Thursday Open Thread

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Follow the Science: Painful births might improve the weather — If we go anesthetic-free will we hold back the tide?

It’s a cult: Another Woke Dilemma

Doctors, hospitals, medical staff, photoShould women in childbirth be warned that their anesthetic might heat the climate a hundred years from now? You know, toss it around, will I or won’t I? On the one hand, there’s hours of what some consider the worst pain they’ll ever feel, or there are other pain-killers which might not be as safe (but it’s only a baby right?). On the other hand, it’s possible that when their baby turns eighty the world might be 0.000 degrees cooler thanks to Mum? You Go Girl!

Frankly, if they wait to ask this in the labor ward – it’s far too late. Women need to hear this on the phone while booking their first appointment. That way they can run, don’t walk, run and find a real doctor — one that looks at data — not the ones scoring points in a science fashion contest.

Is nitrous oxide a climate risk?

Elios Visontay, The Guardian

report in Australasian Anaesthesia notes that while nitrous oxide – known as laughing gas when used as an anaesthetic – is an effective method of pain relief during labour, the gas represents 7% of global emissions, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Carbon dioxide and methane account for 66% and 16% respectively.

Using nitrous oxide as pain relief during a four-hour labour creates a carbon footprint equivalent to driving an average car for 1,500km, the report’s authors found, whereas an epidural is equivalent to driving 6km.

None of the numbers made sense anyhow. Nitrous Oxide is 7% of all global emissions? What are they on…?

In the actual report it’s clear almost no one at The Guardian read the numbers (page 185):

The World Meteorological Organization indicates that globally N2O represents 7 per cent of all long-lived
greenhouse gases (LLGHG) which together result in radiative forcing (inward radiative energy to the earth
minus outgoing). This makes N2O the third most important LLGHG following CO2 and methane which account
for 66 per cent and 16 per cent of global warming respectively. More than 1 per cent of worldwide GHG
emissions resulting from N2O are anaesthetic in origin, which is a substantial figure, given that a total of 40
per cent of global N2O is anthropogenic.

Thus 99% of emissions from N2O are not anaesthetic, and who cares? Even nature makes more N20 than we do and 20 times as much CO2. And all the minor gases are nothing compared to water, the most powerful greenhouse gas of all. The whole fixation on “long lived” gases is only so people can ignore short lived ones like water. Do those photons care if the molecule is here today and gone tomorrow, but another one is in its place?  This is not angels dancing on pins, but viruses dancing on bacteria dancing on angels. How many of our best and brightest medical staff worked on that paper?

Junk models meets junk research, junk journals, and junk reporting.

Speaking of dilemmas

Don’t look now but two commandments of Pussy-Wokism are in conflict. Should women get what they want even when it means the world might end up 0.0000C degrees hotter in 2100? Which victim scores highest… women or the climate?

See the struggle. Feel the pain:

Linking nitrous oxide to climate risk is yet another example of the disdain shown to women’s pain

Isabelle Oderberg, The Guardian

Why this report? Why now? Why did I get all those rolling eye emoji text messages?

When a new report suggested that people who use nitrous oxide when giving birth should be warned about the impacts on climate change, I felt the mild tremor of a collective groan uttered in unison across the country. More than one person sent me headlines accompanied by a rolling eye emoji.

Historians will mark the madness of the era:

Clearly the climate crisis is a pressing mattter of life or death and the future of all humanity. The staggering results of our federal election show that this is an issue about which Australians are deeply concerned. And many medical colleges are considering the effects of climate change on their patients, with the Australian Medical Association even issuing a call to arms.

The real question is why doesn’t the AMA have better things to do, like looking after their patients, giving informed consent, and checking their scientific pronouncements on every topic before they put out a press release. The other real question is why journalists don’t ask medicos more interesting questions about things that might matter today, not in 2100.

Before patients get warned about the effect of nitrous oxide on climate change, they should get warned about B12 deficiency. That’s another story…

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

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Electricity Hunger Games downunder —  potential sighting of four hour price bonfire

It’s a grid on the edge

Solar Panels, resting on a river of subsidies. Photo.Like a meteor-shower, the dinner time performance today may or may not be a spectator event. The fun may start at 4:30pm in Qld, NSW, Vic, SA and Tasmania — a full quinfecta at $15,000 per MW/h. The first wave of winter cold is about to wash over the grid, and those solar panels will fail just as people plug in their heaters, ovens, dryers and kettles and there is a four hour spike at $15,000MWh forecast. The graph below is the forecast for NSW, but it is essentially the same tsunami shape and dimension in every single state of the National Energy Market. Right now I presume there are engineers in the control rooms sweating over alternatives and they may well pull it off. These wildly high spikes have a way of resolving at the last minute.  But think for a moment what kind of stakes we’re playing with. Hypothetically, if there was a 12,000MW demand for 4 hours in NSW at $15,000, that’s $720 million dollars worth of electricity. A few days like that would pay for a new coal plant, but no one seems to be listening to that price signal…

Even if they pull off aerial manouvers tomorrow and save millions of dollars (billions even) what’s clear is that the whole grid is flying seat-of-the-pants. The AEMO issued unprecedented warnings about a gas supply shortfall across Vic SA and Tas that have already been cancelled, but the reserves of generation are razor thin and winter has just begun.

Am I wrong — none of this would be happening if Hazelwood was still running? Brown coal was still winning bids at $24/MWh a few months ago.

But don’t miss the other big signal here. The entire Australian National Energy Market for a “Grid” in a forced subsidized transition needs to be totally redesigned. It might have worked fine with reliable generators but even though we add tweak after tweak, something is going horribly wrong. But redesigning a whole new market is another hidden cost of the junk generators being forced on the grid.

