Saturday Open Thread

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Good Citizen China carelessly crashes 23 tons of space junk on Earth, gets lucky, but 300 flights in Spain delayed

By Jo Nova

Well that was lucky. Early reports suggest the Chinese space junk from the launch four days ago has crashed in the Pacific 1,000 km short of Mexico. However, if I am reading those maps (below) correctly,  on this uncontrolled reentry it only missed Australia and New Zealand by half an hour, and just a few minutes later and it would have “landed” somewhere in Mexico or maybe Florida. (Now that would have been a November surprise).

Despite what China says, this is not what the rest of the world does:

Kenneth Chang, New York Times

It was China’s latest round of celestial roulette involving a deliberate uncontrolled atmospheric re-entry. The rocket stage, by design, did not include a system to guide it into a specific spot on Earth, far away from people.

“The thing I want to point out about this is that we, the world, don’t deliberately launch things this big intending them to fall wherever,” Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant for the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit group largely financed by the U.S. government that performs research and analysis, said in a news conference on Wednesday. “We haven’t done that for 50 years.”

There’s a callous attitude of disregard here in these excuses:

However, Zhao Lijian, a foreign ministry spokesman, on Friday rejected the notion that China’s handling of the Long March 5B rockets represented anything unusual. “I would like to stress that China has always carried out activities in the peaceful use of outer space in accordance with international law and international practice — re-entry of the last stage of a rocket is an international practice,” he said.

Mr. Zhao added that the Long March 5B had been designed to pose less danger upon re-entry. The rocket “is designed with special technology; most of the components will burn up and be destroyed during the re-entry…

It broke no laws because there are no international laws on reentry. This is not “international practice”, and if it had crashed in a populated area, it would have killed people.

Whew! 23-ton Chinese rocket debris falls to Earth over Pacific Ocean

Brett Tingley, Space.com

Other rockets are designed with measures in place to ensure their core stages are steered into the ocean after launch, while others like SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, are designed to come down in one piece and be reused. China’s most powerful rocket has no such measures in place.

Unfortunately, there are no international agreements in place to prevent these incidents from occurring again in the future, said Marlon Sorge, Executive Director for The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies during a media briefing on Wednesday (Nov. 2). “And the reality is there aren’t any real laws, treaties, internationally that govern what you’re allowed to do in terms of reentry,” Sorge said

And past crashes did leave debris:

Mehul Reuben Das, Tech2

China, like always refuses to take responsibility for its falling rocket, instead claiming that it will burn up on re-entry. However, on three separate occasions, metal from their rockets has made impact on the Earth. Once, they managed to damage an entire village.

On the three previous launches by the Chinese space agency where they have used a similar rocket, back in 2020, 2021, and 2022, large chunks of debris damaged villages in the Republic of Cote d’Ivoire, fell into the Indian Ocean, and landed near villages in Borneo, respectively. Fortunately, no one has yet been injured by this falling debris.

300 flights over Spain were delayed while they waited for the space junk to pass over.

According to Alex on twitter, “The Chinese #CZ5B rocket flew over Catalonia a while ago at a height of 148 km and a speed of more than 28,000 km/h.” Which makes it 140 km above most planes. Still, at some point, 23 ton objects moving at Mach 22 through your airspace will surely be breaking some laws.

Flights were cleared north of Madrid.

US Aerospace published a prediction of the last hours of this space hazard

Judging by reports, it went over northern Spain, past the UAE, over Western Australia and New Zealand and then crashed 1000 km short of Mexico.

Note the tick marks on the path show how far this travels in five minutes. It was a 35 minute flight from Spain to Australia. (I wish I’d known to look out the window as it went past Perth).

Chines longmarch rocket reentry path

Click to enlarge | Aerospace

China does not know how to play diplomat, and is not even trying. It is treating the world like a trash can. Careless with rockets. Careless with viruses.

How much more would it have cost to add in the last stage small burner to control that reentry?

Apparently China will try this again next year.

UPDATE: For those who believe CCP promises that the craft will burn up, here is past debris.

Shoo 👀 A cropland in Gansu got struck by a large chunk of Long March 2D Y72 debris

Shoo 👀 A cropland in Gansu got struck by a large chunk of Long March 2D Y72 debris Twitter

UPDATE: #2 Jonathon McDowell Astrophysicist at Harvard says of the photo above that “The debris …is a suborbital stage of the orbital launch, so more intact that a typical orbital debris reentry.”

