JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).

Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!


Follow Jo's Tweets
To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
Electric cars. In my local paper is a photo of an electric car that managed to smash through a low brick wall and into a garden, coming to rest in the shed. The passengers got out and the fire service notified. They commented;
“Crews utilised our mobile data terminal to find the isolation locations and kill switches for the high voltage systems in order to make the vehicle safe.Due to the damage sustained the crew had to use spreading and cutting equipment to remove the bonnet so they could access these systems and make the vehicle and scene safe.”
There isn’t enough data yet to demonstrate if EV’s are more likely to burst into flames than ICE vehicles but the consequences are far more serious with EV fires which are very difficult to put out.
However my main observation is that a lot of equipment was needed to deal with this, which presumably isn’t available to every fire crew and specialist training required to operate it. If this accident had happened on a busy road, or in a built up area, at night, or the occupants had been trapped, the consequences could have been horrific.
Presumably domestic solar panels, Inverters and associated batteries must present similar concerns to firefights. The recommendation is that any battery system should be in a garage or outhouse away from the house.
70
I’m not so sure that being in a garage is that safe either. I was talking to a fire fighter whilst waiting at the vets. He actually told me that there were more EV fires than get reported. They are told to keep quite about them and not talk to media. I live in a rural area and there was a house a few kilometers down the road from me. One morning, driving past it, I noticed that the garage had burned down. The garage was separate and it looked like the house was relatively untouched. The next time I drove past a few weeks later, the whole house had been demolished. Turns out, according to the fire fighter, the house was badly contaminated by the toxic fumes caused by the battery fire. The contamination was so bad that they couldn’t guarantee that the house would be clean enough to to give the owners the peace of mind that they wanted, especially with young children. It was a better outcome to demolish the house, clean up the site and rebuild. There was no mention in the local media of the fire at all, let alone the cause. I suppose, being remote rural, it was easy enough to ignore. However, a pretty massive blaze at a recycling plant in Auckland, caused by lithium batteries, wasn’t that easy to sweep under the carpet. So far this year, there have been 13 waste truck fires in Auckland caused by lithium batteries. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/recycling-plant-fire-prompts-auckland-call-for-proper-battery-disposal/V7HF3SMOUJBBHC5HKND42PBVVY/
40
Gives added meaning to Talking Heads’ song: Burning Down The House.
To save the children we had to demolish their home – $cience!
Utter Madness… which reminds me of another ‘70s song: Our House, In The Middle Of The HEAT 🔥
20
And what if the Chicomms have built “back doors” into their EVs that are exported to the West like they have with solar panels?
In the even of hostilities they could issue a command to cause all the cars to self-immolate and potentially destroy an entire city.
It would be practically impossible to check code and hardware for such back doors.
20
Robin is a sometime author here and this very well referenced report on the impossibility of net zero is worth reading
.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/net-zero-unachievable-dangerous-and-pointless/
40
Standing only seats to be introduced on budget airlines?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-14734831/Low-cost-airlines-standing-seats-2026.html
20
I would only use it if the price was VERY good, and for no longer than about a one hour flight, that is, one hour from the time of entering the cabin to the time of leaving, so probably about a half hour of actual flight time.
00
The real world is starting to show the long term results of the “clot shot” – not that they would admit to that as the causative agent. . .
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/21/heart-attacks-work-fatal-medical-risk-cardiac-emergency-training.html
10
In the linked video(1) Jeff Taylor talks about the UK political prisoner Lucy Connolly who is in jail for 31 months for an angry Tweet she deleted after a few hours.
The Tweet was in relation to her anger about the murder of three young girls and injuries to others by Axel Rudakubana. No motive was ever established.
A shocking miscarriage of justice, especially as numerous people in the UK aren’t even being sent to jail for serious actual crimes.
The UK is now arresting over 12,000 people per year for thoughts expressed on social media. (That figure was from 2023, it’s probably more now.) (2,3)
1) https://youtu.be/vKMqdQAuP4A
2) https://freespeechunion.org/police-make-30-arrests-a-day-for-offensive-online-messages/
3) https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news-corner/uk-crackdown-social-media-commenters-silencing-critical-voices/
20
Netanyahu etc condemn criticism of their government
Source:
Jerusalem Post, May 20
https://m.jpost.com/israel-news/article-854678
00
Leftists are the same everywhere, they would rather submit than do what is morally correct.
The Gazans started the war with an horrific terrorist attack against Israel on October 7th 2023 plus took hostages.
People seem to have forgotten that.
Israel takes extraordinary measures not to harm civilians but Hamas terrorists do everything they can to put their own civilians in harm’s way such as putting their terrorist headquarters in schools, hospitals, UN offices, apartment buildings etc..
And all Hamas have to do is give the remaining hostages back and Israel will stop attacking.
Plus Gazans aren’t starving, vast amounts of food have been delivered there.
And the Israelis aren’t genociding the Gazans either but any civilians killed are a direct result of Hamas policy of embedding themselves among civilians.
Why so many people are inclined to support terrorists is beyond me.
30
In the linked video the History Debunked YouTube channel discusses one of Britain’s immigration scams via the university system.
