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By Jo Nova
If coal is a planet wrecking problem, if it really mattered, about 30 countries are beating themselves up in acts of grandiose public flagellation, while one country is wrecking the planet and nobody cares. The truth is that no one is behaving like they think CO2 is causing a crisis. All over the West everyone wears the hippie-care coat while buying the cheapest fridges, phones and fashion they can get from the global coal furnace. And China nods the nod then keeps on adding coal power plants.
Climate change: China at risk of missing its goals unless it takes drastic action to rein in coal expansion, new research finds
Eric Ng, South China Morning Post
Last year, the Chinese energy sector’s carbon dioxide emissions increased 5.2 per cent, the same as gross domestic product, highlighting a failure to rein in energy-intensive growth, they estimated.
According to the Global Coal Plant Tracker 70 gigawatts of new coal power was built around the world in 2023. Of the 107 countries they tracked, one country built 47 gigawatts. The other 106 countries combined built 22 gigawatts. The distribution of new coal plants is thus:
 (Click to enlarge) Or put another way:
 (Click to enlarge)
And this pattern has been repeated for 23 years.
This is the combined total of coal power installed around the world since the turn of the century:
 (Click to see the bigger graph)
So the rulers of the West buy their transformers, solar panels and wind turbines from The Coal Giant, while pretending they sincerely want to reduce coal use. And the populace buy their cheap t-shirts, lemon squeezers and avocado-slicers (and their fridges and freezers). And no one in polite society suggests sanctions or boycotts. (No one suggests “checking the science” either). Everyone wants their cheap stuff.
And so the charade continues, China pretends it will reduce emissions, and the West pretends it could happen:
“Another year of rapidly rising emissions in 2023 leaves China way off track against its target of cutting carbon intensity by 18 per cent between 2021 and 2025,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). “As a result, carbon dioxide emissions would now need to fall by 4 to 6 per cent by 2025 to hit the goal.”
And everyone pretends that it matters.
Global Coal Plant Tracker
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By Jo Nova
History shall record the ignominious boom and bust of a car genre forced on citizens so they could produce better weather.
Things are so bad, Joe Biden has even put the brakes on his aggressive EV scheme, stepping away from the 2030 deadline. “It’s just a delay” of course. The plan would have forced car manufacturers to sell 3 EV’s for every 2 cars with a combustion engine by 2030. If customers didn’t volunteer to buy enough EV’s, companies would be forced to jack up prices of the cars everyone wants in order to cross-subsidize the discounted sales of the unpopular EV’s. Car dealers were appalled and said so.
EV sales growing in some places but falling in others. The shift has been so fast the full length of the supply chain is in turmoil. The price of lithium has fallen 90% from it’s peak, nickel has halved. Ford has sacked 1,400 people. GM has cut its workforce by 1,000. Hertz is selling one third of it’s electric fleet and cancelling $3 billion dollars worth of forward orders. A month ago, the biggest political party in the EU decided it would rather drop the ban on petrol and diesel cars.
Meanwhile EV drivers in China are learning the same awful lessons the US learned a month ago. EV batteries don’t go as far during freezing cold weather and are extremely hard to charge. During the Lunar New Year holiday Chinese drivers have been forced to push their EV’s for miles in the snow, while traffic jams formed at charging stations. Drivers were so desperate they lit fires on roads to stay warm, rather than use their car heaters and drain the battery. EV’s were banned from the Hainan Ferry due to the fire risk. It must have been sudden. Some Chinese EV manufacturers offered to help rescue cars, but it will take weeks to ship the cars back to owners.
China has placed big bets on EV demand. It would get burnt badly if the West wakes up:
Nora Neughton Business Insider
The Biden administration is poised to dump controversial rule that would require Americans to buy more electric cars sooner,…
Lithium and nickel producers begin mass layoffs and pause multi-billion-dollar projects as US says no to electric car push
Daily Mail
…as interest in EVs has slipped, lithium and nickel facilities – metals used in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles – are taking cost-cutting measures including mass layoffs and suspending operations.
