the country. “It’s ground zero,” Day said.

The average […]

EVs may cause twice as many potholes to save the Planet

By Jo Nova

Wrecking the roads to save the nation from 0.01 degree C?

Electric cars may cause twice as much damage to roads as normal petrol driven cars.

EV’s are heavier, and heavier cars may break bridges and car parks, they wear out tyres 50% faster, increasing pollution, they will cause more road deaths (of other people in smaller cars), and now, they probably wear out roads faster too.

Did anyone think about the carbon emissions of new asphalt and new road surfaces?

Major roads are built to take heavier trucks, but suburban streets were only designed to cope with the occasional truck — not the truck that lives next door. When every car has 300 kilograms more “luggage” there will be consequences.

And remember underlying all this, no one even knows if EV’s will reduce carbon dioxide. An e-Golf has to be driven 100,000 kilometers just to break even with a diesel equivalent. With all these extra lifetime costs, if carbon dioxide mattered at all, EV’s might end up raising global temperatures. But who cares about that eh?

It’s not about carbon, and it’s not about the environment. It’s about control.

Thanks to Tallbloke Pothole damage from […]

Sweden axes Renewable Energy Targets, shifts back to nuclear power

By Jo Nova

Sweden has thrown away the sacred renewables talisman and opened the escape valve from the Temple of WindySolar-Inc. They’ve done the obvious thing anyone who was worried about CO2 would have done in 1992 — aimed for nuclear.

They have switched their 100% “renewables” target by 2045 to a 100% fossil-free target. It’s still a pagan antipathy of the sixth element of the periodic table. But at least it’s a more pragmatic version.

Sweden topped the EU list for renewables share of energy in the last tally — albeit with mostly biomass and hydropower. It was a star of the renewables set — number 1 on the Climate Council list of the “11 countries leading the way“. Yet here they are effectively giving up on the unreliable generators. Surely this must hurt?

The team at NetZeroWatch applaud the Swedish shift, and suggest the UK follow.

Sweden adopts new fossil-free target, making way for nuclear

Florence Jones, Power Technology

Sweden’s parliament adopted a change to its energy targets on Tuesday, which will see it become 100% fossil fuel-free by 2045.

The change means that nuclear generation can count towards […]

Antarctic ice shelves are melting slower than they were 40 years ago

By Jo Nova

Despite the dreaded “polar amplification” and 1,000 new coal fired plants in China, apparently the fragile Antarctic ice shelves have barely changed in the last 40 years. Indeed, instead of fragmenting, they are melting slightly slower now than they were in 1980. Naturally, the researchers *know*, as only high priests can, that things will change any day now. The tipping point is just around the corner, hiding, ready to pounce.

Mankind has emitted fully 65% of our total carbon emissions since the year 1980 — and yet it has not done much at all to the melt-rate of the ice shelves of Antarctica. In fact, if anything, climate change is slowing the ice melting.

That’s 1.1 Trillion tonnes of man-made CO2, and no catastrophe to show for it.

The new study by Banwell et al used satellite microwave data and modeling of meltwater.

GRL

Note that the “small but significant decrease” in melting gets headlined as “a minor change”. Since when where significant warming trends reported as just a “minor change” of indeterminate direction?

Antarctic ice shelves experienced only minor changes in surface melt since 1980, study finds

The results show Antarctic ice […]

62% of UK say reducing bills is more important than carbon targets

By Jo Nova

After thirty years of propaganda the people aren’t buying the crisis. The UK Sun polled 2,000 people and found that 60% think the government should be *prioritizing* a reduction in their bills rather than worrying about reaching Net Zero. Barely 20% thought Net Zero was more important — and they were presumably the only ones who could still afford to pay their bills.

The bigger problem is that it’s not democracy. The UniParty just don’t seem interested in winning votes. They’re not fighting “over the centre”, they’re fighting over the most extreme left 20%.

And ponder that these dismal results come despite 65 per cent of people thinking Net Zero is somehow a useful idea. Imagine what the polls would be like when people find out that carbon dioxide feeds the world and the Sun controls the climate?

Hat tip to NetZeroWatch

Sun poll shows clueless MPs have NO idea of the pain policies like Net Zero inflict on ordinary Brit families

by Harry Cole,

A massive 62 per cent told a YouGov poll for The Sun that getting prices down is more important than achieving carbon neutral status by […]

Betelgeuse may go supernova in our lifetime — brighter than the moon

By Jo Nova

Betelgeuse is the red giant at the top of Orion. Image by yoshitaka2 from Pixabay

Astronomers are very excited. A new paper suggests Betelgeuse — the red giant in Orion — might be only a decade or two (or maybe a century) away from going supernova. It’s the sort of thing that only happens once in a thousand years. Whenever it does go boom, it will shine brighter than the moon, and dominate the sky for a few months to a year.

It’s 600 light years away, so if it is going to go supernova in the next twenty years, then, of course, it must have already happened and the light is on the way.

Before anyone cracks the champers, the new paper by Saio is based on models trying to figure out what’s happening on a pulsating ball of fire 5,600 trillion kilometers away.

Charlie Martin, PJ Media:

Will We See a Supernova in Our Lifetimes?

There hasn’t been a supernova in our neighborhood since July 4, 1054, when Chinese astronomers observed a supernova, now labeled SN1054, that remained visible for almost two years. The remnants of that supernova are […]

Thousands of EV’s rotting in fields in China

By Jo Nova

China is the leader in EV car production but it’s not quite the success you might think it is.

The CCP was apparently determined to claim that they are making more EV’s than Tesla. But in order to get the EV subsidies, companies are producing vast numbers of cars no one wants to buy. It seems these cars are registered, falsely listed as “sold” and driven 30 miles to a graveyard to presumably rot, or spontaneously combust, whichever comes first. After thirteen years of one particular subsidy, supposedly only worth 3-6% of the best selling car, the government has paid out nearly $15 billion, which seems like it would buy quite a few fields of Neta V EVs.

“China is the land of shortcuts and facades”

Winston Sterzel has an insiders view on China, and claims there are also fly-by-night investment schemes which appear, inflate and disappear, in get-rich-quick projects purely designed to scam investors out of their money. In 2018 bicycle sharing schemes led to mountains of rotting bikes, and so it is again — this time with glass, heavy metals and rare earths.



Who knows what the real price of an […]

Bad news for electric planes — batteries only last “a few weeks”

By Jo Nova

Once again, batteries just aren’t living up to hopes and dreams. Only a year ago Rolls Royce were excited about the nine-seater P-Volt electric plane — forecasting that it would be carrying customers on ninety mile hops in 2025 and 250 miles by 2030. Alas, it must have been a sobering year. The developers of the P-Volt have pulled the pin indefinitely and decided to wait until battery capacity and weight improvements make it realistic.

The P-Volt made by Tecnam

Pioneering electric plane shelved as batteries only last a few hundred flights

Howard Mustoe, The Telegraph

A pioneering electric plane developer has shelved development of its new craft after discovering that its batteries will only last a few hundred flights before they need to be replaced.

Tecnam said its main challenge was the energy density of the batteries available today, which are relatively too heavy for the amount of power they can store.

The speed at which the batteries would lose charge would erode the nine-passenger craft’s value, ruining its commercial prospects, it added.

“Not commercially viable” could be name for most Green engineering.

What do we […]