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What’s remarkable is that a conversation had by so many on the internet has finally made it, for a moment, onto television. No surprise it happened on a footy show. It certainly wasn’t going to happen on The 7:30 Report, Four Corners, or 60 minutes.
A star Australian football player had a “scary” incident with nausea, dizziness, and heart irregularities and missed a lot of the game this weekend. The hosts of the show casually asked if it was the booster shot — saying “that’s obviously the word going around.” Possibly they were relaxed about discussing it because one of the shows hosts even has Bells Palsy, and they had discussed it off camera with him. So they let down their guard:
“Exactly, heart issues and Bell’s palsy has gone through the roof since the boosters and Covid issues,” Lloyd said.”
“We had (sports journalist) Michelangelo Rucci on (3AW) on Friday night and he said that there’s a ward in Adelaide filled with people with similar symptoms to Ollie Wines – nausea, heart issues – so there has to be something more to it.”
This is the biggest news story on the planet. […]
There’s an electromagnetic ball of fire that is 1.3 million times the size of Earth and just 8 minutes away by photon, and we really don’t know what’s going on there.
Climate models assume the solar wind and magnetic field has no effect on our climate. But we find solar patterns everywhere from the prehistoric climate of Greenland, the North Atlantic jet stream, and even in human fertility and lifespan and jellyfish plagues.
Historians will mock us for trying to predict Earth’s climate when we are in the baby days of Space Weather knowledge. Solar Cycle 24 (the last one) was a shorter cycle, just under 10 years. Right now the big question is whether Solar Cycle 25 will be bigger and more active which seems to happen after a short cycle. But it’s too early to tell. This top graph overstates the effect.
Sunspot Activity on The Sun Is Seriously Exceeding Official Predictions
The Solar Cycle Prediction Panel predicted that the 25th cycle since record-keeping began would be similarly quiet, with a peak of 115 sunspots. By contrast, the number of sunspots for the last 18 months has been consistently higher than predictions. At time of writing, […]
Not much of a honeymoon — “Week 2 to week 6”
Photo by Hakan Nural on Unsplash
A new Israeli study sliced through the medical records of 1.2 million people. They compared people who had three doses with people who went on to have four. By three or four weeks after the 4th shot, people had half as many symptomatic infections. It’s “nice” but it’s only 50% efficacy, and that’s as good as it gets. So much for the glory days of “95% efficacy” — things are so unimpressive, no one talks in percentages anymore. By eight weeks after the fourth dose there was pretty much no extra protection against infection left.
On the plus side, the fourth dose did seem to prevent people getting a nasty disease, with 3.5 times as many 3-dose people getting a severe infection compared to the 4th-dosers. On the down side, those patients were only followed for six weeks. The honeymoon-from-hospitalization may fade quickly too. It lasts a few months with the 3rd dose.
So the fourth dose isn’t going to last through the winter — the meaningful honeymoon period is just a few weeks — from Week 2 to Week 6 […]
Here’s a surprise for all you Australians trapped in Australia because you chose not to take part in a medical experiment. The reason you can’t leave is not for your own health. It’s not for the health of fellow Australians. It’s because we are “protecting the rest of the world”. This is a world where where fully vaccinated travellers have already spread Covid to every country on Earth and at least 72 countries are happy for you to turn up on their door with your tourist dollars and without a vaccine.
As Senator Rennick says: “I cannot for the life of me see the health risks in an unvaccinated person leaving the country.”
Paul Kelly, Australia’s Chief Medical Officer explained that it was due to Australia’s International Health Obligations. That’s an international treaty we signed because we’re a member of the WHO. As far as a quick search turns up, Australia, Canada and the UAE may be the only nations still banning their own citizens from leaving. In Canada, things are so inexplicable, the vaccinated don’t even need to do a test anymore. So people infected with Covid are free to fly in or out of Canada shedding virus […]
As the grapevines bud for the season in France, a mild spring followed by a savage frost is bad news for farmers.
There have been three bad frosts in recent years. The young fashionable expert tells us that frost means it’s climate change. But people didn’t realize…” it’s a form of denial” she says with a straight face.
Thank goodness for fossil fuels:
Because global warming means you need more insurance against frost and “heating cables” to keep the plants warm:
The change in weather pattern is also pushing up his insurance coverage for loss of harvest, he added. In Yonne, two-thirds of the harvest was destroyed as a result of the frost last year, according to the farm ministry.
Winemakers were starting to join forces to invest in new tools, such as heating cables, to help mitigate the effects of such frosts, she said. However, many in the industry are still reluctant to face up to the fact that the impact of climate change could be long-lasting, Civet said.
Mass Psychosis?
