Thursday Open Thread

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Climate change causes arson in Greece, Turkey, Algeria and California

Fires in Greece

Arson must be one of the easiest crimes to hide by anyone half competent, but in Greece arrests are already happening. People were caught with cans of gasoline. There are so many fires, the Supreme Court prosecutor has called for an investigation into possible organised arson and is asking for sweeping investigative powers.  On social media people are blaming arsonists and slow or inept government responses.

In Media-World, people are blaming climate change, because if the world was a degree cooler, the fires would put themselves out or something. Who knows?

Coincidentally, over in Algeria, strange things are happening too. The Interior Minister says 50 fires were started at the same time. In Turkey, recent arson is suspected to be a terrorist  activity. A few days ago the Israeli airforce bombed Hamas targets to “counter #arson attacks“. And in California a professor of criminology was actually tracked, caught and arrested for setting fires “on the edge” of the huge Dixie blaze. He might be nuts, but the others may have a plan. Has anyone asked them?

Apparently CO2 turns nice people into arsonists, but it’s surely also possible there may be other interests at work, or who knows, even hostile adversaries? Instead of asking: who could benefit — witchdoctors and their minions blame coal power stations on the other side of the world and pray to the God of Solar Panels for mercy.

As reassuring as they are (to some) these primitive rituals blaming fires on climate change go off like a smoke bomb on the national conversation. While everyone is putting pins into the sixth element of the periodic table, we won’t be talking about reducing kilotons of fuel we leave lying around, near houses, birds and babies. Megajoules of stored energy is growing right out of the ground in towers for careless people, stray lightning, mental illness, religious extremists, and  foreign threats to turn into a pyroclastic nightmare. Maybe we should think about that?

Meanwhile on TV, the  media apologists are still talking about extended fire seasons but it’s a meaningless red herring. Fire seasons don’t run around the country lighting fires, they don’t fuel fires either.  The longest fire season in the world is probably in the Sahara desert, but sand doesn’t burn. The worst fires are where the fuel is, not the fire season.

Despite all the talk of how bushfires prove “climate change” the Australian CSIRO are experts on fires in the fireiest country on Earth and they admit — though only in the fine print discovered by Matt Canavan — that “No studies explicitly attributing the Australian increase in fire weather to climate change have been performed at this time.

Here’s a tip to CSIRO And all academic institutions around the world,  If you want people to trust the experts, you need to say something when journalists are telling people to stop fires with carbon credits and declare that “it’s the science”. Where The Hell Are You?

Greek Prosecutor Calls for Investigation into Organized Arson Plot

Patricia Claus, The Greek Reporter

The prosecutor of Greece’s Supreme Court, Vassilios I. Pliotas, on Monday called for an investigation into a possible organized arson plot on the part of a criminal organization after fires ravaged the country for the past week.

“The excessive number of fires, of unusual intensity and extent, that have occurred in recent days, resulting in incalculable damage to the natural environment (especially the forest resources of the country), buildings, facilities, agricultural land and crops and tourist Infrastructures, even endangering the lives of a large number of our fellow human beings, as well as the “synchronization” in their manifestation, create reasonable suspicions of deliberate organized criminal activity and not only of a simple, accidental phenomenon of incidents of negligent behavior.

Arrests  have already started in Greece:

Keep reading  →

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IPCC taps into Global Witchcraft: Stop fires, storms and floods with solar panels and windmills!

Current Witchdoctor Warning: Severe levels of Voodoo likely on all channels

The faith in Wind Power. It's like a religion.Climate Fear Week is Here.

Your car exhaust causes bushfires, your roast beef leads to droughts and the wrong lightglobes could flood the nation.

Hurry, hurry, it’s your absolute last last-chance after the last last-chance to save the world. According to an unaudited, unaccountable UN committee, It’s Code Red for Humanity! Rush and install Solar Special Protection Shields on your home today to be sure no one inside is at higher risk of Malaria, Asthma, Obesity, Eco-depression, and to save Nemo from feeling reckless. (Why haven’t you done that already, you evil reef killer?)

