Tuesday Open Thread

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Great Reset unravels? Germany is thinking of using Green subsidies on weapons of war instead

By Jo Nova

Remember how the war with Ukraine was going to accelerate the green energy revolution?

German Flakpanzer Gepard armored vehicle and air defense system.

The Flakpanzer Gepard needs more ammo, not solar panels. Photo By Hans-Hermann Bühling

For some reason, unreliable wind and solar power are not helping German industry build more tank ammunition. Instead, the federal government is allegedly talking to the state governments about  taking green subsidies and spending the money on factories to build shells instead. And they are building those factories near the coal plants.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the chief of Germany’s army warned that sending weapons and arms to Ukraine has left military stockpiles “bare”.

Germany led the way in the great Green Energiewende transformation spending in the order of €32 billion a year, every year, in a quest for green electrons. Instead of creating peace on Earth and better weather, it just made the legendary economic powerhouse of Europe weak and vulnerable.

Tell the world, if the Germans can’t run a nation efficiently on “renewable” power, who can?

It’s perhaps not the Reset Klaus had in mind:

Great Reset Fail? Germany Mulls Diverting Green Agenda Cash Aimed at Killing Coal to Arms Industry

Kurt Zindulka, Breitbart

German FlagThe German government is reportedly considering diverting green agenda subsidies aimed at cutting coal power to the defence industry in order to ramp up production of arms amid the war in Ukraine.

A report from Bloomberg claims that the federal government in Berlin is conducting confidential conversations with regional state governments to direct green subsidies to produce more weapons and ammunition and thereby create more jobs in areas of the country impacted by the attempted move away from coal.

According to a source familiar with the plans who spoke to the news organisation, German defence contractor Rheinmetall AG is planning to build a factory to produce the basic components for ammunition in the state of Saxony, one of the main hubs of the coal industry in the country.

Trump did warn them.

Now the German Greens despair,
Because military stockpiles are bare,
As the loss of their grants,
Goes to shell-making plants,
Near coal power they need for warfare.

–Ruairi

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Monday Open Thread

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Sunday Open Thread

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What looks, acts and smells like a Global News Cartel and just got hit by an Antitrust lawsuit…

By Jo Nova

What if the news media formed a global monopoly to control the news?

Media pollution

Imagine if the media and tech giants of the world banded together behind-the-scenes to rule certain stories were “misinformation” and all their agencies thus reported the same “news”?

That’s what the Trusted News Initiative aimed to do — decide what ideas were and were not allowed to be discussed.

It’s like “free speech” but without the free part.

Not only could the media bury things but they could get away with it if no upstart competitor could red-pill their audience.

It would be the death of the Free Press

In a world like that the people would be ruled mostly by whomever it was that decided what was “misinformation”. Those controllers would be the defacto Ministry of Truth.

We all saw it happen over the last three years, so it’s good to put a name on the beast, but even better, Robert F Kennedy is suing them for anti-trust violation.

The Trusted News Initiative is everything journalists should hate. It’s basically there to “protect” voters from hearing about things like the Hunter-Biden Laptop, good climate news and bad vaccine reactions. TNI practically told us that in 2020:

The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) was set up last year [2019, just in time, eh?] to protect audiences and users from disinformation, particularly around moments of jeopardy, such as elections.

Nearly everyone’s on board:

Core partners in the TNI are: AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Information Futures Lab, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta [Facebook], Microsoft, Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, The Washington Post, Kompass – Indonesia, Dawn – Pakistan, Indian Express – India, NDTV – India, ABC – Australia, SBS – Australia, NHK – Japan.

Which is a handy list of “where not to get your news”.

It’s a news cartel begging to be busted

Media Bias, voting behaviour of journalists.Tony Thomas at Quadrant not only alerted me to the TNI but also to the news that a lawsuit has been filed in the US for damages and to break it up:

…on January 10 President John Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F Kennedy Jr,  in a Texas District Court launched an anti-trust lawsuit for treble damages from TNI’s biggest news providers, namely the BBC, Washington Post, and global news syndicators Reuters and Associated Press. He wants TNI disbanded as an unlawful cartel. He cites the BBC because of its TNI lead role and US commercial operations involving millions of users.[1] The Kennedy lawsuit is here.[2] His brief says “It is also an action to defend the freedom of speech and of the press.”

This is rather like the Big Money Cartel of bankers and asset managers like BlackRock who are now facing anti-trust legal action all of their own.

The suit names the BBC because they were “the leaders” in at the start. But Thomas points out that the consequences are uncertain for the ABC, SBS and others. Though they are not named in the suit, they can still be liable:

The suit says,

Each participant in an antitrust conspiracy is jointly and severally liable for all the damages (including treble damages and attorneys’ fees) caused by the conspiracy, and the victims of an unlawful antitrust conspiracy are not required to sue all participants therein. (My emphasis, p93).

