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Why does “seven years” suddenly matter?
“The past 7 years have been the hottest on record
“by a clear margin,” scientists say”
Since when do we do climate analysis on seven year periods? — Since climate scientists get rewarded for scaring taxpayers and “seven” is this years lucky number.
2021 wasn’t THE hottest year so they have to come up with something
In climate “science” there are always a thousand combinations and permutations of climate records to pick from, so it’s a snap to find one that sings. If it wasn’t the hottest year in 2021, it might have been the hottest global summer, warmest winter, driest spring, or stormiest “on record”. And if temperatures stop rising, the hottest year record stretches elastically into the hottest 2-years, 3-years and 5 years-on-record.
Scientifically, the climate interval that matters most is whatever it has to be to stretch out and sing “Bingo” — “The Met Bureau needs more money.”
Naturally all Climate Bingo games are boosted by inexplicable adjustments, badly placed thermometers, shrinking thermometer screens, and the process of constantly rewriting history. If the incinerators near thermometers don’t do it, the homogenization will. They might be Australian tricks, but most Met Bureaus are the same.
Remember the shocking heat of 1998 — the UAH satellites still do, but all the other temperature sets have erased it.
 …. It also helps that most of history has been wiped out
The collective amnesia at Met Bureaus doesn’t just include days like the hottest day ever recorded in Australia in modern equipment (which was 51.7C in Bourke in 1909). They also erase the longest hottest summer at Marble Bar too. The Met Bureaus also forget the Medieval warm period, the Romans, Minoans, and the whole damn Holocene. They forget the Eemian, Aveley, Holstein and Hoxnian interglacials and most of the last half billion years of records, almost all of which were hotter than the hottest parts of the Holocene, which was hotter than 2021.
The last 500 years has been the coldest of the last 5,000
Two can play Climate Bingo. In the history of human civilization we’ve never lived through six centuries that were colder than the last six. Maybe that’s more important than a 7 year hot record in the “blip” at the end?
 It’s been cooling for 6,000 years. The blip of modern warming is higher than the graph shows (which ends in 1855). Things might be the same temperature now as a thousand year ago. But all the records we set today are nothing in the big scheme…
UPDATE: See how serious the global warming has been in Greenland since that ice core ended in 1855, the total rise since then is 2C, which has almost entirely occurred by 1880. The effect of CO2 since 1880 has been almost nothing in Greenland.
9.7 out of 10 based on 86 ratings
h.t Andy May
So much for the End of Coal
It’s a bumper year in 2021, a bigger year in 2022, and possibly more glorious records for coal in 2023 and 2024. Humans burnt more coal last year than at any other time in history.
Coal-fired power generation is set to reach an all-time high in 2021
The declines in global coal-fired power generation in 2019 and 2020 led to expectations that it might have peaked in 2018. But 2021 dashed those hopes. With electricity demand outpacing low-carbon supply, and with steeply rising natural gas prices, global coal power generation is on course to increase by 9% in 2021 to 10 350 terawatt-hours (TWh) – a new all-time high.
As the IEA concludes through gritted teeth: Global coal consumption is not on the Net Zero trajectory and is unlikely to be before 2024. Perhaps someone should tell all the Glasgow Minions?
Other editors might have labelled this, “Coal Still Vital” or “Coal’s Day is Here”! Instead the IEA saw a sedate plateauing that kept plateuing in the headlines:
Fully two-thirds of global coal is used by just two countries. The other 193 nations split the last third. Many of these other nations are the same ones fighting hard to make tiny reductions in their coal use in the quest for fashionable weather-purity.
Indeed, one third of all the coal on Earth is used to make electricity in China
Power generation in China alone is responsible for almost one-third
of global coal consumption. No other sector in any other country –
or any other fuel – has a comparable influence on global trends.
Communist planning still doesn’t work
In the third quarter of 2021, an imbalance between coal supply and demand became apparent when coal producers were unable to keep up with surging demand (see also the Supply chapter). The shortage’s effects were exacerbated by China’s rigid electricity tariff system. Because Chinese electricity prices are regulated, they do not follow coal prices. Therefore, as coal prices rose and electricity prices remained rigid (they could oscillate only 10% from the benchmark price, although this was reformed in October to allow a higher range), coal-fired power producers had no incentive to secure sufficient coal.