China CCP Debris Longmarch, Philipines.

Rocket debris believed to be from China’s Long March 5B (CZ-5B) booster rocket were found by fishermen near the Mindoro Strait, the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) confirmed. (Photo courtesy of PCG Station Mamburao)

UPDATE #2:
MV wisely points out these are not blackened. Apparently they are likely space trash from “suborbital” parts early after the launch. They don’t show whether a 23 ton stage would burn up but they do show that the CCP treats the world like its trash can.

But other parts appear to have crashed on land in 2020, showing that the CCP are not being honest when they claim their reentries burn up:

Cote d'Ivoire. Debris. China Longmarch rocket debris.@planet4589

See the Newsweek story. McDowell says the timing and location suggest it might be.

“For a large object like this, dense pieces like parts of the rocket engines could survive reentry and crash to Earth,” McDowell told CNN. “Once they reach the lower atmosphere they are traveling relatively slowly, so worst case is they could take out a house.” ““I conclude that the objects seen in Mahounou, and at least some of the other objects from the Cote d’Ivore region whose photos are being circulated in African media, are very likely parts of the Chinese rocket stage,” McDowell wrote on Twitter.”

It was an 18 ton stage, and there was seismic evidence supporting debris hitting the ground too.

9.8 out of 10 based on 64 ratings

New Climate Omen appears: Glowing crystal jellyfish are telling you to install solar panels

By Jo Nova

Aequorea victoria, Bioluminescent crystal jellyfish.

Lo behold, I give you the sign of doom. Bioluminescent jellyfish have traveled from the Pacific to the UK to warn of climate change.

We know this because citizen scientists have been tracking jellyfish for at least 20 years of the Holocene, if not the other 12,000 years, and they noticed things have not stayed exactly the same.

We don’t understand the underlying ocean gyrations, currents, jellyfish biology, or long term cycles of anything, but the team collected 1,315 sightings in the last year, which is a big number. Lordy, in waters surrounding 66 million people, it amounts to them counting three or four jellyfish a day.

Based on this we’d like your wallet, your pension fund, and the deeds to the houses your children haven’t bought yet.

Climate crisis brings growing numbers of unusual jellyfish to UK seas

Helena Horton, The Guardian

Britain’s seas are becoming populated with large groups of unusual jellyfish owing to climate breakdown…

Between 1 October 2021 and 30 September 2022, there were a total of 1,315 jellyfish sightings reported to the MCS.

Eight jellyfish species are normally seen around the UK and Ireland but this year 11 were spotted, with more uncommon visitors now visiting these waters

Bioluminescent crystal jellyfish made up 3% of total sightings: these animals are nearly completely transparent, but give off an amazing green-blue light under certain circumstances because of the fluorescent protein produced by their bodies. They are usually found in the Pacific Ocean and rarely visit UK waters.

No one mentions that jellyfish plagues come and go on 22 year pattern that matches solar cycles. What’s more likely, the sun shifts ocean currents, or that coal fired plants make jellyfish migrate?

The doom in this story is the state of science journalism. The Guardian churns out pagan whimsy and astrological prophesy on a daily basis, and calls it science — yet no publicly funded academic scientist has the guts to call this out. We are regressing to an era of tea-leaf reading, and scientists are preying upon the vulnerable and untrained.

No wonder the public thinks that “climate change is already here”.

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Thursday Open Thread

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Renewable records tumble? How the ABC turns a grid headache into a glorious solar achievement

by Jo Nova

With all the calm language of a paid ad agency, the ABC is breathless because an esoteric measure called “minimum operational demand” has hit a record or two. This glorious moment may have only lasted 30 minutes, and it isn’t actually a useful thing, but it’s a “record”.

In fact, “minimum  operational demand” is a grid management headache, not a badge of honor. It’s the midday moment when solar panels all work — and it’s becoming such a problem that two states in Australia have said all new solar panels need “smart” controllers so that the guys in the central control rooms can turn the darn things off. That’s how good it is.

ABC Headline solar records
Renewable energy records tumble around the country as rooftop solar power soars

by ABC Energy Propaganda Reporter, Daniel Mercer

Soaring power production from households and businesses with rooftop solar panels has sent records tumbling across Australia as output from fossil fuels falls to all-time lows.

The record so-called minimum operational demand excludes the power generated by consumers with their own solar panels, which met 92 per cent of South Australia’s overall needs at one point on October 17.

