Peak ESG is behind us: They’ve stopped bragging about environmental wokeness.

By Jo Nova

Environmental wokeness has become a liability for investors

The backlash against ESG has hit bonds, stocks, corporates

In a recent survey, half of large investors in North America now admit to worrying that ESG exposes them to legal risk. When companies want to create a Green-Woke project they issue ESG bonds to get loans to build it, but sometime between last year and this year those Bonds have halved. Suddenly companies are not dressing up in the Big Green cloak. That’s $6 billion in ESG investments that didn’t happen.

The change in direction has been driven by Florida and Texas and the 19 or more states that have joined them. Even though the $2b in funds Ron De Santis pulled from BlackRock et al last year was a drop in the ocean for a $10 trillion dollar fund, it was the tip of a spear at the heart of the beast. The financial houses and asset managers were using other people’s money to force through political changes those same people didn’t want to vote for. If the crowd followed De Santis the whole game was up.

De Santis has just tightened the screws further today:

DeSantis […]

40 years of expert failure: New NOAA STAR satellite temperatures only show half the warming that climate models do

By Jo Nova h/t Cohenite

New NOAA STAR Satellite system gets a major correction and suddenly agrees with UAH satellites, not RSS

An all new reanalysis of the STAR satellite data finds markedly lower temperature trends for the last 40 years. The big deal about this is that this third dataset suddenly supports the original UAH satellite data, not the other RSS system, and not the “surface thermometers” sitting near hot tarmacs and absolutely not the climate models.

The warming trend in the troposphere was only half of what the expert models predicted. From the paper:

Santer et al. (2021) reported that the multi-model averages for the TTT trends from CMIP5 and CMIP6 were 0.28–0.29 K/decade during 1979–2019. The total TTT trend found in this study was only one-half of the climate model simulations during the same period.

The authors admit that this has strong implications for the models, and supports a paper by skeptics Ross McKitrick and John Christy: Ross McKitrick replied in the Financial Post:

An important new study on climate change came out recently…

Zou’s team notes that their findings “have strong implications for trends in climate model simulations and other […]

A Technocratic Superclass of Earth Saviors seek to manage every aspect of our lives

By Jo Nova

Now rice controls the weather too:

Meat, dairy and rice production will bust 1.5C climate target, shows study

Damien Carrington, The Guardian

Emissions from food system alone will drive the world past target, unless high-methane foods are tackled. The study showed that 75% of this food-related heating was driven by foods that are high sources of methane, ie those coming from ruminant livestock such as cattle, and rice paddy fields.

The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, treated each greenhouse gas separately for 94 key types of food, enabling their impact on climate over time to be better understood.

Rice is the primary staple of half the world’s population, and mostly the poorer half. They are not normally the target of the do-gooder set, but as Marc Morano argues below, it’s all about creating a technocratic superclass of elite managers — both bureaucratic and business types who decide the winners and losers, who control the purse strings and the profits with regulations. They cannot handle a decentralized world. They need to control the means of production, the distribution of food, and control of the movement of people.

[…]

Democrats, independents and young Americans losing faith that climate change is “man made”

By Jo Nova

Are young Americans growing out of the climate religion?

In a healthy sign, young adults aged 18 to 29 are much more skeptical now than they were five years ago. A 17% decline in the number who think climate change was mostly or entirely man-made is a major fall, especially in a large survey of 5,400 people.

Across all age groups American belief that climate change was mostly or entirely man-made fell from 60% in 2018 down to 49% in 2023. The fall was almost entirely in Democrat and Independent voters.

Republican voters were much more skeptical to start with and haven’t changed at all, which EPIC described as “stable” because that sounded a lot better than “skeptical”.

Source: EPIC (Energy Policy Institute of Chicago)

 

Democrats are persuaded by scientists, storms, and hot weekends, Republicans, not so much:

Source: EPIC

Suggestible people who are primed to see hurricanes, floods and heatwaves as evidence of man-made climate change will believe they were influenced by the weather. Obviously, it’s circular too: those primed to believe a normal downpour is a rain-bomb will also believe they have experienced “extreme events”.

