|
|
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 […]
…
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 […]
…
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, […]
Given that people with dark skin are more likely to be deficient in Vitamin D, wouldn’t studies like these be the best way to show that black lives actually matter? Would you like training in cultural sensitivity or to avoid the intensive care unit?
A free antiviral shining down on you?
In the Castillo study in Spain, 76 patients were randomly assorted into Calciferol treatment ( 0.532 mg Vitamin D ). Of the 26 who didn’t get it, 13 were admitted to the ICU. Of the 50 who got Vitamin D doses on days 1, 3, and 7 — only one ended up in the ICU. It’s worth noting that all patients got HCQ as well, and azithromycin too.
A second study tested 500 people to find out if they were deficient and followed them to see if they caught Covid.
Why has it taken 6 months of pandemic to do these small studies?
Before the pandemic came there was already ample evidence suggesting that it mattered. Vitamin D influences over 200 genes. Its levels also correlate with lower rates of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, heart disease, dental caries, preeclampsia, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. […]
The sitation in California is just like the one in Australia
Tim Ingalsbee has been fighting fires or trying to prevent them since 1980. He founded Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology.
They know how to prevent megafires
Elizabeth Weil, ProRepublica
So what’s it like? “It’s just … well … it’s horrible. Horrible to see this happening when the science is so clear and has been clear for years. I suffer from Cassandra syndrome,” Ingalsbee said. “Every year I warn people: Disaster’s coming. We got to change. And no one listens. And then it happens.”
The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up.
This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”
Modern Californians are burning 0.1% of what […]
It appears people who wear masks are much less likely to get severe infections
This will make some heads spin.
Child Wearing a a Mask. Author vperemen.com
Not only do masks reduce the odds of getting infected, but if people do get infected while wearing a mask — the severity of Covid is so much milder. With masks on, the odds of getting an asymptomatic infection improve. Masks don’t stop all viral particles but they stop the large droplet clusters, and thus reduce the viral load. If asymptomatic people get some protection (and we still don’t know for sure) it could solve so much.
Consider the two cruise ships where the asymptomatic rate varied from 18 to 81%:
One used masks and one didn’t:
In February, one of the first outbreaks of COVID-19 outside of China occurred on the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Yokohama, Japan. Of the 634 people on board who tested positive, about 18 percent of infections were asymptomatic. In March, an Argentinian cruise ship found itself in a similar predicament, but of the 128 people on board who eventually tested positive, 81 percent were asymptomatic— Ghandi et al.
Nations that use […]
The UK parliament has decided to phase out fossil fueled cars entirely by 2040 or even 2035, but right now only 4% of the UK public are even planning to buy an EV, which makes it a very forced transition. Forty four percent say they won’t even be ready in fifteen years time, and a quarter effectively say “over my dead body”.
Half of Britons say a 2035 deadline to switch to an electric car is too soon!
Rob Hull and Grace Gausden, ThisIsMoney.co.uk
But despite the growing availability and wider selection of motors to choose from, a survey commissioned by the SMMT found that almost half of drivers are not only unprepared to make a transition to zero-emission motoring now but don’t think they will be in 2035 – five years ahead of the existing deadline for the sale of new petrol, diesel and hybrid cars to be banished.
A quarter (24 per cent) of the 2,185 drivers interviewed claimed they don’t foresee themselves ever buying an electric car in their lifetimes, despite the impeding ban in 2040.
96% say they are not even thinking of buying one at the moment Hardly anyone […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments