Recent Posts
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Forget “renewable energy” — new AI data centers are building their own gas plants in Texas
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Saturday
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Buy a battery, join a virtual power plant, and let AGL eat 80% of your battery for dinner
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Friday
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Labor Net Zero obsession: Australians don’t know they’re spending $12,000 million dollars a year to fix the weather
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Thursday
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Wednesday
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MPs from Left and Right in France vote to ditch “low emission zones” and bans on old cars
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Billions of dollars spent on wind, solar and batteries and Australian electricity emissions went up last year
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Saturday
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Friday
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Free Speech wins: Trump declares, no US Visas for any foreign official who censors Americans
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Thursday
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New world Energy order: Taiwan closes the last nuclear power plant, then days later, plans a referendum to reopen it
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Wednesday
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Bang! Price bomb sinks Transmission lines: Plan B says let’s pretend cars, home solar and batteries will save “Transition”
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Saturday
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If only we’d built those offshore wind turbines, eaten more cricket-burgers, we could have stopped the floods, right?
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Friday
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If UK had never tried renewables, each person would be £3,000 richer
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Thursday
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New AI data centers will use the same electricity as 2 million homes
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Wednesday
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No one knows what caused the Blackout but Spain is using more gas and nukes and less solar…
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Half of Australia doesn’t want to pay a single cent on Net Zero targets
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Saturday
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Secret comms devices, radios, hidden in solar inverters from China. Would you like a Blackout with that?
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Friday
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LSE junk study says if men didn’t eat so much red meat we’d have nicer weather
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Thursday
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Now they tell us? Labor says new aggressive Net Zero policy they hid from voters “is popular”
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Wednesday
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British politics in turmoil after Reform’s wins — Greens Deputy even attacks Net Zero from the left
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Children of 2020 face unprecedented exposure to Extreme Climate Nonsense…
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Saturday
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60% are skeptics: Only 13% of UK voters say Net Zero is more important than cost of living
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Friday
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Climate change is causing South Africa to rise and sink at the same time
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Thursday
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Why is the renewables industry allowed to sponsor political advertising in schools and call it “education”?
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By Jo Nova
New AI Data Centers need so much energy, so fast, they’re are going off-grid
Such is the blistering race to get ahead in the global AI battle, that the industry is not waiting for the bureaucrats to build new power plants anymore, they are doing it themselves. And the leading edge of data engineers are not choosing the clean green wind or solar power of the future — they’re building gas plants. The sun and wind are free, but the battery back up, high voltage lines, long approvals, and unreliable supply cost the Earth.
What solar? What wind? Texas data centers build their own gas power plants
Dylan Baddour, Arcelia Martin, Ars Technica
The plant would be big enough to power a major city, with 1,200 megawatts of planned generation capacity fueled by West Texas shale gas. It will only supply the new data center, and possibly other large data centers recently proposed, down the road.
The project is one of many others like it proposed in Texas, where a frantic race to boot up energy-hungry data centers has led many developers to plan their own gas-fired power plants rather […]
ABC News
By Jo Nova
Who wants to buy a battery to help save the Energy Minister?
Spread the word, the new desperate plan to rescue the Transition Fantasy is to trick Australians into buying home batteries (and EVs) because the wind and solar factories can’t afford to pay for their own backup. But read about the experience of poor Mr Anderson. He accepted a $1,000 discount off the price of his battery, and in return agreed to allow AGL to draw off emergency power from his battery to “stabilize the grid in times of drama”. But he didn’t realize that the Australian electricity market did drama all the time. It’s like The Hunger Games at 6pm and he’d just volunteered as tribute.
It seemed like a good idea to sign up to be part of a virtual power plant (VPP). It was fine for the first year, he says, but then AGL started draining his battery at dinnertime, leaving him buying electricity when it was the highest price. Worse, they also changed his payment plan — and he got suckered with the “Demand Tariff” surprise — the diabolical plan which takes someone’s single greatest half hour consumption […]
By Jo Nova
For your sake, the Australian government took at least $440 of yours this year and spent it on electrical hobgoblins that claim to make nicer weather in a hundred years. That’s $1,800 for each family of four, in order to reduce world temperatures by nothing in our lifetimes.
How many families would willingly give up that kind of money on the witchdoctor weather quest?