And then there was pain in China. Imagine power cuts and production losses of 70 – 80%? And these were not pandemic losses, just bad planning:
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The oceans were supposed to be swallowing up the islands
Climate change has unleashed rampant growth in mangrove forests. The trees are capturing coral detritus in large sand drifts, and locking it into whole new ecosystems that expand 5 to 6 meters a year. It’s just remarkable — some islands have grown by several kilometers since 1928.
The Howick Group of islands is north of Cairns Australia. Three scientific expeditions mapped out them out in 1928 and in 1974, and again in 2021, and lo, they have grown, especially in the last four decades. That makes them like most of the 709 islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans that were studied a few years ago. Satellites showed that 89% of those islands had grown.
It turns out warmer more carbon rich world makes mangroves happy. Who could have seen that coming, apart from every biologist on Earth?
From the commentary in the video below:
“We’ve seen some really dramatic changes. Some of the things that we’ve seen are advancing fronts of forests. Forests that were mapped to small patches on the windward part of the reef flat are now occupying a much larger section of the reef patch. We’ve seen forests expanding by as much as 5 or 6m a year. That equates to several kilometers of extension.”
 Mangroves are expanding on the Howick Group islands in the Great Barrier Reef The Sydney Morning Herald even managed to let their readers know. We can appreciate their struggle with the headline:
by Laim Phelan
Apparently, the news is not that tropical islands are loving climate change and growing which the models didn’t predict, what matters is that mangroves are “magical” carbon sinks, because the world revolves around your carbon footprint. “Blue Carbon” means carbon dioxide trapped by a mangrove that ends up being sequestered underwater.
“What’s particularly interesting for a lot of the islands in the Howick group that we are mapping and investigating is that they are growing,” Associate Professor Hamylton says.
“Most of the islands we have looked at are predominantly made up of broken up corals, which waves then sweep and deposit on the island. This coral sediment is responsible for building up the islands. Add in mangrove forests and you can see that these islands are actually growing.”
Associate Professor Hamylton says the group was able to compare aerial images taken by a drone with hand-drawn maps created in 1928 and photographs from 1974.
But golly… perfectly good reef sand and ocean is being captured by those invasive mangroves and no one seems to care? Quick, someone cover the islands with solar panels, yeah?
 Mangroves are rapidly taking over the bare reef sand. At this rate, the Arafura sea may disappear in the next two thousand years, forming a mangrove land bridge between Papua New Guinea and Australia.
Friends of the Arafura Sea immediately started a fundraising campaign and lobbying for a seat at the UN. Meanwhile UNESCO warned that the new threat to the Great Barrier Reef Heritage listing was uncontrolled forest growth and they needed half a billion dollars to assess it. Plus it’s not clear whether the mangroves got the correct zoning permit in 1928 either. /sarc
The video:
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9.7 out of 10 based on 71 ratings
Is your Minister of Health interested in saving lives, stopping infections or reducing the burden on hospitals? Did they ban ivermectin or study it?
A study in a small Brazillian town suggests that half of all hospitalization of Covid cases and 70% of the deaths could be avoided at a cost of 10 cents a week.
How super low dose ivermectin still reduced infections by half
A whole town in Brazil of 220,000 people was invited to take part in an ivermectin study. In Itajaí 159,000 people said “Yes” to taking part in a study of a bizarrely low dose infrequent form of ivermectin to see if it prevented people catching Covid. They were asked to take the 0.2mg/kg/day dose two days in a row but only once every two weeks. Since the half-life of ivermectin in humans is only 12–36 hours, those taking it in the study were effectively left unprotected at least half the time. Our livers convert ivermectin into chemical bits and pieces that have half-lives of three days, so those downstream metabolites, if they matter, might kick around a bit longer. More bizarrely, participants were asked not to take ivermectin if they got ill. This study appears to be purely about prevention. Despite all this, it still worked.
Compared to all the other towns in the Santa Catarina State of Brazil, Itajaí has the lowest mortality rate, far below even the second lowest.
The iMask prevention plan by the Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance suggests using the 0.2mg/dose twice a week long term. Those ICU doctors recommend you double the dose if you think you’ve been exposed for real.
44% lower infection rate
So 113,000 people took ivermectin this way, 45,000 didn’t. The infection rate in the ivermectin users was 3.7% which was quite a lot lower than the non-users, of which 6.6% got infected. Imagine if they’d taken ivermectin two times a week instead? The rates of infection in the ivermectin group might have been much lower.
