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By Jo Nova
Fossil Fuels destroy skyscrapers now
The storms of 2,100 have gone underground and are wrecking your city as we speak. Climate Change has is weakening the foundations, shifting the ground underneath you.
If you don’t install enough solar panels, soon buildings will fall on your head.
Horror movie at 8pm. News headline for breakfast. What’s the difference?
This is the headline tonight in Scientific American, and many other media outlets:
Allison Parshall, Scientific American, July 11th 2023
The headline makes no sense at all unless you view it through the lens of the climate cult. It’s as if the words “climate change” have become a substitute for the word “warming”. This story doesn’t mention carbon emissions, and doesn’t talk about “the climate” either. It’s just a click-bait headline about the urban heat island effect and how apparently it is causing subsidence or shifting which may lead to cracks in buildings. We could write it off as the daft result of thirty years of propaganda on one university press team, except that it’s appearing simultaneously tonight in Scientific American, Daily Mail, Metro UK, SciTech Daily, andScienceAlert. Presumably some engineers who wrote a paper on subsidence and other subterranean issues decided they were missing out on attention, grants and UN junkets, and are shamelessly trying to jump on the green gravy train. They invented the term “underground climate change” and the newspapers mostly soaked it up. Bizarrely, they don’t even mention “fossil fuels” and the main reasoning in Scientific American was that it was “like climate change” because it took decades to happen and involved, well, temperatures. It’s that weak.
Nobody mentions, of course, that skeptics have been talking about the Urban Heat Island Effect for twenty years because then they’d have to mention how city thermometers are not remotely reliable, or how all those heatwave deaths are really due to the lack of green trees, shade and parks rather than the type of power plants.
But “Underground climate change” must have been a bit much even for the The New York Times, which is the only newspaper so far to balk at using the term in a headline. Though it did make it to the subheader. The NYT team is also the only one that mentioned “fossil fuels” — explicitly blaming them. What a stretch… We’re talking about heat underneath our biggest cities. As if the emissions of a coal fired plant 500 miles away are even remotely comparable to the effect of black asphalt, six feet above and soaking up the sun.
In big cities worldwide, humans’ burning of fossil fuels is raising the mercury at the surface. But heat is also pouring out of basements, parking garages, train tunnels, pipes, sewers and electrical cables and into the surrounding earth, a phenomenon that scientists have taken to calling “underground climate change.”
Rising underground temperatures lead to warmer subway tunnels, which can cause overheated tracks and steam-bath conditions for commuters. And, over time, they cause tiny shifts in the ground beneath buildings, which can induce structural strain, whose effects aren’t noticeable for a long time until suddenly they are.
The engineers and geoscientists at the core of this are strangely not calling for windmills and solar panels. Really, they just want a few schemes to recapture wasted heat, but dressed it up in Climate lingo. Since their schemes will not make anyone rich, and can’t be used to destroy independent businesses or help our enemies, presumably these ideas will vanish into the night…
But Ferguson and the other researchers interviewed for this story all say this wasted energy [underground] could also be reharnessed, presenting an opportunity to both cool the subsurface and save on energy costs. Subway tunnels and basements could be retrofitted with geothermal technologies to recapture the heat. For example, water pipes could be installed to run through underground hotspots and pick up some of the thermal energy. While that energy wouldn’t be hot enough to turn the water into steam and create electricity, it could still be used to heat buildings and other civil infrastructure. This approach may or may not be worth the effort because it would require a high up-front cost and, in the case of the Loop district, may add up to less than 1 percent of local energy demand. — Scientific American,
Our news media just cut and paste nonsense. Train the children.
–Original image by Solitare from Pixabay, Words by Jo Nova.
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By Jo Nova
Apparently some New Zealand officials are toying with a whole new science curriculum which sounds like a return to the stone age. All the hard stuff about electromagnetism, elements, mass, motion, and molecular bonding has been replaced with UN Agenda 21 items like climate change and biodiversity.
