It’s just a ship full of luxury cars on fire, and no one can put out the lithium batteries

Do EV’s make good reefs?

h/t to Paul Homewood who notes The BBC didn’t mention the burning lithium battery story.

The Felicity Ace cargo ship caught fire on Wednesday last week:

German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that an internal email from Volkswagen USA stated that the ship was carrying 3,965 vehicles of the VW, Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini brands.

It’s not clear if the fire started in an EV battery but once the flames got into them, the ship was abandoned to burn.

According to a study done in 2013 by the German Federal Ministry of Transport, Building, and Urban Development, the batteries burn extremely hot and produce noxious gases.

“In the event of a lithium ion battery catching fire, it is important to note that such a fire reaches very high temperatures, produces toxic gases and is inextinguishable,” the report concluded. — The Independent

Five days later the fire has finally run out of material to consume.

Now Felicity Burnt. | Reuters

Luxury cars on fire on cargo ships is a thing now

March 12th, 2019: The Grande America caught fire with 2,000 luxury cars on board and sank.

[…]

Amid energy crisis, UK Government uses Regulatory Death Curse on gas industry

Lesson 4-billion-and-one in How Big Government Screws Everything Up

Cuadrilla Shale Gas.

Remember Cuadrilla, the company that discovered 200 trillion cubic feet of gas in Lancashire, UK in 2011? It multiplied the entire national reserve of shale gas by 37 fold. At one point the market value was estimated to be something like £136 billion and could keep the UK “in gas” for 56 years.

It should have changed everything. But in 2022 the UK is in an energy crisis and instead of expanding those shale wells, the UK government is sealing them up. They’re the only two viable shale gas wells in Britain, and the government wants them to pour concrete down the holes.

It’s been a long slow grind to nothing. The anti-frackers frightened the people with stories of “known carcinogens called ‘silicon dioxide’” and seismic shocks that registered 1.5 on the Richter scale. So the people of the UK gave up an industry worth £6 billion a year, and a reliable energy supply because a government department was afraid of pure sand and a class of earthquake so small it’s “rarely felt” and so common the world has “several million” of them each year.

Andrew […]

Trucker Convoy: Trudeau doesn’t know how to solve this — Freeze them out?

All Trudeau has to do is declare vaccination is voluntary…

The Trucks can’t be towed away — apparently all the towing companies “have Covid”. And the Truckers have been resolutely peaceful and considerate (honking aside). The protests are spreading, not shrinking. The Ambassador Bridge is now also blockaded — that’s the major bridge connecting Detroit, Michigan and Windsor. Hundreds of Truckers on the Alberta border are still gathered there. The Cavalry has arrived! Hordes of cowboys on horses have joined them. In Alaska, trucks are gathering too. Truckers in Alaska can’t drive to the rest of the USA without crossing the Canadian border.

The Ottawa Mayor has declared a “State of Emergency” because people were burning down buildings, destroying statues, and looting Nike stores — wait… No. That’s all fine. It’s a state of emergency because someone is honking horns. Trudeau could have come out to meet the workers revolution, listen to them, and negotiate, as any good leader would. Instead, the troopers started to arrest people carrying cans of fuel or propane gas to support the Truckers. Staying warm in parked trucks is now an act of insurrection.

It was minus 5C last night in Ottawa, and it’s forecast […]

Who needs trees: Welcome to a black glass wilderness

Greens destroy wilderness one innumerate fantasy at a time. If only they had enough fossil fuels underground they might have saved this forest.

A solar wilderness. Tiahang Mountain Solar plant.

“Industrial solar farms require 300-400 times more land than natural gas or nuclear plants” — — Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

Dystopia await all those who think solar power is free

 …

Solar panels on Taihang Mountain have a theoretical capacity of 20MW

“It can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 20,000 tons annually replacing 7,500 tons of coal each year. “

Since China consumes 4,319,921,826 tons of coal each year, that’s one plant down, and only 575,145 more to build…

9.9 out of 10 based on 74 ratings

A thread to discuss the Canadian Truckers convoy

Sorry I can’t do the updates today, but hopefully readers can below.

Great to hear from so many Canadians!

