BIG NEWS part IV: A huge leap understanding the mysterious 11 year solar delay

The Solar Series: I Background | II: The notch filter | III: The delay | IV: A new solar force? (You are here) | V: Modeling the escaping heat. | VI: The solar climate model | VII — Hindcasting | VIII — Predictions

Implacably, the discovery of a notch suggests a delay of anything from 10 to 20 years but most likely 11 years. (Don’t miss the delay post — two very big important concepts out in two posts). The big mystery is what could cause such a long delay in the correlation of solar radiation with temperatures on Earth?

David and I spent months wondering “what on Earth” could drive it. There were many possibilities though none of them seemed to be able to respond with the right timing: A resonant slop in ocean circulation could absorb extra energy, but it was difficult to see how the timing would be so tight with solar peaks. Likewise changes in ice or land cover. Then there are lunar cycles of 9 – 18 years, potentially generating atmospheric standing waves, but they were not synchronous with the sun.

Given that marine life can produce […]

Mark Steyn ordered to pay $1 million to deter climate deniers from criticizing sacred scientists

The “hockey stick” graph as published in IPCC TAR (Figure 2-20, 2001)

By Jo Nova

Climate deniers must be punished

For newcomers: Michael Mann’s hockeystick graph was wildly different from hundreds of studies of other studies and instantly became the pet graph of the IPCC. It used the wrong proxy, the wrong tree, and the wrong type of averaging. Whole books were written on how bad it was. But when Mark Steyn called it fraudulent Mann sued.

Twelve long years after the case was launched, the six person jury decided that Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg have defamed Michael Mann, but awarded Mann one whole dollar in damages, because he hadn’t been able to prove he suffered any damage at all. Remarkably, though, the jurors felt the skeptics had been so malicious they added punitive damages too. Usually these are limited to a mere four or five times the compensatory damage, but this time it was decided Simberg should pay $1,000 and Mark Steyn $1 million. It sets a new record.

According to Law.com punitive or exemplary damages are saved for truly dreadful acts:

exemplary damages n. often called punitive damages… are damages requested and/or awarded […]

What a backflip: The Biggest political party in the EU now wants to drop the ban on petrol and diesel cars

By Jo Nova

The voter backlash begins

How much more would the car lovers and petrol-heads of Europe take? In draconian style, last February, the EU declared all petrol and diesel cars would be banned from 2035. It was their star policy for the Net Zero push. Car makers would have to cut their emissions by a shocking 55% by 2030 and an unthinkable 100% by 2035. It was to be the end of an era.

The idea was so big and embedded in the EU that only one month ago an insurance insider warned that his company was already devising elaborate plans for a world where everyone had an EV and the insurance giants and the government got access to all your data. Police would be issuing your speeding tickets while-you-drove, and insurance companies would be granting drivers a discount if they allowed them to sell all their data to the highest bidder. Indeed, the word was that insurance companies wouldn’t even insure petrol cars. Obviously only the rich were going to be able to afford a petrol car or an EV “with privacy”.

But now, the largest party in the EU is drafting a policy to ditch […]

COP28 — one big global Psy-op to screw more money out of a few patsies

Image by Willgard Krause from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

What did I say? After the near collapse of climate talks, global leaders “rescued” COP28 at the last minute, scoring top marks in Climate Bingo: the talks are “historic“, “landmark“, “unprecedented” and use the actual phrase “transition away from fossil fuels” for the first time ever. Be still my beating heart.

A hundred billionaires met with 70,000 groupies, using millions of dollars mostly taken from other people, and have decided they need to do it all again.

The point of these meetings is to issue more press releases, reward the faithful underlings, arrange golden handshakes behind the scenes, and transfer billions of dollars from the riff raff to the Private-Jet-Class. This glorious goal is achieved when the Grand UN Performance of vague non-binding Hopium is used to fool investors and voters in domestic theatres.

