Watch another European MP take Prime Minister Trudeau to task for his authoritarianism, mistreatment of Canadians, and his hypocrisy. pic.twitter.com/M9xXmHuP9L
“I refused to validate by my presence the facade of the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who gave a speech before the Plenary of the European Parliament on 23.03.2022, it was the reason for which I was not in the room when he spoke.”
“You can’t come and teach democracy lessons to Putin from the European Parliament when you trample with horse hooves your own citizens who are demanding that their fundamental rights be respected.”
“When you, a politician from the “west”, implement in your home methods of repression and the trampling of the rights of your own citizens, who demand their rights be respected, as Putin does at home, you are no better than him.”
“On the contrary, through the tyranny that you’re implementing you add deceit and hypocrisy, destroying liberty and “western” values.”
“These imposter leaders of today’s west have brought the world into the chaos we find ourselves in today, precisely because they have strayed from the values that made the “west” a free and prosperous world.”
“The departure of western leaders from these values (individual liberty, respect for rights and freedoms, etc.) not only made them lose their moral ascendancy, but allowed the rise of tyrants like Putin.”
“Between the Russian imperialist tyranny, promoted by Putin, and the neo-Marxist tyranny pretending to be progressivism promoted by the likes of Trudeau, in which people are deprived of their rights and freedoms, becoming objects of the state, I do not choose any.”
As some of you might recall Terheș was a vocal critic of Trudeau’s in Brussels when the Canadian prime minister invoked the Emergencies Act to quash the protests in Ottawa.
PM Trudeau, in recent months, under your quasi-liberal boot, Canada 🇨🇦 has become a symbol of civil rights violations. The methods we have witnessed may be liberal to you, but to many citizens around the🌎it seemed like a dictatorship of the worst kind. pic.twitter.com/FZuc6aDZ1I
— Mislav Kolakusic MEP 🇭🇷🇪🇺 (@mislavkolakusic) March 23, 2022
Gives us hope. Trudeau will have hated having to sit there and listen
If only the leaders of the UK, USA and Australia had the balls to say what people who lived under or near the Iron Curtain have to say.
Trudeau is going to come home from Europe VERY angry. He was just forced to sit and listen while he was labelled a “dictator,” in front of the entire European Union, one who “trampled women with horses,” and “blocks the bank accounts of single parents.”
Trudeau’s speech itself, is full of blame on vague “populists” who “play on people’s fears”. It’s projection, projection all the way down… He sees his own dark flaws and “easy solutions” in everyone else and his main form of reasoning is mere assertion with namecalling.
“They pretend to have easy solutions that prey upon people’s fears” an example of @JustinTrudeau‘s clarity of thought and expression https://t.co/31I61iv0Te
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) March 23, 2022
Harry’s Razors capitulated a year ago and pulled advertising from the DailyWire, and then attacked them and their audience. But Jeremy Boreing, CEO of DailyWire, didn’t apologize, and didn’t change his views; instead he set up his own razor company and is launching it now with 100%-testosterone advertising. Make sure you watch this video.
On so many scientific topics we need no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners punchy messages:
A year ago, Harry’s Razors advertised on our shows. But then, they pulled their ads due to “values misalignment”. Introducing Jeremy’s Razors. Stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate you. Give it to the god-king: https://t.co/DLWEe8hraRpic.twitter.com/yt5gVG8pl0
Corporate America wants it both ways — they want conservatives to buy their goods and services — but they also want to virtue signal to the woke mob and their 23-year-old employees by publicly repudiating those same conservative customers.
Make no mistake, they know our politics before they advertise with us. That’s why they advertise with us! We reach a large audience that they want to sell to.
…at the first sign of trouble from the mob — in the case of Harry’s Razors, it was a Twitter account with two — yes, two — followers attacking them — they not only pull their sponsorships, but publicly attack us and that very audience they paid to reach.
Well, I’m tired of losing. I want to win. I want to create culture. And I want to have a freaking good time doing it, because losing… Losing sucks.
That’s why, today, The Daily Wire is launching Jeremy’s Razors, a direct competitor to Harry’s where people with inexcusable values like mine can get a great razor without giving their money to people who clearly hate them.
The Left is happy to bifurcate the culture, ripping it in two. They’re convinced there will be no economic consequences for this because, as I said, you need their products.
So, to win, we have to rip the economy in two. We have to give conservatives their own companies and their own products to buy. We have to build market alternatives that, in success, will force the Left to take real losses if they don’t compete directly for our business.
The Daily Wire is doing just that. Jeremy’s Razors is doing just that.
And may the strongest culture win.
Cancel culture is dominant in science today, extinguishing debate, ideas and entire careers. It’s time to get organised.
