Someone just realized that humans emit methane (like cows, camels, mammals, and ancient herds of bison).
The new study shows that humans are generating methane, just like the awful Planet Wrecking Cows. But the truth is that all mammals have probably always produced some methane, and that includes the massive herds of herbivores that used to roam the Earth, when the climate was “perfect”.
The new paper in PLOS One assessed 104 people and found 31% were methane producers like the cows. They calculated the 67 million homo sapiens in the United Kingdom increase the national methane and N2O emissions by as much as… golly, 0.05 – 0.1%. (Despite this trivial and predictable outcome, somehow, they had no trouble getting grants or getting published for studying methane-angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin).
The main thing we learn from this paper is how easy it is to get money to study climate inanities compared to how hard it is to get grants to audit the IPCC or investigate the sun’s role in climate change.
If belches of methane can cause a climate crisis, how, we marvel, did the planet not boil away when 30 million bison roamed the plains of North America? Why was the climate ideal (apparently) when the vast herds of Wildebeest roamed Africa, and Aurochs stretched across Europe?
Turns out nearly all mammals produce methane
In 2020 Clauss et al reviewed the research on and found that it’s not just cows and camels that produce methane, but carnivorous reptiles, ostriches, kangaroos, sea cows and rodents, pretty much everything they looked at. Indeed, they conclude it’s… prudent to assume that all mammals harbour some methanogens, and produce some CH4, until consistently proven otherwise.”
Methane may provide an evolutionary advantage…
Clauss et al also point out there may be an evolutionary advantage to harboring methanogens (the bacteria that produce methane). If that is true, it would explain why methanogens are everywhere across the zoological world. Bizarrely, inside our intestines, methanogens effectively slow peristalsis, so food takes longer to travel through, and is possibly more efficiently absorbed. So methanogens may help animals absorb more carbohydrate calories and get fattened up. In humans, the presence of methanogens is associated with a higher BMI*. Likewise, efforts to feed cows seaweed or foods that reduce methanogens may come at a cost. And in the last seaweed feed trial, the cows gained weight slower than they usually would. We might reduce methane by an amount too small to measure, and reduce the speed of storms by the square root of nothing, but make meat more expensive and stunt the growth of disadvantaged children. But that’s OK apparently.
h/t John Connor II and on Bison: TdeF, Don, Lance, Another Ian, b.nice, Saighdear, David Maddison, Frederick Pegler, GlenM.
*Excess methanogens are also associated with constipation, bloating, malabsorption and quite a few undesirable outcomes. Search for SIBO.
REFERENCES
Dawson B, Drewer J, Roberts T, Levy P, Heal M, Cowan N (2023) Measurements of methane and nitrous oxide in human breath and the development of UK scale emissions. PLoS ONE 18(12): e0295157. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295157
The best kept secret in the world is that humans are using more coal than ever
So much for the “stranded dead asset”. In 2022 the world set a new all-time record for coal use — reaching 8.4 billion tons. In 2023, despite all the Net Zero billions in spending, despite the boom in windmills and solar panels, global demand for coal will top 8.54 billion tons.
The IEA is the “International Energy Agency” — supposedly, the impartial servant of 31 nations worth of taxpayers. Yet they decided to ignore the world record and instead tell us how coal is set to decline. It’s what they think the taxpayers need to hear. Their press release:
It’s almost as if the IEA works for the renewables industry and their banker investors? Mr Vestas himself could hardly have written a more successful headline to hide the truth and gaslight the taxpayers.
The IEA has been predicting the end of coal for years. Back in 2017 the IEA was telling us China would move away from coal, because by 2025-2030 “solar would be cheaper than coal”. Instead, China’s burning more coal than ever before and the quarterly reporting season was a bloodbath for the solar and wind industries as projects get cancelled because their costs are rising.
In 2023 China uses more than half of the total coal on the planet — an extraordinary 4.5 billion tons of that 8.5 billion ton total.
The three largest coal producers in the world are China, India and Indonesia which account for a blockbuster 70% of global production. The IEA is convinced coal use will decline any day now, but China’s growth rate in coal use was 5% in 2023, and India’s was 8%. These are hardly signs of the plateau before the fall.
