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.

9.7 out of 10 based on 46 ratings

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.

 

9.8 out of 10 based on 84 ratings

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.

9.6 out of 10 based on 92 ratings

Tuesday Open Thread

..

8.8 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

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.

 

9.8 out of 10 based on 97 ratings

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…

9.6 out of 10 based on 104 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

9.1 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

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.

_______________________________________________

*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

9.9 out of 10 based on 73 ratings

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.

Keep reading  →

9.9 out of 10 based on 72 ratings

The battle worth fighting for: Let us and our doctors choose what medicine we take

Adriana Midori Takara,

Adriana Midori Takara,

Adriana Midori Takara was only 38 when she died of Covid in Australia last week. She instantly became a posterchild for the vaccine advertising campaign. But the true story may be something else entirely. Rebecca Weisser treads where few dare:  Adriana’s family tried to get her ivermectin, which may have have saved her, but even though they found a doctor willing to try, he was not allowed to.

The Guardian and MSN both report relatives saying she wanted but had been unable to get any vaccine.  But Rebecca Weisser reports that other journalists heard she was vaccinated, and asked whether she had a vaccine dose. The NSW authorities, who would surely be very interested in her vaccine status, won’t answer that question.

Meanwhile no one is turning the latest 44 and 48 year old victims of Astra-Zenica side-effects into posterchilds for anything. Where are their photos?

This is the battle worth fighting for.

The fastest way to stop lockdowns is by allowing every doctor and patient the choice to use cheap antivirals, not just limit their choices to drugs that earn their manufacturers $45billion dollars.  Ivermectin can be used prophylactically to prevent as many as 86% of infections. Vitamin D could also reduce the spread, the hospitalization and help get the state out of restrictions. At the very least, Vitamin D reduced intensive care by 80%. If cheap safe drugs reduced Covid infections by 10% they’d be worth it. The risks are so low.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian must be getting desperate (the people of NSW are). If ever there was a time, surely it’s now…

Chronicle of a Covid death foretold

Rebecca Weisser, The Spectator

Friends in the Brazilian community said that she had received her first jab just before she tested positive. Yet when a journalist told NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant that ‘Some people close to her are suggesting she had at least one dose of the vaccine,’ Chant replied that she’d have to check but she’d been advised that Adriana did not have any underlying health issues. It was an odd comment because Chant should be briefed on the vaccine status of every Covid victim since it is the first question that every journalist wants answered. Yet days later Chant has yet to confirm or deny Adriana’s vaccine status. It floats in the air like a spectral phantom.

Yet the shocking truth is that Adriana died not because she was unable to get a Pfizer vaccine if that is indeed what happened – Sydney is awash with AstraZeneca – she died because she was unable to access the life-saving early treatment that her family desperately sought to provide.

McCullough contacted the Covid Medical Network who are set up to provide this therapy to every person in Australia who tests positive. One of the doctors was appointed by the family but by then it was too late. Adriana had been hospitalised and could not have been saved even if her doctor had been allowed to treat, which he was not, disregarding the wishes of her next-of-kin. Yet her doctor is adamant that had she received treatment at diagnosis, she would be alive today.

At the same time vaccine injuries and deaths in the under-50s are mounting. According to official UK government data, there have already been 180 people under 50 who developed thrombosis with thrombocytopenia (TTS) after the AstraZeneca shot and 29 who died as well as 463 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis, mostly in the young. Yet this is only a handful of the more than a million adverse reports including nearly 1,500 deaths.

Doctors are legally allowed to prescribe ivermectin “off label” in Australia — Greg Hunt the Health Minister said so, but they need information and well informed, but determined patients.

Start with this one — the Big peer reviewed study: The Ivermectin Review: showing how it may prevent 86% of Covid cases. 

More background information below:

Keep reading  →

9.8 out of 10 based on 76 ratings

Thursday Open Thread

8.8 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

The Not so Clean Green Future: Germany uses 20% less wind, and (wow) 38% more coal

Coal is dead, an old relic, but Germany is burning a lot more coal

If the world cools and gets cloudier will renewables stall as margins become even less appealing? Will wandering jet streams interrupt reliable trade winds as the intersection of hot and cold air generates more clouds over solar panels?

