The Solar Panel cyber threat: Dutch hacker gets into 4 million panels in 150 countries

By Jo Nova

What if a few gigawatts of solar power disappeared without a warning or a cloud in the sky?

Imagine a hostile force had control of half your national power generation at lunchtime and could just flip a switch to bring you to your knees? Or how about a crime syndicate wanting a ransom paid by 5pm?

Steve Milloy: Communist China is setting us up for solar panel-based disaster:

“Solar panels that make the electricity suitable for the power grid and which are usually connected to the web, can be “easily hacked, remotely disabled or used for DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attacks.” DDoS is one of the most common types of attacks, which basically try to overwhelm a system… Solar panels were outlined as a vulnerability in several scenarios, also due to the dominance of a single country, China, in the supply chain.”

It’s only a week without electricity…

Daniel Croft, CyberDaily (October 2023)

Cyber Security CRC chief executive Rachael Falk said… that an attack on the solar grid could spark a “black start” event, which could result in the entire power grid going down. … “This […]

Tuesday

8.7 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

Monday

8.3 out of 10 based on 22 ratings

Sunday

8.5 out of 10 based on 18 ratings

Paper finds the world was cooling for most of the last 2,000 years and started warming long before Big Coal arrived

By Jo Nova

How much money has the world wasted because of some tree ring studies?

A Chinese group has looked at all the different kinds of 2,000 year long proxies in the PAGES dataset and found that history looks quite different depending on which proxy you pick. Only the tree rings show the HockeyStick shape that matches the climate models. In other proxies, temperatures have fallen for most of the last 2,000 years, especially in the Southern half of the world. And even after the recent warming, we are not yet back to the temperatures the Romans lived through.

So yet again, we see that that current temperatures are not unusual except according to tree rings, which we know are affected by rising levels of CO2. (The paper does not mention CO2 or carbon or fertilizer).

“All the evidence points out that we are still far from a complete understanding of the Common Era temperature variability at hemispheric and global scales,” says Professor Yang.”

“We show that the millennial cooling of annual mean temperatures is likely a global phenomenon.”

The world according to tree-rings is at the top, and other proxies, below:

[…]

Saturday

8.9 out of 10 based on 21 ratings

Dear Elon, 1,000ppm of carbon dioxide is safe, we breathe it every day

Every person here is breathing out 40,000 ppm CO2

By Jo Nova

Elon is scratching for a reason to keep worrying about CO2

In the interview with Donald Trump, Elon Musk tried to argue that we ought be limiting carbon dioxide because we are too close to 1,000ppm where people get headaches. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we breath out air at 40,000 ppm fifteen times a minute for our entire lives. If 1,000 ppm gave us a headache or made us nauseous, we’d have to hold our breath every time we kissed someone.

@ElonMusk: The point I was making is that, even if CO2 did not cause global warming, it is uncomfortable to breathe air with >1000 ppm of CO2. Given that the outdoor ppm away from cities is now ~420 (lol), it is already getting close to 1000 ppm indoors in cities at times. You can buy a cheap CO2 monitor and measure this for yourself.

As the global base level of CO2 keeps increasing, it will cause air quality in cities to feel stuffy and unpleasant, resulting in drowsiness, poor concentration and eventually headaches and nausea. […]

Friday

8.8 out of 10 based on 24 ratings

Carbon naughty list: Russia, Australia, USA, export more “climate damage” than any other nations

By Jo Nova

It’s something to be proud of: Russia, Australia and USA have the biggest Greenhouse Gas Export footprint on Earth. It’s a bizarrely contrived title though, where we have to ignore domestic emissions and blame countries instead for the fuels they dig up which someone else uses. (You know they want to).

We could play this game in so many ways. If China uses Australian coal to make a fridge, do those emissions belong to Australia, or China or to the Norwegian who bought the fridge? Correct answer: “all three”. The game of emissions mobile-blame means the shame can be applied to whichever patsy is the most useful. Double counting is not a mistake, it’s a marketing tool.

In a normal world, no one is responsible for what someone does with goods they sold, but in green economics, comrade, it all belongs to the Party.

You are supposed to badger and harass the people you sold the goods to, to ask them not to use it:

[Dr Gillian Moon] said if Australia was serious about its climate commitments, it should be doing more to encourage countries that bought its fossil fuels – particularly the developed economies […]

Thursday

9.5 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

Smart but deceptive: NSW govt keeps big coal plant on until just after the next election to avoid $3b electricity bill shock

By Jo Nova

Hiding the costs of renewables until after the next election

The largest coal plant in Australia was supposed to close in August next year, but the NSW government decided to buy a two year extension until a few months after the next state election. Now the modeling comes out showing that they decided to keep the Eraring coal plant running to prevent the shocking price spikes from disturbing the voters. Keeping the coal plant will reduce wholesale electricity bills by a few billion dollars. (Why don’t we keep it open for ten years?)

