|
|
||||
|
The millionth comment came in this afternoon (on the Friday thread). Congratulations to For the record, I’ve emailed all three and offered to post them a set of books, with thanks. Of course, this really is an achievement of all the commenters who share their thoughts and expertise on a world of absurdities, and thanks to the tireless moderators who made it possible. And thinking of those great minds who shared so much and are no longer with us… — Jo
 The World Bank — Who We Are. As they say — we’re “Accountable to ourselves”. By Jo Nova The World Bank is the largest climate funding multinational blob on Earth, and the world is about to end, the oceans are about to boil, but no one at the World Bank can explain where billions of dollars worth of the Earth saving funds have ended up. It’s almost as if no one there gives a toss about the climate. Indeed, if the World Bank was a giant parasitic squid feeding off the taxpayers of the West, it might look just like this. A new Oxfam report shows that over six years, $24,000 million dollars (at least) has probably gone missing off the balance sheets, but it could be as much as $41 billion. Essentially, the World Bank budgeted to spend a lot of money, but no one bothered to track whether that money was spent, whether the budget blew out, or whether it never happened and the team went surfing in Costa Rica. Imagine if we could do our taxes this way? Indeed, it’s a bit rich to say the money was “missing off balance sheets” because apparently there weren’t any balance sheets, not for expenditures. Oxfam can only guess at the missing sums because they investigated other World Bank projects and found the final cost differed from the planned cost by between 26 to 43%. So they used that to come up with a ballpark figure of the size of the missing millions. It’s that bad. We can’t even say how much is missing. One insider told the New York Post, “it could be twice or ten times more”. The supranational unaccountable entities like the World Bank, the UN, are surely the great attractor of global freeloaders. Like a supermagnet for people who like spending other people’s money: World Bank bureaucrats lost track of at least $24B in funds fighting climate change: ‘Could be twice or 10 times more’By James Franey, New York Post What if it wasn’t bungling — who would know? Bungling World Bank bureaucrats lost track of at least $24 billion bankrolling the battle against climate change, according to a bombshell report by a left-leaning charity group. An investigation by Oxfam revealed “poor record-keeping practices” by the DC-based international lender that resulted in anywhere between $24 billion and $41 billion in misplaced funds. The agency’s audit showed “a lack of traceable spending” over the past seven years — partly because of an oddball accounting practice in which the bank accounts for its climate financing at the time of a project’s approval rather than at the time of project completion,… In the report: Climate Finance Unchecked Oxfam discovered that it was extremely difficult to get simple answers: “We had to sift through layers of complex and incomplete reports, and even then, the data was full of gaps and inconsistencies. The fact that this information is so hard to access and understand is alarming —it shouldn’t take a team of professional researchers to figure out how billions of dollars meant for climate action are being spent. This could all be sorted out in five minutes. All it would take is for our governments to say “No more money for the World Bank until it sorts out reporting”, and next thing you know the World Bank would be filling out tax returns. But the odds of this happening are like an asteroid strike — unless Donald Trump wins the US election (above the margin of cheating). Mere mortal politicians who ask hard questions, not only risk their post-political Blob career with the UN-WEF-World-Bank-IMF-FAO-WHO-IAEA-or-OECD, they might feel the force of a World Bank report telling their citizens how they mismanaged their own economy, and who wants that? The amounts of money are mind-blowing More agitprop from the world banks website. Who We Are (not). The Oxfam writers, bless them, are slightly baffled. With the world in dire straits (as they see it) they can’t figure out why the World Bank is not treating every dollar like a diamond. …the sums needed are vast and growing: According to the UN’s Adaptation Gap Report 2023, the amount needed for There is so much potential. If the World Bank got what it asked for, and spent 90% in an honest way, there would still be $30 billion dollars left to throw parties. But if no one is tracking any of it, why not think big? “This is the wild, wild west of finance,” said Mark Joven, Philippines Department of Finance undersecretary, who represents the country at U.N. climate talks. “Essentially, whatever they call climate finance is climate finance.” “You cannot really follow the money, track the money, track the impact,” said Romain Weikmans, a senior research fellow specializing in climate finance at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. –“Rich nations say they’re spending billions to fight climate change. Some money is going to strange places.” Reuters. Big Government feeds Bigger GovernmentThe Globalist Blob not just The Promised Land for political grifters, on a practical basis, the more they can siphon from the people towards the blob — the more friends they make in the international blob-glitterati, and the better chance they have of being offered the next great blob job offer. Medium level domestic bureaucrats are surely looking to the land of milk and honey, which is where taxpayer funds escape the event horizon of audits and elections. Only there, can the parasites do whatever they want with other people’s money. Download Oxfam’s new report “Climate Finance Unchecked.”
