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By Jo Nova
We are in an information war, and by definition, the best candidates in the Australian election are the ones the media ignores and sometimes they’re also the people the Liberal party has thrown out. (We know they oppose The Blob — think of Craig Kelly -NSW and Gerard Rennick – QLD. ) Its worth knowing that Gerard Rennick People First and The Libertarians, have combined with the Heart Party to form the Australia First Alliance (AFA) — and in NSW, ACT, Vic and QLD they will appear together on the Group Ticket.
Every vote in the Australian election is worth $3.38 as a first preference to any party winning more than 4% of the vote. That money means a lot to the small parties. Pick your number 1 with care. Then list all the freedom loving minor parties, and finally, sigh, one “big” party. Do you want your Senate Vote to Extinguish? If you don’t put a number next to the Liberals (7, 8 or 9 say) and one of your first six choices isn’t elected, your vote may vanish into the ether. It may feel like a worthy protest (the Liberals did endorse the ghastly Under-16 Social Media ban), but The Greens, Teals and Labor will thank you. The Blob hopes die-hard conservatives neutralize themselves. And small parties get soft power from sending preferences. For West Australians: in the Senate — Ky Cao is running as an independent and comes highly recommended by David Archibald, a long time skeptic and defense analyst.
Turning Point Australia has put together a table of party policies below. Parties listed: One Nation / Gerard Rennick People First | Libertarian Party | Trumpet of Patriots | Family First | Great Australia Party | Liberals | Labor | Greens | Teals.  Click to enlarge! *Liberals (for foreign readers) means theoretically conservative. Supposedly for free speech and smaller government. Topher explains the voting strategy with marbles. It makes so much sense…And obviously, this post is authorized by me, and are entirely my own opinions. Do I need to say that? By Jo Nova What a bomb to drop in the last days before the Australian election Tony Blair, Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach/Web Summit via Sportsfile The aggressive climate action of the Australian Labor Party is suddenly wildly far out on a branch. There are council elections in the UK, and Nigel Farage’s party is “expected to make large gains”. So as Ed Cummings in The Telegraph describes it, Tony Blair, former Prime Minister, “chose this moment to lob a large grenade”. Blair is possibly the first person within the Blob to say what skeptics have been saying for years, as if he thought of it all by himself. He’s pulling the pin on the idea that “Net Zero” is sensible, possible, and essential, but this is no mea culpa — more like an escape plan. The populist parties are rising across Europe, grids are falling, and the failures of the Left are becoming too obvious. Watch the pea — on the one hand, it’s good that an influential figure on the Left is saying that Net Zero is “riven with irrationality” and “unworkable” and “doomed to fail” but he’s tacitly pretending the left have figured this out by themselves and are victims of the namecalling they started. The namecalling that has been their greatest weapon, and his remarks have made it to the Sydney Morning Herald today: A political tide is turning across Europe, and at its centre is a hard truth— by Rob Harris, The Sydney Morning Herald In Britain, Sir Tony Blair’s sharp critique of the government’s net zero strategy this week marks a watershed moment for green policy debate. The former Labour prime minister, who has been quietly advising Downing Street, accused politicians of pushing unrealistic and politically unsustainable climate agendas. “People are being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal,” Blair said in a foreword to a new report from his think tank released on Tuesday. This is a remarkable admission. The Blob have ostracized and ruthlessly punished anyone who stepped outside the line. It’s been their substitute for rational argument for thirty years: According to Blair, the political elite is paralysed by a climate discourse he described as “riven with irrationality”. He argued that many leaders know the current approach is unworkable but are “terrified” of voicing that view for fear of being labelled climate change deniers. “The movement now needs a public mandate, attainable only through a shift from protest to pragmatic policy,” he said. This big shift has been forced upon them by Donald Trump, by Nigel Farage, and belatedly the UK Conservative party. Above all, it’s been forced upon them by reality. The shocking price rises, the blackouts, the crippling loss of industrial power — and now finally, the rise of powerful political opposition in the UK. But this is not a reconciliation with reality, there is no acknowledgement the Left got anything wrong, or the “deniers” were right all along. There are no lessons being learned here. It is their escape hatch. In The Foreward, he says people are turning away from politics (meaning Labour politics). People know that the current state of debate over climate change is riven with irrationality. As a result, though most people will accept that climate change is a reality caused by human activity, they’re turning away from the politics of the issue because they believe the proposed solutions are not founded on good policy. So, in developed countries, voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal. It’s