Monday

StopTheseThings — a well known Australian blog opposing wind turbines has been suspended from WordPress.

Anyone have a contact email?

h/t Jock, and Nick C.

 

8.8 out of 10 based on 29 ratings

Sunday

8.4 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

New study of consensus entrails shows 67% of papers don’t accept Man-made-climate-catastrophe

By Jo Nova

Witch doctorsA new paper tries to clean up the chicken entrail decrees of Mark Lynas  (and earlier of John Cook) and concludes that their methodology is so bad, a 99.85% consensus could just as easily have been 32%.

All the papers in between 32 and 99% were neutral on the cause of man-made climate catastrophes, but Lynas et al bundled them in with the believer pack and made hay in the global media. This was even though many of the “neutral” papers showed results that didn’t fit the consensus. But who cares about results eh?  If an abstract was neutral, it was therefore a “sign” the authors believed — like reading their tea leaves, or laying out the entrails. (Either that or it was a sign scientists who question the dogma get sacked, lose funding, and get uninvited to laboratory barbeques, but, shh! We won’t mention that.) So Lynas assumes that as long as a scientist doesn’t specifically say they disagree, they de facto endorse the “consensus”.

Why do people who call themselves scientists even talk about a “consensus”?

Obviously if believers had evidence, they’d talk about that instead.

Climate thought is 99% pure todayDentelski et al do an admirable job of pointing out galactic level bias, grand flaws and wild assumptions of Lynas, but the central fallacy of The Global Industry of Sciencery is barely mentioned. Why do people who call themselves scientists even talk about using consensuses as an instrument of “Truth Seeking”? The whole idea that truth can be figured out by interpreting the first paragraph of industry publications is a parody of science. It’s a fallacy of science (or three at once).

We might as well add up the funding offered to each side of a theory and declare the issue settled.  99% of climate funding is paid to scientists who don’t rock the boat, therefore climate sensitivity on the third rock from the sun is 3.3 degrees…

If the opinions of scientists counted in science, we’d just survey them directly anyway instead of conducting seances on abstracts. But when we do, the consensus blows away. Outside the star chamber of the IPCC junkets, half of Meteorologists and two thirds of Engineers and Geologists flatly didn’t agree. There’s nothing remotely like a consensus in the world of science in the hideously complex and immature world of climate prophesies. Those polling results were done in 2017 and 2012, but the results scared the science pollsters so much, they have been too frightened to ask them ever since.

Consensus is the problemIf the magic wand of “consensus” worked, research could be so much cheaper. Who needs the satellites and thermometers, when opinions cost so little?

As Kenneth Richards says at No Tricks Zone: 67% Of Scientific Papers Can Be Said To Reject The AGW Hypothesis…

Of the 3,000 papers analyzed in Lynas et al., 282 were deemed not sufficiently “climate-related.” Another 2,104 papers were placed in Category 4, which meant either the paper’s authors took “no position” or the position on AGW was deemed “uncertain”…in the abstract. So, exploiting the “if you are not against, you are for” classification bias, Lynas and colleagues decided that the authors of these 2,104 scientific papers in Category 4 do indeed agree with AGW, as what is written in the abstract does not explicitly state they do not agree.

Interestingly, if this classification bias had not been utilized and the thousands of Category 4 (“no position” or “uncertain”) papers were not counted as supporting AGW, only 892 of the 2,718 (climate-related) papers, or 32%, could be said to have affirmatively stated they support AGW. So, simply by assuming one cannot divine the AGW opinions of authors of scientific papers by reading abstracts, it could just as facilely be said that 67% (1,826 of 2,718) of climate-related papers reject AGW.

As I’ve said before, these junk consensus studies are merely sociological surveys of the purity of government funding:

Given the $7 billion in funding from the US government for the 2015 financial year, marked for climate science and clean energy, it is hardly surprising that there are a lot of papers about “climate change” and “global warming”. There are a lot of people studying how big the crisis might be, how to solve the crisis we might be having, and what the effects of this crisis might be (if we are having one). What there is not, are institutions of people specifically tasked to investigate how minor CO2 is, how beneficial it is, or to assess if the Sun controls most of our climate. Around the Western world there is no government funding specifically to audit or find problems with the man-made global warming theory. There are no programs with the sole purpose of finding natural causes to provide the counter arguments ($0). The purity is near complete. Skeptics mostly have to fund themselves. That’s a very high barrier to publication.