AEMO Forecast Electricity prices for June 2. NEM. Graph.

It may not work out this exciting… but that four hour peak is worth millions. | AEMO

The total NEM wide demand expected is a bit over 30GW at peak. Not near the peak highs of summer which have hit 35.5GW on Jan 29th, 2009. Somehow in 13 years we’ve increased our network capacity by 25% but something isn’t working….

Yesterday the Instantaneous Reserve Plant Margin across the whole NEM fell below the 15% yellow alert trigger level.

Paul McArdle who lives and breathes the NEM market, says he can never remember seeing a warning like this before:

Keep reading  →

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Half the French Nuclear Fleet is down

Strategically, this seems like it matters.

The French nuclear power plants are the backbone of the EU grid, but this winter, just when Europe is trying to not-buy-Russian-Gas, the French might need to import power instead of export it.

France runs off 70% nuclear power — it’s highest proportion in the world, and the second largest fleet — after the USA. For some reason, known only to international bankers or Renewable Gods, Early in Macron’s reign, he decided to reduce the carbon-free reliable nukes to just 50% by 2035 and fill the gap with short-lived, unreliable generators that cost a lot, need storage, backup, rare metals from China and slave labor from the Congo. Perhaps he was afraid (or whoever it was that helped him get elected) that France would show up all the schmuck-countries going to renewables?

But then the gas crisis started in Europe last October, and like clockwork, in November President Macron muttered the words “energy independence” and belatedly announced that it wasn’t such a bad idea to build some new nuclear plants. As things got more serious, in late February the French nuclear safety authority decided to extend the life of the 32 oldest reactors for another ten years and  is now planning to retire them at age 50.

Bu by the end of April 27 nuclear reactors were out of action. Odd cracks had been discovered in five reactors last year due to corrosion and that had expanded to six more plants. A couple of weeks ago another one was taken off-line — so that’s 28 out 56 of EDF’s reactors. And some of these are slow repairs. There are already worries that there won’t be enough back in time for winter to keep the lights on in France without expensive imports during an energy crisis.

Interestingly, the plants that unexpectedly need maintenance are the newer ones with “convoluted pipes”. Prices of electricity are already higher in France.  Don’t let anyone tell you the old plants are the cause of the rise!

h/t Notalotofpeopleknowthat

France’s Nuclear Shutdown Hits 50% of Reactors, Squeezing Supply

Jesper Starn Bloomberg

Twenty-eight reactors are offline as Electricite de France SA struggles with extended outages after corrosion issues were found at some sites, requiring lengthy checks and repairs. The extra works come on top of already scheduled halts for refueling and regular maintenance, and has brought French nuclear output to the lowest in more than decade for the time of year.

French Nuclear output MW

Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-29/half-of-french-nuclear-fleet-is-shut-for-works-squeezing-supply

Western Europe has for decades relied on exports of power from EDF’s nuclear fleet. The cuts are another blow to European energy security just as the region is weaning itself off Russian supplies of everything from natural gas to coal and oil because of the war in Ukraine.

EDF Sees Bigger Earnings Hit as It Cuts Nuclear Outlook

The big test will come when temperatures start to fall toward the end of the year. It won’t take many days of cold weather to jeopardize French power supplies, according to Emeric de Vigan, chief executive officer at French energy analysis firm COR-e.

“Which such poor nuclear availability, if we reach 2 degrees Celsius below normal in the winter for a few days we could be in trouble, it would be really tight,” de Vigan said. Paying customers and factories to lower consumption are steps that likely will need to be taken, he said.

The problem is with the new reactors not the old ones

Perhaps the designers got a bit too tricky?

EDF’s newer reactors seem to be most affected because of the design of some of their piping, which is longer and more convoluted, Clement said. The cracks tend to show up very close to welds at the pipes’ elbows, most likely because of a vortex of hot and cold water, and possibly because of how the welds were done.

Europe’s Biggest Exporter of Power Might Need Imports in Winter

The challenges for the utility are now so great that President Emmanuel Macron has suggested some of its key activities could be nationalized as part of a broader plan to bolster the country’s energy independence.

At least he’s not proposing to give control to the EU or the UN. It could be worse.

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Tuesday Open Thread

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While Australia is rushing to close coal plants, the UK is thinking of keeping them running

In Australia a Woke tech-billionaire has decided to “keep” the coal assets in AGL in order to destroy them (like that’s the “free market” at work) . But in the rest of the world, coal is $400 a ton and everybody wants it.

Maybe Australians will get so rich selling coal they can afford to use electricity from unreliable generators instead?

Coal Price, Trading Economics

Not behaving like a stranded asset.  Trading Economics

Britain could keep coal-fired power plants open this winter

LONDON (Reuters) -Some of the British coal-fired power plants slated for closure this year might need to stay open to ensure electricity supply this winter, the government said on Monday.

Countries across Europe are drawing up contingency plans against potential disruption to flows of Russian gas because of the war in Ukraine. Russia typically supplies about 40% of Europe’s gas.

Britain can generate about 50% of its electricity from gas. Although Russia only meets about 4% of Britain’s gas needs, a significant disruption in supply would affect prices in Europe and make it harder for Britain to secure gas from others.

How screwed is that market when they have to “devise” a framework to keep the cheapest reliable generators running?

The government has asked the National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) to devise a framework to encourage plant operators to keep the power stations running, according to a letter seen by Reuters from energy minister Kwasi Kwarteng to National Grid ESO.

Is that new “framework” the plastercast that saves the limb which has a plastic pin-and-plate fitted on a bone that didn’t need to be broken?

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Another La Nina? Climate models just flummoxed. This is not supposed to happen!

We can hear the angst and confusion — Another “nasty La Nina?”, “Something weird is going on”, “They (La Ninas) don’t know when to leave”. Oh no!