The surge in power at midday forces the rest of the reliable generators to spin their wheels, running inefficiently, while they wait to be allowed back to do what they could have done all along without all the stopping and starting. It’s a miles per gallon kind of thing. Solar power makes the whole grid less efficient.

Here’s South Australia on October 16th setting a record in vanity-electricity:

 

AEMO, SA, Minimum operational demand, duck curve.

The Duck Curve in South Australia.  SA, Minimum operational demand. Click to enlarge.  @AEMO,

 

The achievement is that the grid is so overdeveloped that it had twice as many generators as it needed at midday. Briefly, rooftop solar was making 92% of all the electricity the state could use.

Solar panels are the roadworks on the grid freeway that slows down the trucks and cars that are doing something useful. They provide poor quality electricity, which needs back up, frequency stabilizers, storage, long transmission lines, huge subsidies and large holes in the ground to store all the waste. Not to mention slave labor too. What’s not to like?

Having one “generator” supplying the whole state makes the grid more fragile — all it takes is one cloud bank to roll in, and a Gigawatt can disappear, just like that. A few years ago we came close to a crash on the East Coast because lightning hit the grid, and badly installed panels tripped out with minor frequency wobbles. As many as a third of the rooftop solar panels in South Australia bailed themselves out just when we needed them.  Solar panels also cause surges at midday that can push the grid up to 253 volts (when it should be 240). The surges may be breaking appliances, and it costs more on your electricity bill too.

This AEMO graph below shows the exotic but mindless concept of “Instantaneous renewable penetration”. It creates the illusion that this concept is a long term meaningful attribute, when really this is just the peak half hour in a three month period, or 1 part in 4,000 of what we really need. This represents just the leading creeping edge of the fantasy. 99.99% of the time, the world doesn’t look like this.

Instantaneous renewables, AEMO, Q3, 2022, Report, Graph.

AEMO Q3 report. 2022.

The fine print:

28 Instantaneous renewable penetration is calculated using the NEM renewable generation share of total generation The measure is calculated on a half-hourly basis, because this is the granularity of estimated output data for distributed PV.

If they could have estimated the five minute peak of solar, they would have.

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Wednesday Open Thread

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China is the luminous elephant floating in the kitchen at COP27: the developing nation that builds space stations

By Jo Nova

China emits more CO2 than first world combined, but tells the West to “do more” as it quietly sprints into the Space Race

China, dragon flag.

China signed the Paris Agreement, which meant nothing at all. It is now building 60% of all the new coal plants in the world while the West does a kind of Tantric Energy Yoga —  trying to run smelters with solar panels.

China’s emissions of CO2 exceed all developed nations combined, yet President Xi is not even attending COP27, and almost no one cares.

This is the luminous elephant floating in the kitchen at COP27:

If CO2 mattered, they would care. But the point of COP27 was never about the climate.

China's emissions global, compared to US, India, Russia, EU. Graph.

China absurdly mocks the moral carbon-beauty-contest of the west, while applauding us, and playing by its own rules

From the sidelines, the CCP berates and eggs on the West saying that “empty slogans are not ambition” and calling for the “UN climate summit to address the concerns of developing nations.”

Li Gao, director of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment’s climate change department… urged developed nations to meet their commitments on the US$100 billion per year and called for rich countries to develop a more ambitious road map for climate finance for 2021-25 and onwards.    — South China Morning Post

Meanwhile today China-the-developing-nation is celebrating the docking of their third space module. Nothing says “advanced” quite like building your own space station. Nothing says “dangerous” quite like working on the far side of the moon, where no one can see you, which is another project for the China National Space Administration.


As Dr Malcolm Davis says the Chinese program is heavily integrated with the PLA. It’s a military “dual purpose” operation.

There’s a shadow war in Space “every day”. China is actively testing the US defences in space on a daily basis, harassing them with lasers, radio jammers, cyber attacks and even other satellites with robotic grappling hook arms.

Meanwhile it’s almost like there is a shadow economic and industrial war too, and one of the weapons is “carbon”.

10 out of 10 based on 82 ratings

Third world Australian Met Bureau cuts back on weather balloons. Scientists say it’s “kind of horrific”.

Giles, Weather balloon. Photo Jo Nova

Giles, Weather balloon

By Jo Nova

Things are far far worse at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology than even we realized.

