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Somewhere in Victoria. | Image by veronoumea
It’s just another day in the death of investigative journalism
Notice the way the words shift. The ABC told us tonight that a new “Atlas” will “chart” the temperature for wine growing regions in Australia, as if charting is what we do when we are taking a blind guess with a broken model at the future. Once upon a time, atlases mapped things that already existed. The ABC and Uni Tas are just staring right into the future. Neat advertising eh?
Makes you wonder why we bother with thermometers.
The ABC News is like reading Harry Potter. The Hunter Valley is not predicted to get warmer, it’s “destined” to. Gone are the qualifiers: where once people might have to adapt, now they’ll be forced to. In gushing form, the ABC quotes shocked farmers saying “It’s pivotal”, “a line-in-the-sand body of work” a “wow moment” and a “world first”, as if Tasmanian scientists discovered the magical Marauders Map itself. It’s also like no group on Earth has ever tried to predict the climate of wine regions before. If the ABC interviewed a skeptical farmer it would have broken the camera.
If Uni of […]
New research of the WuFlu “gene” lineage in the UK show that the virus kept being introduced via planes, trains and cars. The entire time that UK residents were being restricted in lockdown, tens of thousands of people were allowed to bring virus in through the border. Sabotage or Incompetence? The single failure to quarantine arrivals in the UK means the lockdown has gone on longer than it needed, cost more than it had too, has been less successful, and now, as the UK reopens, it does it with infections still running, when it could be doing it “like New Zealand”.
The BBC news mentioned that there were a lot of imported cases, that the biggest variety of genetic variants came from Spain, France and Italy and not China. But one tantalizing finding was that the UK transmission lines now appear to be “very rare or extinct”. Which surely implies that the lockdown is working, the UK lines are dying out, and that … by golly, the new infections must be regular incoming virus?
Three Key Conclusions: The UK epidemic comprises a very large number of importations due to inbound international travel2. We detect 1356 independently-introduced transmission lineages, however, we […]
Another hidden renewables tax buried in complexity
Here in Renewables World we now have to pay companies to make less of the products we want. It’s a sign of how fragile and dysfunctional the Australian grid is.
“Big energy users like factories and farms will be able to earn money by saving energy during heatwaves and at other times when electricity prices are high,” the Australia Institute’s energy lead Dan Cass said.
They call it “wholesale demand response”. We call it planned blackouts. All over the country equipment will be switched off when its needed most so that our green grid doesn’t fall over, or create billion dollar price spikes.
With some of the most expensive electricity in the world, there is already a strong price signal driving companies to use electricity efficiently. This new “price signal” drives them to be less efficient. Because the grid is now incapable of providing regular reliable electricity whenever it’s most useful to companies, the government is adding a whole new layer of complexity to try to squeeze out the spikes they can’t handle.
This move will mean more people will have to be employed in account-management, but the products made will […]
Watch this:
Tucker Carlson asks whether the insane, unpopular idea to “defund the police” means getting rid of the current police and bringing in a new BLM-compliant “force”? Is this just The March through yet another Institution?
No one is allowed to say anything against this ideology. People are losing their jobs for the merest hint they they don’t wholeheartedly adopt an activist supporting role. But bullies thrive on grovelling obedience.
9.5 out of 10 based on 104 ratings
Just pausing for a moment to say “cheers, New Zealand”.
The last remaining barrier there are closed international borders.
LiveScience Updates
NEW ZEALAND EASES ALMOST ALL CORONAVIRUS RESTRICTIONS AMID NO ACTIVE COVID-19 CASES
— New Zealand has no active cases of the coronavirus, and no new positive cases reported in the past 17 days, according to CNN. For the past 12 days, there are no patients in the hospital receiving treatment for COVID-19 and for the past 40 days, there is no evidence of community transmission, according to CNN. Now, New Zealand is lifting almost all of its coronavirus restrictions, while still encouraging social distancing, keeping borders shut to non-residents and requiring that residents traveling into the country to quarantine for 14 days, according to CNN. New Zealand will be under “alert level 1” rules which means there will be no restrictions on domestic transport and no restrictions on workplaces or services, according to CNN and New Zealand’s government website.
New Zealands daily new cases graphed. Black marks deaths. Wikipedia NZ timeline
New Zealand 1,500 cases and only 22 deaths. The peak of the curve is somewhere around March 30th. The quarantine measures […]
Just another reason to keep the virus out until things improve.
