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Senator Alex Antic is on fire asking why no one seems interested in the 14,062 people who died unexpectedly from January to November last year. In a full year, that’s 15,300 families who lost a loved one. 15,000 lives cut short. It’s nearly twice the size of the covid toll. Where is The Department of Health, the CSIRO, the ABC, TGA, SBS, APRHA, our universities, most newspapers and free to air TV? Do Australian lives matter? @SenatorAntic: Something catastrophic is happening and the government and media are unconcerned. The previous four Australian ABS Provisional Mortality Statistics data releases reveal 15.1%, 16.0%, 17.0%, and 17.3% increases in excess deaths above the baseline average. Similar, if not worse, trends, are happening all over the western world. Clearly, something serious, I would say catastrophic, is occurring, yet strangely politicians and the censorship industrial complex are almost entirely unconcerned about investigating it. They don’t want you to know what is driving this, but we all know what is causing it. h/t Kevin a The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data (ABS) shows that mysterious deaths were far higher than Covid deaths in the last months of 2021. ABS: Provisional Excess Deaths.
Meanwhile the largest vaccine and long covid study in Australia is being prematurely shut down… A year ago it was trumpeted as a five year study of 10,000 people, presumably making people feel safer about how safety conscious the government was. Queenslanders were told they were “perfect” for this landmark study. We know if these results showed the vaccines were safe and long covid was a problem the funding would be doubled. Apparently the results are already too toxic to allow it to continue, and the results must be aborted forthwith. This will bury them, indeed, and possibly destroy rare and valuable data of the effect of vaccines on a population that didn’t have covid. Some of this data couldn’t even be recaptured if the project was started from scratch again. The Australian government has spent $17 billion on Australia’s vaccine and treatment of Covid 19, yet they won’t spend 0.5% of that finding out if the vaccines were safe. Priorities, right?! [Update: For some reason the Australian Government has lost that page bragging about their spending. Luckily the WayBack Machine has a copy and it’s now $18b. ] Don’t axe QoVaxA priceless biobank with the answers to long Covid is threatened with destruction The QoVax team didn’t just collect the standard data. Participants provided information on environmental and social determinants of health and biospecimens of blood and saliva that have been used to derive genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic datasets that will shed light on how the novel vaccines impact the immune system. The secure digitally integrated biobank has 120,000 biospecimens: serum, saliva and peripheral blood mononuclear cells, in three -80 degrees Celsius freezers and three liquid nitrogen dewars. The linked data repository has four million linked data points and more than 500 whole genomes. In addition, the biobank has access to real-time electronic medical records. With 70 per cent of hospitals in Queensland storing medical records electronically, the study was intended to allow long-term digital surveillance of health outcomes related to Covid-19 vaccinations, and intersections between vaccine responses and Sars-CoV-2 infection. Worse still, the biobank, which should be a resource for the world, is threatened with destruction. Its precious resources will be destroyed in twelve months to save a trivial sum of money. The whole project has cost only $20 million. It’s obvious that most cases of Covid only started to occur after December 15th, 2021.  Source: John Hopkins In an update, the Australian has asked what will happen to the data, and a QoVax spokesman says the data will be stored and archived. But then, six months ago, they said it would be a five year program playing “a fundamental role in future health and biomedical research”. So, how much is that worth? I will believe nothing until all the anonymized data is publicly available. “Follow the science” they say, right up until they destroy it. Queensland Health withdraws QoVAX Covid-19 study fundingThe Australia, March 29th, 2023 Keep reading → March 29th, 2023 | Tags: Coronavirus, Excess Deaths, Queensland (QLD), Vaccine | Category: Australia, Health, Lies-by-Omission, Mortality |  Print This Post | | An expensive, razzle-dazzle climate referendum in Berlin aimed to bring forward “climate neutral” ambitions from 2045 to 2030, and no one even led a counter campaign, but it failed miserably: Climate Referendum fails in GermanyBerliner Morgenpost Berlin. The referendum for more ambitious climate goals in Berlin has failed. The state election authority announced on Sunday evening that the required minimum number of yes votes had not been reached. An alliance “climate restart” wanted to achieve a change in the state energy transition law with the vote. Specifically, Berlin should commit itself to becoming climate neutral by 2030 and not by 2045 as previously planned. Of 2.4 million voters in Berlin, the Yes camp needed 608,000 voters (or 25%) to turn up and agree in order to win. While 860,000 people turned up to vote, only 442,000 said “yes” and 420,000 said “no”. Essentially 82% of the total voter population either didn’t want it, or couldn’t be bothered turning up. Pierre Gosselin of NoTricksZone reports it was a crushing defeatHe says “It’ll take a longtime for the radical climate activists to recover from this major setback”. Apparently the promotion was intense: “more than a million euros spent in a massive run-up campaign that included plastering the city with posters, concerts by famous performers, huge support and propaganda by the media and hefty donations coming from left wing activists from the east and west coasts of USA.” There was no leader