70% lower death rate
The regular use of ivermectin (albeit, very low and infrequent) still saved a lot of lives. The death rate in the ivermectin group was 0.8% compared to 2.6% of the non-users. They controlled for age, sex and co-morbidities.
56% reduction in hospitalization rate
It wasn’t a randomized study, but most of the biases should underestimate the benefits. Not only was the dose lower than recommended, but the people who signed up to try ivermectin were slightly older and higher risk. People also weren’t supervised and so if they forgot to take their dose, no one was there to remind them. The reductions in everything could only get better with a more serious approach.
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9.7 out of 10 based on 104 ratings
From Canadian Friends:
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And since it’s the weekend. For fun. Imagine memorizing his lines?
Who is that man?
ANSWER: Paul Whitehouse, thanks to Great Aunt Janet.
PS: If the movies don’t show above, try another browser. Sigh. Not Firefox.
9.7 out of 10 based on 54 ratings
Even the worst imaginary scenarios for global warming are nothing compared to a year without electricity. Bunky Mortimer III thinks US priorities are screwed.
The US will spend some $555b to prevent a theoretical warming of a degree or two. A warming which may not occur for a century, if at all, and about which the largest competitors to the USA are doing nothing.
In contrast, a solar Carrington event, one nuclear blast, or a cyber attack taking out just nine interconnector sites could collapse the entire US grid for 18 months.
Which environmental threat matters? The West is in apoplexy over the environmental degradation affecting polar bears, but the environment we need the most right now is the one with fresh water, edible food and a room temperature above freezing.
Taki’s Magazine
A prolonged collapse of this nation’s electrical grid—through starvation, disease, and societal collapse—could result in the death of up to 90% of the U.S. population. This figure has not been disputed, yet this prospect has received virtually no attention from policy makers or the media. The environmental issue holding center stage, of course, is global warming.
The weak point are the Extra High Voltage transformers which may take one to two years to replace. Not many EHV Transformers were made in the US, and concerns were raised a decade ago, even thirty years ago. Some estimate the US manufacturing is so low they have to import 85% of them. By 2016, not much had changed, despite the urgency, and dire threat. If a crunch is widespread, these transformers will be impossible to get without long delays.
A study published in 2010 for the Congressional EMP Commission calculated that a nuclear detonation 170 kilometers over the United States would collapse the entire U.S. power grid.
A 2017 report by the Department of Defense states that “the United States today lives in a virtual glass house.” In 2018 the Department of Homeland Security issued an alert that Russia could shut down American power plants at will. The grid is also vulnerable to small-scale coordinated military operations. An internal Federal Energy Regulatory Commission memo states that “destroy nine interconnector substations and a transformer manufacturer and the entire United States grid would be down for 18 months, possibly longer.”
With no power, there’s no frozen food, no water pumps, no fuel pumps, no banking, no internet, no phones, and soon no deliveries, no fertilizer, and no hospitals.
The CCP must like the Pentagon:
Climate change is defined by the Pentagon as a threat equal to that posed by China. Meanwhile, China has developed a hypersonic missile, traveling at five times the speed of sound, that can produce an EMP without the need of a nuclear warhead.
Hopefully adversaries of the USA haven’t been reading old reports by the US Dept of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, or Emergency Response. They might get ideas.
Grids, who needs em? Even polar bears. A prolonged grid collapse would have people hunting seals too — armed, loaded and not happy about competition.
10 out of 10 based on 94 ratings
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Amazing what countries too poor to commit to Net Zero get up to
 China’s EAST Tokamak Reactor in 2015 China is the fastest growing nuclear power in the world, poised to have the largest fission fleet by 2030. But it has just scored a bit of a leap forward in nuclear fusion:
Robert Lea, Newsweek
The team at China’s “artificial sun” fusion facility—the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST)—have said that on December 30, 2021, they were able to generate 120 million degrees Fahrenheit plasma (around 70 million degrees Celsius) and hold it for 1,056 seconds.
Tokamaks, like the donut-shaped EAST reactor, are often referred to as “artificial suns” as they are devices that replicate the fusion processes that occur within stars.
