Viv Forbes reminds us of how quickly peace can turn to war and how important energy and industrial strength suddenly was.
At this point Australia has lost half the refining capacity it once had and has only about one month of diesel and petrol. In the event of something hostile stopping the supply of foreign oil, Australian planes would be grounded in a couple of weeks. After Singapore fell, fuel was in such short supply, that cars and trucks were run on charcoal burners. When copper was needed for the war effort, one smelter was repurposed with parts cobbled together in a rush from many other smelters. But Australia has closed 6 smelters in the last 20 years. Where are the spare parts and spare expertise to reindustrialize if and when we need it?
Instead we ship off ore and hope the nice people at the other end send up back the things we need, while we build unreliable generators like talismans to weather Gods in the hope the world, apparently, won’t see as a climate pariah. The patsies quake at the thought of being “left behind” in a race to nowhere, while another nation burns half the coal in the world, will soon have the largest fleet of nuclear power plants and builds the largest navy.
By Steve Hunter
As net zero strangles Australian industry, Australia is becoming green, powerless and defenceless
By Viv Forbes
History holds lessons which we ignore at our peril.
Japan was opened to trade with the US in the 1850’s. They were daunted by the naval power of Britain and the US but were determined to catch up.
In the 1930’s Japan attacked China, Mussolini attacked Ethiopia and Hitler planned how to avenge WW1 in Europe. Britain’s PM Chamberlain negotiated with Hitler and proclaimed he had achieved “Peace in our Time”.
But Churchill warned:
“Britain must arm. America must arm. We will surely do it in the end but how much greater the cost for each day’s delay.”
In November 1938, just after the signing of the Munich Pact, John Curtin (Leader of the Labor Party in the Australian Parliament), made this statement:
“. . I say that any increase in defence expenditure appears to be an entirely unjustifiable and hysterical piece of panic propaganda.”
Source: Hansard, p1095, Nov 2, 1938.
Just ten months later, in September 1939, Germany attacked Poland.
On this side of the world, the Japanese built a large navy and air force. However the Americans, British and Dutch controlled Asian oil supplies needed for trucks, tanks, ships and planes. With Britain pre-occupied with Germany and Italy in Europe, Japan decided on a huge grab for land and resources.
In 1931 Japan occupied Manchuria and by 1937 Japanese troops were attacking Chinese soldiers outside Beijing. Japan invaded French Indochina in 1940 and a large Japanese force threatened the Philippines where US General Douglas MacArthur was based.
On Monday 8 December 1941, Australian PM Curtin was told that Japanese aircraft had attacked the large US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and US bases in the Philippines.
Three days later, two “invincible” British warships, “Repulse” and “Prince of Wales” were sunk by Japanese planes off Malaya. Soon Japanese armies were rampaging through Asia towards Australia. In December 1941 Hong Kong fell. By Feb 1942, the British fortress of Singapore surrendered and Japanese bombs were falling on Darwin. By Sept 1942 the Japanese army had slashed their way down the Kokoda Track across Papua New Guinea. They could see the lights of Port Moresby and were looking across Torres Strait to Australia.
Further south, five Japanese submarines were snooping in the seas off Sydney harbour. Two midget submarines entered the harbour and one sub sank HMAS Kuttabul. The Japanese navy later bombarded Sydney and Newcastle.
By that time, most of Australia’s trained soldiers were fighting Rommel at Tobruk in North Africa or were in Japanese prison camps. Australian politicians discussed the infamous “Brisbane Line” – surrender of Australia north of Brisbane.
Wind farms save the world, and absolutely do not hurt dolphins or whales but did you know the industry has developed bubble curtains to protect porpoises hearing from the things that never harm them (isn’t that nice of them)? Bubble curtains are being “widely” used in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.
The BBC is happy to report it now there are good results from a study, but apparently they weren’t too enthused in 2013 about telling us how pile -driving during construction can permanently destroy hearing in marine mammals. Indeed, ocean noise is such a problem the pile-driving teams use acoustic deterrents — loud noises designed to scare marine life away before they get started on the industrial noise. But even the “safety warning” may itself be dangerous.