about The BacklashThe Paris agreement failed because of Covid and the War in Ukraine, you know: Therefore, there has been a period where climate-change action and global agreements, notably the Paris Agreement in 2015, seemed to herald a new era; but that momentum has been followed – exacerbated by external shocks like Covid and the Ukraine war – by a backlash against such action, which threatens to derail the whole agenda. However, because of the levels of growth and development, present policy solutions are inadequate and, worse, are distorting the debate into a quest for a climate platform that is unrealistic and therefore unworkable. And though action by the developed world is still vital, by 2030 almost two-thirds of global emissions will come from China, India and South-East Asia. Yet the global financial flows for renewable energy in the developing world have fallen and not risen in the past few years. It’s not the end of coal and oil: These are the inconvenient facts, which mean that any strategy based on either “phasing out” fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail. But this is not good news for Wind and Solar power. They may have just been thrown under the bus.  The Climate Paradox: Why We Need to Reset Action on Climate Change, by Tony Blair (Click to download the report). This is a Big Blob documentBut make no mistake, in the conclusions he’s still calling for the ultimate Blob wet dream — he wants weather control with geoengineering and that will need global governance: Actions to address the climate-change challenge must include:
In the most extreme case, in which we fail to make significant progress on decarbonisation, the world may need to seriously consider solar radiation management (SRM), a technology generally considered a last resort for addressing global warming. One of the most radical and controversial forms of disruption, SRM involves the direct manipulation of the Earth’s climate system to counteract global warming through techniques aiming to reflect sunlight away or limit the radiation that reaches the Earth. While highly controversial, such technologies may become necessary if mitigation efforts fail to prevent catastrophic climate shifts. … Because the impacts of SRM are likely to be global and unequally felt, the world needs a robust governance framework to ensure its equitable and ethical use. This framework could mirror past efforts at limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons. There is currently significant risk that a single country could move ahead unilaterally with this technology at scale, resulting in extreme weather effects that transcend national borders. As such, political leaders globally should progress with urgency a governance framework. The potential for unintended consequences such as regional climate disruptions or unforeseen ecological impacts, including risks from sudden temperature rise on the ceasing of SRM activities, underscores the importance of international cooperation and oversight, and makes this intervention the most disruptive of technological options. Finally — In Part 7. “Rethinking the Role of Finance, Including Philanthropy”, free men and women of the world will want to know Tony Blair wants to harness the power of philanthropic funding, and one of the successes he mentions is this: One good example of the power of philanthropic investment is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s investment in mRNA vaccine technology – years before the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s just in case you were wondering if Tony Blair was still an active part of the Global Blob — The Billionaires, the United Nations Bureaucrats, the Davos Ski Club, and the largest corporate leaders in the world. He is. The Labour Party are facing a fire. Think of Blair’s work as “backburning”. He can burn off Net Zero Targets, wind and solar, and Ed Milliband, but he still gets the UN global Power Structure, and he might dig the Labour party out of a big hole (while digging a different hole). h/t TdeF and OldOzzie, GWPF
May 1st, 2025 | Tags: The Blob, UK | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming |  Print This Post | | Comments (79)
By Jo Nova The latest news is that power has been restored in Spain, Portugal and parts of France, but the economic loss of a blackout that affected up to 55 million people for half a day is estimated at 2-4 billion Euro. Even Red Electrica, the Spanish Grid manager now says the initial event was a sudden power loss that was “likely solar”. And to top it off, the group that own the Spanish grid manager warned in February that with so many “renewables” the grid faced the risk of disconnections.
We are three days from an election and the ABC are running cover for the Labor-Greens party, and hiding from Australians that too many renewables and a lack of stable thermal or nuclear power plants were a front running cause. Even yesterday we knew that solar was supplying 60% of the Spanish grid, and that there was almost no spinning inertia on the Iberian Peninsula. If Spain had hosted the Olympics this week, the ABC-BBC-CBC agitprop units would have raved about it being “78% renewable”. But when it’s an Olympic-size blackout, crickets. The ABC has a whole “science unit” but one blogger with no government funding is two days ahead of them. Will they catch up tomorrow, or will they continue to put their own personal voting preferences and juicy career prospects ahead of Australian voters?
