Recent Posts
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Climate change causes child marriages
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Saturday
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Friday
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Vote Left to get expensive electricity
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Thursday
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Lucky us, The UN deigns to not list the Great Barrier Reef as ‘in danger’ (yet again)
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Wednesday
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Blackouts and maintenance problems hit farmers forced onto solar and batteries in Western Australia
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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One Nation are now the Party of the workers, and Labor the party of wealth and academics
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Saturday
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Net Zero anyone? USA bets big on coal and gas — overtakes China in spending.
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Friday
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Winning: Trump persuades The World Bank to drop its huge spending target on “climate”
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Thursday
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Bafflement?! Germany, a global leader in renewables but has one of the highest EU electricity prices
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Wednesday
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Horse-drawn carriages must have caused a Megadrought in Europe in 1540, right?
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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UK facing devastating 36 degree heat — can’t decide whether to use air conditioners or rip them out
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Saturday
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Batteries failed on day One: A four day wind drought in South Australia wreaks havoc, high prices
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Friday
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The UN wants to be One World Government and it starts with a carbon tax on ships and planes
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Thursday
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What if Global Warming was just because something made the clouds go away…
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Wednesday
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Snowy 2.0 is the Trillion dollar Black Hole of Australia — sucking in energy, money, land, industrial relations, the dollar, our lifestyle
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Winter Solstice
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Saturday
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We were throwing-renewable-energy away at record levels in 2025
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Friday
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Pauline Hanson, the centrist, just wants a free market in electricity, and an end to the renewable energy bribery
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Thursday
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Blame the Climate Yeti again for making your life more expensive! (It’s a smokescreen)
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Wednesday
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The Sunrise Project funneled $343 million from overseas to push net zero
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Tuesday
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Monday
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Sunday
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The US government has been secretly funding 120 dangerous biolabs around the world
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Saturday
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New report shows renewables are a drag on our national productivity
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Friday
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Thursday
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Well, how convenient. AI data centers have arrived to be the fall guy for the Energy Minister
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Where would we be without the internet?
The Skeptics Handbook II was released on Nov 20. If you google the phrase “Skeptics Handbook II”, there are 19,200 hits. Even I am surprised. That is a very specific phrase.
Site traffic has been spectacular in the last two months. Thank you for your help.
For the full year of 2009:
Visitors: 238,435
Page views: 868,491
Comments: 11,852
For December: 66,000 visitors, 270,000 pageviews. About 3000 people each day.
To put this in perspective, New Scientist has 170,000 subscribers, but when I hit back at them I’m reaching 15,000 a week, and it’s salubrious company. Ex-IPCC reviewers, NASA-Apollo program people, DoE experts, Engineers in California (and Florida, and Norway, and Canada) Surgeons in Sydney, Lawyers in London and a whole host of independent thinkers and people who are searching for answers.
Thank you to all those who have helped to inform me, add research, or edit my work. Apologies if I don’t always manage to thank people, sometimes it’s because I’m swamped by the emails.
Thanks to all the people who emailed their political leaders, and just as much to those who emailed their friends. It’s sometimes more work and far more scary to send emails to people we know.
Happy New Year to everyone.
May the internet always be free…
UPDATE: Jan 5, 2010. Traffic hit an astonishing (and expensive) 280Gigabytes in December!
Google hits for “Skeptics Handbook II” rose to 19,700
7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
From the first Skeptics Handbook (p 14-15). The very short answers to questions you might get in a bar, or in the media tent at the UNFCCC. Point 1 below was the single most popular riposte from supporters of the greenhouse theory at COP 13 in Bali.
1. How can so many scientists be wrong?
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- Most scientists are not wrong, but they’re not studying the central question either. Instead they’re researching the effects of warming — not the causes. Whether orangutans in Borneo are facing habitat loss tells us nothing of what drives the weather. Likewise: wind-farm efficiency, carbon sequestration, and insect-borne epidemics. Warm weather changes these things, but these things don’t change the weather.
- Consensus proves nothing. It takes only one scientist to prove a theory wrong. Theories fit the facts or they don’t. Instead of saying “Which side has more PhDs?” a better question is “Where’s the evidence?” Once upon a time, the masses thought the world was flat, that no machine could fly, that the sun went ‘round the Earth.
The only thing we know for sure about climate change is that big government-funded committees will keep going long after their use-by date.
Keep reading →
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
UPDATE: The newer edition has been released here.