So that’s alright then, windfarm construction used to kill porpoises, and the BBC kept that a secret, but now that we’ve solved it, it’s news we can use, right?
As huge offshore wind farms spread across Europe’s North and Baltic seas, efforts grow to buffer the impact on wildlife.
Over the past decade, a curious invention has spread across Europe’s northern seas. It’s called a big bubble curtain, it works a bit like a giant jacuzzi, and it helps protect porpoises from the massive underwater noise caused by wind farm construction.
The original pile-driving in that study was actually done around 2009. If intrepid investigators from the BBC cared about marine life for real and investigated, they could possibly have reported it 14 years ago and before another 4,000 wind turbines were hammered in to the sea floor. Do dolphins matter or don’t they?
It appears the BBC only mentioned underwater noise pollution once before in 2018, and the one reference to a windfarm was buried in a list of other industrial sources of noise. There were no headlines “Windfarm construction kills porpoises”. If coal miners used pile-drivers and was killing dolphins, the BBC would headline it and then repeat it until children at school were signing songs about it.
But those wind farmers are the nicest guys designing these jucuzzis just for porpoises:
A very large, perforated hose is laid on the seabed, encircling the wind turbine site. Air is pumped through, and bubbles rise from the holes to the surface of the water, forming a noise-buffering veil.
In the North Sea, the number of wind turbines has risen from only 80 in 2002, to more than 4,000 today – and many more are planned as part of the green energy revolution. Spinning in fierce, fast sea winds, offshore turbines can produce more energy than those on land. On average, an onshore wind turbine generates around 2.5 to 3 megawatts (MW), …
It only took the BBC ten years to mention the Dähne study of 2013:
At close range, pile-driving noise can cause temporary hearing loss or even permanent deafness in harbour porpoises,leaving them disoriented and unable to survive. There can also be indirect damage. A 2013 study of pile-driving during the first offshore wind farm built in the German North Sea found that the noise prompted harbour porpoises to flee the area, swimming more than 20km (12 miles) away. Harbour porpoises need to eat and hunt almost constantly to meet their energy needs. Fleeing over long distances can disrupt that vital activity and make them vulnerable to starvation. Seals may be similarly affected.
Harbour Porpoises have been having a hard time in the Baltic Sea. At least one mammal experts suggests they are dying awfully young:
Michael Dähne et at (2013) Effects of pile-driving on harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) at the first offshore wind farm in Germany, Environmental Research Letters, Volume 8, Number 2, DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/025002
People say things in a car they might never write in an email. Well, they used to.
Who knew? The Subaru privacy policy allows them to record your conversations and your face and sell that data to the highest bidder. Most likely (who reads these things) all the other car companies do too. When an AI analyzes it, presumably it will identify your voice (and you from the cameras). Anything you say in the public broadcasting world of private cars will belong to them, even if you are a passenger, and were never asked.
So if you want to have a private discussion about your political views, your children, your religion, troubles at work, intellectual property, discoveries, information that might affect stock prices, your thoughts on immigration, corruption, or mention any medical issues you have, or affairs anyone you know has had, don’t do it in an electric car. Imagine the blackmail, political, legal and insider potential with this data in the hands of…
Here’s something you might not realize. The moment you sit in the passenger seat of a Subaru that uses connected services, you’ve consented to allow them to use — and maybe even sell — your personal information. According to their privacy policy, that means things like your name, location, “Audio recordings of Vehicle Occupants”, and inferences they can draw about things like your “characteristics, predispositions, behavior, or attitudes.” Call us bonkers, but we don’t think that simply sitting in the passenger seat of someone’s Subaru should mean you consent to having any of your personal information use for, well, pretty much anything at all. Let alone potentially sold to data brokers or shared with third party marketers so they can target you with ads about who knows what based on the the inferences they draw about you because you sat in the back seat of a Subaru in the mountains of Colorado. We’re gonna really call out Subaru for this, because they lay it out so clearly in their privacy policy, but please know, Subaru isn’t the only car company doing this sort of icky thing.