9.4 out of 10 based on 44 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

9.9 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Canadian Truckers for Freedom growing fast — 11 convoys, $5m, one convoy said to be 70km long

11 convoys are converging across Canada. One convoy was claimed to be over 70 kilometers long* last night and growing. US truckers are joining in, and they can’t come over the border they are going to block it.

This is not a union organized thing. It’s grassroots and it’s come out of nowhere. People are coming out and standing in minus 20 degree weather just to cheer the trucks on. The fundraising started last Friday and has reached $5m. It has grown so fast that GoFundMe is holding funds til the organisers present a clear plan. Truckdrivers are even coming from Alaska. There’s an ocean of cars in support in Acheson Alberta.

UPDATE#2: The Empire fights back. Snezhana reports: Facebook shut down the #FreedomConvoy2022 page and Social media is starting to shut down pages supporting #TruckersForFreedom to censor what’s happening in #Canada!

The Facebook Group had grown to 545,000 members before it was shut down.

If news of this convoy spread freely and was supported like the BLM rallies imagine how fast it could grow. Spread the word. We’re in an information war. Share the news any way you can. Never give in. […]

EV needs 13 freezing hours to get 650 km with 3 charging stops and no heater

VW e-Up | Photo by M 93

A German car reporter bought a new VW e-Up car in Wolfsburg and drove the 650 km to Munich. But the weather was freezing and to get further on each charge Lisa Brack kept the heating off most of the time. She still needed three charging stops and took 13 hours to get home.

Gosselin said that a diesel car would usually finish that trip in seven hours without a fuel stop (and with a heater running).

13 hours of driving and charging

The subfreezing weather was a major drawback for the VW e-car. According to the kreiszeitung.de, “the heating stayed off for almost the entire journey in freezing temperature” in order not to draw down the battery so quickly. This meant that to survive the trip, Brack had to take along a generous supply of “hats, scarves, gloves and generally warm clothing”…

According to the kreiszeitung.de, she made the crucial mistake of charging up too seldom and wasted much time charging the batteries to 100% instead of 80% (the last 20% take the longest). “Charge faster, accept a little less range and charge […]

The Bureau of Meteorology finds Australia is still getting colder a century later

Surprisingly, the World War I era temperatures are still changing. Mornings that seemed nippy at the time are now susceptible to frosts.

Someone should warn the farmers — except they’re all dead.

Thanks to Chris Gillham for independently and laboriously going through the new unannounced changes in another cycle of BOM’s hidden revamp of Australia’s history. ACORN 2.2 is the latest version of the Australian Climate Observation Reference Network of “the best” 112 weather stations across Australia.

Bureau of Meteorology ‘cools the past, warms present’

Graham Lloyd, The Australian

“The bureau has now remodelled the national temperature ­dataset three times in just nine years,” Dr Jennifer Marohasy said.

In the last five years the ACORN re-revisions by the BOM have discovered another quarter of a degree of warming that we didn’t know about from the last hundred years. It’s not clear why the BOM doesn’t want to tell the world how good they are at correcting thermometer records from 1913. It seems like a remarkable skill.

The minima just keep getting cooler

Chris Gillham plots the longest running stations from the ACORN 2.2 set against the old raw readings:

Who knew all those old […]

The Tongan eruption sent shockwaves around the world

Scott Manley has done an excellent summary video of the Tongan volcano, much of the science and history of it as well as the effects thousands of miles away. The area around the volcano had completely reformed in the last ten years. He has collected some great footage together.

It’s interesting watching air pressure waves travel across Japan and the USA. Ken Stewart found the compression- decompression wave hit the east coast of Australia at about 5:16 Qld time and took 3 hours and 24 minutes roughly to get to Shark Bay, an average speed of about 1,160 kph. The decompression was about half an hour after the first peak and can be seen (still) in weather station pressure data.

Eruptions of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai are roughly 900 years apart and this one was on schedule.

Thanks to Greg …

A

The CliffMass weather blog noted that the pressure wave hit Seattle at 4:30AM local time, so the air pressure spike took 8.5 hours to cross the Pacific at about 664miles per hour. h/t WattsUp

Sending best wishes for the poor people of Tonga. Planes are on the way to help, slightly complicated because Tonga is still Covid free, and […]

Workers at Big Woke Tech Monopolies are miserable

by Jo Nova

Who would have guessed that giant protected monopolies would devolve into wallowing workplaces where sad-sack un-productive workers accumulate?