Who needs to know the periodic table when you can learn the new religion of “Climate Change”? Knowing actual physics and chemistry will just hold you back in your drive to understand the intersectional suffering of the oppressed swamp antechinus.
By Rebecca Zhu, Epoch Times
New Zealand science teachers have raised alarm over an early draft science curriculum, which lacks any mention of physics, chemistry, and biology.
Mr. Johnston [senior fellow of the New Zealand Initiative think tank] warned that if this draft went through, high school graduates wanting to pursue studies in physical sciences or engineering would need to be taught from scratch by their university.
Who is Mr Johnston kidding? As if universities will fight for the physical sciences… they didn’t even fight for “male and female”. Academics are driving this shift to pagan worship of the new weather-making Gods. Science communication units at universities don’t even know what the scientific method is, they teach their students to “believe” the experts instead of teaching the fundamentals of logic and reason. Who needs Aristotle when you can have obedience?
Students that understand physics might grow up to be critics of the UN:
“Central concepts in physics are absent. There is no mention of gravity, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, mass or motion. Chemistry is likewise missing in action. There is nothing about atomic structure, the periodic table of the elements, compounds or molecular bonding,” he said of the draft.
Rather than physics, chemistry, and biology, the document proposes teaching science through four contexts that appear to draw from fundamental principles of the United Nation’s Agenda 21: climate change, biodiversity, infectious diseases, and the water, food, and energy nexus.
The energy nexus is, after all, a battle for “Energy Justice” and gender-energy equality, and who doesn’t want that?
We know this because peer reviewed papers say so:
Differences in access to and use of energy services between women and men is at the core of gender-energy nexus research. Drawing from Khamati-Njenga and Clancy, we define gender as “the roles, privileges, attributes and relationships between women and men that are socially constructed and not biologically determined” [11]. This definition emphasizes gender as a social construct, which changes over time, space and context. Hence, the gender dimensions of energy access and use vary across social, cultural, economic and political contexts. …
— Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Volume 138, March 2021, 110668, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2020.110668
First they came for language, arts and history, then they came for biology, now they want the STEM courses.
Let’s fight like hell.
h/t R.B.
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By Jo Nova
Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat
Damaged EV’s apparently need a lot more space than damaged petrol cars do. During the first couple of days, they need fifty times as much space…
In the race to make all new cars electric, so we get perfect weather, we haven’t quite ironed out all the wrinkles. Like what will we do with thousands of potentially explosive batteries in damaged cars awaiting repair (or an early grave). According to The Telegraph, a new report by Thatcham Research poses some rather big questions. Not only do insurance claims for EV’s cost 25% more than petrol cars, and take 14% longer to repair, but in a space where we could safely park 100 injured petrol cars, we can only park two crook EV’s.
The government recommends the cars stay 15m apart for at least 48 hours. Apparently this is rarely done at the moment, so current costs of repairs are no indication of future performance…
Thatcham Research helpfully mapped out the quarantine zones so we can see how realistic this is.
 Thatcham Research How does this fit into the WEF “15 minute city plan” I wonder? It fits with you catching a bus, because only central bankers and senior public servants can afford to pay the insurance costs.
Apparently about 10,000 EV’s were involved in accidents in the UK last year that put their batteries at risk. But with government mandates by 2035, there might be 260,000 of the”infectious” EV’s needing quarantines. We could convert quite a bit of the countryside that isn’t covered in windmills and solar panels into giant car parks for sick EV’s.
ByTom Haynes and James Warrington, The Telegraph
Electric cars that sustain minor bumps are being kept 15 meters apart in repair yards over fears they might explode, adding to insurance bills.
Government guidelines recommend electric vehicles with damaged batteries should be “quarantined” from other vehicles due to the risk of battery fires. Damaged batteries pose a risk of “thermal runaway” where the energy stored in the battery releases rapidly, creating temperatures of up to 400C.
