Bill Gates launches giant chalk advertising campaign to “block sun”

The purpose of the hot air balloon adding two whole kilograms of chalk to the atmosphere is a glorious multipurpose marketing exercise. It might as well be a skywriting advert.

Building a sunshade for the whole planet radiates cinematic desperation — it’s advertising the terror of climate change — Really, we need to do that? It’ll get everyone talking about climate change for another five minutes, as if it mattered. But make no mistake, it’s such an ambitious Manhattan-scale idea, it’s advertising Bill Gates the billionaire, too. This is meant to raise his global cachet too. Super-Bill to the rescue. Is he God?

But it’s also advertising other things, like how stupid the climate models are, how fake the pious planetary-care is, and how daft the whole UN-herd is.

Bill Gates plans to launch a bag of chalk into the stratosphere and somehow get useful data out of it about whether we could build an Earthly sunshade to cool ourselves on the same scale as a super volcano. ( To that end, if it looked like he might succeed, watch the Paris agreement dissolve a nanosecond after someone starts to get serious about shading one nation and not some other […]

Toyota says “The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.”

So the worlds car manufacturers are lining up: The Volkswagon group and GM are going “full electric” — so they say. Ford Motor Co claims its line-up in Europe will be fully electric by 2030, while Tata Motors unit Jaguar Land Rover said its luxury Jaguar brand will be entirely electric by 2025.

But Toyota and Honda are not.

At least investors (and consumers) have a choice. Presumably , the US Democrats will want to change that.

Toyota Warns (Again) About Electrifying All Autos. Is Anyone Listening?

Bryan Preston, PJ Media

When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’s probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.

Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refueling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.”

Of those, “Consumer Acceptance” is the easiest thing to change (especially with a law and the right amount of jail time).

[…]

Lomborg: 50 years of unmitigated climate change might leave us only 356% richer instead of 363%

Bjorn Lomborg was going to present some economic pointers to Duke University last week, but even UN approved estimates were too high-risk for Duke . Evidently the students are so poorly trained they couldn’t be trusted around a different point of view. Lomborg might seed all kinds of wicked ideas about them doing their own research. Though, more likely, it had nothing to do with the students. The real problem with Lomborg was that he threatened their branding. What if Duke lost some big lefty donors? (Or the biggest donor of all, Big Government?)

Lomborg shows how fragile the UN-Wall of Science is

All he aimed to do was to join together two separate UN economic factoids, but he had to be axed. He even agrees “climate change is a problem”. But agreeing on the science is not enough.

When climate alarmism meets cancel culture

Bjorn Lomborg, The Australian

One of my [axed] presentation points was highlighting the latest full UN Climate Panel report which estimates the total cost of climate change. They found that unmitigated climate change in half a century will reduce general welfare equivalent to lowering each person’s income by […]

Tuesday Open Thread

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Carbon dioxide radically lower but floods destroy houses, cover beaches in debris across NSW in 1857

Floods are sweeping across NSW and 18,000 people have been evacuated, and rain is forecast to keep coming for til Wednesday. Flooding is described as the worst in 60 years. But that’s the point. There have always been floods right after droughts and fires — and we knew that 150 years ago.

The scandal is that in 1865, scientists had a better grip on what caused them. Today “top” climate scientists think your car causes the weather.

Top science in 2021: Solar panels and windmills could have stopped the flooding:

The multiple natural disasters Australia has experienced over the past 18 months — such as the floods currently ravaging NSW — should be blamed on climate change, say experts from the Climate Council.

“The intense rainfall and floods that have devastated NSW communities are taking place in an atmosphere made warmer and wetter by climate change, which is driven by the burning of coal, oil, and gas,” Climate Council spokesperson Will Steffen said in a statement on Monday.

“For many communities dealing with floods right now, this is the latest in a line of climate change-exacerbated extreme weather events they have […]

In a fluke moment SA and Vic have got cheap electricity (but only thanks to Black coal, and a screwed market)

Yesterdays free advertisement for the Renewables Industry comes from Peter Martin, ANU, and was swallowed whole by The Conversation, and then repeated by The ABC. (If only the ABC had three million dollars a day to spend on checking things before it published them, they might have warned the economist that he doesn’t understand much about the grid or even the energy market.) This kind of anti-coal PsyOps might work on teenagers: Electricity has become a jigsaw. Coal is unable to provide the missing pieces

March 16, 2021 1.46pm AEDT

Yallourn, in the Latrobe Valley, provides up to 20 per cent of Victoria’s power. It has been operating for 47 years. Since late 2017 at least one of its four units has broken down 50 times. Its workforce doubles for three to four months most years to deal with the breakdowns. It pumps out 3 per cent of Australia’s carbon emissions.

