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BHP Home page
By Jo Nova
That didn’t last long
It was only two years ago that BHP announced “Operational Decarbonisation”. They would build 550MW of wind solar and battery storage in the Pilbara region of WA. It was part of a $4 billion global budget for electrifying trucks and reducing carbon emissions. It was all so ambitious — they set a goal of a 30 per cent reduction by 2030, from 2020 levels, and net zero by 2050. The “Responsible Energy” message is still starring all over their home page.
Their diesel haul trucks use 1.5 billion litres of fuel each year, and they were keen to replace them with electric vehicles, which, they said would “save money”. But it’s all fallen in a hole already. The $4 billion USD global plan has shrunk to half a billion — a savage 88% cut. The new Pilbara solar and wind turbines were quietly shelved late last year (perhaps after Donald Trump won) but the news is only being shared now.
Meanwhile the electric trucks haven’t been invented fast enough so they’ve been delayed indefinitely.
BHP scraps renewable energy projects, casting doubt on emissions targets
By Jo Nova
This is where the worship of “expert” peer review science gets us — a science crime syndicate
Once science stopped being about winning arguments and became just the-number-of-papers-someone-published, it became an empty shell. And once billions of dollars, depended on sacred ‘experts’, it was doomed.
Long gone are the days when papers were hardly ever retracted and pal review was “the big problem? Now, fake papers and fake editors are so rife they are their own specialist industry. Networks of brokers connect paper-mills up with authors and publishers and place batches of papers in journals with ‘friendly editors’. When Richardson et al analyzed PLOS ONE, they found 33 editors who seemed to have an extraordinarily high rate of retractions. One in particular had approved 79 papers of which, 49 had already been retracted.
Given the vital importance of peer review and science to the UN, the Labor Party and the Greens, the question is will they immediately launch an inquiry and set up a Royal Commission… or do nothing at all, and mention it to no one. Shh!
If an entire modern economy depended on getting science right, there would be constant monitoring and reporting studies […]
Image by Julius H. from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
It’s still a cult
The Queensland Environment Minister once made the mistake of saying he was “still to be convinced” of the degree to which humans are influencing climate change. Now, 13 years later, he’s had to backtrack in public for the crime of ever having doubts about the climate-bible.
The ABC accidentally sums up the real reason: “It comes as Mr Powell works with Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt to prevent UNESCO from listing the Great Barrier Reef as “in danger”.” So it’s just extortion then? The UN threatens to slap a naughty sticker on their management of the Great Barrier Reef, which would scare off the tourists, and the Ministers have to pander to please the UN? (Nevermind that “in danger” rating would be absurd given the coral cover is still close to a record high.)
This is not about Mr Powell, so much as a message to every other MP to toe the UN line.
The Science is The Science? Queensland environment minister concedes humans are influencing climate change
By Jessica van Vonderen, ABC Agitprop Unit*
Queensland’s environment minister has stepped back […]
Image by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
It’s like we live in a movie — everything around us is fake.
Everyone knows Australia won’t meet the fantasy 2030 target of a 43% reduction in carbon emissions, so there’s a flying-pop-tarts chance of us reaching an even higher one by 2035. Renewables investment is down 65%, farmers hate the transmission lines, offshore wind has stalled, and green hydrogen has collapsed, and yet the Labor Government is about to take the impossible and double it up. They are singing a reduction tune supposedly between 65 to 75%. Ludicrous, either way.
To make matters more absurd, not only will it not change the temperature in any measurable way, but the Australian people don’t want a higher target, and the Labor Party know that. If they thought it had any appeal, they would have sung hallelujah about the new target before the election, but they delayed it instead because they knew the voters would hate it.
Added to that, none of the Labor or Green politicians even seem to believe the scare themselves. It they did, they would have campaigned for nuclear plants 15 years ago, to save the world. […]
By Jo Nova Antarctica defies the experts
Two studies out this year suggest that something shifted in Antarctica recently and no one knows what it was. In 2016 Antarctic Sea Ice surrounding the continent mysteriously started to disappear. At the same time more snow started accumulating on the main Antarctic ice-sheet (Fig 2b).
The GRACE satellite, measures the total surface mass — with all the gains as well as the losses — and suggests after 20 years of decline the steadily falling trend has broken.
What matters most in this story is that the climate models didn’t see this change coming, and therefore are missing at least one big crucial factor, or maybe ten. Who knows?
Antarctica was supposed to suffer polar amplification, and heat twice as fast as the rest of the world. What happened to that?
Wang, Wei, et al 2025. Mass Changes from the AIS from 2002 – 2023. The grey shadow shows the gap between GRACE and GRACE-FO.
The Climate Blob quickly issued a Fact Check, because it was fueling “climate denial” which is like Ebola or something, and must be stopped immediately. So the scientists who didn’t predict any of these shifts […]
Cromarty Firth, where old North Sea Oil platforms are dragged to rest until the price of oil rises again. | Photo by joiseyshowaa Cromarty Firth Oil Rigs
By Jo Nova
Finally, the UK conservative Party is offering fossil fuels with no apology
It’s all good, but the UK Opposition left it so late to actually oppose The Blob, that Nigel Farage and Reform UK may wipe them out permanently. The latest polls have Reform romping ahead on 29-35%, leading the Labor government who can only get support from 18-24% of voters. The conservatives (who, let’s remember, were The Government a bit over a year ago) have slumped to 15-20%.
Now that Nigel Farage has made it obvious what voters want, the Tories have finally been dragged into offering it too. But true leaders are the people that do it first. We hope Sussan Ley, Australia’s opposition leader, is paying attention.
In March The Tories dumped the impossible NetZero plan. Now they say that if they are (ever) elected again, they will “maximize extraction” of North Sea oil and gas, which sounds like the British way of saying “Drill Baby Drill”.
Tories pledge to get all oil and […]
By Jo Nova
This Sunday at lunchtime Australians will March in every capital city for Australia
It’s just another unmentionable topic. Most people don’t know that despite a moat filled with crocodiles, Australia has the highest rate of immigration in the Western World. Fully 31% of people living here today were born overseas. (And 28% in New Zealand). This is higher than the US (15%), the UK (17%), Canada (22%) and Europe (13%).
Who will we invite into our house to live?
It seems like a fundamental question of any civilization. Yet we’ve never voted for mass immigration, and never discussed it. No one in charge, it seems, has even asked “do we have enough rooms” before they gave out the house keys.
But the Blob got more jobs, more voters, and the price of their houses goes up as more people compete to buy the same number of homes. The Workers though, their wages stay low, rents increase, taxes grow, and their children can’t afford to buy a granny flat, or get married and have their own kids. Maybe that matters?
For some reason, even though we are the global Multicultural Star, and everyone is happy, The Blob […]
Top row: In a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease, lithium deficiency (right) dramatically increased amyloid beta deposits in the brain compared with mice that had normal physiological levels of lithium (left). Bottom row: The same was true for the Alzheimer’s neurofibrillary tangle protein tau. Images: Yankner Lab
By Jo Nova
Lithia Springs 1888 poster
A bit of a blockbuster… Wow. A major new study this month suggests for the first time, finally, what might be a causal link between a deficiency in lithium and Alzheimer’s. The team at Harvard asks: Could Lithium Explain — and Treat — Alzheimer’s Disease?
A few weeks ago, they released a big paper in Nature. They had analyzed brain tissue from people who had died, and found that lithium levels declined dramatically in people with mild cognitive decline, in other words, in the earliest stages, before Alzheimer’s was diagnosed. When they deprived mice of lithium, the mice showed accelerated brain pathology and their memory declined. But when they fed deprived mice lithium, they were able to restore their memory. It’s quite remarkable. There is hope.
We’ve known for years lithium might be essential
For a century or more there have […]
By Jo Nova
Another propaganda poll asks loaded cost-free fantasy-questions to maximize fake “support” for higher emissions targets.
The Resolve Political Monitor always lets the hapless pollee know what they are supposed to say. Look at the way they frame it — the pollsters are supposed to be trying to figure out what kind of Net Zero targets Australians want, but they’re not framing it in terms of science, or what other countries are doing, or whether it worth spending $1.5 trillion to cool the world by 0.0 degrees. They frame the question by telling the voter that “both parties support a net zero target” but some in the Nationals would like to “ditch” it. Then they ask the crowd “what’s best for Australia”.
Presumably they’re hoping to fool Australians into thinking that most people support Net Zero targets (“Both major parties support it”.) Yet, despite this effort to plant the consensus opinion in people’s minds, only 28% of Australians say the current target is the right one. Some 55% of Australia reject this or don’t know what to think.
