Recent Posts
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Snowy 2.0 is the Trillion dollar Black Hole of Australia — sucking in energy, money, land, industrial relations, the dollar, our lifestyle
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Winter Solstice
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Saturday
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We were throwing-renewable-energy away at record levels in 2025
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Friday
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Pauline Hanson, the centrist, just wants a free market in electricity, and an end to the renewable energy bribery
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Thursday
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Blame the Climate Yeti again for making your life more expensive! (It’s a smokescreen)
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Wednesday
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The Sunrise Project funneled $343 million from overseas to push net zero
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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The US government has been secretly funding 120 dangerous biolabs around the world
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Saturday
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New report shows renewables are a drag on our national productivity
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Friday
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Thursday
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Well, how convenient. AI data centers have arrived to be the fall guy for the Energy Minister
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Wednesday
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Billionaires are leaving the room with excuses — Bezos says “AI will solve climate crisis”
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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The Craziest eco laws against Farmers. Let’s check that science…
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Saturday
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China cooks the carbon accounting books by 400 million tons
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Friday
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The Wind Power Puzzle (add more wind turbines and get the same output)
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Thursday
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To save the world, Cement Australia stops burning coal and burns trees instead
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Wednesday
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On Fire! US hunger for gas power so large, wait time for turbines blows out to 5+ years
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Saturday
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Perth event Saturday May 30th: Green Greed and the Grid
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Catastrophic warming already happened in Antarctica 130,000 years ago
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Friday
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Suddenly the Paris Agreement grows teeth
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Thursday
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Australian renewable investments evaporate in 2025: reaching a ten year low
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Wednesday
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The Bubble Pops: Big Miner BHP quietly backs away from decarbonization
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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Conservatives are tearing themselves apart over “The Paris Agreement”
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Saturday
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Channel Seven News.
Unintended consequences: When your insurance to stop the planet burning burns down your house instead.
Storing all that energy in a small box at home. What could possibly go wrong?
Fire crews are warning that solar powered batteries may cause fires that move fast and burn with “ferocity”.
Solar home battery warning after Brisbane house fire
Brisbane Times, Toby Crockford
The homeowner told reporters they had solar panels connected to lithium-ion batteries and suspected the fire started nearby, a view shared by firefighter Malcolm Muscat.
“[There were] approximately three battery banks so lithium-ion, lead-acid batteries, they burn with a ferocity that moves through the house quickly,” Mr Muscat said.
Remember: When the future of the planet is at stake, there’s no such thing as too much insurance.
We just hope the owners had plenty.
Friends and family can be consoled that the house has been sacrificed for a good fashionable cause.
Note this is the “suspected” cause in this fire, but solar panels have been linked to many other house fires.
Does your home need a “fire bunker”? ‘Years to understand’ fire risk of solar power systems
From […]
One big government agency quietly admits renewables make electricity more expensive, and another big gov media agency hides it.
The new AMEC report tells us renewables will make electricity prices go down a tiny 2% in the short run but make electricity more expensive in the long run due to forcing out cheap baseload players. What matters most to Australians — that we can expect our electricity costs to be 2% less than “obscene” for the next couple of years, or that the artificial transition we are forcing on the grid will indirectly make electricity more expensive?
Which message does the ABC headline? Say hello to Trivia!
Renewables set to drive down power prices, new AEMC analysis shows The ABC is essentially a taxpayer funded advertising machine for the renewables industry.
A flood of new renewable energy projects is likely to drive down household electricity bills, according to new analysis by government policy adviser the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC).
On a national basis, household bills are set to fall by 2.1 per cent — but price falls in the eastern states and South Australia are offset by increases in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and […]
Here’s a problem coal fired plants don’t need to worry about.
Sydney’s ‘catastrophic’ hailstorm happened on Thursday, the damage bill said to top $125 million. How much of that damage is to rooftop Solar PV? The last massive hail storm in Sydney was in 1999 — but there were hardly any solar panels then.
From SBS News
There are wild scenes and images everywhere.