Comments standing at 999,872 At 1:12AM Queensland time Friday. UPDATE: Congratulations to By Jo Nova For some reason more than a thousand whales, dolphins and porpoises died around the UK’s coastline every year for the last eight years. This is roughly twice as many as in the 25 years before that. What could it be? Whatever it is, it isn’t windfarms. Greenpeace says so: “There is no evidence whatsoever linking offshore wind to whale deaths. The manufactured hysteria is the result of fake news promoted by politicians, big oil, and their cronies to save the oil and gas industry” Greenpeace Australia says wind-plants save whales.: …”building offshore wind is way, way better for ocean wildlife than fossil fuels”. And yet there are a thousand dead cetaceans. Andrew Montford of NetZeroWatch graphed beached dolphins, whales and porpoises against the rise of a new industrial marine machine:  Cetacean Strandings in the UK graphed against offshore wind capacity. @Dissentient There’s no evidence, say Greenpeace, sounding just like Philip Morris. We don’t know for sure what is causing so many whales and dolphins to die, but Greenpeace doesn’t even want to find out. The only thing we do know is that Greenpeace is craven, counterfeit, eco-imposter front for the Globalist Blob. As Matt Ridley said what happened to the Precautionary Principle? Jason Endfield is tracking the carnage:
Researchers have known since at least 2013 that pile drivers were permanently deafening porpoises, leaving them, presumably to die miserable deaths wandering blindly through dark or murky seas. Where were all the professors of marine science, paid by the public to know these things, and where was the BBC? They were all silent for ten years until someone invented and tested “bubble curtains” to protect porpoises, and then they could say “well isn’t that clever”? Spread the word: fifty years ago environmentalists would have raised hell about a thousand dead whales and dolphins. Today they are a part of the cover up. They’re not even blaming climate change and 0.001 degree of warming. They don’t want to draw attention to the blubber on the beach in case people start asking hard questions. Greenpeace, WWF, UNEP, they’re all fake environmentalists. h/t Willie Soon. October 24th, 2024 | Tags: Big Green, Greenpeace, Greens (fake), Whales, Wind Power, WWF | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | | Current tally 999,697 comments … @ 1:20AM EST Nobody checked the carbon-13 ratios!Wouldn’t you know it — 150 nations signed the Global Methane Pledge without even bothering to check if the methane was man-made. Methane — the second most hated Greenhouse gas — spiked to record historic levels in the last few years, over 1,900 parts per billion. In 2019, even the WEF scientists admitted they couldn’t explain the baffling rise, and then in 2020, the world of methane went into the twilight zone. We shut down the modern world due to the pandemic, and methane levels rose even faster. It seems many have been blaming fossil fuels for the global surge in emissions, but forgot to check the C13 isotopes. Somehow we spend millions on breathalysing cows, measuring their burps, and feeding them seaweed, but didn’t think to do the basic chemistry. How could that be, you might wonder… 158 nations agreed to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030, but none of them audited the science even though very strange things were happening. (The point was obviously the “pledge”, the junkets, the captive industries and subsidies, anything but the science). Methane from fossil fuels has a higher carbon-13 ratio, but even though fossil fuel use was rising, the carbon-13 levels of atmospheric methane was rolling down a hill. Indeed this new study shows it’s been falling for 17 years. It’s not like this snuck up on us…. any inquiring mind should have seen this coming a decade ago. The lab has been recording C13 in methane since 1998 and gets air samples from 22 sites around the world every week or two.  (A) Trend of globally averaged CH4 abundance (in gray) and δ13CCH4 (purple) from the NOAA/GML GGGRN. Mean growth rates of CH4 mole fraction and δ13CCH4 are shown for the following time periods: 1983–1998, 1999–2006, 2008–2014, 2014–2020, and 2020–2022. (B) Colocated δ13CCH4 measurements at Alert (Canada), Svalbard (Norway), and Antarctica by INSTAAR, NIWA, TU/NIPR, and MPI. Each dataset is fitted with a trend in the same color. PNAS Microbes in environment drove methane emissions more than fossil fuels between 2020 and 2022, analysis findsThey found that between 2020 and 2022, the drastic increase in atmospheric methane was driven almost entirely by microbial sources. Since 2007, scientists have observed microbes playing a significant role in methane emissions, but their contribution has surged to over 90% starting in 2020. “Some prior studies have suggested that