And only 17% of Australians want the Santa Claus option — the free, uncosted, “more ambitious” 2030 target. And […]
By Jo Nova
Beyond Meat may be beyond saving — it turned $4b into “a dumpster fire”
Like a microcosm of the climate change debate, a group of investors thought they could make a profit while also saving animals, making people healthier, and changing the global climate all at the same time in a nifty 4 for 1. The UN recognised it as a Champion of the Earth for “science and innovation”. Bill Gates tossed money at it.
But it turns out it was hard to recreate a steak without having a cow or 100 million years to evolve something competitive, economical and tasty. Cows are very efficient factories, in that they come with their own chemical plants, filters, thermostats, and barriers to stop infection, they can transport themselves and they make more cows too. So the factory imitation was never going to be cheaper, at least not for years.
Like everything in the climate debate — everyone says they believe, but no one believes enough to spend $19.95 on fake burger meat. So it was a wildly ambitious product, not-yet-invented, not-safety-tested, and without much appeal to 99% of the population.
Financial teardown: How Beyond Meat burned $4 billion […]
8.3 out of 10 based on 19 ratings
By Jo Nova
One third of all human emissions has had no effect on the Arctic
Since 2005, humans have emitted one third of all the emissions we’ve ever put out — some 600 billion tons of CO2. Yet the Arctic sea ice is the same as it was twenty years ago. And even though the modelers cling to the excuse that this is “consistent with simulated internal variability” there was not one model that forecast this would happen.
For twenty years arctic sea ice was the Posterchild of Panic, and on the verge of disappearing forever, while Antarctic sea ice was invisible. Now the sea ice at the South Pole is at “a climate tipping point”, and the northern sea-ice is just a surprise.
Even when sea ice does nothing, it’s dramatic:
As long as the buzzwords are there in the headlines, The Guardian readers may not even realize the scientists were completely, utterly wrong, and all the hand-wringing and tears about the polar bears was just a fundraising publicity stunt.
Remember, bad news is due to man-made climate change, but good news is a natural variation, and it’s only temporary. The Prophets of Climate say disaster […]
By Jo Nova
Something big is going on around Antarctica, but climate experts have no idea what’s causing it
The ABC ran another Agony-Antarctica column in the news — talking about mysterious “rapid, interacting and sometimes self-perpetuating changes” in ominous but vague terms. Blob-Scientists hinted at ambiguous, unnamed, “changes” which might wipe out the cute emperor penguins, or at least non-specifically “heighten the risk” of their extinction, sometime, maybe.
“Scientists say there is emerging evidence of abrupt and potentially unstoppable changes in the Antarctic environment.
The changes are heightening the risk of significant sea level rise and the extinction of species, including emperor penguins.” — ABC “News”
Very unscientifically, none of the scientists pointed out that in 45 years of satellite data the entire south polar region below 60° has not even warmed. Isn’t that material? One point six trillion tons of man-made CO2 hasn’t warmed the continent in the last 45 years. Doesn’t that matter?
Tell the world, Antarctica is the most stable climate on the surface of Earth:
Nothing says global warming like a trend of 0.03°C per decade.
For decades they told us that Antarctica would warm twice as fast […]
9.1 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
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By Jo Nova
Don’t mention that capacity factor…
The media and wind industry always sells the biggest, best new generators at their full imaginary capacity. The newest largest wind farms are said to be “1 GW”, even though they will almost never supply that. The real percentage they supply of the advertised “capacity” is called the “capacity factor” and it rarely gets a mention. The average reader, not paying attention, won’t notice that the $2b cost doesn’t stack up at all. It’s like buying a brand new car without knowing it only gets 7 miles per gallon (and only when the wind blows).
We need to know ‘the mileage’
The latest GenCost report uses the term “capacity factor” literally 100 times (I counted), so obviously it’s central in calculating the value of a generator, yet it is that which shall-not-be-named in public discussions. And when they do say it, it’s often worse than they say, and that bad number is also shrinking.
In 2019 the CSIRO Blob Experts bravely assumed that the modeled average capacity factor of onshore wind would be 44.4%. Years later, in the latest GenCOST report they assume, like an addict, that it would […]
Bernard DUPONT: El Castillo Pyramid, western side – Tulum Maya site QR Feb 2020.jpg
Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash
By Jo Nova
13 year megadrought during Medieval Warm Period may have finished off the Maya
A slightly spooky new paper shows annual rainfall patterns from a thousand years ago on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. It’s so detailed, they list every drought by year, including 13 unbroken years of drought from 929 to 942AD. It’s a bit like someone unearthed the Maya Bureau of Meteorology records from a thousand years ago (except it’s better, because it’s a rock with no politics).