Despite installing more renewables than any nation per capita on Earth, Australia is failing to cleanse the Earth of pollution. Likewise the USA and UK which have both reduced actual carbon emissions by more than nearly everyone else are only leaders when they vote for socialists.  Too many windmills are never enough! (Don’t mention the eagles or the whales, but praise the Sharks, for they are the sacred spirit of Virtue Signalling.)

There are many things you can do to play your part to make the weather nicer for our grandchildren, or at least reinforce the religion. On ABC radio Perth 720 a caller rang in to say they’d stopped using tea-bags. (All hail the weather controlling activity of loose leaf tea!).

Voodoo face mask

The nonsense knows no bounds, and the Pagan faith runs strong, especially in Professors trained to mouth the advertising memes of General Electric, Panasonic and Vestas. They excel when investigated by ABC activist-journalists taught to toss fluffy-toy-questions at the feet of the ecologists who specialize more in grasshoppers and less in spaceweather. What do you say to Climate Deniers? —  sayth the ABC-voice. When did you stop believing in science, sayth Lesley Hughes, biologist who wonders how 200 scientists could ever be wrong?

Cliches will save the day!

Solar PV on rooftops in Australia, photo.

Protect your home against storms and fires!

How many solar panels does it take to stop a cyclone? The ABC-voice, didn’t ask, and the biologist wouldn’t know. But Bushfires in Greece prove that CO2 is dangerous, even if there is not one Climate Model on Earth that could tell us this time last year that the floods would be in Germany, the heat domes would be in British Columbia or that snow would fall in Southern Brazil.

It’s just bad, and all shades of badness are caused by CO2.

Neolithic shamans, chieftans, sorcerers and hofgothi all knew the secret of forecasting ambiguous-multipurpose-gloom. Modern professors are catching up with their astrologic wizard forefathers.

Perhaps we all should give up,
Using tea-bags when having a sup,
Better tea-leaves instead,
Which are easily read,
To forecast at the end of the cup.

—Ruairi

Reference for Witchdoctors 101

IPCC Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the AR6 WGI report (on the Physical Science)

Photo by hp koch on Unsplash

 

 

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Tuesday Open Thread

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Big Pharma spent $4.7b lobbying Big Government which never affects rules, regulations or drug prices, right?

Which industry spends more than any other in Washington? Big Pharma

Over the last 20 years no industry spent more than Pharmaceuticals and Health products on lobbying and campaign contributions. Fully $4,700 million dollars traveled from pharmaceutical giants to politicians, parties and lobbyists.

In 2018 the citizens of the US spent $345 billion on prescription drugs in pharmacies… which works out to about $1,000 per person per year. Adjusted for inflation, that has doubled since 1999 which is not that long ago. Despite competition, discovery and efficiency gains, Americans are spending more than ever.

Maybe Americans are getting much better painkillers, antibiotics, and blood pressure medications than ever before, or maybe government regulations are doing more to protect profits rather than people?

All that lobbying is quite legal, but it isn’t enough. Somehow Big Pharma keep getting caught being naughty as well, lying and hiding things from customers. And if there is no reputational damage from outright deceit and fraud, perhaps the billion-dollar fines are just another cost on the balance sheet.  (If only The Media wanted to shine a light on that…)

The Black Pigeon lists some crimes:

..

Oliver Wouters study on Lobbying…

Lobbying Expenditures and Campaign Contributions by the Pharmaceutical and Health Product Industry in the United States, 1999-2018

From 1999 to 2018, the pharmaceutical and health product industry recorded $4.7 billion—an average of $233 million per year—in lobbying expenditures at the federal level, more than any other industry. Of the spending, the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America accounted for $422 million (9.0%), and the other 19 top companies and organizations in this industry accounted for $2.2 billion (46.8%). The industry spent $414 million on contributions to candidates in presidential and congressional elections, national party committees, and outside spending groups. Of this amount, $22 million went to presidential candidates and $214 million went to congressional candidates. Of the 20 senators and 20 representatives who received the most contributions, 39 belonged to committees with jurisdiction over health-related legislative matters, 24 of them in senior positions. The industry contributed $877 million to state candidates and committees, of which $399 million (45.5%) went to recipients in California and $287 million (32.7%) went to recipients in 9 other states. In years in which key state referenda on reforms in drug pricing and regulation were being voted on, there were large spikes in contributions to groups that opposed or supported the reforms.

