Surprisingly, the World War I era temperatures are still changing. Mornings that seemed nippy at the time are now susceptible to frosts.
Someone should warn the farmers — except they’re all dead.
Thanks to Chris Gillham for independently and laboriously going through the new unannounced changes in another cycle of BOM’s hidden revamp of Australia’s history. ACORN 2.2 is the latest version of the Australian Climate Observation Reference Network of “the best” 112 weather stations across Australia.
“The bureau has now remodelled the national temperature dataset three times in just nine years,” Dr Jennifer Marohasy said.
In the last five years the ACORN re-revisions by the BOM have discovered another quarter of a degree of warming that we didn’t know about from the last hundred years. It’s not clear why the BOM doesn’t want to tell the world how good they are at correcting thermometer records from 1913. It seems like a remarkable skill.
The minima just keep getting cooler
Chris Gillham plots the longest running stations from the ACORN 2.2 set against the old raw readings:
Who knew all those old thermometers were so wrong?
Graham Lloyd:
Independent analysis of the latest changes show they added 0.06C to maximum warming and 0.11C to minimum warming from 1910-19 to 2010-19.
A series of updates to the ACORN data have added 0.228C mean temperature warming if comparing 1910-19 with 2010-17 (2017 being the final year of ACORN 1)
Clearly, the cheapest way to stop global warming would be to sack everyone at the BOM.
The Bureau admitted to Lloyd that they changed 25 sites in the latest round, most of them because of statistical revelations:
The bureau said changes were made to 20 sites on the basis of statistical analysis. According to the bureau, statistical analysis is used to identify an abrupt warming or cooling at a particular site, relative to other sites in the region.
Apparently the future of life on Earth depends on their data, but it would take too long to train someone outside BOM to check it. Tell us again, how much does climate change matter?
Here’s the BOM explanation of the need for adjustments:
“A significant change relative to other sites indicates a non-climatic driver, which sometimes has an easily identifiable cause (e.g. a new building near a site) and sometimes does not (often these will relate to local vegetation or land surface changes)”, the bureau said. “In carrying out this statistical analysis, the bureau uses 10 years’ worth of data from multiple sites to quantify the size of the change. Adjustments are only applied where a significant change has been identified.
So instead of researching the site history as deeply as they can, the BOM use statistical trickery analysis to figure out local site changes using some other thermometers “within a thousand miles”. What they don’t do is full historical research and documentation of the sites first. (Like the ones here, here and here, thanks Bill Johnston). So it’s possible that if, say, 10 sites got similar changes at the same time (like changing to a new small screen) the other better sites in non-changing screens could be slowly “corrected” one-by-one by the junkier sites with the right statistical algorithm. Now, perhaps the BOM have ways to make sure that doesn’t happen — but they won’t tell us what they are, they don’t publish the detailed documentation of either the full site histories or the methods they use to correct them.
As Chris Gillham notes, the BOM say the new adjustments didn’t change the long term trend. But a lot of little changes in the same direction would. The new adjustments might have also made a few local hottest ever headlines much easier to get. Suddenly the modern contenders for the longest heatwave, warmest night, and hottest summer all got a head-start.
The mysterious process of homogenization
The Bureau “homogenizes” a site according to a mystical method that uses an inexplicable group of sites that are in the same region, or at least in Australia somewhere. For example, lighthouse readings off the Bass Strait have been corrected with help from Hay, 600 kilometers away, on the other side of the Great Dividing Range. A thermometer in Ballarat has been used to correct one at Bruny Island off the South coast of Tasmania. The BOM has also corrected Alice Springs using measurements in Collarenabri nearly 1,600 kilometers away. (Thanks to Ken Stewart for that tip). When I said “a thousand miles” I wasn’t joking.
All the sites marked in black, for example, have been used to homogenize Alice Springs
Congratulations to Chris Gillham, Jennifer Marohasy and thanks to Graham Lloyd.
Major protests against mandatory vaccination are being planned in 40 countries and at least 150 cities around the world this weekend.