human activities, especially fossil fuels, were the primary source of methane growth in recent years,” said Xin (Lindsay) Lan… “These studies failed to look at the isotope profile of methane… They go on to mention that in a warmer world, bacteria have a higher metabolism, which means they are happier and work faster. Thus, like CO2, if the world warms for any reason at all, methane will rise — and there is nothing we can do about it. The one last straw they could clutch is that maybe the microbes were “man-made” : It remains unclear whether the increased microbial emissions came from natural sources like wetlands or human-driven sources, such as landfills and agriculture. The team plans to delve deeper to identify the exact source of methane. As if somehow there was a surge in landfill, rice paddies or cows in the last few years that no one had noticed. This is a pretty big deal — methane has supposedly caused about 30% of our current temperature rise (says the broken climate models) yet 90% of that recent rise was microbes. It’s yet another slice of the climate we aren’t controlling, but we’re still designing burgers with mealworms and bacon from fungus, in the hope of reducing methane emissions and controlling the weather. Then it turns out every swamp and square meter of soil is working against us. Methane concentrations in the air have almost tripled since the 1700s, but that was the Little Ice Age. It’s easy to believe that as the world warmed up, the planet’s wetlands and soil microbes have just been returning to normal business for the last 300 years. We skeptics told the experts long ago it was mostly not man-made, Tom Quirk showed that methane rises and falls in time with El Ninos, and was thus largely a natural phenomenon. Willie Soon also pointed out that one of Saturn’s moons has more methane than all the oil and gas deposits on Earth, but has no dinosaurs, cows or leaky wells. REFERENCEMichel, Sylvia Englund, et al (2024) Rapid shift in methane carbon isotopes suggests microbial emissions drove record high atmospheric methane growth in 2020–2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2411212121
And the tally stands at 999,548… @ 2:49AM EST
Lest I forget, the comment count stands at around
By Jo Nova There are a million pointless ways the Deep State Machine can tie down opponents. Elon Musk is having fun sharing his stories of Bureaucratic Entanglement, as petty officials demand he protect sharks, whales and seals in every launch.
Bureaucrats are not even pretending to serve the people anymore, they just serve themselvesThe Lordships at the Californian Coastal Commission have admitted they are disallowing extra Space X launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base because they don’t like Elon’s tweets. And they even said so out loud. It’s so third-world. Commissioner Gretchen Newsom apparently has a theory that stopping rocket launches will protect the people of California from hearing opinions she doesn’t want them to hear. She has appointed herself decider of your vote. “Right now Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” said Newsom, who has no relation to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Newsom claimed Musk harbored an anti-California agenda, saying the CEO had enjoyed billions of dollars in state subsidies while threatening to relocate his companies to Texas due to “bigoted beliefs against California’s safeguards and protections over our transgender community.” — Wall Street Journal In other words, it was just a form of extortion. She was hoping she could exploit her public role to force Musk to endorse the politicians and causes she personally preferred. Unfortunately for her, Musk is suing them all instead. He claims he has a right to free speech… So at this point, despite being the richest man in the world, Elon Musk knows the people in control of the Army, the Spies, and the six trillion dollar budget could take it all away from him in a blink. Which is why he is all in with Trump, and if a few million dollars here or there might shift the outcome, it’s nothing. In his latest volley back against the Machine, Musk wants people in swing states to sign a petition to protect the First and Second Amendments. In the world we thought we lived in, he would have spent millions on the mainstream media for advertising. Since the media are the enemy, to get attention, he’s decided to pick one lucky person each day who signed the petition, and give a million dollars to them instead. Fans of Kamala are crying foul, as though he is “buying votes” but since the petition is endorsing the First and Second Amendment, Democrats can sign the petition too, and (in theory) the Democrats support the Constitution. Yes? And if the Democrats don’t, then now would be a good time for American voters to find that out. It’s so much better than feeding the Machine.