Which company had the highest spend on lobbying and campaign “contributions”? That would be Pfizer, with $220 million from 1999 to 2018. But there are plenty of others following suit:  Amgen spent $190m, Eli Lily — $162m, BIO — $150m, Merck — $143m and so on….

What does Big Pharma spend on advertising in The Legacy Media and on Facebook and Twitter and does that help buy one almost non-stop long advert dressed up as “news”?

h/t Bill in AZ

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Fully vaccinated can be just as infectious as unvaxed (What’s the point of a Vax Passport?)

These first generation vaccinations are not the Get-Out-Of-Pandemic Card some politicians dream of

What a can of nematodes

Fully-vaccinated people who catch Delta Covid variant really may be JUST as infectious as the un-jabbed, Government figures suggest

Emily Craig, Daily Mail

Public Health England say viral loads appear similar among people infected with the Delta variant in both groups, meaning, theoretically, they are equally contagious.

But health chiefs insisted the current crop of vaccines still cut the risk of catching the virus in the first place.

Vaccinated people may be less likely to catch Covid (at least for a few months until it wears off) but when vaccinated people do get infected the viral loads are pretty much the same as when unvaccinated people do. In other words, fully vaccinated people can still be dangerous to the people around them. And if they fly in without quarantine, they can bring outbreaks and new mutants too. So much for the freedom jabs. Though, in fairness, at the moment, they still offer some freedom from hospital, just not freedom from masks, quarantines, and restrictions.

Vaccination clearly isn’t going to stop the spread, eliminate the virus, or do a lot to protect your loved ones or work colleagues. It makes it hard for companies to justify mandatory vaccination “for the greater good”. The question, “Would you sit next to an unvaccinated person” isn’t quite the loaded probe it was. And you can always reply: “Would you work with someone who was Vitamin D Deficient“? I mean really, they are defenceless.

When will companies set up mass Vitamin D testing and free supplements?

A couple of weeks ago the Israeli data suggested only 16% of people were still protected from infection six months after vaccination. Presumably Governments will argue that vaccines still reduce the burden on the health care system but new mutations may render that moot too.

The lines that matter in the graph below are the three in the bottom right. That’s the viral loads of the vaccinated, and unvaccinated, with Delta variant. The lines trailing up on the right are probably the last vestiges of the old alpha (UK) variant which only exists anymore in long recovering patients with low viral loads.

CT values, PCR test, vaccinated, unvaccinated.

The graph shows the Ct values for people who catch the Alpha variant (called SGTF, shown in orange, red and brown) compared to those who catch the Delta variant (called All3P, shown in blue, green and purple). Ct values reflect the amount of the virus found in people’s positive nose and throat swabs, with higher numbers equating to lower levels of the virus. Public Health England compared levels between unvaccinated people, those who have had one dose and those who are double jabbed. It found that Ct values were almost identical, regardless of a person’s immunisation status

Being low on this graph is bad (for us, if not for viruses). The lower the Ct value, the higher the viral load. When there is hardly any virus (or fragments thereof) it takes a lot more cycles to detect and so has a higher Ct value.

NHS Test and Trace data – published in the PHE report – showed daily average Ct values for unvaccinated people who caught the Delta strain was 17.8.

Meanwhile, it was only slightly higher for fully-vaccinated Brits (18).

There are qualifiers, but it is an act of some optimism: We don’t know if the ages of both groups were the same, and if the vaccinated group were older they might have lower viral loads than unvaccinated people their own age. We need to follow both groups through their infections as they progress to know what the real peak is. These groups may have got tested as different points on the curve.