Mandates, masks and VaccinePassports are being wound down in the UK. “Prime Minister pledges to scrap all controls by March”. Omicron has derailed the program. We have a short window to push back hard as current vaccines stumble. In only 6 – 10 weeks Big-Pharma are promising new Omicron specific vaccines (which will probably be mRNA because they are faster to develop). At that point, the old vaccines and all the problems with them may disappear down the memory hole as the radiant glow of *All New Vaccines* appears over the horizon. Now is the time.
Even Austria which announced incredible 1,000 Euro fines for the unvaxxed per month has pushed the date back to April. But other states are ramping mandates up.
“On 22 January, new vaccine mandates for truck drivers will come into effect in the US, which will also bar unvaccinated truck drivers from crossing the border.” — Independent
CANADA, Truckers For Freedom are blocking all lanes of traffic to and from USA in Emerson, Manitoba. What do you think about that @JustinTrudeau , next they are heading to Ottawa to pay you a visit.
…
Europe
Helsinki, Finland: 14:00, march from Senate Square to Rautatientori
Dublin, Ireland: 14:00, Garden of Remembrance
Lisbon, Portugal: 15:00, Praca do Marques de Pombal
Gothenburg, Sweden: 15:00, Gustav Adolfs Torg
Stockholm, Sweden: 14:00, Norrmalmstorg
Kyiv, Ukraine: 12:00, Sofia Square
London, UK: 13:00, Portland Place; protesters will likely march to Westminster
Birmingham, UK: 13:00, Chamberlain Square
Bristol, UK: 13:00, College Green
Cardiff, UK: 13:00, City Hall
Glasgow, UK: 13:00, Commonwealth Monument, Glasgow Green
Leeds, UK: 13:00, Town Hall
Manchester, UK: 13:00, Piccadilly Gardens
Liverpool UK — St Georges Hall, 1pm
Jan. 23
Brussels, Belgium: 12:00, Brussels North railway station
Sofia, Bulgaria: 14:00, Palace of Culture
…
The only protest list Google seems to find is one by a European security firm warning of disruption.
We finally reached a turning point with Omicron that suggests we have it’s measure.
We couldn’t know if the South African experience would translate to the overweight, indoor and diabetic parts of the world given 60% in South Africa had already had Covid — plus it was summer, and that part of the world is more familiar with certain anti-virals which must not be named.
But the news from the UK is about as good as we could have hoped. And Hallalujah, restrictions are being wound back in the UK.
The hospitalization curve in the UK has just (maybe) started to decline, and if there are no surprises, then Omicron is roughly kinda 10% as severe as Delta was.
Modelling Hospitalizations in the UK. Omicron
I know some will feel that this is no news at all and we could see this coming for weeks. But bear in mind that in South Africa, the country far ahead of us all, the deaths have only just plateaued the last three days (we hope).
The peak of infections in South Africa was December 17th. So that’s a full month’s lag from cases to deaths.
Deaths may have only just hit the peak in South Africa. Graph OWID.
And right now, deaths are rising around the world, with the exception of Germany:
Source. OWID
There are plenty of ways this could have turned out differently. Even now, we don’t know the after effects or “sequelae” — like the long Covid tally, or how long natural immunity will last, or whether there is some inflammatory, or autoimmune side effect. A lot of people are turning up in hospital for other things, and being diagnosed with Covid. Most likely Omicron is ripping through the population faster and more asymptomatically than anyone thought, but what if there are other symptoms taking people to hospital that we don’t associate with Covid? We’d hope the docs have figured that out, but it would be nice to see someone in the media even ask the question.
We are not at the end of the Omicron track yet. And as long as we suppress safe cheap drugs and keep injecting 90% of the population with a leaky ineffective vaccine, the next variant-of-concern is in production right now.
Welcome to a world where El Salvador leads the way in medical care
As early as July 2020 El Salvador was trialling kits to treat Covid that included Ivermectin. Cases were starting to rise, so on August 9, 2020 the President Nayib Bukele made a national announcement that treatment kits and tests were available. Anyone with symptoms could call up the helpline and a box would be delivered to their home. The treatment kits included ivermectin, azithromycin, zinc, Vitamin D, Panadol, and an antihistamine.
