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 The “hockey stick” graph as published in IPCC TAR (Figure 2-20, 2001) By Jo Nova Climate deniers must be punishedFor newcomers: Michael Mann’s hockeystick graph was wildly different from hundreds of studies of other studies and instantly became the pet graph of the IPCC. It used the wrong proxy, the wrong tree, and the wrong type of averaging. Whole books were written on how bad it was. But when Mark Steyn called it fraudulent Mann sued. Twelve long years after the case was launched, the six person jury decided that Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg have defamed Michael Mann, but awarded Mann one whole dollar in damages, because he hadn’t been able to prove he suffered any damage at all. Remarkably, though, the jurors felt the skeptics had been so malicious they added punitive damages too. Usually these are limited to a mere four or five times the compensatory damage, but this time it was decided Simberg should pay $1,000 and Mark Steyn $1 million. It sets a new record. According to Law.com punitive or exemplary damages are saved for truly dreadful acts: exemplary damages n. often called punitive damages… are damages requested and/or awarded in a lawsuit when the defendant’s willful acts were malicious, violent, oppressive, fraudulent, wanton or grossly reckless. These damages are awarded both as a punishment and to set a public example. So the jury agrees that Mark Steyn did no material harm to Mann but criticizing climate scientists is itself an unforgivably evil thing. The point is to silence youThe lawyer for Michael Mann had pushed for these punitive damages in his closing arguments (since there weren’t any real damages). John Hinderaker reported that Mann’s lawyer specifically asked the jury to deter “climate deniers” who were apparently as dangerous as “Trump election deniers”. And to a Washington D.C. jury, somehow that made sense. It took thirty years of televised propaganda to create this payday. Cheap namecalling on the news makes for a whole city of hate, ready to pass judgement. The jury probably couldn’t even imagine how anyone could believe a climate expert might be wrong. John Hinderaker points out there’s no evidence there was any malice involved:  Buy a copy at the Steyn store. In a sane world, this case never would have gone to the jury. The legal standard is actual malice, which means the defendants must have thought, subjectively, that what they said wasn’t likely true. In this case, there was no evidence whatever that Steyn and Simberg didn’t sincerely believe that what they said was true. Indeed, as Mark pointed out in closing argument, he has been saying the same things about Mann’s hockey stick for something like 21 years, and even wrote a book about it (pictured to the right). As Mark Steyn so calmly explained at SteynOnline, he will take this all the way to the Supreme Court if he has to: The latter number will likely get overturned at the United States Supreme Court, which generally reckons that “in practice, few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process” – and that’s when “the defamatory statements do not involve matters of public concern”. A “single-digit ratio” means four-to-one, five-to-one punitive-to-compensatory. Steyn’s jurors just set a record – a million-to-one ratio. So, under the Supreme Court guidelines, the punitive damages of $1,000,000 could in theory be reduced to, er, four dollars. Mark may likewise be reduced, somewhat mortifyingly, to waving that US constitution around. Whether his health will hold out long enough to get him before Chief Justice John Roberts and the rest of the gang is a different question. But as Mark has said in the past, the process is the punishment, and so this punishment will go on. As Hinderaker explains, with these extraordinary punitive damages, Mann’s lawyer has succeeded in turning a defamation case into a free speech one. The whole point of the damages is to deter people speaking their minds freely: … now Michael Mann’s lawyer has made it explicit: impose an arbitrary seven figure penalty on Mark Steyn, not to compensate the plaintiff Michael Mann, who didn’t suffer any damages whatsoever, but rather to deter anyone from ever again arguing that climate change alarmists are wrong, however flawed their science may be. It is hard to imagine anything more anti-scientific or anti-American. As Amy K. Mitchell points out, if the media can’t criticize a scientist, no one can:Mark Steyn is a member of the media. As such he is supposedly afforded First Amendment protections. If a member of the media is no longer protected, what do you think that means for every day citizens? And it doesn’t matter if you are in DC or Montana — anyone can file in the jurisdiction of his or her choosing. She quotes Justice Alito who accurately forecast how defamation suits in the right city could be used to silence dissent across the whole country on complex topics like climate change: …the controversial nature of the