Sometimes Randomized Controlled Trials are not the golden trophies of science that some say they are. (Like yesterday’s Ivermectin study). While some say that nothing less than an RCT will do, actually, sometimes it’s just silly to do one. And all RCT’s will wallow on the rocks of confirmation bias if they try to study something people already know the answer to.
For a long time there were no RCT studies showing benefits from parachutes — yet people continued to use them. It wasn’t until 2018 that a paper was finally published, surprisingly showing that there was no statistical difference in jumping with or without one from an average altitude of 4,000m.
This satirical paper makes real points about the flaws of the hallowed RCT’s:
It’s easy to design an RCT to show the opposite of the truth.
Reading the abstract of a paper is rarely enough. Reading a news headline, even less so. Details are everything.
RCT’s are not random if the test subjects have opinions and can self-select themselves out of the experiment.
These authors are black-belt professionals at medico-lingo. Those that appreciate the wit will want to read the whole thing rather than just the snippets below (I really can’t do it justice):
Parachutes are routinely used to prevent death or major traumatic injury among individuals jumping from aircraft. However, evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes is weak and guideline recommendations for their use are principally based on biological plausibility and expert opinion. Despite this widely held yet unsubstantiated belief of efficacy, many studies of parachutes have suggested injuries related to their use in both military and recreational settings, and parachutist injuries are formally recognized in the World Health Organization’s ICD-10 (international classification of diseases, 10th revision). This could raise concerns for supporters of evidence-based medicine, because numerous medical interventions believed to be useful have ultimately failed to show efficacy when subjected to properly executed randomized clinical trials.
The researchers were diligent at collecting data which was essentially useless:
Participants were randomized to wear either a parachute (National 360, National Parachute industries …) or an empty backpack (The North Face, Inc, Alameda, CA…). The interventions were not blinded to either participants or study investigators.
We collected data on basic demographic characteristics during screening by using paper forms or the survey app. Characteristics included age, sex, ethnic group, height, and weight. We also collected information on participants’ medical history including a history of broken bones, acrophobia (fear of heights), previous parachute use, family history of parachute use, and frequent flier status.
At the time of each jump, researchers recorded the altitude and velocity of the aircraft, and conducted a follow-up interview with each participant to ascertain vital status and to record any injuries sustained from the free fall within five minutes of impact with the ground, and again at 30 days after impact.
Details are everything:
Results: Parachute use did not significantly reduce death or major injury (0% for parachute v 0% for control; P>0.9). This finding was consistent across multiple subgroups. Compared with individuals screened but not enrolled, participants included in the study were on aircraft at significantly lower altitude (mean of 0.6 m for participants v mean of9146 m for non-participants; P<0.001) andlower velocity (mean of 0 km/h v mean of 800 km/h; P<0.001).
So the control group with parachutes jumped from 9,000m at 800 km per hour, and participants were more likely to have jumped with backpacks from 0.6m and 0 kilometers per hour.
UPDATE: Before anyone criticizes the trial design, know that the researchers boarded a commercial passenger jet and tried to recruit people for the trial for the 9000m jump with and without a parachute, but were unable to get any participants to sign on to that randomized intervention. However they were able to recruit participants for 0.6m jump with and without said intervention.
Obviously the design of the experiment was entirely fair and even handed, it was just that the participants held strong preconceived and prejudicial conclusions, without evidence, and selected themselves out of the experiment.
The primary efficacy analysis tested the hypothesis that parachute use is superior to the control in preventing death and major traumatic injury. Based on an assumption of an average jump altitude of 4000 meters (typical of skydiving) and the anticipated effect of impact with the Earth at terminal velocity on human tissue, we projected that 99% of the control arm would experience the primary outcome at ground impact with a relative risk reduction of 95% in the intervention arm. A sample size of 14 (7 in each arm) would yield 99% power to detect this difference at a two sided α of 0.05
No deaths were recorded from people jumping from planes with backpacks.
Conclusions Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps. When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community, randomized trials might selectively enroll individuals with a lower perceived likelihood of benefit, thus diminishing the applicability of the results to clinical practice.
The study also has several limitations. First and most importantly, our findings might not be generalizable to the use of parachutes in aircraft traveling at a higher altitude or velocity.
Should our results be reproduced in future studies, the end of routine parachute use during jumps from aircraft could save the global economy billions of dollars spent annually to prevent injuries related to gravitational challenge.
Confirmation bias (and ethics) means both patients and doctors are likely to opt not to take part in an RCT when they believe the intervention is particularly useful. This means many RCT trials are filled with people at low risk who may not benefit or miss out much either way. True RCT’s may be very useful but they are inherently cruel.
Late last week a large prospective “study” showed that ivermectin was useless so it got headline reporting at the Wall Street Journal,unlike the other 80 controlled studies the newspaper ignored. This study is not even a peer reviewed paper, nor is it even news — The TOGETHER Trial announced results way back in August last year, but haven’t officially published the paper yet.
