Now scientists say your breathing might affect the climate

Bison in Montana. USFWS Flickr

By Jo Nova

Someone just realized that humans emit methane (like cows, camels, mammals, and ancient herds of bison).

The new study shows that humans are generating methane, just like the awful Planet Wrecking Cows. But the truth is that all mammals have probably always produced some methane, and that includes the massive herds of herbivores that used to roam the Earth, when the climate was “perfect”.

The new paper in PLOS One assessed 104 people and found 31% were methane producers like the cows. They calculated the 67 million homo sapiens in the United Kingdom increase the national methane and N2O emissions by as much as… golly, 0.05 – 0.1%. (Despite this trivial and predictable outcome, somehow, they had no trouble getting grants or getting published for studying methane-angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin).

The main thing we learn from this paper is how easy it is to get money to study climate inanities compared to how hard it is to get grants to audit the IPCC or investigate the sun’s role in climate change.

If belches of methane can cause a climate crisis, how, we marvel, did the planet not boil away when 30 million bison roamed […]

More coal burned on Earth in 2023 than ever before in human history

By Jo Nova

The best kept secret in the world is that humans are using more coal than ever

So much for the “stranded dead asset”. In 2022 the world set a new all-time record for coal use — reaching 8.4 billion tons. In 2023, despite all the Net Zero billions in spending, despite the boom in windmills and solar panels, global demand for coal will top 8.54 billion tons.

The IEA is the “International Energy Agency” — supposedly, the impartial servant of 31 nations worth of taxpayers. Yet they decided to ignore the world record and instead tell us how coal is set to decline. It’s what they think the taxpayers need to hear. Their press release:

It’s almost as if the IEA works for the renewables industry and their banker investors? Mr Vestas himself could hardly have written a more successful headline to hide the truth and gaslight the taxpayers.

The IEA has been predicting the end of coal for years. Back in 2017 the IEA was telling us China would move away from coal, because by 2025-2030 “solar would be cheaper than coal”. Instead, China’s burning more coal than ever before and the quarterly reporting season […]

COP28 — one big global Psy-op to screw more money out of a few patsies

Image by Willgard Krause from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

What did I say? After the near collapse of climate talks, global leaders “rescued” COP28 at the last minute, scoring top marks in Climate Bingo: the talks are “historic“, “landmark“, “unprecedented” and use the actual phrase “transition away from fossil fuels” for the first time ever. Be still my beating heart.

A hundred billionaires met with 70,000 groupies, using millions of dollars mostly taken from other people, and have decided they need to do it all again.

The point of these meetings is to issue more press releases, reward the faithful underlings, arrange golden handshakes behind the scenes, and transfer billions of dollars from the riff raff to the Private-Jet-Class. This glorious goal is achieved when the Grand UN Performance of vague non-binding Hopium is used to fool investors and voters in domestic theatres.

And so it comes to pass that all nations have finally agreed to do what they were doing anyway. But UN-speak translates the nothingness into hyperbole:

“The agreement marks “the beginning of the end of fossil fuels” — UNFCCC

The president of the European Commission has welcomed the COP28 agreement, hailing […]

“Verge of complete failure” but otherwise a bonanza Olympic fashion parade for billionaires

By Jo Nova

Scientifically the UN Conference of Parties (COP) has abjectly failed 27 times at the one thing it was supposedly set up to do, which was reduce carbon emissions and save the weather, but it’s been a wild success on the Global-Trade-Party-and-Schmooze calendar.

Tonight the UN COP28 “climate” conference is on the ‘Verge of complete failure’ says CNN — because they’ve given up talking about “phasing out fossil fuels” and they’re only trying to reduce fossil fuels now (exactly the same as the last 27 meetings). No doubt tomorrow, headlines will tell us a historic deal, which is barely enough, was somehow clawed from the brink after an all-nighter.

The historic deal will amount to ambiguous subclauses that enable carbon grift and graft wherever carbon grafting and grifting were likely to happen anyway.

28 conferences and nothing to show for it:

It was never about CO2 anyway, was it?

Whatever happens, the conference is a big success as the Planetary Fashion Parade where the virtue-signalers of the world unite to show off their cloaks of carbon-purity. In the background it’s the place where billionaires and bankers bring their yachts and personal planes to meet Presidents […]

Skeptics visit the poster-child of severely bleached reefs, and it’s just fine 18 months later…

By Jo Nova

18 months ago the coral on John Brewer Reef was dead according to The Guardian, but Jennifer Marohasy, Peter Ridd and Rowan Dean took the risk of going back to the same dead reef to make a short documentary on it and found the same coral, 80 kilometers offshore and it, and the whole area around it, is flourishing.