of the “No” case, yet the No votes were almost equal to the “Yes”. Predictably, the inner city voted yes, and the “rest” voted No or didn’t turn up. Gosselin points out that the rich upper class supporters were in agony, calling people names like “climate destroyers”. Their bafflement makes sense if we assume the believers are in a sheltered cult where their news services are controlled and none of them have even met a skeptic. They’ve not heard a single reason why using power plants to command storms is a form of neolithic sorcery with computer support. “The bubble has burst”According to one German commentator Gosselin found, it’s a major victory over the Greens: For this, even major international donors were landed, who were supposed to positively influence the opinion of Berliners about the referendum. And in the end you fail miserably. Not only was the quorum missed by a wide margin, but the number of no votes was only just below the number of yes votes. Nobody had led a counter-campaign against the “climate restart”. That makes the defeat for Neubauer and Co. particularly embarrassing. They, mostly members of the upper middle class, have declared war on the lower and lower middle classes with destructive climate measures. Outside of the Berlin political bubble and the other urban feel-good oases of Germany, the Neubauers and Schramms of this world never had much support. And now the bubble has finally burst. In Marzahn, Köpenick and Lichtenberg, the majority of voters voted against the referendum. Meanwhile, the EU has abandoned plans to ban traditional cars by 2035After Germany, Italy, and five other nations opposed the ban, the EU had to concede and also allow the sale of ICE (internal combustion engine) cars that run on carbon neutral fuels. There is no such requirements for sacred EV’s, of course. Electric vehicles will be fine to run on coal fired electricity. NetZeroWatch calls on the British Government to abandon similar plans which would destroy the British car industry. The Wall Street Journal editorial says the Greens were aghast at this too: Consumers will be allowed to buy internal-combustion autos as long as those cars can run on synthetic fuels, which are fuels made from captured carbon or renewable energy. Brussels still seems to hope that these cars will run only on such “e-fuels” by that deadline. But doubts about the technological feasibility of that pledge may explain why environmental groups were aghast at the weekend decision. They always project their own flaws… The usual suspects complain that this is another earth-destroying crony gift from Berlin to its auto industry—as if there’s no cronyism or corporate welfare involved in subsidizing electric vehicles that carry their own high environmental costs. The reality is that the big winners are consumers… That’s a luxury consumers won’t enjoy in California, Oregon and Washington state, where bans on new cars with internal-combustion-engines remain on the books for 2035. There is hope. March 29th, 2023 | Tags: Elections, Electric Cars (EV), EU, Germany, Polls | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Welcome to Futility IslandAustralia’s role as the Global Renewables Crash Test Dummy continues. Having installed more renewables per capita than anywhere on Earth, our PM declared that the decade of doing nothing was over. It was time to crash faster, or something. So, the revamped Australian carbon tax called the Safeguard Mechanism does everything it isn’t supposed to. Gas and electricity prices will rise, climate targets will be harder to reach, the grid will get more unstable, and investors will run a mile now that new gas fields have to be “net zero” — meaning presumably they will have to buy carbon credits before they sell their first cubic meter of gas. The field of ineptitude even reaches overseas — with less gas for sale — our trading partners will just buy more coal. Australia will spend even more billions to win a fashion contest at UN dinner parties and cool the world by 0.0 degrees C. The Australian Electricity market melted down last winter, and stopped trading, because we didn’t have enough gas for the artificial “transition”. Even the hard-left AEMO — our climate activist electricity grid manager — says we need to unlock more gas fields. Instead, the government ignored the experts, and has just locked more gas fields away. Australia was the world’s fifth largest gas producer and the world’s largest LNG exporter in 2021. All our competitors will be happy. Russia says “thank you” Anthony Albanese. (Australia’s PM)  Click to enlarge Source Statista Caved to the Greens:The Labor government boasted that they did not give in to the Greens’ demands to ban new gas and coal projects. But they effectively banned many of them anyway with the rule that all new gas entrants will be required to have net-zero carbon emissions from the first day of operation. Without cheap gas to keep the lights on, grids will have to keep coal plants running longer and slow the “roll out” of unreliable generators. And the new rule applies to export gas fields too. Without export income and royalties from new gas fields, soon the government will run out of cash to buy batteries, build 10,000km transmission lines to solar white elephants, and dig out drill rigs stuck in Snowy Hydro tunnels to nowhere. It’s like we just put a tariff on our own exports?Other nations put tariffs on imports to help their own industry. Australia adds costs on our exporters… By blocking gas exports we may speed up the brain drainThe free market, such as it exists, will find another way. Presumably Australian oil and gas experts will be more likely to explore overseas, register their companies in the Caribbean and sell direct to Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing without all the carbon frappery. The greens are making Anthony Albanese look sillyOur PM is claiming he hasn’t banned old and gas, but the Greens are claiming they have. Who is running the country?