By January 2021 cases were on the rise again and so Ivermectin was made available over the counter without a prescription for anyone to buy at pharmacies. Meanwhile the vaccine rollout began in February 2021. But by April 9 only 2.8% of the population was vaccinated. The rate of delivery increased from there.
Lucky El Salvador didn’t wait for the random controlled trials to develop a treatment kit. Wow.
The first Covid peak was the day after the President announced home deliveries of treatment kits. The second peak was day after the news was announced that Ivermectin would be available without a prescription.
Here’s El Salvador compared to the rich nations of the world:
On a cases per million basis, the “big” surges in El Salvador were … tiny. Especially when compared to the West.
Per capita cases of Covid. El Salvador managed the pandemic better than nearly anywhere.
The kits were described by one doctor as like a take away food delivery. Here’s a lady delivering some, as seen on a WHO video which praises El Salvador . It mentions masses of treatment kits (at 2:30) but does not list a single ingredient. Just like magic, getting a cardboard box will save you?
Vans were sent to homes of infected people to deliver treatment kits. (WHO Video)
By February 2021 El Salvador had delivered 200,000 treatment kits. But at this stage people were also buying itself for themselves from the local pharmacy too.
200,000 kits were delivered to homes by Feb 2021 | WHO Video
SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said on Tuesday he takes hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug that U.S. President Donald Trump has promoted as a way to ward off the novel coronavirus, though experts have warned about its safety.
Bukele told reporters that El Salvador was not promoting it anymore as a treatment, following the recommendation of the World Health Organization, though patients would still be able to take it as a preventative measure if they wished.
“I use it as a prophylaxis, President Trump uses it as a prophylaxis, most of the world’s leaders use it as a prophylaxis,”Bukele said.
On a cumulative basis El Salvador has done exceptionally well
Only New Zealand has lower cases:
Few have done better than El Salvador. | Source: OWID
It’s fair to ask if El Salvador has done enough testing, but the test positivity rate varied from 3% – 15% which is on par with many countries. And in terms of total death rates per million from Covid — El Salvador at 587 per million was worse than New Zealand (10) and Australia(95) but lower than Canada (820), the UK (2,200), and the US (2,500).
How many of us would have predicted two years ago that we’d have more freedom and more competent medical treatment in El Salvador than we could get at home? Send these figures around the world. People need to know.
Scott Manley has done an excellent summary video of the Tongan volcano, much of the science and history of it as well as the effects thousands of miles away. The area around the volcano had completely reformed in the last ten years. He has collected some great footage together.
It’s interesting watching air pressure waves travel across Japan and the USA. Ken Stewart found the compression- decompression wave hit the east coast of Australia at about 5:16 Qld time and took 3 hours and 24 minutes roughly to get to Shark Bay, an average speed of about 1,160 kph. The decompression was about half an hour after the first peak and can be seen (still) in weather station pressure data.
Eruptions of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai are roughly 900 years apart and this one was on schedule.
Thanks to Greg
…
A
The CliffMass weather blog noted that the pressure wave hit Seattle at 4:30AM local time, so the air pressure spike took 8.5 hours to cross the Pacific at about 664miles per hour. h/t WattsUp
Sending best wishes for the poor people of Tonga. Planes are on the way to help, slightly complicated because Tonga is still Covid free, and people there are not too keen on dealing with that at the same time as the recovery.
Will Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai make a difference to global temperatures or will just it provide a convenient excuse for cooling that may be on the way in 2022 anyhow?
Who would have guessed that giant protected monopolies would devolve into wallowing workplaces where sad-sack un-productive workers accumulate?
“Hazard Harrington” writes from the inside of Big Tech about the terminal decline, the dark moods, despondency and lack of productivity. When the most exulted culture at work are the most victimized, the miserable workers share their misery and nobody gets anything done.
Wokeness is that dead end where everyone can blame everyone else, and no one, apart from white men, can be sacked. So the people who can’t compete collect in a kind of Sargasso sea of civilization.
h/t Bill in AZ
UPDATE: Hazard Harrington’s account is now gone. Archive copy
… COVID/WFH [Working From Home] has totally broken people. They are fundamentally weak, often with no social support outside of work. They’re the people with no children, no spouse. Only a dog or cat for emotional support.