But the practice threatens to increase costs for the insurance industry by more than £600m, costs which ultimately could be passed onto drivers in increased premiums, according to a report by automotive risk firm Thatcham Research.
Managing this quarantine raises the insurance costs and waste (of resources, land, and money). As Thatcham calculate, the extra parking charges alone will add between £625 or £2500 per car to the repair costs. Not to mention the extra time the hire car needed, or the cost of shifting the quarantined cars around to far flung paddocks.
All in all, apparently EV cars lose value so fast that after just one year, if they need a new battery, insurers are better off writing the car off.
Remember the fields of brand new EV’s rotting in China? There is a certain kind of efficiency there. If we wait for these new cars to get damaged, they need a lot more space.
Car accident image: by Shuets Udono
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Octopus in the city image by Эльвина Якубова
By Jo Nova
23 US state Attorneys General blocked the insurance wing of the global climate police
After the States fired the first “Antitrust” volley across the bows, the largest insurance giants in the world ran for the exits. Within weeks, what was a 30 member alliance became a shell of a dozen minor insurance companies. The NZIA has effectively admitted defeat — announcing that members won’t need to set or report on their carbon targets. Phew.
In 2021 many stars of the insurance world rushed to join the global climate activist cartel — the Net Zero Insurers Alliance (NZIA) — which would have turned their industry into another branch of the global UN and WEF climate police. The plan was to make it hard for unfashionable businesses to get insurance unless they went “Net Zero” and followed the policies the UN and WEF billionaires wanted. Democracy be damned. This effectively would have dragooned the coal miners, airlines, farmers, and publishers — practically everyone who needs insurance, into setting “Net Zero” targets above and beyond their legal requirements. All businesses would have to say the right prayers to the Carbonista Gods if they wanted to get insurance. Lord help any company that spoke against the regime!
If the cabal succeeded they would effectively shift power from elected governments to the people who wrote the NZIA rules. In January the NZIA had 29 members with $8 Trillion dollars US in assets under management. They launched their new “targets” at Davos at the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting with the billionaires on skiing holidays. How convenient? But the Republican state attorneys general started talking about “antitrust violations” and sent NZIA members formal legal letters in mid May — whereupon the insurance companies bolted.
To understand just how pervasive and insidious this scheme was, look at how one carbon software company enthusiastically described it. Insurers had to report on carbon emissions from their entire portfolio, which meant pestering all the companies they insure to get them to cough up the data . Then they could decide whether to drop the “big polluters” (like those legal companies providing the electricity they used), or badger them some more to reduce their emissions.
The first step in an insurer’s journey to reach net zero is to measure the carbon emissions from its own operations, investment portfolio, and underwriting portfolio. The former is the easiest part. To measure emissions from its portfolios, an insurer needs to gather data from the companies in them, including assets held by policyholders – a difficult feat for most insurers to do accurately and regularly. However, with the right data management tools, insurers can start to baseline the companies or entire industries in their value chain and identify the largest sources of emissions. Then it’s up to the insurer to decide whether to drop the biggest polluters from its portfolio or take steps to help them transition to net zero, such as by providing guidance and incentives in its underwriting or claims management to adopt low carbon technologies or processes.
Think of how much the whole free market concept has been destroyed. Instead of serving customers, entire industries are trying to change Earth’s weather. In this case the people meant to be helping others spread the costs of storms, floods and accidents become their Nanny-managers, ordering them to sacrifice cows to Gaia to stop the storms before they start.
The insurance companies would become defacto climate police
The scheme would only work if nearly every insurance company joined it — otherwise clients would just abandon the bossy companies for nicer ones. But all insurers ultimately need money, so they are no doubt badgered themselves by the biggest financial institutions in the world. See how this web of coercive power builds? NZIA may be effectively neutered for now, which is great news, but the Big Bankers and Billionaires are still out there colluding. The UNEP “Finance Initiative” managed the insurers cabal but it also manages the banker one — called the Net Zero Banking Alliance or variously known as GFANZ. The banker collective is the $100 Trillion dollar black hole starting to swallow national economies.
