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After a thousand headlines told us Climate Change would make deserts grow, a new study suggests it won’t. It’s a finding that shocks no one who knew that climate models have no predictive skill with rainfall, and that a warmer world means higher global precipitation. Plus there’s the awkward clue that for the last forty years the arid regions of the world have been getting greener instead of more deserty.
Looks a bit different?
The top map (below) shows the deserts expanding — but that’s the old predictions which are based only on “atmospheric data” like temperature and rainfall. The bottom map is the new work which uses soil and vegetation data too. Red means growing deserts. Blue means shrinking.
Remember, all contradictory conclusions are based on expert opinions using worlds best practice and done by Nobel-Prize-winning people. Shame about all the farmers and investors making decisions based on junk models.
Deserts were expanding until experts got a better model.
The new study is based on modeling too so it is still wrong, but less useless than previous studies.
The hugely different forecasts show how vaporously thin the past doom and gloom was, and how so many […]
The EU has given up trying to persuade Australian voters that wind and solar power is “cheap”. Instead, it’s using Upperclass centralized bully-power in an attempt to force Australia to sacrifice cheaper electricity and hobble its generation network to satisfy the EU totalitarians.
Australian exporters could face millions of dollars in European tariffs as EU seeks to punish polluters
Written by someone at Their ABC
Australian exporters to Europe are likely to face millions of dollars in new tariffs after the European Parliament voted overnight to move forward with a carbon levy on products from countries lacking serious pollution reduction programs.
The vote came after a top parliamentary committee noted concerns about “the lack of cooperation by some of the EU’s trade partners … to reach the objectives of the Paris Agreement”.
Australians installed more renewables per capita than any place on Earth in 2018-19, but that isn’t enough. The EU say we need a “target” of net-zero, (which we can point at and ignore, like most of what the EU does):
Kathleen van Brempt, a key parliamentary trade coordinator, said an FTA was contingent on “a clear vision [from] Australia […]
Can you spot a dead coral from 120 meters in the air?
The media and academic experts keep telling us the reef is dead. Jen Marohasy points out that the death of the Great Barrier Reef was diagnosed from the sky, so she had the radical idea of going out to reefs like Pixie reef to photograph it underwater instead. She didn’t receive any of the $440m Malcolm Turnbull sent to save the reef. But strangely, none of those millions appears to be used to do something as banal as a swimming near a coral. In an earlier post she described how many of the corals grow in vertical walls, which are very difficult to spot from a plane. Now she’s demonstrating how hard it is to spot even obvious things from a plane.
This reef, Pixie Reef, was ‘surveyed’ back on 22nd March 2016 from the air by Terry Hughes of James Cook University during one of his fly pasts. It was concluded from that single observation/glance-down from 150 metres altitude that that this reef was 65% bleached. The inshore reefs north of Cairns were more or less all written-off, back then, by the experts and the […]
The Upper Class Swamp has been labeling any conjecture they don’t like as Qanon (even if it isn’t connected to it) which buries it all as dangerous conspiracy theorizing. This weekend the countercry “BlueAnon” took off on Twitter and in the Urban Dictionary — mocking the conspiracy theories of the left.
You might suffer from BlueAnon if you think the CPAC stage was really a NAZI insignia signal, put there as a secret code; or you think the Capitol Hill rioters were really trying to overturn the most powerful government in the world without any guns at all, and of course, if you think all climate skeptics are secretly paid by Big Oil.
BlueAnon was registered on the UrbanDictionary:
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The Upper Class Swamp keep telling us what they are afraid of: Being laughed at
Ed Driscoll on Instapundit noticed the BlueAnon trend yesterday and enthusiastically wrote: “OMG-LOL! Receipt-filled thread mocking #BlueAnon for each and every crazy conspiracy theory on the Left is an epic must-read.” But the Deplorables must absolutely not be able to laugh at crazy Upper Class ideas, so the Thought Police went to work. Within an hour the twitchy.com link and the “epic” jokefest […]
Moves continue in the US to remove “extremists” from the Military. Though no one seems to know the definition of extremeist, nor what will happen to anyone identified as one.
…
Every illegal regime that comes to power by means of a coup lives in constant fear of the same thing happening to them. It’s their abiding characteristic and the reason they regularly have mass purges.
— The Pointman, How the Purge of the Military is Being Done
In 1899 the hard left gained power in France, and purged “the two main” conservative institutions — the church and the military. James S. Corum describes what happened and how 15 years later, it was a bloodbath in the first month of the war against the Germans, the French lost a quarter of a million men — fully one fifth of their field army.