The IPA has done what the Labor Government is too dishonest to do, and the Opposition was too scared to do. Adam Creighton added up the bonzana the government has spent on climate change since 2022 — and it’s exploded like a tanker of polyurethane-policy-filler. It sticks to everything, can’t be removed and if we burn it down, it fills the room with cyanide.
Back in 2021 the nation was throwing $1.7 billion dollars a year on certified weather voodoo. But after Labor won in 2022 that figure ballooned until now the federal budget spending on “climate change” and ‘Net Zero’ has expanded to $9 billion. But this is barely the start of the true cost Australians have paid — The transition bonfire added about $150 to most electricity bills in Australia […]
By Jo Nova
Good news — there is one less hyper-complex, pointless, car-hate program in the world
It all flipped so quickly: Only six months ago President Macron was hurling France into a climate changing roadmap of the Octopus kind. The people of France were going to have to buy EVs, work from home, swap the filet mignon for tofu, and take fewer flights overseas. Even large screen televisions were going to have to shrink, to save electrons. And some bureaucrats were enthusiastically even dreaming that they would reach into homes and set the thermostats to max out at 19C (66F) in winter and to only cool to 25C (78F) in summer.
To beat French car owners around the head, the National government legislated car zoning incentives to make life hard for anyone who wanted to drive an old car. The low emission zones started in 2019 and had already spread like a municipal leprosy to every town larger than 150,000 people.
In these ZFEs (zones à faibles émissions), cars were ranked and given a sticker. Crit’Air 0 were the cleanest and Crit’Air 5 were the most “polluting” vehicles. Different rules applied to each sticker class in each town […]
Image by Manuel Angel Egea from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Welcome to Futility Island
Anthony Albanese was elected in May 2022 and set God-like new emissions targets in to legislation. Ponder the scale of the national achievements of the last three years. All that money, all the wind factories, the solar panels, the batteries, the holes bored in the Snowy Mountains, and this is all we have to show for it?
This is the graph from the latest Quarterly figures shown on the DCCEEW website (with added notation from me):
Poignantly, Mr Bowen, the Minister for Weather Changing and Energy said — “We’re turning around a decade of denial and delay, by setting serious climate targets in law and delivering the policy certainty to industry to bring down emissions”. Indeed. (Do tell us when you start Chris?)
The bump last year was because the clouds didn’t rain on the Tassie Hydro Scheme as much as we needed. And the wind didn’t blow anywhere much in Australia in Quarter 2 last year. Who can forget the calm days of April-May-June last year when the wind turbines on the continent stood still? At one point, $20 billion dollars worth […]
By Jo Nova
Nothing like mucking up the holiday plans of the overbearing bureaucrat…
To combat the rise of the Blob’s new insidious censorship laws Donald Trump will deny visas to any foreign officials who are now or ever were involved in censorship of American citizens.
Suddenly EU lawmakers, and Brazilian Judges will find they can’t get a visa to the USA, and the ban may apply to their family members too.
This should slow down the spread of new cancerous “content moderation” laws around the world, and the attacks on the US Tech Giants. It would also apply to the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese if he brings back the Misinformation and Disinformation laws he tried to rush through last November.
Thus, it may be that Donald Trump may yet prevent some of the worst laws ever dreamed up in Australia (hallalujah). Not that anyone in the government will ever admit that.
Announcement of a Visa Restriction Policy Targeting Foreign Nationals Who Censor Americans
Press Statement, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State
Today, I am announcing a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of […]
Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant, Taiwan. Photo by Jnlin
By Jo Nova
The energy situation is flipping on a dime around the world
Political entities are waking up to the need for reliable mass power. Consider the whiplash in Taiwan. They closed the last of six nuclear reactors on May 17th, marking the end of a nuclear era that started in 1970. But, hey ho, two weeks later, they’ve decided to hold a referendum on whether to restart the same plant. The vote is set for August 23.
Taiwan Plans Referendum on Nuclear Energy Reversal
By Tsvetana Paraskov, OilPrice
Taiwan will hold in August a referendum on whether the just-shuttered last nuclear reactor should be restarted once safety checks are completed, in a major reversal of the country’s policy amid energy security concerns.
Since 2018, Taiwan has shut down four other nuclear reactors and cancelled construction of two others following a referendum in 2021.