Coldest night on a national scale since records began in France in 1947
Météo-France, the country’s meteorological service, said the night […]
This supports Jo’s post on wind droughts. The point is that we have to strive for “wind drought literacy” in the general population. Apart from people who mess around in sailboats and people who play sports where the wind has an impact on missiles in flight, most of us take little notice of the wind unless it is blowing our hat off or turning our umbrella inside out.
It is really important for everyone to know that the wind is quite often low across the whole of SE Australia due to high pressure systems and sometimes these systems linger for a day or two. Wind droughts are more frequent in individual states.
The easiest way to get a fix on the wind situation is to glance at the NEMwatch widget. It is live and it changes every five minutes. You can read it on your phone and this is the kind of picture you will see.
The bars indicate the amount of power that is being generated and consumed in each state at the moment. WA is not connected to the Eastern electricity grid so supply matches demand while in the SE there are flows between the states
[…]
Australia now has nearly 10GW of wind power installed on the National Electricity Grid, but look at the monthly minimums — the guaranteed power we can rely on. The good news is that it’s increased by 10% over this time last year. The bad news is that it was only 216MW.
From the 10,000MW of windpower we paid to install, at one point in the last month only 2% was working, and that’s not unusual.
The true dismal story of wind power is that we need a near total second network of generators just sitting around waiting as back up. Since the back up is reliable, we could use them instead. As a bonus, backup power won’t kill birds, bats and hypnotize crabs and it won’t destroy sleep for farmers and spotted quolls, and it doesn’t create a national security risk either. Handy, eh?
Original graph: WattClarity | Click to enlarge.
The monthly average generation is about 30% of capacity. But the world doesn’t run on average electricity.
9.8 out of 10 based on 87 ratings
Nuclear’s suddenly the answer to “Net Zero” — Japan wants to triple its nuclear power by 2030
It’s the third largest economy in the world, and a large but quiet vacuum of global fossil fuels. Right now it’s the second largest importer of gas in the world after China, and the third largest importer of coal (not that Extinction Rebellion seems to care).
Before the Fukushima disaster in 2011, nuclear power generation produced as much as 30% of Japan’s energy mix, but that’s now shrunk to just 6%. Japan has only six operating nuclear reactors left with a total capacity of six gigawatts, down from 54 before the Fukushima incident. Just a few days ago polls showed that that the fear and negativity of nuclear power in Japan has dramatically shifted in the last few months. One little war can change everything. Russia has suddenly given everyone permission to get serious about nuclear power.
Now the Japanese government wants to grow back from 6% to 20% nuclear in just 8 years.
Japan Sees Nuclear Energy As A Vital Piece Of Its Net-Zero Plan
OilPrice.com
Prior to the Fukushima disaster, nuclear power generation accounted for almost 30% […]
The most devastating thing about this survey is not what it says about energy policy but what it says about our democracy.
70% of Australians think energy policy should be about reliable cheap supply, not about stopping storms, and 70% don’t want to even spend $1 a week saving the world from climate change. Despite this, neither major party stands for that 70%.
Imagine what our election campaign would look like if both parties were trying to win over voters?
The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) asked 1,007 Australians “How much would you personally be willing to pay each year for Australia to reduce its emissions to zero by 2050?” And 42% said “Nothing at all”. Nine out of ten Australians don’t want to spend much at all. Yet somehow both major political parties agree to spend billions every year on a transition we don’t have to have.
We don’t have to have wind or solar power, big batteries, big interconnectors, big Snowy 2.0 and we don’t have to buy international carbon credits.
Bear in mind Australians are not paying $50 or $100 a year on climate bills, they’re paying $1,300 a year.*
So state and federal governments are spending […]
Tyre Extinguishers are vandals who skulk around at night and poke lentils in tyre valves to flatten tyres of evil SUV’s. It’s a new fashion in “climate activism” and it makes sense in a narcissistic pagan-religion kind of way. Those who do it are convinced they are smarter than everyone else, and their latest “plan” is to show you what nice, caring people they are by wasting your time and generally being thoughtless badgering bullies.
Naturally the cowards are anonymous, though they have a twitter account @T_Extinguishers.
Imagine the stress on the disabled, the sick, the missed medical appointments, children late for critical final year exams, and doctors who can’t get to work. Then there’s the damaged tyres that need replacing.