The demand for electric vehicles surged in 2022, rising by 76 percent in April of that year, but by the end of 2023, the number of vehicles sold dropped to just 50 percent.
The price of lithium has fallen 85% from the peak:
[Credendo]: According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), in 2022, batteries dominated the global end-use markets, absorbing 74% of the global lithium production. Indeed, the main driver behind lithium demand is the global transition towards a greener economy.
Global lithium production has doubled in the last six years, but even fans of the green revolution admit that the fall in lithium prices is largely due to the lack of demand because of the unexpected fall in EV orders. According to the USGS batteries used three quarters of the global lithium production.
The same pattern is happening in Germany — From NoTricksZone:
Blackout News here reports how German software giant SAP “no longer wants to use Tesla electric cars as company cars in future.” and is “removing the electric car manufacturer from its list of suppliers”.
Cuts at German Ford plant
In another article, Blackout News reports that Ford is cutting 3500 of 4500 jobs at its Saarloius, Germany plant, citing a “restructuring program.” Deindustrialization is accelerating in Germany.
Production slowdown at Opel
German car manufacturer Opel has announced reduced work-hours at its Eisenach plant “due to low demand” as a “direct response to falling demand for the Opel Grandland SUV, which is offered in variants including an innovative plug-in hybrid.”
Even as Chinese EV companies have aggresssive expansion plans, bad news is popping up:
Long Charging Lines, Snow Stymie EV Drivers in China New Year
Bloomberg
Long waits at highway charging stations, rapid battery depletion in freezing snow and limits on electric vehicles on car ferries because of safety fears have combined to make the Lunar New Year holiday a frustrating experience for China’s growing number of EV drivers.
In central Hubei province, some drivers were forced to push their EVs for miles after heavy snow and freezing rain closed roads, and their batteries — which lose charge faster in cold weather — ran out of juice. According to local media reports, some even resorted to building fires on the road to keep warm because they were concerned using the car’s heater would deplete the battery even faster.
On the tropical island of Hainan — one of China’s most popular tourist spots — the local government restricted the number of EVs and plug-in hybrids on car ferries because of fears of fire or explosions, stranding thousands of cars.
Meanwhile with uncanny timing, the Australian Labor government are aiming to copy the US policies we already know have failed, just as Joe Biden backs away from them:
Australian Financial Review
Labor will press ahead with vehicle emission cuts based on US standards, despite reports the Biden administration is trimming the scale of its own electric vehicle ambitions, amid a growing political clash over the cost of popular utes and SUVs.
Reuters on Monday matched the story, noting the US Environmental Protection Agency in April 2023 proposed requiring a 56 per cent reduction in new vehicle emissions by 2032. Under the initial EPA proposal covering 2027-2032, car makers were expected to aim for EVs to constitute 60 per cent of their new vehicle production by 2030. EVs now make up about 7 per cent of the US car fleet.
The Australian opposition will take that electoral gift and run with it:
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, campaigning in Victoria ahead of next month’s byelection, accused Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of “proposing a great big new car and ute tax, which is going to drive up the cost of a HiLux or a Ranger by somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000”.
Car crash photo by Alexa from Pixabay
Australian flag by Phillip Barrington
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 — (AAP) NZ Herald
By Jo Nova
In Carnarvon yesterday the Bureau tells us that the temperature was “a record” 49.9 degree day (almost 122 Fahrenheit). But in 1896 the Brickhouse Station just 15 kilometers north of Carnarvon hit 121 Fahrenheit in the shade, and there were reports of birds dying and other measurements “in the shade” that were as high as 125F. Somehow man-made emissions have been heating the planet for 128 years but the current freakishly hot days are about the same as the ones when no one in Australia owned a car and CO2 levels in the atmosphere were still under 300 ppm.