Worst Sydney hailstorm in 20 years declared catastrophic
Jessica Cortis and Sascha O’Sullivan, The Australian
At least 50,000 homes remain without power in northern Sydney and more than 1000 calls for help are waiting to be responded to by State Emergency Services after Sydney and the NSW central coast were yesterday rocked by the worst hailstorms in almost 20 years.
Before anyone yells “Climate Change”, Reader, Pat, found stories about hail the size of Eggs in Sydney in November 1929. Hail the size of Tennis Balls fell on Reids Creek near Brisbane in 1934 and hail the size of Tea Cups fell on Brookville in 1902. Paddington had “ice inches deep” on Nov 1, 1931. There are scores more Hail-the-size-of… Maybe building 2 million solar panels on a continent with […]
Opportunity costs are the most invisible costs in the world.
Purely hypothetically, if you wanted to nobble a competing country, you could pay 350.org…
“We know what it takes to stop this industry,” said 350.org’s May Boeve. “It is not a mystery, it is not magical.
Valerie Richardson, The Washington Times
Climate protests cost $91 billion in lost economic activity, chamber study finds
Climate activists fighting to derail pipelines and other energy projects have blocked $91.9 billion in U.S. economic activity and hundreds of thousands of jobs, according to a new report.
See more at: https://www.globalenergyinstitute.org/infrastructure-lost
There is no Economy B. Once we have wrecked this one….
The report analyzed 15 targeted projects, including the hotly contested Keystone XL pipeline, Constitution Pipeline, and Oregon LNG terminal, as well as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s 2014 fracking ban.
In addition to $91.9 billion in lost economic activity, the protests cost nearly 730,000 job opportunities and $20 billion in tax revenue to federal, state and local governments.
…the U.S. surpassed Russia this year to become the world’s largest crude oil producer and has led the world in […]
Got Solar PV? Don’t let the kids play on the roof
Would you like a 240Volt shock with that?
In Australia, shonky fly-by-night installers are botching the wiring and not screwing the panels on properly. As many as a quarter of solar panels pose a high or severe “electrical safety” risk. Since there are two million households with solar panels, that’s half a million homes sitting under a live problem.
By mismanagement and delusional climate-changing schemes the government has entirely and artificially created the solar bubble. Hopefully people won’t die like they did in the Pink Batts Bubble. Back then, to stop droughts and storms and save the nation from the Global Financial Crisis, the government decided to rush out home insulation. The artificial bubble brought in poorly trained workers and four people died. Kevin Rudd (former PM) now says he wouldn’t have done it if he’d known the risks. But heck, way back in 2010 no one could have realized that artificial government industry bubbles wouldn’t mix well with 240 Volts. Sure.
Australia’s big advance seems to be to stop unnecessary deaths under roofs, and start doing them on top.
Warning of deaths over solar panel installations Simon […]
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Looking for a great Christmas present idea? I’ve been enjoying the new glorious full-colour book covering the work and “why’s” of a great Australian cartoonist. There is still time to buy it for a friend, or put it on your list. Cartoonists have leeway to say what no one else will, and of cartoonists, there are few like John Spooner.
John Spooner’s Guide to the 21st Century: What The Hell Was He Thinking
If a scholar in two hundred years time happened to be regarding the intricacies of Australian political life at the turn of the 21st Century, they would find few better guides…. than the cartoons of John Spooner. — Gordon Morrison
John Spooner’s last cartoon, 2016. The Age.
As well as being a collection of his work, a keepsake with over 250 images, Spooner explains what was going on in the editorial zone of one of Australia’s largest newspapers as it evolved over the last 40 years.
Spooner writes about how different things were in The Age in the 1970s. (It used to be a real newspaper once). He describes the gradual closing down of dissent from the party line. He worked […]
The UN collective junket for 25,000 people is over. In PR Bingo, all the winning phrases were launched. As usual, “it’s progress”, but “nowhere near enough”.