The best US Republican states are fighting back against the Bankers, and they’re pegging them back, but the battle is not over. BlackRock is singing a slightly different tune now to what it was a year ago. ESG has become a dirty word, but the coercion has almost certainly just gone underground. Larry Fink may not want to use the term anymore, but he has turned your pension fund into leftist activist machine, and the underlings at BlackRock are still bragging behind the scenes about how they “run the world” and buy off US Senators. Some states and investors are backing away slowly, but as long as $100 trillion dollars in assets are managed by a few guys who drink champers together at Davos, the free market, and democracy, is on life support.
Post Note: For those who don’t know much about the WEF, start reading here. It’s worse than you think. Some of the richest people in the world are here to help us, whether we like it or not. They are the “select few” touched as our saviours. Climate lockdowns are coming and you will need to ask permission to leave your 15-minute-suburb. They said that.
h/t to NetZeroWatch, BallyB
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By Jo Nova
A US judge has finally ruled what we knew all along — that it’s not OK for The US Government to collude with Big Tech to silence critics and political opponents.
It’s a reminder that Australians have no right to free speech. It’s time we had our own “First Amendment” written into the constitution. Instead of a referendum for a Voice for some Australians (which is happening this year) we need a Referendum for a Voice for All Australians — one that guarantees their right to speak, no matter what color their skin is, where their ancestors lived, or which team they vote for.
The US Republican States may yet save us all — the Attorney Generals of Louisiana and Missouri accused the Biden bureaucracy of actively colluding with the Tech Giants to suspend critics or remove comments. Finally, a judge in a District Court has ruled that this must stop.
By Tony Ozimek, The Epoch Times
A federal judge has made a historic ruling by partially granting an injunction that blocks various Biden administration officials and government agencies such as the Justice Department and the FBI from working with big tech firms to censor posts on social media.
Finally, something that slows the Industrial Censorship Complex — look how many government agencies are named:
Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana wrote in the July 4 ruling (pdf) that various government agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the State Department, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are prohibited from taking a range of actions regarding social media companies.
Effectively immediately, these agencies are not to phone, email, message or communicate with the social media giants with any sort of pressure to suppress opinions. It’s already having an effect. The State Department has just cancelled meetings with Facebook.
“This could be arguably one of the most important First Amendment cases in modern history,” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, one of the plaintiffs, told The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” in an interview following the ruling.
“If you look at the opinion that the judge lays out, he takes from our argument that this is basically one of the most massive undertakings of the federal government to limit American speech in the history of our country. The things that we uncovered, in this case, should be both shocking, appalling, and concerning for all Americans.”
The Judge explained that the government had used its power to silence the opposition:
“Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed,” Doughty wrote.
— Read it all at The Epoch Times
This ruling is still three years too late, and still subject to appeal. Many have died or suffered debilitating injury who might have been spared if voices had not been suppressed. People might have voted differently had they known about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Wars might not have been fought.
The Biden administration has already appealled, as any wannabee tyrant would — which shows how important this power to censor is to them. The two key Attorney Generals have vowed to fight all the way to the Supreme Court. Robert Malone was advising Attorney General Jeff Landry of Louisiana. He writes that even State AG’s struggle against the ocean of money that Big-Tech-Giants can bring to any legal battle. As Malone says, the State AG’s are constantly working with a limited budget, picking battles within a four year term, and probably worried about future political donations. It takes a brave AG to tackle Big Tech and the Biggest Government of all.
Australians never seem to be offered the referendums that matter the most
Two Australian Senators tried in 2019, and they say freedom of religion is a part of the Australian constitution, but freedom of speech and a free press are not:
Section 116 of the Australian Constitution protects freedom of religion by providing that the Commonwealth Parliament “shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.”