These are not the words we’d expect to hear from experts who can 97% predict the climate a century from now. The bad news for the modelers is that the climate on Earth seems to be controlled more by the Pacific Oscillation than anything else and they have no idea what drives that pattern, so they can’t predict it more than a few months ahead, and sometimes not even then. And if they can’t predict the Pacific — they can’t predict anything. The hottest of hot years are El Nino, and the coldest years are La Nina and the greatest modelers the world-has-ever-known still get their barbecue summers wrong. The droughts, the floods and the bushfires follow the swinging surface water of the worlds largest ocean. Whenever they happen, the models say “climate change” but the models never tell us which will hit us this time next year.

So here we are with hints that there might be another La Nina, a third in a row, and Oh-the-disappointment! The modelers thought there would be more El Ninos — oh Queen of Global Heating. Instead, in the last 40 years, La Nina’s seem to be getting more common. The models were wrong.

And this failure is of the Grande Mal kind.

Holy Smoke — the Pacific matters

As William Kinninmonth so incisively pointed out — the oceans are 4 kilometers deep and most of the water is only a few degrees above freezing, even under the tropical Pacific. There is a world of cold down there, and the layer of warm water on top is but a thin skin. If that thin skin of warm water rests undisturbed, the air can heat above. But all it takes is a change in dominant currents, or tradewinds, or some new deep sea magma vent to stir up the ocean and the top layers mix. The gargantuan deep blue blob of 3 kilometer thick salty cold water promptly rises up and sucks the warmth out of the sky.

The insipid weak vapor above is no match for the vast energy sink below.

Pacific Ocean temperature gradient. Graph. William Kininmonth.

….

h/t Tallbloke

CBS NEWS:  Weather’s unwanted guest: Nasty La Nina keeps popping up

Something weird is up with La Nina, the natural but potent weather event linked to more drought and wildfires in the western United States and more Atlantic hurricanes. It’s becoming the nation’s unwanted weather guest and meteorologists said the West’s megadrought won’t go away until La Nina does.

The current double-dip La Nina set a record for strength last month and is forecast to likely be around for a rare but not quite unprecedented third straight winter. And it’s not just this one. Scientists are noticing that in the past 25 years the world seems to be getting more La Ninas than it used to and that is just the opposite of what their best computer model simulations say should be happening with human-caused climate change.

“They (La Ninas) don’t know when to leave,” said Michelle L’Heureux, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast office for La Nina and its more famous flip side, El Nino.

That sound you hear is the long term forecasts snapping:

An Associated Press statistical analysis of winter La Ninas show that they used to happen about 28% of the time from 1950 to 1999, but in the past 25 winters, they’ve been brewing nearly half the time. There’s a small chance that this effect could be random, but if the La Nina sticks around this winter, as forecast, that would push the trend over the statistically significant line, which is key in science, said L’Heureux. Her own analysis shows that La Nina-like conditions are occurring more often in the last 40 years. Other new studies are showing similar patterns.

The real problem is this is just one of many things the models get wrong and unlike smaller things, it can’t be just “tuned to fit”:

What’s bothering many scientists is that their go-to climate simulation models that tend to get conditions right over the rest of the globe predict more El Ninos, not La Ninas, and that’s causing contention in the climate community about what to believe, according to Columbia University climate scientist Richard Seager and MIT hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel.

A third dry year for Eastern America will be bad in so many ways. Imagine how useful it would be to everyone if the climate models actually worked and could have told dam managers, farmers and foresters in 2019 that the next three years would be dry? This would be worth billions, but instead the “science” of climate change is a politically captured corrupt sect that shuns alternate ideas, exiles heretics and ignores the Sun, the Moon, Space Weather, the ball of magma we stand on, and pretends that the only thing that matters is a gas your car makes.

And they know it. They’re deleting what they knew: NASA hides page saying the Sun was the primary climate driver, and clouds and particles are more important than greenhouse gases

 

Space-weather can change the climate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Cult of Green: Because no 1,000 year old forest is complete without industrial wind turbines

In Germany, praise be to Gaia, it’s Green to knock down a forest that has sat undisturbed for a thousand years to put wind farms in, and then plant saplings in a fake forest somewhere else as a carbon sink.

When will the environmentalists realize they have been taken for a ride by investment bankers and the renewables industry? Let’s help them speed up that “transition”. There’s a Red-pill moment here. File the story of the Reinhardswald, “fairy-tale forest” away for those moments when a teenager turns up to tell you how important it is to save old growth forest. Exactly, you can say… would you like too help stop the latest rapacious attack on rare heritage forest?

Being “Green” is nothing more than a badge people wear to their weekend dinner party.

NoTricksZone has reported on this environmental crime in February 2022 when the access roads started to go in. In the latest news Swiss  NZZ Daily has described it as the absurdity of the German energy transition:

In the fall, the Documenta management planted oaks in the fairytale Reinhardswald near Kassel to save the climate. Now the forest is to give way to wind turbines, which will save the climate even better.

Germany’s last scenic spot to get industrial wind turbines

The area is the largest contiguous forested area in Hessen, virtually uninhabited, undisturbed, and therefore a precious natural area in itself. Its beauty is an entertainment field of outstanding importance [1] in the middle of a landscape that is partly classified as cultural – historical and has the highest value. Even according to Environment Minister Hessian Priska Hinz (Greens), this is one of the most scenic regions in Germany. [2]….

 

Pierre Gosslin is

“it’s all being industrially raped, gangbang-style, by crony, greedy bastards under the guise of environmental virtue. It’s a grand swindle that in normal times would have everyone enraged.

Wind park proponents defend the deforestation of one of Europe’s remaining virgin forests by claiming that only sick areas of the forest are being cleared away and that the turbines will “free Germany from the clinging grip of Russian energy imports”….and save our climate for generations to come.