“Weary” climate negotiators “worked through the night”, in a “marathon” and “but the agreement fell well short…”
‘1,000 little steps’: Global climate talks end in progress but fail to address the galloping pace of climate change By Brady Dennis ,Griff Witte and Chris Mooney, The Washington Post
The agreement was non binding and has no chance of achieving the 1.5C or even the 2C goal, despite this, the crowd was happy:
“Approval of the agreement prompted a standing ovation from the delegates. “
People who think in group-formation will cheer any form of “Yes” — nevermind the numbers.
Trump is trolling the UN
The US is out of Paris (theoretically) but “in” the negotiations. It will take four years for the US to formally leave the Paris Agreement, but in the meantime, he’s technically at the table, unbridled, and free to kill sacred cows in public. The UN, no doubt, thought the four year cooling off period would work for them (with the help of 4 year US election cycles) but being […]
Oh yes, sure. These are really going to catch on. The grippy totalitarian, gimme dat culture strikes again with hot lyrics like “We Wish You a Steady Climate”, “We all Yearn for Solar Panels”, and “Away in The Arctic”. They sound for all the world like they were written by a climate model. If we can’t outdo this, making them funnier and more in the spirit of Christmas, I’ll eat my keyboard.
Please do your best, the official PDF is here. (Carols against Coal backed up here.)
We wish you a Steady Climate
Tune: Trad English (We with you a merry Christmas) Lyrics: Petrina Barson
We wish you a steady climate, we wish you a steady climate, we wish you a steady climate and a happy new year.
Glad tidings we bring to you and your kin. We wish you a steady climate and a happy new year.
We just want ambitious targets, we just want ambitious targets, we just want ambitious targets so bring some out here. Glad …
We won’t go until we get some, we won’t go until […]
The Pliocene is coming to get you.
The shocking news is that the world cooled for 50 million years, then, just like that, two hundred years ago, humans stopped the cooling, and turned the global clock, or thermometer, whateveryoucallit, around. Now, unleash the disaster — by 2030 Earth is going to resemble the mid-Pliocene. So in just 11 years time, it will be like 3 million years ago. Apparently we are losing 250,000 years every year. Buy a solar panel now!
You think I’m joking:
Humans may be reversing the climate clock, by 50 million years
Our future on Earth may also be our past.
In a study published Monday (Dec. 10, 2018) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers show that humans are reversing a long-term cooling trend tracing back at least 50 million years. And it’s taken just two centuries.
By 2030, Earth’s climate is expected to resemble that of the mid-Pliocene, going back more than 3 million years in geologic time.
How bad was the Pliocene?
In the Pliocene, North and South America joined tectonically, the climate was arid, land bridges allowed animals to spread across […]
A map of the sea surface zone that has cooled since 1979 — from 56S – 72S . It’s a pretty big area. Click to enlarge.
For years the IPCC have said that warming would be amplified at the poles. They warned us things would heat up twice as fast, which would melt sea ice. The oceans surface in turn would switch from being reflective white to a dark absorbing deep blue. Enormous amounts of energy would then flow into the ocean instead of being reflected back out to space. The more it warmed, the more it would warm — unleashing a devastating feedback loop.
As the Arctic warmed, the merchants of doom were keen to tell us how how right they were and this was evidence of man-made warming. But in the Antarctic exactly the opposite trend was taking place.
Mike Jonas has done what the IPCC should have been doing — investigating the trends in the Sea Surface Temperature in the polar latitudes with satellite records. In the latitude band from 56 to 72 degrees south the oceans have cooled, not warmed. The models don’t even have the sign of the trend correct. At the latitudes where […]
2018, Poland: When it comes to national leaders, nobody turned up
The second week of the UNFCCC conferences was always the one where the politicians swarm. But this time the only leaders are the ones from tiny pacific atolls who come in hope of increasing their GDP, one grant at a time.
Ministers – but few leaders – arrive for crucial part of climate talks Nina Chestney, Agnieszka BarteczkoKATOWICE, Poland (Reuters) – Brexit turmoil and French riots have kept many government chiefs away from the final and crucial week of U.N. climate talks, with only four national leaders present on Tuesday.
Out of around 134 national representatives delivering speeches over the next two days, only four are heads of government: the president of Kiribati and the prime ministers of Samoa, the Cook Islands and Tuvalu – nations among the most vulnerable to climate change.