“Freedom of religion is enshrined in our Constitution, but freedom of speech and a free press are not subject to explicit protection; this is a deep-seated flaw in the foundations of Australia’s democracy”, Senator Patrick said.
— Centre Alliance Senators Rex Patrick and Stirling Grif, 2019
A deep seated flaw indeed.
The constitution itself is no magic talisman against evil — not without people prepared to die to defend it. But without the words to begin with, what is there to defend?
h/t to Philip P, David Maddison, Bill in AZ, Stephen Neil, David in Cooyal, Old Ozzie, Gab, Matt Taibbi.
Statue of Liberty Photo: Dominique James
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By Jo Nova
The “hottest day” is not that hot, and very irrelevant
So the news cycle went hyperbolic over a single dubious hot day in records that only go back 0.01% of human existence. Remember when “30 year trends” were all that mattered?
Let’s ignore for the moment that the error bars on measurements of global temperature in 1899 would make any normal scientist blush. Who believes for one minute even today we can measure the global surface temperature to one hundredth of a degree? The cringeworthy insignificant digits were everywhere. On Monday the Earths surface was supposedly 17.01 degrees Celsius for the first time in “human history”. Then Tuesday it was 17.18C, Hallelujah. Who are we kidding?
Probably the biggest lie was to call this “human history” as if the ancient Egyptians were measuring the temperature on Earth and every day of the week. Are we really sure we know what the temperature was on July 3, 2201 BC? Maybe it was 17.31C that day — prove me wrong? We have no idea how hot the “hottest days” were for 99% of human civilization. The best proxies we have can’t tell us what the temperature was for 24 hour periods. We can’t compare 20 year smoothed averages with a single 24 hour snapshot. Well, scientific prostitutes can, but not real scientists.
If it was a record “hottest day”, it might have been the hottest day in the last 40 years (maybe, and if only we had good thermometers, didn’t put them at airports, near air conditioners and incinerators, didn’t go electronic, hide the calibration data, and adjustify the records, eh?). It’s a big so-what.
And in the end we know it there have been hotter years before in human civilization, and probably thousands of them.
Who is trying to erase the Holocene?
Don’t they teach climate scientists anything anymore? Karsten Haustein, from the University of Leipzig was telling the BBC that July will possibly be the hottest “since the Eemian”, 120,000 years ago, as if the Holocene optimum period didn’t exist.
A mere 5,000 years ago sea levels were higher, corals were happy, people thrived, and Greenland was a lot warmer. This was a global phenomenon — higher sea levels and some 6,000 boreholes drilled around the world show the same pattern.
It was hotter for thousands of years and CO2 was irrelevant. What the world needs are some real science journalists who can ask these badly trained junior modelers what happened to the Holocene?
 This graph shows the ice-core data up until 1855. The last 150 years (1705 to 1855) are highlighted in red to show the warming as the Earth began coming out of the Little Ice Age. Sea levels were higher all around the world
How could the oceans be higher all around the world if the world was not warmer? Sea levels have been falling for the last 7,000 years around Australia, they used to be nearly 1m higher in the South China Sea, South Africa and Polynesia and it’s a similar pattern around the world (thanks NoTricksZone). Studies on mangroves in Brazil show sea levels were about 2.7 meters higher in the mid-Holocene, and mangroves grew 34 kilometers further inland. (Fontes et al 2017). CO2 Science lists references all over the world. I am barely skimming the surface.
Other researchers estimate the waters flowing out of the Pacific Ocean past Indonesia were a full 2 degrees Celcius warmer 7,000 years ago. (Rosenthal, (2013). Somehow corals did not go extinct, ancient viruses didn’t wipe out the Sumerians, and humans spread across the Earth.
Sea levels were higher off the very geologically stable Western Australia 7,000 years ago. Across the other side of Australia in NSW sea levels were 1 – 1.5m higher.