Thomas sent questions to the ABC and SBS in Australia asking them if they are involved in the lawsuit; whether they had advised their Minister about the potential legal exposure, and for details of how they had been implementing TNI policies. None have so far replied.

Perhaps it’s time for an FOI?

By the way, this is an actual BBC header, not a satirical dig.

BBC Beyond Fake News, misinformation. MEdia.

The only thing “beyond” fake news  is 100% managed propaganda.

By combining the major news and social media outlets, little competitors could be crushed

Even the media outlets that are not members of TNI would get this message — stray from the line and Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter (pre Elon Musk) will hurt you:

Robert  Kennedy’s own newsletters had 680,000 followers before being de-platformed, censored and shadow-banned by Google/YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook/Instagram. His writ says BBC’s Jessica Cecil, TNI’s head in 2020-21, took evident pride in the assertion that the TNI’s suppression of others’ online reporting did not “in any way muzzl[e] our own journalism”. He adds, “It was apparently of no consequence that the TNI muzzles other news publishers’ journalism.” (p44). Cecil spoke of TNI’s “clear expectations” for members to “choke off” alleged online misinformation. This incidentally prevents any one member gaining traffic by publishing “prohibited reporting” the others have binned.

Kennedy says TNI’s Big Tech members collectively have a gatekeeping power over at least 90 per cent of online news traffic. De-platforming a small news publisher typically costs at least 90 per cent of its traffic. Even well-known major online news publishers can lose up to 50 per cent of their traffic from a  seemingly minor change to Google’s search algorithms.  Smaller online news publishers have been destroyed completely when shadow-banned, throttled, de-monetized, or de-platformed.

The real free press are the bloggers now

The big threat to the legacy media and corruptocrats everywhere was the rise of the independent bloggers and influencers who could easily outscore the boring media bloc that repeated the same tedious lies. Ten years ago an army of blogs like this were growing every year and getting front page in many searches:

Kennedy’s lawsuit, less kindly, claims TNI’s commercial goal is to deplatform and crush  the myriad of upstart online publishers who are contradicting the official lines and reducing trust in big media, along with its ad revenues.  The legacy, high-cost media are smarting over competition from bloggers in the shift to digital publishing, with 85 per cent of Americans now getting their news online. US newspapers’ ad revenue between 2000 and 2020 plummeted from $US48.7 billion to only $US9.6 billion, Kennedy says (p28).

A further motive for the TNI censorship, Kennedy says, is to placate governments that are threatening adverse new regulations, potentially costing Big Pharma billions in fines, liabilities and lost revenue. US conservative pundit Tucker Carlson has satirised the Big Media censorship as: “We have a monopoly on telling lies. No one else can talk.”

In a free market for news, the same players compete with each other to get to the truth the fastest. In the TNI cartel, all the decisions about what “the truth is” are played out behind closed doors. The ABC News Director Justin Stevens claims the TNI is just a system of “fast alerts” about disinformation and “information sharing” about things like “how audiences react to disinformation”. But in a free market all that happens all the time. Stupid ideas get crushed by great responses. That’s how it works.

The best answers win in the court of public opinion. It’s democratic, people vote with their remotes, their wallets and on their ballots. TNI wants to hide that debate, take it away from the people, and put it in the hands of The Ministry of Truth.

Nice racket you have there

Read it all at Quadrant — as Tony Thomas tells it, it’s a profit making cartel. The Kennedy suit explains how the TNI members were promoting vaccines while silencing all the cheaper medicines. And Big Pharma was sending money back to TNI members in advertising.  The conflicts of interest are brazen — the President of Reuters News, James C Smith, sits on the board of Pfizer. When someone pointed this out on Linked In they were banned for life.  See how this works?

Why is a single dollar of our tax money supporting a news service that doesn’t know what journalism is? If cartels like this are not exactly the kind of thing we pay the ABC to expose, why pay them at all?

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Saturday Open Thread

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Expert BoM excuses about a solar panel leaning on bushes near Sydney’s official thermometer

By Jo Nova

Two days in a row, this blog has been quoted in the Daily Telegraph.

Congratulations to Clarissa Bye for shining a torch on the BoM

Craig Kelly found the wandering solar panel leaning on a bush near Sydney’s official thermometer, and I wrote about what a  strange spot that was to leave a solar panel. Then Clarissa Bye of the Daily Telegraph picked up the story and on Jan 25th  asked the BoM why the panel was there.  After a whole week of missed deadlines, with pleas for extra time, The Daily Telegraph gave up waiting and published the story Wednesday:

Questions raised over mystery solar panel at Sydney Observatory

Science blogger Jo Nova has also queried the solar panel’s location, describing the BOM as “lackadaisical” at best in maintaining weather sites. “The solar panel is exactly due south of the Stevenson screen where the thermometer is kept,” she said. “If, hypothetically, someone wanted to leave a reflective object pointed at the box at midday, that’d be the place to do it.”