whole subject of climate change exacerbates the risk that the jurors’ determination will be colored by their preconceptions on the matter. When allegedly defamatory speech concerns a political or social issue that arouses intense feelings, selecting an impartial jury presents special difficulties. And when, as is often the case, allegedly defamatory speech is disseminated nationally, a plaintiff may be able to bring suit in whichever jurisdiction seems likely to have the highest percentage of jurors who are sympathetic to the plaintiff ‘s point of view… If citizens cannot speak freely and without fear about the most important issues of the day, real self government is not possible. To ensure that our democracy is preserved and is permitted to flourish, this Court must closely scrutinize any restrictions on the statements that can be made on important public policy issues. Otherwise, such restrictions can easily be used to silence the expression of unpopular views… The sacred graph must be protected from criticsThe HockeyStick graph underpins a trillion dollar industry. If the weather was just as warm in the medieval period then CO2 is not the control knob on Earth’s temperature dial and the models are missing some big natural drivers. Even after all these years, the HockeyStick graph still forms a core part of the IPCC’s case, even though no one seems to be able to find any tree rings from the last 50 years so they can update it. We have no trouble finding 800 year old trees, but for some reason we can’t find ones alive today to tell us the temperature in 2023. If only the planet still had trees, Mike wouldn’t need to use his Nature Trick to hide the decline. In the immortal words of Professor Phil Jones himself: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” Judith Curry has written an extraordinary exposition of the whole sorry saga of the Hockeystick, with all its gory details. Unfortunately, ain’t it the way, it was not admitted in court as evidence. It’s all at her blog. Savage. Readers, be aware the word fraud is moderated here, so best to use other terms – like misleading, inept, incompetent, and a travesty of science. There are plenty to pick from. Heartland are hosting: Mann vs. Steyn: A Disgrace to the Profession – Climate Change Roundtable #97 _________________ h/t to RickWill, David Wojick, Bill in AZ, El Gordo, Willie Soon, Joe Bastardi February 10th, 2024 | Tags: Hockey Stick Graph, Mann (Michael), Steyn (Mark) | Category: Global Warming, Lawfare, USA |  Print This Post | | There’s no hiding that this is a major backflipHistory books will be written about corporate mistakes. Twenty years ago BP called itself “Beyond Petroleum” and by 2020 the company was hellbent on getting there. They pledged to reduce their own oil production by 40% by 2030, and promised to pivot into renewable power. The media was thrilled — “BP Shuns Fossil Fuels“, said Politico, and shines a light on “stranded oil and gas”. Only two years ago BP talked of “accelerating” it’s green investments. Then the price of oil and gas exploded and problems with unreliable energy started breeding. Now BP is writing off a billion dollars in offshore wind investment, and the new CEO is calling for “pragmatism”. The company has flipped from cutting oil production 40% by 2030 to increasing it instead. The new chief, Murray Achincloss said they still want to be “an integrated energy company” (presumably so it looks less like a full-reverse and more like a “tweak”), but he betrayed himself when he said: “we see growing demand for energy right now across the globe”. “It is not slowing down.” When he says energy, he means oil and gas. BP to Increase Oil Output, New Chief SaysBy Stanley Reed, New York Times BP has a plan to become what Mr. Auchincloss called an integrated energy company. But in the meantime, “we see growing demand for energy right now across the globe,” he said. “It is not slowing down.” He just wants to make oil and gas cheaper for us, really… BP is “going to invest in today’s energy system, to help make sure that prices don’t get out of control,” Mr. Auchincloss said. “So that’s investing into oil and gas,” he added, while also putting money into alternative energy sources like biofuels and hydrogen. But all those promises to cut oil production by 40% are gone with the wind: …the company’s mainstay oil and gas production rose 2.6 percent last year. Supplies of liquefied natural gas — a chilled, compressed fuel transported by ships — rose by more than 20 percent. Mr. Auchincloss said that oil output would continue to rise 2 percent to 3 percent a year through 2027 because of production increases in Abu Dhabi, Angola, the United States and elsewhere. Chasing green rainbows has been an expensive mistake: BP backs away from US offshore windpowerBy Benjamin Storrow, E&E News Call it a $1 billion mistake. BP said Tuesday it wrote down the value of its U.S. offshore wind business by $1.1 billion last year, cementing a strategic shift for the British petroleum giant as it