And so it comes to pass that all nations have finally agreed to do what they were doing anyway. But UN-speak translates the nothingness into hyperbole:

“The agreement marks “the beginning of the end of fossil fuels” — UNFCCC

The president of the European Commission has welcomed the COP28 agreement, hailing […]

Big Car Data: Insurance insider warns they want to force you into an EV, ban insurance for petrol cars, and track you

By Jo Nova

Insurance companies just want to save the world right?

An anonymous insurance insider warns the plan is to force people to buy a digital car, and claims the push is so strong we won’t even be able to get insurance for a combustion engine vehicle. It sounds like a conspiracy theory except that insurers themselves admit Big Data from cars is worth a fortune, and they’ve have been lobbying to get your car data out of the hands of the car manufacturers (purely for your own good), and they’re already “involved in negotiations with the European digitalization and data protection manager”. Righto. Just six weeks ago, a Managing Director of Allianz insurance said he wants to track your car data so he can be “your invisible Guardian Angel.” Creepy, yes?

Wouldn’t you love to have your insurer, the police and the IRS as your back seat drivers?

Imagine a world in which the insurer acts as an invisible guardian angel to drivers, warning them of upcoming weather hazards or accident hotspots to avoid.

— Christoph Lauterwasser Managing Director, Allianz Center for Technology

According to GeoffBuysCars an insider at a large European insurance company has […]

Australian government throws giant pile of money at renewables — so big, the cost is a secret

By Jo Nova

The Australian Government is building magical weather machines with large amounts of our children’s money, and they won’t even tell us what it will cost. Dear Sir, we’re here to fix the car you didn’t know was broken, give us your wallet? We’ll just help ourselves to your cash and won’t tell you what this costs, OK? (It must cost a fortune, because if it were cheap we’d tell you).

The Labor government promised impossible Net Zero things, and 18 months later everyone knows it is impossible. Renewable investment has ground to a halt, people are not buying EV’s, farmers don’t want the transmission lines, coastal towns don’t want the wind towers, project costs are doubling and tripling, and Florence the borer is still stuck in a very short hole that is meant to be a long one.

Instead of backing away slowly, the Labor Party have gone full Santa-wish-fairy.

Just like that — the plan for 6 gigawatts of unreliable generators will become 7, wait, I mean, 32 gigawatts. Wow.

The Australian grid uses about 30 gigawatts of generation, and already has 65 gigawatts of equipment to generate that. It took three generations to build […]

Cars exploding at Luton airport London: Huge fire causes partial collapse of structure

By Jo Nova

All flights are currently suspended at Luton Airport, London after a major fire broke out last night at 9pm. No one at the BBC, apparently, can explain why it spread so fast (the mystery!). But everyone is grateful this was not an underground carpark below, say, a 20 story apartment building with babies sleeping upstairs, especially since part of the top floor of the carpark has collapsed.

The fire has, unfortunately demolished some dreams of carbon reduction.

UPDATE: Apparently the word is that it was a diesel car that started the fire. The question is then, if there were no EV’s on that floor, would it have spread just as fast, would the floor have collapsed, and would cars have exploded like popcorn in the microwave? Awaiting the BBC gurus…

UPDATE #2: Allegedly there were no sprinklers (which wouldn’t put out an EV battery fire anyway). Let’s try to imagine what kind of sprinkler system would contain those EV Fires — like drop-down glass-fibre spray that solidifies on contact or like jet sprayed asbestos?

UPDATE #3: As many as 1,500 cars were in the car park, it’s not clear how many […]

‘Biggest clean energy disaster in years’ — UK government sells rights to the wind and no one wants them

By Jo Nova

The Year of Gloom continues for Wind Power

Wind energy is so cheap and profitable that last week, investors abandoned the annual UK auction to build industrial wind plants in the oceans around the UK. Exactly no one offered to spend money building turbines even though electricity prices are burning hot. Apparently prices for building the machinery to collect and transmit low density erratic energy are not “free” like the wind. Even after decades of advances, sacred green electrons still cost a lot more than war-afflicted-fossil-fuel electrons do.