Our genius PM found a tricky word-salad so he could comply with the Greens while pretending not to: Safeguard mechanism deal threatens power prices, says oil and gas industryJess Malcolm, and Geoff Chambers, The Australian “You will note that the demands that were placed on us of ruling out future projects are ones that we said we wouldn’t agree with, and we haven’t.” — [The Prime Minister said]. “We have had discussions … not just with people in this building, but people outside this building, whether it be the manufacturing sector or whether it be the gas industry,” the Prime Minister said. While the PM spoke to people “outside the building” it didn’t include most of the gas industry who are not happy: The peak oil and gas lobby group attacked the Labor-Greens deal… The gas industry on Monday warned that the Prime Minister’s signature climate policy, forcing 215 big-emitters to slash emissions by nearly 5 per cent each year out to 2030, could drive up costs for households and businesses if new gas supply is restricted. What looks, smells, and acts like fascism…The “Safeguard Mechanism” is not about reducing CO2, — if that was the point, Labor and the Greens would build nuclear power plants. Instead, apparently, it’s about targeting particular industries, giving them an impossible task, and then making them dependent on government handouts or “special treatment”. See how this works: Nuts and bolts of new safeguard mechanismJess Malcolm, The Australian Labor struck a deal with the Greens to amend the safeguard mechanism and impose a “hard cap” in the scheme targeting coal and gas projects. What happens if emissions rise? In the event that real emissions do rise above the cap, the government will work with facilities to help them reduce emissions by either reducing their baseline rates or through more funding from Labor’s Powering the Regions fund, or amend the cap. Amid concern that hard-to-abate industries will struggle under the scheme, Labor committed $1bn in funding for manufacturing and trade-exposed industries to decarbonise, which included an extra $400m for critical industries such as steel, cement and aluminium. So the government will give a special loophole for friends and donors. Or taxpayers will pay for the gas industry to achieve the impossible, but the costs will be laundered through general government coffers — effectively making the gas industry partly “owned” by the government gatekeepers. What gas corporate will dare speak out against unfashionable policies lest the government take away their “support” to meet the impossible target. And of course, consumers will pay through higher bills, and then the government will give them some of their own money back, or their childrens money and call it a rebate. Vote for us! Now the gas industry says they want “science”?To some extent the gas industry got what it deserved — for years they played along with the climate game, assuming the greens were after the coal and oil industries and the “cleaner” gas industry would benefit. It’s a bit late now to cry “science”: Woodside, after all, wouldn’t even let me speak at a Christmas event for geologists — presumably worried I might lead vulnerable 50 year old drilling experts astray with “misinformation”. Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association chief executive Samantha McCulloch – representing gas giants including Santos, Shell and Woodside – said: “We can’t let politics and ideology get in the way of sensible, evidence-based climate and energy policy.” Where’s she been for the last thirty years? The sensible policy in 1993 would have been to get the science right, not to throw half a billion years of geology on the rocks and let parasitic, unaudited foreign committees and 16 year old girls design your energy policy. Increasing carbon emissions and actual pollution overseasThe Green-Labor plan will damage other nations carbon targets too as they will increasingly forced to buy coal and gas off nations with longer transport lines, and lower quality coal. Our PM might get some calls from the leaders of Japan, South Korea, China and India, the people who need our gas and coal. He should ask them if they would prefer to be a thousandth of a degree cooler sometime after they die, or would they rather get cheaper gas now? I mean, should we export cheap gas to help fertilize the fields of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, or take a punt on slowing their storms in 2100 instead? Labor kept telling us we needed certainty, but as soon as we got it, energy shares fell:Keep reading → March 28th, 2023 | Tags: Carbon Credits, Carbon Tax, Net Zero | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | We may have to fix the sleep deprivation to fix the cultural apathy
