Massive Fires: far worse 4,000 years ago in Northern Australia

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 […]

How about a Duty of Care to keep electricity cheap and teach teenagers real science?

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 […]

Has Israel found the cure for Covid?

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 […]

Vitamin B6 may reduce the cytokine storms of Covid

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 […]

News and tips Friday

Just trying to see if this is useful.

h/t Leo

8.5 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

US Climate Czar turns the thumb-screws on Australia coal

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 […]

Climate Propaganda burns out: neither hope nor doom works on audiences anymore

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 […]

Texas dodged a bullet: Would you like explosions with your blackouts?

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 […]

Extinction level event? 42,000 years ago Earths magnetic field shrank to nothing

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 […]

Texas was prepared for global warming but not the return of the cold

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 […]

Texas: day four without power and water for some, fishtanks freeze, pipes burst, “worse than Africa”

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 […]

Texas: 20 dead — Many now going 50 hours plus without electricity, heating, water

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 […]

Texas at -20C, five million without power as Wind Turbines freeze

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 […]

Un-Greening: Mexico gives up on renewables, revives coal industry

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 […]

NATO Chief wonders about Solar Powered Battle Tanks

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.

[…]

West Australian conservative party wants close coal plants and lose election Bigly

Watch this space. The Western Australian election is four weeks off and the new young Liberal (“Conservative”) opposition leader has just made this a “climate change” election and launched himself to the left of the Labor Party by suggesting the state can close all government run coal plants by 2025.

Epic loss coming. The opposition leader may even lose his own seat (Dawesville, in Mandurah, held by only 0.8%). The National Party and minor conservative parties could do well from the aftermath.

Aiming for political correctness in a politically incorrect state?

WA political landscape turned on its head as Liberals outline renewable energy policy

[ABC News] One major party is making the case that renewables are the way of the future, the other is warning they will cripple jobs and send power prices skyrocketing. …it is politics as usual in Australia for the past decade. Except in this case, it is the WA Liberal Party calling for coal to be tossed aside and wind and solar to take its place, with Labor blasting the idea as “reckless”.

The Liberal Party were on a hiding to nothing before this announcement. The local Labor Premier hit 90% […]

Asthma drug Budesonide reduces Covid hospitalization rate dramatically

The STOIC study gave an asthma drug to Covid patients, but it worked so astonishingly well, they had to stop the trial early, as it was unfair to keep giving the placebo to people who were ending up in hospital ten times as often as people who got Budesonide.

“We were hoping for 50% reduction [in severity]. We got 90%, which … is off the charts”

–h/t Eric W at WUWT

Though to keep some perspective, out of about 140 people enrolled, 70 got the drug and 70 got the placebo, with 10 of the placebo group going to hospital and only 1 in the Budesonide group.

You’ll be shocked to know that giving the drug early works better than waiting for the virus to replicate wildly. You’ll also be shocked that there were some doctors using this 7 or more months ago, and yet the media didn’t mention it Apart from Newsmax. (Eg See Dr Richard Bartlett talk about this back in July last year, who talks of using a nebulizer, not an inhaler. )

Common asthma drug slashes Covid hospitalisation by 90%, experts say

Vanessa Chambers, The Sun

A […]

In Peru, Ivermectin cut covid deaths by 75% in 6 weeks: cheap, safe and quite ignored

How many unnecessary deaths does it take til people get angry? Angry that the Chief Medical Officers and Health Ministers didn’t ask for studies to be done. Angry that most academics sat by and said nothing. And angry that the media just parroted the institutions.

One good antiviral changes everything. If the world had a safe cheap drug, we could not only reduce deaths and disability, but also slow the rate of mutation down and probably slow the appearance of new mutations down.

The Chamie-Quintero study from Peru shows the West could be only weeks away from reducing the Covid death toll if we used the safe cheap sheep-dip, lice-killing Ivermectin like less wealthy countries do.

A study across the states of Peru found that after Ivermectin was introduced, deaths started to fall about 11 days later, and within a month after that, deaths were down around 75%.

Ivermectin is a drug so useful early researchers got a Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on it. It’s so well known that in the last thirty years more than 3.7 billion doses of Ivermectin have been given out. It’s so safe we can use it on cats […]

In 2020 China built three times more coal power than the rest of the world

Coal power is surging in the second largest economy even as China tells the rest of the world to “cut carbon”

If, hypothetically, China were to fund anti-coal groups in the countries it competes with — it would be a successful strategy to hurt them and advantage China. Which journalists would tell us if that were happening?

China’s new coal power plant capacity in 2020 more than three times rest of world’s: study

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China put 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity into operation in 2020, according to new international research, more than three times the amount built elsewhere around the world and potentially undermining its short-term climate goals.

The country won praise last year after President Xi Jinping pledged to make the country “carbon neutral” by 2060. But regulators have since come under fire for failing to properly control the coal power sector, a major source of climate-warming greenhouse gas.

Including decommissions, China’s coal-fired fleet capacity rose by a net 29.8 GW in 2020, even as the rest of the world made cuts of 17.2 GW, according to research released on Wednesday by […]

Wokeyleaks — the shallow sickness and obsession of the fameroise

* ! — Site will be down for a while tonight.

Nice. A weapon against the SJW phenomenon

As I have said from the beginning: virtue signaling is primarily driven by the need to “Impress people at Dinner Parties”. Money matters, but status matters even more so. (What do people spend all that money on — gaining status…) Popping this phenomenon is a “must have” on the bucket list of rescuing civilizations and here it is — a nice new pointy social tool.

They/Them is an insider voice from the glitterati elite who got fed up with the emptiness and hypocrisy of the uber famous game and is whistleblowing on the shallow self interest that drives the virtue signalers. These are the celebrity SJW’s who pretend to care about the downtrodden while they send each other selfies on high tech boxes made by slaves in china. What They/Them is doing is not just exposing the hypocrisy, and adding a new vocabulary — like the Fameoisie — but also opening a safe path for those trapped in the bubble to start that conversation. Right now, bullying and fear keep them silent. They/Them is planting a seed. I’ll explain more […]