Friday

9.4 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

Wobbly apocalypse — Humans to blame for making days longer, throwing planet off balance

Neolithic Shamen controlling Earths spin. Climate Change.

By Jo Nova

Is there nothing fossil fuels can’t do?

Climate change makes the Earth wobble on its axis. Now, if you shower too long, and enjoy that beefsteak too much, you could affect the tilt Earths axis. Are you feeling guilty yet, or just fed up that modern science is indistinguishable from the prophesies of Neolithic shamen?

Earth is wobbling and days are getting longer — and humans are to blame

By

We’re talking of fractions of a millisecond:

Initially, these changes will be imperceptible to us, but they could have serious knock-on effects, including forcing us to introduce negative leap seconds, interfering with space travel and altering our planet’s inner core, researchers warn.

So it’s probably your air-conditioner in Power Mode, but it could be due to crustal plates shifting:

A day on Earth lasts about 86,400 seconds. But the exact time it takes our planet to complete a single rotation can shift by tiny fractions of milliseconds every year due to a number of factors, such as tectonic plate movements, changes to the inner core’s rotation and gravitational tugging from the moon.

Earth space spinsAnd it might have something to do with the moon, or the inner molten core of Earth, which might be affected by the sun’s magnetic field. I mean, we really have no idea, but let’s remake our electricity grid just in case we lose a millisecond?

When we melt the ice at the poles and the seas rise higher over the equator, the Earth spins slower just like the iceskater who spreads out their arms:

Over the past few decades, the rate of ice loss from Earth’s polar regions, particularly Greenland and Antarctica, has been increasing rapidly due to global warming, leading to rising sea levels.

Which is all very well, except Antarctica hasn’t warmed in a thousand years, the coastline hasn’t changed since we first took photos of it, and 600 Pacific Islands are not sinking or shrinking.

Plus only 4 years ago, scientists were telling us the days were speeding up

All those emissions sped the world up, and now all those emissions are slowing us down?

In 2020 scientists made a startling discovery. They found that, instead of slowing down, the Earth has started to spin faster. It is now spinning faster than at any time in the last 50 years. In fact, the shortest 28 days on record all occurred during 2020. — ScienceFocus

At the Guardian they’re afraid the extra millisecond will disrupt internet traffic, or screw up financial transactions and GPS. It’s be like Y2K all over again, and we all know how catastrophic that was.

Look at the language here, these people so want to believe we are Gods:

Climate crisis is making days longer, study finds

Damien Carrington, The Guardian

The phenomenon is a striking demonstration of how humanity’s actions are transforming the Earth, scientists said, rivalling natural processes that have existed for billions of years.

The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions and GPS navigation, all of which rely on precise timekeeping.

The other thing that’s persisted for billions of years is radical sweeping climate change. Like this (below). Nature has been screwing up our GPS, our financial transactions and our space travel for millions of years and we just didn’t know it.

Five Million years of Climate Change and sediment Cores. Paleoclimate, ice ages, Graph. Pleistocene.

Wait til you see how solid this research is — like climate modeling but with less data:

I mean, how accurate were the clocks at recording milliseconds in 1901? We didn’t even define what a second was until 1968. and it’s not like we’ve got many measurements of changes in Earths’ core since then either. Ask Jules Verne?

In the new study, published July 15 in the journal PNAS, researchers used an advanced artificial intelligence program that combines real-world data with the laws of physics to predict how the planet’s spin will change over time.

Length of day modeling.

And this is a Nature paper.  Yet the whole thing could have been an AI school project from start to finish. An AI awarded an AI a grant, which produced a “paper” which an AI editor thought was worth publishing, and AI journalists turned into nonsense headlines, which an AI audience clapped. And no one anywhere thought to ask whether the researchers knew Antarctica is not melting, and seas are barely rising, and length of day was shrinking only a few years ago.

Big Government is strangling real science.

REFERENCE

Kiani Shahvandi, M., Adhikari, S., Dumberry, M. et al. Contributions of core, mantle and climatological processes to Earth’s polar motion. Nat. Geosci. 17, 705–710 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01478-2

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 85 ratings

Thursday

9.2 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

Go Vegan to stop blackouts: Climate Change causes Electricity Grid failure now

Electricity Grid, wizard, magic, fantasy. Wind and solar power. High voltage lines.