““There’s only been one day above 30 degrees since February 21st last year in Sydney, and that was a day when the wandering solar panel was visiting the thermometer, seemingly connected to nothing and leaning on a bush.”

Meanwhile the BoM, which didn’t have time to answer questions, somehow found time to take the embarrassing panel away.

Then finally, the BoM responded to Ms Bye and my thoughts are “wow… it took them a whole week to come up with that?Apparently the strange panel has been there for almost a whole year now, and was being used as backup power for the weather station, just in case there were blackouts due to renovations at the school next door, and if you believe that…

BOM responds to vanishing solar panel mystery

Clarissa Bye, The Daily Telegraph, Feb 2, 2023

The solar panel mysteriously vanished after media questions were asked, but the Bureau of Meteorology has now issued a statement saying the panel was erected because of potential power interruptions due to a nearby construction of a school.

It stated the panel was installed in February 2022 and removed in January 2023 “as it was no longer required to supply power to the weather station once the mains power was restored in December 2022”.

“The solar panel could not be placed on a roof due to heritage restrictions, so was placed at an appropriate distance on the grass nearby,” the BOM stated.

As Jo Nova said — there is nothing “appropriate” about this distance, and the BOM knows it.

Sydney Observatory, Thermometer, solar panel, Jan 2023.

That’s a strange spot to leave a panel… | Craig Kelly

Clarissa Bye sent me the BoM reply and most of my responses were put into the online Daily Telegraph update yesterday:

Asked if the BOM was confident that the reflected heat would not affect recordings on the temperature gauge, the BOM spokeswoman stated:

“Any potential impact from the installation and removal of the solar panel will be assessed as part of routine quality assurance processes used by the Bureau for all weather station data.

Climate and science blogger Joanne Nova said that the solar panel should have been located elsewhere on the site and placed so that the reflection was never on the Stevenson screen. “The BOM is not confident it has no effect or they would have said so,” she said.

And as I added:

“An even better answer would have been ‘we bought a 30m extension cord and put the panel far away’.

Which obviously the BoM didn’t do.

And that raises other questions:

“If this panel was a back up for the Stevenson equipment then where was the battery? A solar panel on its own is no use as a mains replacement if the power fails at night.”

Mowing the grass around that panel for a whole year must have been a pain too, right?

I really have a problem with the lack of any care for site conditions and raw data. Does climate science matter?

“They evidently did not make even the slightest effort to put the panel in there in such a way to minimize the impact.  “Indeed, it‘s hard to think how they could have put it in a more suspicious place than they did.

As usual, the BOM don’t care less about recording accurate temperatures. They’d rather play statistical games after the fact to try to fix the errors. Does their “routine quality assurance”, mentioned above, involve homogenization with “neighboring sites” a thousand kilometers away? Perhaps the site in Cobar will detect the effects of the solar panel in the backyard of the observatory? Does that sound like expert science?

The most important thing here is that there are many better locations within the small enclosure for that solar panel, even if a first world country needed a makeshift panel in the centre of their largest city “for reliable supply” — which is another crisis all of its own. The panel could have been placed to get the morning sun at the Western edge of the patio (at least). It could have been placed to make sure the reflection was never on the Stevenson screen.

UPDATE: The solar panel was left where the red line is, directly south of Stevenson screen (the white box) — the ideal place to reflect the midday sun (if that was the aim).  There are many other places they could have picked especially with an extension cord.

Sydney Observatory, Thermometer, solar panel, Jan 2023.

Due South of the Stephenson screen…

A better answer from the BoM would have been: ” We needed the panel for back up supply from day x until day z. This temporary addition was recorded in the metadata. The angle was calibrated at xx% to make sure it collected sun but at no time reflected directly onto the Stevenson screen.”

None of that happened.

Craig Kelly has put in an FOI to get more answers. And Jennifer Marohasy wants answers in court:

Institute of Public Affairs senior fellow Dr Jennifer Marohasy – who is in a court battle with the BOM to access historical weather records – said the solar panel fracas “undermined” the bureau in the absence of other explanations.

The BOM has accidentally admitted the solar panel was definitely there when the site recorded 30.2°C on January 18th. Indeed it may have been warming temperatures the entire time since the last time Sydney reached more than 30°C on Feb 21 last year. The whole time Sydney has been “below 30°C” there was a strange solar panel pointed at the official thermometer.

What’s next: Time for Tanya Plibersek to explain BoM science

Tanya Plibersek is the Minister for Environment and Water and is responsible for the BoM. If scientific standards there are so low, and if climate science matters, what is she doing to fix it? Billions of dollars of policy rest on solving an alleged problem with the Australian climate, yet the BoM can’t even be bothered to set up quality weather stations or maintain them properly?