Lest we forget, there are hundreds of thermometer records from the pre-1908 era that are apparently worth nothing to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Climate change threatens all life on Earth, so you’d think climate scientists would be excited about the longest historical records they can find, but for some inexplicable reason they show little interest in the historical records from 1896 when a heatwave struck and 437 people died across Australia.
Temperatures hit 50C in the shade in many places in January 1896. In locations hundreds of kilometers apart, people were reporting similar temperatures. Perhaps they were all wrong?
 January 5th 1896, Western Australia https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/3076152 At Yalgoo over Christmas 1895 temperatures reached 122 to 127F:
 January 5th 1896, Western Australia https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/3076152 At Southern Cross a man died in his office chair. The heat averaged 115 and reached 122F.
 January 5th 1896, Western Australia https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/3076152 A child succumbed to the heat in Geraldton and in Mullewa it was so hot the railway workers refused to work because it was “impossible to handle the rails”. These towns are 500 km south or 300 miles away from Carnarvon.
 January 5th 1896, Western Australia https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/3076152 Temperatures in Mullawa hit 121F.
Inland at Cue for three weeks the temperature was above 105 F, even reaching 118 twice in the shade.
1,000 kilometers south of Carnarvon, nested among forest, south of Perth, even Pinjarra experienced 114F on Friday 3rd January 1896. This heatwave affected a vast area.
 … The Bureau will say many of these older records were done in “non-standard” equipment, but thermometers were a 300 year old technology even then. Sometimes we have records of the types of screens they used and we even have standardized comparisons of the small differences between the different screens. But the BoM is too precious to admit these old records are useful — the same BOM that doesn’t care when modern sites are surrounded by hot black bitumen or sits near incinerators. The same BOM that shrank the Stevenson screens from 230 litres to just 60 litres and changed the glass thermometers to electronic ones. The best measurements in our history probably came after the BOM was formed in 1908 and standardized the screens. Yet the BOM has adjusted the Carnarvon trends in those years down by as much as 2 whole degrees. In what universe does this make sense?
The actual warming over the whole century was almost nothing until the BOM adjusted the records. Thanks to Ken Stewart for this analysis:
![](https://kenskingdom.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/carnarvon-tmin.jpg?w=450&h=256 ?w=450&h=270")
The ABC parrots the mindless weather trivia produced by the BOM — they both lie by omission
Both institutions hide what Australians really need to know — our history:
“It was the nation’s second-hottest February temperature on record and tied as the eighth-hottest temperature recorded in Australia.”
ABC Feb 19th, 2024
Yesterday wasn’t the “eighth hottest” in Australian records. There are scores of days of baking hot 122 to 125F temperatures in our historical newspapers, often from the 1800s, yet the ABC never investigates, and never asks the Bureau of Meteorology a single hard question. Were all those thermometers in the wrong places? Were all those temperatures invalid? Astronomers were trained to use thermometers, it was a 300 year old technology even during the heatwaves of the Federation drought, and people knew the difference between “in the shade” and “in the sun”.
Thanks so much to research by Chris Gillham, Ken Stewart and Silligy and the rest of the BOM volunteer audit team — without any funding they discover the hot records the bureau can’t seem to find even with $350 million dollars a year and a staff of 1,600 people.
Citizen science beats government funded science any day.
All the historic newspaper links for the map are available at the original post on historic heatwaves.
9.7 out of 10 based on 113 ratings
By Jo Nova
This paper shows exactly how good “Peer Review” is
It’s not just that a clever AI image slipped through peer review, it’s that it was garishly fake in a supersize kind of way. Scientifically everything about it was radioactive satire and yet it still got through “peer review”. The words are gibberish. The editors didn’t even run a spell checker on it before publishing it, let alone the gaze of a single trained biologist in the field.
The paper has been retracted thanks to the real peer review which happened on social media. This was a case of X (formerly Twitter) saves the day. Where normal peer review can take up to two years (if you are an unpopular skeptic) it was only three days from the X review to retraction.