By Jo Nova

Shh: The great Power Grid Necromancers are at work

And you thought Blackouts were caused by bad management, but really, it’s “Climate Change”. The poor grid managers now have to cope with floods, fires, heatwaves and a tenth-of-a-degree of warming every decade, you know. It’s not their fault. It’s not the Ministers fault. It’s not the fault of the solar power glut, or the wind drought, or the lack of spinning inertia, the dearth of despatchable power, or the byzantine complexity of managing a grid full of unreliable generators being randomly unreliable. The grid is not more fragile because we built 100,000 kilometers of long delicate high-voltage-interconnectors, swaying in the wind, and made of cheap imported steel because we can’t afford to make proper steel ourselves. No!

It’s your fault the blackouts are coming. You didn’t ride your bike, you didn’t eat tofu and crickets, you didn’t buy enough solar panels and you drove your car to work, you planet-monster. What did you expect?

Climate Change is coming for your electricity grid.

It took four writers, five advisors, several editors and probably buckets of money to write an obsequious article radiating nonsense. It’s like a form of mass hypnosis — training the serfs to blame Exxon, and forgive their inept, traitorous Grid Managers, for their incompetent blackouts.

The answer to every problem on Earth apparently, is to buy more solar panels, install more wind farms and use child slaves in the Congo so the weather will be perfect.

The excuse for every bureaucrat failure is “climate change”:

The World’s Power Grids are Failing as the Planet Warms

By Eamon Farhat, Misha Savic, Fiona MacDonald, and Mark Chediak, Bloomberg

The bad news for Martinovic and hundreds of millions of people around the world is that the risk of outages is getting worse. Hotter summers mean spikes in demand for cooling, as high temperatures cause wires to sag and risk sparking forest fires. Upgrades to power infrastructure haven’t kept pace, even as efforts to reduce use of fossil fuels make electricity distribution more crucial.

Millions of households in Houston suffered blackouts in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl last week, losing air conditioning as sweltering heat followed the storm. Hitting emerging and developed economies, outages from Ecuador to India in recent weeks offer a foretaste of coming disruption.

Unstable networks create instability for businesses, roil politics and threaten lives….

All those unreliable generators are making the grid more unreliable, so hurry, we need even more of them.

Pay us more money, pay everyone lots of money.

Global Power Grids Require Trillions of Investment

Expanding the grid will cost about $24.1 trillion to meet net-zero goals by 2050, outpacing the investment needed in renewable-power capacity, according to BloombergNEF.

“The whole power system was built and designed in one climatic era and now is being asked to work in a different climatic era,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy at the University of Texas at Austin. “It just means more things can go wrong.”

The Earth is warming at 0.13°C every decade.  Plant “hardiness” zones are shifting by, hold your breath, 13 miles per decade. The permafrost line has shifted 80 miles north in Canada. Plants can move, you know, but high-voltage lines can’t. It’s so unfair.

If only expert climate models could have predicted this thirty years ago, so we could build power lines 50 miles north…

Most blackouts occur when big chunks of supply or demand come on or off suddenly. Damage from storms, a burst of renewable generation or spikes in usage can all cause outages where the network isn’t resilient enough.

 

Climate change affects power distribution in lots of ways. Extreme heat increases demand for cooling, while reducing the efficiency of solar panels, crimping supply. High temperatures can cause lines to sag and transformers to overheat, leading to equipment failing and increasing risks of fires.

So solar panels don’t work as well in hot weather when everyone needs their airconditioners on. I mean, who could have seen that coming, apart from a million material engineers?

It’s so unfair.

 

 

10 out of 10 based on 97 ratings

Wednesday

9.8 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

The contradictions in the narrative break

By Jo Nova

It’s a lever point in history. Millions of people want answers. Such is the demand for news on one of the last free platforms, Elon Musk reports that X usage hit another all time high yesterday. In the US, traffic was  23% higher than it had ever been on any single day ever.

Meanwhile all the people who know that Donald Trump is the Single Biggest Threat to Democracy, must be wondering why Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are so pleased that the Threat survived.