“If you think your public forecasts have gotten worse, that’s because they have,” one meteorologist says.

While Australia is flooding and lives depend on forecasts, the management of our weather bureau is cutting back on meteorologists and on weather balloons, but they’re making sure they do frivolous exercises in rebranding with a new kindergarten logo and calls to be “The Bureau”, and not the BoM.

It’s hard to believe, but instead of releasing two weather balloons from each site every day like the rest of the modern world, the BoM has decided to cuts costs and reduce many regional sites to just one or even none each day. This is in breach of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) standards. Weather balloons are the prize “unrivaled” meteorological instrument. In roughly 900 places all over the world, weather balloons are launched twice a day, every day of the year. These radio back temperature, humidity and wind and pressure data as they rise up as high as 30 kilometers (20 miles) into the atmosphere.

The degradation of the BoM as a science agency is so far gone, that there was even an astonishing plan to reduce launches in capital cities. The idea was to do just one balloon a day, with a second one “on request”. After a fierce internal battle, it appears the aviation division of the bureau, perhaps concerned that planes might crash, said they will find some money to cover the second balloon. Though that’s only for this financial year. The intent is still there. Who needs data, eh?

Insiders are so outraged, they are speaking anonymously to reporters of The Saturday Paper.

‘It’s kind of horrific’: BoM cuts compromise forecasts

Rick Morton, The Saturday Paper

One meteorologist at the bureau, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was now “an open secret that we are not meeting our WMO obligations” on upper atmosphere observation. “We have been told by several senior people that we are now not meeting our WMO requirements, but I also get the sense that it is not considered to be a big deal,” they said. “It’s kind of horrific, the effect that it would have on our model quality as well as just our ability to add our own expertise on top of the computer models. It is crazy to me.”

“Everywhere around the world balloons are launched twice daily at more or less synchronised times,” a meteorologist employed by the BoM said on the condition his identity not be revealed. “Not only is this data the only way to get a real idea of what is actually going on in the vertical profile of the atmosphere, it provides crucial observations for the NWP [numerical weather prediction] models.

“The NWP models are going to become significantly worse across Australia, which in turn affect forecast quality, especially with public weather relying on pure model data so much lately.”

It’s not clear exactly how many sites have shifted from 14 weather balloons a week “to five”, but if the capital cities were next on the list, how many other sites are left still maintaining the normal WMO standards?

Does the climate matter to the BoM? Looks like “not”.

The loss of weather balloon data is an absolute scandal — our entire hundred billion dollar forced transition depends on climate models that use weather balloon data as the main tool to identify the major cause of the warming. Hey, but it’s only “attribution”, who cares what drives the climate, apart from 26 million people paying for green electrons and eating crickets to save the world?

Besides, if the greenhouse “hot spot” fingerprint isn’t there, it’ll be so much easier to find it with sparser data and wider error bars. 28 million weather balloons looked for the hot spot from 1959 – 1999 and couldn’t find it, but maybe they could’ve if models had interpolated the “gaps” instead? Sometimes you can have too much data…

Hadley Radiosonde data.

There was no hot spot in the Hadley weather balloon data 10km up over the equator.

It’s not just the cost cutting, and the data loss, but also the management

Hard to believe I could ever feel sorry for the meteorologists at the BoM, but here we are. They didn’t speak up for science and data much in the last twenty years, instead they welcomed Big Government and it has come in to eat them. Karma, much?

Giles, Weather balloon, Photo Jo Nova

Giles Met Station launching a weather balloon.

Instead of being a scientific agency it is now a Home-for-Bureaucrats which also does some forecasts. It’s run by administrators, not people who love meteorology, and as the bureaucrats grew, the meteorologists shrank. Increasingly the bureau is relying on models, but with less data, and less expert oversight. Staff are not being replaced to keep up with attrition.

“If you think your public forecasts have gotten worse, that’s because they have,” one meteorologist says. “The public forecast gets produced twice a day, at 4am and 4pm. The national production team is shockingly small for the task at hand.

To cope with the vast task of individual town forecasts across a whole continent, the BoM is increasingly relying on “automation and bureaucracy through decision matrices.” All the advanced neural nets in the brains of meteorologists are ignored in favour of a silicon chip decision. So when a prediction from the weighted “global model of models” looks wrong, the experts can’t override it.

“Say, then, that in Melbourne the max temperature that was generated by models was going to be too high, or the models were saying showers all day when it really wasn’t going to happen,” a meteorologist says.