Note how the IEA add their favourite “projection” at the end
To put some perspective on the success of the renewables transition in reducing coal — Australia has more solar panels per capita than any other nation, and while global coal use is 8,536 Mt, in 2022 Australian coal use declined by all of 5 Mt. We only had to spend ten billion dollars to achieve that:
Overall coal consumption in Australia declined from 100 Mt in 2021 to 95 Mt in
2022 and is estimated to have continued its decrease over the course of 2023 with
a reduction of 4%.
Rejoice, global coal use is six one-hundredth of a percent smaller thanks to the Australian Renewable Energy Target and the Safeguard Mechanism emissions market.
In the West the biggest reductions in coal use have come from exporting factories to China, which of course, don’t cut global coal use at all. And ponder at just how incredibly fast the transition to coal has been — from the West to the East:
This year, China, India and Southeast Asia are set to account for three-quarters of global consumption, up from only about one-quarter in 1990.
European and UK friends may want to look out for auroras coming Sunday night from 9pm – 3am UT (London time) from an X2.8 class flare that erupted yesterday. It was the biggest flare this solar cycle, but will be a “glancing blow” to Earth, not a direct hit. Kp 5.7 expected.
For three years they told us it was the most secure election in history, and only deniers would question the result, but a simple poll of voters by the The Heartland Institute shows cheating was widespread in mail-in voting.
In the contest to decide who would control the most powerful country on Earth, as many as 43% of voters cast ballots by mail. If the media pundits care so much about democracy, why didn’t they do a poll like this two years ago? Why didn’t the Republicans or the Democrats? Presumably they knew what they would find.
As David Evans points out, this adds up to 13 million fraudulent votes out of 158 million total, nearly double the difference between the Biden tally of 81 million and Trump result of 74 million. That alone could easily have swung things.
In terms of the future of Western Civilization, it’s hard to think of anything much more important than US election security. Almost all the other crimes depend on who’s writing the rules, or who has the power to set things straight. As Mark Steyn says he’s increasing weirded out by some people’s need to pretend what’s going on is somehow normal. What’s the point of analyzing candidates and parties as if either means what it does in functioning societies? “There’s no point pretending this is a normal situation, right?”
The new survey shows 17 percent of mail-in voters admitting to voting in a state where they are no longer permanent residents; 21 percent filling out ballots for others; 17 percent signing ballots for family members without consent, and 8 percent reporting offers of “pay” or “reward” for their vote.
What’s more, 10 percent of all respondents to the survey (carried on a representative sample of 1,085 likely voters) said they know a friend, family member, co-worker, or other acquaintance who admitted to casting a mail-in ballot fraudulently.
“This is the biggest story of the year, and Republicans must do something about it,” the former president [Donald Trump] wrote.
It’s not just about mail-in voter cheating.
Further, 10% of all respondents — not just those who said they voted by mail — claimed that they know “a friend, family member, co-worker, or other acquaintance who has admitted … that he or she cast a mail-in ballot in 2020 in a state other than his or her state of permanent residence.”
Eight percent of all respondents said “a friend, family member, or organization, such as a political party” offered them “pay” or a “reward” for agreeing to vote in the 2020 election.
What did I say? After the near collapse of climate talks, global leaders “rescued” COP28 at the last minute, scoring top marks in Climate Bingo: the talks are “historic“, “landmark“, “unprecedented” and use the actual phrase “transition away from fossil fuels” for the first time ever. Be still my beating heart.
A hundred billionaires met with 70,000 groupies, using millions of dollars mostly taken from other people, and have decided they need to do it all again.
The point of these meetings is to issue more press releases, reward the faithful underlings, arrange golden handshakes behind the scenes, and transfer billions of dollars from the riff raff to the Private-Jet-Class. This glorious goal is achieved when the Grand UN Performance of vague non-binding Hopium is used to fool investors and voters in domestic theatres.
And so it comes to pass that all nations have finally agreed to do what they were doing anyway. But UN-speak translates the nothingness into hyperbole:
“The agreement marks “the beginning of the end of fossil fuels” — UNFCCC
The president of the European Commission has welcomed the COP28 agreement, hailing it a “global turning point”. –more Sky News.
Despite that — the world continues on the transition to fossil fuels and away from wood and donkeys, while everyone — except the patsies — plays the game and pretends to power themselves with sunshine and breezes.
Oblivious to the trillions of dollars being spent, 82% of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels, and the new annual growth in fossil fuels is so fast that all the additional unreliable energy sources added this year cannot even keep up with it.