According to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park authority, the area was surveyed in April 2022 and the damage was classed as “severe”. According to them, 60-90% of the reef was bleached. It was so bad that when the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about “500 kilometers of severe bleaching” it was John Brewer Reef that they picked for the feature photo.

Just like The Guardian:

The Guardian

Scientists, apparently, were dreading the damage to come (of the reef that recovered):

If the John Brewer reef was sick, most of the Great Barrier Reef was bound to be sick too, said Graham Readfearn:

“This is one of the healthiest reefs off Townsville and one of the best reefs on the whole Great Barrier Reef. So for these corals to be stressed and damaged … well, […]

Big Car Data: Insurance insider warns they want to force you into an EV, ban insurance for petrol cars, and track you

By Jo Nova

Insurance companies just want to save the world right?

An anonymous insurance insider warns the plan is to force people to buy a digital car, and claims the push is so strong we won’t even be able to get insurance for a combustion engine vehicle. It sounds like a conspiracy theory except that insurers themselves admit Big Data from cars is worth a fortune, and they’ve have been lobbying to get your car data out of the hands of the car manufacturers (purely for your own good), and they’re already “involved in negotiations with the European digitalization and data protection manager”. Righto. Just six weeks ago, a Managing Director of Allianz insurance said he wants to track your car data so he can be “your invisible Guardian Angel.” Creepy, yes?

Wouldn’t you love to have your insurer, the police and the IRS as your back seat drivers?

Imagine a world in which the insurer acts as an invisible guardian angel to drivers, warning them of upcoming weather hazards or accident hotspots to avoid.

— Christoph Lauterwasser Managing Director, Allianz Center for Technology

According to GeoffBuysCars an insider at a large European insurance company has […]

Your clean green future *needs* another 80 million km of high voltage lines

By Jo Nova

Did they forget to mention a clean green planet is full of steel transmission lines?

Recently the International Energy Agency (IEA) told the world off for not preparing the Earth for the transition they want to force upon us. Apparently, we should have paid attention and built the right grid and now, due to our laziness, we will have to rush in another 80 million kilometers of interconnectors by 2040. Just like that.

All the high voltage lines we built in the last century, we have to build again in the next 17 years.

Remember, it’s not their fault that renewables need far more land, more space, more back up and more infrastructure — it’s our fault we didn’t build a world ready for their holy energy. Those sacred wind and solar gifts cannot be bestowed upon us! We are unworthy:

IEA Lack of ambition and attention risks making electricity grids the weak link in clean energy transitions First-of-its-kind global study finds the world must add or replace 80 million km of grids by 2040, equal to all grids globally today, to meet national climate targets and support energy security.

Notice how these changes “are essential” […]

Forced EV Transition customers won’t buy EV’s say 3,882 car dealers to Joe Biden

By Jo Nova

Joe Biden wants half of all cars to be EV’s by 2030 to stop the storms, but customers have other plans

Such is the dour mood in sales yards, it only took three weeks to get nearly 4,000 dealers across the USA to sign on. Their joint letter to Joe Biden informs him electric vehicles are piling up in their sale yards. And even though the prices have been cut and subsidies applied — it’s still not enough. They plead with him to slow down with the EV mandates.

Rich Democrats buy EV’s but the poor and middle class can’t afford them, the charging infrastructure is not there and the grids can’t cope. If the price of traditional cars is forced up artificially to effectively subsidize and “meet” the EV Diktat, presumably most customers just won’t buy new cars at all.

Right now in the EV vision, sales are supposed to be accelerating:

Car Dealers to Biden: EVs Aren’t Selling

The Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal

Dealers have a 103-day supply of EVs compared to 56 days for all cars. It takes them on average 65 days to sell an EV, about […]

New study of consensus entrails shows 67% of papers don’t accept Man-made-climate-catastrophe

By Jo Nova

A new paper tries to clean up the chicken entrail decrees of Mark Lynas (and earlier of John Cook) and concludes that their methodology is so bad, a 99.85% consensus could just as easily have been 32%.

All the papers in between 32 and 99% were neutral on the cause of man-made climate catastrophes, but Lynas et al bundled them in with the believer pack and made hay in the global media. This was even though many of the “neutral” papers showed results that didn’t fit the consensus. But who cares about results eh? If an abstract was neutral, it was therefore a “sign” the authors believed — like reading their tea leaves, or laying out the entrails. (Either that or it was a sign scientists who question the dogma get sacked, lose funding, and get uninvited to laboratory barbeques, but, shh! We won’t mention that.) So Lynas assumes that as long as a scientist doesn’t specifically say they disagree, they de facto endorse the “consensus”.

Why do people who call themselves scientists even talk about a “consensus”?

Obviously if believers had evidence, they’d talk about that instead.