increases oil and gas production while recalibrating its efforts to generate clean electricity from ocean turbines. It’s partnership with Equinor, meanwhile, increasingly looked like an albatross, with one company executive calling the U.S. offshore wind market “fundamentally broken. BP’s shares have flatlined, while Exxons have grown 40%Auchincloss can no doubt be only too aware of BP’s lagging share price relative to its rivals in recent years, which many blame on the company’s green agenda. BP’s shares are trading broadly in line with pre-pandemic levels, but by contrast ExxonMobil’s share price has surged by about 40% over the period. – – BP’s green agenda all at sea, Jillian Ambrose, The Guardian. Finally shareholders demand profits and sensible plansOne shareholder of BP turned activist last October and wrote an extraordinary letter to the company to pressure it to drop the “irrational” net zero target and even to sack a board member with links to BlackRock. Bluebell Capital is a hedge fund in London and it had some remarkable requests: BP attacked by investor over ‘irrational’ switch to clean energyMatt Oliver, The Telegraph In a 30-page letter, Bluebell called on BP to scrap its commitment to scale back its oil and gas business by a quarter this decade, halt investment in renewable energy schemes and rewrite its net zero targets to clarify they will be achieved “in line with society”. Bluebell argued that the targets will artificially constrain BP and leave it at a disadvantage compared to rivals such as Shell and ExxonMobil… The activist is also demanding that BP returns an extra $16bn (£12.6bn) to shareholders this decade, and urged the oil giant to sack a board director with links to fund giant Blackrock, which it branded “a world champion of ESG inconsistency and hypocrisy”. As Bluebell so aptly remarked: “And in the short term, don’t cut your own production, because you are just doing a favour to the other [oil] companies.” Bluebell Capital appear to have invested in BP because it was “undervalued” and were betting on a plan that the company could be turned around. They argued that BP would have been worth 50% more on the sharemarket but for this “ill conceived strategy” and scathingly pointed out that BP should keep out of renewable projects where it has little specialist expertise. In the long run the CEO doesn’t see windmills, he see gas and more gasIt’s surely no coincidence that the new CEO made this statement just a month ago: AI will trigger global surge in gas demand, says BP bossJohnathon Leake, The Telegraph Boom in tools such as ChatGPT means data centres require more power Mr Auchincloss said: “Gas production will probably go a little bit lower this decade and then will grow significantly as we move into the following decades… Generative AI is something that’s creating an even higher level of demand for electricity.” The amount of energy consumed by the 8,000 data centres globally is predicted to soar by 73pc to 800 terawatt hours (TWh) by 2026, according to the International Energy Agency. By comparison, the UK consumes 321 terawatt hours of electricity a year. According to research by data experts Digiconomist, in order to move its entire search engine operations to AI, Google would need as much electricity to power a country the size of Ireland. Right now BP is acting as though it has swung right back to being an oil company, but it’s still saying the recent set backs are just a delay. But any company doing a complete reversal would say that, wouldn’t they? A year ago we saw a dramatic shift in language across the company –– talking about their disappointment with renewables, and their shift back to oil and gas. So they were already starting the backflip then, perhaps the Bluebell plan was to wait for the right moment to tighten the screws? Photo by Keith Edkins |
Image by GrumpyBeere By Jo Nova Last year the acceleration in EV sales stopped accelerating. The industry was still growing they said, just not quite as fast. Now, so soon, the sales are actually falling. In the UK, EV sales dropped off a cliff, falling 25% last month. Perhaps it was just a bad month? But in California, home of global green dreams, sales have also declined, and for the last two quarters. Ominously, this is happening despite government decrees insisting every new car sold in 2035 will be an EV. Sales are supposed to be launching into orbit. Something is very wrong. Meanwhile Hertz has taken yet another step away from their EV quest — after announcing they were selling off a third of their EV fleet at bargain basement prices, now they are cancelling plans to buy 65,000 Polestars. This was a $3 billion deal, and to let them out of it, Polestar has, by golly, demanded Hertz give them the right to buy back the old Polestars that Hertz wants to sell — that way Polestar can keep the older models off the secondhard market and stop the value from falling the same dire way the secondhand Teslas have. Polestar is a Volvo spin off company, and now we understand why last