Chocolate is produced from the beans that grow on cocoa trees. These plants can only grow in a fairly narrow range of conditions, which makes them vulnerable to changes in the environment.
Unfortunately, climate change is threatening some of these key growing regions. According to the IPCC, rising temperatures and a relative reduction in rainfall could make areas like West Africa less suitable for cocoa production in the future. Changes to the climate are also pushing cocoa-growing regions to higher altitudes in some parts of the world, which can make some crops unsustainable.
We can see just how hard cocoa crops have been hit by record heat and 500 billion tons of carbon.
Yet another big win against carbon taxes: Abbott, Trump, Ford and now Kenney
Provinces of Canada.
The first pledge was to get rid of the carbon tax. The victory was a scorching 63 to 24 seats, or 55% to 32%.
Alberta is a conservative province of Canada with 4 million people. It’s wealthy from oil, gas and agriculture. (It’s not that different to Queensland and WA.). Jason Kenney is on a mission to get the province back from environmental zealots: fergoodnesssake, he even vowed to set up a ‘War Room’ against energy activists.
The greens were the main target and the people said “Yes”.
…Kenney defeated center-left incumbent Rachel Notley, 55, whose New Democratic Party snapped four decades of conservative rule in 2015. His UCP won 63 seats in the provincial legislature, against 24 for Notley’s NDP,
He’s vowed to get stalled pipelines built, scrap the province’s carbon tax, and create a “war room” to hit back at anti-oil-sands campaigners. He also pledged to cut corporate taxes and balance the province’s books in his first term.
The United Conservative Party’s win will mark a sharp turn in the province’s environmental policy. The NDP introduced a number of stringent climate measures in 2015 that included the province’s first ever economy-wide carbon tax. Kenney has promised to repeal that tax as one of his first policy moves after taking power.
In a nutshell, if the Labor Party wins (and that’s looking likely) Australia will pay $25b, maybe $35b to foreigners for paper certificates that claim to have reduced a tiny amount of beneficial gas. This is hard earned money leaving the country so that our foreign minister and PM can sit at better tables at UN Gala Dinners. The paper certificates have a long history of fraud, are often based on good intentions of Chinese or Russian businessman saying they will put out more CO2 but can stop if we pay up. It’s so stupid sometimes people even create pollution just to get paid to clean it up. They’re unauditable, worthless, and based on scientificy assertions that are also unaudited and worthless. It’s a double layered scam.
Welcome to pagan Australia, obedient fool serf for namecalling rulers of Europe, giant banks, and multinational corporations.
This is mature policy debate in the lucky country.
Richard Ferguson, The Australian
Bill Shorten has angrily dismissed claims his carbon reduction policy could cost business $25 billion as “nonsense” and labelled Scott Morrison a “climate-denying cave dweller.”
But wait — why’s that number wrong?
“The $25 billion figure is a lie. It’s using… You can make any number work for you if you pump in the assumptions you want to.”
Mr Scare Campaign tells people not to run scare campaigns
Today’s comic relief: Mr Shorten says we’re all going to die from floods and droughts but warns that Scott Morrison is running a scare campaign:
.@billshortenmp on climate change policy: You and I know this is a fundamentally dishonest debate … You all recognise a scare campaign when you see one.
In a flash of insight, or possibly rank capitulation, Facebook has announced last week that it will “fight misinformation” with censorship. Seems Facebook thinks Facebook-users are too stupid to figure out the misinformation themselves. Besides, fighting misinformation with the truth is especially hard if the misinformation is true:
Facebook says it is rolling out a wide range of updates aimed at combating the spread of false and harmful information on the social media site – stepping up the company’s fight against misinformation and hate speech as it faces growing outside pressure.
And it’s not even transparent censorship but the the most weaselly hidden kind:
The updates will limit the visibility of links…
How does Facebook define misinformation? Wait til you hear this: Groupthink = truth?
…limit the visibility of links found to be significantly more prominent on Facebook than across the web as a whole, suggesting they may be clickbait or misleading.
So that pretty much rules out Facebook spreading the word of whistleblowers, rebels, new theories, suppressed ideas, oppressed people and anything controversial, interesting or not completely predictable. Facebook seems to want to transform itself into a mumsie discussion board of old news and approved memes with all the thrill of an in-flight safety lecture.
Thus Facebook will become a mirror of the permitted, official, authorized web. Expect their ratings to adjust accordingly.
Facebook’s VP of integrity (?) points out that ‘striking a balance between protecting people’s privacy and public safety is “something societies have been grappling for centuries.”’ But that’s the point. It took centuries but we worked out the worst kind of lies are the ones told by the rulers, and the only antidote to those is free speech.