‘We will make it impossible to own an SUV in the world’s urban areas’
Eco-nuts used lentils to let down the tyres of Chelsea tractors because ‘air pollution is RACIST’
Tom Rawstorne for the DailyMail
And so it was that on Monday night a new front on the eco-war opened as a group calling themselves the Tyre Extinguishers launched a co-ordinated effort to deflate the tyres of as many SUVs […]
This is a thread for voters in South Australia to talk about today’s state election. After the Labor Party wrecked the electricity grid in South Australia, the Liberals appear to be set to lose after only one term. Please, locals or anyone with insight, tell us what is going on. I’ve only listened to 20 minutes of ABC radio in the last 3 months, but even 2000km away, I was informed of the Ambulance Ramping deaths, which now turn out to be exaggerated to the point of being misleading:
South Australian Labor will go to the polls having profited from an ambulance attack advertisement that was ruled inaccurate by the state’s Electoral Commissioner. (ECSA)
The fact that Labor kept running its ramping advertisements on Friday despite the ECSA ruling prompted one of the strongest outbursts from Treasurer Rob Lucas in a 40-year career which ends with his retirement on Saturday, labelling them “despicable lies”. “Labor’s campaign slogan should really be ‘Lie like your life depends on it’,” Mr Lucas said in the final statement of his career. — The Australian
No one seems to be asking the obvious question about Ambulance Ramping (which apparently is […]
The new (old) recipe for goodliness, and to save Ukraine now, is just like the climate change rules.
Thanks to The Putin Excuse, the IEA suggests we cut oil use, so we need to drive 10km per hour slower, go “car free” on Sundays, catch the bus, work from home, avoid business travel and share our car with strangers.
We’ll start right after you — Dr Fatih Birol — Executive Director of the IEA. We’re keen to hear how the 7th Annual Global Conference on Energy Efficiency in Denmark will become a Zoom call instead. Do send pics of your bus trips and ride-shares!
The IEA have already whipped out a handy Report called A 10 Point Plan to Cut Oil Use also known as, Let Them Eat Cake.
The report goes so far as to suggest that car driving be rationed so only odd or even number plates could drive each day.
As Marc Morano says: “Let’s simplify this: The proposed ‘solutions’ to climate change, COVID, and now the Russian war are all exactly the same — hammer the poor and middle class with more restrictions on travel, less freedom, and even more surrendering of power to unelected government […]
It’s was the last chance to save The Planet, but nevermind?
Get ready for the Great Reenergize-ment, we’ve reached a tipping point. Even the elite believers know a real threat when they see one. The ruling class, sitting on cushy taxpayer salaries, weren’t threatened by higher fuel prices and carbon taxes, but Russian missiles are another thing. Only a few months ago we had only “ten years til the next mass extinction”. Now, everything coal is good again, and years of pompous energy policies are on fire.
In normal times these would be monster headline backflips with mass protests in the streets from fifteen-year-old school-skippers.
Hat tip to NetZeroWatch
Germany to fire up mothballed coal power stations
By Matt Oliver, The Telegraph
One of Europe’s biggest energy companies is preparing to bring a string of German coal power stations out of retirement as part of efforts to wean the country off Russian gas.
These include plants that have been decommissioned, those that are scheduled to go off-grid this year and others that are currently kept on standby.
Robert Habeck, Scholz’s economy minister, has insisted there will be “no taboos”, throwing into […]
Mark Mills at the Manhattan Institute has been sending warning signals for years that the push for intermittent energy in the west could have drastic geopolitical consequences. Here he explains how the conflict in the Ukraine has brought the drastic consequences upon us ahead of schedule.
Ukraine and the Great Energy Reset
Naivete about energy realities robbed the U.S. and its allies of important “soft power” options and helped finance Russia’s aggression. In the near term, our choices are limited, but continuing down the same energy path is a formula for yet more problems in the future.
The EU and the US over the past two decades spent more than $5 trillion and made countless mandates to replace oil, natural gas and coal. This brought the hydrocarbon share of all energy use down by two percentage points to 84 percent while burning wood still supplies more energy than all the world’s solar panels and oil still fuels nearly 97 percent of all the world’s transportation.
While the west spent a great deal of money to phase out coal and gas, without going nuclear, Russia and China pressed on to develop their coal and gas resources and nuclear […]
The good news is that the experts are very unhappy:
Today’s disappointing federal court decision undoes 20 years of climate litigation progress in Australia
The Conversation
The federal court today unanimously decided Federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley does not have a duty of care to protect young people from the harms of climate change.
The ruling overturns a previous landmark win by eight high school students, who sought to stop Ley approving a coal mine expansion in New South Wales.
The bad news is that these same experts can’t see how profoundly silly their reasoning is:
So why was Ley successful? The federal court’s 282-page judgment offers myriad reasons for why no duty should be imposed on the minister. But what emerges most clearly is the court’s view that it’s not their place to set policies on climate change. Instead, they say, it’s the job of our elected representatives in the federal government.
Well, do we live in a democracy or don’t we?