The free market has spoken and it said “No”. At The Guardian though – it was, of course, all the Governments fault. That and the dreaded Hand Of Inflation. It’s so unfair:

‘Biggest clean energy disaster in years’: UK auction secures no offshore windfarms

Lack of interest was widely expected after government failed to heed warnings about soaring costs

Jillian Ambrose

None of the companies hoping to build big offshore windfarms in UK waters took part in the government’s annual auction, which awards contracts to generate renewable electricity for 15 years at a set price.

The companies had warned […]

Feel the panic. Something big has shifted in UK politics

By Jo Nova

UK surprise byelection “shows why conservatives must stand against NetZero”

The Telegraph UK

Suddenly conservative Cabinet Ministers, who formerly cheered on green policies are telling Rishi Sunak, the British PM, to back off a bit on Net Zero. This phase shift is so deep, even the leader of the Labor Opposition is warning his Labor counterpart Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London to “reflect” on his expansion of the ULEZ car tax zone to outer London.

ULEZ is the Ultra Low Emission Zone, where a tax of £12.50 a day applies to high emission cars. Naturally, this hurts poor people with old cars living in outer suburbs much more than the inner city cafe latte set who can afford an EV and luxury religions.

The key point, perversely, is that Conservatives managed to barely hold onto Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. What apparently astonished the political masters was that the campaign to protect car drivers from the Mayor of London’s NetZero punishment was much more popular than they expected. The Uxbridge win plays against the backdrop of two whopping losses in other seats. The message is that salvation may yet arrive […]

The cars are winning against the 15 Minute Cities in the UK

Late night road protestor pouring concrete in a former bollard-hole | Youtube

By Jo Nova

Build Back Worse suffers a set-back

It’s hard to believe someone thought that adding artificial blockages to roads would free people from their vehicle-addiction. As if making car trips artificially long, circuitous and inconvenient would teach people to love walking?

It’s part of the 15 minute city plan, where everything was supposed to be within a heavenly short walk from home, so we could give up cars, save the planet, change the atmosphere and get fit too. But the Deplorables didn’t like it.

The idea of a Low Traffic Network (LTN) sounded so apple-pie. Everyone wants fewer cars on the road. So when pollsters asked deliberately ambiguous questions, people would say “yes” they liked the idea. But living with LTN’s wasn’t much fun when it turned out it was their car the overlords wanted to get rid of. And so the protests and petitions began. Under the cover of darkness, people set bollards on fire, attacked them with chainsaws, and even poured concrete in the anchor holes so it was harder to replace them.

But what really seems to have got the attention […]

Germany — big and middle size companies leaving renewables paradise

By Jo Nova

Germany is a lesson for the rest of the world

Few countries have placed a bigger bet on “renewables” than Germany, which installed some 28,443 wind turbines, and at its peak in 2016, employed 160,000 people just in the wind industry. But the effect on the rest of the economy is devastating.

The Energiewende Green program was estimated to have cost €520 billion plus and after 20 years of subsidies and effort, reduced fossil fuel use from 84% of primary energy “all the way” down to 78%. And those presumably were the easy wins.

The cost of expensive electricity vandalizes the rest of the economy. The Green policy gamble may change Germany forever. The former economic powerhouse of Europe is coming undone — losing iconic parts to the US and Asia.

BASF — the German historic giant founded in 1865, is the largest chemical producer in the world. In 1913 it bought the new Haber Bosch process that creates ammonia for fertilizer, and thus changed the world — making billions of lives possible. But now, BASF is shifting out of Germany — spending $10 billion on a new plant in China.

Then there is Linde, an industrial […]

Big Win against Big-Tech Censors in USA shows Australians need a different Referendum — one for Free Speech

By Jo Nova

A US judge has finally ruled what we knew all along — that it’s not OK for The US Government to collude with Big Tech to silence critics and political opponents.

It’s a reminder that Australians have no right to free speech. It’s time we had our own “First Amendment” written into the constitution. Instead of a referendum for a Voice for some Australians (which is happening this year) we need a Referendum for a Voice for All Australians — one that guarantees their right to speak, no matter what color their skin is, where their ancestors lived, or which team they vote for.