In an information war the deepest pockets are in the Treasury’s pants.
Facebook’s solution is some kind of automated groupthink algorithm (like that won’t be gamed) and teams of tens of thousands of moderators with “at least 80 hours training” who are paid “above industry standard”.
The story was published on April 7 in The Australian.
Doctors are at it again trying to scare people about “climate change”. But all around the world, in every study in every city humans die more from the cold than they do from the heat (and by six to 20 times more). That’s thousands of lives and it happens every single year. Don’t these doctors know anything?
Attributable fraction of deaths: Heat, cold and temperature variability together resulted in 42,414 deaths during the study period, accounting for about 6.0% of all deaths. Most of attributable deaths were due to cold (61.4%), and noticeably, contribution from temperature variability [TV] (28.0%) was greater than that from heat (10.6%). Cheng et al.
The awful truth that incompetent self-serving doctors forgot to mention was that cooler room temperatures allow viruses to survive longer, which is just one of many reasons the Flu Season is always worse in winter.
Break my heart, if “climate change” is real the only thing the docs have to worry about is whether they’ll earn less money in winter.
Here’s the real news: The health system needs to be protected from climate-change-doctors. We can’t afford to have medico’s who don’t understand the scientific process, who think “models” provide real evidence, or who will use their positions of trust to falsely scare people for the sake of their own financial gain or political and religious infatuation. We can’t afford to have doctors who don’t understand what the error bars mean on rare events or that correlation is not causation. Who would put their life in the hands of gullible fools who follow groupthink or who get their medical knowledge from watching the ABC?
At the very least, we expect these docs would do a basic competent literature search on the topics they profess to lecture us on. Even a freshman doctor straight out of med school should know deaths are higher in winter.
That said, there are many skeptical doctors around. Many of my top supporters are GP’s and Specialists.
What incompetent doctors are saying in the media:
“With heatwaves more people will die and get sick from things like respiratory illnesses, strokes and things like that, as well as dehydration.”
Higher temperatures also provide vectors for disease, especially mosquito-bourne illnesses, with the insects travelling further south than usual.
That was on top of more frequent natural disasters putting a strain on the health system, he said.
“With heatwaves more people will die and get sick from things like respiratory illnesses, strokes and things like that, as well as dehydration.”
Shame we didn’t have more competent journalists to ask them real questions.
Brilliant. There is still some free speech in Australia, as long as you are willing to risk your career, 12 months out of action and a huge legal case. Peter Ridd wins on all counts.
Presumably James Cook will have to reinstate him, and he is now free to talk about the failure of replication in science and how our institutions may not be trusted. How many taxpayer dollars were fritzed defending the indefensible? Will Ridd get compensation? Will JCU staff get punished or sacked for their war against science?
Thanks to Peter for fighting on when so many would have given up, and thanks to everyone who helped fund the case!
UPDATE: In reply, the Provost of James Cook Uni says Ridd was never gagged or silenced, nor sacked for his scientific views.Which would be great if it were so. But there’s a pattern here — how many skeptical scientists do they employ? Is that zero? We all know they went to great lengths to blackball, evict, and practically erase skeptical Prof Bob Carter too. If there are any skeptical scientists left at JCU, they are probably too afraid to speak out. Which is rather the point. Without some mea culpa, and a change of management, or some encouragement for skeptics to speak we have to assume that all research from JCU is tainted — we don’t know what the researchers won’t say or which results they daren’t mention.We don’t know what experiments they won’t dare do.
My lawyers have told me that the judge handed down his decision and we seem to have won on all counts.
It all happened very quickly and we had no warning , and because I live almost a thousand miles from the court, I was not able to be there. I have still not seen the written judgement and will update you all when I have that information.
Needless to say, I have to thank all 2500 of you, and all the bloggers, and the IPA and my legal team who donated much of their time free for this success. But mostly I want to thank my dearest Cheryl, who quite by chance has been my bestest friend for exactly 40 years today. It just shows what a team effort can achieve.
The next chapter of this saga must now be written by the JCU Council which is the governing body of JCU. What will they do about the VC and SDVC who were responsible for bringing the university into disrepute, not just in North Queensland, but also around the world. JCU crushed dissent, crushed academic freedom and tried to crush my spirit with their appalling behaviour. They only failed because I had your support. But if the JCU council does not act, they will be complicit in this disgraceful episode.
Attention must now focus on the JCU council.
I will update you shortly when I have more information, but for now I certainly have a spring in my step.