In a complex science, purity of opinion is a bad sign.

REFERENCES

Dentelski, David, Ran Damari, Yanir Marmor, Avner Niv, Mor Roses, and Yonatan Dubi. (2023) “Ninety-Nine Percent? Re-Examining the Consensus on the Anthropogenic Contribution to Climate Change” Climate 11, no. 11: 215. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli11110215

Lynas, M.; Houlton, B.Z.; Perry, S. Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Environ. Res. Lett. 2021, 16, 114005. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]

Cook, J.; Nuccitelli, D.; Painting, R.; Honeycutt, R.; Skuce, A.; Jacobs, P.; Green, S.A.; Lewandowsky, S.; Richardson, M.; Way, R.G. Reply to ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature: A re-analysis’. Energy Policy 2014, 73, 706–708. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]

Cook, J.; Nuccitelli, D.; Green, S.A.; Richardson, M.; Winkler, B.; Painting, R.; Way, R.; Jacobs, P.; Skuce, A. Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environ. Res. Lett. 2013, 8, 024024. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]

Cook, J.; Cowtan, K. Reply to Comment on ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature’. Environ. Res. Lett. 2015, 10, 039002. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]

Art: Witchdoctors: US CDC

 

 

10 out of 10 based on 91 ratings

Saturday

10 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Auroras possible tonight as Cannibal CME arrives

Paul Hoelen, Mortimer Bay, Hobart, Tasmania

UPDATE: I want to see an aurora, but living at 32S in Perth, Australia, this is like hoping to see the NorthernLights in Jerusalem or San Diego. No luck for me tonight, but there was one report from Geraldton 400km north of us (28.7S). Hopefully sometime in the next year during the solar max…

A quick note to say a CME just hit Earth, and some people may be able to see an aurora tonight that wouldn’t normally see one. A severe Kp 7 Geomagnetic storm is in progress (BOM estimate). Kp 7 is the bottom end of what is classed as a “severe” geomagnetic storm with Kp 8 and 9 being bigger (and even rarer).

Reports on X (Twitter): #AuroraAustralis   #Auroraborealis

Southern Hemisphere data — BOM 3 day Geomagnetic Indices | Northern Hemisphere: SpaceWeatherLive

Spaceweather.com

Keep reading  →

9.4 out of 10 based on 31 ratings

Friday

7.8 out of 10 based on 23 ratings

EV’s report 80% more problems than petrol, diesel cars

EV, Car breakdown. Repair.

By Jo Nova

Add it to the list. A survey of owners of 330,000 vehicles found that EV’s experience 80% more problems than petrol and gas powered cars.

So EV’s cost more to fuel, take longer to arrive on long distance journeys. They sometimes burn down ships, destroy airport carparks, and kidnap drivers. They are a national security risk, and a burden on electrical grids. Because they are heavier they create more potholes, wear out tyres faster, increase road noise and air pollution (from tyre particles). They also increase wear and tear on bridges and multistory carparks.

EV’s are on the verge of becoming uninsurable partly because near new EV’s may have to be written off after a scratch, and all EV’s need large empty spaces to be stored so they don’t destroy the cars around them.

And in the end, they barely reduce national fuel consumption, and no one even knows if EV’s will reduce CO2 emissions.

On average, electric vehicles are less reliable than other cars and trucks, Consumer Reports finds

By Tom Kriser, CBC News

Electric vehicles have proved far less reliable, on average, than gasoline-powered cars, trucks and SUVs, according to the latest survey by Consumer Reports, which found that EVs from the 2021 through 2023 model years encountered nearly 80 per cent more problems than did vehicles propelled by internal combustion engines.