In the Sun, two hydrogen atoms are bashed together to make one helium atom, plus lots of energy. In stars the temperature only needs to be 60 million F (or 33 million degrees C) for that to be self sustaining, because the pressure is so much higher at the centre of the Sun. Here on Earth, we need to heat up the innards of the Fusion reactors to 270 million F or 133 million degrees C to make up for the lack of pressure. At that point, theoretically, the process will be self sustaining.
Allegedly the deuterium in one liter of seawater will produce power like 300 liters of oil.
So the race is on, but where is The West? Korea set a record in 2016 of 90 million F for 70 seconds. ITER, in France, is a consortium project of seven nations that includes China. It will be the “biggest” but won’t start plasma tricks ’til 2025.
Fusion is the Holy Grail of sustainable cheap energy, which will be handy to heat the world when the next ice age comes.
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by Joanne Nova
Maybe it’s an accident that every answer is “Vaccines”? Or maybe not.
 … People are asking why early safe cheap treatments could have been suppressed, after all, people are dying. A better question is to ask how could any cheap alternative treatment ever be selected? The money-pot on offer is so stupendously, fantastically big, it can buy small nations. And the cheap drugs don’t just compete with it, they obliterate it.
In the current system, legally, the FDA can’t give EUA (Emergency Use Authorization) for any vaccine if there is a safe useful alternative. The EUA approval is simply extinguished by any treatment that works. Therefore billions of dollars in profits depends on making sure there are no cheap safe alternatives.
It’s not a question of whether Big Pharma are pulling levers to crush cheap drugs. With billions at stake, Pfizer and other companies would be crazy, nutso, bonkers, and doing their shareholders a disservice if they did not lobby, cajole, scare, smear and call in all their favours to make sure there would never be a cheap safe alternative.
The EUA is all or nothing
This year, the Covid vaccine has brought in revenue of $24.3 billion. And Pfizer said it expects a total of $36 billion from the vaccine for all of 2021 — nearly $12 billion more in revenue the final quarter of the year. And it said based on contracts it now has signed it expects revenue $29 billion from the Covid vaccine in 2022. And that’s not necessarily all it will bring in.
It’s easy to screw up a study of unloved drugs
There are many ways to innocently mess up a study by starting treatment too late, using too little, too much, picking the wrong participants, and keeping the study small so it never reaches “significance”. And if a study gets published it can always be retracted. Editors like their careers too.
The big two vaccines generate $93 million dollars a day in profits
It’s not just Pfizer with fingers in the medical swamp of course. All Big-Pharma sellers are happier if the people are vitamin deficient, and if all competing unpatentable alternatives “just don’t have enough evidence”:
Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna making $1,000 profit every second while world’s poorest countries remain largely unvaccinated
New figures from the Peoples Vaccine Alliance reveal that the companies behind two of the most successful COVID-19 vaccines —Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna— are making combined profits of $65,000 every minute.
Despite receiving public funding of over $8 billion, the three corporations have refused calls to urgently transfer vaccine technology and know-how with capable producers in low- and middle-income countries via the World Health Organisation (WHO)…
The left-leaning activists miss the point:
Maaza Seyoum of the African Alliance and People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa said: “It is obscene that just a few companies are making millions of dollars in profit every single hour, while just two percent of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus.”
This is what’s obscene
What’s obscene is not that barely tested, unnecessary, risky drugs were not foisted on Africans, it’s that millions of people have died in the West that could have been saved if our government run agencies were serving The People instead of Big-Pharma. Billions of dollars has been burnt in long lockdowns that ten dollars worth of Ivermectin, Vitamin D3, A, C, B6 and antihistamines, nasal sprays, and mouthwashes could have avoided.
What’s obscene is that our spineless elected Representatives fail to represent The People (apart from the few brave souls like Rand Paul, Craig Kelly and Malcolm Roberts).
What’s obscene is that the mass media journalists jumped to “Vax The Nation” and not report the obvious conflicts of interests, the alternative treatments, or give a voice to the few brave doctors who have been sacked.
What’s obscene is that our Minister of Health, our Prime Minister, and Presidents everywhere unquestioningly obeyed the captured committees and incompetent Chief Health Officers who turned vaccines into a religion and signed secret contracts with multinational corporate giants that are well known to sacrifice lives for profits.