A renewables-dominant grid has many points of failure and very few points of stabilityIt sounds similar to the South Australian blackout of 2016. Once a few wind or solar generators trip out for some reason, the voltage or frequency shocks in the system cause other generators to drop out and interconnectors to disconnect. There is no inherent stability in the system because they lack the heavy spinning turbines. Our entire national grids were designed around heavy 500 ton turbines which spin at 3,000 revolutions per minute (or 3,600 RPM in the USA). That’s an awesome amount of inertia, and all that stability was “free” — it was just part of the grid. But the subsidized market, and the pagan fixation on “renewables”, because they supposedly stop storms next century, guarantees that reliable turbines get pushed out of the market. The crazy-balloon has filled the room. Spain, Portugal switch back on, seek answers after biggest ever blackoutReuters Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said his government had not ruled out any hypothesis. “We must not rush to (conclusions) and (commit) errors through haste,” Sanchez said on Tuesday. “We will find out what happened in those five seconds.”REE said it had identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in Spain’s southwest that caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its interconnection with France.
Redeia, which owns Red Electrica, warned in February in its annual report that it faced a risk of “disconnections due to the high penetration of renewables without the technical capacities necessary for an adequate response in the face of disturbances”. Investment bank RBC said the economic cost of the blackout could range between 2.25 billion and 4.5 billion euros, blaming the Spanish government for being too complacent about infrastructure in a system dependent on solar power with little battery storage. SEAT said power returned to its Barcelona car plant at 1 a.m. on Tuesday but that it still wasn’t at full production.
Volkswagen said its plant in Navarra lost a day of production – equivalent to 1,400 cars – as it was not able to restart until 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday.
Will the real cost of solar and wind power please stand up?The 2-4 billion Euro bill plus the expenses for Big-backup-Batteries and extra interconnectors must now be added to the electricity bill estimates of solar and wind power. All the past costs per kilowatt of magical Spanish solar power were all obviously fantasy underestimates. People thought solar was cheap, but it was all an illusion. Negative prices are not a free lunch. The toxic prices due to the solar glut at lunchtime, means that reliable power flees the grid, lest it get shafted with a big bill. An excess of solar output could have contributed to the incident. Spain has reported an unprecedented number of hours with negative power prices in recent months as more solar and wind power gets injected into the grid. Still, the oversupply of power hasn’t previously caused blackouts in the country. The speeding car hadn’t crashed til it crashed, officer. How were we to know? This was a system on the brinkIn El Confidential, in Spanish we hear that excess solar pushed out the nuclear power and things were so unstable there were fluctuations on the grid in the hour leading up to the crash. Red Eléctrica rules out a cyberattack, and everything points to overconfidence in solar energy.Something that has already caused problems recently. The Repsol oil company’s refinery in Cartagena, one of Europe’s largest diesel producers, had to shut down a few weeks ago due to power problems. The blackout occurred at 12:32 p.m., but the system began to fail at 11:30 a.m. With the sun shining, operators began to notice fluctuations in the grid with photovoltaic production at full blast. This excess sunlight caused the gas-fired combined cycle plants to reduce their production to make way for photovoltaic power. In that sense, nuclear power didn’t enter the market to avoid losing money, and there was no need to rely on hydroelectric plants to avoid water loss. Without firmness technologies, the voltage became more fluctuating and vulnerable than ever. And then the incident happened. The 5-second voltage drop is an eternity in the electrical system and tripped the “system differentials,” shutting down everything at once: the photovoltaic, the cycles, the four remaining nuclear plants. The industry insists we were lucky because the transformers didn’t burn out, which would have caused a blackout lasting more than 24 hours. ” Red Eléctrica miscalculated the risks and allowed the closure of three nuclear power plants that would have provided stability (voltage) to the system ,” the industry claims. So there were plenty of warnings that things were going wrong. If only the media in Europe had mentioned the 2016 SA Electricity crisis, people in Spain would have known:People saw The South Australian (SA) black out coming. There were warnings that the dominance of renewables made it vulnerable. Then when it came, it all fell over in an instant — Three towers, six windfarms and 12 seconds to disaster. Ultimately the 40% renewable SA grid was crippled by complexity. The AEMO Report blamed renewables: The SA Blackout was due to lack of “synchronous inertia”, they said. The early estimates suggest the blackout costs South Australia at least $367m, plus their normal electricity is twice the price. Welcome to the future of unreliable electricity: More bad luck for South Australia, yet another blackout followed the first one, 300 powerlines down, 125,000 homes cut off. By 2019, things still weren’t secure, SA was offering $6,000 subsidies to buy batteries but people didn’t want them. In 2020 SA is still at risk of blackout, one third of solar PV “switching off” to save state, and they need a $1.5b interconnector bandaid to NSW. In 2022, they suffered more blackouts. South Australia was Islanded, flying by the seat of their pants, afraid of a solar surge on a sunny day. By 2023 the Renewables Star state “urgently” wants to force two diesel plants back to stop blackouts. The pain of bad decisions never ends, unless they admit they were stupid.