A scientific paper purporting to show the signalling pathway of sperm stem cells has met with widespread ridicule after it depicted a rodent with an anatomically eye-watering appendage and four giant testicles.
The creature, labelled “rat”, was also sitting upright in the manner of a squirrel, while the graphic was littered with nonsensical words such as “dissilced”, “testtomcels” and “senctolic”.
 FIGURE 1
Spermatogonial stem cells, isolated, purified and cultured from rat testes. The macrophages have become Macromages. The Natural killer T-Cells have become “nokillas”, but it’s not a name-swap, it’s just complete and utter nonsense — like a microbiology word soup met a UFO.
 The JAK/STAT pathway and immune regulation in spermatogonial stem cells The researchers even told them the images were faked: “(Images in this article were generated by Midjourney).”
At best, perhaps this is a real paper with junk AI images. There are no obviously imaginary words in the text (unlike the graphics). But it’s still a devastating take on “peer review”. I mean, these images are practically satire… If rushed scientists are using AI to help them write, and AI to get cheap images, and the Peer review journals are just posting anything without even checking, modern science is a zombie.
This is not a one off problem, and the use of AI to create images in peer reviewed science is widespread:
[The Telegraph] Writing on the Science Integrity Digest, Dr Elisabeth Bik, the Dutch microbiologist who works spotting manipulation in scientific papers, said: “Of course, we can have a good laugh at these figures, and wonder how on earth the handling editor and the two peer reviewers didn’t catch this.
“These figures are clearly not scientifically correct, but if such botched illustrations can pass peer review so easily, more realistic-looking AI-generated figures have likely already infiltrated the scientific literature.”
Dr Bik has identified more than 1,000 papers which have fraudulent imagery, most of which she believes was generated by AI.
Amanda Yeo claims as many six real people supposedly gave it a tick:
It isn’t clear exactly how these diagrams made it all the way to publication without being picked up. The article was edited by a member of Frontiers‘ editorial team as well as reviewed by two other parties, which means at least six people gave it their approval. In a statement to Motherboard, one of the reviewers said that he had only assessed the paper for its scientific aspects, and that it was not his responsibility to check the accuracy of the AI-generated images.
For what it’s worth, Frontiers in Cell and Development Biology (Front Cell Dev Biol) is not a big name in the medical world, but they have apparently published 10,730 papers in the National Library of Medicine. The umbrella publishing unit called Frontiers –says it is the 3rd most cited publisher.
The retraction message isn’t exactly confidence boosting:
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Naturally the Big Bankers dress up in trees and rivers… they wouldn’t wear the Dracula Cape when people are looking, would they?
By Jo Nova
The biggest climate bullies on the planet just got a bit smaller. There are two monster climate banker clubs in the world, and yesterday, one of them, the “Climate Action 100+” lost three of the six largest asset management funds in the world, namely JP Morgan Chase, State Street and BlackRock.
State Street manages about $3.6 trillion in funds, JP Morgan Chase about $3 or $4 trillion, and BlackRock $10 trillion, so that’s something like $17,000 billion dollars that just left the ranch. The fact that this kind of money was all grouped together in a cabal of any sort is bad enough, but ponder that now, after the biggest fish have left the tank, there’s still $50 trillion left in assets on the inside.
It appears the Climate Action 100+ group had grown too big for its boots — the new Climate Action 100+ “phase 2” strategy expected asset managers to actively hound companies to cut their emissions.
The Wall Street Journal
The climate alliance’s new rules would compound the legal and political jeopardy. In its withdrawal announcement, State Street said its rules “are not consistent with our independent approach to proxy voting and portfolio company engagement.” BlackRock said the rules “would raise legal considerations.”
Members are supposed to “engage” 170 “focus companies” such as Boeing, Home Depot and American Airlines—that is, threaten to vote against non-compliant corporate directors and back shareholder resolutions that pressure management. Their campaign has had great success with 75% of targeted companies committing to “net zero.”