Consumer Reports said EV owners most frequently reported troubles with battery and charging systems as well as flaws in how the vehicles’ body panels and interior parts fit together. The magazine and website noted that EV manufacturers are still learning to construct completely new power systems, and it suggested that as they do, the overall reliability of electric vehicles should improve.

Some problems are worse than others:

Keep reading  →

9.6 out of 10 based on 106 ratings

Germany: You will own a car and a heater but you can’t use them

Fantasy, floating, home, house, sky, mountain, surreal, dystopia.

By Jo Nova

Oh the irony — Green heat pumps and EV’s will need to be curtailed on a Green Grid

We’re watching the real time collapse of parts of the “Climate Industry” in on itself. The left eats its own. The EV’s and heat pumps the German government was coercing people to use are so incompatible with unreliable expensive energy, they will be among the first appliances to be restricted in the new clean green economy.

The truth is — Solar and wind power can’t power EV’s. In Germany the network regulator is working on ways to limit electricity to hungry EV’s and heat pumps so they don’t crash the grid.

The federal grid agency will throttle the charging power so EV’s will get just enough charge for a 50 kilometer trip from two hours of charging. Home owners will be offered a discount if they give control of their chargers to the government. Effectively the rich will charge their car or turn on their heater whenever they want. The poor will “save” €110 to €190 they never needed to spend with their old car or their old heater, and go withou electricity at peak times.

EV chargers, heat pumps may be curtailed in Germany as of 2024

By Nikolaus J. Kurmayer | Euractiv.com

Germany’s residential grid operators will be empowered to restrict the flow of power to heat pumps and electric vehicle (EV) chargers from 2024 in order to preserve the stability of the grid, which is suffering from chronic underinvestment.

Did you see what they did there? Renewable energy requires a massive new infrastructure and network build to connect up low density energy collectors. Saying that the grid is suffering “chronic underinvestment” implies this new and unnecessary cost was somehow meant to have been built and paid for already. They blame the grid for not already solving the failures of wind and solar power.

This also applies to EV’s and heat pumps. It was obvious they would need more electricity, so this is a belated ploy to blame “investors” effectively for not building the coal and nuclear plants, they weren’t allowed to build, in order to keep the EV’s and heat pumps running…

Across Europe, investments into grids are lagging behind what’s needed as the continent embraces heat pumps and electric vehicles.

“Waiting time for permits for grid reinforcements are between 4-10 years, and 8-10 years for high voltages,” the European Commission said on Tuesday (28 November) as it unveiled a new Action Plan to accelerate the deployment of electricity grids.

“Grids need to be an enabler, not a bottleneck in the clean energy transition,” said Kadri Simson, the EU’s energy commissioner.

Blaming the grid is code for “blaming the taxpayer” for not already giving the Green industry all the things it needs so it can make a profit.

You will own nothing and feel grateful to get any electricity at all…

Car stick in snow

Australia, this is our future if we keep following Germany.

h/t NetZeroWatch

Floating rock house image by Reto Scheiwiller  |  

Frozen Jeep by (Joenomias) Menno de Jong

 

 

 

10 out of 10 based on 107 ratings

Thursday

9.4 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Rare signs of democracy in New Zealand — Govt asking if UN “Treaty” is in the national interest?

Eagle Mountain, NZ

By Jo Nova

Something promising across the Tasman Sea

WHO World Health OrganisationThe newly elected government in NZ is a three party coalition, promising tax cuts and less red tape. It’s barely been sworn in, yet somehow it already has the bright idea of checking whether deals with foreign conglomerate governments (like the UN) “pass the national interest test”. This is the same sort of test foreign conglomerate companies are also supposed to pass.

It sounds brilliant, but also like the bleeding obvious. This is what democratic governments are supposed to do, every deal and every day, right? Yet in 2023, it’s seems like such a radical right wing suggestion. So often our governments are serving someone else…

The conservatives have their sights set (justifiably) on the The UN’s Pandemic Preparedness Treaty. That’s due to be adopted in theory, next May. However The UN International Health Regulations is due to be sneakily accepted by default on Thursday. Hopefully the new NZ govt can fire off a quick letter to get NZ out of that tomorrow, making Australian and other global leaders look really silly (traitorously stupid) if they don’t. See James Roguski for more on that.

