Australians are angry the BOM didn’t see the flooding rains coming
Worse, we’re betting the nation on the BOM’s ability to predict the climate.
The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) tells Australians that record breaking extremes are getting worse because of our cars and our air-conditioners (that’s “The State of the Climate“). But when the BOM can’t predict record breaking rain a month in advance, or even the day before, we know the BOM doesn’t understand what drives the climate.
Somehow the BOM expect Australians to spend trillions and rearrange their economy based on their fifty year prophesies, but not to mind when “this summer” goes right off the rails.
But the real weather gods had another idea, and all the places under any shades of green below got somewhere from 100% to 300% of the average rainfall. The indigo and purple zones got even more.
This was a savage downpour — seven feet of rain in five days fell at one location:
No fewer than 12 locations across far north Queensland posted record rainfall totals.
Some areas received a year’s rainfall in a single day, isolating towns, closing highways and leaving hundreds stranded by surging floodwaters. Black Mountain near Cooktown recorded a cumulative 2189mm over the five days, while Mossman South, an hour northwest of Cairns, had 1935mm.
The BOM suddenly wants to absolve itself of liability
People have noticed there is now a mandatory check box forcing users to agree to a legal disclaimer clearing the BOM of all liability:
Users of the BOM app now have to agree to a 699-word “terms and conditions” statement that includes “information at this app … may not be accurate, current or complete”.
“To the maximum extent permitted by law, the bureau excludes any liability that may arise in connection with the BOM Weather app or any information or material presented therein or your access to or use of any of the same,’’ the bureau says in a “terms and conditions” statement that appears when a user attempts to download its app. — Mackenzie Scott, The Australian
They know they are in trouble.
I say the BOM can have immunity the same day Australians can also tick a box excluding ourselves from any and all costs, imposts and taxes related to any BOM predictions.
To be fair to the BOM, a hysterical and ill-informed media has allowed climate alarmism to infect reporting of what should be routine weather events.
For thirty years the Australian media has made hyperbolic scare stories about the weather while the BOM tacitly stood by and smiled. Where were they as the tenets of science were trashed, and critics were called “climate deniers”? If the BOM are victims of this hyperbole now, they reap what they sowed.
The BOM raised the stakes, and they don’t get to weasel out by saying “we used the best science” as if the best science wasn’t riddled with holes. If the science is good enough to throw away trillions of dollars, then the worst failures need a truckload of explanation.
Predicting the weather is hard. We could forgive the BOM for getting a complex immature science wrong, but not when they also tell us it’s just simple physics, they’re absolutely sure, and there is no doubt they’re wrong (give us your money!).
We know it’s a cult or long-form advertising when every possible consequence is 100% bad, bad, bad, and for everyone, all the time.
Climate change will cause more droughts, except when it rains, and that means more pollen (obviously?!). Even though summers will be longer, and spring will be earlier, and flowers will go extinct, the pollen will be more potent (whatever that is). More people will get asthma, and even though we don’t know what causes allergies, we know that it will get worse with climate change, whatever it is, because everything does.
You too will be locked in your house, afraid to leave, unable to breathe, unless you get solar panels and an EV.
This was Australian’s national news prime time story tonight on our public “news” service. Australians spent some part of 3 million dollars today on their ABC, where regional health reporter Steven Schubert asked no hard questions, did almost no research, and sought no alternative views. He just found an asthmatic trophy victim to use as a poster-girl for F.E.A.R.
Whether Caitlin Ross will go outside on any given day depends on weather and pollen forecasts. If they’re too bad, her severe allergies and asthma mean it can be too uncomfortable or dangerous.
Researchers say pollen is becoming more potent, and seasons longer, as the climate changes
They expect the number of Australian hay fever sufferers to grow by 70 per cent over the next three decades
Poor Caitlin. Her symptoms have got worse these last five years. The ABC news works like hypnosis planting the suggestion that if your asthma got worse lately “it’s climate change”, as if asthma never gets better or worse for any other reason.
Climate change is affecting asthma already — we know because we did an opinion poll:
A recent survey showed climate change was already affecting the health of asthmatic Australia
A survey conducted by advocacy group Asthma Australia in 2023 showed that 91 per cent of people with asthma were very concerned about the impacts of climate change, according to CEO Michele Goldman.
She said 39 per cent of asthmatics surveyed said climate change was already affecting their health, compared to 21 per cent of people without asthma.
It’s like ignorant climate models went on dates with a Women’s Weekly story on asthma from 1985, and gave birth to yet another scary narrative.