But the figures are similar to the US findings and the US CDC said “wear your masks” to the vaccinated:

Keep reading  →

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Weekend Unthreaded

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US Democrats thinking of telling car companies what they can make: communist control of production by stealth

Batteries in EV car. Photo. Joke.

The people don’t really want Electric Vehicles, so the US Government is thinking of forcing them on the buyers by squeezing the industry that makes them. There is talk of new rules which apply to the companies selling cars. The control of production could be hidden in something called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy or CAFE standards. By averaging the fuel consumption across a whole company,  those brands will have to find a way to sell more EV’s and to limit their own sales of gas guzzlers. It’s a supply and demand thing, if a company can only make so many large internal combustion engine cars, the prices of those will be artificially high. Only the wealthy will be able to afford them. The poor will still pay more for cars than they do now, but the cheapest cars on the market will be EV’s — subsidized by inflated prices on petrol driven cars.

This is just a thought bubble for now, but obviously, the message is to buy your big cars and look after them. They’ll be hot property in the second hand market.

Say goodbye to the free market: The Soviets would be proud of it

EV Weirdness looms large

From David Wojik, CFACT

Technically these are the Corporate Average Fuel Economy or CAFE standards. The way they work is hidden in the name. They do not govern the average fuel use of cars used by corporations, which the name “corporate average” suggests. No, they govern the average fuel economy of cars MADE by corporations.

The way it works will be well hidden. Instead of telling you and me what we can buy, they in effect tell the car makers what they can make. I am not making this up.

The result is rationing and it has been for many years. The car makers limit the production of bigger cars and trucks, with higher fuel consumption, to stay below the standards. In reality what is rationed is stuff like power, size and safety. I have even heard that they raise the prices of big cars to cut the prices of little ones. This is called a cross subsidy.

So it sounds like the CAFE standards are going to be ratcheted down over less than a decade, until 40% of the vehicles sold are EVs.

Hopefully this abuse of the efficiency standards will be found to be illegal.

But as David goes on to explain, the Brits have their own form of weird plans to make big trucks run off electric overhead wires? See “Trolley Trucks” and read it at CFACT.

UK 'electric road' study part of £20m electric truck trials

Imagine having hot wires strung just above all the nearly 50,000 miles of interstate highways, carrying enough juice to power all those big trucks. Massive accidents waiting to happen? How about them ice storms?

Seems like the wires will only run over the slow lanes, so maybe just 100,000 miles worth.

Blackouts due to unreliable electricity grids will clog up the roads and cripple the country. Good target for foreign adversaries.

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People deficient in Vitamin D are 14 times more likely to get severe Covid

How badly do our Health Ministers want to reduce Covid infections and deaths? Not much. If they were at all serious — before they hand out free vaccines, they’d hand out free Vitamin D supplements.

In a study conducted in a Galilee hospital, 26 percent of vitamin D-deficient coronavirus patients died, while among other patients the figure was at 3%.  — Times of Israel

If only black lives mattered?  Dark skins are so much more likely to be deficient, this is one of those absolutely easy wins for any politician, yet none of them are doing it?

Nearly half the people in the study were deficient, and half of those who were seriously deficient in Vitamin D would go on to develop a severe case. These were the people with levels below 20 ng/ml. Of all the people above that, only 10% would get a severe case. And just being “above 20ng” would still be classified as moderately deficient by many measures, yet it made such a huge difference.

It was a life and death thing — the mortality rate was 25%, fully five times higher for those who fell below the 20ng/ml bar.

The Israeli study looked at the Vitamin D levels of 1200 patients in their medical records before they got infected with Covid. This is important because although studies like the Indonesian study last year showed that people with low levels of Vitamin D were much more likely to die of Covid, those patients weren’t assessed until they turned up at hospital when  they were already sick. We couldn’t be sure that something about  Covid itself wasn’t chewing through the Vitamin D levels and causing the deficiency. So an Israeli team looked back through their records for up to 2 years to see what their last blood tests showed.

serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels before hospitalization, Vitamin D3, Covid, Graph.

