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By Jo Nova
Now rice controls the weather too:
Meat, dairy and rice production will bust 1.5C climate target, shows study
Damien Carrington, The Guardian
Emissions from food system alone will drive the world past target, unless high-methane foods are tackled. The study showed that 75% of this food-related heating was driven by foods that are high sources of methane, ie those coming from ruminant livestock such as cattle, and rice paddy fields.
The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, treated each greenhouse gas separately for 94 key types of food, enabling their impact on climate over time to be better understood.
Rice is the primary staple of half the world’s population, and mostly the poorer half. They are not normally the target of the do-gooder set, but as Marc Morano argues below, it’s all about creating a technocratic superclass of elite managers — both bureaucratic and business types who decide the winners and losers, who control the purse strings and the profits with regulations. They cannot handle a decentralized world. They need to control the means of production, the distribution of food, and control of the movement of people.
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9 out of 10 based on 9 ratings
By Jo Nova
Are young Americans growing out of the climate religion?
In a healthy sign, young adults aged 18 to 29 are much more skeptical now than they were five years ago. A 17% decline in the number who think climate change was mostly or entirely man-made is a major fall, especially in a large survey of 5,400 people.
Across all age groups American belief that climate change was mostly or entirely man-made fell from 60% in 2018 down to 49% in 2023. The fall was almost entirely in Democrat and Independent voters.
Republican voters were much more skeptical to start with and haven’t changed at all, which EPIC described as “stable” because that sounded a lot better than “skeptical”.
Source: EPIC (Energy Policy Institute of Chicago)
Democrats are persuaded by scientists, storms, and hot weekends, Republicans, not so much:
Source: EPIC
Suggestible people who are primed to see hurricanes, floods and heatwaves as evidence of man-made climate change will believe they were influenced by the weather. Obviously, it’s circular too: those primed to believe a normal downpour is a rain-bomb will also believe they have experienced “extreme events”.
Source: EPIC
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8.2 out of 10 based on 11 ratings
By Jo Nova
We’re on the cusp of the Quickening in Artificial Intelligence
Jordan Peterson wonders if we have thought through how fast things are evolving:
They’re not building autonomous cars ….they’re building fleets of mutually intercommunicating autonomous robots, and each of them will be able to teach the other, because their nervous system will be the same. And when there is 10 million of them, and one of them learns something, all ten million of them learns it at the same time. So they’re not going to have to be very bright before they’re very very very smart.
We’re not connected wirelessly with the same platform. But robots, they are.
Once they get a little bit smart, they’re not going to stop at being a little bit smart for very long. They’re going to be unbelievably smart, like overnight. …
Armed robots are frightening, but so is an artificial “best friend”
Homo Sapiens is a gregarious species. It’s hardwired. What happens when the scams, politics or fake romances are served up by a machine with infinite patience? When the machine knows our full history, our quirks and how we score […]
This Monday went missing a couple of weeks ago, and just turned up now…
8.9 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
By Jo Nova
Where do people live?
These marvelous spike maps mark out a 3D representation of the population density on each two-kilometer-square pixel of Earth’s surface. There are no outlines for countries, yet for the most part we can still see where the land meets the sea.
Credit goes to Alistair Rae, formerly a professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Sheffield. He used the EU’s population density data with the mapping tool Aerialod to create these glorious 3D maps.
And the map shouts “India”.
UPDATE: Do click to see the larger maps!
Alistair Rae, Stats, Maps n Pix Click to enlarge | CC 2.0
This is the global distribution of 8 billion people. The abundance of South East Asia is undeniable, as is the emptiness of the Sahara and the vacancy of Siberia. Antarctica is an invisible continent.
Australia and New Zealand are barely there. We can see how isolated Perth Australia is (where I live).
Annotated by Jo to show friends in the USA where Perth is.
Hawaii and Auckland likewise, stand apart.
Most maps originally came from Alastair Rae on Twitter in 2020 and later from the Visual Capitalist […]
9.1 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
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9.1 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
By Jo Nova Electronic thermometers may read up to 0.7 degrees higher than glass ones.