 Sea level has been falling for 7,000 years in Western Australia (Lewis et al) A thousand stories of human pain and triumph from the last ten thousand years are being erased from the records. Australian Aboriginals apparently struggled through a 1,500 year mega drought about 6,000 years ago (see McGowan et al 2012). And massive fires raged across far north Australia 4,000 years ago that were far worse than today. (Rehn et al 2021).
Another proxy suggesting the Holocene warmer temperatures were global is the heat flow data measured in 6,000 boreholes across six continents down to about 2km. Sometime from 5,000 to 10,000 years ago temperatures were hotter than they are now.
 Location of boreholes for heat flow studies.  6,000 boreholes drilled around Earth show temperatures were hotter in the holocene. Figure 1. Suite of reconstructions of surface temperature history over the last 20,000 years. Nine curves correspond to three values of thermal diffusivity. The reference level is the mean of the instrumental record from 1961-1990 AD. (Huang et al 2008) The hottest day in the last 150 years is irrelevant.
REFERENCES
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By Jo Nova
This week, newspapers in the UK appear to be full of Carmageddon headlines.
Thanks to NetZeroWatch and Ballyb, for the compilation of EV warning signs on the road to West Debacle.
The big advantage of an EV used to be the cheap fill but that’s all changed in the least year with the energy crisis. If the workers can’t afford to turn on the oven to cook a Sunday Roast, they can hardly afford to power up a car.
 In a bit of a bombshell last week, Volkswagon admitted that people weren’t buying their electric cars, quaintly referring to this phenomenon as “strong consumer reluctance”. Sales were so bad though, 30% down on forecasts, that they have closed the factory at Emden, Germany for six weeks and are sacking 300 out of 1,500 staff.
Meanwhile, the UK is speeding towards the 2030 EV mandate five years faster than the rest of the world, and the backlash is growing. A Daily Mail poll finds only 1 in 4 people think it’s a good idea to ban sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2030. Fully 53% of people don’t like it. Is the UK a democracy or not? Manufacturing and industry leaders are using words like “ruinous” and talking of “the end of UK car production.” They’re warning that 800,000 UK jobs are at risk. Nothing about this makes sense. EV’s are a lousy way to change the weather. No one even knows if EV’s will reduce carbon dioxide.
At the moment in the UK 36 cars are fighting over every public charging site. Electricity demand is expected to double in the UK due to EV’s yet there is no plan to provide the extra capacity. Perhaps the real plan is to get half the country onto electric buses…?
Politicians are forcing electric cars on a public that doesn’t want them
Ben Marlow, The Telegraph
The electric car revolution is stalling, of that there can no longer be any doubt. It has left the big global carmakers floundering…
But it’s the setback at VW that stands out, raising serious questions about whether politicians are making the catastrophic mistake of forcing electric cars on a public that doesn’t want them.
Think about it for a second: an entire industry not only forced to abandon a product that the vast majority of people still want and use, but also bullied into channelling all its resources into making something on a colossal level that there simply isn’t the market for – at least not within the horrendously short timeframe that is being imposed on car manufacturers.
It’s industrial self-sabotage and a commercial, economic and social catastrophe in the making.
Mandating EVs is an “assault on the working class” says Joel Kotkin.
EV owners are wealthier, the cars are more expensive, and mandates will put owning a car out of reach of the unwashed masses…
Spiked Online
Replacing the massive $3 trillion global car industry is an extremely high-risk economic gamble, particularly for the West.
In simple terms, the push for EVs represents an assault on the working class. Two-thirds of all EV owners have incomes in excess of $100,000.
EV mandates are also likely to force up the price of now restricted traditional cars. In the meantime, greens will demand higher fuel prices to reduce drivers’ consumption of the demon petrol. Ultimately, as even the Washington Post recently admitted, electric vehicles are hastening a return to conditions not seen since the early 20th century, when the automobile was a luxury item. ‘New cars, once part of the American Dream, [are] now out of reach for many’, it notes.
