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By Jo Nova Banker warfare to destroy businesses but make the weather nicer…
It’s another emergency on the Australian Soviet-style electricity grid. An entirely profitable and law abiding operation is potentially about to be shut down, putting 4% of the national electricity supply at risk, because the bankers want to save the world, and the government is helping them. Who runs the country, is it the PM or the banker cartel?
Delta Electricity needs a bank guarantee so it can keep trading in our national electricity market, but 15 banks have refused to supply that because of their own show-pony ESG requirements, designed to impress their ski buddies at Davos. Essentially, the bankers want to decarbonize our electricity grid, and make electricity more expensive for the poor, but can’t be bothered to run for election, so they are running the country the way they want anyhow — voters be damned.
It’s even more absurd that it looks, Delta isn’t asking for a loan — it’s profitable, it has the cash. But the bankers won’t even hold the cash and promise to pay it back when needed. Delta’s current bank guarantee runs out on Dec 31, and after that it […]
By Jo Nova
With four weeks to go ’til D-Day for the parasitic blob (the US Election), the headlines today are biblical hellfire with photos. Earth’s vital signs have hit record extremes they tell us. In all the years we’ve been recording things, which is practically nothing, storms, floods, droughts and the mental health of jellyfish have never been worse, which is obviously why food crops are higher than ever before, the Earth is greening and more humans are alive than have ever existed.
Like soothsayers with chicken entrails, captive scientists are squawking disaster like their funding depends on it:
Earth’s ‘vital signs’ show humanity’s future in balance, say climate experts
by Damien Carrington, The Guardian
“We’re already in the midst of abrupt climate upheaval, which jeopardises life on Earth like nothing humans have ever seen,” said Prof William Ripple, of Oregon State University (OSU), who co-led the group. “Ecological overshoot – taking more than the Earth can safely give – has pushed the planet into climatic conditions more threatening than anything witnessed even by our prehistoric relatives.
It’s “like nothing humans have ever seen” says Prof Ripple, who has forgotten the Eemian, the […]
***UPDATE: the X9 has finally arrived (Monday afternoon and evening) and is triggering auroras (briefly) as far south as Cape Cod in Florida. Keep your eyes out….
By Jo Nova
Two X-class flares in two days, X7.1 and now X9
I put in an order for an x class flare while I’m away from city lights. I was delighted when a big X7.1 was launched on cue a couple of days ago. It was the second biggest flare this cycle until a few minutes ago when a huge X9.05 occurred. This is now the largest solar flare in Cycle 25, bigger than the flare in May this year which caused all the auroras around the world this year in places like Florida and southern Queensland. That was an X8.7.
The X7.1 flare may bring auroras Friday or Saturday which was exciting enough. The scale is logarithmic, so this latest one is effectively 100 times larger.
Few details are available yet on the latest flare. The same sunspot (AR 3842) caused both x-class flares this week, and it is near the centre of the side facing us.
It does appear to be Earth directed, but as with all things aurora — […]
By Jo Nova
All those sustainable dreams, gone pfft
Google, Oracle, Microsoft were all raving fans of renewable energy, but all of them have given up trying to reach “net zero” with wind and solar power. In the rush to feed the baby AI gargoyle, instead of lining the streets with wind turbines and battery packs, they’re all suddenly buying, building and talking about nuclear power. For some reason, when running $100 billion dollar data centres, no one seems to want to use random electricity and turn them on and off when the wind stops. Probably because without electricity AI is a dumb rock.
In a sense, AI is a form of energy. The guy with the biggest gigawatts has a head start, and the guy with unreliable generators isn’t in the race.
It’s all turned on a dime. It was only in May that Microsoft was making the “biggest ever renewable energy agreement” in order to power AI and be carbon neutral. Ten minutes later and it’s resurrecting the old Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Lucky Americans don’t blow up their old power plants.
Oracle is building the world’s largest datacentre and wants to power it with three […]
Submissions close today!
It’s better to say something short than nothing at all. Let it be known that we have grave concerns, and far too little time to debate and discuss such far reaching legislation. Please read submissions posted below and add your own here too. Thank you! — Jo
Upload your submission here (button on the right hand side)
Committee Secretariat contact:
Committee Secretary Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications PO Box 6100 Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600 Phone: +61 2 6277 3526 [email protected]
Public submission regarding: Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024.
_____________________
The Misinformation Bill is not just wholly unnecessary, it’s an abject travesty. How did such a preposterous overbearing, undemocratic, anti-science and dangerous piece of legislation get past the first focus group? It wouldn’t survive a high-school debate, and yet, here it is?
