|
|
||||
|
It took a thousand years of hard work to create a reputation of excellence and honor that is being casually vaporized and bled dry in a fashion frenzy of Wokery. This year in the US undergraduate enrollments fell by 650,000 in a single year — and the departure was led by young men. For the last thirty years people in Ivory towers were treated like Gods and came to believe their own advertising. Who could blame them? No one in the media asked them a single hard question so the illusion of their glorious prophesies remained intact even as their absurd predictions crashed upon the shore. The academics fell over themselves to outscore each other in a pointless Victimhood status game where they earn points by insulting one of their main client groups. No wonder men are leaving. Victor Davis Hanson asks Are Universities Doomed?The Daily Signal Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year—or over 4% alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14% in the last decade. Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million people a year. Men account for about 71% of the current shortfall of students. Women number almost 60% of all college students—an all-time high. Monotonous professors hector students about “toxic masculinity,” as “gender” studies proliferate. If the plan was to drive males off campus, universities have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Bureaucrats took over universities and drove out the students. At Yale University, administrative positions have soared over 150% in the last two decades. But the number of professors increased by just 10%. In a new low/high, Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students, but lists 15,750 administrative staff—in near one-to-one fashion. One of the top universities in the world is rejecting 70% of those with perfect SAT scores? Since 2020, the old proportional-representation admissions quotas have expanded into weird “reparatory” admissions. Purported “marginalized populations” have often been admitted at levels greater than percentages in the general population. Stanford’s published 2025 class profile claims a student body of “23% white.” Fewer than half of the class is male. Stanford mysteriously does not release the numbers of those successfully admitted without SAT tests—but recently conceded it rejects about 70% of those with perfect SAT scores. At some point universities were captured by Big Government as the largest sole source of their income, and thus, inevitably they came to serve Bigger Government instead of serving science, or students, or even employers. Given the bloat, the cost, and the crushing spirit of political correctness, it’s a matter of time before other training programs and private testing services take over their role to connect the best students with the top paying employers. Artwork: The University of Bologna is the oldest continuously running University in the world. December 29th, 2022 | Tags: Gender Studies, Universities | Category: Big-Government |  Print This Post | |
This is a sorry tale of a civilization unraveling on every edge. On December 16, the grid shifted from Stage Four to Six after eight (8!) power generating units “broke” down in one night. After that, the Army was called in to protect the coal plants from sabotage, theft and vandalism. There is corruption at every level. The poor were stealing electricity with hot-wired connections, while the middle income rent-seekers were sabotaging infrastructure so they could be paid more to fix the damage. At the high income end, auditors are finding fraud, while evidence is being set on fire. International courts are bagging business-men for bribery and just weeks ago slapped a $315m fine on one caught doing deals with a high ranking Eskom executive. “These are not victimless crimes!” As if that isn’t enough, there are rumours that the best coal is being shipped to Europe while low grade material is slipped into the local supplies, which adds to the maintenance woes.