New Kiwi Government to Challenge WHO’s Pandemic Treaty

A new ‘national interest’ test will consider whether the Treaty limits government decision-making.

By Henry Jorn, The Epoch Times

The “national interest test” proposed by New Zealand’s newly formed coalition—including the National Party, ACT, and NZ First—will be applied before accepting any “agreements from the UN and its agencies that limit national decision-making and reconfirm that New Zealand’s domestic law holds primacy over any international agreements.”

The Pandemic Treaty is one example of a UN agreement.

In November 2021, New Zealand and other World Health Organisation (WHO) Member States agreed to establish an Intergovernmental Negotiating Body to draft a Pandemic Treaty.

However, following the conclusion of public submissions on the pandemic treaty on Aug. 11, 2022, a common theme (pdf) was a concern that a new pandemic instrument would require “New Zealand to relinquish control of our domestic decision-making processes during a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) to the WHO, or otherwise reduce autonomy at the individual or country level.”

Here in Australia, the Foreign Minister says the WHO will have no legal authority to force things on us.  (It will only have the right to do sneakery, deception, graft and intimidation, with unbridled help from all our academics, media, and our retirement funds).

The Guardian is already campaigning against the new Luxon government, so we know it’s off to a good start.

There is hope.

hat tip to Mayday.

Image by Ondřej Šponiar

9.9 out of 10 based on 101 ratings

Wednesday

8.8 out of 10 based on 11 ratings

New York narrowly missed a disaster last Christmas Eve: gas pipes froze and 127GW of electricity vanished

Dystopian Fantasy city. Dark. Doom. Death.

By Jo Nova

Our cities are more fragile than we imagine

During the winter storm called “Elliott” last Christmas, gas pipes came close to freezing in New York. The gas shortages are not just deadly themselves in cold weather, but more of the electrical network is dependent on gas now rather than coal, and therein lies double jeopardy. As the gas crisis escalated, so did the electrical one: at its worst there were “90,500 megawatts of coincident unplanned generation unit outages, derates and failures… “. This was on top of 37,000 megawatts of generation that was already out of service, so 127 gigawatts in toto*. Some 18% of the normal resources of the Eastern Interconnection was missing.

At 4:25am on Christmas Eve in North Eastern USA the grid frequency fell to 59.936 Hz, just below the trigger point of 59.95 Hz.

If the gas had stopped flowing completely during the big freeze that lasted five days, water pipes would have frozen, and not only would the water stop flowing out of taps, and toilets stop flushing, but pipes would have burst — rendering thousands of apartment blocks and offices unusable, and possibly water damaged too.

Somehow, like a disaster movie script — 8.5 million people in New York City would need to be evacuated in the midst of  this frozen crisis. They’d need to live somewhere else, while the slow tedious work of repairing and rebuilding the system would take months. Gas networks are far slower to restore than electrical blackouts. Robert Boyce tells how in one gas crisis in Washington State, 35,000 customers lost gas and the gas-company  had to send someone out to every customer, firstly to turn off the gas meters, and then later when the line was fixed, they had to send someone out to light the pilot lights on every property. Even with more than 1,000 people working on the problem it still took nearly a week to restore gas services.

In New York, Con Edison, the company that nearly lost the gas system, has 1.1 million customers.

Via SmallDeadAnimals

Bone-Chilling

Last Christmas, the U.S. narrowly averted an energy disaster that would have decimated New York City and killed thousands

By Robert Bryce

In bone-dry language, the report “Inquiry into Bulk-Power System Operations During December 2022 Winter Storm Elliott,” explains how the gas pipeline network in New York nearly failed last Christmas when temperatures plummeted during the bomb cyclone. Freeze-related production declines, combined with soaring demand from power plants, homes, and businesses, led to shortages of gas throughout the Northeast. The lack of gas, as well as mechanical and electrical issues, resulted in an “unprecedented” loss of electric generation capacity totaling some 90,000 megawatts. While the lack of electricity was dangerous, the possibility of a loss of pressure in the natural gas network should send a bone-chilling shiver through the sacroiliac of every politician and bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., New York and the Northeast.