Misinformation is easy to correct when you own a billion dollar news agency, most academics, institutions, expert committees and 25% of the economy. The really hard thing, even with all that power and money is to defend an absurd lie and stop people pointing it out, which is surely the main purpose of […]
By Jo Nova
It’s grand final day in Australia, and awkwardly the State of Victoria risks a grid overload. A truckload of solar power will arrive at lunchtime that no one needs, and which has no place to go.
The largest single generator in Australia now is rooftop solar and it’s virtually uncontrollable. The geniuses running the national grid have subsidized solar panels and made electricity unaffordable at the same time, thus driving more householders into the arms of the solar industry.
So they’ve created an artificial market bubble — as all good communists do. We now have a 20 gigawatt capacity generator that mostly can’t be turned off, except by clouds or possibly Chinese cyberwarfare.
And where autumn and spring used to be the easy seasons, now Sunny spring days are diabolical too — hardly anyone needs their air conditioner or their heater at lunchtime, but solar watts are pouring in.
This was the situation yesterday in Victoria:
Anero.id
Again, the poor sods who built solar industrial parks (marked in red) have to curtail their production massively from 8am to 5pm. The red curve is supposed to look like the yellow curve. The missing red peak is […]
Jo Nova
The Greens have become the “punching bag” of the Left and the Right
Things just keep getting worse for the Greens in Germany. After two terrible performances in recent state elections the Party “crashed out of the state parliament” in the Brandenburg region of Germany (which surrounds Berlin). Results were so awful, the two current leaders of the German Greens have jointly stepped down.
The Greens won a mere 4% of the vote in the region, not even reaching the minimum 5% required to win a parliamentary seat in the State election. About 70% of their voter base had abandoned them in the last five years. In Thuringia, the entire traffic light ruling coalition of three parties barely amassed 10% of the vote collectively.
The right-wing AfD (Alternative for Germany) party “keeps rising despite efforts to stop the party” says Nette Nöstlinger at Politico, slightly baffled. The establishment used the nastiest names they could think of, and it didn’t work:
The AfD keeps rising despite efforts to stop the party
Germany’s mainstream leaders have made a concerted effort to stop the rise of the AfD by warning voters of the party’s growing extremism, with some […]
The Ministry of Truth will control your every online conversation
By Jo Nova
The Censors are always the bad guys
The only way to fix misinformation is with better information.
Dear Australians, we only have until Monday to lodge a submission against the proposed amended Misinformation bill.
It’s a bill so bad warnings are coming from the far side of the world
The Cato Institute warns that if Tech companies take the simple route and comply with the Australian proposal Americans using mostly American companies may be effectively subject to misinformation rules set by foreign governments (and that may be the point, eh?) The great leftist global machine gets “help” with every country conquered by censorship glue.
Why do the guys with galactic megaphones need to shut you up?
Suppose misinformation was harming Australians, what stops the government giving us the correct information? They have the billion-dollar ABC, the billion-dollar CSIRO, the entire tamed academic sector, every school in Australia (they’re all funded and controlled by the government) — and yet somehow against this, an unfunded mum or dad writing on Facebook or a blog might harm trust in government institutions and therefore must be shut down, before […]
Battery bombs in the suburbs?
By Jo Nova
You think exploding pagers was a wicked trick….
Hypothetically, suppose you were distracted while you tried to change tropospheric jet streams, and accidentally gave away your national manufacturing to a foreign adversary. Next thing you know, you’re buying the batteries they make, and installing them in essential grid infrastructure and thousands of homes. You’re patting yourself on the back for getting a cheap deal (never mind the slaves) and it all seems dandy until one sunny day, a leader who was cheesed off with a trade deal, quietly switched off the “overcharge protection” on all of them remotely.
At that point, millions of solar panels are 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.
Brian Craighead – chief executive of Energy Renaissance, has come to warn us — it’s a hidden threat to national security. He says Australia has already installed 220,000 batteries that were made in potentially unfriendly places, and each home battery has roughly 7,500 times as much energy as a pager. As he […]
By Jo Nova
It takes a lot of money to get a Green saviour out of bed…
If these green groups were really tin-rattling charities supported by Mum and Dad donors, there would be outrage that so many funds were diverted from forests and fluffy animals to lining the pockets of the staff. But apparently the largest donors to these groups don’t care either, because the money keeps on flowing.