When a Great Democracy Politicized the Military
James S. Corum, American Thinker
Even without Facebook the French government still had ways to filter out their political opponents.
In their desire to remold France according to Jacobin principles, the Left Bloc decided that conservative officers had to […]
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone, found some studies showing Fires are less common today than in the past — including a ripper of an Australian study.
Emma Rehn et al went to a small lake in far North Australia and dug up about 6m of sediment core from the bottom. They looked at charcoal deposits and a bunch of different minerals. They discovered that the top most recent layers had the worst fires for a thousand years. It had all the makings of a Great Climate Change advert. But to their absolute credit, they kept going down and further back and uncovered a story of four thousand long years of wild blazes.
Despite millennia of prehistoric infernos, no media outlets in Australia have shown any interest in this study which came out a month ago — showing Sensationalism is not all its cracked up to be, and not as much fun as Confirmation Bias.
Look at the current blip (left hand side) since European settlement, compared to the fires of 4,000 years ago (right hand side). As Mr Dundee would say, “That’s not a fire…. ”
Carbon Flux showing the intensity of fires in Arnhem land for […]
A group of teenagers want to stop the expansion of a coal mine in Australia. They have taken a class action out against the Government because we all know Governments are supposed to manage the weather better.
Well you’d be cross too, if you thought careless old folk were going to bring you slightly warmer weather!
A duty of care’: Australian teenagers take their climate crisis plea to court
The Guardian
Eight teenagers and an octogenarian nun head to an Australian court on Tuesday to launch what they hope will prove to be a landmark case – one that establishes the federal government’s duty of care in protecting future generations from a worsening climate crisis.
If successful, the people behind the class action believe it may set a precedent that stops the government approving new fossil fuel projects.
Because the last thing you’d want is democratically elected Ministers to chose how we use national resources.
As with any novel legal argument, its chances of success are unclear, but the case is not happening in isolation.
So it is an ambit claim, backed by someone with money. Who? This could be a form […]
Just another anti-viral
There was a good but small (tiny) study that came out of Israel three weeks ago about a drug called EXO-CD24. The professor in charge claims to have treated 30 out of 30 people who had moderate to severe cases and had near universal success. All, bar one, were able to leave hospital very quickly. CD24 is normally stuck on the outside of immune system cells. By getting EXO-CD in, apparently they can stop the cytokine storm.
Any day now, the mainstream media will let us know. The media may also mention that unlike vaccines the drug EXO-CD24 and according to Professor Nadir Arber, could be scaled up and mass produced within a few months and they could provide enough doses for the World.
Has Israel found the cure for Covid?
“To date, the preparation has been tried with great success on 30 severe patients, in 29 of whom the medical condition improved within two to three days and most of them were discharged home within three to five days. The 30th patient also recovered but after a longer time,” the hospital reports.
“The drug is based on exosomes, [vesicles] that […]
Maybe getting enough Vitamin B6 will reduce deaths
The main two things that kill people with Covid are blood clotting and an out-of-control inflammation known as a cytokine storm. A group of researchers noticed that both of these were things Vitamin B6 was known to reduce — blood clotting, and inflammation. In particular, there’s a molecule called Interleukin 6 which is a “masterplayer” signal in our immune system and — what do you know — B6 reduces it. Mice that weren’t fed enough B6 got mouse pneumonia more than mice who were fed enough. B6 is anti-inflammatory, anti- and reduces reactive oxygen species (ROS).
The Big Black hole in medical research?
I hoped this paper was report on experiments with Covid patients, but the paper and press release is essentially a literature review of many pre-covid studies and a plea for research into whether vitamin B6 might help stop the deadly cytokine storm.
The bigger, global question they don’t ask, is why despite the millions (billions) going into vaccine design and drug research, hardly anyone is studying the cheap unprofitable and obvious questions? Perhaps we need some government funded research that’s not driven by profits… oh. wait.? What happened to […]
Just trying to see if this is useful.
h/t Leo
8.5 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
And some people wondered why I paid any attention to the US election. Apart from being the biggest political story in my life, there is that effect that US leaders have even on the other side of the world.