Acute Kidney Injury Seen in Most Severe COVID-19 Cases — One third of all hospitalized cases also affected in NYC data
New data from two health systems in New York City — where hospitals struggled to keep up with dialysis demands as they were flooded with COVID-19 patients — detailed a high rate of acute kidney injury among infected patients.
In the first 1,000 patients with COVID-19 at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, 33.9% developed acute kidney injury. Of the 236 who ended up in the ICU, 78% developed AKI, Ruijun Chen, MD, and colleagues reported in The BMJ.
In another study of 5,500 patients the rate was 36% of those hospitalized, and 89% of those in ICU on ventilators. Quite a few of these people went on to die, so, to put it bluntly, they wont be in need of dialysis or further care. But some part of the population in a post corona world will need ongoing care and won’t be able to work at their former level.
At least one person in the US likely died because there wasn’t enough dialysis equipment.
[…]
The Babylon Bee “reports”
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Powerful: Protesters Spell out ‘Love’ with Burning Homes
MINNEAPOLIS, MN—In a powerful display of their care for love and justice, protesters in Minneapolis burned the word “LOVE” into the city, arranging the inspiring message with homes and businesses set ablaze by their riots.
Heartfelt and moving.
The Bee is Dan Coats.
Be aware, the Bee’s point is very serious, but the reporting isn’t.
* * *
Commentators, due to Section 18C in Australia it’s illegal to discuss race or color since it may offend someone somewhere. Therefore the words black, white, yellow, red, skin, color, indigenous, indian, african, eskimo, asian, european, sub-saharan, BLM, WLM, ALM, will go straight to moderation, and can only be published after Section 18C is repealed in 2073AD or thereabouts. We can have a no color conversation. Which means, we here, have arrived in Martin Luther King’s world, ahead of the protestors and looters:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged […]
The new figures from the Mauna Loa Observatory show humans are irrelevant
Despite the Ultra-Revolutionary-Carbon-Reduction-Program far beyond anything the UN has every dreamed of, Global CO2 hit 417ppm. This is a record high since humans discovered test tubes but the 300 millionth time since life on Earth evolved.
It shows how all plans for carbon reduction known to mankind are futile. Obviously Ecoworriers want to take that failure and do more of it.
The world just broke a disturbing trend despite the global lockdown
Tracey Keeling
…the data reveals that two months of significantly reduced human activity did not make a dent in the damage we’ve done to the planet. It ultimately confirms that nothing short of wholesale systemic change will do – with the rejection of fossil fuels at the heart of that transformation.
“Surprised” is not the word. When the punters realize that empty streets and skies makes no difference, there could be a monumental crisis of motivation coming. Games up?
The Scientists Just Told Us Coronavirus Won’t Save Us from Climate Change
The National Interest
“People may be surprised to hear that the response to the coronavirus outbreak […]
We discussed the inadequacies of the large Lancet study of hydroxychloroquine supposed used on 96,000 Covid patients from 671 hospitals. It was largely useless because it ignored zinc, wasn’t randomized and was mainly used on people who were already very ill, with a terrible 12% death rate. But it is far worse than that and has now been retracted. The number of deaths listed in Australia was higher than the official Australian tally on April 21. The number of Covid cases in Turkey was 80 times higher than official numbers.
All over the world the study spooked doctors and governments (with WHO help) into stopping the use of HCQ in their large trial across in 17 countries .That trial has since been restarted.
The authors have now retracted the paper after Surgisphere refused to transfer the full dataset “due to confidentiality”.
The Guardian investigated the company that came out of nowhere with this enormous dataset which was used in both The Lancet paper and a New England Medical Journal paper. It turned out to be small, with a handful of employees and that include a science fiction writer, an adult content model, and few scientific qualifications. When The Guardian contacted […]
Fake Warming in Queensland: The BOM says the sites didn’t move, but photos show they did.
The warming at these four sites alongside the Great Barrier Reef is due to site changes, incompetence, poor record keeping and “adjustments”. Map: Terrametrics, Map data Google 2020
All along the coast near the Great Barrier Reef, the BOM has claimed temperatures have warmed in the last 50 years, and they’ve calculated it to a tenth of a degree. To get that kind of accuracy the thermometers need to be carefully placed, and the BOM needs to know exactly where they were, but they don’t.