It’s a case of PR now, details later.
Thanks to the FLCCC we know some of the reasons the trial was never likely to succeed. And given that several groups involved in the trial were also big clients of Pfizer, it was a very convenient failure. Bear in mind, “fail” is relative — despite all the handicaps below, the Relative Risk of dying of Covid with low dose ivermectin was still 0.82 (0.44-1.52). Meaning they found a 20% lower mortality rate, but it wasn’t statistically significant when done with a low, late dose in the wrong way, with the wrong type of trial, with the wrong type of participants.
How to design a study to fail:
Click to enlarge.
Give the control group a head start. It helps to begin collecting data on the control group weeks earlier when there is a less deadly variant around. That way more of the control group “do well” which makes the test group less likely to outdo them.
Give people ivermectin on an empty stomach so it is not absorbed well. It works against worms, but lowers the effective antiviral dose to about one fifth of the current clinical treatment protocol.
Limit the trial to three days, just in case all the other handicaps weren’t enough.
Start the treatment late — maybe as late as 8 days after symptoms start. It’s not clear exactly how late the treatments ended up being on average. We just have to wait for the paper, eh?
Use a randomized control trial in a community that already knows how useful ivermectin is. That way the really sick people will rule themselves out of the trial, because they won’t want the useless placebo. By comparing groups that are already low risk, ivermectin is less likely to shine. RCT trials work best in communities where the drug is not normally known or used.
Ivermectin was so widely known in Minas Gerais, Brazil that some of the control group may have been using ivermectin before they started the trial. No one asked. Nevermind if they were the lucky ones who actually got the right dose at the right time, we can call them “controls”.
Use vague primary outcomes like “events” that are subject to bias and exaggeration.
Rule out sick people (if they haven’t already ruled themselves out first) by only including patients with an “expected stay of less than 5 days. “
Tweak the protocol in the middle of the experiment: “we hypothesize that younger patients will benefit more than older patients.” Perhaps the results weren’t going well enough?
The illustrious Wall Street Journal swallowed the junk study whole and didn’t interview any of the experts who could have explained why the trial was a waste of time. (Unless the purpose was not to discover if Ivermectin was useful but to get rich selling more expensive and risky drugs, in which case the TOGETHER trial was just what Pfizer needed.)
Patients who got the antiparasitic drug didn’t fare better than those who received a placebo
Sarah Toy, Wall Street Journal
“There was no indication that ivermectin is clinically useful,” said Edward Mills, one of the study’s lead researchers and a professor of health sciences at Canada’s McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
It’s all in how you phrase things:
“This is the first large, prospective study that should really help put to rest ivermectin and not give any credibility to the use of it for Covid-19,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine…
It’s not the first trial of Ivermectin, not the largest trial, it’s the first large trial that should put people off ivermectin.
Even liars leave clues:
But *most* studies showing positive effects had significant limitations such as small sample sizes or poorly defined outcomes, according to the NIH.
“Most” indeed, meaning 51% or more. Not all studies had significant limitations but we don’t need to mention the ones that were bigger and better, right? Like the trial in Itajaí, Brazil with 159,000 people that showed a bizarrely low infrequent dose of Ivermectin could halve hospitalization rates and reduce deaths by 70% if it was used preventatively.
Would you like a conflict of interest with that?
The TOGETHER Trial is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [INV-019641]. Gates is a well known investor in medical treatments and vaccines. Imagine how much money they might not make if a cheap safe alternative was found. The lead investigator Edward Mills, got funding from FastGrants, which includes money from facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg among others. Zuckerberg has invested $100 million in “Coronavirus cures”. And on other days, some of the groups associated with the trial, with names like MMS Holdings and Cytel Inc, earn their money by doing work that helps Pfizer get drugs approved.
Comments under The Wall Street Journal are hotly polarized between people who quote other studies and dosages of ivermectin, and people who make smug remarks about “the Horse Pill loving, anti-science, Joe Rogan listening clientele often found in these comments”.
Where is decent research going to come from?
The FLCCC calls for better trials:
Trials of generic medicines that are funded and influenced by profit-driven pharmaceutical companies will always fail. We need to create an independent, well-funded government body dedicated to conducting well-designed trials and transparent research studies of repurposed generic treatments – not only for COVID-19, but for all diseases that may have safe and affordable remedies. The use of independent research is our only hope of understanding how these medicines can best be used to help patients.
Sadly, as we well know, there is no such thing as an Independent government funded research body. They are all dependent on Big Government funding. They might start out fine but they all end up captured.
More than anything we just need free speech. If doctors could say what they thought, Health Ministers, Prime Ministers, Presidents and Science Advisors could be shamed into the oblivion they so rightly deserved for the unnecessary deaths, suffering and pain they have caused.
Let the people choose their doctors, and let the doctors choose the medicines, and a real free market on a level playing field will solve the rest.
