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Sorry that this is very short notice! This is today at 2pm EST, Australia. All Welcome.
Howard Brady in Antarctica c 1970s
Dr Howard Brady is a geologist who has done four expeditions to Antarctica. He won the Distinguished Scientist Alumnus of the Year Award for his contributions to Antarctic research. He has been published in journals like Nature and Science. He was to do a seminar at ANU today, but it has been cancelled. This upset people in the department at ANU, who may have thought they could write freely. So now its going ahead as a Zoom ANU meeting:
2 pm Tuesday 6 October 2020
Venue: Online via Zoom (link)
All welcome; no registration necessary.
Dr Brady writes:
ATTACK ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM
Professor Ross McCleod was ordered at the Australian National University (ANU) by higher authority – Professor Paul Burke – to withdraw my ACDE (Arnt-Corden) seminar for the Crawford School of Public Policy next Tuesday at 2pm as an official event.
This upset many in that Department as an attack on academic freedom..it seems that some in the faculty are receiving funds with regard to […]
Guest post by David E.
Since the 1990s, political correctness has grown stronger. The penalty for contradicting the political left and their fantasies used to be just social opprobrium in certain circles and not being seen as the trendiest at certain dinner parties. But now it can get you fired. You are free to speak, but the leftists are free to be rude, yell at you, deny you service on their platforms, and bar you from the many institutions they control.
Daniel Greenfield is a rising independent US journalist with a fearless eye and a clever turn of phrase (emphasis added):
A Soviet citizen goes to the dentist. He lies back in the chair. The dentist tells him to open wide.
“But I’m afraid to open my mouth,” he replies.
The old joke has a new resonance in the age of lockdowns and masked pedestrians, cancel culture and self-criticism sessions when Americans are the ones fearful of opening their mouths. Fear is the common denominator. A nation has spent the year holding its breath. And waiting.
Americans used to laugh at Soviet anecdotes without really understanding them. Now Americans are too afraid to laugh because they are coming to understand […]
Guest post by David E.
Tucker Carlson is now the most popular talk show host in America. His nightly show on Fox News, which has been running since 2016, now draws around four million viewers per night, more than anything else on Fox, CNN, or MSNBC. So why are people tuning in?
Jason Hill has written an insightful article, from which we’ll quote extensively (emphasis added).
A friend of mine last week said to me, wide-eyed and indignant “Did you hear all the horrible things Tucker said about black people? He’s such a racist.”
“No,” I responded, “I didn’t hear about them because I’m pretty sure he never said them. He’s not a racist. He’s a diehard American patriot.”
This, I think, is the real place to start regarding why the left-wing media and their herd-like followers who have never watched an episode of Carlson’s show hate him so much. Above all, Carlson loves America. He’s a patriot who hates to see the way in which cancel culture, woke fascists, crazed left-wing cultural post-modern Marxists and socialists are destroying this country.
Carlson is able to see with great lucidity the connection between what happens in the classroom and how it […]
Win for Trump’s enemies would cast pall over democracy
Chris Kenny, The Australian.
If Trump’s enemies succeed, especially when their critiques are often so deceptive and dishonest, and after they have trashed processes and natural justice through episodes such as the Russia collusion hoax or the assassination of Brett Kavanaugh’s character, it will leave a dark pall over the world’s pre-eminent democracy. And it will leave a mass of disaffected mainstream voters feeling that even a democratically elected President promising to “drain the swamp” can fall victim to the revenge of the political, bureaucratic, academic and media establishment — the deep state.
We know he is unorthodox, polarising and crass, yet so many players and commentators never tire of pretending these observations are still worth fussing over.
If Trump’s enemies succeed, especially when their critiques are often so deceptive and dishonest, and after they have trashed processes and natural justice through episodes such as the Russia collusion hoax or the assassination of Brett Kavanaugh’s character, it will leave a dark pall over the world’s pre-eminent democracy. And it will leave a mass of disaffected mainstream voters feeling that even a democratically elected President promising […]
Global carbon dioxide levels hit record highs in 2020. But through incredible luck, or perhaps a Pacific La Niña event, Australia is now less likely to get massive bushfires this summer.
Looks like carbon dioxide will now cause more floods and cyclones, not fires and droughts.
It’s just physics, you know.
La Niña set to bring cooler weather, more rain and cyclones to Australia
Lisa Cox, The Guardian
The last La Niña occurred from 2010-2012 and brought widespread flooding and record rainfall. The Bom said its modelling currently suggested the latest event would be strong but would not reach the same intensity.