“Hazard Harrington” writes from the inside of Big Tech about the terminal decline, the dark moods, despondency and lack of productivity. When the most exulted culture at work are the most victimized, the miserable workers share their misery and nobody gets anything done.

Wokeness is that dead end where everyone can blame everyone else, and no one, apart from white men, can be sacked. So the people who can’t compete collect in a kind of Sargasso sea of civilization.

h/t Bill in AZ

UPDATE: Hazard Harrington’s account is now gone. Archive copy

@HazardHarringto from Inside Big Tech

… COVID/WFH [Working From Home] has totally broken people. They are fundamentally weak, often with no social support outside of work. They’re the people with no children, no spouse. Only a dog or cat for emotional support.

There’s constant talk, even now, about how hard things are for everyone. Often meetings start with going around the room to ask “How is everyone feeling?” Literally everyone else went on sad rants about their lives. “I’m so MAD a […]

A vaccine so good we have to punish The Worlds Best Tennis Player?

UPDATE: Judges decision is final. Djokovic to be deported. He faces a three year ban potentially. “An embarassing farce”.

No one looks good in the Novak Djokovic Deportation saga, but ponder what it says about the vaccines. We’re deporting the best tennis player in the world — not because of the germs he might spread, but to because of the ideas he might spread.

“It’s in the public interest” says the Immigration Minister

While some are cheering One Rule for All, ponder that we’re punishing someone because of what other people might do?

Djokovic is a political prisoner:

Immigration minister Alex Hawke didn’t dispute Djokovic’s claim of a medical exemption… [he] said allowing the player to stay could sway some Australians against getting vaccinated.

“Mr. Djokovic’s presence in Australia may pose a health risk to the Australian community in that his presence in Australia may foster antivaccination sentiment,” Hawke said in a document detailing his decision.

“His presence in Australia, given his well-known stance on vaccination, creates a risk of strengthening the antivaccination sentiment of a minority of the Australian community,” Hawke said in the cancellation notice.

—Wall […]

Repeat boosters may reduce the immune response

Author BernbaumJG

Our immune systems are a fully functioning type of AI, or rather BI — biological intelligence. After millions of years of evolution, the system is tuned for efficiency with feedback loops “up the kazoo”. We’re provoking a complicated system we don’t understand.

It’s quite possible, if we keep provoking it with something “non threatening”, rather than getting more excited, the immune system may get bored. It could also get tired, desensitized, or exhausted.

Robert Malone warned months ago that we need to test each round of vaccines and we can’t assume our bodies will respond the same way.

Whatever it is, the European Medicines Agency wants to put the brakes on the booster program:

Frequent Boosters Spur Warning on Immune Response

By: Bloomberg |

Repeat booster doses every four months could eventually weaken the immune response and tire out people, according to the European Medicines Agency.

European Union regulators warned that frequent Covid-19 booster shots could adversely affect the immune response and may not be feasible.

Repeat booster doses every four months could eventually weaken the immune response and tire out people, according to the European Medicines Agency. Instead, countries […]

Thursday Open Thread

8.8 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

Magical seven year record wins the Hottest-ever Bingo of 2021

Why does “seven years” suddenly matter?

“The past 7 years have been the hottest on record

“by a clear margin,” scientists say”

Since when do we do climate analysis on seven year periods? — Since climate scientists get rewarded for scaring taxpayers and “seven” is this years lucky number.

2021 wasn’t THE hottest year so they have to come up with something

In climate “science” there are always a thousand combinations and permutations of climate records to pick from, so it’s a snap to find one that sings. If it wasn’t the hottest year in 2021, it might have been the hottest global summer, warmest winter, driest spring, or stormiest “on record”. And if temperatures stop rising, the hottest year record stretches elastically into the hottest 2-years, 3-years and 5 years-on-record.

Scientifically, the climate interval that matters most is whatever it has to be to stretch out and sing “Bingo” — “The Met Bureau needs more money.”