The spokeswoman for a bunch of small islands told the world the deal was nothing much and got a two minute long standing ovation anyway:
The lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, Anne Rasmussen, criticised the deal as unambitious.
“We have made an incremental advancement over business as usual, when what we really need is an exponential step change in our actions,” she said.
But she did not formally object to the pact, and her speech drew a standing ovation that lasted nearly two minutes. — Reuters
It doesn’t matter what she said, just like it doesn’t matter that 90% of their islands are not sinking either. The islands are the token mascots and must be cheered. It’s a performance religion.
It’s the empty UN landmark deal that almost no one will achieve
Even the propaganda machine in Geneva has to admit that the “central outcome” is just a stocktake, which shows emissions *need* to be cut by an impossible amount and people are not achieving it. This is as good as it gets:
The global stocktake is considered the central outcome of COP28 – as it contains every element that was under negotiation and can now be used by countries to develop stronger climate action plans due by 2025.
The stocktake recognizes the science that indicates global greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut 43% by 2030, compared to 2019 levels, to limit global warming to 1.5°C. But it notes Parties are off track when it comes to meeting their Paris Agreement goals. — UNFCCC
The UNFCCC hopes everyone will turn up with better plans next year:
In the short-term, Parties are encouraged to come forward with ambitious, economy-wide emission reduction targets, covering all greenhouse gases, sectors and categories and aligned with the 1.5°C limit in their next round of climate action plans (known as nationally determined contributions) by 2025.
If your government is one of the ones sincerely trying to meet impossible, stupid targets, you know you live in The Patsy State.
Thanks to Pierre Gosselin at NoTricksZone who lets us know that Kristina Schröder — a minister in the Angela Merkel government for four years, has written in Der Pragmaticus, of her fear that the German government is copying the dark pattern of the pandemic to create a nation where the government controls what people eat and wear, and whether they can travel.
It would have helped if she had seen this coming ten years ago, when she was a Minister, but she says, she did not believe Germans would accept drastic restrictions for the “collective good” until the pandemic hit. Now she asks why there is a blindness to the costs of climate action, and why there is indifference to the losses of freedom. (Obviously, the German media and industrial censorship complex is just like the rest of the West, and there is no outrage allowed, no node for protests to gather on, and a constant stream of gaslighting — “renewables are cheap”, the “world is hotter than ever” and “climate change makes goldfish alcoholic”, that sort of thing).
Corona is now over, now it’s about climate change . And again, the two argumentation patterns that predominate during the pandemic can be observed: refusal to weigh things up and an end-justifies-the-means way of thinking.
Against the background of the experience of the pandemic, it is easy to imagine these future measures to contain the infection, pardon, CO 2 occurrence: There is a threat of requirements that affect our most private lifestyle. How we live, heat, move, travel and what we eat could soon no longer be an individual decision, but increasingly dictated by the state.
The long-time director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who is considered in some circles to be Germany’s most important climate protector, has already made a corresponding suggestion: You could provide every citizen with a CO 2 budget of three tons annually. Anyone who knows that Germans are currently responsible for an average of eleven tons of CO 2 emissions per capita per year can appreciate what that would mean.
As Gosselin observes Schröder “…so far many Germans have been acting complacently about such drastic proposals”. Schröder asks the 64 trillion dollar question of our times — why are Germans (like so much of the West) willing to accept these losses of basic rights so easily?
Schröder, who contributes regularly to Welt, also wonders why in Germany there’s such a “blindness to the costs” of reducing CO2. “Why this indifference to the loss of freedom and prosperity?” And: “Why this longing for bans, renunciation and penance?”
Schröder is now aware (belatedly) that the activists don’t care about the environment but are using climate change to fight the evil capitalist system.
Fight against the system
I am convinced that large parts of the climate protection movement also fight our way of living and doing business at least as much as they fight climate change. They adhere to the narrative, which has been very powerful in left-wing movements in the Western world since the 1970s, that free and market-economy societies are structurally exploitative and destructive. Also, of course, structurally discriminatory and racist; This is what the members of the wokeness movement deal with.
Clear empirical findings that the more capitalist a country is, the cleaner the water and air and the more diverse the flora and fauna are, are robustly ignored in these circles. With climate protection, activists have found a powerful lever to push back the hated capitalist system.