And here’s Macarthur Wind Power plant, Victoria’s largest at 420-never-attained-MW. It breaks down nearly every single day:

Fig 1: Anero.id Macarthur Wind output

Martin goes on in a non-stop infomercial for wind and solar He must be aiming for 12 year old voters, or perhaps […]

ABC is a billion dollar Leftist advertising agency that most Australians don’t want to pay for

Four out of five Australians wouldn’t pay for ABC TV if it were a subscription service

That’s how much we value our public advertiser broadcaster. But as it stands, at $1 billion dollars a year, on average $70 is taken each year from every *taxpaying* man, woman and child in Australia, or $280 for a family of four.*

In a survey of 500 Australians this week, more than half (52%) didn’t want to pay a cent. The situation got worse when they were asked if they would subscribe “like Netflix”? At this point the number of naysayers grew from 52% to 79%.

Truth be told, we all deserve a refund, and backdated 30 years

The cost to the nation of their ABC is not just a billion dollars a year lost, but their culpable-pro-rata-part in the billions of dollars wasted on policies that were practically pagan witchdraft which the ABC covered up. As leading failures of the fourth estate, the ABC consistently hid the incompetence of universities, professors and institutions like the BoM.

But according to the ABC, 72% of Australians say they are ‘Australia’s most trusted source of news and current affairs’. (I guess it depends on how […]

Political obliteration: The Right sold out their base on sovereign borders and climate change

There are lessons for conservatives from this eclectic election in the most isolated state on Earth. It was historic, epic, and “A complete and utter landslide“. And the message is “borders”. Remember “Build the Wall?” Conservatives all around the world seem to have forgotten the power and appeal of being able to control who and which viridae, come across the border. If the Democrats in the US fortified the wall, they might not have to fortify election results.

It’s a complete blitz. | The West Australian

The election Saturday was a wipeout of legendary proportions among democracies anywhere. Only four years ago, the Liberals (conservatives, theoretically) were the ruling party in Western Australia. Today they hold but two, as in one plus one, seats in the lower house of the WA Parliament, out of 59. They may win 3. The Labor Party took 58% of the first preference votes (that’s almost unheard of). Labor will take the Upper House too. See: WA Election Results. Things are so extreme, the talk now is how the Parliament is not big enough to hold the Labor M.P.’s. The rooms are just not designed for one party having almost […]

Desertification cancelled: Climate Change won’t make the deserts grow

After a thousand headlines told us Climate Change would make deserts grow, a new study suggests it won’t. It’s a finding that shocks no one who knew that climate models have no predictive skill with rainfall, and that a warmer world means higher global precipitation. Plus there’s the awkward clue that for the last forty years the arid regions of the world have been getting greener instead of more deserty.

Looks a bit different?

The top map (below) shows the deserts expanding — but that’s the old predictions which are based only on “atmospheric data” like temperature and rainfall. The bottom map is the new work which uses soil and vegetation data too. Red means growing deserts. Blue means shrinking.

Remember, all contradictory conclusions are based on expert opinions using worlds best practice and done by Nobel-Prize-winning people. Shame about all the farmers and investors making decisions based on junk models.

Deserts were expanding until experts got a better model.

 

The new study is based on modeling too so it is still wrong, but less useless than previous studies.

The hugely different forecasts show how vaporously thin the past doom and gloom was, and how so many […]

EU bullies demand control of Australian electricity in order to do trade deals

The EU has given up trying to persuade Australian voters that wind and solar power is “cheap”. Instead, it’s using Upperclass centralized bully-power in an attempt to force Australia to sacrifice cheaper electricity and hobble its generation network to satisfy the EU totalitarians.

Australian exporters could face millions of dollars in European tariffs as EU seeks to punish polluters

Written by someone at Their ABC

Australian exporters to Europe are likely to face millions of dollars in new tariffs after the European Parliament voted overnight to move forward with a carbon levy on products from countries lacking serious pollution reduction programs.

The vote came after a top parliamentary committee noted concerns about “the lack of cooperation by some of the EU’s trade partners … to reach the objectives of the Paris Agreement”.