[Andrew] Watkins said La Niña would likely bring increased rainfall in both northern and eastern Australia and increased risk of flooding. It also raises the chance of increased cyclone activity during the tropical cyclone season, with a typical season being nine to 11 cyclones.
He said an active La Niña would also reduce the bushfire risk this season slightly, but would not eliminate it.
Dr Joelle Griggs, a climate scientist at Australian National University, reminds us that even in La Niña years sometimes early rain produces bulk grass which, if […]
Jen Marohasy went hunting for bleached coral:
What is the true state of the Great Barrier Reef? … In January 2020, Emmy Award winning cameraman Clint Hempsall, and IPA Senior Fellow Jennifer Marohasy decided to find out. They spent a week exploring the Ribbon Reefs 250kms to the north east of Cairns in search of coral bleaching – the process of corals turning white as a result of warmer water temperature, which climate scientists say is being caused by climate change. Some argue 60% of the coral at the Ribbon Reefs was irretrievably bleached in 2016.
Somewhere among 350,000 square kilometers of coral reef, Jen Marohasy had no trouble finding some happy corals, giant cod, and cute nemo fish.
The IPA and the B. Macfie Family Foundation supports and publishes the video:
Colorful corals of the Great Barrier Reef
Don’t believe your lying eyes. Incandescent light globes are killing the corals one by one, air conditioners cause fish to act reckless, and only more solar panels and windmills can save them. You know it makes sense.
Living coral.
..
Many of the corals grow on vertical formations which are not visible on […]
Coronavirus is both the rock and the hard place
There are costs to stopping it, and costs to letting it go. There are businesses that won’t recover, and also people that won’t.
There is much more to pandemic decisions than just “deaths per capita”. One more aspect of the wicked dilemma are “long haulers” or the condition called “long Covid” (which is defined as being ill for 3 months or longer).
Thirty-nine UK doctors who caught Covid are still struggling 6 months later, and have written a joint letter for the British Medical Journal. These were mostly fit youngish people, and they didn’t get hospitalized. They had mild moderate cases of Covid. But many of them say that the after effects are worse than the initial infection. These include things like headaches, dizziness, the inability to walk 200 metres or more, breathlessness, strange numb patches, new allergies, difficulty regulating body temperature, ongoing diarrhea. Many are unable to work.
The cause could be nerve damage, or an autoimmune disorder (or something else entirely). If the virus triggers an immune reaction against their own cells it may be difficult to undo or “grow out of”. Some nerve damage will repair. Some won’t.
[…]
Suddenly, it’s almost like British schools might be preparing students for real life. How did that happen?
Imagine teaching students that tolerance means listening to people you don’t like, who are saying things you don’t want to hear? Cancel Culture delegitimizes and removes whole people from every aspect of life or public office for the merest trivial breach of some unwritten rules that are applied selectively. Like a neolithic “bone-pointing” type exile, all life experience and expertise is thus “cancelled”. Apologies are worthless, there is no learning, there are only “admissions of guilt”. There is something profoundly unChristian about it all — the complete lack of forgiveness.
This new program then, is like a safe space from The Safe Spaces. For Activist-Uni’s this does the worst possible thing. It may train a generation to see through their propaganda.
Next thing you know, Children might be taught that Climate Change Dogma is bullying too. Woke ‘cancel culture’ is a form of bullying and ‘no platforming’ an attack on free speech, pupils will be taught
Josh White, Daily Mail, UK
Teachers will tell pupils ‘cancel culture’ is not part of a ‘tolerant and free society’ Students will learn that people with controversial […]
Ken Stewart has been looking at the mysterious pattern of temperatures on Horn Island –– right at the top of Cape York Australia. It’s almost as far north as things get in Australia. There was no thermometer there before 1995, so the Bureau of Meteorology has rattled the nearest tea-leaves to find out how warm it was.
The towns listed on the map are its nearest neighbours. “Near”, in the Australian sense, meaning loosely within 500 kilometers.
Horn Island and it’s nearest neighbours
This, below, is the way 70 years of temperature dregs roll at all those sites.
…
This is what the Bureau of Meteorology sees (note the scale has changed on the temp axis). That’s two degrees of warming in far north Queensland.
…
So the average minimum temperature now looks half a degree cooler in 1960 than what your lying eyeballs suggest.
Ken goes into much more detail and deserves our thanks for bothering to try to unpack the mysterious merging of thermometer records in at the BoM department of Tasseomancy.