week Volvo announced it would stop funding Polestar and reduce its shareholding. They knew what was coming. Not to put too fine a point on the state of the EV market, but Ford is losing $38,000 per EV. This means the more EVs they sell, the poorer the company gets. They made $10 billion dollars in profits last year, yet the balance sheet shows they lost about $5 billion just on EVs. This puts them in the bizarre position that they could theoretically give away the entire EV production line and boost company profits by 50%. It’s that bad… Indeed it’s so truly awful, that the UK Lords are calling for the government to counter the misinformation campaign filled with “mistruths”. The industry must be at deaths door. Private buyers slam brakes on electric vehiclesRobert Lea. The Times Britons appear to be turning their backs on new electric cars, with the number of zero-emission vehicles sold to private buyers falling by 25 per cent last month. The latest figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) prompted the industry body to cut forecasts on the proportion of the total market that will go electric this year. California EV Sales Go On The Decline – Has The State Run Out Of Buyers Willing To Believe The Dream?
Agent 009, Autospies Despite a sustained and seemingly unstoppable growth, the registration of battery-electric vehicles in California experienced a downturn in the last quarter of the previous year. Notably, EV sales have consecutively declined for two quarters, even as California authorities set a 2035 deadline for all new vehicle registrations to be zero-emission. California recorded 89,993 registrations for electric light passenger vehicles in the fourth quarter, marking a 10 percent decrease from the 101,151 recorded in the third quarter. What’s a free market for anyway? Perhaps to save Ford shareholders $5,000 million dollars? Ford Could Get 50% More Profit Without EVsBy Stephen Wilmot, The Wall Street Journal Ford’s “Pro” business, which comprises its sales to companies, is the engine behind Ford’s results. It made $7.2 billion of operating profit last year, and the company expects that to rise to at least $8 billion in 2024. The supersize Super Duty, which is mainly a professional product, is a key reason. It is also easier to sell software to businesses than consumers, who can get a lot for free. Meanwhile, electric vehicles lost $4.7 billion last year, and the company sees the losses deepening to between $5 billion and $5.5 billion this year. To put this another way, if Ford weren’t selling its Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning models and investing in a new generation of products to replace them, its adjusted operating profit would be 50% higher. When all else fails, and there’s no way to answer the critics, silence them insteadElectric cars: Lords urge action on ‘misinformation’ in pressEsme Stallard, BBC Baroness Parminter, chair of the committee, told the BBC that both government officials and other witnesses to the enquiry had reported reading disinformation on the subject in national newspapers. “We have seen a concerted effort to scare people… we have seen articles saying that cars are catching fire – but had evidence that the fire risk is absolutely the same as [petrol and diesel] cars,” she said. Richard Bruce, Director of Transport Decarbonisation at the Department for Transport, conceded there was a problem…”There is an anti-EV story in the papers almost every day. Sometimes there are many stories, almost all of which are based on misconceptions and mistruths, unfortunately.” The bottom line: don’t let them speak, but make them give us more money: As well as tackling misinformation the committee also called on the government to unlock funding more quickly for local authorities to install charging infrastructure. And just at this moment Australia is about to bring in rules to force Australians to buy EVs so we can save the World, or make some international bankers rich, whichever comes first. Telsa image by ben saida from Pixabay
February 8th, 2024 | Tags: Electric Cars (EV) | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova Farmers win the day after mass protestsThousands of farmers in tractors and trucks protested in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Ireland, Sweden, Portugul, Greece and Spain. Farmers in Poland are planning to block the Ukrainian border. The French farmers held Paris under siege, blocking roads, pouring manure everywhere and leaving supermarket shelves empty, then after they won some concessions from President Macron, they kept on driving to Brussels and did it all again with help from farmers from other countries. The EU is the target. The thing that made this so potent was not just that the farmers had heavy equipment that moved obstacles and drove over barriers, they also had huge public support. Something like 80 to 90% of French citizens supported the farmers and were willing to put up with the inconvenience. Then to cap it off, EU elections are