German Wind Power Consumption Plummets 20% In First Half 2021… Coal Power Consumption Jumps 38%!

Pierre Gosselin

What would we do without coal?

The first half of 2021 saw a massive 20% drop in wind power consumption in Germany…while “coal power saw a renaissance.”

The reason for the steep drop, according to the findings, was due to unfavorable weather conditions.

The Germans ran out of wind both on and off shore. People stopped investing because the subsidies ran out and the populace insisted on not having the giant industrial plants in their backyard. Then the winds slowed (why didn’t their climate models see that coming?) Europe talked itself out of building gas plants in order to stop global warming, then got an extra cold winter, and they also run out of gas. So what was left was good old reliable brown lignite coal. The kind The Green really hate.

Photo German wind turbines, Emben. Emden, Germany by Gritte

Emden, Germany by Gritte
@gritte

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 76 ratings

Flash floods will be more common, say climate scientists right after flash floods happen

In the Great Pagan Tradition of neolithic fortune telling, modern climate witchdoctors predict everything right after it starts

Last year it was droughts and bushfires. This year its floods. If only the climate models worked, they could have warned the people of Europe, China and India that there would be rampant flooding before it happened.

Imagine a world where climate models worked and they could give people three months notice?

Dr Jess Neumann, a hydrologist at the University of Reading, said: “Flooding from intense summer rainfall is going happen more frequently. No city, town or village is immune to flooding and we all need to take hard action right now if we are to prevent impacts from getting worse in the future.”

As usual, to stop floods, the first recommendation is cutting greenhouse gas emissions. If only the UK had put in more windfarms, they might have avoided this flash flood in London!

They don’t mention how climate models have no skill in predicting rainfall, or low solar activity is associated with central European floods, and that Asian rainfall has been linked to solar activity for last 6000 years, or that 178 years of Australian rain has nothing to do with CO2.

Imagine if they wrote that in every flash flood story…

Sympathies to people in London, India, Russia and Myanmar.

9.9 out of 10 based on 83 ratings

Tuesday Open Thread

* * *

9.1 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

Get serious about Borders: The biggest failure in NSW was letting one limo driver get infected

NSW, New South Wales, Map, Australia.

UPDATE: New readers might find it hard to get their head around this post. Stick with me. There is a path to freedom from masks, mandatory vaccines and from Chinese bioweapons. But we must plan ahead and understand virology. Strangely, the tool no one wants to mention is Sovereign Borders.

*  *  *

There might have been no lockdown in Sydney (and then Melbourne, Perth, and Brisbane)  if that one Limo driver had been protected

Nobody is talking about the best way to stop lockdowns in Australia — stop the virus leaking in through shoddy quarantine in the first place. “Hard Borders”.

Odds are, we could have stopped the July lockdowns if we made sure drivers of flight crews and international arrivals weren’t put at risk. It’s not about vaccines, which reduce but don’t stop people catching the virus, it’s about a $50 type solution that stops a billion dollar lockdown.  The economy of a city of five million (and indirectly the rest of the nation) is relying on just leaky vaccines, masks and hand sanitizer when there are so many better options.

So far, thanks to one leak, 2,227 people have been infected, 10 people have died, and currently 156 people are in hospital. (In NSW). Plus four city lockdowns.

Cheaper than lockdowns:

  1. Put a floor-to-ceiling air tight acrylic sheet between drivers and passengers in the limo’s and don’t recirculate the air.
  2. OR get limo drivers to wear a hazmat suit and a respirator.
  3. AND offer free prophylactic antivirals and Vitamin D to everyone working near travellers in quarantine and in hospitals. A big review shows Ivermectin may prevent 86% of infections.

It’s almost like we want that virus to leak?