Listening to a sleep specialist I was struck that so much of our civilizational decline mirrors the effects sleep deprivation has on individuals. The sleep researcher even used the phrases “deviant” and “social loafing”. Tired people free-load on the team and are more likely to make false claims. It amplifies the worst of “The Welfare State”. A sleep deprived nation is a fatter, less productive, less creative and less motivated country. Sex hormones are reduced, blood sugar is raised, immunity suffers, self control is reduced, and anxiety increases, as does every marker of suicidal ideation. Food choices become more hedonic. Self discipline suffers. Declines in sleep must surely also explain part of the testosterone drop that modern civilization seems to be suffering from. Blood tests show being tired is medically a form of premature aging — albeit, hopefully, temporary. Professor Matthew Walker argues that sleep is more important than food or exercise and yet we are ignoring it. Every species on Earth needs to sleep. If it were not essential, evolution would have found a way to get rid of it, or reduce it, because it is a costly behaviour. Sleeping animals are more vulnerable, seemingly unproductive, they’re not raising babies, or bringing in food. Walker doesn’t say it, but what’s good for a corporation is surely good for a nationAll the things that make companies more profitable and reduce their health care costs surely apply to whole countries? NASA research in the 1980s found that 20 – 60 minutes sleep improved productivity by 34%. It increased general alertness by 50%. The results were so stark NASA even transferred these findings to work conditions for people on the ground. “NASA naps” became a thing. The five reasons a lack of sleep is worse for productivity:When employees undersleep they choose less challenging problems, they check their emails but they don’t tackle the deep issues. Secondly, tired people produce fewer creative solutions. Thirdly, in teams, those who sleep less slack off, they freeload on other people. Fourthly, they are more deviant, they’re more likely to fudge data, to claim reimbursements they don’t deserve. Finally, the leaders who get less sleep are rated as less charismatic by employees, even though the employees don’t know how much sleep their CEO got that day. Plus workers who sleep less take about 11 more sick days annually. And they use health care resources 80% more than well rested people. Their obesity and mental health is worse. (This is discussed at 42 – 48 minutes in the video.) Doctors are only given about 90 minutes of sleep education in their entire degree yet it’s one third of their patients lives. Children aren’t taught much about sleep at school. No nation seems to have a public campaign to increase sleep, yet they have programs to boost exercise, reduce drinking, stop smoking, eat better and drive slower. Dr Matthew Walker is a Berkley neuroscientist and sleep specialist.
The video is surprisingly compelling. He’s an excellent speaker, with lots of research and no finger pointing lectures. We spend a lot of time here wondering why so many in society seem so apathetic, or careless or corrupt. Maybe a tired population is a compliant distracted one and maybe we should be doing something about that. If I were an adversary of the West, I would do everything I could to encourage their sleep deprivation. Night owls and larks are coded in our genes Chronotypes, meaning whether you are a night owl or a lark — are built in genetically — probably because tribes were so much better off if they had someone awake at most hours of the clock, rather than all sleeping for the same 8 hours. Tribes with mixed sleeping patterns were less likely to be surprised in a bad way. Divorce papers suggest that one third of divorcees mention sleep incompatibility. Walker suggests a sleep-divorce (sleeping separately) might be useful before people have a real divorce. A quarter of couples sleep in different rooms. People sleeping apart from each other report getting better sleep, and probably have higher libidos due to that. But people sleeping together report feeling more satisfied about sleep. I listened to the whole 2 hours as a podcast, which I almost never do. People interested in Alzheimers may want to listen from 1:30 onwards. The timeline of topics are listed below (bolding mine).
