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Help needed: Site under DDoS attack from hundreds of thousands of unique IPs this week — especially China and the USA

Image by Eugene Kucher from Pixabay

By Jo Nova       New posts will appear underneath this one:

April 29th: The site is still under hostile attack. Since Easter Saturday waves of traffic from China, the US, Brazil and Europe have surged to overwhelm the servers. Daily, the load increases. At last count, traffic is running at six times normal. The attacker has control of around hundred thousand bots spread around the world. But they are attacking two randomly selected old pages. They are not even trying to hide that this is hostile.

DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. In effect, massive artificial traffic is trying to overwhelm the servers. Is it China?

If you can help, I’m asking for donations to upgrade the armor here

Keep reading  →

10 out of 10 based on 107 ratings

Blackout in Spain to cost 2-4 billion Euro, likely due to solar plants — blind and biased ABC says “cause is a mystery”

By Jo Nova

The latest news is that power has been restored in Spain, Portugal and parts of France, but the economic loss of a blackout that affected up to 55 million people for half a day is estimated at 2-4 billion Euro. Even Red Electrica, the Spanish Grid manager now says the initial event was a sudden power loss that was “likely solar”. And to top it off, the group that own the Spanish grid manager warned in February that with so many “renewables” the grid faced the risk of disconnections.

Meanwhile the billion-dollar-ABC is so far behind the times, on prime-time news tonight they were still saying the blackouts in Spain were a complete mystery — and did not mention renewables once, even though energy experts had warned this would happen for years, and were asking that question yesterday.

We are three days from an election and the ABC are running cover for the Labor-Greens party, and hiding from Australians that too many renewables and a lack of stable thermal or nuclear power plants were a front running cause. Even yesterday we knew that solar was supplying 60% of the Spanish grid, and that there was almost no spinning inertia on the Iberian Peninsula. If Spain had hosted the Olympics this week, the ABC-BBC-CBC agitprop units would have raved about it being “78% renewable”. But when it’s an Olympic-size blackout, crickets.

The ABC has a whole “science unit” but one blogger with no government funding is two days ahead of them. Will they catch up tomorrow, or will they continue to put their own personal voting preferences and juicy career prospects ahead of Australian voters?

A renewables-dominant grid has many points of failure and very few points of stability

It sounds similar to the South Australian blackout of 2016. Once a few wind or solar generators trip out for some reason, the voltage or frequency shocks in the system cause other generators to drop out and interconnectors to disconnect. There is no inherent stability in the system because they lack the heavy spinning turbines. Our entire national grids were designed around heavy 500 ton turbines which spin at 3,000 revolutions per minute (or 3,600 RPM in the USA). That’s an awesome amount of inertia, and all that stability was “free” — it was just part of the grid. But the subsidized market, and the pagan fixation on “renewables”, because they supposedly stop storms next century, guarantees that reliable turbines get pushed out of the market. The crazy-balloon has filled the room.

Spain, Portugal switch back on, seek answers after biggest ever blackout

Reuters

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said his government had not ruled out any hypothesis. “We must not rush to (conclusions) and (commit) errors through haste,” Sanchez said on Tuesday. “We will find out what happened in those five seconds.”REE said it had identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in Spain’s southwest that caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its interconnection with France.
Redeia, which owns Red Electrica, warned in February in its annual report that it faced a risk of “disconnections due to the high penetration of renewables without the technical capacities necessary for an adequate response in the face of disturbances”. Investment bank RBC said the economic cost of the blackout could range between 2.25 billion and 4.5 billion euros, blaming the Spanish government for being too complacent about infrastructure in a system dependent on solar power with little battery storage. SEAT said power returned to its Barcelona car plant at 1 a.m. on Tuesday but that it still wasn’t at full production.
Volkswagen said its plant in Navarra lost a day of production – equivalent to 1,400 cars – as it was not able to restart until 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday.

Will the real cost of solar and wind power please stand up?

The 2-4 billion Euro bill plus the expenses for Big-backup-Batteries and extra interconnectors must now be added to the electricity bill estimates of solar and wind power. All the past costs per kilowatt of magical Spanish solar power were all obviously fantasy underestimates. People thought solar was cheap, but it was all an illusion.