Newseum Tablet of the First Amendment | Photo by DBKing. Amended.

The US Republican States may yet save us all — the Attorney Generals of Louisiana and Missouri accused the Biden bureaucracy of actively colluding with the Tech Giants to suspend critics or remove comments. Finally, a judge in a District Court has ruled that this must stop.

Judge Delivers Major Blow to Biden Admin in Social Media Censorship Case

By Tony Ozimek, The Epoch Times

A federal judge has made a historic ruling by partially granting […]

That’s a big climate surprise: Frost season growing longer across Australia (and for years!)

Image by Penny from Pixabay

By Jo Nova Climate experts wrong on Australian frosts, and media say nothing

The IPCC experts were sure would be less frosts in Australia, but buried in a government funded ABC weather report was the virtually unknown admission that the frost season is actually growing across southern Australia, not shrinking. And in some places by an astonishing 40 extra days a year. What’s more, the researchers have known about this long term trend for years but didn’t think to mention it, and the ABC didn’t have a problem with that either. (It’s not like farmers need to know these things?)

When asked for an explanation for the increase in frosts, the ANU climate expert said “I think this is one of those climate surprises,” as if the IPCC unexpectedly won a game of Bingo, instead of getting a core weather trend 100% wrong.

We note the ABC feigned journalism to cover up for the Bureau of Meteorology and IPCC failures. Where were the headlines: “Climate Change causes more frosts, not less”, or “IPCC models dangerously misleading on frosts?” Did any Australian farmers and investors buy up properties and plant the wrong crops […]

Media giant AP News sells out journalism for just $8m from billionaires

By Jo Nova

The media is totally bought and sold

A bunch of giant Foundations (run by billionaires that also invest in renewable energy) gave Associated Press (AP) $8 million dollars last year to push the climate propaganda even harder than it has been running for the last 20 years.

In return AP, which calls itself a not-for-profit news agency took the grant and then ran 64 climate crisis or ESG stories in the next year. They called this surge a “sweeping climate journalism initiative”.

Sixty four stories doesn’t sound like much but AP stories are repeated in 1,300 newspapers and broadcasters. So 64 stories could really mean 83,200 stories.

The money came from the Rockefeller Foundation, Quadrivium (James Murdoch, who is son of Rupert), the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Looks like, smells like, advertising money for Renewable investors disguised as a grant?

At least some of these Billionaires may be paying for media stories that could improve the return on their green investments. According to InfluenceWatch, two years ago Quadrivium Foundation committed to invest $250 million US in BlackRock Inc for “green energy infrastructure”. […]

EV’s increase pollution: heavier cars wear out tyres 50% faster, increasing waste and poisonous particles…

By Jo Nova

The Greens are polluting the world again

Last week I told Mark Steyn that heavier cars would wear down tyres faster, which would vaporize more tyre chemicals in the air. And here we are a few days later with news stories saying that EV’s wear out their tyres 50% faster, which is not just inconvenient and expensive, and uses more oil, but unleashes as many as 200 different chemicals into the air and water as well. With 2 billion tyres made around the world each year and the forced EV transition supposedly coming any day, it’s yet another problem to be solved “on the fly”, damn the consequences.

By 2050 there are estimates that tyres will be the worlds largest source of microplastics. Not so good for the corals and fishes, but who cares about them right?

If Greens ever want to start caring for the environment or the poor they could always cut half a ton of weight off an EV just by buying an internal combustion engine car instead. It feeds more plants than a lithium battery does too.