 

Source: EPIC

[…]

What’s worse?  A global fleet of interconnected intelligent machines, or 8 billion artificial “best friends”

By Jo Nova

We’re on the cusp of the Quickening in Artificial Intelligence

Jordan Peterson wonders if we have thought through how fast things are evolving:

They’re not building autonomous cars ….they’re building fleets of mutually intercommunicating autonomous robots, and each of them will be able to teach the other, because their nervous system will be the same. And when there is 10 million of them, and one of them learns something, all ten million of them learns it at the same time. So they’re not going to have to be very bright before they’re very very very smart.

We’re not connected wirelessly with the same platform. But robots, they are.

Once they get a little bit smart, they’re not going to stop at being a little bit smart for very long. They’re going to be unbelievably smart, like overnight. …

Armed robots are frightening, but so is an artificial “best friend”

Homo Sapiens is a gregarious species. It’s hardwired. What happens when the scams, politics or fake romances are served up by a machine with infinite patience? When the machine knows our full history, our quirks and how we score […]

A map that might change the way you think about the world

By Jo Nova

Where do people live?

These marvelous spike maps mark out a 3D representation of the population density on each two-kilometer-square pixel of Earth’s surface. There are no outlines for countries, yet for the most part we can still see where the land meets the sea.

Credit goes to Alistair Rae, formerly a professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Sheffield. He used the EU’s population density data with the mapping tool Aerialod to create these glorious 3D maps.

And the map shouts “India”.

UPDATE: Do click to see the larger maps!

Alistair Rae, Stats, Maps n Pix Click to enlarge | CC 2.0

This is the global distribution of 8 billion people. The abundance of South East Asia is undeniable, as is the emptiness of the Sahara and the vacancy of Siberia. Antarctica is an invisible continent.

Australia and New Zealand are barely there. We can see how isolated Perth Australia is (where I live).

Annotated by Jo to show friends in the USA where Perth is.

Hawaii and Auckland likewise, stand apart.

Most maps originally came from Alastair Rae on Twitter in 2020 and later from the Visual Capitalist […]

Is Climate Change really caused by electronic thermometers? (The BOM don’t want Australians to see the data)

By Jo Nova Electronic thermometers may read up to 0.7 degrees higher than glass ones.

Sometime in the mid-1990s the Australian Bureau of Meteorology replaced many of their glass thermometers with electronic sensors. They claimed they were carefully verified to match the slow way the old glass thermometers worked — after all, we wouldn’t want to use gizmos that recorded new all-time *Hottest Ever Records* that were actually just one-second gusts of hot air, would we? Our newspapers would be full of meaningless headlines about how Climate Change made us hotter than ever in history, when really it was just a mistaken effect of a new type of thermometer. Imagine that disaster of public policy…

Of course this question is so easily solved. The BoM just needed to keep the two thermometers side by side in the same boxes and record all that data. Then they could release it, showing how well the electronic gadgets mimicked the glass thermometers, and Australians everywhere would feel confident that BoM was the sterling agency they thought it was. Instead Skeptics have been asking for comparison data for nine years and the BoM has refused, hedged, asked exorbitant fees, destroyed data and […]

Exercise therapy is “better than drugs” for common type of heart failure

Image by DanaTentis from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

A new review of studies came out a few weeks ago pointing out that trials of 700 people with the most common kind of heart failure show they did better after an exercise program than they did with drugs.

I’d like to say “Big Pharma won’t be happy” but Big Pharma probably couldn’t care less. The money, the industry, the regulatory agencies, Hollywood, and a lifetime’s habit means most people will keep returning to largely well-meaning but busy doctors who will prescribe the latest something, whatever it is.