Subaru also admit that when the information is transmitted they cannot guarantee that it will not be intercepted, only that they will do their best to look after your info after they receive it.
To opt out:
It seems the best way to keep Subaru from collecting, sharing, or selling your data to people who want to sell you stuff or data brokers or law enforcement, your best bet is to never buy, drive, or ride in a Subaru. Except if you’re walking on the street when a car with exterior cameras or sensors drives by. Then you might get caught up in that data collection too. So, yeah, the point is, you really don’t have many great choices when it comes to protecting your privacy from connected cars these days, other than to never buy them, drive them, sit in them, or exist on the street when they drive by.
It’s just another day in the hottest ever hyperbole race. The most unprecedentedly unprecedented record where more scientists on Earth than ever before, forget more of the Pleistocene than they ever have in history.
This year didn’t just shatter records. It changed the scales.
Graph after graph tracking this year’s soaring global temperatures reveal that not only were the numbers higher than ever recorded in many places around the world, but the deviation from the norm was also astonishingly large.
Michael Mann says it’s the fastest rate of warming for millions of years. Naturally, no science journalist thinks to ask him how he could possibly know this?
What’s especially concerning, experts say, is that “the rate of warming over the past century has no precedent as far back as we are able to look, not only hundreds or thousands, but many millions of years,” according to University of Pennsylvania meteorologist Michael Mann’s book “Our Fragile Moment.”
Think about how impossibly hard it is to know how much the world warmed from say 3,450,000 BC to 3,449,900? I mean in the last 10 million years there are 100,000 whole centuries. How many samples do we need each century from around the world to estimate what the “global” rate of warming was in every single century? If we just have three samples from the year 2 million BC, could we really say we knew what the temperature was?
Here (below) is one estimate of temperatures for the last 50,000 centuries. It’s a wild ride. Really, truly, could anyone say there wasn’t one century that warmed faster than our last one?
Graph based on work by Lisiecki and Raymo in 2005. Image created by Robert A. Rohde / Global Warming Art
Has Michael Mann found an unknown trove of temperature records from Australopithecus onward, or was it just a moment of mad arrogance fueled by 30 years of propaganda?
We elect an Australian government but get the EU rules
Just before Christmas the government quietly put out new emissions rules they know Australians won’t like. “Tis the season for dropping press release bombs.
Tough new petrol standards will be introduced at the end of 2025, potentially increasing the cost of fuel while expanding consumer access to leading-edge, mostly European, ultra-efficient vehicles.
By forcing Australians to buy expensive, unreliable cars prone to exploding, the government will stop families going on holidays, burn down a few homes, and keep friends from visiting each other, unless the nation of petrol-heads keep driving their old cars and Utes, Cuba style. For all this pain, the new rules will “slash 18 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions” which is equivalent to taking 280,000 imaginary cars off the road, or cutting 0.15% of annual emissions from China. i.e. nothing.
All Peter Dutton, the opposition leader in Australia needs to do to win the next election is to stand up for drivers in Australia.
Apparently Australians need to import more EU cars to save German industry or something:
…the government aims to spur greater imports of vehicles that car makers currently do not sell in Australia because the fuel is too dirty for their highly calibrated engines.
The press release reads like it was written by the EU aristocratic snobs, not the Australian Labor Party.
This is no place for an EV.
The government will force you to subsidize the EVs while pretending the manufacturers are doing it:
The trick in the new Command Economy is to make devious rules that force the market to come up with strange and expensive ways to satisfy communist rules.
The new rules mean cars and light commercial vehicles sold from December 2025 will need to meet so-called “Euro 6d noxious emissions standards”. Years in the making, they are separate to a push by the government to introduce a “fuel efficiency standard” that would force car makers to sell more EVs by imposing penalties on the sales of higher-emitting vehicles such as utes, SUVs and four-wheel-drives.