The report explains that if the gas pipeline system had failed, the recovery process in New York City would have taken “months.”

Hold your breath, this is not a freak rare event. The FERC report states this was the fifth in the last 11 years in which cold weather outages “jeopardized grid reliability”.

The US has become very dependent on natural gas, but there are risks…

Over the last few decades the US energy networks have been transformed with cheap shale gas. But as Robert Boyce explains, gas is a “just in time” fuel, unlike coal which can be stored on site in quantities large enough to survive a short crisis, or uranium, which can run for a couple of years.

It appears policymakers have been numbed into complacency about large generation outages and near-catastrophic misses over the past decade that include events like Winter Storms Uri and Elliott. But this latest near-catastrophe must be put into context. As mentioned above, NERC and FERC have repeatedly warned that the electric grid has become too dependent on natural gas. I love natural gas. And the increased use of gas (at the expense of coal) in the power sector has helped the U.S. cut its carbon dioxide emissions more than any other country in the world. But unlike coal­ ­— and the enriched uranium that fuels a nuclear power plant­­— gas is a just-in-time fuel. That makes it vulnerable to disruptions in service. And if gas supplies run short, so will electricity supplies.

The Billionaire SuperClass is working to make everything worse:

In all, [Michael] Bloomberg has committed more than $1 billion to a group of radical NGOs­­ — including the League of Conservation Voters, Sierra Club, Rocky Mountain Institute, and Earthjustice, all of which have operating budgets of more than $100 million per year ­­— who are aiming to undermine the integrity, affordability, and resilience of our electric grid.

The punchline here is obvious: America’s critical energy networks are nearing catastrophic breaking points due to underinvestment in reliable sources of fuel and generation, and by that, I mean pipelines, nuclear plants, and coal- and gas-fired power plants.

The Eastern Interconnection is huge, and outages were rife:

USA Eastern Interconnector Grid.

Figure 2: Location and Fuel Type of Unplanned Generation Outages and Derates During the Event (Bubble Size by MW for each Outage), as of December 24, 202

h/t AnotherIan

*Was (doh) megawatts typo. Apologies.

Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 81 ratings

Tuesday

9.1 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

Monday

7.6 out of 10 based on 31 ratings

Sunday

8.2 out of 10 based on 24 ratings

Saturday

8.9 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

“Shocked”: Far right climate deniers get more votes than any other party

By Jo Nova

Everywhere there are free and fair elections and a politically biased media, people will be shocked.

What does “far right” even mean when it applies to a quarter of the population?

Netherlands Flag

. ..

It means name-calling is embedded in our vocabulary. Geert Wilder’s party has won 37 seats in the Netherlands election with 24% of the vote — more than any other party. There are 150 seats in total in the Dutch Parliament, so it’s not clear what the final winning coalition will look like. What is clear is that environmentalists hate it:

‘4 years of climate change denial’: Dutch environmental groups react to far-right election swing

by Ian Smith, EuroNews

Environmental groups have expressed shock and promised climate action in response to Dutch election results. Wednesday night saw the historic victory of the far right Party for Freedom (PVV).

“We are shocked,” Extinction Rebellion Netherlands says. “This outcome will likely mean a rollback of climate measures, new fossil investments, exclusion of marginalised groups, and more.”

If far-right applies to a quarter of the population, and the Greens appeal to a much smaller slice, it’s only fair they be called the extreme-left, yes?.

How many votes is it worth when a party is gifted a “label” by the media day in and day out. How many people would have voted for a “Centre Right” party who would not even consider “the far right”? It could be a 2 – 5% advantage right there.

Left leaning players cheat and deceive with language every day, and the Right let them get away with it.

We  need to fight for our language, for consistent words.

So let’s mock the partisan reporters who keep calling the center Right, the far-right. “We know which way you vote”. Ask them to define their terms.