But the climate left is never content. Last June the alliance impelled its members to publish information on their “engagements” and to explain how and why they voted on shareholder resolutions flagged by the outfit. The point was to embarrass asset managers that climate scolds accuse of being insufficiently committed to the cause.
 Climate Action 100+ sells itself as a group of investors who want to save the world and pressure naughty corporations to behave. The truth is that most of the investors are workers with pensions tied up in funds who have no idea they are in an international cabal. Normal real investors try to make money rather than use their life savings to bully companies into political fantasies like fiddling with the weather. But in the monster funds, it’s the asset managers who decide to join clubs like “Climate 100+” and it’s twin club with the sexy name –the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ).
Climate Action 100+ started in 2017 and the day before yesterday it had 700 investors who managed $68 trillion in assets, yet mysteriously has no Wikipedia page (like the ghost that walks?). According to InfluenceWatch it was “conceived by members of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) in 2016 at the French Mission to the United Nations.” So it was set up by the largest government pension fund in the US in cahoots with the UN in order to use workers money to boss around companies and to force left wing policies on right wing states through a back door.
It’s big brother — the other climate banker cabal called GFANZ — was set up in 2021 by the UN and Mark Carney (former governor of the Bank of England). At one point GFANZ grew to an obscenely unbelievable $130 trillion in “funds under management”, giving it the financial power equivalent to a black hole. The largest 20 national economies in the world have a combined GDP of $87 trillion. So when a collective managing $130 trillion says “jump” there are not many Presidents or Prime Ministers inclined to say “No”. In October 2020, the CEO of BlackRock told the Australian government he wanted them to shut coal plants faster and three weeks later, Scott Morrison and the treasurer signed us up for Net Zero, even though the voters had picked them to do less climate action rather than more.
But it was all a big bluff, as I explained — all the giant funds use other people’s money to bully and cajole boards, ministers, and global leaders into doing things that none of them might want. They were supposed to be investing pension funds to earn money for workers to retire on, instead it looked and smelled a lot like they were squandering the returns in order to prop up socialist ideologies, dodgy companies, and to coerce governments to legislate policies that the voters didn’t vote for.
Larry Fink the CEO of Blackrock, and his pals, turned our pension funds into a leftist activist machine. Thankfully 19 US States fought back by asking the legal bombshell questions about whether these funds were cooperating in a way that breached antitrust laws and neglected their fiduciary duty. Ron deSantis in Florida took $2 billion of state pension funds back from Blackrock. It doesn’t sound like much, but it pulled the string on the big bluff, and threatened to unleash an exodus. Now a year later, many funds are backing away slowly.
Make no mistake, the term ESG or Environmental Social Governance is a dead dog, but all these conglomerate Financial Swamp Monsters like BlackRock et al, will still be buying and leveraging up their renewables investments whenever it suits them. They’ll still be flying to Davos to consort and coordinate behind the scenes.
The big funds will still be leaning on governments, but there is more risk other funds will break ranks, offering to fund the projects the cabal don’t want funded. In a free market, it wouldn’t matter a damn if one stupidly large fund said it wouldn’t fund a coal mine because some other fund surely would. That’s why these banker collectives are so profoundly undemocratic and anti-competitive. For their game to work, they have to stop all the other bankers too.
It is after all, why the USA has antitrust laws. It’s why cartels are banned.
So much of the pushback against the banker consortiums comes from the US States:
Mary Chastain, Legal Insurrection
Agricultural officials from 12 states launched probes into ESG investing practices at some big banks. The officials worry that the involvement could “impact food availability, lead to price increases, limit credit access for farmers, and have broad negative economic consequences.”
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti sued BlackRock, alleging the firm harmed consumers through ESG.
“We allege that BlackRock’s inconsistent statements about its investment strategies deprived consumers of the ability to make an informed choice,” explained Skrmetti
At this point in time the GFANZ cabal still say their members include ANZ, the Bank of America, Barclays, the Bank of New Zealand, Commonwealth Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, National Australia Bank, National Bank of Canada, Westpac and a hundred others.