If only Jacqueline Peel and Rebekkah Markey-Towler could persuade us that coal is a killer, they wouldn’t need to go to court to force their opinions on […]
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai
By Jo Nova
Unusual rain in Australia started within days of the Hunga Tonga dust cloud travelling across the continent
On January 15th, Hunga Tonga launched a magma-powered thunderstorm that sent atmospheric shockwaves around the world. Ash, salt and particulates were carried through rising columns, right through the stratosphere, into the mesosphere and all the way up to 58 kilometers above Earth. For hours 400,000-odd lighting bolts zapped the airborne chemical soup.
The dust from Hunga-Tonga travelled West and reached Australia on Jan 18 – 20th. On Jan 21-22 flooding rain washed out the main railway line and roads in central Australia. Over the next few weeks, rains soaked the ground across parts of Queensland and New South Wales. By February 15th, the remnant volcanic dust that had circled the Earth and was back again creating rich red sunsets over Australia. A week or so after that, the rain bombs fell on South East Queensland, and travelled south through New South Wales to Sydney.
The big unknown is that the Hunga-Tonga volcano launched water vapor, salt and dust incredibly high — almost too high. The aerosols are far above the troposphere where rainfall originates and […]
Just in case people were thinking a few nuclear bombs don’t matter:
“…even a relatively “minor” exchange of nuclear weapons would wreck the planet’s climate in enormous and long-lasting ways.”
Despite sounding crazily disconnected from reality, Robinson Meyer is slightly less crazy than the cult people he’s trying to reach. Many “artists” and “climate concerned progressives” have leapt on the latest hot-fashion-in-activism (who could have seen that coming?) and they’re calling for a No Fly Zone over Ukraine. It’s like they believe that putting up a sign saying “Warplane Free” will stop the warplanes.
Meyer has figured out that a No Fly Zone might lead to World War III, and he’s trying warn the raptured throngs, that things might not work out so well. Naturally, he’s speaking in lingua-leftie. But how, exactly do you scare someone in a climate cult? Not with nuclear war, but with something catastro-double-awful-bad for the climate.
On Top of Everything Else, Nuclear War Would Be a Climate Problem
By Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic
Social media pundits are having a field day:
…
…
On the richter scale of climate porn, what’s the worst thing Meyer can […]
There is talk about Soviet funding for green groups to block shale gas fracking and coal mining. This is not a new thing.
[Indeed Jo wrote last week: Russian-linked groups donated to anti-frakking Green groups because they love the planet right?]
In case you were wondering why we have no nuclear power and why the sensible old-time conservation movement turned into a radical green monster, the late John Grover told the story in his book Struggle for Power (1980). This is a summary of the chapter on the birth of the anti-nuclear program under the guise of “respectable” consumer advocacy in the US and also the worldwide network of communist agencies and their fronts.
To summarize the summary:
In 1971 Ralph Nader, bankrolled by the Rockefeller network, began to work with the “Union of Concerned Scientists” to combine the efforts of environmental groups and public interest lawyers against nuclear power (NP). They worked on several fronts: Legal action to delay projects; Lobbying Congress and Government agencies; Propagandising the churches; Advertising directed at the general public.
Exaggerated dangers and innuendos of industry incompetence were widely accepted and the industry had no strategy to respond.
“To cut a long story […]
Russia says the US has bioweapon research labs in Ukraine, an outrageous claim that was instantly fact-checked to oblivion until Senator Marco Rubio stopped the show by asking a US official under oath: Does Ukraine have chemical and biological weapons?
Victoria Nuland, US Under Secretary of State, could have said “No” but instead she said:
Ukraine has Biological research facilities… which in fact we are quite concerned about — that Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of. So we are working with Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into Russian hands should they approach…
So not only is there some kind of research going on, but it’s so safe and fine that the US is worried the Russians might get it. And despite the Russians queuing for days in tanks at the border, no one thought to secure or destroy it?
Then the US official who hid secret labs and worries about what the Russians will do tells everyone that
“It’s classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they are planning to do themselves…”
I’m not sure whether to hope the US secures […]
Warwick McKibbin reckons Vladimir Putin might be the best thing that’s ever happened to the energy transition.
Speaking at The Australian Financial Review Business Summit on Tuesday, the economist, academic and former Reserve Bank board member argued that surging commodity prices caused by the war in Ukraine could force the urgent shift to clean energy to accelerate.
Really?
In the parallel universe Mark Mills at the Manhattan Institute has been sending warning signals for years that the push for intermittent energy in the west could have drastic geopolitical consequences. Here he explains how the conflict in the Ukraine has brought the drastic consequences upon us ahead of schedule.
Naivete about energy realities robbed the U.S. and its allies of important “soft power” options and helped finance Russia’s aggression. In the near term, our choices are limited, but continuing down the same energy path is a formula for yet more problems in the future.
He notes that the EU and the US over the past two decades spent more than $5 trillion and made countless mandates to replace oil, natural gas and coal.
This brought the hydrocarbon share of all energy use down by two percentage points […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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