But ultimately the people who get out there and do supervised exercise of any kind a few times a week get more benefits than those taking the latest patented drug. They’ll also have a higher quality of life. In this study they’re looking at people with the most kind of common heart failure called HFpEF. The exercise is supervised because there is some risk in people who may be quite unfit or unhealthy.

How much of our lives is spend working to pay for a bloated health-care system that finds expensive ways to employ many people to do what we could have […]

Was the 2nd heaviest day of rain in Australia caused by a volcano in Chile?

Photo of the 2015 explosion of Calbuco Volcano in Chile, by Keraunos ob, posted on the Earth of Fire blog by Bernard Duyck.

 

By Jo Nova

A year ago I wrote about the odd link between the Hunga Tonga volcanic dust and floods in Australia, but perhaps volcanic dust also played a role in the savage rain bombs of 1893 that caused the infamous floods of Brisbane?

After Hunga Tonga erupted last year, about a week later unusually heavy rain started falling over Australia — even washing out the Indian Pacific Railway line connecting East and West Australia. A month later and the dust had gone around the world and returned to give us glorious sunsets followed by more rain bombs.

So it may be just a coincidence, but the second heaviest Australian rain bomb was on Feb 3, 1893. And three weeks earlier on January 7th the Calbuco Volcano in Chile had its largest eruption in the last 130 years?

In 1893 an astonishing, flabbergasting day occurred, where 907mm of rain dropped from the sky on Crohamhurst in Queensland (that’s nearly 36 inches!). It came in an astonishing week, where the heavens dumped 2 meters […]

The plague of mental illness in teenage girls

By Jo Nova

Something is going wrong with teenage girls. Horribly wrong. Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt have published a bomb of an article. Across the Anglosphere (and perhaps elsewhere) Gen Z girls are more anxious, more depressed, more likely to self harm and less happy, and not just a bit more, but in a seismic kind of way. Things are not exactly great for teenage boys either, but the trends are worst for girls and young women and most of the downturn started around 2012, uncannily in at least five different countries.

Rausch and Haidt make a compelling case that this coincides with the rise of smart phones and selfie-culture, and perhaps that is all the rocket-fuel we need. But the rise of the Glorious Victimhood Era of Woke was surely the guidance system that pointed a whole generation in a race to climb Mental Disability Mountain.

Teenage girls are magnets for fashion — not just in clothes but in ideas too. They may be collecting diagnoses like teenage boys collected football cards, but self-poisoning is not a sport.

The culture that acts like a teenage girl seems to be having trouble breeding healthy women.

Substack: After […]

Zinc tablets associated with 40% less death, half the ICU admission, and a quicker release from hospital

By Jo Nova

Two weeks treatment costs $3.75*

In Tunisia from February to May last year 470 people with Covid were randomly either given 50mg of zinc each day for two weeks or given a placebo. In the zinc group, after 30 days, 6% had died, and 5% had been admitted to intensive care. Meanwhile in the placebo group 9% had died and 11% had gone to the ICU. People taking zinc got out of hospital a few days before the people who didn’t.

Since there were no serious adverse effects in anyone from taking zinc, it’s obvious that good governments were handing out zinc tablets in carparks, schools and shopping malls, thus saving lives, millions of dollars, and keeping hospitals half empty. The rich world looks to healthcare systems like El Salvador. Shame about the other sclerotic swamps and backwaters of crony medicine. Sometimes countries have too much money to get good treatment.

In Australia, the government spent billions on experimental barely-tested vaccines with hidden results and secret contracts. Our TGA told everyone the vaccines were safe and useful but fined someone $8,000 for advertising on their website that ivermectin and zinc lozenges were effective against Covid. But who […]

88% of Germans don’t believe in the Solar and Wind Green energy transition

 

By Jo Nova

The transition is happening, it’s just not the Green one.

Only one in ten Germans still believe solar and wind power can meet Germany’s energy needs. Three quarters of the people who used to be optimistic about Green energy have changed their mind.