There is still so much to do. But three weeks ago Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, shifted gears — openly saying “Trump was kinda right” and that his supporters deserve respect. I asked at the time if Wall Street was shifting away from the whole poisonous left. Dimon’s statements were game-changing.
We don’t need all the bankers to shift, we just need a few so we have some competition.
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Money pile by Andrew McGill
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By Jo Nova
Victoria is just not big enough to fit all the solar and wind industrial plants
It’s no wonder the Victorian government is desperate to begin building offshore wind turbines. Their own targets for the forced transition are so crazy-brave, they would “need” to use as much as two thirds of the state’s agricultural land instead. It sounds delusional but they told us this straight up in their own policy document released in March 2022.
Thanks to Aidan Morrison at the Centre for Independent Studies, who not only reads these boring tomes, but also noticed that they quietly disappeared the Victorian Offshore Wind Policy Directions Paper. He explained in The Australian that he believes they hid it because they’ve realized how embarrassing it looks.
Apparently 227,000 square kilometers is not enough land to power 7 million people in a NetZero world.
Victorian planners had farmland in their sights (as if it was their own). They mapped it out and described it as “available for onshore renewables”.
If farmers were not aware of the totalitarian disregard the NetZero bureaucrats have for farmers, they know now.
Think about the captive mindset it takes to publish a ludicrous document like this without blinking? These are people who never meet a skeptic. Whoever wrote and approved it didn’t even try to hide the ghastly cost of building wind and solar power onshore. And they certainly didn’t spend a nanosecond imagining what Victorian farmers might think of it. (Or checking their own maths — 70% of agricultural land is not the same as “four times the area of Greater Melbourne”.)
Presumably some bureaucrats were tasked with justifying the big Offshore wind developments and it didn’t even cross their minds that “Net Zero” is a option, a frivolous quest, and that farmers, and everyone (outside the party room) might just say “No”.
Billions of dollars are on the table and no one even reads the policy documents. We live in an era of distilled incompetence.
The Bottom Line:
Victoria is supposedly aiming to be 95% renewable by 2035, and at this point gets about 50% of it’s electricity from fossil fuels (and even more of it’s total energy). Even after the mass installation of unreliable energy for the last ten years Victoria needs to build 15 times as much to reach its target.
There are no offshore wind farms in Australia, and the federal government just put a poleaxe through the offshore plans of the Victorian government. But around the world investors are running away, share prices are falling, and insurance firms are balking at the million dollar cost of repairing the cables.
Now would be the perfect time for Australia to get out of offshore wind — right before it gets into it.
Victoria farmers won’t be pleased,
If their lands are confiscated or seized,
For vast solar panel fields,
Decimating food yields,
Nor by wind turbine pipe dreams appeased.
–Ruairi
REFERENCES
The original government source page contains the dead link. Luckily for us the Wayback Machine captured the site and the PDF.
Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay
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By Jo Nova
A new paper (like so many before it) shows that the sea started warming half a century before the first coal fired power plant was ever built, demonstrating yet again, the skeptics are right, and CO2 is irrelevant. Despite that, the world’s supposedly top science journal lauded it in excitement because it showed the world had warmed “more than we thought”, and somehow, in their brains, ipso delerium, all warming was caused by man-made CO2 even if it occurred when there were no flights, no cars, and no electricity.
Life in 1820 was the ultimate “Net Zero” world: literally every flight was grounded and all petrol stations were closed for 80 years yet the world warmed.
Absurdly, evangelistic headlines decreed the world was “hotter than we thought”, had breached 1.5C earlier than we thought and three hundred year old sea sponges were telling us to hurry up and install solar panels. The point that the geniuses who are 99% certain didn’t know how hot the 1800s were until last week isn’t exactly inspiring. But the political activists at Nature felt that breaching the Paris Agreement (before it was even made) was big news and said so in their first paragraph. All the major nations are failing to meet their Paris targets anyway, and if the targets were expired before they were even set, that only makes the UN look stupid. And to top that off, somehow a thousand thermometers, ship buckets and tree rings have just been superseded by some old Puerto Rican sponges.