“The Court rules that the 17 findings made by the University, the two speech directions, the five confidentiality directions, the no satire direction, the censure and the final censure given by the University and the termination of employment of Professor Ridd by the University were all unlawful,” Judge Vasta said.
Solar installations are rapidly accelerating in Australia, surging in the last quarter by an extraordinary 482MW. This is partly due to rapidly rising electricity costs, but in the last quarter, especially amplified by an extra $2250 subsidy in Victoria which adds to current subsidies like the SRES (RET) which already cover around half the cost of installation.
This is obviously a market destroying practice but will be hailed as evidence that solar power is “surging” due to “falling prices” and “increasing demand”. More fake news.
In the land of the Renewable-Crash-Test-Dummy we’re hitting the death spiral. Every installation costs non-solar owners more (with the tally at $200pa and rising fast) and there are fewer non-solar owners left to pay. Obviously, the whole market has to be changed to ensure that solar owners pay a fair share of networking and backup costs.
If solar power was cheap, useful or competitive, it wouldn’t need the subsidies. Instead, the nation keeps adding more useless infrastructure and wondering why the price of electricity is rising.
Solar Panels are essentially useless most hours of the day, most days of the year, and sometimes the entire Eastern Seaboard of solar panels are only working at half speed even at midday. When they are working together they force the grid voltage as high as 253 Volts, making other equipment prone to breaking and even more costly to run. The dangerous voltages triggers some solar panels to cut themselves off, right at the peak time of day when they are actually working. Solar electricity is so unnecessary that when an eclipse wiped out California’s massive solar input, the price of electricity got cheaper.
It’s a disaster: More plants, more crops, more flowers!
Between 1995 and 2011, fewer freeze-free days meant 11 to 27 days added to pollen season for most of the United States, research shows. The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, which does an annual survey of allergy season, noticed that it’s been growing each year.
It’s a spurious correlation: quick, build a wind farm!
The number of allergy sufferers has grown, research shows. One in 10 Americans struggled with hay fever in 1970, and 3 in 10 did by 2000. Asthma, which can be made worse by exposure to pollen, has become more common too, with higher rates among kids, low-income households and African Americans.
Warming cycles have always happened, and when times are good, plants have to ramp up the competition — it’s in their genes. Allergy cycles, we can bet, probably didn’t happen so often to paleolithic people who didn’t have access to Ventolin-trees or Epipen-plants.
Stating the bleeding obvious about climate science earns headlines
Tony Abbott merely states what no real scientist could argue with. Things are not quite as settled in climate science as people say. For this tiny deviation from the permitted line he is isolated and depicted in a headline as “questioning science” when he’s really just questioning propaganda lines.
The editors of both AAP and The Australian could have chosen a different headline: Abbott declares “we only have one planet”. But in headline-world, which is often the only line people will read, Abbott is made out to be saying something risky. Imagine, I am Spartacus, if every single conservative politician said “of course — Climate science isn’t perfect.” But almost none of them have the balls.
Tony Abbott has questioned the “so-called settled” science about climate change, a month after dropping his view that Australia should pull out of the Paris climate agreement.
The former prime minister insisted he was a realist when asked about his position on climate change during his election campaign launch in Manly on Friday.
“The so-called settled science is not quite as settled as people say, and that’s my position,” he told reporters.
“Nevertheless we have only got one planet; we should do what we reasonably can to rest lightly upon it.”
Despite this questioning, Mr Abbott said he does believe climate change happens and that mankind makes a contribution.
“We should do what we reasonably can to reduce emissions,” he said.
“What we shouldn’t do though, is turn our economy upside down in what turns out to be a futile green gesture.”
It’s hard to believe with statements so banal and ordinary are worth a mention, let alone a headline. But such is the paralyzing grip of fashion and religion in Australia.
There are crooks in every field, but some fields are ripe for the picking.
If you wanted to run a scam would you a/ try to fool hard-nosed money changers in a mature industry that makes a real product or b/ pick the latest touchy feely fashionable trope and offer their fans, who are not good with cause, effect or numbers, a chance to feel great and get rich too?
From 2005 to 2009 a few US graduates straight out of college promised to turn biochar into energy and save the world as well. They raised $54m, gave $17m to the early investors and then promised 484% returns to later investors. The Clinton Foundation loved them, but they never made even a kilo of biochar. Not long after that the US SEC figured the scam out and shut them down. That was 2009. Then it only took 10 years to get one sentenced to 30 months jail.
[Amanda] Knorr co-founded a company called Mantria Corp., which with the help of a slick-talking Colorado “wealth advisor” raised millions for a supposed clean energy product called “biochar.”Their pitch about producing biochar, however, turned out to be completely baked, according to prosecutors, and eventually proved to be a giant Ponzi scheme.