Coronavirus structure

Image: Scientific Animations

No system is perfect, but we are not even trying

To stop feeding the virus new bodies we need a gap between people, and the easiest place to put that gap is at national borders. If that gap is breached then everything gets harder. Borders go up around each state, and if that fails, the borders go around each suburb or (really) around each house.   A hazmat suit is “a border” around each person. Hypothetically, if we all wore Hazmat suits we could go from a mass national outbreak to zero in a few weeks. (Obviously the logistics are harder than that sounds. Medico’s get training and disrobe with a vigilant onlooker so they don’t make mistakes. Then again, Officeworks sell coveralls for $3.50. 😉 OK, I’m stirring… )

Obviously, it’s worth spending a lot on National borders to avoid the bonfire of money that comes with household lockdowns. Yeah?

The Sydney leak affects the whole of Australia. It spread causing lockdowns in Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia*. The Victorian latest lockdown — while better and shorter — was a border failure too. It could have been avoided with a strong state border —  then the removalists wouldn’t have brought the virus in. National borders are much easier and cheaper to get right. But there are ways to improve state borders.  Trucks could even drop containers and trailers at the border, and new cabs and drivers could  finish the trip so all drivers stay in their home state. It’s harder with smaller trucks, but we can unload them and reload them. Sure it costs more, but is a few weeks of hard state borders cheaper than a two week state lockdown?

Covid, Coronavirus, Bioweapons.

For what it’s worth, the Limo driver did all he was supposed to, feels scapegoated and traumatized. He’s not even sure he caught the virus at work. He can’t return to work either now unless he gets the Astra Zenica vaccine, even though he’s had Covid recently and has a family history of clotting disorders. He wants the Pfizer vax and has tried to get it. NSW Health announced an update to the rules, which only amount to mandating vaccines and a mask. It’s like we want more infections to leak in?

FAQ:

We can’t shut the borders forever

It’s temporary. While this virus is mutating, and there are no good approved treatments and only an experimental emergency-use vaccine, the best economies and the healthiest ones are the ones that keep Chinese Bioweapons out. Even China is keeping Chinese Bioweapons out.

We’re buying time to watch the UK and Israeli experiments, and get data. Every month we learn more. Like that current vaccines only provide a few months of protection against catching and spreading the virus, though they appear to protect against severe disease (for now). We hope someone is collecting data on all the risks from the vaccine too (but it appears they are not). There are plenty of potential nasty surprises — like enhanced future infections (ADE), or long term autoimmune diseases. What if we vaccinate 90% of the population against the original covid variant only to find out that the antibodies it generates make reactions to the 2022 variant disease worse? That’s kinda bad to put it mildly, and hard to reverse. (Thanks and commiserations to friends in the UK, Israel and the USA for testing this out. We pray it works out well for you.)

We can’t get to zero

Maths (and Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane) shows we can. What goes up exponentially can go down exponentially. Get the R0 below one, and the borders shut, and zero is coming.  The lower the R0 (rate of spread), the shorter the lockdown. That’s why the worst lockdowns are the ones that keep the R0 near one and go on forever. Like Sydney at the moment.

We can’t keep doing lockdowns

That’s exactly why we must fix the borders. We need to build asap emergency good quarantine. The last likely CCP bioweapon leak appears to be working well for China. The next one is surely coming. What will stop it? If the West builds good quarantine and hard borders and the CCP know that no matter what they dish up, we will stop it at the border. All good Chinese bioweapons belong in China, and nowhere else.

How to make things easier for suffering border towns:

Instead of border towns getting hit with lockdowns in two states, let’s put the border checkpoint outside them to keep these twin towns as one unit and out of lockdown. The PM could ask the states to agree to a system where border towns would be temporarily assigned together, as one unit, to whichever state had the clean slate. For example, the Covid fence and checkpoint would go in north of Albury-Wodonga when the outbreak starts in Sydney, and south if the outbreak starts in Melbourne. For the duration of lockdowns, the border towns become a part of the other state’s health system.

 

*Did the Limo driver’s virus also cause the lockdowns in SA and NT? I’m open to suggestion…

7.9 out of 10 based on 80 ratings

Carbon Capture fails again: Chevron spends $600 a ton to bury fertilizer under the NW Shelf

Stuffing a useful gas into holes under the ocean is harder than they thought

Chevron spent $3 billion to put just 5 million tons of carbon dioxide under the ocean floor. The project was plagued with delays and problems with sand clogging the machinery.  They captured about one fiftyth of the Chevron emissions in a five year period.