April 30th, 2025 | Tags: Blackouts, Europe, Media bias, Renewable Energy, Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Comments (97)
Is this the Net Zero world we’re aiming for?It could be a coincidence, but Spain’s grid ran entirely on renewables for the first time on April 16th. Less than two weeks later, at lunchtime Monday Spain and Portugal and even parts of France suffered massive cascading blackouts. Thirteen gigawatts of electricity, about half the grid, suddenly disappeared at 12:30pm. Trains were halted, and people were stuck in dark subway tunnels. A tennis tournament was stopped, flights were cancelled and diverted, and prosaically, as an emblem of the Western World, Spain’s nuclear plants shut too, and are now running on diesel back up. Shops have been stripped, people are fighting over taxis, and landlines and ATMs are down, and even the mobile network failed in Madrid. The mayor of Madrid has urged the PM to declare an emergency and deploy soldiers. Electricity has been restored to some areas, but the grid operator has said “it could take up to a week to fix”. Other reports say “six to ten hours”. Notably, Spain has one of the highest proportions of renewable power in Europe — with 50% of the national supply coming from pure unreliable power. Spain has 32 GW of solar power, and 32GW of wind turbines. As it happens, the wind turbines have been largely useless for the last 24 hours. The Telegraph is reporting that solar power was providing almost 60% of Spain’s power two hours before the blackout. Blackout ChaosDailyMail, UK Panic buying has swept Spain and Portugal as nationwide blackouts paralysed both countries, shutting down transport networks and prompting people to clear supermarket shelves amid fears the chaos could last for days. Huge queues formed outside shops and banks as residents and tourists desperately sought to stockpile essentials and take out cash as much cash as they could amid the uncertainty. Rows of cars were pictured lining up at petrol stations as people hoped to fill up their vehicles and fuel cans, with ex-pats detailing how they have tried to power generators to keep their homes going. Airports have also been hit by the outages, with flights delayed and cancelled and holidaymakers in Portugal warned by the country’s flagship airline TAP Air not to travel for their flights until further notice. A British holidaymaker in Madrid described the situation in the city centre as ‘carnage’, telling MailOnline: ‘People are starting to panic. It’s going to get really bad if they don’t restore power quickly.’ It must be an attack of the “Rare Atmospheric Phenomenon”There were rumors it was a cyber attack, or a fire in a transmission line. But Portugal is blaming Spain and says it was due to a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” which sounds like a polite way to say “a renewable energy failure”. After all, it’s hard to imagine a rare atmospheric phenomenon blacking out a nuclear plant. What caused it?The Guardian The Portuguese prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said that the issue originated in Spain. Portugal’s REN said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” had caused a severe imbalance in temperatures that led to the widespread shutdowns. REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.” It appears the phenomenon occurred when it was a climate extreme of 23 degrees C in Madrid today. The Daily Mail has a fancy diagram explaining how extreme temperatures cause some regions to use more power than others for cooling. As energy “moves to hotter regions” they say, parts of the grid are “left with different voltages and frequencies”. This creates “‘anomolous oscillations in very high voltage power lines, leading to synchronization errors across the network”. I remain unconvinced that this is anything other than panicked post hoc hand-waving excuses. It’s all kind of obvious when we look at network five minutes before the crisis. Some particular event may turn out to be the trigger, but a system that is 78% reliant on unreliables could probably be knocked over by a teddy bear, or perhaps a wayward cloud.
h/t auto, Tonyb, MrGrimNasty, Another Delcon, Old Ozzie, CharlesM, Stephen Neil, Bella, and Bally.