People with the lowest Vitamind D levels were the most likely to get severe Covid.

It’s a retrospective study, so the blood levels of D might have changed, yet despite that, the results still pop out of the data. Ideally we’d measure them just before they got sick.

Don’t wait til you’re in ICU to fix that deficiency. And definitely don’t wait for the CDC or Anthony Fauci to suggest it. 

The biggest disadvantage with Vitamin D is that there’s no money in  it.

As I’ve said before:

Vitamin D deficiency is so common it’s an epidemic affecting a billion people around the world.

Vitamin D 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. Vitamin D influences over 200 genes. It’s so crucial, it was likely the reason northern Europeans evolved whiter skin. The lack of sunlight and the introduction of grains in diets (as opposed to eating liver and whales) meant that Europeans weren’t getting enough D from either food or sun. The selective pressure was so strong that lighter skin rapidly took over all the northern communities. Eskimos didn’t need to go white — they were still getting D from offal and plenty of fish.

Results:

Keep reading  →

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Thursday Open Thread

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New York Times sells out the US to China for a mere $100,000 a month

How cheap was it for the Chinese Communist Party to buy the American media? Like adding a room to a house.

Practically nothing.

The New York Times, the “paper of record” since 1851 in the USA became a tool for China for just $100,000 a month.  It put stories out for years that were essentially nothing but Communist advertising. They and other newspapers had a deal with state run China Daily which sanitized and covered up human rights abuses like Uighur concentration camps.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that the former “stories” were suddenly deleted:

Acting guilty, what?

The New York Times quietly deleted hundreds of advertorials that the Chinese Communist Party paid to publish on its website.

China Daily, an official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, has been purchasing advertorial spaces in the pages of mainstream U.S. media outlets for the last decade, using the space to disseminate Chinese propaganda to millions of unassuming Americans. In return, U.S. newspapers such as the Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal received millions of dollars.

The NYT has run over 200 advertorials over the last decade,

Key newspapers helped to hide that SARS 2 was lableak and a potential bioweapon. There is blood on their hands.

Bitchute link:  Or whole episode.

The leading newspapers covered up for Anthony Fauci and the Chinese communists as a deadly disease spread:

Tucker Carlson: New York Times in China’s pockets, refused to investigate COVID origins

Fox News:

Last summer, as the COVID pandemic raged throughout the United States, people who still read the New York Times began to notice something very strange happening at the paper. Hundreds of articles that had appeared there, going back nearly a decade, suddenly vanished, they disappeared. There was no way to find them. Nothing like this had ever happened. The New York Times considers itself–very self-consciously– a living historical record. The paper maintains meticulous, searchable archives going back to 1851. Yet last August, a huge number of articles just disappeared.  What was in them? We know the answer because a handful of history-minded readers preserved them when they were in print.  Every one of them was a propaganda piece paid for by the Chinese Communist Party, designed to look like a news article.

One of them reads “China Watch: Diaoyu Islands Belong to China.” That’s the headline. Why would the New York Times, America’s paper of record, print propaganda’s from a totalitarian regime and pretend it was a news article? For money. …

What’s twenty million to buy the wealthiest country in the world?

Since 2016, the Chinese government paid $20 million to outlets like The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post.

Imagine if the New York Times and others had reported rumors of the Chinese Bioweapon back in the days when President Trump wanted to shut the borders. The world could have kept the virus out. The UN WHO would have been recognised broadly (instead of just on skeptical blogs) that the organisation served China, was a public health menace and was culpable.

When China needed help to cover up the lab leak and bioweapon news, the supposed cream of the US Media were only too happy to help.

In the opening months of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was actively discredited by the media and scientific establishment, with anyone associated with it smeared as “racist”.

By Ashley Rindsberg, Unherd

Did the New York Times stifle lab leak debate?

At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCP’s strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.

As someone who has spent years researching the history of the Times, I was struck by the paper’s markedly pro-China bent at the start of the pandemic. It opposed Trump’s travel ban to and from China as “isolationist”. It all but ignored the unparalleled success of China’s arch-enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus. It downplayed China’s economic war against Australia,…

Over the months, the Times’s coverage grew even more strident — and more in line with Chinese propaganda.