In desperation, some Americans are going to court to get rulings to order doctors to use Ivermectin on their loved ones. One family hired a helicopter to take their mother away from intensive care in a hospital that refused to give Ivermectin and saved her.
For peer reviewed studies read:The BIG Ivermectin Review: It may prevent 86% of Covid cases. In vitro, Ivermectin reduces viral loads 5000 fold in 48 hours. There are no less than 73 studies involving 56,000 people that show improvements in over 80% when used prophylactically, 67% when used early and even as many as 40% with late-started treatment. There are 20 known mechanisms of action: IVM binds to ACE2, the spike, and TMPSSR2, it is a zinc ionophore, it binds to a protease the virus needs, prevents key viral proteins getting into the cell nucleus which would normally allow the virus to shut down interferon signalling to warn neighboring cells. It’s anti-inflammatory, it blocks the NF-κB pathway, which will reduce Akt/mTOR signalling, which inhibits PAK1 which reduces STAT3 and IL-6. STAT3 induces C-reactive protein (or CRP). It’s impossible for Covid to mutate around all these mechanisms at once. No leaky vaccine should be given without an anti-viral because it risks the mutation of a nastier virus that escapes our immunity. Read the horror of Marek’s disease in chickens. 50 years of leaky vaccines created a disease worse than Ebola. It’s 100% fatal in ten days for unvaccinated chickens.
The FDA and others will say there is little evidence of success so far, but that’s a scandal in itself. Why are there no large trials? And why are other drugs like Remdesivir approved with only one trial and iffy results? Ivermectin is so safe some 3.7 billion doses have already been used around the world. The inventors won a Nobel Prize for its discovery in 2015. By July last year there were already signs Ivermectin could save as many as 50%. Why were large trials not started then? The UK trial was designed to fail from the start.
Tyre Extinguishers are vandals who skulk around at night and poke lentils in tyre valves to flatten tyres of evil SUV’s. It’s a new fashion in “climate activism” and it makes sense in a narcissistic pagan-religion kind of way. Those who do it are convinced they are smarter than everyone else, and their latest “plan” is to show you what nice, caring people they are by wasting your time and generally being thoughtless badgering bullies.
Naturally the cowards are anonymous, though they have a twitter account @T_Extinguishers.
Imagine the stress on the disabled, the sick, the missed medical appointments, children late for critical final year exams, and doctors who can’t get to work. Then there’s the damaged tyres that need replacing.
‘We will make it impossible to own an SUV in the world’s urban areas’
Eco-nuts used lentils to let down the tyres of Chelsea tractors because ‘air pollution is RACIST’
Tom Rawstorne for the DailyMail
And so it was that on Monday night a new front on the eco-war opened as a group calling themselves the Tyre Extinguishers launched a co-ordinated effort to deflate the tyres of as many SUVs as they could.
Seemingly unconcerned that their actions might stop a doctor or nurse getting to work or the danger that an unnoticed flat tyre might pose to the driver and other road users, the activists warn that this is just the start of it.
‘We are prepared to risk our life and liberty to protect people from climate change, air pollution and unnecessary death on our roads,’ a spokesperson told the Daily Mail. ‘We will make it impossible to own an SUV in the world’s urban areas.’
Precisely who is behind the new shadowy group, which claims to be leaderless, remains unclear.
But their decision to take direct action that affects the lives of ordinary members of the public mimics the tactics of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Insulate Britain, whose protests have gridlocked cities and roads in recent years.
The Useful Idiots are helping Big Bankers and the WEF — make sure you tell them “Klaus Schwab thanks you”.
Climate activists have already let down the tyres of a Hybrid Petrol-Electric SUV. I bet that green driver was understanding. And that’s the funny thing about this protest, if they target the most expensive flashy SUV’s in wealthy suburbs, they’ll be harrassing a lot of Green voters.
Smug. The note they put on targeted cars:
…
Don’t forget to buy some anti-theft valve locks now before they sell out. It will slow them down.
This is a thread for voters in South Australia to talk about today’s state election. After the Labor Party wrecked the electricity grid in South Australia, the Liberals appear to be set to lose after only one term. Please, locals or anyone with insight, tell us what is going on. I’ve only listened to 20 minutes of ABC radio in the last 3 months, but even 2000km away, I was informed of the Ambulance Ramping deaths, which now turn out to be exaggerated to the point of being misleading:
The fact that Labor kept running its ramping advertisements on Friday despite the ECSA ruling prompted one of the strongest outbursts from Treasurer Rob Lucas in a 40-year career which ends with his retirement on Saturday, labelling them “despicable lies”. “Labor’s campaign slogan should really be ‘Lie like your life depends on it’,” Mr Lucas said in the final statement of his career. — The Australian
No one seems to be asking the obvious question about Ambulance Ramping (which apparently is a problem in every state?). How much is it due to banning nurses, doctors and paramedics from working if they refuse to get injected? How much is it due to injuries from the new major health program of 2021 that has no long term data yet, and only suppressed data that Big Pharma fights to keep secret?