Australians installed more renewables per capita than any place on Earth in 2018-19, but that isn’t enough. The EU say we need a “target” of net-zero, (which we can point at and ignore, like most of what the EU does):

Kathleen van Brempt, a key parliamentary trade coordinator, said an FTA was contingent on “a clear vision [from] Australia […]

All reefs look dead from a plane — Great Barrier Reef still alive underwater

Can you spot a dead coral from 120 meters in the air?

The media and academic experts keep telling us the reef is dead. Jen Marohasy points out that the death of the Great Barrier Reef was diagnosed from the sky, so she had the radical idea of going out to reefs like Pixie reef to photograph it underwater instead. She didn’t receive any of the $440m Malcolm Turnbull sent to save the reef. But strangely, none of those millions appears to be used to do something as banal as a swimming near a coral. In an earlier post she described how many of the corals grow in vertical walls, which are very difficult to spot from a plane. Now she’s demonstrating how hard it is to spot even obvious things from a plane.

This reef, Pixie Reef, was ‘surveyed’ back on 22nd March 2016 from the air by Terry Hughes of James Cook University during one of his fly pasts. It was concluded from that single observation/glance-down from 150 metres altitude that that this reef was 65% bleached. The inshore reefs north of Cairns were more or less all written-off, back then, by the experts and the […]

BlueAnon: so funny they had to ban it

The Upper Class Swamp has been labeling any conjecture they don’t like as Qanon (even if it isn’t connected to it) which buries it all as dangerous conspiracy theorizing. This weekend the countercry “BlueAnon” took off on Twitter and in the Urban Dictionary — mocking the conspiracy theories of the left.

You might suffer from BlueAnon if you think the CPAC stage was really a NAZI insignia signal, put there as a secret code; or you think the Capitol Hill rioters were really trying to overturn the most powerful government in the world without any guns at all, and of course, if you think all climate skeptics are secretly paid by Big Oil.

BlueAnon was registered on the UrbanDictionary:

The Upper Class Swamp keep telling us what they are afraid of: Being laughed at

Ed Driscoll on Instapundit noticed the BlueAnon trend yesterday and enthusiastically wrote: “OMG-LOL! Receipt-filled thread mocking #BlueAnon for each and every crazy conspiracy theory on the Left is an epic must-read.” But the Deplorables must absolutely not be able to laugh at crazy Upper Class ideas, so the Thought Police went to work. Within an hour the twitchy.com link and the “epic” jokefest […]

The French once did a political purge of the military and look what happened to them

Moves continue in the US to remove “extremists” from the Military. Though no one seems to know the definition of extremeist, nor what will happen to anyone identified as one.

Every illegal regime that comes to power by means of a coup lives in constant fear of the same thing happening to them. It’s their abiding characteristic and the reason they regularly have mass purges.

— The Pointman, How the Purge of the Military is Being Done

In 1899 the hard left gained power in France, and purged “the two main” conservative institutions — the church and the military. James S. Corum describes what happened and how 15 years later, it was a bloodbath in the first month of the war against the Germans, the French lost a quarter of a million men — fully one fifth of their field army.

When a Great Democracy Politicized the Military

James S. Corum, American Thinker

Even without Facebook the French government still had ways to filter out their political opponents.

In their desire to remold France according to Jacobin principles, the Left Bloc decided that conservative officers had to […]

Massive Fires: far worse 4,000 years ago in Northern Australia

Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone, found some studies showing Fires are less common today than in the past — including a ripper of an Australian study.

Emma Rehn et al went to a small lake in far North Australia and dug up about 6m of sediment core from the bottom. They looked at charcoal deposits and a bunch of different minerals. They discovered that the top most recent layers had the worst fires for a thousand years. It had all the makings of a Great Climate Change advert. But to their absolute credit, they kept going down and further back and uncovered a story of four thousand long years of wild blazes.

Despite millennia of prehistoric infernos, no media outlets in Australia have shown any interest in this study which came out a month ago — showing Sensationalism is not all its cracked up to be, and not as much fun as Confirmation Bias.

Look at the current blip (left hand side) since European settlement, compared to the fires of 4,000 years ago (right hand side). As Mr Dundee would say, “That’s not a fire…. ”

Carbon Flux showing the intensity of fires in Arnhem land for […]

How about a Duty of Care to keep electricity cheap and teach teenagers real science?

A group of teenagers want to stop the expansion of a coal mine in Australia. They have taken a class action out against the Government because we all know Governments are supposed to manage the weather better.

Well you’d be cross too, if you thought careless old folk were going to bring you slightly warmer weather!