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Friday Open Thread

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Backflip: BP “disappointed” in renewables — flags a shift back to oil and gas and “making profits”

By Jo Nova

The environmental fashion parade suddenly has a smell…

This is a notable shift:  Twenty years ago BP called itself “Beyond Petroleum”, and only one year ago the CEO said BP was “accelerating” its green investments. But now the CEO is reassuring investors that BP is not going to be distracted by environmental goals, and are focused on maximizing profits. Furthermore those profits would be found where it has a competitive advantage, including  it’s “legacy oil and gas operations”.

Just like that: it’s OK to talk about profits and energy security. Key words here are “dialing back”, “disappointed”, “narrower” and “less emphasis” and they are all used in relation to environmental investments.

After years of sunshine and unicorns on the forced transition to unreliable energy, the mood appears to be changing.

h/t Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat

BP logo, sign. Fuel. Petrol.BP’s CEO Plays Down Renewables Push as Returns Lag

Bernard Looney seeks to sharpen strategic focus, with less emphasis on environmental goals

Jenny Strasberg, Wall Street Journal

Chief Executive Bernard Looney plans to dial back elements of the oil giant’s high-profile push into renewable energy, according to people familiar with recent discussions.

Mr. Looney has said he is disappointed in the returns from some of the oil giant’s renewable investments and plans to pursue a narrower green-energy strategy, the people said. He has told some people close to the company that BP needs to do more to convince shareholders of its strategy to maximize profits in areas where it has a competitive advantage, including its legacy oil-and-gas operations.

In some of the conversations, Mr. Looney has said he plans to place less emphasis on so-called ESG goals—a catchall term for environmental, social and governance—to help clarify that those aren’t distracting the company from its ability to deliver profits, the people said.

One BP investor said shareholders were carefully watching the performance of renewable investments.

They said: “Societally, people are now more focused on the question of energy security – we’ve got to be mindful that as we run up the new system of renewables, you can’t run down the old system too aggressively; it’s a transition, it’s not a step change.”

This appears to be a company wide shift. Only three days ago the chief economist at BP said that we’d need oil and gas for decades yet.

Oil and gas investment needed for another 30 years, BP warns

By Rachel Millard, The Telegraph

Fossil fuels only way to combat energy shortages, oil giant claims

Investment in oil and gas production will be needed for the next three decades if the world is to avoid more shortages and price swings, BP has warned. The oil giant said in its annual energy outlook published on Monday that fossil fuels are still likely to account for about 20pc of primary energy in 2050 even under a significant tightening of climate policies.

“This would be the first time in modern history that there has been a sustained fall in the demand for any fossil fuel.”

Media spin runs as strong as ever

The New York Times and Reuters readers though, are seeing headlines like this generated from the same BP report.

“The Shift to Renewables is speeding up. Here’s how.”

The head of the world’s leading energy organization called the war in Ukraine an “accelerator” of the transition.

“Ukraine War to accelerate shift to clean energy BP says”

“The increased focus on energy security as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war has the potential to accelerate the energy transition as countries seek to increase access to domestically produced energy, much of which is likely to come from renewables and other non-fossil fuels,” BP Chief Economist Spencer Dale said in the report.

It’s like we live in two different worlds. Some investors may be in for a nasty surprise.

To be fair though, BP are generating the kind of reports that “appeal both ways”. But what’s different is that a few years ago they wouldn’t have dared pouring cold water on the environmental message or talking about energy security and the need for fossil fuels.

But make no mistake there is still a lot of conflict in the companies core mission

Are these plans still current?

BP has said it plans by 2030 to slash its fossil-fuel production by 40% from 2019 levels. Mr. Looney has set a target of increasing investments in what it calls “transition growth businesses” including renewable energy and convenience-store operations to around 50% of total capital spending by 2030, up from more than 40% by 2025. Mr. Looney and his lieutenants have said the company is balancing its deeper push into low-emission projects while still nurturing legacy cash cows like oil-and-gas production and trading. — WallStreetJournal

According to the Wall Street Journal, earnings from oil and gas were projected to be $30 to $35b annually by 2030, while the renewables earning target was $10b.

For perspective, BP abandoned solar and biofuels between 2011-2015:

In 2011–2015, BP cut down its alternative energy business. The company announced its departure from the solar energy market in December 2011 by closing its solar power business, BP Solar.[136] In 2012, BP shut down the BP Biofuels Highlands project which was developed since 2008 to make cellulosic ethanol from emerging energy crops like switchgrass and from biomass.[137][138] In 2015, BP decided to exit from other lignocellulosic ethanol businesses.[139] It sold its stake in Vivergo to Associated British Foods.[140] BP and DuPont also mothballed their joint biobutanol pilot plant in Saltend.[141] — Wikipedia

If there were easy profits to be made in solar or biofuels, presumably BP wouldn’t have axed them.