The new (old) recipe for goodliness, and to save Ukraine now, is just like the climate change rules.
Thanks to The Putin Excuse, the IEA suggests we cut oil use, so we need to drive 10km per hour slower, go “car free” on Sundays, catch the bus, work from home, avoid business travel and share our car with strangers.
We’ll start right after you — Dr Fatih Birol — Executive Director of the IEA. We’re keen to hear how the 7th Annual Global Conference on Energy Efficiency in Denmark will become a Zoom call instead. Do send pics of your bus trips and ride-shares!
The report goes so far as to suggest that car driving be rationed so only odd or even number plates could drive each day.
As Marc Morano says: “Let’s simplify this: The proposed ‘solutions’ to climate change, COVID, and now the Russian war are all exactly the same — hammer the poor and middle class with more restrictions on travel, less freedom, and even more surrendering of power to unelected government regulators. ” — Climate Depot
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency
Australians believe that their doctors are independent, because we have public and private medical systems and lots of “competition” between medical groups that appear to be run like businesses. What they don’t realize is that the bureaucrats entirely own the profession and it’s a monopoly from end to end. There is the illusion of freedom, but AHPRA suspends anyone who “holds the wrong views”. Once suspended a doctor is not permitted to practice, to write scripts, sometimes they are not even allowed to contact their patients.
AHPRA is not sacking doctors for bad patient outcomes, patient complaints, fraud or high risk medicine. For all the world it appears that the worst thing a doctor can do is suggest cheap solutions that get in the way of Medical Profits.
The government forcibly takes the money to fund Medicare from Australians but doesn’t let them have any choice about using those funds to talk to the doctor they prefer — only approved clone doctors. It’s communist medicine.
If there was a free market, Australians could opt out of Medicare and fund their own doctors.
The AHPRA Inquisition Against Australian Health Professionals
Caldron Pool
Who, or what, is AHPRA? Dr Jereth Kok was interviewed this week on the Caldron Pool show, and he explained that it is a “monstrous bureaucracy” in Canberra that rules over all Australian health professionals: doctors, dentists, nurses, physiotherapists, paramedics, osteopaths, pharmacists.
…AHPRA has become a Stasi-like enforcement arm of the Australian Government. It has devoted itself to purging every health practitioner in the country who dares to take a stance that is at odds with the decrees of the Covid bureaucracy.
Some examples are well known. Much adored Melbourne GP, Dr Mark Hobart, was purged by AHPRA in late 2021 for issuing exemptions to patients who were experiencing mental distress as a result of Victoria’s tyrannical mandatory vaccination regime. A few weeks later he was joined in forced exile by Dr Denes Borsos, who having lived through Eastern European Communism, has now been given a taste of Australian Communism.
The Covid Medical Network (CMN) are a group of senior doctors in Australia. They are having such an impact that even membership of the group is enough for immediate dismissal.
The most chilling part of the reasons given to Dr Brennan is this paragraph.
“It is not our role to evaluate the scientific validity of the letter. Our concern is that the letter strongly argued a highly polarised position, contrary to the public health order.”
In other words, the position argued by Dr Brennan and the CMN might be scientifically correct, and the position of the Australian Government scientifically incorrect. But as far as AHPRA is concerned, the crime lies in contradicting the Government’s position. The science is irrelevant.
Dr Paul Oosterhuis is one of the doctors suspended in Australia and he writes that the “bureaucrats are demanding” public renouncements of the forbidden groups “to the satisfaction” of the medical board — see the one below. Doctors must not disagree with them in public. Read and weep. They have no freedom of association for doctors in Australia and no free speech.
…
It is understood that the Western Australian doctor in question was threatened with suspension, and allowed to retain her licence subject to the conditions listed on the AHPRA website. Not only is she gagged from speaking publicly about any medical topic and forced to toe the “party line” on Covid; she is expected to demonstrate her loyalty to the regime by formally denouncing the heretical organisation CMN. With wording that is to the “satisfaction” of AHPRA.
Hands up who thinks your GP will tell you what they really think?
It’s was the last chance to save The Planet, but nevermind?
Get ready for the Great Reenergize-ment, we’ve reached a tipping point. Even the elite believers know a real threat when they see one. The ruling class, sitting on cushy taxpayer salaries, weren’t threatened by higher fuel prices and carbon taxes, but Russian missiles are another thing. Only a few months ago we had only “ten years til the next mass extinction”. Now, everything coal is good again, and years of pompous energy policies are on fire.
In normal times these would be monster headline backflips with mass protests in the streets from fifteen-year-old school-skippers.