According to E&E News the CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, Carter Roberts, takes home a nifty $1.2 million each year in compensation. Similarly the president of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) gets close to one million each year, and the head of the Nature Conservancy gets three-quarters of a million. It takes half a million dollars to get the chief of the “Rainforest Alliance” to turn up for work, and $415k to feed the account of the president of the Wilderness Society. The two co-directors of Greenpeace USA get about $330,000 a year each. “Nice work if you can get it”…
Thanks to Climate Depot:
Meet the top-paid green group bosses
E&E News by Politico
The heads of influential groups including the World Wildlife Fund, Environmental Defense […]
Photo by Horacio_Fernandez
By Jo Nova
It was always the Posterchild Catastrophe of Doomsters, but two new studies suggest Easter Island might be (mostly) a story of remarkable human achievement instead.
In environmentalist legends, Easter Island was The Ecocide: they built nearly 1,000 giant stone statues but stupidly chopped down all its trees, and died in horrible wars. It was the sorry tale of ecological collapse and deforestation that we could tell small children at bedtime. After the last trees were sliced and diced, a catastrophe of horrors surely followed as the population of 15,000 people ran out of food and no one could make a boat to escape. Obsidian flakes across the island were interpreted as weapons of war and one anthropologist claimed there was a huge civil war that ended in the battle of 1680. Environmental hell on Earth was here…
But new research on the genomes of some islanders suggests that the population was probably small all along. When the Europeans arrived there were only about 3,000 people, and a genetic analysis suggests there are no signs of a recent collapse in the population. Another study of the fields suggests they made some very sophisticated […]
Lest we forget, the Luton airport carpark fire October 2023.
By Jo Nova We know it’s coming. One day, sometime there will be a skyscraper inferno started by an EV or a scooter and made so much worse because there were other EV’s in the basement carpark.
At the moment companies are fined $100,000 in Australia for failing to include high fire danger warning labels on kids beach towels, but it’s no problem if children sleep in a tower above a carpark full of EVs.
But after a spate of fires in China, Hotels there are starting to ask customers with EVs to park in open areas outside the building.
China bans electric vehicles from underground carparks
by Jamie Seidel, News.com
… Chinese hotels and property managers have begun to ban all electric vehicles – scooters, e-bikes, family cars or commercial vans – from their undercroft car parks.
“Hotels and other buildings in Hangzhou, Ningbo, Xiaoshan and other places in Zhejiang have banned electric vehicles from entering underground garages for safety reasons, sparking heated discussions,” Chinese online dissident “Mr Li is not your teacher” reported in a post to X (which is […]
By Jo Nova
The whole world is waiting to see who wins the US Election
The annual UN junket-fest for climate troughers — called COP 29 — starts the week after the US election. But this year things are running behind schedule as countries sit on their hands.
The oceans are boiling, the clock of doom is five seconds from midnight, and “renewables are cheap”, but if the largest economy in the world loses enthusiasm, so does everyone else. For some reason, the same cannot be said about the second, fourth and fifth largest economies.
No wonder they are so afraid of him.
Trump stalks global climate talks as COP29 draws near
By Nick Perry, The Japan Times
Paris – The prospect of Donald Trump returning as president is hanging over crucial U.N.-sponsored climate negotiations, with countries “holding back” their positions until they know who sits in the White House.
This year’s negotiations hope to increase money for poorer countries to handle climate change, but some governments have not proposed a concrete dollar figure, wary of committing too soon.
“Everybody is holding back until they know who gets elected,” said Mohamed […]
By Jo Nova
Every scientific curiosity becomes a climate prayer
A year ago, within an hour, 120 seismometers all over the world started to record a freakish shake every 90 seconds like a metronome. People watching the waves were baffled. And even more so that it didn’t stop within a few minutes but continued on all day and night, eventually ringing out for nine days.
It turned out to be a landslide in an oddly shaped fjord in Eastern Greenland. A 1.2 kilometre mountain of rock and ice had collapsed, sending a 110m wall of water 10 kilometers across the gorge to smash 200 metres up the other side of the fjord. The water then came back down and the return wave apparently kept slopping back and forward for nine days. Spare a thought for the fish.
Dickson Fjord before (left) and after (right) the landslide. From Scientific American andSøren Rysgaard (left); Danish Army (right)
Thus “10,000 swimming pools” worth of repeating tsunamis keep rattling seismic detectors for days and then kept 68 scientists busy for a year figuring out what it was.
Predictably, they say, it was caused by climate change, because rock slides and ice collapses […]
By Jo Nova
Finally, 15 years and a trillion dollars too late, George Monbiot says what skeptics have been saying all along. Nearly every single carbon reduction scheme is a useless make-work machination that creates the illusion that the government is doing something. He calls it “perceptionware”.