BP Energy Outlook 2023  |  Photo by Keith Edkins |

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Thursday Open Thread

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Imagine there was a cheap way to save 2,000 people and cool cities but it didn’t make anyone rich?

By Jo Nova

A new paper estimates that if we increased our tree canopy in cities to 30% we could cool our cities by nearly half a degree. Works better than a windmill…

Trees, jungle, in city, urban heat. Maria Orlova

Photo by Maria Orlova

The trillion dollar global warming camp obsesses over 1.5°C of heat, but the urban heat island has already made our cities 1.5°C hotter than the countryside around them, and nobody gives a toss. Cities are where the lived human experience is for most of us, and despite the threat of that extreme heat made “worse by climate change”, no government does the obvious and sets a tree cover target. There are no Ministers of Regreening, and no carbon credits for suburbia. All we’re getting is concrete bollards and  fifteen-minute-cities of pain.

In the green revolution instead of growing gum trees, people are cutting them down because they shade their solar panels. In our capital city they razed a majestic avenue of trees in order to add light rail. A true Green hates cars more than they like trees.

Urban flora not only cleans the air, it also reduces suicides, improves cardiac health, and reduces particulate pollution. One Canadian study estimated that living close to green spaces even reduces all cause mortality and by a remarkable 8 to 12%. (Crouse et al 2017). We’ve known this for years but no one has organized an annual UN convention.

Greening our cities won’t change the global temperature, but it lays bare the hypocrisy

They say they are here to help but they pick the paths that make them money.

Trees could cut urban heatwave mortality by a third: study

Planting more trees in urban areas to lower summertime temperatures could decrease deaths directly linked to hot weather and heatwaves by a third, researchers said Wednesday.

Modeling found that increasing tree cover to 30 percent would shave off 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7 degrees Fahrenheit) locally, on average, during hot summer months, they reported in The Lancet.

Of the 6,700 premature deaths attributed to higher temperatures in 93 European cities during 2015, one third could have been prevented, according to the findings.

On average, the temperature in cities was 1.5C warmer during summer 2015 than in the surrounding countryside. The city with the highest difference—4.1C—was Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Earlier studies have shown that green spaces can have additional health benefits such as reducing cardiovascular disease, dementia and poor mental health, as well as improving cognitive functioning of children and the elderly.

REFERENCES

Cooling cities through urban green infrastructure: a health impact assessment of European cities, The Lancet (2023).

Crouse et al (2017) Urban greenness and mortality in Canada’s largest cities: a national cohort study, Lancet Planet Health, . 2017 Oct;1(7):e289-e297. doi: 10.1016/S2542-5196(17)30118-3. Epub 2017 Oct 5.

Photo by Maria Orlova.

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Wednesday Open Thread

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Ocean life is seeding the clouds above it, and the modellers didn’t know

By Jo Nova

The science is settled except we only just realized that the benzene and toluene gas over the vast Southern Ocean were not man-made pollutants after all, but were made by industrious phytoplankton. For the first time someone went and measured the benzene and toluene in the water and discovered that instead of being a sink for human pollutants in the air above, the ocean was the source.

This matters because these two gases increased the amount of organic aerosols by, wait for it, between 8% and up to 80% in bursts. And all that extra aerosol matters, of course, because aerosols seed clouds, which change the weather.

And the expert climate models, upon which a $1.5 Trillion dollar industry depends on for its’ very existence, did not know this. If hypothetically there has been less phytoplankton in the worlds oceans in the last few decades, there may also have been less cloud cover, and thus more warming. But who knows?

The modelers are always saying climate change can’t be natural because they can’t think of anything else that could have could have caused the warming, then people keep finding another factor they forgot to put in the models…

“In any case “ will have to consider  and toluene emissions from the oceans if they want to get the clouds right in climate projections for both the past and the future,” says IQFR-CSIC researcher and head of the atmospheric modeling part of the study Alfonso Saiz-López.”

This is an image of rolling eddies of blooms of phytoplankton in 2017 between the Antarctic peninsula and South America. Like a giant artist was marbling patterns in the worlds oceans.

Southern Ocean drives massive bloom of tiny phytoplankton

Southern Ocean drives massive bloom of tiny phytoplankton 2017.  On January 13, 2016, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite captured this view of extensive phytoplankton blooms stretching from the tip of South America across to the Antarctic Peninsula.*

Does this sound like a mature field ready to have a $7 trillion dollar carbon market set up around it?

New study highlights the impact of two new marine gases on climate models’ accuracy

PhysOrg

“If we don’t get the clouds right, we won’t get the climate right,” says Charel Wohl, ICM-CSIC researcher and lead author of the study. “We are just beginning to unveil the multiple ingredients that form cloud seeds,” he adds.