Negative prices are not a free lunch. The toxic prices due to the solar glut at lunchtime, means that reliable power flees the grid, lest it get shafted with a big bill.

An excess of solar output could have contributed to the incident. Spain has reported an unprecedented number of hours with negative power prices in recent months as more solar and wind power gets injected into the grid. Still, the oversupply of power hasn’t previously caused blackouts in the country.

The speeding car hadn’t crashed til it crashed, officer. How were we to know?

This was a system on the brink

In El Confidential, in Spanish we hear that excess solar pushed out the nuclear power and things were so unstable there were fluctuations on the grid in the hour leading up to the crash.

Red Eléctrica rules out a cyberattack, and everything points to overconfidence in solar energy.

Something that has already caused problems recently. The Repsol oil company’s refinery in Cartagena, one of Europe’s largest diesel producers, had to shut down a few weeks ago due to power problems. The blackout occurred at 12:32 p.m., but the system began to fail at 11:30 a.m. With the sun shining, operators began to notice fluctuations in the grid with photovoltaic production at full blast. This excess sunlight caused the gas-fired combined cycle plants to reduce their production to make way for photovoltaic power.

In that sense, nuclear power didn’t enter the market to avoid losing money, and there was no need to rely on hydroelectric plants to avoid water loss. Without firmness technologies, the voltage became more fluctuating and vulnerable than ever. And then the incident happened. The 5-second voltage drop is an eternity in the electrical system and tripped the “system differentials,” shutting down everything at once: the photovoltaic, the cycles, the four remaining nuclear plants.

The industry insists we were lucky because the transformers didn’t burn out, which would have caused a blackout lasting more than 24 hours. ” Red Eléctrica miscalculated the risks and allowed the closure of three nuclear power plants that would have provided stability (voltage) to the system ,” the industry claims.

So there were plenty of warnings that things were going wrong.

If only the media in Europe had mentioned the 2016 SA Electricity crisis, people in Spain would have known:

People saw The South Australian (SA) black out coming. There were warnings that the dominance of renewables made it vulnerable. Then when it came, it all fell over in an instant —  Three towers, six windfarms and 12 seconds to disaster. Ultimately the 40% renewable SA grid was crippled by complexity.   The AEMO Report blamed renewables: The SA Blackout was due to lack of “synchronous inertia”, they said.  The early estimates suggest the blackout costs South Australia at least $367m, plus their normal electricity is twice the price. Welcome to the future of unreliable electricity: More bad luck for South Australia, yet another blackout followed the first one, 300 powerlines down, 125,000 homes cut off. By 2019, things still weren’t secure, SA was offering $6,000 subsidies to buy batteries but people didn’t want them.  In 2020 SA is still at risk of blackout, one third of solar PV “switching off” to save state, and they need a $1.5b interconnector bandaid to NSW. In 2022, they suffered more blackouts. South Australia was Islanded, flying by the seat of their pants, afraid of a solar surge on a sunny day. By 2023 the Renewables Star state “urgently” wants to force two diesel plants back to stop blackouts.

The pain of bad decisions never ends, unless they admit they were stupid.

 

10 out of 10 based on 46 ratings

Wednesday

10 out of 10 based on 4 ratings

Days after Spain reaches 100% renewable, mass blackouts hit, due to mysterious “rare atmospheric phenomenon”


By Jo Nova

Is this the Net Zero world we’re aiming for?

It could be a coincidence, but  Spain’s grid ran entirely on renewables for the first time on April 16th. Less than two weeks later, at lunchtime Monday Spain and Portugal and even parts of France suffered massive cascading blackouts. Thirteen gigawatts of electricity, about half the grid, suddenly disappeared at 12:30pm. Trains were halted, and people were stuck in dark subway tunnels. A tennis tournament was stopped, flights were cancelled and diverted, and prosaically, as an emblem of the Western World, Spain’s nuclear plants shut too, and are now running on diesel back up. Shops have been stripped, people are fighting over taxis, and landlines and ATMs are down, and even the mobile network failed in Madrid. The mayor of Madrid has urged the PM to declare an emergency and deploy soldiers.

Electricity has been restored to some areas, but the grid operator has said “it could take up to a week to fix”. Other reports say “six to ten hours”.