Here’s a Spectacular Poster of ClimateGate Covering 3 Decades
You have to see this to believe it. Look up close and admire the detail while you despair at how long science has been going off the rails. To better appreciate the past and what was exposed by the CRU emails, the Timeline chart consolidates and chronologically organizes the information uncovered and published about the CRU emails by many researchers along with some related contextual events. That the chart exists at all is yet another example of how skilled experts are flocking in to the skeptics’ position and dedicating hours of time pro bono because they are passionately motivated to fight against those who try to deceive us.
Click on the image to see it enlarged, but download the full PDF to see the detail.
Download The PDF (788k)
Mohib Ebrahim has created this amazing document. I’ve produced a permanent Home page for this beautiful poster that will host the latest updates as a PDF. There are also printable versions in A4, A3, A2, US Letter and US Tabloid for those of you (like me) who need printed versions on which scribble, and scrawl exclamation marks.
Timeline home page
Thanks also to Curt, an editor who has been dedicated behind the scenes with some of my recent posts, and also with the introduction and lists here. But, if you see an editorial error, blame me 🙂
Here are a few select screen shots so you have some idea of what this document shows. Click on the images just to pop-up readable close-ups.
Keep reading →
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
Thanks to Dr. Mensur Omerbashich for translating the Handbook into the common languages* of most of the Balkans: Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian. Mensur is a theoretical geophysicist from USA with PhD from Canada, who also is a certified court interpreter in Bosnia.
Send this link to your friends in the former Yugoslav republics. This translation will be understandable to Bosnians, Croatians, Serbians, Montenegrins, including most of Slovenians, Macedonians and Kosovars. Around 25-30 million people.
Mensur suggested that ideally someone could volunteer to do localizations into Croatian proper, or Serbian proper.
There is a larger 5Mb version for better printing here.
* I use the term “common language” loosely. There is so little agreement about it, I gather there is not even a proper name of this “language”. It’s more a overlapping common collection of several languages, sometimes referred to just as BCS or Bosnian/Serbo-Croatian. (Correct me if I’m wrong).
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
Imagine a third world nation was mired in corruption so deeply that the ruling class were able to stealthily steal the rights to vast acreage of private property from landowners without paying any compensation.
Imagine that one of the victims of this injustice had approached every court of the land and had not even had his case heard, even after more than 200 attempts. In desperation, and with no other avenue available, having officially “lost the farm”, he starts a hunger strike, which has now gone for 28 52 days unbroken, threatening to starve to death if he has to.
Welcome to Australia — right on track for Third World Status.
Get ready to be shocked.
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10 out of 10 based on 5 ratings
A funny thing happened this week. Humanity did a low-orbit bypass of a totalitarian world government, and pulled away, but only a few noticed the near miss.
Christopher Monckton has already spoken about the draft treaty with it’s message of setting up a new form of global governance, but without any mention of voting. He spoke again yesterday to Alex Jones and pointed out that in a sense Copenhagen succeeded, despite what everyone is saying. After all, it was never really about saving the environment was it? It was about setting up a world government, and they got the odd $30 billion dollars. Not bad for a failure.
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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
Source: Satirical Press
In breakthrough news today, The United Nations announced they had found The Global Thermostat to control the Earth’s temperature.
With 45,000 people searching for the controls in Copenhagen at the Bella Convention Center, commentators were shocked when it turned up instead in a closet in the basement of the World Meterological Organization (WMO) headquarters in Geneva.
“It’s a landmark day for human-kind” said Rajendra Pachuri, Chairman of the IPCC.
Barack Obama stood for a standing ovation that lasted 23 minutes and said: “It gives us all hope”.
Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia: “We wouldn’t have found this without Obama’s magic touch. Obama rolled up his sleeves in Copenhagen, and the ancient Sumerian map fell out of his shirt.”
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10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
Disaster averted
There has been no breakthrough at Copenhagen.
Barak Obama has spoken, and the crowd was disappointed. He was visibly angry.
China and India have walked out. The West did not offer enough.
The departure of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was a major snub for the Western congregation, and guarantees that nothing binding or significant will arise out of Copenhagen. The walkout was exactly what they vowed to do in to the strategic plan they announced a few weeks ago.
The draft treaty has become the Copenhagen Accord, and deadlines have been dropped or postponed.
Keep reading →
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
…
Richard Black from the BBC won’t name me or link to me. Is he scared of sending people my way? Afraid my arguments are too compelling? He claims the evidence for man-made global warming is overwhelming, and he’s wondering why more women aren’t skeptics, so surely he would help his readers if he directed them to the two Australian bloggers he specifically refers to: Jennifer Marohasy and myself.