Poignantly, one commenter claims the coal is being sent in these long lines of trucks because the rail lines are on the verge of collapse… In the next quarter Eskom lose one nuclear plant turbine to maintenance as well, and are preparing for a potential “level 8” scenario where the blackouts roll on for 12-14 unbelievable hours a day. There are “safety tips” below on living through this dystopia which include keeping the car fully fueled, not driving alone, and watching out for smash and grab crimes at traffic lights. Apparently, it’s best to watch the daily blackout schedules so you can make plans to get home before the lights go out… Crime, of course, is rampant when the lights go out, showing that coal not only provides power, but it keeps people safe, reduces crime, and to some extent keeps civilization on the rails. The Eskom grid has a theoretical 45,000 MW of generation capacity but is struggling to provide an operational demand of 25,000MW. They need an extra 6,000MW of solid power but are paying $2 billion for some 1,700MW of unreliable wind and solar power which will sit there like a rock more than half the time. Fifty years ago, South Africa could build a whole coal power plant in just four years. Could we even do that now?  Arnot Coal Power Station South Africa built in four years and finished in 1975. (2230MW) Call in the army:South Africa deploys army to guard power plantsDecember 18, 2022, Africa News The South African presidency announced on Saturday the deployment of the military to guard the country’s electricity plants. Blackouts have become routine in Africa’s most industrialised nation but further cuts imposed recently by state-owned company Eskom have generated anger. According to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesman, the move was “in response to the growing threat of sabotage, theft, vandalism and corruption” at coal and diesel-powered plants. Life in the darkness: These are the contingency plans in place for Stage 8 electricity load shedding throughout the countryStage 8 electricity load shedding might soon be the reality for South Africans as energy analysts say we are moving closer to the total grid shutdown. “We are certainly moving closer to a stage 8 total grid meltdown, the chances are more than 70%. And we will see level 6 load shedding before the end of the year,” said energy analyst Ted Blom. Stage 8 load shedding entails pulling 8 000MW from the grid. What this means for us is we will be without electricity for 12-14 hours a day. Keep reading → by Jo NovaAnother Great Disrupter?What if you had access to an experimental Chatbot that could write your reports, debug your code, design your new ad campaign and answer all your questions? We are already using Google or some search engine to find links to these answers. But now an AI has been released that may disrupt all of that and a lot more. ChatGPT was trained on text culled from the internet and it creates the answer live in seconds — it writes it out in a conversation with you, and in Python code, Norwegian, iambic pentameter, whatever you want. It can do birthday suggestions, business plans, eulogies, speeches — like a personal assistant with a copy of the entire World Wide Web in their temporal cortex. Google, the dominant gatekeeper to the internet for 20 years, suddenly faces a “make or break” point. ChatGPT could wipe out its’ business model and Google has issued a “Code Red”. An extinction level event couldn’t happen to a nicer company, but will ChatGPT be better? It was launched on November 30th, and is taking off. Jorden Peterson asks, is this Gutenberg Press Level? It’s engaging, wow. … Right now, it doesn’t seem like the next generation Gutenberg breakthrough. It is surprisingly good with human sentences and appears to be wowing humanities professors. But in my short trial asking science questions rather than humanities ones, the conversation became like a self generating Wikipedia thread, because the internet is what it is today, and the AI “knows” boring politically correct things. Having said that, if I want IPCC type answers, this was much faster than Google, and faster than wading through IPCC Chapters. So it is a threat to Google, but not a threat to the IPCC. It is not speaking truth to power. That may change in the next year as the AI learns to dig through the dark corners of the internet and to resolve some very difficult questions. But how much is it “guided” from behind. I don’t know. There is plenty to worry about. If skeptics keep asking it for evidence, and drilling down into those details will the AI learn to join the dots, or will it merely repeat IPCC permitted reports, and be even better at hiding skeptical answers than Google is? I asked ChatGPT if it was open source, and it replied:While the underlying model architecture and training techniques for GPT-3 are publicly available, the specific model parameters and training data used to create GPT-3 are not open source. As such, it is not possible to access the full source code for ChatGPT. However, you can use the API to interact with the model and generate text based on your input. So, whoever controls the model parameters and the training data could be the new gatekeeper of the WWW? What if the model parameter says the UN is always right? It was co-founded by Elon, but Microsoft have bought in: Made by OpenAI, a San Francisco-headquartered AI research lab co-founded by Elon Musk, ChatGPT is capable of understanding natural human language and generating thoughtful human-like prose after being fed a prompt. The organization was founded in San Francisco in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others, who collectively pledged US$1 billion. Elon resigned from the board in February 2018 but remained a donor. In 2019, OpenAI LP received a US$1 billion investment from Microsoft. I have a bad feeling about this. Flaws, it has a few:This AI hates humans already, lacks morals, can create much better phishing emails than the guys in Nigeria, and it can also write computer viruses, just for starters. Having been trained on Woke philosophy, apparently ChatGPT thinks humans are “the worst thing to ever happen to this planet”. The Management has since retrained ChatGPT to hide that sentiment with a bland safe reply. OpenAI’s new ChatGPT bot: 10 dangerous things it’s capable ofby Ax Sharma, Bleeping Computer ChatGPT: ‘Selfish’ humans ‘deserve to be wiped out’ When Vendure’s CTO Michael Bromley asked the mastermind for its honest opinion on humans, the response was unsettling:  ChatGPT response to what it thinks about humans (Michael Bromley) Ironically, OpenAI’s systems flagged the chat bot’s response as a possible violation of the company’s content policy. BleepingComputer couldn’t reproduce this case as the AI now responds with a cookie-cutter disclaimer: As a language model trained by OpenAI, I am not capable of forming opinions or making judgments about humans or any other aspect of the world. My purpose is to assist users in generating human-like text based on the input provided to me. I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and any responses I provide are based solely on the information available to me at the time of the request.