As  Douglas Wilson says:

If Trump really is a “threat to democracy,” if he really is Hitler redivivus (as the New Republic cover currently has it), if he is going to usher in a Mordor-like totalitarian regime, then what could possibly be wrong with an assassination to save democracy? We lionize Bonhoeffer because of his willingness to be part of a plot to assassinate Hitler. Ehud did the Israelites a great service when he took out Eglon (Judg. 3:15).

What kind of sense does it make for Biden to call Trump up to congratulate him on his survival if Trump really is a threat to democracy? The call reveals the hypocrisy and hollowness of the prior rhetoric. This reality puts them on the horns of a dilemma. If their rhetoric is to be believed, then Thomas Crooks is a hero and a martyr. If it is not to be believed, then why were they talking that way?

The Democrats were, of course, doing character assassination with galactic hyperbole

They were winding up the crowd and feeding the hate, then people got killed.

Ad hominem attacks are all very well until the crowd realizes they are on the same side as the bad guys. According to Joe Biden, the extreme MAGA Republicans want to stop you using contraception, you will have no right to marry who you love... MAGA Republicans look at the darkness and see carnage and despair…  yet somehow it’s the good guys who are shooting at the families in the crowd. It’s not supposed to be this way.


Take him out … You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price:

As Vivek Ramaswamy points out, the Democrat media have been demonizing the opposition for 150 years. In 1865 they said Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant, a dictator, they said it would be the end of the United States as we know it. That he would make the US a laughing stock…

Paul Joseph Watson has spliced together the sequence of events at the attempted assassination, showing just how long the would-be-assassin had to prepare while in full view of a very agitated crowd who could see him on the roof and were trying to warn people. There goes that idea that the Secret Service are dedicated patriots, and experts, and the best on Earth.

Just in: Donald Trump has chosen JD Vance to run for Vice President (skipping the whole DEI theme, and deciding to treat female voters like adults with brains instead of like teenage girls wanting a cheer squad.) On X, MAGA fans seem happy about this, which means the Deep State definitely won’t be. Vance has been endorsed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy already.

But such is the moment we are living through, people are seeing it as divine providence that Trump turned his head at the moment the bullet went past. Such is the mood, that a video of of an eerie prophesy of Pastor Brandon Biggs is going viral. Three months ago he said that the Lord told him a bullet would pass just by President Trumps ear, so close it would break his eardrum… It’s quite spooky.

Gears are shifting. People report seeing MAGA hats in San Francisco, and others tell the story of conversion from a Trump hater to being a silent supporter too afraid to speak up over the years, but now finally coming out, unashamedly.

The narrative has always painted the picture that Trump is just a narcissist seeking power and fame. But how much fun is it to be shot at? Who, exactly, wants to be indicted and face jail and fines of hundreds of millions of dollars? The latest event shows how wrong the narrative is.

Donald Trump is a billionaire, he doesn’t have to do this. He could retire and play golf and fly from resort to resort.

Instead of getting rich being President, like the rest of the political class,  it’s costing him a fortune — and possibly everything he has.

h/t Stephen Neil

 

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 116 ratings

Tuesday

8.8 out of 10 based on 16 ratings

Monday

8.2 out of 10 based on 20 ratings

Trump survives assassination attempt by an inch, is defiant. CNN says “he fell on stage”.

By Jo Nova

We knew this was coming

Donald Trump barely survived an assassination attempt while on stage in Pennsylvania. The bullet hit his ear. Other bullets killed someone behind him, and critically injured two others. The assassin was on a rooftop just 130 yards away, and was shot dead. (How convenient). He has been identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, aged just 20. He probably had no idea how expendable he was.

Someone on twitter — “This will be the most iconic photo in the history of this country”.

Trump survives assassination attempt.

ZeroHedge reports that the BBC interviewed a witness who says he saw the assassin on the roof before the shots were fired and warned the secret service, but they didn’t prevent this. He wonders why they didn’t have their own guys on every roof.


Joe Biden a week ago:

“I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye,” Biden said.

The Democrats and the Media hounds have been making Trump out to be Hitler and a threat to Democracy for the last year. They feed the hate, and wind up the crowd.

CNN rush to bury the story:

As Tucker Carlson says “You don’t hate the media enough”.