Net zero rules for the North Sea are to be watered down under proposals aimed at freeing the West from its reliance on Russian fossil fuel in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
Officials are examining a plan that would allow new oil and gas drilling to go ahead on national security grounds, even if it violates a ban on schemes that could damage Britain’s bid to go carbon neutral by 2050.
Anyone remember Glasgow?
The move – which would be a major policy reversal just months after Boris Johnson pledged to lead the fight against climate change at the Cop-26 conference – comes as the Prime Minister pushes for more energy imports from Saudi Arabia and weighs up ending a ban on fracking.
The rumours from the UK have been released to soften up the news when it comes. Sadly, if Boris just carves out national security excuses, the UK will still have a mess of carbon rules the plebians won’t be able to carve themselves out of.
Politico on those rumours:
SCOOP — NET ZERO CARVE-OUT: Johnson’s hotly anticipated energy strategy is not expected this week, raising questions over what exactly is holding it up. Playbook is told much of the work that has taken place on the strategy so far has centered on the government’s legal net zero climate change commitments. In order to accelerate licensing for new North Sea oil and gas fields, a key expectation of the PM, government lawyers are having to redraw the so-called climate checkpoints imposed by ministers, which block new licenses if they don’t align with Britain’s net zero pledges. Ministers are looking at adding a “national security” or “geopolitical consideration” clause that would allow them to bypass net zero red tape and quickly drill for more oil in emergency circumstances. A Whitehall source told Playbook that this was one of the main areas of focus in terms of North Sea oil and gas, with much of the rest of the package centered around accelerating renewable energy such as onshore wind and solar. There is also talk the PM could unveil the strategy in a major speech later this month.
Nothing sharpens the mind like a cruise missile.
It’s not a Kalibr Missile, but it probably wrecks Green policies too. Photo by mil.ru
Putin’s warships and submarines are capable of launching Kalibr cruise missiles at UK cities and vital infrastructure from more than 1,000 miles from the east coast of Scotland.
Dr Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow for sea power and missile defence at the Royal United Services Institute, said: “Do the Russians have missiles capable of reaching the UK? Yes, absolutely.”
Vladimir’s intention might not have been to unite and awaken the loopy West. Though the West has dug itself a big hole it didn’t need to jump into, and still needs to get out of.
Mark Mills at the Manhattan Institute has been sending warning signals for years that the push for intermittent energy in the west could have drastic geopolitical consequences. Here he explains how the conflict in the Ukraine has brought the drastic consequences upon us ahead of schedule.
Naivete about energy realities robbed the U.S. and its allies of important “soft power” options and helped finance Russia’s aggression. In the near term, our choices are limited, but continuing down the same energy path is a formula for yet more problems in the future.
The EU and the US over the past two decades spent more than $5 trillion and made countless mandates to replace oil, natural gas and coal. This brought the hydrocarbon share of all energy use down by two percentage points to 84 percent while burning wood still supplies more energy than all the world’s solar panels and oil still fuels nearly 97 percent of all the world’s transportation.
While the west spent a great deal of money to phase out coal and gas, without going nuclear, Russia and China pressed on to develop their coal and gas resources and nuclear power as well.
Europe gets 25 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of all its oil and gas from Russia. For Germany, the shares are 35 percent and 70 percent, as well as 50 percent of its coal needs.
The pivot from Russia will be painful and retrieving the situation will take a long time – it is like turning around the Titanic. Read the whole story, it is not long, it is very important and it is too densely packed to summarize.
STOP PRESS. Hungary bans grain exports, the first sign of an impending global food crisis.
A reminder about the situation in Australia:
South Australia is leading the way in the green transition. Whenever the wind is low overnight SA has to import coal power from Victoria. So you know what is going to happen when more coal capacity closes and there is no spare power in Victoria and NSW when the wind is low across SE Australia. Rafe blogs at NewCatallaxy Blog.
Is connecting intermittent energy to the grid ahead of storage capacity the greatest public policy blunder since federation?
The federal court today unanimously decided Federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley does not have a duty of care to protect young people from the harms of climate change.
The ruling overturns a previous landmark win by eight high school students, who sought to stop Ley approving a coal mine expansion in New South Wales.
The bad news is that these same experts can’t see how profoundly silly their reasoning is:
So why was Ley successful? The federal court’s 282-page judgment offers myriad reasons for why no duty should be imposed on the minister. But what emerges most clearly is the court’s view that it’s not their place to set policies on climate change. Instead, they say, it’s the job of our elected representatives in the federal government.
Well, do we live in a democracy or don’t we?
If only Jacqueline Peel and Rebekkah Markey-Towler could persuade us that coal is a killer, they wouldn’t need to go to court to force their opinions on everyone else.
One of these two experts gets Australian government research funding for “climate change litigation” projects. Evidently she’s funded by taxpayers to steal rights away from them.