That’ll be eighteen 240-meter-high wind turbines. Hope the birds, deer and wild cats can get some sleep.

Pierre Gosselin notes the extraordinary irony that to keep tourists coming they are literally building an artificial forest in the Brothers Grimm Square:

“While the real, historically grown fairytale forest outside the city is being cut down, artificial substitutes are being created within the city. For example, Kassel’s civic society has been fighting for months over the redesign of the Brothers Grimm Square, which is conceived in the form of a “fairy tale forest” of pine trees and shrubbery – whereby at best a light miniature forest on a traffic island can emerge.”

Read it all at NoTricksZone.

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Monday Open Thread

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Doomer Storms of 2080 are here 60 years early — sayth short cherry-picked storm data from pagan climate-model

It’s the usual apocalyptic headline, hyped from a press release smoked out of a Nature paper, which was pumped from a climate model:

“Climate change already causing storm levels only expected in 2080”

An Israeli study published on Thursday found that climate change is already causing a “considerable intensification” of winter storms in the Southern Hemisphere to a level not anticipated until 2080.

It’s bleak I tell you:

“New data reveals climate change might be more rapid than predicted”

In the new study, Chemke and his team compared climate model simulations with current storm observations. Their discovery was bleak: It became clear that storm intensification over recent decades has already reached levels projected to occur in the year 2080.

Yet again we see true mastery of confirmation bias at work: When the climate models underestimate things it means doom is coming faster. When they overestimate things, it means the equipment is faulty.  What would 28 million radiosondes know?

There must be 1,000 permutations of climatoid factors that could be measured across regions of the Earth, but Lo — there has been an intensification of Winter Mid-Latitude Storms in the Southern Hemisphere! Not summer storms, spring storms, or Atlantic Storms or Atlantic Tropical Autumn storms, or Pacific Eastern high latitude Westward events (as far as we know) but roll the dice, some of them will turn up snake-eyes too! (Where is my grant?)

As far as I can see, this is a good example of Neolithic tea-reading type science — equivalent to studying the trails of the scribbly-bark beetle and forecasting that the Blinking Star will eat Neptune before the next full moon.

These are short term trends within the noise envelope, but good enough for a Nature paper, and a press release:

What if there was, say, a natural 60 year trend in there? Who would know?

The intensification of winter mid-latitude storm tracks in the Southern Hemisphere

I notice in the Supplementary section the captivating graph below. Part A, apparently, is the observed trend, and Part B the modeled trend, which don’t look too similar to me. The caption has the immortal words:“The small black dots indicate regions where two thirds of the models/reanalyses agree on the sign.” On The Sign! Unless I’m reading that wrongly, they’re excited about the dot points where two out of three models guessed whether the trend was up or down. It’s that bad. In most of the Pacific apparently nearly 70% of models looked at “climate change” and couldn’t even guess the direction right.

Indeed, the models are so wrong in the Pacific, perhaps it’s significant?

The intensification of winter mid-latitude storm tracks in the Southern Hemisphere

Click to enlarge.

Phys-Org gushes like David Attenborough was let loose in “software biology”:

About 30 massive, intricate computer networks serve the scientists who stand at the forefront of climate change research. Each network runs a software program comprised of millions of lines of code. These programs are computational models that combine the myriads of physical, chemical and biological phenomena that together form the climate of our planet.

What is Truth but “millions of lines of code” eh? What could possibly go wrong (apart from things like the G.F.C.)?

We’re there at 2080 already!

In the new study, Chemke and his team compared climate model simulations with current storm observations. Their discovery was bleak: It became clear that storm intensification over recent decades has already reached levels projected to occur in the year 2080.

Spot the bias anyone? We studied this part of the world  because it showed what we wanted to find?

“We chose to focus on the Southern Hemisphere because the intensification registered there has been stronger than in the Northern Hemisphere,” Chemke says. “We didn’t examine the Northern Hemisphere, but it seems that the intensification of storms in this hemisphere is slower compared to that in the Southern Hemisphere.

If any taxpayer funds were harmed in this report, we want them all back. This is non-stop agitprop:

Chemke, Ming and Yuval’s study has two immediate, considerable implications. First, it shows that not only climate projections for the coming decades are graver than previous assessments, but it also suggests that human activity might have a greater impact on the Southern Hemisphere than previously estimated. This means that rapid and decisive intervention is required in order to halt the climate damage in this region. Second, a correction of the bias in climate models is in order, so that these can provide a more accurate climate projection in the future.

It’s new low in scientific spin. Modelers don’t usually just lie straight out like this:

Could the climate models be inaccurately predicting other important phenomena? “The models are doing a very good job at forecasting nearly all the parameters,” Chemke says. “We’ve discovered one parameter for which the sensitivity of the models needs to be adjusted. Changes in temperature, precipitation, sea ice, and summer  patterns, for example, are all being simulated accurately.”

For what it’s worth, Rei Chemke only finished his BSc in 2012, and his PhD is all “climate science”. It’s more a case of Kool Aid over-exposure for a young guy that has probably never met a skeptic.

Everyone who has met a skeptic knows climate models can’t predict the climate on a local, regional, or continental scale, they don’t know  why global warming slowed for years, they get the core assumptions wrong – the hot spot is still missing, (that’s the only fingerprint they said mattered, right up until they couldn’t find it). They can’t explain the pause, the cause or the long term historic climate movements either. Measurements of satellites, cloud cover changes, 3,000 ocean buoys6,000 boreholes, a thousand tide gauges, and 28 million weather balloons looking at temperature or humidity can’t find the warming that the models predict. In the oceans, the warming isn’t statistically significantsea-levels started rising too early, aren’t rising fast enough, aren’t accelerating, nor are warming anywhere near as much as they predicted. Antarctica was supposed to be warming faster than almost anywhere but they were totally wrong. The vast Southern Ocean is cooling not warming. The only part of Antarctica that’s warming sits on top of a volcano chain they prefer not to tell you about.