CNN MEdia lies about Trump assassination attempt.

This can only be a huge boost to Donald Trump’s chances of winning the election

As ZeroHedge points out, searches for “donate to Trump” are surging, and so are his odds of winning in November.

If there is any way to suggest that he faked this to boost his popularity and play the victim card, the misinformation industry will find it. But the death of the person behind him might be harder to explain.

Afterwards Trump was not cowed but stood up defiantly and declared “Fight! Fight!” tot he crowd as the Secret Service tried to bundle him away:


Trump has been released from hospital and released this statement:

Donald Trump's statement

NY Post has this map showing how close (and obvious) the shooter must have been:

Shooter assassin location.

Elon Musk has made a major donation to the Trump campaign, and “fully endorsed President Trump”.

Elon Musk goes all in for Trump after Pa. rally shooting: ‘I fully endorse President Trump’

NY Post: President Trump has a new super fan in billionaire Elon Musk, who officially endorsed him for president after Saturday’s assassination attempt, saying “the last time we had a candidate this tough was Theodore Roosevelt.”

“I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Musk wrote on X, which he owns, 30 minutes after Trump was shot at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The system is crooked to the core. They won’t give Robert F Kennedy Jnr secret service protection, even though his father and uncle died by assassination and he is third most popular candidate for the Presidency. Tell that to friends who think the US Intelligence agencies are patriots concerned about democracy.

Trump’s VP pick is crucial. If he chooses anyone compromised, weak, or with any sympathy for the Uniparty he would be a dead man walking. They could solve the Trump problem with one bullet. Neutralize those inconvenient voters!

h/t To Scott of the Pacific, Pierce, Steve of Cornubia

UPDATE: Robert Philpot in Butler noticed that security was not on the rooftops this time, but four years ago he saw them on every roof when Trump arrived at the airport.

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 111 ratings

Sunday

8.3 out of 10 based on 18 ratings

French government fines TV news for allowing a skeptic to speak without being challenged

Free Speech, Censorship on CNEWS France.

By Jo Nova

We know what secrets they fear the most, by how they overreact

In France, the second largest news network let an economist go on air and declare he thought global warming was a lie and a scam used to justify State intervention. He even went on to say it is a form of totalitarianism. Shockingly (to the regulators Arcom), the CNEWS TV hosts did not contest this, and nor did anyone else in the studio. For this, 11 months later, the TV channel is being fined €20,000.

Too close to the truth then?

A popular French rolling news channel has been fined for broadcasting climate scepticism unchallenged

By Saskia O’Donoghue, EuroNews

During the programme, prominent economist Philippe Herlin shared personal climate scepticism – but was not contradicted by anybody else in the TV studio, including the hosts.

Anthropogenic global warming is a lie, a scam… Explaining to us that it is because of Man, no, that is a conspiracy, and why does that have so much weight?”, Herlin said. “Because it justifies the intervention of the State in our lives, and it absolves the State from having to reduce its public spending… It is a form of totalitarianism.”

Apparently, the real crime here is not that he said the unthinkable, but that the TV crew didn’t correct him:

After investigation, Arcom found that CNews’ lack of reaction was a “failure” to meet the obligations of the channel …

Perhaps if they’d laughed at him, called him petty names, and treated him like a leper it would have been OK?  (No, seriously, there is a razor point here. There are bound to be past examples where the only response to a skeptic was to call them a climate denier, and Arcom was apparently happy with that, since they’ve never used this fine before.) Does Arcom approve of namecalling or social opprobrium as a “balanced response”? Oh. Yes. They. Do.

The regulators go on to explain that  the channel:

“…is required to ensure an honest presentation of controversial issues, in particular by ensuring the expression of different points of view.

Which must be a new requirement since French TV has relentlessly hammered the establishment line in a one sided way for thirty years without needing any balance at all. And Arcom didn’t fine them for shamelessly promoting government propaganda. Perhaps a French skeptic could ask Arcon if controversial government opinions need to be balanced “in an honest presentation” or whether it’s only critics of the government who need to be held to account?

Arcom found that the views shared “contradicted or minimised” the scientific consensus on climate change “through a treatment lacking rigour and without contradiction”.

Since when was it the job of journalists to promote government approved “science”?