In fact, across the entire sceptical landscape, as far as I can see, the female contingent numbers one UK columnist, a couple of Australian bloggers, UK academic Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen and US counterpart Sallie Baliunas…
But thanks for the backhanded endorsement, Richard, I’m delighted to find out you read my blog and I can tell you exactly why women don’t leap to announce they are skeptics. All you had to do was email me to ask…
Keep reading →
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
Skeptics are growing in number and becoming more confident. Yesterday, CFACT unfurled a banner on the Rainbow Warrior in Copenhagen.
Rather cheekily, global warming skeptics used GPS triangulation from Greenpeace’s own on-board camera photos to find the infamous boat, the Rainbow Warrior. Then the activists unfurled the banner.
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7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
You might think journalists at a popular science magazine would be able to investigate and reason.
In DenierGate, watch New Scientist closely, as they do the unthinkable and try to defend gross scientific malpractice by saying it’s OK because other people did other things a little bit wrong (that were not related) a long time ago. Move along ladies and gentlemen, there’s nothing to see…
The big problem for this formerly good publication is that they have decided already what the answer is to any question on climate-change (and the answer could be warm or cold but it’s always ALARMING). That leaves them clutching for sand-bags to prop up their position as the king-tide sweeps away any journalistic credibility they might have had.
I’ve added my own helpful notes into the New Scientist article, just so you get the full picture.
Keep reading →
8.9 out of 10 based on 8 ratings
Some scientists just keep looking in the wrong places for answers. Here’s Stephan Lewandowsky, professorial fellow of psychology, in The Age trying to answer the most important question in modern science and economics. He refers to ClimateGate and asks if the stunning accusations of serious misconduct are true? Watch the flat out assertion backed by a non-sequiteur:
They are not. Even if we presume that the stolen material is authentic, the notion that climate data is being nefariously withheld is fantastical.
This does not even make sense within the confines of it’s punctuation. Is there a new Natural Law of Thermodynamics that says it’s impossible to withhold data? The data is gone, even Phil Jones, head of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit admits he has withheld it and won’t ever provide it:
“The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.”
We know the emails are real. Phil Jones has said as much. He admits he has withheld data for years, and that he’ll delete it as well if he has too. So it’s not “fantastical” to think that data is being withheld, it’s documented.
Then Lewandowsky claims the “data is freely available”. But that’s not true either according to Phil Jones himself who told Roger Pielke Jnr the original global records were gone:
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10 out of 10 based on 6 ratings
Ice cores reveal that CO2 levels rise and fall hundreds of years after temperatures change
In 1985, ice cores extracted from Greenland revealed temperatures and CO2 levels going back 150,000 years. Temperature and CO2 seemed locked together. It was a turning point—the “greenhouse effect” captured attention. But, in 1999 it became clear that carbon dioxide rose and fell after temperatures did. By 2003, we had better data showing the lag was 800 ± 200 years. CO2 was in the back seat.
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8 out of 10 based on 25 ratings
Clive Hamilton (failed Greens candidate and “intellectual” Australian) couldn’t persuade skeptical adults he’s right about carbon pollution, so instead of improving his arguments, he’s trying the same lines out on our kids.
This is a message for parents in response to Clive Hamilton’s letter to children of “deniers”.
Hi there,
Clive Hamilton has written to your kids. If you’re like me, almost everything he said about you was a lie. How do you answer your children if they say “you are paid a lot of money to try to stop laws about pollution and what you do will kill poor kids?”
After you explain the truth, and point out that this man, a) wouldn’t know, and b) has an interest in promoting the fake scare, it might be time to give them a skill for life. The most dangerous people in the world are the ones who pretend to have good intentions, and there’s a way to tell the fake heroes from the real ones.
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10 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
A denier has many tactics to stop people talking about evidence. The real deniers here are those pushing a fake crisis.
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10 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
Thanks to Jorn in Germany for the graphic (with my additions)
The collateral damage from the emails is large
ClimateGate doesn’t just bring down the scientists who wrote the emails, it brings down all the institutions and organizations that were supposed to have exacting standards and ought to have exposed the crimes years ago. The men whose work was so bogus, were lauded by the IPCC, published in Nature and Science, and defended by the National Academy of Science.
This evidence of collusion, falsification, hiding data, and consistent deceit blows away the infrastructures of the practice of science. It doesn’t hurt the scientific method, but it destroys the premise that the IPCC expert review means anything, that peer review is capable of even picking up outright fraud, and that the National Academy of Science is functional.
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10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
Al Gore describes how carbon dioxide beats up Mr Sunbeam and stops him leaving the atmosphere. But he “forgot” to mention that clouds reflect around a quarter of all the sunlight that hits the earth. Those beams of light travel all the way from the sun to get bounced off into space when they are just a few kilometers from the ground.