The BOM keeps long pages of site descriptions and exact dates of moves and equipment changes, but historic photos show the records are wrong. The BOM will solemnly swear a site was in the same place for decades but photographs and archives show the sites were often moved as developments sprang up around them. The BOM didn’t keep the records and didn’t bother to check. If the thermometer moved to a warmer location or it warmed because they replaced the standard 230-litre Stevenson screen with a 60-litre toy one, or no longer cleaned it […]
As Paul McArdle of WattClarity says: “the NEM* is becoming increasingly dependent on the weather“
Saturday week ago in Queensland was cold enough to break records. Brisbane “only” made it up to 17.9C (64F). It hasn’t been that cold there in May for 40 years. At the same time a band of cloud covered the populated slice of the state.
The cloud cover meant all the large solar “farms” in Queensland — with a total rated capacity of 1.7GW — produced only 79MW as an aggregate average daily output.
Sunshine State forgets its own branding on Saturday 23rd May 2020
Averaged across the 24 hours in the day yesterday, average aggregate output across all of the Large Solar plant in QLD was a very meagre 79MW only:
1a) Dividing this by an aggregate 1,664MW installed capacity* across the Large Solar plant in QLD this represents a capacity factor the day of just 4.7%
Not surprisingly the same clouds that ruined the large solar farms also wrecked the rooftop solar.
One in three homes in Queensland have solar panels. With 1.8GW of theoretical capacity, rooftop solar is Queenslands largest generator (except it hardly ever […]
The Swedish soft lockdown will cost a lot more in the long run
Despite the relaxed approach, Sweden still had major changes in behaviour and movement patterns. The “half lockdown” may have stopped the exponential growth, but it wasn’t enough to reduce the spread. So Sweden is now trapped into maintaining some kind of isolation measures for months while other countries open up around them, and possibly, fly right over.
Norway’s sharp hard action and closed borders cost more in the short run, but they are now tracking towards zero cases and recovery beckons. Sweden has twice as many cases per capita as Norway, and ten times as many deaths, and there’s little sign the new infections are declining, nor that herd immunity is close. Antibody tests show that by late April only 7% of Stockholm may have been exposed to the virus, much less than the 20+ percent that the Swedish Chief Epidemiologist was expecting.
In the graph below the number of cases are on the same scale, though Sweden has twice the population. Given that viruses grow and decline on exponential scales, the Swedish curve could have still shrunk almost as fast as it rose — like Norway’s […]
Remember the Japanese wonder drug Ivermectin that killed Coronavirus in the lab? Some trials on patients in Bangladesh and the US are showing some promise. This is the drug I called “sheep dip” (but which is really more of a cow or horse drench now). It’s famous for stopping River Blindness and saving the eyesight of thousands. It’s also used against roundworms, lungworms, mites, lice, scabies and hornflies, as well as cattle-ticks. So it’s another drug, like hydroxycholoroquine that has been road tested for safety’s sake up the kazoo.
The cost of Ivermectin is around 15c in the third world, and $50 for one round for a human in New York. (But even that is a lot cheaper than a $5000 a day ICU bed.)
As I said — there may come a day when you can cure coronavirus and treat the kids headlice at the same time. Handy.
So it’s good to know some trials are occurring, and even better to know that some doctors are very enthusiastic about the results. In terms of medical clinical trials, these are small. I’m not sure the enthusiasm is matched by the data. I’d only say “it’s not dead yet”. But in […]
Global flight routes are getting remapped as countries close-to-zero start talking about connecting up without that pesky two-week quarantine.
An advantage of doing lockdown properly is getting free of it faster.
European gateway Israel and Costa Rica rush to join plans for Australia-New Zealand tourism bubble
Clare Armstrong, David Aidone, James MacSmith, News Corp Australia Network
Plans have been launched for a quarantine-free gateway to Europe through Israel by December, and a long-haul flight to Costa Rica, as countries that have managed COVID-19 effectively race to join Australia and New Zealand’s tourism bubble proposal.
Israel wants to schedule a permanent flight to its economic hub of Tel Aviv from either Sydney or Melbourne to open itself up as a stepping stone to ‘safe’ European countries including Norway, Denmark, Greece and the Czech Republic.
There are also reports some Pacific Islands, such as Fiji, could be included in a trans-Tasman bubble.
While the timeline includes the Pacific Islands, it has been labelled “aspirational” and the NZ and Australian government will make the final call.
Meanwhile, discounted plane tickets and free accommodation are among perks that will be offered to travellers as […]
….