April 29th, 2025 | Tags: Blackouts, Europe, FCAS, Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Comments (137) Image by Eugene Kucher from Pixabay By Jo Nova New posts will appear underneath this one: April 29th: The site is still under hostile attack. Since Easter Saturday waves of traffic from China, the US, Brazil and Europe have surged to overwhelm the servers. Daily, the load increases. At last count, traffic is running at six times normal. The attacker has control of around hundred thousand bots spread around the world. But they are attacking two randomly selected old pages. They are not even trying to hide that this is hostile. DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. In effect, massive artificial traffic is trying to overwhelm the servers. Is it China? If you can help, I’m asking for donations to upgrade the armor hereKeep reading → April 28th, 2025 | Tags: Blogging, China | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Comments (100)
By Jo Nova The Blob sets “The Science Trap” — and conservative politicians get caught every timeThe Bureaucratic Blob Team brag about following “The Science” but the truth is, they fund only the questions they want answered, they sack the scientists who disagree, then they call everyone names who thinks differently. They’re not open to debate or ideas, they rule through ostracism and cancel culture — demanding people believe “The Science” — and mocking them as simpletons if they don’t — it’s like a cult or perhaps a kindergarten. Conservative politicians leave themselves defenseless because for decades they keep funding the same Blob Science Institutions with the same Blob-incentives. When research groups are paid to find a crisis, they’ll keep hunting til they find one. Last week in the debate, the Australian opposition leader, Peter Dutton said the dreaded line: “I’m not a scientist” and then had to say the next day “I believe in climate change” just to quell the uproar. It was the classic mindless science trap. It’s a hundred agencies paid to speak jargon versus one politician with no tech support. Imagine if he had said the Coalition is going to fund the science research the Labor Party won’t?
Don’t we owe it to the koalas, the children (and the taxpayer?) We know some factor on the Sun affects ground water recharge rates, streamflow in rivers, jet streams, lightning in Japan and even jelly fish plagues. In the 1800s we knew solar cycles affected the price of wheat. Two hundred years later we still don’t know why there are so many links between the solar cycles and our climate. When the sun is quiet, there are more floods in central Europe, the prevailing winds shift in Chile, and winters are warmer in Greenland. Something is going on. All the warming we’ve seen since the Little Ice Age could be entirely due to the increase in solar activity. What if the Sun is causing the warming and we’re spending hundreds of billions trying to reduce CO2 and it’s irrelevant? Who did that due diligence before we spent half a trillion dollars trying to change the weather? Hands up? Anyone? Why aren’t we investigating The Sun’s role in Climate Change? (Because we’re afraid it’s real?)Big-Government politicians strangle science. They pour money in to find out “how bad man-made climate change is” but virtually nothing goes into asking how “good” our emission are, nor whether the Sun has the commanding role, and we’re irrelevant. Where is the institution dedicated to finding out how the Sun drives our climate? There isn’t one. There are a few researchers who trip over parts of the puzzle, but there is no independent dedicated agency that exists in order to find reasons that the Sun controls our weather. Australia needs a dedicated Australian Space-Weather-Climate Institute to investigate the effect of the solar magnetic field, cosmic rays and the changes in solar UV on our climate. It needs to be separate from the other conglomerate behemoths of science, or it just becomes another part of The Blob. We need competition in science, and a free market, not these centralized Soviet conglomerates of science like the CSIRO. Once an agency is trapped inside a big organisation, it can’t say something which makes the rest of the organization look silly. Nor could it publish results that showed the rest of the