No Leonard Di Caprio either.
If there was real money and power going down here, or leaders thought voters loved climate action, they would be in Poland.
Looks like winning.
h/t Pat
PS: Good luck to Great Britain. In the long run, will it be a real hairdryer, or EU approved one?
PPS: Good […]
It’s Santa’s happy hour in electricity land
Finally, No really, renewables are so cheap we can switch to them and change the global climate for free.
This is a new study by the kind of “independent” group that is totally dependent on Big Gov handouts. It compares Australian prices to other obscenely expensive countries and finds that “renewables push down prices”. Compared to what? Not compared to nations with cheap electricity. And not compared to most of the last thirty years in Australia before we added all the unreliable gear.
The tricky graphs clearly baffled Peter Hannam. If only he were a journalist, he could have asked some hard hitting questions and shown this study to be the concocted vaporous PR exercise that it was.
‘No trilemma’: Study finds increased renewables push down power prices
Peter Hannam, Sydney Morning Herald
Renewable energy drives down wholesale power prices well in excess of subsidy costs and a further expansion of wind and solar would likely push them lower still, a study of Australian and European markets shows.
If renewables actually reduced average prices, this would be a first. Around the world, the more intermittent generators you have, the […]
The timing is a disaster for the UN annual junket. The Yellow Vest protest has also spread to the UK now. Politicians must be tip toeing in Katowice, Poland. The Western leaders can hardly offer prime symbolic gifts for carbon action for fear of triggering similar protests at home.
As the protests grew week after week, the “crumbs” thrown to appease the crowd only made them more resolute. The people are realizing how much power they have. The normal veneer of civility holds that the police and laws keep the peace, but the truth is that if the people feel exploited and act together, any free nation can grind to halt in days.
In hours, French President Macron is set to speak to try to defuse the anger.
Craig Rucker from CFACT took time off from the UN climate folly and walked the streets with the Gilets Jaunes. This is so interesting because he is not the usual journalist observer, and he is there, not opining from afar. He says the people have taken over the streets, but the movement is being smeared as violent, though the rioting is due to radical leftists not the core protesters of the movement. […]
Feel the hate
Climate deniers are the delusional lizard-brain unworthy people who can’t see what preschoolers can. They threaten human survival. So sayth Dr David Shearman, founder of Doctors for the Environment Australia, a place where the scientific method and good manners go to die.
This is an Opinion piece the 3 million dollars a day ABC thought was “useful”.
Dr Shearman from Adelaide has the rare genius ability to diagnose hundreds of thousands of people with a mental disorder without even meeting them. Better than a telepathic MRI machine. Indeed he’s so smart, he can predict the climate, and with 100% certainty, so I say — cancel the satellites, who needs em? Why bother to measure upper tropospheric moisture when you could “just ask Dave”?
I apologize forthwith to the rest of the planet: all that money you have wasted installing temperature sensors, launching radiosondes and argo buoys. All along, Australia had David Shearman, SuperGod. He’s probably cured cancer. I can’t wait for him to tell us.
Today Dr David Shearman has diagnosed, and publicly, the mental state of Buzz Aldrin, Charles Duke and Harrison Schmitt, 3 of the 4 men alive who have walked on the moon. […]
The leaderless Yellow Vest — #GiletJaunes protest against living costs is escalating in France and spreading around the world to Belgium, The Netherlands, Serbia, even Basra and Bagdad in Iraq. A Yellow Vest protest is planned for Saturday in Vancouver. The workers are fed-up with being ignored and milked for causes they don’t support, fed up with being shamed for driving cars or for voicing their concerns. On twitter both the left and right sides of politics are trying to claim ownership (though most of the left are silent, recognizing that this is driven from the provincial and rural population and aims right at their sacred cows). Oil refineries are being blockaded. Ambulance workers and firefighters have joined in. Students have aslo started to protest about education changes — blocking over 100 high schools. So far four people have been killed and 133 people injured. Shops and hotels have lost 20% or more of their revenue. They’re flipping over Porsches. Macron’s popularity is down to 23%. The protesters are now starting to cite other issues like the UN migration pact which they don’t want Macron to sign.