Some scientists are also behaving very badly: hiding data, declines, history, adjustments and methodsBut thousands of other scientists are protesting all over the internet.

REFERENCES

Chemke, et al, (2022) The intensification of winter mid-latitude storm tracks in the Southern Hemisphere, Nature Climate Change (2022)

PDF Preview copy on ResearchGate

Supplementary Information

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WHO Chief wants to run the world (for China), Biden, Boris, Albanese is OK with that, but Africa puts the brakes on

We can all use some good news

Tedros Adhanom

Tedros Adhanom

In the latest installment of Big Government Badness the WHO is meeting right now to consider some amendments suggested by the US and largely agreed by about 47 rich nations for no real benefit. The US suggested these changes in January and for months almost no politician anywhere said a thing. The changes give broader powers to the head honcho of the WHO —  Tedros Adhanhom Ghebreysus. He’s the man who told the world to keep flying in Chinese Bioweapons through their front door in January 2020, while he also told everyone how transparent and wonderful President Xi was: “China is protecting the people in the whole world”! He actually said that. China was stopping all flights out of Wuhan to the rest of China, but not to Italy, Iran, or anywhere else, and they lied about human to human transmission, and said it was preventable and curable, while they harvested up masks and PPE from around the world to profiteer from them later. China lied about the bats in the lab, and WHO helped cover it up.

No one can explain why the rich nations of the world would want to sign rights away to an unelected, unaudited foreign committee that has failed to do the only job it was meant to do, is clearly in the pocket of China’s communists and wants us to pay them to let them boss us around?

Notably China was not signing up

The good news at the moment is that according to The Epoch Times African nations have put the brakes on and they appear to have derailed the process. We might assume that with backroom deals that might amount to some local sweeteners in Africa or maybe just a better job for the Ambassador. However the backroom deals appear to be failing, and the final form of the amendments has now been delayed to September or even November. The battle isn’t over but we have more time to fight back.

The documents we’re talking about are called the  WHO International Health Regulations [IHR] — sometimes also referred to as a Pandemic treaty (though there are other Pandemic Treaties too). The original IHR was made in 2005, and you can read the proposed amendments yourself. The IHR already matters. Unvaccinated Australians were banned from leaving Australia because of “this WHO treaty” for nearly two years, it was listed on the Health Ministry website, though apparently almost no other country did the same. Go Figure? Perhaps Australia and Canada were the only ones stupid enough to write it into laws at home?

Opposition Forces Back-Room Talks Seeking Revisions to Biden’s 13 WHO Amendments

Joshua Phillips, The Epoch Times

Under the proposed amendments, the director-general could declare a public health emergency in any country regardless of whether local officials agree with the declaration.

Tedros also would be authorized to rely on evidence from sources other than those approved by the affected country as the basis of such a declaration.

But the Biden proposals have sparked a growing furor in the United States among critics who contend the amendments would amount to ceding of some portion of American sovereignty to WHO in the event of another pandemic like the one that has killed more one million Americans and in excess of six million people worldwide.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), the first member of Congress to comment critically on the amendments, told The Epoch Times on May 26 that, “Of course the amendments should be withdrawn, but the bigger issue is how we got to this point in the first place. Why is this administration apparently willing to cede any authority to an international body, particularly the WHO?”

This is not just about pandemics — any “health emergency” will do:

The WHO document was spectacularly vague in all the right places. We don’t even need a moment of monkeypox — this is a “health emergency” treaty and health can be whatever you want.  The WHO defines health as anything less than 100% happy, bouncing, bubbly people:

      • Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
We all know that Climate Change is an “emergency”, trans-rights is an “emergency”, as are the lack of safe spaces for children oppressed by their parents. It’s only a hop, step and a jump to demand a clean atmosphere is a human right as is having a self-driving electric car with full tracking,  carbon credits, and the remote cut-off “safety” circuit too. For your own health!

Peter Breggin has been raising the alarm on this for months

He spells out the pervasive nature of it all:

WHO World Health Organisation

The amendments will completely remove all current restrictions on the activities of the WHO Director General and will empower him to declare a suspicion of a “potential” global health emergency in any nation without their cooperation or agreement. Within 48 hours, the Director General will be empowered on the mere suspicion of an ill-defined emergency, and be able to publish his recommendations and regulations to marshal all the agencies of the United Nations and other groups outside the UN to put pressure on dissident nations. Other nations feel empowered by WHO to place suggested restrictions on the targeted nation. The World Bank which is an extreme supporter of empowering WHO, could also put pressure on nations.

The Director General, Tedros, of the WHO will be the sole arbitrator of many health issues and activities, including declaring health emergencies relating to physical health, mental health, environmental health, and social health. This means that if the WHO and Tedros decide that guns are producing an “epidemic” of violence, then gun confiscation can be ordered. Or, if overpopulation is declared to be the cause of food shortages, then WHO could order population control actions, including abortions and euthanasia.

Don’t let anyone tell you it can’t be stopped and it’s not worth trying:

We have heard from Congressional sources that there is a firestorm of concern and attention in Congressional offices about the World Health Organization (WHO) amendments proposed by the U.S. Biden Administration. This concern has been ignited by the phone calls, articles, columns, and media coverage about the WHO power grab. Every citizen who is signing petitions and calling their federal Congressional representatives and Senators is having an enormous impact on U.S. Congress. Our initial report, “Biden Handing Over U.S. Sovereignty to WHO,” has gone viral in Congress and throughout the world.
For reference, here are the 20 nations, plus the European Union, listed by the U.S. as already supporting the amendments before they were even discussed:
Albania, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, India, Jamaica, Japan, Monaco, Montenegro, Norway, Peru, Republic of Korea, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, United States of America, Uruguay, Member States of the European Union (EU) (which means another 27 states).
If only we all had the same kind of democratic protection as Africa. Start contacting your representatives asking them why we needed to rely on African politicians instead of our own ones. Write letters to the editors. Share the news with friends.