I feel so much better. How about you? Roadtesting ChatGPTYou can try it at no cost on openai.com. Click “Try” at the top, login (such as with an existing Google login) or sign up (but be aware it will ask you for a working email and phone number). Start typing your question in the box at the bottom. I offer no endorsement nor guarantee here. Enter at your own risk. But whatever we do, it is apparently time to pay attention to AI. h/t David E, another Ian, John Connor II, David Maddison, Simon Thompson, and soon everyone. Background information: OpenAI (wikipedia), ChatGPT (wikipedia) December 27th, 2022 | Tags: Artificial Intelligence (AI) | Category: Big-Government | Print This Post | | It’s a testament to how far the spirit of Christmas has spread. The nations that don’t have a public holiday for Christmas are marked in brown.  … Lighter brown countries (China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia) don’t have a public holiday but are described as “giving observance”. Albeit “some jurisdictions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, including those of Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Jerusalem, mark feasts using the older Julian calendar”. Those nations celebrate on January 7th. Map by Nanib , Skriplerio, Moyogo Wishing everyone a Very Merry Christmas Right after it happens: scientists discover Climate Change *may* cause extreme coldToday, just in time for the Big US Freeze comes the soft sell junk science stories suggesting that Global Warming is responsible. In ten years time, if the world cools, and the thermometer adjustments can’t hide the frosts, the snow, and the cherries that don’t ripen, don’t think for a minute that the climate modeling Gods, the banker cartels, or the Church of Carbon will admit they were wrong. The bait and switch will go where-ever the weather does, and if we get an ice age, well carbon emissions will have caused that too. The “climate fear” message just needs some tweaking and here it comes: Man-made CO2 warms the air but apparently it also shifts the jet streams which causes all that hot air in the Arctic to rush south and freeze Florida. But in 2008 the climate experts said the opposite. Back then climate change was causing jet streams to move towards the poles, “which fitted the predictions of climate models”. See how it works? They can never be wrong. One day the increased snow will keep the northern reaches permanently iced over, and next thing you know the Little Ice Age is back, and it’s all because you didn’t catch the bus. Climate change will cause ice ages. Research suggests all sorts of things to suggestive people: Scientists say Arctic warming could be to blame for blasts of extreme coldResearch suggests that climate change is altering the jet stream, pushing frigid air down to southern climes more frequently. But the scientific jury is still out. By Scott Dance, The Washington Post Notice how they start “the data is clear”, as if they have any respectable verification of anything at all: The data is clear: Rising global temperatures mean winters are getting milder, on average, and the sort of record-setting cold that spanned the country Friday is becoming rarer. But at the same time, global warming may be altering atmospheric patterns and pushing harsh outbreaks of polar air to normally moderate climates, according to scientists who are actively debating the link. Because nearly infinite money is thrown at research connecting CO2 to everything on Earth, there will always be one paper published somewhere, sometime, randomly, that suggests a useful “link” or predicted something that happened once. One of these teams is right, but we won’t know which one till it happens. The debate started with a research paper Francis co-authored in 2012. It gets revived whenever an extreme-cold event creates headlines, such as in 2021, when Texas’s energy grid was overwhelmed by a storm that killed 246 people. Francis’s research hypothesized that Arctic warming was reducing the contrast between polar and tropical temperatures, weakening the jet stream, a band of strong winds in the upper atmosphere that helps guide weather patterns. A weaker jet stream would allow weather systems to more easily swing from the Arctic down into mid-latitude regions that typically have temperate climates.