The greatest scandal of our lifetimes is here, and it’s the deep dark Medical Swamp, hidden in plain view and killing people we love. It bans wonder drugs, pours scorn on vitamins, denies doctors the training and choice to use the best treatments they know of, and generates massive profits for companies that used government funds yet avoid any legal liability and transparency.
They have suppressed many safe, useful treatments:
People deficient in Vitamin D3 are 14 times more likely to get severe Covid. Why aren’t the Health Departments telling us all to get our D3 measured and why don’t they hand out free samples at every corner chemist? Vit D3 reduced hospital deaths in Turkey by 60%. Most of the sickest Covid patients in Spain were deficient in Vit A. And 42% were deficient in B6, which helps reduce cytokine storms. Think that’s an “accident”?
Melatonin reduces deaths by maybe 90%, good old antihistamines saved nursing home patients, Iota-carageenan nasal sprays reduced infections by 80%, Mouthwashes reduce covid deaths by 80%. Asthma drug Budesonide reduces Covid hospitalization rate by 90%. Even cough syrup with Bromhexine might help.
Indonesia cut Covid by 98% with Ivermectin while Australia grew cases 500% with Lock-n-Vax, Uttar Pradesh, India, wiped out Covid with ivermectin. In Peru, Ivermectin cut covid deaths by 75% in 6 weeks. The virus mysteriously disappeared in Japan. Can’t we copy them? Meanwhile countries that use hydroxychloroquine appear to have 80% lower Covid death rates. Maybe that matters?
If the Health Dept cared about health, if hospitalization rates were important at all, they’d be acting differently.
The legal fine print is there for all to see all along:
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9.6 out of 10 based on 122 ratings
Something is going very wrong. Insurers are paying out on more long and short disability claims, which we might expect in a pandemic, but in the 18 – 64 age group in Indiana deaths are up by wildly exotic sigma deviations above the norm.
Margaret Menge
(The Center Square) – The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”
Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said.
“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”
The President of the Indiana Hospital Association confirmed that hospitals across the state were full of patients with “many different conditions” and that what Davison was reporting fitted with what he was seeing too. About 37% of the ICU beds were filled with Covid patients, but 54% were other conditions.
Evidence suggests it’s not untested Covid deaths
There will always be some who die of Covid who didn’t get tested. And in 2020 there were rises in unexplained deaths in different regions of the US at different times. But those peaks in unexplained deaths were always were during the same weeks as the peaks of the known Covid deaths or very close to them. That’s not what is happening here.
Davison is talking about deaths in the third and fourth quarter of 2021. He compares the current wave to the peak in winter the year before. But official cases of Covid in Indiana were slightly higher in 2020 than most of 2021.
 …. Official deaths were also lower in 2021, so unexplained deaths due to Covid should also be lower now than the year before, not higher.
 … So imagine for some mysterious reason, that Indiana hospitals got very slack, and were testing less in 2021. If that were the case, and they were missing Covid infections we’d expect test positivity would be higher — but it wasn’t (at least until until Omicron blew it away in the last week).
 … Which leaves one new medical intervention that peaked in 2021.
 Vaccinations in Indiana were mostly rolled out from Feb to December. It would be interesting to know which weeks Covid vaccines were rolled out for particular age groups and if the extra deaths in each age group were linked, like they so obviously were in the UK as shown by Neil and Fenton: Many deaths in vaccinated people were recorded as “unvaccinated” in the UK.
If the Indiana Health Department was really interested in the health of people in Indiana it would already have done that study.
There is going to be hell to pay when people find out.
h/t Analitik, William Astley, Don B, Clarence.t, OldOzzie, ColA, TedM.
Commenter Analitik estimates it’s a Sigma 12 type event.
REFERENCE
Test positivity, Covid, in Indiana: https://www.coronavirus.in.gov/indiana-covid-19-dashboard-and-map/
Neil, and Fenton et al (2021) Latest statistics on England mortality data suggest systematic mis-categorisation of vaccine status and uncertain effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccination
9.6 out of 10 based on 57 ratings
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9.8 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
Plastics are a free dinner for life on Earth so it was just a matter of time before microbes evolved to eat it.
A PET bottle normally takes 16 – 48 years to break down, but if it were lunch for microflora it would take weeks instead. Hydrocarbons are ultimately just different forms of C-H-O waiting to be liberated as carbon dioxide and water. The only question was “how long” it would take bacteria and fungi to break those unusual bonds.