Are we sleeping less?The interview doesn’t discuss whether we are sleeping less than we did 100 years ago, but a search doesn’t turn up a lot either. One review of research papers suggests we’re not, but most of the data comes from sleep labs, not people at home in their daily lives. Apparently there is very little data about how many hours of sleep people got in 1920 or 1950 and so on, and “hours in bed” is not the same as “hours asleep” which is hard to get without a sleep tracker. At least one Gallup poll suggests people thought they got more sleep in the 1940s. Eighty percent of people in 1942 said they slept more than 7 hours a night. But now less than 60% percent at most say that. Four times as many people now say they are sleeping six hours or less.  Gallup poll numbers suggest people are sleeping less. Vox. Sleeping man on train image by abdulla binmassam.  Emden, Germany by Gritte, @gritte Germany is at the leading edge of the climate wars and the Greens are starting to lose both in polling and policy. Despite the claims that the energy crisis will push everyone into renewables, one year later, the dominant energy source for German electricity is coal, up by eight percentage points to 33% of generation. While the world is supposedly caught in a renewable rush to 2030, the German government just announced it will build 25 gigawatts of gas powered plants by 2030 so they are there when “when [the] wind and sun do not provide enough”. And this week Germany is doing a backflip on their recent EU deal to ban sales of petrol and gas powered cars by 2035. It appears now they will ban the ban, rather than the car, and Germany has the power in the EU to do that. Though it’s not freedom to buy any car you want, but quixotic car loophole. It’s still a mess of awful, subsidized craziness in a futile quest to control the clouds — but there are signs it is getting less crazy. Thanks to NetZeroWatch for the links: Coalition blues make German Greens see redBy Hans von der Burchard, Gabriel Rinaldi and Peter Wilke, Politico
Not only has Germany been causing a ruckus at the EU level in recent weeks by mounting a last-minute blockade to a proposed ban on combustion engines, but the country is also facing a domestic political fight over phasing out gas and oil heating systems, as well as pushing forward the coal exit. The political coalition is tearing itself apart: All those disputes are linked to fundamental disagreements between the Greens and their two coalition partners, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), over how the EU’s climate-protection targets should be implemented and what consequences and costs this will have for industry and citizens. The conflict is not only affecting the Greens’ popularity — is also seems to be threatening a wider crisis for the coalition. And that crisis seems to be escalating. The Greens have every reason to be nervous, as their climate policies are becoming a hard sell in Germany. What were they thinking? Habeck’s heat pump requirement alone could mean additional costs of up to €13,000 per installation for households,…
Not surprisingly, the Greens have lost a quarter of their support in the last ten months: Of great concern for the Green Party is how they have been falling in polls for months, from 23 percent last summer to currently 17 percent. Meanwhile, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been steadily rising and is now close on the Greens’ tail, at 15 percent. One poll on Sunday even put the AfD ahead of the Greens. The rush to build 25GW of government subsidized gas plants as back upsPrivate investors stopped building gas plants because it didn’t make economic sense to build them just as a rescue project to make up for the bad days of wind and solar power — especially when they would sit around unused while the wind blew. So these new rushed plants will be partly subsidized in the same crazy style that renewables are. “We will build the power plants we need for the times when wind and sun do not provide enough electricity out to tender,” said the minister at the presentation of a report on the progress of the country’s transition to climate neutrality. In recent years, Germany has used auctions to incentivise and control the expansion of wind and solar energy. Companies compete in these tenders to receive financial support for renewable electricity.
The big backdown to save ICE cars has played out in just three months. One poll suggested 67% of Germans didn’t want to ban traditional cars, and hundreds of thousands of German jobs were at stake in making car parts. Did Germany just kill the electric car?Dave Keating, Energy Monitor After nearly two years of painstaking talks, negotiators from the European Parliament and EU member states finally struck a deal last November on a new vehicle emissions law that would ban the sale of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars in the EU from 2035. Even though Germany, with its powerful automotive industry, has historically opposed ambitious car CO2 standards, in the end it supported the deal. The agreement was ready to be signed into law – but then German Finance Minister Christian Lindner stepped in. Thanks to Georgia Meloni winning in Italy, apparently she realized that Italy didn’t want the ban either in January. Italy alone didn’t have enough voting power to stop it, but the German Finance Minister did. Germany wants the law changed to allow for the sale of ICE cars after 2035 if they run on hydrogen-derived e-fuels, which are produced by electrolysis with added carbon. Climate campaigners are aghast. The NGO Transport & Environment (T&E) is warning that this is a ruse to extend sales of fossil-fuel-powered cars,…’ The big problem is that this loophole would allow people to buy new ICE cars and then fill them up with old fossils, because no one can check what consumers do, and we all know the e-fuels will be hideously expensive, so only the uber wealthy will be filling up the car with saintly fuel. It’s back to the drawing board for the EU which has to come up with some compromise. The last minute retraction is a great embarrassment to the Greens, and worse they fear Germany won’t meet the 50% target cuts in emissions by 2030. But then, it failed to meet the last target in 2020 and who cared? March 25th, 2023 | Tags: Europe, Fossil Fuel, Germany, Renewable Energy | Category: Big-Government, Europe, Global Warming | Print This Post | | Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh? Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat. The exponential death of affordable electricityIt’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist. Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe for a whole year compared to the total electricity needed. As he says “This is not the headline plot that the industry shows to its investors, the media and politicians, but it comes from their own published annual WindEurope Report”. Just look at this graph from 2021 where wind power is achieving so little in some of the richest nations on Earth and say the words The UN Secretary General wants us all to say: “NetZero by 2040”.  GWPF | Click to Enlarge. The installed theoretical generating capacity above was 236 gigawatts (shown in the brown dashed line), but the highest daily output in the year was 103 gigawatts which means the other 364 days were worse. Then consider the entire output of the offshore windfarms of the UK. The wind is more reliable over the ocean, but it’s still an electrical disaster. In March 2021 there was an eight day period when the wind speed presumably halved and the output plummeted. For eight whole days 8.8GW of wind power was not available (green box). The total energy lost was around 1,600 gigawatt-hours, which is also 1,000 times more than what the biggest battery on Earth could provide.  Figure 2 shows the wind power generated by all UK offshore windfarms in March 2022, as presented online on the Crown Estate website.4 Over some periods, it rose to the nominal installed capacity of 10GW. However, for 8 days at the end of the month it averaged no more than 1.2GW.| Click to Enlarge.