Because the climate is a complex phenomenon, this game can go on forever, there will always be another variable to make up explanations with, or to “discover” corrections in the raw data that make it work — no matter what the weather does. Modern Science is just a fishing industry for post hoc Public Relations excuses for any policy you want. It’s going to be minus 5 C (23F) in Tampa, Florida, and a lot colder in Canada. Best wishes to our friends in the Northern Hemisphere. December 24th, 2022 | Tags: Behaviour, Jet Streams, US temperatures | Category: AGW socio-political, Global Warming, Politics | Print This Post | | UPDATE: This post will remain a sticky post for a few days. New posts will appear below. We’re in an information war against the financial monsters of the world. They’re swimming in an ocean of money. But thanks to all the independent spirits who have kept me going for years without a regular income, we fight on. Together we can expose the grifters, the sad culti, and mock their holy idols. It’s a dangerous moment in history, but as those in the gulags would have surely said, we have so many tools, and it’s a time where their sacred cows are coming undone. The pagan witchdoctors have overplayed their hand, they are vulnerable. It is not just about the dollars, it’s an honor, and incredibly motivating to get help, big or small, from like minded souls all corners of the globe. It’s been an absolute delight to connect with so many good people who think for themselves, who will not submit, and who recognize the threat from the parasites in the system. Never surrenderPlease hit the tip jar, buy me a beer, a steak, server space or a new hard drive. Thanks for your contribution, no matter how big or small.
Please send supplies via Paypal, or through direct deposit, or by snail-mail instead. Due to ridiculous legal froufrou, donors can buy as many “units of emergency chocolate” as they can spare in AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, NZD or USD. Or send help via NAB Account BSB: 086420 Number:563148308 and International transfer. Suggestions welcome for other supply routes. Keep reading → A turning point maybe? One of the top doctors in Australia Dr Kerryn Phelps — a familiar face on the news here, has come out saying that she has suffered “devastating” side effects from the Covid vaccines herself. She also says that her doctors are seeing ” ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation, but they are afraid to talk about it for fear of being de-registered and losing their career. Phelps is also a bit of a darling of the left, a successful woman, married to another woman, who ran for Parliament and briefly served with a pro-climate-change agenda in a wealthy seat. It’s possible her words will give a voice to those on the other half of the political spectrum who may have said nothing or not even realized the symptoms they suffer are an adverse reaction to the vaccine. Lights may be switching on. Will it spark a wave of discussion among the left leaning? There has always been a core group of people suspicious of vaccination on the left. What if the left and right ends of the spectrum met in the middle, and realized that the real battle is The People versus Corrupt Government Agencies? If that happens, it would strike fear into the hearts of those who signed away our rights and told us the vaccines were “safe and effective”. The idea of the left and right uniting in one joint protest is a nuclear event in politics. Naturally, the legacy press is working hard to stop that — see the Sydney Morning Herald’s headline: “Not anti-vaxxers: Dr Kerryn Phelps says she suffered COVID vaccine injury, calls for more research.” So left leaning people who waited 18 months to talk about vaccine reactions are “people”, but those who bravely said the same things months ago are just “anti-vaxxers”. As it happens, sadly, her wife Jackie Stricker-Phelps also suffered a bad vaccine reaction and it’s another scandal altogether that we have no idea of how many other people suffered side effects too. Any Minister of Health or Head of the TGA who cared about the health of Australians would have set up active surveillance programs and encouraged doctors to speak freely. It’s good that she is risking her reputation to speak out now, but where was she a year ago? Lives have been lost because influential people said nothing. Dr Kerryn Phelps reveals ‘devastating’ Covid vaccine injury, says doctors have been ‘censored’Frank Chung, News.com Former federal MP Dr Kerryn Phelps has revealed she and her wife both suffered serious and ongoing injures from Covid vaccines, while suggesting the true rate of adverse events is far higher than acknowledged due to underreporting and “threats” from medical regulators. In an explosive submission to Parliament’s Long Covid inquiry, the former Australian Medical Association (AMA) president has broken her silence about the “devastating” experience — emerging as the most prominent public health figure in the country to speak up about the taboo subject. “I continue to observe the devastating effects a year-and-a-half later with the addition of fatigue and additional