A new paper was released in Science pointing out that in the last 25 years, barely 4% of climate policies in 41 countries have made any real difference. And by “real difference” we mean reducing a useful fertilizer, so it’s a good thing that 96% of the ploys failed, but a tragedy that a thousand billion dollars was stolen from decent people.
In any case, finally Monbiot sees the tip of the iceberg of grift and graft, but doesn’t realize his own role in it, doesn’t realize the same failures of journalists like him also failed the science world where 96% of papers have achieved nothing they set out to do as well — like predicting the climate. Climate science has been spinning its wheels, creating perceptionware and failing to figure out the climate for fifty years, but George hasn’t noticed.
Monbiot hasn’t even taken the obvious leap: Where were the Greens, […]
By Jo Nova
Cold is the Catastrophe
A hotter world might not be so horrible. Back in the early Holocene, 10,000 years ago, rivers flowed in the middle of the Sahara desert, and they were filled with fish. The photo above is what remains of Takarkori Lake today. If only climate change could bring back the fish?
While we were distracted in 2020, researchers published a paper about an trove of bones and body parts they had dug out of a cave in Southwest Libya, which is roughly the middle of the Sahara today. Surprisingly they found 17,551 bones, and even more surprisingly, 80% of them were from fish.
The people who dined there were catching tilapia and clariid catfish, and sometimes the odd mud turtle, mollusc and a crocodile or two. The lake (pictured above) is about 6 kilometers from the cave (below), and all the bones appear to be human refuse. It’s kind of the ultimate archaeological FOGO dump.
Somehow, this restaurant that stayed open for 6,000 years left behind layer after layer of undisturbed dining history. Gradually, over thousands of years the diners ate less fish, and more beef, goat and mutton.
Amazingly, 17,000 bits of […]
Image by Erik Nikolai Halsteinrud from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The silence is deafening
Matt Ridley wrote a whole book about the Covid lab leak, and now marvels that what was once an unthinkable conspiracy is now quietly accepted by two thirds of the population, but still exists under a cone of silence. The Wuhan Lab Leak was “worse than a thousand Bhopals” he points out, but the Royal Society said it wasn’t a suitable topic for discussion. It’s as if the deaths of millions, the economic chaos and the threat of bioweapons is a bore.
The World Health Organization never mentions it. The Academy of Medical Sciences said it was too controversial. Ridley was invited to debate the issue but no one would take the other side. He was invited to write a paper for a prestigious journal with a professor at Oxford. After they wrote a paper with hundreds of references, the editors rejected it out of hand, telling him that there was no evidence of people doing gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan, even though the Institute of Virology has published papers for six years detailing how they did exactly that.
Ridley was invited to debate at […]
By Jo Nova
Greenpeace USA say it may be bankrupted by a pipeline billionaire
Even though the evidence for a climate catastrophe is “overwhelming” and they have the media licking their shoes, Greenpeace have somehow failed to persuade the voters to share their outrage and cancel the pipelines that carry “fossil” fuels. So they moved to lawfare and allegedly a slow sabotage through dubious protests that stopped companies from carrying out legal business activity. Now finally, after years of battling, one pipeline billionaire is said to be “within spitting distance” of winning a $300 million dollar case against them. His company is called Energy Transfer.
In 2016, Greenpeace and some native American tribal groups and activists camped for months in a corner of North Dakota to stop the crude oil pipeline his company was building.
The case is set for trial in February in North Dakota. Obviously the outcome is not known, but everyone seems to be acting as if they do know. The first line of the Wall Street Journal says the billionaire “is about to land a knockout punch on Greenpeace. ”
Donors to Greenpeace will not be happy if their money ends up with a crude […]
Image by Jacqueline Wales from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The modern media is like a form of hypnosis
Lord help us all. Climate change might wreck Ayers Rock, I mean Uluru. It’s been baking in the desert for 550 million years, but another half a degree C and it’s in “peril“. (You had to use the hair-dryer…)
It’s such bad luck. “Climate change” could hit anywhere but it’s going to hit airports, vineyards, national parks, and Bondi Beach? It’s ruining holidays and your favourite symbols. It’s so unfair.
I thought this was surely an AI joke, or a grade school project, but Graham Readfearn put his name on it and the Guardian editors didn’t run away. The whole story is a keyword salad of hot button words and random numbers. 620,000 tourism jobs will be at risk they say mindlessly, as if 26 million Australians will stop having holidays and 10 million international guests will stay home, scared off by a one degree Fahrenheit rise.
Almost 68% of Australia’s tourism sites at major risk if climate crisis continues, report says
Uluru, the Daintree and Bondi beach among iconic Australian locations that could be impacted if […]
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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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