It’s only been five weeks since the inauguration and our largest military ally is already leaning on Australia to get out of coal fired power. To put some perspective on the size of this favour — Coal is our largest single export commodity about half the time, and most years Australia is the largest single exporter of coal in the world. We export more than 400 million tons of coal per annum. We also keep some and use coal to generate more than half our electricity. Even burning through the blackstuff like that, we still have another 300 years of supply underground. It could be very profitable stuff for another twelve generations of Australians. Or not.
So our largest trading partner is launching a trade war and acting hostile, while our largest military ally is saying they want a big favour. How much room is there for Australia to manouver?
Meanwhile last year China built three times more coal power than […]
Hard to find some good news out there today. But here’s a bit:
People are immune to climate hopey gloom
Researchers tried to figure out whether to make their climate propaganda more scary or more uplifting but found instead that they might as well show 500 people “the history of smartphones”. (That was the control video). Nothing works anymore.
It was a complete wash. No new activists were made.
However, despite these emotional responses, neither [doom nor hope] video was associated with significant differences in climate change risk perceptions, likelihood of behavior change, or likelihood of climate activism. These null results suggest that the impacts of a single hope or fear appeal can be overstated…
After watching the online movies, nobody thought climate change was scarier, nobody want to change anything they did, and no one wanted to be climate activist either, unless they were already one to start with. After 30 years of propaganda, people have heard it all. Pounding them them with more isn’t going to work.
It didn’t matter which movie they saw.
Neither doom, hope nor placebo did a thing.
The multi-billion dollar industry of climate propaganda was hoping to tweak […]
Houston Texas, Feb 2021. Image by Fish & Trips
Texas toyed with cascading crises
The Green Experiment could have gone so much worse. Here’s a man who was a gas industry executive involved in a near miss in New England in 1989. The four day blackout sounds bad, but it was a lottery win compared to the worst case scenarios. Not only was a full state-wide blackout possible, which may take months to correct, but the gas system is a bomb waiting to go off too.
ERCOT officials admit they only just averted a blackstart:
Texas was “seconds and minutes” away Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.
— by Erin Douglas, Texas Tribune
The Blackstart in Venezuela took weeks to restart — rebooting an induction motor takes six times the normal current. Energizing a substation can cause explosions. It’s much easier to add load to an operating grid than to rebuild one from scratch. Surges on start up can break things, that fail. It can take rolling rounds […]
Don’t look now, it’s a climate disaster of massive proportions and it has nothing to do with CO2.
Scientists have just discovered what they say was a wild era 42,000 years ago — where the Earth’s magnetic field practically disappeared. They’ve called it the Adams Event (after Douglas Adams of Hitchhikers Guide fame).
This was hidden previously, just before the Laschamp Excursion which we’ve known about since 1969. That event happened about 41,000 years ago – during which the Earth’s magnetic field briefly flipped. It was a pretty big deal in itself. For 800 years the field strength fell to 28% of it’s current strength and was reversed North-to-south. Due to the weak magnetic field, the theory is that cosmic rays zinged further into the atmosphere and created a layer of enriched beryllium 10 and carbon 14 which remains to this day in a thin slice around the world buried under all the layers of dirt that came after it.
The giant kauri tree log preserved in Ngāwhā, New Zealand, was alive during the Adams Event. Photo: Nelson Parker https://www.nelsonskaihukauri.co.nz/
Extraordinarily, during all this, one giant Kauri tree managed to live for more than 1,700 years. It grew […]
If only climate modelers had warned us that children would know what Frozen Fish Tanks were?
Instead Texas spent most of the last decade and billions of dollars trying to cool the world by changing its electricity grid.
Thanks to market-distorting policies that favor and subsidize wind and solar energy, Texas has added more than 20,000 megawatts (MW) of those intermittent resources since 2015 while barely adding any natural gas and retiring significant coal generation. — Jason Issac
Indeed Texas has the fifth largest windpower fleet in the world — bigger than everyone except China, the USA, Germany and India. But having that industrial fleet of free clean energy didn’t save Texas this week. What happened appears to have been a systemic wide failure on so many levels. But one of those levels surely, is the failure to winterize the grid. There are plenty of gas and wind plants in colder places like Canada and they run through winter just fine.
But the awful truth is, that it costs more to add these “heat and de-icing” features and with everyone planning for Global Warming, well, who needs ’em? It’s almost like ERCOT in Texas assumed the […]
Even if the Texas situation resolves tomorrow the anger will burn for months
A few hours ago, about one quarter of Texas still didn’t have power. After three or four days without power some houses are so cold the fishtanks have frozen over. Some people have been without power for 84 hours straight and ERCOT — the Texas Electricity management can’t say when it will be restored (though they have just announced it might be soon). It is still operating under the EEA 3 highest emergency level. Many people have had their power return for a couple of hours only to lose it again. And there is a burning anger at the unfairness of it all. People say they can see houses, shops and office buildings “lit up like Christmas trees” but have had no power themselves for days. Some are using their cars to warm themselves and charge phones but after three days they are running out of gas. There are restaurants that are offering free food.