As it happens the team at Nature also seem to have forgotten they already announced in 2016 that global warming started 180 years ago. Perhaps they don’t read their own papers? (That was Abram et al).
Really, this new paper makes a great study in just how bad current science communication is — every single person in the chain of nonsense failed to see the bleeding obvious. The academics, the journal, the press release team and the “media” all missed the most important message the corals were shouting from the bottom of the ocean. Humans don’t control the climate.
By the time that official temperature records began, global temperatures had already risen by half a degree.
The planet has already passed 1.5 °C of warming, according to a new measuring technique that goes back further in time than current methods. At the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, nations agreed not to exceed 1.5 °C, a guardrail of climate change.
“We have an alternate record of global warming,” says coral-reef geochemist Malcolm McCulloch at the University of West Australia Oceans Institute in Crawley, who is lead author of the study. “It looks like temperatures were underestimated by about half a degree.”
Even though the paper says the warming started in 1860, the data shows it started earlier, more like 1820. Apparently the Sr/Ca ratio is a good proxy for the temperature they say.
But 90% of human emissions have been emitted since World War II.
…
Source: OWID
It does however look similar to graphs of rising sea levels that we’ve known about for years.
Jevrejeva et al 2008
And a lot like graphs of 120 proxies from the Northern Hemisphere:
Ljungqvist et al.
And other proxies from China
 …. Absurdities of the modern era — that newspapers all over the world tell us CO2 is even more dangerous than we thought because of some sponges in the Caribbean.
REFERENCES
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 Paul Englher | ABC News
By Jo Nova
Just how wise is it to have a grid dependent on all this fragile infrastructure?
Nature seems to be telling us something about adding another 10,000 kilometers of vulnerable transmission lines.
Yesterday six high voltage transmission lines collapsed in Victoria leaving half a million people without electricity for hours. But only a few weeks ago five towers collapsed in Western Australia putting 30,000 in the dark. And out in Kalgoorlie, when the gas backup plants failed, thousands of people went for days without power in 40 degree heat. Some people were unable to call triple zero, freezers full of food were spoilt and nearly everything left to buy had to be paid for in cash.
In Victoria the towers fell at 1:10pm during a storm. Their loss triggered the shut down of 4 large coal power units at Loy B Yang taking out 2 GW of generation. It took three hours to get one turbine back on line, and eight hours to restore the second. Everyone is talking about “the coal fired outage” but about half the wind power running at the time was also lost, and over the next hour, more than half the grid scale solar power also disappeared.
It was a shock to the system for a state with nearly 7 million people:
Graph from Anero.id Enery (Feb 13)
The sudden simultaneous drops for wind power and coal power suggests they were both affected by the transmission line failures. Brown coal generation fell almost instantly from 4GW to 2GW, but wind power in the state fell from 1.8GW to 1GW sharply.
Graph from Anero.id Enery (Feb 13)
Solar and wind power just made the storm damage worse:
The renewable cheer squad is calling for “a faster transition” to somehow solve these blackouts but both solar and wind power need thousands of miles of the very same collapsible transmission lines, putting the grid at even more risk of sudden breaks.
Indeed wind power fell right when we needed it. We can’t confirm yet how much of that was due to the towers collapsing, or whether it was because plants were shutting off in turbulent conditions.
Grid scale solar certainly didn’t save the day even though it was the middle of the day. Perhaps the solar plants were cut off, or perhaps the clouds rolled over? Solar “farm” production was reduced from 500MW to 200MW through most of the afternoon. And while rooftop solar suffered smaller losses, by 2pm it lost about 1 GW of generation too. About the nicest thing we can say about solar power is that it won’t destabilize the grid if storms arrive at night.