October 21st, 2024 | Tags: Big-Government, Musk (Elon) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | By Jo Nova It could be the most rigged survey I’ve ever seenThe Lancet “Planetary Health” poll of young Americans looks as contrived as anything in our fake academic and media world. The survey, funded by AVAAZ (a $20 million dollar political activist “NGO“) is clearly an industrial scale psychological mining operation to find Politically Useful Statistics. It is amazing the survey passed ethical approval, because some 15,793 people aged 16 to 24 were allegedly subjected to a relentless series of unhinged and unbalanced suggestions. The sheer repetition of doom mongering is a form of abuse. It’s works like hypnosis — imagine being asked, “How much, if at all, does climate change make you feel the following? Then being offered 10 shades of pain: Anxious, Powerless, Afraid, Sad, Angry, Despair, Ashamed, Grief, Depressed, Guilty, and finally Indifferent, or Optimistic. Not only was there no chance to say climate change made you feel Bored, Lectured, Cajoled, Hen-pecked, Conned, and Scammed, but the response list itself was like a hypnotic suggestion, do you beat your wife, how often do you beat your wife, and how do you feel when you beat your wife? The hapless victims of this interrogation couldn’t escape by picking just one of these words — for every single word on the long list they had to answer on a scale of agreement: “Not at all, A little, Moderately, Very much, Extremely”. It’s a loaded scale. There’s no option to “disagree, moderately, very much or extremely.” It was like saying “Do you agree a bit or a lot”? It must have been clear from the start to every participant that the researchers wanted to hear how bad things were. It would have taken some wherewithal to reply “Not at all” to 26 versions of “Do you see the doom”? And there really were 26 versions — after the first question the second was “How much, if at all, does climate change make you feel the following?” To which the options included “Humanity is doomed” “I question whether the work I put into my career, job, or vocation, will matter” and Climate change will threaten my life”. After 15 (fifteen!) questions of malcontent and fear, there was the option to be hesitant about children, and finally “climate change will make my life better”. All of these horror-show questions were listed in the supplementary file with data. (Links below). Just imagine how many millions of dollars were wasted asking 15,000 people loaded questions? Tellingly, there is no soul searching despite the supposedly dire results. If two thirds of young adults and teens felt the species was doomed, and half truly didn’t want children, it’s a crisis that can’t wait til 2050. But the whole Lancet “Planetary Health” poll is reported on like just another reason to build wind towers (which was probably the point of the paper). There’s no call for a more balanced education, for a more rational discussion or reminders that compared to the last 100,000 years, we all won lotto. Here we are on Planet Earth with more people, living longer than ever, with more food than we can eat, and we get to sit in machines that go zoom. But no, the only solution here is to cool the planet. Discussion: This emotional response represents a substantial burden on wellbeing and might also increase the risk of mental health problems. Youth can benefit from opportunities to share their distress and to act in response to climate change, including in their families, schools and universities, and communities, and through participation in policy development. The findings indicated that the young people in our sample were dissatisfied with the current actions of those in positions of power, in government and in business, and wanted these stakeholders to act to address climate change. In addition, individuals endorsed plans to respond to climate change with their votes and choices about their purchases, lifestyle, and career. These findings reinforce a theme identified in other research that climate change-related distress will continue to increase while climate change remains insufficiently addressed.67 Accordingly, the response to address this distress must be for industries, governments, and policy makers to act at the necessary scale. It almost has a flavour of hostage negotiation — build the wind towers schmuck, or the kids get suicidal, right? Ironically, the lead researcher was a Lewandowski (but not that Lewandowsky), and this must be the first, zeroth, volume of the all new Lancet Planetary Health Journal. Straight out the mill, it’s a machine for deceit and political propaganda. Welcome to modern “science”. Just a tool for political activists to score points off opponents and get reckless headlines out of the Guardian, while exploiting some young and naive teens and adults who probably do have some mental health issues. Shameless “The Lancet”. Science has become a paper mill that serves people with lots of money. REFERENCE Lewandowski et al (2024) Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events, The Lancet, Planetary Health, Volume 0, Issue 0. PDF (560.58 KB)
October 19th, 2024 | Tags: Polls, Psychology, Survey, US Politics | Category: Health, Politics | Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova Soon every tech billionaire will have their own nuclear power plantTwo weeks ago it was Microsoft reviving Three Mile Island’s nuclear plant. Now Google is buying seven small modular reactors, and Amazon is spending $500 million USD on part of a nuclear energy company. Too bad for the deplorables who get stuck with the expensive wind-solar-battery clunker spaghetti-grid forced on them by the arts graduates in Parliament. An AI datacentre needs all the same thing a human city does — cheap gigawatts, 24 hours a day. The number-nerd men with money have all decided the cheapest reliable answer to running their AI data center cities, while pretending to fix the weather, is nuclear power. (Coal, of course, is cheaper which is why China uses so much, but it’s against the religion). The unwashed masses won’t get that choice, of course, to sign up with whatever generator they want. Only the uber rich get that kind of luck. Every one of these tech giants could have poured that money into wind farms and gardens of solar panels, backed up with acres of batteries and ten thousand miles of high voltage towers, pumped hydro, and synchronous condenser flywheels. But none of them want to pour in their own billions anymore, despite the social credit points bonanza and the bragging rights that would bring. For twenty years these same people have been pushing the renewable hard sell on us, now overnight, without so much as a “sorry” they’ve all flipped, leaving us holding the can of decrepit national grids that can’t do what they were designed to do. Google will build seven small nuclear reactors, the first by 2030…Our PM and the CSIRO must be feeling hung-out-to-dry. They declared nuclear was the most expensive option and said Australia couldn’t even build one before 2040. Google signs deal with startup to build small nuclear reactors to power AIAljazeera Google has signed a landmark deal to use electricity produced by small nuclear reactors to power its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts. Under the agreement with startup Kairos Power announced on Monday, the California-based tech giant will back the construction of seven small nuclear reactors capable of generating 500 megawatts of power. The first reactor is scheduled to come online by 2030, with others to follow in the coming years. “The grid needs new electricity sources to support AI technologies that are powering major scientific advances, improving services for businesses and customers, and driving national competitiveness and economic growth,” Michael Terrell, the senior director of energy and climate at Google, said in a blog post. Two days later, Amazon too. Amazon follows Google in taking the nuclear option to power data centresEuroNews Amazon is investing in US firm X-energy to utilise nuclear reactors to power its data centres. Amazon and X-energy are aiming to have more than 5 gigawatts of SMR-generated power operational by 2039. The reactors are currently under development, with none currently providing power to the electric grid in the US. Big investors can help change that, and these announcements could be the “inflection point” that makes scaling up this technology truly possible, Huff said. Feel the heat. Only weeks ago these same billionaires were raving about renewable energy, downranking and censoring the skeptics… now they are doing exactly what we said all along.