This is one of the highest-resolution tropical stalagmite records ever published. Each year the stalagmite grew by as much as a millimeter, allowing for a year by year analysis — or indeed 12 datapoints within each year.
During this era of perfect CO2, for some reason that no climate model can explain, the poor sods in Maya suffered through extreme swings from wet to dry, stacked back to back. The climate was chaotic. Droughts were followed by floods. It’s uncannily like “climate extremes” we are told man-made emissions are going to bring.
It is sobering […]
By Jo Nova
What’s left of Australian manufacturing
The CEO of Bluescope Steel is a fan of renewables, but for Mark Vassella to make steel, what he wants is cheap gas, not wind and solar power — and he’s getting desperate. These are strong words from a CEO of one our Big-50. “Manufacturing is at a ‘tipping point‘” he says. “Energy costs are now 3 to 4 times higher than the US”. Furthermore, “Without immediate intervention there will be no Future Made in Australia.” — He twists the knife, talking about the PM’s pet project (the one where we somehow make solar and wind power here cheaper than the slaves do in China. )
He’s especially scathing of the idea that one of the biggest exporters of LNG in the world, now has to import it back.
“ In what world does exporting LNG in massive quantities only to re-import it to supply a shorter domestic market make any sense? It’s like importing sand into the Sahara.”
Vassella knows US and Australian energy prices all too well. Bluescope also own the North Star steel mill in Ohio and is looking to expand further in the US.
BlueScope […]
By Jo Nova
If the whole renewables fantasy was crumbling, it would look something like this
Despite the Labor Government throwing money at unreliable energy, renewables hopes are quietly unraveling. The largest energy retailer in the country just announced a nice 26% profit jump, based on fossil fueled gas, and they also announced they’d be keeping Australia’s largest coal plant open longer. The two year extension for Eraring, is now a four year extension. Despite reaping in gas profits and keeping the planet-destroying-plant operating, the share price promptly leapt 6% to a ten year high.
Significantly, Giles Parkinson at Reneweconomy also noticed that Origin’s annual report includes talk of batteries, but no wind or solar projects, which seems like an important oversight in a nation belting headlong towards the Green Utopia.
Meanwhile, for the first time I can recall, a fossil fuel CEO is daring to defend the industry. The shift in confidence in palpable. Mike Wirth, the Chevron CEO, is not only saying “oil is not evil” but he clearly isn’t afraid of the Australian government. He’s so unafraid he also delivered a “stinging rebuke” — saying that high costs, red tape and environmental rules have made Australia so […]
By Jo Nova
Who knew, we can solve global warming by moving suburbs, planting trees, limiting immigration?
A new study used satellite data to look at ten cities around the world to see which parts of cities are the warmest, and how that has changed in the last twenty years as they grew.
It looks like man-made global warming mainly applies to airports and industrial areas. We put most of our thermometers at airports which awkwardly turn out to be 2.5 degrees Celsius warmer than surrounding areas, and presumably warmer than they were 120 years ago when there wasn’t 3 square kilometers of concrete runway there sitting in the sun. Industrial zones were even worse, being 2.8°C hotter. Conversely leafy green areas with a lot of vegetation were nearly 4 degrees cooler than the average. So airports are at least 6 degrees warmer than forests. Places near bodies of water were, not surprisingly, even more than 4 degrees cooler. It’s part of why people pay $5 million for a beachside mansion isn’t it?
The worst climate change in Melbourne is on Boundary Road
One of the ten cities they studied was Melbourne and there is a special mention for […]
Nobody wants to say China
A couple of weeks ago at the Australian Clean Energy summit, there was a dawning realization that in our rush to diversify the energy grid we are accidentally “diversifying” our cyber security risks too.
Where, once upon a time, we could double and triple check the barriers around big old coal plants, now we have opened electronic doors to our grid on homes all over Australia. Energy geniuses told us solar panels would be decentralized, but instead, now that Australia has 25,000 megawatts of household solar, we have to add wireless gadgets to control them remotely. And some of these gadgets are coming in from fly-by-night small time operators. If, hypothetically, a foreign power wanted to be mean, or just hold an extra negotiating or blackmail card up its sleeve, we’re making it very easy. If Mr Chin wants something approved, he could say “Nice grid you have there…”
Small scale solar is so big, As Williamson points out, that it supplied 13% of the electricity to the NEM so far this year. And in Western Australia, it has generated 20%. (Boy is the West in trouble?)
On top of this, to deal with […]
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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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