The things that did save the day were gas and hydro power (see below), but if Hazelwood coal power was still running, it would have helped too. Luckily, there is no drought on the East Coast at the moment. In a normal El Nino year, the hydro might not have been there…
Graph from Anero.id Enery
The Victorian Energy Minister blames the weather and doesn’t seem to realize some forms of generation need a thousand more miles of power lines:
But Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio said that if “catastrophic extreme weather” physically took out power lines, “then no matter what you do in terms of electricity generation or other technologies, that will cause outages”.
But if all of the state ran on coal fired power or gas, less of the state would have blacked out.
Grids with lots of transmission lines are vulnerable grids
The Guardian, masters of misinformation, told us that the coal fired plants were affected by the storms, just in case you thought they might be stronger than flimsy windmills and giant sheets of glass panels.
 The Guardian didn’t mention the 2GW drop in wind power and solar output. They happen every day of course…
Further information is available from WattClarity — like grid inertia, and the frequency volatility.
9.8 out of 10 based on 97 ratings
By Jo Nova
The global carbon market in sacred certificates-to-stop-storms now “worth” nearly one trillion dollars
Remember this number next time someone tells you fossil fuels are stopping “climate action”.
The whole trillion dollar carbon market is a vested interest. It is a fake market entirely created on government whimsy. The whole absurd point of it is supposedly to slow tornadoes or floods in 2100, and reduce beach-weather in Europe. Because who likes the beach?
LONDON, Feb 7 (Reuters) – The value of traded global markets for carbon dioxide (CO2) permits reached a record 850 billion euros ($909 billion) last year, analysts at Refinitiv said on Tuesday. Around 12.5 billion tonnes of carbon permits changed hands in the world’s emissions markets – 20% less than the previous year – but the value of the markets rose by 14% as prices for permits were much higher.
In a carbon market, certain favoured groups can say they produced less carbon dioxide this year than they otherwise might have. They get to sell their anointed pieces of paper to other less favoured people who have to buy credits because the government says they must. At any point in this game, industries can get exemptions added or allowances boosted. So if the bribes or post-political-life jobs on offer are good enough, the right people can arrange to divert the river of money toward their own accounts. And the insiders can buy or sell the shares as the government policy changes. It creates a vast economy of busy work and a big pile of money.
The great thing about this political and fundraising tool (for criminals) is that almost anything can be “flexed”. The potential for loopholes is infinite because this is not a free market, just the illusion of one. For starters there’s no product anyone cares about at the end of the chain –there’s no cargo ship of diamonds that someone will miss. Corruption can run riot, and who would know?
The carbon market is not really a carbon market at all — the largest producers of CO2 are not even in the game. The Pacific Ocean can’t pay, the phytoplankton can’t be taxed and the northern boreal forests will get plain away with it unless a friend of a friend happens to own a nice plot that can be rebadged as a carbon farm. So politicians are sitting on a gold mine of opportunity. Most carbon in the world doesn’t count, and they get to be kingmakers to decide what does. What’s an act of God? — ask the Minister.
If, hypothetically, our elected representatives were less than angelic, they could tweak the terms and conditions to their donors’ hearts content. The ruling party in charge decides whether your saltbush credits are accepted, or whether your organic goats cheese gets an exception. Is nuclear power “carbon neutral”? Fifty years laters, the EU still can’t decide.
If an election is coming up, the ruling party can roll out some more credits and reduce the “cost of living” at least until after the votes are in.
The Game of Carbon Leeches works because the money is stolen quietly from the people. Thousands upon millions of shoemakers, mechanics, bakers and cleaners pay higher prices for peas, beans and widgets because somewhere down the supply chain someone or several of the people involved had to buy some fairy carbon credits. Their fake costs are added to our real bills. The money is siphoned invisibly from the masses and given to the special classes. Did you get lucky?
The carbon market is gradual creeping communism, but even the Soviets didn’t tax the proletariat to give their grandchildren better weather.
Elephant artwork by Jo Nova adapted from Wikimedia photo: Hansm
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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