Dentelski et al do an admirable job of pointing […]

EV’s report 80% more problems than petrol, diesel cars

By Jo Nova

Add it to the list. A survey of owners of 330,000 vehicles found that EV’s experience 80% more problems than petrol and gas powered cars.

So EV’s cost more to fuel, take longer to arrive on long distance journeys. They sometimes burn down ships, destroy airport carparks, and kidnap drivers. They are a national security risk, and a burden on electrical grids. Because they are heavier they create more potholes, wear out tyres faster, increase road noise and air pollution (from tyre particles). They also increase wear and tear on bridges and multistory carparks.

EV’s are on the verge of becoming uninsurable partly because near new EV’s may have to be written off after a scratch, and all EV’s need large empty spaces to be stored so they don’t destroy the cars around them.

And in the end, they barely reduce national fuel consumption, and no one even knows if EV’s will reduce CO2 emissions.

On average, electric vehicles are less reliable than other cars and trucks, Consumer Reports finds

By Tom Kriser, CBC News

Electric vehicles have proved far less reliable, on average, than gasoline-powered cars, trucks and SUVs, according to […]

Germany: You will own a car and a heater but you can’t use them

By Jo Nova

Oh the irony — Green heat pumps and EV’s will need to be curtailed on a Green Grid

We’re watching the real time collapse of parts of the “Climate Industry” in on itself. The left eats its own. The EV’s and heat pumps the German government was coercing people to use are so incompatible with unreliable expensive energy, they will be among the first appliances to be restricted in the new clean green economy.

The truth is — Solar and wind power can’t power EV’s. In Germany the network regulator is working on ways to limit electricity to hungry EV’s and heat pumps so they don’t crash the grid.

The federal grid agency will throttle the charging power so EV’s will get just enough charge for a 50 kilometer trip from two hours of charging. Home owners will be offered a discount if they give control of their chargers to the government. Effectively the rich will charge their car or turn on their heater whenever they want. The poor will “save” €110 to €190 they never needed to spend with their old car or their old heater, and go withou electricity at peak times.

EV chargers, […]

Rare signs of democracy in New Zealand — Govt asking if UN “Treaty” is in the national interest?

By Jo Nova

Something promising across the Tasman Sea

The newly elected government in NZ is a three party coalition, promising tax cuts and less red tape. It’s barely been sworn in, yet somehow it already has the bright idea of checking whether deals with foreign conglomerate governments (like the UN) “pass the national interest test”. This is the same sort of test foreign conglomerate companies are also supposed to pass.

It sounds brilliant, but also like the bleeding obvious. This is what democratic governments are supposed to do, every deal and every day, right? Yet in 2023, it’s seems like such a radical right wing suggestion. So often our governments are serving someone else…

The conservatives have their sights set (justifiably) on the The UN’s Pandemic Preparedness Treaty. That’s due to be adopted in theory, next May. However The UN International Health Regulations is due to be sneakily accepted by default on Thursday. Hopefully the new NZ govt can fire off a quick letter to get NZ out of that tomorrow, making Australian and other global leaders look really silly (traitorously stupid) if they don’t. See James Roguski for more on that.

New Kiwi Government to Challenge WHO’s […]

“Shocked”: Far right climate deniers get more votes than any other party

By Jo Nova

Everywhere there are free and fair elections and a politically biased media, people will be shocked.

What does “far right” even mean when it applies to a quarter of the population?

. ..

It means name-calling is embedded in our vocabulary. Geert Wilder’s party has won 37 seats in the Netherlands election with 24% of the vote — more than any other party. There are 150 seats in total in the Dutch Parliament, so it’s not clear what the final winning coalition will look like. What is clear is that environmentalists hate it:

‘4 years of climate change denial’: Dutch environmental groups react to far-right election swing

by Ian Smith, EuroNews

Environmental groups have expressed shock and promised climate action in response to Dutch election results. Wednesday night saw the historic victory of the far right Party for Freedom (PVV).

“We are shocked,” Extinction Rebellion Netherlands says. “This outcome will likely mean a rollback of climate measures, new fossil investments, exclusion of marginalised groups, and more.”

If far-right applies to a quarter of the population, and the Greens appeal to a much smaller slice, it’s only fair they be […]

Friday

9.5 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

Australian government throws giant pile of money at renewables — so big, the cost is a secret

By Jo Nova

The Australian Government is building magical weather machines with large amounts of our children’s money, and they won’t even tell us what it will cost. Dear Sir, we’re here to fix the car you didn’t know was broken, give us your wallet? We’ll just help ourselves to your cash and won’t tell you what this costs, OK? (It must cost a fortune, because if it were cheap we’d tell you).

The Labor government promised impossible Net Zero things, and 18 months later everyone knows it is impossible. Renewable investment has ground to a halt, people are not buying EV’s, farmers don’t want the transmission lines, coastal towns don’t want the wind towers, project costs are doubling and tripling, and Florence the borer is still stuck in a very short hole that is meant to be a long one.