In the real world of health and biology the rise of asthma in the last fifty years could be due to diet, pollution, hygiene, loss of gut flora, or a lack of parasites. It could be due to leaky guts, new highly allergenic wheat strains, heavy metals, pesticides, or all of the above. It could be because kids don’t get to eat dirt or play with farm animals, and it could be because kids don’t play in the sun and get their vitamin D.
Asthma is a first world problem, not a climate change one
So these researchers — whoever they are, are starting with models that can’t predict rainfall, humidity, soil moisture, cloud cover and wind speed, and use those errors to not-predict plant growth and pollen movement. Then they take all those failures and run headlong into a medical swamp.
This is lousy science, bad reporting, and incompetent “investigation”.
China must be wishing CO2 caused some damn warming
Beijing this month has had the coldest December since they started measuring the cold in 1951. Obviously, this is because of climate change. Any day now newspapers will start to call this the tragic inevitable result of man-made climate change, reminding us of how we need to send money to renewables, and immediately, or we’ll face so much more of this.
Or maybe journalists will forget how they use every freak warm event as free-advertising for the climate religion:
BEIJING, Dec 24 (Reuters) – China’s capital Beijing has broken its record for hours of sub-zero temperatures in December dating back to 1951, after a cold wave swept swathes of the country and brought blizzards in its wake, sending temperatures towards historic lows.
As of Sunday, a weather observatory in Beijing had recorded more than 300 hours of below-freezing temperatures since Dec. 11, the most for the month since records began in 1951, according to state-backed Beijing Daily.
Naturally cold snaps are due to natural causes like a polar vortex. Strangely, Reuters editors suddenly remember that climate scientists don’t know everything:
However, there is debate among scientists about what part climate change plays in this.
Thanks to having more than half the worlds coal fired power plants, Beijing and a few other Chinese cities have more CO2 in the air above them than pretty much anywhere else in the world.
Strangely no media outlets are telling us that China would have been even colder if it weren’t for CO2.
Finally, the wheel turns and the Greens start to realize their bedfellows might be the environmental wreckers and industrial profiteers that they thought they were working against. Finally there is a point where the price of “climate action” can be too damn high. And somehow, the ends does not always justify the means.
Make no mistake, Bob Brown was the face of the Greens in Australia for decades. He was in politics for 30 years, and Leader of the Australian Greens. He was Mr Green himself on the Australian scene.
Now he’s going further and saying the “free for all” with wind farms must stop. He’s even using the ugly term “profiteers” to describe the Tasmanian government setting up a 200% Renewable Energy Target to soak up carbon penance money out of the mainland. Of course, wind power is still essential (how could he say anything else?) but some of these wind farms — a small number — will do more damage to the environment than they will prevent. The wind farm developers are “not doing it in the service of the planet” you know.
This all very well, but ten years too late. When skeptics were predicting exactly this outcome — that Green policies would wreck the environment, where were the Greens? They weren’t saying “let’s listen to the climate deniers” — or climate deniers are people too you know. All their talk of building communities was the Gucci fashion show of hipster vegans who would just as soon demonize half the population as have a coffee with them.
Who needs maths?
As usual, the Greens biggest failure — and they condemn birds and whales with it every day — is that they can not do maths. They want to micromanage a bit of a wind farm here and a bit there — without doing the sums. To meet their own “climate targets” Australia needs to install 40 wind turbines every month, and 22 thousand solar panels every day. Where will they go? Where exactly will those gigawatts fit among the gum trees, and the ten thousand kilometers of high voltage lines too? That’s eighty million kilometers of transmission lines around the globe. How many trees, bats, birds and koala’s will they kill?
Bob Brown protests at the Adani coal mine at Parliament House. By Andrew Meares, Flickr
Veteran conservationist Bob Brown has turned on sections of the wind industry, accusing some developers of “profiteering” from climate change and not caring about the planet, while warning the wind rush risks accelerating extinctions.
He was concerned the Tasmanian government’s pursuit of a 200 per cent renewable energy target – to allow surplus power to be exported to the mainland – was driven by “profiteering” under the guise of climate action.
The Bob Brown Foundation continues to fight the 100-turbine wind farm proposed for Robbins Island by ACEN Australia.
“The real driving reason for that (200 per cent renewables target) is profiteering by people like ACEN, moving into a lucrative new market which is being forced by the exigencies of climate change,” Dr Brown said.
Bob Brown is also opposed to the windfarm being built to the west of Cairns in the Daintree National Park, a project he calls “appalling”. In that he is correct.
From the press release — the Greens have a vision that we can save the world just by turning off a few appliances at home:
“This is part of humanity’s deliberated destruction of the natural world which sustains all life,” Bob Brown said today.