There’s a trend across Europe — Victor Orban (Hungary), Geiorgia Meloni (Italy), Sweden, Finland…

Geert Wilders’ shock victory in the Netherlands creates fear as Europe eyes another hard-right win

By Bruno Waterfield, The Australian

Once renowned for tolerance, stability, liberalism and its pro-European credentials, one of the EU’s wealthiest nations is now a seething hotbed of discontent.

If it were only the Netherlands that would be bad enough, but most of the discontents and political trends that have propelled Wilders to victory are writ large across the EU.

Congratulations to Geert Wilders and his team, and to Javier Milei who won 56% of the vote in Argentina this week too. In the latter’s case, he’s not just “far right” but fully anti-science, according to Nature —  the science journal that appears to think science is defined by government funding, not by evidence.

‘Extremely worrying’: Argentinian researchers reel after election of anti-science president

Martín De Ambrosio & Fermín Koop, Nature

As part of his plan to address the country’s economic crisis, Javier Milei has promised to slash research funding and shut down key science agencies.

The result brings much uncertainty for Argentina’s science community. Milei and other members of his party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances), have pledged to shut down or possibly privatize the country’s main science agency, the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), as well as to eliminate the ministries of health, science and the environment.

So 56% of Argentian voters are climate skeptics:

‘A massive setback’

Milei has also called climate change is a “socialist hoax”, comments that have stirred concern in the science community. “His position is typical of a denier,” says Matilde Rusticucci, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Buenos Aires

Good to know next time someone says a skeptic is unelectable.

–Flag photo: Dutchgamer(Yusuf Babayusuf)

 

 

 

 

10 out of 10 based on 126 ratings

Friday

9.5 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

Australian government throws giant pile of money at renewables — so big, the cost is a secret

Treasure Chest of glowing gold.

By Jo Nova

The Australian Government is building magical weather machines with large amounts of our children’s money, and they won’t even tell us what it will cost. Dear Sir, we’re here to fix the car you didn’t know was broken, give us your wallet? We’ll just help ourselves to your cash and won’t tell you what this costs, OK? (It must cost a fortune, because if it were cheap we’d tell you).

The Labor government promised impossible Net Zero things, and 18 months later everyone knows it is impossible. Renewable investment has ground to a halt, people are not buying EV’s,  farmers don’t want the transmission lines, coastal towns don’t want the wind towers, project costs are doubling and tripling, and Florence the borer is still stuck in a very short hole that is meant to be a long one.

Instead of backing away slowly, the Labor Party have gone full Santa-wish-fairy.

Just like that — the plan for 6 gigawatts of unreliable generators will become 7, wait, I mean, 32 gigawatts. Wow.

The Australian grid uses about 30 gigawatts of generation, and already has 65 gigawatts of equipment to generate that. It took three generations to build and pay off, but we’re adding 32 GW this decade….

Chris Bowen gambles with taxpayers’ cash to hit renewables target

Geoff Chambers, The Australian

Taxpayers will underwrite a five-fold increase in new government-backed renewables capacity across Australia, as Chris Bowen gambles on a dramatic market intervention to secure grid reliability and achieve Labor’s ambitious target of 82 per cent renewables by 2030.

If the market won’t build crazy loss-making unreliable generation machines, the government will.

They force us to pay, but they can’t even tell us what it costs:

The program will be expanded from its initial mandate to underwrite 6 gigawatts of renewable energy projects to 32GW, with the cost to taxpayers being kept secret under commercial-in-confidence provisions.

And before you object to whale-killing, wedgetail-eagle-whacking and mowing down of forests, we’ll just clear out red tape for massive industrial projects:

Mr Bowen will also strike deals with states and territories to fast-track major renewables projects.

Is this the part where the Greens realize what a monster they have created?

All this money, so they can impress their friends with private jets at the UN:

Ahead of attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, Mr Bowen said the government was taking unprecedented action on renewables to avoid blackouts and energy price rises as coal generators shut down.

The new scheme is called the Capacity Investment Scheme. The government is  now your financial advisor, and they are picking winners. Be afraid.

Image by Franz Bachinger from Pixabay

 

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 136 ratings

Thursday

9 out of 10 based on 13 ratings