The Times, which used Daszak as a key source in over a dozen articleshas never mentioned that Daszak’s organisation funded the Wuhan lab, in particular research into bats and coronaviruses, a flagrant conflict of interest.

The Times set the tone by calling anyone who asked about the lab leak as being a tinfoil hat nutter…

The CCP also controls access to a vast market, and The Times, like so many other corporations in the US was happy to sell out it’s own standards in order to gain access:

In 2012, seeking to capitalise on China’s burgeoning middle and upper classes, the Times launched a Chinese edition of its daily paper followed by the launch of a luxury lifestyle magazine.

In investing so heavily in China, the Times unintentionally handed the rapacious CCP an editorial lever to sway coverage. The Times learned this first-hand when, in 2012, the CCP blocked Chinese access to the Times online in retaliation

The elite media was China’s best friend, and a traitor to the USA.

The culture of hating-the-US-as-a-fashion-statement probably meant the editorial board didn’t even feel like they were selling out their own nation.

h/t Bill in AZ

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John Lennon’s “Imagine all the people — sharing all your stuff”

John Lennon’s “Imagine” (the Gulag).

Get this into schools.


Leave no child in ignorance about the greatest threat to life and liberty…

The Babylon Bee at its best.

Share the information before they share your life savings.

h/t David E.

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China, India and 85 other nations can’t be bothered meeting UN emissions target deadlines

Despite headlines declaring the World is Committed to Cutting Emissions, and that ( pick a nation) is an “isolated pariah” — the truth is they were all supposed to “update their emissions targets” but 42% of nations, including the two largest, haven’t. Worse, the updates were supposed be done by the end of 2020, and the UN extended the deadline, so they are already double late. And since China effectively promised to do nothing til 2030, all it had to do was say it would do nothing again, so that’s double-late on a non-promise, and it can’t even do that?

h/t GWPF

China, India ignore UN deadline to update emissions targets in COP26 warning shot

In a warning shot across the bows of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, China, India and 85 other nations have decided to ignore a UN deadline to submit its pledges for cutting CO2 emissions in time for the UN climate summit in Glasgow later this year.

South Africa hasn’t put in its own update, but it has asked for money:

Meanwhile South Africa has demanded that developed countries should set a target of $750 billion a year to help poorer nations transition to renewable energy.

Nothing is more important than saving the Earth, and everyone is doing it except (… where you live…).

Glascow COP 26 could end up as another dud. Except even when it’s a dud it’s a success. The junket is the point. It’s the two week glorious reward for all the Climate Fans. Plus the headlines are already written, the late night prolonged finale will still “affirm” the commitment of blah, every nation, blah. Large meaningless numbers of dollars and gigatons will be massaged into subheaders to woo the distracted into thinking something important just happened.

And in the end, a group of bureaucratic grifters will have forged out a lifestyle of foreign flights, heroic subsidies and unaccountable grants.

And the weather will have done whatever the weather was going to do, while they all pretended they could control it.

UNFCCC, World Bank, Its' all the same. Give us money.

Give us your money.

 

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Approaching a tipping point in the power supply

Guest post by Rafe Champion

We are installing wind and solar power at a great rate and the expectation is that this will go on and RE will increasingly penetrate the system as coal power fades away. In the SE we still have just enough conventional power to get by almost all the time but the tipping point will come when we lose another couple of coal stations and we will need to have a continuous supply of RE. There will not be enough conventional power to keep the lights on through windless nights.

The point is that RE can DISPLACE coal power but not REPLACE it.

Note from Jo: With the sad demise of Catallaxy, I invited Rafe to continue here blogging about energy and electricity in Australia. So the format of the blog will flex somewhat to try to fill some of that void.

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Tuesday Open Thread

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The Tesla battery fire burned for longer than it operated for

We all heard about the Tesla Megabattery fire in Victoria last Friday, but you may not know it only started operating on Thursday night. Or that 30 fire trucks and 150 firefighters took 76 hours to get the blazing battery under control.