Knorr was also sentenced to five years’ parole and ordered to pay $54 million in restitution. She so far has paid $10,000 through wage garnishments, according to prosecutors.
The Clinton Global Initiative, run by Bill and Hillary Clinton, link to Mantria on its website, ambiguously praise the “committment” and value it at “$600,000”?” Did they fund it, or are we just meant to think they did? There are many details and plans of how carbon sequestration would enrich the soils of Africa and cool the world on that site, but there’s only one progress report: This commitment was reported unfulfilled.
A brief break in transmission now for the first photograph of a black hole, looking pretty much exactly as anyone would expect it to. The photons caught in this image traveled for hundreds of years at the speed of light. Lots of “hundreds” — burning through space for some 55 million years.
The numbers melt neurons: The supermassive black hole called M87 is 6.5 billion times bigger than our Sun. It’s bigger than the orbit of Neptune (which is circling 30 times further out from the Sun than we are). This star is 10 billion kilometers across.
Geoffrey Crew, a research scientist at Haystack Observatory commented that “With the M87 black hole being so massive, an orbiting planet would go around it within a week and be traveling at close to the speed of light.”
The black heart of Messier 87, or M87, a galaxy within the Virgo galaxy cluster, 55 million light years from Earth.
It takes a telescope roughly as big as The Earth to catch an image 20 micro-arcseconds across. Eight radio telescopes were combined across four continents and lined up on a few special days when they all had clear weather together. Each telescope took a petabyte of data. Some one million gigabytes. It was so much data that it was quicker to fly the discs around the world in planes rather than try to upload it.
These photons started their journey during the Eocene on Earth, so Antarctica was covered in subtropical rainforest and the biggest mammals were about the size of pet cats.
EV ownership in Australia is only 1 car in 4,000 of all our cars on the road. Yet already they are causing streets to go black, and possibly blowing transformers which need replacing “more often”:
It’s a crisis that has been concealed from the vast majority of the population … The danger really came home to me when I met up with an affluent, long-time Melbourne acquaintance who lives in a street where there are six Tesla cars. When they all try to charge their batteries at the same time, the power goes out in the street because the grid fails. Sometimes it fails when only three or four of them try to charge at the same time.
Australians only own 5,000 EV’s at present. Imagine the fun when 500,000 new EV’s hit the streets in 2030, and again in 2031, 2032,….
He talks about intermittent power causing “choppy” electron flows which make transformers hotter:
To my horror I discovered that cities like Melbourne and Sydney are in danger of either experiencing explosions or even a complete collapse of the system.
Gottliebsen went on to find a solution (apart from the obvious one of “not rushing into EVs”). He found something called the Faraday Grid, developed in Australia, but ignored, so now based in Scotland and used by London and Tokyo.
But give me one reason not to just use cheap clean brown coal for the next 300 years, leave the grid as is, and use all the spare money for medical research and holidays in the Bahamas.
David Attenborough thinks fossil fuels cause scores of walruses to careen off cliffs. The ABC is crying as it advertises the latest Netflix tear-jerker and WWF fundraiser.
In behind-the-scenes footage posted to YouTube by Netflix, producer and director Sophie Lanfear explained the events with tears in her eyes.
“It’s the sad reality of climate change,” she said.
“They’d be on the ice if they could be, but there’s no option but to come to land.
Actually though, it’s the sad reality of predatory polar bears
…
Canadian zoologist Dr Susan Crockford is all over it calling it Walrus Tragedy Porn. Apparently, the Attenborough footage is from 19 October 2017 in Ryrkaypiy, Siberia which was overrun with polar bears that terrorised the walruses. Five thousand walruses were herded to a cliff. Hundreds were driven over the edge to their deaths, and afterwards the polar bears feasted off McWalrus on the rocks.
Apparently, it’s happened before and has nothing to do with sea ice:
“We have records of walrus haulouts that are nearly a century old, including some from this part of the Arctic. The idea that walruses are being driven on shore by sea-ice decline is entirely incorrect. They have always done so. In fact there are reports of walruses falling over cliffs from long before the age of global warming too. Sir David’s story about climate change appears to be just that – a fable.”
Buying a Tesla probably won’t save a single walrus.
The ABC doesn’t mention this, nor find an zoologist expert to interview. They don’t even google it. Instead, they give us the-world-according-to-WWF:
“They are meant to live on the ice. Now they have lost this ice platform essential for their everyday life in the Chukchi sea.