The regulator is going out on a limb and sawing off the branch…

Officially, the regulators are trying to pretend they are not punishing the TV channel for putting on a skeptic, which would be a free speech issue, but it’s clearly what they are doing. So they dress this up as a lack of balance, which accidentally exposes that they’ve never cared a jot about balancing opinions before. Immediately, this opens up all kinds of interesting doors: for one, skeptics can start asking where the balance is on controversial government propositions? In most countries about half the population doesn’t agree that mankind is solely responsible for “climate change”. Where is their voice? The government is suggesting that solar panels can stop storms, and EV’s will control floods, why isn’t this a failure of the obligations of a news channel?

Secondly, skeptics can ask when this rule started and why the regulator missed so many past examples. Why aren’t breaches the other way being fined too?

The overreaction IS the news story

Ponder how afraid the believers must be if the mere opinion of an economist is so dangerous. This man is a not a scientist and every person in France has heard the evidence is overwhelming, climate change is real, and 130% of all scientists who ever lived know that CO2 threatens life on Earth. For three decades children have been trained to say that skeptics are funded by Big Oil, and motivated by money, and yet here is one guy who used the word “totalitarian” and they all go off their rocker.

Why, perhaps because it suggests that believers are motivated by a bigger pot of money and power than skeptics ever could be.

BACKGROUND

Arcon stands for  theRegulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication

CNews is controlled by billionaire business magnate Vincent Bolloré and has been compared to FOX in the US.

Edit: Approbration corrected to opprobrium. H/t Robert Swan.

 

 

10 out of 10 based on 108 ratings

Saturday

8.7 out of 10 based on 15 ratings

Worlds largest vacuum to suck carbon out of the sky (and money out of wallets)

https://climeworks.com/news/climeworks-mammoth-construction-update-dec22

In a world of turmoil, trust the Sydney Morning Herald to ask the key question of the day:

Should Australia house a giant vacuum cleaner to suck carbon from the sky?

In May this year, on the flat plains of an Icelandic geothermal reserve, a gigantic vacuum cleaner designed to suck planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the sky was switched on.

The machine, called Mammoth, would not be entirely out of place on a Mad Max set….

The big machine in Iceland and will soon start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year and turning it into calcium carbonate rock underground.

In a world where humans make 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually the project will be able to remove 36,000 tons of CO2 each year, which is approximately one millionth of human annual emissions.

Cost estimates are said to be “closer to $1,000 a ton” to remove the CO2. Effectively, we’re spending 36 million dollars US to convert one millionth of human annual emissions of a fertilizing gas into limestone rock we don’t need.

Flagrant Big Government wastage doesn’t get much more pointless than this.

File this away for the history books of the future like the quest for perpetual motion machines.

 

Carbon Capture

https://climeworks.com/news/climeworks-mammoth-construction-update-dec22

The process is called Direct Air Capture (DAC) and supposedly the Mammoth plant achieves something equivalent to taking “8,000 cars off the road” each year, as if that was a useful thing.

The problem for the Swiss Company (Climaworks) is that the most efficient machines for capturing carbon are plants, and they’re cheap and out of patent.

Climeworks built this project in Iceland, of course, so they can use “clean” geothermal energy. But that raises the question of how much electricity it takes to turn CO2 into limestone. If we ran it off coal fired power would it ever be carbon neutral?

The Chemical Engineer explains the process

“It’s essentially a SodaStream on steroids,” says Douglas Chan, COO of Climeworks. Absorption water is injected at the top of the tower and trickles down through packing that fills the column. The water dissolves the CO2 coming up through the bottom of the tower producing a pressurised mix that is ready for injection underground through two onsite wells operated by project partner Carbfix. Deep under the earth it reacts with the rock, becoming mineralised, locking up the emissions for long-term storage.

Jan Wurzbacher, Climeworks CEO, said: “Within two years, the CO2 has become solid carbonate rock, 800m underground where it will stay for the next couple of millions of years for sure.”

As for the cost of capturing the carbon, Wurzbacher says: “Today we are closer to the US$1,000 per tonne mark than we are to the US$100 per tonne mark.”