The whole case was silly beyond words. If the Environment Minister has a Duty of Care to stop a coal mine for fear of losses to these teens in future years, then surely the Treasurer also has a Duty of Care not to wreck the economy and put those same teens in debt on a frivolous pagan quest to stop floods, storms and droughts? Likewise, the Minister for Energy has a Duty of Care to make sure these students don’t grow up to live in a third world banana republic that can’t power factories to provide jobs or keep their quality of life as high as it was for their parents. Where does it end? With a dictator running a command economy, and gulags for the dissidents.
From the original ruling we see the maths never added up:
In the ruling, Justice Mordy Bromberg noted that the expansion of the Whitehaven Coal-owned mine would lead to an additional 33 million metric tons (36 million U.S. tons) of coal being extracted over 25 years and 100 million metric tons (110 million U.S. tons) of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.
The world uses 8.5 billion tons of coal a year, and the court case was about 1.3 million tons of coal per year or 1 part in 6,500 of annual coal consumption. Even if coal was bad, and even if warming was bad, and even if CO2 caused warming, this case still would not make sense.
Unusual rain in Australia started within days of the Hunga Tonga dust cloud travelling across the continent
On January 15th, Hunga Tonga launched a magma-powered thunderstorm that sent atmospheric shockwaves around the world. Ash, salt and particulates were carried through rising columns, right through the stratosphere, into the mesosphere and all the way up to 58 kilometers above Earth. For hours 400,000-odd lighting bolts zapped the airborne chemical soup.
The dust from Hunga-Tonga travelled West and reached Australia on Jan 18 – 20th. On Jan 21-22 flooding rain washed out the main railway line and roads in central Australia. Over the next few weeks, rains soaked the ground across parts of Queensland and New South Wales. By February 15th, the remnant volcanic dust that had circled the Earth and was back again creating rich red sunsets over Australia. A week or so after that, the rain bombs fell on South East Queensland, and travelled south through New South Wales to Sydney.
The big unknown is that the Hunga-Tonga volcano launched water vapor, salt and dust incredibly high — almost too high. The aerosols are far above the troposphere where rainfall originates and some of that floating ash was still too high even as it returned on the second lap of the Earth at 25km above sea level. On the other hand, some particles will fall out faster than others, others will be highly charged and possibly novel entities created in the monster lightning storm above the volcano, and some ash and particles will have been released at lower heights.
This post was inspired by Jennifer Marohasy who pointed out the weak La Nina conditions don’t really explain the floods in Australia this year. She wondered if the recent Australian rain was fueled by aerosols from Hunga Tonga and describes how rainfall has been linked to past eruptions in scientific papers: after “El Chichon spewed 20 million tonnes of aerosols into the stratosphere in 1982, Hong Kong recorded very high rainfalls as the dust arrived across the Pacific”.
The volcanic dust passes over Australia on Jan 18 -20
Hunga Tonga lies 20 degrees south of the equator at roughly the same latitude as Townsville in Queensland. So the densest band of aerosols circling the Earth westwards from the eruption would track right over Queensland.
SO2 emissions of #HungaTongaHungaHaapai. The huge plume of sulphur dioxide was detected today, Jan. 18 by the #Copernicus #Sentinel5p #Tropomi sensor over Northern #Australia.
The volcanic dust cloud travelled west, arriving over Australia on January 18th and reaching the Indian Ocean on the far side by January 20th. It was dissipating as it moved, but could have left a trail of cloud seeding particles in the stratosphere over Australia. These in turn will be falling and blowing with the wind, spreading out through the Southern Hemisphere.
On Jan 21 and 22, flooding in the arid zones of South Australia was so severe, it washed out the one trans Australian railway line and the Stuart Highway as well. And this was in midsummer in an area that rarely gets any rain. Rainfalls in some areas of South Australia were 400% higher than normal.
Perhaps some parts of these falls were too far south, and perhaps the dust just wasn’t low enough in the atmosphere at this point. But on the 16th of January there were slow surface and lower tropospheric winds blowing past parts of the Tonga cloud to the west.
The downpour in central South Australia was so unusual it washed out the sole Trans-Australia “Indian Pacific” railway line running across the nation from East to West.
The line normally delivers 80% of Western Australia’s retail supplies on freight trains that are nearly 2km long. The line took weeks to be restored and the shelves here in Perth are still running empty in somewhat random patterns.
Flooding has damaged parts of the freight line across the Nullabor.
Across Australia the rain for the whole month of January was generally heavier than usual
There is usually very little rain in central Australia in the hottest month of the year. When there are big falls in the deserts it is usually due to the remnants of a cyclone. That doesn’t seem to be the case this time.
And most of the rain recorded on this map occurred after the dust passed over. The first two weeks of January were much drier.
Hunga Tonga was the tallest, wettest, most violent storm in our lifetime
The eruption that reached an astonishing 58 kilometers into the sky.