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9.8 out of 10 based on 74 ratings

Weekend Unthreaded

8.8 out of 10 based on 13 ratings

Transition Going Swimmingly: Futures Prices next quarter jump $30MWh in a single day. Power Shock coming.

Baseload futures for electricity on the Australian market used to sell for $60 a megawatt hour last year. Now prices are rising by $30 in a single day.  Paul McArdle at WattClarity calls it “staggering”. Prices rose from $260/MWh at the end of Tuesday 24th May to $291.20/MWh at the end of Wednesday 25th May 2022.

Futures Prices, Electricity, Australian, NEM.

…. Click to enlarge

It’s a bloodbath.  It appears that no one wants to provide a guarantee they can sell electricity in Quarter 3 for much less than an astonishing, heartbreaking $290/MWh. Unless this situation resolves, the forward prices will soon flow through to the retail prices. At the moment, the number crunchers don’t seem to think it will be fixed soon.

So far, with several coal turbines out of action, and one turbine recently closing (Liddell) it appears to be a network on the brink, with no spare capacity anymore. The situation on the Australian grid isn’t improving. After record April prices, May will also bring in medals of the wrong kind. Current prices of wholesale electricity on the spot market are averaging a blistering $200 — $300  per megawatt every day for all the mainland states of Australia on the national grid.

Meanwhile, household retail prices are already set to go up around 10% from the start of July

This was determined — not by a free market — but by the AER (Australian Energy Regulator). Because we need a government agency to dictate that sort of thing. It’s not like we could let people pay a network fee and then choose to do deals with, say, the cheapest generator they can find.

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9.3 out of 10 based on 80 ratings

Thursday Open Thread

9 out of 10 based on 9 ratings

It’s the cover-up that gives it away: The Jan 6 rioters the FBI don’t want to catch

A radio journalist was at the Jan 6 riots and thought the FBI would want his detailed footage showing men smashing windows and trying to incite others to join in. The odd actors dress strangely, act differently, have radio’s strapped on, and push people into the Capitol Building at times, and Bobby Powell has 29 minutes of high definition video, on the terrace, up close, but the FBI don’t want to find out who those people are. They are not sitting in jail, like others accused of Jan 6 crimes. Their photos are not even posted on the most-wanted lists.

Journalist Bobby Powell has spent 16 months trying to get anyone to pay attention in officialdom. He posted the video on Twitter of the US Capitol Police and within five minutes his Twitter account was permanently suspended. Google demonetized his Youtube account. Facebook took down his live streams, and now Paypal has shut his donation account.  He spoke to some of biggest names in broadcast news but no one was interested in “a story about alleged government agents attacking the capitol”. Now he has sold his own home to keep going.

The one person who is interested is Brad Geyer, the lawyer defending many of the people accused of Jan 6 crimes. He has already filed a motion on May 6th to identify and get as many as 80 suspicious actors called up as material witnesses. Bobby Powell’s video adds to that list.

What’s worse, that the FBI appear to have set up an entrapment operation to distract the world from hearing evidence about election corruption, or that the FBI, the CIA, all the Media, Twitter, Paypal, Youtube and the US Capitol Police are so keen to cover it up?

 

 

EXCLUSIVE: Videos Show Unindicted ‘Suspicious Actors’ Attacking Capitol on Jan. 6

Joseph Hanneman, Epoch Times

Bobby Powell thought someone would be interested in his video evidence showing two “suspicious actors” taking part in events on the east side of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

He was in for the surprise of his life.

He wants to see those men charged with the destruction of government property and assault.

Almost no one, it seems, wants to listen.

Powell has learned that his video isn’t welcome in many places; some people view it as a threat. In Michigan, he said a politician friend suggested he take a six-figure bribe to keep quiet. When he flatly refused, he says his life was threatened.

He also thought photos of the men would eventually appear among the 1,558 individuals on the FBI’s Jan. 6 most-wanted page. That never happened, nor have they been arrested or charged.

“These are two men that are pulling windows out of the Capitol and pushing people inside the doors,” Powell told The Epoch Times. “Okay, so why isn’t the FBI interested? That is the key question.”

“I’ve been giving speeches in New York, North Carolina, Florida, for the January 6 defendants,” Powell said. “And you know, I flat out come out and say it:

“The FBI led the insurrection of the Capitol.

“I have proof, and, you know, the FBI didn’t want to hear anything about it.”

Read it all

After one man smashed the window, the Capitol Police came and arrested him, but for some reason, with thousands of energized protesters present, on a momentous day, they didn’t leave a single man there to guard the open window.

Protestors are heard calling out “it’s a trap”. It was that obvious…

 

9.7 out of 10 based on 91 ratings

Energy Crisis picks up speed Downunder: Now a major Gas retailer goes under

Last week small electricity retailers were bleeding so badly they doubled their prices and asked their customers to leave.

This week it’s a big gas retailer, as Australia belatedly faces the same pain that hit and wiped out UK energy retailers:

Gas retailer Weston Energy’s collapse stirs call for Labor intervention

Perry Williams, The Australian

Weston Energy, which provides gas to more than 400 companies and government agencies, ceased trading with immediate effect on Monday, creating uncertainty for major manufacturers with 7 per cent of the east coast’s commercial and industrial market forced to find a new supplier.