Sooner or later all plastic will be biodegradable.
 Polyethylene-terephthalate (PET) The first bacteria known to chew through PET bottles was discovered at a Japanese rubbish dump in 2016. But we had no idea then just how advanced the microbial world of plastic processing was.
Instead of hunting for single bacteria Zrimec et al mined through collected metagenomes of soil and ocean and found not just 5 or 10 new enzymes but 30,000. It appears that they could metabolize at least ten different types of plastic.
And in places where there was more plastic pollution, there were more enzymes. All over the world a whole new ecosystem is rising out of the puddles and bubbles and grains of sand.
Enzymes that degrade plastics are found all over the world
 FIG 2 Plastic-degrading enzymes across the global microbiome. Depicted are 11,906 enzyme hits in the ocean and 18,119 in the soil data sets, obtained by constructing HMMs of known plastic-degrading enzymes and querying them across metagenomic sequencing data sets. The potential to degrade up to 10 and 9 different plastic types was observed in the respective ocean and soil fractions (Fig. S3A). Mother Nature has a big toolshed of genes to play with:
With a library like this, is it any wonder life on Earth could find and amplify the right tools to process plastics?
For example, global ocean sampling revealed over 40 million mostly novel nonredundant genes from 35,000 species (35), whereas over 99% of the ∼160 million genes identified in global topsoil cannot be found in any previous microbial gene catalogue (34)
So there are 200 million genes to work with.
Bugs across globe are evolving to eat plastic, study finds
Damian Carrington, The Guardian, 15 Dec 2021
The explosion of plastic production in the past 70 years, from 2m tonnes to 380m tonnes a year, had given microbes time to evolve to deal with plastic, the researchers said. The study, published in the journal Microbial Ecology, started by compiling a dataset of 95 microbial enzymes already known to degrade plastic, often found in bacteria in rubbish dumps and similar places rife with plastic.
About 12,000 of the new enzymes were found in ocean samples, taken at 67 locations and at three different depths. The results showed consistently higher levels of degrading enzymes at deeper levels, matching the higher levels of plastic pollution known to exist at lower depths.
The soil samples were taken from 169 locations in 38 countries and 11 different habitats and contained 18,000 plastic-degrading enzymes. Soils are known to contain more plastics with phthalate additives than the oceans and the researchers found more enzymes that attack these chemicals in the land samples.
Nearly 60% of the new enzymes did not fit into any known enzyme classes, the scientists said, suggesting these molecules degrade plastics in ways that were previously unknown.
The not so apocalyptic plastic crisis
The new 250 page “Consensus” Study (their words) by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, is as out of date and useless as it sounds. While it is scoring headlines, scaring us about accumulating plastics, it largely writes off the idea that microbes will evolve to degrade plastic, saying “measurable biodegradation (complete carbon utilization by microbes) in the environment has not been observed.” Which is one of those true but useless statements.
Some 40 year old theory says it won’t happen:
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9.9 out of 10 based on 68 ratings
 Rarely do we see how meaningless the fear and worry is. One UK polling group asked people about phasing out coal boilers, adding vegan foods on menus and taxing frequent flyers. But the team followed up to find out whether people were willing to make the sacrifices themselves and support suddenly fell off a cliff. Fifty to seventy percent of so-called supporters were suddenly skeptical.
Most polls are only measuring the size of a cheer squad. 83% of Brits say they’re worried about climate change. But they’re so worried, yeah, they couldn’t even bring themselves to say “yes” to poll question. People know we need to fly less to “Save the World”, but they have no intention of riding the e-bike to the tofu factory instead of holidaying in Majorca.
Somehow 45% of people are dreadfully worried about climate change but if it means catching a bus, the Planet can wait, eh?
How worried is this?
The survey also finds that while people are in favour of drastic measures to help the country become net zero by 2050 in theory – when they realise the cost and potential inconvenience it could give them personally support drops off rapidly.
Wow. Watch those numbers fall…
In principle, frequent flier levies receive the highest levels of support at 68 per cent – but this falls to just 32 per cent once the personal implications of such a move have been contemplated. Meanwhile, 62 per cent support phasing out the sale of gas and coal boilers, in principle – falling to just 17 per cent when the personal implications are factored in.