October 18th, 2024 | Tags: Nuclear Energy, Renewable Energy | Category: Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post | | By Jo Nova Lesson #457 in how to lie with scienceFile this lesson away in the Decline and Fall of Enlightenment Science. Nature, formerly known as the esteemed science journal, is now achieving everything a captured tabloid industry sales mag could hope for. They’ve squeezed a disaster out of a tiny change in a short record, and from a good news story. Let’s not forget, for the last 100,000 years most humans would have been happy that a bit of Antarctica was greening. “Lush”? The only people who call this lush are penguins:
To appreciate the Black Belt level of naked exaggeration going on here, consider the opening hyperbole: A fast-warming region of Antarctica is getting greener with shocking speed. Satellite imagery of the region reveals that the area covered by plants increased by almost 14 times over 35 years — a trend that will spur rapid change of Antarctic ecosystems. “It’s the beginning of dramatic transformation,” says Olly Bartlett, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and an author of the study1, published today in Nature Geoscience, that reports these results. All this shock and drama arise from an area of “less than a square kilometer” expanding all the way up to “nearly 12 square kilometers”. These numbers “shocked us” say the PR team, I mean, the scientists, who continue on in their best Agony-Aunt impression: “It’s simply that rate of change in an extremely isolated, extremely vulnerable area that causes the alarm.” Sob sob, and Boo hoo too. It’s a lonely peninsula. Can we find it a friend? Everything about this shows the pathetic decay of Western Science. We’re talking about 12 square kilometers of more habitable land on a continent with 14 million square kilometers of ice. The horrible affliction of unexpected tundra now covers 0.00009% of Antarctica. It could get worse, the mosses might make … soil: The research is “really important”, says Jasmine Lee, a conservation scientist at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. Other studies2,3 have found evidence that vegetation on the peninsula is changing in response to climate change, “but this is the first study that’s taken a huge-scale approach to look at the entire region”, she says. Previous visits to the peninsula led the authors to think that most of the vegetation is moss. As mosses spread to previously ice-covered landscapes, they will build up a layer of soil, offering a habitat for other plant life, Roland says. “There’s a huge potential here to see a further increase in the amount of non-native, potentially invasive species,” he says. It is, of course, due to climate change: The researchers point to climate change as the driver of the landscape’s shift from white to green. Temperatures on the peninsula have risen by almost 3 °C since 1950, which is a much bigger increase than observed across most parts of the planet. Nobody mention the 91 volcanoes they discovered there seven years ago which line up with the warmest parts of Antarctica. We sit on a ball of lava, and there is an edge of crustal plate under there. But really, it’s more likely the warming is caused by your Ford fiesta and those beef kebabs…  https://joannenova.com.au/2014/10/west-antarctica-more-evidence-it-was-the-volcanoes-that-melted-the-ice/ Quick, someone build a wind farm to kill off this feral moss!
October 17th, 2024 | Tags: Antarctica, Journalism, Nature | Category: Media-matters | Print This Post | | By Jo Nova The Blob are losing control of the messageEven Gallup admits the US is suffering from a crisis in confidence in their institutions, and the least trusted of all is “the media”. For some reason, telling readers that they are selfish, small minded people who are screwing up the world isn’t resonating with the Rednecks. In 2020 40% of US Citizens thought the media was trustworthy, but now only 31% do, an all time record low. This is the same media that told us elections were secure, vaccines were safe and effective and Joe Biden was sharp as a tack right up until the day everyone discovered he had dementia. The Pullitzer-prize-guys fell for every bureaucratic lie they could — Hunter Bidens laptop was Russian disinfo, ivermectin was horse-dewormer, and an unarmed mob with a horned hat and flags staged an insurrection against the largest military power in the world. There’s a price to pay for lying and the media have barely began to pay it. Obviously they need to censor blogs and social mediaThe big question is why do 31% still trust the media? Possibly their paypacket depends on believing the program. And welfare is so much easier to take with a dose of Media entitlement-sauce. It’s a long term declineThe full graph shows just how different things used to be. Once upon a time, 70% of the people believed the media. Imagine a tool so effective, with such a brand, that 70% of voters believed it. Such a tool would be a magnet for the rich and powerful to control for other purposes, and so it has come to pass…  https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx The media are impartial professionals, of course, but for some reason the audience are biased:Over half of Democrats like what they hear, but only 1 in 8 Republicans do.  https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx Trump’s Fake News meme in 2016 hit a nerve with Republicans and it stuck. The hate campaign against him only proves his point to Republican voters. Since the media are supposed to be the watchdogs, the graph is almost a proxy for the decline of The West.
October 16th, 2024 | Tags: Corruption (Media), Media bias | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | |
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets
   
 
|
|||
|
Copyright © 2024 JoNova - All Rights Reserved |
||||
Recent Comments