The company said it could no longer finance cash flow requirements of its trading portfolio “on a timely basis” with prices rising over 180 per cent since April, and almost three times higher than at the start of the year.

These are blistering rises in costs:

With spot gas prices up to four times higher than normal levels and wholesale electricity prices in NSW on track to finish the June quarter twice as high as the previous record, Mr Willox called on the Albanese government to respond.

Extinction Rebellion protester

It’s a cult.

Presumably at this point geniuses will suggest we need even more solar power — thus creating an even greater demand for expensive gas until we get a battery the size of Tasmania, or the sun goes Supernova and runs 24 hours a day.

Better yet — the inner city Teal voters could offer to run off their solar panels and donate their gas to the poor?

Will any of the Labor Party, Professors and Energy Experts even think of boosting gas production and exploration, and vaporizing the red tape? Probably not. But will they miss the chance to redevelop the cheap brown coal of La Trobe Valley and take the pressure off gas use and energy prices. We know they will…

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9.4 out of 10 based on 96 ratings

Trump’s Base Isn’t Shrinking says Conrad Black

Conrad Black does a summary of the situation in the US that other media outlets forgot to mention:

The Epoch Times

US FlagWhatever anyone thinks of Trump, he’s the first president since Franklin D. Roosevelt for whom people in any part of the country will stand outside in falling snow for hours to see and hear him. No one who saw the immense ovation given Trump at the Kentucky Derby of Churchill Downs earlier in May by 150,000 people across all socio-economic groups could doubt the force of his political popularity. All but three of the approximately 70 candidates he endorsed have been elected.

Even the Great Replacement may have run out of voting power

For some reason Democrats assumed that immigrants would always vote for infinite continuing immigration after they arrive (thus creating exactly the conditions they had escaped from).

The policy area where they seem most satisfied with the administration is immigration, where all will concede, except the surrealistically implausible Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, that the administration is getting on admirably in allowing anyone who wishes to enter the country to do so. The presumed underlying ambitions for this policy of national suicide are to admit enough permanently grateful Democratic voters to produce an almost one-party system, and to reduce whites to a minority of Americans, to facilitate the seizure and redistribution of their wealth to others. This goal is only specifically espoused by the peppiest of the new members of the 2020 Democratic coalition, but it’s hard to find any other plausible motive to impute to the supporters of the current administration policy of a completely open southern border. The latest polls indicating that only 26 percent of Hispanic Americans now approve of the Biden administration indicates this catastrophic policy is backfiring.

Don’t miss those signs of success —

We regularly see the collapse in defeat of key supporting individuals and organizations in the anti-Trump movement: the unmasking of Black Lives Matter as an allegedly massive tax cheat operation that effortlessly swindled witless American big businessmen out of hundreds of millions of shareholders’ dollars, the collapse in the ratings of CNN and MSNBC, the resigning of CNN’s Jeff Zucker, the folding of Chris Wallace’s CNN streaming service after it attracted only a few thousand viewers in all of America and after only three weeks, the unmasking of Twitter and specifically of the president’s Twitter account as largely frauds, and the apparent loss of control of Twitter to ex-Democrat Elon Musk. Hillary Clinton has been finally revealed as approving the mighty Trump–Russia smear job and the suborning and politicization of senior ranks of the FBI and CIA: the dirtiest political trick in American history.

h/t Rafe Champion

9.7 out of 10 based on 63 ratings

Tuesday Open Thread

8.6 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

A speech so good he was sacked: HSBC head says investors don’t need to worry about “Climate Risk”

Hopefully Elon Musk will give him a job.

Stuart Kirk, head of “responsible investing” for HSBC let rip at the doommongers of finance with a speech called “Why investors need not worry about climate risk”. He was speaking at A Moral Money Europe Summit, held by the Financial Times and is clearly fed up with listening to hyperbole and being told to analyze and worry about trivial long term future events. “Last night Target fell 25% — twentyfive!” … but I’m being told to worry about something coming 20 – 30 years down the track.”  Other speakers were unceremoniously dispatched. He complained climate risk has become so hyperbolic no one knows how to outdo it.  “Sharon [a speaker from Deloittes] said “we’re not going to survive!” But no one even looked up and ran from the room.”

Dangerously (for him) he also explained how the central banker models bury massive GDP and interest rate shocks in their economic forecasts of climate risk, otherwise they can’t generate bad news and headlines. Apparently, it’s all in the fine print that nobody mentions. They’re sounding more and more like climate models all the time.

That was last week. This week he’s been suspended.

h/t Greg M and Rafe Champion, Another Ian.

Climate Risk and Wall St Meet Cancel Culture

Steven Hayward, Powerline

Stuart Kirk, head of “responsible investing” for HSBC, gave a presentation at a Financial Times “Live Moral Money Summit Europe” a few days ago in which he shredded the climatista claim about financial climate risk.

Needless to say, you can’t say this! And so the predictable has happened:

HSBC has suspended a senior banker after he referred to climate crisis warnings as “unsubstantiated” and “shrill” during a conference speech that has since been denounced by the lender’s chief executive.

Kirk’s presentation controversially included slides that said “Unsubstantiated, shrill, partisan, self-serving, apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS wrong”, while referring to comments made by officials at the UN and Bank of England, who have tried to raise the alarm over global heating.

“Human beings have been fantastic at adapting to change, adapting to climate emergencies, and we will continue to do so,” Kirk told attenders at the Financial Times’ Moral Money conference on Thursday. “Who cares if Miami is six metres underwater in 100 years? Amsterdam has been six metres underwater for ages and that’s a really nice place.”

Stuart Kirk, who has been HSBC’s head of responsible investing since last July, will remain suspended until the bank completes an internal investigation into the matter.