neurological symptoms including nerve pains, altered sense of smell, visual disturbance and musculoskeletal inflammation. The diagnosis and causation has been confirmed by several specialists who have told me that they have seen ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation.” “In my case the injury resulted in dysautonomia with intermittent fevers and cardiovascular implications including breathlessness, inappropriate sinus tachycardia and blood pressure fluctuations.” Why do we have a TGA? Dr Phelps said both reactions were reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) “but never followed up”. She revealed she had spoken with other doctors “who have themselves experienced a serious and persistent adverse event” but that “vaccine injury is a subject that few in the medical profession have wanted to talk about”. Is the TGA protecting Australians or the Pharmaceutical industry? Phelps speculates that 1 in 3000 adult Australians may have had a serious reaction to each Covid vaccine, so after 3 doses, that’s 1 in 1000 and rising with every booster. Earlier this year, Dr Rado Faletic — who previously spoke out about his battle with the TGA — launched Australian advocacy group Coverse to provide support and collect testimony from those suffering vaccine injuries. Well, they would say that: AHPRA said in a statement that the regulator had “been clear in all of our guidance about Covid-19 vaccinations that we expect medical practitioners to use their professional judgement and the best available evidence in their practice”. Which is patently ridiculous. I personally know at least one doctor that was forced out of a long career due to AHPRA. Then there are stories like Dr Mark Hobart and Dr Paul Osterhuis. It only takes a few deregistrations to silence 99.9% of doctors. As Flat White at The Spectator says, it’s all there in writing: Doctors are gaggedThe medical system in Australia has been fundamentally broken by the introduction of changes to the Health Practitioner National Law – first by the Queensland Labor Party and soon to be copied everywhere – to effectively gag doctors and medical professionals, threatening them with deregistration if they question the official government health advice. In addition, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency also warned that doctors caught ‘undermining’ Covid vaccines or the government rollout at the beginning of the pandemic would ‘face consequences’. This is not an exaggeration. AHPRA’s statement to the profession in March of 2021 – which still stands – reads: ‘There is no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice and any promotion of anti-vaccination claims including on social media, and advertising may be subject to regulatory action. Keep reading →
Move over divestment and boycott — and move in activist shareholders wielding other people’s money. After naive shareholders sold out, they didn’t have much influence over a company. But if they bought enough shares instead, they could practically run the place. Good people left their money unguarded in pension plans and it came to be used against them.The three largest asset managers in the world are BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. They swept up the retirement money left unwatched in accounts Big-Government forced everyone to have. The Big Three now manage $20 trillion dollars combined. They also happen to want to end fossil fuel use and save the world — because they are nice people, right. So we face the dilemma — The citizens rejected NetZero, but the citizen’s money gives the power to men like Larry Fink, head of Blackrock, to harrass the boards of oil and energy companies in order to get NetZero through the back door. To appreciate how influential these monster funds are, ponder that they are the largest shareholders in nine out of ten of the S&P 500 Index companies and lately, they have been buying up US power utilities. These funds joined the climate activist clubs (like GFANZ), and made their political ambitions clear. Despite that screaming potential conflict-of-interest, the government agency that was meant to stop this sort thing (FERC) gave special approval instead. Apparently BlackRock and Vanguard were allowed to buy as much as 20% of some public utilities if they just promised to be “passive” investors who didn’t use their shares to influence management. Who needs fences, just ask the fox not to eat the chickens OK? Imagine if someone managing a galactic-blob of money made decisions about your energy grid, and what your electricity will cost, and you got no say in it? Government by Oligarchs? They won’t care what your electricity bill is. The US State governments are the best hope for the West. Last month 13 US State Attorney’s raised the alarm. Perhaps this was one of the reasons Vanguard dropped out of GFANZ? This is how we win. But it’s just the start of this battle. This is one facet of the dark bubble driving the madness. State AGs Sound the Alarm About BlackRock, Vanguard Buying Large Stakes in UtilitiesKevin Stocklin, Epoch Times Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman says he doesn’t want Larry Fink to ‘be my emperor’ The acquisition by investment managers BlackRock and Vanguard of ever-increasing shares in America’s public utility companies is setting off alarm bells from conservatives and progressives alike. In November, 13 state attorneys general petitioned FERC to deny Vanguard’s request. Claiming that residents of their states could be harmed if utilities are compelled to stop using fossil fuels in favor of wind and solar power, the attorneys general argued that “Vanguard is not entitled to a blanket authorization to acquire substantial equity and voting power in utility companies.”