The work, published in the journal Science Advances, describes the first measurements of benzene and toluene in polar oceans and indicates that these compounds have a biological origin. Until now, their presence in polar marine air was thought to be a proof of the extent of human pollution from coal and oil combustion or solvent use, among others.

A biological origin

The only way to know how the  was regulated before the profound changes generated by  in the industrial era is to study those regions where the air is still clean, such as the polar areas.

To carry out the study, the team measured the concentrations of benzene and toluene in  and air during the course of two oceanographic campaigns: one in the Arctic and the other in the Southern Ocean. The distribution of these gases, their relationship to the amount of phytoplankton, and the fact that the ocean was constantly emitting them into the atmosphere rather than capturing them from it, led the researchers to conclude that they were of biological origin.

Then, by incorporating the data into a global atmospheric chemistry and climate model, the scientific team realized that benzene and toluene emitted by the ocean contributed significantly to aerosol production. This was especially true in the extremely clean and unpolluted atmosphere of the Southern Ocean, where these two gases increased the amount of organic aerosols by 8% and up to 80% in transient situations.

The ocean is a net supplier — it’s outgassing far more than it absorbs

From the paper: Benzene is the top row, and clearly, in this two month period in 2019 there are big fluctuations, which could affect cloud cover (Click to enlarge. ) The fluxes of gases are shown in C and D and most of the time the ocean is neutral or outgassing.

Benzene, Toluene, Southern Ocean, Cloud cover.

Fig. 2. Underway measurements from the Southern Ocean.
Hourly underway surface seawater concentrations and atmospheric mole fractions of benzene and toluene in (A) and (B), respectively. Interpolated air mole fractions are also shown in (A) and (B). The calculated sea-to-air fluxes are shown in (C) and (D). Positive fluxes indicate ocean outgassing, i.e., sea-to-air fluxes. The other plots show the wind speed (WS) (E), underway sea surface temperature (SST) (F), and Chl a and surface seawater salinity (SSS) (G). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add9031

 

This unique combination of measurements points toward a biological source for these two compounds previously thought to be predominantly released to the environment from anthropogenic activity.

Chlorophyll concentrations marks out where phytoplankton were in a three month period. The highest concentration blooms are marked in red.

Secondary Organic Aerosols (SOA) may have a big effect on cloud formation:

Keep reading  →

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Tuesday Open Thread

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Just like that: the suspicious solar panel disappears. The Bureau of Met experts at work?

By Jo Nova

Remember the nomadic solar panel that appeared a few meters due south of the Sydney Observatory thermometer at the same week as the city ended it’s coldest streak in 140 years? Well Craig Kelly, who took the original photos, went back and now its gone.

Today there is just grass and shrubs to reflect the midday sun towards the back of the thermometer box.

As Craig Kelly said: “The fact that it’s disappeared shows that it was never installed – someone at the BOM just happened to grab a random solar panel and place it at such an unexplained position…”

So much for expert rigorous science accurate to a tenth of a degree.

Kelly explains that this site is nearly invisible:  “The only way you can see it is by holding a camera above your head – it’s not visible to the eye – even if you were 6’6” and standing on your toes you can’t see over the fence – and the Observatory is closed to the public for some unknown reason.”

Perhaps the BOM just thought no one would notice, and “it’s for a good cause, eh?” We can’t have the punters thinking Sydney was cooler today than in 1883.

As I said:

The solar panel was exactly due south of the Stevenson screen on exactly the right day. If, hypothetically, someone wanted to leave a reflective object pointed at the box at midday, that’d be the place to do it.

Look for the handy BOM guidebook:

“How to create temperature records with spare parts lying around the house”

Sydney Observatory, Thermometer, solar panel, Jan 2023.

That’s a strange spot to leave a panel… | Photo by Craig Kelly 20th January 2023

It’s the year without a summer for Sydney. There’s only been one day above 30°C since Feb 21st last year in Sydney, and that was a day when the wandering solar panel was visiting the thermometer, seemingly connected to nothing and leaning on a bush.

Guilty, what? Will the BOM retract the 30.2°C “official temperature” or do secret homogenisation adjustments to figure out what the temperature might have been with thermometers 800 km away?

I wonder how often this is happening at other sites around Australia? Time to start looking?

By onlookers, not easily seen,
At just the right angle to lean,
One odd solar panel,
Some heat for to channel,
Straight on to the Stevenson screen.

–Ruairi

Keep reading  →

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Monday Open Thread

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Pfizer Pleased To Announce Their New Vaccine 90% Effective Against New Virus They Created

After the blockbuster revelations, the Babylon Bee right onto it: Babylon Bee. Satire, Pfizer.

Babylon BeeNEW YORK, NY — Pfizer Inc. dropped their new COVID variant and accompanying vaccine Thursday at midnight, much to the delight of CDC officials. The new vaccine is reportedly shown to be 90% effective against the COVID variant Pfizer created in their lab.