Even after the violence and damage over 70% of people surveyed in France […]
Even heads of green institutes are telling Australians not to go too green too fast
The IEA is the kind of organization that runs global summits selling carbon capture. That’s a process so fantastically inefficient it wastes 40% of the electricity a coal plant makes while it stuffs a useful fertilizer in a hole in the ground. With that context, I note that even the IEA is warning Australia not to get too carried away in its Speeding Green Transition. Presumably Faith Birol, IEA head, is worried The Renewable Crash Test Dummies might actually crash.
First, the other news today of how fast we are adding unreliable infrastructure:
About 3400MW of solar, more than the capacity of Victoria’s twin Loy Yang coal-fired plants, is expected to be installed this year in Australia with a further 4300MW next year, according to the Clean Energy Regulator.
— Perry Williams, The Australian
To put that in perspective, our total grid is 56,000MW. We only had 4,000MW or so of unreliable power in December last year and were already struggling. Now we have 6,000MW and look like adding another 3,400MW of solar — in the next year. And […]
Excuse #101: Denying Climate Change is an Evil Depraved Sin so we don’t need to bother coming up with reasons anymore
Why is Krugman sticking pins into Denier Dolls? It makes him feel better.
He said it himself — if people disagree about climate change in good faith, it means climate believers need to be more persuasive. But if they are just evil, there’s nothing you can do. This is the end-days desperation. And after thirty years of propaganda, there’s nothing left in their communication toolbox. The awful truth is that in the muted, lopsided debate, they had all the money and institutions but they still lost.
When you can’t convince people with polite discussion all that’s left is to agree with your opponents or demonize them. So that’s what Krugman does. Change the goal-posts — he’s saying these evil people are not even worth talking to.
Humans are incredibly good at rationalizing stupid things. Pace Paul Krugman, who wrote this in the NY times last week. This week, the Sydney Morning Herald became the copy-paste late repeater of junk analysis and naked smear by a failed economist. Bravo.
Denying climate change is evil Climate denial is rooted in […]
The Crash Test Dummy accelerates. Australia is steaming ahead in the forced transition to unreliable energy
A lot of the reason for the growth in renewables is the Renewable Energy Target (the RET). Renewables must supply 16% of our electricity in 2018, and even more in 2019.
Strap yourself in. Buried in the AEMO summer readiness plan was the news that our intermittent renewables capacity is forecast to increase by fully 50% this year. All the renewables we had accrued in the two decade “transition” til December last year, we’ve added half again. We are already pushing the bounds of stability and setting price records, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. We are escalating the rate of change.
In toto, we have 56GW of generation of all sorts in the national grid on the east coast. The wind and solar component increased from 4GW at the end of 2017 to over 6GW by the end of 2018. But it doesn’t take much intermittent power to change the way the whole grid works.
Things are so fragile that a few weeks ago, when 240MW of reliable supply was suddenly not available for this summer, the AEMO had to issue a […]
By David Evans
The BBC in Sydney reports:
Thousands of Australian school students have urged greater action on climate change in protests across the country.
The students skipped school on Friday to highlight what they say are inadequate climate policies by the Australian government.
On Monday, Australian PM Scott Morrison rebuked their plans for “activism” during school hours and insisted his government was tackling climate change. …
The idea started with Milou Albrect and Harriet O’Shea Carre, both 14, in the state of Victoria. … Milou said: “We want our government to acknowledge publicly that climate change is a crisis. Stop digging coal, stop making new coal mines, switch to renewable energy.” …
Jean Hinchcliffe, 14, saw the idea to protest grow in Victoria and decided to start one in her home city, Sydney. … “Everyone, all young people, we can see that climate change is a real issue and we’re completely sick of politicians’ inaction.
Like with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, what would change their minds? How can we convince them they have been misled?
When eventually the carbon dioxide theory is proved to be quite wrong, what will this generation think? Will they […]
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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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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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