Increased vegetarian and vegan options on menus is supported by 56 per cent – falling to 26 per cent, on the prospect of less meat and dairy choice – while creating low traffic neighbourhoods fell from 53 to 18 per cent, when costs and inconvenience are factored in.
The survey was done by Ipsos MORI and the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST). Though, after searching, I can’t find the questions, the answers, or what kind of “personal implications” were on offer for a survey of 5,665 people. If readers find them, please post the links. I’d love to see those details.
9.8 out of 10 based on 79 ratings
The most dangerous Big-Government Qango of all may well be the Central Banks (not the NIH). Money drives all the incentives across national economies, but one small unelected group decides the price of money, and all corruption flows downstream from there. Ponder how they set the temperature that drives the global currents of goods, resources and opportunity. They feed Big Government, Big Pharma and Big Tech.
Saddle Up: There is no hiding inflation. Despite the global economy grinding to a halt in a pandemic, house prices set surging records and paradoxically the Dow hit all times highs.
It is just supply and demand. As more dollars are printed, a bigger supply of money competes for the same number of goods. And boy, have they been printing money.
It’s a temporary spike they say:
This is the money base of USD, a rough measure of “how many dollars there are”.
 US St Louis Federal Reserve, Money Base graph 1918-2008 | Source For perspective, below is the history of the growth in US Dollars since 1918 up until the GFC. The US left the Gold Standard in stages between 1913 and 1971, and the growth in money supply since then is obvious. But as fast as this appeared to grow in ninety years, it was nothing compared to what would come in the 14 years since.
 US St Louis Federal Reserve, Money Base graph 1918-2008. Source All the market-rattling crashes of history shrank when compared to the GFC and the Pandemic, which change the whole scale of the graph. The Occupy Crowd, and the Tea Party both recognized something was very wrong with the bail-out of 2009. But the Occupy Crowd have no understanding of what drives the inequality they hate and oppose.
The corruption of the dollar feeds all the other corruption
The people that benefit are the ones that borrow the money and spend it first. The people who lose are those holding their money in cash. Did your wage grow sixfold from 2008 to 2021?
Printing money-for-nothing is always the politically easy way to win votes. Voters like to vote themselves the treasury, so what Treasurer wants to promise austerity?
But inflation eats away at the strength of the economy. The incentives during inflation favor high risk speculation and punish the hourly wage earner and the savers. Inflation makes possible and rewards the mergers and hostile takeovers, thus conglomerating power and reducing competition. It feeds the predators like Amazon, Facebook and Google. Like acid, it destroys the benefits of competition as the big fish swallow up the little fish. It feeds inequality, and of course, it feeds Big-Government.
Worse than World War II
The graphs above are not log graphs, so they don’t show the proportionate shift. But the percentage change in money base shows the “seismic” surges in money supply. The GFC and the Pandemic have clearly shaken the value of the American Dollar more than The Great Depression and World War II.
 Percentage Monthly Money base change, USD, St Louis Federal Reserve.* Is it the end of an empire? We hope not. But We The People need to plan accordingly. The Chinese Communist Party is. China is buying gold.
The Treasury officials are doing their best to hide inflation. Just as with climate change, the bureaucrats keep adjusting their inflation indicators so they can keep getting away with the game of silent theft. Big Government lives off silent inflation. Gold or any other real and timeless asset is an anti-cheating device. If currencies were pegged to something real, it’s much harder for governments to grow.
REFERENCE and DATA
St Louis Federal Reserve: AMBSL and BOGMBASE
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9.8 out of 10 based on 55 ratings
Wishing everyone good health and free and fair elections…
9.9 out of 10 based on 85 ratings
Data from several countries now shows that, per capita, after a short honeymoon, the vaccinated are more likely to catch Omicron than the unvaccinated. No one can pretend any more that we need to get vaccinated to protect our friends.
As if to confirm the bad news, Twitter suspended an inventor of the mRNA vaccine, Dr Robert Malone. They’re trying to cut him off from his half a million followers so it’s my duty and yours to sign up to his site instead. Who needs Twitter? In other omens, last week, Joe Biden even started to give Donald Trump credit for vaccines. We can see where that might lead…
Iceland is one of the most boosted nations on Earth
Iceland is 80% triple boosted yet cases are going through the roof.
And the fastest growing group of infections is in the fully vaccinated (dark blue).