It’s so cold in Texas homes that fish tanks are frozen. pic.twitter.com/IRuDjpG5Af
— Cleavon MD (@Cleavon_MD) February 18, 2021
Others are desperately using gas BBQ’s indoors even though it […]
Things are still not looking good in Texas.
At the peak demand on Sunday in Texas the people were using 70 Gigawatts of electricity — an all time record. Then both wind and gas generators failed. Currently the ERCOT Grid is using about 42GW of electricity and ERCOT reports of up to 46 GW of generators being out of action. Total wind output is still under 3GW out of 30GW* of wind capacity.
The gas was the back up to the Wind, but Wind power can’t be a back up to the gas (or anything else).
An ERCOT press release claims that they still have to loadshed 14,000MW which means 2.8 million homes.
“As of 9 a.m., approximately 46,000 MW of generation has been forced off the system during this extreme winter weather event. Of that, 28,000 MW is thermal and 18,000 MW is wind and solar.”
It’s not clear to me how they arrive at only 18,000 MW missing of wind and solar. Perhaps they are only counting the 6 or so GW they expected to be able to use of windpower?
There is so little power that the electricity companies can’t even rotate the blackouts between […]
Welcome to Woke World where states pretend to control the weather while the weather controls the state
An Arctic blast; an ice storm called Uri, has frozen up half the wind turbines in the hot southerly Big State of Texas.
Supplier Oncor is warning it may be hours before power is restored. People are livid, their pipes are freezing, some have had no electricity for 12 hours. Their website is down, their phone lines are out. People can’t even report outages.
UPDATE: NY Times is already blaming Climate Change for the frigid weather.
While the wind turbines have been working at only 3 – 10% capacity in Texas. Gas wellheads have frozen so there are gas shortages as well. Details at the end below.
Anchorage, Alaska is warmer than parts of Texas.
At least five dead and 5 MILLION without power as winter storm Uri sweeps the nation, freezes wind turbines, plunges wind chills to -20 in Texas and causes tornadoes in the south west
Records will be broken in Texas
Daily Mail
Temperatures nosedived into the single-digits as far south as San Antonio, and homes that had already been without […]
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Mexico, the eleventh biggest population on Earth, was all enthused about renewables a few years ago, but now they are actively winding back wind and solar and reactivating coal projects. Mines are being reopened, coal miners are being hired and the state owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has been told to buy electricity from its own coal generators before they buy electricity from the privately owned renewables generators.
López Obrador is called a populist, he talks of energy sovereignty, and speaks badly of predecessors who opened up the energy sector to foreign and private interests. He vowed to put ” at least 80% of the budget – into fossil fuels.””
Mexico was once a climate leader – now it’s betting big on coal
David Agren in San Juan de Sabinas, The Guardian
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as Amlo, has unveiled plans to buy nearly 2m tons of thermal coal from small producers like Rivera. He also plans to reactivate a pair of coal-fired plants on the Texas border, which were being wound down as natural gas and renewables took a more prominent role in Mexico’s energy mix.
Not […]
Is there a better badge to show the intellectual collapse of The West than the idea, from a NATO chief, that we should put solar panels on battlefield tanks? One hundred years from now, there will be a stage in the collapse of civilization called the “Solar powered battle tank” phase. An idea so radioactively stupid that any science writer’s first question is “is this satire?”
Apart from the whole power to weight ratio non-starter, there is the problem of night time and rainy-day warfare, camoflaging a shiny surface, and the general vulnerability of glass and electronics in a situation known to “have bullets”.
Oh the dilemma: how to camouflage solar panels and also collect sunlight?
Not only are these Solar Powered Tanks at risk of being immobilized by a stray shot, they could be struck down with a paint bomb.
Another day in Fall of the West Nato chief suggests battle tanks with solar panels as militaries go green
Thomas Harding, National News
The Nato chief [Jens Stoltenberg] suggested that militaries should advance research into low-emitting vehicles because of the advantages they bring, at an online seminar titled New Ideas for Nato 2030.
[…]
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