Visit his site: Garbage In, Garbage Out- Horn Island
10 out of 10 based on 59 ratings […]
Did the British Labor Party just agree to Brexit, talk of family, nation, and chuck out the anti-semites?
Just when democracy looks dead, comes this. The British Labour party got savaged in the last election, but they appear to have quietly decided to aim for the centre.
The new leader, Keir Starmer, has apparently “set his sights on the Red Wall seats that Labour had lost.”
Keir Starmer, a true conservative
Maurice Glasman, UnHerd
Brexit was the fault-line that destroyed the Left and created a one-nation Conservatism that would push Labour back to its progressive comfort zone in the big cities, sealing it off from the small towns and working class heartlands forever. The Conservatives would be in power for a generation and when Keir Starmer was elected leader, it sealed the deal. A Remainian lawyer could never heal the wounds.
They [the Tories] didn’t notice when he said that the issue of Brexit had been resolved and Labour supported leaving the EU by the end of the year. The biggest issue in British politics had dissolved into a previous era and the Covid response was centre stage. They didn’t notice when Rebecca Long-Bailey […]
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8 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
Spring snow has fallen in Ballarat and even parts of mid north South Australia, and regional NSW.
Unlike warm spells which are caused by air conditioners and SUV’s, cold spells are due to “polar air masses” that evidently got lost on the way to school or something.
Someone was reported Skiing in mid north South Australia. The normal ski season here was winding down, normally closing in early October, and that’s in the Alps.
In the many posts under #Snow, Australians are reported to be confused, mistaking white stuff for blossoms and other things. One Australian cried at seeing her first snow. Others just wonder what it is:
“Whyte Yarcowie resident Judy Lewis said she initially could not believe what she was seeing when she noticed a white blanket over her car and front yard.
“I got up to make a coffee and I looked out and I thought, ‘What’s all that white on the car?’” she said.”
Snow in Australia in places that almost never get snow.
Snow falls in South Australia, hail lashes Adelaide in unusually chilly September cold snap
Spring snow has blanketed parts of regional South Australia — […]
The Morrison government has released a new roadmap for low emissions technology. The nicest thing that can be said is that it’s better than the Turnbull plan. It gives no joy to the Renewables multinational octopus, it steers a Qango in a less damaging direction, but still isn’t brave enough to just say “No” to the low-carbon bullies.
$18 billion for technologies we don’t need
The Coalition plan is an investment in five low emission technologies that private investors have mostly already looked at and don’t like:
Hydrogen made with renewable energy, Batteries, Low-emission steel and aluminium, Carbon capture and storage, and Adding carbon to soil.
Since emissions don’t change the weather in a measurable way, no one in the world “needs” low emission steel or aluminum. It doesn’t solve any problem, apart from giving guilt-free passes to Ecoworriers to help them feel better about buying a new car. We-the-people are investing in a fashion empire dedicated to a niche market, so they can brag at dinner parties.
Of the five technologies, the only useful outcome is richer soil. Batteries are handy, but if we burnt coal for power we get all the storage and stability we need and at […]
The good news: Lockdowns will end sooner than expected. Not soon enough for some desperate businesses, but sooner than Dan Andrew’s modelers thought.
As I predicted, Victoria is doing better than the models estimated. Many people focus on the “daily new cases” but the “unknown source cases” is a better, more forward looking tool.
In Newspoll today we find — also as I predicted from the outset of the pandemic — that health is priority one for most voters. It’s an awkward fact of democracy. As drastic as the restrictions are in Victoria, more than half the voters are happy to give up some freedom temporarily in order to save lives, hardship and unknown health effects, and the burden on healthworkers.
Right-leaning small business owners and entrepreneurs are often not at all happy about giving up freedom. They’re much more comfortable taking risks, but most of the population are not. It’s a personality type thing. It’s not going to change. (What’s obscene though, is that those comfortable taking risks are bearing more of the costs while public servants like Dan Andrews are getting fat pay rises. )
Despite the strict restrictions, fully 71% of Victorians view the restrictions as “about […]
Just in time for the US election. Climate Hustle 2 is almost a Who’s Who of the climate skeptic world. It’s a documentary of the power games, dirty tricks and brazen hypocrisy behind the push for a global governance through the excuse of carbon dioxide. It’s about the way children are used as pawns, trained in schools to “become a whole generation of obedient voters”. It’s Eisenhower’s warning, and Nineteen Eighty Four. It’s the Rise of the Climate Monarchy.