CCS is a modern industrial talisman:

Chevron concedes CCS failures at Gorgon, seeks deal with WA regulators

Reneweconomy

Chevron is understood to have spent more than $3 billion building the carbon capture facility, but it took several years after the start of gas production for the Gorgon CCS project even to begin operation due to delays and technical difficulties. The first CO2 was injected into an undersea deposit in 2019.

It is understood regulators may ask Chevron to offset the emissions it failed to store by purchasing offsets from either local or international carbon markets. If Chevron is made to buy Australian Carbon Credit Units, which currently trade at above $20 per tonne, the cost to the company could easily exceed $200 million.

So they could have done it all 30 times cheaper. (Or, if they had used it to grow plants and make beer they might have broke even and made something useful.)

How many cyclones will the Chevron CCS stop? Is that 0.0 or 0.00?

The Australian taxpayers put in $60m which could have been used, say, to add one medical MRI in every capital city.

CCS is a fantasia wand for weak leaders who don’t want to brave up and just say “Carbon is useful”.  Greens know it doesn’t work, and so do skeptics.

h/t RicDre

9.9 out of 10 based on 89 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

9.1 out of 10 based on 22 ratings

What climate disaster? The Great Barrier Reef has more coral growing on it than ever recorded

The coral cover as sampled by AIMS across the entire Great Barrier Reef is not just good, but better than it has ever been in the 36 years they have been studying it. If the reef is in danger — it’s from being overgrown with coral. Climate Change, such as it is, has caused no trend at all.

If anything, in the spirit of modern-media-science, climate change causes record coral growth.

Tonight the UN scientists decided not to list the reef as “in danger”. The ABC and every Green group who normally follow UN scientists slavishly said that was “only because of lobbying”.

In the last few hours The Great Barrier Reef barely escaped being labeled as "in danger" by a branch of the China-friendly-UN. Go ell us how climate change causes record coral growth?

Record Coral Cover on the Great Barrier Reef.

The new AIMS report on Monday showed the Great Barrier Reef had a remarkable recovery, but the graphs were of three different sections of the reef (North, central and South). Peter Ridd obtained all the data and combined it to make one graph and discovered that the coral cover of 2020 was a new all time record high.

Strangely none of the government agencies or paid Professors discovered this. You have to be unemployed to discover record coral growth.

Science and media doomsayers ignore good news on reef

Peter Ridd, (The Professor that JCU sacked for being “non-collegial”) The Australian

Like all other data on the reef, this shows it is in robust health. For example, coral growth rates have, if anything, increased over the past 100 years and measurements of farm pesticides reaching the reef show levels so low that they cannot be detected with the most ultra-sensitive equipment.

This data is good news. It could hardly be better. But somehow, our science organisations have convinced the world that the reef is on its last legs. How has this happened?

The only thing the reef is plagued with is “experts”:

It was reasonable in the ’70s to be concerned about these plagues and they ultimately precipitated AIMS’s long-term monitoring of coral and starfish in the ’80s. I was working at AIMS when this important work started, and it is interesting to look back on what has changed. The coral cover is no less, the number of starfish is no more, but the number of scientists and managers working on the reef has exploded. Perhaps this is the problem.

Record coral cover means there was no disaster on the reef. The only disaster is the quality assurance at the science organisations.

In the last few hours the Great Barrier Reef barely escaped being labeled as “in danger” by a branch of the China-friendly-UN. Instead UNESCO will leave it at “critical” and decide again in a year if the 340,000 square kilometer reef is in danger of turning into a calcium-carbonate quarry.

The Australian ABC has already decided this was only because the Minister played games and pulled some tricks on a “whirlwind diplomatic effort” to override the UN body’s scientific advisors. Apparently the science advisors of the UN are so corrupt they can be bought off with a few rushed phone calls from a minor Australian minister, but these same advisors would never be influenced by the giant Chinese Communists with their billion dollar Belt and Roads, debts and honeypot traps.

Remember the UN experts are always right except when they’re not.

But China still wins this round of sabre rattling. By leaning on the UN to tell Australia off, the Australian government is still  tying itself in knots and spending millions to save a reef that has already saved itself.