Instead of backing away slowly, the Labor Party have gone full Santa-wish-fairy.

Just like that — the plan for 6 gigawatts of unreliable generators will become 7, wait, I mean, 32 gigawatts. Wow.

The Australian grid uses about 30 gigawatts of generation, and already has 65 gigawatts of equipment to generate that. It took three generations to build […]

Thursday

9 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

There go those glorious EV transition plans — Australians are not buying

Image by Anwarul Quddus Sikder from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

The thrill of EV ownership in Australia has worn off before it even started

In news that will shock no one, except the Minister for Weather himself, Labor’s plan to have nine out ten new car drivers in an electric vehicle by 2030 has crashed into a mountain of apathy. The latest estimates from the Australian department in charge of guessing these things is that EVs will only be 27% of new car sales by then, not 89%. And the modeling assumes EV’s will be exempt from the usual tariffs and taxes, but finds most Australians would rather pay the extra taxes and get themselves a planet-wrecking petrol-head machine anyway.

Of course, in climate maths, 27% is practically the same as 89% because EV’s may not reduce emissions at all, but since the push to force them on us has nothing to do with carbon emissions, the theatrical chasm in their big plans is a major loss.

That and the dilemma of who will pay for the back up batteries to stabilize the windy wobbly national grid if car owners don’t?

By 2030, after years of propaganda and […]

Renewables facing “Enron-style collapse” says Venture Capitalist — Sustainability has become a dirty word

By Jo Nova

Word is spreading openly of the awful third quarter results in wind and solar power, and in EV’s. Morningstar noted some $14 billion dollars moved out of sustainability funds in the last quarter even before the dismal results were announced. This is only a small part of the $300 billion total, but it’s a big bad shift in momentum in a sector that is supposed to be going exponential and theoretically “the next big thing”.

Two years ago funds were tagging anything they could with Sustainability. But the term has become a dirty word, and so has ESG. Funds that were enthusiastically adding these green terms to their titles are now dropping them and backing away slowly…

With major daily business newspapers now reporting the bad news it’s hard to see what will stop the slide — only massive subsidies would do that (temporarily), but the US has already done that with the bizarrely named Inflation Reduction Act.

But make no mistake, there is a $300 billion industry begging for help and a lot of politicians who don’t want to admit their renewables push was an economic disaster. The German government has bailed out Siemens, and the […]

Matt Ridley in Perth: Tuesday — Cures vs Consequences with Government Science

By Jo Nova

A rare opportunity: the wonderful Matt Ridley will be in Perth to speak on Tuesday. One of the few great science commentators across economics, biology, genes, climate and politics. Author of The Rational Optimist, Viral: The search for the origin of Covid-19 and for years a writer for The Times, WSJ, and also elected as a hereditary peer to membership in the House of Lords, UK.

Get tickets from the CIS.

Cures vs Consequences: How does Government navigate the science?

Matt Ridley

Join Matt Ridley in PERTH, Novotel Murray Street on Tuesday, November 21 or a thought-provoking discussion on the critical role of Government in shaping climate, health, and energy policies.

Scientists aren’t infallible authorities who universally override political disagreements, nor are they unscrupulous fraudsters with hidden political agendas. Somewhere between the two lies the truth: Science is a flawed and all too human affair, but it can generate timeless truths, and reliable practical guidance, in a way that other approaches cannot.

How can the average person make sense of the often-conflicting scientific opinions that have arisen during the COVID pandemic and in the discussions about climate and […]

How many more secret warehouses of viruses are there in all our countries?

By Jo Nova

Time the CDC was razed

Thanks to an odd garden hose sticking out of a warehouse wall, the illegal, clandestine, Reedly Biolab was discovered. Chinese citizens wandered around inside with lab coats on. And the “lab” contained samples marked with names like SARS-CoV-2, Chlamydia, HIV, E. coli, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Hepatitis B and C, Dengue virus, the Rubella virus and Malaria.

So Reedly city officials in California stumbled on this warehouse almost by chance, and wanted some answers, but the FBI didn’t want to investigate and the CDC refused to test the pathogens. Most of the samples were destroyed and some 104 tons of material was “eradicated”.

Afterwards City Officials found a freezer the CDC missed. It was labeled Ebola — that most fun infectious agent with fatality rates between 25 and 90%. (Fortunately is not anywhere near as transmissible as Covid).

Jiabei “Jesse” Zhu was known as David He

The man running the lab was Jiabei “Jesse” Zhu, a citizen of China, who formed dozens of companies in Canada in order to steal intellectual property. After he was caught and hit with a $330 million dollar fine, he escaped to the USA, set up the […]