Marc Morano and CFACT have circled the world, interviewing everyone from Richard Lindzen, to the late great Bob Carter, to Vauclav Klaus and Patrick Moore, the man Greenpeace erased. There’s Christopher Monckton, Will Happer, Roger Pielke, Tim Ball, Don Easterbrook, Senator Malcolm Roberts, Anthony Watts… too many to name, even briefly, Jo Nova. This is aimed at a wider audience than the skeptics who will be familiar with the battles of the last ten years. But even for the die-hards, there’s something good about putting faces to so many names.
Worldwide, the online premiere is set to take place on September 24th at 8 p.m. (in every time zone around the world … including yours in Australia!). For those […]
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7.4 out of 10 based on 20 ratings
What happens when the Glorious Coal Free Future meets summer:
How a ‘coal-free’ UK has returned to coal
Terry McCrann, The Herald Sun
Back in June, they separately sprung tweet-style to deliriously hail the ‘end of coal’ in the UK.
[Former PM, Kevin] Rudd tweeted: “For anyone who thinks it cannot be done: the UK has not produced any electricity from coal for the last two months — the longest period since the Industrial Revolution. Let that sink in,” he concluded with all the deadening portentousness he could muster.
But then it got warm, calm, and everyone wanted to use the air con:
..not only did the Brits go back to coal to keep the lights on – and, as they baked in a mid-20s ‘heatwave’, the aircons as well – they really shovelled some coal.
At its peak this week, the UK was getting nearly 3000MW from coal, well more than three times the 800MW or so coming from all the wind turbines, both those that despoil the British landscape and those parked equally hideously offshore.
Where are the headlines: Victorious coal saves the day?
9.7 out of 10 based on 102 ratings
Dr Li-Meng Yan worked in the WHO Coronavirus Reference Lab in Hong Kong. She has just published a detailed paper claiming that the SARS-2 coronavirus was artificially made in a laboratory and appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show today. She also claims it was deliberately spread (though this was slightly ambiguous– listen closely).
We already had enough evidence to know that SARS-Cov2 is a likely bioweapon. (The virus it supposedly evolved from appears to be fake.) This is largely what her paper covers.
Chinese defector virologist Dr Li-Meng Yan publishes report claiming COVID-19 was made in a lab
Phoebe Looms, News.com
Dr Yan had been working at Hong Kong University’s public health laboratory sciences division, a World Health Organisation infectious diseases research centre, when her boss was asked to investigate the outbreak in Wuhan.
Dr Yan claimed her and her team’s scientific findings were suppressed, and they were told only to report cases linked to the Huanan seafood market. After becoming fearful of her safety, she fled China on a flight bound for Los Angeles in late April.
Others in her lab said: “ Dr. Yan’s statement does not accord with the key facts […]
Losing unloseable climate change elections has some effect:
In the 2019 election the Labor emissions reduction target was a 45 per cent cut from 2005 levels by 2030:
New Labor manifesto drops emissions targets for 2030
Greg Brown, The Australian
Anthony Albanese has been given the green light to go to the next election without specific climate change targets for 2030, under an ALP draft policy platform that outlines plans to turn Australia into a “renewable energy superpower”.
The party’s preliminary draft platform — obtained by The Australian — was backed by shadow cabinet this month. The document, a third of the size of the 2018 national platform, makes no mention of a 2030 or 2035 emissions reduction or renewable energy targets. The Labor leader is facing an internal push to drop medium-term targets and focus on a policy of net-zero emissions by 2050.
“Labor will ensure that Australia becomes a renewable energy superpower, harnessing our natural advantages in clean energy to become energy independent from the world, while lowering power prices, reaching zero net emissions by 2050,” the document says.
Labor’s overall direction hasn’t changed, they are still captive to the […]
All around the world are dawning headlines wondering if we have founds signs of life on Venus.
Despite the hunt for life on star systems that are lightyears from Earth, it turns out there may be something on the Planet-next-door. “May” being the operative word. A team found phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus and can’t think of any other way it could have got there. Phosphine is considered to be a biomarker. And microbes on Earth would have no trouble making it, though none of them could easily survive on Venus where the atmosphere clouds and rain are nearly pure hot sulphuric acid.*
Scientists find gas linked to life in atmosphere of Venus
Ian Sample, The Guardian
Sara Seager, a planetary scientist on the study at MIT in the US, called the finding “mind-boggling”. She hypothesises a lifecycle for Venusian microbes that rain down, dry out and are swept back up to more temperate altitudes by currents in the atmosphere.
For 2bn years, Venus was temperate and harboured an ocean. But today, a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere blankets a near-waterless surface where temperatures top 450C. The clouds in the sky are hardly inviting, […]
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