We’ll have to hand in our homework report again as soon as February 2022. And the hack-media are not reporting on why UNESCO don’t care about China’s concrete-the-reef approach.

Greenpeace et al, who would have told us how horrified they were if the reef was listed as “in danger”, said they were disappointed it was not.

UNESCO would not get away with these absurdly transparent games if the Western media and most universities did not provide continuous running cover for their hypocrisy.

REFERENCE

The Australian Institute of Marine Science’s (AIMS) Long-Term Monitoring Program – Annual Summary Report on Coral Reef Condition for 2020/21

Latest Great Barrier Reef Condition Report

9.9 out of 10 based on 82 ratings

Israel data: Vaccines only 16% effective after 6 months but still prevent 86% hospitalization

Good and bad news about long term vaccine effectiveness is coming out of Israel. Protection from catching Covid plummets after a few months. Only 1 in 6 people who were vaccinated against Covid in January still have enough protection left to stop themselves catching and spreading Covid. The good news is that five out of six still have good protection against hospitalization and severe disease.

Thanks to David Archibald who says “The coronavirus vaccines are an immunological Potemkin village”

The Israeli data above is what sent the markets sliding on Monday. Ouch!

Vaccine efficacy Isreal, Graph, Coronavirus

Vaccine efficacy in Israel from people vaccinated in January, Febuary, March and April this year.

Forget herd immunity and Vax-passports

The new results mean taking a vaccine is more a personal decision about risk benefits, less  “one for the team”, though it may reduce the risk of transmission. Toss out the idea that a vaccination passport offers meaningful protection and get used to the idea that people can and will catch Covid from the double vacced. There is little medical justification for giving extra rights or free access to vaccinated people.

Israel used the Pfizer vax mostly.

Efficacy against infection, asymptomatic and symptomatic, falls away rapidly. After six months (blue):

        • catching covid: 16% effective
        • mild symptoms: 16%
        • hospital: 82%
        • severe cases of covid: 86%.

The big problem is that leaky vaccines means nastier mutations are more likely

With leaky vaccines, the arms race is live and running. The mutation machine that is every infected body will be churning out and testing variations of Covid. Sooner or later there will be variants that escape this round of vaccines. That means the virus can not only get around the hosts immune system — making them sick, but it will probably be able to get around most other vaccinated people too.

Remember Marek’s disease in domestic chickens? After 50 years of vaccinations the 1%-killer of chickens became a tumorigenic 100% killer and wipes out unvaccinated chickens in a mere 10 days. This process is called “immune escape”. Medico’s will talk about it, but rarely spell out how bad it can be. Watch for those words. They are trying to warn us (albeit quietly and in a slightly cowardly way). This took 50 years in chickens and a lot of rounds of vaccines, but we don’t want the 2022 covid to be a bit nastier than the 2021 covid.

History books will show that it was beyond criminal not to hit the virus with antivirals. We stopped AIDS with a triple antiviral cocktail, not a vaccine. Using more than one drug at a time stops the virus mutating easily to gain resistance.

This was so predictable

Human immune systems are intricate, with feedback loops, and are designed to ignore minor threats. The challenge with vaccines is always to fool our immune system into getting excited about something that, in theory, doesn’t pose any threat at all. Often vaccines only induce short term protection compared to a natural infection. While the real influenza disease gives lifelong protection — and antibodies are still detectable over 50 years later — the influenza vaccines don’t provide long protection at all, and need regular boosters. And natural coronaviruses are not like influenza, they often don’t provoke long term protection. So it is (doh) not surprising that Coronavirus vaccines only offer short term protection against catching and spreading Covid. No wonder the industry started talking of the third booster shot months ago.

Vaccines are not the way of out the current mess in Sydney. Vaccination won’t give protection for weeks, and the vaccination clinics pose a spreading risk. How serious is Scott Morrison and Gladys? The main reason to pump vaccinations now is a/ to capitalize on fear and motivation, and b/ to reduce the spread and danger weeks from now but slightly increase it at the moment?