If we pretend the costs will fall like they did with slave-made solar panels subsidized by the Chinese Communist Party this process will become wildly cheap I promise:

“If we apply learning rates, which are known from other industries such as solar PV and the wind industry, and if we compare them to our predicted technological learning, we’ll end up at a cost level at the order of US$100 per tonne, going towards 2050.”

Even if this fantasy comes true, it’s still $100 a ton we don’t have to spend.

It’s a cult.

10 out of 10 based on 110 ratings

Friday

8.3 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

You will buy the batteries that unreliable wind and solar need, but the government will own them…

By Jo Nova

They want you in an EV so they can use your battery to rescue the unreliable grid they built

There is a desperate need to add billions of dollars worth of batteries to smooth out our volatile grids. As I said last year:

The hapless homeowners will buy the back up battery for the grid and install it in their garage. (Sometimes they might drive it too.)

It’s so much the better if the unwashed masses pay for the batteries themselves, and so it has come to pass. Some academics in Canberra are excited that they finally proved the point and sucked some electricity out of 16 cars at a tight moment in February.

A vehicle-to-grid response: Electric vehicles fed power into Australian grid during blackout, says report

During a major storm event that eventually cut power to tens of thousands of homes, a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) were able to feed power back into Australia’s electricity grid, according to a new report from The Australian National University (ANU).

These 16 cars provided all of 107 kilowatts for an unspecified length of time.

They let slip just what a drain EV’s will be on the average household.

“Stopping just 6,000 EVs charging would have kept the power on for those 90,000 customers whose power was cut on February 13.

So one EV consumes as much electricity as 15 houses, and we want to add a million to an unreliable grid? Where is all that electricity coming from?

And as Andrew Bolt points out, you might have been charging your car for a reason…

There’s huge bushfires, say. They knock out electricity lines, like the ones that went down and triggered Victoria’s big blackout. Your EV, which you were charging at home, is suddenly drained to save the electricity system. And then the fires approach. Or the floods.

So after they subsidize your EV purchase, and you think you have a good deal, they’ll raise the price of electricity. Then they’ll offer their hostages discounts if they join the scheme and plug in the car every day. But when your car battery depreciates “to landfill”, or your house burns to the ground, you’ll be the one paying the bill.

UPDATE: To clarify —  It will be voluntary but only the wealthy will really have the choice…   Like air conditioners that the government switches off in our homes on hot days, the unwashed masses will find the “discounts” offered to keep their car plugged in at peak hour will be hard to refuse.

Expensive electricity is not a bug, it’s a feature. Cheap electricity gives power to the people. Expensive electricity gives power to the bureaucrats who control the complicated pricing schemes. The bureaucrats give discounts to encourage certain “patterns of behavior”. The wealthy do what they want.

h/t Bally and MeAgain.

REFERENCE

Bjorn C. P. Sturmberg et al, Vehicle-to-grid response to a frequency contingency in a national grid – successes and shortcomings (2024). DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-4445838/v1

9.9 out of 10 based on 111 ratings

Thursday

9 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Giant oyster shell shows the sea near Taiwan was up to 3m higher, several degrees hotter 7,000 years ago

Sea levels, Taipei, Oyster Shell

By Jo Nova

Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone reports on yet another paper that shows things were much hotter back in the early Holocene when there were hardly any coal fired power plants, and cars were just molecules spread across hematite deposits, emitting nothing.

Awkwardly, carbon dioxide levels were very low during this five thousand year Monster Heatwave, so climate modelers are forever trying to erase the hot Holocene, it’s just that the dang evidence keeps turning up in the damnedest of places.

In 2002 construction workers in Taipei dug up a giant oyster shell, and a whole oyster reef, rather improbably in the metropolitan area. This was 20 kilometers from the ocean where oysters are not supposed to grow.

One particular oyster shell was especially hard to ignore because it was a 42cm across. When it was carbon-14 dated, it clocked in as 7,500 years old. This particular kind of oyster is not found around Taipei any more (even in the ocean), but is found in colder waters around Japan and Korea. So the researchers wondered if this meant the oceans were somehow improbably higher but cooler at the time. They also wanted to find out if these oysters died out in Taipei because of global warming.  Instead it turns out the ocean there was much warmer and quite a lot higher.