Just to repeat… None of this makes sense. Even if people have a religious fixation on climate change, this isn’t the path to salvation:
Economist Bjorn Lomborg calculates that a wholesale shift to EVs will lead to a reduction of global temperatures of no more than 0.0002 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
Kotkin asks “who benefits”:
 So, who wins here? Certainly not middle- or working-class families for whom climate change barely registers as a primary concern.
…the biggest winner is China.
Today, China produces twice as many EVs as the US and the EU combined. Its leading EV maker, BYD, is now the world’s largest. Its electric-car exports are expected to almost double this year, helping it to overtake Japan as the biggest car exporter worldwide, according to the South China Morning Post.
China has control of much of the worlds rare metals. Giving up an industry with a century of expertise and mass public support for a new high risk industry that depends on foreign supply lines needs some explanation. No one believes we’re doing it to fix the weather.
——————-
Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His latest book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is out now. Follow him on Twitter: @joelkotkin
Image by OpenIcons from Pixabay | Das Logo der Marke Volkswagen Nutzfahrzeuge | VW EV Photo by Vogler,
There was a young climate-change tzar,
Bought a brand new all E.V. car,
Found that very few joints,
Had quick charging points,
Means this car can’t venture too far.
–Ruairi
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By Jo Nova
UN Human Rights commissioner turns into a hellfire prophet
Volker Turk has looked into his crystal bowl and sees five or ten plagues coming — there will be famine, flood, and fire, and the Earth is melting — it may cease to exist or perhaps even evaporate? Luckily, the UN knows how to save the world, we just have to do what they say and be nice to their friends at BlackRock, Microsoft and the Chinese Communist Party. That means buying lots of windmills and solar panels because climate change is a human rights issue, but slave labor camps in Xingjiang are not.
And who cares about child cobalt miners in the Congo?
Simon Kent Breitbart
 Volker Turk Volker Turk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, declared Monday the planet is “[…] burning. It’s melting. It’s flooding. It’s depleting. It’s drying. It’s dying,” as he evoked a “dystopian future” for all unless “climate change” is addressed.
The Austrian lawyer turned U.N. official said the time has come for everyone to heed the unelected body and address the long list of concerns it sees as threatening the very existence of the planet.
Essentially, some lawyer appointed to a UN committee says extreme, preposterous, provably wrong things about climate science, global food, makes some end-of-world prophesies and some newspapers think it’s worth reporting.
 Turk says crops have been wiped out and 80 million more people will starve
France24
Turk told a UN Human Rights Council debate on the right to food that extreme weather events were wiping out crops, herds and ecosystems, making it impossible for communities to rebuild and support themselves.
“More than 828 million people faced hunger in 2021. And climate change is projected to place up to 80 million more people at risk of hunger by the middle of this century,” said Turk.
This is the catastrophe that climate change inflicts on global agriculture. Far from being wiped out, there has never been more food on Earth.
The dystopia he warns about is here, but it’s where career bureaucrats can work 30 years at the UN, and get taken seriously when they are 100% wrong.
The UN is the dystopia Orwell warned us about. Time to end it and give us our money back.
REFERENCE
Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2023) – “Agricultural Production“. Published online at OurWorldInData.org.
Earth image by Bela Geletneky
Wizard Artwork: pendleburyannette
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By Jo Nova
Perhaps Africa could use some global warming?