conglomerate group’s work was pointless. Likewise, Australia has an Australian Space Weather Forecasting Centre (ASWFC) but it’s a part of the Bureau of Meteorology. It won’t be competing with the BoM, or pointing out their flaws on the Channel Nine news. Australia has RMIT SPACE Research Centre, and the University of Newcastle’s Centre for Space Physics, they are looking at space weather effects on satellites, technology, and advancing the space industry. The CSIRO Climate Science Centre should be looking at the role of the sun, but the CSIRO is 100% Blob. It has bet its “expert” reputation on CO2, lock, stock and barrel. We need a free market in science — we need that competitionThe incentives for science are screwed. Right now scientists serve Big Government and work to get Bigger Government elected. They don’t serve the people. In a better world the government would fund both science teams and they’d be criticizing each other in televised debates. The media would ask scientists hard actual questions and embarrass them when they were inconsistent hypocrites, or just chronically wrong. The voters could have informed consent… In an even better world, the voters could vote for their tax dollars to go to particular areas of interest (like say when they fill out their tax return?). That way the scientists would want to serve the public, they’d want to be useful, and they’d be competing with other scientists so they’d speak out when they thought a climate model was useless. In my favourite world, we’d pay hardly any tax, so we could all afford to donate to the research we liked the most… Naturally, anything funded by the Government sooner or later becomes part of the Blob. That’s why we have to get the incentives right. That and Eternal Vigilance. X5.8 solar flare May 10, 2024. NASA SDO
April 26th, 2025 | Tags: Corruption (science), Monopolistic Science | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post | | Comments (119)
By Jo Nova The Gods in the UK Parliament plan to spend £50 million in a quest to control sunlight, because obviously, the UK is too sunnyAlso obviously, there is nothing more useful the United Kingdom could spend money on than pie-in-the-sky plans for weather-control. It’s not like people are struggling to heat their homes or put food on the table. And it’s not like anything could go wrong, or plants use sunlight. It’s not like the UK just installed 1.5 million solar panels on homes and is now paying money to reduce the sunlight falling on them. In the end, this is just another Grow-The-Government-Blob job, but it’s also an escape plan. Wait for it. Twenty years from now, if the world is cooler due to solar activity or cosmic radiation, they’ll say the Geoengineering saved the world from global warming. Experiments to dim the Sun will be approved within weeksScientists consider brightening clouds to reflect sunshine among ways to prevent runaway climate change By Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph Experiments to dim sunlight to fight global warming will be given the green light by the Government within weeks. Outdoor field trials which could include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere, or brightening clouds to reflect sunshine, are being considered by scientists as a way to prevent runaway climate change. But it’s all really safe and effective “by design” (unlike all those other experiments which were designed to be dangerous): Prof Mark Symes, the programme director for Aria (Advanced Research and Invention Agency), said there would be “small controlled outdoor experiments on particular approaches”. “We will be announcing who we have given funding to in a few weeks and when we do so, we will be making clear when any outdoor experiments might be taking place,” he said. “One of the missing pieces in this debate was physical data from the real world. Models can only tell us so much. “Everything we do is going to be safe by design. We’re absolutely committed to responsible research, including responsible outdoor research. Now they tell us? Suddenly (when a grant depends upon it) researchers remember that “Models can only tell us so much” and they need real data. Where were you Professor Symes for the last 30 years while national economies were being crushed on the alter of climate modeling.