“Even if a forecaster in national production knew this was the case, and even if it would take them five minutes to fix, it would not satisfy the decision matrix for that day, and they would not be allowed to fix it. I stress, even if it would take them five minutes.”

The BoM defends its forecasts are better now than five years ago, and that the automated forecasts are more accurate. Though, of course, some of us wonder what accurate means, and who decided how to measure it.

The whole nation is spending billions of dollars to “fix” our weather based on warming measured in sites that often fail the BoM’s own standards, but the BoM is more concerned about the way people refer to it on Twitter instead of the thermometers placed near incinerators and bitumen car parks.

There’s a lot more BoM incompetence on display in The Saturday Paper article, which is well written, but is paywalled. In other scandals the BoM’s giant new supercomputer has sat there for years unable to be used until it can be moved to a new “resilient data centre” perhaps another year or two away. And an 18 month long program to upgrade the national forecast grid from 6km to 3km ended with them dropping the more accurate 3km grid which existed in Victoria and Tasmania and putting the whole nation on the lower resolution 6km grid. So not only did the process reduce the resolution in two states, but now there are many work-arounds to compensate for the lack of the 3km grid everyone was expecting to use, and had been planning for.

Thanks to David E, El Gordo, and The Great UnVaxxed.

Photos by Jo Nova

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Monday Open Thread

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The kind of medicine where you’re lucky if you get a bad batch

This may explain why some unlucky people got such bad reactions.

Dr Ryan Cole points out that it normally takes years to perfect the mass production of a new class of drug products, but many people, he claims were lucky because they got a shot “of mush” — from harried car park pop-up clinics — if the vaccines weren’t kept cold enough they had probably already degraded.

Quality control was so poor, he claims, that batches weren’t mixed well, and some people got a dilute vial from the start of a batch. The fats in the vat float to the top, apparently, and the first vials are missing “the goods”. But by the end of the batch the last vials are high dose, and with debris from manufacturing, from gaskets, aluminum seals, and crushed glass.

“The more we look at it, the more we see bad manufacturing.”

 

It would be a relief to think it was just incompetent rushed quality control.

h/t Craig Kelly

9.6 out of 10 based on 65 ratings

UK chaos: It’s almost like Fracking was the biggest threat?

By Jo Nova
UK Flag, Britain, United Kingdom.
Just as Joe Biden cancelled Keystone on his first day, the new UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak canned Fracking on Day one. He was appointed on Tuesday and the fracking ban was reinstated Wednesday. It tells us exactly what his top priorities are, and perhaps also tells us what the real unforgivable sin was that Liz Truss committed. There are a lot of vested interests that would hate to see fracking start in the UK. The horror, after all, would be if that cheap gas started to flow and people in the UK got used to it, and realized micro earthquakes were, well, nothing. How would anyone cork up those wells after the war? If a few old coal plants restart it’s no big deal, they can be shut down again. But if shale gas “was trialled” there’d be no going back.

Fracking shale gas turned the US back into an energy giant. For the last month or so, there was the stark danger that the UK might get energy independence too, but then Rishi Sunak arrived to save the day, or rather to save a few houses from theoretical seismic events so small that people would need a Richter scale in the kitchen to detect most of them. The UK fracking limit is set at a tiny 0.5 magnitude.

For perspective, there were 45,000 shale gas wells operating in the US in 2014, but the UK has two which are not operating, and they want to shut them down in the middle of an energy crisis. Things are so bad in the UK, that 1 in 10 hotels, pubs and restaurants may go out of business this winter.

The situation is so bizarre, so over-the-top, that there are calls for a general election from every angle. Even the greener end of the Tory Party are mad, because killing off shale is not enough —  Sunak is committing blasphemy by not singing hymns at COP27 in Egypt too. Speaking of which, Boris is heading off to COP27 because grandstanding is what it is designed for, and the rumors are running that he will make a comeback.

The  UK government is using the Regulatory Death Curse to stifle Shale Gas

The anti-frackers frightened the people with stories of “known carcinogens called ‘silicon dioxide’” and seismic shocks that registered 1.5 on the Richter scale. So the people of the UK gave up an industry worth £6 billion a year, and a reliable energy supply because a government department was afraid of pure sand and a class of earthquake so small it’s “rarely felt” and so common the world has “several million” of them each year.