So it burned for three times longer than it operated.

When they burn, Tesla batteries produce smoke with aluminum, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, lead, selenium, manganese and chromium.

Luckily no one would put a large Tesla battery inside their home, eh?

Battery fire.

Firefighters  were essentially helpless to stop the 13 ton lithium battery from burning, but they did stop the rest of the battery plant catching fire.

“…we cannot put them out with water or anything else. The best way to deal with these things is to let them burn until they are burnt out. If we try and cool them down, it just prolongs the process. …this wind is helping us by keeping it burning fairly freely,” the CFA’s Assistant Chief Fire Officer Ian Beswicke said.

“But we could be here anywhere from 8 to 24 [or even 76] hours while we wait for it to burn down.”

They also measured air quality and issued warnings to residents to get themselves and their pets indoors, close windows, and turn off their heating and cooling so they didn’t breath in the toxic smoke. (That must have been a fun weekend in midwinter.)

No price is too high when you’re saving the planet.

Geelong’s Tesla Big Battery fire burns over weekend

Jessica Sier Journalist

Aug 1, 2021 – 5.16pm

A fire at French renewable energy giant Neoen’s Victorian Big Battery at Geelong continued to burn into Sunday, with fire crews awaiting experts from Tesla to assist in opening the Megapack battery that first caught ablaze.

The fire started at the partly federally funded 300-megawatt Tesla Megapack battery project at Moorabool on Friday morning. Fire crews quickly containing the blaze but were unable to extinguish it completely to determine what started it. A Country Fire Authority spokesperson said the fire had been contained to two battery packs, but sparks flared up every so often, re-igniting the blaze. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.

The Tesla battery is expected to become the largest in the southern hemisphere, capable of discharging 450 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity, as part of a Victorian government push to transition to renewable energy.

Luckily no one was injured, but some nearby crops will be enriched in heavy metals.

Tesla Battery Fire, Geelong, Victoria.

Don’t put one of these near your home

The first sign of any operation was at 6:15pm the night before. Some part of the plant was operational for at least 16 hours.

So really it burned for four times longer than it ran for.

The incident did not disrupt the grid, but if the battery plant was operating on a hot sunny day and it caught fire, Victoria might not be so lucky. If this had been a coal plant on fire, presumably someone would have already calculated the cadmium and lead effect and how many spotted-quoll-years were lost.

Bill S and David B, David Archibald. Rafe. Jim Simpson.

 

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Jet streams playing havoc — bringing snow to Brazil

h/t Electroverse, WX Cycles:

“’I am 62 years old and had never seen the snow’: Brazilians revel in unusually cold weather” 

@ReutersScience

Watch the Antarctic cold burst reach up into South America. If only climate models could predict Jet Streams.

There are wandering jet streams at work, watch the video. We get some idea of how vast these weather systems are.

And yet it reminds me of a candle flame…

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Weekend Unthreaded

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Running out of time in the Holocene…

At some point, the ice sheets want their land back

We’re balanced at the end of a ten-thousand-year warm spike, in an ocean of ice-ages, reshaping our economy to try to stop a half a degree of warming.

 Lamplugh Glacier, Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, United States

Those glaciers are coming…                                                             |    Photo by Diego Delso

The last million years have been whipsawing climate action. While modern Homo sapiens sees two degrees of warming as an apocalypse, for most of the last million years it would have been God’s gift to Pleistocene man.

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

….

Ken Stewart compared the current interglacial with the last three, and found our favourite – the Holocene — has already run longer than all of last three did.*

Global Warming or Global Cooling: Keep an Eye on Greenland

Ken Stewart

There are several ways of identifying the start and end of interglacials.  I have chosen points when Antarctic temperatures first rise above zero and permanently fall below zero relative to 1999.  Graph 3 shows the length of time between these points for the previous three interglacials compared with the Holocene.

Vostok Ice Ages, Interglacials, Holocene. Length of. Graphed.