Notably, Spain has one of the highest proportions of renewable power in Europe — with 50% of the national supply coming from pure unreliable power. Spain has 32 GW of solar power, and 32GW of wind turbines. As it happens, the wind turbines have been largely useless for the last 24 hours. The Telegraph is reporting that solar power was providing almost 60% of Spain’s power two hours before the blackout.

Blackout Chaos

DailyMail, UK

Panic buying has swept Spain and Portugal as nationwide blackouts paralysed both countries, shutting down transport networks and prompting people to clear supermarket shelves amid fears the chaos could last for days.

Huge queues formed outside shops and banks as residents and tourists desperately sought to stockpile essentials and take out cash as much cash as they could amid the uncertainty. Rows of cars were pictured lining up at petrol stations as people hoped to fill up their vehicles and fuel cans, with ex-pats detailing how they have tried to power generators to keep their homes going.

Airports have also been hit by the outages, with flights delayed and cancelled and holidaymakers in Portugal warned by the country’s flagship airline TAP Air not to travel for their flights until further notice. A British holidaymaker in Madrid described the situation in the city centre as ‘carnage’, telling MailOnline: ‘People are starting to panic. It’s going to get really bad if they don’t restore power quickly.’

It must be an attack of the “Rare Atmospheric Phenomenon”

There were rumors it was a cyber attack, or a fire in a transmission line. But Portugal is blaming Spain and says it was due to a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” which sounds like a polite way to say “a renewable energy failure”. After all, it’s hard to imagine a rare atmospheric phenomenon blacking out a nuclear plant.

What caused it?

The Guardian

The Portuguese prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said that the issue originated in Spain. Portugal’s REN said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” had caused a severe imbalance in temperatures that led to the widespread shutdowns.

REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”

It appears the phenomenon occurred when it was a climate extreme of 23 degrees C in Madrid today. The Daily Mail has a fancy diagram explaining how extreme temperatures cause some regions to use more power than others for cooling. As energy “moves to hotter regions” they say, parts of the grid are “left with different voltages and frequencies”. This creates “‘anomolous oscillations in very high voltage power lines, leading to synchronization errors across the network”. I remain unconvinced that this is anything other than panicked post hoc hand-waving excuses.

It’s all kind of obvious when we look at network five minutes before the crisis. Some particular event may turn out to be the trigger, but a system that is 78% reliant on unreliables could probably be knocked over by a teddy bear, or perhaps a wayward cloud.

h/t auto, Tonyb, MrGrimNasty, Another Delcon, Old Ozzie, CharlesM, Stephen Neil, Bella, and Bally.

 

9.9 out of 10 based on 65 ratings

Tuesday

8.8 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

Monday: Election Day Canada

10 out of 10 based on 19 ratings

When the Labor Party talk about “The Science” the Opposition can easily outflank and outgun them with bigger, better science

Sun. X5.8 solar flare May 10, 2024. NASA SDO

By Jo Nova

The Blob sets “The Science Trap” — and conservative politicians get caught every time

The Bureaucratic Blob Team brag about following “The Science” but the truth is, they fund only the questions they want answered, they sack the scientists who disagree, then they call everyone names who thinks differently. They’re not open to debate or ideas, they rule through ostracism and cancel culture — demanding people believe “The Science” — and mocking them as simpletons if they don’t —  it’s like a cult or perhaps a kindergarten.

Conservative politicians leave themselves defenseless because for decades they keep funding the same Blob Science Institutions with the same Blob-incentives. When research groups are paid to find a crisis, they’ll keep hunting til they find one.

Last week in the debate, the Australian opposition leader, Peter Dutton said the dreaded line: “I’m not a scientist” and then had to say the next day “I believe in climate change” just to quell the uproar. It was the classic mindless science trap. It’s a hundred agencies paid to speak jargon versus one politician with no tech support.

Imagine if he had said the Coalition is going to fund the science research the Labor Party won’t?

SunNone of our climate models can tell us whether next summer will be a BBQ scorcher or a wet blanket. The models are failing because they are missing nearly everything about The Sun. They treat our nearest star like it is a light globe, ignoring the solar magnetic field which is bigger than the solar system, the electric field, the sun spot cycles, and the way sun’s output of UV light changes. Our current best climate models all assume these effects are zero. They assume the solar wind which batters Earth at a million miles an hour has no effect at all. Isn’t it time we set up a dedicated agency to find out what role the sun has?