It’s a case of selective enforcement. No other industry has to keep seismic events to nothing; not truckers, or miners, or pop singers. Even primary school children are allowed to generate seismic shocks ten times bigger than Cuadrilla is. In 2001, one million of children jumped off chairs to create a shake of about a 3.0.

The Russians have been feeding fracking fear for years:

Russians spent $95 million to NGOs to feed “shale fear” and anti-fracking campaigns. Most of the West fell for it…

Russia makes about $300 billion in gas and oil exports each year. For a tiny tenth of a billion dollars it fed western activists in NGOs* and successfully stopped fracking development in the UK (and some parts of Australia apparently). It’s what you call a stupendous investment.

But China also benefits from UK energy poverty; The EU doesn’t want a strong independent UK, and the WEF, the UN, the renewables industries, and the religious greens are all happy about it too.

No wonder British people want an election:




The flag, with apologies: Rian (Ree) Saunders

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Saturday Open Thread

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Now climate change makes fossil fuels “unreliable”, the lamest excuse for grid failure, yet

By Jo Nova

LaTrobe Valley Coal Plant

Affected by high winds?

Whatever the question, the excuse is always “climate change” and the answer is always Wind and Solar.

Are you an Energy Minister? Did you stop drilling for gas, let teenage girls design your national grid, and rely on a hostile power to supply your fuel? Stupid you, but that’s OK, because if your reliable grid is failing, it’s not your fault, it’s “climate change”. See how this works? It’s not that you vandalized a highly engineered system with frivolous vanity projects but that you didn’t do enough of them.

Heatwaves are apparently wrecking coal plants now. That extra one degree outdoors makes all the difference to a turbine that runs 24 hours a day at 540 degrees C. If only we’d known? Or maybe we did. In 1962 we could build coal plants in Arizona that are still running, and gas plants (in 1959) in Yuma County where the average maximum is 45C (115F) for three months of the year.

Seems the engineers had hot weather sorted out 60 years ago.

The lamest excuse for grid failure yet

Is it gas-lighting, or just stupid?

How the climate crisis is threatening power supply stability

Paul Brown at The Guardian

 Extreme weather events – high winds, heatwaves, freezing rain, and loss of glaciers and snow pack mean once reliable sources of power can fail.

It’s not that socialist policies to drive out reliable power have succeeded and 50 year old equipment is being neglected and not replaced. No…

Clearly children are not doing enough tours of nuclear plants and coal turbines. They grow up to be journalists for The Guardian that think rainy, windy days can slow these industrial giants down.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says 87% of global electricity comes from nuclear, hydro and thermal fossil fuel plants that rely on water for cooling, and up to a third of these are in high water stress areas. Predicting droughts, stream flows and water availability is therefore vital for maintaining supply.

If only climate models were not 100% skillless in predicting regional rain, droughts or extremes, 1,2,3,4 they might be able  to tell us where to build our power plants. Not to mention those windmills…

For solar and wind, where water is less of an issue, predicting wind strength and sunshine hours is key. In countries with highly variable weather, such as the UK, this is still a work in progress, although improving all the time. Partly, these problems can be mitigated by giant batteries and well-tried technologies, such as pump storage, where water is pumped back uphill at night for hydro-power production at peak times.

Batteries? Someone needs to tell the petals at The Guardian that extreme heat can drastically shorten the life of batteries and solar panels perform worse as the temperature rises.

REFERENCES

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9.6 out of 10 based on 81 ratings

Elon Musk buys Twitter “to empower citizen journalism”. No wonder the left are scared.

The deal has officially gone through in the last hours. Twitter belongs to Elon.

He’s calling himself the Chief Twit. He has 110 million followers, and he is enjoying himself.

Meanwhile there is apoplexy in some corners of Twitter with warnings that the Nazi dogs of the Right are about to return.

But Elon says:

“A beautiful thing about Twitter is how it empowers citizen journalism – people are able to disseminate news without an establishment bias.”

Restoring free speech on Twitter is not necessarily a given. There are plenty of political players that are afraid of uncontrollable citizen journalists and they will fight back.

But Musk at least, is clear on what he hopes to achieve:

The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.

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9.8 out of 10 based on 105 ratings

NY Supreme Court nixes vaccine mandate, orders jobs returned with back-pay

New York Supreme Court.