Much the same thing happens in Australia.
It’s very profitable for the universities in both cases and they are both graduating people who can’t or can barely speak English in some cases so there’s no way they could have done the actual coursework claimed.
https://youtu.be/UxGxEgNS5kQ
30
Video, Congo’s “Boat of Hell” documenting the misery of the 2,000 passengers as they first wait fir the boat to leave and then the 1700km journey up the Congo River.
https://youtu.be/KPMZdUg2GjM
00
Refreshing to see US media covering hugely destructive weather without having to hear it blamed on CAGW or Climate Change
2 Videos less than 2 minutes each:
https://d1l66zlxaqpl1u.cloudfront.net/wp-gray/CNN_KHBS_WLKY_WFIE_KMOV_SEE_PREFONTS/20250520/682c8b75e5760e32ad8e8df6/t_0c92dc4f518f4a81a4763020d0336f16_name_BHDN_PY_03TU_SYSTEM_SPAWNING_SUPER_33fd8ef6_af98_4ae2_b07d_410d12c84d5d/file_1280x720-2000-v3_1.mp4
https://d1l66zlxaqpl1u.cloudfront.net/wp-gray/CNN_Newsource/20250520/682c1ece2df9ce090e728e7a/t_11e5208bcbec4b7c9110e7d9e4befceb_name_BHDN_NE_020MO_KY__VIDEO_SHOWS_FAMIL_75087eb5_8919_4866_8067_81fa49e6684f/file_1280x720-2000-v3_1.mp4
10
20
Horrific.
Already about 4% of all deaths in Canada are attributable to “euthanasia”, often for trivial reasons.
As expected, the bar is being continually lowered, now it’s children without parental consent.
10
“‘Shrinking Nemo’: Smaller clownfish sound alarm on ocean heat”
The BBC hyperventilates again.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c629z4y762xo
Some fish shrank by several millimetres, so we have to return to the Eighteen Century. FFS.
“The research recorded clownfish living on coral reefs slimmed down drastically when ocean temperatures rocketed in 2023. Scientists say the discovery was a big surprise and could help explain the rapidly declining size of other fish in the world’s oceans.”
More –
“Global warming is a big challenge for warm-blooded animals, which must maintain a constant body temperature to prevent their bodies from overheating. Animals are responding in various ways: moving to cooler areas or higher ground, changing the timing of key life events such as breeding and migration, or switching their body size.”
I’m not a senior lecturer – and I know most fish are cold blooded. Okay, some tuna, and IIRC a few others, can keep internal temperature several degrees above ambient – but they’re not classically ‘warm-blooded’.
I dunno about clown fish. And I doubt the BBC does, either.
Auto
20
I bet they chose clownfish because 1) they are popular due to Nemo and 2) the people promoting this BS are themselves clowns so they are an appropriate icon.
10
Honesty and openness are cleansing and refreshing
Trump confronts Cyril Ramaphosa
Naturally the BBC defended Cyril and castigated Trump
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cpqe7rp388vt
40
TRUMP doesn’t mess around. He is a true leader and takes no BS.
No other world “leader” would dare show the truth like that.
It’s unbelievable (or not) that the commies at the BBC called this an “ambush”. Obviously they support race-based violence.
21
Can it really be true?
Apparently “renewable” energy generation is expensive, according to facts.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/05/20/kathryn-porter-the-true-affordability-of-net-zero/
But… but… but wind and sunshine are free.
Aren’t they?
30
Even though wind and solar are “the cheapest of all electricity generation methods” as we are constantly told, the reality is that the more we get, the more expensive electricity becomes.
The Government and Left could only achieve the acceptance of these two contradictory positions by the introduction of Orwellian Doublethink. In this case it is that “wind and solar electricity is the cheapest of all”. Just like the classic doublethink “war is peace”, “freedom is slavery”, “ignorance is strength”.
10
Now that everyone has mobile phones and is online 24/7 it’s difficult to imagine how people used to keep in contact, back in the day, or organise to meet people.
E.g. you’d say you would meet at a certain place at a certain time, no dynamic updates via the phone or text messages.
And you had to wait until you got home to get phone messages, either on an answering machine or someone had written it on a message pad. (Better answering machines had remote access.)
And you remembered commonly used phone numbers.
Office messages were conveyed by voice or memos and they were meaningful and limited in number, not 50 emails on the sane trivial topic.
Community organisations would send out monthly printed newsletters, not daily “updates”.
Meetings were held in person, not via zoom.
People took notes at meetings, and understood what the meeting was about. They didn’t ask the AI bot to explain what the meeting was about or make a summary for them.
Etc..
20
Albanese (PM) to give Indonesia $100 million of Aussie taxpayer money.
You don’t think the money could have been better spent on Australians or better yet, not taken from taxpayers in the first place?
10
Singapore has just mandated vaccines, which Aus is kindly paying for. Despicable.
00
With the Labor mandate there’s ever more new Government departments being added and “jobs for the boys”.
Now we have:
Mr Tim Watts MP
Special Envoy for Indian Ocean Affairs
https://www.dfat.gov.au/about-us/our-people/ministers
00