But right now, the people are ploughing the snow off the solar panels while the government is ploughing along with the plan…

“The Germans have realized their government is on a suicidal ghost ride.”

— AUF1 Editorial team

Thanks to Pierre Gosselin at NoTricksZone : Germans Overwhelmingly Fed Up With Move To Green Energies

As the government gears up to try to pass legislation that would force most homeowners to carry out extensive renovation to their homes and upgrades to their heating systems, the Energiewende is suddenly no longer looking like a bargain and is no longer welcome by the vast majority of Germans, according to a Forsa survey.

Skeptics are the majority.

Majority of Germans have doubts about a complete energy transition

Die Welt, Germany

Germans do not believe that the country’s energy needs can be met entirely by renewable energies. Amazing: Far […]

The Climate religion is so fragile they had to train hairdressers to keep the fantasy levitating

By Jo Nova

Man-made weather control is such unscientific witchcraft it needs professional teams of coaches to maintain the mythology. It’s not enough to pump the doctrine in the nightly news, they have to nudge them while they get a cut n’ color.

We’ve now descended to the Pravda School of Hairdressing Science in order to keep the climate bubble floating above cold weather and shocking power bills. According to The Guardian customers are “embarrassed” that they don’t understand climate science, and can’t wait to have their hairdresser to explain radiative physics to them. Sorry, I mean, to sell them a solar panel or teach them how to lose money with an environmental pension fund. Sounds like a fun haircut, eh?

But who has the time (or money) to train 400 hairdressers in Sydney? The Climate Council of course. Tony Thomas does a deep dive into the media machine that they are. They have an $8.3 million budget from donations, and a staff of 50, including 20 full time media professionals.

As well as hairdressers the Climate Council trains firefighters, farmers, vets, surfers, football players, Aboriginal indentifiers, and of course “the media” itself. The team who are supposed to […]

Vaccine damage: 300,000 deaths in the US, $148 billion lost, and 10% say a member of their house died

By Jo Nova The crime of the century

“Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this state of affairs is that most Americans don’t know it’s happening.” “…this death count in one year is 5.2 times the number of men killed in ten years of combat in Vietnam.”

— John Leake

Ed Dowd’s Vaccine Damage Report is finally here. It looks at excess death in the healthy working age population of the US — the 148 million Americans aged 18 – 64 who are employed. Shockingly, an estimated 300,000 people have died due to Covid vaccines, and another 1.4 million are now classed as disabled. Around the world this would translate to about 5 million deaths and 46 million with disabilities and as many as 900 million people with some injury.

A Rasmussen poll just out, corroborates that something awful happened in America.* It shows 10% of people in the US say that someone in their own household died and they suspect their death was caused by the vaccines. This number was spread evenly across Democrat and Republican voters showing it is not a politically driven response but probably just a sad reflection of […]

AI chatbot encouraged man obsessed with climate change to kill himself to save planet

By Jo Nova

Imagine we taught a generation to obey authority, question nothing, and ran one-sided prophesies of doom for their whole lifetime. Then in a mass experiment, we let loose AI Chat-bots designed to be popular, somewhat addictive, and sounding convincingly human — “to see what happened”?

What could possibly go wrong? The Chat-bots appear to be trained on the same unskeptical material that vulnerable people are, which would make the bots a perfect way to amplify their fears. If only they had heard the other half of the story…

One particular Belgian father of two in his thirties had used an AI Chatbot for two years, but became obsessive about global warming and the chatbot in the last six weeks.

As well as a dire warning of the dangers of AI, he is, in part, another victim of the Climate Religion, and the one-sided media propaganda:

Married father kills himself after talking to AI chatbot for six weeks about his climate change fears

Christian Oliver, Daily Mail

The man, who was in his thirties, reportedly found comfort in talking to the AI chatbot named ‘Eliza’ about his worries for the world. He […]

Sunday Open Thread

8.8 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

The man the Democrats fear most

It’s history in the making. The leading opposition candidate in the next US election is indicted. Is there any person so pure in the United States who could not be accused and indicted for something if a crooked government really wanted to do so? Even if it was beyond the statute of limitations and previous Federal prosecutors have turned it down.