There were only 16 people involved in the lawsuit in New York, but they won this round categorically and it may set a precedent that affects thousands. The 16 sanitation workers who were sacked because they chose not to be vaccinated must be reinstated, and the Judge wants lost wages to be paid too:

The Epoch Times: Judge Strikes Down NYC Vaccine Mandate

New York Supreme Court judge on Monday struck down New York City’s vaccine mandate, finding the rule to be unconstitutional, arbitrary, and capricious.

Attorney Chad LaVeglia, who announced the verdict outside the Richmond County courthouse, said the mandate was now “null and void.”

This is not over yet. The decision, applies just to these 16 workers and will be appealed:

The ruling strikes down the mandate that saw over 2,000 city workers fired for not getting a COVID-19 vaccine. LaVeglia said the ruling extends to all public workers, including the New York fire department, the police department, and the Department of Corrections. However, the city disagreed and filed an appeal, saying it is keeping the mandate in place.

Justice Ralph Porzio’s decision is here. Apparently the legal case partly hinged on the lack of scientific evidence for the mandate, but mostly on the arbitrary and capricious nature of the ruling. While police, firefighters and cleaners had to obey, some athletes and celebrities did not.  The mandate applied to public sector workers from one date but not to private sector workers until several months later. And the NY ruling class gave exceptions out “arbitrarily” (presumably to anyone famous enough to protest and make the City of New York look bad).

“This is clearly an arbitrary and capricious action because we are dealing with identical unvaccinated people being treated differently by the same administrative agency.”

Porzio said in his ruling that a new condition of employment cannot be imposed on employees when the condition did not exist when they accepted the contract. This seems cut and dried, but expect future employment contracts to add in this cause. Free citizens must be prepared to protest as soon as the employment contracts change and before anyone signs them.

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Thursday Open Thread

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Unplug the fridge: UK gears up for hard cold winter and BBC secretly plans for a national blackout

by Jo Nova

Things are getting serious Mum.

Snow on rooves over norwich. UK. Photo

Nearly half of Britons are already finding it hard to pay their energy bills. Over two million UK households are behind in their payments, and some have started unplugging fridges, hand washing their clothes and skipping meals, and it’s not even winter. The National Grid manager is so desperate they’re setting up a scheme to pay people to switch off their own electricity at peak hour, and the going rate for these precious Negawatts is £3,000 per megawatt hour.

There’s the hint of a war footing building. Thousands of shared refuges from the cold are being planned across the country, and the WarmSpaces website is setting up a directory.

Last week someone leaked that the BBC was secretly planning what to do if the UK gets a full two-day national blackout in the dead of winter. Apparently the BBC will advise people to use their car radios, or haha “battery powered receivers” (do the millennials know what they are?) to tune in the BBC. If they manage that, the BBC could then helpfully tell them, the minute after it was too late to do anything, that the blackouts may affects their gas supply, their mobile phone, the cash machines and  all the traffic lights too. And don’t call an ambulance unless you really need it.  But that’s OK, because if their phone battery goes flat, they won’t be able to anyway.

Maybe the BBC could stop covering up for Big Government and advise people to buy batteries, food, fuel, and a small radio now instead. Was the leak was their way of doing that?

hat tip to Tallbloke and GWPF

Someone leaked out the BBC plans in case there’s a nation-wide winter blackout:

Britons will allegedly be advised to stick to car radios or battery-powered receivers to get the necessary information amid a power cut. One draft of these scripts states that a blackout could last up to two days, with hospitals and police placed under “extreme pressure”.

Another warns: “The government has said it is hoped power will be restored in the next 36 to 48 hours.”

People will be comforted to know that there will be no shortage of bureaucrats:

It also states that an emergency coordination centre has been launched in Wales, while in Scotland the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, is chair of a devolved government emergency planning meeting in light of the ordeal.

 This is how to tell people their food supply might be at risk without saying it.

The script also states: “Officials are saying there is no current risk to food supply and distribution. But they’re asking people to look out for vulnerable neighbours and relatives.”

There really are a lot of warm spaces being planned. Wolverhampton has 0.4% of the UK population:

As Winter Looms, Britons Bank on Warming Hubs

The phenomenon is widespread — the 262,000-resident city of Wolverhampton alone expects 38 such centers to open within its limits this year. But issues such as disability access, amenities and even ideal indoor temperatures may vary widely. Lewis’s how-to guide is aimed at ensuring that these often bottom-up, locally organized facilities are inclusive, financially sustainable and welcoming.