So they sampled the heck out of this shell. They took so many data points they could figure out the seasonal swings from four years in a row in what was somewhere around 5,500 BC. Somehow even when CO2 levels were perfect, the water temperature swings around quite a lot. Neolithic people probably prayed for better weather, rolled some runes or read some tea leaves. These were early climate models and five thousand years later, seasonal models have not improved much.

Sea levels, Taipei, Oyster Shell

Given that these oysters like to live 1 to 3m below the surface, the seas then must have been 1 to 3 meters above where they are now. Which gives us that awkward truth, yet again, that everywhere we look 7,000 years ago the seas were 1 – 2 meters higher than where they are today. Our seas are only rising at 1mm a year, (or 3mm if you believe the adjusted satellites).  How could that be unless the natural world was much hotter, frying and expanding the oceans and melting the ice caps to some degree?

And indeed, current winter water temperatures around Taipei on our Catastrophe-Earth  are 14–16oC but back 7,500 years ago researchers suggest the water in winter ranged from 15 to a shocking 23oC.

And if you’re wondering, the big oyster shell was not just carried there by some fisherman long ago — it was found in a  muddy black silt clay layer that was more than 5-m thick and filled with other marine remnants above and below that. The researchers dated other things in that stack going back to about 10,000 years ago.

The researchers concluded as drily as possible “The disappearance of this type of oyster in Taiwan during the late Holocene should not be due to a warming trend.

Indeed.

Sea levels, Taipei, Oyster Shell

So yet again, we find something made the Earth a lot hotter 7,000 years ago, and yet the corals survived, the koalas managed and the extinction apocalypse never came. Sensible people would stop throwing money at the wind to control these natural swings that we can’t predict.

REFERENCE

Li H-C, Mii H-S, Liu T-K, et al. (2024) AMS 14C Dating and Stable Isotope Analysis on an 8 kyr Oyster Shell from Tapei Basin: Sea level and SST changes. Radiocarbon. Published online 2024:1-15. doi:10.1017/RDC.2023.117

9.9 out of 10 based on 90 ratings

Wednesday

9.2 out of 10 based on 17 ratings

China is the coal furnace of the world, and everyone is fine with that

By Jo Nova

Even though India now consumes more than Europe and the US combined, there is really only one coal consumer. Just to update those figures…

Remember you are a planet-wrecker, but China just has growing pains

China burns four times as much coal as the second largest coal burner in the world. Everyone else is an also-ran in the coal stakes. For every ton the US consumes, China fries 12 times as much. And poor patsy Australia, for every ton we apologetically ignite, China burns 50. More coal was burned on Earth in 2023 than ever before in human history, and more than half of it was burned in China. Moreover, despite all the Sino nodding to sacred targets, China shows no intention of putting the brakes on the coal train. Around the world, 95% of all new coal power plants built in 2023  were built in China.

Where is the apoplexy?

The UN has met every year for twenty-eight years to badger everyone to stop using coal to appease the Goddess of Trace Gases and Weird Weather — all while China became the coal furnace of the world.

Or perhaps The UN met every year, so China could do exactly that? Lord above, imagine if the bureaucratic starlets of the West could be bought off so easily by trophies, trinkets and photo-opportunities — as a trade strategy, it would be a bargain. And it surely was.

Somehow life on Earth depends on Just-Stop-Oil protestors, but they can’t seem to find the Chinese Embassy. Banker cartels threaten higher interest rates for naughty nations, but no one suggests so much as a boycott of solar panels made with coal.

 We’re all in this together, eh?

Supposedly, the developed world caused all the bad weather we have today — leaving the developing world to wallow in the suffering of the coal plants and cars the West invented. But, the developing world just landed a rocket on the moon and bought back some moon-rocks.

The last time NASA did that it was 1972.

A fork in the road for civilization

In a sense, the diverging lines of coal consumption mark the rise and fall of civilizations. They don’t have to — not if the West had upscaled to some better industrial power. But the West upscaled to witchcraft and corruption instead, arrogantly trying to control the weather itself with our power plants in a teenage fashion contest. China took our mistake and smiled and egged us on. They would be crazy if they didn’t support the Greens, and pay off our politicians to cripple our grid.

As CO2 Lover says in comments, it is the Sun Tzu Art of War. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

 

 

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