Experts suggest Pfizer’s radical approach to virus treatment may be tantamount to an abusive relationship, but that’s okay because we probably deserve it.

“I’d suggest we investigate this immediately,” said Congresswoman AOC. “But I don’t want to burn any bridges. I might have to get a job there someday.”

h/t John Connor II, David

PS: Huge congratulations to the indominatable Novak Djokovic, a man we discussed so much a year ago when he was deported for not taking drugs. See the raw emotion as he breaks down in the stands a few minutes after his win. It really is remarkable. It’s not just the vaccine debacle last year, but serious injuries in the last few weeks as well. The man is a champion who will not submit. Last year, they were afraid he would win and spread freedom, not viruses.

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Blockbuster claims in video of Pfizer executive — making mutant viruses, capturing official agencies

By Jo Nova

UPDATE: Pfizer have responded! Wow. They don’t even mention the unwitting informant Jordon Walker, thus suggesting he is one their own. They deny they do Gain of Function or Directed Evolution, but admit “we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.” AND: “In a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function [GOF] mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells”. 

Pfizer are admitting to adding GOF mutations, and to mixing the new spike and old nasty virus!

Are they not saying they engineer viruses — starting with the original Wuhan virus and adding the new spike from new “variants of concern”? The new Omicron variants have incredibly well evolved spikes that are so much more infectious than the original variant, but the Omicron virus “in toto” is much less dangerous than the original Wu-Flu. So by mixing the old nasty variant with the new spike, they could be playing with a virus that has the worst of both? How’s that for “potent”?

In the second quote they are admitting they engineer and add “Gain of Function” mutations to a full virus in order to blah blah blah… Is that not exactly what the accusations are suggesting?

And it’s being done in BSL3 labs, not the most secure BSL4?

One way or the other, it’s setting the internet on fire.

Project Veritas has footage of a Pfizer executive bragging on camera about utterly reckless profit-seeking immoral behaviour and corruption at the highest level. If this is what it appears, it’s dynamite. It’s almost “too good”.

Vaccine, Pfizer.

Jordon Trishton Walker appears to be the Director, Worldwide R&D Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning.  In the video he candidly discusses how Pfizer are talking of creating mutant Covid viruses. Walker is utterly cavalier about the risks, he brags about the profits, and also claims Pfizer has complete captured the regulatory agencies. “It’s a cash cow”.

The video was released Thursday, but within hours, it was hard to independently verify who this man was. As impressive as Project Veritas’ record is, what if this was a Pfizer sting instead? James O’Keefe from Project Veritas offered some internal Pfizer Documents. But Walker doesn’t seem very old, articulate or particularly smart enough to be a glorious high level director of Pfizer. He speaks far too easily, as if he’s never met the company’s lawyers. Other strange things were happening, like his Linked in account, had disappeared off the internet and for an hour or so The Daily Mail covered the story, then their article disappeared without a word (a copy was archived here). The internet was being “scrubbed”. No other news outlets were mentioning it. The censorship, though, suggested he was the real deal. If he wasn’t, Pfizer would surely have said so?  Brian OShea went on a hunt for information to confirm Walkers identity, and pieced together a timeline of his career. But Walker has a very strange career path — so strange, I’ll write more on that soon. One way or another careers hang in the balance…

When caught, Walker said he was lying to “impress a date”. And perhaps he was exaggerating and embellishing. Nothing he claims here is necessarily true or verified yet.

Today Tucker Carlson has weighed in (see that segment below). Pfizer have not denied that Walker is who he says or that anything he said was false.  They have not responded at all to repeated requests for answers, but suspiciously they apparently quietly shut down comments on some of their social media accounts.

Dramatically, James O’Keefe says that other insiders at Pfizer are coming forward as whistleblowers today. If so, this could be a game-changer. He has also released more footage of Walker getting violent  and trying to smash the tablet when he finds out it was recorded (see that, far below).

This video is now up to 18 million views on Twitter after little more than a day and a half. When will the news media investigate?

Must watch. Pfizer exec explains how Pfizer is mutating the Covid virus to create new variants so it can sell new vaccines and the regulators turn a blind eye because they are going to work for Pfizer. It’s good for us but bad for everyone else he says laughing.

Rebecca Weisser

Robert F Kennedy says:

Amazing reporting by James O’Keefe showing us what we already knew: Pfizer is a craven venal homicidal morally bankrupt criminal enterprise that has captured and corrupted its regulators.

Hot quotes from Jordon Walker:

Pfizer may be talking about mutating Covid…

  •  “One of the things we’re exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it [COVID] ourselves so we could create — preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that. If we’re gonna do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine — no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f**king viruses.”

It’s not Gain of Function experiments on Covid, it’s just “directed evolution” to make it more potent:

  • No, no, no, no. Though directed evolution is very different. Well, you’re not supposed to do gain of function research with the viruses. They recommend not. But you do things like selected directional mutations to try to see if you can make more . So there is research ongoing about that. I don’t know how that’s going work. There better not be any more outbreaks, because like Jesus Christ.