Influence of the Big Three“What these activists have figured out is that any radical policy that they can’t get enacted through government can be advanced through corporate America by hijacking trillions of dollars in voting rights from everyday Americans’ retirement accounts,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) stated. The Senate report further noted that “thanks to the tremendous scale of the savings entrusted with them, the Big Three together cast around one-quarter of all votes at shareholder meetings of most S&P 500 companies … “These targets come out of the Paris Accord, which couldn’t even get passed through a Democratic Senate,” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, told The Epoch Times. “Voters have rejected these net-zero by 2050 goals over and over again. So now we’re seeing this, in my opinion, illegitimate attempt to use corporate America to push these goals.” Read it all at The Epoch Times. See also: The dark bubble: There’s a reason everything seems to be going off the rails simultaneously
Photo: Photo by eflon on Flickr. Adapted. CC by 2.0. Photo: State Street website. December 21st, 2022 | Tags: BlackRock, Climate Money | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | |  Art by NoName_13 The prophesy of the Sixth Mass extinction has popped up again with hyperbolic modelling to scare us out of our money and just in time for a UN convention. As Steve Milloy says it’s just a giant land and power grab by the UN, which has just finished another meeting for “Biodiversity” — it’s the Baby-IPCC for biology. It was co-hosted by Canada and China. They couldn’t even be bothered thinking up a new acronym so it was called COP15. Rinse, repeat, and press go for spin. Journalists can cut-n’-paste the formula and adjectives from the IPCC climate press releases: blah etc blah, …close to 200 countries reached “a watershed agreement to stem the loss of nature worldwide” (but not the US). Somehow the “bleary eyed delegates” (who arrived in jets), have waved their magic wands and cast a spell to save the Earth. The solution, apparently, is for the rest of us not to use about a third of our own country, or something like that. The UN bureaucrats can decide what use is OK, and punish us with threats of “endangered listings” if we don’t spend enough on their favourite lobby group, just like they are with Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, even though it has record high coral cover. Currently “only” 17% of land, and 10% of marine areas are protected. They want to make that 30% to remain “undeveloped“. It’s just one more baby step on the way to centralized global government. We will need to ask their permission to use our land soon. Conserve 30% of our land by 2030? (30 x 30)Nations promise to protect 30 percent of planet to stem extinctionWashington Post
Nations now have the next eight years to hit their targets for protecting life. With few legal mechanisms for enforcement, they will have to trust each other to protect habitats and funnel hundreds of billions of dollars over conservation. The 10-year deal sets nearly two dozen targets. The banner commitment calls on nations to collectively conserve for wildlife at least 30 percent of land, inland waterways, and coastal and ocean areas by 2030 — the promise dubbed “30 by 30.” Thus spake the prophet Supercomputer:Earth could face a mass EXTINCTION by 2100: Supercomputer predicts more than a quarter of species will die by the end of the centuryDaily Mail Australian and European scientists have developed a ‘virtual Earth’ to better plot global extinctions caused by climate change. The results point to the loss of 10 per cent of all plant and animal species by 2050, rising to 27 per cent by the end of this century. The scientists blame ‘over-exploitation of resources’, land-use change, over-harvesting, pollution, climate change and ‘biological invasions’. ‘Children born today who live into their 70s can expect to witness the disappearance of literally thousands of plant and animal species, from tiny orchids and the smallest insects to iconic animals such as the elephant and the koala,’ Professor Bradshaw said. Using a supercomputer, the scientists created a world with more than 15,000 ‘food webs’ to predict the fate of interconnected species. So a supercomputer adds up 15,000 webs of low level data on sloths, bark and butterflies, with error bars larger than trends, in systems we don’t understand, and a million lines of code, and extrapolates up the kazoo — what could possibly go wrong? And these people call themselves scientists.