The underwater explosion made Hungo Tonga very different. Unlike Pinatubo or El Chichon, it didn’t carry a large weight of sulphur dioxide, but did carry a lot of water. The blast punched so far up into the atmosphere, because it was powered by a massive expansion of water vapor as the 20 degree water hit 1000 degree magma. The steam powered column drove a mix of salt, ash and particulates right through the stratosphere and into the mesosphere. It was possibly the biggest thunderstorm on Earth. The rising column generated a phenomenal 400,000 lighting strikes over a seven hour period. That towering electrical morass must have generated a wild-card mix of aggressively charged particles, and at altitudes we never normally see them. Who knows how long those zapped chemicals would take to drift back down to Earth and what mischief they might do on the way?
Lidar showed the sulphates and aerosols were back over Australia from Feb 15th:
The aerosols are still very high, well up in the stratosphere:
“[It’s] showing us what is probably mostly sulphate aerosols (maybe a bit of volcanic ash) around 25 km in height in the stratosphere, sitting well above the troposphere where the clouds are,” according to Dr Tupper [of Natural Hazards Consulting]
On February 15th volcanic aerosols could be seen in the stratosphere over eastern Australia using LIDAR imagery.(Supplied: NASA)
Since the initial explosion, the plume has been circling around the atmosphere, too high to affect our day-to-day weather, but adding a red glow to sunrises and sunsets. The plume has now roughly made its first full loop of the globe and has been travelling over Australia again this week.
“So that’s why we’ve seen these really glowing skies at sunrise and sunset,” Mr [Graham] Creed said.
“The interesting thing is that at sunset you can actually see the meteorological sunset, which is when the clouds change colour but as the sun goes over and it starts to go dark that’s when the volcanic ash was illuminated and was bending and refracting the light.”
Hunga-Tonga isn’t expected to cool the climate much:
The latest estimates of the effect of Hunga Tonga are that the cooling impact will be smaller, because the amount of sulfur dioxide was only 2% of what the Pinatubo eruption released. However the underwater explosion reached far up into the stratosphere, nearly 40km altitude, so those particulates may be suspended for a long time.
Just in case people were thinking a few nuclear bombs don’t matter:
“…even a relatively “minor” exchange of nuclear weapons would wreck the planet’s climate in enormous and long-lasting ways.”
Despite sounding crazily disconnected from reality, Robinson Meyer is slightly less crazy than the cult people he’s trying to reach. Many “artists” and “climate concerned progressives” have leapt on the latest hot-fashion-in-activism (who could have seen that coming?) and they’re calling for a No Fly Zone over Ukraine. It’s like they believe that putting up a sign saying “Warplane Free” will stop the warplanes.
Meyer has figured out that a No Fly Zone might lead to World War III, and he’s trying warn the raptured throngs, that things might not work out so well. Naturally, he’s speaking in lingua-leftie. But how, exactly do you scare someone in a climate cult? Not with nuclear war, but with something catastro-double-awful-bad for the climate.
On the richter scale of climate porn, what’s the worst thing Meyer can imagine:
“And it would be worse for the climate than any energy policy that Donald Trump ever proposed.”
He’s gently telling them their calls for a No Fly Zone might be more damaging for the climate than the demon-man himself. I don’t think they’ll get the message though. The whole package just won’t parse. He goes on to tell them nuclear war “carbon” doesn’t warm the world, it cools it, and cooling is awful.
After 26 UN COP meetings aimed at cooling the world by lowering carbon, this story will just bounce right off:
A 2007 study estimated that if 100 small nuclear weapons were detonated, a number equal to only 0.03 percent of the planet’s total arsenal, the number of “direct fatalities due to fire and smoke would be comparable to those worldwide in World War II.” Towering clouds would carry more than five megatons of soot and ash from these fires high into the atmosphere.
All this carbon would transform the climate, shielding it from the sun’s heat. Within months, the planet’s average temperature would fall by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit; some amount of this cooling would persist for more than a decade. But far from reversing climate change, this cooling would be destabilizing. It would reduce global precipitation by about 10 percent, inducing global drought conditions. In parts of North America and Europe, the growing season would shorten by 10 to 20 days.
Ponder how far these people are from reality, even at the sensible end of the spectrum. He goes on to say that ocean acidification would get worse, the ozone layer would be destroyed, the world will be fried by extra UV radiation, and people will get skin cancer.
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This is a thread for voters in South Australia to talk about today’s state election. After the Labor Party wrecked the electricity grid in South Australia, the Liberals appear to be set to lose after only one term. Please, locals or anyone with insight, tell us what is going on. I’ve only listened to 20 minutes of ABC radio in the last 3 months, but even 2000km away, I was informed of the Ambulance Ramping deaths, which now turn out to be exaggerated to the point of being misleading:
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