Don’t we owe it to the koalas, the children (and the taxpayer?)

We know some factor on the Sun affects ground water recharge rates, streamflow in rivers, jet streams, lightning in Japan and even jelly fish plagues. In the 1800s we knew solar cycles affected the price of wheat. Two hundred years later we still don’t know why there are so many links between the solar cycles and our climate. When the sun is quiet, there are more floods in central Europe, the prevailing winds shift in Chile, and winters are warmer in Greenland. Something is going on. All the warming we’ve seen since the Little Ice Age could be entirely due to the increase in solar activity.

What if the Sun is causing the warming and we’re spending hundreds of billions trying to reduce CO2 and it’s irrelevant?

Who did that due diligence before we spent half a trillion dollars trying to change the weather? Hands up? Anyone?

Why aren’t we investigating The Sun’s role in Climate Change? (Because we’re afraid it’s real?)

Big-Government politicians strangle science. They pour money in to find out “how bad man-made climate change is” but virtually nothing goes into asking how “good” our emission are, nor whether the Sun has the commanding role, and we’re irrelevant. Where is the institution dedicated to finding out how the Sun drives our climate? There isn’t one. There are a few researchers who trip over parts of the puzzle, but there is no independent dedicated agency that exists in order to find reasons that the Sun controls our weather.

Australia needs a dedicated Australian Space-Weather-Climate Institute to investigate the effect of the solar magnetic field, cosmic rays and the changes in solar UV on our climate. It needs to be separate from the other conglomerate behemoths of science, or it just becomes another part of The Blob.

We need competition in science, and a free market, not these centralized Soviet conglomerates of science like the CSIRO. Once an agency is trapped inside a big organisation, it can’t say something which makes the rest of the organization look silly. Nor could it publish results that showed the rest of the conglomerate group’s work was pointless. Likewise, Australia has an Australian Space Weather Forecasting Centre (ASWFC) but it’s a part of the Bureau of Meteorology. It won’t be competing with the BoM, or pointing out their flaws on the Channel Nine news.

Australia has  RMIT SPACE Research Centre, and the University of Newcastle’s Centre for Space Physics, they are looking at space weather effects on satellites, technology, and advancing the space industry.  The CSIRO Climate Science Centre should be looking at the role of the sun, but the CSIRO is 100% Blob. It has bet its “expert” reputation on CO2, lock, stock and barrel.

We need a free market in science — we need that competition

The incentives for science are screwed. Right now scientists serve Big Government and work to get Bigger Government elected. They don’t serve the people.

In a better world the government would fund both science teams and they’d be criticizing each other in televised debates. The media would ask scientists hard actual questions and embarrass them when they were inconsistent hypocrites, or just chronically wrong. The voters could have informed consent…

In an even better world, the voters could vote for their tax dollars to go to particular areas of interest (like say when they fill out their tax return?). That way the scientists would want to serve the public, they’d want to be useful, and they’d be competing with other scientists so they’d speak out when they thought a climate model was useless.

In my favourite world, we’d pay hardly any tax, so we could all afford to donate to the research we liked the most…

Naturally, anything funded by the Government sooner or later becomes part of the Blob. That’s why we have to get the incentives right.

That and Eternal Vigilance.

X5.8 solar flare May 10, 2024. NASA SDO

 

10 out of 10 based on 116 ratings

Saturday

9.4 out of 10 based on 17 ratings

UK Gov spends £50 m to dim sun to create slightly less beach weather

Planes contrail, sunset

By Jo Nova

The Gods in the UK Parliament plan to spend £50 million in a quest to control sunlight, because obviously, the UK is too sunny

Also obviously, there is nothing more useful the United Kingdom could spend money on than pie-in-the-sky plans for weather-control. It’s not like people are struggling to heat their homes or put food on the table.

And it’s not like anything could go wrong, or plants use sunlight.

It’s not like the UK just installed 1.5 million solar panels on homes and is now paying money to reduce the sunlight falling on them.