Sometime in the mid-1990s the Australian Bureau of Meteorology replaced many of their glass thermometers with electronic sensors. They claimed they were carefully verified to match the slow way the old glass thermometers worked — after all, we wouldn’t want to use gizmos that recorded new all-time *Hottest Ever Records* that were actually just one-second gusts of hot air, would we? Our newspapers would be full of meaningless headlines about how Climate Change made us hotter than ever in history, when really it was just a mistaken effect of a new type of thermometer. Imagine that disaster of public policy…
Of course this question is so easily solved. The BoM just needed to keep the two thermometers side by side in the same boxes and record all that data. Then they could release it, showing how well the electronic gadgets mimicked the glass thermometers, and Australians everywhere would feel confident that BoM was the sterling agency they thought it was. Instead Skeptics have been asking for comparison data for nine years and the BoM has refused, hedged, asked exorbitant fees, destroyed data and […]
8.6 out of 10 based on 25 ratings
8.8 out of 10 based on 21 ratings
Image by DanaTentis from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
A new review of studies came out a few weeks ago pointing out that trials of 700 people with the most common kind of heart failure show they did better after an exercise program than they did with drugs.
I’d like to say “Big Pharma won’t be happy” but Big Pharma probably couldn’t care less. The money, the industry, the regulatory agencies, Hollywood, and a lifetime’s habit means most people will keep returning to largely well-meaning but busy doctors who will prescribe the latest something, whatever it is.
But ultimately the people who get out there and do supervised exercise of any kind a few times a week get more benefits than those taking the latest patented drug. They’ll also have a higher quality of life. In this study they’re looking at people with the most kind of common heart failure called HFpEF. The exercise is supervised because there is some risk in people who may be quite unfit or unhealthy.
How much of our lives is spend working to pay for a bloated health-care system that finds expensive ways to employ many people to do what we could have […]
9.3 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
Photo of the 2015 explosion of Calbuco Volcano in Chile, by Keraunos ob, posted on the Earth of Fire blog by Bernard Duyck.
By Jo Nova
A year ago I wrote about the odd link between the Hunga Tonga volcanic dust and floods in Australia, but perhaps volcanic dust also played a role in the savage rain bombs of 1893 that caused the infamous floods of Brisbane?
After Hunga Tonga erupted last year, about a week later unusually heavy rain started falling over Australia — even washing out the Indian Pacific Railway line connecting East and West Australia. A month later and the dust had gone around the world and returned to give us glorious sunsets followed by more rain bombs.
So it may be just a coincidence, but the second heaviest Australian rain bomb was on Feb 3, 1893. And three weeks earlier on January 7th the Calbuco Volcano in Chile had its largest eruption in the last 130 years?
In 1893 an astonishing, flabbergasting day occurred, where 907mm of rain dropped from the sky on Crohamhurst in Queensland (that’s nearly 36 inches!). It came in an astonishing week, where the heavens dumped 2 meters […]
By Jo Nova
Something is going wrong with teenage girls. Horribly wrong. Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt have published a bomb of an article. Across the Anglosphere (and perhaps elsewhere) Gen Z girls are more anxious, more depressed, more likely to self harm and less happy, and not just a bit more, but in a seismic kind of way. Things are not exactly great for teenage boys either, but the trends are worst for girls and young women and most of the downturn started around 2012, uncannily in at least five different countries.
Rausch and Haidt make a compelling case that this coincides with the rise of smart phones and selfie-culture, and perhaps that is all the rocket-fuel we need. But the rise of the Glorious Victimhood Era of Woke was surely the guidance system that pointed a whole generation in a race to climb Mental Disability Mountain.
Teenage girls are magnets for fashion — not just in clothes but in ideas too. They may be collecting diagnoses like teenage boys collected football cards, but self-poisoning is not a sport.
The culture that acts like a teenage girl seems to be having trouble breeding healthy women.
Substack: After […]
Well, nearly.
9.1 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
8.3 out of 10 based on 24 ratings
By Jo Nova
Two weeks treatment costs $3.75*
In Tunisia from February to May last year 470 people with Covid were randomly either given 50mg of zinc each day for two weeks or given a placebo. In the zinc group, after 30 days, 6% had died, and 5% had been admitted to intensive care. Meanwhile in the placebo group 9% had died and 11% had gone to the ICU. People taking zinc got out of hospital a few days before the people who didn’t.
Since there were no serious adverse effects in anyone from taking zinc, it’s obvious that good governments were handing out zinc tablets in carparks, schools and shopping malls, thus saving lives, millions of dollars, and keeping hospitals half empty. The rich world looks to healthcare systems like El Salvador. Shame about the other sclerotic swamps and backwaters of crony medicine. Sometimes countries have too much money to get good treatment.
In Australia, the government spent billions on experimental barely-tested vaccines with hidden results and secret contracts. Our TGA told everyone the vaccines were safe and useful but fined someone $8,000 for advertising on their website that ivermectin and zinc lozenges were effective against Covid. But who […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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