There’s constant talk, even now, about how hard things are for everyone. Often meetings start with going around the room to ask “How is everyone feeling?” Literally everyone else went on sad rants about their lives. “I’m so MAD a white supremacist shot 3 black men in Kenosha!”
It’s bad to feel good:
It’s toxic. When it got to me, I said “Good.” and then a (((lady engineer))) literally proposed that we should not be allowed to answer the question positively. I shit you not. I think it hurt her that I wasn’t as miserable as her.
She made some argument about “vulnerability”. These people not only want you weak, they want you to expose your vulnerabilities to them so they can exploit them. They may not intend this explicitly, but whatever twisted ideology they worship ends with this result.
So back to morale. Everyone is demoralized. This may surprise you, since Big Tech is extremely well paid and has been able to WFH throughout the past 2 years. They’ve been given extra days off, extra stipends, bonuses, etc. They never had to fear being laid off.
Thus The Big Tech empires have become Soviet style microcosms — because they are protected by Big-Government and able to swallow up competition in a predatory easy way, they lost the hard edge of competition and gained the luxury of supporting and fostering every cultural soft whimsy, debilitating ideology, and self-defeating dark habit.
The Great Resignation is real. Many employees are leaving for better jobs. Remote work has (so far) resulted in more job opportunities for those working in Big Tech, especially outside of Silicon Valley. And so we backfill those positions, or hire new people, all remote.
We now have employees who have nearly 2 years of tenure who have never met another employee in person, and lives alone in some city away from where the office was.
The churn in good workers leaves the last decent employees training everyone new. They can’t get anything done, but the new employees, probably remote, don’t get enough support to thrive either.
We’re running on the code written in years past. No major new product initatives are being launched.
Bosses have become left-wing therapists
We know Big Tech management will sack people with conservative or outspoken male views, or who just says “toughen up sunshine” because they are not paying enough deference to the Wokish totems. So it follows that the vacuum of realism was filled with red carpet support for anyone as long as they’re “sufficiently left” or a minority. They “can agitate, complain, do no work, and continue employment.” That in turn became the self-reinforcing spiral. The sensible left cajoled each other into becoming militant progressives and there was no one there to put the brakes on.
Management has become “understanding” to the extreme. Anyone who has had a bad sleep can be excused for the day.
“Bring your whole self to work” was the Big Tech mantra. Tell people about your cool hobbies, share your politics (if you’re far left only), share your sex life. This plus the feeling of distance an online-only presence creates has made people braver in speaking their thoughts.
You used to have to have the balls to knock on the CEOs office door, or schedule a meeting. Now you can fire off a nasty Slack message straight to her. People will openly write threads and comments throughout Slack bad-mouthing the higher ups at the company. And they do nothing.
Productivity is essentially zero, or less:
We had a woman who worked for us who was just awful at her job. Could not understand instructions at all. Could not do the job. Barely spoke English. She wasn’t just not productive, she actually dragged the team down. I worked with my Director to finally get her fired after…
…failing her Performance Improvement Program (PIP). HR told us they can’t fire her because she’s Asian and female and in California, that it’s just simply too hard. This was over 5 years ago.
And I’m not productive either. I’m constantly bombarded with anti-white, anti-male, woke propaganda. We’ve even had explicit discussions of assigning less work to URMs (under-represented minorities), because “life is really hard for them right now.” This suggestion was from a lesbian white woman with cats.
As productive as one person can be, you can’t add value when constantly thwarted.
I worry about this apathy spreading to companies that matter. Ones that write software for utilities.
The Great Monopolies have become socialist corporations like the USSR, eaten from within, but running on momentum.
We are going to win this cultural war. Whereas conflict is the air we breathe, the delicate snowflakes of converged Corporate America can’t even handle reading the news headlines. Whereas our morale is antifragile, and we become more determined with every deplatforming, discrediting, and demonetization, their morale is breaking under the weight of their loneliness.