In the end, this is just another Grow-The-Government-Blob job, but it’s also an escape plan. Wait for it. Twenty years from now, if the world is cooler due to solar activity or cosmic radiation, they’ll say the Geoengineering saved the world from global warming.

Experiments to dim the Sun will be approved within weeks

Scientists consider brightening clouds to reflect sunshine among ways to prevent runaway climate change

By Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph

Experiments to dim sunlight to fight global warming will be given the green light by the Government within weeks.

Outdoor field trials which could include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere, or brightening clouds to reflect sunshine, are being considered by scientists as a way to prevent runaway climate change.

But it’s all really safe and effective “by design” (unlike all those other experiments which were designed to be dangerous):

Prof Mark Symes, the programme director for Aria (Advanced Research and Invention Agency), said there would be “small controlled outdoor experiments on particular approaches”. “We will be announcing who we have given funding to in a few weeks and when we do so, we will be making clear when any outdoor experiments might be taking place,” he said.

“One of the missing pieces in this debate was physical data from the real world. Models can only tell us so much.

“Everything we do is going to be safe by design. We’re absolutely committed to responsible research, including responsible outdoor research.

Now they tell us? Suddenly (when a grant depends upon it) researchers remember that “Models can only tell us so much” and they need real data. Where were you Professor Symes for the last 30 years while national economies were being crushed on the alter of climate modeling.

Shipping, airlines, contrails.

Looks like the big plan to use pollution to fight “pollution”

The press release coyly talks about “aerosols” being injected into the sky, like it might be an giant air-misting device, or aromatherapy for the atmosphere. They don’t want to name the actual aerosol these experiments will dump in the sky — not in one sentence. Instead, they hint suggestively that sulfur dioxide comes off ships and makes clouds brighter from space, which is a nice way of saying that pollution from diesel makes clouds darker from Earth. See how this works? Bad-sulfur-dioxide needed regulation and created jobs (and the UN was very proud of itself for getting rid of SO2). Now good-sulfur-dioxide needs grants and creates even more jobs.  SO2 just needs a makeover. So, gasp, it’s a common thing in jet exhaust. Did he just admit that we could all fly more and “save the planet”? The WEF won’t be happy about that.

Dr Sebastian Eastham, a senior lecturer in sustainable aviation at Imperial College London, said: “Every time you fly, sulphur, which is naturally present in jet fuel, is emitted into the lower most stratosphere causing a small cooling effect.

Experts are hopeful that if experiments prove a success, they could be scaled up and implemented within 10 years.

So they don’t specifically say they’ll be adding pollution to the sky that we’ve spent the last 100 years trying to get out of shipping. But it’s likely that’s exactly what they’re thinking of. Nearly all stratospheric aerosol injections use sulfur dioxide. Just last week, news came that the project called “Make Sunsets” in the US uses weather balloons to drop sulfur dioxide in the sky to “cool the world”.

The latest papers blame their success at getting SO2 out of shipping as the reason we got freakish warming that their models didn’t predict.

For the record, some crazy geoengineering schemes may involve chalk dust, titanium dioxide, and sea salt. Perhaps they’ll try them all?

And as the commenters on X are saying, I do not consent!

h/t David M, Rafe, Jim Simpson,

Image by Myriams-Fotos from Pixabay

 

 

 

10 out of 10 based on 98 ratings

Friday

8.5 out of 10 based on 12 ratings

The cocoa price crisis is a Big Government price fixing disaster, not a climate change one

Cocoa Price Spike.

Markets Insider

By Jo Nova

Price fixing kills the cocoa farm

There has been a wicked price spike in cocoa beans which the usual suspects are blaming on “climate change” as if your air conditioner was ruining cocoa crops in West Africa. Instead African governments have fixed the price of cocoa for decades, forcing poor farmers to work for a pittance, and keeping the big profits for themselves. Not surprisingly, even though there is a wild price spike, farmers in Ghana are leaving the industry, smuggling crops out (because they get a better price). They didn’t plant new trees, they ran out of money for fertilizer, and didn’t try new varieties. Their children don’t want to farm cocoa, and the yields are falling on old sickly plantations.