Presumably his reelection chances would be worse if “saved the planet”, and shut the coal plant a few months before the election instead.

They know the voters don’t want the transition. They know it will cost more. And yet they do it anyway…

Bizarrely, this news comes from the renewable industry site Reneweconomy, where Giles Parkinson doesn’t seem to notice this shows coal power is cheap and renewables are hideous. Apparently he doesn’t mind inflicting costs on hapless homeowners, he is just bummed that they couldn’t force more unreliable energy and battery packs on the grid even sooner:

NSW confirms Eraring closure delay […]

Wednesday

8.8 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Repeating climate denial claims makes them seem more credible

By Jo Nova

A group of arty psychologists has accidentally shown how much skeptics can achieve if they just speak up.

The small, poorly worded study, done by people who have little understanding of the climate debate, or even of the scientific method, doesn’t prove much at all. But if you start with 170 people who have been fed propaganda for years and then ask some random questions, whatever you repeat seems more believable. We could have learnt so much more if these psychologists did not start so confused themselves.

Their big “discovery” was that hearing something skeptical a second time gave it a significant boost in believability, even when the audience were 90% believers. Their big conclusion was the advice to essentially never utter a skeptical word, just repeat the propaganda:

“Do not repeat false information. Instead, repeat what is true and enhance its familiarity.”

They appear to be oblivious that their advice essentially kills the idea of open public debate. They don’t mention public debate or free speech. Possibly, since they are at an Australian university, they’ve never come across it.

But the core message comes through at The Guardian — they are scared skeptics […]

Tuesday

10 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

Auroras sighted now in NZ, Victoria, WA, NSW, Tas

By Jo Nova

UPDATED: The Bureau of Met has issued another Aurora Watch for today (Tuesday 13th). Interested readers can sign up to get these emails, which give a few hours warning of promising conditions.

A major substorm is in progress. People are reporting auroras on the Glendale App across southern Australia and NZ. Because we are in the maximal part of solar cycle 25, with the peak (so far) in sun spots recorded a few days ago, conditions are ripe for auroras, but they are alas, fleeting things. Next burst of activity likely at 9:40pm EST and 7:40pm WST. [Reports live from Mandurah, Flinders Island, Adelaide hills….]

The image from Nullschool is loosely indicative (and usually underestimates the odds).

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 out of 10 based on 26 ratings

Monday

8.4 out of 10 based on 30 ratings

Sunday

8.9 out of 10 based on 24 ratings

Now your emails and memes are destroying the planet

By Jo Nova

So you hit “Reply All” and ten years later the heatwaves begin. You know it makes sense — the global cloud is full of cat videos, and storing the code that made Socks sing Bohemian Catsody in a million emails requires another data centre. And as the old copies accumulate the “dark data” that no one looks at piles up. And those servers need electricity.

If only we had cheap reliable, renewable energy sources that worked 24 hours a day, we wouldn’t have to worry, would we? But data centers that only work when the wind blows are not much use to anyone (except maybe Hillary and Hunter). But the awful truth is that the more data we store the more CO2 we produce. Thus in the cult of climate change, the O-so-human quest to connect needs to be suppressed so we can cool the world by a thousandth of a degree in 2143.

Anyone who liked humans would just say “build a nuclear plant”. (Anyone who liked plants would say “build a coal one”). That would solve it. But here we are in the modern era and professors are effectively telling us that our emails […]

Saturday

9 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Lost for 30 years in a freezer: The whole of Greenland melted away when CO2 was perfect — consensus broken

Photo taken by Ansgar Walk

By Jo Nova

The Experts thought Greenland’s ice has been there for the whole Pleistoscene era, or the last 2.6 million years. It was just another useless consensus, stultifying science — feeding the myth that the climate was perfect until Big Coal screwed it up.

Map adapted from Westoff et al 2022

Finally, 30 years after the famous GISP ice core was hauled out of the Greenland summit, someone has bothered to study the dirt at the bottom and found poppy seeds, willow twigs and insects there, where they were not supposed to be. They discovered a vibrant tundra ecosystem where there was supposed to be an ice-cap. The obvious conclusion is that cavemen didn’t cause it, and that there must be some huge other natural forces at work that we have no clue about. Our climate models didn’t predict this, because CO2 was low then and clearly, the models are hopelessly incomplete. We are babes in the wood on the third rock from the sun.

The captive science PR writers don’t tell us that CO2 might be irrelevant compared to the big mystery forces we don’t understand. Instead they tell […]