coming in June, and they only happen once every five years. The Greens look like they will do badly. That people like Geert Wilders can win in national elections must have shocked the politerati class. But right wing governments have been elected in Italy, Sweden, and Finland too. This looks like a major win. Not only is the EU backing down on the demands to cut nitrogen and methane by a third, but they’re also not going to halve the use of pesticides, and they’re not even going to harass EU citizens smugly telling them to eat less meat. The next big move of climate activists was through agriculture, but this has, for the moment, hit the fan… EU drops net zero demands after farmers’ protestsThe Telegraph The European Union has caved in to angry protests from farmers and cut a target to slash agricultural emissions as part of the bloc’s net zero drive. A demand to reduce nitrogen, methane and other emissions linked to farming by almost a third has been removed from a wider Brussels plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent by 2040. The move to offer concessions to the farmers would be seen as a major step away from the bloc’s original green plans. People may have missed just how big the European farmer protests have been. For some reason the media didn’t want to cover what happens when farmers get angry. Like the truck-driver protests in Canada last year, these sort of revolts are potentially dangerous to the political class. They can bring a nation to its knees in days. Journalists and media moguls scorn the workers, but they quietly fear their power. If the masses wake up and realize they don’t have to put up with rules set by chattering classes and desk jocks, that could wreck the cushy lifestyles of the wordsmiths and academics. A truckload of manure can stop the traffic…
Such was the anger, there were fires in the carpark of the EU Parliament, and fires on French highways.
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Reuters: At least 14 highways in the regions of Catalonia, Andalusia, Castille-La Mancha and Valencia were blockaded, official traffic data showed. Victor Orban PM of Hungary explains that the EU rules destroy farming in Europe by imposing rules on European farmers but then allowing produce from other parts of the world to come in which have none of these rules. The push to reduce pesticides and force organic farming onto European farms, but not on imports was one of the major complaints about EU regulations.
Nigel Farage explains the importance a week ago:
The war is far from over. After the elections, if there is any way they can, the EU still wants to bring in absurd laws of climate voodoo and witchcraft. Green backlash looms over EU elections[Reuters] The European Commission is set to recommend an ambitious goal to cut net greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2040. The target would aim to foster green jobs and low-carbon industries, drafts of the proposal showed. Polls show more seats could go to far-right and right-leaning parties opposed to climate policies. EU officials say backing for ambitious green laws has also been eroded among EU states by recent elections in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
Photos came from these Twitter links:
Thank you Elon. Apologies to readers, these Twitter videos take a long time to load. February 7th, 2024 | Tags: Europe, Farmers, Protests | Category: Europe, Global Warming, Politics | Print This Post | |
A team of psychologists were so sure “climate deniers” deceive themselves for selfish reasons that they ran three experiments with four thousand people, only to find they were completely wrong. The researchers figured that those who do not accept that coal makes storms and floods must be motivated by their desire to keep on polluting, or flying, or feeling warm, and so they lie to themselves about the science in order to feel OK about it. (A bit like academics must do when it turns out they get paid well, but don’t know their research topic at all, maybe?) It must have been quite the shock when Zimmermann and Stötzer were proved wrong on every single experiment. They even tried to bribe skeptics with $20 cash rewards and it still wasn’t enough. Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected resultsDo climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves surprised by the results. One hypothesis is that these misconceptions are rooted in a specific form of self-deception, namely that people simply find it easier to live with their own climate failings if they do not believe that things will actually get all that bad. “We call this thought process ‘motivated reasoning,’… The only thing the study showed was the dire state of psychological science. For starters, researchers were oblivious to their own prejudice and incompetent background research. They can’t define a climate change denier in any scientific sense, it’s not a label of a group of homo-sapiens who think the climate never changes, it’s just a petty kindergarten insult