In other words, if the punters buy the cars they want, and not the cars the government wants, then the prices of the “limited” number of popular cars will rise. The penalties that will have to be imposed by the car makers are really subsidies in disguise. They will add thousands in costs to the popular cars so they can use the extra profits to sell the unpopular cars at discount prices.
The net result is that billionaires will keep buying whatever they want to buy, and if it’s an EV it will be subsidized by the workers, who will have to pay more for their own “higher emitting” cars that will still be able to drive as far as the outer suburbs, or God forbid, a country town.
This is a boilerplate policy that been copied from overseas. It’s a blueprint of the global billionaire class. It would mean newer smaller petrol cars will subsidize bigger EV’s, and as Craig Kelly says, put lives at risk on country roads. The small car passengers will be more likely to die in crashes with cows, trees and heavier EV’s. Momentum always wins. Or our children will only be able to drive cheap Chinese-EV’s.
Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Catherine King said the changes would save lives.
“The changes, along with fuel efficiency standards are part of delivering cleaner, cheaper-to-run cars and tackling transport costs for Australian families and businesses,” said Ms King.
Time Australians stood up and paid attention.
Those elected are not on our side,
And their contempt for us barely hide,
As the truth slowly dawns,
That these globalist pawns,
Are all to the doom cult allied.
Australians are angry the BOM didn’t see the flooding rains coming
Worse, we’re betting the nation on the BOM’s ability to predict the climate.
The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) tells Australians that record breaking extremes are getting worse because of our cars and our air-conditioners (that’s “The State of the Climate“). But when the BOM can’t predict record breaking rain a month in advance, or even the day before, we know the BOM doesn’t understand what drives the climate.
Somehow the BOM expect Australians to spend trillions and rearrange their economy based on their fifty year prophesies, but not to mind when “this summer” goes right off the rails.
But the real weather gods had another idea, and all the places under any shades of green below got somewhere from 100% to 300% of the average rainfall. The indigo and purple zones got even more.
This was a savage downpour — seven feet of rain in five days fell at one location:
No fewer than 12 locations across far north Queensland posted record rainfall totals.
Some areas received a year’s rainfall in a single day, isolating towns, closing highways and leaving hundreds stranded by surging floodwaters. Black Mountain near Cooktown recorded a cumulative 2189mm over the five days, while Mossman South, an hour northwest of Cairns, had 1935mm.
The BOM suddenly wants to absolve itself of liability
People have noticed there is now a mandatory check box forcing users to agree to a legal disclaimer clearing the BOM of all liability:
Users of the BOM app now have to agree to a 699-word “terms and conditions” statement that includes “information at this app … may not be accurate, current or complete”.
“To the maximum extent permitted by law, the bureau excludes any liability that may arise in connection with the BOM Weather app or any information or material presented therein or your access to or use of any of the same,’’ the bureau says in a “terms and conditions” statement that appears when a user attempts to download its app. — Mackenzie Scott, The Australian
They know they are in trouble.
I say the BOM can have immunity the same day Australians can also tick a box excluding ourselves from any and all costs, imposts and taxes related to any BOM predictions.
To be fair to the BOM, a hysterical and ill-informed media has allowed climate alarmism to infect reporting of what should be routine weather events.
For thirty years the Australian media has made hyperbolic scare stories about the weather while the BOM tacitly stood by and smiled. Where were they as the tenets of science were trashed, and critics were called “climate deniers”? If the BOM are victims of this hyperbole now, they reap what they sowed.
The BOM raised the stakes, and they don’t get to weasel out by saying “we used the best science” as if the best science wasn’t riddled with holes. If the science is good enough to throw away trillions of dollars, then the worst failures need a truckload of explanation.
Predicting the weather is hard. We could forgive the BOM for getting a complex immature science wrong, but not when they also tell us it’s just simple physics, they’re absolutely sure, and there is no doubt they’re wrong (give us your money!).