Big Tech leads the way, but the commenters below this extraordinary thread find similar themes in their own workplaces, in academia and “much of American society in general”.
America needs a mass emigration from Big Tech to Free Tech, and Big Tech is working towards that, banning their own most popular commentators. The more they ban the better. But here’s thing, Hazard Harrington is writing about the flaws of Big Tech from his Twitter account. He’s gone from 0 to 17,000 followers in just two months.
If you visit @HazardHarringto — tell him to make his exit plan now to take his readership with him. We all need an escape plan.
UPDATE: Judges decision is final. Djokovic to be deported. He faces a three year ban potentially. “An embarassing farce”.
No one looks good in the Novak Djokovic Deportation saga, but ponder what it says about the vaccines. We’re deporting the best tennis player in the world — not because of the germs he might spread, but to because of the ideas he might spread.
“It’s in the public interest” says the Immigration Minister
While some are cheering One Rule for All, ponder that we’re punishing someone because of what other people might do?
Djokovic is a political prisoner:
Immigration minister Alex Hawke didn’t dispute Djokovic’s claim of a medical exemption… [he] said allowing the player to stay could sway some Australians against getting vaccinated.
“Mr. Djokovic’s presence in Australia may pose a health risk to the Australian community in that his presence in Australia may foster antivaccination sentiment,” Hawke said in a document detailing his decision.
“His presence in Australia, given his well-known stance on vaccination, creates a risk of strengthening the antivaccination sentiment of a minority of the Australian community,” Hawke said in the cancellation notice.
It’s a free speech battle. And yet Djokovic didn’t come here to make a political point. He wasn’t brandishing his state of unvaccination. He has steadfastly refused to discuss his medical choices.
If Australia can’t guarantee players in a Grand Slam will be free of political interference we don’t deserve to host one. Two other players with medical exemptions arrived in Australia and were moving around freely, but turned around and left after Djokovic was detained. It’s all so sordid. Renata Voracova was deported after being ordered to strip in a six-hour interrogation. Others like Frenchman Jeremy Chardy chose not to even come after having an adverse reaction to his first dose and deciding not to have the second.
If the border rule about vaccination was about health and not politics, it would have allowed people to use alternatives like testing, or quarantine, or effective antivirals.
It’s become a farce — a global advertising campaign that says “Don’t visit Australia”. Tourism Australia must be cringing.
It’s not “one law for all” when it’s selectively enforced
Some say deporting Djokovic is a victory for “one rule for all”. But only the unvaxxed will be given a legal visa, allowed to fly in, detained, and post hoc have all their details scrutinized by teams of lawyers and be turned into a media circus and a “lesson” for the public.
How many vaccinated tennis players got things wrong on their forms? Who knows? Apparently no one verified the details of Novak’s forms before he was given a visa, so presumably no one checked any other ones either. Will the Australian government go through all the vaccinated players applications now and arrest them on court if any got things wrong?
The unvaccinated are being punished and singled out.
“Australians have made many sacrifices during this pandemic, and they rightly expect the result of those sacrifices to be protected,” he said Friday evening.
Because we are certainly not protecting the hard border any more. Australia has had 1.5 million cases of Covid (that we know of) in the last four weeks. All of whom ultimately caught it in a chain from double-vaccinated travellers.
Perhaps Scott Morrison is afraid that people who had been forced into getting a vaccine they really didn’t want would realize they were bullied into it, and should have had a choice too?
The donations don’t excuse people breaking the rules, but in the PR game of Australia versus Novak, Australia looks embarrassing. Novak wants to play tennis. We are not being good sports.
After the government lost in court, they waited days til 5:50pm Friday night to announce they were revoking his visa for a competition that starts Monday. Presumably they figured they had a weak case and didn’t want him to have more time to appeal.
Australians justifiably hate the hypocrisy of the rich and famous getting exemptions, so this has lit a fire among fed-up Australians. But the real target of that anger should be spread a lot wider. If the rules really mattered, the government would have investigated all the visa applicants before they gave them visas. If it was about health then we can hardly block the unvaccinated when the vaccinated have the same viral loads. If we were trying to stop Covid on planes we’d ask people to take ivermectin.
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