“Many scientists blame this on global warming.
Then for the 4,400th time, ABC breaks their own rule about only interviewing real experts:
“I am not a climate specialist, but the fact is, over the last 34 years the ice has just disappeared before my very eyes and the animals, their natural habitat has changed, that fact is undeniable.”
Of course, if they’d interviewed an actual expert, or even a blogger, they’d know that ice comes and goes, and so apparently, do marauding mean poley bears.
Should we save more polar bears? Let’s ask a walrus…
We can see how much research and planning goes into Labor Party policy.
“How long does it take to charge it up?” Jackie O asked the alternative prime minister in an interview on the Kyle and Jackie O radio show this morning.
“Oh, it can take, umm … it depends on what your original charge is, but it can take, err, 8 to 10 minutes depend on your charge, it can take longer … ” Mr Shorten replied unconvincingly.
“Is that all?” Jackie O pressed.
“Well it depends how flat your battery is,” Mr Shorten said.
Seeing the tragedy unfolding, assistants leapt to Shorten’s defense to say that there is a theoretical planned, possible battery charger that can charge in 10 minutes. But read Shorten’s words again — he is strictly all waffly present tense, and the only qualifier is “how flat the battery is”. This is not a man thinking of kW or amps. Jackie O presses him to expand, but he can’t.
In the world there is one show-pony super fast charger of 350kW — but there are no cars that can use that speed. Most home chargers are 3 kW and up to 7kW. It’s all very well for some EV fans to rave about how far new batteries go, but those new big batteries need two whole days even at 7kW to get fully charged. (see that Vector report)
PLUS we’re going to need a whole new grid
There’s the problem that each fast charger is like adding 20 extra houses. The Vector, New Zealand Report 2018 claimed that new big batteries are like adding “three new houses to the grid” (if they are charging at 7kW). If consumers want to fast charge at 50kW it is like adding “20 homes”. (Though at the moment the cost of a 50kW charger is NZ $50,000 which would rather limit the rush to buy them.)
Australians buy around 1 million new cars a year, so that would be 500,000 new EV’s each year by 2030 according to the Labor Party plan. If I read it correctly, according to the Vector NZ report that would be like adding another ten million homes to the Australian grid each year in terms of network capacity — and we only have 10 million homes in the country. Could it really be that nuts?
The world would probably cool if he took, say, 1,000 years.
Wiebe Wakker drove his retrofitted station wagon nicknamed “The Blue Bandit” across 33 countries in what he said was the world’s longest-ever journey by electric car.
The trip from the Netherlands to Australia took just over three years and was funded by public donations from around the world, including electricity to charge the Bandit, food and a place to sleep.
Proving EV holidays are viable if you can create a global fan-base by riding on a multinational industrial scare campaign, and have 36 spare months to do what fossil fuels can achieve in 20 hours.
Given it takes 12 hours to recharge the car from a domestic power point and three hours from a commercial point, he’s learned to live in the moment. The journey appeared to go really pear-shaped in Surabaya, Indonesia when floodwaters deluged his battery pack, rendering it completely unable to hold a charge.
However, the indefatigable Mr Wakker simply set up a GoFundMe page to raise the cash to have a technical specialist ***fly in and fix it…
When Coober Pedy was his next goal 260km away, he waited 12 hours for a tailwind and then trundled along at a power-saving 60km/h, with giant road-trains thundering by at irregular intervals. Despite the conservative approach he still fell 15kms short of the mining town and had to be towed the rest of the way…
Next time someone tells you how extreme the climate is today remind them that five million people died in a drought in 1896 in India. That was the same year a brutally hot summer in Australia caused 400 deaths and people fled the inland heat on emergency trains. Somewhere between 1 and 5 million people died a few years later in the next drought — the same time as Australia’s “Federation drought”.
Spot the effect of CO2 in 150 years of rainfall of India:
Average rainfall anomalies in India from 1850 – 2016 from IMD (black) and GISS (red). | Click to read the official caption.
Famine deaths have largely been eliminated in India, mostly thanks to better transport and organisation, higher yields (thanks to fertilizer and CO2) and irrigation. Droughts still happen but in a population that has grown from 250 million in 1880 to a billion in 2000 the extraordinary thing is that more people starved of famine when the population was only a quarter of the size and CO2 levels were “perfecto”.
Weakened people died of cholera and malaria, and bubonic plague too. Death rates to these diseases often doubled or tripled.
Famine, India, 1896.
Thanks to fossil fuels and atmospheric CO2 countless lives have been saved.
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I know commenters discussed this on the weekend, but lest anyone missed it. The man who wants 
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