Pfizer are just trying to save lives right?

  • “Don’t tell anyone. Promise you won’t tell anyone. The way it [the experiment] would work is that we put the virus in monkeys, and we successively cause them to keep infecting each other, and we collect serial samples from them.”

By the way, Covid was a lab leak from Wuhan:

  • “You have to be very controlled to make sure that this virus [COVID] that you mutate doesn’t create something that just goes everywhere. Which, I suspect, is the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest. It makes no sense that this virus popped out of nowhere. It’s bullsh*t.”

And we wouldn’t want to create another pandemic like that last one:

  • “From what I’ve heard is they [Pfizer scientists] are optimizing it [COVID mutation process], but they’re going slow because everyone is very cautious — obviously they don’t want to accelerate it too much. I think they are also just trying to do it as an exploratory thing because you obviously don’t want to advertise that you are figuring out future mutations.”

On capturing government agencies

From Project Veritas comes the claim that Pfizer has the government agencies under its command by offering jobs to everyone in the agency after they have approved the drugs Pfizer wants them to approve:

Walker went on to explain how Big Pharma and government officials, such as at the Food & Drug Administration [FDA], have mutual interests, and how that is not in the best interest of the American people:

Walker: [Big Pharma] is a revolving door for all government officials.

Veritas Journalist: Wow.

Walker: In any industry though. So, in the pharma industry, all the people who review our drugs — eventually most of them will come work for pharma companies. And in the military, defense government officials eventually work for defense companies afterwards. …

Veritas Journalist: How do you feel about that revolving door?

Walker: It’s pretty good for the industry to be honest. It’s bad for everybody else in America.

Veritas Journalist: Why is it bad for everybody else?

Walker: Because when the regulators reviewing our drugs know that once they stop regulating, they are going to work for the company, they are not going to be as hard towards the company that’s going to give them a job.

We already knew we should raze those agencies.

Tucker Carlson

If legit, Pfizer is admitted their vaccines can’t keep up with viral evolution

At 16:20  Robert Malone points out that Pfizer are repeating the kind of risky work that was being done in Wuhan. (It’s that bad). But also that they have made a big admission here –“This is an acknowledgement of defeat”, he says. They’re saying that even with the new mRNA technology they can’t keep up with the virus’s evolution. They’re trying to jump ahead with “directed evolution” which is a way of not saying “Gain of Function”. It’s a desperate measure to outdo the virus. (Showing that vaccines were never the right solution to a rapidly evolving coronavirus, and antivirals were always the better solution.)

The idea that Pfizer are mutating things in “advance” to try to beat the virus and develop the next vaccine seems suspiciously futile. There are so many ways this virus could change — there are 29,000 bases to mutate, in every combination and permutation, and we won’t know which are truly successful mutations until they get tested in real people. Some can be guesstimated with testing in humanized mice that carry copies of human proteins like ACE2 receptors. But how realistic is it to make 5,000 different vaccines “just in case”? Perhaps the combinations and permutations can be reduced enough to make this viable. Maps of mutations in the genome of the virus (below) show that some points are hot-spots, and other points hardly vary because they are too essential to viral fertility.

These are the rate of mutations that occur naturally at each of the 29,000 base pairs since 2020

The spikes in the graph below show the parts of the viral genome that have mutated the fastest, but also show which parts of the virus are so important they do not mutate (changes at these sites are presumably “fatal” for the virus). It still seems a desperate and daunting task for Pfizer to out-do what is already occurring all over the world in millions of people with covid.

Nextstrain, Covid, Mutations, spike map. Graph.

Click to enlarge. Source — Nextstrain. Scroll down, mouseover their graph for more detail.

Desperation: Walker descends into violence

When Walker realizes he’s been recorded, he loses it. He says he was lying “to impress a date”. Then calls the police and won’t let them leave, and then tries to destroy their tablet. He even tries to stop a car from leaving which he thinks has the Project Veritas team in.

He is flummoxed, caught in the headlights, but aware this is terrible:


James O’Keefe gives an update today on Steve Bannon’s War Room

In this interview below, O’Keefe explains that Pfizer has not responded except to shut down comments on their social media accounts. But most encouragingly new Pfizer whistleblowers are appearing and he believes that the path forward is with insiders coming forward:


In the original sting Walker was apparently talking to a former Pfizer worker (according to O’Keefe in the Bannon interview), which might explain why he let his guard down. Presumably he’s gay because his date is a man.

There will be so much more to say on this…

h/t Lance, Scott of the Pacific, Jill J, John Connor II, Charles, Leo G, Honk R Smith, Tides of Mudgee. Bill in AZ, George Christiansen from NationFirst, @Rebeccaweisser.

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