It is the crisis for the sake of having a crisis — and by definition it must never be solved:
I am sure that if a technical solution were to be found tomorrow that would allow us to make CO2 harmless overall, large parts of the radical climate protection movement would not be relieved, but rather disappointed.
Scientifically the UN Conference of Parties (COP) has abjectly failed 27 times at the one thing it was supposedly set up to do, which was reduce carbon emissions and save the weather, but it’s been a wild success on the Global-Trade-Party-and-Schmooze calendar.
Tonight the UN COP28 “climate” conference is on the ‘Verge of complete failure’ says CNN — because they’ve given up talking about “phasing out fossil fuels” and they’re only trying to reduce fossil fuels now (exactly the same as the last 27 meetings). No doubt tomorrow, headlines will tell us a historic deal, which is barely enough, was somehow clawed from the brink after an all-nighter.
The historic deal will amount to ambiguous subclauses that enable carbon grift and graft wherever carbon grafting and grifting were likely to happen anyway.
28 conferences and nothing to show for it:
It was never about CO2 anyway, was it?
Whatever happens, the conference is a big success as the Planetary Fashion Parade where the virtue-signalers of the world unite to show off their cloaks of carbon-purity. In the background it’s the place where billionaires and bankers bring their yachts and personal planes to meet Presidents and Kings.
Supposedly 100,000 people signed up, and 70,000 “were expected” to attend the Bureaucrat-Trade-Olympiad which used to be a kind of science conference 28 years ago, but is now a large trade convention.
How COP28 has become the new Davos
It costs a lot to stop global storms and floods you know. No wonder the Bankers and Bill Gates, care so much about the climate, and go to a UN convention with lectures on climate sensitivity. It’s like speed-dating for business deals:
…there are trillions of dollars needed to finance or develop projects that serve the energy transition. As World Bank chief Ajay Banga told a panel: “Everything has a lot of zeroes attached to it.”
It’s an all-star cast: ExxonMobil chief executive Darren Woods, and the bosses of energy companies RWE, ENI and Engie. The global CEOs of PwC and EY. The heads of Brookfield, BlackRock and IFM Investors. The bosses of Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America and Macquarie. Rubbing shoulders with Stella McCartney and Chelsea Clinton.
18 months ago the coral on John Brewer Reef was dead according to The Guardian, but Jennifer Marohasy, Peter Ridd and Rowan Dean took the risk of going back to the same dead reef to make a short documentary on it and found the same coral, 80 kilometers offshore and it, and the whole area around it, is flourishing.
According to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park authority, the area was surveyed in April 2022 and the damage was classed as “severe”. According to them, 60-90% of the reef was bleached. It was so bad that when the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about “500 kilometers of severe bleaching” it was John Brewer Reef that they picked for the feature photo.
Scientists, apparently, were dreading the damage to come (of the reef that recovered):
If the John Brewer reef was sick, most of the Great Barrier Reef was bound to be sick too, said Graham Readfearn:
“This is one of the healthiest reefs off Townsville and one of the best reefs on the whole Great Barrier Reef. So for these corals to be stressed and damaged … well, it’s likely it’s the same at other reefs down here.”
But here in the real world, the formerly bleached coral now is a normal “cafe latte” brown color, showing it has recovered from the bleaching. The growing tips are always white, apparently, so it’s all good. Jennifer wrote all the details up on her blog.
The coral threw out the zooxanthellae last year, but this year it has new ones…
The John Brewer reef, right now, is full of colorful fish and very alive corals.
As Jennifer Marohasy says, it was a risk to return to the “The centre of the sixth mass coral bleaching”. The 15 minute video of the trip to John Brewer Reef is below.
But some official agencies that diagnose the doomed reefs do it from a plane. Here’s an example of the same reef from 120 meters above sea level. For some reason nearly everything deeper than 2 meters is hard to see, and vertical walls of coral are, invisible.
The Australian government gave $1 billion dollars to save the reef in January 2022. Perhaps it worked? You’d think The Guardian might want to tell the world, but they don’t seem to want to give a healthy reef the same attention they gave to a momentarily bleached one.
Though alarmists are losing the head,
John Brewer reef is anything but dead,
With its colourful coral,
Spread like bouquets floral,
Where parrot fish swim and are fed.
Insurance companies just want to save the world right?