The UK National Grid wants to pay people for having their own little blackout at peak times:

UK homes can become virtual power plants to avoid outages

Fintan Slye the director of National Grid’s electricity system operator

We can now confirm our proposals for how much people and businesses can be paid for shifting their electricity use outside peak times. We anticipate paying a rate of £3,000 per megawatt hour. Businesses and homes can become virtual power plants and, crucially, get paid like one too.

For a consumer that could mean a typical household could save approximately £100, and industrial and commercial businesses with larger energy usage could save multiples of this. We are working with Ofgem to get this scheme launched in November…

If they have to pay people as much as £3,000 per megawatt hour to turn off their own power, it shows how highly people value the service. And, presumably, only the poor will take the deal, upend their daily schedule, screw with their body clocks, or cook with candles indoors.

Photo: Sebastiandoe

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Wednesday Open Thread

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Vaccination Games: One way to create the medical stats you need

By Jo Nova

Give this man a medal. Prof Norman Fenton explains this so well. If this technique is widely used, then it is a scandal. It is so utterly dishonest, so obviously wrong. If groups really are using this to report “efficacy” where were all the Professors and medical agencies we pay to protect us? Perhaps there were other efficacy studies which didn’t do this? Shouldn’t our universities, the FDA, the CDC, the TGA, and the Chief Medical Officers be the ones to point out this problem, and in real time, not 18 months later…

 

As a piece of science communication this short video is excellent. The only thing lacking is the list of where exactly this technique is used.

In the first two weeks after vaccination researchers call people “unvaccinated” which leaves room for all kinds of naughty statistical games. By switching infected people from the vaccinated group to the unvaccinated group, or reclassifying them, they introduce a selective bias which will “show” that the vaccinated are less likely to catch Covid, even if they are exactly as likely to catch it.

UPDATE: How many studies misclassify the vaccinated in the first two weeks? On his site Fenton explains that In assessing the efficacy of Covid vaccines in observational studies (such as in the large Israel study which claimed 95% efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine) it is now standard to assume that the vaccine takes 14 days to ‘work’ and hence to classify a person as ‘unvaccinated’ within 14 days of vaccination.

Yossi Shaul replied: this is exactly what happened in Israel. And that’s also why whenever we requested “raw data” without any classification, we were turned down.

Hiding raw data is never a good sign.

This is the same Prof Norman Fenton who wrote the paper about mis-categorisation of vaccinated people. That paper is still the most scientifically robust example of excess deaths rising in the weeks after vaccination programs were carried out in each age group in the UK.

I’ll just keep repeating this graph from December last year — the one with the spooky quantum entanglement effect where more unvaccinated people die in the weeks after other people in their age cohort get vaccinated.

Ponder how many people we have vaccinated since this damning study was published?

Fenton et al, Vaccine, unvaccinated, graph, mortality, first and second dose.

Strangely, the unvaccinated are more likely to die in the week after the first dose peaks in their age group.

A year ago a large Swedish study of efficacy showed how the vaccines held up well from 2 weeks to 4 months, but declined to zero protection by nine months. The graphs don’t include any data from the first two weeks which is a shame. It would have been better to see it, whatever it was, just to know that those who were vaccinated (but didn’t yet have a mature antibody response) were kept in the same data set.

*Edited after a few hours to reflect that we are not certain which studies this applies too.
UPDATED to a corrected video.

REFERENCE

Neil, and Fenton et al (2021) Latest statistics on England mortality data suggest systematic mis-categorisation of vaccine status and uncertain effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccination

9.7 out of 10 based on 83 ratings

Climate 360 – the Debate in Perth tomorrow

Now for something very unusual: Tuesday night  in Perth, Australia, there will be a climate debate. Bravo to the Philosophy and Reason group for organising it.

Climate 360 - The Debate.

Click to enlarge to use the code.

The legendary David Archibald and I take on Professor Peter Newman from Curtin University – Advisor to IPCC, 2018 Premier’s (WA) Scientist of the Year, and Councillor Ian Johnson – Current City of Swan elected councillor responsible for CoS Climate Sustainability Policies.

  • Belmont RSL 6:30PM 

To attend see Meetup Use the QR code in the image on the right. It’s a small group and a shoestring budget, but they look like pulling off something that almost never happens. Kudos to Prof Newman and Councillor Johnson for being willing to take part.

Link to promo video on Facebook

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