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By Jo Nova
UK surprise byelection “shows why conservatives must stand against NetZero”
The Telegraph UK
Suddenly conservative Cabinet Ministers, who formerly cheered on green policies are telling Rishi Sunak, the British PM, to back off a bit on Net Zero. This phase shift is so deep, even the leader of the Labor Opposition is warning his Labor counterpart Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London to “reflect” on his expansion of the ULEZ car tax zone to outer London.
ULEZ is the Ultra Low Emission Zone, where a tax of £12.50 a day applies to high emission cars. Naturally, this hurts poor people with old cars living in outer suburbs much more than the inner city cafe latte set who can afford an EV and luxury religions.
The key point, perversely, is that Conservatives managed to barely hold onto Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. What apparently astonished the political masters was that the campaign to protect car drivers from the Mayor of London’s NetZero punishment was much more popular than they expected. The Uxbridge win plays against the backdrop of two whopping losses in other seats. The message is that salvation may yet arrive […]
By Jo Nova
What do you do when not enough people die to suit your religion? Distort the axis and hope no one notices.
Welcome to government-science, where one of top journals in the world uses graphic design tricks for political convenience. In this graph from the paper, 10 excess deaths from the heat looks “bigger” than 50 excess deaths from cold. Isn’t the whole point of a graph so we can compare the bars “at a glance”?
Björn Lomborg corrected this with chart on right. Doesn’t that tell a different story?
Thanks to Patrick Moore @EcoSenseNow:
The journal “Lancet” published the chart on left with unequal X-Axis* to downplay fact that cold causes 10X more deaths than heat in Europe. …This is disgraceful for a supposedly scientific journal.
Click to enlarge
Björn Lomborg‘s version shows us exactly how important heat deaths are. It’s no small thing. The news outlets are filled with heatwave porn trying to scare people about normal weather, while politicians try to justify spending billions to “cool” the world. These graphs hide the crime — increasing the cost of energy will kill far more than mythical cooling could ever save.
[…]
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By Jo Nova
Soon we may have hackable transmitters and receivers on every roof…
When storms hit Adelaide last November the first thing the AEMO did was ask people to switch off their own solar panels so they didn’t swamp and crash the fragile wounded grid. Some 400MW of rooftop PV was also remotely shut down through the combination of smart inverters and voltage controls. Imagine if a foreign power could launch a cyber attack — one that switched a large energy source on or off at the wrong moment?
Last year “a hacker gained access to PV systems in the Netherlands that were operated via a monitoring tool from China’s Solarman“. That meant a Dutch government agency was suddenly called on to investigate and report on the risks. According to PV magazine:
“The hacker was able to view the personal data of Dutch customers, create new customers and delete existing users,” reported Tweakers. “He was also able to find out how much electricity customers’ solar panels generate via GPS coordinates, and download, adjust and upload inverter firmware.”
In May this year a report by the Dutch National Digital Infrastructure Inspectorate (RDI) found that many […]
Late night road protestor pouring concrete in a former bollard-hole | Youtube
By Jo Nova
Build Back Worse suffers a set-back
It’s hard to believe someone thought that adding artificial blockages to roads would free people from their vehicle-addiction. As if making car trips artificially long, circuitous and inconvenient would teach people to love walking?
It’s part of the 15 minute city plan, where everything was supposed to be within a heavenly short walk from home, so we could give up cars, save the planet, change the atmosphere and get fit too. But the Deplorables didn’t like it.
The idea of a Low Traffic Network (LTN) sounded so apple-pie. Everyone wants fewer cars on the road. So when pollsters asked deliberately ambiguous questions, people would say “yes” they liked the idea. But living with LTN’s wasn’t much fun when it turned out it was their car the overlords wanted to get rid of. And so the protests and petitions began. Under the cover of darkness, people set bollards on fire, attacked them with chainsaws, and even poured concrete in the anchor holes so it was harder to replace them.
But what really seems to have got the attention […]
By Jo Nova
Does the planet matter or doesn’t it?