An anonymous insurance insider warns the plan is to force people to buy a digital car, and claims the push is so strong we won’t even be able to get insurance for a combustion engine vehicle. It sounds like a conspiracy theory except that insurers themselves admit Big Data from cars is worth a fortune, and they’ve have been lobbying to get your car data out of the hands of the car manufacturers (purely for your own good), and they’re already “involved in negotiations with the European digitalization and data protection manager”. Righto. Just six weeks ago, a Managing Director of Allianz insurance said he wants to track your car data so he can be “your invisible Guardian Angel.” Creepy, yes?
Wouldn’t you love to have your insurer, the police and the IRS as your back seat drivers?
Imagine a world in which the insurer acts as an invisible guardian angel to drivers, warning them of upcoming weather hazards or accident hotspots to avoid.
According to GeoffBuysCars an insider at a large European insurance company has spilled the beans. Being a car lover himself, the insider wants to warn the world that the plans are well advanced. The insurance giants want to collect all your data as you drive so they can adjust the premiums accordingly and instantly. If you drive a bit too fast, it’ll cost you (especially when 20-mile-an-hour-zones spread to everywhere). Your EV will report your offenses to the police and the insurance company. How good with that be?
GeoffBuysCars has translated the insider report “doing the rounds of Europe” into English (hear him below). I’ve searched for any news reports or confirmation and of course, found almost nothing at all about the insider. But a story from Allianz on October 17th suggests he’s right on the money.
It’s a new era of Big Data from cars:
Allianz seem awfully very excited about the tidal wave of big car data that is about to arrive, which they warn was being “monopolized” and “hoarded” (just not by them). Luckily for us, they lobbied the EU and now there’s a new law. Insurers are salivating at the thought of getting their hands on this data, and Big Bankers, and Big Bureaucrats are hardly going to stand in their way are they? They want that data too:
As the world in which we live becomes increasingly digital, every day, more and more data is being generated, monitored and analyzed. It’s also being transferred and monetized, and in some cases, monopolized. The power and insights that can be drawn from data is not lost on corporations and industry players, and while data can improve the competitive position of those with access, the hoarding of it can stifle competition and progress.
Connected vehicles already churn out several terabytes of data per day, but this is nothing compared to what’s to come – an estimated 30 terabytes of data per day by 20251. This is the data equivalent of over 7,000 high-definition movies2! In today’s cars, hundreds of high-tech sensors record everything from driving behavior to fuel consumption and seatbelt status.
…a coalition of parties including insurers, leasing companies, and repair shops have been lobbying the European Commission to intervene when it comes to accessing valuable vehicle data.
All the terabytes of car data was owned and “hoarded” by the car manufacturers like VW and Volvo but the new EU Data Act “gives that back to the car owner”. Which all sounds good, but wait half a nanosecond for the insurance companies and government agencies who will “offer discounts” to people who sign away their data so they can be spied on legally. Obviously the skiing billionaires at Davos won’t need the discount, so only the riff raff and the poor will be tracked every second of their driving day.
..the new EU Data Act will be a game changer, putting car owners back in the driver’s seat when it comes to who accesses their vehicles’ data. “This move is an important first step in order to enhance data sharing and competition, and for us as insurers to be able to implement new and improved products, claims processes, and effective prevention measures for our customers,” says Christoph Lauterwasser, Managing Director of the Allianz Center for Technology.
“We are about to enter a new era in the world of automotive insurance and solutions, thanks to the power of data from connected cars.”
Imagine being able to sell that data? Say, the insurers give you the discount and collect the bytes and then the tyre guys, the media, the phone companies, the police, the FBI, the shopping centres, the electricity companies and the CCP are happy to pay…
The Government will of course, just offer you a discount on your registration if you agree to be tracked.
“I worked in the IT department of a very large insurer…”
Hear his words. They are already setting this up… it will be connected to police, insurance and national security agencies…. in cooperation with Google and Microsoft.
Since the Luton airport fires, my favourite car commentator is GeoffBuysCars. This is a depressing story, but forewarned is forearmed. Get the word out so we can cut them off at the pass…
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Bison in Montana. USFWS Flickr
![USFWS Flickr](http://<a href="http://joannenova.com.au/wp-content/bison-herd-montana..jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-94906" src="http://joannenova.com.au/wp-content/bison-herd-montana..jpg" alt="Herd of Bison (making lots of methane)" width="800" height="406" /></a> Bison in Montana. USFWS Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwsmtnprairie/5264639596</dd></dl></div>){kind=link}
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