Earlier this month, Taiwan’s Parliament amended the country’s nuclear power act to allow plant operators to apply for a 20-year license renewal beyond the existing 40-year limit. This legislative amendment effectively opens the door to […]
By Jo Nova The Transmission line cost bomb just went off and it changes everything
This is big. So big the AEMO just announced transmission line costs are up as much as 55%, and they are going to re-visit projects they previously said needed to proceed (which is the nice way of saying they will have to axe some or many of them). What no one is spelling out, is that if the transmission lines can’t be built, they also can’t build the vast solar and wind “farms” that the Labor government was depending on. Suddenly a lot of renewable projects are orphans.
Australia is supposed to build 10,000 kilometers of high voltage transmission lines by 2050. But last week, the AEMO admitted in their Draft 2025 Electricity Network Options Report that these interconnectors would cost between 25 to 55% more than expected, which makes them essentially unaffordable.
Plan B is where they pretend cars, home solar and batteries can save the “Transition”
The old plan of massive wind and solar factories spread across the continent is quietly mutating into a DIY version where the government hopes homeowners will rescue the Net Zero transition by buying the batteries the […]
By Jo Nova
Major flooding has struck New South Wales with 50,000 people evacuated and three deaths. Even as one person is still missing, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Climate Council are already milking the disaster as a Witchdoctor Psy-Op for the Blob.
Our thoughts are with everyone in the major flood areas.
Shameless: The Climate Council is already exploiting floods in NSW as a climate scare
Climate pollution is fuelling more intense rainfall that triggers bigger floods, like the ones overwhelming towns on the NSW Mid North Coast right now.
Footage credit: Mmu At
#NSWfloods pic.twitter.com/XdF73KkE9L
— Climate Council (@climatecouncil) May 21, 2025
The Sydney Morning Herald reads the tea-leaves of climate seance
The intensifying climate driver behind the coastal deluges and inland drought
Caitlyn Fitzsimmons, The Sydney Morning Herald
Note the spooky tea-leaf reading in the second paragraph — pay attention to the psychological operation.
This dichotomy of drought and flooding rains is not new to Australia, but for it to occur simultaneously on opposite sides of the Great Dividing Range is a phenomenon that scientists say is likely to increase with climate change.
Firstly they say the […]
By Jo Nova
If the UK had kept the old gas policy, skipped “renewables” — they’d be £220 billion better off
Since there are 67 million Britons, that means every man, woman and child would be £3,283 richer today. For a family of four that’s £13,000 of savings spread over 20 years.
Kathryn Porter has painstakingly unpacked the bureaucratic polyglot to add up the ghastly bill, and published “The true affordability of net zero”
“..had Britain continued with its legacy gas-based power system in the period since 2006, consumers would have been almost £220 billion better off (2025 money) even taking into account the impact of the gas crisis.“
Even if the fuel is free, every other thing about collecting, storing and distributing “free energy” is very expensive.
Ed Milliband might blame fossil fuels for the train-wreck that is UK electricity — but the prices have been rising in the UK ever since vainglorious politicians first dreamt of fiddling with the weather. In the UK, even though wholesale prices remained the same largely, all the other costs of renewables snuck in to household prices to inflate them like the Hindenburg.
Renewables “profits” come from trickery, […]
By Jo Nova
The cause of the mysterious oscillations and the big Iberian blackout is still a mystery, and it will take six months before the world has forgotten, sorry, I mean before the official report is finished.
In the meantime, baffled Spanish grid managers, who couldn’t possibly speculate on the cause, have cranked up the nuclear power and the gas, and reduced solar generation for no reason in particular. It’s all very odd, because gas is more expensive, and sun is free.
The Minister accidentally called this “Strengthened Mode” . (Didn’t they used to call it pollution?).
Lest we forget — in the hours before the crash, solar power was providing 60% of the energy, while nuclear power was covering 11%, and gas was just 3%.
Net Zero Spain leans on Nuclear, Gas to keep the lights on after historic Blackout
By Oliver JJ Lane, Breitbart
Spain is running its national power grid in “strengthened mode”, using more nuclear and natural gas in place of the renewables it vaunted before last month’s historic blackout, but still hasn’t said what started the outage.
Bloomberg energy industry journalist Javier Blas, who is Spanish, further […]
By Jo Nova
Nobody believes the Experts
Four thousand climate scientists have cried about climate change on TV. Weather maps are red-hot. And every fire, flood and dry weekend is caused by climate change, yet somehow, half the country doesn’t want to pay a cent to stop these catastrophes and most of the other half just want to pay one or two dollars a week, which is practically nothing — not even a coffee. It’s so low it might be “go-away” money — as in, they hope the pollster will go away and stop asking more questions about climate change. None of these people take carbon emissions seriously and this is 90% of the country.