He will remain suspended until other economists get the message about what they are not allowed to say.

Well worth watching: This is a man who believes the science is right but nothing about the economics or market response makes sense. Luckily he doesn’t talk about science, just the things he knows. Amazing how much damage one man can do in a mere 16 minutes.

The odd quandry — the markets are completely ignoring climate risk

Strange things happen: the more people say the world is going to end, the higher risk asset prices go. Kirk counted the time the news media mentioned the “climate catastrophe” and noticed that the “worse” it was, the higher the MSCI index rose. (The MSCI is the market cap weighted stock market index of 1,546 companies around the world.)

“The Sharons and Mark Carneys need to explain why the prices keep rising.”

 

MSCI Graph, climate warnings mean high MSCI Values.

The more the news was “catastrophic” the more investors invested in the MSCI.

 

Jo Nova, however,  thinks it’s no coincidence. Inflating the money supply pumps our stocks at the same time as our fantasy ideologies.

Fiat currency bubbles inflate assets as well as dumb ideas. We couldn’t afford to be this stupid in times of austerity.

The fine print of the Central Banker Models of Doom

Stuart Kirk also unpacked the central bankers climate risk stress test models and found surprises in the fine print which I don’t recall hearing about before. (He wishes they would pay less attention to climate risk, and more attention to inflation and growth instead.)

Climate change itself isn’t going to be a problem, he says, the only potential risk is from a major policy shock. So the models forecast a whopping change like a $200 carbon tax, out of the blue, …put that in the model, “Wham” — but even that wasn’t enough. …

He begs people to take the Bank of England and Dutch forecasts and “go right to the back and get into the fine print”. They will put in a whopping great policy shock in to their models, but then you look at the sensitivities of what they have done.  To make things look really bad the first thing they do, it seems, is trash GDP growth with huge unrealistic negatives ….minus one, minus three, minus two, changes so big they have never happened in our lifetimes… But that’s not the end of it. To make things look worse in these economic forecasts they have to put in a huge interest rate shock as well. And they never talk about it. It’s very easy to make a bank look sick, he says, if you destroy their fixed income base.

“Even with a carbon tax, even hitting growth, they couldn’t make climate risk move the needle so they had to get their clever little wonks in the back room, and put a gigantic interest rate shock through their models, in order to make headlines. That is not reported very much either. “

Despite this, humans, he says, are spectacularly good at managing change, which is true. That (below) is the long run change of the S&P 500. It’s the last hundred years of world wars, depressions, global financial crisis’, and pandemics — but nothing really changes the trends of the S&P 500 he argues, and climate change won’t either.

Climate Risk, graph, long term S&P graph.

A century of S&P growth continues…

He seems quite optimistic about climate change, though after being suspended, he may not be so optimistic about our financial management, freedom of speech or that problems with central bankers will be fixed in our lifetimes.

We wish him the best of luck. Welcome to the dark side Stuart Kirk.

9.8 out of 10 based on 80 ratings

The Secret Climate Election we didn’t know we had

The only way Climate elections are won is by keeping it a secret or telling lies. Today we wake up to find out it was a climate election. Who knew?

Australian Flag, Gif file.

There was not one word, barely, about climate change in the public square in Australia the last six weeks, yet today suddenly it was “a Green-slide” and a climate election post hoc. But the whole reason the Greeny-Teals did well was because no one talked about climate change.

No one asked how expensive it might be to alter the planet’s weather a hundred years from now? Should we fund hospitals now, or slow cyclones in 2100, ya’reckon?

Whenever it was a climate election in the last 12 years, the skeptical side won.

And the more skeptical they were, the bigger the win was. Tony Abbott won a landslide 90 seats by crushing the Climate Gods.  It was a Climate Election and the voters said “No”. To win in 2010 Julia Gillard had to lie “there will be no Carbon Tax”, and do 17 days of wheeling and dealing to barely scrape through.  In 2016 Turnbull was barely a skeptic and barely won — losing 14 seats in the process. In 2019 Morrison pulled off the Miracle Win by asking Bill Shorten hard questions about the costs of climate action, which Bill called dumb and a “charlatan’s argument”. That election was called a Climate Election they bragged,  and believers were shocked to lose. But this time, there was no policy debate. There was no “let them eat cake” moment.  No out-of-touch Bob Brown tour of the coal zones of Queensland. The climate bomb ticked quietly and no one said “boo”. No one, at least that the media couldn’t ignore. Vale! Craig Kelly.

The only climate battles were strategic quiet shots in the inner city Teal Seats between the Gucci wives and the Liberals who said “me too”. None of this played out in public and won the Liberals a single vote in battler-land.

Thus the Liberals ran chicken down the left lane on the freeway — in the same direction as the climate bully bandwagon — because they thought that the media wouldn’t hit them as hard, and it was true — but that didn’t help at all. It’s in the hate-filled fantasy rants of ideology when the winning “Deplorable” moments occur. The smug, lefty zeal looks ugly to the public, but it was never exposed. The punters didn’t get reminded of the elitist disdain for their electricity bills. Extremists didn’t glue themselves to footpaths or dance naked in the street shrieking. This was not an ugly, vitriolic election; it was a nothing campaign. But that just left a pinless vacuum the green fantasy balloon grew to fill.

The whole climate facade is built on feel-good branding and fashion, and the Libs just joined the advertising — as Matt Canavan says – we effectively legitimized the green agenda when we signed up for Net Zero.

Matt Canavan is a gem.

The Nationals though, in the partyroom that signed up to NetZero didn’t deserve to keep their seats. And if the media interviewed the minor parties in the country, they probably wouldn’t have.

We’re in an Information War. Shore up your lines of communication. Find a way!

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9.6 out of 10 based on 87 ratings