Today the headlines read “As the world sizzles, China says it will deal with climate its own way“, as if it made sense that the planet could be burning up and the largest emitter was clearly steaming ahead anyway. But no one got too upset in the Washington Post, or anywhere else either.
From a carbon-believer’s point of view this should be the main game, the big crisis, the drama to launch a thousand protests and fund-raisers. But there are no encampments outside the Chinese embassies, no one is calling for boycotts on Chinese goods “until they act”, and no people are gluing themselves to wharves to stop “the boats of doom” loading and unloading.
China’s intentions are pretty clear:
China’s output of carbon dioxide is set to reach a new record high in 2023. It grew 4 percent in the first quarter this year alone.
Apparently China is committed to deadlines but not to a path, or a tempo, or a public plan, or any kind of transparency:
China remained “unwaveringly” committed to reaching its peak in carbon emissions before 2030 and becoming […]
By Jo Nova
Is the Commonwealth Games just another target of the Culture Wars?
The Commonwealth is the largest cultural union of nations across the globe. It includes one third of the world’s population in a group of 56 nations with 2.4 billion people. It could also be the largest trading block in the world, if only member nations wanted it to be that way. And who wouldn’t — well, obviously the EU and the Chinese Communist Party wouldn’t. For them, The Commonwealth is a threat, a club they can’t control, a sleeping giant. It’s kind of an inverse “Belt and Road” — but one that spread democracy and human rights.
Maybe its nothing, but Dan Andrews (premier of Victoria) who signed up to host the 2026 Commonwealth Games, then abruptly sank it, also once signed the state up for the Belt and Road program, which the Federal government blocked.
So we have to ask — who benefits from the shock announcement to cancel the Commonwealth Games?
Why suddenly was an athletic carnival not worth doing for anything less than $7 billion dollars? As The Australian points out, The Gold Coast hosted the Games in 2018 for $1.8 […]
By Jo Nova
Germany is a lesson for the rest of the world
Few countries have placed a bigger bet on “renewables” than Germany, which installed some 28,443 wind turbines, and at its peak in 2016, employed 160,000 people just in the wind industry. But the effect on the rest of the economy is devastating.
The Energiewende Green program was estimated to have cost €520 billion plus and after 20 years of subsidies and effort, reduced fossil fuel use from 84% of primary energy “all the way” down to 78%. And those presumably were the easy wins.
The cost of expensive electricity vandalizes the rest of the economy. The Green policy gamble may change Germany forever. The former economic powerhouse of Europe is coming undone — losing iconic parts to the US and Asia.
BASF — the German historic giant founded in 1865, is the largest chemical producer in the world. In 1913 it bought the new Haber Bosch process that creates ammonia for fertilizer, and thus changed the world — making billions of lives possible. But now, BASF is shifting out of Germany — spending $10 billion on a new plant in China.
Then there is Linde, an industrial […]
By Thomas K
By Jo Nova
Despite twenty years of media stories telling us how every rain-bomb was “climate change” a new satellite study of rainfall suggests that in the last 20 years the intensity of rainfall has mysteriously declined a little in most places. This is despite predictions it would increase, and CO2 itself rising by 41ppm globally during the same period. In terms of total emissions released by humans since the stone age, it’s been a bonanza — in this 20 year period we emitted 38% of all the emissions we ever emitted.
So humans put out 656,000 Mt of CO2 and there’s been either a decline or no trend at all in rainfall intensity.
Is 38% of all human CO2 emissions enough of a test? The satellites cover all the Earth, including the oceans which the met bureau gauges don’t.
Thanks to Kenneth Richards at NoTricksZone for finding this paper:
New Study: 21st Century Precipitation Trends Have Become Less Intense Globally
Hydrological processes were expected to intensify with warming. The opposite has happened.
Per a new study, global precipitation intensity, measured in mm/hour per century, has exhibited flat (large precipitation systems) to declining (medium and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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? […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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