So, surprise, socialist government controls wrecked the industry and they are now scrambling to put the pieces back together. Things are so desperate, the government of Ghana raised the price of cocoa by 58% last April and then raised the price of cocoa by another 45% last September, to try to reduce the smuggling. (The government was losing too much money). At one point last year it was estimated that a third of the national crop was lost to smugglers. A few months after this, the farmers were hoarding their beans in expectation the government would have to give them another price rise. Just chaos for everyone.

Meanwhile other socialists use these failures to tell us they have to fix the weather and we must give them lots of money to do it.

https://theweek.com/environment/chocolate-climate-change-solutions

It’s always the way. Big Government creates a crisis and then beats us over the head with it, to demand more money and power. Greenies pretend to care about the poor, but they are happy to exploit the poor farmers of Ghana as fodder for press releases for their industrial “renewable” schemes, and banker friends.

Feel the pain of these farmers. Some of them have farmed for decades, yet they have nothing to show for it, saying “ It feels like we are working for other people’s benefit.”

Ghana produces the world’s cocoa; why are its farmers still poor?

Ghana has farmed cocoa for over 100 years. The country is the world’s second-largest producer, behind Côte d’Ivoire. The cocoa industry employs over a million people and contributes about $2 billion in foreign exchange annually. In recent times, prices of the commodity have increased exponentially, pushed by extreme climate events and supply chain crisis on fertilizers used by farmers.

Yet farmers like Anane and Holiata say they see little of this wealth. They point to the low prices set by the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), established in 1947. The board sets cocoa prices to regulate the industry and protect farmers from exploitation by European merchants, but farmers argue that these prices fail to reflect the crop’s true value on international markets.

The Cocobod traders were forward selling as much as 70% of the crop one year in advance. But when weather, disease, and a lack of fertilizer hit the crop, the bureaucrats couldn’t find the cocoa they’d already sold. They were caught short, forced to buy cocoa on the open market which sent the prices rocketing. (If only climate models worked, eh, they could have seen this coming?)

According to Oxfam, up to 90% of Ghanaian cocoa farmers do not earn a living income. Many of the 800,000 smallholder farmers who cultivate the crop survive on less than $2 a day, struggling to afford basic needs such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare.

The cocoa industry is rife with human rights issues, like forced child labor, and slavery. When the environmentalists start to care about pain and suffering in the here and now, instead of theoretical storms in a hundred years time, we might think they give a damn about making the world a better place.

Apparently man-made climate change made it too wet, then too dry. Sure, we believe you…

The weather has been bad in Ghana in the last two years, first it was too wet which rotted the old sickly trees, and then it was too dry, but no climate model on Earth predicted both these extreme seasons correctly (the witchdoctors might as well use chicken entrails), and other countries nearby suffered bad weather too, yet they increased their crop yield. Nigeria’s cocoa exports saw a year-over-year increase of 15% in October 2024, and Cameroon’s cocoa crop is expected to rise 7% this year.

Price fixing, and regulation hurts the people it was supposed to protect

The Government of Ghana formed the price fixing board to try to protect farmers from volatile prices. Instead they trapped them in poverty and fed a bunch of bureaucrats that may destroy the local industry.

Under Ghanaian law, selling cocoa to anyone other than the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) through its licensed buying companies (LBCs) is a crime. The market is tightly regulated, with prices set annually by the government through the Producer Price Review Committee (PPRC).

If the government had offered a service but not forced it upon the farmers, the Cocobod bureaucrats would have had to stay competitive, or the farmers would have abandoned it to make their own deals. But there were no brakes or accountability on the government. In the end, the farmers did abandon it, but years too late, because it was against the law to smuggle the cocoa out of the country — so the farmers had to be desperate before they would take the risk.

It takes up to five years to grow new cocoa plants, so chocolate will be expensive until the free market solves itself, which it will, as long as the government gets out of the way.

Together the Ivory Coast and Ghana provide 60% of global cocoa, they have a nice little monopoly. But with these latest price spikes, many other countries are planting cocoa beans and soon there will be a lot more competition. The West African cartel have just wrecked their own competitive advantage.

Quote of the day: Despite the shocking price rise, chocolate consumption is “inelastic”.