Looks like the big plan to use pollution to fight “pollution”The press release coyly talks about “aerosols” being injected into the sky, like it might be an giant air-misting device, or aromatherapy for the atmosphere. They don’t want to name the actual aerosol these experiments will dump in the sky — not in one sentence. Instead, they hint suggestively that sulfur dioxide comes off ships and makes clouds brighter from space, which is a nice way of saying that pollution from diesel makes clouds darker from Earth. See how this works? Bad-sulfur-dioxide needed regulation and created jobs (and the UN was very proud of itself for getting rid of SO2). Now good-sulfur-dioxide needs grants and creates even more jobs. SO2 just needs a makeover. So, gasp, it’s a common thing in jet exhaust. Did he just admit that we could all fly more and “save the planet”? The WEF won’t be happy about that. Dr Sebastian Eastham, a senior lecturer in sustainable aviation at Imperial College London, said: “Every time you fly, sulphur, which is naturally present in jet fuel, is emitted into the lower most stratosphere causing a small cooling effect. Experts are hopeful that if experiments prove a success, they could be scaled up and implemented within 10 years. So they don’t specifically say they’ll be adding pollution to the sky that we’ve spent the last 100 years trying to get out of shipping. But it’s likely that’s exactly what they’re thinking of. Nearly all stratospheric aerosol injections use sulfur dioxide. Just last week, news came that the project called “Make Sunsets” in the US uses weather balloons to drop sulfur dioxide in the sky to “cool the world”. The latest papers blame their success at getting SO2 out of shipping as the reason we got freakish warming that their models didn’t predict. For the record, some crazy geoengineering schemes may involve chalk dust, titanium dioxide, and sea salt. Perhaps they’ll try them all? And as the commenters on X are saying, I do not consent! h/t David M, Rafe, Jim Simpson, Image by Myriams-Fotos from Pixabay
April 25th, 2025 | Tags: Geoengineering, UK | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming, UK | Print This Post | | Comments (79)
Price fixing kills the cocoa farmThere has been a wicked price spike in cocoa beans which the usual suspects are blaming on “climate change” as if your air conditioner was ruining cocoa crops in West Africa. Instead African governments have fixed the price of cocoa for decades, forcing poor farmers to work for a pittance, and keeping the big profits for themselves. Not surprisingly, even though there is a wild price spike, farmers in Ghana are leaving the industry, smuggling crops out (because they get a better price). They didn’t plant new trees, they ran out of money for fertilizer, and didn’t try new varieties. Their children don’t want to farm cocoa, and the yields are falling on old sickly plantations. So, surprise, socialist government controls wrecked the industry and they are now scrambling to put the pieces back together. Things are so desperate, the government of Ghana raised the price of cocoa by 58% last April and then raised the price of cocoa by another 45% last September, to try to reduce the smuggling. (The government was losing too much money). At one point last year it was estimated that a third of the national crop was lost to smugglers. A few months after this, the farmers were hoarding their beans in expectation the government would have to give them another price rise. Just chaos for everyone. Meanwhile other socialists use these failures to tell us they have to fix the weather and we must give them lots of money to do it.
It’s always the way. Big Government creates a crisis and then beats us over the head with it, to demand more money and power. Greenies pretend to care about the poor, but they are happy to exploit the poor farmers of Ghana as fodder for press releases for their industrial “renewable” schemes, and banker friends. Feel the pain of these farmers. Some of them have farmed for decades, yet they have nothing to show for it, saying “ It feels like we are working for other people’s benefit.” Ghana produces the world’s cocoa; why are its farmers still poor?Ghana has farmed cocoa for over 100 years. The country is the world’s second-largest producer, behind Côte d’Ivoire. The cocoa industry employs over a million people and contributes about $2 billion in foreign exchange annually. In recent times, prices of the commodity have increased exponentially, pushed by extreme climate events and supply chain crisis on fertilizers used by farmers. Yet farmers like Anane and Holiata say they see little of this wealth. They point to the low prices set by the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), established in 1947. The board sets cocoa prices to regulate the industry and protect farmers from exploitation by European merchants, but farmers argue that these prices fail to reflect the crop’s true value on international markets. The Cocobod traders were forward selling as much as 70% of the crop one year in advance. But when weather, disease, and a lack of fertilizer hit the crop, the bureaucrats couldn’t find the cocoa they’d already sold. They were caught short, forced to buy cocoa on the open market which sent the prices rocketing. (If only climate models worked, eh, they could have seen this coming?) According to Oxfam, up to 90% of Ghanaian cocoa farmers do not earn a living income. Many of the 800,000 smallholder farmers who cultivate the crop survive on less than $2 a day, struggling to afford basic needs such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare. The cocoa industry is rife with human rights issues, like forced child labor, and slavery. When the environmentalists start to care about pain and suffering in the here and now, instead of theoretical storms in a hundred years time, we might think they give a damn about making the world a better place.  Photo by Charles William Adofo on Unsplash Apparently man-made climate change made it too wet, then too dry. Sure, we believe you…The weather has been bad in Ghana in the last two years, first it was too wet which rotted the old sickly trees, and then it was too dry, but no climate model on Earth predicted both these extreme seasons correctly (the witchdoctors might as well use chicken entrails), and other countries nearby suffered bad weather too, yet they increased their crop yield. Nigeria’s cocoa exports saw a year-over-year increase of 15% in October 2024, and Cameroon’s cocoa crop is expected to rise 7% this year. Price fixing, and regulation hurts the people it was supposed to protectThe Government of Ghana formed the price fixing board to try to protect farmers from volatile prices. Instead they trapped them in poverty and fed a bunch of bureaucrats that may destroy the local industry. Under Ghanaian law, selling cocoa to anyone other than the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) through its licensed buying companies (LBCs) is a crime. The market is tightly regulated, with prices set annually by the government through the Producer Price Review Committee (PPRC). If the government had offered a service but not forced it upon the farmers, the Cocobod bureaucrats would have had to stay competitive, or the farmers would have abandoned it to make their own deals. But there were no brakes or accountability on the government. In the end, the farmers did abandon it, but years too late, because it was against the law to smuggle the cocoa out of the country — so the farmers had to be desperate before they would take the risk. It takes up to five years to grow new cocoa plants, so chocolate will be expensive until the free market solves itself, which it will, as long as the government gets out of the way. Together the Ivory Coast and Ghana provide 60% of global cocoa, they have a nice little monopoly. But with these latest price spikes, many other countries are planting cocoa beans and soon there will be a lot more competition. The West African cartel have just wrecked their own competitive advantage. Quote of the day: Despite the shocking price rise, chocolate consumption is “inelastic”.