Allison explains the devastating maths of filling in those gaps: That much energy, 1600GWh, is 1000 times the capacity of the world’s largest grid storage battery (1.6GWh at Moss Landings, California). Batteries 20 million times larger are never going to be available and storage batteries will never make good the failure of offshore wind farms, even for a week. And the wind can drop for longer periods than that. For those who want the physics, he sums it up so well: The energy of the wind is that of the moving air, and, as every student knows, such energy is ½Mv2, where M is the mass of air and v the speed. The mass of air reaching each square metre of the area swept by the turbine blade in a second is M=ρv, where ρ is the density of air: about 1.2kg per cubic metre. So, the maximum power that the turbine can deliver is ½ρv3 watts per square metre. If the wind speed is 10 metres per second (about 20 mph) the power is 600 watts per square metre at 100% efficiency.2 That means to deliver the same power as Hinkley Point C (3200 million watts) by wind would require 5.5 million square metres of turbine swept area – that should be quite unacceptable to those who care about birds and to other environmentalists. Keep reading → March 24th, 2023 | Tags: Battery, UK, Wind Power | Category: Electricity, Renewable, Storage, UK, Wind Power | Print This Post | | We have reverted back to the old style comment layout but with a few new buttons and a new “editing” link in comments for five minutes after publication. Save the world with disposable EV’s?After children in the Congo have dug out the cobalt for the blessed batteries we’d hope the cars would be sustained as long as possible. Alas, apparently there is just one more design flaw on top of the low mileage, delays, expense, spontaneous fires, and the need for a whole new grid. After a minor accident, no one quite knows how to assess the safety of the battery, so it’s easier to throw it away. That means more waste in the landfill and higher insurance premiums to cover the cost of writing off near new cars. Where are the Greens? If child slaves and emissions matter, isn’t it better to reduce consumption by saving your old car from landfill, especially if your new one might end up there as well? Reduce, reuse, recycle… Meanwhile the UN is demanding Net Zero targets, which are not even theoretically possible, be achieved ten years sooner. Half the technologies we need are not even invented yet. Infinity-minus-ten is a number that won’t get you to work, but it powers whole careers at the UN. h/t David and Notalotofpeopleknowthat Scratched EV battery? Your insurer may have to junk the whole carBy Nick Carey, Paul Lienert and Sarah Mcfarlane, Reuters LONDON/DETROIT, March 20- For many electric vehicles, there is no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents, forcing insurance companies to write off cars with few miles – leading to higher premiums and undercutting gains from going electric. And now those battery packs are piling up in scrapyards in some countries, a previously unreported and expensive gap in what was supposed to be a “circular economy.” “We’re buying electric cars for sustainability reasons,” said Matthew Avery, research director at automotive risk intelligence company Thatcham Research. “But an EV isn’t very sustainable if you’ve got to throw the battery away after a minor collision.” Amazing what uncertainty can do to the value of a good car: Allianz [an insurer] has seen scratched battery packs where the cells inside are likely undamaged, but without diagnostic data it has to write off those vehicles. … Keep reading → When the formerly esteemed journal Nature endorsed one side of politics in 2020, apparently it didn’t change any votes, but about a third of Trump supporters decided the science it published was politically biased too. The loss of trust in Nature was so strong that it tarnished the whole field of US science. (Zhang et al) There goes the public faith in peer reviewed “Experts”. “Trump supporters who had been shown the summary of Nature’s editorial were less likely to trust Nature’s information on COVID-19, and also reported more mistrust in US scientists.” Being actively political meant 154 years of scientific reputation disappeared just like that. In the graph below presumably* naive Trump supporters ranked Nature as mostly “informed” (marked in orange, of course). The Trump supporters who saw the political endorsement (marked in red) suddenly, apparently saw Nature as more of a partisan rag than an impartial reporter of scientific truth.  @Nature says: In 2020, Nature endorsed Joe Biden in the US presidential election. A survey finds that viewing the endorsement did not change people’s views of the candidates, but caused some to lose confidence in Nature and in US scientists generally.