designed to fool, well… psychologists. And it works. If they had spent five minutes reading skeptical web-sites they’d know that half the population have good reason to be skeptical of unaudited and unaccountable foreign committees which rely on broken models. In fact if they were looking for “motivated reasoning” in the climate debate (and they say they were) then most of it is on the believer side, where people might be motivated by billions of dollars in government grants. Zimmermann and his colleague Lasse Stötzer told people they could decide where a $20 donation went — they could choose which climate charity would get the cash, or they could keep it themselves. The “control” group weren’t allowed to keep the cash themselves. Basically 41% to 44% of the crowd kept the money. But amazingly more than 50% still gave the cash to a climate charity. Humans are nice people, really. I mean, they could all have kept the cash, and most didn’t. Presumably no one wants to look too scroogey in front of researchers, but some people know climate charities are pagan groups designed to cheat money from the poor and give it to billionaires — so it’s better to look like a scrooge than feed the machine. At the center of the experiments was a donation worth $20. Participants were allocated at random to one of two groups. The members of the first group were able to split the $20 between two organizations, both of which were committed to combating climate change. By contrast, those in the second group could decide to keep the $20 for themselves instead of giving it away and would then actually receive the money at the end. “Anyone keeping hold of the donation needs to justify it to themselves,” says Zimmermann, … “One way to do that is to deny the existence of climate change.” In another variation, participants could pick either a skeptical video or a believer one, and the researchers hoped somehow it would show people who kept the money would choose the skeptical video to reassure themselves that they were right. But as it happens, about 51% of the control group wanted to see “the skeptical side” of this 30 year long boring debate, which was slightly more than the test group. Foiled. Another null result. It was good, bad, nothing-news really — another piece of useless academic study, and the experts don’t know how to convince anyone: This finding was also borne out in two further experiments. “In other words, our study didn’t give us any indications that the widespread misconceptions regarding climate change are due to this kind of self-deception,” says Zimmermann, summing up his work. On the face of it, this is good news for policymakers, because the results could mean that it is indeed possible to correct climate change misconceptions, simply by providing comprehensive information. If people are bending reality, by contrast, then this approach is very much a non-starter. All five treatments found nothing, even though there was money to be had. They even sliced and diced the data according to income to see if poorer people were more likely to keep the money and then “become” a skeptic, but they couldn’t even find a link there. We do not observe that more financially constrained participants choose the selfish action more frequently in reaction to our treatment variation. Contrary to our hypotheses, we find no evidence that motivated cognition can help to explain widespread climate change denial and environmentally harmful behaviour. It never even occurred to Zimmermann and Stötzer that their life’s work was to figure out how to force an absurd political fantasy on to half the population. Do windmills today stop storms in 2100AD? Will solar panels stop the oceans rising? Is it possible that one trace gas controls the global temperature when water vapor is far more important, 10 to 100 times as abundant, and subject to rapid change on a minute by minute basis? Is it possible that the sun and space weather has an effect on our climate through the solar wind, the magnetic field, the heliospheric plane, cosmic rays, or spectral changes. And lastly, just in case these 2,000 people (or 0.0001% of US voters) were influenced by watching one skeptical video the researchers had to “debrief” them. To mitigate the ethical concern about showing some participants a video casting scepticism about climate change by presenting factually wrong information, we added a short debriefing for all participants at the end of the experiment (Supplementary Information). You know it’s a cult… h/t Willie Reference:Lasse S. Stoetzer, and Florian Zimmermann, (2024) “A representative survey experiment of motivated climate change denial” by 2 February 2024, Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-023-01910-2 Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay
February 6th, 2024 | Tags: Academics, Psychology | Category: Global Warming, Pseudoscience, Psy-Op, Psychology | Print This Post | | By Jo Nova Farmers all over the world are bearing the brunt of the massive infrastructure and land needed to collect low density, unreliable energy. They’re being forced to take part in a giant pagan experiment to try to change the global weather and with virtually no consultation. No wonder they’re angry. In Australia there are more than 1,000 renewable projects in the pipeline and people in the regions are furious. They’re coming to Canberra at 10am on Tuesday. Professor Peter Ridd will be there. Don’t miss it if you can get there… The regions renewable energy war in Canberra on Tuesday
They will come from the north and south. By car and bus and train. And if they have to, given their passion, by Shanks’ pony. The“Reckless Renewables Rally” is also expected to attract similarly disaffected sympathisers from Queensland, Victoria (itself embroiled in the great wind farm debate) and Tasmania. Hundreds if not thousands of the wind farm- and renewable energy-aggrieved are set to pour on to the manicured lawns of Parliament House, Canberra on Tuesday, February 6 – federal parliament’s first sitting day for 2024 – drawn from the Hunter and the Illawarra, the two NSW regions earmarked for the government’s multibillion-dollar offshore wind farms beyond 2030. PRESS RELEASE – National Rally Against Reckless Renewables – 6 Feb 2024 – Parliament House 10amWe urge the Federal and State Governments to cease their reckless rollout of unreliable, unaffordable, and environmentally destructive wind, solar, limited “firming” batteries, and high-voltage transmission lines, amidst an ever-increasing demand for reliable electricity. h/t to MP and Johnny Rotten. I wish I could be there…
By Jo Nova Instead of the conservatives being torn apart by climate change, now it’s the left side of politicsPoliticians finally seem to realize the voters don’t want to spend money on climate change. Once all players in politics realize that their climate policies and green pledges paint targets on their backs, it’s the beginning of the end.
A spending target was always a stupid thing, on any issue. What organisation, company or billionaire pledges to throw money for the sake of hitting a spending target, as if spending itself was the goal? It’s a vanity gig — only for those who want to show off their wealth (or in this case, your captured wealth). Surely the government should be bragging about achieving things as cheaply as possible, not about throwing more money than the next guy? One target is gone but the boondoggle lives onLabour still promises to set up a new publicly owned energy investment creature called GB Energy and a national insulation program. The word is that these will cost about £10bn. And there are already £8 – 10bn in green projects that the conservatives are already funding, so if the Labour party keep those, that will still amount to about £20bn. So far too much green gravy will still keep flowing but make no mistake — For an industry levitating on green fairytales, and entirely dependent on government largess, this is bad news. It’s a big shift, a giant deflation. Naturally Big Green industry are worried. The head of Seimens is now on the back foot: ““Don’t let populism unsettle you,” ” he told the Labour party, which was his coded way of saying “Please keep giving us money”. Britain risks a steep decline without a £28bn green economy pledge, Labor warned Green economyBecca Roberts, Fior Reports Jürgen Maier, former British boss of Siemens, the German industrial giant and major investor, said massive investment was needed to rebuild the British economy and make it fit for the future and that it should focus on low-carbon energy, transport and industry . “These are the growth areas of the future,” he said. “The £28 billion is not a cost, but an investment. “Don’t let populism unsettle you,” he urged the doubters within the party. In the EU, the German Greens themselves are putting the brakes onThe German Greens suffered a major hit in popularity polls after they tried to foist “low emission” heaters on the public last year. The next elections are coming up in June, and the Greens look like shrinking from 21 seats to 14. So now they are trying to water down, slow down and take out the sting from their Green policies. It’s almost like voters matter? German Greens push to water down EU party’s climate targetsBy Max Griera and Nick Alipour | EURACTIV
The Germans are also pushing to remove calls to end the use of fossil gas by 2035 and of oil by 2040, keeping only the draft’s target of phasing out coal by 2030, as well as a call to prohibit financial services “for coal, oil and gas extraction, coal-fired energy projects, and the companies that develop them”. The disagreement reveals that the national Green parties remain split on how moderate or radical their targets should be. The German Greens have been looking to moderate their messaging, as the party is aiming to strengthen its social and economic profile and reconcile more business-friendly rhetoric with the Greens’ traditional stand on climate change. Image by Дмитрий Бирюков from Pixabay Rian (Ree) Saunders – UK Flag.