Thanks and credit to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone:
During the hottest part of the Holocene, for thousands of years, there were deep lakes filled with water in the middle of the Sahara Desert. From 9,500 years ago to 6,000 years ago the monsoons rained on the Sahara, freshwater plankton frolicked in the lakes, and greenery grew far and wide. The wetter conditions made it possible for “widespread human occupation and the development of agriculture across North Africa”. Amazingly, that last quote comes from Kuper and Kropelin fully seventeen years ago. Strangely the UN experts don’t mention very often that in the warmer world not that long ago, the hyperarid Sahara desert was rich, green and filled with water? We wouldn’t want people to start wondering if climate change might mean Chad and Libya could be nicer places for Africans to live? Instead we’re told that global warming will turn into our whole world into the Saharan desert, only to find out that in a warmer world even the Sahara didn’t turn into the Saharan Desert.
There once was a lake here…
 Era Kohor, northern Chad. The new study by Yacoub et al shows how the water came and went in more detail, in the Tibesti Volcanic Massif (TVM) of northern Chad, but they cite twenty years of other studies that show a lost rich Saharan wilderness. The period is quietly known in academic circles as the African Humid Period (AHP).
So yet again we find that the climate on Earth has always changed, that lakes, forests, and rainfall came and went without any input from coal fired plants or SUV’s and that solar panels probably would not have saved the once great green Sahara from turning into a hyperarid desert. We claim to have expert climate models, but we don’t really know why these big shifts happen, or how fast they occurred or what caused them — they are vaguely “linked” to the changes in sunshine that happen due to our orbit.
But if we are still debating whether it ended quickly or gradually, then obviously we haven’t got a good grip on the driving forces.
 …. 7,020 years ago freshwater plankton lived and died leaving behind their silica skeltons.
 Diatoms. Photographed by a Scanning Electron Microscope Things started to dry out about 5,500 years ago.
The introduction to Yacoub et al is eye-opening. It is a literature review of scores of papers showing just how wet and green the Sahara was, and then wasn’t — in the blink of a geologic eye. There is still debate about how fast the green era disappeared.
Yacoub et al., 2023,
An extensive array of palaeoclimatic records (Shanahan et al., 2015; Holmes and Hoelzmann, 2017) and archaeological investigations (Cremaschi et al., 2014; Manning and Timpson, 2014) have shown that during this humid period, large parts of the present-day hyperarid Sahara and the semi-arid Sahel regions were much wetter and “greener” than today, and thus characterized by grasslands with tropical trees (Hély and Lézine, 2014), hosting numerous lakes (Hoelzmann et al., 2004; Drake et al., 2011) and incised by vast fluvial networks (Skonieczny et al., 2015). This early-to-mid Holocene period of greening of the Sahara, named the Green Sahara period (Claussen et al., 2017), was linked to the low precession in Earth’s orbit associated with high boreal summer insolation that induced the northward extension of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and the intensification of the associated African monsoonal rainfall belt (Kutzbach and Liu, 1997; deMenocal, 2015; Dallmeyer et al., 2020). These wetter conditions enabled widespread human occupation and the development of agriculture across North Africa (Kuper and Kröpelin, 2006; Manning and Timpson, 2014). After the mid-Holocene, the southward retreat of the monsoonal rainfall belt led to drier conditions that provoked the desiccation of most lakes (Gasse, 2000) and critical demographic shifts (Manning and Timpson, 2014), sealing the end of the AHHP. Throughout the African continent, the timing and magnitude of the termination of the AHHP were probably variable in space and time (Shanahan et al., 2015) and there is a long-standing and on-going debate about whether the end of the AHHP and the subsequent drying of the Sahara was abrupt or gradual (deMenocal et al., 2000; Holmes, 2008; Kröpelin et al., 2008; Bard, 2013; Collins et al., 2017; Ménot et al., 2020; Chase et al., 2022).
REFERENCES
Yacoub et al., (2023), The African Holocene Humid Period in the Tibesti mountains (central Sahara, Chad): Climate reconstruction inferred from fossil diatoms and their oxygen isotope composition
Kuper and Kropelin, (2006): Climate-controlled holocene occupation in the Sahara: motor of africa’s evolution. Science 313, 803e807. https://doi.org/10.1126/ science.1130989
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