 

 

 

10 out of 10 based on 101 ratings

Thursday

 

We are still getting to the bottom of the problems on the site and working to overcome the issues.  I’ll make an announcement soon. This is not just a software glitch. The site is being swamped with requests that started on Saturday.  Thanks again for your patience.

Thanks to those who are sending donations to help upgrade the server.

 

 

9.6 out of 10 based on 23 ratings

Blame the Vikings! Moss found in East Antarctica lived in warmer summers a thousand years ago.

Pohlia nutans

Pohlia nutans moss. Photo by Hermann Schachner

By Jo Nova

Around 1,000AD, a little delicate moss (just like the one above), lived in a spot in Antarctica which is now locked in snow and ice all year round, and considered hyper arid and perennially frozen. No one expected to find nodding thread-moss (Pohlia Nutans) on Boulder Clay Glacier.

Researchers had to drill through 11 meters of ice to find it (or what’s left of it) and managed to date it to 1,050 years before present. This puts it smack in the centre of the Medieval Warm Period, when Vikings were marauding England, showing that this part of Antarctica was warmer 1000 years ago than it is today, even though humans have poured forth 1.8 trillion tons of greenhouse gases.

At the same time as the mosses grew, there was a veritable population boom of penguins and elephant seals in the Ross Sea next door, right up until the brutal cold of the Little Ice Age wiped them out.

Pohlia nutans, needs liquid water and warmer summers. In order to grow, it has to find land that is ice free in summer has rain or melted water. Mosses can’t survive in this area now.

Thanks to Kenneth Richards at NoTricksZone for finding the study.

Antarctic Glacier. Photo.

Boulder-Clay Glacier, Figure 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02259-4#Sec10

Spare a thought for the life of an Antarctic moss. They spend 9 or 10 months of the year buried in snow, hoping for a five or six weeks of warmth so they can grow a few millimeters. If they’re lucky they might catch some floating penguin poo dust for nutrients. If they’re not lucky the summers get cold for thousand years, and they’re buried in 11 meters of snow.

Apparently, some mosses have survived 5,000 years stuck under a glacier, and can still spring back to life, not just from spores but from dormant tissue itself.

It sort of suggests this sort of climatic mayhem has happened before?

 

Map Antarctica.

Fully 120 proxies show the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon. Yet the climate industry depends on it not being true. Everything that shows the world was warmer shows that our coal plants and cars are irrelevant. That nature does it all by herself, and that thousands of IPCC experts have been selectively skewing their stories to get bigger grants, or are just too scared to say what they really thought lest they be called a “climate denier”.

That, and the media ignoring hundreds of stories like these.

Keep reading  →

9.9 out of 10 based on 90 ratings

Wednesday

9.1 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Tuesday

 

Apologies for the server troubles over Easter. We are working on it. (I would have left a note last night here but I was forbidden, like you.)

The problem seems to be so much traffic that the system was pushed beyond its limits over Easter. We will be increasing server power asap. I’ll keep you posted, but there may be more dropouts.  Apologies for all the disruptions. I hope to be back to normal as soon as possible.

I’ll post more updates here. Thanks for your patience!

— Jo

 

 

9.6 out of 10 based on 43 ratings

Monday

8.5 out of 10 based on 30 ratings

Easter Sunday

Sunrise, beach. reflection.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Apologies for the intermittent site outages today. I know not why. Still investigating….

UPDATE: These are extensive outages. It’s not just you. Hope to have this back to normal later tomorrow. Thanks for your patience and apologies for the disruption.

 

9.2 out of 10 based on 53 ratings

Saturday

8.4 out of 10 based on 28 ratings

Good Friday

9.2 out of 10 based on 33 ratings

In crash-test dummy land, we solve teenage girl climate anxiety with $500b in fantasy weather experiments…

By Jo Nova

And so we arrive, a nation of people looking at TikTok as they cruise down the freeway

This week, our national energy policy is an Agony-Aunt letter — poor Alexa, 21, has been suffering from ‘climate anxiety’ since she was 15. Instead of asking her grandparents (who don’t rate a mention) she dreams of telling her grandkids that she did “everything she could”. Everything, that is, except for talking to her own grandparents, listening to climate skeptics, or seeking alternative views.