The IPA asked 1,027 Australians how much they would personally be willing to pay for the nation to reach Net zero by 2050, and half of them said, nothing. Another quarter said “$50 a year” which is one pitiful dollar a week. Most of the rest said “$2” a week, which leaves barely 7% of people ticking the boxes $500 or more per year, which everyone is already paying and has been paying for years. They just don’t know it, because the cost was […]
Image by Maria Godfrida from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Nice grid you have there, shame if someone suddenly… switched it off
Two insiders at the US Dept of Energy say they have found covert devices inside solar panel inverters and batteries that would allow them to communicate with China. Even though firewalls have been put in place, these backdoor devices could operate around them.
Last August a Dutch white hat hacker got into 4 million panels in 150 countries in an effort to warn the West that major infrastructure was vulnerable. A month later an Australian cyber expert warned that a foreign hacker could turn our home batteries into “pager-bombs” too. If a hostile power turned off the overcharge protection on a sunny day, millions of solar panels would be pumping excess electricity into batteries that have no safety cut off. A few houses start to go off like popcorn, and an hour later we’re all living at the Western Front. How exactly would our firemen cope if 1 in 100 homes caught fire at the same time, and then we had a blackout? Anyone?
Individual solar panel inverters are generally too small to trigger national security […]
By Jo Nova
They really do want to turn men into women
The men are the climate vandals who carelessly wreck the Earth. If they would just eat the tofu and drive less, the world would be a better place, eh, especially for bourgeois academic femmebots in London. This is the kind of junk research that Big Government funding feeds. Someone spent a lot of money, and nobody learnt a thing.
Naturally, The Guardian lapped it right up:
Car use and meat consumption drive emissions gender gap, research suggests
The Guardian
Ondine Berland, LSE Associate
Cars and meat are major factors driving a gender gap in greenhouse gas emissions, new research suggests.
Men emit 26% more planet-heating pollution than women from transport and food, according to a preprint study of 15,000 people in France. The gap shrinks to 18% after controlling for socioeconomic factors such as income and education.
But really the 26%-more-planet-polluting-men shrinks to a third once you account for men being, you know, bigger and more likely to travel further.
Eating red meat and driving cars explain almost all of the 6.5-9.5% difference in […]
Chris Bowen, Crawford Forum, 2016
By Jo Nova
Deception and lies — the only way the government can get more renewables
The Labor Party was supposed to tell the whole world their 2035 renewables target in February, but they knew the voters would hate it, so they hid it until after the election. If Chris Bowen thought the voters wanted more renewables spending, obviously, he would have said so to win more votes.
As a part of the sacred Paris Agreement Australia was supposed to announce new Nationally Determined Commitment every five years. That deadline was late February. The world is bursting into flames around us, but the UN didn’t mind if the Labor Party were late, and hid their intentions, and nor did the Greens, or the “Climate Change Authority”. They all sat silent because they all know the voters don’t want it. Ipso Fabricato, all of them serve “The Blob”, not the voters.
Climate Change was virtually invisible during the election, yet the dishonorable Chris ‘Blackout’ Bowen now suddenly says the ‘silent majority’ support him.
Chris Bowen feels ‘silent’ wind at his back on green agenda
by Geoff Chambers. The Australian
Emboldened […]
By Jo Nova
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is transforming British politics
The Tories have already dropped Net Zero policies, but now the effects are spreading to Labour and the Greens. Australian spineless political parties should note that voters reward parties who lead the way in dumping Net Zero and immigration.
Just the fear of what might happen at the Council Elections meant Tony Blair, the former Labour PM, dropped the bombshell that Net Zero was unworkable, and that people were being silenced because they were terrified of being called Climate Deniers. A wave of skepticism was sweeping across Europe and Blair wanted to jump in ahead to steer the rebellion somewhat and promote his own plans.
Reform stormed the English council elections in a seismic way — winning 677 seats, twice as many as the Conservatives, and more than sixfold than Labour.
Now even the Guardian are writing headlines asking if the Labour party will abandon Net Zero? In the end the article is another advert for Net Zero (aren’t they all) but it’s obvious the Guardian editors are worried that Labour might be tossing the idea around.