* Naturally, although the data was smashingly strong, Nature completely missed the signal. The editors tell us it’s the voters fault: This experiment builds on the literature on trust in research among people with different political allegiances. This includes the idea of confirmation bias, whereby people on different sides tend to favour evidence that supports the views they already have, while avoiding evidence that does not, and the backfire (or rebound) effect, whereby evidence that challenges a view can have the opposite effect to that intended. So Nature took a hit for the team. The editors say they had to do it, and would do it again.Jo Nova says, please do, your science journal is a travesty of bias and unreason, and the more voters that realize that, the better. Endorse Away! Nature also endorses namecalling in science and published “research papers” on how to convince “climate change deniers” to believe (Bain et al). I offered to help them reach thousands of deniers, if they could only define the term scientifically and name the evidence that deniers deny. They were unable to. I managed to get an apology issued then. But, true to their religion, Nature was the journal that published a blacklist of 386 scientists and commentators who got too much media on climate change and shouldn’t be listened to (Petersen et al). It was an honor for me to be be listed at 99. (With the other half, David Evans very pleased to be ranked at 57). To mark the occasion I designed a cover page just for them for free:  … by Jo Nova, 2020. Since 60% of US voters already think climate change is a religion, all Nature has to do is keep pumping out these kind of excuses (below) and no one will believe anything it says. It’s acting for all the world like a Union of Science Bureaucrats that think they know what’s best for the health and wellbeing of US citizens, even if the voters aren’t smart enough. Nature, being paid mostly through government funded subscriptions knows Big Government is always the answer. Excuses from the Nature Editorial Staff: Should Nature endorse political candidates? Yes — when the occasion demands it Political endorsements might not always win hearts and minds, but when candidates threaten a retreat from reason, science must speak out. …the study does question whether research journals should endorse electoral candidates if one implication is falling trust in science. This is an important question, and there are, sadly, no easy answers. The study shows the potential costs of making an endorsement. But inaction has costs, too. Considering the record of Trump’s four years in office, this journal judged that silence was not an option. Nature’s October 2020 editorial was an appeal to readers in the United States to consider the dangers that four more years of Trump would pose — not only for science, but also for the health and well-being of US society and the wider world. Trump had laid waste to science and scientific institutions at home on issues from COVID-19 to climate change, and had gutted environmental regulations even in the face of increasing climate risk. At a time when the world needed to unite to deal with these and other global threats, he took an axe to international relationships, pulling the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the United Nations science agency, UNESCO. He moved to defund the World Health Organization, and he walked away from a deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) that the United States had carefully negotiated with Europe, China and Russia to prevent Iran’s government from enriching weapons-grade uranium. It is hard not to think of a worst-case scenario for public health, climate change or nuclear security had Trump remained in office today. How dare any political leader defund globalist committees that spread viruses and rave about President Xi?! ____________ * The graph Nature tweeted doesn’t say what the survey answers relate to, and the paper is behind their own paywall, but we presume this graph refers to a question about their own reputation, not how Trump supporters scored on a science-quiz. REFERENCESFloyd Jiuyun Zhang, Political endorsement by Nature and trust in scientific expertise during COVID-19, Nature Human Behaviour (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01537-5. www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01537-5 Alexander Michael Petersen, Emmanuel M. Vincent & Anthony LeRoy Westerling (2019) Discrepancy in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians, Nature Communications, volume 10, Article number: 3502 (2019) | Copy of the deleted supplementary list here. Today we are trying to fix the comment box toolbar to allow commenters to add bold etc to comments. So the layout may change and randomly. Thanks for your patience and feedback.  Art by Syaifulptak Now that half the US knows that climate science has become a religion, let’s all thank the IPCC for working hard to convince the other half. Here comes Fire, Brimstone, and Ticking Bombs again:Like all successful bureaucracies, The IPCC is here to pretend to save you from problems it invented. The taxpayer funded doomsday cult wants you to think of them as a brave bomb disposal team, putting their lives on the line to do anything humanly possibly to make storms go away, except for using a tried and tested technology with a 50 year record of zero emissions. Nobody say n.u.c…. IPCC climate scientists issue ‘a survival guide for humanity’, warning window closing to reduce emissions“The climate time-bomb is