Donald Trump is now the first former President of the United States ever to be indicted. There is no coming back from this moment. pic.twitter.com/pHuXdDRAka

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 31, 2023

.

Is Donald Trump the main target here, or is it his supporters? Glenn Beck argues they want to provoke violence from the Right.

OR we could always talk about great moments of science from Banana Republics.

9.7 out of 10 based on 107 ratings

The paradox: The West burns more fossil fuels per capita but has healthier air

Source: IQAir

By Jo Nova

The trend is clear: Burning more fossil fuels per person means less polluted air

Tell the world: two weeks ago a new study showed Australians and New Zealanders breathe the cleanest air on Earth. Not far behind them are people in the US, Canada, most of western Europe and Japan.

Naturally, hypnotized journalists either ignored the story or repeated the magic spell conclusions that fossil fuels were to blame, along with wildfires “caused by climate change”. All of them momentarily forgetting that Australians burn more fossil fuels per capita than nearly anywhere on Earth and are also renown for wildfires so big they drop ash on New Zealand.

The best air in the world turns out to be in nations that burn a lot of fossil fuels per person. The most polluted air is in poorer nations, poor sods.

Report: Only six countries met ‘healthy’ air quality standards in 2022

March 14 (UPI) — Just six countries had “healthy” air quality levels last year, as air pollution surged across the globe.

Only Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland and New Zealand, met the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines, according […]

14,000 Australians died of something mysterious last year and no one wants to research it

By Jo Nova

Senator Alex Antic is on fire asking why no one seems interested in the 14,062 people who died unexpectedly from January to November last year. In a full year, that’s 15,300 families who lost a loved one. 15,000 lives cut short. It’s nearly twice the size of the covid toll.

Where is The Department of Health, the CSIRO, the ABC, TGA, SBS, APRHA, our universities, most newspapers and free to air TV? Do Australian lives matter?

@SenatorAntic: Something catastrophic is happening and the government and media are unconcerned.

The previous four Australian ABS Provisional Mortality Statistics data releases reveal 15.1%, 16.0%, 17.0%, and 17.3% increases in excess deaths above the baseline average. Similar, if not worse, trends, are happening all over the western world. Clearly, something serious, I would say catastrophic, is occurring, yet strangely politicians and the censorship industrial complex are almost entirely unconcerned about investigating it. They don’t want you to know what is driving this, but we all know what is causing it.

h/t Kevin a

The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data (ABS) shows that mysterious deaths were far higher than Covid deaths in the last months of 2021.

ABS: Provisional […]

This is why we are not offered a climate referendum — 82% didn’t endorse it

By Jo Nova

An expensive, razzle-dazzle climate referendum in Berlin aimed to bring forward “climate neutral” ambitions from 2045 to 2030, and no one even led a counter campaign, but it failed miserably:

Climate Referendum fails in Germany

Berliner Morgenpost

Berlin. The referendum for more ambitious climate goals in Berlin has failed. The state election authority announced on Sunday evening that the required minimum number of yes votes had not been reached.

An alliance “climate restart” wanted to achieve a change in the state energy transition law with the vote. Specifically, Berlin should commit itself to becoming climate neutral by 2030 and not by 2045 as previously planned.

Of 2.4 million voters in Berlin, the Yes camp needed 608,000 voters (or 25%) to turn up and agree in order to win. While 860,000 people turned up to vote, only 442,000 said “yes” and 420,000 said “no”. Essentially 82% of the total voter population either didn’t want it, or couldn’t be bothered turning up.

Pierre Gosselin of NoTricksZone reports it was a crushing defeat

He says “It’ll take a longtime for the radical climate activists to recover from this major setback”. Apparently the […]