Naturally all Climate Bingo games are boosted by inexplicable adjustments, badly placed thermometers, shrinking thermometer screens, and the process of constantly rewriting history. If the incinerators near thermometers don’t do it, the homogenization will. They might be Australian […]

Coal power to hit all time high in 2022 says IEA weeping

h.t Andy May

So much for the End of Coal

It’s a bumper year in 2021, a bigger year in 2022, and possibly more glorious records for coal in 2023 and 2024. Humans burnt more coal last year than at any other time in history.

Coal-fired power generation is set to reach an all-time high in 2021

The declines in global coal-fired power generation in 2019 and 2020 led to expectations that it might have peaked in 2018. But 2021 dashed those hopes. With electricity demand outpacing low-carbon supply, and with steeply rising natural gas prices, global coal power generation is on course to increase by 9% in 2021 to 10 350 terawatt-hours (TWh) – a new all-time high.

As the IEA concludes through gritted teeth: Global coal consumption is not on the Net Zero trajectory and is unlikely to be before 2024. Perhaps someone should tell all the Glasgow Minions?

Other editors might have labelled this, “Coal Still Vital” or “Coal’s Day is Here”! Instead the IEA saw a sedate plateauing that kept plateuing in the headlines:

Fully two-thirds of global coal is used by just two countries. The other 193 nations split […]

Stop That Now! Climate change helps aggressive mangrove forests build bigger tropical islands

The oceans were supposed to be swallowing up the islands

Climate change has unleashed rampant growth in mangrove forests. The trees are capturing coral detritus in large sand drifts, and locking it into whole new ecosystems that expand 5 to 6 meters a year. It’s just remarkable — some islands have grown by several kilometers since 1928.

The Howick Group of islands is north of Cairns Australia. Three scientific expeditions mapped out them out in 1928 and in 1974, and again in 2021, and lo, they have grown, especially in the last four decades. That makes them like most of the 709 islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans that were studied a few years ago. Satellites showed that 89% of those islands had grown.

It turns out warmer more carbon rich world makes mangroves happy. Who could have seen that coming, apart from every biologist on Earth?

From the commentary in the video below:

“We’ve seen some really dramatic changes. Some of the things that we’ve seen are advancing fronts of forests. Forests that were mapped to small patches on the windward part of the reef flat are now occupying a much larger section of […]

Send some global warming to Canada

From Canadian Friends:

Hilarious! Way more fun than the “climate emergency “. pic.twitter.com/g0qY6LnmzG

— Patrick Moore (@EcoSenseNow) January 7, 2022

… And since it’s the weekend. For fun. Imagine memorizing his lines?

Its important to laugh. This made me cry with laughter. I miss comedy so much. Wokery has just about killed it off. pic.twitter.com/S7vpjJhwYU

— Laurence Fox ✝️ (@LozzaFox) January 8, 2022

Who is that man?

ANSWER: Paul Whitehouse, thanks to Great Aunt Janet.

PS: If the movies don’t show above, try another browser. Sigh. Not Firefox.

9.7 out of 10 based on 54 ratings

Deaths from 1 degree of warming nothing compared to an Electricity Grid collapse for a year

Even the worst imaginary scenarios for global warming are nothing compared to a year without electricity. Bunky Mortimer III thinks US priorities are screwed.

Get one at Indiamart perhaps?

The US will spend some $555b to prevent a theoretical warming of a degree or two. A warming which may not occur for a century, if at all, and about which the largest competitors to the USA are doing nothing.

In contrast, a solar Carrington event, one nuclear blast, or a cyber attack taking out just nine interconnector sites could collapse the entire US grid for 18 months.

Which environmental threat matters? The West is in apoplexy over the environmental degradation affecting polar bears, but the environment we need the most right now is the one with fresh water, edible food and a room temperature above freezing.

Securing the grid should be this country’s highest environmental priority

Taki’s Magazine

A prolonged collapse of this nation’s electrical grid—through starvation, disease, and societal collapse—could result in the death of up to 90% of the U.S. population. This figure has not been disputed, yet this prospect has received virtually no attention from policy makers or the media. The […]

Weekend Unthreaded

10 out of 10 based on 7 ratings