Two weeks ago this would have been unthinkable.
The win for […]
Number of people born in 2020 who will face “unprecedented lifetime exposure” to heatwaves, crop failures, river floods, tropical cyclones, wildfires and droughts under 1.5C 2.7C and 3.5C warming. Source: Save the Children | CarbonBrief
By Jo Nova
It’s like expert scientists in Nature have never heard of an air-conditioner?
The Blob launched its latest permutation of Fire and Brimstone. By using broken climate models, and ignoring ten thousand years of bones, rocks, sediments, ice-cores, caves and corals, they were able to pretend that babies today will suffer “unprecedented” storms, floods and fires of every kind and it’s all your fault.
The paper by Grant et al ticks the full Marxist Bingo Card whipping up class warfare driven by “intergenerational inequality”. It was funded by the EU and is being used to shake down citizens to get more money and power for the EU, so they will be happy. “Mission accomplished”. (That’s what ‘The ScienceTM’ is for right?)
But it is embarrassing. We have to talk about that formerly esteemed “Nature” journal. For starters, the researchers behave like the universe only formed in 1960. Their whole shtick is that babies today will live through more ghastly heatwaves than […]
By Jo Nova
What were they thinking?
Despite 30 years of wall-to-wall propaganda most adults seem to feel that Climate Change is not an emergency. For some reason, they’d rather cut their electricity bill now, than cool the world by a thousandth of a degree in a hundred years time.
It’s taken billions of dollars worth of prime time news, school doom projects, clean-green advertising, and hot-weather-girl hyperbole to keep the fantasy levitating. Not to mention the weeping lectures from 97% of experts — yet somehow, improbably, most people are not buying it.
Imagine if we had a free press, and the Nobel Prize winners who disagreed were interviewed by the 7:30 Report or 60 minutes? Imagine if they talked to electrical engineers and geologists on the news? It wouldn’t be 60% of voters who were skeptical, it would be 100%.
He who controls the media, can confuse 40% of the people.
Thanks to Will Jones at the Daily Sceptic.
Nigel Farage speaks for voters on net zero. Here’s how we know Michael Deacon, Telegraph, UK
This week, a new polling firm called Merlin Strategy asked voters for their views on tackling climate change. But here’s the […]
By Jo Nova
A candidate for this years Cult Science Oscar:
The Coal Plant God is at it again — causing the oceans to swallow South Africa on the one hand and lifting up the land by 2mm a year with the other. (A lucky coincidence that disguises the horrors of rising seas, eh?). Apparently we used to think the land was rising due to hot plumes of magma far below, but now researchers say its because a drought has made the crustal plate lighter.
Even though no model can predict rainfall, everyone reading the tea-leaves, and editing newspapers, can see that climate change caused the drought.
Satellite data reveals climate change is lifting South Africa out of the ocean
Joshua Shavit, BrighterSide
Instead of heat from below, the Earth’s crust in parts of South Africa appears to be lifting due to water loss above. When surface and underground water vanish, the weight on the land decreases. That loss of pressure lets the land subtly spring upward, like a sponge expanding after being squeezed.
The precambrian crust under South Africa is some of the oldest in the world, and the research team proudly tells us […]
Jo Nova Programming and “pre-bunking” our children to vote Green — Boosting profits for years to come!
And you thought school textbooks were non-political…
Imagine the uproar if a coal company spent thousands of dollars to put lesson plans in schools to teach our children how to run activist lobby groups to get better subsidies and tax breaks for coal miners? Imagine these lessons even include instruction on how to fundraise, and ways to counter the anti-coal “misinformation and disinformation” ?
Indeed the ACCC banned the Commonwealth Bank’s Dollarmites program from Queensland schools because it contained “sophisticated marketing tactics”. But it wasn’t teaching children to write activist campaigns to lobby for tax breaks and subsidies for bankers.
Mike Cannon Brookes, Atlassian
Instead Mike Cannon Brookes, Mr $30 billion, has set up the Boundless Earth charity with a $15 to $30 million budget which generously sponsors a group called Cool org. They write “scripts for teachers” and tell the kiddies to walk to school or ride their bike while (as Tony Thomas reminds us) Mr Cannon-Brookes travels in his Bombardier Twin-jet.
It’s no tinker-toy project, already reaching 2.5 million Australian kids each year and 200,000 teachers. It’s a […]
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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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