7.6 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
The seed for every advert for the Donald Trump Campaign is somewhere in there.
Trump is the only president in history who didn’t need to be President to be rich and famous
… so rich he already had his own plane and may have had to settle for a smaller one to take office.
There is something to be said for electing leaders who are so wealthy they are hard to buy off.
Charlie Kirk speaking.
UPDATE: For readers wondering why this is on a science blog, or relevant to Australia…
Establishment science is a Swamp.
Imagine Australia standing up to China in a world where the US is poorer, the Swamp is stronger, and the UN is in charge?
The Lucky Bubble we live in floats in a house The West built.
h/t Stephen Harper
9.2 out of 10 based on 77 ratings
Science before politics
Some are claiming the Victorian lockdown was too late, saying the rate of spread was already suppressed before it started. But that misses the point that slowing flight arrivals was responsible for most of the suppression up to that point, but that wasn’t going to stop the rising cases of community transmission. To judge if lockdown works, we need to look at domestic spread.
The graph that matters are the new daily cases, and even more so, the graph of daily new cases due to of community transmission (below).
Victoria started a major lockdown on March 24th when schools were largely closed (except to essential workers) and only essential services were allowed to run. We see daily new cases peaked 11 3 days later, almost exactly as expected (We expect a 12 day delay as seen in Japan, Germany, Italy, Spain, South Korea and Norway). The 12 day average expected lag comes from a five day average incubation and then a roughly seven day lag for new cases to get into breathing trouble and get tested as such. In Victoria, the case numbers were dominated by incoming arrivals, so the timing of border closures determined the daily […]
A week ago the Australian Government released their Technology Investment Roadmap Discussion Paper. Presumably they want a map because they’re lost. They’d like submissions by June 21.
David Archibald lets rip on why hydrogen fuel is not going to save us, but coal, gas, and nukes will. He has wondered for years why Australia is so concerned with talking about a thirty year energy plan when we don’t even have a 90 day supply.
Australia’s Energy Plan
Guest Post by David Archibald
Image: Gus Pasquerella
Global warming is the new state religion and Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, is its high priest…
The fad of the moment is hydrogen. To recap, when global warming started out the villains among us realised that the easiest way to make money was to turn Australia from being a low-cost power producer to a high cost one and take a slice of the action on the way through. So the likes of AGL and Macquarie Bank concocted solar farm and wind farm schemes and sold them on to people wanting a high, government-enforced rate of return. They then used their own money to generate a yet higher return on equity by taking […]
Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans racked up 8 million views in a month, then when they extended the free views for another month, YouTube finally found a reason to shut it down. Apparently 4 seconds of video isn’t “fair use” in a documentary any more, and thus for copyright reasons, the video got pulled. If Youtube took down every 4 second violation of copyright there’d be no Youtube. Which may be about to happen anyway, when the young hip revolutionary teens realize the conglomate power is heavily censoring their access to “news” in order to fool them into obedience for corporate profit.
It’s so predictable. A month ago, Myron Ebell, CEI, said “Quick. Watch it before it’s banned”.
Everytime Youtube does this it makes it easier for a competitor to take their top spot. Bring it on.
Moore put it on Vimeo, but searching there finds nothing too. Has Vimeo been “got to”?
Doesn’t matter, because Moore’s now moved to Bitchute. https://www.bitchute.com/video/KQnVEMOOYuJd/
Long live Bitchute.
The documentary was banned by the film distributors right from the start, but when people started tweeting “now that it’s banned, I want to see it” they reversed their decision. But there are […]
The advertising wing for Big Government is out claiming that our cars cause extended fire seasons. Since they can’t claim that CO2 causes droughts or controls rainfall, there’s not much else they can claim.
But Fire-seasons don’t create bigger fires. The longest fire season in the world is possibly in Marble Bar but that’s not where the pyroconvective monster firestorms are.
If fuel loads were managed, longer fire seasons might allow for more small fires, but they wouldn’t be big bad ones. Plus, there’s the thing that a high fuel load without lightning or an arsonist, is just a forest.
At one point 42% of fires last summer in NSW were man-made. 9% were “natural.
Fire season extends by almost four months in parts of Australia
The fire season in parts of eastern Australia has lengthened by almost four months since the 1950s, with climate change a prominent driver in the trend, the Bureau of Meteorology says.
Karl Braganza, head of the bureau’s climate monitoring, told the first day of public hearings for the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements on Monday that the South Coast of NSW and eastern […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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