Imagine a mass vaccination program against the wrong molecular shape. Imagine a government insisted that every single health-worker took the same vaccine and sacked those who didn’t.
Time to give them their jobs back.
Efficacy is falling in Denmark
In Denmark, against Omicron, both Pfizer and Moderna only protect a third to a half of the vacinees for a month. After 3 months the “efficacy” against infection is negative. 90 days after vaccination with Pfizer, vaccinees are 76% more likely to catch Covid (Omicron) than if they were not vaccinated. (Hansen et al)
 Vaccine effectiveness against Omicron in Denmark.
Or to graph that another way — noting that zero is what we get with no vaccine:
 Note how fast the decline is? Boostees would need to take vaccines every two months to stay in the honeymoon zone. It may save lives from Covid but cost lives from other conditions. What if inflammatory markers were raised for months after vaccination as some Cardiologists think. That would put people at a higher risk of heart attacks? Covid vaccines may not improve our chances of staying alive at all even in a pandemic. (Click that link to read the extraordinary UK study showing how many deaths of newly vaccinated people were classified as “unvaccinated”).
Bear in mind, this is just about cases, not about hospitalization or ICU. But even if vaccines reduce hospitalization, so does Ivermectin and it can stop the spread of Covid as well. Just ask Uttar Pradesh, or Indonesia, or Japan.
Ontario
Likewise in Ontario the per capita rate of infections in the fully vaccinated has risen much faster than the rate in the unvaccinated.
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9.6 out of 10 based on 79 ratings
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10 out of 10 based on 11 ratings
 One side of politics maintains its support through fear, but it’s an invisible wall until you touch it. Most people within the bubble think they got there through persuasion and reason. They think they are free to leave, they “just don’t want to”. But once an errant thought occurs, or they ask an unpermitted question, the wall of fear appears — it’s the unexpected poison barb, the mockery a reasonable question provokes. It quickly escalates to full blown “primal rejection”.
Leil Leibovitz lived within the bubble, and writes about The Turn — the moments he realized that he was afraid to ask, to speak his mind.
I sense a phase change coming as more and more people reach The Turn.
By Leil Leibovitz
You might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you have questions about public health policies—including the effects of lockdowns and school closures on the poor and most vulnerable in our society—but can’t ask them out loud because you know you’ll be labeled an anti-vaxxer. You are living through The Turn if you think that burning down towns and looting stores isn’t the best way to promote social justice, but feel you can’t say so because you know you’ll be called a white supremacist.
If you’ve felt yourself unable to speak your mind, if you have a queasy feeling that your friends might disown you if you shared your most intimately held concerns..
The Turn brings with it the sort of pain most of us don’t feel as adults; you’d have to go all the way back to junior high, maybe, to recall a stabbing sensation quite as deep and confounding as watching your friends all turn on you and decide that you’re not worthy of their affection any more. It’s the kind of primal rejection …
And what a perfect, epic, Turn he has had:
But, having been there before, I have one important thing to tell you: If the left is going to make it “right wing” to simply be decent, then it’s OK to be right.
Why? Because, after 225 long and fruitful years of this terminology, “right” and “left” are now empty categories, meaning little more than “the blue team” and “the green team” in your summer camp’s color war. You don’t get to be “against the rich” if the richest people in the country fund your party in order to preserve their government-sponsored monopolies. You are not “a supporter of free speech” if you oppose free speech for people who disagree with you. You are not “for the people” if you pit most of them against each other based on the color of their skin, or force them out of their jobs because of personal choices related to their bodies. You are not “serious about economic inequality” when you happily order from Amazon without caring much for the devastating impact your purchases have on the small businesses that increasingly are either subjugated by Jeff Bezos’ behemoth or crushed by it altogether. You are not “for science” if you refuse to consider hypotheses that don’t conform to your political convictions and then try to ban critical thought and inquiry from the internet. You are not an “anti-racist” if you label—and sort!—people by race. You are not “against conformism” when you scare people out of voicing dissenting opinions.
If you glimpse someone close to that point, welcome them. We’ve been watching it slowly for years in the climate debate. Someone asked a reasonable question and was shouted down. Bitten, they come to us seeking answers, or just a friendly ear. They want the Red Pill then..
Read it all at The Tablet, there’s a lot more.
9.9 out of 10 based on 78 ratings
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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