Viruses are dead chemicals with a two week “lifespan” at room temperature

It’s an engineering problem. To get rid of it, stop feeding the virus new bodies. Close borders properly. Use every filter and barrier, get better airflow, use UV-C light, heaters, faster airflow, outdoor events, measure and correct Vit D and Zinc deficiency, use antivirals like Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, bromhexine, plus quercetin, and every other tool we can find. We are not defenceless. It’s a dumb virus.

All business losses must be compensated by the masses who benefit. It’s only fair. The worst lockdowns are the half baked ones that drag on for weeks. Better and fairer to do it fast and properly so it can end soon.

All failures start at the border — so fix that first.

PS: hat tip to David Archibald, who is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia

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Men worse for climate change than women (so if enough transition, will that stop the floods?)

Men cause all the bad things (except for this study which mostly written by women):

Men Are Worse for Climate Change Than Women Because They Love Meat and Cars

By Anya Zoledziowski, Vice

Men emit 16 percent more greenhouse gases than women because they tend to spend more money on fuel and eat more meat, among other things, a new study has found.

Men Are Worse for Climate Change Than Women Because They Love Meat and Cars

It’s just another man-hating, high-fashion opinion article with a peer reviewed badge and some meaningless data.

With similar reasoning I might as well write: “Women are bad for climate change because they live longer and love hair dryers.” We all know women like to turn up the heater too. And they have babies, that’s got to be bad.

But men, clearly, were the target du jour, and the “experiment” such as it wasn’t, was to compare spending of single men and single women, as if we could get finer control of atmospheric systems by getting boys to drive less, eat more indoor lettuce (that’s a thing) and get their furnishings secondhand off Gumtree.

I’m sure men eat more meat than women but they also have bigger bodies, more lean mass and need more protein, and it seems a tad unfair to expect them to adopt a female-body-composition in the quest to cool the world. (But it’s probably a transphobic sin to ask the question.)  A search of the paper turned up zero instances of the term “lean mass” or “body composition”. Nutrition was not something that had occurred to researchers. If men would just eat more soy, they argued, we’d be that much closer to controlling global temperatures.

There was also no mention of lifespan, but there were three mentions of “soy”.

It all came back to spending habits – This was the kind of study you’d expect if an accountant was cross-bred with a social scientist and given a grant to solve climate change:

“These expenditures are as you would expect in a gender stereotype: Women spend more money on health care, furnishings, buy more food, clothes. Men spend more money on eating out, alcohol and tobacco, and more money on cars and fuels,” said the study’s lead author, Annika Carlsson Kanyama, with the research company Ecoloop in Sweden.
“If men spent money the same way as women, their emissions would be similar but they are not,” Carlsson Kanyama said.

Essentially, the preordained lesson in weather control was that men need to eat less meat, more plant protein and stay at home and grow lettuce in the backyard:

Meat and dairy have “much higher emissions than all their replacements,” including tofu, soy and oat milk, and vegetables, the study says, while travel by train or “staycations” offer alternatives to air and car travel. Pork, for example, is five times more polluting than tofu, while lamb is a whopping 25 times more polluting than tofu.

Holidays were the biggest source of emissions, so the researcher-activists were advocating staycations to stop the storms:

As can be seen, the lowest emissions come from staycations and a package tour by train in Sweden. The staycation category includes activities such as concerts and massage, and the package tour by train in Sweden includes train and hotel accommodation. In Sweden, trains run on electricity and the state-owned rail company (SJ) buys only electricity generated from renewable sources for their trains (SJ, 2017, p. 11). The package tour abroad by train is assumed to go to Italy and include six nights.

Men use cars more than women: (They needed a study to show that?)

“Gender is one of many factors to take into account when talking about how we can reduce emissions,” Carlsson Kanyama said. “Lowering car use, for example. Men use cars more than women, so maybe policies should target men.”

But what if single men are driving cars to pick up single women?  There goes that accounting. There goes that policy…

The only thing this study shows is how human knowledge would be advanced if governments stopped funding science. The entire cause-and-effect chain from single-men-buying-petrol being a forcing on storm-surges-in-the-baltic-sea needs industrial size grants to keep it from collapsing on its own absurdity.

It takes a lot of money to create this much stupid.

h/t Climate Depot

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