Any change in cloud cover makes a major difference. The IPCC assumes clouds respond to warming, but clouds could easily drive the warming.
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7.8 out of 10 based on 8 ratings
If there was enough money, fame and power on the table (think seismic proportions, money that moves the economic landscape), would it be possible to take a small unproven scientific theory as an excuse and, with the best PR teams in the world, promote it, support it, and make it appear unquestionable?
If it were cloaked in the most “innocent” of motives, and shrouded in terminology that veils the truth, would it not run unchecked for years, unless some big vested interest opposed it? And if there was no particular big vested interest to oppose it, isn’t it possible that if the only harm it causes is to the giant disorganized mass known as humankind, there would be no committee of humankind to check its momentum.
On Watts Up tonight, we get some insight into just one specific example of how corrupt science can be. It’s yet another day in the history of the climate-scam where people may say years from now… remember that night we got the news about Darwin? Thanks to Willis Eschenbach’s dedicated analysis.
The blue line is the raw unadjusted data from Darwin. There are five stations there and their records are a very tight fit. It’s unusual for all five stations to agree with each other. Yet one of the three top climate centres in the world has “adjusted the data” using corrections that are graphed in black. (More artificial adjustments?) The raw data shows a trend down of 0.7 degrees C per century. After adjustment, the data “shows” a trend up of 1.2 degrees warming per century. It’s the scale of this shift that is so brazen. We’re supposed to be looking for a rise of one fifth of a degree per decade, and that statistical adjustment gave us half that rise.
Could Darwin be a local anomaly?
If Darwin had some freak local conditions, then we would expect to see the raw data in graphs from other top-end towns as trending much higher. Here are the graphs for Wyndham, Derby, Halls Creek and Broome. The graphs are from WA Climate Net, an excellent data set. Direct, Broome is 1100 km from Darwin, or 690 miles. (By road, it’s 1876 km from Darwin). (Thanks to MapCrow for the distances). I thought I would post these graphs to give people a rough idea of the historical warming across the far tropical north of Australia.
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10 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
There were 12 of us skeptics among 12,000 believers at the Bali UNFCCC in 2007. We were a rag-tag team of passionate people, some of whom had PhDs, and most of whom were not paid to be there. We came because we were angry about the way science was being exploited.
It was a convention on a scale I had not seen before. Not just 2,000 for a weekend, which would be big, but 12,000 for two entire weeks, which was an extravaganza.
12,000 people for an two entire weeks was an extravaganza.
The UNFCCC meetings define the term “junket”. These mass climate conventions happen every year in locations like Nairobi (Kenya), Poznan (Poland), Montreal (Canada), Buenos Aires (Argentina), and Milan in Italy. Copenhagen is COP 15, meaning there have been 14 before it. (And at two weeks each, that’s over six months of non-stop PR and “staff incentives”.) Is there any larger yearly congregation in the world?
From the outset the UNFCCC did everything it could to maintain the appearance that it is a fair, transparent, and scientific based organization. Yet on the ground, it did everything it could to make sure that there would be no dissent, no debate, and no free speech unless it was their official line.
The UN are not trying to promote humanities search for knowledge, instead they exploit climate science as a tool to increase their own power. Once again the western media let down the public. The UN got away with being anti-science, and anti-free-speech. The tactics and incidents described below seem minor, but it’s indicative of a deeper systematic censorship what we’ve seen in their assessment reports. Only the light of the media would keep the UN on it’s leash, and the western media are out to lunch.
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10 out of 10 based on 17 ratings
The two by-elections in Australia this weekend were meant to be a “bloodbath” for the conservative Liberal Party right? After all, the Liberal Party have had their worst two weeks in history, where they were described as “imploding” over the ETS (Emissions Trading Legislation), and just elected a rather unexpected new leader. The two electoral seats were also held by high profile leaders who’ve resigned (former Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson and former Treasurer Peter Costello).
George Megalogenis said, “Tony Abbot could not have wished for two less friendly seats to test his leadership”.
Analyst Malcolm Mackerras was adamant that climate change would play a critical role in the calculations of voters on Saturday. [Here]. He was utterly confident the Greens would win (and that was only two days ago).
“…Higgins and Bradfield would be the electorates in which people most strongly feel resentment at climate change denialists,” he said. “That is why electing Abbott was a complete disaster. They will get a terrible shock on Saturday night, they really will.”
And the “complete shock” was a shock for Mackerras instead. The Liberal Party did just fine.
Keep reading →
10 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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