The Holocene has lasted longer than the previous three interglacials: and is colder.

The point where the green, black and purple lines end is when temperatures fell permanently below our current baseline temperature (1999 give or take a decade). We can also see just how tame the current interglacial has been — with all the others getting 2 – 3 blockbuster degrees hotter.

The key question is when does a little ice age become a Big One? Where’s the point of no return?

Possibly it’s the point when the Northern Hemisphere turns into a giant white mirror:

Many scientists think glacial periods start when summer insolation at 65 degrees North decreases enough so that winter snowfall is not completely melted and therefore year by year snow accumulates.  Eventually the area of snow (which has a high albedo i.e. reflects a lot of sunlight) is large enough to create a positive feedback, and this area becomes colder and larger.  Ice sheets form, and a glacial period begins.  This is a gradual process that may take hundreds of years.

Well before global temperatures decrease, the first sign of a coming glacial inception will be an increasing area of summer snow in north-eastern Canada, Baffin Island, and Greenland.

Despite fifty years of greenhouse gas production, snow on Greenland isn’t melting away in summer as much as it used too. If this trend continues, Ken calculates Greenland might be completely covered in snow all year round in just 45 years.

Greenland Minimum Snow Cover

It’s probably nothing…

But as Ken says, it’s only a short trend, and the Little Ice Age was colder but didn’t trip the albedo feedback loop and plunge us into a Big Ice Age, which was very convenient.  We probably have a few centuries yet.

More to the point though — if climate models actually understood the climate, we might know the answer. What are our governments doing about that? They’re working hard to make the planet cooler, which is probably the best thing they could do, since they’re so bad at it, they might unwittingly help.

If the start of the endless winter was 50 years off, would we even know or will we still be holding UN Conferences to stop the warming as the Ice sheets reach Ontario?

Thanks to Ken. Go and say hello at his blog. It’s great work.

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*Inasmuch as water evaporating off then falling as snow at Vostok represents global temperatures.

Photo (top): Lamplugh Glacier, Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, United States. By Deigo Delso

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Saved by a pyroclastic-winter? Man-made Mega wildfires cause climate cooling

Fire Australia, smoke cloud.

….

Who knew? Climate change causes horrible wildfires but these dump aerosols in the sky which causes cooling which will in theory, stop more bushfires. It’s another feedback loop the models got wrong.

One author even admits the models “have to take fires into account” — which is the same as saying that their robust settled science of the last thirty years was wrong.

It has all the hallmarks of high quality astrology. The science writing is full of colorful vagaries like “vast amounts of energy”, and “overwhelming evidence” without ever spelling them out. There is spooky inference: we “suspected the world might be witnessing something new”. And then there are the vague predictions: if we scale these fires up by (pick a number) we either set off a nuclear winter or we are turbo-charging climate change. That provides excuses for the next fail in any direction.

If only the ABC had real science reporters they could have asked real questions.

h/t Eric Worrall, WattsUpWithThat (and RicDre)

Super-outbreaks of fire thunderstorms could change Earth’s climate, Australian and US experts warn

          • Fire thunderstorms during Australia’s Black Summer released as much energy as about 2,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosions
          • Clusters of fire thunderstorms may be powerful enough to change the climate, scientists say

Fire thunderstorms — which occur in pyrocumulonimbus clouds — not only create their own weather system but may also be powerful enough to actually change the climate, according to scientists from Australia and the United States.

A “super-outbreak” of fire thunderstorms — also known as pyroCb events — during Australia’s Black Summer fires of 2019-20 released the energy of about 2,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons, according to a study published recently in the journal Nature Climate and Atmospheric Science.

“The energy released was just vast,” said Rick McRae, somewhat innumerately, from the University of New South Wales.

The Hiroshima counting system sounds frightening, but every second the Sun dumps 2,700 Hiroshima bombs of energy on the Earth at the top of the atmosphere. So the entire Black Summer of bushfires in Australia produced less than one extra second’s worth of energy from sunlight on Earth.

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