“Instead of turning off wasted electricity, we will wreck another surviving stronghold of natural wildlife diversity in Australia. It is now up to the Albanese government and national environment minister Tanya Plibersek to protect the cornucopia of nature which Robbins Island holds. They should at least back the Tasmanian EPA position.”
So we keep the 1.5C global safety limit under control just with a few more windfarms and turning off the standby light on the stereo?
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By Jo Nova It’s a dangerous moment in history across the West, but as those in the gulags of 1953 would surely have said, we still have so much to work with. Our Democracies might be unraveling, but the Oligarch’s gambits are also coming undone. Investors are fleeing from wind, solar and exploding EVs. Voters are tossing out bad governments. And more than half the population knows that climate science is a religion. We are the majority, but they don’t want you to know.
It’s been 15 years here on this blog, somehow, outside the system, living off goodwill and donations, debating the U.N. and trillion dollar cartels. Real freedom is writing with no corporate sponsor, and no major advertiser. There’s no billionaire publisher to toss me off, no editor to boss me around, and no committee to answer to. The government can’t take away a grant it never gave me, and the cowards of Cancel Culture can’t scare away advertisers.
I am not dependent on any institution, but I am of course, dependent on you, the reader, which is exactly how it should be. To serve the people direct, instead of serving Disney, Pfizer or the Minister of Misinformation. When no one holds the strings, everyone does.
I don’t ask for a subscription here, just any help you can spare.
The Chinese Communist Party just wants to save the Earth, right?
Even though China is the largest single user of fossil fuels on Earth, for some reason The Energy FoundationChina — an NGO dedicated to worrying about carbon emissions — spent nearly $4 million working on reducing US emissions instead of Sino ones. They also spent some undisclosed amount helping the Grantham Research Institute in London last year. So we have donors in a developing country giving generously to the US and UK because the rich first world is too poor to fund their own environmental philanthropy groups, right?
A climate-focused nonprofit with significant operations in Beijing has wired millions of dollars to fund climate initiatives and environmental groups in the U.S., according to tax filings first obtained by Fox News Digital.
While the Energy Foundation’s financial filings indicate that the group is technically headquartered in San Francisco, a Fox News Digital review determined that the majority of its operations are conducted in China with a staff that boasts extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Its recently filed tax form show the group, which refers to itself as “Energy Foundation China,” contributed $3.8 million to initiatives in the U.S. like phasing out coal and electrifying the transportation sector.
The Fox authors list several examples of how the EFC spends their money on climate policy activism. For example, the Chinese group gave $375,000 to the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) — a non-profit in the US that files legal challenges to stop oil pipelines, drilling, coal plants and other mining activities. The head of the NRDC says they get no money from China, and protests that the Energy Foundation is based in San Francisco, but the Fox authors explain that not only does the group lease office facilities in Beijing, but their CEO and President used to be the deputy director general of China’s National Centre for Climate Change Strategy. The program director of the EFC’s “industry program” spent eight years at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The US Energy Foundation gave birth to the Energy Foundation China
The Fox news article could have explained the relationship of the Energy Foundation with the Energy Foundation China. They are separate now, but for twenty years they were one and the same.
The parent US “Energy Foundation” is so huge it gave an amazing $52 million dollars (US) to groups around the world last year. Ponder that somehow the Energy Foundation China was fully enmeshed as a part of that giant machine from 1999 to 2019.
‘A quintessential “pass through” for donors…’
InfluenceWatch notes that way back in 2014, a US Senate committee already felt the Energy Foundation was a conduit for donors to funnel money to left-wing activism without being easily traced:
A July 2014 report by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works’ Republicans called the Energy Foundation “a quintessential example of a pass through” for donors who want to fund left-wing environmentalist activism while avoiding accountability for traceable connections to activist groups. The report also stated that the foundation, which cannot support political campaigns directly, transfers money to other groups that can thanks to loopholes in the tax code.
More profits and power for China
China controls the rare metals market, builds the wind turbines and solar panels, and now also the EV’s. Obviously, on a pure self-serving business level, the CCP would be crazy if they weren’t amplifying Green fantasia in the West in order to sabotage the competition. And the idea of undermining energy security and the general industrial power base of the West might also appeal to CCP leaders. And hypothetically, if it did, what would stop it happening — investigative reporting from The ABC or the BBC? As if.
Someone just realized that humans emit methane (like cows, camels, mammals, and ancient herds of bison).
The new study shows that humans are generating methane, just like the awful Planet Wrecking Cows. But the truth is that all mammals have probably always produced some methane, and that includes the massive herds of herbivores that used to roam the Earth, when the climate was “perfect”.