We know it’s a cult or long-form advertising when every possible consequence is 100% bad, bad, bad, and for everyone, all the time.
Climate change will cause more droughts, except when it rains, and that means more pollen (obviously?!). Even though summers will be longer, and spring will be earlier, and flowers will go extinct, the pollen will be more potent (whatever that is). More people will get asthma, and even though we don’t know what causes allergies, we know that it will get worse with climate change, whatever it is, because everything does.
You too will be locked in your house, afraid to leave, unable to breathe, unless you get solar panels and an EV.
This was Australian’s national news prime time story tonight on our public “news” service. Australians spent some part of 3 million dollars today on their ABC, where regional health reporter Steven Schubert asked no hard questions, did almost no research, and sought no alternative views. He just found an asthmatic trophy victim to use as a poster-girl for F.E.A.R.
Whether Caitlin Ross will go outside on any given day depends on weather and pollen forecasts. If they’re too bad, her severe allergies and asthma mean it can be too uncomfortable or dangerous.
Researchers say pollen is becoming more potent, and seasons longer, as the climate changes
They expect the number of Australian hay fever sufferers to grow by 70 per cent over the next three decades
Poor Caitlin. Her symptoms have got worse these last five years. The ABC news works like hypnosis planting the suggestion that if your asthma got worse lately “it’s climate change”, as if asthma never gets better or worse for any other reason.
Climate change is affecting asthma already — we know because we did an opinion poll:
A recent survey showed climate change was already affecting the health of asthmatic Australia
A survey conducted by advocacy group Asthma Australia in 2023 showed that 91 per cent of people with asthma were very concerned about the impacts of climate change, according to CEO Michele Goldman.
She said 39 per cent of asthmatics surveyed said climate change was already affecting their health, compared to 21 per cent of people without asthma.
It’s like ignorant climate models went on dates with a Women’s Weekly story on asthma from 1985, and gave birth to yet another scary narrative.
In the real world of health and biology the rise of asthma in the last fifty years could be due to diet, pollution, hygiene, loss of gut flora, or a lack of parasites. It could be due to leaky guts, new highly allergenic wheat strains, heavy metals, pesticides, or all of the above. It could be because kids don’t get to eat dirt or play with farm animals, and it could be because kids don’t play in the sun and get their vitamin D.
Asthma is a first world problem, not a climate change one
So these researchers — whoever they are, are starting with models that can’t predict rainfall, humidity, soil moisture, cloud cover and wind speed, and use those errors to not-predict plant growth and pollen movement. Then they take all those failures and run headlong into a medical swamp.
This is lousy science, bad reporting, and incompetent “investigation”.
China must be wishing CO2 caused some damn warming
Beijing this month has had the coldest December since they started measuring the cold in 1951. Obviously, this is because of climate change. Any day now newspapers will start to call this the tragic inevitable result of man-made climate change, reminding us of how we need to send money to renewables, and immediately, or we’ll face so much more of this.
Or maybe journalists will forget how they use every freak warm event as free-advertising for the climate religion:
BEIJING, Dec 24 (Reuters) – China’s capital Beijing has broken its record for hours of sub-zero temperatures in December dating back to 1951, after a cold wave swept swathes of the country and brought blizzards in its wake, sending temperatures towards historic lows.
As of Sunday, a weather observatory in Beijing had recorded more than 300 hours of below-freezing temperatures since Dec. 11, the most for the month since records began in 1951, according to state-backed Beijing Daily.
Naturally cold snaps are due to natural causes like a polar vortex. Strangely, Reuters editors suddenly remember that climate scientists don’t know everything:
However, there is debate among scientists about what part climate change plays in this.
Thanks to having more than half the worlds coal fired power plants, Beijing and a few other Chinese cities have more CO2 in the air above them than pretty much anywhere else in the world.
Strangely no media outlets are telling us that China would have been even colder if it weren’t for CO2.
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