ticking,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres, at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which this week released its final “synthesis report”, marking six years of work by about 700 scientists. “Today’s IPCC report is a how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb,” he said. “It is a survival guide for humanity.” Senior marketer of renewable energy, Sarah Prophet Kirkpatrick says we are all doomed unless we buy more Chinese solar panels, even though China is making most of them with coal: University of New South Wales Associate Professor Sarah Perkins Kirkpatrick said it had to be done before 2030. “Bottom line, we need to stop burning fossil fuels — 80 per cent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions actually comes from burning fossil fuels [such as] coal, oil and gas,” she said. Quick, buy my panels, she says, they come with nice weather eighty years from now after you’re dead, but only if you sign here by Friday. The Perfect Doom Sale:The panic is now perfectly tuned like a Boxing Day sale — stocks are limited but there is hope if you act fast. Every warning is the last chance, every catastrophe is ten years away, and every final clearance sale has a discount for early responders… “This is the final warning to limit the climate warming,” Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said. “In the next 10 years, we’ll overshoot that 1.5-degree threshold, but then we can bring it back down again — with heavy climate mitigation, heavy investment in renewable energy and also carbon capture and storage,” she said. Macquarie University’s Professor Lesley Hughes … “One of the things this IPCC report emphasises is that the window of opportunity for a safer climate in the second half of this century is closing rapidly, but it’s not yet closed,” she said. 16 years ago we had only ten years to save the world: Pagan witchery and voodoo meets catholic guiltThe ABC include no evidence at all in this round of perfect panic — just the words “drought” and “flood” and gospel of the 700 scientists of the high realm of the IPCC is enough. The new IPCC report, is just like all past reports: it depends on climate models that ignore solar magnetic effects, solar wind, cosmic rays, and changes in the solar spectrum to pretend that CO2 causes all the changes they can’t otherwise explain. It’s argument from authority that depends on argument from ignorance with circular reasoning and it’s based on a simulated planet that has a tropospheric hot spot which 28 million weather balloons can’t find here on Earth, but nevermind. It’s only data! But a foreign unaudited committee says “it’s unequivocal” and it will cost us trillions, and the ABC can’t see any problem with that. Just lay on the guilt trip — what kind of evil person wants to send their own children to hell, I tell you… Macquarie University’s Professor Lesley Hughes said what happens in the next seven years would be vital if we’re to leave a world that’s habitable for our children and grandchildren.  Think of the children! | Image by Garten-gg. Gone are the days when the media would even try to communicate science. Now it’s like reality TV. Tug my heartstrings — one poor man in Torres Strait is being terrorized by witchdoctors in lab coats. The ABC is exploiting his macabre fear of the bones of his parents being washed out to sea. This is climate science reporting in 2023: On Australia’s Torres Strait islands, Warraber man Daniel Billy has been taking photos of what has already been lost as the sea creeps up on his homeland. “Just to see a lot of the land mass taken out from the islands, it’s really sad,” he said. “It’s destroying places. “It’s very sad and it’s scary at the same time, as it’s slowly coming up to the community.” Mr Billy is worried about the cemetery, metres from the shoreline, where his parents have been laid to rest. “I don’t want to pick up my parents’ remains from the reef,” he said. “I don’t want my children, or their children, my nieces and nephews to pick up my remains.” Someone needs to show Mr Billy the study of 700 Pacific islands which are almost all growing (thanks to climate change). As long as he buried his parents on an inhabited island, they’ll be fine. The only islands disappearing are sand drifts with a population of zero that are just a hundredth of a square kilometer in size. It’s war, I tell you, War! sayth NonScientist magazine:The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global group of climate scientists, has released its latest report today. It yet again warns that without immediate and massive emissions reductions, limiting global warming to 1.5°C will be beyond reach. “If we don’t act with the necessary speed, we will shoot past 1.5 degrees and possibly even 2 degrees,” says Peter Thorne at Maynooth University in Ireland, one of the authors of the report. “Really it’s a call to arms.” Hyperbole knows no bounds. REFERENCE Synthesis Report, Sixth Assessment Report, IPCC, Working Group I, II and III. |
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A growing backlash over climate-friendly policies is now hitting the German Greens, putting wobbles into the country’s three-party ruling coalition.
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