The new paper in PLOS One assessed 104 people and found 31% were methane producers like the cows. They calculated the 67 million homo sapiens in the United Kingdom increase the national methane and N2O emissions by as much as… golly, 0.05 – 0.1%. (Despite this trivial and predictable outcome, somehow, they had no trouble getting grants or getting published for studying methane-angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin).
The main thing we learn from this paper is how easy it is to get money to study climate inanities compared to how hard it is to get grants to audit the IPCC or investigate the sun’s role in climate change.
If belches of methane can cause a climate crisis, how, we marvel, did the planet not boil away when 30 million bison roamed the plains of North America? Why was the climate ideal (apparently) when the vast herds of Wildebeest roamed Africa, and Aurochs stretched across Europe?
Turns out nearly all mammals produce methane
In 2020 Clauss et al reviewed the research on and found that it’s not just cows and camels that produce methane, but carnivorous reptiles, ostriches, kangaroos, sea cows and rodents, pretty much everything they looked at. Indeed, they conclude it’s… prudent to assume that all mammals harbour some methanogens, and produce some CH4, until consistently proven otherwise.”
Methane may provide an evolutionary advantage…
Clauss et al also point out there may be an evolutionary advantage to harboring methanogens (the bacteria that produce methane). If that is true, it would explain why methanogens are everywhere across the zoological world. Bizarrely, inside our intestines, methanogens effectively slow peristalsis, so food takes longer to travel through, and is possibly more efficiently absorbed. So methanogens may help animals absorb more carbohydrate calories and get fattened up. In humans, the presence of methanogens is associated with a higher BMI*. Likewise, efforts to feed cows seaweed or foods that reduce methanogens may come at a cost. And in the last seaweed feed trial, the cows gained weight slower than they usually would. We might reduce methane by an amount too small to measure, and reduce the speed of storms by the square root of nothing, but make meat more expensive and stunt the growth of disadvantaged children. But that’s OK apparently.
h/t John Connor II and on Bison: TdeF, Don, Lance, Another Ian, b.nice, Saighdear, David Maddison, Frederick Pegler, GlenM.
*Excess methanogens are also associated with constipation, bloating, malabsorption and quite a few undesirable outcomes. Search for SIBO.
REFERENCES
Dawson B, Drewer J, Roberts T, Levy P, Heal M, Cowan N (2023) Measurements of methane and nitrous oxide in human breath and the development of UK scale emissions. PLoS ONE 18(12): e0295157. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295157
The best kept secret in the world is that humans are using more coal than ever
So much for the “stranded dead asset”. In 2022 the world set a new all-time record for coal use — reaching 8.4 billion tons. In 2023, despite all the Net Zero billions in spending, despite the boom in windmills and solar panels, global demand for coal will top 8.54 billion tons.
The IEA is the “International Energy Agency” — supposedly, the impartial servant of 31 nations worth of taxpayers. Yet they decided to ignore the world record and instead tell us how coal is set to decline. It’s what they think the taxpayers need to hear. Their press release:
It’s almost as if the IEA works for the renewables industry and their banker investors? Mr Vestas himself could hardly have written a more successful headline to hide the truth and gaslight the taxpayers.
The IEA has been predicting the end of coal for years. Back in 2017 the IEA was telling us China would move away from coal, because by 2025-2030 “solar would be cheaper than coal”. Instead, China’s burning more coal than ever before and the quarterly reporting season was a bloodbath for the solar and wind industries as projects get cancelled because their costs are rising.
In 2023 China uses more than half of the total coal on the planet — an extraordinary 4.5 billion tons of that 8.5 billion ton total.
The three largest coal producers in the world are China, India and Indonesia which account for a blockbuster 70% of global production. The IEA is convinced coal use will decline any day now, but China’s growth rate in coal use was 5% in 2023, and India’s was 8%. These are hardly signs of the plateau before the fall.
Note how the IEA add their favourite “projection” at the end
To put some perspective on the success of the renewables transition in reducing coal — Australia has more solar panels per capita than any other nation, and while global coal use is 8,536 Mt, in 2022 Australian coal use declined by all of 5 Mt. We only had to spend ten billion dollars to achieve that:
Overall coal consumption in Australia declined from 100 Mt in 2021 to 95 Mt in
2022 and is estimated to have continued its decrease over the course of 2023 with
a reduction of 4%.
Rejoice, global coal use is six one-hundredth of a percent smaller thanks to the Australian Renewable Energy Target and the Safeguard Mechanism emissions market.
In the West the biggest reductions in coal use have come from exporting factories to China, which of course, don’t cut global coal use at all. And ponder at just how incredibly fast the transition to coal has been — from the West to the East:
This year, China, India and Southeast Asia are set to account for three-quarters of global consumption, up from only about one-quarter in 1990.
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