By Jo Nova Thanks to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone for finding this paper. It’s time we stopped messing around. Clearly, fossil fuels are feeding the world, greening the land, and boosting tree growth. Anyone who gives a damn about the environment needs to start campaigning to increase our fossil fuel emissions. Recently a batch of studies announced that the era of global greening might be over, or that drought stress might be browning the Earth faster than it was being greened. But a new study shows that the Earth is not only still getting greener, but that the rate of green growth is accelerating on more than half of the world. Chen et al used four satellite datasets to estimate the Leaf Area Index (LAI). They found the long feared desertification of Earth is only accelerating over 7% of the globe while the long ignored greening is not increasing but even accelerating over 55% of the Earth. At this rate, the barren corners of the Earth are in danger of going missing. Obviously, the habitat of koalas is benefiting hugely from coal, gas and petrol. But to be more serious, so are the worlds poor. If we care about the children of Haiti, we have a duty to liberate that coal, burn that oil and free up those stores of diesel. Do it for the children… LAI = Leaf Area Index. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989423004262#fig0020 All over the world, the dominant driver (according to the paper) was nearly always CO2.  Chen et al 2024 CO2 fertilization is still the dominant (75.63%) driver of the trends on Earth in the last 20 years. REFERENCE Chen et al (2024) The global greening continues despite increased drought stress since 2000, Global Ecology and Conservation Photo by Waren Brasse on Unsplash
You will own nothing and be hot and botheredWelcome to modern Australia where the grid is so fragile, poor people have to buy air conditioners that the government can remotely switch off . Such is the state of decay that Queensland no longer has enough electricity to allow the riff-raff to have air conditioning whenever they want it — only the rich can do that. The state energy companies of Queensland offer customers up to $400 cashback when they buy an air conditioner, but in return they allow the government to reach into their homes and turn off the air conditioner when the grid is in trouble, which it seems is a lot lately. It was only supposed to be a “few days a year”. It’s a way to manage the grid — think of it as 170,000 mini blackouts instead of one big one: Energex remotely cuts power to 170,000 air conditioners six times in a monthABC News Queensland’s state-owned power grid remotely turned down almost 170,000 air conditioners six times in the past two months as part of a scheme to protect the electricity network.  … So this is where someone owns a Hi-Tech instrument designed to keep them cool, that they can’t use on the hottest days of the year. They call this the PeakSmart scheme (so you know it’s stupid). Gone are the luxury days when consumers could control their own appliances, get cheap reliable electricity, and not need invasive, complicated schemes in order to keep some of their own money. It also allows the energy companies to send people into your home to “visit” for afternoon tea, or rather, to check you haven’t ripped out the PeakSmart controller boxes. They will give you five days notice. Nice of them, eh? If you like your air conditioner you can keep it (but you can’t use it…)Ergon and Energex said PeakSmart limiting should only occur “a few times” per year. There have been six events since December 1 and nine in the last year — the highest rate since the program began. On Monday and Saturday last week, Energex used its remote access to limit 169,490 air conditioners to run at 50 per cent power between 4:20pm and 6:50pm across the south-east. The part I like best is when they tell us that you won’t notice anything different about having a compressor that is only running on half strength, but they won’t tell you when they are cutting your air-con (in case you do notice). Somehow they cut your cooling in secret but find the time to tell the company you bought the air conditioner from, just in case you not only notice but call out a repairman. Users are not told when their unit is affected, but installers and repairers are given notice in case customers report what they think is a malfunction. Renters or new property owners may not realise their units are fitted with the device. Multiple installers contacted by the ABC said they were wary about the meters and the potential for the government and energy providers to control an appliance in the home. Up until now, the riches of the rich were gradually spread to the poor. Have we reached the point when that reverses? Image by Ari Galang Udayana from Pixabay h/t David of Cooyal in Oz
February 1st, 2024 | Tags: Demand-management, Queensland (QLD) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | |
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