April 24th, 2025 | Tags: Africa, Big-Government, Chocolate, Free Markets | Category: Big-Government, Free markets, Global Warming | Print This Post | | Comments (34)
We are still getting to the bottom of the problems on the site and working to overcome the issues. I’ll make an announcement soon. This is not just a software glitch. The site is being swamped with requests that started on Saturday. Thanks again for your patience. Thanks to those who are sending donations to help upgrade the server.
 Pohlia nutans moss. Photo by Hermann Schachner By Jo Nova Around 1,000AD, a little delicate moss (just like the one above), lived in a spot in Antarctica which is now locked in snow and ice all year round, and considered hyper arid and perennially frozen. No one expected to find nodding thread-moss (Pohlia Nutans) on Boulder Clay Glacier. Researchers had to drill through 11 meters of ice to find it (or what’s left of it) and managed to date it to 1,050 years before present. This puts it smack in the centre of the Medieval Warm Period, when Vikings were marauding England, showing that this part of Antarctica was warmer 1000 years ago than it is today, even though humans have poured forth 1.8 trillion tons of greenhouse gases. At the same time as the mosses grew, there was a veritable population boom of penguins and elephant seals in the Ross Sea next door, right up until the brutal cold of the Little Ice Age wiped them out. Pohlia nutans, needs liquid water and warmer summers. In order to grow, it has to find land that is ice free in summer has rain or melted water. Mosses can’t survive in this area now. Thanks to Kenneth Richards at NoTricksZone for finding the study.  Boulder-Clay Glacier, Figure 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02259-4#Sec10 Spare a thought for the life of an Antarctic moss. They spend 9 or 10 months of the year buried in snow, hoping for a five or six weeks of warmth so they can grow a few millimeters. If they’re lucky they might catch some floating penguin poo dust for nutrients. If they’re not lucky the summers get cold for thousand years, and they’re buried in 11 meters of snow. Apparently, some mosses have survived 5,000 years stuck under a glacier, and can still spring back to life, not just from spores but from dormant tissue itself. It sort of suggests this sort of climatic mayhem has happened before?
Fully 120 proxies show the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon. Yet the climate industry depends on it not being true. Everything that shows the world was warmer shows that our coal plants and cars are irrelevant. That nature does it all by herself, and that thousands of IPCC experts have been selectively skewing their stories to get bigger grants, or are just too scared to say what they really thought lest they be called a “climate denier”. That, and the media ignoring hundreds of stories like these. Keep reading → April 23rd, 2025 | Tags: Antarctica, Evidence, Medieval Warm Period | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Comments (49)
Apologies for the server troubles over Easter. We are working on it. (I would have left a note last night here but I was forbidden, like you.) The problem seems to be so much traffic that the system was pushed beyond its limits over Easter. We will be increasing server power asap. I’ll keep you posted, but there may be more dropouts. Apologies for all the disruptions. I hope to be back to normal as soon as possible. I’ll post more updates here. Thanks for your patience! — Jo
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