 

Image by E Bouman from Pixabay

h/t Spangled Drongo

Tyre-makers under pressure as […]

It’s War: 19 US States fight back against the Woke Banker Cartel

 

By Jo Nova

Oklahoma blacklists BlackRock and 12 other banks that boycott fossil fuels

We may yet be saved by states in the US that are pulling the pin on the Big Banker Cartel. In this case Oklahoma wrote laws to investigate and ban state investments with banks that boycott the energy sector. They’ve now decided that 13 banks fail the bar, and should be banned from all public business. In response BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are now dancing to a whole new tune, suddenly protesting that they invest billions in the energy sector. The twisted truth is, that it is no defense at all, it was part of their strategy. Often they used their major voting interest to oust directors and pressure boards to pick up more “woke” ESG policies. These are big targets. JP Morgan Chase is the largest bank in the US and BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world.

This is excellent news, and we need more. Spread the news. But how did it get to the point where a bank that outspokenly campaigned to end fossil fuels was managing 60% of the state employees retirement funds in a state that is […]

Wind fantasy land: to cover 8 days of half-speed wind, UK needs 1,000 times the “biggest battery” on Earth

By Jo Nova

Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh?

Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat.

The exponential death of affordable electricity

It’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist.

Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe […]

Big-Gov Desperation: Now we need a $3,000 parking fine to keep sacred “EV” charging spots clear

A sign in Rockhampton. Where do they mention the fine though? | Photo by RegionalQueenslander

By Jo Nova

Block a sacred weather-changing EV from a charging point and you may have to sell your car

Feel the fear. The whole EV fantasy is coming undone as people miss planes, get stuck in cars, or ruin holidays because their battery is flat. There aren’t enough chargers, and charging is slow. In abject desperation, some Australian states are slapping monster fines on to make inadequate infrastructure stretch further, or because they realize how vulnerable they are to a protest campaign. Either that or they are actually trying to finance the transition to NetZero through parking fines. Call it a secret subsidy…

Victorians may be hit with a $370 fine if they drive a normal car and accidentally park it in an EV charging spot, thus depriving a sacred EV user of the chance to top up. You might think that’s wildly out of proportion — it’s only $100 less than if you recklessly run a red light. But it’s nothing compared to what NSW, Queensland and the ACT are doing. Drivers in these states who make the same mistake could […]

The Censorship Industrial complex — the secret cabal of Big-Government, University, Media and NGO’s

By Jo Nova

Imagine if the national postal service had secret blacklists of people whose mail “should be lost”?

What if the FBI, CIA, or Department of Defence was talking to the postie, and the postie read your letters and threw some out, but not others, and none of the institutions told you they were doing this? Or perhaps the post-office told you point-blank you were banned from sending mail now “because your letters were wrong”.

In this case the “posties” are private organizations, but to all intents and purposes, their network connection and obedience to Big-Government made them, in effect, another branch of the government. The government wasn’t paying the postie direct, but it protected the monopoly of the corporate postie team and gave them a legal loophole to hide in, and the media outlets stopped anyone criticizing the government. It was a Pravda-KGB consortium with filters that worked at light speed, but hidden.

 

“Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism.”

 

Where would we be if Elon Musk hadn’t bought Twitter?

In the latest round of Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi shows how Twitter was not just censoring things that would later turn […]

18 months too late: natural immunity is *almost* as good as vaccination (except when it’s better)

By Jo Nova

In the great Covid backpedalling of 2023, even the Australian ABC has finally admitted that natural immunity from Covid “lasts as long as vaccination” which is still false and misleading (because it lasts longer and is higher) but must have caused angst at the office. They go on to say their holy rosary incantation: “but experts have cautioned that vaccines are still the safer option”. Safer than what now, though? The new meta-review in the Lancet says nothing at all about side effects of vaccines or new variants, but people-who-believe-experts and people who think they are “good journalists” need to say their medical Hail-Marys, otherwise they have to admit to themselves that they were wrong and sometimes obnoxiously, insufferably, stupidly so.

The new Lancet metastudy looked at 65 studies from 19 countries. They found the reinfection rate of people who caught Covid was lower than people who were given Pfizer or Moderna. About a year after catching Covid, people with natural immunity still had about 37% protection against getting Omicron BA.1, about four times higher than people who had two Moderna doses. Yet the people with the better protection were locked out, punished, and sometimes even banned […]