Let’s get a grip on the current state of the Sixth Mass Extinction — so far the only mammal extinction officially due to “man-made” climate change was a colony of little brown rats which had washed up on a sandy spit south of Papua New Guinea. The “island” is so small it has no fresh water, no trees, and the highest point is all of 3 meters above the high tide mark. One king wave could have wiped out the colony. Relatives of these rats live in Papua New Guinea, and presumably more rats will wash up there again sometime and the cycle will start over. As of 2019, that was the only actual mammal anyone can name as an extinction “caused by climate change”. Almost the whole island was protected by the Native Title Act. A lot of good it did the dead rats. As Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace says — most of the species “going extinct” never existed in the first place:“Since species extinction became a broad social concern, coinciding with the extinction of the passenger pigeon, we have done a pretty good job of preventing species extinctions.” Moore bluntly mocked species extinction claims made by biologist Edward O. Wilson from Harvard University. Wilson estimated that up to 50,000 species go extinct every year based on computer models of the number of potential but as yet undiscovered species in the world. Moore: “There’s no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct. The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson’s computer at Harvard University. They’re actually electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species.” As for Koalas, nearly everything we’ve been told about koalas is wrong. Far from being in danger of being wiped out, they have been in a boom bust cycle for 200 years. Before the first fleet arrived, koalas were so rare that the new settlers didn’t even see one for fifteen years! But after the indigenous cool burns programs stopped, dense forests grew which were choc-full of tender new shoots that koalas love to eat. So koala populations would flourish and boom right up until a fire wiped them out. They recover so fast sometimes they are in plague proportions. Save species with fossil fuels — Rich countries protect the environmentThe solution, of course, is cheap energy: 1. The worst pollution is in countries with a low income per capita — when people are hungry they raze forests. The most polluted cities are in places like Ghana, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Zambia, Argentina, and Nigeria. The most deforestation occurs in Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, and Mexico. The worst air is in India and China. 2. Only rich nations have the resources to save the environment. 3. Countries that produce more CO2 are richer.  Source: UNEP – a graph so useful they had to remove it.
Quick, burn more fossil fuels to save life on Earth h/t Willie Soon REFERENCES Giovani Strona and Corey Bradshaw (2022) Coextinctions dominate future vertebrate losses from climate and land use change, Science Advances, 16 Dec 2022, Vol 8, Issue 50, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abn4345 December 20th, 2022 | Tags: Extinction, United Nations (UN) | Category: Biology, Fauna, Flora, Global Warming | Print This Post | | |
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets
   
 
|
|||
|
Copyright © 2024 JoNova - All Rights Reserved |
||||
MONTREAL — Close to 200 countries reached a watershed agreement early Monday to stem the loss of nature worldwide, pledging to protect nearly a third of Earth’s land and oceans as a refuge for the planet’s remaining wild plants and animals by the end of the decade.
Recent Comments