Instead of doing her homework, she gate-crashed the PMs promo event so she could be used as emotional bait in a battle between the deep-state-banker-blob and the workers. She probably thinks she’s on the side of the workers (though she’s also probably never met one).

Channel Nine reports on her mental health disorder in the middle of an election campaign, not to help her heal, but to exploit her to push for the climate policies, and political winners that Nine shareholders probably want. See their first line. It’s not “news”, it’s political advertising.

Alexa, 21, has been suffering from 'climate anxiety' since she was a teenager. She's not alone

Alexa, 21, has been suffering from ‘climate anxiety’ since she was a teenager. She’s not alone

Young voters are forming a rallying cry for the federal government to address one of their greatest concerns: climate change.

Alexa Stuart, 21, has already spent years of her life anxious about the climate.

In other words, (twist-the-knife) — to solve her mental illness, we should turn our electrical network into a weather modification scheme at a cost of hundreds of billions, right? (Either that, or we could send her to a pub for fish and chips with a few climate skeptics. It’s so much cheaper.)

No country on Earth has made its own climate nicer with solar panels, or cricket burgers, and most of them are not even trying, but we should, they imply, because only horrible people would not be touched by her sad story. And after all, electricity runs on hope, faith and diversity, not on three phase power. If we follow the fantasy here — coal power causes heart palpitations.

Agony Aunt, (April Glover) digs deep for science, and finds psychological coleslaw instead:

One in 10 Australian adults is experiencing “significant eco-anxiety” like Stuart is, said the Black Dog Institute’s Chloe Watfern.

More than 80 per cent of 16 to 25-year-olds are worried about climate change, according to research published in The Lancet.
Watfern said this currently undiagnosed feeling can be akin to “the feeling of homesickness that you have when you’re home” or even pre-traumatic stress.
It can also be known as “ecological grief”, which is “a sense of mourning for ecosystems, biodiversity and species lost to environmental damage”.

So 10% of Australian adults have a mental illness that has three different names and is “currently undiagnosed”? It’s like pre-traumatic stress, she says, which is the trauma you get from events that haven’t happened, right? Just call it paranoid fantasies, OK?

If Alexa is stressed, it’s because she had a terrible education and grew up in a journalistic wasteland. Articles like this in Nine Media exploit vulnerable teenagers to scare money and votes out of nice people and feed that money to institutional banker funds. Speaking of which…

Channel Nine’s major shareholders are institutional banker funds:

What a surprise. As MarketScreener tells us, the major shareholders of Nine Entertainment are largely large index funds which invest in renewable energy and even if they don’t, they all prefer the kinds of governments that waste lots of money, write sloppy massive legislation full of loopholes, support glorious subsidy schemes, and pointless boom and bust cycles.

Major shareholders: Nine Entertainment Co. Holdings Limited

Name Equities % Valuation
Birketu Pty Ltd.
238,260,442 15.02 % 223 M $
Macquarie Bank Ltd. (Private Banking)
145,524,938 9.177 % 136 M $
Perpetual Investment Management Ltd.
139,953,811 8.826 % 131 M $
Australian Retirement Trust Pty Ltd.
79,129,530 4.99 % 74 M $
FIL Investment Management (Singapore) Ltd.
72,527,964 4.574 % 68 M $
Macquarie Investment Management Global Ltd.
14,605,831 0.9211 % 14 M $
Investors Mutual Ltd.
10,325,056 0.6511 % 10 M $
BetaShares Capital Ltd.
9,092,133 0.5734 % 9 M $
State Street Global Advisors Trust Co.
8,939,320 0.5637 % 8 M $
Netwealth Investments Ltd.
8,383,182 0.5287 % 8 M $

 

Nine  Entertainment pushes these cloying stories as a way to keep both sides of the Uniparty in line. They win either way. Even if the Big Green Labor Party doesn’t win, the Opposition candidates know what policies the media giants want, and are, for the most part, cowed into timid submission. Only Trump, who called them the Fake News Media, has used their terrible reporting against them, and outflanked them with social media. The people hate being lied to.

Any real opposition must turn the tables on the crooked media, in the politest possible way, and ask the questions that the fake journalists won’t ask. Say, do your shareholders benefit if you exaggerate climate change?

Mental illness is very serious. Should we treat it with national energy policy?

 

 

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