A duty of care’: Australian teenagers take their climate crisis plea to court

The Guardian

Eight teenagers and an octogenarian nun head to an Australian court on Tuesday to launch what they hope will prove to be a landmark case – one that establishes the federal government’s duty of care in protecting future generations from a worsening climate crisis.

If successful, the people behind the class action believe it may set a precedent that stops the government approving new fossil fuel projects.

Because the last thing you’d want is democratically elected Ministers to chose how we use national resources.

As with any novel legal argument, its chances of success are unclear, but the case is not happening in isolation.

So it is an ambit claim, backed by someone with money. Who? This could be a form […]

News and tips Friday

Just trying to see if this is useful.

h/t Leo

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US Climate Czar turns the thumb-screws on Australia coal

And some people wondered why I paid any attention to the US election. Apart from being the biggest political story in my life, there is that effect that US leaders have even on the other side of the world.

It’s only been five weeks since the inauguration and our largest military ally is already leaning on Australia to get out of coal fired power. To put some perspective on the size of this favour — Coal is our largest single export commodity about half the time, and most years Australia is the largest single exporter of coal in the world. We export more than 400 million tons of coal per annum. We also keep some and use coal to generate more than half our electricity. Even burning through the blackstuff like that, we still have another 300 years of supply underground. It could be very profitable stuff for another twelve generations of Australians. Or not.

So our largest trading partner is launching a trade war and acting hostile, while our largest military ally is saying they want a big favour. How much room is there for Australia to manouver?

Meanwhile last year China built three times more coal power than […]

Climate Propaganda burns out: neither hope nor doom works on audiences anymore

Hard to find some good news out there today. But here’s a bit:

People are immune to climate hopey gloom

Researchers tried to figure out whether to make their climate propaganda more scary or more uplifting but found instead that they might as well show 500 people “the history of smartphones”. (That was the control video). Nothing works anymore.

It was a complete wash. No new activists were made.

However, despite these emotional responses, neither [doom nor hope] video was associated with significant differences in climate change risk perceptions, likelihood of behavior change, or likelihood of climate activism. These null results suggest that the impacts of a single hope or fear appeal can be overstated…

After watching the online movies, nobody thought climate change was scarier, nobody want to change anything they did, and no one wanted to be climate activist either, unless they were already one to start with. After 30 years of propaganda, people have heard it all. Pounding them them with more isn’t going to work.

It didn’t matter which movie they saw.

Neither doom, hope nor placebo did a thing.

The multi-billion dollar industry of climate propaganda was hoping to tweak […]

Texas dodged a bullet: Would you like explosions with your blackouts?

Houston Texas, Feb 2021. Image by Fish & Trips

Texas toyed with cascading crises

The Green Experiment could have gone so much worse. Here’s a man who was a gas industry executive involved in a near miss in New England in 1989. The four day blackout sounds bad, but it was a lottery win compared to the worst case scenarios. Not only was a full state-wide blackout possible, which may take months to correct, but the gas system is a bomb waiting to go off too.

ERCOT officials admit they only just averted a blackstart:

Texas was “seconds and minutes” away Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.

— by Erin Douglas, Texas Tribune

The Blackstart in Venezuela took weeks to restart — rebooting an induction motor takes six times the normal current. Energizing a substation can cause explosions. It’s much easier to add load to an operating grid than to rebuild one from scratch. Surges on start up can break things, that fail. It can take rolling rounds […]

Extinction level event? 42,000 years ago Earths magnetic field shrank to nothing

Don’t look now, it’s a climate disaster of massive proportions and it has nothing to do with CO2.

Scientists have just discovered what they say was a wild era 42,000 years ago — where the Earth’s magnetic field practically disappeared. They’ve called it the Adams Event (after Douglas Adams of Hitchhikers Guide fame).

This was hidden previously, just before the Laschamp Excursion which we’ve known about since 1969. That event happened about 41,000 years ago – during which the Earth’s magnetic field briefly flipped. It was a pretty big deal in itself. For 800 years the field strength fell to 28% of it’s current strength and was reversed North-to-south. Due to the weak magnetic field, the theory is that cosmic rays zinged further into the atmosphere and created a layer of enriched beryllium 10 and carbon 14 which remains to this day in a thin slice around the world buried under all the layers of dirt that came after it.

The giant kauri tree log preserved in Ngāwhā, New Zealand, was alive during the Adams Event. Photo: Nelson Parker https://www.nelsonskaihukauri.co.nz/

Extraordinarily, during all this, one giant Kauri tree managed to live for more than 1,700 years. It grew […]